New Left Review 38 - March-April 2006
As fears are voiced within the US establishment of impending debacle in
Iraq, a survey of the embattled landscape from Baghdad, Ramallah and
Tehran to Beirut and Damascus.
American control is slipping, - Ali argues- but it is too soon to count
on imperial defeat.
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.
[1] Over the last few years, Chávez has visited the major
countries in every continent, embarrassing some of his hosts by
demanding a global front against imperialism. His hour-long interview
on al-Jazeera had an electric impact on 26 million Arab viewers. It
received the station’s largest ever email response-tens of
thousands-with the bulk of them posing a simple question: why can’t the
Arab world produce a Chávez?
[2] Graham Usher, ‘The New Hamas’, merip, 21 August 2005.
[3] By the end of 2004, Israeli death squads and helicopter gunships
had assassinated much of the Hamas leadership-Sheikh Yassin, Abdel Aziz
Rantissi, Ibrahim Makadmeh, Adnan Ghoul, Sheikh Khalil-and tried but
failed to kill Muhammad Dayf, Mahmoud Zahhar, and possibly Khaled
Meshaal and Musa Abu Marzuq in Damascus.
[4] Yediot Aharonot, 12 August 1993, cited in Khaled Hroub, Hamas:
Political Thought and Practice, Washington 2000.
[5] For this hopeful prospect, see Hussein Agha and Robert Malley:
‘Insofar as the burden has shifted to Hamas, the us and Israel could
achieve their objectives at less cost than had the old regime prevailed
. . . The leader who stands most to gain from this new setting is
President Abbas . . . He has become the central figure upon whom
all depend: the Islamists, who need him as a conduit to the outside
world; Israel, which will see him as the most palatable and reliable
interlocutor on the Palestinian scene; the us and Europe, as they seek
to shun Hamas without turning their backs on the Palestinians’-‘Hamas:
the Perils of Power’, New York Review of Books, 9 March 2006. A
photograph taken at the obsequies of King Fahd in Riyadh shows Abbas,
Allawi and Karzai sitting together at the feet of more eminent
mourners, as if auditioning for a Hollywood remake of a Three Stooges
film.
[6] In the late 60s and 70s the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood stood by
as their secular plo rivals were decimated in Jordan and driven to
Beirut. The Brethren’s inactivity was justified by a refusal to work
with godless militants; instead a period of ‘mosque-building’ was in
order. As the secular leadership was discredited in the 90s, Hamas,
while retaining the cloak of Islam, adopted an increasingly nationalist
persona.
[7] Virginia Tilley, The One-State Solution, Ann Arbor and Manchester
2005. For nlr’s positions on what a viable two-state solution might
entail, see Perry Anderson, ‘Scurrying Towards Bethlehem’, Guy Mandron,
‘Redividing Palestine?’, Gabriel Piterberg, ‘Erasures’, Yitzhak Laor,
‘Tears of Zion’, nlr 10, July-August 2001.
[8] Initially, it was hoped that Bashar, trained in a British medical
school, would prove as amenable as the younger Mubarak or Gaddafi, both
in the pocket of the West. His loyalty to the traditions of his father
was a severe disappointment.
[9] On the Elysée’s campaign, see Flynt Leverett, Inheriting
Syria:
Bashar’s Trial by Fire, Washington 2005, p. 259.
[10] See Detlev Mehlis’s uniiic report on the assassination of Hariri,
October 2005. Jumblatt is the-currently staunchly pro-Western-clan
leader of the Druze.
[11] Saatchi & Saatchi helped orchestrate ‘Freedom Square’ rallies;
Spirit of America supplied sandwiches, flags and theatrical effects,
including a huge Freedom Clock with an electronic ‘countdown to
liberty’; a deck of ‘Most Wanted’ playing cards with Syrian faces-a
gimmick pioneered by the Israeli paper Maariv when targeting
Palestinians, and publicized globally by the American army in Iraq-was
distributed. See CounterPunch, 18 November 2005.
[12] During the recent crisis, several Syrian opposition groups offered
the Assad regime a deal: a national government to defend the country
against the West, followed by elections in which the Ba’ath Party would
be a major player. The Ba’ath High Command turned it down, preferring
to rely on repression at home and manoeuvring abroad.
[13] Reuel Marc Gerecht, ex-cia Middle-East chief, had a similar view.
In an essay that begins: ‘The January 30 elections in Iraq will be
easily the most consequential event in Arab history since Israel’s
six-day defeat of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s alliance in 1967’, Gerecht
concludes: ‘Continue to pray every night for the health, well-being and
influence of Grand Ayatollah Sistani [sic] . . . It is a blessed thing
that Sistani and his followers have a far better understanding of
modern Middle Eastern history than the American or European liberals.’
‘Birth of a Democracy’ in Gary Rosen, ed., The Right War? The
Conservative Debate on Iraq, Cambridge 2005, pp. 237, 243.
[14] For a hostile account from the Left, see Iran Bulletin-Middle East
Forum, series ii, no. 3, December 2005. For a cinematic examination of
the class polarization in Iran see Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold (2003),
scripted by Abbas Kiarostami-the film was banned by the Khatami
government. Will Panahi’s latest offering, Offside-about women and
football-share the same fate under Khatami’s successor?
[15] Denial of the Judeocide, a typical expression of the ignorance,
stupidity and prejudice of fundamentalist culture, is one of the first
examples. Euro-American outrage-the French Socialist Party’s Fabius has
gone so far as to call for an international travel ban on
Ahmadinejad-is, of course, the merest tartufferie. Iran had no part in
the Shoah. Turkey, on the other hand, denies the genocide for which it
was responsible, without bien-pensant opinion in Europe batting a
diplomatic eyelid: indeed, no cause is so eagerly embraced, in the name
of multiculturalism, as rapid Turkish entry into the eu. Armenia is not
Israel: who cares?