The fourth Gulf War must not happen

BY MATEIN KHALID

24 January 2007

GEORGE Bush rolled history’s dice in Iraq and lost but now our region must pay the price of the neocon imperial ineptitude. The president has ordered the USS John Stennis, with its 5000 sailors and F–18 Hornet bombers to set sail for the Gulf, making it the second US Navy aircraft carrier deployed within the Straits of Hormuz.

While Ahmedinijad fulminates against the Great Satan in Caracas with Comrade Hugo in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine and mocks the Holocaust, the American military noose tightens around Iran. The United States has escalated its pressure on Iran since the UN imposed sanctions to punish the regime’s clandestine nuclear enrichment programme in December 2006.

The raid on Iran’s Kirkuk consulate and arrest of Revolutionary Guard intelligence agents, the US Treasury’s blackball of Iran’s international banking relations, CIA sabotage and infiltration in Khuzestan, pressure on the Kremlin and Beijing to halt the sales of ballistic missiles to Teheran, psychological warfare about an Israeli air strike, deployment of warships and combat troops in US bases across the Gulf, the imminent assault against the Shia militias in Baghdad, the presence of NSC hawk – Eliot Abrams in Dr Condi Rice’s entourage to Saudi Arabia all suggest that the world is sleep walking into the fourth Gulf War. As in September 1980, August 1990 and March 2003, the miscalculations and delusions of megalomaniac statesmen spell disaster in the Gulf.

The oil market also points to the rising probability of war. In 1986, Iran’s shock troops broke Iraqi battle lines at Dezful and encircled the trapped Republican Guard brigades in Basra, whose capture would have meant doom for the Baathist regime. It was the most dangerous moment for the West’s clients in the Iran-Iraq war. Just then, oil prices crashed to $10 a barrel as Saudi Arabia flooded the crude spot market in Rotterdam with tanker loads of black gold in Sheikh Yamani’s netback deals. The crash in oil prices bankrupted Iran’s war chest and forced Ayatullah Khomeini to abandon his war aims and sue for peace with the Iraqi’s on the Shatt al Arab. The 1986 crash in oil prices was due to pure Middle East geopolitics because the American economy was booming and the Roaring Eighties bull market was in full swing on Wall Street. Is history repeating itself now? Did Washington help engineer another oil price crash to deprive the theocratic regime of Iran of the petrocurrency hoards needed to buy black market missiles, death squads and centrifuges? Is the fourth Gulf War, like its three bloody predecessors, also about oil, the fateful prize that proved so expensive a currency in Arab blood since 1948?

It is a tragic irony that, as they sleepwalk across the geopolitical minefields of the Gulf towards war, Bush and Ahmedinijad are both failed ideologues who have lost their domestic mandates. The Congressional election in November was a damning verdict of the American electorate against Bush’s messianic delusions in Iraq. Two thirds of the American people oppose the war that has proved so catastrophic in lives and Uncle Sam’s tax dollars. The old guard of the Establishment has repudiated the war. Yet Bush ignored the Baker–Hamilton recommendations and chose military power, not diplomacy, with Iran. Ahmedinijad has faced a torrent of criticism in the Iranian Press for his tirades on the world stage. His protégés lost elections to the Assembly of Experts and his populist demagoguery is anathema to pragmatic diplomats like Ali Larijani, whose shuttles to Jeddah ahead of Dr Rice’s visit was an attempt to avert the war that Ahmedinijad’s rhetoric seems destined to hasten.

Above all, war is an abhorrent prospect for Teheran’s bazaari merchant elite, whose money financed the Shia Qom clerics for centuries, the ascent of Mohammed Mossadegh’s Nationalists in the 1950’s, the revolutionary riots against the Pahlavi Shah, the ascent of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as Iran’s top powerbroker in the 1980’s. It is a pity that Fox News and CNN are totally ignorant about the nuances of Iranian factional and theological politics. It is a pity that Bush’s “axis of evil” demonology has only helped the fanatics and sworn enemies of the West seize power in Iran.

There is no doubt that the Bush White House will not hesitate to use America’s awesome armadas, armies and warplane squadrons in the Gulf. The US encouraged its client Ethiopia to invade Somalia and used questionable intelligence to bomb Somali jihadist camps. The US has deployed Patriot anti–missile batteries on naval warships off the coast of its Gulf Arab allies. The US has funded Kurdish and Sunni enemies of Dr Assad’s Alawite Baathist regime in Damascus. The US gave the green light to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to launch his air, sea and land assault against Hezbollah in Lebanon. There is no doubt that “Bush’s new way forward” means war with Iran.

The US decision to boost its naval assets in the Horn of Africa, the Gulf and the Red Sea all mean that Tomahawk missiles and F–18 warplanes could well streak like angels of death over the skies of the ancient Persian desert. The Pentagon itches to move against Moqtada Al Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia in the Shia slums of Baghdad. The US seems determined to exploit the schisms in Iraq that turned the Arab heartland into a sectarian slaughterhouse, that bequeathed Renaissance Europe with wars of religion which lasted centuries, passions could well plunge the Arab world in generations of war.

Sadr City or West Beirut could be the new Arab Sarajevo, the catalyst for a regional war. Kurdistan is a de facto sovereign state where the Iraqi national flag is banned. Al–Anbar province is a Sunni jihadi enclave, akin to Mullah Omar’s Afghan emirate in the 1990’s. The two Shia militia warlords in Basra are poised for civil war within a civil war. The US combats Shia insurgents in Lebanon and befriends Shia warlords in Iraq even while its combat troops control little beyond the Green Zone. It encourages Arab government to ally with its patrons while a horrified world watched the IDF massacre Lebanese innocents in Qana. The Middle East is on the precipice of regional civil wars unlike anything seen in the region since the twilight and death rattle of the Ottoman Empire a century ago.

There are no winners in this madness in the Gulf other than the Halliburtons and the Bechtels who get to rebuild all the Arab cities and oilfields gutted by American napalm and cruise missiles since Desert Storm. America must not let Bush to go to war against Iran, a war that will be a nightmare for the entire world. The fourth Gulf War must not happen.

Matein Khalid is a Dubai based investment banker