Edited by W. Joseph Stroupe with the mission of explaining world events correctly via strategic analysis & forecasting
Gold (Non-Subscribers) |
N/C | Partial Text |
2003 was the year that marked the implementation of bold and reckless strategies aimed at handing the US and Britain virtual ownership of the crucial Middle East region and far beyond, but 2006 was the year all the negative repercussions of their failed policies finally converged, obliging the two reckless powers to stare into the yawning chasm of a regional forfeiture. Now, 2007 is the year that marks the full-blown arrival of the endgame in the Middle East, when the US, Britain and Israel attempt to somehow pull a "win" from the mauling flames of region-wide failure. Their desperate policy of "one last push" to achieve that win is already shoving all the region's fractious players into a similar endgame stance, powerfully accelerating the region's descent into instability and upheaval as all its players get set into an endgame posture to make their final moves to prevent a loss of their respective goals and interests, each one attempting to win the game against its opponent(s) before time and opportunity quickly run out.
However, while the region is certainly characterized by a multitude of fractious entities all struggling for advantage and ascendancy, the negative effects of the ill-fated US/British invasion and occupation of Iraq and now their 'one last push for a win before defeat' policies are causing the region's varied sectarian, political and militaristic factions to polarize, to line up on only two fundamental sides, with the ever more distinct dividing line between the two sides constituted as the issue of Shiite-vs-Sunni regional ascendancy and domination. The entire region is ever more sharply mirroring the bipolar sectarian configuration of Iraq itself - with Shiites and their sympathizers and supporters on one side and Sunnis and their sympathizers and supporters on the other.
When the US and Britain removed the oppressive and bloodstained Sunni-based Saddam regime in 2003, they simultaneously unleashed the very real prospect of Shiite region-wide ascendancy. The Saddam regime effectively and strategically kept Shiite Iran contained, and worked to keep its region-wide tentacles (such as Hamas and Hezbollah) weak and manageable. Prior to the 2003 invasion there existed a rough balance of power between the Shiite and Sunni factions across the region - neither was able to achieve inordinate region-wide power or dominance because a region-wide virtual stalemate existed. The US and Britain took directly upon themselves the enormous task and responsibility of maintaining that rough regional balance of power when they crashed into the Saddam regime in 2003. They were entirely unprepared to assume that strategic responsibility, however.
They permitted, and by rushing along Iraq's troubled political process they even facilitated and encouraged, the steady rise toward ascendancy of one faction over the other, and not merely within Iraq. They facilitated the region-wide ascendance of the Iran-friendly Shiite faction. Thereby they shoved, and facilitated the ongoing pushing of, the entire region toward a fundamental, ever more lopsided power imbalance, one that has pointedly inspired the hopes and determination of the rising Shiite faction with respect to the achievement of (1) freedom from its perceived cruel domination by Sunnis, (2) increased regional influence and power, and even (3) regional domination. At the same time, as that US/British-instigated imbalance of power continues to tip in Iran's favor, it has acutely disturbed and frightened the oil-rich Sunni Arab regimes who legitimately fear a regional take-over by ascendant Iran.
US/British policies and actions have already cast the entire Middle East region into a deepening imbalance of power and thereby pointedly heightened its instability. In 2007 the final consequences of such failed policies will arrive. Those consequences are extremely unlikely to include anything resembling the "win" still hoped for by the US, Britain and Israel for the simple reason that all the evidence points to the conclusion that the regional tipping point toward ascendancy by the Shiite faction may already have been reached.
Now, the US and Britain are faced with the insurmountable problem of finding a way, at this extremely late date, to restore a rough balance of power to the region by attempting to reconstruct something similar to the mechanisms they idiotically razed and utterly failed to replace in 2003 - and they now have but one last chance, and they must be successful before the sectarian tinderbox they helped create is set aflame by only one of many impending sparks. All the odds are entirely against them.
The two powers realize they cannot literally reconstruct a dominant Sunni regime in Iraq to face down the Shiites and Iran in a bid to revive power-balancing mechanisms virtually identical to the ones they destroyed in 2003. Those former mechanisms are gone and they cannot be revived. Those are no longer workable strategies and policies, anyway.
But if Iran and the region's Shiite factions are to be faced down and counterbalanced, only the region's Sunnis can hope to accomplish the task and hold it in place on a strategic basis because the US, already severely over-stretched and bogged down in Iraq, cannot genuinely accomplish the feat by itself. This is true notwithstanding its increasing naval presence in and around the Persian Gulf. Except for short-term, acute military measures designed to confront and damage an ascendant Iran and its proxies, and a subsequent scaled-down strategic supporting role in the background, the region's Sunnis will have to play the major, foreground role in achieving and holding in place a return to a balance of power across the region.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in his recent trip to the Middle East, called for the formation of a Sunni grand strategic alliance to confront Iran and its proxies. His 'call to action' made clear the fact that the endgame has indeed arrived in the Middle East and that, according to him, the "moderate" governments and factions must unite to face down the "radical" governments and factions, lest Iran and its supporters soon achieve a position of regional ascendancy that cannot be rolled back. If Iran does achieve that position, then the energy-based geopolitical implications and repercussions would be incalculable, especially for the West.
What Prime Minister Blair and President Bush have obviously come up with is a strategy to pit the region's Sunnis against its Shiites, backing the Sunnis for the moment because they are in a weakened position with respect to Iran, yet not entirely abandoning the Shiites in Iraq in the process, as long as they remain separate enough from Iran and its regional goals and tentacle-like proxies. The more radical Shiite militias, such as that belonging to the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, will have to be de-fanged in the "one last push" strategy when many thousands of additional US troops soon arrive. The policy of supporting both sides in order to achieve a balance of power (stalemate) is not new - the US pursued that strategy for decades before 2003, supporting both Saddam and Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war, for but one example.
But now the old strategy of indirect US/British involvement has a new twist, seeing that Iran and its proxies have advanced on the region to such a great extent since the US and Britain removed their primary impediment in 2003. The US and British military forces, primarily naval forces, are being massively increased inside and outside the Persian Gulf in order to facilitate certain "measured" actions against Iran. These will begin with sanctions and embargo enforced at sea and in the global financial arena, and clandestine support for opposition groups and sabotage within Iran itself. A massive air attack on Iran will be held in immediate readiness. The US and Britain hope such "measured" action will weaken the Iranian regime financially and politically over a period of months starting early in 2007 and lead to a West-favorable regime change later in the year without the need to resort to the massive air attacks.
One of the fundamental problems with the strategy of a 'renewed stalemate' is that it relies upon a pointed, region-wide exploitation of already-hot Sunni-Shiite sectarian rivalries in order to "succeed" in restoring some semblance of a balance of power to the region. Across the region, from Saudi Arabia to Bahrain to the Palestinian territories to Lebanon to Iraq, once-pent-up Sunni-Shiite sectarian tensions are already bursting out into the open and they now require only a spark in order to explode into a regional conflagration. As the Saudi king recently warned, three impending civil wars, in the Palestinian territories, in Lebanon and in Iraq, are merely waiting in the wings for such a spark. All three are characterized by ever hotter and more explosive Sunni-Shiite rivalries.
If the US and Britain imagine they can play the Sunni-Shiite sectarian rivalry card and somehow keep the repercussions contained within the realm of orderliness or 'manageable chaos' by means of their naval and other forces, they are every bit as dense now as they were when they went into Iraq in the first place, imagining that strategy would succeed. Sectarian passions on both sides are already running far too high across the region to facilitate any form of manageable transition from the current simmering and mounting chaos to a hoped-for return to a rough balance of power between the two factions. The US and Britain are playing with the lighting of the fuse of a region-wide sectarian explosion. Are the two powers any more prepared to handle its multi-sphere implications and repercussions than they were prepared for those resulting from their 2003 invasion of Iraq? No, they most certainly are not prepared - but they are decidedly desperate to pull a "win" from the flames of failure, even if it means intentionally orchestrating a regional sectarian explosion whose outcome they imagine they can succeed in controlling.
When the US and Britain foolishly and stubbornly ignored the repeated warnings and invaded Iraq anyway, the US and Britain allowed themselves to be tied up into a Gordian knot whose compound filaments are much stronger than high tensile strength steel. The more vigorously they have struggled to free themselves from that self-made knot the tighter it has constricted their interests and goals in the entire region, so that at present they are near to being crushed entirely. The 'one last push for victory before defeat' strategies represent what they hope will be their ingenious insight to raise the sword and cut across the knot, thereby freeing themselves from the impending strangulation of their goals and interests and permitting them to achieve their goals at the last, during the endgame maneuvers that are even now beginning.
However, because those endgame strategies rely upon the core policy of an acute exploitation of the region's explosive Shiite-Sunni sectarian rivalries, their captive Gordian knot is like one that is not only constricting them, but also simultaneously constraining an impending detonation of high-explosives. Cut across the knot with the sword to free themselves and they simultaneously cause the detonation of those pent-up explosives right in their own faces. The ever hotter Shiite-Sunni rivalry inside Iraq is only being kept from a full-blown detonation by the presence of US and British forces there. In Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and across the region similar situations exist, where the governments and their security forces are barely able to contain the sectarian rivalries to try to keep them from exploding in their faces.
Now the US and Britain wish to exploit those very rivalries to push back the steadily advancing Shiite axis. That will almost inevitably accelerate the region's already unstable sectarian hotspots into a series of full-blown explosions, from Saudi Arabia all the way to Iraq and Iran. At every vortex across the region where the forces of Shiite-Sunni rivalry are swirled into close contact with each other both the factions will come to the full realization of the impending endgame and will spare no effort, energy and risk to come out the winner.
The hurried execution of Saddam on an Islamic holy day held sacred by Sunnis and other sects across the region and the brutal Shiite behavior evident at the execution scene before and after the execution are also likely to greatly exacerbate the region's sectarian rivalries as Shiites engage in triumphalism and Sunnis fear that the Baghdad regime is arising as a decidedly Shiite, Iran-friendly one that will soon be instrumental with partners Iran and Syria in overturning the longtime Sunni domination of its Shiite brethren across the region. The New York Times reveals that top US officials advised the Iraqi government not to rush to execute Saddam, but the US was entirely overridden by the Shiite Maliki government. In truth, Iraq has long since become a Shiite-dominated train the US can no longer control. The entire region's Shiite and Sunni factions are becoming ever more bold and determined to 'pull out a win' for their own respective sides as all come to the realization that the endgame has arrived.
In the resulting chaos, which will most likely be anything but manageable, the oil-rich Sunni regimes themselves will be at grave risk of collapse in the face of the storm waves of Shiite-Sunni sectarian rivalry crashing against them both from within and from without. Every one of those Sunni regimes has a significant, mostly disaffected and increasingly restless Shiite population that poses a fundamental risk to the stability of the US-friendly oil-rich regimes. Those regimes, whose hold on power is already quite tenuous, will be forced to engage in ever more oppressive measures in an effort to subdue their domestic Shiite peoples, and such measures are most likely to fail as the Shiites are joined by others in their passion and outrage over the heavy-handed tactics that will increasingly be employed by the regimes' leadership in order to retain power.
As the endgame arrives prompted by destructive US/British policies and strategies Iraq itself will almost inevitably break apart along sectarian lines as its factions vie for ascendancy. That will absolutely oblige the surrounding states of Iran, Turkey, Syria to intervene in order to secure their respective, and conflicting, interests. Additionally, the Sunni Arab states will also intervene on behalf of their Sunni brethren in Iraq.
As the US and Britain work to instigate the return to a regional balance of power by implementing their last-ditch strategies and policies, they will instead bring on the full-blown arrival of the Middle East endgame in which something other than the region-wide stalemate they envision will be the result - one of the region's sectarian factions will win the game, thereby rising to ascendancy across the region. Not a restoration of a balance of power, but rather a further chaotic tipping of the balance toward one faction will be the most likely result of the implementation of their strategies. The Bush and Blair administrations are not known for their ability to conceive truly brilliant strategies and wisely implement them on the ground - hence the impending exhibition of their latest foreign policy 'talents' in the Middle East should be more than sufficient cause for alarm.
| Note: This Gold version of the analysis is significantly condensed as compared to the full text Platinum version available only to subscribers. The Platinum version addresses head-on the issues of what the point-by-point endgame strategies of the US and Britain are, how Russia and China have expertly positioned themselves to capitalize on the sure-to-fail endgame strategies of the US and Britain, and how a US/British forefeiture across the Middle East will affect the West. |
© Copyright 2004-2008 This article may not be reproduced, reprinted or otherwise disseminated, nor may its inherent distinctive and original ideas be used elsewhere without the prior written permission of W. Joseph Stroupe. No journalistic, analytical, editorial or forecasting substance from GeoStrategyMap.com may be republished or employed in any form without prior written permission. Send all requests for permission by email to: editor_in_chief@geostrategymap.com. |
Get the PDF 
See Also
Gold (Non-Subscribers) |
N/C | |
Platinum (Subscribers Only) |
 |
Gold (Non-Subscribers) |
N/C | |
Platinum (Subscribers Only) |
|
Gold (Non-Subscribers) |
N/C | |
Platinum (Subscribers Only) |
|
Platinum (Subscribers Only) |
|
Platinum (Subscribers Only) |
|
ARCHIVES |
FEATURES |
SITE REFERENCE |