KEY POINTS:
America is going home from Iraq bloodied, but the sky won't fall unless George W. Bush bombs Iran.
"To do that, you would, of course, have to be insane", says geopolitical commentator Gwynne Dyer, whose book, The Mess They Made, examines the likely shape of the Middle East after the United States pulls out.
Dyer has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, broadcaster and lecturer on international affairs for more than 20 years, but his original training was as a historian.
Having done his PhD in Middle Eastern history, he finds the sudden abundance of open questions about the region's future fascinating.
"All of my life the region has been stuck in the same rut, and it's quite clear it's not going to be much longer. The American hegemony in the area is about to come to an end, and that has huge implications."
In the new book he follows the likely progress of the falling dominoes once Middle Eastern politics emerges from its American deep-freeze.
"I'm sick to death of reading further analyses of how the Americans are slowly losing in Iraq - I mean, for God's sake, we know that, can we please just take it as read? The interesting question is what the major fracture lines in the region are going to be once America leaves, and that's beginning to become clearer.
"Many of the coming changes we won't like much. But none of them will have wide implications beyond the region - the oil will keep flowing whoever comes to power - and none of it is our business."
Unless America bombs Iran, in which case the picture is very different, and far more worrying. The preparations for the bombing campaign have become one of the world's worst kept secrets, Dyer notes. A second carrier task group is in place in the gulf, runways have been lengthened on airstrips around Iran's borders, the targets have been selected.
"But you'd have to be mad to do it, because it wouldn't work. There's no way America can win by bombing Iran. It's the one thing they can do that would guarantee Iranian nuclear weapons sooner or later. And once the bombing starts, the Gulf shuts down, and then you'd have the second oil crisis."
Beyond which, America would be humiliated in a far more damaging way than it has been or will be in Iraq.
Dyer doubts the consequences of defeat in Iraq will be all that great for America in the long term.
"Losing in Iraq is like losing in Vietnam, it's losing an insurgency. And that's something every major power in the industrialised world has done over the past 40 years, from the Russians in Afghanistan, to the French in Algeria, to the British in Cyprus or Kenya. It's pretty stupid to keep fighting them, you might well think, but of course they didn't understand that that was what they were getting into".
You can lose an insurgency, Dyer says, and walk away clean: change the team that's running the country, change the subject, keep your head down for a few years.
"You can survive this stuff. But to use your major instrument of power, air power, against a serious country in a conventional attack and to face defeat ... it would fundamentally weaken America. Because although you, of course, are not defeated militarily, you're defeated in every other dimension, economically, diplomatically - I mean, Nato could easily break up over this.
"In that scenario, you really do lose your place in the world. It's hard to believe they'll do it. Various American generals would be on the verge of mutiny if they were ordered to do it, but the American military does not have a tradition of resigning their commissions rather than accepting disastrous orders."
Dyer considers it obvious that Iran has no territorial ambitions beyond its own borders. "The idea which is now being very urgently thrust upon the Arab countries by the US State Department that Iran is a military threat to them is nonsense. It isn't and it never was. But there is this attempt to build the threat up in order to get the Arab states to circle to wagons and remain obedient to America and its policies."
As to the question of Iran's supposed nuclear programme, Dyer points out that the International Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty allows non-nuclear signatory states to develop what is known as a threshold nuclear capability.
In fact, the treaty requires the existing nuclear powers to give non-nuclear signatories help in developing civilian nuclear power generation, including uranium enrichment and fuel reprocessing capabilities.
"It's a very strange treaty. It basically amounts to this: promise not to build the bombs and we'll promise to give you the means. The treaty's explicit quid pro quo for keeping the nuclear club as small as possible was that the great powers would ultimately disarm, but it was clear to everyone when it was being drawn up that that was complete poppycock.
"They're never going to do that. So you want us to sign this treaty which requires us not to acquire these things you've already got; you say you're going to give them up, but we don't believe you, so ... where's our actual quid pro quo?"
And so we have a non-proliferation treaty which encourages signatories to walk right to the brink of the nuclear weapons cliff.
"Australia has done this. Canada has done this. Iran has some reason to desire its own nuclear deterrent, given the existence of hostile nuclear powers in the region - Israel and Pakistan - but it has much better reasons to toe the treaty's line, and that's exactly what it's doing."
And yet not only is the Bush Administration teetering on the verge of attacking Iran, some of the bombing plans being put forward involve the use of tactical nuclear weapons. "You need to remember that in the United States there is a significant body of people, both inside and outside the military, whose principal ambition for some 40 years has been to make nuclear weapons useable.
"Which is why they now have mini-nukes and neutron bombs, and all the other options for going nuclear without having to do a full-scale Strangelove.
Dyer compares America's attitude to Iran to its obsession with Cuba.
Now that Castro is gone - "and he is, he's not coming back to power even if he's still alive" - various foreign governments are quietly setting up the preconditions for a resumption of diplomatic ties.
"Obviously not the Americans, but the Brits and the Canadians and so on."
Dyer, born in Canada and now living in London, has served with three Navies and taught at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and Oxford University. He was invited to give talks to the Cuban foreign ministry school and the military think tank. "And also to a group of journalism students at the university. There were dozens of other people there doing similar things ... Once you get talking there, the conversation always comes back to the 45-year burden of being America's chosen worst enemy. How does a country get around that? And they have no answer.
"The only answer America will accept seems to be that you roll over and die, at which point they'll forgive you. Because, of course, Cuba, like Iran, was once an American satrapy, and it chose to spit in its master's eye."
* Published by Scribe
