As a political scientist, and a Hegelian
at that, I have never considered making
predictions more than an occasional byproduct of
in-depth analysis that would be germane to an
intrinsic evaluation of one's corpus of
explanations.
However, that does not
preclude analyzing the perspectives that offer
forecasting with or without the benefit of a sound
theoretical and methodological framework.
Take, for instance, King Abdullah II of
Jordan's alarm of a coming
"triple crisis" in the Middle
East in 2007, ie, in Lebanon, Iraq and the
occupied territories, although with Iraq still
under foreign occupation, we must quickly add "in
Palestine" to the last. How accurate is this
prediction?
The situation in Lebanon is veering simultaneously
toward and away from a civil war,
not least because all parties have learned from
the past the precious lesson that it could turn
out to be a lose-lose situation and not worth
the risk, particularly as the country has yet to
recover minimally from the devastations of
Israel's aggression last summer.
In terms
of the tension between Hamas and Fatah, it is too
early to tell, since the main theater of power
struggle is in Gaza and not the West Bank, and the
upcoming elections may succeed in taking some of
the steam from the brewing conflict between the
Palestinians.
In Iraq, on the other hand,
there is a nexus between civil war and insurgency
that has yet to be fully explored, and one wonders
if the Shi'ites can hold onto their political gains
as long as they are viewed as occupation
collaborationists by the Sunnis. The current state
of civil war in Iraq will likely continue unabated
and will parallel the tempo of insurgency and
counter-insurgency.
The US is
now poised to increase its troop levels in Iraq,
despite the opposite advice of the Iraq Study Group and the
dissenting voice of former secretary of state
Colin Powell, who has openly wondered what a surge
in troop levels can actually accomplish (other
than inflaming the nationalist sentiments of
Iraqis further).
Maybe the United States
should combine that with a timetable for
withdrawal, a one-two punch, which avoids the
binary decisions and recommendations hurled at
President George W Bush these days. There is,
after all, something amiss with the Iraq Study
Group's pitch for a troop increase in Afghanistan
because of rising insecurity there and yet
refraining from making similar recommendations for
Iraq, which admittedly faces a "grave and
deteriorating" situation. Vice-versa, the US could
apply the Afghanistan model, that is, just as the
Taliban have won "sanctuaries" or "zones" of
freedom in Afghanistan, similarly the US could
forfeit certain areas in Iraq to the insurgents
under the condition that they would not transgress
their limits.
Had the US done this in
Fallujah, for instance, and reached a modus
vivendi with the insurgents, the
situation might not have turned out as badly as it has.
Another prudent move would be to give the Kurds a
greater role in Iraq's security above and beyond
their enclaves. Yet another idea would be somehow
to bring the United Nations back in the picture
and entertain the experimental infusion of UN
peacekeeping forces in certain areas not too hot
to handle by the UN.
Turning to Iran and
the nuclear crisis, that is the other, fourth
crisis that King Abdullah might have wanted to add
to the list, given the impending UN sanctions and
the negative ramifications of this crisis on
regional security. The pertinent question is, of
course, whether or not the electoral victory of a
coalition of reformists and pragmatic
conservatives led by the former president, Hashemi
Rafsanjani, will translate into continuity or
change in Iran's foreign policy.
There is
a good-to-excellent chance that in light of the
election results, widely interpreted as a vote of
no confidence in President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, the
moderate politicians in Tehran will succeed in
influencing the tone and content of Iran's foreign
policy toward compromise and dialogue with the
West. The "Eastward" orientation pushed for by
Ahmadinejad has its limitations, and a return to
the more balanced, neither West nor East, initial
elan of the post-revolutionary regime may be
called for, albeit with the positive twist of
"both West and East". That is more in tune with
the Iranian character, in view of Iran's history
and geographical location in Europe's proximity.
At this point, a note of self-reflection.
Soon after the invasion of Iraq, I published the
following letter in the New York Times, dated
March 20, 2003:
The war just unilaterally declared
by President Bush, in addition to lacking
legitimacy and harming the United States' global
image for a long time, is likely to turn most if
not all of Iraq into rubble. At a minimum, it
will turn Baghdad into a Mesopotamian
Stalingrad, causing intolerable death and
destruction, as well as an ecological
catastrophe.
The shortsighted dreams of
quick victory are likely to evaporate in a war
of attrition, disruptions in the flow of Persian
Gulf oil, acts of terrorism and so on - all this
as a result of a war of choice, not of
necessity.
My subsequent letter in the
New York Times, dated September 3, 2003,
explicitly stated that there was now a civil war
in Iraq, reflected in the assassination of a
Shi'ite leader:
Regarding the murder of the Shi'ite
leader Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim and
scores of others in Najaf, the United States
military bears part of the responsibility for
the security lapse. The ayatollah's death is a
severe blow to the postwar political
reconstruction of Iraq, and a sad reminder of
the civil war that has followed the military
invasion of the country in clear breach of the
United Nations charter, notwithstanding the
absence of weapons of mass destruction. The
ayatollah's collaboration with the United States
may have cost him his life, and he and his group
may have underestimated the anti-foreign passion
of Iraqis reflected in the sentiments of many
younger Iraqi Shi'ites against the United States
occupation.
In yet another such
letter, published in April 2004, I stated that
military victory in Iraq was unachievable and the
US was better off thinking "shared sovereignty":
"There is no military solution to [the]
Iraqi quagmire, and a prudent American policy
would be to negotiate shared sovereignty at
macro-levels as well as micro-levels (town by
town) as the framework of a viable exit strategy."
These are just a few samples of my own
"predictions", which I dare say have turned out on
the mark, and, in turn, this gives me hope to keep
the flame of writing that is the essence of
enlightenment.
Kaveh L
Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After
Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy
(Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating
Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World
Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with
Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's
nuclear potential latent", Harvard International
Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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