THE NEXT OIL WAR … A COMPLEX, TROUBLED BACKGROUND
Andrew McKillop
VHeadline.com, Venezuela
May 2 2006
VHeadline.com oil industry commentarist Andrew McKillop writes: The
imperial, royal and religious dynasty of the Bourbons was a long-lived
European power elite, episodically holding many different powers
through the 11th to 16th centuries. Legend has it that the family
had one severe weakness: “Forgetting nothing, and learning nothing.”
Imperial and Great Power plays in the Middle East — all basically
drawn in by the region’s big, if declining hydrocarbon reserves —
show every sign of also suffering from the Bourbon’s weakness.
It is certain that not only the recent (20th century) ‘colonial and
imperial’ players, the USA, UK and France, but also the ‘traditional
imperial’ powers of Iran, Russia and Turkey, and the sunnite religious
imperiums of the Jordanian Hashemites and Saudi Wahabites, all suffer
from imperial nostalgia and current immobilism.
Their inability to forget their former power and glory is accompanied
by their incapacity to learn from their present powerlessness.
NEW AND TRADITIONAL PLAYERS AND THEIR STRATEGIES
In the daily present of 2006, this is driven home to the US and UK by
their failed ‘liberation experiment’ in Iraq, which has resulted in the
country’s oil export performance falling well below that achieved under
the sunnite Saddam Hussein regime. Far worse, this bungled attempt at
installing a servile puppet regime to replace the previous autocratic
regime has also created the certainty of widespread ‘intercommunal’
or sunnite-chi’ite conflict.
Basically, the entity called Iraq is now ungovernable, a country
whose frontiers mean nothing.
France’s blustering in Lebanon and against Syria, together with firstly
French and then US threats of nuclear weapons use against the ‘mollah
regime’ controlling Iran, are essentially sabre rattling with no fixed,
set or organized strategy, or policy behind them.
The most significant ‘traditional players’ are Turkey, Russia and Iran.
Turkey is now reduced to a tiny rump relative to its Ottoman glory,
but is also a modern, fast-growing, oil dependent industrial power with
a strong military. This regularly threatens an immediate invasion of
any reconstituted and re-declared Kurdistan, but the result of this,
including a very widespread Kurdish revolt, would trap Turkey in a
long and unwinnable colonial war.
Iran is also today heavily reduced in imperial reach and power, but
surely imagines it will be the first to profit from the final collapse
or break-up of Iraq, when or if the larval and terminal civil war
breaks out. Any attempt by Iran to concretise its role as the chi’ite
bastion, and move on to occupy and subjugate eastern Saudi Arabia,
SE Iraq, and the Petromonarchies will however, and surely lead to US
and European military action.
Russia, under the Putin regime or clique, now has an expansionist
strategy, after Russia’s heavy compression following the collapse
of the Soviet Union, and is reminded every day of its newfound
oil-and-gas power. Tinted with the nostalgia of Mother Russia, many
powerful voices in the Putin clique remind Russians that its 19th
century regional claims extended to all of present northern Iran and
to some regions of today’s Turkey, as well as much of Central Asia.
When or if a US-European alliance attempts regime change of Tehran,
Russia can claim a large slice of the remains, the north of Iran
containing a very large part of Iran’s established and ageing oil
production capacities.
The regional strategy or strategies of the ‘new players’, that is
mainly India and China, as well as actual and potential action by
atomic weapon armed Pakistan, are for the least cloudy and sometimes
contradictory. Apart from Pakistan, which provides sure and certain
support to the more extreme ‘imperializing’ factions among Saudi
Wahabites, nothing indicates that China and India will avoid the route
taken by their imperial rivals. In other words China and India will,
very soon, start to play divide-and-rule in the region. Their strategy
is clear: through divide-and-rule a precarious balance of forces and
military stalemate can be hoped for, enabling oil and gas production
and exports to be maximized. Conversely, another direct impact of India
and China being drawn into the region by hunger for hydrocarbons is
yet further arms inflows to the Middle East and Central Asia.
What the former, actual and would-be imperial powers always choose
to ignore, before the event of military invasion and occupation,
is the cost and logistics of occupying the terrain. This in fact
has, or will soon effectively drive the US and UK out of Iraq:
their continued presence in Iraq can be counted in months rather
than years. The Times Square ticker display panels count the hourly
cost, in millions of dollars, of this failed colonial adventure. In
rough terms, using a barrel price of US$65-70, the Iraq war costs US
taxpayers about 7.5 times the cost of all US oil imports, of about
13.5 million barrels-per-day.
It is rather certain that the G. W. Bush clique, before the war,
counted on rapid pacification and improvement of Iraq’s oil export
performance … it betted and lost, along with its junior partner,
the UK New Labour government of Tony Blair.
We could hope that the most recent imperial players to arrive, China
and India, who are already active in the region through oil need,
will learn from this, but no bets can be placed on this, due to the
Bourbon Achilles heel. One possible result might be that the US and
European players, driven out by the sheer cost of occupying the region,
‘subcontract’ the task of regional pacification to the cheap labor
armies of India and China Alternatively, these two superpowers could
decide by themselves to take on the task, and guarantee certain oil
export quotas for certain periods of time to the departing imperial
powers, in return for non-belligerence from these latter.
Many other scenarios are possible, for example ‘nuclear
sanctuarization’ of Saudi Arabia, by Pakistan, through this latter’s
extreme sunnite ruling elite supplying atomic weapons to its ‘fraternal
cousins’, the extreme sunnite ruling elite of Saudi Arabia, in return
for cheap oil.
REGIONAL INSTABILITY
The Middle East, and to a lesser extent Central Asia, has been a
geopolitical ‘fault-line’ area for many centuries, but particularly
since the collapse of the Turkish or Ottoman Empire, and the Bolshevik
revolution, in 1917-23. The numbers of displaced ethnic, religious and
national entities in the region is very large. Some are well-known,
notably the Kurds, who number about 40 to 45 million but have no
national identity. The Palestinian national ‘conflict’ with an Israel
whose borders remain fluid and controversial, is another well-known
example. Many others exist, throughout the region, from the east
Mediterranean, to the Caspian region, and the wide region around the
Persian or Arab Gulf.
We can note that an apparently insignificant ethnico-national group
like the Baluchis, whose main population grouping is currently
concentrated in eastern Iran, on the Pakistani frontier, was like
the Chechens, Kurds, Palestinians and Armenians subjected to mass
deportation. Today, this minority, like many others could trigger a
shockwave of communal religious or national conflict and instability if
it chose, for one reason or another, that now is the moment to act. In
the Baluchi case, mass deportation was due to the Iranian chahs of
the 20th century (1925-1979). Within current and unstable national
frontiers of the region, similarly, huge forced population movements
have occurred since 1917-23, for example in Syria, Lebanon, Israel,
Iraq and Saudi Arabia. These movements have sometimes been reinforced,
sometimes weakened by ‘normal’ and large-scale economic migration.
All the above, and other ‘minority peoples’ of the region have
‘legitimate’ claims. Taking the Baluchis, their claim is to ‘return
to’ an independent Kurdistan once this is re-created. However, the
borders of Greater Kurdistan are for the least unclear, but extend to
at least one-half of current Iraq, one-third of Syria and Turkey, and
about one-quarter of Iran. Armenian nationalists consider their current
geographical national entity as completely unrelated to ‘historical’
or Greater Armenia. In the same way, Israeli ‘hyper nationalists’ claim
a vast sweep of territory to the north and east of current Israel,
stretching to the Caspian Sea. We are now witnessing a sharp, and
continual reduction in the ‘tightness’ of the unrealistic frontiers
quickly traced for the wider Middle East region at the Versailles
treaty series (1917-23).
The imminent and effective disappearance of Iraq would quickly increase
mass migration within the region, and whether armed or not this would
rapidly lead to a shockwave of change.
Great Powers, that is ‘external and imperial’ powers can essentially
either manipulate the regional kaleidoscope of traditional and modern
national movements, or invade and occupy the region, or parts of
the region. In both cases, in today’s context, the results will be
powerful and unexpected, because of the many downstream shockwave or
‘eddy current’ effects. The net result would most likely be a frenetic
period of frontier drawing, and conflict, as in the period 1918-49.
One important point to add is that the two ‘regional great powers’,
other than Iran, that is Turkey and Egypt, would almost surely and
certainly be drawn ino any conflict. Both of these players can or
could nurture maximalist goals.
In the case of Turkey this would be restoring the Ottoman Empire,
which is already very clearly stated as the ‘higher goal’ for Turkey,
by the powerful Grey Wolf organization, firmly entrenched inside the
Turkish military, and also by some nominally Kurdish nationalist
groups. In the case of Egypt, the restoration of the earliest and
greatest sunnite Caliphates would be the maximalist goal.
OPTIONS, SEQUENCES AND OUTCOMES
As in many other areas of social and economic activity, and also in
the physical, astrophysical and nuclear sciences, system stability
very often breaks down after long periods of apparent fixity and
apparent resistance to change. In other words when change comes,
it is rapid and large-scale. In the historical and political arena,
it is nothing at all like the ‘reformist’ or ‘stage-by-stage’ process
of change that for example the Palestine-Israel conflict is supposed to
be responding to. If we take the 6 years 1917-23, and compare ‘before’
and ‘after’ frontiers, population groupings, even the supposed ethnic
and religious identity of large tracts of the region, we find that
huge changes occurred. To dramatize, we could say that for 300 years
previous, under the Ottomans, almost nothing changed.
Then, in 6 years, everything changed.
This of course was not really the case.
The Ottoman ’empire’ or suzereinty itself vastly changed through
the centuries, sometimes rapidly. Turkish-Iranian conflict, that
is sunnite-chi’ite rivalry in the region led to a long and probably
decisive war, comparable to the 1980-88 sunnite-chi’ite or Iraq-Iran
war.
In 1736-47 the Iranians traced a sharp, clear eastern border or limit
to the sunnite Ottoman ’empire’, through winning this ‘ethnic’ war.
At the same time, this sent a signal to Imperial Russia, already
beginning its ‘march towards warm oceans’, that is south.
The fact that religious rivalry or conflict is a very strong part
of the underlay, still today, makes it important to examine a few
elements of the religious background.
What is sure, however, is that when change starts to occur across
the region it will be fast rather than slow. The current Mid East
and Central Asian geopolitical situation is very surely overdue for
change, but we cannot exactly predict when it will change. We can
predict the extent, which will be large, its rapid speed, and the
approach of different external ‘players’, who today are almost all
and exclusively drawn into the region by oil-need, in a context of
rising anxiety on supplies due to the rapid approach of Peak Oil.
RELIGIOUS AND ETHNIC INFLUENCES
We can easily argue that the first Iran-Iraq (or Ottoman sunnite)
war, of 1736-47, at least in part, and a big part, was an ethnic or
religious conflict, that is sunnite-chi’ite. The 1980-88 war should
be interpreted the same way: partly nationalist, partly political,
partly induced or triggered by outside powers, but also and strongly
a religious or ethnic conflict. Unlike the highly traditional and
low-tech war of the mid-18th century, the 1980-88 war led to huge
human and economic losses for both sides, and no territorial gains
for either. We can easily say this war had two losers and no winner.
Baghdad, Basra, the ‘twin cities’ of Najaf and Karbala, all in Iraq,
and the Khuzistan region of Iran are the essential heartlands of
Islam’s earliest philosophical and theological development. This
followed very soon after the Yemenite, Saudi, Palestinian, Jordanian
and Syrian (using today’s meanings of the terms) voyages of Mahomet
himself, about 550-580 AD. Later, the intellectual centre of
sunnism shifted to the west, to Egypt and Syria, but the earliest
development and definition of the Sunna or Tradition, was to the
east, and dependent on interpenetration between the many religions,
mythologies and folkways of the larger West and Central Asian region.
Indeed the great schism or split between chi’ites and sunnites
originated in the east, and not in the west. The city of Samara, about
100 kms north of Baghdad at the southern edge of the Kurd-controlled
northern region, was the theatre of the final, decisive and almost
certainly irrevocable split, in 873 AD (260 AH or Hegire), of the
sunnite and chi’ite faiths and philosophies.
This split was easily as deep, and violent as that produced in Europe
in the first two centuries after Martin Luther (1483-1546).
European mediaeval religious or religico-political and ethnic conflicts
between Catholics, Lutherans, Protestants and others caused hundreds
of thousands of deaths, and mass human migrations.
The ghaybat soghra or ‘short occulatation’, caused by the simultaneous
disappearance of the XIth and XIIth Imams, a father-and-son pair,
in Samara, was the result of heavy handed treatment by the Abbaside
(sunnite) police and local authorities.
After this, the chi’ite faction of Islam, itself divided into
Septimamians, Duodecimamians and Ismaelians (following the VIIth
Imam’s choice of Musa al-Kasim as his wasi, instead of Ismael), was
and remained fundamentally opposed to the Quadrimamian sunnites or
Motakallimin. Among these, the literalists, led by the shafi’ites,
karajites, malekites, and hanbalites, much later (18th century)
joined by the formerly insignificant tribe of Wahabites in today’s
Saudi Arabia, and also including a large number of motazilites and
al-asharites, constituted and constitute the core of an intrinsically
anti-chi’ite theology and political power structure in the region.
Also and importantly, sunnite power is essentially Arab.
Iran’s current population of around 75 million, we can note, is
over 90% chi’ite, and is almost exclusively non-Arab. Iran is an
ex-imperial power. No Arab state can legitimately claim this for the
various caliphates, with shifting and uncertain powers, that held
various forms of power over a very wide region — extending to the
Atlantic coast of Morocco and Mauretania — for many centuries. This
has left little behind, except Islam, in the way of Arab pre-eminence
or recognition as the earliest, or an early civilizing presence.
Conversely, the Persian Empire was an accepted and long-accepted fact,
also over a large region and for at least 300 years.
SUNNITE OR CHI’ITE EXTREMISM?
It is often claimed that sunnite influence is ‘intrinically’
moderate, and chi’ite influence is the reverse, particularly
Duodecimamian chi’ism. First we can note that Al-Qaeda is almost
exclusively sunnite, and that what can be called the core doctrines
of Quadrimamian sunnites are of nearly unlimited extremism. The
anthropomorphic and literalist Quadrimamian doctrine and philosophy,
for example as embodied by Hanbalite, and later Wahabite theology is
rightly renowned for its fundamentalism and intolerance of all and
any other religion, agnosticism or atheism.
The Al-Ashari movement (about 909-935 AD), essentially seeking to
moderate and reconcile ‘modernists’ and ‘traditionalists’, the latter
following the very strict literalism of Ibn Hanbal (died 855 AD),
was effectively defeated. His Motazilite sect became highly orthodox,
anti-chi’ite and literalist. Sunnism became, ever more, the claimed
defence of Tradition (Sunna = Tradition), in the narrowest possible
sense of a strict word-by-word intepretation of the Qoran and the
hadith.
To many chi’ites, however, all sunnites are idolatrous Mohammedans.
While sunnite theology drew heavily on Judaism, Christianism,
Neoplatonism and general Hellenistic philosophy, before totally
rejecting these influences in its ‘core versions’ or factions,
chi’ism draws more on Zoroastrianism and Mazdeism, and even Hinduism,
as well as these ‘western’ religious, semi-religious, philosophical
and theological sources. Iran, before the final and total imposition
of chi’ite Islam around 1100 AD (officially in 1315), was essentially
Zoroastrian and Mazdean. Arab and non-Arab islamism is therefore
highly divided. Many more Arabs are sunnite rather than chi’ite,
and most chi’ites are not Arab. Over the centuries, this has tended
to reinforce the more fundamentalist tendencies in both sunnite and
chi’ite thought.
The overlay of the Turkish sunnite Ottoman Empire, another caliphate,
for over 400 years in the Arab sphere, but not in the Iranian chi’ite
sphere of influence, was brutally stripped away in 1917. Today’s
situation is a direct hand-down from the 1917 context, and is
intrinsically unstable. Chi’ite demographic dominance is large, nearly
total in all major oil producer regions south of the Kurdish sunnite
sphere, at about 35°N, extending from Lattakia in Syria through Samara
in Iraq, to the Iranian coastal region of the Gulf.
All Saudi Arabia’s major oilfields are under chi’ite demographic
dominance, by chi’ite communities with no basic identification with,
or loyalty to the often extreme sunnite local ruling elites.
In logical terms, that is logical to the majority chi’ite communities
of the region, Arab sunnites have no legitimate basis for continuing to
occupy, control and profit from the oil and other natural resources of
the region. The Irano-Iraqi ‘Anschluss’ is at any time possible. Iraqui
civil war, that is chi’ite-sunnite civil war, would nececessarily
encourage and incite other chi’ite majorities, ruled by sunnite
minorities, to react and respond. Chi’ite communities all over the
region, in the event of major conflict, would surely look to Iran
for intervention and protection.
REGIONAL ‘ETHNIC’ WAR — BAD FOR OIL
The first Iranian or Persian war against the sunnite Ottomans, won
by Iran in 1736-47, was only the start of rising threats to firstly
the Persian Empire, then the Ottoman. Britain and Russia had begun
probing attacks and incursions into both empires by that period.
Against Russia, Iran steadily lost territory to the west, in today’s
Iraq, and to the north, in the Caucuses. Exactly like sunnite Turkey,
chi’ite Iran has a score to settle with History because of this. The
newfound industrial and geostrategic power of Turkey, and Iran’s
hydrocarbon power and demographic weight provide both with easy
rationales for regional expansion.
As we can note, Turkey and Iran are recognized national entities,
both within and without. Modern warfare essentially concerns national
entities, but this is to some extent breaking down with the increasing
emergence of ethnic conflicts, able to spread over several national
borders and trigger localized hearths of civil war and insurrection,
rather than ‘classic’ national confrontations.
Nevertheless, national entities are ‘war-prone’, for one major reason
because of their natural tendency towards geographical, economic and
strategic expansionism.
Purely ethnic and religious entities, such as faith-based communities,
are less organized and war-ready. This helps to explain the
history of defeat for the various attempts at Arab expansionism
in the region, going back to the Mongol invasion (13th century),
and the later Turkish Ottoman and Persian imperial expansion in
the region. Aided and reinforced by the fundamental divide between
chi’ite and sunnite doctrines and theology, Iran readily became a
nation, while Arab nationalism is a long history of frustrated and
unsuccessful attempts at creating national entities alongside the
Oumma or religious community, predicated by the Sunna.
Taking only Iran and Iraq inside their present borders with their
present ethnic and religious mix, that is relatively homogeneous for
Iran and the reverse for Iraq (which has only existed for about 80
years), we can identify the causes and triggers of future conflict.
These include ethnic, religious and national differences. In fact,
to many Iranians, Iraq has never existed as a nation or any other
identifiable entity, and is a relic of short-lived British colonial
presence (about 1920-1958).
The British choice, and imposition of a minority sunnite ruling family
in Iraq (the Faycals) only reinforced, and reinforces Iraqi chi’ite,
and Iranian hostility to the de facto sunnite power structure that
emerged, and continues in the peninsular region, that is from about
35°N to the Indian Ocean and Gulf.
At the same time, the chi’ite Oumma regards Mecca and Medina as
much a part of their religious identity and sphere of influence as
the sunnites. Being the demographic majority in the region, east of
Egypt and Jordan, any chi’ite-sunnite conflict starting in Iraq can
literally engulf the region. Kurd nationalism, probably the strongest
and most legitimate in the sunnite area, sets a more ‘modern’ and
nation-building program for the large and diffuse Kurdish sphere of
influence, but might easily become drawn into ‘purely’ sunnite-chi’ite
conflict, if this extended far over the region.
Previous ethnic conflicts and national wars in the region have very
often been long and destructive, sometimes lasting 15 or 20 years, or
more. During such conflicts, successively descending the war-trigger
‘layers’ or ‘shells’ of political, then religious and finally ethnic
rivalry, dispute and conflict, widespread destruction of any economic
advantage or support to the enemy was a common, almost obligatory
phase of the fighting. As the European christian crusaders found,
in their 200-year (1095-1299) religious-motivated military invasion,
and partial occupation of the western fringe of the region, ‘resource
denial’ was readily practiced by the enemy, and practiced against
the enemy in replique.
Today, therefore, we could be reasonably sure that oil and gas
installations would suffer repeated attack by all sides, when or if
any longer-term conflict started.
In such political-ethnic-religious wars and conflicts, little or no
attention goes to what happens when the fighting ceases, because it
is thought of as a moral or religious duty, and long-term.
SYRIA AND IRAN REGIME-CHANGE WAR
Together with a new Iran-Iraq war, this essentially unwinnable, and
very foolish project could be considered as possible or even likely.
The ‘regime-change’ of both Syria and Iran is claimed by the Bush
administration, and by some European governments, notably the French
and German, to be both necessary and feasible.
The UK position is more than somewhat cloudy, for one reason because
of the ambiguous relations between the Blair government and the Bachr
Al-Assad regime of Syria, but also and more likely because of the
extreme cost that Iran ‘regime change’ would impose on the UK if it
wanted to play ‘junior coalition partner’ in another American military
‘adventure’ in the Middle East.
Conversely, French and German interest in and support to Syria and
Iran regime-change has increased, at least verbally, although this
‘courageous posture’ is likely more feint than real.
Any cursory glance at what it would require in military personnel and
logistics to occupy Iran, probably 3 or 4 times the troop strength
needed to loosely and weakly maintain a semblance of central power
in ungovernable Iraq, shows this project is absurd.
Neither the US, nor any of its European allies has the manpower or
cash to engage another unwinnable ‘regime change’ war in the region.
This is very clear.
While the Bachr Al-Assad minority chi’ite regime of Syria would be
easy to overthrow, and Syria would be easy to occupy, the benefits or
Peace Dividend, that is war booty from the operation would be very
slender. Apart from some small but easily developed oil reserves in
Syrian Kurdistan, now attracting Indian interest in the shape of the
Indian Oil & Natural Gas Commission (ONGC), Oil India and several
small, private Indian entities, Syria has little to offer.
Regime-changed, its Mediterranean coast might offer tourism development
potential, including ‘sustainable tourism’ featuring energy-saving
tech, but in terms of significant war booty, that is Peace Dividend,
there would be little to show from ‘liberating’ Syria.
Conversely, the Bachr Al-Assad regime, in its death throes, could and
likely would start a full-scale civil war in Lebanon and intensify
its support to Palestinian fighters opposing Israel.
Regarding Iran, various propaganda feeds are now appearing in world
media, in which ‘informed sources’ claim that Iran’s oil reserves
are very large and, clearly indicating the intention, that they are
second-only to Saudi Arabia’s reserves, whatever they might be.
Shortly before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, world media repeatedly
carried ‘informed source’ estimates of Iraq’s oil reserves being
second-only in size to those of Saudi Arabia.. This exciting war
booty, or Peace Dividend is therefore now on the table for Tehran
regime-change, the only problem being that the figures are false.
Iran’s real remaining oil reserves are probably less than Iraq’s, and
no more than 60 billion barrels. They are certainly not the 120-135
billion barrels claimed by ‘informed’ but of course anonymous sources.
In fact, even in the 1970s, the then-future prospect of declining
oil output was one factor determining the Chah’s regime to seek the
development of nuclear electricity production, with warm approval
from the Ford and Carter administrations of the USA. Since 1979 Iran’s
net exports, due on the one hand to stagnant total production, and on
the other to very fast increase of domestic consumption, has nearly
halved, to about 2.5 Mbd.
Such has been the confused, slow and lugubrious, and frequently
contradictory nature of the anti-Iran media campaign, and the ‘signals’
sent to Tehran, or at least to the world’s media, that the clearly
irrational or incoherent nature of the US and European war goals,
and political values regarding the Ahmedinjad regime in Tehran
have become widely known. Iran with atomic weapons is unlikely any
more dangerous to world peace than Pakistan, Israel, North Korea or
India with atomic weapons — the only difference being that Iran is
an oil exporter and the others are not. Whether all oil exporters
except Russia should be prevented from possessing atomic weapons,
to facilitate regime-change when or if they ‘underproduce’ oil, and
fail in their apparent mission to deplete their national resources in
the fastest possible time, has yet to be clearly stated as the real
reason for the sudden ‘urgent need’ to prevent Iran from developing
atomic weapons.
It is possible that this slow and increasingly unreal ‘crisis’ can
drag out and through the rest of 2006 and even into 2007.
Conversely, the final and irremediable collapse of Iraq into full scale
‘ethnic’ and religious civil war could occur at any time.
If this should happen, it is rather likely that Iran will be blamed
for it, quickly restoring the ‘military option’ in the nuclear
crisis. At this stage, the world’s oil and gold markets will be
absolutely febrile, and the spillover to the ‘real economy’ will be
sure and certain, and negative.
An economic and geopolitical crisis at least equal to that of 1979-81
would be a reasonable prediction.
We can provisionally conclude that neither Iran nor Syria regime-change
are attractive, and in the Iranian case is also probably not at
all feasible. Iran is a big country with a large population that is
‘ethnically’ almost completely homogenous. Public opinion in Iran,
even among the young would-be jean wearing, mobile phone wielding
middle classes, is strongly in favor of Ahmedinjad’s hard line and
defiance of the West, on the subject of Iran’s ‘right to nuclear
power’. Further threats, by the West, to utilize nuclear weapons
if necessary to prevent Iran ‘acceding’ to atomic weapons status
only reinforce the groundswell of Iranian public opinion in favor of
defiance. If the US, France, Germany and UK had sought a better way
to reinforce the anti-western leadership of the mollahs, as it is
called in Western media, they would have had few other choices. Iran
will likely therefore proceed to ‘nuclear sanctuarization’, or making
itself un-invadable and un-regime changeable, through possessing
atomic weapons.
THE SECOND IRAN-IRAQ WAR
The very first war, as we noted was in the 1730s, but the first war
for today’s war historians and geopolitical analysts was the 1980-88
war. Regional response to this war, which was often stalemated for
long periods, usually with small but clear territorial gains for
Iranian chi’ite forces, notably included the near-panic reaction of
regional sunnite ruling families. This dovetailed with US and European
sentiment, and that of global finance and equity markets, that Iran’s
Khomeinist hordes must be driven back at any cost. And this cost was
high – to the ruling sunnite royal and princely families of Saudia
Arabia and the Petromonarchies.
Their response was to massively finance the then-hero of the sunnite
world, and friend of the West, Saddam Hussein. It can be noted that, at
the time, Hussein’s regime had already killed at least 50, 000 Kurds,
and deported several hundred thousand, without a whisper of complaint
from Western media, public opinion or political leaderships. The
Petromarchies’ deluge of part-gift and part-loan amounts to Iraq,
probably totaling more than 50 Billion US dollars (oil prices being
very high at the start of the war), was enthusiastically approved by
the US and Europe. However, this display of vulnerability and weakness
by the region’s feudal sunnite regimes was almost surely a reason
for the Reagan administration of the US to start a mostly secret
diplomatic campaign aimed at persuading these regimes, and specially
the Saudi rulership, to radically increase oil output, and maintain
high production and exports ‘at whatever market price’ for oil.
Many other analyses and theories are offered as to why, and when the
Saudi rulers accepted this deal, and for what counterpart benefits to
themselves, apart from vague assurances of ‘security’ and ‘protection’.
Also, and today, the actual amounts of Saudi increases in oil output
in the period are disputed: figures given for annual daily average
oil production by the 4 major Arab producers of the Middle East led
by Saudi Arabia, and through the period 1985-1990 are highly variable
according to the source, and date of original publication. What can
be said is that Saudi Arabia likely increased its oil production from
around 7.5 Mbd to over 9 Mbd in the years 1985-88, and then maintained
high output and exports, long after the war ended, supposedly to
‘defend market share’. This was despite the catastrophic fall in
barrel prices, of about 65% in Nov 1985-Jun 1986, that most surely
eliminated any possible revenue gain for the Saudi royal coffers from
this production feat.
Not unrelated, the Saudi rulers, and other minority feudal sunnite
rulers of the Gulf Petromonarchies, and also Iran, radically and
unilaterally raised their stated or official reserves of oil in this
period. This feat of imaginative paperwork was also to defend market
share, because OPEC member quota are based on the official reserves
of each member. In the Saudi case, the jump in ‘official reserves’
was from about 180 Bn to 260 Bn barrels. Needless to say, not a scrap
of geological or exploration evidence was given for this heroically
‘revised’ estimate.
One direct result of this, and one real cause of the disastrous
invasion of minority sunnite-ruled Kuwait by Saddam Hussein’s armed
forces in 1990, was the sunnite-sunnite dispute between Hussein’s
regime, and the ruling princely clans of Kuwait. A similar, but less
virulent dispute emerged between Hussein’s Iraq and the Saudi ruling
family. In both cases it concerned money, and the barrel price.
The effective collapse of the barrel price in 1985-86 made Iraq
unable, as well as unwilling to repay Kuwait that part of its deluge
of petrodollars provided as loans, for defending Kuwait against the
Khomenei hordes. The Iraq-Kuwait dispute was acrimonious, and one
direct direct cause of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Western and other
oil importers reacted with hysteria to the Iraqi invasion.
Major oil trading on the NYMEX had only recently started (in 1987-88),
thus the Kuwait invasion and its sequels provided traders with the
chance to operate a fine speculative oil price run-up, and then price
collapse, the revenues of traders being proportional to price swings,
not highs or lows.
The massive destructive capability of the US-led military coalition’s
attacks on Iraqi forces, and Iraqi civil infrastructures, called
‘command and control centers’ by the Western media and the Pentagon,
and the very rapid restoration of cheap oil, were no doubt strong
reasons why the G. W Bush administration ‘tried its hand’ at Iraq
regime change, in 2003.
Quick and total victory-plus-cheap oil were evidently the hooks on
which G. W. Bush war strategists hung their expectations, leading to
their abortive attempt to remake the 1991 spectacle.
Also unlike the post-1991 situation, oil supplies from the region
did not bounce upwards, post-2003. Yet another ignored element by G. W.
Bush’s war strategists was the fact that the world is rapidly
approaching Peak Oil, meaning that ‘spare’ capacity of oil production
is falling fast.
There is only one clear winner of the sequels to the 1980-88 war, which
include the Kuwait liberation war, or ‘Oil War 1’, and Iraq invasion,
or ‘Oil War 2’, and that is Iran. Not subjected to the sanctions
regime which Iraq suffered, nor repeatedly bombarded for hard-to-fathom
reasons by the two Clinton administrations, Iran pursued a very rapid
and ‘classic’ economic growth and industrialization strategy through
the period 1988-2005. This is reflected by its domestic or internal
oil and gas consumption, which has grown about 175% since 1988 (and
50% since 1996).
Conversely, Iraq is now almost ‘Third World basketcase’, and suffers
endemic malnutrition and 60% adult unemployment.
The choice between being ‘liberated’, or suffering ‘theocratic
rulership’, which is also exactly the situation in Saudi Arabia and
the Petromonarchies, is therefore easy for the Iranian public, who
prefer to eat and to have work.
Another reason explaining the apparently effortless victory of the
small US-led coalition of 2003 in Iraq, similar to the 1991 victory
of the very large US-led coalition in Kuwait, is that Iraq’s war
preparedness and military capability was vastly weakened by the 1991
war, and by the sanctions regime. Iran, conversely, has been able to
pursue a strategy of maintaining a large land army in readiness to
fight invaders, as well as developing long-range missiles based on
North Korean and Chinese technology.
The state of forces in play, Iran-Iraq, is now completely in Iran’s
favor. Without foreign troops in Iraq, in very large numbers, Iran
could sweep through, take and occupy Iraq at least as fast as the
US-UK coalition in 2003.
In other words, Iraq’s national cohesion, economic strength and
military preparedness are now so low, so degraded that Iran can decide
the ‘chi’ite Anschluss’ whenever it wants, and be sure of victory.
Events unfolding in Iraq, and elsewhere in the region, and US-European
hysteria concerning Iran’s nuclear program, could together and quickly
trigger a kind-of ‘chi’ite uprising’, firstly in Iraq, but with rapid
appeal by Iraqui chi’ites for Iran to intervene.
This would in turn trigger sunnite reaction, firstly of the rump
sunnite government in Baghdad, whose shaky control of Iraq would fall
apart under Iranian and eastern Iraqui chi’ite communal pressure.
Kurdish separation, and declaration of de facto and complete
independence would in this scenario be a likely and rapid additional
impact.
The stage would be set for the Baghdad sunnite regime to call on the
US, the UK, other Europeans, and also local Arab states, for military
support. Unless this was quickly supplied, with quick and decisive
military victories on all battle fronts, in fact mostly urban civil
and guerrilla theatres, Iran would hold de facto control of most
non-Kurdish eastern Iraq. If the Petromonarchies and Saudi Arabia
intervened, which would be unlikely because their military capabilities
essentially only exist on paper, and in staged displays of imported
hi-tech equipment, this would rapidly transmit the ‘chi’ite uprising’
into the heart of their own oil-bearing regions.
The worst possible outcome for all oil importers, everywhere, would
be in the process of taking place.
THE CHOICE OF ‘NATURAL ALLIES’
The complex overlay of historical events in a Middle East split between
chi’ite and sunnite religious factions or branches of Islam, and
further complicated by population movements and external interference,
for nearly 100 years oil-motivated, has resulted in the patchwork of
Arab and non-Arab communities and nations that we find today.
Very often, ruling elites are ethnically different from the majority
population, for example Syria with its chi’ite minority elite in a
sunnite majority country, and the opposite in Iraq and Kuwait.
External interference over the centuries before the 20th usually
sought to divide-and-rule, to create weakly governed entities, more
amenable to external influence.
During the 20th century and due to oil, this strategy continued,
but required fixed and sharp national borders, which hitherto did
not exist. Thus tension and dispute of all sorts, inter-religious,
inter-communal and inter-ethnic, no longer has the safety valve of
easy population movement and migration outside and away from the
source region of dispute and tension.
Since 1945-48, with the creation of Israel and fast-growing
dependence of the USA and Europe on Middle East oil, and now gas,
external manipulation of the region’s borders and national politics
has become constant. It has also been incoherent and contradictory,
almost from the very start. This is shown by US treatment of sunnite,
and chi’ite claims, and US measures and methods for resolving national,
communal and religious disputes.
Solely because of oil, we can argue, US ‘strategy’ or rather its
constant series of shifting and incoherent foreign policy tactics
for the last 60 years has tended to support sunnite claims and
sunnite-based political movements. This said, examples to the contrary
are easy to supply, for example US, and European support to chi’ite
forces in Afghanistan opposing the sunnite Taliban, following very
strong US support to both sunnite and chi’ite forces in Afghanistan
opposing the Russian Soviet occupation of 1979-88.
In recent years, the USA’s almost blind support to Israel, within
which a powerful faction, the Eretz Israel movement, has extreme
expansionist claims on most of the western Middle East, has resulted
in the denigration of Palestinian national claims. This in turn
progressively weakened sunnite power within Palestine, favoring the
ascension of chi’ite factions and the Hamas movement.
One result of this has been to reinforce Syrian influence inside
the Palestinian national movement, because of Syria’s control by a
chi’ite minority.
In turn, the Syrian power elite is close to Iran’s powerbrokers,
effectively replacing sunnite-led opposition to Israeli expansionism,
by chi’ite-led opposition. This could be considered the exact
opposite of what the US, French and British (historically the Western
external powers most implicated in the region) would want or seek,
for maintaining a semblance of calm and maximizing oil production
and exports.
Other examples of ‘imperial incoherence’, or blindness and
irrationality, are very easy to give. The twists and turns of
support and recognition given, and removed from the two main
Kurdish resistance, and liberation movements within Iraq, in the
period 1975-2003, are one good example. In this case the players
involved were very many: the USSR, then Russia, USA, Iran, Britain,
other Europeans, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and others. The net result was
about 100 000 Kurdish dead, and today the emergence of a de facto
Kurdistan in the north of Iraq. Another is France’s treatment of
the various factions at play in Lebanon, and its relations with the
chi’ite minority Alaouite ruling elite in Syria.
Today, France is vigorously opposed to the Bachr Al-Assad regime,
at least as much as the USA.
Ironically, the Alaouite minority was only able to gain and hold
power through large-scale French military protection in the years
1946-48. US and European treatment of the many Palestinian national
movements and factions is yet another example of this incoherence.
Over the years, and decades these abrupt and capricious switches of
‘strategy’, or rather tactics have increased population movements,
despite national borders, in a region with world record demographic
growth until very recently.
One clear result is ‘internal divide-and-rule’, the prelude to civil
war, following which larger, more stable groupings can emerge and
maintain themselves.
External imperial powers, as we note, have felt themselves constrained
to continually divide-and-rule; inside the various national and
geographic entities and areas where this power play is exercised. The
net result in the mid-term and longer-term is localized, internecine
factional rivalry, dispute and conflict.
A good example is Afghanistan … under external threat, that is
Soviet invasion and occupation, the many chi’ite and sunnite factions
in Afghanistan could and did unite to resist and repel the invader.
External powers opposed to the Soviet Russians of course aided
this effort.
However, immediately the Russians quit Afghanistan, internecine and
factional fighting resumed in the country.
The newcomer players to the scene, notably Saudi Arabia, Pakistan,
India and China, further complicated the patchwork of external
military and economic aid to the many Afghani factions, both chi’ite
and sunnite, engaged in an effective, nearly permanent civil war.
Today this is overlaid by US and European troop presence, which
‘freezes the dynamic’, ensuring that Afghanistan remains almost
totally unstable.
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