The Third "I"
India and Iran are natural allies in the region. In 2003 the two conducted naval military exercises in tandem, and between them they squeeze Pakistan on either side. Pakistan is a Sunni Muslim country and thus of no use to heavily Shi'ite Iran, and India's extraordinary economic potential could carry Iran along on its coat-tails, especially if Iranian energy credits were thrown into the bargain.
India and Iran both share something important with the U.S.: a wariness, if not downright fear, of China. This new Axis of Power - US/I3 (I-cubed for Israel, Iran, India - has a ring to it!) - represents a stable front along the underbelly of Russia and Western China. The presence of U.S. allies enforces the time-honored U.S. strategic goals of encirclement, at least along whatever borders it can access. And while Israel-Iran-India are hardly a match for a Russian-Chinese alliance, even with U.S. support, it is the ability to destabilize western China, which has missed out on much of the economic boom, or southern Russia, which oversees a large Muslim population on both sides of its border, that makes the region so valuable to the U.S. - that and its access to oil, not just from the Mid East, but from Baku as well. The entire alliance is buttressed by the chain of military bases the U.S. has established - and continues to establish - in Iraq and other central Asian countries.
"They're Not that Smart"
Many friends of mine reject such theories because of the "They're not that smart" (TNTS) fallacy, which holds that our leaders, who generally make such a mess of things, just aren't smart enough to do all this high-falutin' manipulation and long-term planning on a global scale. These friends point to an apparent contradiction: you can't say, on the one hand, that Bush, Rumsfeld, et al, have dragged us into a quagmire in Iraq as a result of their incompetence, greed, and stupidity, and on the other, envision them as evil geniuses playing a subtle game of chess across the world stage. And they're right - unless there is another explanation.
Without lengthening this article interminably, let's supply such an explanation: the public leadership is put in place by power brokers with unlimited global access to high-level military, intelligence, economic, and strategic analysts, policy-makers, influence brokers, and puppet-masters (yes, the latter do exist are not simply a fantasy of thriller-writers). The broader objective of extending the power of the military/industrial elite without regard to national interest (except as a given nation serves as a secure power base for that group) is still largely in place. Not everyone in these groups adheres to that world-view, but the system self-selects for those who, when confronted with a choice between profit and integrity, power and political idealism, always opt for profit and power. The logic of the system assures that the sum total of many such choices adds up to a very purposeful policy of aggressive economic colonialism. The ideology of a ruling elite both determines and reinforces favored decision-making algorithms that, despite their complexity, generally result in the same rather obvious determinations: exploitation of labor, strategic use of military force, allocation of resources for purposes of social control rather than social empowerment, and even choosing which party and candidates can best represent the elite's interests in national elections.
Of course, within the system there are factions, old-line interests that date back centuries as well as up-and-coming newbies, upstarts who are seized by a reformist vision (JFK and RFK?), and younger generations whose vision of their inherited power may be inspired by their alternative experiences among their peers. The individual identities may change, but access to the inner decision-making circles remains exclusive and determined in large part by a combination of possessing useful skills and/or extraordinary resources. In other words, "they" is far broader than the Bush Gang and "they" possess virtually unlimited intellectual capital.
The real fear factor that throws monkey wrenches into the whirring gears of any elite's mechanations is the most important - the people themselves. In the eyes of the elite, "the people" tend to be viewed as a wholly malleable mass whose individual members count for very little in the grander strategic calculations that govern national and global policies. They exist as demographic and economic statistics and their uncanny ability to be killed off in large numbers by natural and human disasters tends to devalue their lives in the eyes of those gazing upon them from Olympian heights. One of the great ethical divides in human history lies in the gulf between the impulses of those who view it as their ordained right to govern, guide, manipulate, and/or exploit "the people" and the people themselves, in whom the universal human impulses towards autonomy, social cohesion, and self-actualization are often reinforced by an ironic moral knowing imposed on them by adversity. The middle class, truly caught in the middle, deludes itself that it somehow shares interests with the elite even as it fears slipping back into the swarming under-class from which so many of them - or their recent ancestors - emerged. It is this strange dynamic of the middle that governs so much of the politics and economics of the industrial nations.
What does all this have to do with Israel, Iran, India, and the U.S.? Another way to say it is, "How many evil geniuses does it take to screw up a region?" The answer - not as many as you'd think. It's not quantum mechanics. The British and Russians were hard at it in the mid 1800s, playing "The Great Game" across this very area. The British drew up plans for subduing Iraq via aerial attack as early as 1922! Over a century earlier, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Austrian diplomat Metternich at the Congress of Europe drew up plans for a balance of power among the European powers that staggered along more or less intact for a century before blowing up in everyone's face during World War I. To control a foreign country one needs to have influence over a dozen key people, and this the elites can achieve fairly easily. (When they can't, reference Lumumba, Allende, Goulart, Bosch, and dozens of others of similar pedigree). This kind of strategic chess game has been going on for centuries unabated, incubated in a Europe that was home to hundreds and hundreds of duchies, kingdoms, principalities, city-states, nascent nation-states, trading groups, warring religious factions, and a never-ending shuttling of military and commercial alliances. Manipulating a few dozen national entities and a few core industries simply does not require a unique brand of "smarts".
The system is, of course, reasonably complex, but the good thing about complexity is that one can screw up one part of the game and adjust by shifting resources and objectives to another area. So if the Shah of Iran is unexpectedly thrown out of power, as he was in 1979, and his successors basically hate your guts because you (meaning the U.S.) supported his unpopular policies, you move the pieces around for awhile until conditions change and you get what you want a different way. Voil'a! An alliance! This is why Cockburn's version of the TNTS fallacy can be both correct and fallacious: the ruling powers do screw up all the time, but they have the resources, freedom from accountability, raw power, and - let's admit it - talent at their command to adjust in whatever way necessary, even if the adjustment becomes rather messy. Imagine a chess game: one side has a few pawns and a bishop and a knight, the other not only its full array of pieces, but four extra bishops, three more rooks, two superfluous queens, and a partridge in a pear tree. Blundering away a queen and two rooks doesn't necessarily derail one's plans.
The bottom line is that the United States wants access to Iranian oil, Iran's highly strategic geopolitical position (its counterpart in importance on the western end of the central Asian massif, Turkey, remains one of the U.S.'s staunchest allies), and the economic stimulus that full commercial relations between the U.S. and Iran will engender. Israel wants security and wouldn't complain about profitable arms and high-tech deals. Iran wants to be a world player, a major energy exporter, and security against Russia and China's regional influence. India is a world player but needs to raise up hundreds of millions of its poorer inhabitants if it is to purchase political stability and establish long-standing security in the face of potential threats from Pakistan and China. There is no significant way their interests collide, and strong historical and geographic pressures driving the four into one another's arms. Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, meet your match!
Iraq
So U.S./I3, makes sense for all parties economically, strategically, and geopolitically, especially long-term as a counter-balance to the uncertainties inherent in China's economic growth and virtual super-power Russia's wildly caroming destiny. The alliance also helps us make better sense of what's going on in Iraq.
In the United States, Iraq is generally seen as a miserably failed military adventure driven by lies and the delusions and miscalculations of men who have failed also as president, vice president, secretary of defense, secretary of state, etc. Instinctively, I share those views. But part of me thinks that the U.S. is getting precisely what it wants out of the Iraqi invasion. In many respects, the invasion is only an extension of Bill Clinton's policy of maintaining a strangling embargo on Iraq in which critical medical and food supplies were cut off for the entire two terms of his presidency, resulting in tens of thousands, some say hundreds of thousands, of unnecessary deaths. His policies continued those of his predecessor, George Bush Senior, whose administration lured Saddam into Kuwait, sold the war to the American public, betrayed the groups that took seriously our proclaimed desire to get rid of Saddam, and left the tyrant in power while letting, again, many thousands die at his hands in revenge for supporting us. We put Saddam in power by supporting his career in the Ba'ath party on his way up, the CIA provided him with names of political enemies whom he arrested, tortured and killed, and in general, he was what's known in the trade as a "good doobie" for us until, seemingly inexplicably, we turned on him. But was it Saddam Hussein that we turned on in the early 1990s or Iraq itself?
At some point, perhaps in the wake of the war between Iraq and Iran, strategic thinkers decided that Iran had far more to offer us than Iraq. The reversal was swift and complicated by such issues as the northern Iraqi Kurds' influence on eastern Turkey (Turkey's stability is a keystone of U.S. geopolitics and is inviolate). Selling Gulf Wars to the U.S. public was another difficulty that was resolved by 9/11 and its aftermath. Let's take a quick look at where today's Iraq fits within the strategic perspective provided by the U.S./I3 alliance.
Iraq is in ruins, U.S. corporate interests have taken the U.S. taxpayer debt incurred by the war and destruction and converted it into windfall profits, the U.S. has control of Iraqi oil, the country is in the midst of a violent conflagration that creates a power vacuum that strengthens both Israel and Iran, and we're building massive military bases and the world's largest and most heavily fortified embassy as a governor's mansion for our new 51st state. Of course, 3,000 U.S. troops have died with many more severely wounded, and who knows how many Iraqis. U.S. casualties are especially tendered by Americans as proof of the catastrophic handling of the war. But this concern represents a total misreading of the mindset of military command.
Perhaps it's time to get this straight: 3,000, even 10,000, dead soldiers means nothing to the Pentagon or the Defense Department. When will Americans get that through their heads? Take a look at the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial Wall in D.C. Take a look at 58,000 deaths, gone for a tragic lie for which few responsible have owned up. If Vietnam was worth 58,000 deaths to the U.S. military, how many is Iraq worth? The emotional camaraderie among soldiiers displayed in "Band of Brothers", "Saving Private Ryan", and their ilk has become a part of modern American mythology, but it does not extend to the military command of just about any army in history. Military commanders have never considered the welfare or lives of their troops over and against the operational success needed to fulfill their strategic objectives. Many - especially among field officers - have reflected with sensitivity and deep pain over the cost of a campaign, and been righteously outraged over the waste of young lives due to the stupidity of commanders further up the line. Yet from Napoleon's squandering of 98% of his army of 600,000 in Russia, to U.S. Grant's campaigns in the Civil War and on to the trenches of World War I and countless slaughtering fields since, the Command has always viewed soldiers as expendable, despite the crocodile tears they shed in public. Just look at the way the Bush administration started cutting back on veterans' benefits as soon as the Iraq invasion began.
So yes, militarily our commanders have screwed up royally in Iraq. Almost all would probably have preferred a "surgical" victory with few American casualties. But because of endless resources, Congressional and media passivity, public complicity in their retention of power, lack of accountability, the endless debt-making machinery of the U.S. Treasury, etc., the broader outlines of long-term strategy can be retained. That's how the game is played.
Could Well Be Wrong
If the U.S. winds up invading Iran and Israel bombs Tehran, well, I guess I've just wasted a few hundred kilobytes of cyber-space. Perhaps the religious lunacy of the U.S. right wing has over-ridden the influence of the long-term policy making matrix. Perhaps military strategists in Israel have finally lost their minds completely. Maybe the left has been wrong ever since C. Wright Mills penned The Power Elite in the 1950s and foreign policy is indeed made solely by buffoons like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, and Perle, although that would fly in the face of a lot of evidence. But frankly, even voicing the notion that we will attack Iran has a ridiculous ring to it: with what will we invade, and who will support us, and what do we gain and how far will Israel play its role as America's little attack dog before Israelis awaken to the impossible dead end the U.S. has helped back them into? My guess is that the Axis of Power is indeed in place and, to paraphrase June Carter and Johnny Cash, "it turns, turns, turns, a ring of fire."
One final observation, though. The most flawlessly played game might still proceed under such fundamentally flawed assumptions that the player might win all the battles and lose the ultimate decision. The ends we seek and the means we are using to achieve them ultimately destabilize the political integrity of the global system. We manipulate and betray for the sake of oil and an illusion of security in a world whose dangers we can barely assess without succumbing to hysteria and paranoia, and whose real sources we only dimly surmise. The U.S. uses Iraq and then Iran, and the rulers of each in turn manipulate their own people and long to join us on the playing field. The entire program is corrupt to the core, but policy decisions still rest with those addicted to making their mark in today's version of "The Great Game". As for the masters of the game, I agree with Bob Dylan's sentiments in his early masterpiece, "Masters of War": "All the money you made will never buy back your soul."
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