The principal reason the liberal hawks give to justify the Iraqi war is the effect a modern liberal democracy in Iraq would have on the region. That was theory, this is reality
The Iraq Effect
Like a meteor crashing into a lake, the American invasion of Iraq made a lot of waves last year. Every one of the leaky, rotting regimes afloat in the Middle East had to worry it might be swamped by the cataclysm. Which would be next? Syria? Iran? Perhaps even Saudi Arabia? The old elites shuddered to think. But in geopolitics, as in physics, for every action there's an opposite reaction—and 10 months after the first U.S. bombs were dropped on Baghdad, what we're seeing in the Middle East is nothing like the spreading circles of American influence, reform and democratization hoped for by some of the Bush administration's idealists.
There's change, to be sure, and lots of it. But the waters are roiled and murky, the currents and countercurrents increasingly unpredictable. In the last few weeks, Iran has signed a new protocol allowing the International Atomic Energy Agency to conduct snap inspections of its nuclear sites to make sure it's not building a bomb. Libya, in December, completely surrendered its incipient nuclear-weapons program. Syria, meanwhile, has tried to launch a peace initiative with Israel (following story) and shore up its troubled relations with Turkey. "The Americans are in deep trouble in Iraq. But what happened in Libya, Iran and Syria suggests there are positive consequences as well," says Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "The secondary consequences of the invasion are huge."
Or are they? On closer examination, it's obvious the pre-emptive ouster of Saddam was neither the only, nor even the primary, catalyst for these developments. And far from setting a course for the region, Bush administration policy appears adrift. The diplomatic follow-up to the Iraq war, for instance, the so-called Roadmap to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, has hit a complete dead end. In Iraq itself, U.S. troops are struggling to beat back a bloody insurgency that Washington never anticipated. (The U.S. death toll since the invasion reached 500 last week.) While vowing to stay the course, the Bush administration is scrambling for an exit strategy, constantly revising its slapdash plans for a transition to democracy next summer, bending to pressure from Iraq's ayatollahs and facing mounting protests in what used to be the quiet Shiite south of the country.
Watching all this, despots who once worried that they were "next on the list" appear increasingly confident that Washington's first pre-emptive war will also be its last. Last week in Iran, for instance, the hard-line leadership close to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made a blatant bid to disqualify hundreds of reformists, including 85 incumbents, from next month's parliamentary elections.
With or without the fall of Saddam, this would be a critical moment for the mullahs who've ruled the Islamic republic since the late Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979. Both the hard-liners and the more —moderate clerics around President Mohammed Khatami have lost credibility among the country's young and restless majority (roughly 70 percent of Iranians are under 30). The most striking thing about the current showdown is what hasn't happened: "A few years ago, I and thousands of other students would have been on the street protesting, even setting ourselves on fire," says former activist Milad Khademi. But this time the streets of Tehran are empty, and most analysts think the hard-liners' power play will lead only to a pathetically low turnout in the February elections.
If Iran's hard-liners are acting cocky, it's partly because they've concluded that the West, and especially the United States, needs them. "The conservatives have bluntly said, 'You have to deal with us'," says political activist Ibrahim Yazdi. The go-to guy on nuclear issues, for instance, is Hassan Rohani, who answers only to the Supreme Leader. Passing through Paris last week, Rohani curtly dismissed U.S. criticism of the parliamentary disqualifications, saying: "They [the Americans] pursue their own interests and try to show hostility toward the Iranian people." As Rohani well knows, there has been tacit cooperation between Washington and Tehran since the 2001 war in Afghanistan, when the mullahs agreed not to interfere in the ouster of the Taliban. Now that Washington faces a restless Shiite majority in Iraq, it has to mollify the mullahs in the hope they won't stir up too much trouble next door. "Ties between Iranian and Iraqi clerics have grown immensely after the war," says Abdullah Ramezanzadeh, an Iranian government spokesman. "Many of them have family ties. Many others were classmates and had been separated for years."
Last week saw unprecedented demonstrations in the Shiite cities of Amara, Kut and Basra, where 30,000 protesters turned out. A growing confrontation is underway between Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the U.S. administration over the critical issues of elections, sovereignty and the conditions under which American troops will—or will not—be allowed to stay in the country. U.S. administrator Paul Bremer was summoned back to Washington last week to try to find a compromise between the U.S. plan to form a transitional regime using caucuses and Sistani's insistence that a popular vote is the only way to ensure the legitimacy of the new government. The Iranians aren't the cause of these contretemps, but they and their agents could surely make them worse. "We have very close relationships with the Kurds and Shiites of Iraq—that's about 85 percent of the population," says Ramezanzadeh. "We haven't created obstacles in Iraq, but the Americans know we could."
Other discredited old regimes have reason to believe the Bush administration will actually help them stay in power. Libyan leader Muammar Kaddafi, for instance, has ruled since 1969. In 1986 his support for terrorism made him the personal target of a U.S. bombing raid. His intelligence officers responded by blowing up Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, and a French airliner over Africa in 1989. He became the main arms supplier for the Irish Republican Army. Because of his terrorist activities, his people have suffered through more than a dozen years of draconian international sanctions.
But in the mid-1990s Kaddafi's agents, led by intelligence chief Musa Kusa, began what a senior U.S. official calls a "strategy to get him out of that sandy hole he'd dug himself into." While the public side of the initiative involved the trial of the Lockerbie bombers and compensation for the victims' families, there were also more-secretive arrangements. One major factor, according to British sources, was intelligence-sharing about terrorist activities. As an Arab source described the demarche, "The British asked 10 questions about the IRA; the Libyans came back with the answers to 50 questions." Even more valuable were the massive dossiers Libya had compiled about Osama bin Laden, who once tried to have Kaddafi killed, and about Al Qaeda, which Libyan agents had worked hard to penetrate. After September 11, those files became all the more important.
But the Americans wanted more. They wanted Libya to dismantle whatever weapons of mass destruction it might have. As it happens, the Libyans had started a clandestine nuclear program at just about the same time they started currying British and American favor. They didn't invest much in it—a little over $40 million by —some published estimates. And the Libyan program didn't get very far, judging from initial IAEA inspections in December. They were a very long way from building a bomb. Last week Libyan, British and American intelligence officers met in London to discuss the program further. "You have to wonder if the nuclear program was just a bargaining chip created to surrender at the right time," says Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based Arabic daily Al-Quds. "In any case, you don't hear the British or Americans talking much about human rights in Libya these days, do you?"
In the immediate aftermath of Saddam's overthrow, Syrian President Bashar Assad looked like the most vulnerable of Iraq's neighbors, and he probably still is. Damascus not only has to contend with its new neighbor, the United States, but with its old one, Israel. So Assad has turned to Turkey. He quickly handed over several terrorists who'd tried to find refuge in Syria after the bombings of two Istanbul synagogues last November. And on a state visit this month, he emphasized a common goal on which Ankara and Damascus strongly concur: the need to keep Iraq's Kurds from establishing an autonomous, much less an independent, homeland. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared that he and Assad were "in complete agreement." (Turkey, Syria and Iran all have Kurdish populations that might try the same thing if the Iraqis succeed.) The uncertainties raised by the Iraq effect—including the status of the Kurds—have brought these old enemies closer together.
Is this what Washington wanted? Two of the region's dictatorships seem to be coming in from the cold without instituting any serious internal reform, while Iran, the one country really ripe for democracy, is slipping back under the tight control of the same leaders who made it a charter member of the Axis of Evil. "Never before were the Americans in so much need of the Iranians, thanks to Iraq," says a senior European official who recently visited Tehran. "The [Iranian] conservatives, because they are the ones who can deliver, hold the key for the Americans there. Middle Eastern politics is full of paradoxes, no?" Yes. There has been some positive change following the war, but much of it began earlier as part of the dictators' selfish—and successful—strategies for self-preservation. Unless Washington wants to risk more regime changing, a genuine transformation of the region may remain a distant dream.
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