There has been much talk recently about a new cold war. US-Russian relations have grown very cold. Russia is gaining power and becoming more totalitarian at the same time the US has lost much of its international influence and military credibility. Bush and Putin issue not very veiled rebukes to each other. To my mind this constitutes merely a souring of relations, rather than a new Cold War. The Cold War was cold only in that the US and Russia were not openly fighting each other. But there were threats of open war and constant proxy wars. Each side would arm and fund groups in other countries to fight the other side, or its proxies. The cold war involved a lot of fighting, just no open fighting directly between the US and Russia.
So are we in a new Cold War? Yes, but not with Russia. Heavy fighting has broken out in the Palestinian territories, not between Israelis and Palestinians, but between US funded and armed Fatah, and Iran funded and armed Hamas. In Lebanon there remains the heavy threat of renewed civil war. The government is backed by the US, Hezbollah by Iran and Syria. In Iraq, Iranian armed Shiites fight with US troops (and everyone else).
The current state of our interactions with Iran is clearly unacceptable. So what should we do about it?
Iran has nothing approaching the direct military might of the US. The USSR had roughly equivalent troops, tanks, planes, bombs, ships and so on to us. Iran has none of those things. But it does not need them. The US has spent the last six years acting against our own interests with all our military and diplomatic force. And we've been doing it on Iran's home turf. We have been losing the Cold War with Iran much more thoroughly than the active one with Al Qaeda.
Iran's standing in the world has increased immensely, and the Islamic government is much more firmly in control because of their successes in making the US uncomfortable. They do have serious internal problems, most recently gasoline shortages, which do not go over well in the world's second biggest oil exporter. As always with struggling regimes, their strategy has been to direct the fear and anger of the populous outward. And we have made that very easy for them. Iran is sandwiched between Afghanistan and Iraq. US troops are massed on both sides. Bush and his minions are constantly threatening to take some sort of military action against Iran. McCain got up on stage and said that if he was president he would, "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran."
Our Secretaries of Defense and State have been all over the middle east recently negotiating arms deals. We are eager to sell sizable arsenals to Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Why these three? Because they are the regional powers most strongly opposed to Iran becoming the military powerhouse of the Middle East. Secretary Gates is enough of a pragmatist to know that as long as the battle is between US soldiers and Iranian proxies, we are losing the new cold war. Sell weapons to local states that are very interested in limiting Iran's power, and suddenly we have proxies of our own. With a little bit of maneuvering and a bloody regional war over Iraq, we can have our proxies fighting Iranians directly, at which point we will be winning the new cold war. Sort of.
The parallels to the first cold war, the one with Russia, are rather exact. They made China their proxy to oppose us in Korea and Vietnam. We learned from them and built Al Qadea as a proxy to fight them in Afghanistan. It worked brilliantly, except that Al Qaeda failed to disappear when we didn't need them any more.
Iran's great international prize would be to Iranify Iraq (and to a lesser degree Palestine). For the US, that, in combination with a Talibanized Pakistan, would be the ultimate expression of the failure of our middle east policy. Iraq's civil war is extremely likely to become a larger regional conflict whenever the US pulls out, and our current arms sales are an attempt to determine who will win that war. It will be a bloody mess, not only in terms of people killed, wounded and displaced, but also in terms of figuring out who is fighting whom.
Already in Iraq, it is hard to figure out the networks of shifting alliances, rivalries and infiltrations. Is Sadr allied with Iran, the Iraqi Government, neither or both this week? The various Sunni tribes have oscillated between fighting against the US, fighting against Al Qaeda and fighting various Shiite groups. Turkey's main interest in Iraq is keeping the Kurds from having an independent state from which to support Kurdish rebels in Turkey. Iran, with its own large restive Kurdish population, shares this goal. The US, nominally strongly allied with Turkey, sees the Kurds as our strongest ally within Iraq, and does not want the Turks stomping on them. This is one reason we have not offered any new big arms deals to Turkey. The US has gone from opposing all armed groups except those under our control to gladly supporting and arming any group that seems to be fighting on our side, however fleetingly.
When we pull out, which we will, the big regional players will be jumping into the mosh pit. Iran will more openly back the Shiite theocratic parties, quite possibly sending in their own military, and try to bring all the Shiite clerics into line. Al Qaeda will do their best to build a Talibanic Sunni theocracy, fighting anyone and everyone. Saudi Arabia and Egypt, not wanting Iraq to become either a new Iran or a new Afghanistan, will choose some set of Sunni groups to back, and quite likely deploy some shinny new American weaponry. Somebody will take the opportunity to lob some missiles at Israel. Turkey will invade Kurdistan, and the Kurds will call for the protection the US promised them. We will once again let them down. Syria, in typical Syrian fashion, will claim to be on all sides at once. The various Iraqi militias and Imams will merge and split, realign and reconfigure. The US will be tempted to stay involved more than is good for us.
If we are wise we will look at our history of interventions in Iraq and realize we can only make things worse. We have broken Iraq so badly that almost everyone not paid to think otherwise knows things will get much worse before they get any better. And so while a continued US presence may (note I am only saying it is possible, not likely) make Iraq slide into the chasm more slowly, we can't stop the slide, let alone reverse it. We can only try to determine what the other side of the chasm will look like.
In doing that, in saying to ourselves, "we lost this round, let's make the best of it and let our proxies try to salvage the situation" we have to avoid the same pitfalls we fall into over and over. Al Qaeda exists because we built a ruthless proxy and let it loose. Iran became an anti-US theocracy because we installed a repressive puppet regime that the populous rejected in favor of the clerics. We armed Saddam Hussein in order to make him our proxy in fighting those clerics. We seeded armed Shiite groups in Iraq to help fight Saddam.
Proxies don't stay proxies once our interests and theirs stop being aligned. And weapons don't generally stay with the groups we sell them to. So perhaps the worst thing we can do to ourselves is keep selling weapons to groups that happen to agree with us on one issue at one time. And perhaps the best thing we can do for ourselves, and the Middle East, is stop pouring in the weaponry. The Sunni theocrats will fight the Shiite theocrats no matter what we do. Why stand in the middle?
Maybe, just maybe, rather than trying to win the new cold war, we should be trying to cancel it. When the USSR lost the first cold war, it ceased to exist. If the US pulls out of the new cold war, doesn't fight directly, doesn't arm proxies, what do we lose?
Pride? Yes.
Oil? Possibly, but probably no more than by staying in.
Security? Possibly, but again, probably less than by staying embroiled in Middle Eastern wars.
Vital Security Interests? What do our vital security interests in the Middle East have to offer us that makes them so vital? Protection of our other vital security interests in the middle east. And the ability to control oil. Which $71 a barrel says we have failed at.
The exercise of influence is necessary for the maintenance of influence, and the US cannot completely withdraw from the world. But we also cannot exercise influence simply for the sake of exercise. This leads to exactly the kind of self destructive flailing about we have seen over the past four years.
In the cold war with the USSR, the communists really did have the ability to destroy us, and we couldn't just leave them to their own devices. In the cold war with Iran, they need us to keep fighting, and we don't need them at all. The worst thing we could do to the leadership of Iran is get out of their neighborhood, stop threatening them and let the people of Iran see that it is their own government that is the real threat to them.
In response to a comment I made recently, ellersbrown1 wrote:
I say let them fight it out over Iraq if that is what they want but the US should not be involved. We don't have a draft and restarting a draft would not motivate the US politicians to encourage alternative energy sources. Look, Iraq is not in the US region of the earth. Wars are too costly and we have an aging population with other priorities. If the Turks want to fight with the Kurdish people, then it so be it. If Iran wants perpetual war, then let them bankrupt themselves. Get it. They will weaken themselves by attacking Iraq. The Saudis and Egypt will be forced to change their society, with an unstable Iraq, without the US enabling them. Let the Muslim peoples , handle Muslim business. The US does not really understand the culture of those places in full so getting involved is really a folly. How about having higher mileage cars instead. That's much easier Don Q.
And while I think this a bit cavalier regarding all the suffering and dying that will result from this firestorm we started in the middle east, I think it may be the best policy. Not every war has to have a winner and a loser. We can still call this one a draw.