Trump
Will Spark a War With Iran – Which is Great News for
Isis
A confrontation will probably come in a year or two,
when previous policies conceived under Obama have run
their course. Trump may feel that he has to show how
much tougher he is than his predecessor
By Patrick Cockburn
February 13, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Independent"
-President
Trump made great play when he came into office with his
return of a bust of Winston Churchill to the Oval
Office, presenting the move as a symbol of his
admiration for adamantine patriotic resolve in pursuit
of patriotic ends. Presumably, Trump was thinking of
Churchill in 1940, not Churchill in 1915-16 when he was
the leading advocate of the disastrous Gallipoli
campaign in which the Turks decisively defeated the
British army with great slaughter.
Trump is
reputed to seldom read books or show much interest in
history other than that of his own life and times, but
it would be worth his while reflecting on Gallipoli,
because Churchill was only the first of six British and
American leaders to have suffered political shipwreck in
the Middle East over the last century. The prime reason
for these successive disasters is that the region has
always been more unstable and prone to wars than
anywhere else in the world. Mistakes made on its
battlefields tend to be calamitous and irretrievable.
Avoiding
this fate is not easy: the six British and American
leaders who came a serious cropper in the Middle East
were generally abler, more experienced and
better-advised than Trump. It is therefore worthwhile
asking, at the beginning of his administration, what are
the chances of him becoming the next victim of the
permanent state of crisis in the wider Middle East. He
campaigned as an isolationist who would avoid being
sucked into armed conflicts abroad, but his first weeks
in office and his senior appointments suggest that he
will try to take a central role in the politics of the
region. The new administration projects a macho
self-image devoted to “Making America Great Again” and
this, combined with the demonising of its enemies, will
hinder compromise and tactical retreats. Western
intervention in the region has usually come to grief
because of arrogant exaggeration of its own strength and
an underestimation of the capabilities of their enemies.
These
failings unite with a crippling ignorance of the part of
foreign powers about the complexity and dangers of the
political and military terrain in which they are
operating. This was true of Churchill, who wrongly
assessed likely Turkish military resistance in 1915.
Lloyd George, one of the most astute of British prime
ministers, made the same mistake in 1922 when his
government destroyed itself by threatening to go to war
with Turkey. Anthony Eden lost office after the Suez
Crisis in 1956 when he failed to overthrow Nasser in
Egypt. Tony Blair’s reputation was forever blasted for
leading Britain into war in Iraq in 2003.
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Of the
three US presidents badly or terminally damaged by
crisis in the Middle East, Jimmy Carter was the most
unlucky, as there was nothing much he could do to stop
the Iranian Revolution in 1979 or the seizure of
diplomats in the US embassy in Tehran as hostages.
Ronald Reagan’s presidency saw military intervention in
Lebanon where 241 US Marines were blown up in 1983, and
the Iran-Contra scandal that permanently weakened the
administration. Significant though these disasters and
misadventures seemed at the time, none had the impact of
George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 which led to
the regeneration of al-Qaeda and the spread of chaos
through the region.
In
retrospect, these leaders may look foolhardy as they
plunged into bottomless quagmires or fought unwinnable
wars. Some, like Carter, were victims of circumstances,
but entanglements were not inevitable, as was shown by
President Obama, who did read books, knew his history
and was acutely aware of the pitfalls the US needed to
skirt in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and beyond. Avoiding
disasters which nobody else knew existed will seldom win
a politician much credit, but Obama deserves credit for
escaping being sucked into the civil war in Syria or
into a broader conflict against Iran as the leader of
the Shia axis. He justifiably suspected that US allies
like Saudi Arabia and the Sunni states of the Gulf were
eager to see the US fight their battles for them.
The Trump
administration is seen by so many commentators as so
uniquely awful in its contempt for the truth, legality
and democracy, that they underestimate how much it has
in common with that of George W Bush. After 9/11, the
Bush administration famously gave the Saudis a free pass
despite the many links between the hijackers and Saudi
Arabia. Instead the White House channelled the popular
anger and desire to hit back provoked by 9/11 into its
military campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Thirteen
years later it is well established through leaked US
documents and briefings that Saudi Arabia and the Sunni
states of the Gulf played a central role in financing
and supplying fundamentalist Islamic groups in Syria
after 2011. Trump continually promised during the
presidential election that he would focus exclusively in
the Middle East on destroying Isis, but one of the first
moves of his administration has been to shift the US
closer to Saudi Arabia by backing its war in Yemen. In
almost his first statement of policy, Secretary of
Defence James Mattis said that Iran is "the single
biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world".
One of
the dangers of Trump’s demagogic rants and open
mendacity is that they tend to give the impression that
less theatrical members of his team, especially former
generals like Mattis or National Security Adviser
Michael Flynn, are monuments of good sense and
moderation. Yet both men are set on threat inflation
when it comes to Iran, though without providing any
evidence for its terrorist actions, just as their
predecessors inflated the threat supposedly posed by
Saddam Hussein’s non-existent WMD and fictional support
for al-Qaeda.
This is
all good news for Isis, though it has so many enemies
committed to its defeat that a switch in US policy may
be too late to do it a lot of good. But its main enemies
on the ground are the Iraqi and Syrian armies, whose
governments are backed by Iran, and the Syrian Kurds who
fear that the US may soon give them less support in
order to appease Turkey.
Given the
high decibel level of the Trump administrations threats
and warnings, it is impossible to distinguish bellicose
rhetoric from real operational planning. A confrontation
with Iran will probably not come soon; but in a year or
two, when previous policies conceived under Obama have
run their course, Trump may well feel that he has to
show how much tougher and more effective he is than his
predecessor, whom he has denounced as weak and
incompetent.
This
administration is so heavily loaded with crackpots,
fanatics and amateurs, that it would be optimistic to
imagine that they will pass safely through the political
swamplands of the Middle East without detonating a
crisis with which they cannot cope. The diplomatic
agreements that Trump denounces as “terrible deals” for
the US represent real balances of power and interests
and he is not going to do any better. In four years’
time, the select club of American and British leaders
who failed in the Middle East, with disastrous
consequences for everybody, may have a voluble seventh
member.
