President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. The two nations have been subject to vicious attacks by the imperialist countries of the US and Britain.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
By Reason Wafawarova in PERTH, Australia
Courtesy of the Zimbabwe Herald
ON January 29, 2002, President George W. Bush coined the phrase "axis of evil" as he singled out Iran, Iraq and North Korea as "posing a serious threat to the civilised world", and he collectively accused all the three countries and other unnamed countries of developing "weapons of mass destruction".
On March 5, 2009 Bush’s successor Barack Obama announced an extension of the United States’ illegal economic sanctions regime on Zimbabwe by a year, telling the world that Zimbabwe "poses a continuing and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States".
For North Korea the mainstream debate that presents the conflict between Pyongyang and Washington is that the North Koreans are an unscrupulous lot up to developing a mass killing weapon so they can bring an end to this planet.
Indeed the Western mainstream society is dead scared although the majority of the world’s population finds the assertion thoroughly laughable.
A similar debate rages on for Iran and we are told the Iranians want to "wipe Israel off the map" and that the country is such a bunch of "extremist Muslims" that if allowed to have a nuclear bomb, they will enjoy blowing off the planet with one nuclear strike.
In simple black and white colours, the US confrontation with Iran is presented as the good Judeo-Christian world against the evil Islamic extremism world.
For Iraq the initial mainstream debate was similar to that of North Korea and Iran and former British premier Tony Blair spiced up this debate on the eve of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by claiming that Iraq was about to destroy the world "in 48 hours".
Saddam Hussein was presumably armed to the hilt with weapons of mass destruction and had to be disarmed by the good boys of this planet — the Westerners, led by the most righteous Americans.
When the weapons of mass destruction could not be found anywhere, the Americans and their world-saving Western crack team simply shifted public debate to a new dimension where we were told if weapons of mass destruction did not exist in Iraq, as indeed was the case, then the occupying Western forces could as well "free the Iraqis" from themselves and "create a democracy" in the primitive Islamic state.
Those members of the public who publicly loath this doctrine and refuse to follow the logic of this nonsense are reminded that after all Iraq, like Iran "supports and exports terrorism", so they can at least be scared and sympathise with Washington’s sabre-rattling foreign policy.
For Zimbabwe, the mainstream debate is that President Mugabe does not respect "property rights" and violates the human rights of indigenous Zimbabweans by denying them the chance to be ruled by Morgan Tsvangirai and his Washington-sponsored and London founded MDC-T party.
The debate continues to outline how President Mugabe destroyed "the Jewel of Africa" and how he destroyed "the bread basket of Africa" by "grabbing land" from "skilled white commercial farmers".
At the centre of US foreign policy on North Korea is the Korean peninsula and the threat to Seoul. For Iran and Iraq, the central issue is Israel and the Zionist dream of controlling the Middle East.
For Zimbabwe, the centre of US foreign policy is the Anglo-Rhodesians who lost the land they held to President Mugabe’s land reform policy, and on the lunatic fringe of this nucleus is the MDC-T with its ill-thought vision of turning Zimbabwe into a United States client state whose welfare and economic backing will be reminiscent to that of Israel — almost totally backed by aid from the Mighty Empire.
The United States is the dog in the Middle East and Israel is the tail. They are the dog for North Korea and South Korea is the tail.
For Zimbabwe, the US is still the dog and the MDC-T-Anglo-Rhodesian alliance is the tail.
The question is what is happening with US foreign policy for all these places?
We have heard of recent confessions by MDC insiders that the so called Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001; the US sanctions law on Zimbabwe, was actually drafted at a hotel inside Zimbabwe by a team of legal people from Prime Minister Tsvangirai’s MDC.
There are numerous similar reports of Israel drafting US policy on Middle East countries as well as South Korea’s role in supplying intelligence on the US foreign policy on North Korea.
Can we say it is the "dog wagging the tail" or the "tail wagging the dog"? Yet others like Jonathan Cook, the author of "Israel and The Clash of Civilisations" argue that it is the "dog and the tail wagging each other", something he calls "organised chaos".
The "dog wagging the tail" model is championed by Noam Chomsky who argues that the contradiction between US interests and its policies on the ground is only apparent and not real.
He argues that in truth, the US is just pursuing its long-standing strategy of bullying non-compliant states in the Middle East and elsewhere to secure control of such resources as oil and minerals.
Clearly, the Bush regime was intending to cream off much of Iraq’s wealth, giving Anglo-American corporations the right to plunder from many of the country’s vast oilfields for the foreseeable future, just like the Bush-Blair alliance sought to restore Anglo-Rhodesian control of Zimbabwe’s farmlands.
When asked about the reasons for a possible attack on Teheran by an interviewer in 2007, Chomsky had this to say:
"There are several issues in the case of Iran. One is simply that it is independent and independence is not tolerated.
"Sometimes it is called successful defiance in the internal record. Take Cuba. A very large majority of the US population is in favour of establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba and has been for a long time with some fluctuations.
"And even part of the business world is in favour of it too. But the US government won’t allow it. It’s attributed to the Florida vote but I don’t think that’s much of the explanation.
"I think it has to do with a feature of world affairs that is insufficiently appreciated. International affairs are very much run like the mafia.
"The godfather does not accept disobedience, even from a small storekeeper who doesn’t pay his protection money.
"You have to have obedience otherwise the idea can spread that you don’t have to listen to the orders and it can spread to important places."
Chomsky argued that it is not only that Iran has substantial resources and that it is part of the world’s major system but it also defied the United States.
He raised the point that the United States overthrew the Iranian parliamentary government in 1953 and installed a brutal tyrant, helped him to develop nuclear power; in fact the very same programmes that are now considered by the United States and other Western countries to be a threat.
Chomsky argued that the US government sponsored this programme, by Cheney, Wolfowitz, Kissinger, and others in the 1970s, as long as the Shah was in power.
This argument is the dog wagging its tail. It portrays the US using Israel to destabilise the Middle East, using South Korea to control the Korean peninsula, the MDC-T-Anglo-Rhodesian alliance to topple Zanu-PF and President Mugabe, its leader and so on and so forth.
Chomsky’s argument is plausible but fails to answer why the White House ignored documented Pentagon advice that Bush was better off negotiating with Iran, or why the earlier decision to occupy Iraq in 1991 was taken against expert advice from Washington hawks; who argued that the containment policy on Saddam Hussein was more successful than the chaos that followed the invasion.
It is interesting that while Cuba was contained through sanctions and Iran was attacked by the US, via the efforts of Iraq, both methods failed to bring the desired regime change just like the embargo on Mugabe’s Zimbabwe also has so far failed to bring the desired regime change.
The US had an opportunity to engage Iranians and persuade them against the enrichment of uranium in 2003 when Teheran wrote to the White House seeking negotiations.
That method could have ended the stalemate that exists today, but the United States ignored the hand extended by Iran.
This move goes against Chomsky’s argument of the US seeking obedience and compliance.
It suggests another possibility, a third force interest; the tail wagging the dog. This is where the monstrous and murderous ambitions of Israel come into play.
Israel wants Iran annihilated and destroyed so that it can remain unrivalled as a Middle East super power, and negotiations with Iran are an insult to the ambitions of Israel.
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, two American professors, provided the alternative to Chomsky’s hypothesis.
They argued for the tail wagging the dog scenario where they wrote in an article published in the London Review of Books, after American publications refused it, that the pro-Israel lobby, uniquely among Washington lobby groups, had managed to push US foreign policy in a totally self-destructive direction.
Although Israel was not a vital strategic asset, argued the professors, its policy goals were being pursued above Washington’s.
They wrote: "The Israeli government and pro-Israel lobby groups in the United States have worked together to shape the administration’s policy towards Iraq, Syria, and Iran, as well as its grand scheme for reordering the Middle East."
The end result is that the US policy ends up looking identical to that of its clients, be it the Israeli position on Palestine, Iran or Hezbollah.
The same goes for the MDC-T’s position on who should run Zimbabwe’s central bank or the Attorney General’s office. The MDC-T talks like the Americans and the Americans talk like the MDC-T.
Johnnie Carson talks like he is the identical twin of Tendai Biti and so on and so forth.
But is Washington so supine to allow foreign powers to hijack foreign policy?
Would the US Congress endorse a Bill drafted by a team of third world citizens at a hotel in a remote bush in a third world African country as law?
How would other powerful elites like the executives of corporations afford to allow Israel to compromise the US national interests without expelling such "foreign bodies"?
These are the challenges to the Mearsheimer-Walt hypothesis and indeed this has always been the defence publicly offered by Zimbabwe’s MDC-T — that they are too small to influence what the Americans want to do on Zimbabwe.
They argue that they will not bother adding their voice to the growing call for the lifting of illegal economic sanctions against Zimbabwe because they reckon such a call would not make a difference anyway.
But do they believe in that call themselves? Does Prime Minister Tsvangirai really want to have ZDERA repealed and does he want to see the illegal sanctions he fought so hard to mobilise lifted? Is that in his political interest?
It would be naive to say Jewish and American neo-cons put more loyalty to Israel than they do to the US. That fails to explain the motivations of such hardcore neo-conservatives like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, John Bolton and Collin Powell.
It may be that we may have to go by the third model from Jonathan Cook.
He argues that these tails, be it Israel, Taiwan, MDC-T, South Korea or the disgraced Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan — all of them somehow push their agenda through by persuading the US neo-cons that their respective goals are all related and compatible with US broader interests.
Cook argues that Israel’s ambitions to be a small empire in the Middle East can easily be married to the US’ interests in controlling the oil resource in that region.
It can be argued that the MDC-T ambitions to form a government in Zimbabwe can easily be married to the US plan to establish client states in Africa, and this is this writer’s argument and it is not from Cook.
In this vein the US Congress could have endorsed ZDERA on the basis of how the law would coincide with their broader interest of restoring white hegemony in Zimbabwe’s agrarian sector as well as establishing a client black government in the country.
Otherwise it is hard to see how the US could ever allow a situation where a US law was actually drafted by foreigners, let alone those from an African country, as indeed is said to have happened with the drafting of ZDERA.
It is interesting to watch the dog and the tail wagging each other but this may as well be the scenario. The MDC-T may be that tail that can wag the dog for or in the name of the dog’s own interests.
Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!
Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk or reason@ rwafawarova.com or visit www.rwafawarova. com
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