On the brink of war?

Let’s not kid ourselves, or be blinded by the never-ending insular "wars" concerning domestic politics and even rebellion. The world maybe on the brink of war over what’s going on in Iran, the effect it is having on the globe’s geopolitics, and, more urgently, on the world’s oil prices.

As long as economies, including our own, are handcuffed to the availability – on non-availability – of fossil fuels, the price of oil per barrel is a matter of life-and-death. Right now, owing to the crisis over Iran’s nuclear face-off with the United States, the European Union (which is somewhat divided but still collectively against Tehran becoming a nuclear "power") and the United Nations Security Council, oil per barrel has gone over US$72 – a record high. This will soon be reflected at your corner gas pump.

Worst of all, a bitter word war has erupted between Iran’s Islamic hardlining President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the West, especially the USA.

The Iranian leader, when first elected a few months ago, had startled America and the Western countries by declaring that Israel should be obliterated. Later, trying without enthusiasm to sound more moderate, Mr. Ahmadinejad proposed (sarcastically) that the Israelis be moved to Europe where he claimed they belong.

Now, after months of insisting that Iran was developing its nuclear capacity exclusively for peaceful economic purposes, the resentful Iranian President and his officials are saying, in effect: "what’s wrong with our joining the nuclear club – and becoming a nuclear power?"

Since the UN Security Council recently issued a 30-day deadline for Iran to suspend its atomic program, Tehran and the UN are on a collision course, di ba?

Last April 2, Iran announced that it had tested a new torpedo in war games in the Strait of Hormuz – a strait which links the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, described as "by far the world’s most important oil chokepoint."

About one in every three barrels of oil travels through that strait – and, moreover, Iran is the world’s fourth largest oil producer. (Oil exports account for around 60 percent of Iran’s government revenue and 80 percent of export earnings).

Last Tuesday, President Ahmadinejad racheted up the tension by several notches when he declared that Iran "would cut off the hands of any aggressor" and boasted that the Iranian military was ready to fight with the most modern technology.

Speaking before a televised parade of his missile-launchers and double-goosestepping military units, the Iranian leader thundered that "today, Iran’s Army is one of the most powerful armies in the world and it will powerfully defend the country’s political borders and the nation!"

This clearly gives the impression that Ahmadinejad, never one to mince words, apparently believes his country is about to be invaded.

US President George W. Bush – now busily "hosting" Chinese President Hu Jintao and trying to agree with Mr. Hu on a modus vivendi with Beijing – has had no time to reply to Ahmadinejad’s sabre (and nuke) rattling. Once Hu departs, however, nobody knows, least of all the usual know-it-alls within the Beltway, what the unpredictable Mr. Bush might do.

The funny part is that there is even speculation that he might drop a nuke on Tehran – or Isfahan (where the Iranian nuclear tunnels supposedly are) – in a fit of "cowboy" anger. It’s not funny, really – it’s scary. There are those in Washington DC and the world’s capitals who believe, probably unfairly, that Dubya Bush and the suicide-bombers might have the same kind of mentality.

I do him, of course, an injustice by even suggesting the possibility. But there’s no fudging the fact that in more jittery or malicious quarters, that kind of suspicion exists.

* * *

If you’ll recall, in his first State of the Union address delivered before Congress on January 29, 2002, Mr. Bush had astonished almost everyone and generated banner headlines by accusing Iraq, Iran, and North Korea of being "an axis of evil."

Subsequently, three years ago, Bush and his "coalition" forces invaded Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein – and they are still stuck there while the situation degenerates into a civil war (the majority Shiites being backed, by the way, by that next-door Shia nation, Iran).

When Bush and his troops barged in, they unfortunately didn’t find the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) the US had sworn to the UN Saddam and his evil empire had been stockpiling. Now that Iran’s Ahmadinejad is waving another weapon of mass destruction right under his nose – the "possibility" that Iran has nuclear strike capability – what will Bush do?

The fact is that Mr. Bush may be sadder and wiser today. He doesn’t have the hubris he exhibited in the pugnacious months after the terrible terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in 9/11, and is being buffeted on the question of defending his Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from the assertion of several high-ranking retired generals that Rumsfeld has bungled everything and must "resign."

There are those who’ll argue that in his present plight, Bush may need another war, just as Britain’s Margaret Thatcher needed the Falklands War with Argentina. Yet, can he afford another war, this time in Iran, when the smarter course might be to begin devising an exit strategy from Iraq?

Being a Superpower is no fun these days.

* * *

For starters, the Iranians are a more complicated and frustrating type of enemy than the Iraqis – where the Shia Muslims, the Sunni Muslims, and the Kurds (also Muslims), kind of balance off each other in a weird relationship of hatred and mutual suspicion. Iran is an all-Shia nation of 67 million, with its religious center in Qom, the city which sends its influence out to the entire Shiite "world" from its famous theological center.

Worst of all, the late Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Mussavi Khomeini, who forged Iran into a dictatorship of clerics – a country run completely by religious leaders called "Ayatollahs" – had cursed the United States as "The Great Satan" and dedicated the Iranian people to eternal war against the Americans.

This condemnation was far more chilling than another fatwa Khomeini issued, ordering every Muslim to "execute" the British author Salman Rushdie for having insulted the Prophet and, indeed, Allah himself by his sacrilegious novel, "The Satanic Verses."

Rushdie wisely went into hiding, and apparently has managed to survive because the Ayatollah is dead and he (Rushdie) is still alive and beginning to reappear in the Society Pages. But he better still be careful. The Shiites have long memories – and, if you forgot, they were the original "assassins" (hyped up on hashish) who were mobilized and trained centuries ago by the Old Man of the Mountain (a fabled king of assassins) to go forth and terrorize many of the rulers of Europe and the Near East.

In sum, the Americans are "The Great Satan" to the Iranians and they’d better not overlook it.

* * *

Space won’t let me try to explain the difference (and the hatred which exists) between the Sunni Muslims – who populate most of the Arab states (except partially Iraq and, of course, Bahrain).

The feud between Muslims dates back to Mecca in 632 C.E., to the Prophet Muhammad’s death and the outbreak of a succession quarrel: should succession to the Prophet be granted to the most suitable disciple among the closest followers of the Prophet – or to a blood descendant?

Those in favor of the latter got their way at first and elevated Muhammad’s nephew and son-in-law Ali as the fourth Caliph. However, with the fifth Caliph, Muawiya, power shifted away from Ali and even Mecca to the Syrian city of Damascus. The original party would later be identified as "Shi’ite", after "Shiat Ali" or "party of Ali". The dispossessed Shiites gathered around Ali’s successors – the imams.

The hostile Caliph Yazid finally set out to stamp out this "rebellious" group. On October 2, 680 (according to the Islamic calendar, the second day of Muharram of the year 61), a small group of Hussein ibn Ali’s loyal followers were trapped in the town of Karbala, close to the Euphrates River, right inside today’s Iraqi borders.

Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson and third Shiite Imam, told his trapped followers to escape, releasing them from their oaths of fidelity, but 72 insisted on remaining with him to the death.

Together, they made one final charge against the Caliph’s army of several thousand, and perished to the last man. Since then, Karbala has been the "holy city" of the Shiites – the city symbolizing "self-sacrifice".

Hussein’s younger son carried on, and there were nine Imams after him. The twelfth and last, according to Shiite belief, vanished – and remains "alive" until someday God (Allah) allows him to reappear to the faithful as the Mahdi, the "returning" Messiah.

The best volume on the subject, if you want to research further, is "My Life as a Weapon", incidentally subtitled, "A Modern History of Suicide Bombing", by Christopher Reuter, originally published in German as "Mein Leben ist eine Waffe" by C. Bertelsmann Verlag, Munich, 2002).

Iran today is ruled by Ayatollahs (the name means "Reflection of Allah") under a 1979 Constitution. Khomeini instituted decreeing a government supposedly mandated by God which claims the right to "pass judgment on the ideas, thoughts, and behavior of humans."

The idea was that Iran should be under a velayat-e faquish (the "rule of a jurisprudent"), in which a spiritual leader would rule in the Messiah’s place until his "return." The leader was dubbed the rahbar, a post plucked out of . . . who knows, since it never previously existed.

In any event, any invader from "the West" ought to learn from the sad experience of, who else, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein when he invaded Iran along a 400-mile wide front on September 22, 1980. (The Americans were probably rooting for Saddam at this juncture).

Saddam believed he would gain a quick victory and manage to grab the rich oil resources of the Iranian province of Chusistan.

Khomeini, instead, utilized this attack to "unite" the Iranians under his iron command – to repulse the Iraqis. This was when the term jihad or "holy war" first manifested itself. He converted the Iran-Iraq War into a war decreed by "the will of God" to liberate Karbala Mecca and Jerusalem from the Infidel Sunnis.

Sure enough, in the first weeks of the conflict, the Iraqis advanced deeply into Iranian territory. The Iranians only had a clumsy Pasdaran, a Revolutionary Guard force, while its regular army had been weakened by bloody purges of its generals and ranking officers.

By 1982 – again Reuter (a correspondent for the German magazine STERN) has the best account – the Iranian army managed to recover most of the territory seized by the Iraqis, but badly decimated by their frontal attacks (banzai, literally) begged Khomeini to agree to an end of the war. Saddam, also very bloodied, was asking for "peace."

The Ayatollahs said, "No."

He placed the war under the control of his Revolutionary Guards – but found they were running out of manpower. (In one single offensive in February 1984, the Iranian army had lost, for instance, more than 20,000 men!)

Reuter writes: "In order to find stocks of human fodder for the waves of attacks, recruiters trawled through the schools. They told the children the heroic epic of Karbala like a fairytale adventure, on which they were summoned to appear as heroes, as martyrs."

When the children were reluctant, the Revolutionary Guards simply took them off to the barracks, leaving notes to their distressed parents that their children had volunteered to go to war.

"From 1981 onwards," Reuters said, at times quoting former recruiters who had fled Iran to express their remorse, "they sent 10,000 children into the line of fire and across minefields. They were sent in order that their bodies would explode all the mines and thus clear the way for the soldiers that were following them. . ."

If this is true, the Americans and other UN countries must expect – if they invade Iran – that the children are waiting for them.

One thing is certain, if it ever happens (God forbid). It won’t be a conventional war.