The less than three decade-old history of confrontation between the US and Iran is full of failures, both military and political, as America attempted to place Tehran under control. Landmark events include Saddam Hussein's defeat in the Iraq-Iran war that he started with encouragement and support from the US in the wake of an Islamic revolution. There was also the dismal failure by a team of US commandoes to secure the release of hostages held by revolutionary students at the US Embassy in Tehran.

It would also be appropriate to recall the downing of an Iranian airliner by a missile launched from the USS Ticonderoga, killing more than 250 civilians of various nationalities aboard (unlike the famous "Lockerbie case," that barbarous act did not become a subject of international condemnation, the US did not apologize to Iran, and the US commander was not prosecuted). That deed can also be ranked as yet another US failure, albeit a moral one. However, lying behind this series of clashes and confrontations - the Iran-Iraq war stands out prominently in this respect - are several fundamental causes, both long-running and those that developed only recently. One of the deep-seated causes is the under-the-rug rivalry between the US and the UK. As is known, the US was the principal geopolitical factor in the disintegration of the British colonial empire. After World War II, all US actions were aimed to crowd the British out of their traditional regions of influence, bringing down aristocratic (as a general rule, monarchical) "Anglophile" regimes, and replacing them with pro-US regimes, key actors in which were young army officers and members of the national bourgeoisie.

In principle, the Pahlavi regime-even though it was established a long time before the outbreak ofWorld War II and was evidently monarchical - belonged to the pro-American, not Anglophile camp. It was a classic putsch regime of an upstart military officer (father of the overthrown shah) with strong pro reform, national bourgeois ambitions, which broke an almost 200-year-old special relationship between the Kajar Dynasty with the feudal elite and the British aristocracy.

Under Pahlavi, Iran directly contributed to the consolidation of American positions in Upper Asia; it was a close ally of Israel, which, it should be recalled, was created despite counteraction from British imperial strategists; and it adopted a hostile position with respect to the pro-London Arab states in the Gulf. The Islamic Revolution could not have taken place (at least, on the purely technical level) without support from the UK or its close ally, France. Two major figures in the anti-Shah struggle - Ayatollah Khomeini and Ali Shariati, a political ideologue of the radical Islamic youth - found refuge in France and the UK, respectively.

The establishment of a theocratic regime in Iran became a major geopolitical act of revenge by the Foreign Office in the struggle for influence withthe empire across the ocean. On a day to day level, no distinction is made between the US and the UK, since they are generally seen as close allies, pursuing a common line. But as a matter of fact, they are rivals, arising from the civilizational and genetic incompatibility of their elites, or rather the core of the elites, which ensures the long-term continuity of imperial strategy and the cultural identity of the ruling elite. In this respect, the traditional confrontation between the US and the UK is probably even deeper than between America and continental Europe. Since theocracy in Tehran covertly restored contacts with the British establishment (between their respective elites), the United States set a course for direct confrontation with the largest country in the Near East.

London prevented Bush Sr. from defusing the conflict that followed Saddam's invasion of Kuwait.Margaret Thatcher stood firm on her position that Saddam must not be permitted to fulfill UN resolutions and thus avoid an invasion by coalition forces. But Saddam was a US ally, faithfully pursuing Washington's line. When in 2003 the British, together with US forces, invaded Iraq, they occupied a Shiite enclave, where they subsequently had almost no problems with the liberation movement, which was delivering telling blows against the Americans. The British effectively provided legitimate protection to the Shiite enclave in Iraq, allowing the radicals to assert themselves politically and emerge as a potentially leading factor in defining Iraq's identity. Such behavior by the British is especially noteworthy in light of the not so distant past, when during Operation Desert Storm, the Americans cruelly suppressed an anti-Saddam Shiite uprising, even returning war prisoners to Saddam.

Today, the US badly needs an international crisis and is ready to create one on the scale of previous world wars, not excluding the controlled use of tactical nuclear weapons - needless to say, US weapons. Analysis of the military-political traditions of the American empire suggests that the Pentagon will strive to minimize its direct involvement in the conflict. Its goal is to cause maximum chaos in Old World territories and provoke an all out war according to historical patterns, in which Washington would act as a kind of an arbiter "above the fray," but then become directly involved in it at the final stage.

The principal obstacle to these aspirations is Iranian and Russian sovereignty, spanning across a huge territory and effectively neutralizing the potentially explosive situation. In this setup, Iran acts as a minor "prop" and Russia as a major one, but stability depends on both to equal degree. A strike against Iran and the collapse  of the military-political and economic infrastructure of the Tehran regime should, according to US strategists, "universalize" the internal Islamic conflict, when the territory and resources of a fallen state will be divided up by Arab countries led by the Saudis, Pakistan, and possibly also Uzbekistan, which has far-reaching ambitions. That could put Russia (although it is painstakingly avoiding direct confrontation) on the verge of disaster.

By Geidar Dzhemal

Chairman of the Islamic Committee of Russia