National Observer, Australia, No. 83 (June - August 2010)
The consequences of America’s
declining power in the Middle East
by Joseph Poprzeczny
National Observer
Australia's independent current affairs online journal
No. 83 (June - August 2010).
A new and markedly less stable Middle East, one with the United States no longer playing a dominant policing and power-broking role, has begun to emerge.
Middle Eastern leaders, especially in Israel, Turkey, Iran and Egypt, but also in other Arab states, have concluded that America’s President Barack Obama is a weak man who has indicated that he’s withdrawing American power from the region. Obama is viewed as a man who delivers nice speeches but lacks muscle.
Moreover, the fact that he is a black — which is a big and welcome selling-point for American left-liberals — carries no kudos whatsoever amongst Muslims. Indeed, although in the West it may be politically incorrect to say so, the opposite is the case. For centuries Arab Muslims have owned black slaves and, unlike Europeans and Americans, have never even thought about their emancipation.
All Middle East regimes are therefore observing America’s decline and inevitably working out what accommodations they will need to make in the region’s coming post-American era.
This is the second time since World War II that a non-Middle Eastern or non-Islamic, or distant, power has opted to pull-out from the region. The first was in the late 1960s when the British Labour Government under Harold Wilson pulled out from what it called “East of Suez”. America, and to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union, moved in to fill the power vacuum left by Great Britain, with America emerging as the dominant hegemonic power, especially after the unexpected collapse of the Soviet empire during 1989-91.
But just two decades on, the current American president has foreshadowed the U.S.’s eventual withdrawal from the oil-rich region. The end of America’s 40-year old oversight of Middle Eastern affairs will provide ample room for another power to step in to fill the vacuum.
Far and away the most crucial question, not only for the region but for the world at large, is whether that new hegemonic power will be favourably disposed towards the industrialised but energy-reliant West, meaning primarily the United States, Japan and Europe. And we should not leave out of this equation the rapidly modernising and arming China.
China already has a naval presence off Somalia and Yemen, combating pirates operating out of a network of small fishing harbours.
Professor Efraim Inbar, director of the Tel Aviv-based Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies, spoke to National Observer recently and warned that Iran is already a prime contender to become the Middle East’s new hegemonic power.
In past decades, Great Britain, and later America, imposed a degree of restraint on this unstable region; but in the future, diplomatic and other inter-state dealings will be determined almost solely by fear.
Take the 199o Iraqi attack and occupation of Kuwait after Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein came to believe that America would not thwart him in his pursuit of that handsome prize. The only reason President George H. Bush reluctantly led an international coalition to expel Saddam from Kuwait was because of the fear of Iraq’s enhanced power so clearly felt by Saudi Arabia and the adjacent oil-producing Gulf States.
Saddam pursued an Eastern plan — one that involved taking over the Persian Gulf’s entire southern oil-producing zone. Although today’s weak post-Saddam Iraq cannot even aspire to such a goal, few informed observers would dismiss the possibility that Islamist Iran has harboured similar ambitions.
Professor Inbar said all Arab states, including especially Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, feared Iran and its Hezbollah and Hamas proxies ensconced on Israel’s northern and southern borders respectively.
Clearly this Iranian sphere of influence — which extends beyond the entire Persian Gulf to the shores of the Mediterranean — makes Iran the obvious emerging imperial contender for the region.
Turkey, which since 2002, has been under the control of the Islamist-leaning Justice and Development Party (AK-P), has also begun extending its influence further and wider than ever since its secularist founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, abolished on March 3, 1924, the once far-flung Ottoman-headed Caliphate.
Professor Inbar said both Iran and Turkey were aiming to become major regional military and diplomatic powers and both are likely to become stronger and more assertive. He said the third regional power was Israel, but, unlike the other two, it had no grand imperialist designs. Although Egypt is the fourth contender, it is far weaker than either Turkey or Iran and is unlikely to be a match for them in the foreseeable future.
Today’s Iran is a huge 70-million-strong state, stretched across most of the Persian Gulf’s northern shoreline. It is strategically placed to dominate not only the Middle East but also the nearby Caspian basin region. Together these two regions have about 80 percent of the world’s known oil reserves.
Professor Inbar said Iran was best viewed as “a crazy state”, which “has far-reaching goals and wishes to change the world.” It wants to bring back Islam to the Balkans and even to Andalusia — southern Spain. It is committed to becoming nuclear-armed. Iran has proxies engaged in terror not only in the Middle East but across the world, including South America.”
He said Iran’s decision to move down the nuclear path was taken for defensive as well as for offensive reasons.
“If they have such weapons it will be more difficult for the West to change Iran’s current regime, as it has been with North Korea,” he said. America attacked Iraq before it became a nuclear power, but didn’t do the same thing to Pakistan. Iranian nuclear hegemony over the Middle East and the Caspian Sea regions means that, in the absence of America’s stabilising role in the region, Iran will be able to become the hegemonic power. Already Georgia, which once sought to join NATO, is making an accommodation.”
Inbar said Iran believed American and Western culture was decadent, whereas Islam was seen as more assertive and able to meet coming challenges.
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad views the United States as a “sunset power” and Iran as a “sunrise power”. So U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East, as foreshadowed by President Obama, therefore only confirms Tehran’s longstanding assessment.
“The Iranian Islamists’ strategy has been to talk [while they] build their nuclear arms,” Inbar said. “They’ve been ‘negotiating’ for years — with the European Union they negotiated for 10 years.” Their model has been North Korea, with its clandestine building of a nuclear arsenal. There was no firm Western response to North Korea, which has tested a bomb; so Iran has followed in its footsteps.
“The international community has allowed Iran to get away with it, so they are now also acquiring long-range missiles that will be able to strike anywhere in the Middle East as well as parts of Europe. And there is evidence of underground testing — they are well on the way and they will challenge American dominance.”
Not widely realised is that even America’s once most loyal Middle Eastern ally, Iran, when governed by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, evaluated the United States in somewhat the same way as does today’s fundamentalist Shi’ite Muslim regime.
According to leading Iranian-born commentator, Amir Taheri, contrary to the largely Moscow-inspired propaganda campaign against the Shah during the 1970s and 1980s, he was never a lackey of the Americans. Quite the opposite.
The Shah allied himself with the United States to ensure that the Soviet Union, which had occupied Iran’s northern reaches in the 1920s and again in the 1940s, did not transform Iran into another Poland or East Germany or Czechoslovakia.
The Shah was aware that Iran’s Communist Party was far stronger than Poland’s ever was before the Soviets imposed communist rule upon Poland. He rejected Soviet moves to reduce Iran to a Finland-like status as a Soviet client-state or satellite.
Amir Taheri, in his pathbreaking work, The Persian Night: Iran under the Khomeinist Revolution (New York: Encounter Books, 2009), wrote: “The suggestion always angered the Shah: Finland was ‘a tiny backwater of Europe’, while Iran was ‘a great power in the heart of the most important region on earth’.” (p.185).
This meant that Tehran chose to pursue close co-operation with the United States, even when the White House was occupied by a succession of hesitant and difficult-to-comprehend presidents. Iran equipped its air force with American equipment and technology, and “the [Iranian] army and navy used French, Italian, British, Swiss and even Soviet equipment and materiel.” (p. 185).
However, no American bases were ever permitted on Iranian soil. “The Shah regarded the United States as a fickle power whose policies could change in accordance with changes of mood in its domestic policies,” Amir Taheri wrote.
“Except for the eight years of the Nixon and Ford administrations the Shah’s relations with the United States were never easy.… The Shah believed that the period of American ascendance would be short, perhaps not more than a few decades.” (p.187).
He thus opted for a path to strengthen Iran against unfriendly intruders with the intention of building up his country so that it could wield decisive influence in its corner of the world.
The resemblance with Tehran’s current policy is uncanny.
Amir Taheri continued: “His dream, therefore, was to make Iran powerful enough not to need US support against the Soviets and their radical Arab allies. That meant establishing Iran as the regional ‘superpower’, capable of defending the vital sea-lanes of the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. Those ambitions ran counter to the global Soviet strategy and thus turned the Shah into the bête noire of Communists and their fellow travellers and ‘useful idiots’.
“Rather than offer a critique of the Shah’s strategy with references to Iran’s interests as a nation-state, his enemies preferred to present him as an ‘American puppet’, thus drawing support from all those throughout the world, including the United States itself, who had succumbed to the irrational seduction of anti-Americanism.” (p.187).
Clearly, therefore, Iran’s Khomeinists are building upon a foundation that had been laid well before they ever had any prospect of one day controlling Iran.
However, the new or Islamist Iran is best compared to revolutionary France of the 1790s and/or Bolshevik Russia of the 1920s and 1930s. It is at least as messianic, though not armed with mere swords, cannons and muskets, as was France under Napoleon Bonaparte, or the T-34 tanks, as was Stalinist Russia, but rather with an expanding missile arm and nuclear weaponry.
That’s why Professor Inbar describes Iran as “a crazy state” and sees fear as likely to be the dominant feature of the region once America departs.
“In the Middle East everyone is afraid of everybody; it is not only Israelis who fear,” he said. “Having nuclear weapons means Teheran will scare everybody in the region. The international community has allowed them to get away with it for over 10 years. Their missiles will be able to reach parts of Europe. Iran is also the hub of exporting terrorism.”
He said that the central Asian countries — the so-called Five ’Stans (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan) — will also be affected. These states had opted to align more with the West and were looking at Turkey’s pre-AK-P secular model.
“Iran will scare them,” he said. “Afghanistan’s ruling elite is Persian-speaking and it fears Iran. Bahrain fears Iran, as does Saudi Arabia whose northern oil regions have a Shi’ite community. And in Lebanon there is the Shi’ite Hezbollah while in Gaza there is the Sunni Hamas that is being paid by Iran. A nuclear Iran will have no qualms about destabilising Egypt and Turkey. Today’s Turkey is having an identity crisis, while Hezbollah is destabilising Egypt’s pro-Western ruling regime.”
And the emerging nuclear threat will have an impact upon Pakistan as well as India, both already nuclear powers.
Professor Inbar said that, since Iran operated via proxies, the likelihood of a nuclear device being dispatched by sea to, say, Rotterdam or another European or even an American port could not be discounted.
A closely related and deeply disturbing factor is that ardent Islamists do not hesitate killing on a mass scale, even if this means the individual perpetrator thereby commits suicide.
On the question of Israel, Inbar said: “Famously, Israel has been successful in parrying several military challengers intent on destroying the Jewish state. Over time the power differential between Israel and its regional foes has grown, enhancing Israel’s capacity to deal successfully with security problems. While Israel has become stronger, its enemies, with the exception of Iran, have become weaker. Moreover, the Jewish state is widely recognised as an entrenched reality, even by Arab and Muslim states.”
With two proxy mini-states, Hezbollah to Israel’s north, and Hamas in Gaza, to its south, and Iranian ally, Syria, to its north-east, Israel faces a tough challenge from distant Iran.
Moreover, Iran’s hatred of Israel dates back many decades.
“Because Israel was perceived as a friend of the Shah, his opponents had no difficulty in regarding the Jewish state as an enemy,” Amir Taheri writes. “While the [Iranian] left tried to present its opposition to Israel in secular terms, Khomeini, emerging as the principal spokesman for radical mullahs, seized every opportunity to foment hatred of Jews as a whole. In a sermon in Qom on April 13, 1963, he told his supporters: ‘I know that you do not want Iran to lie under the boots of the Jews.’ Later he called the Shah ‘a Jew in disguise’.”
Since then President Ahmadinejad has elevated Holocaust denial to new heights.
In addition, Hezbollah, Hamas and Syria are being guided and armed as front-line challengers to the Jewish state.
It is difficult not to see Iran’s missile program as at least in part motivated by this deep hatred. Iraq, during the 1990 Kuwait conflict, fired Scud missiles into northern Israel. Both Hezbollah and Hamas subsequently emulated this with many thousands more launchings.
In addition, Iran has installed radar facilities in Syria that could provide early warning against a possible surprise Israeli air attack on Tehran’s nuclear sites.
The sophisticated radar network is believed to have been deployed in Syria during 2009 as an early-warning system to help protect Iran’s nuclear facilities that Israel has refused to rule out as possible targets.
American State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, responded to the disclosure of the radar installations in June 2010 by stressing that Washington had concerns about the relationship between Iran and Syria. “We don’t believe that Iran’s designs for the region are in Syria’s best interest,” Crowley said.
An Israeli defence force spokesman said: “Iran is engaged in developing Syrian intelligence and aerial detection capabilities, and Iranian representatives are present in Syria for that express purpose. Radar assistance is only one expression of that cooperation.”
However, Israel has certainly not been slow in responding to these and related moves. For example, Israel had redeployed three of its five Dolphin-class submarines in the Gulf. All three of these German-built submarines — the Dolphin, Tekuma and Leviathan — have previously patrolled in the Gulf, but now are expected to be assigned to waters off Iran as a permanent station. Each carries nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.
If the three were to ever be simultaneously located off Iran, Israel’s strike power would be formidable. Each submarine is armed with six 553mm torpedo tubes that are capable of launching sub-Harpoon missiles.
Furthermore, four of the torpedo tubes aboard each of these submarines were recently enlarged and it believed this means they are now equipped to launch nuclear-tipped Popeye Turbo cruise missiles (a variant of the Popeye/AGM-142 Have Nap standoff missile) that have a 1,500-kilometre range.
The decision to put its submarines on permanent station off Iran means Israel is able to launch a devastating counter-attack should any future attack be launched against it from Syria, Gaza or southern Lebanon.
According to London’s Sunday Times (May 30), the Israeli submarine flotilla’s commander, identified only as “Colonel O”, said: “We are an underwater assault force. We’re operating deep and far, very far, from our borders.”
Israeli intelligence often uses the British press to warn enemies of the consequences of any belligerent act.
“Ballistic missiles developed by Iran, and in the possession of Syria and Hezbollah, could be used to hit strategic sites within Israel, which include air bases and missile-launchers,” the Sunday Times report said.
What remains to be seen is how Tehran’s fundamentalists, with their irrational views about global cataclysms, will respond to an Israeli threat of retaliation hanging over them.
Modifications to the Israeli subs mean that they can now ply waters well away from Israel — for example, in Iranian waters — for up to 50 days. This means just seven turnarounds annually, to ensure one submarine is permanently on station.
An unnamed Israeli naval officer, quoted by the London Sunday Times (May 30, 2010), said: “The 1,500km range of the submarines’ cruise missiles can reach any target in Iran.”
Israel’s urgent need to deter the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah alliance was demonstrated last month. Israel’s defence minister Ehud Barak reportedly showed President Barack Obama “classified satellite images of a convoy of ballistic missiles leaving Syria on the way to Hezbollah in Lebanon”.
According to one expert quoted in the same Sunday Times report, “Tel Aviv, Israel’s business and defence centre, remains the most threatened city in the world”. He said: “There are more missiles per square foot targeting Tel Aviv than any other city.”
Professor Inbar said that the two men who will make the final decision on what Israel does are Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak.
“They have the guts,” he said. “I don’t know if they will do it [i.e., order an air or submarine attack upon Iran]. Israel is preparing for military action.
“Will it happen? I don’t know if it will. But I think we can do it. Iran can be attacked by air. It may be a suicide mission. But I know there would be volunteers.”
Clearly, the stakes across the Middle East — from Tehran to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean — have never been higher. Moreover, Israel’s known willingness to make a pre-emptive strike is something that cannot be downplayed or discounted.
Joseph Poprzeczny is an historian and writer, based in Perth, Western Australia.
National Observer, Australia, No. 83 (June - August 2010)
