WASHINGTON - United States President Barack Obama will try this week to
underline his progress in extricating the US from the morass his predecessor's
" war on terror" in the Greater Middle East.
Tuesday evening's prime-time television address marking the withdrawal of all
US "combat" troops from Iraq, as well as the following day's formal launch here
of direct talks between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and
Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, will be hailed by the
administration as key advances in restoring some stability to the world's most
volatile region.
But, as Obama himself will admit, the country remains deeply
mired in Middle East conflicts - from the eastern Mediterranean to
flood-ravaged Pakistan. The long-sought light at the end of the tunnel remains
at most a very distant glimmer.
Indeed, the fact that Washington remains bogged down in Middle East and South
Asia quagmires is becoming increasingly frustrating to many in the
administration and within the larger foreign-policy establishment.
They believe Washington needs to focus much more on China, with which relations
have in recent months become distinctly more fractious over a number of issues
- ranging from its chronic bilateral trade surplus, to US arms sales to Taiwan
to its more assertive territorial claims and ambitions in nearby waters.
As Financial Times writer Geoff Dyer wrote recently, "Over the last decade or
so, China has stolen a march on the US in Asia. The wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq proved to be a strategic gift for Beijing."
The fact that Washington has reduced its troop deployment in Iraq from a high
of 165,000 a couple of years ago to the 50,000 who remain today will not only
permit Obama to claim compliance with a key campaign promise, but, more
importantly, to also relieve pressure on what virtually all analysts agree is a
military force that was badly "overstretched" during the "war on terror."
If all goes according to plan, the remaining troops will be withdrawn over the
next 17 months, although most experts believe Baghdad, depending on the
composition of the government and the its army's effectiveness and confidence,
will likely request some continued US military presence - in a training
capacity at least - for some years after.
That assumes, however, that all will go according to plan. The fact that the
Iraqis have so far been unable to put together a government more than five
months after national elections - the focus of a sudden trip by Vice President
Joseph Biden to Baghdad on Monday - has stoked fears that the "national
reconciliation" that was supposed to be achieved by General David Petraeus'
vaunted "surge" tactics in 2007 and 2008 has in fact not taken place, and that
both ethnic and sectarian tensions that brought the country to the bring of
all-out civil war remain to be resolved.
United States military officials, who note that the remaining troops will still
be prepared to engage in combat operations if requested by the Iraqis, are
themselves warning that violence is likely to increase. In just the past week
al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia pulled off more than a dozen coordinated attacks across
the country, killing more than 50 people.
The group also now appears to have launched an intensive recruitment drive
among increasingly disaffected Sunni "Awakening" groups that played a key role
in ensuring the yet-to-be-fully-tested "success" of Petraeus' surge, according
to a recent account in Britain's Guardian newspaper.
"Extensive research on inter-communal civil wars - wars like Iraq's - finds a
dangerous propensity toward recidivism," warned Kenneth Pollack, an expert and
former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst who supported the 2003
invasion in the Washington Post last week. "[T]he fear, anger, greed and desire
for revenge that helped propel Iraq into civil war in the first place remain
just beneath the surface."
If those forces gain momentum, and the Iraqi security forces fail to restrain
them, Obama will be confronted with very difficult - and politically costly -
options: to delay the withdrawal and risk becoming mired in renewed civil
conflict; or to continue disengagement and risk "losing" Iraq, as Republicans
will almost surely charge.
With respect to the other major Middle East-related event this week - the
commencement of direct talks between Netanyahu and Abbas aimed at reaching
agreement within one year - skepticism about its prospects is running
significantly higher than hope.
Obama, backed by both Biden and Petraeus among others in administration and the
military, has long believed that any tangible progress in making peace between
Israel and the Palestinians will pay dividends in overcoming the immense damage
inflicted by George W Bush's "war on terror" on Washington's overall strategic
position - especially vis-a-vis Iran and its regional allies - throughout the
Arab world and beyond.
Even Bush appeared to embrace that conclusion in the last year of his term when
he launched his Annapolis conference in 2007 that brought Abbas together with
then-prime minister Ehud Olmert and a host of Arab and European leaders who set
as a deadline for agreement on a two-state solution at the end of Bush's term
in January 2009.
The initiative, however, was derailed as a result of the political weakness of
both Abbas and Olmert, the three-week Gaza war, and the efforts of
neo-conservative spoilers in the White House to sabotage the talks.
While neo-conservatives have been expelled from the executive branch, most
analysts believe the situation for progress today is no more ripe for major
progress than two years ago.
Abbas remains as weak as ever; Netanyahu, whose politics and government are
significantly more rightwing than Olmert's, has ruled out a number of solutions
- such as dividing Jerusalem - that are seen as minimal conditions for the
agreement of Palestinians and key Arab states which, other than major US aid
recipients Egypt and Jordan, are avoiding this week's summit.
Finally, the administration seems, at least until after the mid-term elections
in November, unwilling to aggressively press its own "bridging proposals", let
alone a comprehensive peace plan.
The most realistic hope is that Netanyahu will quietly agree to maintain a
10-month moratorium on new settlement construction on the West Bank beyond its
September 26 expiration date and restrain new building in East Jerusalem in
order to keep the talks alive.
But that alone falls far short of the kind of breakthrough needed to
substantially improve Washington's strategic position in the region as desired
by the administration and the Pentagon. Indeed, some commentators are
dismissing the new round of talks as "deja vu".
Meanwhile, the situation in Afghanistan - where Washington will soon have a
record 100,000 troops deployed - does not appear to have improved, as the
Taliban spreads its forces into regions previously considered secure, and new
reports of corruption by the government of President Hamid Karzai surface
virtually daily.
And the massive flooding in nuclear-armed Pakistan, which has displaced more
than 20 million people and is believed to have caused at least US$7 billion in
damages to infrastructure and agriculture - more than Washington had planned to
provide the country in aid over the next five years - has dashed whatever US
hopes remained that its army would focus on counter-insurgency operations along
the Afghan border, particularly in the North Waziristan tribal area.
If anything, according to reports from the region, the Taliban on both sides of
the frontier are likely to emerge stronger from Pakistan's worst-ever natural
disaster.
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