MB Civic

Sir,

You are correct that the blame for this mess belongs to the neocons, but your view that the neocons wanted to create a democracy in Iraq as a beacon in a troubled region couldn’t be farther off the mark. The neocons’ primary objective is to promote the security of Israel. This interest is best served by a crippled Iraq too busy disembowelling itself to march on Jerusalem. Or better yet, three little crippled Iraqistans doing the same.

This is at odds with the interests of the West. Britain originally created Iraq out of three distinct ethnic-religious entities in the wake of the Ottomans’ defeat, as a “matchweight” to Iran. The large, landlocked Iraq was drawn on a clean sheet of paper with a single point of contact with the outside world at the mouth of a contested river with the wealthy, tame, and powerless sheikhdom of Kuwait as it’s gatekeeper. This arrangement ensured that Iraq could be isolated with little more than a gunboat, while maintaining a country with enough mass and population to challenge Iran. The plan was to effect a similar fate on Iran by splitting off “Arabistan” and “Baluchistan”, creating a credible, but landlocked, threat to Iraq. Both countries could thus be isolated with the same gunboat! Iraq and Iran could thus be kept supine by the tricks of the map-maker, in the same way that Jordan’s unfortunate geography has kept it friendly.

This plan failed as a result of the Cold War, the decline of British power, and the transfer of Iran to the US. The US preferred a strong, captive, centrally controlled, well armed, autocracy in Iran to counter Soviet designs on the warm winter anchorages of the Gulf, the Straits of Hormuz, and the oilfields of Arabia. The plan to separate Iran from it’s coastline, as had been carried out on the Southern shores of the Gulf, was thus binned — The little fiefdoms could turn into little Cubas in the middle of the US oilfields.

The utility of Iraq as a matchweight to Iran was demonstrated in the Iran-Iraq War in which the West supported Saddam in an eight year war of attrition against the Ayatollahs that preserved both intact to bleed each other again as needed. This balance of power was the reason the first George Bush did not topple Saddam in Desert Storm and risk a breakup of the country. With the breakup of Iraq now being viewed as a viable alternative to “Staying the Course”, it seems likely that the partition of Iran will have to be attempted to rebalance the power.

The neocons’ project is risky, because it could fail as miserably as the current adventure in Iraq has. The result would be Shia Southern Iraq allying with Iran, and Sunni Eastern Iraq allying with Syria, creating an unfriendly bloc from the Mediterranian to Pakistan. The chess board could tilt further if the fall of nuclear Pakistan’s US-allied dictator and/or Afghanistan’s tame puppet results.

The only beneficiary thus far has been Israel, free to expand and attack its neighbours away from the limelight while the Coalition of the Willing dismembers it’s old enemy.

The talk of democracy is pure piffle. US allies Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Pakistan, the UAE, Jordan, and the newest member of the fold, Lybia, couldn’t be any less democratic, since they are hereditary totalitarian autocracies. This seems obvious. The US does not want democracies in these countries if the increasingly Islamist majorities vote for Hamas or Hezbollah. Israel itself – that beacon of democracy in an otherwise bleak landscape — does not extend the vote or (even basic human rights) to the six million or so people it has displaced.

This is the trajectory the neocons have launched us on; they weren’t trying to spread democracy.