Wayne Brown
WELL! ALL of a sudden, it seems, most of the balls on the snooker table, that's the Middle East, are in motion; and this columnist's expressed fear, a fortnight ago, that Madeleine Albright's metaphor for the world's hot spots might yet light up 'like a pinball machine' appears peremptorily to have been realised.
It is devilishly difficult to follow their ricochets amid the incendiary fog of war. But I suppose we shall have to try.
Most wars are engendered in the womb of miscalculation.
In 1914, the assassination of the Austrian archduke by a Serbian 'terrorist' permitted the Austro-Hungarian Empire to move against Serbian nationalists. But, the latter were backed by Russia, which led Germany to threaten Russia, which led the Germany-fearing French to mobilise, which led Germany to threaten France, which led England to mobilise until all at once these escalating crises erupted into the First World War in which 20 million people died.
In 1941, when Hitler, made complacent by his easy victories against the western democracies, launched
Operation Barbarossa in the east, he grossly underestimated the enormous resources-in-depth of the Soviet Union and its ability to resist and eventually overcome a German invasion conducted essentially as a blitzkrieg.
In 1951, in Korea, after U.S. and South Korean forces had taken Pyongyang, (U.S. President Harry S) Truman didn't realise it was time to stop. He drove on, to the Korean-Chinese border and triggered Mao Zedong's entry into the war.
Lyndon Johnson thought 'a show of force' would keep North Vietnam from supporting the Vietcong. Argentina's macho generals assumed Britain's first woman Prime Minister wouldn't have the cojones to respond to their invasion of the Falklands. Saddam (he was probably tricked) interpreted the American ambassador as having told him the U.S. would stand aside if he invaded Kuwait. George W Bush was persuaded by Cheney and his neo-cons that Iraq's oil could be grabbed on the cheap.
And so on. History is replete with examples of leaders miscalculating, and either starting or ruinously escalating wars.
WHO'S TO BLAME?
With regard, though, to last week's sudden conflagration involving Israel and Lebanon, the question is: Who miscalculated?
It is probably too soon to answer that with any certitude: the pinball machine has only just started lighting up. But 10 days into hostilities a word which on the face of it may seem a euphemism for Israel bombing its neighbour into the Stone Age a tentative answer might be: Both sides. Meaning, of course, not Israel and Hezbollah, but the Bush administration and Iran. For Israel is clearly acting in close coordination with the White House, which has repeatedly rebuffed U.N., European and Arab calls for a ceasefire; and the initial kidnappings of Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah which Israel opportunistically seized upon as a casas belli were, equally clearly, instigated by Teheran: part of its warning to the Bush administration to desist from trying to punish it for its nuclear programme.
(The Iranian warning had two further dimensions. One was the inevitable spike in oil prices, which jumped to over $78 a barrel; and the other, much more important, was its escalation of the Iraq conflagration, in an arena in which Iran holds all the cards. In the wake of the Hezbollah kidnappings and Israel's response, sectarian violence in Iraq has increased dramatically; and in Baghdad alone where the U.S. client regime of Shiite Prime Minister al-Maliki had just recently launched a much-publicised 'crackdown' involving 50,000 troops attacks on US and Iraqi forces have jumped by 40 per cent, from 24 to 34 a day. The repercussions for both Iraq and the Pentagon are sufficiently serious that it would be a mistake for anyone following events in the Israel-Lebanon theatre to take his eyes off Iraq.)
All this is the straightforward part. And it is easy, too, to see that Teheran miscalculated in not anticipating the massive Israeli response to its provocations. But here is where the ricochets start multiplying.
War, to paraphrase von Clausewitz, is but the intense and temporary face of politics. By its garish light, the linked realities of everyday politics and geopolitics may seem to recede. But the latter always ultimately have control, and once the rubble has ceased bouncing they re-emerge, greatly weakened or strengthened by the war that briefly upstaged them. The last time Israel bombed Beirut they created Hezbollah, and it was their persecution of Arafat that gave wings to Hamas: two Islamic organisations that have harried Israel sufficiently to launch Sharon no doubt, emitting the same epochal sigh with which the Emperor Hadrian committed Rome to building its defensive wall on his policy of unilateral withdrawal.
But then, look at this tangle of thorns.
Back in the 1970s, the Shah of Iran, a U.S. puppet, engineered such a repressive and dissolute society that it exploded in an astonishing revolution, one that turned a western-style country into a militant theocracy overnight and established a Shia fundamentalist regime in the heart of the world's oilfields.
Next, just as Jimmy Carter had armed the Afghan freedom fighters against the Soviets, thus creating the conditions for the emergence of the Taliban, so Ronald Reagan sought to punish the Iranian Ayatollahs by arming and inciting Saddam against them thus creating a rogue Sunni warlord whose military power would in due course have to be broken.
When, under cover of driving Saddam from Kuwait, George Bush Sr. parked his American legions in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, he created al Qaeda; which led, 10 years later, to 9/11; which led at once to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan; which, in part by its apparent and easy success, seduced George Bush Jr. into crashing greedily into Iraq, where his armies have been bogged down and bled for three years by both al Qaeda and Saddam's Baathists, who till then had been natural enemies, and where Mr Bush has been hoist by his own figleaf 'democracy' rhetoric into installing a Shiite government, in this way so enhancing the power of the same Iranian fundamentalists who'd threatened U.S. interests in the region in the first place that Mr Bush is now preparing to go to war to force regime change in Iran - except that al-Maliki's denunciation last week of Israel for its destruction of Shiite Beirut came like a thunderclap of defiance of his puppet-master's policy, and may yet have untellable consequences for the long-term garrisoning of Mr Bush's imperial legions in Iraq.
Not an easy sentence.
Well! Not an easy snooker table to track.
In the meantime, the U.S.-Israeli gamble, which is that Israel's attack upon Hezbollah will strengthen rather than destroy Lebanon's fragile young democracy and its government, is one that defies the odds. For, as every child of colonialism instinctively understands, the rage of the Arab street is real and runs deep.
It was so before last week, and it will be much more so in the days and weeks to come - especially when the Israeli bombing intensifies, as one expects it will, once the Americans and Europeans currently in Lebanon have been safely evacuated.
And the most inimical consequence of that rage, to U.S.-Israeli interests, may yet be to unite at 'street' level Shiite and Sunni, Persian and Arab, under the umbrella of Islam, and against both Israel and the despotic Sunni regimes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which last week rather foolishly attacked Hezbollah while Hezbollah was waging war on Israel.
