The struggle for the Middle East continues but the balance of forces constantly shifts like the shake of a kaleidoscope. The main underlying cleavage is between the US hegemon and its clients and those resisting it, including the Syrian-Iranian alliance and a variety of trans-state actors. This has sometimes appeared as a Sunni-Shia cleavage in the region since the main Sunni states, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, wary of Iran, are largely US-aligned. The main battlegrounds are Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon, with actors in each country aligned to one side or the other. These main axes of conflict are, however, crosscut and diluted by a variety of others, immensely complicating a fluid balance of power between the antagonists. And even the main antagonists, the US and Iran, are split within
In terms of raw military power, there should be no contest between the two main sides, yet the US cannot efficiently translate its immense military fire power into the ability to get its way, if its enemies are willing to incur the high costs and risks of resistance. US opponents cannot get their way but can obstruct US designs. The US needs allies to control the region, but its coalition is fragile, particularly split between Israel and Arab powers like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and between Turkey and its Kurdish clients.
The US-Iran confrontation is the most dangerous, but is also fluid. US President George W. Bush’s rhetoric of a ‘nuclear holocaust’ if Iran obtained an atomic arsenal was used to justify a campaign to economically isolate Iran, impose UN sanctions and threaten a “military option” Iranian rhetoric has warned of the repercussions of an attack on it, threatening that 170 US targets, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan are within range of its rockets, that any Gulf state from which US forces mounted an attack would also be hit, and threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz to oil exports and hence raising the price of oil to hundreds of dollars a barrel, and de-stabilizing the world economy
Yet, reputedly US and Israeli leaders privately concluded that Iran’s air defenses and dispersal of its nuclear facilities would likely allow Iran’s underground nuclear infrastructure to survive an air-strike, while Washington’s Gulf allies were keen to avoid a war in which they could become part of the battleground. Then, just as the Bush administration was seeking consensus in the security council for a new round of sanctions against Iran, the US National Intelligence estimate announced that Iran had halted its nuclear program in 2003 and that even if it re-started the program it would be a decade before it could produce a single bomb. Iran was preserving its options by developing a civilian nuclear energy capability that both complies with international law and would allow it to easily develop nuclear arms if feels threatened. The report makes it harder for Bush to sustain the international coalition against Iran or to get further UN sanctions on it. Not long afterwards, a senior US diplomat announced that the Iranian leadership had reined in Shia militias in Iraq, causing a sharp drop in roadside bomb attacks that had targeted US forces.
Had moderates on both sides reining in the extremists to halt the march to war? Almost certainly the National Intelligence estimate was a preemptive strike by Washington’s mainstream career foreign policy establishment in Washington against the efforts of extremists around Bush and Cheney, especially the pro-Israeli neo-cons, to push the US against its own interests into a war with Iran and at a time when it was overcommitted in Iraq and Afghanistan. Influential ex-officials accused this clique of pushing for a war. The report "shows that the intelligence community has learned its lessons from the Iraq debacle," said
Sen. John D. Rockefeller, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, referring to allegations that intelligence on Iraq was skewed to promote Bush’s war with Iraq. Similarly, in Iran, a power struggle the moderates were able to restrain the radical President Ahmadinejad and his backers in the revolutionary guard after the intervention of the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Khamenai.
At the same time, Ahmedinejad was invited to the Gulf Co-operation Council summit in Qatar and then to Saudi Arabia where both sides sought to ease the threat of war. One Saudi newspaper called this “the end of the American game” of bringing the Arab Gulf into an anti-Iranian alliance. The Gulf states believe it unwise to be overly dependent on the US for their security. They would be major losers in the event of a US war on Iran. The NIE report raised the prospect of a US-Iran reapproachment, and, as Iran seemed to play a stabilizing role in Iraq, the Gulf states thought it wise to be on better terms with Tehran. But also America’s Arab allies have little confidence in it for its failure to push the peace process and because of the regional instability, terrorism and clash of civilizations unleashed by its invasion of Iraq; Saudi King Abdullah called the US occupation of Iraq illegitimate and a top Dubai general labelled it “a provocation to billions of Muslims.” They remain aligned with the US chiefly for lack of an alternative way of balancing Iran. For Iran’s part, it was seeking to assurances the Gulf states would not allow their territory to be used by the US for an attack on it.
Meanwhile, the balance of power in Iraq had, to a degree, shifted toward the US. It was not just the extra troops the US had interjected into Baghdad. More important was that the Saudi’s had staunched the flow Saudi jihadists to Iraq, Iran’s reining in anti-US Shia militias, including the nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army; and the US-Saudi sponsorship and arming of some 75,000-man tribal militias, the so-called Sahwa (Awakening). The al-Qaida extremists among the insurgents, in their indiscriminate attacks on civilians rather than fighting the occupation forces had, created such insecurity that Iraqi Sunni opinion began to turn against them. Nevertheless the US was a long way from creating a stable client state in Iraq. As the US ambassador admitted, Iran could reactivate the insurgency if it wished. The US arming of Sunni and Shia militias further undermines state authority. Additionally, the US is determined to retain permanent bases in Iraq, but these are likely to become a major issue of dispute when the current UN mandate expires December. Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki may negotiate a permanent arrangement allowing US bases but for other Iraqi leaders such bases are unacceptable. It seems unlikely that any Iraqi government that allowed such US presence could retain any legitimacy. The US trump card is that Maliki cannot survive without US backing and that US forces would be welcome in the Kurdish areas. Another de-stabilizing factor is the drive of the Kurds for de-facto independence, especially their effort to appropriate for themselves the oil resources of Kirkuk, unilaterally selling off oil concessions to Western companies. This puts them at odds with Iraqi Arabs and also with Turkey, a main US ally. If the US allows the Kurds to seize the oil resources, it will alienate the Sunni militias it has created. Turkey’s recent attack on Kurdish guerilla bases in Iraq Kurdistan was blamed by Iraqi Kurds on the US and supported by Sunni Iraqi opinion, giving the conflict a trans-state ethnic-sectarian dimension. All these divisions enables the US to “divide and rule” but also make managing its coalition more difficult.
Meanwhile, in the Levant the struggle for power remained stalemated. Lebanon was a battleground between the Sunni-Christian 14 March coalition backed by Saudi Arabia, the US, and France and the Shia-led counter-coalition backed by Syria and Iran. The country remained paralyzed by their inability to reach agreement on who would fill the vacant presidential office. Partly at issue is whether the temporary parliamentary majority enjoyed by the former gives the right to rule decide national issues unilaterally or whether they must be made by consensus in which no sides interests are damaged, the tradition in Lebanon.
Syria’s power position remains unclear. It has maintained its influence with its allies in Lebanon. But it is blamed for the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, former prime minister and client of both France and Saudi Arabia, which has cost it its former good relations with these important powers. The international inquiry into the Hariri murder remains a sword hanging over Bashar al-Asad’s head. Syria also suffered an Israel air attack approved by the US on what some charged was a nuclear facility but may have been meant to test Syria’s air defenses. Yet, there is also a realization by some in the West that Syria cannot simply be browbeaten into compliance with their agenda and that it can be a force for stability if its interests are recognized and for instability if they are not. Thus, the US, hoping to break Syria’s alliance with Iran, invited it to the Annapolis conference and put the Golan Heights on the conference agenda. Thereafter, however, Bush declared that he had lost patience with Syrian President Bashar Al-Asad for trouble making in Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine.
The Arab-Israeli conflict is no nearer to a breakthrough. Israel’s conflicts with sub-state movements are stalemated. Hizbullah has been rearmed to an extent greater than before the 2006 summer war, notwithstanding the U.N. resolution that prohibits this, with long-range missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv. Israeli military operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip continued while an Iranan-made missile was fired 10 miles into Israel. The Bush administration’s Annapolis peace conference started was not so much to push for a peace agreement between Palestinians and Israelis but to rally pro-US Arab states to its side against Iran. In the absence of serious US pressure on Israel, the peace talks between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas have gone nowhere. For, as Olmert admitted, Israel continues it policy of settlements on Palestinian territory in violation of its obligations under the Road Map peace plan. The Palestinians are, however, greatly weakened by the split between Abbas who controls the West Bank and is supported by the US and its allies and Hamas, which controls Gaza and is supported by Syria and Iran.
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