Can Mexico Be Neutral?

The fight between the United States and Iran for control over Iraq won’t be an outright war but rather low-intensity warfare. The result: terrorism in the West, including in the U.S.

Every war starts because somebody wants something that the other person doesn’t want to give. In Iraq there are two reasons: oil in the north of the country, and the nationwide increase of the Shiite Muslim sect, who want to surrender themselves to the Shiites of neighboring Iran.

The Middle East is strategic for the United States. They fought the British first and then the Soviets for what remained of the Persian Empire, now known as Iran. In 1925, Washington won, and commissioned Reza Pahlavi, whose dynasty was deposed in 1941 for incompetence.

Washington refused to lose, and in 1953 they installed another Pahlavi as shah of Iran, ordering him to be bloodthirsty and brutal with his opposition. Washington knew that the shah was a son of a bitch, but as they proudly announced, “[H]e’s our son of a bitch,” and also our stooge.

To modernize Iran, the shah took power away from the clergy (ayatollahs), who, when they saw that Jimmy Carter and his dreams of world peace did not stand in their way, overthrew him.

In 1980 Iran wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, whom they hated for being Sunni. To stop the U.S. slaughter, they sealed up the hornet’s nest. But George W. Bush stepped in it, uncovered the nest, killed Saddam and paved the way for the ayatollahs to give back control to the Shiites.

Now nobody knows what to do. There are three populations in the same country that hate each other. The Sunnis in the northwest alongside Syria, the Shiites in the southeast alongside Iran. Ethnically speaking they are both Arabs, who hate each other because they come from two different branches of Islam.

In the north are the Kurds, who have oil. They are not Arabs, but Sunni Muslims who hate the Shiites of Iran, who in turn are not Arabs, but Persians. There are some that say the solution is to redraw the map, but this would disrupt the world. And in Turkey, Iran and Syria they’re afraid that their Kurdish minority population will rebel against them, supported by their oil-rich Kurdish neighbors.

Iraqi Shiites would happily unite with the Shiites governing Iran, thereby controlling Iraqi oil, but the world would be reliant on their fanaticism.

Iraq was formed on the whim of Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence, or Lawrence of Arabia. Now, the United States, with or without Donald Trump, will never yield it to Iran.

This is the lifeblood of the Islamic State, which is trying to take control of Sunni Muslims in Iraq and Syria. If Iraq were split into three, there would be mass, violent migration, worse than that resulting from the birth of Pakistan.

So the American battle with Iran for control over Iraq will not be an outright war but rather low-intensity warfare. The result: terrorism in the West, including in the U.S., and the U.S. within Iran looking for another son of a bitch, one who is willing to dethrone the ayatollahs.

Although Mexico is not connected to this, the long, open border is a huge terrorist risk for the United States. So the time will soon come when Washington will ask Mexico to prove the beautiful friendship it has recently promised.