China

Chavez is the king of Latin America, and the number of potential US allies among the pseudo-populist regimes, such as in Brazil, is diminishing by the day. - Pepe Escobar. Read the rest of this entry � UMC News: China.

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IT DON’T MEAN A THING IF IT AIN’T GOT THAT EURASIAN SWING

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.

—James Joyce, Ulysses

… I saw the Aleph, from all points I saw in the Aleph the earth and in the earth once again the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth, I saw my face and my viscera, I saw your face, and I felt vertigo and I cried, because my eyes had seen this secret and conjectural object, whose name men usurp but which no man has seen: the inconceivable universe.

—Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph

General Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war?

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: No, I don’t think I do, sir, no.

General Jack D. Ripper: He said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

—Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove

In his short story The Aleph Jorge Luis Borges—that South American Buddha in a grey suit—leads his narrator to discover “the place where we find, without confusion, all the places in the orb, seen from all of the angles” in the basement of a house in Buenos Aires. For the past few years I have had a feeling that the Aleph might be found in Iran, perhaps in fabled Isfahan, the pearl of Shah Abbas which in the 17th Century reached its full splendor, impressed in the famous rhyme Esfahan nesf-e jahan (“Isfahan is half the world”).

Figure 1. The world centered on Isfahan.

Perhaps the Aleph would be in the Meidun, the fabulous square built in 1612—the Persian answer to Saint Mark’s in Venice. Perhaps inside Sheikh Lotfollah mosque, whose intricately-painted dome tiles progressively change color from cream to strong pink as the days wear out and the light reflection forming the tail of a legendary painted peacock on the dome’s roof also, imperceptibly, moves. We may spend hours, days, light-years absorbing this living meditation on the architecture of light. The peacock’s tail inside an Isfahani mosque, now that would be a smashing location for the Aleph.

And why not? After all, Isfahan is at the center of Eurasia, roughly equidistant from Paris and Shanghai. And Eurasia is the geopolitical pivot of the world. Would the Aleph be there, it would be nothing but echoing the great 12th Century Persian poet Nezami Ghandjavi, who in the famous Haft Peykar (“The Seven Portraits”) wrote that “The world is the body and Iran is its heart.”

Iran is at the key intersection of the Arab, Turk, Indian and Russian worlds. It’s at the key intersection of the Middle East, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Indian subcontinent and the Persian Gulf. It sits between three seas—the Caspian, the Persian Gulf and the sea of Oman. It’s not far from Europe (in fact it will border Europe if and when Turkey accedes to the E.U.). And it’s a neighbor to Asia (in fact it is in Southwest Asia). Iran is the ultimate crossroads in the heart of Eurasia.

Now about that oil, gas, Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and Caspian Sea node. Not for nothing Khalij-e-Fars, in Farsi, means exactly “Persian Gulf.” So Iran—the largest, most populous and most stable nation of Southwest Asia, strategically straddling most of the world’s oil and gas reserves—is at the ideal crossroads for the distribution of oil and gas to South Asia, Europe and East Asia as both China and India emerge as two of the 21st Century superpowers. That is, Iran is the Great Prize par excellence. Maybe a larger than life Aleph.

Now suppose you are the world’s only superpower with a foreign policy hijacked by neocons of the armchair warrior kind. What you’re gonna do? You’re gonna declare that you want regime change in Iran—betraying your dream scenario of relieving a puppet in power just like that former tortured soul, the Shah Reza Pahlavi.

Iran is completely surrounded by U.S. military bases in the Gulf, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Turkey, in Central Asia, in Iraq, in Cyprus, and in Turkey, not to mention Israel, a naval base in Oman close to the hyper-strategic Strait of Hormuz (transit point of half the oil sold globally) and another, naval and air base, in the Indian Ocean, in Diego Garcia. Not that Iranian public opinion is particularly freaking out. Osama bin Laden, riding his Flying Carpet One cross legged with a giant F-16 breathing on his neck, side by side with a map of Iran surrounded by Uncle Sam’s big guns: that was the cover of a magazine on political studies I found at the University of Tehran only a few months after George W. Bush’s first Axis of Evil speech.

U.S. Global Strike planning is able in half a day to smash over 10,000 targets simultaneously in Iran in just one mission using “smart” conventional weapons carried by more than 200 strategic bombers (B-52s, B-1s, B-2s and F-117As). This would mean an even deadlier remix of Shock and Awe over Iraq—destroying the bulk of the political, military, economic and transport infrastructure of Iran. Some “minor” complementary issues should be added on, like mini-nukes redefined as “defensive weapons” thus “safe for civilians” because “the explosion is underground,” as well as what Israel would be doing with some 5,000 “smart air launched weapons” it bought from the U.S., including 500 BLU 109 bunker busters.

Who actually wants this mini-Armageddon unleashed over the descendants of Cyrus the Great and Darius I? We find a sort of coalition (of the willing) special interests camouflaged behind national interests, linking Pentagon civilians of the armchair warrior kind, neocons in key government positions, an array of pro-Israeli organizations, Armageddon believers (call them Western Taliban), a great deal of the U.S. mainstream media and a minority of U.S. citizens. Neocons dismiss the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is adamant: Iran’s civilian nuclear energy program has no military wing. Neocons dismiss the CIA, which has made clear that any possible Iranian WMD would not materialize before 2015. Neocons have even cynically abandoned their “freedom agenda” for the Middle East. No more democracy-inducing Shock and Awe: what’s left is just pure Jack D. Ripper logic.

Against mini-Armageddon on Iran we find a majority of retired U.S. military officials, Big Oil (for which, on a cost/benefit basis, this is very bad business), virtually all the Christian and Muslim organizations, the majority of U.S. public opinion and virtually all of the world’s public opinion.

These special interests bent on mini-Armageddon derive outstanding business profits from one of the key intersections of Globalistan: globalization and war. In the Middle East the economic interests of the U.S. military-industrial complex happen to merge with the geopolitical interests of Eretz Israel (Greater Israel) proponents. During the binary, bipolar Cold War the U.S. rationale was to fight the communist specter. In Globalistan the specter remixed are the barbaric hordes of “Islamo-fascist” terror, Axis of Evil states, “rogue” states and failed states (after all “rogue” states are easier to locate on a map than “terrorists”). As informed Americans are well aware institutional framework and respectability for this agenda is provided by a plethora of militaristic, jingoistic think tanks which work closely with the Pentagon, the industrial-military complex and the powerful Israeli lobby (which could be described as a junior partner in this association).

The neocons profited immensely from 9/11 and the subsequent, nonsensical “war on terror” (which basically—literally?—means war on war). But the mighty profiteer of the neocon drive was actually the U.S. Corporatistan node of the military-industrial complex. Moreover the U.S. ruling class gets paid in tax money by the lower classes; that could not have been a more cunning mechanism of wealth distribution (1% of Americans control 40% of the country’s wealth). Of all key neocon players a majority are former executives, consultants or shareholders of major Defense contractors. Think tanks may predominate in the (non) debate of ideas. But those really calling the shots are the military-industrial complex. This is all about business—not ideology. And Long, infinite, permanent war is an extremely profitable business.

The mini-Armageddon over Iran would mean the fulfillment of most dreams outlined in Rebuilding America’s Defenses, the supremacist roadmap concocted by the warmongering neocon think tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in 2000, which could be defined as the Cheney/Wolfowitz roadmap. The “direct imposition of U.S. ‘forward bases’ throughout Central Asia and the Middle East” has been accomplished—sort of. But preventing the emergence of any potential “rival” or any viable alternative to “free market economy” implies smashing Iran. Further on down the militaristic road there’s the “revolution in military affairs” (RMA), which is obsessed with the accumulation of high tech weapons systems for pulverizing infrastructure, but not interested in conquering hearts and minds; the “Strategic Defense Initiative”; and the total militarization of space. “Preemptive war” has already been further enhanced in the March 2005 Pentagon National Defense Strategy, to the benefit of “proactive war.” Amid all this frenzy the Council on Foreign Relations was forced to admit, at its 2005 annual conference, that by 2010 the U.S. “will be spending more money than the rest of the world on defense.”

By the summer of 2006 all the—ominous—signs were “on the table” (copyright Donald Rumsfeld) for all to see. The Pentagon had its former “war on terror” rebranded as The Long War; Dick Cheney swore that the genuine article will last for decades, a replay of the war between Eastasia and Oceania in Orwell’s 1984. George W. Bush had issued a “wild speculation” non-denial denial that the U.S. was planning strategic nuclear strikes against Iran. A “new Hitler”—but wasn’t he Saddam Hussein in 1991 and then Saddam remixed in 2003?—had also been rebranded and his name was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President, while the previous Hitler was still alive fighting – and then being sentenced to hang – by a kangaroo court in Baghdad.

Ahmadinejad was incessantly depicted by the ideological machine as an angry, totally irrational, Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying, Islamo-fascist who wanted to “wipe Israel off the map.” The quote, repeated ad nauseam, came from an October 2005 speech. But what he really said, in Farsi, to an annual anti-Zionist conference in Iran, was that “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” He was actually quoting the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had said the same thing in the early 1980s. He was hoping that an unfair regime (towards Palestine) would be replaced by another one more equitable, not threatening to nuke Israel. It didn’t matter. Just like in a Monty Python sketch the mob could not stop screaming “Witch! Witch!”

How does the leadership in Tehran analyze all this mess? Tactically, they see neocon Washington going no holds barred for regime change—as much as strategically they see it plunged in a take-no-prisoners war on Islam. The proof was the U.S./Israeli alliance in the summer of 2006 Lebanon war. Whatever the spin for world public opinion, nothing will convince the leadership in Tehran of the contrary. Eventual U.N. sanctions against Iran will never be as hardcore as the neocons would dream. No sanctions will force Iran to deviate from its civilian nuclear program. And then one fine day Iran masters enough technology to produce a nuclear bomb. This could certainly happen before the end of the second Bush administration, in January 2009.

What next? George W. Bush—who Gore Vidal calls “the little emperor”—vowed from the deep recesses of his soul that he would never allow Iran to become a nuclear power. It’s another Blues Brothers-inspired Mission from God. So the march to mini-Armageddon may be inevitable. The only ones capable of stopping it would be sensible, rational, influential voices inside the U.S. military complex. Threats will proliferate. And then the White House decides that a preemptive nuclear strike—against a non-nuclear power—is a wiser decision than doing nothing. This Persian-American war would finally configure the U.S., for 1.5 billion Muslims, as Dajjal, a force of evil bent on destroying Islam. The dark side, no less. And against the dark side, all Islam would have to be united—Sunnis and Shiites. Traditional U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, the Gulf petromonarchies (their governments, not their populations) would not be afforded the luxury to sit on the fence: this would mean certain collapse. The Persian-American war could in fact realign the whole Arab-Muslim world. But not exactly the way mini-Armageddon stakeholders see it.

A Trilateral Commission Report presented in a meeting in Tokyo in the summer of 2006 proposes some sound solutions: direct U.S.-Iran negotiations leading to a Regional Middle East Nuclear Council where every declared (and some undeclared) nuclear powers would be represented: U.S., Russia, China, France, the U.K., India, Pakistan, Iran, Israel and Japan. The IAEA would be allowed to inspect anything it wanted, with absolutely no restrictions. Israel would get a “security package” and Iran would be reassured of no regime change attempt. The Middle East and the Maghreb would get a sort of Marshall Plan: Palestine, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt and Algeria would join the WTO and get funds from the World Bank. A regional Middle East Water Council—including Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Palestine and Jordan—would also be implemented, as well as a Middle East Energy Council—including Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran—to take care of regional Pipelineistan, oil security, technology transfers.

Yes, it sounds too smooth to be true. And yes, many of these regimes are not exactly sure they want to be “helped” (or dictated by) the WTO and the Paul Wolfowitz-presided World Bank. This would be a case of the Greater Middle East being achieved not by the barrel of a gun but by “free trade”/market opening for Corporatistan. The marketing ploy would be slightly more sophisticated, and fewer lives would be lost, but the results would be substantially the same.

From the point of view of the Pentagon’s Long War, a strategic nuclear attack on Iran has the obvious merit of being spun to oblivion as the crucial next stage of the war on “radical Islam.” Buried in the militaristic rubble is the fact that Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution, had made clear in the 1980s that production, possession and use of nuclear weapons is against Islam. Russia, China, India, key E.U. players like Germany, and the overwhelming majority of the South still take him at his word. For the Iranian government, the nuclear program is a powerful symbol of independence vis-à-vis what is considered Anglo-Saxon colonialism. The view is shared by Iranians of all social classes and all educational backgrounds. Moreover, Iran is pushing for a leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), stating that every country has the right to a peaceful nuclear program. What Iran officially wants is a nuclear-free zone in West Asia, and that of course includes Israel, the sixth nuclear power in the world with more than 600 nuclear warheads.

German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk seems to be closer to the mark when he says that “if tomorrow was unveiled a new technology which would end Western civilization’s dependence on oil, the clash of civilizations would disappear overnight.” We’re quite far from it, hence The Long War.

The Quadrennial Defense Review—the Pentagon’s strategic document which on 34 times, including the title, calls for a “Long War,” a “Long, Global War” or a “Long, Irregular War” against terror can be interpreted even by an infant as a call for a war on Islam. The Iranian political elite is more than aware that Washington might release Shock and Awe remixed, including the possibility of unilateral nuclear bombing. The question is when. But everyone—reformists included—downplays the possibility of a street revolution toppling the nationalist theocracy, as the neocons’ wishful thinking rules; in the event of a foreign attack virtually the whole population would rally behind the government.

Amid non-stop carpet info-bombing, it’s easy for global citizens to forget that oil and gas had, once again, to be at the heart of the matter. Preventing the emergence of any strategic “rival,” according to PNAC, means the U.S. exercising a sort of strategic veto over the E.U. and Japan in terms of control of energy. Thus the U.S. by all means needs to control Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in the Middle East. Iraq will be a disaster zone for years, if not decades, and there’s no guarantee the U.S. will control its oil reserves. Iran—since 1979—is absolutely off limits, the Big Prize.

From a PNAC/Pentagon point of view, the ultimate nightmare—very plausible in the short to medium term—would be the emergence of a loose alliance of Iran, the Shiite parties in power in Iraq and the Shiites in Hasa in Saudi Arabia controlling a very powerful axis of energy intimately linked to the Asian Energy Security Grid and under the protection of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

An article in the July 2006 issue of Scientific American by U.S. scientists affiliated with the U.S. Electric Power Research Institute suggests that a long term (22d Century) solution to global energy issues would be construction of a superconducting (supercold) grid for transmitting electricity around the globe. It’s interesting that the article is accompanied by a 1981 map drawn by the polymath visionary Buckminster Fuller that illustrates a global pipeline route that avoids prolonged trips across oceans—and thus tracks very closely with the map of Eurasia. Such a project would require trillions of dollars (or euros!) of investment in highly vulnerable insulated pipeline, and a proportionately large investment in pipeline security—by someone.

For now, Iran is the absolutely crucial node of the proposed Asian Energy Security Grid, which includes China, Russia and India. This Grid would do nothing less than bypass Western—especially American—control of energy supplies in the Middle East/Central Asia arc and fuel a real 21st Century industrial revolution all across Asia. It’s no wonder that scores of independent analysts in Iran, Pakistan, China, India and Russia view the U.S. war on Iran as essentially a war of the West against Asia. A surefire way to engender a coming conflict with China is to put its energy supply under threat. David Harvey from New York University and author of The New Imperialism, goes straight to the point: “Whoever controls the Middle East will control the global oil spigot, and who controls the global oil spigot will control the global economy, at least in the near future.”

A war on Iran is a war against China. China created the SCO in June 2001—with Russia and the Central Asians Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as members. At first the SCO was basically a security arrangement to prevent terrorism although officially it was also promoting “cooperation in political affairs, economy and trade, scientific-technical, cultural, and educational spheres as well as in energy, transportation, tourism, and environment protection fields.” It slowly evolved to a series of security, economic and infrastructure agreements, coupled with the odd, joint military exercise. By 2006 Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia had become participating observers. And Afghanistan, the CIS countries and the ASEAN 10 were visitors. All of them could become full members by 2007 or 2008. Thus the SCO, silent as a kung fu master, had suddenly blossomed as a kind of Asian answer to the E.U. and NATO.

It’s very enlightening to contrast the SCO agenda—the wider Asian agenda, in short—with the PNAC/Pentagon worldview. According to its 2006 summit, the SCO:

“has outlined a new norm of international relations aiming at ensuring equal rights for all countries worldwide…a new and non-confrontational model…that calls for discarding the Cold War mentality and transcending ideological differences…”

“opposes interference in other countries’ internal affairs, using the excuse of the differences in cultural traditions, political and social systems, values and models of development.”

“safeguards each other’s sovereignty, security and territorial integrity and in case of emergencies that threaten regional peace, stability and security, we will have immediate consultations and respond effectively to protect our member states.”

“in economic cooperation [ our goal] is to realize a free flow of goods, services, capital and technology by 2020 amongst members.”

“holds that the next Secretary-General of the United Nations should come from Asia.”

It’s also very enlightening to superimpose the list of SCO members and soon-to-be members on the map of Eurasia. Virtually all the big players—with the exception of the U.S. “protectorates” Japan and South Korea—are represented.

The International Conference on Energy and Security: Asian Vision, held in Tehran in the spring of 2006, could not be a better place to examine how scholars and executives from Iran, China, Pakistan, India, Russia, Egypt, Indonesia, Georgia, Venezuela and Germany saw the future. The overall message was unmistakable: they see an interdependence of Asia and “Persian Gulf geo-ecopolitics,” as an Iranian analyst put it. They want the U.S.-Iran nuclear row solved diplomatically. And they bet on Asian integration with Pipelineistan linking the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, South Asia and China.

This Persian Gulf/Asia interplay is more than enshrined. World demand for natural gas will triple from now to 2020. By 2025, Asia will import 80% of its total oil needs, and 80% of this total will be from the Persian Gulf. Chinese executives like Liu Guochen from the Sinochem Corp., based in Amman, admit that China will keep importing energy from unstable areas, and the Middle Kingdom will remain worried about “U.S. hegemony” over the flow of energy resources. That’s why China is frantically diversifying, as Iranian scholar Masoud Akhavan-Kazemi of Razi University puts it, “in its investments, pursuing territorial claims and building up strategic oil reserves.” He foresees Asia facing “great imbalances”; potential for conflict in the Persian Gulf, Russia, Central Asia and the Caspian; insecurity suffered by China, India and Japan vis-à-vis the U.S. drive in Asia; and a Chinese sense of vulnerability as China and the U.S. remain de facto strategic rivals.

Akhavan-Kazemi sees the U.S. pursuing three key objectives. The first two may be shared by some in Asia: guaranteeing the energy flows from Asia to international markets; and trying to stop Russian hegemony. But a crucial factor—which the Russians are keen to point out—is that Iran, India and Pakistan are now observers at the SCO. In the mid to short-term, as the organization develops, “the SCO would be able to protect pipelines going in all directions,” says a Russian oil executive. As for the third American objective —preventing Iran from exporting its gas­— definitely it is not shared by anyone. Akhavan-Kazemi emphasizes that “despite the American military hegemony in the Persian Gulf, its political hegemony is in doubt.”

Most Asian oil and gas executives and scholars agree that the way the game is played today in Pipelineistan, everything is politicized. “When Bush tells India you don’t need to import gas from Iran, that’s totally illogical,” says Albert Bininachvili, a Georgian scholar based in Bologna. “The [alleged Iranian] bomb is a pretext,” says Manouchehr Takin, a senior petroleum upstream analyst based in London. “The Americans don’t want Iran to develop, and that’s equally true of China and Venezuela. We need to talk about security through knowledge.” To sum it all up, Asia does not want an Iran battered by the West; Iran, after all, is part of West Asia.

It took less than a decade for a full Eurasian swing since former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote his landmark 1997 piece “A Geostrategy for Eurasia,” published by Foreign Affairs. Then, for Brzezinski, it was a question of formatting how to keep America’s “global primacy” and “historical legacy” in “the decisive geopolitical chessboard.” It was a time when America was still viewed as “the indispensable nation.”

Brzezinski may be criticized for being “past his sell-by date,” but it’s important to follow his thinking through time for two reasons: he’s a solid practitioner of realpolitik, as much as Henry Kissinger or Brent Scowcroft; and he’s dedicated a lot of effort to formulate and publicly explain a U.S. Eurasian policy. A testament to the remarkable continuity of the American hegemonic project—irrespective of who is in power —‌is that Brzezinski’s “swingin’ into Eurasia” master plan was enthusiastically incorporated by PNAC, the subsequent Bush-Cheney system and U.S. Corporatistan. It was always clear that the implementation of Brzezinski’s agenda would presuppose a Pentagon on a cocktail of steroids and vigilant, non-stop manufacture of internal consent—a state of affairs only arrived at after 9/11.

Brzezinski is a keen Mackinder disciple. Sir Halford John Mackinder (1861-1947) is the celebrated father of geopolitics who in 1902 introduced to the Royal Geographic Society his famous paper The Geographic Pivot of History, where he developed the Heartland Theory. According to Mackinder the “world island” was Europe, Asia and Africa, and the “islands” were the Americas, Australia, the British Isles and Japan. The Heartland stretched from the Volga to the YangTze and from the Arctic to the Himalayas. The key for a true global power was to control Eurasia. As the Mackinder formula enunciated, “who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the world-island; who rules the world-island controls the world.”

Mackinder-drenched Brzezinski correctly stated in his piece that “all the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia” (although, by another historical irony, the last two superpowers, the British Empire and the U.S., were “islands”). As “the world’s axial super continent,” any power in control of Eurasia “would exercise decisive influence over two of the world’s three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia.” This would answer Immanuel Wallerstein’s question of which of the members of the Triad dominates the capitalist world system in the next phase.

Brzezinski wanted “the emergence of strategically compatible partners which, prompted by American leadership, might shape a more cooperative trans-Eurasian security system.” Yet he could never have predicted the emergence of the SCO as a counter-power.

Brzezinski stated that “America’s status as the world’s premier power is unlikely to be contested by any single challenger for more than a generation. No state is likely to match the United States in the four key dimensions of power‌—military, economic, technological, and cultural—that confer global political clout.” Yet the U.S. has been challenged in at least two—economic and technological. “Culture” means essentially pop culture—Hollywood, pop rock, TV series, reality shows—but global challenges abound, from world music to Bollywood, from world cinema to Mexican and Brazilian telenovelas. Wallerstein and Professor Eric Hobsbawm would argue that the only dimension of power left for the U.S. is the military. Brzezinski’s dream of “a benign American hegemony” is gone.

Figure 2. Mackinder’s abstract rendition of the relationship between the World Island and its satellites in Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).

Brzezinski correctly noted “like insular Britain in the case of Europe, Japan is politically irrelevant to the Asian mainland.” But he did not believe that China was likely to become a global dominant power for a long time. Brzezinski may have anticipated the Chinese demographic crisis caused by the one-child policy—the U.S., with its younger population and less stress on its “carrying capacity,” is in a much better demographic position—but maybe he should review the Chinese economic data.

Brzezinski essentially dreamed of an emasculated E.U. “A larger Europe will expand the range of American influence without simultaneously creating a Europe so politically integrated that it could challenge the United States on matters of geopolitical importance, particularly in the Middle East.” He was thinking in terms of a batch of new eastern European members eager to join NATO and benefit from E.U. cash, but not interested in integration. He was not thinking in terms of France and Germany, supported by Spain and Italy, working towards deepening European political integration.

America, for Brzezinski, “should also support Turkish aspirations to have a pipeline from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Ceyhan on its own Mediterranean coast [to] serve as a major outlet for the Caspian sea basin energy reserves.” The result was the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, of which Brzezinski himself was a major instigator.

But the crucial point still is what Brzezinski, a realpolitik practitioner, had to say about Iran. The solution, for him, definitely was not Shock and Awe. “It is not in America’s interest to perpetuate U.S.-Iranian hostility. Any eventual reconciliation should be based on both countries’ recognition of their mutual strategic interest in stabilizing Iran’s volatile regional environment. A strong, even religiously motivated—but not fanatically anti-Western— Iran is still in the U.S. interest. American long-range interests in Eurasia would be better served by abandoning existing U.S. objections to closer Turkish-Iranian economic cooperation, especially in the construction of new pipelines from Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. In fact, American financial participation in such projects would be to America’s benefit.”

Brzezinski dreamed of the U.S. having a “decisive role as Eurasia’s arbitrator.” Eurasia’s stability, in his view, “would be enhanced by the emergence, perhaps early in the next century, of a trans-Eurasian security system. Such a transcontinental security arrangement might involve an expanded NATO, linked by cooperative security agreements with Russia, China, and Japan. But to get there, Americans and Japanese must first set in motion a triangular political-security dialogue that engages China.” Forget about an expanded NATO. Forget about Japan engaging China. The future of Eurasia seems to be spelling “SCO” plus Asian Energy Security Grid.

Cue to 9 years later. Nathan Gardels, editor-in-chief of a journal of social and political thought published by Global Services of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune, asks Brzezinski whether military superiority leads to eternal enmity or to more security. Brzezinski’s answer could not be more realpolitik: “The lessons of Iraq speak for themselves. Eventually, if neocon policies continue to be pursued, the United States will be expelled from the region and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as well.”

Brzezinski refined his new worldview—but up to a point—in a September 2006 interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel. He admitted we were now in a historic stage of “global political awakening” in which “people in China and India, but also in Nepal, in Bolivia or Venezuela will no longer tolerate the enormous disparities in the human condition.” But he framed this upheaval not in terms of a global struggle for a more equitable system, but in terms of a collective danger, a “challenge to global stability.” Irrepressibly the hegemonic, he still viewed “the American leadership role vulnerable, but irreplaceable in the foreseeable future.” Well, let’s plunge into liquid modernity—or “space-velocity,” as French cross-cultural analyst Paul Virilio put it—and see for ourselves.

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IT DON’T MEAN A THING IF IT AIN’T GOT THAT EURASIAN SWING

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.

—James Joyce, Ulysses

… I saw the Aleph, from all points I saw in the Aleph the earth and in the earth once again the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth, I saw my face and my viscera, I saw your face, and I felt vertigo and I cried, because my eyes had seen this secret and conjectural object, whose name men usurp but which no man has seen: the inconceivable universe.

—Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph

General Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war?

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: No, I don’t think I do, sir, no.

General Jack D. Ripper: He said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

—Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove

In his short story The Aleph Jorge Luis Borges—that South American Buddha in a grey suit—leads his narrator to discover “the place where we find, without confusion, all the places in the orb, seen from all of the angles” in the basement of a house in Buenos Aires. For the past few years I have had a feeling that the Aleph might be found in Iran, perhaps in fabled Isfahan, the pearl of Shah Abbas which in the 17th Century reached its full splendor, impressed in the famous rhyme Esfahan nesf-e jahan (“Isfahan is half the world”).

Figure 1. The world centered on Isfahan.

Perhaps the Aleph would be in the Meidun, the fabulous square built in 1612—the Persian answer to Saint Mark’s in Venice. Perhaps inside Sheikh Lotfollah mosque, whose intricately-painted dome tiles progressively change color from cream to strong pink as the days wear out and the light reflection forming the tail of a legendary painted peacock on the dome’s roof also, imperceptibly, moves. We may spend hours, days, light-years absorbing this living meditation on the architecture of light. The peacock’s tail inside an Isfahani mosque, now that would be a smashing location for the Aleph.

And why not? After all, Isfahan is at the center of Eurasia, roughly equidistant from Paris and Shanghai. And Eurasia is the geopolitical pivot of the world. Would the Aleph be there, it would be nothing but echoing the great 12th Century Persian poet Nezami Ghandjavi, who in the famous Haft Peykar (“The Seven Portraits”) wrote that “The world is the body and Iran is its heart.”

Iran is at the key intersection of the Arab, Turk, Indian and Russian worlds. It’s at the key intersection of the Middle East, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Indian subcontinent and the Persian Gulf. It sits between three seas—the Caspian, the Persian Gulf and the sea of Oman. It’s not far from Europe (in fact it will border Europe if and when Turkey accedes to the E.U.). And it’s a neighbor to Asia (in fact it is in Southwest Asia). Iran is the ultimate crossroads in the heart of Eurasia.

Now about that oil, gas, Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and Caspian Sea node. Not for nothing Khalij-e-Fars, in Farsi, means exactly “Persian Gulf.” So Iran—the largest, most populous and most stable nation of Southwest Asia, strategically straddling most of the world’s oil and gas reserves—is at the ideal crossroads for the distribution of oil and gas to South Asia, Europe and East Asia as both China and India emerge as two of the 21st Century superpowers. That is, Iran is the Great Prize par excellence. Maybe a larger than life Aleph.

Now suppose you are the world’s only superpower with a foreign policy hijacked by neocons of the armchair warrior kind. What you’re gonna do? You’re gonna declare that you want regime change in Iran—betraying your dream scenario of relieving a puppet in power just like that former tortured soul, the Shah Reza Pahlavi.

Iran is completely surrounded by U.S. military bases in the Gulf, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Turkey, in Central Asia, in Iraq, in Cyprus, and in Turkey, not to mention Israel, a naval base in Oman close to the hyper-strategic Strait of Hormuz (transit point of half the oil sold globally) and another, naval and air base, in the Indian Ocean, in Diego Garcia. Not that Iranian public opinion is particularly freaking out. Osama bin Laden, riding his Flying Carpet One cross legged with a giant F-16 breathing on his neck, side by side with a map of Iran surrounded by Uncle Sam’s big guns: that was the cover of a magazine on political studies I found at the University of Tehran only a few months after George W. Bush’s first Axis of Evil speech.

U.S. Global Strike planning is able in half a day to smash over 10,000 targets simultaneously in Iran in just one mission using “smart” conventional weapons carried by more than 200 strategic bombers (B-52s, B-1s, B-2s and F-117As). This would mean an even deadlier remix of Shock and Awe over Iraq—destroying the bulk of the political, military, economic and transport infrastructure of Iran. Some “minor” complementary issues should be added on, like mini-nukes redefined as “defensive weapons” thus “safe for civilians” because “the explosion is underground,” as well as what Israel would be doing with some 5,000 “smart air launched weapons” it bought from the U.S., including 500 BLU 109 bunker busters.

Who actually wants this mini-Armageddon unleashed over the descendants of Cyrus the Great and Darius I? We find a sort of coalition (of the willing) special interests camouflaged behind national interests, linking Pentagon civilians of the armchair warrior kind, neocons in key government positions, an array of pro-Israeli organizations, Armageddon believers (call them Western Taliban), a great deal of the U.S. mainstream media and a minority of U.S. citizens. Neocons dismiss the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is adamant: Iran’s civilian nuclear energy program has no military wing. Neocons dismiss the CIA, which has made clear that any possible Iranian WMD would not materialize before 2015. Neocons have even cynically abandoned their “freedom agenda” for the Middle East. No more democracy-inducing Shock and Awe: what’s left is just pure Jack D. Ripper logic.

Against mini-Armageddon on Iran we find a majority of retired U.S. military officials, Big Oil (for which, on a cost/benefit basis, this is very bad business), virtually all the Christian and Muslim organizations, the majority of U.S. public opinion and virtually all of the world’s public opinion.

These special interests bent on mini-Armageddon derive outstanding business profits from one of the key intersections of Globalistan: globalization and war. In the Middle East the economic interests of the U.S. military-industrial complex happen to merge with the geopolitical interests of Eretz Israel (Greater Israel) proponents. During the binary, bipolar Cold War the U.S. rationale was to fight the communist specter. In Globalistan the specter remixed are the barbaric hordes of “Islamo-fascist” terror, Axis of Evil states, “rogue” states and failed states (after all “rogue” states are easier to locate on a map than “terrorists”). As informed Americans are well aware institutional framework and respectability for this agenda is provided by a plethora of militaristic, jingoistic think tanks which work closely with the Pentagon, the industrial-military complex and the powerful Israeli lobby (which could be described as a junior partner in this association).

The neocons profited immensely from 9/11 and the subsequent, nonsensical “war on terror” (which basically—literally?—means war on war). But the mighty profiteer of the neocon drive was actually the U.S. Corporatistan node of the military-industrial complex. Moreover the U.S. ruling class gets paid in tax money by the lower classes; that could not have been a more cunning mechanism of wealth distribution (1% of Americans control 40% of the country’s wealth). Of all key neocon players a majority are former executives, consultants or shareholders of major Defense contractors. Think tanks may predominate in the (non) debate of ideas. But those really calling the shots are the military-industrial complex. This is all about business—not ideology. And Long, infinite, permanent war is an extremely profitable business.

The mini-Armageddon over Iran would mean the fulfillment of most dreams outlined in Rebuilding America’s Defenses, the supremacist roadmap concocted by the warmongering neocon think tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in 2000, which could be defined as the Cheney/Wolfowitz roadmap. The “direct imposition of U.S. ‘forward bases’ throughout Central Asia and the Middle East” has been accomplished—sort of. But preventing the emergence of any potential “rival” or any viable alternative to “free market economy” implies smashing Iran. Further on down the militaristic road there’s the “revolution in military affairs” (RMA), which is obsessed with the accumulation of high tech weapons systems for pulverizing infrastructure, but not interested in conquering hearts and minds; the “Strategic Defense Initiative”; and the total militarization of space. “Preemptive war” has already been further enhanced in the March 2005 Pentagon National Defense Strategy, to the benefit of “proactive war.” Amid all this frenzy the Council on Foreign Relations was forced to admit, at its 2005 annual conference, that by 2010 the U.S. “will be spending more money than the rest of the world on defense.”

By the summer of 2006 all the—ominous—signs were “on the table” (copyright Donald Rumsfeld) for all to see. The Pentagon had its former “war on terror” rebranded as The Long War; Dick Cheney swore that the genuine article will last for decades, a replay of the war between Eastasia and Oceania in Orwell’s 1984. George W. Bush had issued a “wild speculation” non-denial denial that the U.S. was planning strategic nuclear strikes against Iran. A “new Hitler”—but wasn’t he Saddam Hussein in 1991 and then Saddam remixed in 2003?—had also been rebranded and his name was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President, while the previous Hitler was still alive fighting – and then being sentenced to hang – by a kangaroo court in Baghdad.

Ahmadinejad was incessantly depicted by the ideological machine as an angry, totally irrational, Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying, Islamo-fascist who wanted to “wipe Israel off the map.” The quote, repeated ad nauseam, came from an October 2005 speech. But what he really said, in Farsi, to an annual anti-Zionist conference in Iran, was that “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” He was actually quoting the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had said the same thing in the early 1980s. He was hoping that an unfair regime (towards Palestine) would be replaced by another one more equitable, not threatening to nuke Israel. It didn’t matter. Just like in a Monty Python sketch the mob could not stop screaming “Witch! Witch!”

How does the leadership in Tehran analyze all this mess? Tactically, they see neocon Washington going no holds barred for regime change—as much as strategically they see it plunged in a take-no-prisoners war on Islam. The proof was the U.S./Israeli alliance in the summer of 2006 Lebanon war. Whatever the spin for world public opinion, nothing will convince the leadership in Tehran of the contrary. Eventual U.N. sanctions against Iran will never be as hardcore as the neocons would dream. No sanctions will force Iran to deviate from its civilian nuclear program. And then one fine day Iran masters enough technology to produce a nuclear bomb. This could certainly happen before the end of the second Bush administration, in January 2009.

What next? George W. Bush—who Gore Vidal calls “the little emperor”—vowed from the deep recesses of his soul that he would never allow Iran to become a nuclear power. It’s another Blues Brothers-inspired Mission from God. So the march to mini-Armageddon may be inevitable. The only ones capable of stopping it would be sensible, rational, influential voices inside the U.S. military complex. Threats will proliferate. And then the White House decides that a preemptive nuclear strike—against a non-nuclear power—is a wiser decision than doing nothing. This Persian-American war would finally configure the U.S., for 1.5 billion Muslims, as Dajjal, a force of evil bent on destroying Islam. The dark side, no less. And against the dark side, all Islam would have to be united—Sunnis and Shiites. Traditional U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, the Gulf petromonarchies (their governments, not their populations) would not be afforded the luxury to sit on the fence: this would mean certain collapse. The Persian-American war could in fact realign the whole Arab-Muslim world. But not exactly the way mini-Armageddon stakeholders see it.

A Trilateral Commission Report presented in a meeting in Tokyo in the summer of 2006 proposes some sound solutions: direct U.S.-Iran negotiations leading to a Regional Middle East Nuclear Council where every declared (and some undeclared) nuclear powers would be represented: U.S., Russia, China, France, the U.K., India, Pakistan, Iran, Israel and Japan. The IAEA would be allowed to inspect anything it wanted, with absolutely no restrictions. Israel would get a “security package” and Iran would be reassured of no regime change attempt. The Middle East and the Maghreb would get a sort of Marshall Plan: Palestine, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt and Algeria would join the WTO and get funds from the World Bank. A regional Middle East Water Council—including Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Palestine and Jordan—would also be implemented, as well as a Middle East Energy Council—including Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran—to take care of regional Pipelineistan, oil security, technology transfers.

Yes, it sounds too smooth to be true. And yes, many of these regimes are not exactly sure they want to be “helped” (or dictated by) the WTO and the Paul Wolfowitz-presided World Bank. This would be a case of the Greater Middle East being achieved not by the barrel of a gun but by “free trade”/market opening for Corporatistan. The marketing ploy would be slightly more sophisticated, and fewer lives would be lost, but the results would be substantially the same.

From the point of view of the Pentagon’s Long War, a strategic nuclear attack on Iran has the obvious merit of being spun to oblivion as the crucial next stage of the war on “radical Islam.” Buried in the militaristic rubble is the fact that Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution, had made clear in the 1980s that production, possession and use of nuclear weapons is against Islam. Russia, China, India, key E.U. players like Germany, and the overwhelming majority of the South still take him at his word. For the Iranian government, the nuclear program is a powerful symbol of independence vis-à-vis what is considered Anglo-Saxon colonialism. The view is shared by Iranians of all social classes and all educational backgrounds. Moreover, Iran is pushing for a leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), stating that every country has the right to a peaceful nuclear program. What Iran officially wants is a nuclear-free zone in West Asia, and that of course includes Israel, the sixth nuclear power in the world with more than 600 nuclear warheads.

German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk seems to be closer to the mark when he says that “if tomorrow was unveiled a new technology which would end Western civilization’s dependence on oil, the clash of civilizations would disappear overnight.” We’re quite far from it, hence The Long War.

The Quadrennial Defense Review—the Pentagon’s strategic document which on 34 times, including the title, calls for a “Long War,” a “Long, Global War” or a “Long, Irregular War” against terror can be interpreted even by an infant as a call for a war on Islam. The Iranian political elite is more than aware that Washington might release Shock and Awe remixed, including the possibility of unilateral nuclear bombing. The question is when. But everyone—reformists included—downplays the possibility of a street revolution toppling the nationalist theocracy, as the neocons’ wishful thinking rules; in the event of a foreign attack virtually the whole population would rally behind the government.

Amid non-stop carpet info-bombing, it’s easy for global citizens to forget that oil and gas had, once again, to be at the heart of the matter. Preventing the emergence of any strategic “rival,” according to PNAC, means the U.S. exercising a sort of strategic veto over the E.U. and Japan in terms of control of energy. Thus the U.S. by all means needs to control Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in the Middle East. Iraq will be a disaster zone for years, if not decades, and there’s no guarantee the U.S. will control its oil reserves. Iran—since 1979—is absolutely off limits, the Big Prize.

From a PNAC/Pentagon point of view, the ultimate nightmare—very plausible in the short to medium term—would be the emergence of a loose alliance of Iran, the Shiite parties in power in Iraq and the Shiites in Hasa in Saudi Arabia controlling a very powerful axis of energy intimately linked to the Asian Energy Security Grid and under the protection of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

An article in the July 2006 issue of Scientific American by U.S. scientists affiliated with the U.S. Electric Power Research Institute suggests that a long term (22d Century) solution to global energy issues would be construction of a superconducting (supercold) grid for transmitting electricity around the globe. It’s interesting that the article is accompanied by a 1981 map drawn by the polymath visionary Buckminster Fuller that illustrates a global pipeline route that avoids prolonged trips across oceans—and thus tracks very closely with the map of Eurasia. Such a project would require trillions of dollars (or euros!) of investment in highly vulnerable insulated pipeline, and a proportionately large investment in pipeline security—by someone.

For now, Iran is the absolutely crucial node of the proposed Asian Energy Security Grid, which includes China, Russia and India. This Grid would do nothing less than bypass Western—especially American—control of energy supplies in the Middle East/Central Asia arc and fuel a real 21st Century industrial revolution all across Asia. It’s no wonder that scores of independent analysts in Iran, Pakistan, China, India and Russia view the U.S. war on Iran as essentially a war of the West against Asia. A surefire way to engender a coming conflict with China is to put its energy supply under threat. David Harvey from New York University and author of The New Imperialism, goes straight to the point: “Whoever controls the Middle East will control the global oil spigot, and who controls the global oil spigot will control the global economy, at least in the near future.”

A war on Iran is a war against China. China created the SCO in June 2001—with Russia and the Central Asians Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as members. At first the SCO was basically a security arrangement to prevent terrorism although officially it was also promoting “cooperation in political affairs, economy and trade, scientific-technical, cultural, and educational spheres as well as in energy, transportation, tourism, and environment protection fields.” It slowly evolved to a series of security, economic and infrastructure agreements, coupled with the odd, joint military exercise. By 2006 Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia had become participating observers. And Afghanistan, the CIS countries and the ASEAN 10 were visitors. All of them could become full members by 2007 or 2008. Thus the SCO, silent as a kung fu master, had suddenly blossomed as a kind of Asian answer to the E.U. and NATO.

It’s very enlightening to contrast the SCO agenda—the wider Asian agenda, in short—with the PNAC/Pentagon worldview. According to its 2006 summit, the SCO:

“has outlined a new norm of international relations aiming at ensuring equal rights for all countries worldwide…a new and non-confrontational model…that calls for discarding the Cold War mentality and transcending ideological differences…”

“opposes interference in other countries’ internal affairs, using the excuse of the differences in cultural traditions, political and social systems, values and models of development.”

“safeguards each other’s sovereignty, security and territorial integrity and in case of emergencies that threaten regional peace, stability and security, we will have immediate consultations and respond effectively to protect our member states.”

“in economic cooperation [ our goal] is to realize a free flow of goods, services, capital and technology by 2020 amongst members.”

“holds that the next Secretary-General of the United Nations should come from Asia.”

It’s also very enlightening to superimpose the list of SCO members and soon-to-be members on the map of Eurasia. Virtually all the big players—with the exception of the U.S. “protectorates” Japan and South Korea—are represented.

The International Conference on Energy and Security: Asian Vision, held in Tehran in the spring of 2006, could not be a better place to examine how scholars and executives from Iran, China, Pakistan, India, Russia, Egypt, Indonesia, Georgia, Venezuela and Germany saw the future. The overall message was unmistakable: they see an interdependence of Asia and “Persian Gulf geo-ecopolitics,” as an Iranian analyst put it. They want the U.S.-Iran nuclear row solved diplomatically. And they bet on Asian integration with Pipelineistan linking the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, South Asia and China.

This Persian Gulf/Asia interplay is more than enshrined. World demand for natural gas will triple from now to 2020. By 2025, Asia will import 80% of its total oil needs, and 80% of this total will be from the Persian Gulf. Chinese executives like Liu Guochen from the Sinochem Corp., based in Amman, admit that China will keep importing energy from unstable areas, and the Middle Kingdom will remain worried about “U.S. hegemony” over the flow of energy resources. That’s why China is frantically diversifying, as Iranian scholar Masoud Akhavan-Kazemi of Razi University puts it, “in its investments, pursuing territorial claims and building up strategic oil reserves.” He foresees Asia facing “great imbalances”; potential for conflict in the Persian Gulf, Russia, Central Asia and the Caspian; insecurity suffered by China, India and Japan vis-à-vis the U.S. drive in Asia; and a Chinese sense of vulnerability as China and the U.S. remain de facto strategic rivals.

Akhavan-Kazemi sees the U.S. pursuing three key objectives. The first two may be shared by some in Asia: guaranteeing the energy flows from Asia to international markets; and trying to stop Russian hegemony. But a crucial factor—which the Russians are keen to point out—is that Iran, India and Pakistan are now observers at the SCO. In the mid to short-term, as the organization develops, “the SCO would be able to protect pipelines going in all directions,” says a Russian oil executive. As for the third American objective —preventing Iran from exporting its gas­— definitely it is not shared by anyone. Akhavan-Kazemi emphasizes that “despite the American military hegemony in the Persian Gulf, its political hegemony is in doubt.”

Most Asian oil and gas executives and scholars agree that the way the game is played today in Pipelineistan, everything is politicized. “When Bush tells India you don’t need to import gas from Iran, that’s totally illogical,” says Albert Bininachvili, a Georgian scholar based in Bologna. “The [alleged Iranian] bomb is a pretext,” says Manouchehr Takin, a senior petroleum upstream analyst based in London. “The Americans don’t want Iran to develop, and that’s equally true of China and Venezuela. We need to talk about security through knowledge.” To sum it all up, Asia does not want an Iran battered by the West; Iran, after all, is part of West Asia.

It took less than a decade for a full Eurasian swing since former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote his landmark 1997 piece “A Geostrategy for Eurasia,” published by Foreign Affairs. Then, for Brzezinski, it was a question of formatting how to keep America’s “global primacy” and “historical legacy” in “the decisive geopolitical chessboard.” It was a time when America was still viewed as “the indispensable nation.”

Brzezinski may be criticized for being “past his sell-by date,” but it’s important to follow his thinking through time for two reasons: he’s a solid practitioner of realpolitik, as much as Henry Kissinger or Brent Scowcroft; and he’s dedicated a lot of effort to formulate and publicly explain a U.S. Eurasian policy. A testament to the remarkable continuity of the American hegemonic project—irrespective of who is in power —‌is that Brzezinski’s “swingin’ into Eurasia” master plan was enthusiastically incorporated by PNAC, the subsequent Bush-Cheney system and U.S. Corporatistan. It was always clear that the implementation of Brzezinski’s agenda would presuppose a Pentagon on a cocktail of steroids and vigilant, non-stop manufacture of internal consent—a state of affairs only arrived at after 9/11.

Brzezinski is a keen Mackinder disciple. Sir Halford John Mackinder (1861-1947) is the celebrated father of geopolitics who in 1902 introduced to the Royal Geographic Society his famous paper The Geographic Pivot of History, where he developed the Heartland Theory. According to Mackinder the “world island” was Europe, Asia and Africa, and the “islands” were the Americas, Australia, the British Isles and Japan. The Heartland stretched from the Volga to the YangTze and from the Arctic to the Himalayas. The key for a true global power was to control Eurasia. As the Mackinder formula enunciated, “who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the world-island; who rules the world-island controls the world.”

Mackinder-drenched Brzezinski correctly stated in his piece that “all the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia” (although, by another historical irony, the last two superpowers, the British Empire and the U.S., were “islands”). As “the world’s axial super continent,” any power in control of Eurasia “would exercise decisive influence over two of the world’s three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia.” This would answer Immanuel Wallerstein’s question of which of the members of the Triad dominates the capitalist world system in the next phase.

Brzezinski wanted “the emergence of strategically compatible partners which, prompted by American leadership, might shape a more cooperative trans-Eurasian security system.” Yet he could never have predicted the emergence of the SCO as a counter-power.

Brzezinski stated that “America’s status as the world’s premier power is unlikely to be contested by any single challenger for more than a generation. No state is likely to match the United States in the four key dimensions of power‌—military, economic, technological, and cultural—that confer global political clout.” Yet the U.S. has been challenged in at least two—economic and technological. “Culture” means essentially pop culture—Hollywood, pop rock, TV series, reality shows—but global challenges abound, from world music to Bollywood, from world cinema to Mexican and Brazilian telenovelas. Wallerstein and Professor Eric Hobsbawm would argue that the only dimension of power left for the U.S. is the military. Brzezinski’s dream of “a benign American hegemony” is gone.

Figure 2. Mackinder’s abstract rendition of the relationship between the World Island and its satellites in Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).

Brzezinski correctly noted “like insular Britain in the case of Europe, Japan is politically irrelevant to the Asian mainland.” But he did not believe that China was likely to become a global dominant power for a long time. Brzezinski may have anticipated the Chinese demographic crisis caused by the one-child policy—the U.S., with its younger population and less stress on its “carrying capacity,” is in a much better demographic position—but maybe he should review the Chinese economic data.

Brzezinski essentially dreamed of an emasculated E.U. “A larger Europe will expand the range of American influence without simultaneously creating a Europe so politically integrated that it could challenge the United States on matters of geopolitical importance, particularly in the Middle East.” He was thinking in terms of a batch of new eastern European members eager to join NATO and benefit from E.U. cash, but not interested in integration. He was not thinking in terms of France and Germany, supported by Spain and Italy, working towards deepening European political integration.

America, for Brzezinski, “should also support Turkish aspirations to have a pipeline from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Ceyhan on its own Mediterranean coast [to] serve as a major outlet for the Caspian sea basin energy reserves.” The result was the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, of which Brzezinski himself was a major instigator.

But the crucial point still is what Brzezinski, a realpolitik practitioner, had to say about Iran. The solution, for him, definitely was not Shock and Awe. “It is not in America’s interest to perpetuate U.S.-Iranian hostility. Any eventual reconciliation should be based on both countries’ recognition of their mutual strategic interest in stabilizing Iran’s volatile regional environment. A strong, even religiously motivated—but not fanatically anti-Western— Iran is still in the U.S. interest. American long-range interests in Eurasia would be better served by abandoning existing U.S. objections to closer Turkish-Iranian economic cooperation, especially in the construction of new pipelines from Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. In fact, American financial participation in such projects would be to America’s benefit.”

Brzezinski dreamed of the U.S. having a “decisive role as Eurasia’s arbitrator.” Eurasia’s stability, in his view, “would be enhanced by the emergence, perhaps early in the next century, of a trans-Eurasian security system. Such a transcontinental security arrangement might involve an expanded NATO, linked by cooperative security agreements with Russia, China, and Japan. But to get there, Americans and Japanese must first set in motion a triangular political-security dialogue that engages China.” Forget about an expanded NATO. Forget about Japan engaging China. The future of Eurasia seems to be spelling “SCO” plus Asian Energy Security Grid.

Cue to 9 years later. Nathan Gardels, editor-in-chief of a journal of social and political thought published by Global Services of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune, asks Brzezinski whether military superiority leads to eternal enmity or to more security. Brzezinski’s answer could not be more realpolitik: “The lessons of Iraq speak for themselves. Eventually, if neocon policies continue to be pursued, the United States will be expelled from the region and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as well.”

Brzezinski refined his new worldview—but up to a point—in a September 2006 interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel. He admitted we were now in a historic stage of “global political awakening” in which “people in China and India, but also in Nepal, in Bolivia or Venezuela will no longer tolerate the enormous disparities in the human condition.” But he framed this upheaval not in terms of a global struggle for a more equitable system, but in terms of a collective danger, a “challenge to global stability.” Irrepressibly the hegemonic, he still viewed “the American leadership role vulnerable, but irreplaceable in the foreseeable future.” Well, let’s plunge into liquid modernity—or “space-velocity,” as French cross-cultural analyst Paul Virilio put it—and see for ourselves.

... rather than turning to the next in line, former president Hashemi Rafsanjani. Such a move, though, would lead to the isolation of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. - Pepe Escobar. Read the rest of this entry � UMC News: China.

Globalistan: How the Globalized World Is Dissolving into Liquid War

Pepe Escobar

Nimble Books LLC

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Contents

INTRODUCTION.. ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. xii

IT DON’T MEAN A THING IF IT AIN’T GOT THAT EURASIAN SWING.. 1

GLOBALISTAN.. 15

PIPELINEISTAN.. 41

Putin’s pipeline chess 48

The Iranian counterpunch. 50

The Golden Gate of the New Silk Road. 61

Jumpin’ South Pars, it’s a gas, gas, gas 63

Who will profit from Iraq’s oil?. 66

CORPORATISTAN: THE DUBAI POST‑OIL DREAM.. 71

JIHADISTAN.. 83

A prologue. 84

OSAMASTAN.. 105

AMERICASTAN IN BABYLON.. 113

ERETZ ISRAEL MEETS ARABISTAN.. 135

TALIBANISTAN.. 149

The day the “war on terror” was lost 150

Iiiiiiiiiiiit’s back! The Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan. 163

SHIITEISTAN.. 169

CHINDIA. 185

India: “Full power!” 190

Workers (flush with cash) unite! 196

THE GAZPROM NATION AND ITS “NEAR ABROAD” 213

FORTRESS EUROPEISTAN.. 231

(SOUTH) AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL. 249

Meet Hugo Boss 255

9/11 South. 261

AFRICASTAN.. 277

NUCLEARISTAN.. 289

PETROEUROSTAN?. 303

CONDOFORNIA VERSUS SLUMISTAN.. 315

Babylon revisited. 319

CODA: BEYOND HUBRIS. 337

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY. 343

SOURCES FOR THE FIGURES. 348

GREATER BLOGISTAN.. 349

INDEX, GLOSSARY & FREE PDF UPDATES. 352

ORDERING IN A BOOKSTORE. 352

DIRECT SALES POLICY. 352

US AND INTERNATIONAL RIGHTS. 352

PUBLISHING WITH NIMBLE BOOKS. 353

ABOUT NIMBLE BOOKS LLC. 353

COLOPHON.. 354

Table of Figures

Figure 1. The world centered on Isfahan. 2

Figure 2. Mackinder’s abstract rendition of the relationship between the World Island and its satellites in Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919). 12

Figure 3. GDP per capita (PPP), Robinson projection. 25

Figure 4. GDP per capita (WorldMapper). 26

Figure 5. Walls in history and the present day. 31

Figure 6. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (Deparment of Energy). 43

Figure 7. Kazakhstan (CIA World Factbook). 53

Figure 8. Turkmenistan (CIA World Factbook). 57

Figure 9. The New Silk Road. 62

Figure 10. The United Arab Emirates from space (NASA). The Corporatistan playground of Dubai is surrounded by sand. 81

Figure 11. Rumored locations of Osama bin Laden, 2001-2006. 106

Figure 12. Commaland (Ken Layne/Wonkette.com). 115

Figure 13. Giap is adamant: “The strategy of popular war is of a protracted war.” (CIA World Factbook). 119

Figure 14. A photomap of the crowded Gaza strip (CIA). 147

Figure 15. Poverty in Gaza and the West Bank. In the darkest areas, more than 40% of the population is below the poverty line (CIESIN). 148

Figure 16. Rectangular cartogram of the world’s population (Bettina Speckmann, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven). 186

Figure 17. The globe centered on Mumbai. 192

Figure 18. The globe centered on Shanghai. 199

Figure 19. Data from the 2000 China census showing counties by percentage of nonagricultural population: darker is more urban, lighter is more agricultural. Most of China is still predominantly agricultural (China Data Center). 207

Figure 20. The globe centered on Moscow. 214

Figure 21. The Gazprom nation looks east. 223

Figure 22. Lorenzetti’s Effects of Good Government. 232

Figure 23. E.U. members and candidates are shaded (European Union). 235

Figure 24. The globe viewed from Brussels. Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia are all in relatively close proximity to the E.U. 237

Figure 25. The globe centered on Caracas. Venezuela is well positioned to connect South America to the rest of the world; but it is also, inescapably, in close proximity to the U.S. 252

Figure 26. A new star has joined Mercosur, but in 2006 the change had not yet been reflected in the organization’s logo. 257

Figure 27. Mercosur membership 2006 (Mercosur). 261

Figure 28. In this inverted map, black dots represent “night lights” visible from space. The densely populated and highly developed areas of northwestern Europe are packed with lights. Most of Africa is dark at night. 280

Figure 29. Large portions of China and the entirety of South Korea and Japan are within 2000 km Nodong-2 range of Pyongyang. 291

Figure 30. The accident at Chernobyl caused worldwide panic as radiation spread across the globe. The dispersion plume is seen here in a view looking down from above the North Pole. A U.S. nuclear attack using tactical nuclear “bunker busters” on North Korea or Iran might cause more or less radioactive material to be released, but the resulting panic would inevitably be much greater. 292

Figure 31. Megacities in 2015 (Kraas). 326

Figure 32. Only 18 countries are net exporters of royalty and license fees, which play a key role in California’s great wealth (IMF via WorldMapper). 330

Figure 33. Absolute poverty, less than $2/day (WorldMapper). 331

To all you nomadic readers out there

INTRODUCTION

If the hoar frost grip thy tent

Thou wilt give thanks when night is spent

—Ezra Pound, Canto LXXXIV

You are holding a warped travel book. This warped travel book remixes three main themes: globalization, energy wars and the Pentagon’s Long War, originally packaged as the “war on terror.” Call it a—what else—war travel book. Or a warped geopolitical travel book.

You will be traveling mostly in the arc from Middle East to Central Asia, but also in China, Russia, Western Europe, Western Africa, South America. You’re going to revisit the asymmetrical wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. You’re going to crisscross the Islamic world. You’re going to follow a lot of pipelines. You’ll be acquainted with the Iran the next war will probably hit. You’ll see how national resistance wars have nothing to do with “terrorism.” You’ll be confronted over and over again with “strategic competitor” Asia—where the future of the 21st Century is being played out. You’re going to revisit how, where and who profits from economic globalization and especially war corporatism. You’ll see how more trade does not necessarily mean more peace. You’ll see how and where possible New Orders are emerging, and Old Orders disintegrating. And you will finish the pilgrimage back in the middle of a—predictable—global war of the privileged few against the excluded many.

9/11 was the first globalization war. Our warped travel book argues we are now living an intestinal war, an undeclared global civil war. In this early 21st Century context of re-medievalization, where those who control power control weapons, money and The Word, this book also aims to provide a counter-narrative.

You will cross a lot of “stans.” The re-medievalized world is being fragmented into “stans,” some very exclusive (Pipelineistan, Europeistan, Nuclearistan), some feeding on war (Talibanistan, Americastan in Iraq), some regarded as a supreme threat (Shiiteistan), some spreading like a virus (Slumistan). We still live in a world of nation-states. But you will see that as civilian peace between nations and their populations is being slashed, basically because of economic imperatives, now virtually everyone seems to be threatened by a permanent state of emergence—which is just another way of referring to a global state of siege. This includes of course the plural culture of Islam constantly demonized in a lethal magma as The Barbarian Other—that silly “clash of civilizations” working out as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You may ask where I’m coming from. Well, to talk about nomad global wars it helps being a nomad—and a pure product of globalization. As a writer I have lived and worked in North and South America, Western Europe and all across Asia and Islam; since the end of the Cold War I have been tracking the West drunk on its own secular mission civilisatrice, eager to globalize Russia, China, Islam/Arabia, Africa. Home is wherever I happen to be. Not accidentally this short introduction comes from one of the great world cities, to the sound of electronic tango. Or as they say in Bangkok and Hong Kong, it comes from “the other side of the world.” For me it makes perfect sense being in the Paris of South America dreaming of Asia and selected cities of the heart (and work)– Kabul, Baghdad, Tehran, Peshawar.

You should know that I do not answer to any corporate sponsor; no political party; no intelligence agency; no academic body; no think tank. And I got nothing to spin. The online publication I write for—Asia Times, owned by a Sino-Thai visionary businessman and based in Thailand/Hong Kong—allows me total freedom of expression.

This book is another way to tell a story—dissected by towering figures like Immanuel Wallerstein, Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrick Beck or Gabriel Kolko—from the ground level. Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity gave me the inspiration for “Liquid War.” Only then I found out there was already a videogame called Liquid War. Pop culture rules! The game, whose basic rules are inspired by Japanese go, is described as a sort of “psychedelic action” where strategy is crucial. Sounds like a definition of the world out there. Indonesia would say the world out there is like wayang theatre—we see the shadows, but we never see the puppeteer.

Beyond strategic and political conflict, Liquid War tends towards the destruction of singular cultures and everything capable of resisting globalization. Its optimum is anthropological genocide. If the future is being configured by Liquid War all actors are positioning themselves for the decisive moment, the catharsis in Greek drama, when Liquid War boils to the point of Hot War. Dear Leader Kim Jong-il is a weak link; his acts are very revealing, denouncing real fears. So are Hugo Chávez’s.

Revered Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh prays that we may all escape the wheel of samsara—our addiction to nefarious vicious circles. If only we could accumulate enough compassion—instead of designer weapons: “touched by the Dharma,” we would have an instrument to cut through the wheel of samsara, we would not legate so much bad karma for future generations, we would escape this demented war logic.

Hope lies in selected humanitarian, social, juridical and ecological NGOs, and the emergence of globally connected civil society. Even Professor Stephen Hawking, with his global-sized brain, does not know “how can the human race sustain another 100 years.” He admitted: “I don’t know the answer,” suggesting improvements in genetic engineering to make humans less addicted to war.

Perhaps Groovemaster General James Brown had come up with the best answer after all: it’s time to get funky. But on a less escapist level, maybe what we need is a post-modern Paolo Ucello. We have to come up with a different real time perspective for virtual space, learn how to deal with the telecity, the metacity, telesex, telepolitics, telewar. Paul Virilio warned us that the end of geopolitics is leading us to metropolitics. The enemy is undeclared. The logic is of fear. And widespread urban panic is already drowning for good the political character of the City.

Military/intelligence elites of Globalistan are all immersed in electronic tracking of deterritorialization, monitoring every turbulence caused by globalization—local conflicts, the shrinking of the middle classes, abysmal poverty, incipient civil wars, Salafi-jihadist reaction. Conflicts should be perpetuated, just about anywhere, but without turning into irreparable catastrophe. For these elites, this is just a technical matter. A question of managing chaos.

Robert Musil wrote that parallel universes could be as relevant as reality. Physicists go for a Multiverse that resembles boiling water (where, in Michiko Kaku’s words, “the Judeo-Christian genesis takes place within the Buddhist nirvana, all the time”). In philosophical terms, the universe itself may even be a dream. I wonder what Jorge Luis Borges would make of all this. Against our world of nomad wars and Liquid War he would probably counterpunch with a dazzling play on cultures, History and signs. Could it be Kim Jong-il drinking an absinthe at the café La Puerto Rico? Could it be George W. Bush browsing books on Islam at the venerable Libreria del Colegio? Could it be Osama bin Laden dancing a tango with one of his wives at the ultra-atmospheric Bar Sur?

If only Liquid War was no more harmful than a drink. So here’s to you, dear reader, a glass of fabulous Malbec. Cheers. Now let’s hit the road.

Buenos Aires

September 2006

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not exist without my publisher Fred Zimmerman’s vision and drive. Then there are those scores of extraordinary, hard-working people I have met on the road, in China, Russia, the “stans” in Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, south India, southeast Asia, Dubai, Qatar, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, Western Africa, across the US, South America… You know who you are, and my admiration for you knows no bounds.

I owe special gratitude to the critical perspective of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world system analysis and to Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity, which inspired Liquid War.

Arif Jamal in Islamabad, K. Gajendra Singh in Bucharest, Professor Paulo Alves de Lima and Islamic scholar Rosalie Pereira in Sao Paulo, and Fréderic Maduraud in Brussels have offered precious insight. In the early 2000s Khawar Mehdi and Majeed Babar in Peshawar and Afghanistan have been priceless. A very special thanks to the people in the Red Zone in Baghdad and the Sunni belt, the clerical establishment in Najaf, Mahmoud Daryadel, Emadeddin Baghi and Babak Pirouz in Tehran, Professor Rasul Amin in Peshawar, Mohammad Khan Stanikzai in Kabul, Olga Uzhegova in Almaty, Rustam Muslimov in Tashkent, Yulya Zhukov in Ashgabat, Punyavee Pharktham in Bangkok.

Asia Times publisher Sondhi Limthongkul has always been very generous and tremendously supportive. A heartfelt thanks to the Asia Times team in Thailand and Hong Kong, plus Alex, Cher and Joe in Guangzhou (the guys who translate my stories into Mandarin). Over the years, the ice cool copywrong gang in Paris and Brussels has provided good times, caring, hospitality, encouragement and fabulous conversation. And of course my wife Cecilia is always a blast—top of the world in a nutshell.

The soundtrack for this book has been Theme Time Radio Hour, “Themes, Schemes and Dreams… with your host Bob Dylan,” courtesy of www.‍whitemanstew‌.com. Either talking about Irma Thomas “as a snow leopard ready to pounce” or spinning Sonny Boy Williamson’s Eyesight to the Blind, Bob’s vinyl guerrilla took no prisoners. Thanks, Bob! To wrap things up, this book is dedicated to my son Nicholas, diver extraordinaire, a wise fellow whose brand of Liquid War is of the “scuttling-across-the-floors-of-silent-seas” kind.

~ 1 ~

IT DON’T MEAN A THING IF IT AIN’T GOT THAT EURASIAN SWING

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.

—James Joyce, Ulysses

… I saw the Aleph, from all points I saw in the Aleph the earth and in the earth once again the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth, I saw my face and my viscera, I saw your face, and I felt vertigo and I cried, because my eyes had seen this secret and conjectural object, whose name men usurp but which no man has seen: the inconceivable universe.

—Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph

General Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war?

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: No, I don’t think I do, sir, no.

General Jack D. Ripper: He said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

—Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove

In his short story The Aleph Jorge Luis Borges—that South American Buddha in a grey suit—leads his narrator to discover “the place where we find, without confusion, all the places in the orb, seen from all of the angles” in the basement of a house in Buenos Aires. For the past few years I have had a feeling that the Aleph might be found in Iran, perhaps in fabled Isfahan, the pearl of Shah Abbas which in the 17th Century reached its full splendor, impressed in the famous rhyme Esfahan nesf-e jahan (“Isfahan is half the world”).

Figure 1. The world centered on Isfahan.

Perhaps the Aleph would be in the Meidun, the fabulous square built in 1612—the Persian answer to Saint Mark’s in Venice. Perhaps inside Sheikh Lotfollah mosque, whose intricately-painted dome tiles progressively change color from cream to strong pink as the days wear out and the light reflection forming the tail of a legendary painted peacock on the dome’s roof also, imperceptibly, moves. We may spend hours, days, light-years absorbing this living meditation on the architecture of light. The peacock’s tail inside an Isfahani mosque, now that would be a smashing location for the Aleph.

And why not? After all, Isfahan is at the center of Eurasia, roughly equidistant from Paris and Shanghai. And Eurasia is the geopolitical pivot of the world. Would the Aleph be there, it would be nothing but echoing the great 12th Century Persian poet Nezami Ghandjavi, who in the famous Haft Peykar (“The Seven Portraits”) wrote that “The world is the body and Iran is its heart.”

Iran is at the key intersection of the Arab, Turk, Indian and Russian worlds. It’s at the key intersection of the Middle East, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Indian subcontinent and the Persian Gulf. It sits between three seas—the Caspian, the Persian Gulf and the sea of Oman. It’s not far from Europe (in fact it will border Europe if and when Turkey accedes to the E.U.). And it’s a neighbor to Asia (in fact it is in Southwest Asia). Iran is the ultimate crossroads in the heart of Eurasia.

Now about that oil, gas, Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and Caspian Sea node. Not for nothing Khalij-e-Fars, in Farsi, means exactly “Persian Gulf.” So Iran—the largest, most populous and most stable nation of Southwest Asia, strategically straddling most of the world’s oil and gas reserves—is at the ideal crossroads for the distribution of oil and gas to South Asia, Europe and East Asia as both China and India emerge as two of the 21st Century superpowers. That is, Iran is the Great Prize par excellence. Maybe a larger than life Aleph.

Now suppose you are the world’s only superpower with a foreign policy hijacked by neocons of the armchair warrior kind. What you’re gonna do? You’re gonna declare that you want regime change in Iran—betraying your dream scenario of relieving a puppet in power just like that former tortured soul, the Shah Reza Pahlavi.

Iran is completely surrounded by U.S. military bases in the Gulf, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Turkey, in Central Asia, in Iraq, in Cyprus, and in Turkey, not to mention Israel, a naval base in Oman close to the hyper-strategic Strait of Hormuz (transit point of half the oil sold globally) and another, naval and air base, in the Indian Ocean, in Diego Garcia. Not that Iranian public opinion is particularly freaking out. Osama bin Laden, riding his Flying Carpet One cross legged with a giant F-16 breathing on his neck, side by side with a map of Iran surrounded by Uncle Sam’s big guns: that was the cover of a magazine on political studies I found at the University of Tehran only a few months after George W. Bush’s first Axis of Evil speech.

U.S. Global Strike planning is able in half a day to smash over 10,000 targets simultaneously in Iran in just one mission using “smart” conventional weapons carried by more than 200 strategic bombers (B-52s, B-1s, B-2s and F-117As). This would mean an even deadlier remix of Shock and Awe over Iraq—destroying the bulk of the political, military, economic and transport infrastructure of Iran. Some “minor” complementary issues should be added on, like mini-nukes redefined as “defensive weapons” thus “safe for civilians” because “the explosion is underground,” as well as what Israel would be doing with some 5,000 “smart air launched weapons” it bought from the U.S., including 500 BLU 109 bunker busters.

Who actually wants this mini-Armageddon unleashed over the descendants of Cyrus the Great and Darius I? We find a sort of coalition (of the willing) special interests camouflaged behind national interests, linking Pentagon civilians of the armchair warrior kind, neocons in key government positions, an array of pro-Israeli organizations, Armageddon believers (call them Western Taliban), a great deal of the U.S. mainstream media and a minority of U.S. citizens. Neocons dismiss the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is adamant: Iran’s civilian nuclear energy program has no military wing. Neocons dismiss the CIA, which has made clear that any possible Iranian WMD would not materialize before 2015. Neocons have even cynically abandoned their “freedom agenda” for the Middle East. No more democracy-inducing Shock and Awe: what’s left is just pure Jack D. Ripper logic.

Against mini-Armageddon on Iran we find a majority of retired U.S. military officials, Big Oil (for which, on a cost/benefit basis, this is very bad business), virtually all the Christian and Muslim organizations, the majority of U.S. public opinion and virtually all of the world’s public opinion.

These special interests bent on mini-Armageddon derive outstanding business profits from one of the key intersections of Globalistan: globalization and war. In the Middle East the economic interests of the U.S. military-industrial complex happen to merge with the geopolitical interests of Eretz Israel (Greater Israel) proponents. During the binary, bipolar Cold War the U.S. rationale was to fight the communist specter. In Globalistan the specter remixed are the barbaric hordes of “Islamo-fascist” terror, Axis of Evil states, “rogue” states and failed states (after all “rogue” states are easier to locate on a map than “terrorists”). As informed Americans are well aware institutional framework and respectability for this agenda is provided by a plethora of militaristic, jingoistic think tanks which work closely with the Pentagon, the industrial-military complex and the powerful Israeli lobby (which could be described as a junior partner in this association).

The neocons profited immensely from 9/11 and the subsequent, nonsensical “war on terror” (which basically—literally?—means war on war). But the mighty profiteer of the neocon drive was actually the U.S. Corporatistan node of the military-industrial complex. Moreover the U.S. ruling class gets paid in tax money by the lower classes; that could not have been a more cunning mechanism of wealth distribution (1% of Americans control 40% of the country’s wealth). Of all key neocon players a majority are former executives, consultants or shareholders of major Defense contractors. Think tanks may predominate in the (non) debate of ideas. But those really calling the shots are the military-industrial complex. This is all about business—not ideology. And Long, infinite, permanent war is an extremely profitable business.

The mini-Armageddon over Iran would mean the fulfillment of most dreams outlined in Rebuilding America’s Defenses, the supremacist roadmap concocted by the warmongering neocon think tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in 2000, which could be defined as the Cheney/Wolfowitz roadmap. The “direct imposition of U.S. ‘forward bases’ throughout Central Asia and the Middle East” has been accomplished—sort of. But preventing the emergence of any potential “rival” or any viable alternative to “free market economy” implies smashing Iran. Further on down the militaristic road there’s the “revolution in military affairs” (RMA), which is obsessed with the accumulation of high tech weapons systems for pulverizing infrastructure, but not interested in conquering hearts and minds; the “Strategic Defense Initiative”; and the total militarization of space. “Preemptive war” has already been further enhanced in the March 2005 Pentagon National Defense Strategy, to the benefit of “proactive war.” Amid all this frenzy the Council on Foreign Relations was forced to admit, at its 2005 annual conference, that by 2010 the U.S. “will be spending more money than the rest of the world on defense.”

By the summer of 2006 all the—ominous—signs were “on the table” (copyright Donald Rumsfeld) for all to see. The Pentagon had its former “war on terror” rebranded as The Long War; Dick Cheney swore that the genuine article will last for decades, a replay of the war between Eastasia and Oceania in Orwell’s 1984. George W. Bush had issued a “wild speculation” non-denial denial that the U.S. was planning strategic nuclear strikes against Iran. A “new Hitler”—but wasn’t he Saddam Hussein in 1991 and then Saddam remixed in 2003?—had also been rebranded and his name was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President, while the previous Hitler was still alive fighting – and then being sentenced to hang – by a kangaroo court in Baghdad.

Ahmadinejad was incessantly depicted by the ideological machine as an angry, totally irrational, Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying, Islamo-fascist who wanted to “wipe Israel off the map.” The quote, repeated ad nauseam, came from an October 2005 speech. But what he really said, in Farsi, to an annual anti-Zionist conference in Iran, was that “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” He was actually quoting the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had said the same thing in the early 1980s. He was hoping that an unfair regime (towards Palestine) would be replaced by another one more equitable, not threatening to nuke Israel. It didn’t matter. Just like in a Monty Python sketch the mob could not stop screaming “Witch! Witch!”

How does the leadership in Tehran analyze all this mess? Tactically, they see neocon Washington going no holds barred for regime change—as much as strategically they see it plunged in a take-no-prisoners war on Islam. The proof was the U.S./Israeli alliance in the summer of 2006 Lebanon war. Whatever the spin for world public opinion, nothing will convince the leadership in Tehran of the contrary. Eventual U.N. sanctions against Iran will never be as hardcore as the neocons would dream. No sanctions will force Iran to deviate from its civilian nuclear program. And then one fine day Iran masters enough technology to produce a nuclear bomb. This could certainly happen before the end of the second Bush administration, in January 2009.

What next? George W. Bush—who Gore Vidal calls “the little emperor”—vowed from the deep recesses of his soul that he would never allow Iran to become a nuclear power. It’s another Blues Brothers-inspired Mission from God. So the march to mini-Armageddon may be inevitable. The only ones capable of stopping it would be sensible, rational, influential voices inside the U.S. military complex. Threats will proliferate. And then the White House decides that a preemptive nuclear strike—against a non-nuclear power—is a wiser decision than doing nothing. This Persian-American war would finally configure the U.S., for 1.5 billion Muslims, as Dajjal, a force of evil bent on destroying Islam. The dark side, no less. And against the dark side, all Islam would have to be united—Sunnis and Shiites. Traditional U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, the Gulf petromonarchies (their governments, not their populations) would not be afforded the luxury to sit on the fence: this would mean certain collapse. The Persian-American war could in fact realign the whole Arab-Muslim world. But not exactly the way mini-Armageddon stakeholders see it.

A Trilateral Commission Report presented in a meeting in Tokyo in the summer of 2006 proposes some sound solutions: direct U.S.-Iran negotiations leading to a Regional Middle East Nuclear Council where every declared (and some undeclared) nuclear powers would be represented: U.S., Russia, China, France, the U.K., India, Pakistan, Iran, Israel and Japan. The IAEA would be allowed to inspect anything it wanted, with absolutely no restrictions. Israel would get a “security package” and Iran would be reassured of no regime change attempt. The Middle East and the Maghreb would get a sort of Marshall Plan: Palestine, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt and Algeria would join the WTO and get funds from the World Bank. A regional Middle East Water Council—including Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Palestine and Jordan—would also be implemented, as well as a Middle East Energy Council—including Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran—to take care of regional Pipelineistan, oil security, technology transfers.

Yes, it sounds too smooth to be true. And yes, many of these regimes are not exactly sure they want to be “helped” (or dictated by) the WTO and the Paul Wolfowitz-presided World Bank. This would be a case of the Greater Middle East being achieved not by the barrel of a gun but by “free trade”/market opening for Corporatistan. The marketing ploy would be slightly more sophisticated, and fewer lives would be lost, but the results would be substantially the same.

From the point of view of the Pentagon’s Long War, a strategic nuclear attack on Iran has the obvious merit of being spun to oblivion as the crucial next stage of the war on “radical Islam.” Buried in the militaristic rubble is the fact that Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution, had made clear in the 1980s that production, possession and use of nuclear weapons is against Islam. Russia, China, India, key E.U. players like Germany, and the overwhelming majority of the South still take him at his word. For the Iranian government, the nuclear program is a powerful symbol of independence vis-à-vis what is considered Anglo-Saxon colonialism. The view is shared by Iranians of all social classes and all educational backgrounds. Moreover, Iran is pushing for a leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), stating that every country has the right to a peaceful nuclear program. What Iran officially wants is a nuclear-free zone in West Asia, and that of course includes Israel, the sixth nuclear power in the world with more than 600 nuclear warheads.

German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk seems to be closer to the mark when he says that “if tomorrow was unveiled a new technology which would end Western civilization’s dependence on oil, the clash of civilizations would disappear overnight.” We’re quite far from it, hence The Long War.

The Quadrennial Defense Review—the Pentagon’s strategic document which on 34 times, including the title, calls for a “Long War,” a “Long, Global War” or a “Long, Irregular War” against terror can be interpreted even by an infant as a call for a war on Islam. The Iranian political elite is more than aware that Washington might release Shock and Awe remixed, including the possibility of unilateral nuclear bombing. The question is when. But everyone—reformists included—downplays the possibility of a street revolution toppling the nationalist theocracy, as the neocons’ wishful thinking rules; in the event of a foreign attack virtually the whole population would rally behind the government.

Amid non-stop carpet info-bombing, it’s easy for global citizens to forget that oil and gas had, once again, to be at the heart of the matter. Preventing the emergence of any strategic “rival,” according to PNAC, means the U.S. exercising a sort of strategic veto over the E.U. and Japan in terms of control of energy. Thus the U.S. by all means needs to control Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in the Middle East. Iraq will be a disaster zone for years, if not decades, and there’s no guarantee the U.S. will control its oil reserves. Iran—since 1979—is absolutely off limits, the Big Prize.

From a PNAC/Pentagon point of view, the ultimate nightmare—very plausible in the short to medium term—would be the emergence of a loose alliance of Iran, the Shiite parties in power in Iraq and the Shiites in Hasa in Saudi Arabia controlling a very powerful axis of energy intimately linked to the Asian Energy Security Grid and under the protection of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

An article in the July 2006 issue of Scientific American by U.S. scientists affiliated with the U.S. Electric Power Research Institute suggests that a long term (22d Century) solution to global energy issues would be construction of a superconducting (supercold) grid for transmitting electricity around the globe. It’s interesting that the article is accompanied by a 1981 map drawn by the polymath visionary Buckminster Fuller that illustrates a global pipeline route that avoids prolonged trips across oceans—and thus tracks very closely with the map of Eurasia. Such a project would require trillions of dollars (or euros!) of investment in highly vulnerable insulated pipeline, and a proportionately large investment in pipeline security—by someone.

For now, Iran is the absolutely crucial node of the proposed Asian Energy Security Grid, which includes China, Russia and India. This Grid would do nothing less than bypass Western—especially American—control of energy supplies in the Middle East/Central Asia arc and fuel a real 21st Century industrial revolution all across Asia. It’s no wonder that scores of independent analysts in Iran, Pakistan, China, India and Russia view the U.S. war on Iran as essentially a war of the West against Asia. A surefire way to engender a coming conflict with China is to put its energy supply under threat. David Harvey from New York University and author of The New Imperialism, goes straight to the point: “Whoever controls the Middle East will control the global oil spigot, and who controls the global oil spigot will control the global economy, at least in the near future.”

A war on Iran is a war against China. China created the SCO in June 2001—with Russia and the Central Asians Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as members. At first the SCO was basically a security arrangement to prevent terrorism although officially it was also promoting “cooperation in political affairs, economy and trade, scientific-technical, cultural, and educational spheres as well as in energy, transportation, tourism, and environment protection fields.” It slowly evolved to a series of security, economic and infrastructure agreements, coupled with the odd, joint military exercise. By 2006 Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia had become participating observers. And Afghanistan, the CIS countries and the ASEAN 10 were visitors. All of them could become full members by 2007 or 2008. Thus the SCO, silent as a kung fu master, had suddenly blossomed as a kind of Asian answer to the E.U. and NATO.

It’s very enlightening to contrast the SCO agenda—the wider Asian agenda, in short—with the PNAC/Pentagon worldview. According to its 2006 summit, the SCO:

“has outlined a new norm of international relations aiming at ensuring equal rights for all countries worldwide…a new and non-confrontational model…that calls for discarding the Cold War mentality and transcending ideological differences…”

“opposes interference in other countries’ internal affairs, using the excuse of the differences in cultural traditions, political and social systems, values and models of development.”

“safeguards each other’s sovereignty, security and territorial integrity and in case of emergencies that threaten regional peace, stability and security, we will have immediate consultations and respond effectively to protect our member states.”

“in economic cooperation [ our goal] is to realize a free flow of goods, services, capital and technology by 2020 amongst members.”

“holds that the next Secretary-General of the United Nations should come from Asia.”

It’s also very enlightening to superimpose the list of SCO members and soon-to-be members on the map of Eurasia. Virtually all the big players—with the exception of the U.S. “protectorates” Japan and South Korea—are represented.

The International Conference on Energy and Security: Asian Vision, held in Tehran in the spring of 2006, could not be a better place to examine how scholars and executives from Iran, China, Pakistan, India, Russia, Egypt, Indonesia, Georgia, Venezuela and Germany saw the future. The overall message was unmistakable: they see an interdependence of Asia and “Persian Gulf geo-ecopolitics,” as an Iranian analyst put it. They want the U.S.-Iran nuclear row solved diplomatically. And they bet on Asian integration with Pipelineistan linking the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, South Asia and China.

This Persian Gulf/Asia interplay is more than enshrined. World demand for natural gas will triple from now to 2020. By 2025, Asia will import 80% of its total oil needs, and 80% of this total will be from the Persian Gulf. Chinese executives like Liu Guochen from the Sinochem Corp., based in Amman, admit that China will keep importing energy from unstable areas, and the Middle Kingdom will remain worried about “U.S. hegemony” over the flow of energy resources. That’s why China is frantically diversifying, as Iranian scholar Masoud Akhavan-Kazemi of Razi University puts it, “in its investments, pursuing territorial claims and building up strategic oil reserves.” He foresees Asia facing “great imbalances”; potential for conflict in the Persian Gulf, Russia, Central Asia and the Caspian; insecurity suffered by China, India and Japan vis-à-vis the U.S. drive in Asia; and a Chinese sense of vulnerability as China and the U.S. remain de facto strategic rivals.

Akhavan-Kazemi sees the U.S. pursuing three key objectives. The first two may be shared by some in Asia: guaranteeing the energy flows from Asia to international markets; and trying to stop Russian hegemony. But a crucial factor—which the Russians are keen to point out—is that Iran, India and Pakistan are now observers at the SCO. In the mid to short-term, as the organization develops, “the SCO would be able to protect pipelines going in all directions,” says a Russian oil executive. As for the third American objective —preventing Iran from exporting its gas­— definitely it is not shared by anyone. Akhavan-Kazemi emphasizes that “despite the American military hegemony in the Persian Gulf, its political hegemony is in doubt.”

Most Asian oil and gas executives and scholars agree that the way the game is played today in Pipelineistan, everything is politicized. “When Bush tells India you don’t need to import gas from Iran, that’s totally illogical,” says Albert Bininachvili, a Georgian scholar based in Bologna. “The [alleged Iranian] bomb is a pretext,” says Manouchehr Takin, a senior petroleum upstream analyst based in London. “The Americans don’t want Iran to develop, and that’s equally true of China and Venezuela. We need to talk about security through knowledge.” To sum it all up, Asia does not want an Iran battered by the West; Iran, after all, is part of West Asia.

It took less than a decade for a full Eurasian swing since former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote his landmark 1997 piece “A Geostrategy for Eurasia,” published by Foreign Affairs. Then, for Brzezinski, it was a question of formatting how to keep America’s “global primacy” and “historical legacy” in “the decisive geopolitical chessboard.” It was a time when America was still viewed as “the indispensable nation.”

Brzezinski may be criticized for being “past his sell-by date,” but it’s important to follow his thinking through time for two reasons: he’s a solid practitioner of realpolitik, as much as Henry Kissinger or Brent Scowcroft; and he’s dedicated a lot of effort to formulate and publicly explain a U.S. Eurasian policy. A testament to the remarkable continuity of the American hegemonic project—irrespective of who is in power —‌is that Brzezinski’s “swingin’ into Eurasia” master plan was enthusiastically incorporated by PNAC, the subsequent Bush-Cheney system and U.S. Corporatistan. It was always clear that the implementation of Brzezinski’s agenda would presuppose a Pentagon on a cocktail of steroids and vigilant, non-stop manufacture of internal consent—a state of affairs only arrived at after 9/11.

Brzezinski is a keen Mackinder disciple. Sir Halford John Mackinder (1861-1947) is the celebrated father of geopolitics who in 1902 introduced to the Royal Geographic Society his famous paper The Geographic Pivot of History, where he developed the Heartland Theory. According to Mackinder the “world island” was Europe, Asia and Africa, and the “islands” were the Americas, Australia, the British Isles and Japan. The Heartland stretched from the Volga to the YangTze and from the Arctic to the Himalayas. The key for a true global power was to control Eurasia. As the Mackinder formula enunciated, “who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the world-island; who rules the world-island controls the world.”

Mackinder-drenched Brzezinski correctly stated in his piece that “all the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia” (although, by another historical irony, the last two superpowers, the British Empire and the U.S., were “islands”). As “the world’s axial super continent,” any power in control of Eurasia “would exercise decisive influence over two of the world’s three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia.” This would answer Immanuel Wallerstein’s question of which of the members of the Triad dominates the capitalist world system in the next phase.

Brzezinski wanted “the emergence of strategically compatible partners which, prompted by American leadership, might shape a more cooperative trans-Eurasian security system.” Yet he could never have predicted the emergence of the SCO as a counter-power.

Brzezinski stated that “America’s status as the world’s premier power is unlikely to be contested by any single challenger for more than a generation. No state is likely to match the United States in the four key dimensions of power‌—military, economic, technological, and cultural—that confer global political clout.” Yet the U.S. has been challenged in at least two—economic and technological. “Culture” means essentially pop culture—Hollywood, pop rock, TV series, reality shows—but global challenges abound, from world music to Bollywood, from world cinema to Mexican and Brazilian telenovelas. Wallerstein and Professor Eric Hobsbawm would argue that the only dimension of power left for the U.S. is the military. Brzezinski’s dream of “a benign American hegemony” is gone.

Figure 2. Mackinder’s abstract rendition of the relationship between the World Island and its satellites in Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).

Brzezinski correctly noted “like insular Britain in the case of Europe, Japan is politically irrelevant to the Asian mainland.” But he did not believe that China was likely to become a global dominant power for a long time. Brzezinski may have anticipated the Chinese demographic crisis caused by the one-child policy—the U.S., with its younger population and less stress on its “carrying capacity,” is in a much better demographic position—but maybe he should review the Chinese economic data.

Brzezinski essentially dreamed of an emasculated E.U. “A larger Europe will expand the range of American influence without simultaneously creating a Europe so politically integrated that it could challenge the United States on matters of geopolitical importance, particularly in the Middle East.” He was thinking in terms of a batch of new eastern European members eager to join NATO and benefit from E.U. cash, but not interested in integration. He was not thinking in terms of Fran