Nuclear Parity in the
Middle East
By Tom A.
Milstein
December 13,
2005
On Thursday, Dec. 15,
the Iraqi people will once again vote in a free election, this time to choose
their next government. This momentous event will empower the formerly
disenfranchised and oppressed 60% of the Iraqi people who are Shi’a for the
first time in their country’s modern history.
Elections are no less
struggles for power than revolutions, coups, and wars. In all such struggles
there are winners and losers. This time the losers will be the Sunni Moslems of
Iraq, who traditionally have ruled the Shi’a with an iron fist. They will lose
no matter whether they participate in the election or not, because either way,
their dispossession as the ruling elite of Iraq
will be confirmed. Needless to say, the Sunni are unhappy at this turn of
events.
To appease them,
various concessions and compromises have been made in both the Iraqi
constitution and other areas of society, the new army, and the government. The
sum total of this appeasement has come close to completely vitiating the
representative and democratic character of the new republic, by granting this
former ruling class minority privileges and powers normally considered
incompatible with democratic principles.
Why have these
concessions and compromises been made? The official explanation is to prevent a
civil war from tearing Iraqi society apart. We shall see whether this tactic
works, in the statistics of insurgent terrorist acts to be compiled in the
post-election future. Certainly we can see that it has failed up to now, as
30,000 dead Iraqis mutely testify to, but perhaps the success of the election
will usher in a new spirit of peaceful participation. One hopes
so.
So far, the Iraqi
Insurgency has largely been a Sunni affair, aimed at inflicting as much carnage
as possible on the Shi’a population. In truth, the Shi’a have largely replaced
the American military as the target of choice for terrorist attacks. Sunni
violence against Shi’a, whether carried out by former Ba’athist secular cadres
or Al Qaeda Islamofascists, has in fact become “the war within the war” in
Iraq. The media likes to publicize
the comparatively sparse instances of Shi’a violence against Sunni, whether
carried out by militias or by Iraqi government agencies, in order to establish
some sort of false equivalency. The fact is that the volume and sheer horror of
the Sunni attacks on innocent Shi’a civilians, mosque worshippers, police and
army trainees, and shoppers, far outweighs counterpart Shi’a
atrocities.
The insurgent focus on
blowing up Shi’a appears on the face of it a rather odd tactic, if the objective
of the insurgency is to drive American forces out of Iraq. A
true “national liberation front” strategy would seek to unite Sunni and Shi’a
against the American occupation. Instead, the effect has been to place
Iraq’s Shi’a under the somewhat
half-hearted protection of the U.S. Army. Most Americans, and that includes
American soldiers, sense no vital stake in the Sunni-Shi’a struggle. “Let ‘em go
on killing each other off” would be a fair characterization of this attitude,
particularly if it means less ordnance being expended against our troops.
Nevertheless, given the President’s commitment to establishing a democratic
government in Iraq, our Army
has been tasked to prevent terror attacks and this means, in the current
Iraq reality, protecting Shi’a
against Sunni. Indeed, in the larger sense this mission ties in directly with
the President’s aim of creating a legitimate, representative government in
Baghdad, for the
previous Sadaam government was simply the institutionalization of minority Sunni
terror against the Shi’a majority.
Shi’a’s humiliating
dependence on American protection against the Sunni minority is supposed to end
with the creation of a representative government through free elections. The
theory – or the hope – is that such a government will make it impossible for a
Sadaam-style regime to ever return to Baghdad. But this theory begs the question of
how such a government could have arisen in the first place, given the radical
disproportion between Sunni and Shi’a numbers in the demography of Iraq.
And this question needs to be asked, and answered, not drowned out in “Strategy
for Victory” cheerleading rallies, or the President may well find himself
returned to the same predicament in which he found himself after he prematurely
declared “Mission accomplished” to the sailors of the USS
Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003.
The Sunni have a ready
answer to this question. They regard, and treat, the Shi’a as an effeminate
nation of slaves, lacking in the manly Islamic virtues, and therefore easy to
oppress because they can’t or won’t defend themselves. This characterization is
of course propaganda, designed like most such propaganda to hide the real
dynamics of Sunni dominion over Iraq. Sunni Moslems were able to
dominate the Shi’a of Iraq notwithstanding the latter’s numerical preponderance
not because Shi’a are girly-boys, but because exterior factors came into play: Sadaam’s
Sunni thugs were clients of Saudi Arabia, which provided the indispensable
financial and political clout he needed to compensate for Sunni inferior numbers
in Iraq. This relationship became quite clear during the Iraq-Iran War, when
with America’s help,
Iraq was essentially
converted into a buffer state for Saudi
Arabia to gas the Shi’a Revolution launched by the
Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran.
Things
change. Sadaam decided that
if he was destined to play Praetorian Guard for the Saudi Oil Patch, he might as
well assume the landlord role as well, and, following his idol Hitler’s
time-tested strategy, tried to bite off Kuwait as a dress rehearsal for later
adventures against the Saudi degenerates whose bossy dominion he resented.
George Bush Senior was not about to exchange the House of Saud, with whom he and
his friends had maintained cozy and lucrative relations for generations, for the
unknown of a hypothetical House of Sadaam. “Soddum” was duly expelled from
Kuwait – but left in place in
Baghdad to continue his buffer role against the
Shi’a of Iraq and Iran. Better he than us, reasoned
Bush 41.
Bush Sr.’s
pusillanimity was duly noted by the Saudis, so things changed again – on 9/11/01. After
all, if Sadaam could survive defeat in Kuwait, could not the cowardly
Americans be relied upon to forgive and forget a direct strike on their homeland
by the Saudis themselves? Would not the second-rate son show even more of the
family appeasing spirit than the supposedly granite-like father (“This shall not
stand!”), particularly if the attack were audacious, giving Americans a taste of
their own “Shock and Awe” medicine? It was time for the Saudis to accomplish
what Sadaam had tried and failed to achieve – a great turning of the tables.
Saudi Arabia had hitherto
managed the Oil Cartel as a client of America. Now America
would have to learn how to become a junior partner of the Oil Cartel and its
Islamic masters.
This is the inner
meaning of 9/11. It was a daring adventure, but not a terribly risky one. Even
if it failed – and it did, for George W. Bush turned out to be made of different
stuff than his father – the example of Sadaam demonstrated that America
would never bite the hand that fed it. The Saudis and their Cartel might have to
undergo some difficult moments, but when the dust of 9/11 settled,
America would try to restore
the status quo ante World Trade Center. America’s economic stake in the
Cartel could be trusted to outweigh all other considerations, and the House of
Saud would emerge unscathed.
And this gets us back
to Iraq. The “status quo ante World Trade
Center” will
never be restored, because it cannot be. If
America leaves the Saudi Oil Cartel
intact, there will be future 9/11’s. This is the diplomatic circle
that cannot be squared. The enemy is not terror. The enemy is not Islam. The enemy is the financial and
economic foundation of Islamic terror, the Saudi Oil Cartel. No one point of
this triad can be defeated unless all three are attacked. This is the lesson
Lincoln had to
learn during our own Civil War, as he fought his way forward toward an
understanding that it was the institution of
Slavery, not the abstraction of “disunion,” or the geographic region
of “the South,” that he had to defeat. It is the same type of understanding that
awaits our President too, in Iraq. Merely establishing a
representative government in Baghdad will not insure against its subversion by a
return of Sunni domination, a new Sadaam, and a resulting rebirth of
Arab-Islamic triumphalism absolutely guaranteed to produce more 9/11’s, unless
something is done to permanently neutralize the Saudi role in Iraq.
Shall
America then permanently
occupy Iraq to prevent Saudi influence from
bringing about this counterrevolution? Awkward and untenable. Instead,
America needs to find a
countervailing regional force able to balance Saudi influence in Iraq
and provide the Shi’a with an exterior base of support equivalent to that
provided by the Saudis to the Iraqi Sunnis. Such a force can only be supplied by
Iran. And Iran would be more than willing to play this
role, were it not for one inconvenient power reality in the Middle East: the Shi’a have no nuclear deterrent, while
the Sunni do. Pakistan now
possesses scores of nuclear bombs, and delivery systems capable of placing them
in Teheran and all other Iran cities. And not just Pakistan. According to a
little-noticed but highly credible report from Arnaud de Borchgrave, writing in
the Oct. 22, 2003 Washington
Times, “Pakistan
and Saudi
Arabia have concluded a secret agreement on
‘nuclear cooperation’ that will provide the Saudis with nuclear-weapons
technology in exchange for cheap oil, according to a ranking Pakistani insider.”
(http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031021-112804-8451r.htm
)
It is this nuclear
imbalance that explains Iran’s drive for nuclear parity, not any
disinformational ambition to erase Israel from the map. And the
worldwide uproar over Iran’s ambition seems designed more
to preserve the Sunni nuclear monopoly rather than to deter Iranian extremism.
How else to explain the awkward silence that envelopes the issue of
Pakistan-Saudi nuclear weaponry? The Sunni Bomb effectively inhibits
Iran from playing a balancing
role in the Middle East, and particularly in Iraq, against Saudi
Arabia. And in the absence of such a role,
America willy-nilly ends up having to
perform it instead.
No demand that
Iran drop its quest for
nuclear weapons is credible unless it is accompanied by the regional quid pro quo of disarming
Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia of similar weapons. In the absence of
such an arrangement, the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran is a prerequisite to the success of George
W. Bush’s Strategy for Victory in Iraq. For unless Iran is freed from
the Pakistani-Saudi nuclear sword of Damocles that hangs over Teheran, it cannot
rescue the Neoconservative program of a democratic self-government from the same
humiliating debacle that overtook their identical program in South Vietnam over
30 years ago.
For these and other
reasons, Israel will not
attack Iran, American will
not attack Iran, and
Iran will someday announce to the world that
it possesses a nuclear deterrent. The Bush Administration will outwardly
denounce and inwardly exult. So will Israel. So should we
all.
