The shooting down of Ukraine air plane in Iran in which 176 innocent souls perished has brought to the fore the unacceptable tinderbox situation in the Middle East.

This followed the assassination of General Qaseem Suleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Force through a drone attack by the American government. Suleimani was killed in Iraq which had been virtually destroyed by American and western bombs following the war against Saddam Hussein and later against Abubakar Al- Baghdadi’s caliphate.

Important legacies of ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Babylon and Chaldea were obliterated. Suleimani was allegedly plotting against American forces in Iraq and American interests generally.

America had previously tolerated Iranian attacks on shipping in the Persian Gulf, shooting down of American drone and launching an attack on Saudi Arabian American-built, world’s largest oil refinery.

The assassination of Suleimani was the climax of seething antagonism between the Western hegemonic power of the United States of America and Iran, a putative power in the Middle East with determined influence and leadership of the Shia sect of Islam particularly in the Middle East and South and South East Asia and some toehold even in Nigeria.

Iran was fuelling the conflict in Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon and had considerable influence on the Taliban in Afghanistan its neighbour to the East.

In recent times and at considerable cost in American lives and money, the USA has had to contend with Saddam Hussein, Al Qaeda, Abubakar Al – Baghdadi’s ISIS and virtual Iranian take-over of Iraq. One of course can legitimately ask who made America the global gendarmes.

As long as there is no other way of maintaining global peace outside some delicate balance of power among the super powers or under some informal directorate of global powers, the question of what is the USA doing in the Middle East or why it is there, will remain a moot question.

The strategic importance of the Middle East in a world still dependent on hydrocarbons as sources of energy draws the big powers to the area. What will happen when the world abandons oil and gas remains in the belly of time.

Even apart from the search for secure energy source, the Middle East is located along the most important shipping route in the world, and it is also a major meeting point for global culture.

The Middle East is the place of origin of the three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and the holy sites in sometimes overlapping locations are found there occasioning conflict over primacy of ownership.

The place has witnessed the rise and fall of the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian and later the Phoenician empires before the place fell under the Greeks and later the Romans which brought the place into unequal relations with the western world.

By the time Islam knitted together the various contending forces in the region by the 7th century, some semblance of order at considerable slaughter of people had been imposed under the largely Arab Umayyad caliphate with headquarters in Damascus in Syria in 661.

The Abbasid under Persian leadership took over control in 762 and moved the capital to Baghdad. The Caliphate was destroyed by Mongols in 1258.

Later the Ottoman from 1301 to 1922 were to be the supreme force in the world of Islam until in 1918 when they were defeated along with Germany in the First World War and their Arab territories were “liberated” and Syria, and Lebanon came under France’s League of Nations mandate while Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq came under British administration as mandated territories of the League of Nations.

Even the kingdom of Saudi Arabia was largely a British creation. From then on, all attempts to drive out western influence in the Middle East have failed. Regimes have been changed at the whim of their western overlords.

Earlier on from 1095 to 1291, in nine brutal campaigns against Muslim control of Jerusalem, Christian knights in what has gone down in history as crusades fought to liberate Jerusalem from Islamic control and to set up colonies in the near East.

This of course elicited equal massacres by Muslim forces against Christian knights from Europe. The point I am making is that western and Middle Eastern conflict has a long history. Unfortunately, this conflict is rooted in religious antipathy. But religion does not explain why the leadership of the Arab world are largely pro West.

From Morocco, to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the gulf states and Oman, the leadership there and possibly their people follow a live-and-let-live policy with the west.

Algeria in spite of its war of liberation against France in the 1950s and 1960s, has remained pro-west; so also has Tunisia. Yemen before the Houthis take-over of the place has been too poor to matter.

But Persian Iran is a different kettle of fish. American and western attempt to dominate it has been rebuffed. After genuine nationalist government of Muhammad Mossadegh nationalized Iranian oil and took it from the British, western power was called in to reverse a genuine nationalist assertion and thus began the hostility between Iran and the West.

The British appealed to the USA for help and the USA promptly through the CIA overthrew the democratically-elected Iranian government and restored power to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. In this way, the USA became the enemy of Iran.

Read Also: Iran seeks help reading downed plane’s black boxes in new standoff

The Shah, even though a modernizer, ruled with iron fist under American military tutelage until overthrown by students and Islamic fundamentalists led by grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini In 1979 thus ending a dynasty that was more than 2000 years old and also drawing a wedge between the USA and Iran.

From this time onwards, Iran adopted two strategic policies that have continually brought it into conflict with the USA. Iran realized that its security would always be threatened unless it developed a nuclear deterrence as well as a delivery capability in terms of missiles that could conceivably reach not only Israel and Europe but also the USA itself.

It was the fear of this that made the Obama administration to sign with the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany the so-called P 5+1 with Iran the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) of 2015 essentially to prevent Iran refining Uranium up to nuclear weapons grade.

This was to be verified by the International Atomic Agency of the UN in which all the signatory powers have representatives. This plan was to last initially for 10 years and renewable thereafter. Iran was to get its money seized by the USA after the Iranian revolution of 1979.

Iran‘s missile programmes were also to be monitored. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel feel that the treaty with Iran was too loose and that it will permit Iran to develop nuclear weapons.

For this reason President Trump withdrew from the treaty and slammed comprehensive economic sanctions on Iran. These sanctions have virtually brought Iran’s economy down.

A proud country like Iran, inheritor of an ancient civilization, finds itself humiliated and almost brought to its knees. In reaction, it has gone on adventurist policies of destabilization of the whole of the Middle East.

This is the kernel of the problem in the Middle East and the USA’s relation with Iran. Unfortunately when two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. This has been the lot of suffering humanity which for the past 40 years has witnessed one war after the other with countries like Yemen, Libya, Syria, Palestine and Iraq in ruins.

Iran has publicly said it will attack Saudi Arabia and the Emirates states if the USA attacks it. Iran also can expect to be supplied with Russian weapons. It was a Russian made missile that brought down the Ukrainian plane which killed 176 people about 100 of them young Iranians living or studying in Canada.

The bogey of Godless Russia has been removed since the collapse of the Soviet Union so Iran can feel comfortable dealing with its Russian ally just as Turkey, a member of NATO, is awkwardly dealing with Russia in the purchase of advanced weapons in the face of western and USA‘s refusal to oblige it.

The role of Turkey may be crucial in finding solution at least as Sunni counterbalance to Iran’s Shia influence. This may persuade the USA to treat Iran with less hostility. One hopes Iran will not gamble going to war with the USA and thus bringing total destruction to its ancient civilization and its people and precipitating a possible global Armageddon.

By Prof. Jide Osuntokun