Immanuel Wallerstein: Playing With Fire

Commentary No. 162, June 1, 2005
by Immanuel Wallerstein
"Playing With Fire: the U.S., Iraq, Iran"

When you're a powerful country, it's hard not to play with fire. But the Bush regime has been particularly reckless. Take for example the triangle Iran, Iraq, the United States. The history is well-known. The first famous CIA intervention anywhere was in Iran, way back in 1953. At that time, Iran had a prime minister named Mohamed Mossadegh, a secular middle-class politician who had the audacity to nationalize Iranian oil. The shah went into exile. Great Britain and the U.S. were quite unhappy about this and they backed, indeed inspired, a military coup to arrest Mossadegh and restore the shah to his throne. From then on, the shah's Iran became a close ally of the United States. Shah Reza Pahlevi's regime was authoritarian and very repressive but this didn't bother the U.S. since he was a pillar of pro-U.S. forces in the Middle East.

Finally, the shah's regime was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1979 and the shah went into exile once again. This time the dominant forces turned out to be not secular nationalists but Islamic militants led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. An Islamic republic was proclaimed. And within a year, Iranian militants seized the U.S. embassy and kept those they found there prisoners for 444 days. The U.S., needless to say, was quite unhappy once again. Iran proclaimed the U.S. the Great Satan, and the U.S. in turn now considered Iran a total enemy. President Carter's attempt to liberate the U.S. embassy prisoners by force turned out to be a fiasco. And President Reagan got them out only by making a secret deal, returning frozen Iranian assets for their release.

The U.S. decided the best way to handle the Iranians was to encourage the president of Iraq, one Saddam Hussein, to invade Iran, which he did in 1980. Iran is of course a largely Shia Muslim country. And Iraq has a very large number of Shia Muslims who however have been kept from participation in power by Sunni Arab politicians since Iraq's creation as a modern sovereign state. In 1983, Pres. Reagan sent one Donald Rumsfeld as a special envoy to meet Saddam Hussein, to encourage him in his war efforts, to offer him direct and indirect forms of assistance (including some elements of biological warfare), to remove Iraq from the U.S. list of states aiding terrorist groups, and in general to coddle Saddam. The Iran-Iraq war lasted eight years, was extremely costly to both sides in both casualties and money, and finally ended in exhaustion, with the troops back at the starting-point. It was a military truce, but of course the political enmity persisted.

Saddam Hussein, as we know, found it difficult to repay the debts he had contracted in order to conduct this war, especially Iraq's large debts to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. He decided to cancel the debts and satisfy long-standing nationalist claims in one fell swoop by invading Kuwait in 1990. Now at last the U.S. turned against Saddam Hussein, leading a U.N.-sanctioned coalition to oust Iraq from Kuwait with, among other things, the tacit support of Iran. The war ended with various kinds of double crosses. Saddam had sent much of his air force to Iran to keep it safe from U.S. bombing. After the war ended, Iran refused to return the planes. The Shia in Iraq rose up in rebellion against Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, but the U.S. refused to help them after the truce with Saddam, although the U.S. eventually did enforce a no-fly zone over Shia areas - too late, however, to prevent Saddam from his revenge on the Shia rebels.

Everyone was a bit unhappy with the de facto truce betwen 1991 and 2001. The neo-cons in the U.S. felt that the U.S. had been humiliated by the fact that Saddam remained in power. Saddam was unhappy because of a U.S.-led economic boycott and U.N.-decreed limitations on Iraq's sovereignty concerning the sale of oil. Iraqi Shia (and Kurds) were unhappy because Saddam was still in power, and the U.S. had let them down. And Iran was unhappy because Saddam was still in power, because the Iraqi Shia were still suffering, and because the U.S. was still too much a force in the region.

When September 11 occurred, the neo-cons seized the opportunity to get Bush to focus on a war on Iraq. As we know, the invasion would finally occur in 2003, resulting in the overthrow of Saddam. At the time, George W. Bush denounced the "axis of evil" - a trio of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. The U.S. had now decided to be against both the Iraqi and the Iranian regimes simultaneously, but to take on Iraq militarily first. It is quite clear that in 2003 the Bush regime considered it only a matter of time before the U.S. took on Iran.

What President Bush seemed to expect in 2003 is that the U.S. would be able to install, rather rapidly, a friendly regime in Iraq, and then proceed to force a showdown with Iran. What they did not expect was a quite powerful resistance movement in Iraq, one which they now seem unable to contain seriously. What they did not expect was effective political pressure from the Shia to hold early elections that would give the Shia a majority in the government. What they did not expect was that the U.S. military would be so overstretched that there is now no way the U.S. can seriously consider undertaking any kind of military action to change the regime in Iran.

And least of all did they expect that it would be Iran that would be in a position to be the great diplomatic victor of the U.S. invasion. Take what happened on May, 15, 2005. The U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, made an unannounced visit to Baghdad, during which she spent her brief time half scolding, half pleading with the new Iraqi government, and all this is public. She said that the Iraqis should try to be more "inclusive," the code word for making more space for Sunni Arabs in the government. She cautioned against "severe" de-Baathification, meaning the inclusion in power of at least some of those who supported Saddam Hussein. Presumably, Rice thinks this might undermine the resistance to U.S. occupation and make it possible to reduce U.S. troop commitment to Iraq (the better to use them against Iran?). Curious turnaround where the U.S. Secretary of State is pleading on behalf of at least some ex-Baathists. And, as far as one can tell, to half-deaf ears. The analyses of the present Iraqi government, or rather its priorities, seem to be different.

Two days later, the Foreign Minister of Iran, Kamal Khazzeri, arrived for a far more successful four-day visit. He was greeted at the airport by Iraq's Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari, himself a Sunni and a Kurd, who broke into fluent Farsi. After three days, Iraq and Iran signed an agreement to end hostilities between them, in which the new Iraqi government agreed with Iran that the Iraq-Iran war was initiated by Saddam Hussein. The two countries renewed criticisms of Israel. If Bush thinks the new Iraqi government is going to join the U.S. in a crusade against Iran, that other member of the "axis of evil," he clearly has another think coming.

Relations between Iraq and Iran have now become normal, en route to becoming friendly. This is not what the neo-cons had envisaged when they launched the drive for a U.S.-led "democratization" of the Middle East. When the U.S. forces leave Iraq (probably sooner rather than later), Iran will still be around, and (thanks to the U.S.) stronger than ever.

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