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With a Bang and a Whimper

October 2008
Bush's 'suicidal statecraft' has injured US power in the Middle East and elsewhere. What now?
George W. Bush's vow of unwavering American support during Israel's 60th anniversary celebrations in May was the nail in the coffin in any last-minute effort to broker a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement.

Although Bush was grappling with other foreign policy crises, he essentially ignored the conflict for most of his eight-year tenure. Many of the wars he did involve the US in were of his own making, such as the Iraqi and Afghan quagmires. Altogether, Bush's failures in the Middle East show just how far American influence in the region has declined since the Soviet Union's disintegration almost 20 years ago left the United States as the world's only superpower.

After antagonizing Arab countries further with his vow to Israel, Bush visited Saudi Arabia and begged King Abdullah to help push down record-high oil prices. He was openly rebuffed - an act unthinkable before 9/11. If Bush needed a sharp lesson in how limited US power has become, that was it.

"The American era in the Middle East is over," wrote Richard Haas, a veteran Middle East hand from several US administrations and current president of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. "More than anything else it was the Iraq war - the enormous military, economic and diplomatic costs, the shifting internal balances in the region - that brought it to an end.

"Other factors contributed: The demise of the 'peace process,' the rise of Hamas and Hezbollah, the Israeli embrace of unilateralism and the disinclination of George W. Bush and his administration to undertake active diplomacy. The failure of traditional Arab regimes to combat the appeal of radical Islam also figures here, as does globalization. ... But let's be clear: The wounds America has suffered in the region were self-inflicted."

The great British historian Arnold Toynbee attributed the British Empire's collapse to the "suicidal statecraft" of its leaders. You can apply that equally to the Bush administration's "shoot-'em-up" response to Islamic extremism.

Losing friends. Bush has even been spurned by Israel, America's "closest ally in the region," who tried to gauge Syria's appetite for peace in the face of bitter US objections. Bush wants to isolate Syria for allying with Iran and its enmity in the Middle East, while Israel has its own prerogatives (including a lame duck prime minister facing corruption charges who needed to pull a rabbit out of the hat to save his political career).

Israel's decision to re-engage Damascus points to a strategic split between Jerusalem and Washington - one that will not be lost on America's Arab friends - and lends weight to their inclination to make a deal with Iran.

Hezbollah's ascendancy in Lebanon (by threatening renewed civil war) with the subsequent capitulation of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's beleaguered Western-backed government in Beirut were other strategic defeats for Bush. Iran, Hezbollah's sponsor, had notched yet another geopolitical success at America's expense. Hezbollah's gains also bolstered another patron, Syria, much to US chagrin.

In Iraq, it was Iran - and not the US - that played the critical role in brokering a ceasefire in Baghdad's Sadr City recently, between the government's forces and Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. As US allies cut deals with their rivals, the message across the region is clear: diplomacy in theMiddle East is now bypassing Washington.

Haas maintains that one of the main reasons this happened was that US policy is flawed. "Both what it has done and what it has failed to do, the US accelerated the emergence of new power centers and it has weakened its own position relative to them," he adds.

Bush's self-deluded decision to invade Iraq as part of his global war on terror accelerated the decline that has been progressing gradually since the early 1990s. Ousting Saddam, more than anything else, empowered Iran to assert itself as the paramount power in the region and brought about the end of the era of Pax Americana.

Resurgent powers. Russia is also a key factor. Now a post-Cold War energy titan rivaling Saudi Arabia, it has flexed its muscles under Vladimir Putin. That means reasserting itself on the world stage, aggressively challenging both the US and an expanding NATO.

In August, Russia's brief war with pro-Western Georgia, armed by the US and Israel, was the most dramatic example yet. It could yet swell into an East-West confrontation that could hurt the Middle East, another consequence of US reliance on military power. Putin sees opportunities to intervene in the Middle East, where he has quietly been rebuilding Moscow's influence among the Arab states that once were Soviet clients.

Iran's sole Arab ally is Syria, a country being increasingly isolated by the Americans and their friends. Bashar al-Assad, the country's president, stood with Putin as the West railed against the Russian invasion of Georgia. While a Syrian-Russian alliance could scupper Turkish-brokered peace talks with Israel, it will help Damascus gain advanced weapons systems from Moscow that it has long been seeking.

The mounting toll of Iraqi and Afghan civilian casualties caused by increasingly desperate US and coalition military actions are also eroding US authority in the region and beyond. They simply make new enemies for the Americans and eat away at whatever moral high ground American forces have held as self-proclaimed "liberators" of the Middle East.

Before 9/11, the conventional wisdom in Washington, and elsewhere, was that the core cause of instability in the Middle East was the Arab-Israeli conflict. Resolving it would stabilize a strategic region that had been fermenting since the 1930s. That view changed with 9/11.

The Hezbollah factor. According to Egyptian analyst Mustafa el-Labbad, Israel's failure to crush Hezbollah in the summer 2006 war showed that it was "incapable of filling the void created by Bush administration policy failures. More importantly, this incapacity has called into question Israel's ability to fulfill the proxy role it has performed for the US since 1967."

The war has also diminished Israel's reputation for military prowess. "Herein resides the true strategic significance of the war against Lebanon, for which reason it merits being classified as a turning point between two eras in the history of power balances in the Middle East," el-Labbad argues.

Hezbollah, flush with what it hailed as its "divine victory" in a war in which the Americans had so clearly encouraged Israel to destroy Iran's allies, went on to hijack the Lebanese government, more or less at gunpoint.

Meantime, in the January 2006 democratic parliamentary election in the Palestinian territories, Hamas, aided by Syria and Iran, crushed the US-backed Fatah party led by President Mahmoud Abbas. Hamas later seized control of the Gaza Strip in a mini-civil war that made a peace settlement infinitely more difficult to achieve.

These were dramatic and humiliating reversals that, to Arab and Muslim eyes, emphasized how hollow US power had become. With radical Muslims making political gains in Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt, Bush's grandiose crusade to bring democracy to the Arab world as a means of achieving peace, prosperity and stability went down in flames. "A genie unbottled," was how The New York Times described it.

Israel never bought into Bush's vision. After Bush promised that overthrowing Saddam would usher in an era of democratic reform, one Israeli diplomat in Washington mused, "Let's just hope, that these domino blocks don't fall on us."

These days in Israel, America's closest Middle East ally, there are those who believe US power is ebbing fast. If that becomes the predominant view, it could push the Jewish state toward the realization that Israel cannot continue to rely on force alone for its survival (particularly if Iran acquires nuclear weapons) or even continue acting alone. Ehud Olmert's decision to defy Washington and discuss peace with Syria is a case in point.

Former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami recently wrote that "America remains by far the world's most powerful country; its decline has more to do with its incompetent use of power rather than with the emergence of competitors."

"With Iraq probably becoming the first Arab country to be ruled by Shi'ites, and hence integrated into an expanding Shi'ite Iranian empire, America's Sunni allies in the region now view the US as unreliable. Indeed, the US is seen as practically complicit in inciting a monumental reversal of Islam's fortunes, the Shi'ite revival."

Pernicious policies. As George W. Bush edges through the twilight of his presidency, the prospect that his successor - whether Barack Obama or John McCain - will be able to reverse America's waning power in the Middle East is open to question. The emerging confrontation with Vladimir Putin's aggressively assertive Russia will test whether the US can learn from its mistakes.

Yet the US seems to be inclined toward engaging long-shunned adversaries like Iran and Syria. That may even eventually extend to such revolutionary groups as Hezbollah, Hamas and others.

Ben Ami notes: "The Palestinian issue is not the source of all the Middle East's ills, but its resolution would dramatically improve America's standing among Arabs. More importantly, it would deny Iran the ability to link popular Islamic and Arab causes with its own hegemonic ambitions."

That may be putting too rosy a glow on the situation. Many in the region fear that, once Shi'ite-dominated Iran gains control of Iraq's energy wealth (thanks to George W. Bush) Tehran's challenge to Islam's long-dominant Sunni branch will lead to bloodshed in the Gulf and the Levant.

Andrew J. Bacevich, a former army colonel and foreign policy analyst, notes in his new book "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism," that the US embarked on "a decade of unprecedented interventionism" by the military after the Cold War, and soon lost its way.

This process was accelerated by the Likudnik, neo-conservative hawks led by Dick Cheney, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz when Bush won the presidency and, Bacevich noted, was happily endorsed by the American people as a whole. "The impulses that have landed us in a war of no exits and no deadlines come from within," he wrote. These, Bacevich added, "found their ultimate expression in a perpetual state of war afflicting the Unites States today."

Much of the impetus behind the distinct shift in US policy in recent months, away from brute force to diplomatic engagement, has come from America's traditional Arab allies who fear getting trapped in the crossfire of any conflict. The Saudis have finally started flexing their diplomatic muscles, although how successful they will be still remains an open question.

Bacevich notes the underlying problem is the illusion that America as a superpower is all-powerful. "To persist in pretending that the United States is omnipotent is to exacerbate the problems that we face. The longer Americans ignore the implications of dependency and the longer policymakers nurture the pretence that this country can organize the world to its liking, the more precipitous will be its slide when the bills finally come due."

By Ed Blanche Beirut

© Arabies Trends 2008