May 15—The deteriorating global position of U.S. imperialism was starkly exposed in two very different recent visits to Abu Dhabi.
On Friday, May 11, Vice President Dick Cheney stood on the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf in front of the deadly firepower of five F-18 Super Hornet jets to deliver an ominous threat. Cheney declared: “With two aircraft carrier strike groups in the Gulf, we’re sending a clear message to friends and adversaries alike. ... The United States will stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region.”
The next day Cheney quietly visited Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as part of a hasty trip to U.S.-controlled regimes, including Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, to shore up Washington’s deteriorating position.
Just one day after the U.S. vice president’s visit, and in stark contrast to the low-key reception accorded to Cheney, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived in Abu Dhabi May 13 to a red carpet welcome. It was the first time an Iranian head of state had visited the UAE since the 1979 Iranian revolution.
Besides meeting with top officials in the capital, President Ahmadinejad went to the city of Dubai, where he gave a rousing speech to a cheering rally of thousands who packed a soccer stadium to greet him. This had to have been seen in Washington as another serious challenge to U.S. domination of the region.
The very fact that the tiny, privileged layer of UAE rulers, who have depended on the U.S. military presence in their country to preserve their position, allowed the rally to happen despite a permanent ban on any demonstrations shows just how fearful this grouping is of mass pressure.
The UAE is ruled by a small but fabulously wealthy royal family that holds dictatorial power. No political parties are allowed. There are no elections. Three U.S. military bases are located in the Emirates and U.S. Navy ships dock there regularly.
Out of its population of 4 million, 80 percent are not even considered citizens. Millions of workers in all the Gulf states have a similar status. Whether they have lived in the region for decades or even generations, they are labeled migrant workers.
These workers have no rights to education, health care, pensions, minimum wage or even to form unions or participate in any political activity. Nevertheless, a growing number of strikes and job actions have accompanied political ferment.
Half a million ethnic Iranians live in Dubai, the largest city in the UAE. In three separate public talks during his two-day visit, the fiery Iranian leader called for U.S. troops to “pack their bags” and leave their bases in the Gulf. Asked to comment on Cheney’s threats against Iran made two days earlier aboard the USS John C. Stennis, Ahmadinejad replied, “What are these outsiders doing in our region?”
The UAE, along with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and even Jordan, are all ruled by semi-feudal monarchies whose power and vast wealth are maintained by the force of U.S. arms and bases in the region. Each of these regimes is fearful that the continued U.S. war in Iraq and the threat of war on Iran can undermine their hated control. In each of these monarchies any efforts at democratic change are brutally suppressed.
In addition to the large force the Pentagon has in Iraq, more than 40,000 U.S. troops are based in other Gulf countries, along with 20,000 sailors and Marines on aircraft carriers and ships.
Ahmadinejad left the UAE for a two-day visit to the neighboring Sultanate of Oman, where the U.S. has use of four airbases. Iran and Oman face each other across the strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which two-fifths of the world’s oil shipments pass.
Iran’s state news agency, IRNA, reported May 14 that Ahmadinejad hopes to establish government trade offices in Oman’s capital of Muscat and the port city of Khasab, which sits near the strait, just across from Iran. Khasab is also the site of an airport that has been used as a base by the U.S. military.
Cheney sold nuclear technology to Iran
Until the explosive upsurge of millions of Iranian workers and peasants in the 1979 revolution, Iran was also ruled by a hated and fabulously wealthy royal family—the Shah of the Pahlavi dynasty. As the largest and most populous country in the region, Iran was considered the U.S. police force or gendarme for the entire area.
The dictatorship of the Shah was imposed on Iran after a CIA-orchestrated coup in 1953 overthrew the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. During the years that the Pentagon was the real ruler in Iran, when its oil wealth flowed into U.S. oil corporations, banks and to U.S. military contractors, Washington was anxious to build a massive nuclear energy industry there.
It was Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, all officials in the Gerald Ford administration, who in 1976 arranged the sale to Iran of nuclear power plants and large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium—the very technology that President George W. Bush and Cheney now say Iran must be prevented from acquiring or developing.
In 1976 Cheney was White House chief of staff, Rumsfeld was secretary of defense and Wolfowitz was responsible for nonproliferation issues at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Their view then was that Iran should spend billions of dollars to purchase, from U.S. corporations, over 20 nuclear reactors. (Washington Post, March 27, 2005)
All this technological development was cut off after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Iranian nuclear energy became a “threat” as soon as U.S. oil corporations no longer had unlimited access to Iran’s fantastic oil wealth and as soon as U.S. imperialism lost its Iranian police force in the region.
U.S. control eroding
Under the Shah’s dictatorship, Washington was able to dominate the entire region by arming the Iranian military. The Pentagon did not need to station tens of thousands of U.S. troops in the Gulf. It did not need a whole string of bases. Iran policed all the surrounding states. But after the Iranian Revolution, Washington’s global position changed dramatically.
In 1979, after U.S. corporate power had lost control of the largest, most populous country in the region, it had to get Washington to begin sending U.S. troops and position bases elsewhere in an effort to hold on to its fantastic profits.
Today—even with two aircraft carrier groups in the Gulf, tens of thousands of troops in the region and 150,000 troops in Iraq—the U.S. imperialists’ hold on the region is clearly slipping.
Every effort to shore up their position through wars and invasions has led to further erosion.
Washington tried to weaken the states in the Gulf by arming both Iran and Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980 to 1988. The strategy, as Henry Kissinger explained it, was, “I hope they kill each other.” More than a million people died in the war.
In 1990, with the Soviet Union collapsing, Washington again tried to re-establish its former position through enormous destruction in the 1991 war on Iraq. Next, through the years of U.S./U.N. starvation sanctions on Iraq, the U.S. was able to maintain a stranglehold on trade in the entire region.
The 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq was the next step in trying to re-colonize the area. But the Pentagon and the oil corporations did not calculate on the enormous resistance of the Iraqi people. Four years after the invasion, it is clear that the war to re-conquer Iraq is a howling disaster and is considered unwinnable by even top Pentagon generals.
The U.S./NATO war in Afghanistan is also in serious trouble. Washington’s major ally in that region, the Musharraf dictatorship in Pakistan, is facing a crisis of demonstrations, strikes and shutdowns.
Cheney’s frantic trip through the region and his threats from the deck of an aircraft carrier will not restore U.S. imperialist domination. The hatred of the U.S. has now reached a fever pitch throughout the region. Further war would only lead to greater resistance.
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