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America and the world: Oil, Iran and Senator Biden's Plan |
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Tuesday, 09 May 2006 |
Our world is a turbulent and a very dangerous place, look at what is happening in Darfoor, a vast expanse of a very harsh desert a wasteland over which people were for the last three years waging a crazy senseless war and after two years of negotiations are still failing to reach a reasonable agreement to end it. Also remember Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo and don’t forget the Iraqi mess. For all of these tragedies the whole world has been to a big or a small extent involved, but no country has been so greatly embroiled in these terrible miseries and has been exposed to the dangers they pose to its interest and security as the United States of America. The Americans have been for a very long time after their independence happily isolated in their own continent and benignly neglecting what was happening elsewhere, but since the end of World War II this isolation been replaced by an increasingly active involvement in the affairs of the world outside its borders. This shift has mostly been due to its elevation to the position of the world’s only super power, but with the very serious commitment to the survival of Israel and because of its great need for strategically based military bases and its almost total dependence on oil (dependence on both foreign oil and oil reserves).
Oil is the black blood of the western civilization it powers its industry and provides the fuel for its motors and provides raw materials to manufacture drugs and other products and no country is so dependant on oil and its products than the United States. The US moves on wheels and any interruption of this movement is liable to create immense problems and until very recently the US was happy in the belief that its reserves were always there to protect it from the sudden hiccups in the Middle East which has come to be its main supplier of oil, but also known to contain the greatest reserves. The oil reserves are concentrated in the Gulf area and in southern Iraq. America’s reserves are rapidly dwindling and are thought to be almost totally depleted by 2025, and this was one of the main reasons why America invaded and occupied Iraq. The other reason is that Iraq is located in a great proximity to Eurasia [the great chessboard] which is known itself to have huge oil reserves, but the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraqi operation has been so clumsy and blunderrous that it has actually plunged America in a very serious and a messy quagmire. The consequence is a very serious deterioration in the president’s popularity whose job approval has fallen to very low levels which are posing very serious challenges to his party’s chances in the next fall’s mid term elections. The conventional wisdom is that the Republicans are going to lose, but the magnitude of their losses will be influenced to a very extent by what happens in Iraq during the next six months. Also, the way the Bush administration deals with the other very serious threats posed by Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
I have always been absolutely intrigued and puzzled by these so-called nuclear ambitions by some third world countries like those of Iran. The average Iranians are living under very harsh and poor conditions economically socially an politically under a very backward and self centered regime. Which is headed by a pseudo religious clique which is made up of mosque attendants and old mullahs, who have been waiting for a very long time to gain political control of their country who ultimately succeeded in 1979 after a very brutal struggle under the leadership of the late Ayatollah Khomeini of toppling the late shah and establishing their own theocracy which was immediately brawled in a mad conflict with Saddam Hussein who was trying to stop them exporting their so called Islamic revolution to the world especially their neighbors in the gulf a conflict which lasted for eight years and resulted in an unbelievable levels of death and destruction and ended without a winner with the mullahs unable to achieve the most minor of their objectives after suffering hundreds of thousands of dead and injured and an unimaginable sums of wasted money. But these same leaders instead of trying to heal the wounds of the long war and the rebuilding of their destroyed cities and institutions and trying to improve the lot of their suffering people are pouring billions of dollars which are gained from the sale of their oil on a crazy unachievable ambition, the acquisition on of an A-bomb which is a crazy dream because the world well never allow the Iranian mullahs to put their fingers on the nuclear trigger because of the very delicate balances of the military forces in the middle east and for wider geopolitical considerations but these ambitions have already created a very dangerous standoff between Iran and the international community especially the United States.
But on the other hand Iran is a very important regional power with a huge oil reserve still to lean on, that is why the world is trying hard to convince its leaders Iran of the absurdity of their adventure and peacefully dropping their nuclear ambitions but they are being very obstinate and stubborn in spite of the untold number of meetings and conferences and United Nations resolutions a stubbornness which is threatening a very dangerous explosion in an area which is still suffering from a lot of conflicts and confrontations not the least of which is the messy situation in Iraq, but on the other hand one hopes that the Iranian mullahs might still have a bit of rationality and pragmatism to shy from the brink and accept some face saving compromise which would be welcome to the Bush’s administration which has its hands full of the Iraqi mess but if the worse come to the worse and the mullahs persist with their ambitions Israel will always find a means of eliminating the threat to its survival which is posed by an atomic bomb in the hands of the Iranian mullahs, the Jewish state will never allow the Tehran mullahs to have their hands on the nuclear trigger. The Bush administration would still be struggling with the Iraqi quagmire, enter Senator Biden.
Joseph Biden is the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee of the US Senate from Delaware Senate wrote with Leslie Gelb the former president of the council on foreign affairs an essay in the May 1, 2006 issue of the New York Times in which they suggested that Iraq be divided into three separate regions, Kurdish, Shiite and Sunnis. The Senator suggested maintaining a united Iraq by decentralizing it giving each ethno-religious group room to run its own affairs while leaving the central government in charge of common interests. The senator and his co-writer also acknowledged the opposition to such an idea by the Sunnis who have opposed the new constitution and agreed to participate in the political process only after a promise by the others to have the constitution amended by the newly elected parliament after it convenes to rewrite the clauses about federalism and the distribution of the oil revenues. The senator and his co-writer suggested that the Sunnis be given part of the revenue proportional to the number of their population which is thought to be about 20% they also wrote that the president must direct the military to design a plan for withdrawing the US forces and providing for only a small effective residual force to combat the terrorists they finished by stating that the Bush administration does not have a strategy for victory in Iraq they suggested that he was trying to prevent defeat and pass the problem along to his successor.
Senator’s Biden’s plan is a clever and an extremely well timed political balloon, because if the Republicans’ losses in the fall were going to be manageable President Bush would continue for the next two years as a lame duck. The Republican candidate for the president’s job in the next presidential elections will face senator Biden who would be certain of winning and be in a position to put his plan into action like former presidents Eisenhower and Nixon when they disengaged from Korea and Vietnam. If next fall’s elections will result in a Republican rout, there will be many voices calling for the president’s head, but the United States is not in a position for a divisive resignation and more polarization or the nerve to go through a second impeachment process in less than ten years, there is going to be a major reshuffle of the administration with some of its most senior members shoved out with senator Biden himself going into the administration in a very senior post with a mandate to implement his plan.
Najeeb Hanoudi
Monday, May 8, 2006
Amman/Jordan
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