Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East

Preface

Indeed, there was in the United States, in the days immediately after the military victory in the Persian Gulf, a sense of omnipotence similar to the euphoria that dominated Israel after the Six-Day War in 1967—a feeling that everything was possible in arranging the political cards in the Middle East; that after Saddam Hussein, an Iraqi Thomas Jefferson would come to power in Baghdad, and a window of opportunity would be opened for democracy, stability, and peace in the region.

Sound like the fitting opening remarks of a book analyzing the U.S. military invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the ouster of Saddam Hussein? In fact, those comments were part of my conclusions to Quagmire: America in the Middle East, a study of U.S. intervention in that region, that was published in 1992 in the aftermath of the Gulf War and the American military victory in the Middle East that was led by President George H. W. Bush.¹

That successful military conclusion of the war against Iraq created unrealistic expectations that were fanned by President Bush’s rhetoric,² I wrote ten years ago, suggesting that the outcome of the Gulf War illustrates the policy dilemmas Washington faces in the Middle East.³ I argued that the goals that were enunciated in Bush I’s war rhetoric about establishing democracy in the Middle East, forming regional security arrangements, moving toward arms control agreements, and bringing peace between Arabs and Israelis—have only created unfulfilled expectations that are bound to lead to new American commitments and entanglements.⁴

Americans who thought that it was difficult to bring democracy and free markets to the [former] Soviet Union, that had strong historical ties to the West, will discover that trying to implant those concepts in Middle Eastern systems, that are just emerging from the Middle Ages, is a long and almost impossible mission,⁵ I wrote after the Gulf War, at a time when the Wilsonian rhetoric of Bush I was at its height. I also observed that neoconservative intellectuals in the United States insist that the global spread of democracy will also produce an increase in pro-American sentiment, but that that is not the case in the Middle East, where anti-Americanism pervades the Arab and Moslem worlds and stems … from resentment of both the tacit Arab-Israeli alliance and the direct American intervention in the region. Hence, the chances of making the Middle East safe for democracy, along with Washington’s power to move the region’s states in that direction, are extremely limited. I contended that American efforts can create a backlash and produce major political costs for perceived American interests in the area since such efforts are bound to unleash anti-Western authoritarian forces.⁶

At the same time, I expected that an alliance with the status quo regimes in the Arab World, such as those in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, will inevitably turn Washington into a symbol of repression in the eyes of democratic and revolutionary factions. And I concluded by arguing that the United States faces a no-win situation in its relationship with the existing political regimes. Attempting to democratize them would produce political and social instability and create a vacuum that would entice militant and outside forces to act. Trying to secure the power of existing regimes would create conditions that could lead to the rise of anti-American successor governments.⁷

Indeed, challenging the tenets of U.S. intervention in the Middle East in the post–Cold War era, I warned in 1992 that the Gulf War and the continuing high-profile American diplomatic and military involvement in the region would produce a backlash against U.S. interests. Washington will ultimately begin to feel the regional political repercussions of the Gulf War, I wrote, noting that Middle East societies have always exhibited delayed reactions to domestic and regional crises. Hence, the continuing socioeconomic problems in the Arab world, coupled with growing hostility toward Washington because of its support for Israel and its war against Iraq, could contribute to similar delayed reaction to the Gulf War. Ten years before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, I predicted that we might even see a resurgence of ‘Saddamism,’ a combination of Arab radicalism and Islamic fundamentalism that might as well outlive Saddam himself. The United States and the conservative Arab regimes would then face a regional anti-American Intifada that would threaten American citizens as well as pro-American governments in the Middle East.⁸

Moreover, as I pointed out a decade ago, European resentment over America hegemony in the Middle East that was already evident during the Gulf War was bound to rise as Washington tried to marginalize the role of France, Germany, and other European Union (EU) members, setting the stage to what I envisaged as The Coming American-European Struggle over the Middle East, the title of one of the chapters in Quagmire.⁹ President Bush I, like President Bush II, expected the European allies to support the American policy in the Middle East without having a major say in the overall strategy. But in a chapter subtitled Confronting the Gulf War Rift and in a cautionary note that would have sounded very timely in 2003, as it did in 1992, I argued that the message behind the European reservations about America’s moves in the [Persian] Gulf was that Bush could not have his cake and eat it too: he could not continue to call the shots and expect Europe to pay the costs of unilateral U.S. action.¹⁰ I suggested that unless the occupant of the White House recognized that reality, the Euro-American tensions over the Middle East of 1992 would be transformed into a major rift in the transatlantic alliance, as the Europeans reject the American strategy of establishing hegemony in the region.

These and related observations seem to be as relevant today, following the end of the war against Iraq, as they were more than ten years ago. That much of what I had written ten years ago sounds as though it was composed today, after another American triumph in the Middle East led by another President Bush, demonstrates the sustaining potency of the central theses that were advanced in that 1992 study and that will be re-examined in this book—with even greater force. Indeed, I am arguing that the military victory of the United States in Iraq in 2003 should serve as a new opportunity to rethink the decades-old U.S. policy in the Middle East that was fashioned in the crucible of the Cold War or what I identify as America’s Middle East Paradigm (MEP). That foreign policy paradigm has been kept in place despite the end of the rivalry with the former Soviet Union. It continued to evolve following the military triumph of the Gulf War and has led eventually to the war against Iraq and its aftermath.

A core argument of this book is that while the costs of American intervention in the Middle East could be justified in the context of Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, there is no reason why the United States should have continued to sustain such costs following the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Instead, the United States should have adopted a policy of gradual disengagement, or what I describe as constructive disengagement from the Middle East that would create incentives for the evolution of a regional balance of power system and encourage the EU to play the role of an off-shore balancer or a balancer of last resort in its strategic backyard in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. I suggest that the only realistic alternative to this proposed process of U.S. constructive disengagement from the Middle East is a long and costly route of destructive disengagement. That means that Americans would have to use their military power and economic resources to deal with growing challenges to U.S. hegemony in the Middle East from regional players and global powers.

The group of neoconservative ideologues who were the main driving force behind the U.S. policy in the Middle East following 9/11 assume that the United States should pay the full military and economic costs involved in preserving the MEP and American primacy in the Middle East through what amounts to the creation of a U.S.-controlled empire in the region that would serve American interests and even reflect and promote its democratic values. Their leading critics in the liberal internationalist and conservative realist wings of the foreign policy establishment contend that we can continue upholding our MEP and retaining our hegemony in the Middle East in a more cost-effective fashion, by working together with our European allies and by backing the regimes that serve our interests in the region. In order to achieve these goals these critics have put forward a strategy that challenges the neoconservative vision. They argue that Washington needs to move more forcefully to resolve the Israel/Palestine conflict, to adopt a less ambitious and more realistic program for political change in the Middle East, and to draw the outlines of a division of labor between the United States and its European allies so as to allow the latter to share the military and economic costs of securing Western interests in the region.

As I make clear in this book, this strategy, which has been advanced by foreign policy thinkers like Democrat Zbigniew Brzezinski¹¹ and Republican Brent Scowcroft¹² could help to reduce the short- and mid-term costs of maintaining the MEP and American primacy in the Middle East. They certainly should be adopted by Washington as part of an effort to replace the neoconservative imperial fantasy with a more realistic multilateralist approach. But I also argue that advancing such a policy would not be a substitute for reassessing the MEP itself and replacing it with a new Middle East paradigm. It will have to be based on recognition that as part of a new post–Cold War multipolar international system, of an Ensemble of Great Powers, Europe should gradually take the place of the United States as the balancer of last resort in the Middle East. Americans should encourage such a process because it would serve long-term U.S. geo-strategic and geo-economic interests. Unless we are willing to readjust U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East in that direction, we should expect to see the region becoming a major global arena for political-military competition between the Americans and the Europeans. The central theme in this book is that the war against Iraq and its aftermath have demonstrated that the Americans and the Europeans are already on a collision course in the Middle East that reflects their increasingly divergent interests in the region.

As a political scientist with a traditional realpolitik disposition, I am not very optimistic that a structural readjustment in U.S. policy could take place unless American elites and the public, having to deal with new diplomatic and military crises in the Middle East, and perhaps even take part in another major war there, recognize that the costs of maintaining U.S. hegemony in the Middle East outweigh the benefits to American interests. For better or for worse, our anarchic international system, unlike our domestic politics, lacks legitimate, effective, and peaceful mechanisms for adjustment. As great powers adapt to major changes in the balance of power only in response to systemic pressures from other powers, some form of long-term U.S. destructive disengagement from the Middle East is probably more likely than the more benign constructive one I advocate.

But we should not regard such Euro-American conflict over the Middle East as a foregone conclusion. Analysts of international politics of the idealist persuasion may be overstating their case against realists by arguing that democracies never go to war against each other; but they are correct in arguing that in democracies, foreign policy decisions are not the exclusive domain of governments and elites, but can be influenced at important critical junctures by mediating opinion makers and the general public. As a proponent of a realpolitik tradition of foreign policy I am not very optimistic that Europe and the United States will be able to cooperate in managing the transition of power in the Middle East; as someone who is an idealist by nature, however, I am still very confident about the power of public opinion in this country to affect government policies. I hope this book will at least help start a debate in the United States over the American approach the Middle East. Perhaps the outcome of such a debate will make it more likely that Washington will take the route of constructive disengagement from the Middle East.

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In Chapter 1, Old Paradigms Don’t Just Fade Away: Why Are We (Still) in the Middle East? I introduce the reader to the conceptual and historical background of America’s Middle East Paradigm. I outline the geo-strategic and geo-economic rationales for U.S. engagement in the Middle East during the Cold War, explain the reasons for the continuing American intervention in the region in the aftermath of the end of the rivalry between the United States and the former Soviet Union, and propose why the commitment to the costly MEP should be reassessed, taking into consideration current U.S. geo-strategic and geo-economic interests.

In Chapter 2, Tilting the Middle East Kaleidoscope: The Rising Costs of American Intervention from the Cold War to the Iraq War, I introduce the reader to the Kaleidoscope model that helps to understand the complex relationship between local, regional, and global players in the Middle East. Applying this model, I explain why outside global players, including the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, have found it so costly to advance their interests in the region, and why the costs of U.S. intervention there have risen after the fall of the Berlin Wall, from the Gulf War in 1991 to the war against Iraq in 2003.

In Chapter 3, Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: America’s Fixation with the Middle East’s ‘Rival Twins,’ I focus on the role performed by domestic political players, in particular those advancing the interests of the rival twins, Saudi Arabia and Israel, which, despite their conflicting agendas have a common interest in keeping the MEP alive, and I describe the way the neoconservatives have succeeded in re-energizing this paradigm in the post-9/11 period. I also challenge two axioms that the rival twins advance: that America is dependent on Middle Eastern oil and that America needs to do something to resolve the Israel-Palestine Conflict.

In Chapter 4, It’s Interests—Not Culture Stupid! The Euro-American Rift over the Middle East I argue that geo-strategic and geo-economic interests in the Middle East explain the current rift between the Americans and Europeans over Iraq and Israel/Palestine and challenge the neoconservative attempt to portray it as a clash of cultures. I provide an historical background to the cooperative and competitive Euro-American relationship in the Middle East during the Cold War and its aftermath, and explain how the current American hegemonic policy in the region is igniting a European challenge.

In Chapter 5, Extracting the ‘Suez Revenge’; Can Europe Challenge U.S. Hegemony in the Middle East? I continue to pursue the issues raised in Chapter 4, and suggest that in the long run, the changing geo-economic and geo-strategic balance of power between the Europeans and the Americans will create an environment in which a Euro-American conflict over the Middle East will become inevitable. In particular, I focus on the way the interaction between the global oil trade and the U.S. dollar and the euro, as well as the debate over the future of the Western military alliance, will affect this Euro-American conflict.

In Chapter 6, Replacing the Middle East Paradigm: A Pax Americana—or a Northern Alliance? I conclude the book by proposing that the only way that the United States will succeed in managing its relationship with Europeans in the Middle East is by adopting a new MEP based on pursuing a policy of American constructive disengagement from the Middle East as well as encouraging Europeans to become the off-shore balancers in the region. I contend that such an approach should be integrated into a long-term strategy in that the notion of American unipolarism and hegemony in the Middle East is replaced by multipolarism: an ensemble of great powers that will include the United States, Europe, Russia, and eventually China and India to deal with threats to the status quo in the Middle East and its peripheries.

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Not many policy research institutions in Washington would be willing to sponsor the work of an analyst who makes such contrarian arguments, challenges the foundations of American foreign policy in the Middle East, and critiques much of what is regarded as conventional wisdom in the administration, Congress, leading think tanks, editorial pages, and broadcast news shows. But the leaders of the Cato Institute, which has served as my intellectual residence for more than a decade, and in particular, Ted Galen Carpenter, the vice president for foreign and defense policy, have encouraged me to pursue and develop my ideas on American foreign policy in general and about U.S. policy in the Middle East in particular, through policy analyses, magazine articles, op-ed pieces, as well as broadcast interviews and presentations in academic and public forums. I want to express thanks to all the staff at the Cato Institute, and in particular to Christopher Preble, director of foreign policy, for encouraging me to re-examine my views on the Middle East after 9/11 and the war in Iraq and for pressing me to write this book. I am also grateful to the Cato Institute for permitting me to rely on and use in this book some of my work that appeared in other publications.

I am also grateful to David Pervin, my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, for his guidance and constructive criticism. Meg Weaver helped transform my original manuscript into a comprehensible and readable document. Amanda Fernández was responsible for the process of turning that document into a real book.

Finally, I want to thank my wife, Alyn, for all her support.

1

OLD PARADIGMS DON’T JUST FADE AWAY

WHY ARE WE (STILL) IN THE MIDDLE EAST?

American troops bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, nation building resulting in increased likelihood of local warlords fragmenting fragile states, and the worst rift between the United States and its European allies in memory: these developments are the result of the terrorist attack against the United States on September 11, 2001. That attack has been widely seen as a bolt from the blue, an undeserved and unwarranted assault. The American policies that followed took on an air of inevitability, as if they were natural. Of course they were neither; nor was 9/11. Instead, they—including 9/11—were the result of American policies that have set in motion a conflict between the United States and a resolute foe that perceives itself as defending a Muslim world under attack. The mess the United States is in was preordained by a failure of policymakers since the end of the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union to evaluate the extent of American interests in the Middle East.

Imagine if President George H. W. Bush had, in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union, spoken to the nation and said something along the following lines:

Now that the Cold War is over, the time has come for the American people and its leaders to re-examine our policies and our diplomatic and military commitments in the Middle East. These were an integral part of a strategy to contain Soviet expansionism and to permit the Western economies access to the oil resources in that part of the world. As those challenges have been transformed, American policies should change. We need to redefine our interests and policies in that area, including our military partnerships with and our economic assistance to governments there. We should be less pre-occupied with trying to resolve the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, a localized national dispute that should be resolved by the two sides and other governments that are affected by it, including the neighboring Arab states and the Europeans.

TO DREAM THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM

Indeed, consider the idea of an American President reassessing the need for U.S. management of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and for U.S. troops in the Middle East. Farfetched? Even unimaginable? Agreed. But that is the point. Why is it impossible to imagine, even now, Bush I making such a speech, initiating such a revisioning of American policy in the Middle East? The reason does not lie in his famous absence of vision. Whatever else one wants to say about Bush I, his diplomacy as the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union imploded was adroit, helped no doubt by the skills of a team of seasoned advisors. No. The reason it is impossible to imagine Bush making such a speech is that it calls into question basic assumptions of America’s place in the world, especially in the Middle East. To suggest that the United States should have then, and must now, reduce its involvement in the Middle East is to call into question both the importance of the region to the United States and the importance of the United States to the region. It is to challenge conventional wisdom that not only has the force of inertia, it also has a constituency invested in portraying the Middle East as important in itself, rather than important because of the resources, chiefly oil, it supplies to the rest of the world.

But as Americans are following the news from Iraq and the Middle East these days, two years after the start of the U.S. war against Iraq led by President George W. Bush, they are probably wishing that the older and more experienced President Bush had made that speech stating Washington’s readiness to untie its entanglements in the Middle East after the Soviet Union had ceased to be a threat to U.S. interests. The expanding U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, the rising American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, the terrorist acts against U.S. targets, the continuing violence in the Holy Land, and the speculations about new U.S. military campaigns against Iran or Syria are all demonstrating the costs of American policies in the Middle East. Americans observe that the costs are increasing each day. But they fail to see that the policy is providing tangible benefits to their security and welfare.

The ending of the Cold War was one of those rare moments in history when there was a real opportunity to reevaluate and rethink basic assumptions underlying policies. Had there been a reassessment of U.S. ties with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel—a critical analysis of U.S. support for the status quo in the region and the United States’ commitment to secure access to the oil resources in the Persian Gulf—it would have been less likely that the United States would feel the need to use its military power to force Saddam Hussein’s Iraq out of Kuwait after it invaded that oil-producing state in August 1990. Under a policy of gradual disengagement of the Middle East, the United States, under the leadership of Presidents Bush I and Bill Clinton, would not have pursued a policy of American hegemony in the region. Under such a disengaged policy, the United States would not have maintained military presence in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf while imposing a devastating economic embargo against the Iraqi people. It would not have backed the Saudi theocracy and the Egyptian military regime while isolating Iran. It would not have treated the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza with benign neglect while trying to resolve the Israel/Palestine conflict. And it probably would have refrained from marginalizing the political role of the Europeans in the Middle East.

But after 1990 the United States did seek to establish hegemony in the Middle East. This goal was perceived to be relatively cost-free during the administrations of Bush I and Clinton. But this goal intertwined with the effect of the blowback from another component of U.S. Middle East policy seen as crucial to protect Saudi Arabia—the backing for the Islamic Mujaheddin guerrillas in Soviet-controlled Afghanistan—and helped create the conditions that propelled the rise of radical Islamic terrorism, and specifically the birth of Al Qaeda. The result was the attacks on the American homeland on September 11, 2001, the ensuing war on terrorism, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the war against Iraq.

Under President Bush II, the undertaking of a hegemonic project in the Middle East has proved to be very costly, measured in rising American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, a rise in anti-American terrorism worldwide, the overstretching of U.S. military forces, and the increasing spending on defense and homeland security that are responsible for the ballooning budget and account deficits: clear signs of an imperial overstretch. The occupation of Iraq and the staunch support for the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon have ignited anti-American sentiments in the Arab world, in many Moslem countries, and even among the majority of the European public. These policies have wrecked the traditional strategic alliances with France, Germany, and other governments in Europe, creating a transatlantic rift that will be difficult to repair.

My goal in this book is not to engage in the drawing up of entertaining alternative What If? historical scenarios. Either Bush I or Clinton could have decided to adjust U.S. policy in the Middle East to respond to the changing geo-strategic and geo-economic realities of the post–Cold War era. They did not. It is impossible to press the rewind button on history.

What I am proposing is not to change the past, but to try to affect the future. A debate in Washington and around the country about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East should begin today. The growing costs of the war in Iraq and of advancing neoconservative imperial designs in the Middle East should encourage members of the foreign policy establishment and the general public to start a debate that should have taken place after the Berlin Wall fell. This debate should not focus exclusively on the direction of American policy in the Middle East, that is, whether we are exhibiting a pro-Israeli or a pro-Arab bias, or on the methods with which this policy is being pursued, such as unilateralism vs. multilateralism. Instead, Americans should ask themselves more basic questions: Why are we involved in the Middle East? Why are we trying to maintain hegemony in that region? Does this costly intervention help secure core U.S. national interests? Or does our continuing political-military presence in the region run contrary to Washington’s geo-strategic and geo-economic