Can
Trump Still Avoid War With Iran?
President Donald Trump does
not want war with Iran. America does not want war with Iran. Even the Senate
Republicans are advising against military action in response to that attack on
Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities.
"All of us (should)
get together and exchange ideas, respectfully, and come to a consensus – and
that should be bipartisan," says Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Chairman Jim Risch of Idaho.
When Lindsey Graham said
the White House had shown "weakness" and urged retaliatory strikes
for what Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calls Iran’s "act of war,"
the president backhanded his golfing buddy:
"It’s very easy to
attack, but if you ask Lindsey … ask him how did going into the Middle East …
work out. And how did Iraq work out?"
Still, if neither America
nor Iran wants war, what has brought us to the brink?
Answer: The policy imposed
by Trump, Pompeo, and John Bolton after our unilateral withdrawal from Iran
nuclear deal.
Our course was fixed by the
policy we chose to pursue.
Imposing on Iran the most
severe sanctions ever by one modern nation on another, short of war, the U.S.,
through "maximum pressure," sought to break the Iranian regime and
bend it to America’s will.
Submit to US demands, we
told Tehran, or watch your economy crumble and collapse and your people rise up
in revolt and overthrow your regime.
Among the 12 demands issued
by Pompeo:
End all enrichment of
uranium or processing of plutonium. Halt all testing of ballistic missiles. Cut
off Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Disarm and demobilize Shiite
militias in Syria and Iraq. Terminate support for the Houthi rebels resisting
Saudi intervention in Yemen.
The demands Pompeo made
were those that victorious nations impose upon the defeated or defenseless.
Pompeo’s problem: Iran was neither.
Hezbollah is dominant in
Lebanon. Along with Russia and Hezbollah, Iran and its militias enabled Bashar
Assad to emerge victorious in an eight-year Syrian civil war. And the scores of
thousands of Iranian-trained and -allied Shiite militia fighters in the Popular
Mobilization Forces in Iraq outnumber the 5,200 US troops there 20 times over.
Hence Tehran’s defiant
answer to Pompeo’s 12 demands:
We will not capitulate, and
if your sanctions prevent our oil from reaching our traditional buyers, we will
prevent the oil of your Sunni allies from getting out of the Persian Gulf.
Hence, this summer, we saw
tankers sabotaged and seized in the Gulf, insurance rates for tanker traffic
surge, Iran shoot-down a $130 million US Predator drone, and, a week ago, an
attack on Saudi oil production facilities that cut Riyadh’s exports in half.
This has been followed by
an Iranian warning that a Saudi attack on Iran means war and a US attack will
be met with a counterattack. We don’t want war, the Iranians are saying, but if
the alternative is to choke to death under US sanctions, we will use our
weapons to fight yours.
America might emerge
victorious in such a war, but the cost could be calamitous, imperiling that a fifth of the world’s oil that traverses the Strait of Hormuz, and causing a
global recession.
Yet even if there is no US
or Saudi military response to Saturday’s attack, what is to prevent Iran from
ordering a second strike that shuts down more Arab Gulf oil production?
Iran has shown the ability
to do that, and, apparently, neither we nor the Saudis have the defenses to
prevent such an attack.
A more fundamental question
arises: If the United States was not attacked, why is it our duty to respond
militarily to an attack on Saudi Arabia?
Saudi Arabia is not a
member of NATO. It is not a treaty ally. The Middle East Security Alliance or
"Arab NATO" chatted up a year ago to contain Iran – of Egypt, Jordan,
Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states – was stillborn. We are under no
obligation to fight the Saudis’ war.
Nor is Saudi Arabia a
natural American ally.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman runs an Islamic autocracy.
He inserted himself into the first position in the line of succession to the throne of his father, who’s in
failing health. He locked up his brother princes at the Riyadh Ritz Carlton to
shake them down for billions of dollars.
He summoned the prime
Minister of Lebanon to the kingdom, where the crown prince forced him to resign
in humiliation. He has ostracized Qatar from Arab Gulf councils. He has been
accused of complicity in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal
Khashoggi in Istanbul.
With his U.S.-built and
bought air force, the Crown Prince has made a hell on earth of Yemen to crush
the Houthis rebels who hold the capital.
The question President
Trump confronts today:
How does he get his country
back off the limb, he climbed out on while listening to the Republican neocons
and hawks he defeated in 2016, but who have had inordinate influence over
his foreign policy?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the
author of Churchill, Hitler, and
“The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. To find out more about
Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists,
visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario