Why Washington Clings to a Failed Middle East Strategy

The
death throes of the Mubarak regime in Egypt signal a new level of crisis
for a U.S. Middle East strategy that has shown itself over and over
again in recent years to be based on nothing more than the illusion
of power. The incipient loss of the U.S. client regime in Egypt
is an obvious moment for a fundamental adjustment in that strategy.

But
those moments have been coming with increasing regularity in recent
years, and the U.S. national security bureaucracy has shown itself to
be remarkably resistant to giving it up. The troubled history
of that strategy suggests that it is an expression of some powerful
political forces at work in this society, as former NSC official Gary
Sick hinted in a commentary on the crisis.

Ever
since the Islamic Republic of Iran was established in 1979, every U.S.
administration has operated on the assumption that the United States,
with Israel and Egypt as key client states, occupies a power position
in the Middle East that allows it to pursue an aggressive strategy of
unrelenting pressure on all those "rogue" regimes and parties in
the region which have resisted dominance by the U.S.-Israeli tandem:
Iran, Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas.

The
Bush administration's invasion of Iraq was only the most extreme expression
of that broader strategic concept. It assumed that the United
States and Israel could establish pro-Western regime in Iraq as the
base from which it would press for the elimination of resistance from
any of their remaining adversaries in the region.

But
since that more aggressive version of the strategy was launched, the
illusory nature of the regional dominance strategy has been laid bare
in one country after another.

• The U.S. invasion and occupation
  of Iraq merely empowered Shi'a forces to form a regime whose geostrategic
  interests are far closer to Iran than to the United States;
• The U.S.-encouraged Israeli
  invasion of Lebanon in 2006 only strengthened the position of Hezbollah
  as the largest, most popular and most disciplined political-military
  force in the country, leading ultimately the Hezbollah-backed government
  now being formed.
• Israeli and U.S. threats
  to attack Iran, Hezbollah and Syria since 2006 brought an even more
  massive influx of rockets and missiles into Lebanon and Syria which
  now appears to deter Israeli aggressiveness toward its adversaries for
  the first time.
• U.S.-Israeli efforts to
  create a client Palestinian entity and crush Hamas through the siege
  of Gaza has backfired, strengthening the Hamas claim to be the only
  viable Palestinian entity.
• The U.S. insistence on demonstrating
  the effectiveness of its military power in Afghanistan has only
  revealed the inability of the U.S. military to master the Afghan insurgency.

And
now the Mubarak regime is in its final days. As one talking head
after another has pointed out in recent days, it has been the
lynchpin of the U.S. strategy. The main function of the U.S. client
state relationship with Egypt was to allow Israel to avoid coming to
terms with Palestinian demands.

The
costs of the illusory quest for dominance in the Middle East have been
incalculable. By continuing to support Israeli extremist refusal to
seek a peaceful settlement, trying to prop up Arab authoritarian regimes
that are friendly with Israel and seeking to project military power
in the region through both airbases in the Gulf States and a semi-permanent
bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, the strategy has assiduously built up
long-term antagonism toward the United States and pushed many throughout
the Islamic world to sympathize with Al Qaeda-style jihadism.
It has also fed Sunni-Shi'a tensions in the region and created a crisis
over Iran's nuclear program.

Although
this is clearly the time to scrap that Middle East strategy, the nature
of U.S. national security policymaking poses formidable obstacles to
such an adjustment Bureaucrats and bureaucracies always want
to hold on to policies and programs that have given them power and prestige,
even if those policies and programs have been costly failures.
Above all, in fact, they want to avoid having to admit the failure and
the costs involved. So they go on defending and pursuing strategies
long after the costs and failure have become clear.

An
historical parallel to the present strategy in the Middle East is the
Cold War strategy in East Asia, including the policy of surrounding,
isolating and pressuring the Communist Chinese regime. As documented
in my own history of the U.S. path to war in Vietnam, Perils of Dominance, the national security bureaucracy
was so committed to that strategy that it resisted any alternative to
war in South Vietnam in 1964-65, because it believed the loss of South
Vietnam would mean the end of Cold War strategy, with its military alliances,
client regimes and network of military bases surrounding China.
It was only during the Nixon administration that the White House wrested
control of national security policy from the bureaucracy sufficiently
to scrap that Cold War strategy in East Asia and reach an historic accommodation
with China.

The
present strategic crisis can only be resolved by a similar political
decision to reach another historical accommodation - this time with
the "resistance bloc" in the Middle East. Despite the demonization
of Iran and the rest of the "resistance bloc", their interests on
the primary issue of al Qaeda-like global terrorism have long been more
aligned with the objective security interests of the United States than
those of some regimes with which the United States has been allied (e.g.,
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan).

Scrapping
the failed strategy in favor of an historic accommodation in the region
would:

• reduce the Sunni-Shi'a
  geopolitical tensions in the region by supporting a new Iran-Egypt relationship;
• force Israel to reconsider
  its refusal to enter into real negotiations on a Palestinian settlement;
• reduce the level of antagonism
  toward the United States in the Islamic world and
• create a new opportunity
  for agreement between the United States and Iran that could resolve
  the nuclear issue.

It
will be far more difficult, however, for the United States to make this
strategic adjustment than it was for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger
to secretly set in motion their accommodation with China. Unconditional
support for Israel, the search for client states and determination to
project military power into the Middle East, which are central to the
failed strategy, have long reflected the interests of the two most powerful
domestic U.S. political power blocs bearing on national security
policy: the pro-Israel bloc and the militarist bloc. Whereas
Nixon and Kissinger were not immobilized by fealty to any such power
bloc, both the pro-Israel and militarist power blocs now dominate both
parties in the White House as well as in Congress.

One
looks in vain for a political force in this country that is free to
press for fundamental change in Middle East strategy. And without
a push for such a change from outside, we face the distinct possibility
of a national security bureaucracy and White House continuing to deny
the strategy's utter failure and disastrous consequences.