{"id":75694,"date":"2016-06-27T12:00:40","date_gmt":"2016-06-27T11:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=75694"},"modified":"2016-06-27T10:20:28","modified_gmt":"2016-06-27T09:20:28","slug":"u-s-policy-and-the-geopolitical-dynamics-of-the-middle-east","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/06\/u-s-policy-and-the-geopolitical-dynamics-of-the-middle-east\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. Policy and the Geopolitical Dynamics of the Middle East"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remarks to the Center for the National Interest – 9 June 2016 Washington, DC<\/em><\/p>\n

9 Jun 2016 – <\/em>I have been asked to speak about the geopolitical dynamics of the Middle East, the realignments occurring among states there, and the prospects for the achievement of renewed stability in the region.\u00a0 I\u2019m tempted to suggest that you read my latest book, America\u2019s Continuing Misadventures in the Middle East.<\/em>\u00a0 So much has gone wrong that it is hard to be either brief or optimistic.<\/p>\n

Two hundred and eighteen years ago today, Napoleon was preparing to take Malta.\u00a0 His purpose was to clear an obstacle to his seizure of Egypt for revolutionary France.\u00a0 He was able to invade Egypt on July 1, 1798.\u00a0 Napoleon\u2019s campaign there and in Palestine kicked off a two-century-long effort by the West to transform the Middle East.\u00a0 European imperial powers and, latterly, the United States, have repeatedly sought to convert Arabs, Persians, and Turks to the secular values of the European Enlightenment, to democratize them, to impose Western models of governance on them in place of indigenous, Islamic systems, and more recently to persuade them to accept a Jewish state in their midst.<\/p>\n

This experiment in expeditionary, transformative diplomacy has now definitively failed.\u00a0 The next administration will inherit a greatly diminished capacity to influence the evolution of the Middle East.\u00a0 Amidst the imbecilities of our interminably farcical election season, it has proven expedient to blame this on President Obama.\u00a0 If only he had bombed Syria, repudiated his predecessor\u2019s agreement to withdraw the U.S. military from Iraq, refused to compromise with Iran on nuclear matters, knuckled under to Netanyahu, or whatever, the old order in the Middle East would be alive and well and the United States would still call the shots there.<\/p>\n

But this is nonsense.\u00a0 Our estrangement from the Middle East derives from trends that are much deeper than the manifest deficiencies of executive and congressional leadership in Washington.\u00a0 Americans and our partners in the Middle East have developed contradictory interests and priorities.\u00a0 Where shared values existed at all, they have increasingly diverged.\u00a0 There have been massive changes in geo-economics, energy markets, power balances, demographics, religious ideologies, and attitudes toward America (not just the U.S. government).\u00a0 Many of these changes were catalyzed by historic American policy blunders.\u00a0 In the aggregate, these blunders are right up there with the French and German decisions to invade Russia and Japan\u2019s surprise attack on the United States.\u00a0 Their effects make current policies not just unsustainable but counterproductive..<\/p>\n

Blunder number one<\/strong> was the failure to translate our military triumph over Saddam\u2019s Iraq in 1991 into a peace with Baghdad.\u00a0 No effort was ever made to reconcile Iraq to the terms of its defeat.\u00a0 The victors instead sought to impose elaborate but previously undiscussed terms by UN fiat in the form of the UN Security Council Resolution 687 \u2013 \u201cthe mother of all resolutions.\u201d\u00a0 The military basis for a renewed balance of power in the Gulf was there to be exploited.\u00a0 The diplomatic vision was not.\u00a0 The George H. W. Bush administration ended without addressing the question of how to replace war with peace in the Gulf.<\/p>\n

Wars don\u2019t end until the militarily humiliated accept the political consequences of their defeat.\u00a0 Saddam gave lip service to UNSCR 687 but took it no more seriously than Netanyahu and his predecessors have taken the various Security Council resolutions that direct Israel to permit Palestinians to return to the homes from which it drove them or to withdraw from the Palestinian lands it has seized and settled.\u00a0 Like Israel\u2019s wars with the Arabs, America\u2019s war with Iraq went into remission but never ended.\u00a0 In due course, it resumed.<\/p>\n

The United States needs to get into the habit of developing and implementing war termination strategies.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Blunder number two<\/strong> was the sudden abandonment in 1993 of the strategy of maintaining peace in the Persian Gulf through a balance of power.\u00a0 With no prior notice or explanation, the Clinton administration replaced this longstanding approach\u00a0 with \u201cdual containment\u201d of both Iraq and Iran.\u00a0 For decades, offshore balancing had permitted the United States to sustain stability without stationing forces other than a very small naval contingent in the Gulf.\u00a0 When the regional balance of power was undone by the Iran-Iraq War, Washington intervened to restore it, emphasizing that once Kuwait had been liberated and Iraq cut back down to size, U.S. forces would depart.<\/p>\n

The new policy of \u201cdual containment\u201d created a requirement for the permanent deployment of a large U.S. air and ground force in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar as well as an expanded naval presence in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.\u00a0 The political and socioeconomic irritants this requirement produced led directly to the founding of al Qa`ida and the 9\/11 attacks on New York and Washington.\u00a0 \u201cDual containment\u201d was plausible as a defense of Israel against its two most potent regional adversaries, Iran and Iraq.\u00a0 But it made no sense at all in terms of stabilizing the Gulf.<\/p>\n

By writing off Iraq as a balancer of Iran, dual containment also paved the way for the 2003 American experiment with regime removal in Baghdad.\u00a0 This rash action on the part of the United States led to the de facto realignment of Iraq with Iran, the destabilization and partition of Iraq, the destabilization and partition of Syria, the avalanche of refugees now threatening to unhinge the EU, and the rise of the so-called \u201cIslamic state\u201d or Da`esh.\u00a0 With Iraq having fallen into the Iranian sphere of influence, there is\u00a0 no apparent way to return to offshore balancing.\u00a0 The U.S. is stuck in the Gulf.\u00a0 The political irritations this generates ensure that some in the region will continue to seek to attack the U.S. homeland or, failing that, Americans overseas.<\/p>\n

The United States needs to find an alternative to the permanent garrisoning of the Gulf.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Blunder number three<\/strong> was the unthinking transformation in December 2001 of what had been a punitive expedition in Afghanistan into a long-term pacification campaign that soon became a NATO operation.\u00a0 The objectives of the NATO campaign have never been clear but appear to center on guaranteeing that there will no Islamist government in Kabul.\u00a0 The engagement of European as well as American forces in this vague mission has had the unintended effect of turning the so-called \u201cglobal war on terrorism\u201d into what appears to many Muslims to be a Western global crusade against Islam and its followers.\u00a0 Afghanistan remains decidedly unpacified and is becoming more, not less Islamist.<\/p>\n

The United States needs to find\u00a0 ways to restore conspicuous cooperation with the world\u2019s Muslims.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Blunder number four<\/strong> was the inauguration on February 4, 2002 \u2013 also in Afghanistan \u2013 of a campaign using missiles fired from drones to assassinate presumed opponents.\u00a0 This turn toward robotic warfare has evolved into a program of serial massacres from the air in a widening area of West Asia and northern Africa.\u00a0 It is a major factor in the metastasis of anti-Western terrorism with global reach.<\/p>\n

What had been a U.S. problem with a few Islamist exiles resident in Afghanistan and Sudan is now a worldwide phenomenon.\u00a0 The terrorist movements U.S. interventions have spawned now have safe havens not just in Afghanistan, but in the now failed states of Iraq and Syria, as well as Chad,\u00a0 Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Sinai, Somalia, and Yemen.\u00a0 They also have a growing following among European Muslims and a toehold among Muslim Americans.\u00a0 We have flunked the test suggested by the Yoda of the Pax Americana, Donald Rumsfeld.\u00a0 We are creating more terrorists than we are killing.<\/p>\n

The United States needs a strategy that does not continuously reinforce blowback.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Blunder number five<\/strong> was the aid to Iran implicit in the unprovoked invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003.\u00a0 This rearranged the region to the severe strategic disadvantage of traditional U.S. strategic partners like Israel and Saudi Arabia by helping to create an Iranian sphere of influence that includes much of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.\u00a0 It showed the United States to be militarily mighty but geopolitically naive and strategically incompetent.\u00a0 Rather than underscoring American military power, it devalued it.\u00a0 The U.S. invasion of Iraq also set off a sectarian struggle that continues to spread around the globe among the Muslim fourth of humanity.\u00a0 The U.S. occupation culminated in a \u201csurge\u201d of forces that entrenched a pro-Iranian regime in Baghdad and that only its authors consider a victory.<\/p>\n

The United States needs to deal with the reality and the challenges to others in the region of the Iranian sphere of influence it helped create.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Blunder number six<\/strong> has been to confuse the motives for terrorism with the religious rationalizations its perpetrators concoct to justify its immorality.\u00a0 Many of those who seek revenge for perceived injustices and humiliations at the hands of the West and Western-backed regimes in the Middle East, or who are treated as aliens in their own countries in Europe, give voice to their anger in the language of Islam.\u00a0 But their political grievances, not heretical Islamic excuses for the mass murders they carry out, are what drive their attempts at reprisal.\u00a0 Islamism is a symptom of Arab anguish and rage.\u00a0 It is a consequence, not a cause of Muslim anger.<\/p>\n

Religious ideology is, of course, important.\u00a0 It is a key factor in justifying hatred of those outside its self-selected community.\u00a0 To non-believers, arguments about who is a Jew or whether someone is a true Muslim are incomprehensible and more than a little absurd.\u00a0 But to the intolerant people doing the excommunicating, such debates define their political community and those who must be excluded from it.\u00a0 They separate friend from foe.\u00a0 And to those being condemned for their disbelief or alleged apostasy, the judgments imposed by this intolerance can now be a matter of life or death.<\/p>\n

In the end, the attribution of Muslim resentment of the West to Islam is just a version of the facile thesis that \u201cthey hate us because of who we are.\u201d\u00a0 This is the opiate of the ignorant.\u00a0 It is self-expiating denial that past and present behavior by Western powers, including the United States, might have created grievances severe enough to motivate others to seek revenge for the indignities they have experienced.\u00a0\u00a0 It is an excuse to ignore and do nothing about the ultimate sources of Muslim rage because they are too discomfiting to bear discussion.\u00a0 Any attempt to review the political effects of American complicity in the oppression and dispossession of millions of Palestinians and the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths caused by U.S. sanctions, bombing campaigns, and drone warfare is ruled out of order by political correctness and cowardice.<\/p>\n

The United States needs to work with its European allies, with Russia, and with partners in the Middle East to attack the problems that are generating terrorism, not just the theology of those who resort to it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Blunder number seven<\/strong> was the adoption after the 1973 Yom Kippur War of a commitment to maintain a \u201cqualitative military edge\u201d for Israel over any and all potential adversaries in its region. This policy has deprived Israel of any incentive to seek security through non-military means.\u00a0 Why should Israel risk resting its security on reconciliation with Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors when it has been assured of long-term military supremacy over them and relieved of any concern about the political or economic consequences of using force against them?<\/p>\n

Confidence in Israel\u2019s qualitative military edge is now the main source of moral hazard for the Jewish state.\u00a0 Its effect is to encourage Israel to favor short-term territorial gains over any effort to achieve long-term security through acceptance by neighboring states, the elimination of tensions with them, and the normalization of its relations with others in its region.\u00a0 U.S. policy inadvertently ensured that the so-called \u201cpeace process\u201d would always be stillborn.\u00a0 And so it proved to be.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s lack of concern about the consequences of its occupation and settlement of the West Bank and its siege of Gaza has facilitated its progressive abandonment of the universalist Jewish values that inspired Zionism and its consequent separation from the Jewish communities outside its elastic borders.\u00a0 U.S. subsidies\u00a0 underwrite blatant tyranny by Jewish settlers over the Muslim and Christian Arabs they have dispossessed.\u00a0 This is a formula for the moral and political self-delegitimization of the State of Israel, not its long-term survival.\u00a0 It is also a recipe for the ultimate loss by Israel of irreplaceable American political, military, and other support.<\/p>\n

The United States needs to wean Israel off its welfare dependency and end the unconditional commitments that enable self-destructive behavior on the part of the Jewish state.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Blunder number eight<\/strong> has been basing U.S. policies toward the Middle East on deductive reasoning grounded in ideological fantasies and politically convenient narratives rather than on inductive reasoning and reality-based analysis.\u00a0 America\u2019s misadventures cannot be excused as \u201cintelligence errors.\u201d\u00a0 They are the result of the ideological politicization of policy-making.\u00a0 This has enabled multiple policy errors based on wishful thinking, selective listening, and mirror-imaging.\u00a0 Examples include:<\/p>\n