Bush’s Democracy Agenda in the Middle East has ended in a foreign policy disaster. The U.S. military now expects to stay paralyzed in the Iraqi palm groves and deserts for a ‘few more years‘.
Since Bush started the democracy project propagated by Likudnik Natan Sharansky and others, the only two successful cases in Palestine and Iraq have turned against U.S. interests.
The project has therefore been aborted. As Michael Hirsh in Newsweek remarks:
[I]in the space of a year, the Bush team seems to
have gone from condemning the decades-old U.S. policy of backing the
Arab regimes to championing precisely that course.
Indeed Secretary of State Rice said only a year ago:
What you had in the Middle East before was American policies — bipartisan, by the way, it had been pursued by Democratic Presidents and by Republican Presidents — that engaged in so-called Middle East exceptionalism [i.e. incompatibility of Arabs and Democracy] and was pursuing stability at the expense of democracy, and it turned out, […] was getting neither.
Asked about the recent $33 billion weapon deal with Middle East dictatorships, Rice says now:
SECRETARY RICE: Well, first, let me just say that
these are our longstanding and close friends and allies. These are
strategic relationships that go back decades. And we are really determined to signal our commitment and to provide for the security of our allies to the degree that they need initiatives from the United States to do that.And there isn’t an issue of quid pro quo. We have the same goals in this region concerning security and stability for the region.
As the democracy policy collapsed, there were two possible ways to go.
One route would have included the rapprochement with Iran I speculated about. Such a move would have been followed by a confrontation with the Wahhabi salafist philosophy (and money) that is coming out of the Saudi Kingdom and is feeding the various al-Qaida franchises.
But that step would have been radical and Bush’s presidency has little time and energy left.
So instead, the Bush administration did fall back onto the default route of U.S. foreign policy and the tool-box of the cold war: arm the allies and contain the (perceived) enemies (Iran and Syria and, tacitly backing them, Russia and China.)
In her academic career Rice specialized on the Soviet Union. Secretary of Defense Gates, now her political companion, has a doctorate in Russian and Soviet history and his career at the CIA evolved during the cold war.
Maybe they were just overwhelmed by complexity of the situation they created and had to reset it back into their personal default-mode of thinking.
As the cold war model now likely determines the new strategy, there will have to be another major correction.
The only practical result of the democracy strategy that survived so far is the Maliki government and the parliament in Baghdad.
Maliki didn’t turn to be the willing puppet the U.S. hoped for. He and his party are also allies of the new ‘enemy’ Iran. As long as Maliki is in place, Iran can not be successfully contained.
The usual cold war instrument to get rid of some inconveniently unruly ‘ally’ is a coup.
Indeed, despite all the al-Qaida talk, the U.S. military in Iraq sees the shiite militia in Iraq as the main threat. The efforts to build up a tribal Sunni force is likely part of an attempt to challenge Maliki’s role.
The Iraqi parliament is now in recess until September and its members are on vacation. There is quite a chance that they will not need to come back to Baghdad at all.
Even with a coup and the installment of some new puppets, the cold-war approach is unlikely to reduce the complexity of the overall situation. The released ghosts will not silently slip back into the bottle. But that doesn’t mean the U.S. won’t try to push them.