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.
