Soapbox:

The Bush crisis

By Gamal Ali Salama

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The Bush administration cannot do much about Iran right now. Domestically, it needs a mandate from Congress to initiate a military strike on Iran. With the Democrats in control of Congress, forget it. The war in Iraq hasn't been going well. Instead of establishing American clout overseas, the war served only to highlight US vulnerability. Internationally speaking, the US administration has only one ally supporting military action against Iran: Israel.

Any military action against Iran would hamper the supply of oil and perhaps push oil prices to $200 a barrel or more, a catastrophic scenario for America and Europe. So the current confrontation with Iran must now be viewed as the Bush crisis, or let us say the neo-con crisis. And yet, Bush's Middle East tour was all about Iran. Any interest in Palestine was incidental, if not unintended.

Speaking during his stop in the United Arab Emirates, Bush warned of dangers coming from Iran. The audience didn't need the warning -- they have their own misgivings about Tehran. But people in the Gulf are less afraid of Iran than of hostilities next door. Any war in the vicinity can be devastating -- Iraq a case in point. Furthermore, Gulf countries can see that the current US administration cannot handle another military offensive.

So what exactly was Bush hoping to accomplish? Most likely, he wanted to scare Gulf countries into buying more weapons. An arms race in the region, while beneficial to Israel, could turn out to be debilitating to both Iran and Gulf states. Think of a major defence scheme, a wall of defensive rockets based in the Gulf, presumably to protect the region against Iran's ballistic missiles. Hasn't Iran said that it can strike at any country within a distance of 4,000 kilometres? So how about a few gadgets to keep the Iranians at bay? This is what Bush came to this region to say. This is how far he has sunk.

This week's Soapbox speaker is head of the Department of Political Science at the Suez Canal University.