Posted on 01/16/2006 9:28:48 AM PST by B.Bumbleberry
Are we living through the origins of the next world war? Certainly, it is easy to imagine how a future historian might deal with the next phase of events in the Middle East:
With every passing year after the turn of the century, the instability of the Gulf region grew. By the beginning of 2006, nearly all the combustible ingredients for a conflict - far bigger in its scale and scope than the wars of 1991 or 2003 - were in place.
The first underlying cause of the war was the increase in the region's relative importance as a source of petroleum. On the one hand, the rest of the world's oil reserves were being rapidly exhausted. On the other, the breakneck growth of the Asian economies had caused a huge surge in global demand for energy. It is hard to believe today, but for most of the 1990s the price of oil had averaged less than $20 a barrel.
A second precondition of war was demographic. While European fertility had fallen below the natural replacement rate in the 1970s, the decline in the Islamic world had been much slower. By the late 1990s the fertility rate in the eight Muslim countries to the south and east of the European Union was two and half times higher than the European figure.
This tendency was especially pronounced in Iran, where the social conservatism of the 1979 Revolution - which had lowered the age of marriage and prohibited contraception - combined with the high mortality of the Iran-Iraq War and the subsequent baby boom to produce, by the first decade of the new century, a quite extraordinary surplus of young men. More than two fifths of the population of Iran in 1995 had been aged 14 or younger. This was the generation that was ready to fight in 2007.
This not only gave Islamic societies a youthful energy that contrasted markedly with the slothful senescence of Europe. It also signified a profound shift in the balance of world population. In 1950, there had three times as many people in Britain as in Iran. By 1995, the population of Iran had overtaken that of Britain and was forecast to be 50 per cent higher by 2050.
Yet people in the West struggled to grasp the implications of this shift. Subliminally, they still thought of the Middle East as a region they could lord it over, as they had in the mid-20th century.
The third and perhaps most important precondition for war was cultural. Since 1979, not just Iran but the greater part of the Muslim world had been swept by a wave of religious fervour, the very opposite of the process of secularisation that was emptying Europe's churches.
Although few countries followed Iran down the road to full-blown theocracy, there was a transformation in politics everywhere. From Morocco to Pakistan, the feudal dynasties or military strongmen who had dominated Islamic politics since the 1950s came under intense pressure from religious radicals.
The ideological cocktail that produced 'Islamism' was as potent as either of the extreme ideologies the West had produced in the previous century, communism and fascism. Islamism was anti-Western, anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic. A seminal moment was the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's intemperate attack on Israel in December 2005, when he called the Holocaust a 'myth'. The state of Israel was a 'disgraceful blot', he had previously declared, to be wiped 'off the map'.
Prior to 2007, the Islamists had seen no alternative but to wage war against their enemies by means of terrorism. From the Gaza to Manhattan, the hero of 2001 was the suicide bomber. Yet Ahmadinejad, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, craved a more serious weapon than strapped-on explosives. His decision to accelerate Iran's nuclear weapons programme was intended to give Iran the kind of power North Korea already wielded in East Asia: the power to defy the United States; the power to obliterate America's closest regional ally.
Under different circumstances, it would not have been difficult to thwart Ahmadinejad's ambitions. The Israelis had shown themselves capable of pre-emptive air strikes against Iraq's nuclear facilities in 1981. Similar strikes against Iran's were urged on President Bush by neo-conservative commentators throughout 2006. The United States, they argued, was perfectly placed to carry out such strikes. It had the bases in neighbouring Iraq and Afghanistan. It had the intelligence proving Iran's contravention of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
But the President was advised by his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, to opt instead for diplomacy. Not just European opinion but American opinion was strongly opposed to an attack on Iran. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 had been discredited by the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein had supposedly possessed and by the failure of the US-led coalition to quell a bloody insurgency.
Americans did not want to increase their military commitments overseas; they wanted to reduce them. Europeans did not want to hear that Iran was about to build its own WMD. Even if Ahmad-inejad had broadcast a nuclear test live on CNN, liberals would have said it was a CIA con-trick.
So history repeated itself. As in the 1930s, an anti-Semitic demagogue broke his country's treaty obligations and armed for war. Having first tried appeasement, offering the Iranians economic incentives to desist, the West appealed to international agencies - the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Security Council. Thanks to China's veto, however, the UN produced nothing but empty resolutions and ineffectual sanctions, like the exclusion of Iran from the 2006 World Cup finals.
Only one man might have stiffened President Bush's resolve in the crisis: not Tony Blair, he had wrecked his domestic credibility over Iraq and was in any case on the point of retirement - Ariel Sharon. Yet he had been struck down by a stroke as the Iranian crisis came to a head. With Israel leaderless, Ahmadinejad had a free hand.
As in the 1930s, too, the West fell back on wishful thinking. Perhaps, some said, Ahmadinejad was only sabre-rattling because his domestic position was so weak. Perhaps his political rivals in the Iranian clergy were on the point of getting rid of him. In that case, the last thing the West should do was to take a tough line; that would only bolster Ahmadinejad by inflaming Iranian popular feeling. So in Washington and in London people crossed their fingers, hoping for the deus ex machina of a home-grown regime change in Teheran.
This gave the Iranians all the time they needed to produce weapons-grade enriched uranium at Natanz. The dream of nuclear non-proliferation, already interrupted by Israel, Pakistan and India, was definitively shattered. Now Teheran had a nuclear missile pointed at Tel-Aviv. And the new Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu had a missile pointed right back at Teheran.
The optimists argued that the Cuban Missile Crisis would replay itself in the Middle East. Both sides would threaten war - and then both sides would blink. That was Secretary Rice's hope - indeed, her prayer - as she shuttled between the capitals. But it was not to be.
The devastating nuclear exchange of August 2007 represented not only the failure of diplomacy, it marked the end of the oil age. Some even said it marked the twilight of the West. Certainly, that was one way of interpreting the subsequent spread of the conflict as Iraq's Shi'ite population overran the remaining American bases in their country and the Chinese threatened to intervene on the side of Teheran.
Yet the historian is bound to ask whether or not the true significance of the 2007-2011 war was to vindicate the Bush administration's original principle of pre-emption. For, if that principle had been adhered to in 2006, Iran's nuclear bid might have been thwarted at minimal cost. And the Great Gulf War might never have happened.
• Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University www.niallferguson.org
I would prefer a selective mass sterilization of the Muslim world.......let it die off gradually.
I find that difficult to believe, given that the only people interested in that godforsaken bit of coral have been radio amateurs seeking a "new country" and the Chinese, Vietnamese and Philippines squabbling over whose flag will fly over it (at low tide).
I'm bolstered to see that there are others with whom I share the same opinion on this scenario. I frequently contemplated as I was growing up what it must have felt like for my parents to have lived during WWII, seeing it develop before their eyes and seeing how it played out on a daily basis, how it escalated, and how the momentums shifted back and forth between the two sides. I've been convinced since 9/11 that I'm now similarly experiencing what they did in the late 30's and early 40's first hand for myself. It's a gut-rolling uneasiness to say the least.
I think Condi is in over her head as Secretary of State. Her expertise on Russia has given her no preperation to deal with Islam. In fact, her training might even be detrimental. Although the Soviet were evil, they were reasonable and weren't keenly interested in dying.
Although Soviets outlawed churches, Russians still had a basis of Christianity....i.e., they had not been brainwashed to blow themeselves up in the name of God.
<< The second wave is moving northward now, despite the utter denial of those who lead us. >>
Like the writer of the piece that leads this thread you are using the wrong tense.
The war he's talking about began, courtesy of the traitor Cartah, in 1979 and we have, until recently and perhaps again soon, been losing it ever since.
And we are already hostilely colonized by and having already lost our sovereign borders are in the process of losing our language and our culture and our Rule of Law to and unassimilated and unassimilable more than thirty-five million strong criminal-alien invasion.
And then there's China and its islamanazi allies and Russia.
And Eurabia.
I supported and still support the Iraq war. We need to win it and not look like paper tigers. What's done is done, and failure is not an option. We live in the world of the indicative mood, not the subjunctive mood.
However, if a time machine was invented and we could go back in time to Summer 2002, I would argue until I was blue in the face that war with Iraq would deplete our resources and resolve to fight the greater threat--Iran. All the post 9-11 GWOT capital should have been invested in arguing for the overthrow of the Iranian mullahs. I know all the arguments about how Iran was going to fall ASAP because of their pro-American youth and how it was just a matter of time before we had a sea of liberty between Afghanistan and Iraq...hasn't happened, won't happen. Now, in 2006, the doctrine of preemption is for the most part dead, because of the struggles in Iraq--more specifically, the intelligence failures which will haunt our credibility both inside and outside our borders for decades to come. Iran would have been easier to manage, with one friendly border (Afghanistan) and a unified populace ethnically. You can make better arguments to the skeptical and the weak-kneed that Iran fits in w/ the GWOT than Iraq, mostly because it would be a delayed response to Iran's sponsored attack on U.S. Marines in 1984 that killed 250 soldiers in Lebanon and of course the gross seizure of hostages when the mullah state was founded. Iran's long deserved a massive butt-kicking.
Iran's the problem, and its problems dwarfed those presented by Saddam's Iraq. Let's pray something happens that doesn't make us rue choosing Iraq over Iran.
Those countries which have the ability and the technology to go hydroelectric and nuclear for power generation have had all the warning that they need to have done so already, if not, any hardship resulting should clearly be placed at the feet of the insane and ignorant among each society, and their supporters.
One source of deep satisfaction is that if China or another crazy country unleashes the dogs of nuclear war in search of raw materials and oil, the insane fuzzies in all "civilized" societies, and their supporters, will be the first to "go".
A quick death, if they are lucky, torn limb from limb by the others freezing in the dark.
Other than self-imposed restraint, there is no reason for this scenario not to play out. The primitive mass murderers are only accidental owners of the world's oil suppy. It was given to them by the very countries who then turned around and bought the stuff from them, instead of simply taking the territory back; mistake number one.
Other than the suicidal impulse to "do the right thing" There is no reason whatsoever why Great Britain, and the US did not take back the rich oil fields, once their importance was clear.
How long have those fields been in sandmaggot hands? Eighty years? Out of a world history of 6000 years?
The problem with this analysis is that it presumes that a rational solution is not possible. There are an infinite number of permutations, in all of which the overreaching muslims are the permanent losers: among them, China, Europe, and the U.S. jointly take over the oil fields, permanently, and divide production (and the cost of recovering it) among themselves in proportion to population.
Since Russia has a more or less independent source of oil, I don't see them taking on the rest of the civilized world for a piece of the action (even if they could).
When it starts, the "free world" will have to stand with us, or suffer the humiliation of becoming an islamic state.
Not exactly right.
The clear precursor of 911 was allowing the Ayatollahs to get away with the first blatant violation of diplomatic immunity in a thousand years, on Nov. 4, 1979.
Nothing enboldens the primitive, ignorant mind like success; or excess, with impunity.
The nuclear exchange scenario between Israel and Iran makes a lot of sense to me. I suggest two things: one, the Iranian leadership has got to be persuaded that pursuing nuclear weapons isn't going to lead to the achievement of their goals. Second, that the anti-regime Iranians be persuaded that they have to do something about their present regime, rather than waiting for the U.S. to do it for them.
I dont think we have a particularly clear picture of what Iran's strategic intentions are. Obviously they're on the road to being a nuclear power but to what end? Iranians are always quick to point out that they are not Arabs or Sunnis, they are Persians and Shiites and thus what we usually think of as the "middle east" doesnt apply to them. Unlike Iraq, which is essentially 3 different groups trapped in a failed state, Iranians have a strong sense of national identity. These factors alone mean that Iran must be treated with a different strategy than the rest of the gulf states which are largely Arab. If Iraq has taught us anything its that these distinctions mean a great deal on the ground.
Iran's relations with the world have largely been defined by other powers attacking them and not the other way around. Iran spent most of the last century being swatted around by the British and Russians, before being invaded by Iraq. Essentially the Iranian posture is more defensive than aggressive and the nuclear game could be seen as an extension of that. Iran surely sees the American forces in its neighbors as a threat and considering the tone of American leaders (axis of evil) its not hard to see their point.
The Israeli question is interesting because its hard to tell what is bluster and what is intent. Iran must know it can never hope to defeat Israel with or without nuclear arms so much of it must be seen as posturing. Its also worth remembering that the current leader was elected chiefly because the moderates fractured their support over too many parties. He is essentially a populist street preacher type who is now in way over his head. Most Iranians do not have the seemingly suicidal rancor he displays and our best hope is that they will take power before its too late. We cannot hope to encourage the moderate by taking broad swipes at the nation though, nothing unites a people like an outside threat.
Hot tip to KG9 -- in a "nuclear exchange," BOTH sides are on the receiving end.
Hmmm -- a voice of reason. Dangerous.
Yeah, I thought that went without saying.
Amhadidinejad wants to provoke the apocalypse so the Mahdi will return and usher in the after life of Shi'a paradise. He belongs to the Hijjoteh cult and there is no rational way to solve this. Bomb them without regime change and they will reconstitute their nujes in short order, and you can't count on a uprising by the students because to many are nationalist and an invasion or bombing will drive them to the Mullahs.
This fairy tale would have been better as a TV special.
I tend to be cryptic, but thats what I was talking about.
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