Opponents of the war with Iran say that the war is not in American interests, seeing that does not pose any visible threat to the United States. This appeal to reason misses the neocon logic that has guided U.S. foreign policy for more than a half century, and which is now threatening to engulf the Middle East in the most violent war since Korea. That logic is so aggressive, so repugnant to most people, so much in violation of the basic principles of international law, the United Nations and the U.S. Constitution, that there is an understandable shyness in the authors of this strategy to spell out what is at stake.
What is at stake is the U.S. attempt to control the Middle East and its oil as a buttress of U.S. economic power, and to prevent other countries from moving to create their own autonomy from the U.S.-centered neoliberal order administered by the IMF, World Bank and other international institutions to reinforce U.S. unipolar power.
Around 1974 or 1975 there was much talk of creation a New International Economic Order (NIEO). I was working at the Hudson Institution with Herman Kahn on international finance and trade, and he brought me to sit in on a military strategy discussion of plans being made already at that time to possibly overthrow Iran and break it up into ethnic parts. Herman found the weakest spot to be Baluchistan, on Iran’s northeast border with Pakistan. The Kurds, Tajiks and the Turkic Azerbaijanis are others whose ethnicities were to be played off against each other, giving U.S. diplomacy a key potential client dictatorship to reshape both Iranian and Pakistani political orientation if need be.
Three decades later, by 2003, General Wesley Clark pointed to Iran as being the capstone of seven countries that the United States needed to control in order to dominate the Middle East, starting with Iraq and Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan, culminating in Iran.
From the view of U.S. strategists, the emergence of China’s industrial socialism poses an existential danger to U.S. unipolar control in providing a model that other countries might seek to join to recover the national sovereignty that has been steadily eroded in recent decades.
The motivation has nothing to do with Iran’s attempt to protect its national sovereignty by developing an atom bomb. The basic problem is that the United States has taken the initiative in trying to pre-empt Iran and other countries from breaking away from dollar hegemony.
Here’s how the neocons spell out the U.S. national interest in overthrowing the Iranian government and introducing a regime change – not necessarily a secular democratic regime change, but perhaps an extension of the ISIS-Al Qaida Syrian Wahabi terrorists.
With Iran and its component parts turned into a set of client oligarchies, U.S. diplomacy can control Near Eastern oil. And control of oil has been a cornerstone of U.S. international economic power for a century, thanks to U.S. oil companies operating internationally and also as domestic U.S. producers of oil and gas. Control of Near Eastern oil also means control of the vast holdings of U.S. Treasury securities and private-sector investments by Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries.
Iran also is a key to blocking Russian development via the Caspian and access to the south. Under U.S. control, an Iranian client regime could threaten Russia from its southern flank, bypassing the Suez Canal.
To the Neocons, this makes Iran a central pivot on which U.S. national interest is based – if you define that national interest as creating a coercive empire of client states.
The ostensible US military budget actually is much larger than is reported in the bill. Congress funds it in two ways: The obvious way is by direct arms purchases paid for by Congress directly. Less acknowledged is MIC spending routed via U.S. foreign military aid to its allies – Ukraine, Israel, South Korea, Europe and Asian countries to buy U.S. arms. This shows the extent to which the military burden is what normally accounts for the entire U.S. budget deficit and hence the rise in ostensible government debt (much of it self-financed by the Federal Reserve since 2008, to be sure).
