Is history repeating itself, asks Ayman El-Amir* The Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki has completed the first phase of negotiations with the US over the long-term strategic agreement that will govern relations between the occupying power and occupied Iraq for decades to come. It will be supplemented by a "status of forces" agreement outlining the privileges and immunities of the 50,000-strong US military force that will be stationed in Iraq well beyond the formal withdrawal of the occupation army. Iraq will thus be incorporated into the "Axis of the Good" that includes the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council where the US has developed and maintains sprawling military bases and other facilities, encircling Iran and controlling the southern entrance to the Straits of Hormuz. Fifty years after the demise of the Baghdad Pact (1955-1958) the military alliance has not only been reborn, but is more expansive, with US Central Command at the helm and Iran replacing the former Soviet Union as the adversary. In 1955, when the Cold War and the nuclear arms race between the former Soviet Union and the US had reached fever pitch, the Arab world was also undergoing deep transformation triggered by the Nasser-led 1952 Egyptian revolution. Egypt's emerging role as a beacon of national liberation in the Arab region and in Africa was coveted by both superpowers though for different reasons. The Soviet Union, reversing the old-era Stalinist approach, wanted to embrace Third World revolutionary movements as a bulwark against the old imperial and colonial powers. The US secretary of state at the time, John Foster Dulles, was obsessed with the idea of blocking Communist expansion towards the Middle East which occupied strategic routes, waterways, and possessed burgeoning oil wealth. The Baghdad Pact sought to build a military alliance comprising the US, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, setting a wall against the Soviet Union at both the southern tip of NATO (Turkey) and the northern tier of the Western alliance (Pakistan). The strategy did not sit well with Nasser. He was interested in playing both sides of the street, capitalising on the approaches of the two superpowers. His ultimate aim was to build on his concept of Pan Arabism as his power-base for the revival of Arab cohesion under his leadership. Nasser not only refused to join the pact but attacked it repeatedly as an attempt by old imperial powers (Britain later joined the US in the alliance) to sneak back into the Arab world and dominate it. Nasser fired up Arab sentiment against the Baghdad Pact which he considered the antithesis to his Pan Arabism ambitions. Three years later the pact collapsed and was buried under the 1958 leftist- leaning Iraqi military revolution of Abdul-Karim Kassem, which toppled the monarchy and dragged the mutilated bodies of its symbols through the streets of Baghdad. Dulles's failure to contain the Communist expansion through the doomed Baghdad Pact was not the only blow to US policy in the region. It had been preceded by the Czech-Egyptian arms deal in 1955, arranged by the Soviet Union, and the 1958 Soviet agreement to help build the High Dam after the US had nixed the World Bank's favourable consideration of the project. Former US president Richard Nixon told president Anwar El-Sadat's national security adviser Hafez Ismail when he received him at the White House in February 1973 that Washington's withdrawal of the project was "a mistake". The nadir of US policy in the Middle East came in 1963. In August of that year Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev was visiting the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He told me -- I was working as a wire service bureau chief based in Belgrade at the time -- during a brief interview on the northernmost Adriatic island of Brioni, that he was going to visit Egypt in the summer of 1964 at the invitation of President Nasser. He did visit Egypt in June 1964 on the occasion of the diversion of the course of the River Nile, a critical stage in building the body of the High Dam. The news story, insignificant as it may appear, sent shockwaves through the West. It meant that the communist Soviet Union had not only leapt over NATO's southern barricade outflanking it but that Soviet leader Khrushchev had realised, with one bold stroke, the centuries-old dream of the Russian Czars to have access to the warm waters of the Mediterranean. Although Nasser and Khrushchev had their differences the visit cemented Egyptian-Soviet relations for two decades. It gave the Soviet Union a gateway to the Arab world and to Africa. Until its disintegration in 1990, the Soviet Union was never encircled or disabled, and its influence reached as far as Angola in southern Africa. The Soviet empire has been gone for nearly two decades now, leaving the US to shape the new international order. As the US cornered the world it abused it. It went from the war against terror in Afghanistan to the war against Iraq to abetting Israel's genocidal war against the Palestinians and is now building the case to wage war against Iran, at Israel's prodding. For a brief period after the invasion of Iraq it brandished democratic transformation in the face of entrenched Arab dictators. However, as Jon Alterman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies put it, "after vowing to transform the Middle East, the administration is submitting to it, resorting to the process-driven incremental diplomacy that previous administrations had pursued and that this administration had disdained". The Bush administration was persuaded by its closest allies in the Middle East that, in serving US goals, dictatorship has its merits. They will turn out to be wrong. To guarantee its interest in controlling the flow of oil from the Gulf and to de-claw its old enemy, Iran, the US ringed the six Arab Gulf States with a string of huge military bases housing a sophisticated war machine. From the naval base of the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to the command and control centre in Kuwait, to air bases in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Oman, and prospective troop pre-positioning in Iraq, the US now commands the most destructive firepower in history. An interesting sidelight is that all these countries still consider themselves upstanding members of the Movement of Non-Aligned States formed in 1958 with the pre-condition that none of its participants should have any foreign military base or presence on its territory. The guns and missiles are all trained on Iran, defined by the US, at the behest of Israel, as the region's rogue state. In the heyday of the 1950s Secretary of State Dulles and his agents tried to persuade Nasser that the expansion of Communism, not that of Israel, was his greatest enemy. Fifty-three years later, as Israel continues to murder Palestinians, occupy Arab territories and demonstrate daily that it is the most violent state on earth, the US is persuading Gulf Arab states that it is Iran, not Israel, that poses the greatest threat to their security. Together with other members of the axis of the moderates they are playing along, refinancing the US budget deficit arising from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan by purchasing billions of dollars worth of arms that they will never use. They are buying regime protection with petrodollars. Iran has been marked as the region's rogue state because it is challenging Israel's military and political supremacy -- a role that Egypt used to play before it withdrew from the Arab-Israeli confrontation and signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Iran is striving to fill the vacuum left by the failure of Nasser's Pan Arabism, so-called Arab socialism and by the free market economy, though not political liberalisation, as introduced by former Egyptian president Anwar El-Sadat. Iran's "Islamic" revolution of 1979 introduced religious nationalism as an antidote to neo-colonial expansion. This coincided with the Muslim Brotherhood's 1970s slogan "Islam is the solution". Islamic nationalism became a new political ideology, taking extreme forms in the shape of Al-Qaeda. What the US, Israel and the West are fighting tooth and nail against is not just the phenomenon of terrorism, which they introduced in the world in the first place by colonial wars, but against the new threat of religious nationalism that seeks to unite Muslims worldwide. To stem the tide US-Israeli strategists could find no better way of foiling the rising Islamic movement than to fight Islam with Islam, fanning the flames of a Shia- Sunni conflict and selling it to the Gulf Cooperation Council members -- mainly Saudi Arabia. This was the plan introduced by the first colonial administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, after the 2003 US invasion. He divided Iraq into three ethnically-based sub-regions: the Kurds in the north, the Sunnis in the centre and the Shia in the south. This is the plan the US Congress endorsed in 2007 in a non-binding resolution. It is the colonial strategy of divide and rule all over again. The winds of regional confrontation are blowing strong, puffed by the warrior state of Israel. The envisioned long-term agreement to pre-position US troops in Iraq to complete the encirclement of Iran, to dominate the region and to secure it for US-Israeli interests will not work. It is a surefire recipe for Islamic nationalists to wage jihad against the US and the West for decades. Jihadism, terrorism and rebellion have become the weapons of the helpless. A military strike against Iran will set the whole region aflame, rekindle war against Israel and hurt the vital oil interests on which both the West and the Gulf countries depend. The US is rallying Western European countries against Iran's ambitions to acquire nuclear technology in the same way it rallied a ragtag alliance of its partners to invade Iraq under the pretext of ridding it of the weapons of mass destruction it never possessed. The GCC countries have a great deal at stake. The presence of foreign military forces in Arab territories, no matter how circumspect it may appear, is a casus belli for Islamic and non-religious nationalists alike. Saudi Arabia, for one, has taken firm steps to reduce the number of US troops and military technicians in the country's bases after their presence had fuelled the cause of Al-Qaeda and its clandestine sympathisers within the kingdom. US heavy-handedness, Israeli intimidation tactics, its genocidal war against the Palestinians and the perpetuation of Arab dictatorships have combined to arrest the transformation of the greater Middle East region. It is a restive region that is yearning for fundamental change and not cosmetic reform that suits Western interests and their regional allies. The US has inherited the colonial legacy of grabbing and securing its interests by military hegemony. Israel followed the same myopic approach; Nasser's Pan Arabism against neo-colonial military alliances is being revisited. Nasser and his Pan Arabism suffered a humiliating defeat in 1967, from which the regime did not recover until Sadat launched the October 1973 War. The Gulf Arab states are wallowing in the windfall profits of the $114-barrel of oil, leaving it to Washington's string of garrisons to protect them and the oil bonanza. Like the Baghdad Pact, it will prove a short- lived strategy. When the army officers of the 1958 revolution overthrew the monarchy they shredded the Baghdad Pact treaty. A story that circulated at the time was that they cut off the forefinger of the mutilated body of the Iraqi prime minister who signed it, gift-wrapped it with the pen he signed it with and sent them both to Nasser. The prime minister's name was Nuri Al-Said. * The writer is former Al-Ahram correspondent in Washington, DC. He also served as director of United Nations Radio and Television in New York.
