Saturday, December 02, 2006
"Realism" and the containment of Iran
Paul Mirengoff has a rather good short post this morning about the prospects for the containment of Iran via regional proxies.
Diana West (no "realist" to my knowledge) notes that an adviser to the Saudi government, Nawaf Obaid, has said that in the event of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, the Saudi government might try to check the spread of Iranian influence by supporting Iraq's Sunni fighters and by inducing a drop in oil prices so as to limit Tehrans's ability to subsidize proxy militias. Diana argues that "a Saudi-Iranian rift over Iraq sounds like a win-win situation for the United States," especially if accompanied by a drop in oil prices. And she contends that such a scenario provides an alternative to "victory" (probably unattainable) or "cataclysm" in Iraq.
I'd be quite surprised if, in the absence of a U.S. presence in Iraq, the Saudis would be able to counter-balance Iran there. It strikes me as more likely that al Qaeda, if anyone, would serve that function (not that the Saudis and al Qaeda necessarily represent an "either-or"). I'd also be surprised if, without substantial assistance from the U.S., the Saudis or anyone else would be able to check Iranian power in the region as a whole.
I do agree, though, that Sunni-Shia strife in Iraq is not a threat to our security (as long as we're not in the crossfire) and that certain of Iran's neighbors are likely to be far better long-term anti-Iran coalition partners than the Europeans. Finally, I note that to the extent James Baker wants to enter into a grand bargian with Iran, he is not only unrealistic, he's not even a "realist" in the academic, balance-of-power sense.
West's column, which bears the silly headline "Saudi-Iranian rift?" (as if there has ever not been one), had this to say about the prospect that the Saudis would work against Iran in the event of an American withdrawal:
Here's an "or else" scenario from Nawaf Obaid, an adviser to the Saudi government, that actually sounds promising -- not a term that usually springs to my mind to describe Saudi scenarios. Contemplating what he would call an unwelcome American withdrawal from Iraq, Mr. Obaid writes that the Saudi government just might fill the breach out of "religious responsibility" to Iraq's Sunni minority. Saudi Arabia, "the de facto leader of the world's Sunni community," Mr. Obaid writes, just might decide to support Iraq's Sunni fighters, just as Iran has been supporting Iraq's Shi'ite fighters, to avert a possible "full-blown ethnic cleansing."
Imagine: Sunni Saudi Arabia vs. Shi'ite Iran -- and nary an American soldier ordered to pull his PC punches in the crossfire. But there's more. Mr. Obaid continues: King Abdullah might also "decide to strangle Iranian funding of the [Shi'ite] militias through oil policy. If Saudi Arabia boosted production and cut the price of oil in half, the kingdom could still finance its current spending. But it would be devastating to Iran, which is facing economic difficulties ...The result would be to limit Tehran's ability to continue funneling hundreds of millions each year to Shi'ite militias is Iraq and elsewhere."
I like. If Saudi Arabia "strangled" Iran's economy, that would also strangle Iran's capacity to fund its nuclear blackmail program, not to mention Hezbollah and other murderous proxies. And what was that the Saudi adviser said about cutting the price of crude oil in half?
A Saudi-Iranian, Sunni-Shi'ite rift over Iraq sounds like a win-win situation for the United States, maybe even better than the Sino-Soviet rivalry of the Cold War. This time around, instead of nuclear weapons to build in the interim, we would have something even more liberating to work on -- energy independence.
At the risk of getting on Diana West's bad side, this is silliness at many levels. Let us count the ways:
First, the last thing we want is the Saudis funding more Sunni Islamic proxy warriors. We thought that was a great idea in Afghanistan in the 1980s -- and it may have been worth it even in retrospect, if you believe Afghanistan brought down the Soviet Union a decade or two earlier than it would have fallen otherwise -- but the blowback is the war we have now. The only thing worse than a wealthy, corrupt, monarchial Saudi Arabia spending all its excess money on yachts and mosques in Pakistan is the same country arming and training mujahideen. What will they do when Iran is sufficiently contained? Find somebody else to blow up, that's what. The problem of unemployed soldiers is a famous one in history, and Americans (particularly, I'm sorry to say, on the right) seem oblivious to it. Americans are blind to this problem because we are just about the only people on earth who both willingly go to war and delight in returning home to an ordinary life when the war is over. For most soldiers in most places through most of history, there is no better ordinary life to return to.
Second, this is another version of "offshore balancing" in the Persian Gulf, the failed approach that led us to support Saddam Hussein against Iran in a barbaric war, triggered the "tanker war", brought us into Saudi Arabia when Saddam counterbalanced his way into Kuwait in 1990, and led to the twelve year "warm war" against Iraq between 1991 and 2003, during which we enriched the worst people in the region with sanctions, flew 10,000 sorties a year against Iraq, bombed it far more often than Democrats are willing to admit, and still could not bring Saddam Hussein to heel. In all of these ways, offshore balancing -- the failed strategy of favoring stability over freedom in the region -- led to September 11. Whatever the other failures of the Bush administration's foreign policy, this insight remains true. We must not allow our stress over Iraq to push us back into offshore balancing, which is where I fear James Baker is going to lead our president. If George Bush follows the advice of Baker and other Saudiphiles, he will have abandoned the one great foreign policy insight of his administration and destroyed any hope that history will regard him differently than the current opinion of the New York Times.
Third, the Saudis have had plenty of chances to contain Iran. The ugly truth is that they will not get their hands truly dirty for several reasons, the most significant of which is that they know that even if the United States retreats from Iraq it will come riding to Saudi Arabia's rescue if Iran gets too aggressive. It was this confidence that allowed the Saudis to obstruct our investigation into Iran's previous attack on the United States, the bombing of the Khobar Towers. Nothing will shake that confidence short of an aggressive American strategy to slash our economy's reliance on imported oil, the one thing that can weaken all the disgusting and dangerous regimes that need to be "balanced" only because of their natural resources.
The Persian Gulf and environs will be of strategic significance so long as the world's economy depends on petroleum, after which it will slide back into the primitive incompetence that characterized it from the rise of the Ottoman Empire until the oil age, at least if it continues its tradition of monarchial, theocratic and fascist oppression. If you believe that the oil age will continue for several generations, you know that neither we nor the other major powers of the world will be able to ignore the region. The choices are "offshore balancing" or some other strategy, and I think that history teaches us that some other strategy is now necessary. There was a chance that Iraq might have been a model for regional reform, but we unaccountably did not match our military planning to the transformational objective. We obviously need a new plan. Hoping that the Sunni kings fund terrorists to attack the Shiite clerics is not only not a plan, it is an obviously terrible idea.
The question, of course, is what would a better strategy look like?
6 Comments:
By 
, at
Sat Dec 02, 11:36:00 AM:
Did you get your usual official clearance from Israel to post this?
By 
Dawnfire82, at
Sat Dec 02, 01:15:00 PM:
You're an anonymous idiot.
Now, for the post. In short, I largely disagree.
"First, the last thing we want is the Saudis funding more Sunni Islamic proxy warriors."
I don't think that's the last thing we want. It may not be net positive, but it is certainly not the worst thing that I can think of. Policy choices are often between bad and worse.
It's easy to draw a parallel between Afghanistan and Iraq here, but there are some important differences. First, Saudi-backed fighters in Iraq would likely be majority *Iraqi,* and at least majority to the region. The issue with the Afghani fighters was that they were Arabs who traveled from across the world to Afghanistan for jihad. After they won, they went home, thereby disseminating their abilities throughout the corners of Islam. Iraqis wouldn't travel anywhere in large numbers unless they lost, (which in my opinion is much more likely) in which case there might not be large numbers of them remaining at all, and would imply the existence and victory of a rolling Shi'i juggernaut moving west across the Middle East, in which case the Arabs will have much more important things to do than bother us. Like fight another religious civil war.
Second, the fox was never expelled from the henhouse. The jihadi mentality and training are already out there from Afghanistan and Al Qaeda. Anyone who seriously wants to be a jihadi can be one; the books and beliefs and contacts already exist and are a problem. But if you have a way to channel said problem against an enemy, why not? It's very Zen.
"In all of these ways, offshore balancing -- the failed strategy of favoring stability over freedom in the region -- led to September 11. Whatever the other failures of the Bush administration's foreign policy, this insight remains true."
I never pegged you as a Neo-conservative.
You can't just label something a failure because something bad happened while ignoring the successes. Favoring stability over freedom played a very important role in preventing potentially disastrous superpower conflicts through the Cold War, which didn't actually end until after the Gulf War. Predictability and conservatism are essential to maintaining a stable balance of power; if one side get aggressive or becomes unpredictable, the others get nervous and tensions rise. Status quo is safe. There is a method to the madness aside from simple convenience, and it serves a purpose.
And Islamic fundamentalism, on the rise since the 60s, caused 9/11. It's not something that we brought on ourselves, it's a problem that we didn't pay enough attention to for 20 years when it first bit us in Lebanon, and it finally got around to biting us in the ass at home. Their first direct problem with us was, of all things, the presence of our troops in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War, to keep an eye on Saddam because the Saudis wouldn't let us overthrow him.
Through the entirety of the Cold War we pursued stability as a goal in and of itself in other places, like South America, Africa, and East Asia. If our balancing acts create terrorist backlashes, where are the Nicaraguan "El Qaedas", or Congo, or Chinese? Well, there aren't mass martyrdom-obsessed religious movements that lionize the use of violence there. The issue for us is specifically Islamic, and generally Arab.
Your third point is too full of assumptions to really contradict with argument. I'll simply point out that the Saudis have indeed gotten their hands dirty in the past in a protracted guerilla war against an Islamic enemy in the past (against Egypt in Yemen, back when there were two), but no one in the west ever seems to learn that. If they think that their country is threatened, (and we tell them that they're not going to be able to pass the buck this tiem) they'll do something about it. That's how countries, especially centralized ones like monarchies, behave.
For the final question, offshore balancing is used because we can't do 'onshore balancing.' We don't have a state or anything there to use as a hands on counterweight to other regional powers. Therefore, we can only reach out to interfere when we think that things have drifted too far in a wrong direction. Other than that we can not interfere (balance) at all, or we can try to establish a base from which we can 'onshore balance.'
The whole Iraqi venture could be characterized as a type of offshore balancing, but instead of only nudging a country here or there we obliterated one in order to replace it with another, not ruled by us, (a key point) that hopefully has the potential to alter the entire region in the long term in a way beneficial to us. That is, one that recognizes the value of and disseminates the freedoms we believe are necessary to advance the Middle East beyond the Dark Ages they wallow in now so it'll stop being a continous policy migraine.
My alternative strategy idea consists of provoking Iran into a shooting war and then beating their ass, along with their proxies in Iraq, since they're the actual root of Iraq's problems. But then, I like to keep solutions simple.
By Lanky_Bastard, at
Sat Dec 02, 03:52:00 PM:
Rare day that I agree with DF, but that bit on the stability issue is good.
Also, I don't trust the Saudis to support the US over Iran. Fifteen of the 18 hijackers were Saudi. I'm not a conspiracy nut, but it seems like a lot of people (administration, MSM, even a lot of bloggers) are choosing to conveniently forget that.
By allen, at
Sat Dec 02, 07:10:00 PM:
For those who have yet to read Chester’s latest, please do so. And, don’t be repulsed by the use of “ecosystem” in the article’s title; neither Al Gore nor Kyoto are mentioned even once. This churning of American policy in Iraq, as it affects the abandonment of a series of clearly failed “policies”, is starting stimulate some first-rate analyses. Chester’s is one several recent products.
A Red Harvest in the "Conflict Ecosystem"
Enjoy!
Aristides,
Regrettably, I have been unable to locate your comment; I was looking forward to it.
By , at
Sat Dec 02, 09:03:00 PM:
If the Saudis lower the price of the oil, it might have another great effect. It will be a well-aimed kick in the balls for our beloved Hugo.
Vilmos
By , at
Sun Dec 24, 01:48:00 PM:
"It might seem somewhat counterintuitive, but if pacifying Iraq and containing Iran is the goal, then the best answer might be to side with the Iraqi Shia to suppress the Sunni insurgency once and for all."
Completely pointless and not doable.
1.) Most of the current Iraqi Shia leaders spend years in Iranian exile. In the light of the predictable reaction from Riyadh (panic, mixed with new policies aimed at again destabilizing Iraq), they would side with Teheran. (one could argue that the model of a successfull Shia ruled Iraq would be attractive for many Iranians. However, such a form of government would not be much more stable than the Sunni-ruled Iraq, since it excludes around 40% of the population)
2.) What would be won by such a regime? Iraq would remain unstable.
"Also, I don't trust the Saudis to support the US over Iran. Fifteen of the 18 hijackers were Saudi. I'm not a conspiracy nut, but it seems like a lot of people (administration, MSM, even a lot of bloggers) are choosing to conveniently forget that."
They would support the US over Iran, just because the Saudi government has to live in fear because of its Shiite citizens, who are oppressed but at the same time concentrated in the oil rich northeast of the country.
"My alternative strategy idea consists of provoking Iran into a shooting war and then beating their ass, along with their proxies in Iraq, since they're the actual root of Iraq's problems. But then, I like to keep solutions simple."
So, what would you suggest to do after their asses are beaten? Just take a look on Iraq. The Baathists asses were beaten, but in exchange you have psychopaths all over the place now.
And Iran is even more complex. While Iraq under Saddam just had one power centre (Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti) Iran has multiple power centres that compete and in some cases even have the vision of an Iran putting its revolution on the dump and integrating in the ME.
"The whole Iraqi venture could be characterized as a type of offshore balancing, but instead of only nudging a country here or there we obliterated one in order to replace it with another, not ruled by us, (a key point) that hopefully has the potential to alter the entire region in the long term in a way beneficial to us. That is, one that recognizes the value of and disseminates the freedoms we believe are necessary to advance the Middle East beyond the Dark Ages they wallow in now so it'll stop being a continous policy migraine."
Very true!
"The question, of course, is what would a better strategy look like?"
In my opinion, the best solution for stability in the Middle East would be to completely contain Iran (by completely, I mean especially policies that lower Irans trade volume and the mobility of its citizens) while at the same time...
1.) Taking over Irans proxies in the ME one by one, starting with Syria. Bashar al-Assad for instance would want to negotiate a deal after the Ghadaffi model(actually, I believe the only reason he wasn't able to do this yet was this summers Israel-Hezbollah conflict)
2.) Making Iraq a model state.
3.) Integrating the ME economies, including Palestine and Israel, after...
4.)..solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and brokering a peace deal between the Arab countries and Isreal. Something that becomes far easier after eliminating Iranian influence in the Levant.
5.) Preventing a new conflict (which would strenghten the support for the regime among Iranians, comparable to the 1st Gulf War) with Pakistan in Baluchistan over the future main port for Central Asia (Gwadar vs. Cha Bahar), also by influencing India not to use Iran as a proxy against Pakistan.
As it is said in the US:
Just my 2 cents.
