By Dr. Nayyer Ali

Reshaping the Middle East - Part 1

December 29 , 2006

(The following two-part piece is the text of my remarks at the MPAC Convention in December 2006. I shared the podium with Amy Goodman and Robert Fisk as we discussed the reshaping of the Middle East.)
The reshaping of the Middle East, the grand project of the Bush administration, now lies in ruins. The goal of creating a pro-American, pro-Israeli Arab democracy out of the ashes of Saddam’s Iraq is now dead. The current state of Iraq is abominable. Over 1 million Iraqis have fled the country since the war started, taking the heart of the middle class on which any real democracy could have been built out of the nation. Another hundred thousand give up and flee to wherever they can every month. Over 500,000 Iraqis have died, and to put that in perspective, in proportional terms that would be equal to America having six million dead in three years. There is no functioning economy, oil and electricity production have shown no significant increase since the US takeover, and there are no effective national institutions.
The Kurds are essentially running their own country in the north, while every government ministry, police unit, and army battalion is loyal to a militia or ethnic faction rather than Iraq as a nation. The US has suffered 3000 dead and 25000 wounded, and has spent over 500 billion dollars on this adventure, with no visible progress. In fact, the violence and lack of security have never been worse. The head of the US Army has now said that the Army is near its breaking point. It can’t keep sending the same soldiers back to Iraq again and again. Meanwhile, US influence in the region and around the world has declined dramatically. North Korea tested a nuclear bomb, and Iran knows the US has its hands tied. Elsewhere public opinion polls show the US government is held in low esteem by majorities around the world.
The big prize that factions are competing for is control of the oil wealth. With 100 billion barrels in proven reserves, Iraq sits over five trillion dollars worth of oil. The deposits are split between the Kurdish north and the Shia south, and who will control that oil wealth and how it will be distributed is the main driver of the violence.
How did we get here? I don’t believe Bush planned this war when he took office. He had no real foreign policy experience, and was in fact critical of the interventions and nation-building projects that Clinton had used the military on a small scale in the 1990’s. But then 9/11 happened. 9/11 however was fundamentally misinterpreted, probably deliberately so, to allow the Bush administration to undertake the reshaping of the Middle East in a manner more agreeable to the US. According to Bush, we were attacked for our freedoms. This was a fatuous remark, but from it flowed all sorts of bad policy. It allowed Bush to avoid answering tough questions about the effects of US policy in the Middle East, and whether those policies actually served our interest. It also allowed Bush to respond by declaring a Global War on Terror, which is a meaningless idea as terror is a tactic, not a movement or country to declare war on. But it allowed Bush to demand the powers of a wartime President, and he used those powers to reduce civil liberties in the US while engaging in war abroad and bypassing the Geneva Convention and the ban on torture. A servile Congress allowed him to do as pleased.
Within the Bush administration, and the broader conservative movement, 9/11 was used to create a massive Islamic threat to the security of the United States. Instead of 9/11 being seen as the work of a small group of motivated radicals who exploited a weakness in airline safety, it was portrayed as the opening salvo of a worldwide contest between the US and a massive radical Islamic movement bent on global conquest. Every point of friction or conflict between Muslims and the US or Europe was added to this. Riots in France, the cartoon controversy, the London and Madrid rail bombings, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Chechen attacks on Russia, secular Saddam Hussein, and Shia Iran’s nuclear policy were rolled into a brief for a new global Cold War. Just as the old Cold War with the Soviet Union and global communism gave conservatives an extremely useful structure on which to hang their policies, having another Cold War with a global enemy was extremely useful to scare the public. In fact that enemy was a mere phantom, incomparably weak, and very small, making up a few thousand young males at best scattered throughout the globe. But on this thin reed, Bush went to war in Iraq.
The Bush campaign was based on the idea that terrorism in the Muslim world was a product of a democracy deficit. If the Muslim countries were democracies, then they would not have terrorist groups. This is a leap of faith to some extent, but it is true that the sources of Al-Qaeda were two very undemocratic regimes, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The main grievances that Bin Laden was articulating had no legitimate path to be aired. If Saudi Arabia was a real democracy, it might be the case that Bin Laden could have pursued his agenda through a political path, formed a party, and campaigned for the removal of US forces from Saudi Arabia. But this scheme would suggest that the problem lay not in Iraq, but in the pro-American Arab states that did not allow internal dissent from their policies. Saddam’s Iraq was not the source of Al-Qaeda, and yet Bush decided that turning Iraq into a democracy by force was the way to deal with the Arabs’ and Muslims’ democracy deficit.
The other pillar of this strategy was the notion that the US could impose democracy by force. Doing such a thing, while not totally impossible, is extraordinarily difficult. It requires tremendous patience, skill, and knowledge on the part of the occupier, and the chance of success depends to a large part on the underlying character and institution of the country. A homogenous nation that is not distracted by ethnic or other divisions, and one that has previous experience with democracy and contains viable institutions such as political parties, independent press, and civil society, is much more likely to find success. Egypt would have a much better chance of democracy taking hold than Iraq after Saddam. So to pick Iraq as the country in which to carry out this vast social science experiment was rather bizarre.
In fact, after creating this incredibly ambitious policy, Bush simply lacked the knowledge or interest, either personally or in his administration, to make it work. The occupation has been characterized by gross negligence and incompetence. Half of the staff of the CPA had never traveled outside the US when they got hired. There is still no clear understanding of who gave or why the order was given to disband Iraq’s only national institution, the army. The lack of 10,000 military policemen allowed Baghdad to descend into the chaos of mass looting right after the war, from which it never really recovered. There were many strong voices who pointed out the need for a large army of occupation, but they were ignored or silenced. The lack of sufficient understanding of Iraq’s complexities, and the heavy-handed tactics used by the military initially, culminating in Abu Ghraib, completely backfired. And yet Bush had no accountability or real process to analyze and manage these complex problems.
Throughout the last four years there has been insufficient security and reconstruction in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The overwhelming need to establish security early and maintain it was ignored, and that is why we have the catastrophe we face today. In Afghanistan, a few billion dollars annually would have been sufficient to buy and destroy the poppy crop, which fuels much of the instability. In Iraq, the lack of security has inexorably allowed the situation to go from bad to worse to beyond that. Baghdad is now dividing into armed neighborhood camps, and ethnic cleansing is gathering pace.
Part two next week.

 

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Editor: Akhtar M. Faruqui
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