Bush's Middle East policy in tatters
By M K Bhadrakumar
"They [Arab leaders] have stopped taking their instructions from Islam, they
have decided that peace with the Zionists is their strategic option, so damn
their decision." - Osama bin Laden, audio message, May 18
Last Tuesday, while United States President George W Bush was setting out from
Washington on a five-day tour of the Middle East, Iran's semi-official Fars
news agency quoted Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad as hinting that Tehran
might consider a cut in oil exports. Of course, Iranian Oil Minister
Gholamhossein Nozari quickly clarified that Tehran was only reviewing its
exports
and here, too, a decision was to be taken on a possible increase or decrease.
Neither Ahmadinejad nor Nozari said anything like Iran was reviewing oil output
as such (which exceeds 4.2 million barrels per day, the highest level since the
1979 Islamic revolution). But US oil prices went into a tizzy nonetheless and
hit a record high of US$126 per barrel by the time Bush landed in the Persian
Gulf region.
Bush was expected to press the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
(OPEC) for an early meet to raise oil production. (OPEC is scheduled to next
meet in September to decide on its oil output policy.) Stephen Hadley, the US
national security advisor, was on record that Bush would tell Saudi King
Abdullah that the oil-exporting countries should regard it to be in their
self-interest to "take into account the economic health of their customers who
pay these prices". In the event, when they met on Friday, Bush found that the
Saudi king was not to be persuaded.
Meanwhile, Nozari was back on stage. He told Fars news agency, "I believe there
is no need for an [emergency] OPEC meeting. Why should there be this meeting
when oil prices go up? The OPEC members are currently utilizing their full
capacity and are supplying the market ... With oil at US$126, it is not wise
for those with oil not to supply it." Nozari then added, "I believe it is not
that oil is becoming more expensive, but the dollar is becoming cheaper."
It would have been unthinkable five or six years ago that a visiting US
president would receive such an open rebuff in the Middle East. Last weekend's
exchanges revealed the extent of decline in the US's dominance of the Middle
East through the present Bush administration. No doubt, oil lies at the very
center of the decline of the American dominion. The cascading rise in oil
prices has led to a massive transfer of resources to the energy exporting
countries. Iran is one principal beneficiary.
The huge accumulation of wealth enables Iran to exert influence regionally and
ensure there is practically nothing the US can do to stop its rise as a
regional power. Goldman Sachs in a report on Friday predicted oil would further
jump to a level of $140 by July. "The near-term outlook for oil prices
continues to be bullish," Goldman said. Investors are flocking to the oil
market as a hedge against the fall in the value of the dollar. The Wall Street
Journal has reported that at the moment the Iranians hold about 25 million
barrels - about twice the quantum of the US's daily imports - of heavy crude in
offshore tankers in the Persian Gulf.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov underscored these realities of the new
regional order when he called on the big powers recently to "put concrete
proposals on the table guaranteeing the security of Iran and ensuring Iran a
worthy, equal place in talks on resolving all problems in the Near and Middle
East."
Lavrov is not alone in doing some fast-forward thinking. US specialists also
realize the need for new thinking regarding the shaping of a nuclear Iran.
Essentially, it boils down to reflecting the limits of American power. A
leading US expert on Iran, Ray Takeyh a senior fellow at the influential
Council on Foreign Relations, took the bull by the horns when he suggested
recently that the time had come for the US to "concede to Iranian indigenous
enrichment capability of considerable size" and to concentrate instead on ways
and means to make certain that "untoward activities" do not take place within
the perimeters of its nuclear infrastructure.
Takeyh wrote last week while Bush was in Iran's neighborhood, "Iran has an
elaborate nuclear apparatus and is enriching uranium. It is impossible to turn
the clock back. Instead of reviving an incentive package rejected long ago by
Iran or issuing calls for military retribution that worry no one in the
country's hierarchy, the United States and its European allies would be wise to
negotiate an arrangement that would meet at least some of their demands."
True, oil and nuclear proliferation make a serious mix. But they form only one
facet of the breakdown of the Bush administration's Iran strategy. The
breakdown is comprehensive. During his tour, Bush kept trying to secure support
for his containment policy toward Iran. However, the regional countries remain
circumspect. Iraq's Arab neighbors refuse to get involved in the quagmire in
that country despite their constant wailing that Iranian influence in Iraq has
reached an intolerable level. They won't allow themselves being lined up with
any further efforts by the Bush administration to confront Iran. While
criticizing Iran in private to their American interlocutors and urging US
counter-measures, they hedge their bets, factoring that the next US president
might well engage Iran in unconditional talks.
The developments in Lebanon have further exposed that the Bush administration
has no effective plan for coping. If the Washington-based newsletter
Counterpunch is to be believed, a pre-planned Israeli intervention (with US
acquiescence) in Lebanon during the recent fighting had to be called off at the
last minute on the basis of intelligence that Hezbollah would massively
retaliate. In the view of the US intelligence community, Tel Aviv would have
been subject to "approximately 600 Hezbollah rockets in the first 24 hours in
retaliation".
Counterpunch says the Bush administration developed cold feet after it
"initially green-lighted" plans regarding Israeli military intervention on the
side of the US-backed militias. "The Hezbollah rout of the militias in West
Beirut plus the fear of retaliation on Tel Aviv, forced cancelation of the
supportive [Israeli] attack."
Unsurprisingly, there is much anger and bitterness among Lebanese warlords that
they were let down by the Bush administration. Prime Minister Fuad al-Siniora
wanted to resign and the Saudis had to dissuade him from doing so. The result
is plain to see. The political balance has shifted in favor of the Hezbollah
and the pro-West militias have been humiliated. Most important, an improbable
alliance formed between the Hezbollah and the Lebanese army (which the Bush
administration assisted to the tune of $400 million in the past two-year
period).
The regional implications are equally significant. Saudi Arabia and Egypt are
backing Arab League mediation efforts, distancing themselves from the US
denunciations of Iran and Syria. The two Arab heavyweights would be uneasy
about the lengthening shadows of Iranian influence on Lebanon, but they realize
at the same time that Iran is a regional power with which they need to come to
terms.
To quote well-known British author and Middle East scholar Patrick Seale, "The
Arab Gulf States in particular trade briskly with Iran and are home to a large
Iranian population. They do not want to isolate Iran or undermine its economy,
as the United States and Israel would like them to do. It seems clear that
greater understanding and confidence between Saudi Arabia and Egypt on the one
hand and Iran and Syria on the other - free from US and Israeli interference -
would do much to ease Lebanon's path to peace and security."
In sum, the Bush administration has no Plan B on Lebanon, either. The Arab
League mediation coolly ignored Washington's keenness to open a Lebanon file in
the United Nations Security Council and to pillory Syria and Iran. All that the
US officials could do was to keep mumbling skepticism concerning the prospects
of the intra-Lebanese talks in Doha under the Arab League.
However, the US's failure in rolling back Syrian and Iranian influence in
Lebanon pales in comparison with the withering away of the US-sponsored
Arab-Israeli "peace process". The latter hung like an albatross's cross on
Bush's Middle East tour. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' credibility has
greatly suffered; Fatah has been eliminated from Gaza; Hamas is significantly
gaining ground in the West Bank after its consolidation in Gaza. Thus, there
were no takers when Bush told the Arab audience in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on
Friday, "All nations in the region must stand together in confronting Hamas,
which is attempting to undermine efforts at peace with continued acts of terror
and violence."
The Arabs knew that at any rate, there is an air of unreality in Bush's
anti-Hamas rhetoric. Hamas had announced only a couple of days ago that it
would send a delegation to Egypt on Monday for a new round of talks with
mediators. The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported on Sunday that several
former Israeli military and security officials - including ex-Mossad head
Ephraim Halevi, former army chief Amnon Lipkin-Shahak and the former commander
of Israeli troops in Gaza, Shmuel Zakai - wrote to the government a month ago
supporting indirect talks with Hamas and expressing opposition to any
large-scale military assault on Gaza.
They wrote, "Recognizing that ending the Hamas regime in Gaza is not a
realistic goal and reinstating Fatah in the Gaza Strip by means of Israeli
bayonets is not desirable ... non-public negotiations should take place with
Hamas through Egypt or anyone else acceptable to both sides."
Time and again during Bush's Middle East tour, what emerges is this palpable
sense that the US has been all but marginalized from a new Middle East that is
taking shape. All of Bush's rhetoric couldn't hide the fact that even by adding
300 million Americans to 7 million Israelis, he failed to disprove the erosion
in Israel's regional supremacy.
In a brilliant article recently, former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer
underlined that the center of gravity of the regional power and politics in the
wake of the Iraq war has shifted to the Persian Gulf. To quote Fischer,
"Indeed, it is now virtually impossible to implement any solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict without Iran and its local allies - Hezbollah in
Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine."
The point is, the historic failure of the Iraq war is yet to be fully grasped.
On a regional plane, as the Iraq war interminably rolls on, the situation is
fraught with the immense consequence of the unraveling of the entire system of
states that was created in the Anglo-French settlement after the fall of
Ottoman Empire in 1918. The Iraq war has triggered Shi'ite empowerment and
unleashed historical forces that lay chained for centuries. Its geopolitical
significance is yet to sink in as winds of change sweep across the entire
region.
Fischer underscored that the Iraq war has conclusively finished off secular
Arab nationalism, which was, historically speaking, European-inspired. In its
wake has appeared political Islam, which cultivates "anti-Western" nationalism
and taps into social, economic and cultural grievances and combines them with a
revolutionary fervor to confront the authoritarian, corrupt, unjust regimes
lacking popular legitimacy. Islamists pilot this trend of "modernization",
while the future of political Islam itself remains far from clear.
Equally, China has appeared on the Middle Eastern chessboard, which would make
the decline in the US dominance of the region increasingly difficult to be
arrested. Curiously, on the eve of Bush's arrival in the Middle East, a
prominent Chinese scholar, Weiming Zhao, professor at the Middle East Studies
Institute of the Shanghai International Studies University, assertively wrote:
"China has a significant interest in the Middle East, and any changes in the
situation there will affect China's energy security ... Therefore, it will
remain a basic posture of China's diplomacy for a long time to come to pay more
attention to the development of the situation in the Middle East, to be more
concerned with Middle East affairs and to establish closer relations with
Middle East countries."
Bush's tour exposed that, alas, the US doesn't have a Middle East strategy to
address these manifold trends. It seems all the while, the Bush administration
was only pretending it had one. A formidable challenge awaits the next US
president.
M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service
for over 29 years, with postings including India's ambassador to Uzbekistan
(1995-1998) and to Turkey (1998-2001).
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