The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat (26 page)

Iraqis like to claim that there was no sectarianism in their country before the U.S. tanks showed up. Shias had Sunni friends, there were mixed marriages, collaborations, and partnerships—although mostly among the urban middle classes. The historian Niall Ferguson reminds us that pluralism was an inverse guide to ethnic and communal violence during the First World War. Wherever there was more intermarriage there was also more ethnic and racial violence.
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We saw this happen in Sarajevo as well. The Middle East is now where Europe was in 1914—gone is the unity and peace that held sectarian violence at bay.

Along the arc from Syria in the Levant to Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, Arab dictatorship has kept in place the dominance of one sect—often the one that is locally in the minority—over the other. The very first consequence of the weakening of those states will be a knife fight between the stubborn, desperate minority that has held power and the energized majority that now wants it. In short, Arab dictatorships from Syria to Bahrain are variations of Saddam Hussein’s state, and the Arab Spring is doing to them what the American invasion accomplished in Iraq: transferring power from the minority to the majority.
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So far Shia protests in Bahrain have gone down under hails of lead and failed to repeat the outcome in Tunisia and Egypt. The Bahraini monarchy has defended its grip on power with ferocity, and with generous Saudi support.

But what the Arab Spring did not do for Bahraini Shias, it did do for the region’s Sunnis. The regime changes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya all empowered the Muslim Brotherhood and, more worryingly still, Salafis. This puritanical sect subscribes to a narrow reading of Islam and loves to patrol its constricted boundaries with an avid hostility toward deviants.
Shias come in for special contempt not merely as infidels who refuse the message, but as heretics and apostates who insist on garbling and perverting it. The type of Sunni Muslim fervor that the Arab Spring has unleashed will not stop with vicious assaults against religious “outsider” groups such as Egypt’s ancient Coptic Christian minority. On the contrary, it will take aim at perceived enemies within the house of Islam itself and allow greater scope for conflict with Shias.

The uprising in Syria also upset the sectarian status quo. Assad’s Syria was the mirror image of Saddam’s Iraq. Iraq was a Shia-majority country in the clutches of a Sunni regime, whereas Syria is a Sunni-majority country ruled by Alawites, generally viewed as part of the Shia family. True, Bashar al-Assad had been no friend to Iraq’s Shias. To protect Syria’s facade of Arab unity for domestic consumption, Assad decried the American occupation while joining in with the regionwide sympathy for Iraq’s Sunnis (all the while continuing to suppress Sunnis at home). As a result, he supported all manner of Baathist and jihadist outfits in the insurgency that killed and maimed thousands of Iraq’s Shias and challenged their newfound hold on power. Still, his fall from power and Syria’s passage into Sunni hands (the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis are major forces among Syrian Sunnis) cannot help but energize the Sunnis just across the border in Iraq. The despair that led them to accept the outcome in Iraq in 2008 could be replaced by exuberance and a belief that this outcome may still be reversed.

A Sunni regime in Damascus—or controlling large parts of Syria bordering on Iraq—could do for Iraq’s Sunnis what Iran did for its Shias. If you add to that the full force (and cash) of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE—to say nothing of Turkey, Egypt, and the rest—the Arab world could be quite a lonely place for Iraq’s Shias. It was for this reason that Maliki lobbied on behalf of Assad with everyone he met while in Washington in December 2011. He even told President Obama that if the region’s Sunnis—backed by the Arab Gulf states—try to roll back gains made by Shias, “we will all become Hezbollah”—that is, turn radical and wage armed resistance.

Iraq’s Sunnis may still hope to take back Baghdad, but failing that they could opt out of Iraq. A larger Sunni zone stretching from Anbar to northern Lebanon on the one side and the Turkish border on the other
would be sandwiched between Shia southern Iraq and Shia and Alawite pockets to the north.

Iraq’s Shias would be sitting in the midst of a hostile Sunni world. Turkey and Saudi Arabia would be supporting their Sunni rivals, with the Turks possibly applying additional pressure via the Iraqi Kurds. Iran would then be the Iraqi Shias’ only friend. The Arab Spring may have weakened Iran’s influence in Egypt and the Levant, but it has confirmed it in Iraq. The political and religious resurgence of Sunni Islam is pushing the region’s Shias closer to Iran.

People in the Middle East talk of religious and national unity, and there are voices calling for bridge building. Egypt’s new president has reached out to Iran and wants his country to bring Iran into the Middle East fold. But sectarianism is the rising tide. It is setting in train complex and interrelated developments that will change the strategic—and possibly the physical—map of the Middle East, deciding regional dynamics for years to come. The sectarian impulse will guide strategic decisions such as Turkey’s support for Iraq’s Sunnis and Saudi Arabia’s mobilization against Iran. America has had nothing to do with this second wave of sectarianism—that was the fruit of the Arab Spring—but the hasty U.S. departure from Iraq paved the way for the tsunami to wash unimpeded over the region.

We cannot prevent all conflict in the Middle East, but we can hope to reduce its impact. A more gradual withdrawal from Iraq or an earlier push for political settlements in Bahrain and Syria would have kept the embers of sectarianism from erupting into raging flames. Left unchecked, strife in Iraq and Syria (and, before long, Bahrain) could combine to produce a belt of instability stretching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. That would threaten America’s allies in Jordan and Saudi Arabia as well as jack up oil prices and hence threaten the global economy. There would be ethnic cleansing, floods of refugees, humanitarian disasters, and failing states with ungoverned territories that would provide opportunities for al-Qaeda. As Ayad Allawi has sagely and succinctly put it: “The invasion of Iraq in 2003 may indeed have been a war of choice. But losing Iraq in 2011 is a choice the United States and the world cannot afford to make.”
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Too late.

The general verdict on the Obama administration’s Middle East policy is that “it has not done too badly.” There are no blatant mistakes, bleeding gashes, or crippling crises. In fact, the argument goes, the president’s hands-off policy has been good in that it has made the Arab Spring about Arabs—at the height of the protests there were no American flags burning in Cairo or Tunis, and plenty being waved in Tripoli.

This may be “good enough”—for today—but it provides precious little assurance about tomorrow. America’s aim remains to shrink its footprint in the Middle East, and so its approach to unfolding events there has been wholly reactive. It may get a passing grade in managing changes of regime as old dictators fall, but it has largely failed at the real challenge, which is to help new governments in the region move toward democracy and reform their parlous, sclerotic economies. Removing a dictator is only the first step on the road to democracy; beyond that, America has been nowhere to be seen. The Obama administration has neither come up with a strategy for capitalizing on the opportunity that the Arab Spring presented nor adequately prepared for potential fallout in the form of regional rivalry, the explosion of sectarian tensions, and deep-rooted economic crises.

What
are
America’s interests in the Middle East? How will we protect them as old regimes fall and new ones try to take shape? Can we influence outcomes? How should we prepare for the rise of Islamism, civil wars, state failures, reversals, and recrudescence of dictatorship? We need answers to these questions and a strategy for realizing the best, avoiding the worst, and protecting our interests in the process. America
cannot and should not decide the fate of the Middle East, but it should be clear about its stakes in the region, and not shy away from efforts to at least nudge events in more favorable directions as a critical world region faces momentous choices. A “lean back and wait” posture toward unfolding events will not be enough—a series of reactions and tactical maneuvers do not amount to a strategy. A strategy requires having a clear view of our interests and of how to realize them by influencing as best we can the dynamics that are shaping the region.

President Obama’s approach to the Middle East has been distant from the outset. He has wanted to improve America’s image in the Muslim world and feels that the best way to do this is to end America’s unpopular wars there. His modus operandi has been disengagement: end existing commitments, foremost among them Iraq and Afghanistan, and avoid new entanglements. His approach to the Arab-Israeli peace process typifies this. Obama’s June 2009 Cairo speech impressed Muslims with its call on Israel to halt the building of settlements in the West Bank. In 2011, he made a similarly provocative call on Israel to agree to return to its 1967 borders (with mutually agreed swaps of territory with Palestinians). But the Muslim world was wrong to assume that these exhortations signaled a readiness on Obama’s part to roll up his sleeves and help fix problems.
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In fact, “nowhere in Obama’s foreign policy has the gap been wider between promise and delivery,” writes former American diplomat and observer of the Arab-Israeli scene Martin Indyk, “than in the [peace process].”
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Obama started with a new approach to the issue. He was fervent in his commitment to Israel. Yet he also recognized the corrosive effects that the simmering conflict was having on America’s image and the region’s stability, and was not shy about speaking out against the everyday indignities that Israeli occupation meant for Palestinians. Many Arabs and Muslims were elated and many Israelis incensed, but no one on either side of the divide should have become so excited. All were wildly overestimating Obama’s willingness to get involved in moving the peace process along.

What Obama had in mind was to placate Arab opinion while laying down markers for Israel to abide by. This, he hoped, would by itself spur diplomatic engagement and ultimately a solution. What he did not have
in mind was to pick a fight with Israel or commit to a greater U.S. role in facilitating a diplomatic breakthrough. He definitely did not think about a comprehensive diplomatic strategy that would have created the proper context and framework for compromises by both sides (halting new settlement construction could have been a part of that). Instead, he proceeded in an uncoordinated and unproductive fashion by laying undue stress on a single unrealistic demand in a way that stopped the entire process in its tracks. He was determined to extricate America from the Middle East and thought he could do so by talking tough but from the sidelines.

Dealing with Arab and Israeli leaders on the Palestinian issue must have been eye-opening for the president. Publicly Arab rulers pressed him on Palestine, but privately all they wanted to talk about was defanging Iran (the same is true of the Israelis). Obama may have thought that fear of Iran would create common ground between Israel and the Persian Gulf monarchies, enough for them to join hands to resolve the Palestinian issue. The Saudi ambassador to Washington may have fueled such expectations by telling Obama early on that King Abdullah was eager for him to visit Riyadh and would not let him leave empty-handed.
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But the Saudi King was definitely not prepared to lend a hand to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. When Obama met Abdullah in Riyadh in June 2009, most of the hour-long meeting was taken up with a royal lecture on the Iranian threat. The Saudi king wanted America to fix the Iranian problem, not the Palestinian one, and he did not want any linkages between the two issues. In that, the king and Netanyahu were on the same page.

Whatever his personal views, the president quickly handed off the management of the Israel-Palestinian problem to his special envoy, former senator George Mitchell. But in effect, it was Obama’s senior White House adviser, Dennis Ross, who decided the matter. Ross had a long history with the issue, going back to managing the 1991 Madrid Conference that convened shortly after the first Gulf War. He differed with Obama over how best to influence events. He warned against publicly parting ways with Israel, such as by taking a stand on settlements—“showing daylight between the United States and Israel would only encourage Arabs to sit back and wait … rather than step
forward and engage with Israel.”
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Ross argued that Netanyahu had to work with a difficult domestic coalition, and that the more Obama built trust with the Israeli public—by backing away from publicly pressuring Israel—the more likely the Israeli government would be to cooperate.
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Whether or not this was an accurate reading of the situation, it meant that what Obama said turned out to be different from what his administration did. No deeds matched Obama’s bold words. Israelis found little reason to budge, and the Palestinians found themselves worse off. It was hard enough getting Israel to move, and nearly impossible when the president’s lack of follow-through allowed Israel to stand its ground. The Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, told the
Daily Beast
’s Dan Ephron: