Asia Times, Hong Kong
Sept 21 2004

Bush, Marshal Foch and Iran
By Spengler

Washington’s strategic position in the Middle East is stronger than
it has ever been, contrary to superficial interpretation. With much
of central Iraq out of US control and a record level of close to 100
attacks a day against US forces, President George W Bush appears on
the defensive. The moment recalls French Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s
1914 dispatch from the Marne: “My center is giving way, my right is
in retreat; situation excellent. I shall attack.” To be specific, the
United States will in some form or other attack Iran while it
arranges the division of Iraq.

That Sunni diehards and Shi’ite adventurers would prevent the
pacification of Iraq never was in question (Will Iraq survive the
Iraqi resistance? , December 23, 2003). Leaks of a National
Intelligence Estimate warning last week of impending Iraqi civil war
suggest that Washington is thinking past the loser’s game of
occupation. The phony war between reluctant Iraqi recruits and rebels
will persist past November, but something deadly and different will
follow on Bush’s re-election. Russian paratroops will be busy in the
Caucasus after the Beslan atrocity, making a Russian presence in Iraq
unlikely, contrary to my earlier forecast. (That may have been the
intended outcome of the incident.) Nonetheless, Washington has a
winning card to play, and the decibel level of protests from Tehran
as well as from the US opposition suggests that it is well
anticipated.

If Washington chooses to dismember Iraq rather than pacify it, who
will win and who will lose? Washington always has had the option of
breaking up the Mesopotamian monstrosity drawn by British
cartographers in 1921. The only surprise is that it has taken US
intelligence so long to reach this conclusion. Whether America’s
policymakers are slow learners, or whether Bush chose to perpetuate
the farce of Iraqi nation-building until the November elections, we
may never know. An Iranian alliance with Iraq’s Shi’ites poses a
danger to this maneuver. But that danger, in turn, drives the US
toward action against Iran.

Ahmad Chalabi, the Shi’ite Iraqi leader closest to the Pentagon,
endorsed Kurdish independence in the following exchange with the
Middle East Quarterly (MEQ, summer 2004 issue):

MEQ: Some high-profile American analysts, such as Leslie Gelb, former
president of the Council on Foreign Relations, have called for Iraq
to be split up into three states. Are they right? Should Iraq be
broken up? Why shouldn’t the Kurds have independence?

Chalabi: All peoples have the right to self-determination and that
includes the Kurdish people. Why should they be any different? If the
exercise of that right leads them towards independence, then so be
it. We will negotiate with them. The days of using violence to build
this country are over.
Iraq’s Shi’ites, who comprise nearly two-thirds of the population,
have no reason to subsidize the Sunni minority with revenues from oil
wells located in their centers of ethnic preponderance. The simplest
way to deal with resistance in the Sunni triangle is to break off the
oil-rich Kurdish north and Shi’ite south, and let the Sunni center
eat sand.

Washington loses nothing by promoting an independent Kurdistan,
except for Turkey’s dwindling goodwill. It is not surprising that
Ankara warns darkly of Kurdish plots behind US operations in Iraq’s
northwest (Turkey snaps over US bombing of its brethren, K Gajendra
Singh, AToL September 18). At the Pentagon, patience grows thin for
the crypto-Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey is the
new sick man of Europe (In defense of Turkish cigarettes, August 24),
and Washington has less and less to gain from it.

For that matter, the Kurds are more than Washington’s pawns. Their
love (in Franz Rosenzweig’s luminous phrase) for their own nationhood
is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death; if the present
opportunity for independence passes them by, the glacial tide of
modernity will grind their language and culture underneath (You have
met the enemy and he is you , June 29). Binding them to Mesopotamia
may prove more trouble than it is worth. A kind of historic judgment
would afflict the Turks in the form of Kurdish independence, for
Turkey employed the Kurds to expel the Armenians in 1915, leaving
them in what used to be known as Western Armenia.

That leaves the specter of a greater Shi’ite entity as the main
dissuasion against an Iraqi breakup. News reports of US efforts to
destabilize the Iranian regime have been circulating for the better
part of the year, and some media (eg the New York Times on September
1) linked press leaks about Israeli spies in the Pentagon to internal
administration debates over possible action against that country.
Iranian officials have warned daily against US efforts to undermine
their regime, as have American opponents of the Bush administration,
for example the University of Michigan’s Middle East scholar Juan
Cole on August 29 in his “Informed Comment” weblog: “It is an echo of
the one-two punch secretly planned by the pro-Likud faction in the
Department of Defense. First, Iraq would be taken out by the United
States, and then Iran.”

All of this was so much ectoplasm until Saturday, when the US forced
through the International Atomic Energy Agency a resolution demanding
that Iran cease enriching uranium. Now the strategic logic is as
compelling as it was in 1914, when the German general staff insisted
that immediate war with Russia was preferable to waiting until the
eastern giant completed its railway network. Washington is assembling
its case for some form of intervention against Tehran, and turned an
important corner of diplomacy with the weekend’s warning.

For Iran, the emergence of a quasi-independent entity from among the
Iraqi Shi’ites presents as much danger as opportunity, that is, as
much of a channel of US influence into Iran as a source of Iranian
leverage in Iraq. Chalabi, accused of betraying US secrets to Iran,
personifies this duality.

Personalities are less important than the layout of the chessboard.
America’s next move will be to break out of the stalemate in Iraq by
widening the conflict.