By:Tashbih Sayyed, Ph. D.
Iran's intransigence on the nuclear issue confirms its confidence that the US will not be able to mobilize an international coalition to dissuade it from pursuing the nuclear program. This confidence is a commentary on the state of world affairs as they exist today.
On one side, there are indications that Russia and China will always find an excuse to provide Iran with diplomatic protection at the UN Security Council while, on the other side, some of the United States' friends are also finding it uncomfortable to go along with the sole superpower. These attitudes are not aberrations, but stem from historical reasons.
As the Soviet Union disintegrated, the US emerged as the world's sole superpower. The idea of the US being in this role was comforting. It took away the option from the rogue states to play one superpower against the other and keep the world in a perpetual state of tension, suggesting a future without big power conflicts and thus of peace and stability. It was thought that as an unchallenged superpower, the US could impose peace in regions that lack stability, fermenting religious and ethnic extremism.
These hopes of a peaceful world were based on the assumption that in a post Cold War era, the challenge to Americanism will be reduced to a manageable level. But what everyone failed to realize was that it was historically incorrect to expect Russia to play a second fiddle to any power for long. The optimism also didn't take into account that Germany and France, with their own nationalism to satisfy, were nurturing their own ambitions. The success of the European Union gave them reasons to believe that they could compete with the US
The People's Republic of China was another state that had a history of fighting off the Western influences: it too couldn't have accepted US leadership. The demolition of the Soviet Union actually encouraged China to accelerate its efforts to become a superpower itself.
And then there was political Islam, which felt a religious obligation to do everything possible to prevent a "Judeo-Christian" power from being in control of the world affairs. The manner in which it interpreted its holy book instructed it to seek each and every opportunity to get rid of the Judeo-Christian-Hindu influences from this world. To fulfill this "holy" obligation, political Islam had been fighting Judeo-Christian and Hindu powers for centuries.
Political Islam held Judeo-Christian powers responsible for the Crusades, demolishing its caliphate and establishing the Jewish State in the midst of its heartland. The fire to avenge the humiliation was always in the Islamist's heart and the US only refueled that fire in its desire to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The victory in Afghanistan created the impression among jihadis that if they could defeat one superpower, they could also defeat the other one.
The "holy war" in Afghanistan affected political Islam in many ways. It helped the Islamists who were scattered all over the world and lacked the ability to connect with each other find a mechanism to organize themselves on scientific lines. It provided them with a base - Al-Qaeda - and the means to fund the movement. It helped in institutionalizing the phenomenon of non-state terrorist groups.
The recent developments in the Middle East and South Asia clearly indicate that all these contenders to the status of world superpower have joined hands against the US Signs abound that countries like North Korea, Iran and Syria are being used by these adversaries to test Washington's resolve in following through on its stated foreign policy objectives and to undermine the authority so essential in the realization of its stated mission.
Just as Washington backed the Afghan jihad, Moscow is now backing insurgency in Iraq and terrorism in Palestine and Lebanon. The Russian involvement in Iraq to undermine the US is not new. An unclassified Pentagon report released in March, 2006, cited two captured Iraqi documents that say the Russians collected information from sources "inside the American Central Command" and that battlefield intelligence was provided to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein through the Russian ambassador in Baghdad.
According to Pavel Felgenhauer, a Moscow-based military analyst, the report was within the realm of possibility. He said a unit affiliated with the defense ministry's main intelligence department was actively working in Iraq at the time of the US invasion of Iraq.
The relationship between Russia and Hezbollah is also old, reaching to the early 1970's. Imam Moussa Al-Sadr, a spiritual leader of the Lebanese Shia community, visited Moscow in 1972 and asked Soviet authorities to issue humanitarian aid to his people. Soviet military intelligence (GRU) worked very closely with the PLO leadership.
Several Soviet officers (speaking fluent Arabic) even visited Palestinian terrorist training camps in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon during 1972-1975. Using their connections in PLO they managed to establish contact with Iranian opposition members and radical Lebanese Shiite groups, which also were training in Palestinian camps at that time. These contacts, later on, between Shiite extremists and GRU officers, allowed Soviet leaders access to the AMAL and the Hezbollah leaders.
On its side, China is not far behind. Beijing is providing the much needed support to Pyongyang to continue with its nuclear program and is also believed by many to have already supplied Iran with the necessary wherewithal to surprise the world with some kind of a nuclear explosion. In the Chinese view, the US has few, if any, realistic options with respect to Iran and North Korea, apart from appealing to China for help-which will not be forthcoming in any meaningful sense of the term.
US military action, in the Chinese view, is basically a bluff because both rogue regimes are already nuclear powers with the ability to launch devastating attacks on American allies-Israel, in the case of Iran, and South Korea and Japan, in the North Korean case.
According to reports, China is sending nuclear technology to Iran in exchange for oil and allowing North Korea to use Chinese air, rail and seaports to ship missiles and other weapons. And according to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, "China's continued failure to adequately curb its proliferation practices poses significant national security concerns to the United States.
It seems that the US will have to act alone as the world at large doesn't share the US view of Iran being an imminent threat.
(Tashbih Sayyed is the Editor in Chief of Pakistan Today and The Muslim World Today, President of Council for Democracy and Tolerance, an adjunct fellow of Hudson Institute, and a regular columnist for newspapers across the world.)
