Toward the end of the most violent month in Iraq since last August (nearly one thousand dead Iraqis), Michael Ledeen threw down the jam with these shrewd observations:
If the Iraqi Government wins this, there will be consequences all around. First, it will curl the toes of the mullahs, because of all the possible outcomes in Iraq, the worst for them is a duly elected government that can fight effectively. Second, as Nibras says, it will greatly solidify Maliki’s position in Baghdad. Third, it will send a double message throughout the region: it isn’t easy to defeat America, and countries that work with America can defeat even the fiercest enemy.
--Michael Ledeen, March 27, 2008
It must be frustrating to be a neocon.
By all accounts, Iran played a decisive role in hammering out the peace deal among the Shi'ite factions in Iraq. A bloody week of human killing on the Tigris River ended on Sunday. Details are sketchy, however, since they must come from non-Iranian sources. Tehran keeps silent about its role...
...But the politics of the deal are all too apparent. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who was camping in Basra and personally supervising the operations against the Mahdi Army, was not in the loop about the goings-on. As for US President George W Bush, he had just spoken praising Maliki for waging a "historic and decisive" battle against the Mahdi Army, which he said was "a defining moment" in the history of a "free Iraq".
George Bush: Skywalking it to the hoop! Again! Oh Noes! He gets batted away in the paint! Again! Dick Cheney must be positively volcanic about being micromanaged by the Iranians. It’s a good thing they’re not rubbing his nose in it, or he might snap like Bobby Knight and brace somebody. If he can’t control the levels of violence and anarchy in Southern Iraq, how the hell is he going to steer any political solution that allows him to write the oil contracts in the Basra? And for General Odom to testify in Congress that the military surge was a huge political setback was simply a slap in the face. Moreover, what does the facile Iranian control over Southern Iraq mean if the US were to draw down troops under hostile Iranian intent, say, after they were provoked into war?
Here's roughly how it might play out. In response to American air and missile strikes on military targets inside Iran, Iran moves to cut the supply lines coming up from the south through the Persian Gulf (can anyone in the Pentagon guess why it's called that?) and Kuwait on which most U.S. Army units in Iraq depend (the Marines get most of their stuff through Jordan). It does so by hitting shipping in the Gulf, mining key choke points, and destroying the port facilities we depend on, mostly through sabotage. It also hits oil production and export facilities in the Gulf region, as a decoy: we focus most of our response on protecting the oil, not guarding our Army's supply lines.
Simultaneously, Iran activates the Shi'ite militias to cut the roads that lead from Kuwait to Baghdad. Both the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigades – the latter now supposedly our allies – enter the war against us with their full strength. Ayatollah Sistani, an Iranian, calls on all Iraqi Shi'ites to fight the Americans wherever they find them. Instead of fighting the 20 percent of Iraq's population that is Sunni, we find ourselves battling the 60 percent that is Shi'ite. Worse, the Shi'ites' logistics lie directly across those logistics lines coming up from Kuwait.
U.S. Army forces in Iraq begin to run out of supplies, especially POL (petroleum, oil, lubricants), of which they consume a vast amount. Once they are largely immobilized by lack of fuel, and the region gets some bad weather that keeps our aircraft grounded or at least blind, Iran sends two to four regular army armor and mech divisions across the border. Their objective is to pocket American forces in and around Baghdad.
The U.S. military in Iraq is all spread out in penny packets fighting insurgents. We have no field army there anymore. We cannot reconcentrate because we're out of gas and Shi'ite guerrillas control the roads. What units don't get overrun by Iranian armor or Shi'ite militia end up in the Baghdad Kessel. Gen. Petraeus calls President Bush and repeats the famous words of Ducrot at Sedan: Nous sommes dans un pot de chambre, et nous y serons emmerdés. Bush thinks he's overheard Petraeus ordering dinner – as, for Bush, he has.
U.S. Marines in Iraq, who are mostly in Anbar province, are the only force we have left. Their lines of supply and retreat through Jordan are intact. The local Sunnis want to join them in fighting the hated Persians. What do they do at that point? Good question.
Does anyone know why they call it the Persian Gulf? That’s funny. And it’s true: The US army guzzles tons of gas and oil for its everyday operations. What do you expect when your armored vehicles only get 3 mpg and gas costs $45.00 per gallon, because you have to import most of it from other countries?
But America’s presence in Iraq isn’t making use of the local riches. Indeed, little, if any, Iraqi oil is being used by the American military. Instead, the bulk of the fuel needed by the U.S. military is being trucked in from the sprawling Mina Abdulla refinery complex, which lies a few dozen kilometers south of Kuwait City. In 2006 alone, the Defense Energy Support Center purchased $909.3 million in motor fuel from the state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corporation. In addition to the Kuwaiti fuel, the U.S. military is trucking in fuel from Turkey. But some of that Turkish fuel actually originates in refineries as far away as Greece.
In 2007 alone, the U.S. military in Iraq burned more than 1.1 billion gallons of fuel. (American Armed Forces generally use a blend of jet fuel known as JP-8 to propel both aircraft and automobiles.) About 5,500 tanker trucks are involved in the Iraqi fuel-hauling effort. That fleet of trucks is enormously costly. In November 2006, a study produced by the U.S. Military Academy estimated that delivering one gallon of fuel to U.S. soldiers in Iraq cost American taxpayers $42—and that didn’t include the cost of the fuel itself. At that rate, each U.S. soldier in Iraq is costing $840 per day in fuel delivery costs, and the U.S. is spending $923 million per week on fuel-related logistics in order to keep 157,000 G.I.s in Iraq. Given that the Iraq War is now costing about $2.5 billion per week, petroleum costs alone currently account for about one-third of all U.S. military expenditure in Iraq.
As ironic as it sounds, this aggressive military solution to assure America’s energy security is actually blowing up in our faces and causing energy insecurity! And whereas we waged aggressive war selfishly, Iran is acting in the interests of regional stability. I’d be surprised if Sophocles is not laughing his ass off, because this is playing out with the fatalism of a Greek tragedy. The US military has entrapped itself in a situation beyond its control, while oil producing nations are forging long-term deals with other countries.
One of the unintended consequences of the Iraq War has been the strengthening of Iran’s influence in the region. In 2007 alone, the Iranians cut deals—worth perhaps $50 billion over the next few decades—with companies from Britain, Spain, Brazil, China, Austria, Turkey, and Malaysia. In addition to those projects, the Iranian government is still negotiating the pricing formulas for the long discussed, much-delayed Peace Pipeline, the $7 billion, 1600-mile conduit to carry Iranian gas to Pakistan and India. In 2005, Susil Chandra Tripathi, the secretary of India’s ministry of petroleum and natural gas, promised that the deal would eventually go through. He told me that the U.S. may "want to isolate Iran, but that doesn’t mean Iran will quit producing crude oil and gas, or that we will stop buying it."
Obviously, I don’t have nearly the prophetic skills of, say, a Michael Ledeen, but I predict George Bush will kill his father and fuck his mom in the final act. As for Dick Cheney, I hope that there really is bipartisan consensus developing on his psychotic break from reality, because:
...nothing infuriates Cheney more than when US oil interests are hit [by an Iranian drive-by peace initiative!]. Thus, the most critical few weeks in the decades-long US-Iran standoff may have just begun. Last week, five former US secretaries of state who served in Democratic and Republican administrations - Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Warren Christopher, Madeline Albright and Colin Powell - sat at a round-table discussion in Athens and reached a consensus to urge the next US administration to open a line of dialogue with Iran.
Just for fun, let’s interpolate some public levity from the beginning of this train wreck in Florida in 2000:
Warren Christopher and James Baker III call a joint press conference asking for both sides to "chill." But their appearance takes a sudden rancorous turn when Baker jests with reporters afterward, "With all due respect, it was Ronald Reagan's election that got our hostages out of Teheran, not some elegantly tailored twerp L.A. lawyer."
--Christopher shrugs off Baker's remark as "just harmless banter from an over-rated Texas fixer." He adds that he "understand[s] why [Baker] is so eager to put another Bush in the White House since he couldn't keep the last one in."
Same problems, same solutions, same old bipartisan zombies. After trying everything else, and failing catastrophically, they consider the final option of doing the right thing. I am glad that the Iranians, at least, are playing responsibly.