6/12/2006

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

The End of the Neo-Conservative Illusions about the Middle East?

Bush’s military invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein were guided by a grand neo-conservative vision of a Middle East transformed from a hotbed of anti-American terrorism into a peaceful pro-American region that provided the United States with safe, low-cost access to the region’s oil treasures.

All we had to do, the neo-conservatives preached, was overthrow Iraq’s brutal dictator and allow free elections. The blossoming of freedom and democracy in Iraq would trigger democratic changes throughout the region, and one undemocratic regime after another would tumble in the face of popular uprisings that demanded that they be allowed to live just like Americans do.

Of course that is not quite what happened. In the recent Iranian elections, rigid, anti-democratic Islamists swept the last of the reformers from power. And the radical Palestinian group, Hamas, won control of the Palestinian Authority through recent elections. The Shiites who make up the majority of Iraq’s population voted not for the secular, pro-Western Shiite groups the neo-conservatives hoped to install but for anti-Western pro-Iranian theocratic religious leaders who control their own militias. The Kurdish region of Iraq, also, continues to be ruled by competing military groups. Elections thus far have not carried the region in the direction predicted by Bush’s advisors. Instead it has veered in the opposite direction.

Although the neo-conservatives would have us believe Iran and Iraq had been havens for al-Qaeda, the opposite was true in both countries where the governments harshly suppressing what they saw as uncontrollable jihadist soldiers of fortune. The breakdown of security in Iraq after the American invasion changed that, providing an attractive haven for jihadists and suicide bombers and the formation of an al-Qaeda in Iraq built around the Jordanian thug al-Zarqawi. The Iranian government publicly praised the killing of al-Zarqawi; that was not surprising given that al-Zarqawi had been targeting Shiites and trying to trigger civil war on Iran’s borders.

The US now faces the possibility of a Shiite government in Iraq cooperating with its previous sponsors within the government of Iran, both well funded by their oil resources, forming a new dominant axis in the region that is anything but pro-American.

We can rattle our sabers and threaten air strikes against Iran, but given how bogged down we are in Iraq and how thin our military forces are stretched, it is not clear how convincing such a threat would be. We certainly can use air strikes to do incredible damage to Iranian infrastructure, but we have tried before to get people to cooperate with us by trying to “bomb them back into the stone age.” It did not work then; it is unlikely to work now. The international fall-out from our savaging another Muslim country would also be considerable.

We clearly need an alternative strategy for dealing with Iran that does not threaten us and them with another Iraq-like quagmire. That may explain the dramatic step taken recently by Secretary of State Rice in agreeing to begin direct talks with the Iranian government. Previously the position of the Bush Administration was that it would not negotiate with Iran because its government was part of the “Axis of Evil” and such negotiations would lend it respect and legitimacy when only regime change was really acceptable. The result has been convoluted, back-channel negotiations, making use of third parties.

It is not that Iran and the United States have no common interests and are unlikely to be able to reach agreement on issues of common concern. As we planned our invasion of Afghanistan, we negotiated agreements under which Iran offered search-and-rescue assistance for any of our pilots downed within Iran; it offered humanitarian assistance to people fleeing the fighting in Afghanistan, and, it is reported, actually offered advice on important Taliban targets for American bombing. Unlike our “ally” Pakistan, which actively supported the Taliban, Iran worked for years with an anti-Taliban coalition. That gave it the leverage to pressure those groups to cooperate in the formation of the new Afghanistan government sponsored by the United States.

Given our difficulties in creating functioning national governments in both Iraq and Afghanistan and our difficulties in defeating decentralized insurgencies that are at least partially rooted in religious, ethnic, and tribal divisions, we may well need the assistance of other countries in the region to make sure that our ill-advised invasion does not simply create a political vacuum that catastrophically destabilizes the region. Iran, sitting between Iraq and Afghanistan, could be a valuable partner in stabilizing the region if we can get beyond the neo-conservative fantasies of an American dominated Middle East. From a very pragmatic point of view, Iran and the United States have a broad set of common interests. If the focus was on those common interests and more open engagement with both the Iranian government and people of Iran, rather than on apocalyptic religious zeal, we might be surprised by how broad an agreement could be reached on security, terrorism, and nuclear weapons.

Hopefully, the recent acceptance of nation-to-nation negotiations by both the United States and Iran will allow us to test an alternative to the neo-conservatives’ failed and costly use of pre-emptive military strikes to try to “shock and awe” other countries into yielding to our interests.