Posted on 12/08/2002 7:32:30 PM PST by Lessismore
As George W. Bush gears up for war against Iraq, to liberate it from Saddam Hussein’s grotesque regime, the Middle East faces a crisis of immense proportions, one in which the 50-year conflict with Israel pales into virtual insignificance.
Few in the Arab world or Iran have any love for Saddam and most grieve for Iraq’s long-suffering people. But across the Middle East, the “Bush Doctrine,” unveiled in September, is viewed as a blueprint for catastrophe that the region’s leaders fear is aimed at bringing about wide-scale “regime change” not only in Iraq, but in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Libya and Palestine as well.
This, say critics of Bush and the powerful coterie of hard-line, pro-Israel neoconservatives who are defining US policy these days, will intensify the anti-American hostility that is swelling across the region and play right into the hands of Osama bin Laden and Islamic militants whose tentacles, more than a year after Sept. 11, are reaching out the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Europe. And indeed, if the bellicose rhetoric emanating from Washington in recent months is anything to go by, the administration seems to be lining up its targets across the region once Saddam is toppled the Vietnam-era domino theory in reverse.
The marked shift in US national security policy from deterrence and containment to an aggressive unilateral approach based on the twin pillars of pre-emptive military strikes and global military supremacy is of immense importance to the Middle East. Reflecting the post-Sept. 11 realities and new priorities, the authors of the administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) argue that “America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones. We are menaced less by fleets and armies than by catastrophic technologies in the hands of the embittered few.”
Ironically, even some US military commanders, notably General Anthony Zinni, former head of the US Central Command, which covers the Middle East, are questioning the wisdom of this new strategy. Analyst Geoffrey Kemp of the Nixon Center told the Washington-based Middle East Institute’s annual conference in October during a debate on the NSS that “the institution least enamored with attacking Iraq is the military because they know what their limits are.”
From the Middle East perspective, Bush’s war against terrorism has increasingly become a war to enforce US global power, and this has left the Arab world, particularly US allies like Egypt and Jordan, wringing their hands, impotent and uneasy, unable to influence events that could affect them severely, and fearful of the upheavals that a US conquest of Iraq could trigger in a region that Salah al-Din Hafiz, editor of the international edition of Egypt’s influential al-Ahram newspaper, says is now sitting “on the edge of a volcano.”
In the wider context, the Arab world is in danger of being marginalized by the impact of Sept. 11 and the manner in which it has changed geopolitics. According to Giandominico Picco, a former assistant secretary-general of the UN who succeeded in the perilous mission of securing the release of US and other Western hostages held by Iranian-backed Islamic militants in Lebanon in the late 1980s, the suicide attacks on the US “accelerated processes that were already under way. “In others it brought to the surface trends that had been previously been less visible. And in others still it has provided an opportunity, or excuse, to undertake policies under the cover of the struggle against terrorism. New political partnerships have also been initiated or strengthened, and the most striking is a convergence of sorts, an alignment involving the US, Russia, China and India.”
This could impact significantly on the Gulf states’ traditional dominance of the oil market, with Russia re-emerging as a major exporter and, with US encouragement, challenging Saudi Arabia.
“A new era in oil production has just begun with significant efforts under way to make Russia a de facto competitor to Saudi Arabia in the determination of oil prices and market shares, although not, of course, in exports,” Picco wrote in a recent article. “A major oil company today can be a player with hardly any presence in the Arab oil-producing countries, an unlikely possibility some 20 years ago. Indeed, a more relevant development in the months and years ahead will be the potential repatriation of Arab funds from the US. More than oil, this may be the real weapon left in the hands of Arab oil producers.”
Arab dismay at Bush’s strategy is compounded by his reluctance, or inability, to tackle their conflict with Israel. They are alarmed by Bush’s tolerance of Ariel Sharon’s use of overwhelming force to crush the Palestinian intifada, and fear that the Israeli leader will use the smoke screen of the war in Iraq to drive Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip into Jordan, what the Israelis’ call “transfer,” to change the demography of the Occupied Territories and thus annex them into “Greater Israel.”
The so-called Middle East peace plan that Bush unveiled in June, in which he referred to the emergence within three years of a “provisional” Palestinian state (whatever that might mean) in the “disputed” (not occupied) territories, provided Yasser Arafat was cast aside and democratic reforms initiated, has been described as “the dampest of damp squibs” since it put no obligation on Sharon to negotiate a political settlement.
Small wonder, then, that when Sharon visited Washington in October, his seventh since becoming premier in February 2001, he told Bush “I think we have never had such relations with any president of the US as we have with you, and we never had such cooperation in everything as we have with the current administration.” The Arabs would not argue with that.
Egyptian, Jordanian and Saudi leaders see the resolution of the conflict with Israel as the key to defusing discontent among their restive populations and undermining the appeal of bin Laden and other anti-Western extremists. King Abdullah II of Jordan, who has spoken more forcefully in support of Bush’s “war on terrorism” than any other Arab leader, is the most vulnerable to deepening violence between Israel and the Palestinians, haunted as the Hashemite kingdom is with the specter of an exodus of Palestinians across the Jordan River.
Arab leaders, fearful of regional destabilization once the American hit Iraq, are aghast at Washington’s apparent inability to distinguish between bin Laden’s ideologically-driven violence and the Palestinians’ struggle against the region’s military superpower that has occupied their land for 35 years, and balks at setting them free.
As Hafiz commented, “the US finds itself in a contradiction. For while it is pressing home its demand for political reform, it is causing the process to be delayed because of its anticipated war.”
The war in Iraq, when it comes, is not expected to be a lengthy one. The biggest problem is likely to be installing a transitional government to transform Saddam’s dysfunctional police state and into a democratic one in which all Iraq’s ethnic groups are represented. Given Iraq’s internal divisions, that may be difficult. The last thing anyone wants is to have the country fragment into cantons Shiites in the south, Sunnis in the center and the Kurds in the north. Turkey, Syria and Iran do not want to see Iraq’s rebellious Kurds become independent, since that would encourage the Kurdish minorities in their countries to press for similar arrangements. Turkey’s powerful generals have indicated they could seize the northern province around Mosul, which contains the Kirkuk oil fields, to prevent the Iraqi Kurds achieving their long-held ambition of statehood and have revived their old claim to the region that was a separate vilayat during the Ottoman days.
Iraq’s oil wealth is likely to be a critical issue. A US interagency task force known as the Executive Steering Group run by the White House has been seeking to formulate a plan on how to run the country once Saddam has been removed. According to some reports, there have been suggestions that Washington use oil revenues to help pay for the war, but the general feeling is that it would be better to use the money to start rebuilding the country’s infrastructure, wrecked by war and UN sanctions, to demonstrate that the Bush administration is not seeking to control the oil, as many Arabs believe. Iraqi opposition groups in exile who expect to be represented in any new government have long been fractious and have put forward various and often competing proposals on how the country should be governed after Saddam has gone. This is likely to be a real headache for the Americans, and they will have to get it right first time or face potentially serious trouble in the long term.
How the Americans cope with that problem could dictate to some degree how the rest of the region views US military intervention against a sovereign state, however odious its regime may be. And it is here that Bush’s relations with Sharon become critical. Although the Israelis have sought to portray Iraq as a mortal danger to them, Saddam is really a minor (and rather convenient) threat. The handful of aging Scud-type missiles he may have stashed away are not likely to be able to penetrate Israel’s defense shield, namely two batteries of Arrow missiles, the world’s most advanced anti-missile system, and several batteries of the latest US Patriot missiles.
Israelis have long viewed Iran, which they and the Americans claim is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons and has recently accelerated its efforts to develop medium-range missiles capable of hitting the Jewish state, as their primary threat. In early November, Sharon was quoted by The Times of London as demanding that pressure should be put on Iran part of Bush’s “axis of evil” with Iraq and North Korea “the day after” action against Iraq ends. Only a few days earlier, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had declared that, amid growing street protests in Tehran by students demanding political reform, the conservative clerical regime would soon collapse.
Such comments are causing considerable unease in Tehran, which fears that it may be next on Bush’s hit list. Tehran’s jitters could well be justified, given the convergence of Israel’s strategic aims and the Bush administration’s aggressive new doctrine of pre-emption, long a pillar of Israel’s military doctrine. The influence of hard-line pro-Israel hawks in the administration, particularly those in the Pentagon, seems to be near-total now and talk of regime-change in Tehran has been growing of late.
Richard Perle, a longtime advocate of hard-line policies since the Reagan administration who has Rumsfeld’s ear, recently declared that the US was prepared to attack Iran, Syria and Lebanon all enemies of Israel if necessary. It was the Pentagon Defense Policy Board, chaired by Perle, that a few weeks ago was given a briefing that urged seizing Saudi Arabia’s oil fields for the kingdom’s alleged support for terrorism. It also proposed that a “Grand Strategy for the Middle East” should concentrate on “Iraq as the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia as the strategic pivot, and Egypt as the prize.” That gave no comfort at all to the ruling elites in Riyadh or Cairo.
Sharon’s expected re-election in January, with a mandate for harsher military action against the Palestinians and who knows who else, will inevitably deepen the sense of insecurity pervading the region as the strategic objectives of the US and Israeli governments move increasingly in tandem.
According to some accounts, the $800 million nuclear reactor the Russians are building for Iran outside the northern Gulf port of Bushehr could become the litmus test for the Bush administration’s doctrine of pre-emptive strikes if the Israelis, who consider it a threat to their national security don’t attack it first, as they did against Saddam’s nascent nuclear program when F-16s destroyed the French-built Osirak reactor near Baghdad in June 1981.
Here's to Instability among despots!!
And we shall drive their women and children before us, and their lamentations shall be as music to our ears.
They need to be afraid. They kicked a normally easy-going giant in the shins.
/john
Please provide a reference.
/john
If they get rid of the scourge of terrorism, we'll have no need to call for regime change in their country.
/john
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