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21 Nov 2006 09:31:34 PM |
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=?utf-8?q?Oh_well,_it'z_that_time_of_the_day_once_again_for_your_dear_old_Uncle_Wally,_who_iz_just_your_average,_run-of-the-mill,_friendly_neighborhood_Prophet_of_Doom=E2=84=A2_&_most_excellent_party_dude_extraordinaire_to_say_HOOROO_once_again_to_al |
TOODS !!!
UNCLE WALLY
----0----
The origins of the Great War of 2007 - and how it could have been
prevented
By Niall Ferguson
(Filed: 15/01/2006)
Are we living through the origins of the next world war? Certainly, it
is easy to imagine how a future historian might deal with the next
phase of events in the Middle East:
With every passing year after the turn of the century, the instability
of the Gulf region grew. By the beginning of 2006, nearly all the
combustible ingredients for a conflict - far bigger in its scale and
scope than the wars of 1991 or 2003 - were in place.
The first underlying cause of the war was the increase in the region's
relative importance as a source of petroleum. On the one hand, the rest
of the world's oil reserves were being rapidly exhausted. On the other,
the breakneck growth of the Asian economies had caused a huge surge in
global demand for energy. It is hard to believe today, but for most of
the 1990s the price of oil had averaged less than $20 a barrel.
advertisementA second precondition of war was demographic. While
European fertility had fallen below the natural replacement rate in the
1970s, the decline in the Islamic world had been much slower. By the
late 1990s the fertility rate in the eight Muslim countries to the
south and east of the European Union was two and half times higher than
the European figure.
This tendency was especially pronounced in Iran, where the social
conservatism of the 1979 Revolution - which had lowered the age of
marriage and prohibited contraception - combined with the high
mortality of the Iran-Iraq War and the subsequent baby boom to produce,
by the first decade of the new century, a quite extraordinary surplus
of young men. More than two fifths of the population of Iran in 1995
had been aged 14 or younger. This was the generation that was ready to
fight in 2007.
This not only gave Islamic societies a youthful energy that contrasted
markedly with the slothful senescence of Europe. It also signified a
profound shift in the balance of world population. In 1950, there had
three times as many people in Britain as in Iran. By 1995, the
population of Iran had overtaken that of Britain and was forecast to be
50 per cent higher by 2050.
Yet people in the West struggled to grasp the implications of this
shift. Subliminally, they still thought of the Middle East as a region
they could lord it over, as they had in the mid-20th century.
The third and perhaps most important precondition for war was cultural.
Since 1979, not just Iran but the greater part of the Muslim world had
been swept by a wave of religious fervour, the very opposite of the
process of secularisation that was emptying Europe's churches.
Although few countries followed Iran down the road to full-blown
theocracy, there was a transformation in politics everywhere. From
Morocco to Pakistan, the feudal dynasties or military strongmen who had
dominated Islamic politics since the 1950s came under intense pressure
from religious radicals.
The ideological cocktail that produced 'Islamism' was as potent as
either of the extreme ideologies the West had produced in the previous
century, communism and fascism. Islamism was anti-Western,
anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic. A seminal moment was the Iranian
president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's intemperate attack on Israel in
December 2005, when he called the Holocaust a 'myth'. The state of
Israel was a 'disgraceful blot', he had previously declared, to be
wiped 'off the map'.
Prior to 2007, the Islamists had seen no alternative but to wage war
against their enemies by means of terrorism. From the Gaza to
Manhattan, the hero of 2001 was the suicide bomber. Yet Ahmadinejad, a
veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, craved a more serious weapon than
strapped-on explosives. His decision to accelerate Iran's nuclear
weapons programme was intended to give Iran the kind of power North
Korea already wielded in East Asia: the power to defy the United
States; the power to obliterate America's closest regional ally.
Under different circumstances, it would not have been difficult to
thwart Ahmadinejad's ambitions. The Israelis had shown themselves
capable of pre-emptive air strikes against Iraq's nuclear facilities in
1981. Similar strikes against Iran's were urged on President Bush by
neo-conservative commentators throughout 2006. The United States, they
argued, was perfectly placed to carry out such strikes. It had the
bases in neighbouring Iraq and Afghanistan. It had the intelligence
proving Iran's contravention of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
But the President was advised by his Secretary of State, Condoleezza
Rice, to opt instead for diplomacy. Not just European opinion but
American opinion was strongly opposed to an attack on Iran. The
invasion of Iraq in 2003 had been discredited by the failure to find
the weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein had supposedly possessed
and by the failure of the US-led coalition to quell a bloody
insurgency.
Americans did not want to increase their military commitments overseas;
they wanted to reduce them. Europeans did not want to hear that Iran
was about to build its own WMD. Even if Ahmad-inejad had broadcast a
nuclear test live on CNN, liberals would have said it was a CIA
con-trick.
So history repeated itself. As in the 1930s, an anti-Semitic demagogue
broke his country's treaty obligations and armed for war. Having first
tried appeasement, offering the Iranians economic incentives to desist,
the West appealed to international agencies - the International Atomic
Energy Agency and the United Nations Security Council. Thanks to
China's veto, however, the UN produced nothing but empty resolutions
and ineffectual sanctions, like the exclusion of Iran from the 2006
World Cup finals.
Only one man might have stiffened President Bush's resolve in the
crisis: not Tony Blair, he had wrecked his domestic credibility over
Iraq and was in any case on the point of retirement - Ariel Sharon. Yet
he had been struck down by a stroke as the Iranian crisis came to a
head. With Israel leaderless, Ahmadinejad had a free hand.
As in the 1930s, too, the West fell back on wishful thinking. Perhaps,
some said, Ahmadinejad was only sabre-rattling because his domestic
position was so weak. Perhaps his political rivals in the Iranian
clergy were on the point of getting rid of him. In that case, the last
thing the West should do was to take a tough line; that would only
bolster Ahmadinejad by inflaming Iranian popular feeling. So in
Washington and in London people crossed their fingers, hoping for the
deus ex machina of a home-grown regime change in Teheran.
This gave the Iranians all the time they needed to produce
weapons-grade enriched uranium at Natanz. The dream of nuclear
non-proliferation, already interrupted by Israel, Pakistan and India,
was definitively shattered. Now Teheran had a nuclear missile pointed
at Tel-Aviv. And the new Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu had a
missile pointed right back at Teheran.
The optimists argued that the Cuban Missile Crisis would replay itself
in the Middle East. Both sides would threaten war - and then both sides
would blink. That was Secretary Rice's hope - indeed, her prayer - as
she shuttled between the capitals. But it was not to be.
The devastating nuclear exchange of August 2007 represented not only
the failure of diplomacy, it marked the end of the oil age. Some even
said it marked the twilight of the West. Certainly, that was one way of
interpreting the subsequent spread of the conflict as Iraq's Shi'ite
population overran the remaining American bases in their country and
the Chinese threatened to intervene on the side of Teheran.
Yet the historian is bound to ask whether or not the true significance
of the 2007-2011 war was to vindicate the Bush administration's
original principle of pre-emption. For, if that principle had been
adhered to in 2006, Iran's nuclear bid might have been thwarted at
minimal cost. And the Great Gulf War might never have happened.
=E2=80=A2 Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harva=
rd
University www.niallferguson.org
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| Title: =?utf-8?q?Oh_well,_it'z_that_time_of_the_day_once_again_for_your_dear_old_Uncle_Wally,_who_iz_just_your_average,_run-of-the-mill,_friendly_neighborhood_Prophet_of_Doom=E2=84=A2_&_most_excellent_party_dude_extraordinaire_to_say_HOOROO_once_again_to_al |
22 Nov 2006 08:30:29 PM |
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