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The
World Bows to Iranian Regional Hegemony
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Originally published under the title, "World Bows to
Iran's Hegemony."
The
looming nuclear agreement is a dark cloud for countries within range of
Iranian ballistic missiles.
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The problem with Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu's address
to Congress March 3 was not the risk of offending Washington, but rather
Washington's receding relevance. President Barack Obama is not the only
leader who wants to acknowledge what is already a fact in the ground,
namely that "Iran has become the preeminent strategic player in West
Asia to the increasing disadvantage of the US and its regional
allies," as a
former Indian ambassador to Oman wrote this week.
For differing reasons, the powers of the world have elected to
legitimize Iran's dominant position, hoping to delay but not deter its
eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons. Except for Israel and the Sunni
Arab states, the world has no desire to confront Iran. Short of an
American military strike, which is unthinkable for this administration,
there may be little that Washington can do to influence the course of
events. Its influence has fallen catastrophically in consequence of a
chain of policy blunders.
The powers of the world hope to
delay, but not deter, Iran's eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons.
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The best that Prime Minister Netanyahu can hope for is that the US
Congress will in some way disrupt the Administration's efforts to strike
a deal with Iran by provoking the Iranians. That is what the White House
fears, and that explains its rage over Netanyahu's appearance.
Tehran may overplay its hand, but I do not think it will. The Persians
are not the Palestinians, who discovered that they were a people only a
generation ago and never miss an opportunity to miss and opportunity;
they are ancient and crafty, and know an opportunity when it presents
itself.
Most of the world wants a deal, because the alternative would be war.
For 10 years I have argued that war is inevitable whatever the diplomats
do, and that the question is not if, but how and when. President Obama is
not British prime minister Neville Chamberlain selling out to Hitler at
Munich in 1938: rather, he is Lord
Halifax, that is, Halifax if he had been prime minister in 1938.
Unlike the unfortunate Chamberlain, who hoped to buy time for Britain to
build warplanes, Halifax liked Hitler, as Obama and his camarilla admire
Iran.
China is Chamberlain, hoping to placate Iran in order to buy time.
China's dependence on Middle East oil will increase during the next
decade no matter what else China might do, and a war in the Persian Gulf
would ruin it.
Until early 2014, China believed that the United States would
guarantee the security of the Persian Gulf. After the rise of Islamic
State (ISIS), it concluded that the United States no longer cared, or
perhaps intended to destabilize the region for nefarious reasons. But
China does not have means to replace America's presence in the Persian
Gulf. Like Chamberlain at Munich, it seeks delay.
Obama, to be sure, portrays his policy in the language of balance of
power. He told the New Yorker's David Remnick in 2014,
It would be profoundly in the interest
of citizens throughout the region if Sunnis and Shias weren't intent on
killing each other. And although it would not solve the entire problem,
if we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion - not funding
terrorist organizations, not trying to stir up sectarian discontent in
other countries, and not developing a nuclear weapon - you could see an
equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states
and Iran in which there's competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an
active or proxy warfare.
That, as the old joke goes, is the demo version.
The US has tacitly accepted the
guiding role of Iranian commanders in Iraq's military operations
against ISIS.
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On the ground, the US has tacitly
accepted the guiding role of Iranian commanders in Iraq's military
operations against ISIS. It is courting
the Iran-backed Houthi rebels who just overthrow a Saudi-backed regime in
Yemen. It looks the other way while its heavy arms shipments to the
Lebanese army are diverted to Hezbollah.
At almost every point at which Iran has tried to assert hegemony over
its neighbors, Washington has acquiesced. "In the end, peace can be
achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power," wrote Henry
Kissinger. The major powers hope for peace through Iranian hegemony,
although they differ in their estimate of how long this will last.
Apart from its nuclear ambitions, the broader deal envisioned by
Washington would leave Iran as a de facto suzerain in Iraq. It would also
make Iran the dominant power in Lebanon (via Hezbollah), Syria (via its
client regime) and Yemen (through its Houthi proxies). Although Sunni
Muslims outnumber Shi'ites by 6:1, Sunni populations are concentrated in
North Africa, Turkey and South Asia. Iran hopes to dominate the Levant
and Mesopotamia, encircling Saudi Arabia and threatening Azerbaijan.
Washington destroyed the balance
of power that defined the region's politics when it pushed through
majority rule in Iraq.
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It is grotesque for America to talk of balance of power in the Persian
Gulf, because America destroyed the balance of power that defined the
region's politics from the end of the First World War until 2006, when
Washington pushed through majority rule in Iraq.
The imperialist powers in their wisdom established a power balance on
two levels. First, they created a Sunni-dominated state in Iraq opposite
Shi'ite Iran. The two powers fought each other to a standstill during the
1980s with the covert encouragement of the Reagan administration. Nearly
a million soldiers died without troubling the world around them.
Second, the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 created two states, Syria
and Iraq, in which minorities ruled majorities - the Alawite minority in
Syria, and the Sunni minority in Iraq. Tyranny of a minority may be
brutal, but a minority cannot exterminate a majority.
America's first great blunder was to force majority rule upon Iraq. As
Lt General (ret.) Daniel
Bolger explained in a 2014 book,
The stark facts on the ground still sat
there, oozing pus and bile. With Saddam gone, any voting would install a
Shiite majority. The Sunni wouldn't run Iraq again. That, at the bottom,
caused the insurgency. Absent the genocide of Sunni Arabs, it would keep
it going.
Under majority Shi'ite rule, Iraq inevitably became Iran's ally.
Iranian Revolutionary Guards are now leading its campaign against the
Sunni resistance, presently dominated by ISIS, and Iranian
officers are leading Iraqi army regulars.
This was the work of the George W Bush administration, not Obama. In
its ideological fervor for Arab democracy, the Republicans opened the
door for Iran to dominate the region. Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's
National Security Advisor, proposed offering an olive branch to Iran as
early as 2003. After the Republicans got trounced in the 2006
Congressional elections, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld got a pink
slip, vice president Dick Cheney got benched, and "realist"
Robert Gates - the co-chairman of the 2004 Council on
Foreign Relations task force that advocated a deal with Iran - took
over at Defense.
China and
Russia
In the past, China has sought to strike a balance between Saudi Arabia
and Iran with weapons sales, among other means. One Chinese analyst
observes that although China's weapons deliveries to Iran are larger in
absolute terms than its sales to Saudi Arabia, it has given the Saudis
its best medium-range missiles, which constitute a "formidable
deterrent" against Iran.
A
Chinese warship arrives in Bandar Abbas, Iran in September 2014.
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As China sees the matter, its overall dependency on imported oil is
rising, and the proportion of that oil coming from Iran and its perceived
allies is rising. Saudi Arabia may be China's biggest provider, but Iraq
and Oman account for lion's share of the recent increase in oil imports.
China doesn't want to rock the boat with either prospective adversary.
Among the world's powers, China is the supreme rationalist: it views
the world in terms of cold self-interest and tends to assume that others
also view the world this way. One of China's most respected military
strategists told me bluntly that the notion of a nuclear exchange between
Israel and Iran (and by implication any regional nuclear power and Iran)
was absurd: the Iranians, he argued, know that a nuclear-armed Israel
could destroy them in retaliation.
Other Chinese analysts are less convinced and view Iran's prospective
acquisition of nuclear weapons with trepidation. It is not only war with
Israel but with Saudi Arabia that concerns the oil-importing Chinese. For
the time being, Beijing has decided to accommodate Iran. In a March 2
commentary, Xinhua
explicitly rejected Israeli objections:
The US Congress will soon have a guest,
Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu, who is expected to try to
convince lawmakers that a deal with Iran on its nuclear program could
threaten the very existence of the Jewish state.
Despite the upcoming pressure,
policymakers in Washington should have a clear mind of the potential
dangers of back-pedaling on the current promising efforts for a
comprehensive deal on the Iranian nuclear issue before a March 31
deadline …
With a new round of talks in
Switzerland pending, it is widely expected that the P5+1 [the five
permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany] could succeed
in reaching a deal with Iran to prevent the latter from developing a
nuclear bomb, in exchange for easing sanctions on Tehran.
The momentum does not come easy and
could hardly withstand any disturbances such as a surprise announcement
by Washington to slap further sanctions on Tehran.
The Obama administration needs no
outside reminder to know that any measures at this stage to
"overwhelm" Iran will definitely cause havoc to the positive
atmosphere that came after years of frustration over the issue.
While it is impossible for Washington
to insulate itself from the powerful pro-Israel lobbyist this time, the
US policymakers should heed that by deviating from the ongoing endeavor
on Iran they may squander a hard-earned opportunity by the international
community to move closer to a solution to the Iran nuclear issue, for
several years to come if not forever.
Russia has taken Iran's side explicitly, for several reasons.
First, Russia has stated bluntly that it would help Iran in
retaliation for Western policy in Ukraine, as I wrote in this space January
28. Second, Russia's own Muslim problem is Sunni rather than Shi'ite.
It has reason to fear the influence of ISIS among its own Muslims. If
Iran fights ISIS, it serves Russian interests. Russia, to be sure, does
not like the idea of a nuclear power on its southern border, but its
priorities place it squarely in Iran's camp.
Demographic
Time Bomb
The Israeli prime minister asserted that the alternative to a bad deal
is not war, but a better deal. I do not think he believes that, but
Americans cannot wrap their minds around the notion that West Asia will
remain at war indefinitely, especially because the war arises from their
own stupidity.
Balance of power in the Middle East is inherently impossible today for
the same reason it failed in Europe in 1914, namely a grand demographic
disequilibrium: Iran is on a course to demographic disaster, and must
assert its hegemony while it still has time.
Game theorists might argue that Iran has a rational self-interest to
trade its nuclear ambitions for the removal of sanctions. The solution to
a multi-period game - one that takes into account Iran's worsening
demographic weakness - would have a solution in which Iran takes great
risks to acquire nuclear weapons.
Between 30% and 40% of Iranians will be older than 60 by mid-century
(using the UN Population Prospect's Constant Fertility and
"Low" Variants). Meanwhile, its military-age population will
fall by a third to a half.
Belated
efforts to promote fertility are unlikely to make a difference. The
causes of Iranian infertility are baked into the cake - higher levels of female
literacy, an officially-sanctioned culture
of sexual license administered by the Shi'ite clergy as "temporary marriage,"
epidemic levels of sexually-transmitted
disease and inbreeding.
Iran, in short, has an apocalyptic regime with a lot to be apocalyptic
about.
Henry Kissinger is right: peace can be founded on either hegemony or
balance of power. Iran cannot be a hegemon for long because it will
implode economically and demographically within a generation. In the
absence of either, the result is war. For the past 10 years I have
argued in this space that when war is inevitable, preemption is the
least damaging course of action. I had hoped that George W Bush would
have the gumption to de-fang Iran, and was disappointed when he came
under the influence of Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates. Now we are back
in 1938, but with Lord Halifax rather than Neville Chamberlain in charge.
David P. Goldman is a Senior
Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and the Wax Family Fellow
at the Middle East Forum. His book How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too)
was published by Regnery Press in September 2011. A volume of his
essays on culture, religion and economics, It's Not the End of the World - It's Just the End
of You, also appeared that fall, from Van Praag Press.
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