How Bibi and Bush Made a Mess of the Middle East
Misplaced Focus on Saddam's Iraq Tore Region Apart
Read more: forward.com
By now it’s become a Washington cliché: Barack Obama stumbling cluelessly through a Middle East in flames. He’s leading from behind, surrendering to Iran, withdrawing from the world, pivoting to Asia. He tried to disengage from Middle East entanglements, but the region sucked us back in.
Or did it? Here the cliché gets muddled. In one version, we’ve abandoned longtime allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia, who are left to battle the Iranian threat alone. In another version, we’re fighting on too many fronts — Iraq, Syria, Yemen — with no clear idea who’s the enemy.
We’re fighting alongside Sunni Saudi Arabia against Shiite Iran’s proxies in Yemen. We’re fighting alongside Shiite Iran against Sunni ISIS in Iraq. We’re supporting Syrian rebels battling against both ISIS and Iran’s Syrian proxy, the Assad regime. Meanwhile we’re jawboning in Switzerland to make Iran eliminate half its centrifuges. And keep half.
In one telling, Obama lacks an overall foreign policy vision, a must for real leaders. In another, he’s secretly adopted the arcane theory of “offshore balancing,” a modified isolationism. The idea is, you use naval and air power rather than ground troops to defend your friends. Which doesn’t sound quite like isolationism, but never mind. One neoconservative, Lee Smith, wrote in Tablet last year that Obama had adopted Israel-bashing “balance” maven Stephen Walt as his foreign policy guru, though Walt’s never been to the Obama White House.
How did things get so confused? Actually, it’s rather simple. Let’s start at Square One.
In early January 2002, four months after the September 11 attacks, Israeli national security council director Uzi Dayan met in Washington with his American counterpart Condoleezza Rice. She told him — to his surprise, he later told me — that President Bush had decided to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. A month later Dayan’s boss, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, met with Bush in the White House and offered some advice, based on decades of Israeli intelligence.
Removing Saddam, Sharon said, according to three sources with direct knowledge, will have three main results, all negative. Iraq will implode into warring tribes of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. You’ll be stuck in an Iraqi quagmire for a decade. And Iran, a far more dangerous player, will be rid of its principal enemy and free to pursue its ambitions of regional hegemony. Bush didn’t agree. Israeli leaders continued pooh-poohing Iraq all spring. Dismissal turned to alarm in August, when Iranian dissidents released evidence that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons. In September Sharon told his cabinet to stop discussing Iraq. It was annoying the White House.
On September 12, however, a different Israeli voice visited Washington: ex-prime minister-turned-private citizen Benjamin Netanyahu. A longtime Sharon rival, closely allied with Washington’s neoconservatives, he’d been invited to address the Republican-led House as an expert on Iraq. Baghdad, he said, was hiding mobile centrifuges “the size of washing machines.” Moreover, “if you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.” Throughout the Middle East, including Iran, populations will be inspired to topple their own dictators. Bush, of course, listened to Netanyahu and the neocons, not Sharon and his generals. Alas, Sharon was right. Iraq imploded. Iran surged. The invasion had reverberations, but hardly positive. The rest is history.......
Read more: forward.com |
