US Turnabout?
Engagement and Confrontation in the Middle East
By NICOLA NASSER
02/28/07 "Counterpunch" -- -- Two-pronged U.S. tactics of
confrontation and engagement unfolded last week and described by
some media as "turnabouts" in the strategy of containment of
what Washington perceives as adverse regional roles in the
Middle East, but in the Iraqi context and in historical
perspective these tactics are revealed only as old diplomatic manoeuvres in the drawers of the State Department.
In remarks before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the Unite States will
engage Iran and Syria, previously condemned by President George
W. Bush as two pillars of the world "axis of evil," in two
meetings of Iraq neighbours and the veto-wielding members of the
United Nations Security Council (UNSEC) next March and April and
expressed hope they "will seize this opportunity."
In face-saving remarks Rice noted her administration was just
responding to a "new diplomatic initiative" by the Government of
Iraq because "Prime Minister (Noori) Maliki believes and
President Bush and I agree that success in Iraq requires the
positive support of Iraq's neighbours." She did not miss the
opportunity to remind that, "This is one of the key findings, of
course of the Iraq Study Group." In fact this finding was also
recommended recently by Prime Minister Tony Blair, German
Chancellor Angela Merkel among other world powers, mainly
Russia, and by friendly Arab states as well as the U.S.
bipartisan James Baker-Lee Hamilton Iraq Study Group.
However Rice stressed that this seemingly "turnabout" was just
an "additional component" to an U.S. "diplomatic offensive"
aimed at cementing concrete action on the ground, including
upgraded military naval presence in the Arabian Gulf ("Persian"
to Iran) and a surge of 21.000 troops in Iraq, to guarantee "the
security and stability of the Gulf region" and the success of
the recently-launched "security plan" in Iraq. (1)
Two weeks on, the U.S.-Iraqi "Baghdad security plan" unfolds as
pursuing an elusive enemy (2) amid an exacerbated insecurity,
while revealing an evasive non-committal Iraqi government. It is
antagonizing the so far allied "Shiite" militias and at the same
time showing indications pointing to what the prominent
investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh described as a
"redirected strategic shift" by the Bush administration, within
the context of an "open confrontation with Iran," towards
realignment with what he also described as "Sunni extremist
groups that ... are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al
Qaeda." (3) This second "turnabout" on the ground has yet, if
ever, to be officially confirmed.
Gradually but emphatically the facts of the U.S. policy of first
igniting the sectarian divide in Iraq then playing the emerging
sectarian protagonists against each other are unfolding by the
day to reveal the context as well as the real goals of the
American strategy in the occupied country, which the
anti-occupation national resistance is rendering more elusive
than in any time since the invasion of the country in 2003, in
as much as the alleged WMD and the al-Qaedi links to the Sddam
Hussein-led Baath regime had unfolded as merely lies of a
covertly planned propaganda campaign drawn to mislead the
American public into supporting their country,s devastating
invasion of another people.
The Washington Post highlighted the elusiveness of the "enemy":
"I don't know who I'm fighting most of the time. I don't know
who is setting what IED," it quoted Staff Sgt. Joseph Lopez, 39,
a soldier based in the northern outskirts of the capital. (4)
The evasive commitment of the Iraqi government to the "security
plan," which Bush announced it was an "Iraqi" one, was
highlighted by a widely reported leaked confidential letter
Prime Minister al-Maliki sent to the leaders of two of the most
notorious militias warning them of the impending American
crackdown and advising them to go underground or abroad to
outmanoeuvre the coming storm, especially the powerful Shia
cleric Muqtada al-Sadr whose whereabouts are still unknown; al-Sadr
is the main ally of al-Maliki and is represented by 30 members
of parliament and six cabinet ministers in the government in
whose name the security plan is carried out.
The instrumental role played in Baghdad,s security plan by the
pro-Iran militias who dominate the army, police and security
agencies of the Iraqi government (5), could only be interpreted
as using the American involvement to serve their own ends, i.e.
to "clean" the Iraqi capital from both the national resistance
and their sectarian foes alike. Once that is done Baghdad would
be secured as their pro-Iran sectarian capital.
Meanwhile it looks unrealistic that Bush,s reported "strategic
shift" could win over their Sunni counterparts. His shifting of
focus from one side of the extreme sectarian divide to the other
aims first at containing then revoking Iran,s regional role in
Iraq either per se or as a prelude to confronting the Iranians
inside their own country.
"The White House is not just doubling the bet in Iraq, it,s
doubling the bet across the region. This could get very
complicated. Everything is upside down," Hersh quoted the
director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the
Brookings Institution, Martin Indyk, as saying. "The Middle East
is heading into a serious Sunni-Shiite Cold War," Indyk warned.
The Iranian Factor
Ironically Iran has gained her prominent role in Iraq thanks to
the U.S. Washington has adopted, financed, equipped and promoted
pro-Iran militias as the alternative to the Saddam Hussein-led
regime, knowing beforehand they were without exception nurtured
militarily, financially and logistically by Iran and were either
drawing on sectarian or ethnic divides for recruitment and
support against the secular and the Pan-Arab ideology of the
ruling Baath party, the only ideology other than the Islamic one
that could secure a national majority consensus uniting all
sects and ethnicities against foreign threats. The aim was to
neutralize an Iraqi pro-Iran Shiite base as a tactic to buy
Iranian collusion with the invasion. That aim was fulfilled, but
entailed the current Iranian prominence, which has become a
counterproductive U.S. burden that should be removed.
Ironically also Iraq,s regional role was one of the main targets
of the U.S. occupation. The sectarian power struggle in Iraq in
the post-Saddam era was exactly the US-sought pretext to stay in
the country and use the divide as a realistic excuse to promote
federalism as solution and accordingly install a weak central
governing authority that depends internally more on regional
federal security than on a strong national central source of
authority and externally on the U.S. occupying power, which
entails both a small Iraqi army and a weak federally-divided
economy, thus dooming a major Arab state that was a founder of
the League of Arab States and the United Nations to a minor
regional role or no role at all in regional, especially Arab,
politics.
Five months ahead of the invasion, Michael Eisenstadt, a senior
fellow military and security expert at the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy said: "A government organized along federal
lines would rely on local law enforcement for internal security,
alleviating the need for a large army or security apparatus.
Such changes could foster a less aggressive Iraq that is less
likely to assert a leadership role in the Arab world. The United
States, not Iraq, will ensure regional stability and provide a
counterbalance to Iran." (6)
Like many Arab governments, Iran has converged with the U.S.
strategy of containing the Iraqi regional role. Tehran
maintained armed formations, such as the Badr Corps, inside Iraq
prior to the U.S. invasion. In 2004, the assistant commander of
the Iranian Republican Guard announced, during his visit to
London, that Iran has two brigades and other militia in Iraq in
order to protect the national security of Iran. Tehran
anticipated and welcomed the U.S. invasion since it would
destroy her chief enemy in the region. Now that the Iraqi enemy
has been destroyed as a state irrespective of the ruling regime,
"Iraq is considered to be the first line of defense for Iran
against any foreign invasion." (7)
Containment of Regional Roles
All U.S. administrations whether Republican or Democrat have
been always ready to confront the regional roles of non-Middle
Eastern powers, like Russia, or of Arab and Islamic states in
Middle East in two cases: When those roles are in conflict with
the Israeli security prerequisites and when they could
compromise the American free access to the "vital" oil
interests. Late Saddam Hussein and Jamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt
did both. Now Iran and Syria are also portrayed as threats to
both U.S. interests. The American diplomatic rhetoric about
defending their regional "moderate" friendly and allied
governments against the regional roles of both countries is
merely meant to be sold to American voters, Arab public as well
as to other unforthcoming world powers and public opinion.
The Iranian hosts of the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during
a two-day visit to Tehran last week said the U.S. and Israel are
trying to undermine the regional positions of Iran and Syria by
questioning their roles in Iraq, Lebanon and with Palestinians
so they remain the sole players in the region. When the U.S.
bipartisan James Baker-Lee Hamilton group recommended engaging
the regional roles of both countries where those roles are
mostly felt, particularly in Iraq, the Bush Administration opted
instead for containment through confrontation with both
countries, encouraged both overtly and covertly, directly and
indirectly, by Israel and other regional players who are
adversely affected by their cross-border influences, in a
pattern that reminds historians and observers of a similar
reaction to the over-borders political and military roles of
late Iraqi and Egyptian presidents Saddam Hussein and Jamal
Abdul Nasser during the second half of the twentieth century.
However the U.S. case against Iran and Syria this time is
essentially flawed. When Saddam Hussein crossed the American red
line and pushed Iraqi forces to sit on the Kuwaiti oil fields in
1990, in retaliation to what he perceived as a U.S. and regional
ungratefulness after eight bloody years in a war, during which
the only human fodder were Iraqis, to contain a perceived
Iranian military and political threat to the historic American
regional "sphere of influence" in the Arabian Gulf as well as to
Iraq, both countries stood pragmatically firm on the opposite
side.
Syria in particular is promoting a regional role to gain a
better negotiating position in pursuit of peace with Israel as
"a strategic option" since 1971 when late President Hafez
al-Assad assumed power to end a split in the ruling Baath party
early in the seventies of the last century over the issue of
peace with Israel, but Israel nonetheless has been
unforthcoming. The U.S.-.initiated current crisis with Syria has
everything to do with her containment strategy than with the
U.S. allegations that Damascus is a "terrorist-supporting"
country regionally. Syria,s regional leading role is the target.
Once this role is neutralised Washington will certainly leave
the Syrians to their internal potentially Iraqi-style divides.
The same U.S. strategy applies to Iran.
As for the U.S. oil interests the self-sufficient Syria and Iran
are not and never have been a threat. Moreover Syria in
particular has been a regional stabilizing factor particularly
to the U.S.-allied GCC oil-producing countries as well as
through her close coordination with them. Her military
intervention in Lebanon, which ended the first civil war there,
was supported diplomatically and financially by those same
countries, green-lighted by the United States and grudgingly
accepted by Israel, though unexpectedly it had become the
incubator that nurtured another extension of Iran,s regional
role.
The "containment strategy" has been always a national bipartisan
U.S. strategy against what she labels as "rogue" states, which
do not identically fall in line with the American strategies
abroad. This strategy has become dangerously destabilising
worldwide after the collapse of the balancing and deterring
power of the former USSR and the emergence of the United States
as the world,s only super power because the military
intervention has been added as a feasible risk-free addition to
sanctions within the containment strategy.
The United States however tolerates even military regional roles
played by strategic allies like Israel and encourages political
roles regionally by friendly allied Arab states, which move and
act within the U.S. strategy in the Middle East.
Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Ramallah,
West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
Notes
(1) Remarks by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Before the
Senate Appropriations Committee, Washington, DC, Feb. 27, 2007.
(2) The Washington Post, Feb. 26, 2007.
(3) Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker, Issue of 2007-03-05, Feb.
25, 2007.
(4) Ibid (2)
(5) Mounir Elkhamri, "Iran,s Contribution to the Civil War in
Iraq," Jamestown Foundation, Jan. 2007. Elkhamri is a former
aide, "cultural adviser" and translator for Major General
Rodriguez, the commander of Task Force Freedom, General George
Casey, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and U.S. Ambassador
to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad.
(6) Michael Eisenstadt, Washington Institute for Near East
Policy, POLICYWATCH, NO. 681, Nov. 25, 2002.
(7) Ibid, Mounir Elkhamri.Click here
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