America’s Iraq gameplan

Why is Iraq so important to the West? So important that the American president and the British prime minister have gambled their political careers and personal reputations to occupy this small Middle-Eastern country where, under its historical name, Mesopotamia, civilisation was born?

The official answer: democracy. That of course is nonsense. It was Washington (with a supportive nudge from London) which financed Saddam Hussein’s rise to power as a thuggish young rebel leader in the 1960s right through to his ascension to president-cum-dictator in 1979. It was only an increasingly ambitious Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, another Anglo-American protectorate, in August 1990 that turned his former Western benefactors into foes.

Most neutral observers believe that the real reason the United States and Britain have occupied Iraq is oil. This is simplistic and wrong. The West has enough leverage over oil fields in Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest producer of crude oil, to treat Iraqi oil as important but not critical. 

The real reason Iraq is so important is its neighbours — specifically Saudi Arabia, Israel and Iran. All three countries are potential minefields for the West. American intelligence has consistently indicated over the past four years that Saudi Arabia, which the US has used as a military base for more than half a century, will implode into civil unrest over the next decade. That is why the US has in recent years quietly removed the majority of its troops there. It is preparing for a scenario in which the ruling House of Saud comes under intense internal pressure. A worst-case scenario drawn by Pentagon is an Iran-style revolution in with a non-monarchic, Islamic fundamentalist regime overthrowing the royal family. That would plunge Saudi Arabia and the entire region into chaos in a manner reminiscent of the revolution that led to the overthrow of the US-friendly Shah of Iran in 1979 and the emergence of Ayotollah Khomeini. A democratic, shi’ite-led Iraq aligned to the US is seen in as an attractive geopolitical replacement for an increasingly unreliable Saudi Arabia.

But it is shi’ite-majority Iran which worries Washington the most. Its hardline president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has infuriated the US with his intransigent stand over Teheran’s nuclear programme. Ahmedinejad’s recent remarks demanding the relocation of Israel to an enclave in Europe has also deeply antagonised Washington. For it is Israel that has long been the pivot of Washington’s entire Middle-East strategy. Without Washington’s military and financial support, Israel would be an unviable state amidst an ocean of Arab hostility. Iraq under Saddam posed a significant and growing military threat to Israel. By installing a US-loyalist democracy in Iraq the US sought to kill three geopolitical birds with one stone. First, to end the biggest, most contiguous military threat to Israel. Two, to create a powerful bulwark against a recalcitrant, belligerent nuclear weapons-seeking (but also shi’ite-ruled) Iran. And three, to secure a replacement for Saudi Arabia as a future US military and intelligence base in the heart of the Middle-East.

Will this US game of geopolitical chess end in a satisfactory outcome for Washington? Unlikely. Iraq could well explode into a shia-sunni-kurd civil war once the US army leaves, as it must do sooner or later, probably in 2008. Iraq did not exist as a country before 1918 when the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled the region almost uninterruptedly from 1532, lost all its Arab territories to the allies after World War I. Under the Ottomans, what passes as Iraq today was administered as three separate semi-autonomous regions — kurds in the north, sunnis around Baghdad and shias in the southeast (Basra). Once the area fell to the victorious  Americans and British following World War 1, it was named “Iraq”. The new “country” was artificially held together by a succession of kings and dictators propped up by Britain and the US for the next 70 years, Saddam being the latest. Once that glue was gone, Iraq was always likely to disintegrate into its three historic ethnic factions. This will decisively defeat the long-term Western strategy of using Iraq as a US-aligned geopolitical replacement for Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, Iran’s anti-American stand is likely to harden as Washington increases pressure on it to abandon its nuclear ambitions. These two developments will lead to the exact outcome the US fears most in the Middle-East - an implacably hostile, potentially nuclear-armed Iran, an unstable, rapidly disintegrating Iraq  and an increasingly unsafe Israel.

minhazmerchant@business-leaders.com