It was a refreshing of an old wound last Monday, when the American President, Donald John Trump, fortuitously designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist organisation. And, in a prompt reaction, Iran also declared the entire American military forces as a gang of terrorists. Coming up just a couple of weeks after the same Trump mischievously recognized a Venezuela opposition leader, Juan Guaido, who did not contest in the recent election for the office of the President in that country but declared himself as President with a swearing in ceremony, Trump’s seeming neurotic actions these days could not have come as a surprise. Here is a man who unilaterally decided in 2017 to erect a fence covering about 1,933 miles at the US border with Mexico and insisted that the latter must pay the cost. Also, like a neurotic patient, this man has thrown both the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the European Union (EU) into an embarrassing disarray on many issues with his garrulous international posture.
Today’s article is not new. It is rather a repeat of an earlier article published in this column in November 2018, albeit with a different title. The article is being repeated here today on the demand of some prominent readers of this column who are strongly concerned about the gathering particles of an impending World War 111 the drum of which President Trump has been beating aloud in recent time with no reflection on its consequences Thus, capturing the vivid mood of those readers and based on their tone of demand for the repetition of this article, ‘The Message’ column decided to migrate, from the insanity of Nigeria’s unwarranted political, economic and insecurity rigmarole to that of a global implacable tempest if only for a momentary change.
After all, elasticity has its limit. And by so doing, even if temporarily, some relief might come, not only to the readers of this column but also to the writer who is currently writhing in the dust of unimaginable suffocation in Nigeria. For now, that may be a way of ventilating the atmosphere for a relatively peaceful existence.
Trump’s Predation Agenda
At the instance of American President, Donald Trump, an unexpected global war may soon break out, the consequences of which will be very difficult to predict. As a matter of fact, the motivation for this assertion had started gathering momentum with the swinging of a dangerous pendulum from the premise of the US imperial tendencies since Trump’s assumption of office as the 45th US President in 2016.
When and how such a war will break out may just be a matter of guessing for all agitated minds around the world.
The Immediate Cause of Iran/US Tango
About four years ago, Al-Jazeera Television throbbed with breaking news, reporting that a United States’ military aircraft strayed into the airspace of Iran and the latter promptly responded by shooting it down. The incident occurred when Dr. Barack Obama was the President of the US. And that was the climax of an allegation of stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, especially, nuclear armament, levelled against Iran by the US.
That disturbing development which dragged Iran to the United Nation’s Security Council for explanation further heightened the already existing tension between the US and Iran. The tension had started in 1979 with the Iranian revolution that uprooted Shah Pahlavi’s imperial despotism which had caged the country’s citizens for decades.
U.S.’ Reaction
In reaction to the fortuitous incident of the American intrusion that led to Iran’s prompt military reaction, the US authorities said that the destination of the shot aircraft was Afghanistan and not Iran.
They explained that its pilot accidentally lost control and strayed inadvertently into Iranian territory. But then, the die had been cast even as the US has since been looking for an opportunity to revenge.
Genesis of Faceoff
The faceoff between Iran and certain Western countries, particularly the US and Britain, can be traced to a grand design by the West as expressed in 1902 by a British Prime Minister, Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman who observed as follows:
“There are people who control spacious territories teeming with manifest and hidden resources. They dominate the intersections of world routes. Their lands were the cradles of human civilizations and religions. These people have one faith, one language and the same aspiration. No natural barriers can isolate them from one another… If, per chance, these people were to be unified into one state it would then take the fate of the world into its hands and separate Europe from the rest of the world. Taking these considerations seriously, a foreign body should be planted in the heart of this nation to prevent the convergence of its wings in such a way that it could exhaust its powers in never- ending wars. It could also serve as a spring board for the West to gain its coveted objects”.
Follow Up
Sir Bannerman’s observation was tacitly a further pursuit of an earlier demand by an Austrian Jewish lawyer and Journalist, Theodor Herzl, the initiator and leader of the Zionist movement founded in 1879.
Theodor Herzl’s Demand
In the euphoria of a chauvinistic ambition, shortly after the establishment of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, made a demand thus: “Let sovereignty be granted us (Jews) over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation. The rest, we shall manage by ourselves…”
The Balfour Declaration
In furtherance of the West’s clandestine agenda expressed by Bannerman as quoted above, another British Prime Minister, James Arthur Balfour, issued an insensitively devastating declaration that now bears his name in history. That seemingly conspiratorial declaration, which forcefully conceded a major chunk of Palestinian land to the Zionists as a home, became a thorny point in the serenity of the world.
Since then, the infamous Balfour declaration has put the Middle East in an incessant turmoil to the discomfort of the world’s peace and harmony. The declaration read partly as follows: “His majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment, in Palestine, of a national home for the Jewish people and will use its best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this objective…. The rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country shall not be prejudiced by the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”
Implementation
To facilitate the effective implementation of that agenda, some other Middle East countries had to be decapitated economically and politically through an imperial excision of some juicy chunks of their lands from them. Thus, Lebanon was excised from Syria and Kuwait from Iraq. The strategy was to cause a dissention among the citizens of those countries with the intention of breaking the yoke of the Muslim unity which Bannerman had targeted in his infamous observation quoted above.
Iran Connection
Now, how does Iran come into this scenario when she is not an Arab country? That is the logical question that anybody who is not quite familiar with the Middle East and the intricacies of its political and economic set up may ask.
Naturally, Iran is affected by three major factors: culture, economy and politics. By culture here, we mean ISLAM. Iran is a foremost Muslim country even if her official language is Farsi and not Arabic.
And, as a Muslim Country, whatever affects other Muslim countries must affect her. Thus, as a major neighbour to the Arabs in the Gulf region, she cannot but play a major role in the politics of that region. Also, as an economically strong nation in the primordial and contemporary times, Iran, a current member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), occupies a very strategic position in the Middle East especially with her proximity to the Persian Gulf.
How Ayatullah Khomeni Emerged
It was in 1963 that the late Iranian spiritual leader, Ayatullah Ruhullah Mousavi Khomeini, embarked on his country’s liberation struggle that culminated in a successful revolution of February 1979.
In that struggle, Ayatullah Khomeini took a retrospective view of the incident that almost obliterated Islam under the iron rule of Mustapha Kamal Ataturk of Turkey in the 1920s. With that review, he knew that without a clear-cut culture, man couldn’t be better than a beast. He knew that such values as law, education and religion, which had guided man in his peregrinations on earth, were the attributes of culture. He knew that any nation that surrendered its culture and adopted that of another nation had enslaved herself permanently to the caprice of the latter nation. Thus, Khomeini saw Islam, the spiritual culture of over one billion Muslims in the world at that time, as the target of the Western imperialists, which needed defence and protection.
The Iranian Revolution
No one believed before 1979 that a mass protest which started like a small political billow and was engendered by the country’s unarmed Mullahs could eventually grow into such a great magnitude of political ‘earthquake’. But by the time the foggy dust of that protest finally settled, a new Iran had emerged from the debris of the old. Thus, against the wish and expectation of the capitalist West, the hitherto secular, monarchical Iran became a democratic, Islamic republic. The drama was quite electric.
Characteristic of the West, all hands were put on deck, at that time, to ensure that an Islamic republic did not succeed the tyrannical monarchy headed by the Shah Pahlavi who had been serving as a front for the oppressive West. America was most active in that ambitious but vain effort. She would not easily allow the massive benefit she had been enjoying for decades in that oil-rich country, under the Shah regime, to slip out of her hands just like that.
Rescue Mission
Thus, under the pretext that she wanted to rescue her citizens from the siege laid by Iranian students on her embassy in Tehran, the US attempted an invasion of the country. The espionage activities by the American diplomats, inside that embassy, against the new Islamic government in Iran, had warranted the siege.
The Strategy
While a number of US F15 jet bombers were approaching Iran, the then American President, Jimmy Carter cunningly engaged his country’s pressmen in a media chat without giving them any hint of the impending military operation in Iran. The tactics was to divert the attention of the press and that of the country from the illegal Pentagon’s military expedition going on in Iran. But no sane person can ever fault the contents of the Qur’an. Almost 1400 years before that incident, a verse of the Qur’an had been revealed to Prophet Muhammad (SAW) thus: “They (the unbelievers) schemed, and Allah schemed. Allah is the supreme schemer”. Q. 3:54.
Jimmy Carter’s thought was that by the time he would be finishing his media chart, the news would have reached him that America had successfully invaded Iran. He had therefore intended to announce the news of his ‘great’, successful scheme to the press as the epilogue of his address. And that would have served as his impetus for wining that year’s election for a second term in office. But, as Allah would have it, instead of the expected news, what he got was a shocker of his life.
The failure of the Strategy
Miraculously, two of the F15 fighters deployed for the operation collided in the air just at the point of entering Iran crashing with their contents, and consuming the lives of all the 16 top air force officers on board while the other jet fighters had to turn back having run into confusion. When this devastating news reached Carter, it was too much to hide and it quickly became a public knowledge.
Thus, the mighty America failed woefully, with her technology, in circumstances she has never been able to decipher and explain convincingly. With that scheme, it became obvious that Jimmy Carter of the Democrat Party had dug his own political grave. Of course, he lost the election to the cowboy turned Politician, (Ronald Reagan) of the Republican Party. For about 444 days (well over a year) thereafter, the 52 American hostages remained under the siege of the Iranian students. It took high-level diplomacy, through third party countries, to get them released.
Yet, America was not done. She went ahead to freeze Iran’s foreign reserve of about $80 billion in addition to imposition of economic sanctions with the intention of running that country’s economy aground. The only Iran’s offence in this case was to chart an independent political course that could liberate her citizens from the manacles of the Western imperialism. Ever since, the relationship between America and Iran has remained icy.
That relationship however, further deteriorated recently when Iran started a nuclear project with which to prop up her economy. America responded with a threat saying the United States would not tolerate any nuclear project in Iran because the latter could not be trusted with such a project.
The World’s Greyhound
Only a fool will not know that the United Nation (UN), as presently constituted, is the greyhound of the US through which the latter barks randomly at the rest of the world.
But for the recent Iraqi episode that became regrettable for the self-appointed policeman of the world, and of course, the North Korean case, which suddenly became a cancerous sore on the head of the US, another Gulf war would have either ensued or become advanced in plan by now.
Secret of American Power
The secret of America’s military successes in various parts of the world is neither in technological advancement, nor military superiority per se. The failed rescue mission in Iran shortly after that country’s revolution has confirmed that.
Rather, the secret of America’s military successes in various wars around the world are in her ability to cause schism among some other nations and races.
Iran has never been a prey to America’s direct military aggression because that Gulf country has never played a fool dancing to the sour music of the predatory country called America in a seeming military arena.
Sanction as a Weapon
Now, with the threat of invasion of Iran by Israel on the one hand and economic and political sanctions against Iran by the US on the other, will history repeat itself? One fact has become clear about the US political trend ever since her withdrawal from her self-isolationism in 1945. The success of her internal politics has been regularly dictated by her foreign policy. Thus, many American Presidents have won or lost elections at home due to the foreign policy of the concerned President. Will this also repeat itself? The days ahead will answer this fundamental question as events continue to unfold. But with the objection by China and Russia to using suffocating economic sanctions against the people of Iran, the US may need to watch her steps carefully especially with respect to the aloofness of most European countries to her unilaterally planned invasion of Iran. It must be remembered that Iran is neither Iraq nor Afghanistan. The world cannot afford another World War now. No individual or country should attempt to plunge it into one by taking a country’s military capability for granted. A word is enough for the wise.