[NYTr] Dilip Hiro: Bush's Zero-Sum Game Fiasco with Iran

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

TomDispatch via ZNet - Dec 7, 2007
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=67&ItemID=14458

The Zero-Sum Fiasco

Bush in a Humiliating Zero-Sum Iranian Game of His Own Making

by Dilip Hiro

Bush's woefully misguided invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003,
carried out under false pretences, has not only drained the United
States treasury, but reduced Washington's standing in the Middle East
in a way not yet fully grasped by most commentators. Whereas Washington
once played off Tehran against Baghdad, while involved in a superpower
zero-sum game with the Soviet Union, the Bush administration is now
engaged in a zero-sum game, as a virtual equal, with Iran. That is,
America's loss has become Iran's automatic gain, and vice-versa.

To grasp the steepness of Washington's recent fall, recall that until
Saddam Hussein's disastrous invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the
zero-sum doctrine in the region applied only to Iraq and Iran, two
minor powers on the world stage.

Having emerged in a self-congratulatory mode as the "sole superpower"
after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. now finds
itself competing with a secondary power in the Middle East. This
humbling realization seems to have finally penetrated the minds of top
policy makers in the Bush administration, causing concern.

More than anything else, that explains the sudden spurt of presidential
interest in healing the long-running Israeli-Palestinian sore by
holding a Middle East conference in Annapolis, Maryland. The real
objective of the Bush team had more to do with mollifying Arab leaders
in order to hold them together in its ongoing confrontation with Tehran
than realizing a genuine urge to create a viable, independent Palestine
within a year.

With his invasion of Iraq in 2003, George W. Bush diverged wildly from
the policies of his two Republican predecessors: his father, George H.
W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan. Both of them had proved erudite enough to
maintain the zero-sum game between Iraq and Iran.

The Zero-Sum Doctrine

While the United States and the Soviet Union vied for supremacy in the
oil-rich, strategically important Middle East, the rivalry between
Baghdad and Tehran was long submerged in the Cold War between the two
superpowers.

After the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, a zero-sum
doctrine came to dominate that global "war." From then on, each Soviet
gain was automatically seen as a loss in Washington, and vice-versa in
Moscow.

This status quo held for 30 years. In April 1978, a Soviet-inspired
military coup in Afghanistan toppled the regime of Daoud Khan -- who
had earlier overthrown his cousin, King Zahir Shah, and founded a
republic -- replacing it with a pro-Moscow republic. That alarmed the
administration of President Jimmy Carter. The turmoil that ensued in
Afghanistan would last two decades, at the end of which the
puritanical, Sunni, Islamic fundamentalist Taliban movement would seize
control of almost the entire country. (Being staunch Sunnis, the
Taliban held Shiites in low esteem, which helped raise tensions with
Shiite Iran to a fever pitch in 1998.)

In the Middle East, meanwhile, a historic zero-sum game had prevailed
between the pro-American Shah of Iran, re-installed after a CIA coup in
1953, and the Soviet-leaning regime of Arab nationalist officers in Iraq
that followed the overthrow of the pro-British monarch in 1958.

In the eight-year war between the two neighbors, started by Saddam
Hussein's invasion of Iran in 1980, President Reagan maintained a
pretence of neutrality, while covertly supporting the Iraqi dictator,
as some "rogue" officials in his administration sold weapons secretly
to Iran's fundamentalist regime that had toppled the Shah in 1979.

In the mid-1980s, when Saddam's defeat became a real possibility, the
Pentagon introduced the U.S. Navy into the conflict. While the
ostensible purpose was to escort tankers, carrying Kuwaiti oil, through
the Persian Gulf to foreign destinations, this was an overt U.S. tilt
toward Iraq. The war ended in a stalemate, leaving the regional
zero-sum equation intact.

Following the expulsion of Saddam Hussein's occupying Iraqi forces from
Kuwait in February 1991, President George H. W. Bush, leading a
coalition of 28 nations, called on Iraqis to rise up against Saddam.
Both the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south answered his
call. Bush senior came to the rescue of the Iraqi Kurds under the guise
of United Nations Security Council Resolution 688 (relating to "the
repression of the Iraqi civilian population"). By contrast, he allowed
Saddam's forces to deploy helicopter gun ships to mow down the Shiite
rebels in the south. Why?

Bush and his top officials, including then-Secretary of Defense Dick
Cheney, understood that Saddam's overthrow would end the classic
Iraqi-Iranian zero-sum game. Once the long-suffering Shiite majority in
Iraq was in the driver's seat in a post-Saddam Iraq, it would naturally
ally with predominantly Shiite Iran.

The Zero-Sum Fiasco

The coming to power of the anti-Shiite Taliban government in
Afghanistan, culminating in its killing of a dozen Iranian diplomats in
the regional capital of Mazar-e Sharif in the summer of 1998, raised
Tehran-Kabul tensions to an explosive point. Tens of thousands of
Iranian Revolutionary Guards gathered along the international border
with Afghanistan for "military exercises."

Although the two governments pulled back from the brink of war, Iran
continued to regard the Taliban, a creature of Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia, as an intensely hostile entity.

Contrary to Iran's public posturing, including protests against the
Pentagon's aerial strikes on Afghanistan between October and December
2001, its government actually shared intelligence on the Taliban with
Washington, using back channels. Like its politicians, the Iranian
public was glad to see the Taliban defeated, and Iran's diplomats
cooperated with their American counterparts to install Hamid Karzai as
the leader of the post-Taliban Afghanistan.

Then, in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the
Shiite-dominated government feared by the first Bush administration
came into existence. The overthrow of its enemies to the east (in
Afghanistan) and to the west (in Iraq) -- wrought by Bush junior to
advance his own blinkered agenda -- had now prepared the ground for
Iran to assume the regionally dominant role its leaders consider their
right.

Iran has the largest population in the region, is four times the size of
Iraq, shares land and water borders with nine countries, and has a
coastline that runs along the whole Persian Gulf as well as part of the
Arabian Sea, not to mention the land-locked Caspian Sea. It also has
the second largest reserves of oil, as well as natural gas, in the
world.

In its regional policies, it does not differentiate between Sunnis and
Shiites. It has taken the lead in offering aid, material and moral, to
Hamas, even though it is a Sunni Palestinian movement.

Iran's stance is in line with popular sentiment among Arabs. Hassan
Nasrallah, Ismail Haniyeh, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- respectively, the
heads of the Lebanese Hizbollah movement, the Palestinian Hamas
movement, and Iran -- now top opinion polls as favorite leaders in Arab
countries. That is, ordinary Arabs generally ignore sectarian
differences, except when it comes to occupied Iraq.

Worried by this fact, Arab rulers have resorted to stressing their
sectarian, rather than ideological or policy disagreements, with Iran.
The Bush administration has encouraged them to do so. Eager to counter
rising Iranian influence by any means, its top officials are now trying
to rally Arab rulers as Sunnis against Shiite Iran, forgetting that a
hasty and unnecessary invasion of Iraq was what has brought about this
wretched mess in the first place.

Increasingly, Washington under Bush will be the loser, no matter who
prevails in the region -- an apt definition of a superpower in decline
and of a genuine zero-sum fiasco.


[Dilip Hiro is the author of The Iranian Labyrinth, Secrets and Lies:
Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and After, and, most recently, Blood of the
Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources, all
published by Nation Books.]