Читать книгу War In The Age of Trump - Patrick Cockburn - Страница 15
Оглавление11 November 2016
“Make America Great Again” was the slogan of Donald Trump’s election, but the immediate impact of his victory is to make the US less of a power in the world for two reasons: American prestige and influence will be damaged by a general belief internationally that the US has just elected a dangerous buffoon as its leader. The perception is pervasive but not very deeply rooted and likely to be temporary, stemming as it does from Trump’s demagogic rants during the election campaign. Those about relations with foreign countries were particularly vague and least likely to provide a guide to future policy.
More damaging in the long term for America’s status as a superpower is the likelihood that the US is now a more deeply divided society than ever. Trump won the election by demonising and threatening individuals and communities—Mexicans, Muslims, Latinos—and his confrontational style of politics is not going to disappear. Verbal violence produces a permanently over-heated political atmosphere in which physical violence becomes an option. At the same time, the election campaign was focused almost exclusively on American domestic politics with voters showing little interest in events abroad. This is unlikely to change.
Governments around the world can see this for themselves, though this will not stop them badgering their diplomats in Washington and New York for an inkling as to how far Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks were more than outrageous attempts to dominate the news agenda for a few hours. Fortunately, his pronouncements were so woolly that they can be easily jettisoned between now and his inauguration. Real foreign policy positions will only emerge with the formation of a Trump cabinet when it becomes clear who will be in charge. But, if future policies remain unknowable, super-charged American nationalism combined with economic populism and isolationism are likely to set the general tone. Trump has invariably portrayed Americans as the victims of the foul machinations of foreign countries who previously faced no real resistance from an incompetent self-serving American elite.
This sort of aggressive nationalism is not unique to Trump. All over the world, nationalism is having a spectacular rebirth in countries from Turkey to the Philippines. It has become a successful vehicle for protest in Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and Eastern Europe. Though Trump is frequently portrayed as a peculiarly American phenomenon, his populist nationalism has a striking amount in common with that of the Brexit campaigners in Britain or even the chauvinism of Erdogan in Turkey. Much of this can be discounted as patriotic bombast, but in all cases, there is a menacing undercurrent of racism and demonisation, whether it is directed against illegal immigrants in the US, asylum seekers in Britain, or Kurds in south-east Turkey.
In reality, Trump made very few proposals for radical change in US foreign policy during the election campaign, aside from saying that he would throw out the agreement with Iran on its nuclear programme—though his staff is now being much less categorical about this, saying only that the deal must be properly enforced. Nobody really knows if Trump will deal any differently from Obama with the swathe of countries between Pakistan and Nigeria where there are at least seven wars raging—Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and South Sudan—as well as four serious insurgencies.
The most serious wars in which the US is already militarily involved are in Iraq and Syria and here Trump’s comments during the campaign suggest that he will focus on destroying Isis, recognise the danger of becoming militarily overinvolved, and look for some sort of cooperation with Russia as the next biggest player in the conflict. This is similar to what is already happening. Hillary Clinton’s intentions in Syria, though never fully formulated, always sounded more interventionist than Trump’s. One of her senior advisers openly proposed giving less priority to the assault on Isis and more to getting rid of Assad. To this end, a third force of pro-US militant moderates was to be raised that would fight and ultimately defeat both Isis and Assad. Probably this fantasy would never have come to pass, but the fact that it was ever given currency underlines the extent to which Clinton was at one with the most dead-in-the-water conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment in Washington.
President Obama developed a much more acute sense of what the US could and could not do in the Middle East and beyond, without provoking crises exceeding its political and military strength. Its power may be less than before the failed US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan following 9/11, but it is still far greater than any other country’s. Currently, it is the US that is successfully coordinating the offensive against Isis’s last strongholds in Mosul and Raqqa by a multitude of fractious parties in Iraq and Syria. It was never clear how seriously one should have taken Clinton’s proposals for “safe zones” and trying to fight Isis and Assad at the same time, but her judgements on events in the Middle East since the Iraq invasion of 2003 all suggested a flawed idea of what was feasible.
Trump’s instincts generally seem less well-informed but often shrewd, and his priorities have nothing to do with the Middle East. Past US leaders have felt the same way, but they usually end up being dragged into its crises one way or another, and how they perform then becomes the test of their real quality as a leader. The region has been the political graveyard for three of the last five US presidents: Jimmy Carter was destroyed by the consequences of the Iranian revolution, Ronald Reagan was gravely weakened by the Iran-Contra scandal, and George W Bush’s years in office will be remembered chiefly for the calamities brought on by his invasion of Iraq. Barack Obama was luckier and more sensible, but he wholly underestimated the rise of Isis until it captured Mosul in 2014.
Obama resisted the temptation to fight new wars, but if Hillary Clinton had been in charge, her record suggests that she might well have done so. How would Donald Trump have responded? There is a bigger gap between his words and deeds than there are with most politicians. But words create their own momentum and his constant beating of the patriotic drum will make it difficult for him to exercise the degree of caution necessary to avoid ensnarement in the Middle East. Over-heated nationalism cannot be turned on and off like a tap. He may want to concentrate on radical change at home, but the vortex of crises in the Middle East will one day suck him in.
18 November 2016
Isis is under pressure in Mosul and Raqqa, but it is jubilant at the election of Donald Trump. Abu Omar Khorasani, an Isis leader in Afghanistan, is quoted as saying that “our leaders were closely following the US election, but it was unexpected that the Americans would dig their own graves.” He added that what he termed Trump’s “hatred” towards Muslims would enable Isis to recruit thousands of fighters. The calculation is that, as happened after 9/11, the demonisation and collective punishment of Muslims will propel a proportion of the Islamic community into its ranks. Given that there are 1.6 billion Muslims—about 23 percent of the world’s population—Isis and al-Qaeda-type organisations need to win the loyalty of only a small proportion of the Islamic community to remain a powerful force.
Bloodcurdling proposals for the persecution of Muslims played a central role in Trump’s election campaign. At one moment, he promised to stop all Muslims from entering the US, though this was later changed to “extreme vetting.” The use of torture by waterboarding was approved and applauded, and Hillary Clinton was pilloried for not speaking of “radical Islamic terrorism.” Trump and his aides may imagine that much of this can be discarded as the overblown rhetoric of the campaign, but Isis and al-Qaeda propagandists will make sure that Trump’s words are endlessly repeated with all their original venom intact. Nor will this propaganda about the anti-Muslim bias of the new administration be so far from the truth, going by the track record of many of the people in its security and foreign policy team. Trump is reported to have offered the post of National Security Adviser to General Michael Flynn, who was sacked by President Obama as head of the Defence Intelligence Agency in 2014. Flynn notoriously sees Islamic militancy not only as a danger but as an existential threat to the US. He tweeted earlier this year that “fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.”
There is an obsessive, self-righteous quality to Flynn’s approach that led him to join chants of “lock her up” in reference to Hillary Clinton during election rallies. Former associates complain of Flynn’s political tunnel vision that could wreak havoc in the Middle East. His consulting company, the Flynn Intel Group, appears to lobby for the Turkish government and Flynn recently wrote an article calling for all-out US support for Turkey, who Washington has been trying to stop launching a full-scale invasion of Syria and Iraq. Unsurprisingly, the Turkish president welcomed Trump’s election with enthusiasm and sharply criticised protests against it in the US (something that would be swiftly dealt with by police water cannons in Turkey).
A striking feature of the aspirants for senior office under Trump is a level of personal greed high even by the usual standards of Washington. Trump famously campaigned under the slogan “Drain the Swamp” and castigated official corruption, but it is turning out that the outflow pipe from the swamp is the entry point of the new administration. One grotesque example of this is Rudy Giuliani, who exploited his fame as mayor of New York City at the time of 9/11 to earn millions in speaking fees and consultancy for foreign governments and companies. Apparently, none were too dubious for him to turn down. In 2011 and 2012, he reportedly made speeches defending the sinister Iranian cult-like movement, the Mujahideen e-Khalq (People’s Mujahedin of Iran), that had been on the State Department’s list of terrorist organisations. Giuliani is a swamp creature if ever there was one, yet this week he was publicly turning down the post of attorney general and was, at the time of writing, being considered for the post of secretary of state.
Isis and al-Qaeda may underestimate the degree to which they will benefit from Trump’s election, which came at a bleak moment in their fortunes. He and his henchmen have already frightened and enraged hundreds of millions of Muslims and vastly expanded the constituency to which the jihadis can appeal. A clampdown against them that, in practice, targets all Muslims plays straight into their hands. What made 9/11 such a success for Osama bin Laden was not the destruction of the Twin Towers, but the US military reaction that produced the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This could happen again. There are other potential long-term gains for the beleaguered Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, whatever the outcome of the siege of Mosul. The Taliban, al-Qaeda, and Isis are all militarised fanatical movements born out of the chaos of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and they are flourishing in similarly anarchic conditions in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and beyond.
In theory, Trump is a non-interventionist; opposed to US military involvement in the Middle East and North Africa, he wants to bring the war in Syria to an end. But he has simultaneously opposed the agreement with Iran on its nuclear programme and criticised Barack Obama for pulling the last US troops out of Iraq in 2011 (though in fact this was under an agreement signed by George W. Bush). But Bush and Obama were both non-interventionists when first elected—until the course of events, and the enthusiasm of the Washington foreign policy establishment for foreign military ventures changed all that.
The US army and air force are today heavily engaged in Iraq and Syria and that is not going to end with Obama’s departure. In contradiction to Trump’s non-interventionism, leading members of his foreign policy team, such as John Bolton, the belligerent former US ambassador to the UN, has been advocating a war with Iran since 2003. Bolton proposes carving out a Sunni state in northern Iraq and eastern Syria, a plan in which every sentence betrays ignorance and misjudgements about the forces in play on the ground. As a recipe for deepening the conflict in the region, it could scarcely be bettered.
There have always been crackpots in Washington, sometimes in high office, but the number of dangerous people who have attached themselves to the incoming administration may be higher today than at any time in American history. For instance, one adviser to the Trump national security transition team is, according to Shane Harris and Nancy Youssef of The Daily Beast, one Clare Lopez, author of a book called See No Sharia, which says that Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular have infiltrated the White House and the FBI, as well as the US Departments of State, Justice, Defence, and Homeland Security. Lopez believes that terrorists caused the 2008 financial crash by short-selling stocks.
Optimists have been saying this week that Trump is less ideological than he sounds and, in any case, the US ship of state is more like an ocean liner than a speedboat, making it difficult to turn round. They add privately that not all the crooks and crazies will get the jobs they want. Unfortunately, much the same could have been said of George W. Bush when he came into office before 9/11. It is precisely such arrogant but ill-informed opportunists who can most easily be provoked by terrorism into a self-destructive overreaction. Isis is having a good week.
25 November 2016
Where does Donald Trump stand on the use of torture by US security agencies? During the presidential election campaign, he notoriously recommended a return to waterboarding, the repeated near-drowning of detainees that was banned by President Obama in 2009. But last week The New York Times reported that in an interview with its senior staff, he said that he had changed his mind after talking with retired Marine Corps General James Mattis, who is a leading candidate to be the next secretary of defence.
Trump quoted General Mattis as saying that “I’ve never found it [water-boarding] to be useful.” He had found it more advantageous to gain the cooperation of terrorist suspects by other means: “Give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers, and I’ll do better.” Trump recalled that he was very impressed by the answer, adding that torture is “not going to make the kind of difference that a lot of people are thinking.” Trump’s remarks were taken by The New York Times as a sign that the president-elect had changed his mind about waterboarding. Unfortunately, the full transcript of his talk, as pointed out by Fred Kaplan in Slate, shows exactly the opposite. Trump did indeed say that he was surprised by what Mattis said because the general was known for his toughness, but the president-elect went on to explain that “I’m not saying it changed my mind about torture.” He added that “we have people that are chopping off heads and drowning people in steel cages and we’re not allowed to waterboard.” Though he had been given pause by what Mattis told him, he was convinced that “if it’s so important to the American people, I would go for it. I would be guided by that.”
The initial misreporting may have stemmed from wishful thinking by Times reporters—and American liberals in general—who hope that the most outrageous pieces of Trump demagoguery during the election were off-the-cuff campaign rhetoric which he is now abandoning. A pledge to prosecute Hillary Clinton is apparently being discarded, as is a plan for the immediate construction of a wall to seal off the Mexican border. The abandonment of agreements on climate change and on Iran’s nuclear programme are becoming less categorical and more nuanced. But this is not so much a sign of a more moderate Trump emerging as it is fresh evidence of his shallowness and flippancy. He tells people whom he wants to influence exactly what they want to hear. Nothing is off-limits. He not only flatters his audience but does so in a way that is thrilling and attention-grabbing and sure to dominate the news agenda.
This sort of tough-guy talk is scarcely unique to Trump, but a common feature of American political leadership. Hillary Clinton frequently made distasteful boasts about her self-inflated role in the killing of Osama bin Laden and Muammar Gaddafi. Trump likewise uses and misuses macho slogans more than most politicians and then disowns them when they have served their purpose. But he does not disown all his election pledges and he has not disowned the one on waterboarding, banned by President Obama by means of an executive order, which is much more important than the prosecution of Clinton or building the Mexican wall. Ever since 9/11, and more particularly since the rise of Isis, there has been debate about the radicalisation of Muslims and how this might be prevented. Saudi-sponsored madrassas and imams have been blamed, with some reason, but a much simpler cause of radicalisation has nothing to do with the slow imbibing of extreme Islamist ideology. This is anger and a desire to retaliate provoked by specific injustices such as waterboarding, rendition of suspects to be tortured, and the abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, which acted as powerful and persuasive recruiting sergeants for Isis and Islamic extremism.
Keeping this in mind, it is important to realise that the US now has a president-elect who has just restated that he believes in the value of water-boarding. His views will not pass unnoticed among the quarter of the world’s population who are Muslims and know that they were the main victims of these abuses. Some members of the Trump administration, like General Mattis or General Flynn, the national security advisor, do not believe in torture, but others say that it works and that any criticism of it is unpatriotic.
Such senior figures include the newly appointed head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, a Kansas congressman and a supporter of the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party. He has backed interrogation techniques amounting to torture and greater domestic surveillance by the NSA. He sees Christianity and Islam as engaged in a titanic struggle. Speaking in 2015 before a Christian flag at a church in his district that focuses on “Satanism and paranormal activity,” he spoke of the “struggle against radical Islam, the kind of struggle this country has not faced since its great wars,” and warned that “evil is all around us.” He advised the congregation not to be put off by people who might call them “Islamophobes or bigots.” On another occasion, he denounced a mosque in Kansas for holding a speaking event which coincided with Good Friday. As for Guantanamo, Pompeo described it as “a goldmine of intelligence about radical Islamic terrorism. I have travelled to GTMO and have seen the honourable and professional behaviour of the American men and women in uniform, who serve at the detention facility.” He denounced the release of the revelatory 2014 Senate report on torture, saying that “these men and women [the interrogators] are not torturers, they are patriots. The programmes being used were within the law, within the constitution.” It is worth recalling what waterboarding and other types of torture of which Trump and Pompeo approve really consist of.
The 2014 US Senate Report on torture by the CIA described waterboarding as a “series of near drownings,” in addition to which detainees were subjected to sleep deprivation for up to a week and medically unnecessary “rectal feeding.” One CIA officer described prisoners being held in a “dungeon” and interrogation leading to “hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm and self-mutilation.” The report concludes that the CIA had lied about the number of detainees, their treatment, and had fed sympathetic journalists with false information about valuable intelligence acquired by means of torture. The “waterboarding” approved by Trump and Pompeo was only one in a range of torture techniques used by the CIA before they were banned, according to testimony in the case of Abd al-Rahim Hussein Muhammad al-Nashiri in a US appeals court hearing earlier this year. In addition to artificially induced suffocation, detainees “were kept naked, shackled to the wall, and given buckets for their waste. On one occasion, al-Nashiri was forced to keep his hands on the wall and not given food for three days. To induce sleep deprivation, detainees were shackled to a bar on the ceiling, forcing them to stand with their arms above their heads.”
By such means, Trump intends to make America great again.
13 January 2017
As Trump prepares for his inauguration, he is struggling with opposition from the US media, intelligence agencies, government apparatus, parts of the Republican Party, and a significant portion of the American population. Impressive obstacles appear to prevent him from exercising arbitrary power.
He should take heart: much the same was said in Turkey about Erdogan in 2002 when he led his Justice and Development Party (AKP) to the first of four election victories. He faced an army that, through coups and the threat of coups, was the ultimate source of power in the country, and a secular establishment suspicious of his Islamist beliefs. But over the years he has outmanoeuvred or eliminated his enemies and—using a failed military coup on 15 July last year as an excuse—is suppressing and punishing all signs of dissent as “terrorism.” As Trump enters the White House, the AKP and far-right nationalist supermajority in the Turkish parliament is this month stripping the assembly of its powers and transferring them wholesale to the presidency. President Erdogan will become an elected dictator able to dissolve parliament, veto legislation, decide the budget, and appoint ministers who do not have to be MPs.
All power will be concentrated in Erdogan’s hands as the office of prime minister is abolished and the president, who can serve three five-year terms, takes direct control of the intelligence services. He will appoint senior judges and the head of state institutions, including the education system. These far-reaching constitutional changes are reinforcing an ever-expanding purge begun after the failed military coup last year, in which more than 100,000 civil servants have been detained or dismissed. This purge is now reaching into every walk of life, from liberal journalists to businessmen who have seen $10 billion in assets confiscated by the state.
The similarities between Erdogan and Trump are greater than they might seem, despite the very different political traditions in the US and Turkey. The parallel lies primarily in the methods by which both men have gained power and seek to enhance it. They are populists and nationalists who demonise their enemies and see themselves as surrounded by conspiracies. Success does not sate their pursuit of more authority. Hopes in the US that, after Trump’s election in November, he would shift from aggressive campaign mode to a more conciliatory approach have dissipated over the last two months. Towards the media, his open hostility has escalated, as was shown by his abuse of reporters at his press conference this week.
Manic sensitivity to criticism is a hallmark of both men. In Trump’s case, this is exemplified by his tweeted denunciation of critics such as Meryl Streep, while in Turkey, 2,000 people have been charged with insulting the president. One man was tried for posting on Facebook three pictures of Gollum, the character in The Lord of the Rings, with similar facial features to pictures of Erdogan posted alongside. Of the 259 journalists in jail around the world, no less than eighty-one are in Turkey. American reporters may not yet face similar penalties, but they can expect intense pressure on the institutions for which they work to mute their criticisms.
Turkey and the US may have very different political landscapes, but there is a surprising degree of uniformity in the behaviour of Trump and Erdogan. This type of political leadership is not new: the most compelling account of it was written seventy years ago in 1947 by the great British historian Sir Lewis Namier, in an essay reflecting on what he termed “Caesarian democracy,” which over the previous century had produced Napoleon III in France, Mussolini in Italy, and Hitler in Germany. His list of the most important aspects of this toxic brand of politics is as relevant today as it was when first written since all the items apply to Trump, Erdogan, and their like. Namier described Caesarian democracy as typified by “its direct appeal to the masses: demagogical slogans; disregard of legality despite a professed guardianship of law and order; contempt of political parties and the parliamentary system, of the educated classes and their values; blandishments and vague, contradictory promises to all and sundry; militarism; gigantic blatant displays and shady corruption. Panem et circenses [bread and circuses] once more—and at the end of the road, disaster.”
Disaster comes in different forms. One disability of elected dictators or strongmen is that, impelled by an exaggerated idea of their own capacity, they undertake foreign military adventures beyond their country’s strength. The disaster that Namier predicted was the natural end of elected dictators has already begun to happen in Turkey. The Turkish leader may have succeeded in monopolising power at home, but at the price of provoking crises and deepening divisions within Turkish society. The country is embroiled in the war in Syria, thanks to Erdogan’s ill-judged intervention there since 2011. This led to the PKK establishing a de facto state in northern Syria and Isis doing the same in Syria and Iraq. At home, Erdogan restarted the war with the Turkish Kurds for electoral reasons in 2015 and the conflict is now more intractable than ever. Every few weeks in Turkey, there is another terrorist attack, which is usually the work of Isis or a faction of the PKK—although the government sometimes blames atrocities on the followers of Fethullah Gulen, who are alleged to have carried out the attempted military coup last July. In addition to this, there is an escalating financial crisis, which has seen the Turkish lira lose 12 percent of its value over the last two weeks. Foreign and domestic investment is drying up as investors become increasingly convinced that Turkey has become chronically unstable.
Erdogan and Trump have a further point in common: both have an unquenchable appetite for power and achieve it by exploiting and exacerbating divisions within their own countries. They declare they will make their countries great again, but in practise make them weaker. They are forever sawing through the branch on which they—and everybody else—are sitting.
20 January 2017
Inequality has increased everywhere with politically momentous consequences, a development much discussed as a reason for the populist-nationalist upsurge in Western Europe and the US. But it has also had a significant destabilising impact in the wider Middle East. Impoverished Syrian villagers, who once looked to the state to provide jobs and meet their basic needs at low prices, found in the decade before 2011 that their government no longer cared what happened to them. They poured in their millions into gimcrack housing on the outskirts of Damascus and Aleppo, cities whose richer districts looked more like London or Paris. Unsurprisingly, it was these same people, formerly supporters of the ruling Baath Party, who became the backbone of the popular revolt. Their grievances were not dissimilar from those of unemployed coal miners in former Democratic Party strongholds in West Virginia who voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump.
Neoliberal free-market economic reforms were even more destructive of political and social stability in the Middle East and North Africa than in Europe and the US. In dictatorships or arbitrary monarchies without political accountability or rule of law, such changes further crony capitalism: access to the narrow circle wielding political power becomes the essential key to riches. Governments turn into giant looting machines under the kleptocratic guidance of a few ruling families. In Baghdad a few years ago, heavier than usual winter showers flooded the streets to the depth of a foot or more with an evil-smelling grey mixture of water and sewage. I asked an advisor to the Ministry of Water Resources why this had happened and she explained, as if it was nothing out of the ordinary, that over the previous decade the Iraqi government had spent $7 billion on a new sewage system for the capital, but either it had never existed, or the sewers were too badly built to carry away rainwater.
In the US, Europe, and the Middle East, there were many who saw themselves as the losers from globalisation, but the ideological vehicle for protest differed markedly from region to region. In Europe and the US, it was right-wing nationalist populism which opposes free trade, mass immigration, and military intervention abroad. The latter theme is much more resonant in the US than in Europe because of Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump instinctively understood that he must keep pressing these three buttons, the importance of which Hillary Clinton and most of the Republican Party leaders, taking their cue from their donors rather than potential voters, never appreciated.
The vehicle for protest and opposition to the status quo in the Middle East and North Africa is, by way of contrast, almost entirely religious and is only seldom nationalist, the most important example being the Kurds. This is a big change from fifty years ago when revolutionaries in the region were usually nationalists or socialists, but both beliefs were discredited by corrupt and authoritarian nationalist dictators and by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Secular nationalism was, in any case, something of a middle-class creed in the Arab world, limited in its capacity to provide the glue to hold societies together in the face of crisis. When Isis forces were advancing on Baghdad after taking Mosul in June 2014, it was a fatwa from the Iraqi Shia religious leader Ali al-Sistani that rallied the resistance. No non-religious Iraqi leader could have successfully appealed to hundreds of thousands of people to volunteer to fight to the death against Isis.
The Middle East differs also from Europe and the US because states are more fragile than they look and once destroyed prove impossible to recreate. This was a lesson that the foreign policy establishments in Washington, London, and Paris failed to take on board after the invasion of Iraq, though the disastrous outcome of successful or attempted regime change has been bloodily demonstrated again and again. It was always absurdly simple-minded to blame all the troubles of Iraq, Syria, and Libya on Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, and Muammar Gaddafi, authoritarian leaders whose regimes were more the symptom than the cause of division. But it is not only in the Middle East that divisions are deepening. Whatever happens in Britain because of the Brexit vote or in the US because of the election of Trump as president, both countries will be more divided and therefore weaker than before. Political divisions in the US are probably greater now than at any time since the American Civil War 150 years ago. Repeated calls for unity in both countries betray a deepening disunity and alarm as people sense that they are moving in the dark and old norms and landmarks are no longer visible and may no longer exist.
The mainline mass media is finding it difficult to make sense of a new world order which may or may not be emerging. Journalists are generally more rooted in the established order of things than they pretend and are shocked by radical change. Only two big newspapers—the Florida Times-Union and the Las Vegas Review-Journal endorsed Trump before the election and few of the American commentariat expected him to win, though this has not dented their confidence in their own judgement. Criticism of Trump in the media has lost all regard for truth and falsehood with the publication of patently concocted reports of his antics in Russia, but there is also genuine uncertainty about whether he will be a real force for change, be it good or ill.
Crises in different parts of the world are beginning to cross-infect and exacerbate each other. Prior to 2014, European leaders, whatever their humanitarian protestations, did not care much about what happened in Iraq and Syria. But the rise of Isis, the mass influx of Syrian refugees heading for Central Europe, and the terror attacks in Paris and Brussels showed that the crises in the Middle East could not be contained. They helped give a powerful impulse to the anti-immigrant authoritarian nationalist right and made them real contenders for power.
The Middle East is always a source of instability in the world and never more so than over the last six years. But winners and losers are emerging in Syria where Assad is succeeding with Russian and Iranian help, while in Iraq, the Baghdad government backed by US airpower is slowly fighting its way into Mosul. Isis probably has more fight in it than its many enemies want to believe but is surely on the road to ultimate defeat. One of the first real tests for Trump will be how far he succeeds in closing down these wars, something that is now at last becoming feasible.
10 February 2017
President Trump made a great play when he came into office with his return of a bust of Winston Churchill to the Oval Office, presenting the move as a symbol of his admiration for adamantine patriotic resolve in pursuit of patriotic ends. Presumably, Trump was thinking of Churchill in 1940, not Churchill in 1915–16 when he was the leading advocate of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign in which the Turks decisively defeated the British army with great slaughter.
Trump is reputed to seldom read books or show much interest in history other than that of his own life and times, but it would be worth his while reflecting on Gallipoli because Churchill was only the first of six British and American leaders to have suffered political shipwreck in the Middle East over the last century. The prime reason for these successive disasters is that the region has always been more unstable and prone to wars than anywhere else in the world. Mistakes made on its battlefields tend to be calamitous and irretrievable. Avoiding this fate is not easy: the six British and American leaders who came a serious cropper in the Middle East were generally abler, more experienced, and better-advised than Trump. It is therefore worthwhile asking, at the beginning of his administration, what are the chances of him becoming the next victim of the permanent state of crisis in the wider Middle East. He campaigned as an isolationist who would avoid being sucked into armed conflicts abroad, but his first weeks in office and his senior appointments suggest that he will try to take a central role in the politics of the region.
These failings unite with a crippling ignorance on the part of foreign powers about the complexity and dangers of the political and military terrain in which they are operating. This was true of Churchill, who wrongly assessed likely Turkish military resistance in 1915. Lloyd George, one of the most astute of British prime ministers, made the same mistake in 1922 when his government destroyed itself by threatening to go to war with Turkey. Anthony Eden lost office after the Suez Crisis in 1956 when he failed to overthrow Nasser in Egypt. Tony Blair’s reputation was forever blasted for leading Britain into war in Iraq in 2003.
Of the three US presidents badly or terminally damaged by crisis in the Middle East, Jimmy Carter was the most unlucky, as there was nothing much he could do to stop the Iranian Revolution in 1979 or the seizure of diplomats in the US embassy in Tehran as hostages. Ronald Reagan’s presidency saw military intervention in Lebanon where 241 US Marines were blown up in 1983, and the Iran-Contra scandal that permanently weakened the administration. Significant though these disasters and misadventures seemed at the time, none had the impact of George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, which led to the regeneration of al-Qaeda and the spread of chaos through the region.
In retrospect, these leaders may look foolhardy as they plunged into bottomless quagmires or fought unwinnable wars. Some, like Carter, were victims of circumstances, but entanglements were not inevitable, as was shown by President Obama, who did read books, knew his history, and was acutely aware of the pitfalls the US needed to skirt in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and beyond. Avoiding disaster that nobody else knew existed will seldom win a politician much credit, but Obama deserves credit for escaping being sucked into the civil war in Syria or into a broader conflict against Iran as the leader of the Shia axis.
Trump continually promised during the presidential election that he would focus exclusively in the Middle East on destroying Isis, but one of the first moves of his administration has been to shift the US closer to Saudi Arabia by backing its war in Yemen. In almost his first statement of policy, Secretary of Defence James Mattis said that Iran is “the single biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world.” One of the dangers of Trump’s demagogic rants and open mendacity is that they tend to give the impression that less theatrical members of his team, especially former generals like Mattis or Michael Flynn, are monuments of good sense and moderation. Yet both men are set on threat inflation when it comes to Iran, though without providing any evidence for its terrorist actions, just as their predecessors inflated the threat supposedly posed by Saddam Hussein’s non-existent WMD and fictional support for al-Qaeda.
Given the high decibel level of the Trump administration’s threats and warnings, it is impossible to distinguish bellicose rhetoric from real operational planning. A confrontation with Iran will probably not come soon; but in a year or two, when previous policies conceived under Obama have run their course, Trump may well feel that he has to show how much tougher and more effective he is than his predecessor, whom he has denounced as weak and incompetent. In four years’ time, the select club of American and British leaders who failed in the Middle East, with disastrous consequences for everybody, may have a voluble seventh member.
3 November 2017
In his jeremiad against Iran on 13 October, Trump justified his refusal to certify the Iran nuclear deal with gobbets of propaganda, one-sided history, and straight lies. He proposed a new US policy towards Iran based “on a clear-eyed assessment of the Iranian dictatorship, its sponsorship of terrorism, and its continuing aggression in the Middle East and all around the world.” The speech sounded like the opening volley in a new campaign against Iran, to be fought out on multiple fronts.
Some sort of collision between the US and Iran looks possible or even likely, a battle which will probably be carried out by proxies and will not be fought to a finish. It may not come to that: such is the intensity of political strife in the US that new foreign policy ventures do not look very feasible. But any sensible leader in the Middle East always looks at the worst-case scenario first. The wars in Syria and Iraq are either coming to an end or their present phase is ending, but in both cases, the situation is fragile.
It is doubtful if either the US or Iran would come out the winner in any new confrontation, but Iraqis would certainly come out the losers. The best policy for the US in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere is to do nothing very new. But this may be difficult for Trump. It is not just him who has wrong-headed ideas about the Middle East. There has recently been a stronger than usual surge of apocalyptic commentary about how Iran is winning victory after victory over the US in the region. Washington think-tankers, retired generals, and journalists warn of Iran opening up “a land corridor” to the Mediterranean as if the Iranians travel only by chariot and could spread their influence by no other means. It could be that Trump’s menaces really are serious, in which case the Iranians are understandably going to react. But even if they are largely rhetorical, they might trigger an Iranian overreaction.
“The Iranians are under the impression that others want to topple their regime,” an Iraqi politician told me. “The Iranians are very smart. They do not send their armies abroad. Once you do that, you are lost. They fight by proxy on many fronts outside their borders, but this destabilises everybody else.” Once again, Iraq would find itself in the front line. Curiously, Iran owes much of its expanded influence not to its own machinations but to the US itself. It has been the collateral beneficiary of US-led regime change in two of its neighbours, Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which had been viscerally anti-Iranian.
The sheer ignorance of Trump and his administration about the Middle East is dangerous. It is usual, particularly in liberal circles, to see people in the Middle East as passive victims of foreign intervention. This is largely true, but it masks the fact that at any one time, there are several governments and opposition movements trying to lure the US into a war with its enemies by demonising them as a threat to the world. Trump may speak of confronting Iran, but there is no sign that he has a coherent plan to do so. Much of what is happening in the region is beyond his control and US influence is going down, but for reasons that have nothing to do with him.
26 January 2018
Seldom has an important new US foreign policy crashed in flames so quickly and so spectacularly, achieving the very opposite results to those intended.
It was only ten days ago that Rex Tillerson unexpectedly announced that American military forces would remain in Syria after the defeat of Isis. Their agenda was nothing if not ambitious: it included the stabilisation of the country, getting rid of Bashar al-Assad, rolling back Iranian influence, preventing the resurgence of Isis, and bringing an end to the seven-year Syrian war. Tillerson did not seem to care that this new departure was sure to offend a lot of powerful players in and around Syria and was quite contrary to past US pledges that it was only fighting in Syria to defeat Isis and had no other aims. In effect, the US was reversing its old policy of trying to keep its distance from the Syrian quagmire and was blithely plunging into one of the messiest civil wars in history.
The first sign of this radical new development came early last week with an announcement that the US was going to train a 30,000-strong border force that, though this was not stated, would be predominantly Kurdish. This was furiously denounced by Turkey and Tillerson appeared to disavow it. But his speech spelling out the new interventionist American policy on 17 January was just as explosive and was the reason why, five days later, Turkish tanks were rumbling across the Turkish-Syrian border into the Kurdish enclave of Afrin. A fertile and heavily populated pocket of territory, this is one of the few parts of Syria that had not been devastated by the war. But this is changing fast as Turkish bombers and artillery pound the town of Afrin and the 350 villages around it. The YPG have been fighting back hard, but unless there is some diplomatic solution to the crisis, the enclave will end up looking like much of the rest of Syria with whole streets reduced to mounds of smashed masonry.
The fighting over the last five days has exposed as a dangerous fantasy; the US hopes that its new interventionist policy would stabilise northern Syria. Instead of weakening Assad and Iran, it will benefit them, showing the Kurds that they badly need a protector other than the US. The Kurds are now demanding that the Syrian army go to Afrin to defend it against the Turks because it is an integral part of Syria. A military confrontation between Turkey and the US would be much in the interests of Tehran and Damascus. The Iranians, denounced by the US as the source of all evil, will be glad to see America in lots of trouble in Syria without them having to stir a finger.
The post-Isis US policy in Syria and Iraq coming out of the Trump administration has more far-reaching goals than before but is vague on how they should be achieved. The US may want to get rid of Assad and weaken Iran across the region, but it is too late. Pro-Iranian governments in Iraq and Syria are in power and Hezbollah is the most powerful single force in Lebanon. This is not going to change any time soon and, if the Americans want to weaken Assad by keeping a low-level war going, then this will make him even more reliant on Iran. The US obsession with an exaggerated Iranian threat—about which, in any case, it cannot do much—makes it difficult for Washington to mediate and cool down the situation. Trump and his chaotic administration have not yet had to deal with a real Middle East crisis yet and the events of the last week suggest that they will not be able to do so.
14 September 2018
Before his election as president, it was understandable that Trump’s critics should have vastly underestimated his ability as a politician. It is much less excusable—and self-destructive to effective opposition to Trump—that they should go on underestimating him almost two years after his victory. Every week there are more revelations showing the Trump administration to be chaotic, incompetent, and corrupt. The latest are the anonymous op-ed in The New York Times in which one of his own senior officials claims to be working against him and Bob Woodward’s book portraying the White House as a sort of human zoo.
The media gleefully reports these bombshells in the hope that they will finally sink, or at least inflict serious damage, on the Good Ship Trump. This has been the pattern since he announced his presidential candidacy, but it never happens. Political commentators, overwhelmingly anti-Trump, express bafflement at his survival, but such is their loathing and contempt for him that they do not see that they are dealing with an exceptionally skilled politician. His abilities may be instinctive or drawn from his vast experience as a showman on television. Priority goes to dominating the news agenda regardless of whether the publicity is good or bad. Day after day, hostile news outlets like The New York Times and CNN lead on stories about Trump to the exclusion of all else.
The media does not do this unless they know their customers want it: Trump is an American obsession, even greater than Brexit in Britain. A friend of mine recently met a group of American folk singers touring the south coast of Ireland, who told him that they had often pledged to each other that they would get through the day without mentioning Trump, but so far, they had failed to do so. This tactic of dominating the news by deliberately headline-grabbing behaviour, regardless of the criticism it provokes, is not new but is much more difficult to carry out than it looks. Boris Johnson is currently trying to pull the same trick with outrageous references to “suicide vests,” but his over-heated rhetoric feels contrived. MP David Lammy’s jibe about Johnson as “a pound-shop Donald Trump” is apt.
Trump is never boring: it is a simple point and central to his success but is seldom given sufficient weight. During the presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s supporters complained that Trump got excessive amounts of free television time, while her speeches were ignored or were given inadequate attention. The reason was not any pro-Trump bias—quite the contrary given the political sympathies of most people in the media—but because her speeches were boring and his were not. He has the well-developed knack of always saying something the media cannot leave alone. An example of this is his tweeted retort this week to a claim by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon that he could “beat” Trump in a presidential election and is tough and smarter than him. This silly boast was not much of a news story, until Trump tweeted: “The problem with banker Jamie Dimon running for president is that he doesn’t have the aptitude or ‘smarts’ and is a poor public speaker and nervous mess—otherwise he is wonderful.” Not many politicians or journalists could put so much punching power into a single sentence.
Trump is regarded with a peculiar mixture of fear and underestimation by opponents across the board from the Democratic Party leaders to the EU heads of state. They believe—rightly—that Trump is a monster and hope—wrongly—that this means he will one day implode. This would be deeply convenient for them all because, until this happens, they do not have to act themselves. Trump will hopefully pass away like a bad dream. There is no need for the EU leaders or prominent Democrats to devise and explain policies that would divide them. Sometimes this policy of sitting on your hands and doing nothing until your opponent makes a mistake is the correct one. But it carries the grave risk of creating a vacuum of information that will be filled by your enemies. During the presidential election, it was easy to deride Trump’s vague promises to bring factory jobs back to the US, but he did not have to say much about this because Hillary usually said nothing at all.
Trump is at war with the institutions of the US government. This is unsurprising: US presidents have invariably been frustrated by the sense that they reign but do not rule. A convincing explanation for the fall of Richard Nixon is that different branches of the bureaucracy used Watergate to frustrate his grab for power and get rid of him. They may yet succeed in Trump’s case. Many Americans want to witness a sequel to Watergate with Trump in the starring role. But this is almost impossible to do without control of Congress and the ganging-up of bureaucrats against an elected president will not be palatable to a lot of voters.
The anonymous senior White House official of the New York Times op-ed says that he is part of a group within the administration pledged to thwart “Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses.” This is the latest emergence of “adults in the room” who are going to prevent the US government abandoning policies essential to its existence. The problem is that these “adults” are promoting policies that are often just as dangerous as anything Trump has in mind, if not more so. For instance, Trump has periodically said that the US ought to pull its 2,000 troops, which are backed by the US Air Force, out of north-east Syria. This would be a sensible move to negotiate because the US has a weak hand in Syria and could not determine the course of events without a full-scale war.
Trump is not “an isolationist” in the classic sense, but his instinct is to avoid wars or situations that might lead to one. Talking to Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin may not produce anything very substantial, but it does make war less, rather than more, likely. Yet, such is the bitterness of divisions in the US, that liberal commentators were furiously denouncing Trump as a traitor for meeting either man in terms that Senator McCarthy would have recognised seventy years ago. It is easy to sympathise with their rage. Trump is the worst thing to happen to the US since the Civil War, but miscalculating his strengths and weaknesses is not the way to deal with him. His near-miraculous ability to survive repeated scandals reminds me of what the diplomat, politician, and writer Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote about Charlie Haughey, the Irish political leader, who was notorious for surviving against the odds in similar challenging circumstances: “If I saw Mr. Haughey buried at midnight at a crossroads with a stake driven through his heart,” wrote O’Brien, “I should continue to wear a clove of garlic around my neck, just in case.”
21 December 2018
President Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria is being denounced by an impressive range of critics claiming that it is a surrender to Turkey, Russia, Syria, and Iran—as well as a betrayal of the Kurds and a victory for Isis. The pull-out may be one or all of these things, but above all, it is a recognition of what is really happening on the ground in Syria and the Middle East in general. This point has not come across clearly enough because of the undiluted loathing for Trump among most of the American and British media. They act as a conduit for the views of diverse figures who condemn the withdrawal and include members of the imperially-minded foreign policy establishment in Washington and terrified Kurds living in north-east Syria who fear ethnic cleansing by an invading Turkish army.
Opposition to Trump’s decision was supercharged by the resignation of Secretary of Defence James Mattis, which came after he failed to persuade the president to rescind his order. Mattis does not mention Syria or Afghanistan in his letter of resignation, but he makes clear his disagreement with the general direction of Trump’s foreign policy in not confronting Russia and China and ignoring traditional allies and alliances. The resignation of Mattis has elicited predictable lamentations from commentators who treat his departure as if it was the equivalent of the Kaiser getting rid of Bismarck. The over-used description of Mattis as “the last of the adults in the room” is once again trotted out, though few examples of his adult behaviour are given aside from his wish—along with other supposed “adults”—to stay in Syria until various unobtainable objectives were achieved: the extinction of Iranian influence; the displacement of Assad; and the categorical defeat of Isis (are they really likely to sign surrender terms?).
In other words, there was to be an open-ended US commitment with no attainable goals in an isolated and dangerous part of the world where it was already playing a losing game.
It is worth spelling out the state of play in Syria because this is being masked by anti-Trump rhetoric, recommending policies that may sound benign but are far detached from political reality. This reality may be very nasty: it is right to be appalled by the prospects for the Syrian Kurds who are terrified of a Turkish army that is already massing to the north of the Turkish-Syrian frontier. There is a horrible inevitability about all this because neither Turkey nor Syria were ever going to allow a Kurdish ministate to take permanent root in north-east Syria.
This is a good moment to make a point about this commentary: it is an explanation, not a justification for the dreadful things that may soon happen. I have visited the Kurdish controlled part of Syria several times and felt that it was the only part of Syria where the uprising of 2011 had produced a society that was better than what had gone before, bearing in mind the constraints of fighting a war. I met the men and women of the People’s Protection Units (YPG and YPJ) who fought heroically against Isis, suffering thousands of dead and wounded. But I always had a doomed feeling when talking to them as I could not see how their statelet, which had been brought into existence by temporary circumstances, was going to last beyond the end of the Syrian civil war and the defeat of Isis. One day the Americans would have to choose between two million embattled Kurds in Syria and eighty million Turks in Turkey and it did not take much political acumen to foresee what they would decide.
Turkey had escalated its pressure on the US to end its protection of the Kurds and this finally paid off. A telephone conversation with Erdogan a week ago reportedly convinced Trump that he had to get US soldiers and airpower out of Syria. Keep in mind that Trump needs—though he may not get as much as he wants—Turkey as an ally in the Middle East more than ever before. His bet on Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and Saudi Arabia as the leader of a pro-American and anti-Iranian Sunni coalition in the Middle East has visibly and embarrassingly failed. The bizarre killing of Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi team in Istanbul was only the latest in a series of Saudi pratfalls showing comical ineptitude as well as excessive and mindless violence.
Critics of Trump raise several other important questions in opposing his withdrawal decision: is he not letting Isis off the hook by prematurely announcing their defeat and thereby enabling them to make a comeback? There is something in this, but not a lot. Isis is no more and cannot be resurrected because the circumstances that led to its spectacular growth between 2013 and 2015 are no longer there. Trump is right to assume in a tweet that “Russia, Iran, Syria & many others…will have to fight ISIS and others, who they hate, without us.” Isis may seek to take advantage of chaos in eastern Syria in the coming months, but there will be no power vacuum for them to exploit. The vacuum will be filled by Turkey or Syria or a combination of the two.
A further criticism of the US withdrawal is that it unnecessarily hands a victory to Vladimir Putin and Assad. But here again, Trump’s manoeuvre is more of a recognition of the fact that both men are already winners in the Syrian war. Nor is it entirely clear that Russia and Iran will have greater influence in Syria and the region after the US withdrawal. True they have come out on the winning side, but as the Syrian state becomes more powerful, it will have less need for foreign allies. The close cooperation between Russia and Turkey was glued together by US cooperation with the Kurds and once that ends, then Turkey may shift—though not all the way—back towards the US.
By denouncing Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria, his opponents are once again making the mistake of underestimating his instinctive political skills.
13 May 2019
Saudi Arabia’s claim that two of its oil tankers have been sabotaged off the coast of the UAE is vague in detail—but could create a crisis that spins out of control and into military action. Any attack on shipping in or close to the Strait of Hormuz, the thirty-mile wide channel at the entrance to the Gulf, is always serious because it is the most important choke point for the international oil trade.
A significant armed action by the US or its allies against Iran would likely provoke Iranian retaliation in the Gulf and elsewhere in the region. Although the US is militarily superior to Iran by a wide margin, the Iranians as a last resort could fire rockets or otherwise attack Saudi and UAE oil facilities. Such apocalyptic events are unlikely—but powerful figures in Washington, such as the National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, appear prepared to take the risk of a war breaking out. Bolton has long publicly demanded the overthrow of the Iranian government. “The declared policy of the United States should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran,” he said last year before taking office. “The behaviour and the objectives of the regime are not going to change and, therefore, the only solution is to change the regime itself.”
Bolton and Pompeo are reported to have used some mortar rounds landing near the US embassy in Baghdad in February as an excuse to get a reluctant Pentagon to prepare a list of military options against Iran. These would include missile and air strikes, but it is unclear what these would achieve from the US point of view. Paradoxically, the US and Saudi Arabia have been talking up war against Iran just as economic sanctions are seriously biting. Iranian oil exports have dropped from 2.8 to 1.3 million barrels a day over the last year and are likely to fall further. Inflation in Iran is at 40 percent and promises by the EU, UK, France, and Germany to enable the Islamic republic to avoid sanctions on its oil trade and banking have not been fulfilled. Commercial enterprises are too frightened of being targeted by the US Treasury to risk breaching sanctions.
Iran is becoming economically—though not politically—isolated. This is in contrast to previous rounds of sanctions on Iran under President Obama prior to the nuclear deal when the reverse was true. One reason why it is unlikely that Iran would carry out sabotage attacks on Saudi oil tankers is that its strategy has been to play a long game and out-wait the Trump administration. Though the Iranian economy may be badly battered, it will probably be able to sustain the pressure. Much tighter sanctions against Saddam Hussein after his invasion of Kuwait in 1990 did not lead to the fall of his regime.
The circumstance of the alleged sabotage at 6 a.m. on Sunday remain mysterious. Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih says the attack “didn’t lead to any casualties or oil-spill” but did cause damage to the structure of the vessels. The incident has the potential to lead to conflict in the context of an escalating confrontation between the US and Iran. The rise in temperature reached particularly menacing levels this month as the US sent an aircraft carrier to the Gulf and Iran suspended in part its compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal after President Trump withdrew last year. However, Iran has made serious efforts to show moderation and cultivate support from the EU, Russia, and China. For this reason, it appears unlikely that it has had a hand in attacking the Saudi oil tankers. Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Abbas Mousavi asked for more information about what had really happened to the tankers. He warned against any “conspiracy orchestrated by ill-wishers” and “adventurism” by foreigners.
In this febrile atmosphere, almost any incident, true or false—such as the unconfirmed sabotage of tankers or a few mortar rounds fired towards the US embassy in Baghdad—might provide the spark to ignite a wider conflict.
17 May 2019
In its escalating confrontation with Iran, the US is making the same mistake it has made again and again since the fall of the Shah forty years ago: it is ignoring the danger of plugging into what is in large part a religious conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
I have spent much of my career as a correspondent in the Middle East, since the Iranian revolution in 1979, reporting crises and wars in which the US and its allies fatally underestimated the religious motivation of their adversaries. This has meant they have come out the loser, or simply failed to win, in conflicts in which the balance of forces appeared to them to be very much in their favour. It has happened at least four times. Now the same process is underway yet again, and likely to fail for the same reasons as before: the US, along with its local allies, will be fighting not only Iran but whole Shia communities in different countries, mostly in the northern tier of the Middle East between Afghanistan and the Mediterranean. Trump looks to sanctions to squeeze Iran while National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo promote war as a desirable option. But all three denounce Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Popular Mobilisation Units in Iraq as Iranian proxies, though they are primarily the military and political arm of the indigenous Shia, which are a plurality in Lebanon, a majority in Iraq, and a controlling minority in Syria. The Iranians may be able to strongly influence these groups, but they are not Iranian puppets, which would wither and disappear once Iranian backing is removed.
Allegiance to nation-states in the Middle East is generally weaker than loyalty to communities defined by religion, such as the Alawites, the two-million-strong ruling Shia sect in Syria to which Bashar al-Assad and his closest lieutenants belong. This is not what Trump’s allies in Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Israel want Washington to believe; for them, the Shia are all Iranian stooges. For the Saudis, every rocket fired by the Houthis in Yemen into Saudi Arabia—though minimal in destructive power compared to the four-year Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen—can only have happened because of a direct instruction from Tehran. On Thursday, for instance, Prince Khalid Bin Salman, the vice minister for defence and the brother of Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, claimed on Twitter that drone attacks on Saudi oil pumping stations were “ordered” by Iran. He said that “the terrorist acts, ordered by the regime in Tehran, and carried out by the Houthis, are tightening the noose around the ongoing political efforts.” He added: “These militias are merely a tool that Iran’s regime uses to implement its expansionist agenda in the region.” There is nothing new in this paranoid reaction by Sunni rulers to actions by distinct Shia communities (in this case the Houthis) attributing everything without exception to the guiding hand of Iran. I was in Bahrain in 2011, where the minority Sunni monarchy had just brutally crushed protests by the Shia majority with Saudi military support. Among those tortured were Shia doctors in a hospital who had treated injured demonstrators. Part of the evidence against them was a piece of technologically advanced medical equipment—I cannot remember if it was used for monitoring the heart or the brain or some other condition—which the doctors were accused of using to receive instructions from Iran about how to promote a revolution.
This type of absurd conspiracy theory used not to get much of hearing in Washington, but Trump and his acolytes are on record as saying that nearly all acts of “terrorism” can be traced to Iran. This conviction risks sparking a war between the US and Iran because there are plenty of angry Shia in the Middle East who might well attack some US facility on their own accord.
It might also lead to somebody in one of those states eager for a US-Iran armed conflict to stage a provocative incident that could be blamed on Iran.
But what would such a war achieve? The military invasion of Iran is not militarily or politically feasible, so there would be no decisive victory. An air campaign and a close naval blockade of Iran might be possible, but there are plenty of pressure points through which Iran could retaliate, from mines in the Strait of Hormuz to rockets fired at the Saudi oil facilities on the western side of Gulf. A little-noticed feature of the US denunciations of Iranian interference using local proxies in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon is not just that they are exaggerated but, even if they were true, they come far too late. Iran is already on the winning side in all three countries.
If war does come, it will be hard-fought. Shia communities throughout the region will feel under threat. As for the US, the first day is usually the best for whoever starts a war in the Middle East, and after that, their plans unravel as they become entangled in a spider’s web of dangers they failed to foresee.
7 June 2019
Is Donald Trump a fascist? The question is usually posed as an insult rather than as a serious inquiry. A common response is that “he is not as bad as Hitler,” but this rather dodges the issue. Hitler was one hideous exponent of fascism, which comes in different flavours, but he was by no means the only one.
