The Great Satan, The Wounded Snake - The U.S.-Iran Imbroglio
February 27, 2007 Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta
The idea for this essay was borne when several aspects came together. The first was when I heard on the Sky News channel that the Americans were complaining about the fact that several Iraqi road side bombs were either designed in or actually being constructed in Iran. The view that there is a nexus between Iran and Iraq has been endorsed by Condoleezza Rice, who said a few months ago that Iran “does need to understand that it is not going to improve its own situation by stirring instability in Iraq,” and by George W. Bush, who said, in August, that “Iran is backing armed groups in the hope of stopping democracy from taking hold” in Iraq. Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker, of Abu Gharib fame, wrote recently: “More and more people see the weakening of Iran as the only way to save Iraq.” The second aspect emerged when I was trying to write about the future of Iraq and the fact that Iraq as we know it now doesn’t really have any strongly unifying national ethos or ideology. The final aspect came up when I was reading Robert Fisk’s magnum opus, The Great War for Civilization - the Conquest of the Middle East. My overall thoughts at the end of all this was, Lord, I hope Dubya doesn’t attack Iran, because if he does, it will be yet another spectacular mistake.
I have already written about Iran and its nukes and why attacking Iran won’t be such a good idea, but the more I read about the happenings in the USA, the more worried I get. I am seriously concerned about President George Bush, his cabinet, the armed forces and the GOP’s ideas. Slowly and surely, as of middle of February 2007, the noises around attacking Iran are steadily becoming more and more cacophonous. Seymour Hersh further wrote recently that U.S. officials were involved in “extensive planning” for a possible attack — “much more than we know”. There is not much point going on about the respective strengths of the militaries, the local geo-political situation or the possibility of non-conventional war, as they have been discussed before, but what I do want to concentrate on is what Kautilya has talked about. Kautilya defined the most important aspect of one’s enemy as being the enemy’s mental strength. In this particular case, I am afraid, Iran is not Iraq. While debating this, we can look at what potential angle to take if the grand panjandrums do want to do something about Iran, purely as a theoretical exercise.