US Middle East Policy – A Complete Disaster

The US has had good and bad policy eras. Insofar as the Middle East is concerned, this is a very bad era.

First, US policy has resulted in the entire Middle East, with the exception of Israel, hating Americans. And not just a little hatred: hatred to the point where a new terrorist cadre with suicide bombers came into being. The Twin Towers and Pentagon bombings were the direct result of this hatred. Foreign policy that creates such hatred is not good foreign policy.

So what did the US do to counter this hatred and resulting terrorism? First, it started a land war in Afghanistan. Second, it invaded Iraq and removed Saddam Hussein from power.

Iraq

Removing Saddam Hussein from power destabilized the entire Middle East and handed Iran the opportunity to extend its sphere of influence throughout the region. Why? Because Saddam was Sunni. His military dictatorship created a balance of power standoff with Iran (predominantly Shiite). Now that Saddam has been removed, Iran will encroach on Iraq and its oilfields. Note that the majority of Iraqis are also Shiite. The tension over the contested oil field is just a hint of what is to come – http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091219/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iraq.

The White House and Western media give the impression the Iraq surge worked and therefore, the American military can leave soon. One gets a slightly different impression by listening to the very excellent coverage of the Iraq situation by Al Jazeera – http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/insideiraq/. Most of the factions in Iraq want us out so they can resolve their hatreds of one another in their own way. It will not be pretty and cause great instability throughout the region.

Afghanistan

Bush invaded Afghanistan in hopes of capturing Bin Laden. But he shortly lost interest in Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. However, he left the US military engaged in a ground war in Afghanistan. A ground war in Afghanistan?? This is crazy. Afghanistan has no real government. Instead, it has two factions (the Karzai regime and the Taliban). Each separately controls large sections of the country.

You might remember that during the campaign, Obama was pushing hard to get out of Iraq, saying that we should focus instead on Afghanistan. I believe that in part, his argument for an Afghanistan focus stemmed from his advisers warning him that he had to act tough and not appear to be a peacenik.

In his recent “big think” on Afghanistan, Obama pushed hardest to establish an exit date. He wants an exit date that presupposes that we have achieved some concrete objective. What can we possibly get done in the next 2 years to legitimate our exit? Give more money and resources to Karzai’s crooked regime? And oh, the Pakistan problem on the horizon….

A good friend of mine, Richard Rust, recently sent me a piece by Robert L. Borosage. A couple of quotes from the Borosage piece are in order. Borosage, in talking about military power, offers the following:

The country finds itself constantly at war. New presidents inherit the wars of their predecessors. They are faced not with deciding to go to war, but whether to accept defeat in one already in progress.

And slowly, the great power declines from the inside out. The wars are costly, running up national debts. Vital investments are put off. Schools decline. Sewers leak. For a long time, circuses distract from the spreading ruin.

Other societies become productive centers, capturing the new industries. Some begin providing better education for their citizens, better support for their citizens. Their taxes, not drained by the cost of wars past and present, can be devoted to what we used to call “domestic improvements.”

This is a very rich country, despite the years of conservative misrule. But even wealthy countries must choose. We can afford to police the world – to sustain 800 bases across the globe, to station troops in Korea, in Japan, in Bosnia, in Europe, fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, sustain fleets to police the seas.

He concludes:

South Waziristan, Yemen, Somalia, Kosovo, the Taiwan straits, the North Korean border, the seven seas – we can do this. But the result is that we are continually at war. And the wars cost – in money, in lives, in attention. And inevitably, domestic priorities, as well as emerging security threats that have no military answers, get ignored. A rich country, Adam Smith wrote, has a lot of ruin in it. We seem intent on testing the limits of that proposition.

A Modest Proposal

I have a 3-part suggestion.

1. Get our troops out of Iraq as quickly as it can be done without endangering them.

2. Get our troops out of Afghanistan as quickly as it can be done without endangering them. What, pray, can be accomplished in the next two years to justify the expense and loss of life of staying there?

3. Focus all energies on the primary reason for the Middle East hatred by getting Israel and Palestine to agree to a two state solution.