TARIQ ALI
MID-POINT IN THE
MIDDLE EAST?
Editorial
Looking
down on the world from the imperial grandeur of the Oval Office in the
fall of 2001, the Cheney–Bush team was confident of its ability to
utilize the September events to remodel the world. The Pentagon’s Vice
Admiral Cebrowski summed up the linkage of capitalism to war: ‘the
dangers against which us forces must be
arrayed derive precisely from countries and regions that are
“disconnected” from the prevailing trends of globalization’. Five years
later, what is the balance sheet?
On
the credit side, Russia, China and India remain subdued, along with
Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Here, despite the attempts of
Western political science departments to cover the instrumentalist
twists of us policy with fig-leaf
conceptualizations—‘limited democracies’, ‘tutelary democracies’,
‘illiberal democracies’, ‘inclusionary autocracies’, ‘illiberal
autocracies’—the reality is that acceptance of Washington Consensus
norms is the principal criterion for gaining imperial approval. In
Western Europe, after a few flutters on Iraq, the eu
is firmly back on side. Chirac now sounds more belligerent than Bush on
the Middle East, and the German elite is desperate to appease
Washington. On the debit side, the Caracas effect is spreading. Cuba’s
long isolation has been broken, the Bolivian oligarchy defeated in La
Paz and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has assumed a central role
in mobilizing popular anti-neoliberal movements in virtually every
Latin American country. [1]
More
alarmingly for Washington, American control of the Middle East is
slipping. No irreversible setbacks have yet occurred, but in the past
year the position of the us in the
region has weakened. The shift has not been uniform—at least one front
has moved in the opposite direction, with a successful intervention in
Lebanon. But elsewhere the tide of events is running against
Washington. In Iran and Palestine, elections have humiliated those on
whom it had counted as pliable instruments or interlocutors, propelling
more radical forces into power. In Iraq, the resistance has inflicted a
steady train of blows on the us
occupation, preventing any stabilization of the collaborator regime and
sapping support for the war in America itself. The Cheney–Wolfowitz
political project of establishing a model satellite state for the
region lies buried underneath the rubble of Fallujah. In Afghanistan,
guerrillas are on the move again and Washington is wooing Taliban
factions close to Pakistani military intelligence. Further revelations
of torture by us and British forces,
and plunder of local resources by the invaders and their agents, have
intensified popular hatred of the West across the Arab world. American
forces are overstretched, and the belief of troops in their mission is
declining. Establishment voices at home are beginning to express fears
that a debacle comparable to—or even worse than—Vietnam may be looming.
But outcomes across the whole theatre of conflict still remain
uncertain, and are unlikely to be all of a piece.
Palestine
Western
enthusiasm for rainbow revolutions stops, as is to be expected, when
the colour is green. Hamas’s triumph in the elections to the
Palestinian Legislative Council has been treated as an ominous sign of
rising fundamentalism, and a fearsome blow to the prospects of peace
with Israel, by rulers and journalists across the Atlantic world.
Immediate financial and diplomatic pressures have been applied to force
Hamas to adopt the same policies as those whom it defeated at the
polls. Numerically, the extent of that victory should not be
overstated—with 45 per cent of the vote on a 78 per cent turnout, Hamas
took 54 per cent of the seats. But morally, given the undisguised
intervention by Israel, the us and the eu
to assure a Fatah majority, the result was equivalent to a landslide.
Palestinian voters rebuffed the concerted threats and bribes of the
‘international community’ in a campaign that saw Hamas members and
other oppositionists routinely detained or assaulted by the idf, their posters confiscated or destroyed, us and eu
funds channelled into the Fatah campaign, and us
congressmen announcing that Hamas should not be allowed to run. Even
the timing of the election was set by the determination to rig the
outcome. Scheduled for the summer of 2005, it was delayed till January
2006 to give Abbas time to distribute assets in Gaza—in the words of an
Egyptian intelligence officer: ‘the public will then support the
Authority against Hamas’. [2] Popular
desire for a clean broom after ten years of corruption, bullying and
bluster under Fatah proved stronger than all of this.
Uncompromised
by the Palestinian Authority’s combination of greed and dependency, the
self-enrichment of its servile spokesmen and policemen, and their
acquiescence in a ‘peace process’ that has brought only further
expropriation and misery to the population under them, Hamas offered
the alternative of a simple example. Without any of the resources of
its rival, it set up clinics, schools, hospitals, vocational training
and welfare programmes for the poor. Its leaders and cadres lived
frugally, within reach of ordinary people. It is this response to
everyday needs that has won Hamas the broad basis of its support, not
daily recitation of verses from the Koran.
How
far its conduct in the second Intifada has given it an additional
degree of credibility is less clear. Its armed attacks on Israel, like
those of Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade or Islamic Jihad, have been
retaliations against an occupation far more deadly than any actions it
has ever undertaken. Measured on the scale of idf
killings, Palestinian strikes have been few and far between. The
asymmetry was starkly exposed during Hamas’s unilateral ceasefire,
begun in June 2003, and maintained throughout the summer despite the
Israeli campaign of raids and mass arrests which followed, in which
some three hundred Hamas cadres were seized from the West Bank. [3] On
19 August 2003 a self-proclaimed ‘Hamas’ cell from Hebron, disowned and
denounced by the official leadership, blew up a bus in West Jerusalem,
upon which Israel promptly assassinated the Hamas ceasefire’s
negotiator, Ismail Abu Shanab. Hamas in turn responded. In return, the
Palestinian Authority and Arab states cut funding to its charities and,
in September 2003, the eu declared the
whole Hamas movement to be a terrorist organization—a long-standing
demand of Tel Aviv.
What
has actually distinguished Hamas in a hopelessly unequal combat is not
dispatch of suicide bombers, to which a range of competing groups
resorted, but its superior discipline—demonstrated by its ability to
enforce a self-declared ceasefire against Israel over the past year.
All civilian deaths are to be condemned, but since Israel is their
principal practitioner, Euro-American cant serves only to expose those
who utter it. Overwhelmingly, the boot of murder is on the other foot,
ruthlessly stamped into Palestine by a modern army equipped with jets,
tanks and missiles in the longest armed oppression of modern history.
‘Nobody can reject or condemn the revolt of a people that has been
suffering under military occupation for forty-five years against
occupation force’: the words of General Shlomo Gazit, former chief of
Israeli military intelligence, in 1993. [4]
The real grievance of the eu
and us
against Hamas is that it refused to accept the capitulation of the Oslo
Accords, and has rejected every subsequent effort, from Taba to Geneva,
to pass off their calamities on the Palestinians. The West’s priority
now is to break this resistance. Cutting off funding to the Palestinian
Authority is an obvious weapon with which to bludgeon Hamas into
submission. Boosting the presidential powers of Abbas—as publicly
picked for his post by Washington as was Bremer in Baghdad—at the
expense of the Legislative Council is another. [5] But
since each of these involves some risk of boomeranging, more likely is
an attempt to domesticate Hamas, in the belief that it too will relax
with the fruits of office, and become in time as ‘pragmatic’ as its
predecessor. This is certainly a reasonable calculation. Hamas is
historically an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Egyptian
branch is now scarcely more radical in outlook than the ruling party in
Turkey. [6] Like
all religions, Islam offers a complete palette of ideological
positions, from fulsome collaboration with capital and empire to
impassioned opposition to them, with a great deal of mobility in
between.
Whether
Hamas could be so rapidly suborned to Western and Israeli ends may be
doubtful, but it would not be unprecedented. Hamas’s programmatic
heritage remains mortgaged to the most fatal weakness of Palestinian
nationalism: the belief that the political choices before it are either
rejection of the existence of Israel altogether, or acceptance of the
dismembered remnants of a fifth of the country. From the fantasy
maximalism of the first to the pathetic minimalism of the second, the
path is all too short, as the history of Fatah has shown. The test for
Hamas is not whether it can be house-trained to the satisfaction of
Western opinion, but whether it can break with this crippling
tradition. To do that would require the Palestinian national cause to
be put on its proper basis, with the demand that the country and its
resources be divided equally, in proportion to two populations that are
equal in size—not 80 per cent to one and 20 per cent to the other, a
dispossession of such iniquity that no self-respecting people will ever
submit to it in the long run. The only acceptable alternative is that
outlined by Virginia Tilley in
this issue: a single state for Jews and Palestinians alike, in which
the exactions of Zionism are repaired. [7]
Lebanon and Syria
To
the north, the relative independence of Syria’s Ba’ath regime, and the
institutional stability that allowed it to punch above its weight in
the region, have long been irritants to Tel Aviv and Washington.
Whatever its history of political opportunism, Damascus, unlike Cairo,
has refused to scuttle the Palestinian cause by signing a separate
peace with Israel, or to collaborate with the us
occupation of Iraq. With the spread of the Iraqi insurgency in the
provinces along its border, able to draw on a sympathetic hinterland,
neutralization or removal of the younger Assad has moved up the
American agenda. [8] Since us
forces are now in no position to mount a second invasion, the obvious
route to toppling the government in Syria was to create a pressure
point in Lebanon, where Western powers can manoeuvre freely. For there
Syrian troops, installed since 1976, were an exposed and unpopular
presence. Forcing their withdrawal, it could be hoped, would foment
domestic unrest conducive to regime change.
Contemporary
Lebanon still remains in large measure the artificial creation of
French colonialism it was at the outset—a coastal band of Greater Syria
sliced off from its hinterland by Paris, once it became clear that
Syrian independence was inevitable, to form a regional client dominated
by a Maronite minority that had long been France’s catspaw in the
Eastern Mediterranean. The country’s confessional chequerboard has
never permitted an accurate census, for fear of revealing that a
substantial Muslim—today perhaps even a Shi’a—majority is denied due
representation in the political system. Sectarian tensions,
over-determined by the plight of refugees from Palestine, exploded into
civil war in the mid-seventies, providing the occasion for the entry of
Syrian troops into Lebanon with tacit us
approval, and their long-term establishment there—ostensibly as a
buffer between the warring communities, and deterrent to a complete
Israeli takeover, which was on the cards with the idf
invasions of 1978 and 1982. Over time, Damascus came to exercise a
pervasive control over wide areas of Lebanese political life. Its
military and intelligence apparatus picked candidates for the highest
offices of the state, manipulated cabinets and factional disputes,
assassinated recalcitrant politicians and amassed personal fortunes in
the process.
In
1994, the billionaire property magnate Rafik Hariri—a creature of the
House of Saud—was approved for premier. Once installed in power, he
became the Berlusconi or Thaksin of his native land, rebuilding the
centre of Beirut with his own companies to his own profit and
engineering an exchange-rate crisis when he was briefly ousted, to
return as the only man rich enough to solve it. With his huge hoard of
cash, he could purchase connections to give him increasing leeway in
dealing with Damascus. Among friends acquired in these years was
another venal politician, Jacques Chirac, to whose campaign funds he is
said to have generously contributed. [9] France has never lost interest in its colonial
foothold. By 2004, Chirac was seeking to make up for the desertion of
the us
over Iraq required by domestic considerations, and after arranging for
a joint Franco-American coup in Haiti, had every reason to help Bush
and Hariri expel Syria from Lebanon. Damascus, of course, knew what was
afoot. In August, Bashar Assad summoned Hariri and—according to his
son—told him: ‘If you think that President Chirac and you are going to
run Lebanon, you are mistaken. This extension [of President Lahoud’s
term] is going to happen or else I will break Lebanon over your head
and over Walid Jumblatt’s’. [10]
The following week, France and the us
pushed a resolution through the Security Council demanding Syrian
withdrawal from Lebanon and the disarming of the Hizbollah militia. The
response was not long in coming. In February, as the campaigning season
opened for Lebanese elections, Hariri was blown up by a car bomb
outside the St Georges hotel in Beirut. He was not the first Lebanese
politician to suffer this fate—two previous presidents, Bashir Gemayel
in 1982 and René Moawad in 1989, had gone the same way without
much
commotion. This time, however, the un
Secretary-General immediately convened a Commission of Enquiry,
dispatching a German prosecutor armed with plenipotentiary powers to
investigate the crime, which duly concluded that Syria was responsible.
Since this was plain from the outset, all that the Commission has
revealed is the extent to which the un,
under the miserable figure of Annan, has become an automaton for the
will of the West. For, of course, Israeli assassinations—of leaders of
Hizbollah, Fatah, Hamas—have never raised a whisper of reproach in the
Secretariat, let alone any commission of enquiry. The fate of Lumumba,
Ben Barka, Guevara, Allende, Machel, says enough about the continuity
of these Western traditions.
In
Lebanon itself, the killing of Hariri—whose largesse had built a wide
clientele—provoked more genuine reactions, with vast demonstrations by
the country’s middle class demanding the expulsion of Syrian troops and
police, while a host of Western organizations arrived to assist the
progress of a Cedar Revolution. [11] Backed
by threats from Washington and Paris, the momentum was sufficient to
force a Syrian withdrawal, and produce a more congenial government in
Beirut. But the various Lebanese factions remain as spreadeagled as
ever, Hizbollah has not disarmed, and Assad has not fallen. [12] America has taken a pawn, but the castle has yet to be
captured.
Inferno in Iraq
If
it is Syria’s shelter for the Iraqi resistance to the east that has
made it the target for an American siege, it is with good reason. For
in Iraq itself, the war has gone from bad to worse for Washington.
Confronted with a dauntless insurgency, the Occupation is still—after
three years and an outlay of over $200 billion—unable to assure regular
supplies of water and electricity to the people it has subjugated.
Factories remain idle. Hospitals and schools barely function. Oil
revenues have been looted wholesale by America’s local minions, not to
speak of a horde of us contractors on
the take. Wretched as living conditions were for the majority of the
population under un
sanctions, under the Americans they have deteriorated yet further, as
sectarian killings multiply and minimal security disappears.
In
the midst of these scenes from hell, the morale of the occupiers
themselves is showing signs of giving way. Denied the luxury of a
casualty-free attack from 30,000 feet, American troops are stalemated:
confined to barracks, embarking on missions only with air power or
ultra-protective ground cover, but still losing lives almost daily. In
a February 2006 Zogby poll of American troops serving in Iraq, 72 per
cent thought the us should pull out
within a year, and of those 29 per cent thought they should pull out
‘immediately’. Less than a quarter—23 per cent—backed the official
stance, reiterated by the president and most of the domestic
establishment, that the us must ‘stay
the course’. Military reserves are now so depleted that the Pentagon
has announced a waiver on criminal records for army recruits and is
increasingly forced to rely on mercenaries bought in the marketplace.
The
political cover laboriously constructed for the invasion has not fared
much better. A first round of elections for a puppet government was
boycotted en bloc by the Sunni community. A Made-in-usa
constitution had to be rammed through with a manipulated plebiscite. A
second round of elections has led to quarrels between the different
American clients, and accompanying parliamentary deadlocks. Vast sums
spent on bribes to assorted figures and funding for favoured candidates
have yielded scant rewards, with the humiliation of the stipendiaries
of both the cia and the Pentagon, Iyad
Allawi and Ahmed Chalabi, at the polls. At the time of writing, the
American viceroy is using a Kurdish president to oust a Shi’a premier
who has become inconvenient. Popular cynicism about the ‘Purple
Revolution’ is general, the credibility of the authorities in Baghdad
all but invisible.
Not
that the liberation of Iraq is close at hand. The continuation of the
Occupation has led to an intensification of the sectarian tensions upon
which it has rested. Lethal attacks by Sunni on Shi’a and Shi’a on
Sunni have now become a daily occurrence, with tragic loss of life in
both communities. The initiative for these came at first from deadly
bigots in the Sunni resistance. But the originating responsibility for
a disastrous slide into communal warfare, alongside and interwoven with
a patriotic struggle against the foreigner, lies with the Shi’a
clerics—and above all Ayatollah Sistani—who threw in their lot with the
conquerors of the country, fatally exposing their communities to risk
of retribution from the resistance, so long as ordinary believers
followed the direction of their leaders. The cisterns of sentimentality
ladled over the collusion of Sistani with Bremer, Negroponte and
Khalilzad rival those once poured over that other taciturn, dignified
elder of his country, who in the evening of his years protected his
people while keeping his distance from the occupier. But the
Pétain of
Najaf can expect a better fate. Gratitude for his role in saving the
American bacon should assure him of the Nobel Peace Prize for which
Thomas Friedman, a swaggering champion of the invasion, has recommended
him. [13]
Had
the Shi’a leadership at large, and Sistani in particular, told the
Americans to pack their bags in the spring of 2004, when Sunni and
Shi’a alike rose against the Occupation, Iraq would now be a free
country with a reasonable prospect of communal harmony, founded on
joint struggle against the invader. Instead Sistani and his entourage
joined forces with the Americans to suppress the revolt of Muqtada
al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army in the south and the Sunni resistance in the north
and west of the country, with the aim of taking power in Baghdad under us
tutelage, and building a sectarian regime on demographic preponderance
and foreign arms. The confessional parliamentarism of this option has
predictably guaranteed a deepening of sectarian hatreds, as the taint
of collaboration with the enemy spread downwards, leading to
indiscriminate retaliation and then reciprocal massacres by jihadis
on
one side and death squads on the other. The progenitors of this mayhem
are now using it as a pretext to prolong their invasion of the country,
with kickbacks to Sunni politicians to induce them to plead with
America to stay, as if the occupation that has unleashed it were the
remedy rather than source of an ongoing catastrophe.
The
reality is that there is only one way to halt this spiral of violence:
the path refused by Sistani in 2004, and now taken up once again by
Muqtada al-Sadr—a national agreement between Sunni and Shi’a leaders,
the maquis in the provinces and the militias in the capital, to
secure the expulsion of all occupying forces from the country without
further ado. ‘Cut off the head of the snake and remove all evil’, as
Muqtada exhorted on returning from Lebanon to a shattered Samarra and
Baghdad. His militias, largely made up of the urban poor, are recruited
in quarters that were once strongholds of Iraqi communism. The
expeditionary armies from America and Britain could not last a month in
Iraq, if the Shi’a at large followed the example of their Sunni
compatriots. Indeed, it would take only a vote in the puppet parliament
demanding the immediate withdrawal of foreign forces to make the
position of Washington and London untenable. Given the modern history
of Iraq, there would still be many grave tensions in the relations
between the two communities, not to speak of the recent role of the
Kurds as the Gurkhas of the invader. But until the spreading poison of
Western intrusion is removed, there is no chance of wounds, past or
present, healing. The Anglo-American armies need to be driven out of
the country, bag and baggage, for Iraq to have any future.
Iran in the crosshairs
In
Basra and Maysan provinces, in the far south-east of Iraq, the local
Shi’a authorities are now refusing to cooperate with the British
occupiers. Their change of attitude is likely to bear some relation to
the new situation across the border. The victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
in Iran’s presidential elections of 2005 represents the biggest
political upset of the new century in the region. The mayor of Tehran,
a hard-core clerical militant from a working-class family and soldier
in the war against Iraq, handsomely defeated the candidate favoured by
the Western media and its masters: the corrupt clerical tycoon and
political operator Rafsanjani, ruler of the country in the late 80s and
early 90s, whose lavishly financed campaign—complete with hi-tech
rallies, bumper stickers and hijab-edrah-rah girls—was
overwhelmed by the protest votes of the dispossessed. Running on a
platform of egalitarian redistribution—‘put the oil money on the table
of the poor’—with a cd portraying his
millionaire opponent living in the lap of luxury, while he gave much of
his own salary to the needy, Ahmadinejad was the only candidate who
could, with any conviction, put on street-cleaner’s clothes to sweep
the Tehran gutters. Against Rafsanjani’s hollow establishment rhetoric,
he called for concrete solutions to the housing crisis and
unemployment, and the problems these caused for young couples wanting
to get married, as well as promising an end to corruption and to
compliance with us dictates on energy
issues. [14] As
a result, the campaign was sharper in tone and offered a more serious
choice of social policy than did the elections of 2004 in the United
States, or 2005 in Britain, and saw a higher turnout.
Ahmadinejad
reaped a harvest of discontent not only with the corrupt and brutal
record of Rafsanjani’s presidency, but also the time of his spineless
successor. Under the reformer Khatami, economic conditions steadily
worsened even as oil prices rose, while naive overtures in foreign
policy, Gorbachev-style, merely produced Bush’s Axis of Evil, much as
the Russian versions met with Reagan’s Evil Empire. Ready to defend the
rights of foreign investors, but rarely those of independent newspapers
or student demonstrators, given to vacuous dialogues with the Pope on
spiritual values, but incapable of firm protection of civil rights,
Khatami manoeuvred ineffectually between contradictory pressures until
he had exhausted his moral credit. Ahmadinejad’s base in the popular
classes embeds a greater social sensibility in the new presidency, but
there is no guarantee the practical outcomes will be better. The
millions of young, working-class jobless, crammed into overcrowded
living conditions, are in desperate need of a coherent policy of
national development. But Islamic voluntarism is not a stable
alternative to creeping neoliberalism, and the temptation to ratchet up
cultural repression to compensate for economic frustration is usually
irresistible.
In
Iran’s sprawling, opaque political system, the presidency is surrounded
with competing centres of power, nearly all of them more conservative
than the incumbent. The Supreme Leader Khamenei does not want to be
upstaged by a young firebrand. The mullah–bazaari nexus behind
Rafsanjani has already thwarted Ahmadinejad’s efforts to clean up the
Oil Ministry, and remains entrenched in the Expediency Council. The
pro-Western middle class that identified with Khatami is licking its
wounds, and looking for a comeback. All are ready to pounce on any
inexperience or misstep, of which there will be not a few. [15] The
social backdrop to such disputes remains tense enough in its own right.
The skewed development model inherited from the Shah, battered by
nearly a decade of war, then subjected to Rafsanjani’s inflationary
boom and Khatami’s privatizations, has produced a vast black market, an
unofficial unemployment rate of 25 per cent and a looming agricultural
crisis. Students are disaffected, labour rebellious, the Arab
south-west, Kurdish and Azeri north, and Baluch south-east simmering.
There is ample material in this maze for every kind of domestic and
imperial intrigue to topple the unwelcome victor of a popular contest.
Meanwhile, those who once dreamt of ‘liberation’ via a us intervention should take note of the
worsening nightmare in Iraq.
But
for the moment, it is Iran’s external role that holds centre stage.
Here too the directionless clerical state has left a scene of
confusion. Since the end of the Iran–Iraq War, its foreign policy has
been little more than a ragbag of incoherent opportunism, combining
conventional diplomacy of a cautious, typically collaborationist sort
with largely costless gestures of solidarity to fellow-Shi’a abroad,
principally Hizbollah in southern Lebanon, with crumbs for the
Palestinians. Tehran was tactfully silent during the Gulf War of 1991,
with not even a peep of complaint when us
troops were stationed in the Holy Places. It instructed its surrogates
in the Northern Alliance to pave the way for the American invasion of
Afghanistan. It collaborated with the cia
in preparations for the occupation of Iraq, and directed sciri and its other political assets to prop
up us
rule in Baghdad. In exchange for these favours to the Great Satan, what
has it received? American armies camped on its eastern and western
borders, and American threats to obliterate its reactors.
Even
by the standards of today’s ‘international community’, the Western
campaign to oblige Iran to abandon nuclear research to which it is
entitled under the Non-Proliferation Treaty itself is breathtaking. The
country is ringed by atomic states—India, Pakistan, China, Russia,
Israel—and American nuclear submarines patrol its southern coast.
Historically, it has every reason to fear outside threats. Although
neutral, it was occupied by both British and Soviet forces during World
War Two. Its elected government was overthrown by an Anglo-American
coup in 1953, and the secular opposition destroyed. From 1980 to 1988,
the Western powers abetted Saddam Hussein’s onslaught, in which
hundreds of thousands of Iranians died. In the war’s final stages, the us destroyed nearly half the Iranian navy in
the Gulf, and for good measure shot down a crowded civilian passenger
plane.
At
present, Iran has little more than primitive gropings towards the
technology needed for nuclear self-defence. Yet these are being
presented as a casus belli by Bush, Blair, Chirac and Olmert,
whose own states are armed with hundreds—in the American case,
thousands—of nuclear weapons. Whining and cavilling over the small
print of Vienna protocols, however warranted, is a futile pursuit for
Iranian diplomacy. The country would do better to choose the right
moment and simply withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Of all
the anachronistic emperors in the world, it is the most brazenly naked.
There is not a shred of justification for the oligopoly of the present
nuclear powers, so hypocritical it does not dare even speak its
name—Israel, with 200 nuclear bombs, is never mentioned. There will
never be nuclear disarmament until it is broken.
To
face up to the enemies ranged against Iran requires a coherence and
discipline of which there is little sign at present. With their own
operational habits and doctrines to the fore, the Iranian clerics have
played a profoundly divisive role in keeping the Shi’a parties and
Sistani, Tehran’s bearded queen on the Iraqi chessboard, pitted against
the resistance forces. A de-confessionalized alliance of forces from
Tehran to Damascus, via Basra and Baghdad, would both damp down
communalist conflict and strengthen Iran’s position. Little in the
recent Iranian record suggests the country’s ruling institutions are
capable of dealing with imperial arrogance when they confront it, other
than with a hydra-headed incompetence. However, circumstances may now
be forcing them into decisions they have so far sought to evade. It
will not be easy to dress up surrender to Western threats as dignified
national wisdom. It will not be difficult to turn Shi’a crowds and
militia against the Western occupation across the border. Tehran
controls more significant hostages today than a mere embassy. It is
unlikely, if the country kept its nerve, that the Pentagon or its
proxies would risk an attack.
Outlook
The
crisis in the Middle East that began in 2001 is not in sight of any
dénouement. At best, we are perhaps only at mid-point in the
unfolding
drama. New forces and faces are emerging that have something in common.
Muqtada, Haniya, Nasrallah, Ahmadinejad: each has risen by organizing
the urban poor in their localities—Baghdad and Basra, Gaza and Jenin,
Beirut and Sidon, Tehran and Shiraz. It is in the slums that Hamas,
Hizbollah, the Sadr brigades and the Basij have their roots. The
contrast with the Hariris, Chalabis, Karzais, Allawis, on whom the West
relies—overseas millionaires, crooked bankers, cia
bagmen—could not be starker. A radical wind is blowing from the alleys
and shacks of the latter-day wretched of the earth, surrounded by the
fabulous wealth of petroleum. The limits of this radicalism, so long as
it remains captured by the Koran, are clear enough. The impulses of
charity and solidarity are infinitely better than those of imperial
greed and comprador submission, but so long as what they offer is
social alleviation rather than reconstruction, they are sooner or later
liable to recuperation by the existing order. Leaders comparable to
figures like Chávez or Morales have yet to emerge, with a vision
capable of transcending national or communal divisions, a sense of
continental unity and the self-confidence to broadcast it. Thanks to
its ex-mayor, there is now a statue of Bolívar in Tehran. The
region
awaits an equivalent spirit.
Meanwhile,
the emplacements of the hegemon have scarcely budged. The current
turmoil is still confined to those areas of the Middle East where for
twenty years or more American power never really penetrated: the West
Bank, Ba’athist Iraq, Khomeinist Iran. The real us
anchorage in the region lies elsewhere: in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the
Gulf States and Jordan. There its traditional clients have held the
line, and are on hand to help out with regional problems. Beyond them,
Europe and Japan stand shoulder to shoulder with America on Iran and
Palestine, while Russia, China and India make no difficulties. It is
too soon to count on imperial defeat.