THe Region: Defining priorities
By BARRY RUBIN
Things are not going well in Iraq, though perhaps not so badly – for the same reasons – as some may think. The key issue now is defining priorities.
American forces attacked Iraq a year ago to eliminate the regime of Saddam Hussein, with all that entails, and to establish a new government there. The former goal has been successfully accomplished; it is the latter that provides the big problem today.
Originally, the goals were to create a democratic government that would ensure Iraq was stable, at peace with its neighbors, and could even become a light unto other Arab nations as an example of the rewards of moderation. The lions would lie down with the lambs and federalism could solve the difficult issue of distributing power among Kurds, Sunnis, and Shi'ites. To oversee this process and ensure its success, US forces would remain in Iraq for a long time.
Probably, this vision was impossible to realize. Its advocates were often people knowing startlingly little about the Middle East, who drew their analogies from elsewhere, notably Germany and Japan in 1945.
Had the US had gone into Iraq with a predetermined interim government, perhaps everyone would have started courting this authority. Ironically, American sincerity about not acting like an imperialist power – offering all forces in Iraq an equal democratic opportunity – was a major factor leading to instability.
Perhaps, too, had the Iraqi army been left largely intact it would have been capable of restoring order and keeping its soldiers on the US side, rather than shooting at Americans. But these options are gone now.
This situation has many parallels in both American and Middle Eastern history. For example, it is forgotten that while some of the many US interventions in Latin America in the early 20th century were directed by corporate interests, a more important motive was the desire to bring stability and democracy to various countries there. Given the limit of what external forces can do – and the time they are likely to stay on the ground – these places soon reverted to dictatorships.
THE IDEA of a rational series of measures to "solve" some Middle Eastern problem is a mainstay of Western thinking. There was, for instance, the dispatch of US forces to Lebanon in 1982, European Union efforts to make deals with regional dictatorships (most recently the already failed effort to buy Iran away from developing nuclear weapons).
And, of course, it is simply not permissible in most of the West to suggest that ending the Israel-Palestinian or Arab-Israeli conflict may not be a quick, easy matter of finding the correct diplomatic formula.
Israel, too, has tried this approach on occasion, an obvious example being its 1982 attack on Lebanon (to put in place a friendly regime there) and, arguably, the Oslo peace agreement of 1993.
In short, what is at stake in the failure of Iraq is not just a single action but a whole style of thinking and strategy. What if there is little outside forces can do to mend the region's problems? What if, unfortunately, it is going to take a long time, with the key ingredient being a long-term change in the Arab world's systems and thinking?
Is that really so unimaginable, even if it is unpalatable?
There is nothing innate in Islam, the Arab character, or Middle Eastern societies to prevent them from becoming moderate, economically successful, peaceful, and democratic. But the same thing could have been said of Europe in, say, 1700 or 1800. What does exist are tremendous structural impediments.
I have been reading Mark Bowden's remarkable book Black Hawk Down about the failed 1993 US mission in Somalia to capture the warlord making the lives of that country's people so miserable. The operation was a disaster in which not only did US forces suffer heavy casualties but killed as many as 1,000 Somalis, most of them civilians.
Here is what Bowden writes of the views held by the Clinton – not Bush – administration: "There were plenty of politicians, diplomats, and journalists with bright hopes for a new millennium of worldwide capitalist free markets. America's unrivaled big stick could right the world's wrongs, feed the hungry, democratize the planet."
But the Somalia debacle, in Bowden's words written in 1999, "ended a brief heady period of post-Cold War innocence, a time when America and its allies felt they could sweep venal dictators and vicious tribal violence from the planet."
But Somalia showed there were places where problems existed because everyone "is caught up in hatred and fighting. The hatred and the killing continues because they want it to. Or because they don't want peace enough to stop it."
This is the reality of the Middle East. It will not go away by the appeasement of terrorists and dictators, nor by a change (forced or voluntary) in Israel's policy, nor by a Western public-relations campaign, nor by European diplomatic cleverness.
It is a tragedy. But the best way to make a tragedy worse is to act on the basis of wishful thinking.
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