By contrast, even though liberal historians have reviled Warren G. Harding as some kind of dummkopf politician, he well understood that the Great War had been for naught, and that to ensure it never happened again the nations of the world needed to rid themselves of their huge navies and standing armies.
To that end, he achieved the largest global-disarmament agreement ever during the Washington Naval Conference of 1921, which halted the construction of new battleships for more than a decade. And even then, the moratorium ended only because the vengeful victors at Versailles never ceased exacting their revenge on Germany.
And while he was at it, President Harding also pardoned Eugene Debs. In so doing, he gave witness to the truth that the intrepid socialist candidate for president and vehement antiwar protestor, who Wilson had thrown in prison for exercising his First Amendment right to speak against U.S. entry into a pointless European war, had been right all along.
In short, Warren G. Harding knew the war was over and the folly of Wilson’s 1917 plunge into Europe’s bloodbath should not be repeated, at all hazards.
But not George H. W. Bush. The man should never be forgiven for enabling the likes of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Gates and their neocon pack of jackals to come to power—even if he has now denounced them in his doddering old age.
Even more to the point, by opting not for peace but for war and oil in the Persian Gulf in 1991 he opened the gates to an unnecessary confrontation with Islam and nurtured the rise of jihadist terrorism that would not haunt the world today save for forces unleashed by George H. W. Bush’s petulant quarrel with Saddam Hussein.
We will momentarily get to the 45-year-old error that holds the Persian Gulf is an American lake and that the answer to high oil prices and energy security is the Fifth Fleet. Actually, the answer to high oil prices everywhere and always is high oil prices—a truth driven home in spades last winter when the world oil price plunged below $30 per barrel.
But first it is well to remember that there was no plausible threat anywhere on the planet to the safety and security of the citizens of Springfield MA, Lincoln NE or Spokane WA when the Cold War ended.
The Warsaw Pact had dissolved into more than a dozen woebegone sovereign statelets; the Soviet Union was now unscrambled into 15 independent and far-flung republics from Belarus to Tajikistan; and the Russian motherland would soon plunge into an economic depression that would leave it with a GDP about the size of the Philadelphia MSA.
Likewise, China’s GDP was even smaller and more primitive than Russia’s. Even as Mr. Deng was discovering the People’s Bank of China’s printing press, which would enable it to become a great mercantilist exporter, an incipient Chinese threat to national security was never in the cards.
After all, it was the 4,000 Wal-Marts in America upon which the prosperity of the new Red Capitalism inextricably depended and upon which the rule of the Communist oligarchs in Beijing was ultimately anchored. Even the hardliners among them could see that in swapping militarism for mercantilism and invading America with tennis shoes, neckties and home textiles the door had been closed to any other kind of invasion thereafter.
NO ISLAMIC TERRORIST OR JIHADI THREAT CIRCA 1990
Likewise, in 1990 there was no global Islamic threat or jihadi terrorist menace at all. What existed under those headings were sundry fragments and deposits of Middle Eastern religious, ethnic and tribal histories that were of moment in their immediate region, but no threat to America whatsoever.
The Shiite/Sunni divide had coexisted since A.D. 671, but its episodic eruptions into battles and wars over the centuries had rarely extended beyond the region, and certainly had no reason to fester into open conflict in 1990.
Inside the artificial state of Iraq, which had been drawn on a map by historically ignorant European diplomats in 1916, for instance, the Shiite and Sunni got along tolerably. That’s because the nation was ruled by Saddam Hussein’s Baathist brand of secular Arab nationalism, flavored by a muscular propensity for violent repression of internal dissent.
Hussein championed law and order, state-driven economic development and politically apportioned distributions from the spoils of the extensive government-controlled oil sector. To be sure, Baathist socialism didn’t bring much prosperity to the well-endowed lands of Mesopotamia, but Hussein did have a Christian foreign minister and no sympathy for religious extremism or violent pursuit of sectarian causes.
As it happened, the bloody Shiite/Sunni strife that plagues Iraq today and functions as a hatchery for angry young jihadi terrorists in their thousands was initially unleashed only after Hussein had been driven from Kuwait in 1991 and the CIA had instigated an armed uprising in the Shiite heartland around Basra.
That revolt was brutally suppressed by Hussein’s republican guards, but it left an undertow of resentment and revenge boiling below the surface. That was one of many of George H. W. Bush’s fetid legacies in the region.
Needless to say, when it came their turn, Bush the Younger and his cabal of neocon warmongers could not leave well enough alone.
When they foolishly destroyed Saddam Hussein and his entire regime in the pursuit of nonexistent WMDs and ties with al-Qaeda, they literally opened the gates of hell, leaving Iraq as a lawless failed state where both recent and ancient religious and tribal animosities were given unlimited violent vent.
WHY THE WAR PARTY NEEDED TO DEMONIZE IRAN
Also circa 1990, the Shiite theocracy ensconced in Tehran was no threat to America’s safety and security—even if it was an unfortunate albatross on the Persian people. The very idea that Tehran is an expansionist power bent on exporting terrorism to the rest of the world is a giant fiction and tissue of lies invented by the Washington War Party and its Bibi Netanyahu branch in order to win political support for their confrontationist policies.
Indeed, the three-decade-long demonization of Iran has served one overarching purpose. Namely, it has enabled both branches of the War Party to conjure up a fearsome enemy, thereby justifying aggressive policies that call for a constant state of war and military mobilization.
When the Cold War officially ended in 1991, the Cheney/neocon cabal feared the kind of drastic demobilization of the U.S. military-industrial complex that was warranted by the suddenly more pacific strategic environment. In response, they developed an anti-Iranian doctrine that was explicitly described as a way of keeping defense spending at high Cold War levels.
And the narrative they developed to this end is one of the more egregious big lies ever to come out of the Beltway. It puts you in mind of the young boy who killed his parents, and then threw himself on the mercy of the courts on the grounds that he was an orphan!
To wit, during the 1980s the neocons in the Reagan Administration issued their own fatwa again the Islamic Republic based on its rhetorical hostility to America. Yet that enmity was grounded in Washington’s 25-year support for the tyrannical and illegitimate regime of the shah, and constituted a founding narrative of the Islamic Republic that was not much different than America’s revolutionary castigation of King George.
That the Iranians had a case is beyond doubt. The open U.S. archives now prove that the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953 and put the utterly unsuited and megalomaniacal Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi on the Peacock Throne to rule as a puppet on behalf of U.S. security and oil interests.
During the subsequent decades the shah not only massively and baldly plundered the wealth of the Persian nation; with the help of the CIA and U.S. military, he also created a brutal secret police force known as SAVAK. The latter made the East German Stasi look civilized by comparison.
All elements of Iranian society including universities, labor unions, businesses, civic organizations, peasant farmers and many more were subjected to intense surveillance by the SAVAK agents and paid informants. As one critic described it:
Over the years, Savak became a law unto itself, having legal authority to arrest, detain, brutally interrogate an
d torture suspected people indefinitely. Savak operated its own prisons in Tehran, such as Qezel-Qalaeh and Evin facilities and many suspected places throughout the country as well. Many of those activities were carried out without any institutional checks.
Ironically, among his many grandiose follies, the shah embarked on a massive civilian nuclear-power campaign in the 1970s, which envisioned literally paving the Iranian landscape with dozens of nuclear power plants.
He would use Iran’s surging oil revenues after 1973 to buy all the equipment required from Western companies—and also fuel-cycle support services such as uranium enrichment—in order to provide his kingdom with cheap power for centuries.
At the time of the revolution, the first of these plants at Bushehr was nearly complete, but the whole grandiose project was put on hold amidst the turmoil of the new regime and the onset of Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran in September 1980. As a consequence, a $2 billion deposit languished at the French nuclear agency that had originally obtained it from the shah to fund a ramp-up of its enrichment capacity to supply his planned battery of reactors.
Indeed, in this very context the new Iranian regime proved quite dramatically that it was not hell-bent on obtaining nuclear bombs or any other weapons of mass destruction. In the midst of Iraq’s unprovoked invasion of Iran in the early 1980s, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against biological and chemical weapons.
Yet at that very time, Saddam was dropping these horrific weapons on Iranian battle forces—some of them barely armed teenage boys—with the spotting help of CIA tracking satellites and the concurrence of Washington. So from the very beginning, the Iranian posture was wholly contrary to the War Party’s endless blizzard of false charges about its quest for nukes.
However benighted and medieval its religious views, the theocracy that ruled Iran did not consist of demented warmongers. In the heat of battle they were willing to sacrifice their own forces rather than violate their religious scruples to counter Saddam’s WMDs.
HOW WASHINGTON INSPIRED THE MYTH OF IRAN’S SECRET NUCLEAR-WEAPONS PROGRAM
Then in 1983 the new Iranian regime decided to complete the Bushehr power plant and some additional elements of the shah’s grand plan. But when they attempted to reactivate the French enrichment-services contract and buy necessary power plant equipment from the original German suppliers they were stopped cold by Washington. And when they tried to get their $2 billion deposit back, they were curtly denied that, too.
To make a long story short, the entire subsequent history of off-again, on-again efforts by the Iranians to purchase dual-use equipment and components on the international market, often from black market sources like Pakistan, was in response to Washington’s relentless efforts to block its legitimate rights as a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to complete some parts of the shah’s civilian nuclear project.
Needless to say, it did not take much effort by the neocon “regime change” fanatics that inhabited Washington’s national-security machinery, especially after the 2000 election, to spin every attempt by Iran to purchase even a lowly pump or pipe fitting as evidence of a secret campaign to get the bomb.
The exaggerations, lies, distortions and fear mongering that came out of this neocon campaign are truly deplorable. Yet they incepted way back in the early 1990s when George H. W. Bush actually did reach out to the newly elected government of Hashemi Rafsanjani to bury the hatchet after it had cooperated in obtaining the release of American prisoners being held in Lebanon in 1989.
Rafsanjani was self-evidently a pragmatist who did not want conflict with the United States and the West; and after the devastation of the eight-year war with Iraq, he was wholly focused on economic reconstruction and even free market reforms of Iran’s faltering economy.
It is one of the great tragedies of history that the neocons managed to squelch even Bush the Elder’s better instincts with respect to rapprochement with Tehran.
So the prisoner-release opening was short-lived—especially after the top post at the CIA was assumed in 1991 by the despicable Robert Gates. He was one of the very worst of the unreconstructed Cold War apparatchiks who looked peace in the eye, and elected, instead, to pervert John Quincy Adams’ wise maxim. That is, Gates spent the rest of his career searching the globe for monsters to fabricate.
In this case the motivation was especially loathsome. Gates had been Bill Casey’s right-hand man during the latter’s rogue tenure at the CIA in the Reagan Administration. Among the many untoward projects that Gates shepherded was the Iran-Contra affair that nearly destroyed his career when it blew up, and for which he blamed the Iranians for its public disclosure.
From his post as deputy national-security director in 1989 and then as CIA head, Gates pulled out all the stops to get even. Almost single-handedly he killed off the White House goodwill from the prisoner release, and launched the blatant myth that Iran was both sponsoring terrorism and seeking to obtain nuclear weapons.
Indeed, it was Gates who was the architect of the demonization of Iran that became a staple of War Party propaganda after 1991. In time that morphed into the utterly false claim that Iran is an aggressive would-be hegemon and a fount of terrorism dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel, among other treacherous purposes.
The latter giant lie was almost single-handedly fashioned by the neocons and Bibi Netanyahu’s coterie of power-hungry henchman after the mid-1990s. Indeed, the false claim that Iran posed an “existential threat” to Israel is a product of the pure red meat domestic Israeli politics that have kept Bibi in power for much of the last two decades.
But the truth is Iran has only a tiny fraction of Israel’s conventional military capability. And compared to the latter’s 200-odd nukes, Iran never even had a nuclear weaponization program after a small-scale research program was abandoned in 2003.
That is not our opinion. It was the sober assessment of the nation’s top 16 intelligence agencies in the official National Intelligence Estimates for 2007, and has been confirmed ever since.
It’s the reason that the neocon plan to bomb Iran at the end of George W. Bush’s term didn’t happen. As Dubya confessed in his autobiography, even he couldn’t figure out how he could explain to the American public why he was bombing facilities that all his intelligence agencies had said did not exist. That is, he would have been impaled on WMD 2.0 on his way out of the White House.
Moreover, now in conjunction with a further study arising from the 2015 nuclear accord, which will straitjacket even Iran’s civilian program and eliminate most of its enriched-uranium stockpiles and spinning capacity, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has also confirmed that Iran had no secret nuclear-weapons program after 2003.
The whole scary bedtime story was false War Party propaganda manufactured from whole cloth.
On the political and foreign policy front, Iran is no better or worse than any of the other major powers in the Middle East. In many ways it is far less of a threat to regional peace and stability than the military butchers who now run Egypt on $1.5 billion per year of U.S. aid.
And it is surely no worse than the corpulent tyrants who squander the massive oil resources of Saudi Arabia in pursuit of unspeakable opulence and decadence to the detriment of the 30 million citizens who are not part of the regime, and who one day may well reach the point of revolt.
When it comes to the support of terrorism, the Saudis have funded more jihadists and terrorists throughout the region than Iran ever even imagined.
MORE WAR PARTY LIES—DEMONIZATION OF THE SHIITE CRESCENT
In this context, the War Party’s bloviating about Iran’s leadership of the so-called Shiite Crescent is another component of Imperial Washington’s 25-year-long roadblock to peace. Iran wasn’t a threat to American security in 1991, and since then it has never organized a hostile coalition of terrorists that requires Washington’s intervention.
Start with Iran’s long-standing support of Bashir Assad’s government in S
yria. That alliance goes back to his father’s era and is rooted in the historic confessional politics of the Islamic world.
The Assad regime is Alawite, a branch of the Shiites, and despite the regime’s brutality, it has been a bulwark of protection for all of Syria’s minority sects, including Christians, against a majority-Sunni ethnic cleansing. The latter would surely occur if the Saudi-supported rebels, led by the Nusra Front and ISIS, were ever to take full power.
Likewise, the fact that the Baghdad government of the broken state of Iraq—that is, the artificial 1916 concoction of two striped-pants European diplomats (Messrs. Sykes and Picot of the British and French foreign offices, respectively)—is now aligned with Iran is also a result of confessional politics and geo-economic propinquity.
For all practical purposes, Iraq has been partitioned. The Kurds of the Northeast have declared their independence and have been collecting their own oil revenue for the past two years and operating their own security forces. And the western Sunni lands of the upper Euphrates, of course, have been conquered by ISIS with American weapons dropped in place by the hapless $25 billion Iraqi army minted by Washington’s departing proconsuls.
Accordingly, what is left of Iraq is a population that is overwhelmingly Shiite and nurses bitter resentments after two decades of violent conflict with the Sunni forces. Why in the world, therefore, wouldn’t they ally with their Shiite neighbor?
Likewise, the claim that Iran is now trying to annex Yemen is pure claptrap. The ancient territory of Yemen has been racked by civil war off and on since the early 1970s. And a major driving force of that conflict has been confessional differences between the Sunni South and the Shiite North.
In more recent times, Washington’s blatant drone war inside Yemen against alleged terrorists and its domination and financing of Yemen’s government eventually produced the same old outcome—that is, another failed state and an illegitimate government that fled at the 11th hour, leaving another vast cache of American arms and equipment behind.
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