If Iran is attacked, they will hit back in Iraq.Without Shia support the West will have to withdraw, writes Tariq Ali.
If one looks at the crisis-torn, oil-rich Middle East through the lens of the past one can say that history never repeats itself exactly, but it echoes. Nowhere are these echoes louder than in the forms of rule exercised by successive empires.
The graph of history is a broken and twisted line, but one universal law that has emerged suggests that, sooner or later, imperial occupations provoke resistance.
Soon after his arrival on a cold and miserable island in the North Sea, Agricola, the most gifted of Roman pro-consuls, was informed that episodic resistance to the Roman occupation had never stopped.
It was not that the stinking native barbarians were unaware of the merits of Roman civilisation: hygiene, straight roads, orgies and advanced military techniques. It was simply that they did not like being enslaved.
In his essay on Agricola, the Roman historian Tacitus provides another useful example of the imperial mentality.
On one of his visits to the outer reaches of the darkness that was Britain, the Roman ruler looked in the direction of Ireland and asked a colleague why it remained unoccupied. He was assured that it was of no use to the empire, inhabited as it was by the most primitive and wild tribes and consisted mainly of uncultivable bog lands. The man was sternly admonished.
Economic gain wasn't all. The problem was that it was still free. The notion that it was possible to remain unoccupied was dangerous. It offered hope to the enslaved.
The war in Iraq led to the occupation of one of the three states not until then under US domination (the other two are Syria and Iran).
This war at the centre of the Middle East that has inflicted an immeasurable mass of cruelty on the Iraqi population, now threatens to destabilise the entire region.
Bogged down in Iraq, faced with the drought of volunteers and reserves at home, the Pentagon is increasingly being forced to rely on mercenaries bought in the market-place (usually from Central America) for a down payment of $20,000, an annual salary of $25,000 and a written guarantee of US citizenship.
Despite the shortage of numbers, the US is provoking both Syria and Iran. The Bush regime appears to be psyching itself up for a safe strike against Iran, either by itself or via the Israelis. And according to an opinion poll conducted in the last week of January, 57 per cent of the US public would support such a strike.
The viciousness of such a circle cannot be overemphasised.
Syria, a loyal US ally in the first Gulf War is now treated as expendable and the assassination of a rich Lebanese fixer is treated as the casus belli for regime change.
Forget the assassination squads despatched by Israel to wipe out key leaders in both the PLO and Hamas over the last few decades.
That was fine. Israel is an imperial pet. But the grotesque display of double-standards that is acceptable to the West and its citizenry does not go down so well in the rest of the world.
I have always argued that imperial fundamentalism acts always in its own interests, immediate or medium-term. Everything else, including democracy, is regarded as a sideshow. The squeals of outrage at the electoral triumph of Hamas in occupied Palestine are only the latest manifestation of this reality.
The Iranian "crisis" of today has been carefully manufactured. Iran has as much right to nuclear weapons as any of the existing nuclear states. Why is Israel's 200-bomb arsenal acceptable? India and Pakistan are also fine. What all three states share in common is loyalty to the empire.
But the Iranian "crisis" could explode in unforeseen directions. US sabre-rattling has strengthened the hardline clerical faction inside the country.
It has embarked on a campaign of internal repression and banned all critical publications, citing the American threat as an excuse. Then there are the Shia factions whose support has been vital to the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq.
Last week Moqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the most independent-minded Shia group visited Tehran and at a public press conference with the Iranian foreign minister, both men demanded the withdrawal of the occupying armies from Iraq, the first occasion on which a serious Iranian politician has done so.
If Iran is attacked, they will hit back in Iraq. Without Shia support the West will have no option but to withdraw and pressure on sub-contractor Blair's troops, stationed in the Shia stronghold of Basra, will become irresistible.
The occupiers have been assiduously stoking sectarian and ethnic tensions in Iraq. These could now backfire on them.
The West usually pins its hopes on corrupt, collusive establishments.There are indications that outside Europe, these are on the wane.
Tariq Ali's latest book Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, Terror, London is published by Verso. He is due to speak in Dublin on February 15th at a meeting organised by the Peace And Neutrality Alliance (www.pana.ie)