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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.
Iran, we later learned, briefly halted nuclear
research in 2003, fearing it was next on Bush’s hit list. Once it
realized it was safe, it resumed work. The United Nations now started
churning out resolutions condemning Tehran for violating its signed
commitments under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran dutifully sat with
France, England and Germany and agreed to behave, but kept working
anyway. There was nobody to stop it.
In Iraq, as Sharon predicted, removing Saddam’s
Sunni-dominated dictatorship allowed the Shiite majority to take over.
Sunnis were marginalized. Saddam’s army was disbanded rather than
coopted. The Shiite-controlled government, though U.S.-backed,
effectively allied itself with Iran, which now controlled an arc from
the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean.
In late 2003 Iraq’s Sunnis began fighting back.
Leading the insurgency was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born
terrorist with a gruesome penchant for decapitation. In 2004 his
organization, swollen with Saddam’s veterans, intensified the fighting
and took the name Al Qaeda in Iraq. Zarqawi was killed in 2006, but the
organization was undeterred and renamed itself the Islamic State in
Iraq. In 2011 it entered Syria to join the growing civil war there,
eventually renaming itself yet again as the Islamic State in Iraq and
Syria, or ISIS.
In 2009 two more regimes changed: Washington and
Jerusalem. Barack Obama entered the White House on a wave of popular
disgust with the long, pointless Iraq war. Ehud Olmert, Ariel Sharon’s
protégé, was forced from office amid scandal and his Kadima party was
replaced by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud.
Netanyahu immediately set about sounding the alarm
about Iran’s nukes.
A series of U.N. sanctions got nowhere. Ditto U.S.
and European sanctions under both Bush and Obama. In 2006 the three
powers negotiating with Iran were joined by Washington, Moscow and
Beijing. But Bush’s Washington took a back seat, reluctant to engage the
enemy. Russia and China, noting America’s passivity, weren’t serious.
Obama upgraded U.S. participation in 2009. This
jolted Russia and China to attention but outraged Netanyahu and the
Republicans. Netanyahu now began eyeing a military attack. His generals
and spymasters resisted, warning that a solo Israeli attack wouldn’t
work and America wasn’t ready for another war. Iran’s working
centrifuges multiplied from 164 in 2009 to 10,000 in 2012.
Netanyahu tried pressuring Obama, but the gambit got
mired in Washington’s partisan infighting. Relations turned poisonous.
Looking for other answers, Bibi fired one security adviser after another
but kept getting the same response: Work with Washington. Finally in
2013 Obama opened a back channel to Tehran, leading to the current
compromise talks. Then came the explosion in Bibi’s relations with Obama
— and, less noticed, with his generals.
And what of those democratic regional reverberations?
They came. In January 2011 an economic protest in Tunisia was coopted
by hopeful democrats and became a revolution. Protests spread to Egypt,
then Libya, Syria and Yemen. It seemed to be just what Netanyahu had
predicted, an Arab Spring reverberating from Saddam’s downfall. So, at
least, said Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and a bevy of academics.
But it didn’t work out as Netanyahu promised. The
autocrats fought back. Liberal democrats, never a significant force,
collapsed before Islamist radicals. Libya descended into chaos. Syria
became a slaughterhouse. Yemen fell into civil war. Obama dithered,
looking for bloodless diplomatic solutions to the whirlwind. America’s
Arab allies, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, fumed at the inaction.
Washington wanted the moderate Arab powers to take charge of their own
affairs, but that wasn’t how they rolled.
The final straw came last summer, when Yemen’s
capital fell to a little-known Shiite sect, the Houthis. In the 1960s,
backed by the Saudis, they’d battled Egypt’s Nasser to defend the
traditional imamate against his republicans. They’re still battling the
republic, but now Iran’s backing them, part of its Shiite imperial
ambition. The Saudis, seeing an Iranian pincer action on their southern
flank, are finally fighting back, with backing from the full Arab
League. As in Syria, as in Libya, Obama’s providing air cover while
Arabs see to their own affairs. It’s Pax Americana for a post-Iraq,
post-abundance era.
Nowadays you don’t hear much about Iraq being the
inspiration for the Arab Spring, except in academic papers and
intelligence assessments. It’s too embarrassing.
Read more: How Bibi and Bush Made a Mess of the Middle East – Forward.com
