Iran’s intransigence on the
nuclear issue confirms its confidence that the
U.S. will
not be able to mobilize an international coalition to dissuade it
from pursuing the nuclear program. This confidence is a commentary
on the state of world affairs as they exist today. On one side,
there are indications that Russia and China will always find an
excuse to provide Iran with diplomatic protection at the U.N.
Security Council while, on the other side, some of the United
States’ friends are also finding it uncomfortable to go along with
the sole superpower. These attitudes are not aberrations, but stem
from historical reasons.
As the Soviet Union
disintegrated, the
U.S. emerged
as the world’s sole superpower. The idea of the
U.S. being
in this role was comforting. It took away the option from the
rogue states to play one superpower against the other and keep the
world in a perpetual state of tension, suggesting a future without
big power conflicts and thus of peace and stability. It was
thought that as an unchallenged superpower, the
U.S. could
impose peace in regions that lack stability, fermenting religious
and ethnic extremism.
These hopes of a peaceful world
were based on the assumption that in a post Cold War era, the
challenge to Americanism will be reduced to a manageable level.
But what everyone failed to realize was that it was historically
incorrect to expect
Russia to
play a second fiddle to any power for long. The optimism also
didn’t take into account that
Germany and
France, with
their own nationalism to satisfy, were nurturing their own
ambitions. The success of the European Union gave them reasons to
believe that they could compete with the
U.S.
The People’s Republic of
China was
another state that had a history of fighting off the Western
influences: it too couldn’t have accepted
U.S.
leadership. The demolition of the Soviet Union actually encouraged
China to
accelerate its efforts to become a superpower itself.
And then there was political
Islam, which felt a religious obligation to do everything possible
to prevent a “Judeo-Christian” power from being in control of the
world affairs. The manner in which it interpreted its holy book
instructed it to seek each and every opportunity to get rid of the
Judeo-Christian-Hindu influences from this world. To fulfill this
“holy” obligation, political Islam had been fighting
Judeo-Christian and Hindu powers for centuries.
Political Islam held
Judeo-Christian powers responsible for the Crusades, demolishing
its caliphate and establishing the Jewish State in the midst of
its heartland. The fire to avenge the humiliation was always in
the Islamist’s heart and the
U.S. only
refueled that fire in its desire to defeat the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan.
The victory in
Afghanistan
created the impression among jihadis that if they could defeat one
superpower, they could also defeat the other one.
The “holy war” in
Afghanistan
affected political Islam in many ways. It helped the Islamists who
were scattered all over the world and lacked the ability to
connect with each other find a mechanism to organize themselves on
scientific lines. It provided them with a base – Al-Qaeda - and
the means to fund the movement. It helped in institutionalizing
the phenomenon of non-state terrorist groups.
The recent developments in the
Middle East and South Asia clearly indicate that all these
contenders to the status of world superpower have joined hands
against the U.S. Signs abound that countries like North Korea,
Iran and Syria are being used by these adversaries to test
Washington’s resolve in following through on its stated foreign
policy objectives and to undermine the authority so essential in
the realization of its stated mission.
Just as
Washington backed the Afghan
jihad,
Moscow is now backing insurgency in
Iraq and
terrorism in
Palestine and
Lebanon. The
Russian involvement in
Iraq to
undermine the
U.S. is not
new. An unclassified Pentagon report
released in March, 2006, cited two captured Iraqi documents that
say the Russians collected information from sources "inside the
American Central Command" and that battlefield intelligence was
provided to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein through the Russian
ambassador in
Baghdad.
According to Pavel Felgenhauer, a Moscow-based military
analyst, the report was within the realm of possibility. He
said a unit affiliated with the defense ministry’s main
intelligence department was actively working in
Iraq at the
time of the
U.S. invasion
of
Iraq.
The relationship
between
Russia and
Hezbollah is also old, reaching to the early 1970’s.
Imam Moussa Al-Sadr, a spiritual
leader of the Lebanese Shia community, visited
Moscow in 1972 and
asked Soviet authorities to issue humanitarian aid to his people.
Soviet military intelligence (GRU)
worked very closely with the PLO leadership. Several Soviet
officers (speaking fluent Arabic) even visited Palestinian
terrorist training camps in the
Bekaa
Valley in
Lebanon
during 1972-1975. Using their connections in PLO they managed to
establish contact with Iranian opposition members and radical
Lebanese Shiite groups, which also were training in Palestinian
camps at that time. These contacts, later on, between
Shiite extremists and GRU officers,
allowed
Soviet leaders access to the AMAL and the Hezbollah leaders.
On its side,
China is not
far behind.
Beijing is providing the much
needed support to
Pyongyang to continue with its
nuclear program and is also believed by many to have already
supplied
Iran with
the necessary wherewithal to surprise the world with some kind of
a nuclear explosion. In the Chinese
view, the
U.S. has few,
if any, realistic options with respect to
Iran and
North Korea,
apart from appealing to
China for
help—which will not be forthcoming in any meaningful sense of the
term. U.S. military action, in the Chinese view, is basically a
bluff because both rogue regimes are already nuclear powers with
the ability to launch devastating attacks on American
allies—Israel, in the case of Iran, and South Korea and Japan, in
the North Korean case. According to reports,
China is
sending nuclear technology to
Iran in
exchange for oil and allowing
North Korea
to use Chinese air, rail and seaports to ship missiles and other
weapons. And
according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review
Commission, “China’s
continued failure to adequately curb its proliferation practices
poses significant national security concerns to the
United States
It seems that the
U.S. will have
to act alone as the world at large doesn’t share the
U.S. view of
Iran being
an imminent threat.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/challenges.php?id=237479