The USA's Slavish Saudi Allegiance Against Iran
January 5, 2020 . 2 Comments
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The assassination of a top Iranian general reflects a U.S. foreign policy
tied to Saudi interests, says Craig Murray.
President Donald Trump is welcomed with bouquets of flowers, May 20, 2017,
on arrival at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
(White House/Andrea Hanks)
By Craig Murray
CraigMurray.org.uk
For the United States to abandon proxy warfare and directly kill one of
Iran's most senior political figures has changed international politics in a
fundamental way. It is a massive error. Its ramifications are profound and
complex.
There is also a lesson to be learned in the excitement and satisfaction this
caused in the palaces of Washington, Tel Aviv, Riyadh and Tehran. All of the
political elites will see prospects for gain from the new fluidity. While
for ordinary people in all those countries there is only the certainty of
more conflict, death and economic loss, for the political elite, the arms
manufacturers, the military and security services and allied interests, the
hedge funds, speculators and oil companies, there are the sweet smells of
cash and power.
Tehran will be pleased because the USA has just definitively lost Iraq. Iraq
has a Shia majority and so naturally tends to ally with Iran. The only thing
preventing that was the Arab nationalism of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath
Socialist Party. U.S. President George W. Bush and U.K. Prime Minister Tony
Blair were certainly fully informed that by destroying the Ba'ath system
they were creating an Iranian/Iraqi nexus, but they decided that was
containable. The "containment" consisted of a deliberate and profound push
across the Middle East to oppose Shia influence in proxy wars everywhere.
This is the root cause of the disastrous war in Yemen, where the Zaidi-Shia
would have been victorious long ago but for the sustained brutal aerial
warfare on civilians carried out by the Western powers through Saudi Arabia.
This anti-Shia Western policy included the unwavering support for the Sunni
Bahraini autocracy in the brutal suppression of its overwhelmingly Shia
population. And, of course, it included the sustained and disastrous attempt
to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria and replace it with pro-Saudi Sunni
jihadists.
'The Redirection'
This switch in U.S. foreign policy was known in the White House of 2007 as
"the redirection." It meant that Sunni jihadists like Al-Qaida and later
al-Nusra were able to switch back to being valued allies of the United
States. It redoubled the slavish tying of U.S. foreign policy to Saudi
interests. The axis was completed once Mohammad Bin Salman took control of
Saudi Arabia. His predecessors had been coy about their de facto alliance
with Israel. MBS felt no shyness about openly promoting Israeli interests,
under the cloak of mutual alliance against Iran, calculating quite correctly
that Arab street hatred of the Shia outweighed any solidarity with the
Palestinians. Common enemies were easy for the USA/Saudi/Israeli alliance to
identify; Iran, the Houthi, Syria's PresidentBashar al-Assadand of course
the Shia Hezbollah, the only military force to have given the Israelis a
bloody nose. The Palestinians themselves are predominantly Sunni and their
own Hamas was left friendless and isolated.
U.S. Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo meets with Iraqi Prime Minister
Adil Abdul-Mahdi, Baghdad, May 7, 2019. (State Department/ Ron Przysucha)
The principal difficulty of this policy for the U.S. of course is Iraq.
Having imposed a rough democracy on Iraq, the governments were always likely
to be Shia dominated and highly susceptible to Iranian influence. The U.S.
had a continuing handle through dwindling occupying forces and through
control of the process which produced the government. They also provided
financial resources to partially restore the physical infrastructure the
U.S. and its allies had themselves destroyed, and of course to fund a near
infinite pool of corruption.
That U.S. influence was balanced by strong Iranian-aligned militia forces
who were an alternative source of strength to the government of Baghdad, and
of course by the fact that the center of Sunni tribal strength, the city of
Falluja, had itself been obliterated by the United States, three times, in
an act of genocide of the Iraqi Sunni population.
Through all this the Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi had until now
tiptoed with great care. Pro-Iranian, yet a long-term American client, his
government maintained a form of impartiality based on an open hand to accept
massive bribes from anybody. That is now over. He is pro-Iranian now.
Precarious Balance
Such precarious balance as there ever was in Iraq was upset these last two
months when the U.S. and Israelis transported more of their ISIL Sunni
jihadists into Iraq, to escape the pincer of the Turkish, Russian and Syrian
government forces. The Iranians were naturally not going to stand for this
and Iranian militias were successfully destroying the ISIL remnants, which
is why General Qassem Suleimani was in Iraq, why a U.S. mercenary assisting
ISIL was killed in an Iranian militia rocket attack, and why Syrian military
representatives were being welcomed at Baghdad airport.
Second day of protests at U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Jan. 1, 2020. (Desmond
Cassell, Wikimedia Commons)
It is five years since I was last in the Green Zone in Baghdad, but it is
extraordinarily heavily fortified with military barriers and checks every
hundred yards, and there is no way the crowd could have been allowed to
attack the U.S. embassy without active Iraqi government collusion. That
profound political movement will have been set in stone by the U.S.
assassination of Iran's General Qassem Suleimani. Tehran will now have a
grip on Iraq that could prove to be unshakable.
Nevertheless, Tel Aviv and Riyadh also celebrated the idea that their dream
of the U.S. destroying their regional rival Iran, as Iraq and Libya were
destroyed, is coming closer. The U.S. could do this. The impact of
technology on modern warfare should not be underestimated. There is a great
deal of wishful thinking that fantasizes about U.S. military defeat, but it
is simply unrealistic if the U.S. actually opted for full scale invasion.
Technology is a far greater factor in warfare than it was in the 1960s. The
U.S could destroy Iran, but the cost and the ramifications would be
enormous, and not only the entire Middle East but much of South Asia would
be destabilized, including of course Pakistan. My reading of President
Donald Trump remains that he is not a crazed Clinton type war hawk and it
will not happen. We all have to pray it does not.
The assassination also caused rejoicing in Washington. There is nothing like
an apparently successful military attack in a U.S. re-election campaign. The
Benghazi embassy disaster left a deep scar upon the psyche of Trump's
support base in particular, and the message that Trump knows how to show the
foreigners not to attack America is going down extremely well where it
counts, whatever wise people on CNN may say.
So, what happens now? Consolidating power in Iraq and finishing the
destruction of ISIL in Iraq will be the wise advance that Iranian statesman
can practically gain from these events. But that is, of course, not enough
to redeem national honor. Something quick and spectacular is required for
that. It is hard not to believe there must be a very real chance of action
being taken against shipping in the Straits of Hormuz, which Iran can do
with little prior preparation. Missile attacks on Saudi Arabia or Israel are
also well within Iran's capability, but it seems more probable that Iran
will wish to strike a U.S. target rather than a proxy. An ambassador may be
assassinated. Further missile strikes against U.S. outposts in Iraq are also
possible. All of these scenarios could very quickly lead to disastrous
escalation.
In the short term, Trump in this situation needs either to pull out troops
from Iraq or massively to reinforce them. The U.K. does not have the latter
option, having neither men nor money, and should remove its 1400 troops now.
Whether the "triumph" of killing Suleimani gives Trump enough political
cover for an early pullout - the wise move - I am unsure. 2020 is going to
be a very dangerous year indeed.
Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was
British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector
of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.
