Iran, Syria, Who’s Next?

Whoever believed America’s policy changed when George W. Bush was replaced by Barack Obama was poorly informed. At any rate, it’s now taking greater pains to propagandize, and appears to be counting on recruiting more countries into its coalition of the willing while taking more care to not totally alienate the citizens of those nations. But that’s about all. In substance, not much has really changed. Under the pretense of “humanitarian assistance,” pressure is being applied to governments in various forms, whereby the military option is always on the table and, in fact, has already been applied in Iraq and Afghanistan, showing that it is by no means the trump card of last resort.

The bottom line is domination of the Middle East, where the largest reserves of petroleum and natural gas are found and the control of which is essential to the preservation of Western society. A side purpose is to exclude global competitors such as Russia and China and run them out of the region. This has far less to do with human rights than it has to do with geopolitics. Another strategic side issue of some importance is Iran, where the change from a Shah, who was completely in America’s pocket, to a council of ruling Mullahs remains a thorn in America’s side to this day.

Since then, America has resorted to a policy of international isolation, economic sanctions, covert intelligence actions, exploitation of real tensions, political maneuvers — some with the threat of military action — and open interference in Iran’s domestic affairs, accompanied by occasional olive branches that have the effect of making it impossible to judge whether or not they were genuine or just designed to show Iran in a bad light, and therefore incorrigible.

A sober political assessment can be made of events over the past decade, showing their relative risks and limits: Iraq’s vicious dictator was overthrown but (considering the economic costs and the cost in human lives) this resulted in little more than a ruined country where conditions conducive to civil war abound and whose foreign policy orientation looks hopeless, even to those responsible for the changes. In Afghanistan meanwhile, an actual civil war is in full swing and the population is completely against the foreign invaders, and not just since the Koran-burning incident. What will come out of those countries that underwent the “Arab Spring” remains to be seen. In Libya’s case, at any rate, the outcome was a thinly veiled military intervention by Western powers.

A movie with a similar script is being shot in Syria at the moment, with the exception that the backdrop of peaceful demonstrators opposing a dictator’s brutal army is missing. They already admit that the “Free Syrian Army” and an ominous sounding “Syrian National Council” (who on earth authorized that?) represent a veritable insurgency that is anything but peaceful, and is calling for foreign troops to intervene. Calls for an end to the violence are exclusively directed toward the dictator of the nation that is waging war against its own people. Try to briefly imagine what would happen if the people who are currently shedding blood against Greek bankers and their investors succeeded in driving them all straight to hell and then refused to pay Greece’s foreign debt!

Four distinct political interest layers overlap each other in the Middle East: Who controls global oil and gas reserves to the extent that they can decide to whom they will sell and at what price; the interest of reactionary Arab regimes in preserving their own power (especially evident in Saudi Arabia); the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and the ever-increasing anger of the Arab masses who demand to share in the prosperity and participation paraded before them each day on the internet and in other media. Since the collapse of “real socialism,” the United States has abandoned its Metternich-like stability policy, of which Henry Kissinger was so enamored, and has now settled on a forced roll-back with all options including propaganda, threats, sanctions, isolation and, of course, the ultimate option: War.

And this comes at a time when debt in the Western world has reached a dimension such that repayment is pure fantasy and makes a global depression like that of 1929 almost unavoidable. Shame on you if you see some connection there and think it’s evil.