Considering the danger of ‘unintended consequences’

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif dismissed the threat of US military action against his country’s nuclear facilities if negotiators fail to reach a deal over the country’s nuclear programme by the end of June.

The threat, he said, was an “old habit that dies hard”.

Zarif’s remark was in response to US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs-of-Staff General Martin Dempsey who had flaunted the threat of “the military option… to ensure Iran does not achieve a nuclear weapon is intact”.

The problem is, of course, that the “military option”, not just the threat, has been used by the US all too many times.

Indeed, Washington often employs the “military option” without assessing intended or unintended consequences.

Dempsey should be well aware of this as he was one of the first senior US generals on the scene in Baghdad after its fall to US forces on April 9, 2003.

At that time, there was little security in the Iraqi capital and unknown vandals — the Iraqis believed were vengeful Kuwaitis — were torching telephone exchanges, power transformers and other essential public facilities because the US and its partners had invaded with too few troops to ensure order.

The then army chief, General Eric Shinseki, argued that “several hundred thousand soldiers” were required for the invasion and occupation, but he was not only ignored but also compelled to retire early by defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his acolyte Paul Wolfowitz, who set a much lower figure for deployment.

Chaos, destruction and mass murder were the unintended consequences of their disastrous miscalculations.

Since World War II, there have been literally hundreds of US military “interventions” and invasions round the world, quite a few of them in this region.

The majority have been in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa. Europe was not spared. 

Here are a few telling regional examples.

The first was the 1958 landing of US Marines in Lebanon at the instigation of president Camille Chamoun who had tried to secure a second term in breach of the country’s constitution.

He faced armed opposition from Greek Orthodox Christians, Sunnis and Druze Lebanese.

The former Allied commander in Europe, US president Dwight Eisenhower, did not order the marines to use muscle to keep Chamoun in power, but convinced him to stand down when his term finished.

A UN envoy urged the rebels to compromise, paving the way for the election of Fuad Chehab.

If all or most US interventions — military or political — were as benign, unintended consequences could be contained.

In 1982, US president Ronald Reagan did not intervene politically for more than two months to halt Israel’s brutal invasion of Lebanon, but sent 800 marines to assist in the withdrawal of Palestinian forces from Beirut, one of Israel’s main objectives.

The marines departed on September 20 as Israel’s Lebanese Maronite surrogates carried out the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla camps south of Beirut.

This was certainly an unintended result of the brief US intervention.

On September 29, Reagan dispatched another 1,200 marines to “stabilise” the situation, boosting the Israeli occupation.

In October, after US and French troops took the government’s side in the civil conflict, their barracks were targeted by lorry bombs, killing 269.

A previously unknown group called “Islamic Jihad” claimed responsibility.

In February 1984, after exacting crude vengeance, US troops withdrew from Lebanon. Iran was blamed for the barrack bombings. Israel’s invasion led to the creation of Hizbollah.

Following the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, president George H.W. Bush assembled a “coalition” and in March 1991 waged war on Iraq with the aim of compelling it to pull out of Kuwait.

Jordan’s King Hussein bravely stood against that war, fearing a popular backlash as well as the war’s “unintended consequences”.

These consequences included further US military action that has been the catalyst for the critical situation the region now faces.

From 1992-2003, the US imposed a “safe haven” for the Kurds in northern Iraq, allowing them to establish an autonomous region. This and “no-fly zones” weakened the unity of Iraq, once the hard core of the eastern Arab world.

In January 1993, the US carried out cruise missile strikes on Baghdad and in December 1998, US and British forces bombed Iraqi targets on the pretext Iraq was not cooperating with UN weapons monitors.

On March 20, 2003, US president George W. Bush — seeking to show his dad, George H.W., that he was a “man” to be respected, and to pander to US pro-Israel neoconservatives — invaded and occupied Iraq and replaced the secular Baathists with a sectarian Shiite fundamentalist regime.

This sparked Sunni resistance and the rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

US intervention on the side of “moderate rebels” opposing Damascus has transformed unrest — which might have ended if negotiations had been pursued seriously — into a prolonged conflict that killed 200,000, drove half the population from their homes and led to the emergence of Daesh, which has now extended its operational reach to Afghanistan and its ideological tentacles as far as Australia and North America.

US — or Israeli — strikes on Iran, a vast country with a population of 77.5 million, could lead to total disaster in an already turbulent region and fresh floods of refugees flowing into neighbouring countries, which cannot support them.

Millions of migrants could brave deserts, mountains and the Mediterranean in search of sanctuary in Europe.

Unfortunately, Obama and his generals continue to speak of a “military option” when no serious minded person would dare do so.

Obama and Dempsey do this to counter accusations and pressures from assertive neoconservatives in Congress and among Republican candidates competing with each other for their party’s presidential nomination to enter the race against the current Democratic favourite Hillary Clinton.

These attempts to outbid Obama and each other are very dangerous because they could have dramatic and drastic “unintended consequences” if one of these irrepressible and irresponsible men succeed Obama.

No one in the Republican Party has the penchant for, as Winston Churchill put it, “jaw-jaw rather than war-war”.