The new Communists

A good piece by Paul Craig Roberts about the ongoing campaign of the Bush government and their propaganda machine to create havoc in the Middle East by threatening to invade Iran, while growing increasingly authoritarian at home as evidence by the Patriot Act and the war propaganda on TV. The US Forces have great difficulty to defeat the insurgency by the 5 million Sunni Muslim minority already. Why invade Iran with its 70 million inhabitants, 35 million of which are Persians and another 20 million are Azerbaidjanis with good relations with the Persian ethnics, so finding local allies will not be so easy.

The stated intention of Iran to acquire Nuclear weapons is used as a motive. However, Israeli Professor of Military history Martin van Creveld already foresaw in 2003 that invading Afghanistan and Iraq would cause the whole region, Syria, Turkey and even Greece to develop nuclear weapons, if not in defense against the USA, than in defense against its nuclear armed neighbours. That is because Nuclear weapons are the perfect deterrent against the US Armed forces. So the predicament that Bush finds himself in, an Iran working on its own Nuclear weapons, is caused by the VERY strategy of invasion that the US has been using so far.

There is no indication that the Sunni insurgency or Al-Queda in Iraq is being overcome by the US Army. The US Army is fighting the wrong kind of enemy in the wrong kind of battlefield. The enemy is a weak, lightly armed invisible force with good intelligence and reasonable or good understanding of local culture and the battle field is a cluttered, dirty city scape that defies the use of observation enhancing instruments, such as radar, infrared, night sights that is the strength of an army armed by a modern light industry production base.

Finally there is really little hope for victory even if the US had the right kind of military force and was fighting on a battle field more suited to the type of warfare that is its strong suit. A military victory has to be followed by political and social acceptance of the dominance of the victor. Because the West and the world of Islam are Ancient enemies a Western victory will never be seen as letigimate by a local population. In fact the only populations that will see US dominance as legitimate are the Middle Eastern Christians.

Snouck is not some peacenik pinko, I consider myself to the right of such light-weight, hippy jokers as Attila the Hun, Djengis Khan and Mohammed al Rasul, those women. But to create a new enemy and to fight them in a similarly unsuited battlefield for a goal that is impossible to attain is not a good idea. My prediction is that if the Bush Administration continues with its intention to make Iran comply to its will by using military force. A hand will appear out of nothing and in the Senate the writing will be on the wall:

MENE MENE TEKEL UFARSIN - Bush's Kingdom will be parcelled up and divided.