Iran and Israel will be kings of the Middle East jungle--The Guardian

[Gloria]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,12858,1685460,00.html#article_continue

Iran and Israel will be kings of the Middle East jungle

The US occupation of Iraq has turned its neighbour into a new regional power. But the contagion is likely to spread far wider

David Hirst
Friday January 13, 2006
The Guardian

SNIP

If all this portends an unfathomable mess, one thing at least is already clear: Iran will be the main beneficiary of US failure and the long-overdue accession of the Shia majority, its coreligionists, to political ascendancy in Iraq. The increase in regional clout it derives from this will be used at America's expense. The mullahs have long been readying themselves for a great reckoning. With their new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, readiness seems to be mutating into active desire. He and those around him believe that only the US stands in the way of Iranian regional dominance and that the US, seen as defeated in Iraq, is now a "sunset power".

For Iran, the sectarian/ethnic and Islamist factors are now potent assets. Its Kurdish vulnerabilities are more than offset by improved Shia influence throughout the region. This is a reality which, within the Sunni-dominated Arab establishment, Jordan has been most publicly alarmed about. King Abdullah warns of a "Shia crescent" stretching from Iraq, via Syria (so long as its pro-Iranian Alawite regime survives), to south Lebanon. Jordanian politicians even talk of building a "Sunni wall" through Iraq to keep the peril at bay.

In addition, non-Arab Iran is now the main state patron of radical Islamism in the Arab world, and Palestine is its most profitable arena. Long an advocate of Islamicising the Palestinian struggle, nothing could better serve its ambition than the effect that US failure in Iraq will have on Hamas, which is now close to supplanting the secular-nationalist Fatah as the dominant political force in the occupied territories.

But the thing that will really make it and Israel the most dangerous animals in the post-Iraqi Middle East jungle is Iran's apparent quest for nuclear weapons. On the one hand, this commands grassroots popularity among the Arabs. They see it as a self-assertion that no Arab leader would dare offer against colonial-style western bullying and the hypocrisy of the west's acceptance of Israel's nuclear monopoly.

On the other hand, no one invested greater expectations in the Iraqi adventure than Israel. US success, it thought, would transform its strategic position. But with US failure, Israel will grow more repressive against the Palestinians, and more ready for military action against Iran. Should the US itself deal with Iran in the same violent and partisan fashion as it did Iraq, the adverse consequences of that new adventure will outstrip those of the earlier one. For there is no reason to doubt that Iran's response, from both itself and its strengthened Shia and Islamist allies in the region, will be the devastating one it constantly promises.

· David Hirst reported from the Middle East for the Guardian from 1963 to 2001
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[txindy]

1. "the US.......is now a sunset power"

I'd say that's an accurate statement. We have Junior and his Cabal to thank for that, too.

[PDJane]

2. He's correct.......

And, in fact, it was bound to happen.

Saddam was, in spite of everything, a secular leader........and had the sanctions not weakened his country, he would have managed to survive quite nicely. Was he any worse than some of the current US crop of allies? Uh........no. He did, however, have the power to unify Iraq, which was an artificial construct.

Removing him from power just left a vacuum and embroiled the US in a war that will be, I believe, regarded as a war crime.