by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

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Let us imagine for a moment that the years of George W. Bush as president have already passed us by, that it is perhaps 2017. In this imaginary time, what might the former president’s Wikipedia entry look like? Here is a guess: "George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) was the 43rd U.S. president. His decision to invade Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein resulted in the disintegration of Iraq and in the emergence of its neighbor and rival Iran as the main military power in the Persian Gulf, turning the Shiite-headed regime in Baghdad as well as the Shiite-led groups in Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East into political satellites of Tehran. The invasion of Iraq accelerated Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear military capability (which it did in 2009 immediately after President Barack Obama entered the White House), posing a major threat to U.S. allies in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Western strategic and economic interests in the oil-rich region. At the same time, the collapse of Iraq also led to the intervention of Turkey in the Kurdish areas of the country and to the growing radicalization of the Iraqi Sunni minority. It is not surprising therefore that many historians have concluded that the invasion of Iraq was one of the major strategic mistakes in U.S. history."

Of course, one does not need a crystal ball to determine that President Bush’s actions on Iraq were seriously flawed. The above imaginary biography from 2017 could be titled, "The Legacy U.S. President George W. Bush Does Not Want." It also gives one an idea why Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney might focus most of their attention and remaining political resources in the next 600 or so days on dealing with the Middle East, and in particular on managing the war in Iraq and the growing confrontation with Iran, to the detriment of other domestic and foreign policy issues, including America’s ties with its allies in the Pacific and the Atlantic as well as its trade policies.

Hence, while many pundits have speculated that some of the major foreign policy moves by the Bush administration (the six-party deal with North Korea on its nuclear program; refraining from challenging Beijing over its defense buildup and human rights conduct; reducing the tensions with Moscow over the proposed U.S. missile defense) are a reflection of the new "realism" promoted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, these steps should be seen as part of an effort to "park" all these issues on the policy backburner so as to permit Bush and his advisers to divert more time and energy to the Middle East.

After all, one recalls that putting military pressure on Pyongyang while rejecting a compromise with it, advancing a "containment" strategy vis-à-vis Beijing, and stirring up anti-Russian sentiments in Ukraine, the Caucus, and Central Asia through "color revolutions" have been central policy plans on the neoconservative agenda. Yet Bush and his aides have ended up embracing almost the same kind of accord with North Korea that they had once portrayed as a Clinton-style appeasement. They have been less inclined to encourage new anti-Russia bashing in Ukraine and Georgia and even proposed linking some U.S. and Russian antimissile systems, and they have certainly not raised again their earlier proposals of working together with Japan, India, and Taiwan as part of a strategic alliance to counterbalance China in Asia.

Moreover, there are no indications that the administration is planning to pick major fights with the Democrat-controlled Congress over restarting the Doha round of trade liberalization, privatizing Social Security, or immigration policies. And to the disappointment of America’s military allies in Afghanistan, the administration has not gone out of its way to mobilize international support for the feeble pro-Western government in Kabul or exert more pressure on Pakistan’s President Gen. Pervez Musharraf to stand up to the radical Islamist groups in his country.

The only policy area that seems to excite Bush and bring him back to life from his political depression is the Middle East, where he rightly assumes his legacy as a president could be determined. Hence his refusal to pursue the policy ideas presented to him by the Iraq Study Group (ISG). When it comes to the Middle East, and in particular his rejection of the ISG’s main suggestion that Washington needs to engage Iran and Syria, Bush has refused to project the same kind of "realism" that he supposedly adopted with regard to North Korea, China, and Russia.

Notwithstanding his public statements to the contrary, Bush has probably concluded that there is not much he can do to revive his ambitious Freedom Agenda in the Middle East, which was supposed to transform Iraq into a shining model of political and economic freedom for the entire region, creating the conditions for "regime change" in Iran and Syria and encouraging moves toward reform in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other regional pro-American authoritarian regimes. The reasons for the reversal here are quite obvious. Washington doesn’t have the military capability to force regime change in Tehran and Damascus and it needs all the help it can get from Cairo and Riyadh to bring stability in Iraq and deter the mullahs in Iran. Moreover, there is a recognition in Washington that after what happened as a result of free elections in Palestine (Hamas won) and Lebanon (Hezbollah was strengthened), similar exercises in electoral politics in, say, Egypt could bring to power anti-American movements like the Moslem Brotherhood.

In a way, what has survived from the neoconservative project of Democratic Empire is the Empire – that is, the project has been drained of its Wilsonian idealism and has been transformed to a Realpolitik-based program of sustaining the U.S. hegemonic position in the region. In that context, central to the Bush administration’s policy is the need to maintain at home and abroad a perception of "strength" and "resolve" as opposed to "weakness" and "appeasement." From that perspective, Bush’s unyielding personal backing of his Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (the symbol of the administration’s tough legal stands in the name of combating terrorism) and of World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz (the neocon whiz-kid who as a former Defense Department official helped lay the foundation for the Bush Doctrine) is meant to send clear signals to the anti-war critics that Bush will not throw to the wolves either the legal mind behind Abu Ghraib or the intellectual architect of the Iraq War.

Similarly, the belligerent attitude that Bush has adopted in resisting legislation proposed by congressional Democrats to set a timeline for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and the harsh language the administration used to criticize the visit to Damascus by House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), are part of an effort to accentuate Bush’s message that he is not willing to negotiate any compromise when it comes to continuing to stand by the government in Baghdad through the military surge and refusing to negotiate with Syria’s leader Bashar al-Assad, who has been accused of conspiring to destroy the pro-Western government in Beirut.

The mess in Iraq, combined with the rising power of radical Shiite forces like those led by the cleric Moqtada Al Sadr, has played into the hands of the Iranians. That, together with the failure of Israel to deal a military blow to the Hezbollah in Lebanon in the recent conflict there, has helped shift the balance of power in the Persian Gulf toward Iran and its Shiite allies in the Middle East, in a way that threatens the interests of a key regional U.S. ally, Saudi Arabia. In the eyes of the Bush-Cheney team, the current status quo is only making Iran more assertive, inducing it to continue its nuclear programs. The images of the humiliated British sailors who were held by the Iranians and then released only create the impression that the Iranians are winning in the confrontation with the United States, despite the mighty naval force that Washington is displaying in the Persian Gulf.

But what diplomatic or military actions can the Bush administration take in the next 600 days that would reverse the balance of power in favor of the United States and its allies? A U.S. military victory in Iraq is clearly not a realistic option, so one can expect more orchestration of "turning points" as the Bush administration spins the reduction of violence here or the killing of more insurgents there as signs of "progress" that supposedly demonstrate "success" of the surge and therefore require the American public to show even more "patience and resolve." The standards for measuring success in Iraq have become so low that if Iraq does not break into pieces before a new president comes to Washington, it could be spun by Bush and his aides as a "historic" achievement.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to conceive of any realistic option that could provide the Bush administration with an opportunity to deal a major blow to Iran in a way that would force it to "cry uncle" and to deal with Washington on U.S. terms. The options – attacks by the United States or Israel on Iran’s nuclear military sites; providing support to members of the Arab and Kurdish guerrilla groups in Iran; encouraging students and opposition groups to turn against the regime in Tehran – is fraught with costs and risks, including rising anti-American violence by Iraq’s Shiites, a war between Israel and Syria, and mounting oil prices. All of which would probably not bring Wikipedia editors to make major changes to my draft 2017 bio of Bush.

Reprinted courtesy of Right Web.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

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It was the renowned Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz who had proposed in the early 19th century that "war is merely a continuation of politics" — an assertion that should continue to serve a cautionary note to statesmen and generals who fail to take into consideration the political context in which their military strategy is being pursued.

War should not be likened to a wrestling match whose outcome depends almost entirely on the effective deployment of brute force. A military strategy has to be a means to achieve a political strategy with the player having to overcome both military and political obstacles on his way to victory.

From that "Clausewitzian" perspective, US President George W. Bush’s "new" Iraq policy — his decision to add 21,500 American troops to secure Baghdad and Anbar province as a way of reversing Iraq’s slide into civil war — is an example of a military plan divorced from a sensible political approach.

That explains perhaps why leading political and military figures in Washington and Baghdad ranging from the Iraq Study Group’s (ISG) Wise Men to the US generals who have managed the military operations on the ground (not to mention the Iraqi leaders themselves) have reacted to Bush’s latest plan for Iraq with so much skepticism, if not hostility.

In a way, much of what Bush said last week seemed to be based on the premise that the errors that the US has made in Iraq involved a failure to dispatch the right number of US troops to halt the descent of Baghdad and other parts of Iraq into chaos. A related error, according to Bush, had to do with the excessive restrictions that were imposed on the military operations of the US troops.

In fact, these arguments reflect the notion advanced by many neoconservative analysts that the political thinking underlying the decision to oust Saddam Hussein, centered on the goal of establishing a unified and democratic Iraq, made a lot of sense — but that the military implementation of that strategy was flawed. That is, if only the US had a larger number of brigades in Mesopotamia that were allowed "to do the job," Iraq would have been by now on the road of becoming a functioning democracy in the Middle East.

So, based on this argument which continues to dominate the thinking in such neoconservative bastions as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where the outlines for the latest plan were drawn, Bush announced that he would be sending five additional brigades to Baghdad, consisting of 16,000 combat troops. This would double the number of troops in the Iraqi capital, who together with Iraqi forces would have the capability and the authority to clear and secure neighborhoods controlled by both Sunnis and Shiites.

Bush also said that the US would be dispatching 4,000 more troops to Anbar province, where most of the anti-American insurgency is led by Sunni-controlled forces (which, according to Bush, have links to al-Qaeda).

In addition, Bush announced plans to double the number of provincial reconstruction teams and to give commanders more flexibility in spending on local improvements. That plan in turn assumes the military strategy that the president outlines will succeed and create the political conditions for pursuing the economic reconstruction of Iraq.

Some neoconservative critics have suggested that the proposed surge is too small and that 30,000 to 35,000 troops would be needed to achieve the goals that Bush stated in his address. But even if the overstretched US military could come up a larger number of troops, that would still make it unlikely that the Americans would be able to overcome the political obstacles that confront them in Baghdad and in Washington.

First, much of the neoconservative grand designs for Iraq were based on the idea that Iraq was a cohesive nation-state and that through open and free elections, its citizens would elect a legitimate and effective central government. But political reality in Iraq proved to be very different than that envisioned by the architects of the war, with three ethnic and religious communities — an Arab-Shiite majority, and Arab-Sunni and Kurdish minorities — vying for power.

The elections brought to power Shiite political parties whose main goal is to protect and advance the interests of their community, including by repressing the Arab-Sunnis, while coexisting with the Kurds in a loose confederation. A Sunni-based insurgency has degenerated into a low-level sectarian civil war with violent Sunni and Shiite extremists challenging a weakening political center as each community continues to advance its respective narrow interests.

Much of the success of the military surge proposed by Bush is based on the expectations that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his government have the political will and power to reverse this process by standing up to the Shiite militias led by the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and by taking action to integrate the Sunnis into the political process.

Indeed, the ability of the Iraqi troops to lead the pacification of Baghdad assumes that such an entity as a legitimate and effective "Iraqi military" is evolving. In reality, in addition to their inability to fight, many Iraqi military troops as well as police units have been infiltrated by the Shiite militias that they were supposed to control.

At the same time, Maliki and his political allies are dependent on the support of Sadr and other leaders of Shiite militias and it is very doubtful that they would be willing to support the Americans in taking a tough stand against the Shiite radicals. And that is very rational behavior, since Maliki knows that Sadr and his militias will remain in Iraq long after Bush and the American troops leave the country.

That even a larger number of American troops are bound to find themselves in the middle of the war between Shiites and Sunnis isn’t going to help Bush deal with the other political hurdle that his costly military strategy is facing: the continuing erosion in the support at home among the political elites and the general public for his Iraq policy.

With the exception of the members of his narrow Republican base, most opinion polls suggest that Bush has lost the backing of almost every demographic group for the conduct of the war and that Americans want to see the start of the withdrawal of the 132,000 US troops that are now deployed in Iraq. But it looks as though Bush has decided to disregard this public opposition as well as the recommendations of the ISG and the military commanders and Iraq, and move to expand the level of US military presence in the country.

Moreover, by pledging last Thursday to "interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria" to Iraq and ordering an additional carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf, Bush has suggested that his administration is preparing for the possibility of the widening of the war to Iran and Syria.

The indications that Bush is going to escalate the war has strengthened the hands of the leaders of the Democratic majority that control Capitol Hill now and that is led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Harry Reid. What should be even more troubling to Bush and his aides is that several leading Republican lawmakers, including Senators Gordon Smith (Oregon), Susan Collins (Maine), and Sam Brownback (Kansas) and others have indicated that they would oppose Bush’s surge plan.

One of the ideas being discussed is the passage of non-binding resolutions in the House of Representatives and the Senate in opposition to Bush’s strategy. In the long run, Congress could even try to use its "power of the purse" to reject the White House’s demands for funding of the war.

Hence the military conflict in Iraq could result in a political war in Washington — demonstrating that politics could also be the continuation of war.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

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One of Aesop’s fables recounts how once upon a time Mount Ida, the birthplace of Zeus, experienced a huge earthquake. u201CThe earth commenced to tremble and shake – and huge boulders flew off the mountain top into the sky,u201D the fable goes. u201CIt seemed as if the mountain was about to give birth.u201D Then the sky blackened and the thunderous sound became even worse. Finally, u201Can earthquake more violent than any ever before it set everything in motion – and in one terrifying moment, the mountain’s peak split wide open!u201D Some people got on their knees and began to pray. Others couldn’t take their eyes off the mountain, wondering how it would end.

Suddenly the roaring, the shaking, and the shocks simply stopped. The whole region went silent. And then, slowly, u201Cand with hardly a whisper of sound … out of the huge cleft in the mountain peak there slowly emerged … a tiny little mouse.u201D

I was reminded of Aesop’s fable about the mountain that birthed a mouse as I finished reading the long-awaited – what an understatement – report from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG), co-chaired by those two Washington fixtures, ex-Secretary of State and chief and Bush family consigliere James Baker and former Indiana Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton, who also co-chaired the 9/11 Commission. Working together with eight other u201Cformers,u201D u201Cexes,u201D and u201Chas beensu201D (the kind of distinguished elderly gentlemen and one lady who under the British system would have probably been taking naps in the House of Lords), Baker and Hamilton were supposed to lead the ISG in producing what one might have expected, based on the suspense built up by the members of the chattering class, was a report akin to a cure for cancer, or the discovery of life on Mars, or the vanishing of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Looking anew at Iraq with their u201Cfresh eyes,u201D as one pundit described the perspective that panel members were reputed to bring to the issue, they were supposed to devise a plan to extricate the U.S. troops from Iraq, fix the mess in Mesopotamia, secure Iraq’s stability, and maintain U.S. hegemony in the Middle East. A tall order if ever there was one. Baker and Hamilton tried to lower public expectations by insisting that they weren’t going to offer a u201Cmagic bullet.u201D But the hope was that their bullet would hit close to the target.

And apropos of Mount Ida, Zeus, and ancient Greek civilization, a favorite theatrical device of many ancient Greek tragedians was the machine, u201Cmechane,u201D which served to hoist a god or goddess on stage when they were supposed to arrive flying. This device gave origin to the phrase deus ex machina (god from a machine), that is, the surprise intervention of an unforeseen external factor that changes the outcome of a tragic event. In the sad and depressing story we refer to as the Iraq War, the ISG was expected to play the role of the god from the machine, providing the opportunity to change the tragic ending unfolding before us.

U.S. officials, lawmakers, journalists, and citizens have discovered that they are acting in a tragic farce, as highlighted by the foundering nature of the war, the continued violence in Iraq, and the poor Republican showing in the November 7 midterm elections. And they are hoping that someone could show up with the ability to write a new denouement. But unfortunately, when it comes to real world tragedies, there are no stage props to save the story.

Nevertheless, there was an element of historical drama in what took place in Washington in the first week of December 2006. When the grand narrative of the American Empire is written decades from now, it will describe the preparation and the issuance of the Baker-Hamilton recommendations, together with the replacement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with Robert Gates, as elements in a powerful political coup staged by the members of the old American foreign policy establishment against the neoconservative ideologues who had taken control of the Bush administration’s national security apparatus and much of official Washington after 9/11.

Indeed, Baker, Hamilton, and other ex-officials and lawmakers who were associated with the more Realpolitik-oriented administrations of George Bush Senior and Bill Clinton published on December 6 what Glenn Kessler and Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post described as u201Cthe Realist Manifesto.u201D The ISG authored a scolding repudiation of the diplomacy and national security policies that were drawn up by neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and their allies in the administration, Congress, and the media, and advanced by President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, and Rumsfeld. If Baker were a university professor and the current White House occupant his student, Bush’s term paper, u201CWhat I’ve Done in Iraq in the Last Three Years,u201D would have been graded with a big red u201CF.u201D And in an attached note, Professor Baker would have added: u201CAvoid collaborating with your neocon pals. Next time, consult your dad.u201D While Bush Senior is not quoted in the reports, there is little doubt he would have approved of most of the ISG’s assessments of Junior’s performance, along with the group’s 79 recommendations to Junior.

The situation in Iraq is u201Cgrave and deteriorating,u201D the ISG’s report concludes, and u201Cthe ability of the United States to influence events within Iraq is diminishing,u201D it warns, basically accusing those responsible for the policies in Iraq of incompetence, disorientation, and even deceit. The report criticizes U.S. officials for underreporting the number of attacks by Iraqi insurgents – now about 180 each day – by failing to count individual Iraqi slayings and attacks on U.S. troops that do not result in serious injuries. It notes that on one July day the military counted 93 acts of violence; the ISG’s reexamination of the data found 1,100. u201CGood policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes discrepancy with policy goals,u201D the report states, underscoring one of its major points: u201COur leaders must be candid and forthright with the American people.u201D

In terms of recommendations, the ISG’s report addresses diplomatic and military solutions in Iraq, and it calls on the new Iraqi government headed by Nouri al-Maliki, whom Bush described as the u201Cright guyu201D for Iraq, to shoulder more of the load of ending the violence and restoring order. And by setting milestones that measure improvements in Iraqi security, governance, and reconciliations, the ISG suggests that Washington make it clear that its support will be reduced if the milestones are not met. The recommendations also call for revamping the number of U.S. troops providing training to the Iraqi military in the short term from about 4,000 to as many as 20,000, with the goal of withdrawing most of the U.S. combat troops by early 2008.

Though it intended to offer a rescue plan for the failing U.S. military mission in Iraq, the ISG delivered a broader rebuke of the Bush administration’s policies there and throughout the Middle East, including the goal of spreading democracy. More specifically, the ISG suggests that the time has come to set realistic goals for U.S. Mideast strategy and to launch a new u201Cdiplomatic offensive.u201D Notably, the study group’s chief recommendation is that Bush pursue a diplomatic dialogue with Syria and Iran, countries that border Iraq and have been criticized by the administration for aiding violence there. u201CThe United States should embark on a robust diplomatic effort to establish an international support structure intended to stabilize Iraq and ease tensions in other countries in the region,u201D the report states. u201CThis support structure should include every country that has an interest in averting a chaotic Iraq, including all of Iraq’s neighbors – Iran and Syria among them.u201D

In addition to calling for a dialogue with Tehran and Damascus, including inviting them to take part in an u201CIraq International Support Group,u201D the ISG urges the Bush administration to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and negotiations between Israel and Syria that would lead to Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights in exchange for peace with Damascus. u201CThe United States will not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East unless the United States deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict,u201D the report notes.

These and other elements in the Realist Manifesto make a lot of geostrategic sense. They might have worked if implemented in the immediate aftermath of the ousting of Saddam Hussein in 2003. At the time, Iran expressed a willingness to cooperate with the United States in stabilizing Iraq (in the same way it helped the Americans in Afghanistan following the ouster of the Taliban regime). Syria was signaling its desire to join the pro-American camp in the Middle East, and the Palestinian Authority was still under the control of the moderate Fatah group. Since then, the political and strategic conditions in the Middle East have changed dramatically, as the U.S. policies in Iraq and the Middle East helped to strengthen the power of Iran and its Shiites allies in Iraq and Lebanon and to cement its ties to Syria, while the radical Islamist Hamas came to power in Palestine. Hence, it is doubtful that a more assertive Iran has any incentive to make a deal with a weakened United States that seems to be losing its credibility in Iraq (especially among the Shiite parties), in Lebanon (where Hezbollah seems to be gaining power), as well as in Israel/Palestine. And there is certainly no indication that Bush is even willing to adopt the notion of a u201Cdiplomatic offensive.u201D Nor is there any sign that either the administration or Congress would be willing to exert diplomatic pressure on Israel two years before critical U.S. presidential and congressional elections. In short, the Realist Manifesto is based on some unrealistic assumptions.

Moreover, most military analysts seem to agree that the U.S. military will not be able to train the Iraqi military and security forces in two years, as the ISG proposes, and many experts on Iraq are doubtful that the Iraqi government will succeed in embracing the set of improvements in security, governance, and reconciliation by 2008, as the report suggests. Cynics might argue that Baker, Hamilton, and colleagues are creating the political conditions under which Iraq can be blamed for the mess and for the inevitable withdrawal of U.S. troops.

In the best-case scenario, the ISG report would provide the Bush administration and Congress with the outlines for a strategy of gradual military disengagement from Iraq that will permit Washington to cut its losses while consolidating its influence in the Middle East through alliances with the moderate Arab states (perhaps including Syria), Turkey, and Israel – and not to mention containing Iran. Such a scenario would fit very much with the u201CEmpire Liteu201D approach favored by the U.S. foreign policy establishment that wants Washington to maintain its Mideast hegemony through indirect military influence (via military bases in the Persian Gulf) and more direct diplomatic engagement. But a realist would point out that it’s not clear whether Washington has the power or the will to advance even a low-cost strategy like the one proposed by the ISG. The Realist Insurgency may have come too late.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

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by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

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I’m not a financial speculator and I don’t play one on television. So please don’t base your decision on whether or not to bet against the US dollar on my thoughts about the fate of the greenback which has fallen to a 20-month low against the euro recently. But for someone like myself who is interested in the relationship between economics and politics, especially as they affect global affairs, the current weakness that the US currency seems to be experiencing hasn’t come as a total shock.

Hence while economic analysts have been examining the volatility of the dollar and searching for explanations by focusing mainly on US economic indicators, including the restless housing market and the weakening confidence of consumers, or the structural differences between the US and European economies, it seems to me there is a need to integrate the discussion into the larger domestic and global political context. The problems of America’s mighty currency need to be viewed from the perspective of the US capital.

After all, it would be inconceivable to examine one of the most important economic decisions made by a US president in the 20th century — Richard Nixon’s "closing of the gold window" in August 1971, that is, making the US dollar inconvertible to gold directly (and basically abolishing the Bretton Woods System) without considering the geopolitical environment in which it was made and which exposed an erosion of US hegemony in the Western alliance.

Specifically, the Vietnam war and the increasing military expenditures to finance it resulted in an increased dollar outflow and accelerated inflation by the 1970s, leading to rising balance of payment and trade deficits. The dollar was overvalued while the Deutsche mark and yen were undervalued and the attempt to defend the dollar at a fixed peg was becoming increasingly untenable. Ripping the dollar loose from gold was designed to boost US exports and cut the country’s worsening deficits.

In a way, Nixon’s decision to delink the dollar to gold followed by his 1972 visit to China reflected the relative decline in US global political and economic power — brought about by the devastating geopolitical and geo-economic impact of the Vietnam war — and Washington’s adjustment to these changes (the two decisions together are appropriately known as the Nixon Shocks) in American political history.

So you recall about one failed war (Vietnam), US presidents fighting for their political survival (Lyndon B Johnson and Nixon) and a weakening US dollar, and suddenly it seems that someone has produced a remake of that old horror movie. Once again there is a failing war (Iraq), a beleaguered US president (George W Bush) and erosion in the value of the US dollar. Like in the case of the US quagmire in Southeast Asia (which spread from Vietnam into Laos and Cambodia), the current military quagmire in the Middle East (which is producing shockwaves also in Iran, Lebanon and Israel/Palestine) has led to a major increase in military spending (and not unlike in that period, no effort has been made to cut domestic spending) which resulted in rising budget and trade deficits.

If in the 1960s and early 1970s the Germans and the Japanese were helping finance the US military intervention in Vietnam, China and other East Asian central banks are playing a similar role today. Hence the need to reevaluate the dollar can be seen now like then as a recognition that American geopolitical and geo-economic power is declining and that some kind of readjustment is necessary. From that perspective, the erosion in the US currency was inevitable under these conditions — although the slowdown in the US economy and the attractive economic conditions in the euro zone may have been the direct trigger for the dumping of US dollars and the buying of the euros.

Things can get even worse if the rising populist and protectionist wing of the Democratic Party that had taken over Capitol Hill adopts policies to punish China for its "unfair" trade practices that are supposedly responsible for the giant American trade deficit with the Chinese. The Chinese, who until now have continued to invest in the US economy and as a result prevent an even more dramatic and painful drop in the value of the US dollar, might then have no choice but to change course.

One of the main reasons why US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke are traveling to Beijing this month is to work together with the Chinese to prevent that kind of worst-case scenario that could result from the political pressure by the Democratic trade warriors on Capitol Hill. That makes a lot of economic sense, but it doesn’t deal with the geopolitical sources of the problem: the bloody and costly war in Iraq and the potential for wars with Iran and other parts of the Middle East that are going to drive US military spending and the deficits into the stratosphere and put even more pressure on the dollar.

Only a readjustment of the United States to the new global political and economic realities could relieve that pressure. Who knows? Perhaps the implementation of the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton Commission could help not only stabilize the US position in the Middle East but would also have a similar effect on the US dollar. The Baker Shock?

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

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There is an element of Schadenfreude in the reaction of critics of Washington’s neoconservatives to the policy setbacks and ideological turbulence that their erstwhile bureaucratic rivals and ideological antagonists have been experiencing in recent weeks. With the humiliating u201Cresignationu201D of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a day after the Democrats, carried by populist antiwar sentiment, won both the House and the Senate, the neocons have lost one of their two most powerful patrons in the George W. Bush administration.

Adding insult to injury, replacing Rumsfeld in the Pentagon will be Robert Gates, a leading member of the u201Crealistu201D foreign policy establishment that dominated the George H.W. Bush administration. Many members of this old-school cadre, including former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and ex-Secretary of State James Baker, have disapproved of the neoconservative agenda adopted by the younger Bush, including the Iraq War and the ambitious Wilsonian campaign to u201Cdemocratizeu201D the Middle East.

In fact, in a sign that Bush père’s advisers are on their way back to power in Washington, the city’s foreign policy elites – government officials, lawmakers, pundits, foreign diplomats – are now holding their breath as they wait for the report of Baker’s Iraq Study Group (ISG). The independent, congressionally-mandated panel, which Baker chairs with u201Crealistu201D former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN), is set to issue recommendations on Iraq that could set the ball rolling for the United States to cut its losses and start withdrawing troops from Iraq. To put it bluntly, the same foreign policy types whom the neocons have traditionally accused of u201Cappeasingu201D Mideast dictators and of u201Cselling outu201D Israel have now been assigned by the Bush administration and Congress to show the way out of the Middle East mess into which the country was driven by neoconservative-inspired policies.

And according to news reports, the ISG is expected to call for rewriting the neoconservative script of establishing democracy in Iraq and to replace it with a plan to partition Iraq and/or bring the country under the rule of a friendly dictator, a user-friendly Saddam Hussein. The so-called Baker Commission may also recommend that Washington start negotiating with Iran and Syria to take steps to reenergize the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. In short, from the perspective of the neocons, Baker and his gang of u201Cpro-Arab appeasersu201D are drawing the outline of the anti-neocon foreign policy script.

Indeed, it seems that the neoconservatives are now engaged in rearguard battle to secure their remaining outposts in Washington, which include many media outlets, think tanks, and front organizations, including the Weekly Standard, FoxNews, and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The neocons are also striving to ensure the allegiance of lawmakers, such as former Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), as well as media pundits, such as David Brooks of the New York Times and Ann Applebaum of the Washington Post.

But unfortunately for them, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice embracing what looks like a Realpolitik-lite foreign policy on Iran and North Korea, it seems that the neocons’ last bureaucratic bastion in the Bush administration is now the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, a stronghold from which neocons like David Wurmser will probably try to counter the rising power of the old realists. That task could be challenging, if only because Wurmser and his colleagues are likely to be required to testify before the congressional investigative committee that the Democrats are sure to launch in the coming months.

Though the neocons and their allies in the media have tried to spin the Democratic electoral victory as a reaction to the corruption and scandals that engulfed the Bush administration and the Republican Party, the fact is that most opinion polls suggest that opposition to the Iraq War was responsible for the anti-Republican, anti-Bush political backlash. Such sentiment made it possible for Democratic candidate Jim Webb (a former Republican and ex-Navy secretary) to advance his anti-war campaign and win the Senate race in Virginia, a conservative, Republican-leaning state.

It’s not surprising that in this new political environment, neoconservative pundits and thinkers are hoping to lead a bureaucratic and ideological counterinsurgency. As expected, many of them are now defending their support for the Iraq War by arguing that the plan they had envisioned – establishing a prosperous democracy in Iraq and using it as u201Cmodelu201D to remake and reform the Middle East – was great, but those who carried it out – the Bush administration – screwed it up. Until recently, neoconservatives have pointed the finger mainly at Rumsfeld, the military, the CIA, and other allegedly incompetent and disloyal members of the Bush administration. But now they seem to be ganging up on Bush himself.

Richard Perle and Kenneth Adelman, who were both Pentagon advisers before the war (Adelman predicted that the invasion of Iraq would be a u201Ccakewalku201D), Michael Rubin, a former senior official in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (and a leading backer of Ahmed Chalabi), and David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter (credits include the phrase u201Caxis of evilu201D), were among the neoconservatives who blasted the performance of the Bush administration in Iraq in pre-election interviews with Vanity Fair ‘s David Rose. Perle, who was a member of the Defense Policy Board, blamed u201Cdysfunctionu201D in the Bush administration for the present quagmire in Iraq. u201CThe decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn’t get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly,u201D Perle told Vanity Fair, according to published excerpts of the article. u201CAt the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.u201D

Perle also told Rose that in retrospect, he would not have backed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. u201CI think if I had been Delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, u2018Should we go into Iraq?’, I think now I probably would have said, u2018No, let’s consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.’u201D This reflects a new neocon attitude, since until recently most neoconservatives insisted that both Iraq and the United States were u201Cbetter offu201D as a result of Saddam’s removal.

And Adelman’s excuse for his incredibly optimistic pre-war assessment? He hugely overestimated the abilities of the Bush team. u201CI just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent,u201D Adelman told Vanity Fair. u201CThey turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional.u201D About Rumsfeld, a close personal friend, Adelman remarked: u201CI’m crushed by his performance.u201D Adelman also expressed worry that the u201Cidea of using our power for moral good in the world,u201D a tenet of neoconservative ideology, is not u201Cgoing to sellu201D after Iraq.

Rubin and Frum also blast Bush on Iraq, suggesting that he had betrayed neoconservative principles. Bush’s actions in Iraq were u201Cnot much different from what his father did on February 15, 1991, when he called the Iraqi people to rise up and then had second thoughts and didn’t do anything once they did,u201D Rubin told Vanity Fair. Frum, who predicts now that the insurgents will win in Iraq, contends that the blame for the mess in Iraq lies with the u201Cfailure at the center,u201D starting with Bush. (For more, see David Rose, u201CNeo Culpa,u201D VanityFair.com, November 3, 2006.)

So how will the neoconservatives adjust to the new reality in which the foreign policy realists, backed by Democrats and Republicans, want to project U.S. power in the pragmatic work of diplomacy? Several former neoconservatives such as Francis Fukuyama have already abandoned the neocon ship, bailing on the movement altogether and perhaps hoping to join the ranks of Democratic and Republican u201Crealist internationalistsu201D in post-Bush era.

Of course, there is at least one neocon who is still bullish about his ideology. AEI scholar Joshua Muravchik, writing in the latest issue of Foreign Policy, exhorts his u201Cfellow neoconservativesu201D to learn from – and admit – their mistakes. u201CThe essential tenets of neoconservatism – belief that world peace is indivisible, that ideas are powerful, that freedom and democracy are universally valid, and that evil exists and must be confronted – are as valid today as when we first began,u201D Muravchik writes. Mistakes were made in Iraq, but mostly by those implementing the policies. u201CCould things have unfolded differently had our occupation force been large enough to provide security?u201D he asks, seeming to assign blame for the mismanagement of the occupation on Rumsfeld and the military. You see, Muravchik implies, the mess in Iraq is not neocons’ fault. Sure, the ideas might have come from neocons, but after all, u201COur forte is political ideasu201D – not practical matters. Neocons, it seems, are not to be blamed for the poor job done carrying out their ideas.

What Muravchik seems to suggest is that the new generation of neocons should be in charge of a huge project to promote democracy in the Middle East and worldwide. u201CThe Bush administration deserves criticism for its failure to repair America’s public diplomacy apparatus,u201D he writes. u201CNo group other than neocons is likely to figure out how to do that. We are, after all, a movement whose raison d’être was combating anti-Americanism in the United States. Who better, then, to combat it abroad?u201D

And Muravchik, a former socialist and labor union activist, reached to the Cold War-era for an appropriate model for the neocons. u201CToday, no one in the U.S. Foreign Service is trained for this mission,u201D he writes in Foreign Policy. u201CThe best model for such a program are the u2018Lovestonites’ of the 1940s and 50s, who, often employed as attachés in U.S. embassies, waged ideological warfare against communism in Europe and Russia. They learned their political skills back in the United States fighting commies in the labor unions. There is no way to reproduce the ideological mother’s milk on which Jay Lovestone nourished his acolytes, but we need to invent a synthetic formula. Some Foreign Service officers should be offered specialized training in the war of ideas, and a bunch of us neocons ought to volunteer to help teach it. There should be at least one graduate assigned to every major U.S. overseas post.u201D (For more, see u201COperation Comeback,u201D Foreign Policy, November/December 2006.)

Muravchik has also one or two short- and mid-term u201Cpractical ideasu201D for the neoconservative strategy, including preparing to bomb Iran and recruiting Lieberman to run for president in 2008. But it’s doubtful that his somewhat kooky program for the neocons – training Foreign Service officers to export democracy – is going to be adopted by the more ambitious and action-oriented neoconservatives. These neocons are hoping that, notwithstanding the current bureaucratic and ideological setbacks, they’ll be able to regain policymaking powers, as opposed to just dispensing propaganda. After all, they have suffered similar losses in the past, including in clashes with the Bush 41 realists, and eventually came out as at least temporary winners, living to advise another president and leading the way to the Iraq War. They are probably already outlining plans and generating goals for the next generation of neocons.

Reprinted courtesy of Right Web.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

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Since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, US President George W Bush has campaigned in one presidential contest (2004) and two Congressional races (2002 and 2004) as a victorious "War President."

Mr. Bush and his Republican allies in Congress chalked up one electoral victory after another by comparing the White House occupant to Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Mr. Bush was cast as a leader who was supposedly leading America — and the Free World — in a global struggle against the terrorist network led by Osama bin Laden and (allegedly) Saddam Hussein. Thrown in for good measure were the Axis of Evil nations (Iraq, Iran, North Korea) attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to attack America and the West.

The rising nationalism that had swept America after 9/11 helped Mr. Bush and the Republican Party rally voters round the President, the Flag and the Judeo-Christian Civilization. Mr. Bush was proclaimed to be standing up against Islamo-Fascism, wimpy Europeans, and the weak, spineless and godless Democrats.

The initial military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq helped to mobilize electoral support for Mr. Bush and the Republicans, especially in the Red States in the Midwest and the South and even to advance into Democratic territories in the Blue States on the East and West Coast.

With Karl (“Boy Genius”) Rove — Mr. Bush’s ‘brain’ and top political aide — drawing the outline of an ambitious electoral strategy, the Republicans seemed to be on their way to produce a major political realignment and to becoming the permanent Majority Party. There were even some indications that traditional Democratic demographic groups — women, African-Americans, Hispanic and Jews — were drifting towards the Republicans.

Indeed, for the last five years it seemed as though Mr. Bush and the Republicans had found that formula that would have allowed them to achieve an era of one-party Republican rule in Washington — in the White House, Congress (Senate and House of Representatives) and the Supreme Court.

The political pendulum in American politics has been swinging towards the political right for 12 years after the Republican Revolution of 1994 cemented Republican control over Capitol Hill.

Political analysts suggested that 9/11 and the ensuing war on terrorism helped Mr. Bush accelerate that process and that the White House and Republican policies — nationalism, unilateralism and militarism in foreign policy; and the growing influence of the Christian Right — would dominate American politics in the coming years.

According to the then prevailing conventional wisdom, the Democrats were in retreat and have become the permanent Minority Party.

The Republicans certainly helped to strengthen their hold over the House of Representatives by gerrymandering Congressional districts which seemed to ensure that Republican incumbents would be able to get reelected again, and again, and again . . .

. . . Until, that is, on Tuesday when the Republicans in Congress came crushing down as an anti-Bush and antiwar sentiment helped to produce a Democratic wave that brought a swift end to the Republican Era and eroded the power of the War President.

In fact, it was the growing opposition of the American people to the war in Iraq and to the way that it has been managed by the White House and the Pentagon coupled with general voter disaffection over Mr. Bush’s performance in office and corruption in Congressional Republican ranks that seemed to be responsible for the electoral upheaval.

The War President had failed to deliver a victory in Iraq and the Middle East. He had failed to meet expectations that had been raised to the stratosphere — about finding WMDs in Iraq, uncovering ties between Osama and Saddam, establishing a stable democracy in Iraq, spreading freedom and democracy in the Middle East. And if you live by the sword, if you try to stoke up militant nationalism as a way of winning an election, you shouldn’t be surprised when a perception of defeat on the battlefield in Iraq is translated into an electoral defeat at home.

Indeed, as most opinion polls have indicated, the Republicans lost the support of the majority of independent and centrist-moderate voters. These voters’ anger at the war in Iraq led to the Republican loss of Senate seats in two critical electoral states of Ohio and Pennsylvania and have also helped defeat middle-of-the-road Republicans in the Northeast who have been punished for their ties to President Bush whose approval ratings sank to the low thirties.

Many of these Republican candidates had tried to distance themselves from Mr. Bush by refusing to campaign with him and even criticized his Iraq policy.

But sometimes even that didn’t help: Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island lost his seat despite the fact he had called for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

There is also no doubt that much of the anti-Republican mood has to do with voter irritation with a political party that has been in power for such a long time and the recognition that the Republican power in the White House needs to be checked and balanced by the Democrat Congress.

While the new House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is a leading member of the liberal wing of the party, and “Clintonism,” the enthusiasm for globalization led by an American light touch continues to dominate Democratic ideology, one of the interesting developments this year has been the election of conservative and populist Democrats like Jim Webb in Virginia who is opposed to the war in Iraq as well as to free trade policies.

Some analysts speculate that the elections could mark the start of the return of conservatives, including Evangelical Christians, to the Democratic Party.

This antiwar, protectionist and populist mood among Democrats could clearly weaken the chances of Senator Hillary Clinton — who had supported the decision to go to war in Iraq — in winning her party’s presidential nomination and plays into the hands of other possible challengers.

Most important, the results of the elections are going to force President to “change the course” in Iraq.

On the one hand, Bush is facing the antiwar populist mood, a mini revolution, represented by the Democratic electoral wave. On the other hand, the White House occupant is being confronted by a rebellion for the Foreign Policy Establishment against his policy in Iraq.

Responding to pressure from the People and the Elites, Bush has fired Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and replaced him with a respected member of the Establishment, Robert Gates.

The firing is probably the first step in a series of changes in personnel and policy that are going to move the Bush Administration in the direction of the more realist and internationalist approach to global affairs, including Iraq, that was pursued by his father when he served in the White House.

The post-9/11 nationalism has given way to a growing recognition by the American elites and public of the limits of US global and economic power. The War President is going to become less of a warrior.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

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The Queen, a film directed by Stephen Frears with Helen Mirren in an Oscar-winning performance as Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, is meant to be the cinematic account of the composed — well, chilly — response by the Queen to the death of Princess Diana in a car crash in a Paris tunnel in 1997, which enraged the hysterical British masses.

But in fact, the movie is about the way Prime Minister Tony Blair ends up saving the institution of monarchy. The head of the New Labor government (played by Michael Sheen) explains to Her Majesty that she needs to contain the threatening populist wave by demonstrating to her subjects that she feels their pain.

Blair’s political instincts put him at odds with his wife and advisers who spurn the Royals. But the savvy PM understands that if you start questioning the legitimacy of the reign of the Queen, you are in danger of sliding down a dangerous slippery slope that could threaten all of Britain’s traditional institutions. Hence, by helping to save the monarchy, Blair is really protecting the interests of the entire British Establishment. If Blair was seen by many as being responsible for saving Queen Elizabeth II, the conventional wisdom in Washington now is that former United States secretary of state James Baker has taken it upon himself to save the US Iraq policy, and by extension, the political fortunes of President George W Bush.

Baker, a longtime personal friend and political ally of the members of the Bush Dynasty, has been appointed by Congress as co-chair of the Iraq Study Group (ISG), a high-level panel of prominent former officials charged by Congress with taking a fresh look at America’s policy on Iraq.

His panel, which is co-chaired by former Democratic representative Lee H. Hamilton is scheduled to issue its report some time after the 2006 mid-term elections. And everyone in the US capital — the Bush Administration, Congress, the media — are now holding their breath waiting for the words of wisdom to be dispensed by the US capital’s ultimate Wise Man.

In a way, if Baker succeeds in drawing up constructive ideas for getting the US out of the quagmire in Mesopotamia, he will not only be protecting America’s geo-strategic position and saving the political legacy of Bush the Second; he will also be helping to save that very elusive creature, the American Establishment.

"The Establishment," according to Wikipedia is a slang term, popularized in the 1960s and 1970s to refer to the "traditional ruling class elite and the structures of society they control."

Many Americans, who pride themselves on the relatively open political and economic system ("My son would grow up to be a president") insist that unlike Britain and Europe, the US doesn’t have such a rigid political ruling class.

Conspiracy theorists imagine that decision-making in Washington, especially when it comes to issues of war and peace, are made by the members of a small cabal associated with the Pentagon, the Big Corporations, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.

The reality is, as the developments leading to the war in Iraq have demonstrated, the major decisions in US foreign policy are made by a relatively small elite of policymakers, led by the White House, and shaped by powerful bureaucrats, lawmakers, lobbies and pundits.

While these influential political players include Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, they all seem to share a common interest in the aftermath of the Cold War in maintaining US global political, economic and military primacy.

If anything, the war in Iraq and its aftermath has exposed a debate among leading members of this establishment.

On the one hand, realist internationalists like James Baker and Zbigniew Brzezinski and other public figures with ties to the administrations of president Bill Clinton and George Bush the First have argued that the US’ leading position in the world and in the Middle East can be secured only by playing a leadership role in multilateral structures and through cooperation with allies.

US hegemony

On the other hand, neoconservative ideologues like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle and their patrons (George Bush the Second; Richard Cheney; Donald Rumsfeld) have advocated a unilateralist diplomatic and military strategy to protect American global hegemony.

This has been a dispute over means and not over goals, between those members of the American Establishment who are willing to permit allies to set some constraints on US policies as a way of maintaining an effective collective action to achieve core American interests and those who argue that the American Gulliver cannot allow himself to be constrained by the weak and useless Lilliputians who are bound to follow him if he only projects his power. The 9/11 terrorist attacks provided an opportunity for the neoconservatives led by Wolfowitz and company to apply their preferred strategy in the Middle East and worldwide.

And for a while, in the aftermath of the initial military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq it seemed as though the realist internationalists like Baker and Brzezinski had lost the debate and were being marginalized as members of the Establishment.

But the failure of the unilateralist US project in Iraq and the Middle East — no weapons of mass destruction and no Saddam-Osama ties; the anti-American violence and the civil war; continuing opposition from regional partners and international players and rising anti-American sentiment — have made it clear that the neoconservatives were the ones losing the debate and were being gradually marginalized.

Ironically, the invasion of Iraq coupled with the ensuing effort to export American values to the Middle East exposed the major threat that neoconservatism posed to the American Establishment by strengthening the forces that challenge US primacy — Iran and its Shiite allies in Iraq and Lebanon, Syria and the radical Hamas in Palestine — while eroding American ability to resolve the nuclear crises with North Korea and Iran and manage its relationships with great powers like the European Union, Russia, and China. The most important concern of American Establishment has to do mainly with the impact that a disastrous outcome of the war in Iraq would have on the attitudes of the American public towards the continuing US leadership role in the world.

A costly US defeat in Iraq followed by the collapse of that country, a bloody civil war and possible intervention by outside regional players could devastate the American position in the Middle East and could produce pressure from voters to reduce, and perhaps even end the expansive American military engagement in the region, followed by similar demands to reassess US intervention in other parts of the world. And that kind of rising isolationist and protectionist sentiments could challenge the core beliefs and interests of the American Establishment, whose members — Republicans and Democrats alike — continue to regard Washington as the modern-day Rome, the central and dominant player in the global system.

Moreover, all the major potential presidential contenders in 2008, including Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican John McCain supported the decision to go to war in Iraq, and a devastating blow to that undertaking could strengthen the position of antiwar populist figures in both parties that might decide to join the race to the White House.

Indeed, savvy Democrats like Hillary Clinton recognize that if one starts questioning the decision to go to war in Iraq, the next thing you know is that he or she begins raising doubts about the central tenets of US foreign policy, and before you know it, the American public is sliding on a dangerous slippery slope, a process that could threaten the entire American Establishment.

No surprise

So it is not surprising that Baker and Hamilton, two traditional realist internationalists are being called to the rescue by the Hillary Clintons as well as the John McCains of Washington.

According to some reports, the ISG report will probably draw the outlines of a plan similar to a Bosnia-like partition of Iraq, providing wide political autonomy to the Shiite south, the Kurdish north and the Sunni area, including arrangements to divide the country’s energy resources among the three regions.

Baker and his colleagues are also expected to call for US negotiations with Iran and Syria as part of an effort to involve other regional players in securing the stability of Iraq and for the launching of an international initiative to resolve the other critical Middle East problems: Israel/Palestine, Lebanon and the Iran nuclear crisis.

Both Democrats and Republicans hope that the adoption of such a plan by Washington would create the conditions for gradual withdrawal of American troops from Iraq as Iraqi military and police forces backed by the US and other governments could provide security and make it possible to begin the economic reconstruction of that country.

In that context, such a process coupled with progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the integration of Hezbollah into Lebanon’s political system, and the possible transformation of Iran into a responsible regional and international actor could mark the beginning of the end of the Bush Administration’s neoconservative-driven strategy and a return to the more "Empire-Lite" approach that had been advanced by presidents Clinton and Bush the First.

The US would be able to maintain a leadership position in the Middle East by working with the global powers (EU, Russia and China) and regional allies (Turkey, the moderate Arab states, and Israel) while co-opting rivals like Iran and Syria and trying to bring peace to the Holy Land, Lebanon and Iraq. But it’s quite possible that it is getting too late to save American positions in Iraq and the Middle East.

The Bush Administration may have unleashed such powerful destructive forces in the Middle East that cannot be restrained and contained anymore. It may be impossible to close Pandora’s Box.

At the same time, other global players, like the EU and Russia may not have enough incentive to help Washington stabilize its position in that region and may prefer to leave the US twisting in the wind.

And one cannot dismiss the possibility that even if it is presented by the Baker Commission with a realistic plan for Iraq, President Bush will not be ready to change the course. After all, PM Blair was able to save Queen Elizabeth II only because she wanted to protect the British monarchy and Establishment. Is Bush ready to be saved by Baker? Inquiring minds in the American Establishment want to know.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

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The conventional wisdom in Washington is that the North Korean nuclear test is just the latest demonstration of the Bush Doctrine being challenged by an aggressive international player intent on defying the dictates of the current global hegemon.

Hence, if after the Cuban Missile Crisis, then–US president John Kennedy could say that the US and the Soviet Union stood eyeball to eyeball and the other fellow blinked, this time it was US President George W Bush and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il who stood eyeball to eyeball and — Mr. Bush blinked.

According to this perspective, since President Bush asserted the commitment by the world’s last remaining superpower to thwart any attempt by the members of the Axis of Evil and their subsidiaries to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the US Administration has been engaged in a very costly and failed strategy — at the center of which has been the ousting of Saddam Hussein and the occupation of Iraq — that has resulted in the overstretching of American military power.

Strategic reality

In a way, the US hegemon has been humbled because it had to deal within the constraints of its diplomatic and military power. Neither in North Korea nor in Iran would the United States be able to unilaterally use its power to force these regimes to give up their nuclear programs. Washington’s earlier hopes for achieving "regime change" in Pyongyang and Teheran sounds like a fantasy today.

Indeed, that strategic reality explains why Kim Jong Il and, for that matter, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are prepared to go ahead and acquire nuclear capabilities. They understand that only by going nuclear would they be able to deter the US from doing to them what it had done to Saddam Hussein.

And they have concluded that with America sinking deeper into a military quagmire in Iraq, its military stretched thin and its voters opposed to new overseas adventures, the chances for a US military response to their acquisition of WMDs are very slim.

Instead, the Bush Administration finds itself in a position of having no choice but to use diplomacy — working with other powers — through the six-party talks in the case of North Korea and with the aid of the EU3 with regard to Iran.

This conventional wisdom that considers the Bush Doctrine, with its emphasis on the willingness to use preemptive military action against regimes and terrorists coveting WMDs and the ensuing war in Iraq, as developments that set in motion the current process of humbling the hegemon is basically correct.

But it’s incomplete. Even in the heyday of the post–Cold War era — during America’s so-called Unilateral Moment — Washington’s political-military power was never invincible. The notion that the US was the global hegemon reflected it success in asserting its "soft power" in the aftermath of the collapse of the communist bloc and the subsequent process of globalization which has been driven by American economic and cultural power.

At the same time, there was a perception for most of the 1990s that no major global or regional player was ready yet to challenge US political-military power. And when it came to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the civil war in Yugoslavia, US administrations responded by building political-military coalitions with other players.

In fact, in both cases, the US decided not to take certain actions — like ousting Saddam Hussein and invading Iraq or deploying large number of ground troops in the former Yugoslavia — because it recognized the constraints operating on its power, including opposition from partners and adversaries.

Officials in the administrations of Presidents George Bush the First and Clinton had warned that launching an all-out invasion of Iraq would produce a major and costly diplomatic and military backlash from both global allies and regional players — exactly the kind that the administration of George Bush the Second is facing in the Middle East right now.

Moreover, instances in which the American hegemon was challenged and was forced to adjust to the international political-military realities occurred during the last years of the Clinton Administration, including the decision by India and Pakistan to test their nuclear weapons; the collapse of the Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations at Camp David and the start of the Second Intifada; and the US agreement to allow China to join the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Officials in Washington did their best to rationalize and put a positive spin on these developments. But the fact remained that the Americans couldn’t prevent New Delhi and Islamabad from joining the global nuclear club; they couldn’t deliver a peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians; and they were forced to de-link their trade policies with China from that country’s human rights conduct.

In that context, the decision by president Clinton and his aides to take the path of bilateral negotiations with North Korea, including the trip by then–secretary of state Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang created the conditions for a gradual peaceful resolution of the North Korean nuclear crisis.

It was the decision by President Bush and his aides to reject the advice of China, South Korea, Russia and Japan to continue the US bilateral negotiations with North Korea that led eventually to Pyongyang’s decision to go ahead with its nuclear test.

Contrary to the pledge to pursue "humility" in foreign policy that he had made during the presidential election campaign of 2000, President Bush’s ended up embracing a unilateral hegemonic strategy aimed at asserting that Washington was "in charge" — a response in part to the 9/11 terrorist acts which were seen in Washington as a dramatic challenge to US supremacy.

That response was incorporated in the Bush Doctrine and its emphasis on preemption and regime change that led to the invasion of Iraq and the current nuclear crisis with North Korea. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other officials insist that the Bush Administration is now doing more diplomacy and going multilateral.

After all, it is using multilateral setting, including the UN Security Council to deal with North Korea and Iran. So why do their partners continue to criticize them? But the "new" Bush-Rice policy has to do more with tactics and public relations than with strategy and substance.

In the Middle East, a serious US diplomatic effort has first and foremost to include a willingness to negotiate with Iran (and Syria) over a "grand bargain" that includes achieving stability in Iraq, the Israel-Palestine conflict and a resolution of the nuclear issue.

Practical way

This is the kind of package deal that US allies in Europe and the Middle East want Washington to reach with Iran. The Bushies reject the approach which they portray as "appeasement" and demand that their partners join them in imposing punitive measures on Iran.

Similarly, while US partners in Northeast Asia, including China, South Korea, Russia and Japan, are clearly concerned over the North Korean nuclear test, they also consider bilateral talks between Washington and Pyongyang as the most practical way to deal with the current tensions. But again, the Bush Administration is opposed to the idea and calls for sanctions against North Korea while stressing the need for the Chinese to "take the lead" in the process of punishing Pyongyang.

In both diplomatic arenas, the Bush Administration would have to readjust its policies sooner than later. In fact, it now has an opportunity to make diplomatic deals with both China and Russia as way of winning their cooperation on both Iran and North Korea.

But there are no indications that President Bush is willing to pay the costs of the necessary adjustments to the evolving balance of power in the same way that his predecessors had done.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

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Nikolas Gvosdev, editor of the National Interest, a foreign policy magazine affiliated with the Nixon Center in Washington, DC, has recently been trying to revitalize the stale discourse on U.S. global strategy in the capital of the world’s only remaining superpower. Gvosdev, whose magazine has been shaken up by post-Iraq invasion ideological disputes (leading to the departure from its editorial board of neoconservative Charles Krauthammer, as well as ex-neocon Francis Fukuyama), has been holding gatherings that bring together realist and internationalist critics of President George W. Bush’s foreign policy agenda to discuss alternative approaches to the Bush administration’s neoconservative hegemonic strategy.

In late September, the National Interest convened a meeting to consider u201CWhat a Post-Bush Foreign Policy Might Look Like.u201D Gvosdev invited two foreign policy experts, one a Republican and one a Democrat, to predict how an administration of, say, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) or Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) would change U.S. global strategy, and in particular, whether they would reverse current policies. The conventional wisdom in Washington is that a Republican president like McCain might embrace a u201CBush liteu201D approach (that’s the best-case scenario – some say a Republican super-hawk would try to u201Cout-neoconizeu201D Bush), and a Democrat like Senator Clinton would adopt more sensible and internationalist diplomacy, à la Bill Clinton.

To the surprise of some of those attending the National Interest event, it was the speaker representing the Democratic perspective, Will Marshall, president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, who ended up u201Cout-neoconizingu201D Bush. Republican Stefan Halper, former official in the Reagan and Bush Senior administrations and a fellow at the Centre of International Studies at Cambridge University, presented a devastating critique of the foreign policy of Bush Junior.

That a Republican conservative was urging a more realistic and less interventionist foreign policy and a Democratic liberal was advocating a hegemonic global strategy aimed at strengthening American military presence abroad as well as at promoting u201Cdemocracyu201D worldwide should not shock anyone familiar with the history of U.S. politics and foreign policy. Indeed, as Halper has noted in a book he coauthored with Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (2004), many of the neoconservatives who joined the Republican Party at the height of the Cold War had been hawkish liberal Democrats critical of their party for u201Cabandoningu201D the interventionist and militarized policies pursued by Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson and for adopting an u201Cisolationistu201D agenda. The neoconservatives accused George McGovern and his supporters of u201Chijackingu201D the Democratic Party’s foreign policy and of u201Cappeasingu201D the Soviet bloc.

Yet the neoconservatives were also very critical of the Realpolitik approach pursued by the Nixon-Kissinger team that created the conditions for détente and arms control agreements with the Soviets and the opening toward China. And moreover, even under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush – when such figures as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and I. Lewis Libby served in top foreign and defense policy jobs – neoconservatives opposed policies that they considered contrary to their staunchly pro-Israel ideas. Such policies included Reagan’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Lebanon or Bush Senior’s pressure on Israel to end its settlement policies and negotiate with the Palestinians.

The foreign policy principles espoused by neoconservatives – unilateralist military intervention aimed at establishing U.S. global hegemony, a messianic Wilsonian agenda of spreading democracy worldwide, and a radical pro-Likud Zionist stance – run very contrary to the cautious pursuit of U.S. interests traditionally reflected by conservative and realist Republican foreign policy. Republican and conservative critics of the neoconservatives felt the need to reassess their u201Cunionu201D with the neoconservatives, which had made sense during the ideological and strategic conflicts with the Communists during the Cold War, but whose impact on U.S. foreign policy, the Republican Party, and the conservative movement proved to be disastrous after 9/11.

Critics like Halper argue that neoconservatives seized the Republican Party’s diplomatic and national security agenda after 9/11 and persuaded Bush and his advisers to adopt their approach in the Middle East as part of an effort to establish U.S. hegemony and American-style democracy in the region, while also trying to advance Israel’s interests there. But if anything, the Iraq misadventure has demonstrated the u201Climitations of American power,u201D as Halper put it during his presentation. u201CReality has been a harsh teacher,u201D and is leading the American elites and public – including Republicans – to recognize that although the United States may have the world’s strongest, most technologically advanced military, it cannot be effectively used to u201Cexport American valuesu201D to the Middle East and elsewhere, Halper said.

But at the same time as realists and conservatives in the Republican Party are hoping to challenge the dominance of the neoconservatives over their party’s foreign policy, many leading Democratic activists and liberal intellectuals seem to be calling on their party to embrace an even more u201Cpureu201D or radical version of the neoconservative ideology. Indeed, during his presentation at the National Interest event, Marshall insisted that his party does not and would not advance anti-war sentiment or hopes for military disengagement. u201COur party needs to show it can take on the job of defeating Islamic extremists if we want to win the next election,u201D said Marshall, editor of the recent book With All our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihad and Defending Liberty. u201CWe need to fight for liberal principles abroad as vigorously as we fight for them at home,u201D he said. He stressed that Democrats u201Cshouldn’t abandon democracy as a goal.u201D

Criticizing the Bush administration for declining to expand the military it relies on as a major policy instrument, Marshall proposed that a Democratic administration would grow the American military by 40,000 troops to better meet the demands of Iraq and Afghanistan. Not everyone liked this idea; in response to Marshall’s comments, one participant responded: u201CIf the first item on the Democrats’ plan for foreign policy is making the military bigger, color me Republican.u201D

Although Marshall’s views may have sounded like an echo of the neoconservative agenda, they should not be considered a minority stance of the political and intellectual Democratic elites. Much attention has been paid to the anti-war bloggers and other Democratic Party rank-and-file activists who helped torpedo Sen. Joe Lieberman‘s (D-CT) Senate nomination as the party candidate. Yet many of Lieberman’s Democratic colleagues in the Senate and the House not only backed the resolution giving Bush a green light to invade Iraq, but also continue to oppose any congressional plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. Many of the same Democrats have backed Bush’s inflexible approach toward Iran – in some cases sounding tougher than the Republicans on the issue – as well as the White House’s firm defense of Israel’s recent military operations in Lebanon and Palestine.

Moreover, as New York University historian Tony Judt pointed out recently, many hawkish liberal intellectuals and policy analysts who have ties to the Democratic leadership and are affiliated with newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times, Washington Post, New Republic, and the New Yorker and with think tanks like the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, have acquiesced to Bush’s foreign policy agenda (see u201CBush’s Useful Idiots: Tony Judt on the Strange Death of Liberal America,u201D London Review of Books, September 21, 2006). Not unlike Marshall, they seem to be promoting the idea that the Democrats need to adopt the ambitious neoconservative creed while trying to u201Cimproveu201D it by making it more marketable and workable. They seem to suggest that the neoconservative doctrine was fine – it’s just that the Republicans lacked the talent and the imagination to turn it into a success.

In some respects, the liberal hawks tend to share more of an ideological affinity with the Wilsonian elements in the neoconservative agenda than with some of the more nationalist hawks, like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who seem more pre-occupied with the need to maintain U.S. geostrategic hegemony. u201CFor what distinguishes the worldview of Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neoconservative allies is that they don’t look on the u2018War on Terror,’ or the war in Iraq, or the war in Lebanon and eventually Iran, as mere serial exercises in the re-establishment of American martial dominance,u201D Judt argues. u201CThey see them as skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against fascism and their Cold War liberal parents’ stance against international communism … Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: They are at war with u2018Islamo-fascism.’u201D

Among some of these liberal hawks, Judt mentions Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, and Peter Beinart, whose views on Iraq, the Middle East, and U.S. foreign policy in general seem to be very similar to those of neoconservatives William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Lawrence Kaplan. While liberal hawks like Tom Friedman have been critical of Bush’s Iraq policy, much of their disapproval has been directed at the management of the war and the occupation of Iraq, not of the underlying justification of the administration’s hegemonic Wilsonian project in the Middle East.

Another contingency of liberal hawks occupies positions of influence in Washington think tanks, including the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, where such scholar-practitioners as former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk and Kenneth Pollack have been cheerleaders for the Iraq War and have approved of Bush’s policies on Iran and Israel. In fact, one does not have to be a veteran political observer to predict Indyk, Pollack, and other experts on the Middle East, like former peace negotiator Dennis Ross, would probably play a major role in influencing the policy of a future Democratic administration. In that case, the Democratic Party activists who rallied against Joe Lieberman should not be surprised if Bush’s Democratic successor ends up pursuing policies that might be described as neoconservatism with a smiling Democratic face.

This article originally appeared on RightWeb.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

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Would US President George W. Bush and Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad run into each other by chance during their opening session of the United Nations General Assembly this week? That seemed to be the major concern occupying US officials. It seems White House aides were doing their best to avoid a run-in between Mr. Bush and Mr. Ahmadinejad in the hallways of the UN building in Manhattan; for example, the Iranian leader "ambushing" Mr. Bush as he tries to enter the lavatory, igniting a Clash of Civilizations in front of the Men’s Room.

Well, that did not happen. Instead, the US and Iranian presidents engaged in diplomatic histrionics, clashing at the UN on Tuesday during the opening debate in the General Assembly. Mr. Bush made a direct appeal to the Iranian people stressing that Washington has "no objection to Iran’s pursuit of a truly peaceful nuclear power program," while Mr. Ahmadinejad stressed several hours later that his government was pursuing such a peaceful nuclear power program.

And if Mr. Bush was arguing that the US confrontation with Iran was part of a US-led campaign to establish democracy in the Middle East, his Iranian nemesis contended that his proud nation was standing up against US hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East and worldwide.

Neocon Hysteria

It is difficult to figure out who had "won" this latest battle in the arena of public theater. But the "narrative" that it helped create seemed to play into the hands of Mr. Ahmadinejad whose interest was to assert his nation’s status as a Middle Eastern and global power. Indeed, even the New York Times carried on its front page on Wednesday the pictures side by side of Presidents Bush and Ahmadinejad addressing the General Assembly with quotes from their respective speeches, recalling the Cold War era when the newspaper would apply similar editorial choices to cover UN speeches by the US and Soviet leaders.

Moreover, the conventional wisdom in Washington is that Mr. Bush’s address reflected a more accommodative approach towards Iran. After all, even Mr. Bush’s insistence that his administration does not object to a "truly peaceful" Iranian nuclear power program could be considered a reversal from an earlier US policy that rejected any Iranian effort to develop nuclear power.

At the same time, all indications are that the Bush administration is continuing to support the negotiations between the European Union members and Iran that could lead to a peaceful diplomatic resolution of the nuclear crisis with Teheran. Even Mr. Bush in his address expressed his hopes that the United States and Iran one day will "be good friends and close partners in the cause of peace."

The notion that Washington may be pursuing a more accommodative approach towards Teheran seemed to be creating a certain hysteria among the ranks of the neoconservative intellectuals in Washington for whom diplomatic "accommodation" is almost always equated with "appeasement."

Mr. Bush’s speech marked "the final fizzling out of his Iran policy of the past three years" David Frum, one of the leading neoconservative ideologues (who as a former speech writer to Mr. Bush coined the term "Axis of Evil"), argued this week. "The tough talk of the ‘axis of evil’ speech of 2002 faded into the background," wrote Mr. Frum, a fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative think-tank in Washington.

"Did (Bush) challenge the Iranian bomb program before the world?" he asked. "He did not. He said nothing about it. There will be no UN action, no Security Council sanctions, nothing." And Mr. Frum concluded: "America’s dwindling list of Iran options has dwindled further to just two: unilateral military action without any semblance of international approval to pre-empt the Iranian bomb program — or acquiescence in that program."

Such conclusions seem to be based on fears — on the part of the neocons who are urging the administration to do a "regime change" in Teheran, and on wishful thinking — on the part of those in Washington who are calling for pursuing a diplomatic détente towards Teheran.

But investigative journalist Seymour Hersh and other analysts have reported that President Bush and his aides have already ordered the US military to prepare for operations against Iran’s nuclear military sites and have also been providing assistance to Iranian exile groups. Indeed, retired Air Force colonel Sam Gardiner, interviewed on CNN, said the Bush administration had already given a "go ahead" to US military operation against Iran.

"In fact, we’ve probably been executing military operations inside Iran for at least 18 months," Col. Gardner said. "The evidence is overwhelming."

There are several important reasons that are being advanced to claim that US would not take a military action against Iran.

First, the US military is overstretched in Iran and Afghanistan and does not have the manpower that will be required for widening ground troops operations in Iran.

Secondly, it is doubtful that the Americans could win the backing from the UN Security Council for using military force against Iran. Russia and China will probably veto such a move, while France and Britain will probably not support it.

Thirdly, a unilateral US attack on Iran could produce powerful anti-American reactions among the Shi’ites in Iraq (that control the government), in Lebanon (which could trigger a military confrontation with Israel) and in other parts of the Middle East. Iran could also succeed in rallying support for its cause in the entire Middle East and the Muslim world, threatening pro-US regimes there.

And, finally, a military confrontation between the US and Iran could force the global price of oil into the stratosphere and devastate the American and global economy.

But this line of thinking, which assumes that Iran is now in a position to threaten US interests in the Middle East and around the world and thus deter the Americans from using their military power, also explains why the Bush administration will probably end up doing exactly that — taking military action against Iran. In a way, the Bush administration’s policies have created the conditions in which such an American move becomes almost inevitable.

First, the ousting of the Ba’athist regime in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan enhanced Iran’s position in the Persian Gulf by removing two strategic threats to Iran.

Secondly, the coming to power in Baghdad of Shi’ite religious parties with strong ties to the Shi’ite mullahs in Teheran has strengthened the political power of Iran and Shi’ite communities around the Middle East, threatening the interest of the pro-American Arab-Sunni regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt.

Thirdly, the green light that Washington had given to Israel to attack the Hezbollah guerillas in Lebanon has strengthened the political power of that Shi’ite group and its leading ally, Iran, increasing the long-term threats to America’s ally, Israel.

And fourthly, the acquisition of nuclear military power by Iran will formalize its position as the main regional hegemon in the Persian Gulf, and make it likely that Saudi Arabia and other governments will try to appease it. At the same time, a nuclear military stalemate between Israel and Iran could weaken the strategic position of Israel and by extension that of the US in the Middle East.

Bush-Cheney "Legacy"

As the Bushies see it, they need to "do something" to "correct" the current balance of power which has been shifting in favor of Iran (thanks to US policies, that is). While the diplomatic, military and economic costs of a unilateral US military action against Iran could be high, even if they involve only "surgical" attacks against that country’s nuclear military sites, it is important to remember that in the aftermath of the mid-term Congressional elections in November, President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney will be free to pursue even very politically costly moves since neither of them will be running for office in 2008.

Instead, they are now in the process of writing their historical legacy which will center on their policies in the Middle East. Leaving office with Iraq in ruins and Iran emerging as the military hegemon the Persian Gulf — equipped with nuclear military power! — would damage whatever remains of the Bush-Cheney "legacy."

While the possibility of the Democrats taking over the House of Representatives and even the Senate could make it difficult for the administration to deploy more troops in Iraq, it will not face major opposition from the mostly pro-Israeli Democrats on Capitol Hill if and when it decides to take military action against Iran.

Of course, there is another way for Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney to deal with the challenges they are facing in the Middle East: a diplomatic dialogue with Iran (and Syria) combined with an effort to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. But for an administration that has portrayed the Iranian regime as a member of the axis of evil and has placed itself squarely behind Israel, such a move would be out of character.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

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A few days after the US troops had entered Baghdad and Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled, Condoleezza Rice (serving then as President George W Bush’s National Security Adviser) told American reporters that US policy towards Europe should be: "Encourage the Russians, ignore the Germans and punish the French."

The Bush administration, celebrating its military victory in Iraq and preparing for more "regime changes" in Syria and Iran, was basically sending a "go-fly-a-kite" message to the French and the other members of "Old Europe" who had opposed the use of military force to oust the Iraqi Ba’athist regime.

Pentagon officials explained then that Washington was going to place members of the "New Europe" like Poland, Estonia and Bulgaria at the center of the transatlantic alliance. After all, who really needed those "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys," as one neoconservative columnist bashed the French who were also denounced as "Euro appeasers," "Arabists" and "anti-Semites."

For a while it sounded as if the Vichy regime of World War II were back in power in France and were being led by French President Jacques Chirac. For a while, Mr. Chirac competed for the title of the Most Hated Man in America.

Well, it has been three years since the anti-French hysteria in Washington which among other things led lawmakers in Capitol Hill to rename the "French fries" in the menu of the Congressional cafeteria as "Freedom fries." But guess who are now emerging as the Good Guys in the neoconservative narrative? Is it Ahmed Chalabi and the rest of the Iraqi "freedom fighters"? Guess again. The French? Those wimpy Froggies? Yup.

"It’s Up to You, President Chirac," screamed the headline of a recent column in the pro-war editorial page of the Washington Post which asked — actually pleaded with — the French President to deploy his country’s troops to Lebanon to help clean up the mess made there by the Israelis and the Americans.

Apparently the Estonians, the Bulgarians and even the Poles were not ready to send their troops to Lebanon to disarm the Hezbollah guerillas. "France has had a very close relationship with Lebanon," President Bush explained in a recent press conference. "There’s historical ties with Lebanon. I would hope they would put more troops in," he said, adding that the French "understand the region as well as anybody."

These are the same French who in 2003 warned the Americans not to invade Iraq since they could end up in the same kind of quagmire that the French had found themselves in once upon a time in Algeria. In 2003, the advice of the guys who "understand the region as well as anybody" was dismissed by the neocons as a reflection of a certain lack of manhood.

But now everyone in Washington and Tel Aviv seems to be breathing a sigh of relief after President Chirac announced that France would commit 2,000 troops to the new international peacekeeping troops in southern Lebanon.

The decision breaks a stalemate that has held up the dispatch of soldiers seen by diplomats as crucial to maintaining the ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel. Mr. Chirac’s announcement in a nationally televised address followed days of intense negotiations with the United Nations, Lebanon and Israel over European concerns that the force would have no clear mandate and inadequate rights to open fire in defense of itself or civilians.

"We obtained the necessary clarifications from the UN on the chain of command, which needs to be simple, coherent and reactive," he said, "and the rules of engagement, which must guarantee the freedom of movement of the force and its ability to operate when confronted with hostile conditions."

The French, it should be noted, also helped broker the UN ceasefire after forcing the United States to accept important changes in the original American draft resolution.

What is really interesting in all these latest developments is that even the most ardent neocons in Washington have not challenged the notion the US would not be sending its troops to Lebanon.

They justified that by pointing out that hundreds of US marines were killed during a bombing in Beirut in 1982. But the French also suffered many casualties at that time and are still sending their troops to Lebanon. So what gives? It seems that the Americans are basically conceding that they "cannot do Lebanon" and are passing the Lebanese "portfolio" to the French. Perhaps the Bushies are beginning to feel that the Americans are indeed overstretched in the Middle East and that the time has come to shift some responsibilities to other players.

But with responsibility comes power. With their troops being deployed in Lebanon, the French are going to be "in charge" in Lebanon, something that the American and the Israelis will have to accept.

And if this works, one would not be surprised to see the French and the Italians (who are also sending troops to Lebanon) and the Germans (who have good ties with the Syrians AND the Israelis) becoming more active in the region.

It seems the American hegemon has been humbled a bit. By the way, "French fries" are back in the Congressional cafeteria too.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

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In addition to being the capitals of three Middle Eastern countries, Baghdad (Iraq), Beirut (Lebanon) and Doha (Qatar) have something else in common, and its U.S. President George W. Bush’s global policy. While the violence taking place in Baghdad and Beirut is a direct consequence of the collapse of Bush’s Middle East policy and much of its geo-strategic approach, the breakdown of the Doha round of trade talks is a reflection of the failure of the Bush Administration to project US leadership in the geo-economic arena. If Washington does not take immediate steps to reevaluate and re-energize its role in global affairs, then not only the United States but the entire international system could be threatened.

Clearly, the Doha Round was a way to link America’s strategy to promote its interests and values in the Middle East, the efforts to continue to liberalize global trade and the US-led war on terrorism. In fact, one of the reasons that the latest round of trade negotiations was launched in the capital of one of the most prosperous economies in the Middle East after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 was to demonstrate that contrary to al-Qaeda’s ideology, Islam and capitalism were compatible, and that an economy like that of Qatar, committed as it is to the principles of free trade, can thrive at the center of the Arab Middle East.

Moreover, the message coming out of the post-9/11 Doha meeting was that liberalizing global trade which creates the conditions for economic growth in the Third World could also be the most effective way to weaken the appeal of Islamic radicalism. It was al-Qaeda and its terrorist networks — and not the Middle East and the Muslim world — that were not compatible with free markets and economic prosperity.

It is in this context that we have to consider the collapse of the talks in Geneva aimed at reaching a global market-opening agreement under the auspices of the World Trade Organization. Yes, the breakdown in the talks had to do with the technical and somewhat esoteric problems involving farm subsidies and related trade policies and their intertwining with domestic politics. But against the backdrop of the mess in Iraq and Lebanon and the inability of the US and its allies to resolve the crises there, the decision to shelve the five-year-old talks to dismantle market barriers provided a very dramatic and even tragic soundtrack to the current depressing Middle Eastern movie.

Indeed, the original ambition of the Doha Round was to produce an agreement by the end of 2004 and boost trade by as much as US$800 billion, according to the World Bank. The bank has already scaled back its prediction of a trade accord’s value to as little as US$96 billion, and the current deadlock would threaten even this kind of modest gains. Estimates show that relatively open economies had a gross domestic product more than seven times higher, and grew at a rate more than eight times as fast, than the least open economies. Hence the stalemate in the Doha Round will only make it more certain that it would be impossible to lift out of poverty millions of people in the Middle East (and elsewhere), ensuring that the environment in that region would be conducive to promoting Osama bin Laden’s strategy of hatred and violence.

As most analysts agree, there is a lot of blame to go around in trying to figure out who was responsible for the collapse of the trade negotiations, including the refusal of India and Brazil to cut Customs duties in industrial goods and the resistance by the European Union to cut its protective tariffs on commodity tariffs. But the main obstacle to the agreement was the failure by political leaders in the major economies to stand up to their respective agricultural lobbies. From that perspective, the Bush administration has been certainly guilty of pandering to American farmers by dispensing to them huge subsidies.

But in the previous global trade rounds, US officials recognized that America’s willingness to open its markets to foreign imports was not really a form of concession but a necessary step to be taken by the driving force in the multilateral trading system to ensure that it remains open. After all, it is the American economy that ends up enjoying the highest benefits from global free trade. Unfortunately, the White House and Congress seem to be more inclined now to respond to protectionist pressure than to pursue the kind of trade policy that will benefit both the American and the global economy. And after the White House loses its fast-track trade negotiating authority next year, it will become even more difficult to push for trade liberalization in Washington.

There is no doubt that President George W Bush’s political weakness at home, resulting primarily from the growing costs of US policies in Iraq and the Middle East, made it challenging for him to win domestic support for adopting a more courageous stand in Geneva, which could have prevented the collapse of the talks.

But the irony is that this blow to the Doha Round and the new obstacles to the process of free trade will make it even more difficult to ignite economic growth in the Middle East. That could prove to be a setback to the effort to deal with the core political problems affecting Baghdad and Beirut, or for that matter, Gaza, Cairo and Amman.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

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It feels like dj vu all over again. US official leaves for a conference in East Asia where he or she is supposed to discuss issues that affect the interests of the governments and economies in the region. Instead, the American representative ends up investing most of his or her time and energy in trying to resolve another Middle East crisis.

Indeed, this was expected to be a Southeast Asian week for US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who was scheduled to fly to Malaysia for the ASEAN regional forum and after concluding talks with officials from the region, to return to Washington. But her trip to Kuala Lumpur would probably be recalled now as nothing more than a short stopover in between her extensive and more important efforts to deal with the mounting violence in the Middle East.

On her way to Southeast Asia, Ms. Rice spent several days of shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East, followed by an international conference in Rome, as part of an effort to bring a cease-fire in the war between Israel and the Hezbollah that has already resulted in hundreds of casualties and appalling destruction in Lebanon (as a consequence of Israeli aerial bombing) and in northern Israel (caused by hundreds of missiles launched by Hezbollah guerillas.

And on her way back from Malaysia, the US chief diplomat held more talks with Israeli and Arab officials as she tried to find ways to reach an agreement that she insisted should lead to the release of Israeli soldiers who had been kidnapped by the Hezbollah (the development that ignited the current crisis) and to the disarming of its militias in exchange for Israeli willingness to discuss the return of Lebanese citizens it has been holding for several years as well as the fate of disputed land on the border of Israel, Lebanon and Syria.

Most US allies, including the ones that Ms. Rice met in Kuala Lumpur would like to see an immediate cease-fire in the Mideast. But Ms. Rice and her boss, US President George W Bush – as he made clear during a press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Friday in Washington – seem to have given Israel a green light to continue its assault on the Hezbollah until the Shi’ite group is so damaged so as to force it to raise a white flag.

That this has been a very long and grueling week of diplomacy for Secretary Rice becomes obvious when one studies her body language during press conferences. She looks like being under a lot of pressure. That is not surprising when one takes into consideration the problems she has been facing as she tries to juggle the many and contradictory US commitments – to Israel which the Bush administration and Congress regard as a close US ally, to the fledging democracy of Lebanon where Hezbollah is part of the cabinet, to the pro-American Arab-Sunni regimes in Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and to a Arab-Shi’ite government in Iraq with close ties to Iran. The US has the ambition of achieving peace between Israelis and Palestinians, isolating and containing Syria and Iran, promoting political and economic freedom in the Middle East, and securing access to the oil resources in the Persian Gulf.

Secretary Rice’s failure to fulfill all of these costly commitments and achieve these many goals has less to do with her personal charm and diplomatic skills and more with the fact that the United States is reaching a point in which it seems not to have the power anymore to advance its agenda in the Middle East that combines a Realpolitik drive towards hegemony with a Wilsonian crusade for democracy.

To put it simply, the United States has too much on its Middle Eastern plate and it is clearly beginning to lose its leverage over the main players in the region. As America’s allies in East Asia are discovering, that means that the US has less time and resources to devote to other policy issues.

You don’t have to be a great strategic thinker to reach these conclusions. Just glance at the headlines in your daily newspaper and watch the latest news on television and you get the picture: The United States is overstretched militarily in an Iraq that is experiencing a form of a civil war that threatens to split the country and where the rise of an Arab-Shi’ite-dominated government has helped Iran to emerge as the main regional power in the Persian Gulf and as a source of inspiration for Shi’ites in the entire region.

All that has been happening as Washington tries without much success to force Iran to end its plans to acquire nuclear military capability. The Americans have succeeded in evicting Syrians from Lebanon but that has created a military vacuum that helped to strengthen the power of Hezbollah there. And the US has made little effort to revive the Palestinian-Israeli process. In fact, the push for democracy in Palestine has brought to power the radical Hamas movement.

That does not mean that the US is a global power in decline like, say, Great Britain and France were after World War II as they were gradually ejected from the Middle East by the Americans (and the Soviets). But the unilateral and hegemonic project that the US have been trying to establish in the Middle East since the end of the Cold War and starting with the 1991 Gulf War is probably coming to an end.

The kind of challenges that America is facing now in Iraq, Israel/Palestine and Lebanon, including the rising power of radical political Islamic movements, growing ethnic and religious tensions (including between Sunnis and Shi’ites), increasing number of failed states, and the threats from military non-state actors, cannot be dealt with through this Democratic Empire project.

Making way for others

There are limits to Washington’s ability to invest its economic and military resources in such a project, especially if one considers the unwillingness on the part of the American taxpayers to support a never-ending military intervention in the Middle East.

On one level, Washington cannot continue to pursue a policy of punishing and isolating Middle East regimes with which it disagrees on either policies or ideology. There is no way that Washington could encourage the creation of a stable balance of power system in the Persian Gulf, including Iraq, without negotiating with Iran.

And it cannot help bring stability to Lebanon without dealing with its powerful Syrian neighbor or for that matter with the powerful Lebanese-Shi’ite community when many of its members support Hezbollah. Similarly, no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be reached through unilateralist Israeli strategy backed by Washington. Not unlike the process that has taken place in Southeast Asia, the US should be supportive of a formation of regional security groups in which Washington will not play the leader; for example, a Persian Gulf security organization, that includes Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.

On another level, it is in the interest of the US to provide incentives for other global players to play a more active role in promoting stability and peace in the Middle East. In particular, the members of the European Union (EU), and especially the Mediterranean countries (France, Italy, Spain), Germany (which has special ties with the Jewish state). Britain and Turkey should play a leading role in this process of growing engagement in the Middle East, a region that because of geographical proximity, economic ties and demographic links is their strategic backyard – what Mexico and Latin America is for the US.

Through its hegemonic strategy in the Middle East, the US has encouraged the Europeans to take a free ride on the American policy. The message from Washington has been: "We’ll do the driving while you only have to check the tires and replace the oil."

France and Germany could start doing some of the driving even if that means that they will have more impact on deciding what policy route to take in the Middle East. The current crisis in Lebanon might be exactly such an opportunity for a growing European engagement.

Against the backdrop of declining US prestige, France, Italy and Spain have been playing an active role, mostly through back-channel diplomacy with Israel, Syria and Lebanon, and indirectly with the Hezbollah to fashion a peaceful resolution.

At the same time, according to press reports, Germany has been also pursuing behind-the-scene diplomacy involving Israel, Syria and Iran. The EU has already announced that it would be willing to take the lead in deploying peacekeeping troops to southern Lebanon; France, Italy, Turkey and Norway have agreed to participate in such a force. And the Europeans have also indicated their interest in playing a more central role in future Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

This the kind of European activism in the Middle East that American officials should encourage, so that when another crisis blows up in the Middle East, US officials would be able to participate in an ASEAN conference without being distracted by a new mess in the Levant.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

If you’ve been watching the television images from Lebanon, Israel and Palestine and have been getting a little depressed, cheer up! US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has explained to reporters that the scenes of death, destruction and human misery from Beirut, Haifa, and Gaza were — get this! — "birth pangs of a new Middle East."

If the folks who had promised — let’s see — that Iraqis would be welcoming US troops with flowers; that a New Iraq would serve as a model of democracy, peace and prosperity for the entire Middle East; that renewed efforts would be made to bring about Israeli-Palestinian peace — are now ensuring us that we’ve been watching the birth of a New Middle East, well, permit me to be a bit skeptical.

What I’ve been watching on television are scenes of war in the Middle East. Or to put it differently, it’s another sequel in that familiar and violent television program called the Old Middle East. War has been the norm in the Middle East since 1945, with wars between Israelis and Arabs, between Iranians and Arabs, between Arabs and Arabs, not to mention quite a few military coups and civil wars.

Microcosm

In fact, Lebanon itself has been a setting for a long civil war between its many ethnic and religious sects that lasted for most of the 1970s and early 1980s and was interrupted by an Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the military control by Syria. In a way, Lebanon is a tiny microcosm of the politics of the Middle East, which have been dominated since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire by rivalries between tribal, ethnic and religious groups.

The artificial borders that were drawn by British and French imperialists after World War I have remained in place for most of the 20th Century thanks to the support by global powers for autocratic regimes in the region despite the fact that most of the nation-states there, with the exception of Turkey and Iran, have lacked a clear sense of national identity.

Many analysts had expected that the end of the Cold War and dawn of globalization would lead to some movement of political and economic reform in the region. Israel’s peace accord with Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization and the economic renaissance of Lebanon in the 1990s had created a mood of optimism in the region.

But no one had expected that a US president would launch a revolutionary process to democratize and remake the Middle East, not unlike Napoleon who attempted to spread liberty in Europe in the early 19th century.

But as in the case of Napoleon, the attempt by President George W Bush to achieve his goals through the use of military force has backfired, creating the conditions for a civil war in Iraq, radicalizing the Palestinians, empowering the Hezbollah in Lebanon, and antagonizing the Syrians and the Iranians, and as a result, destabilizing the entire Middle East, from Iraq to Israel/Palestine through Lebanon.

What President Bush should do in the last two years of his term in office is to try to "de-revolutionize" the Middle East that his policies has brought about. Among other things, Washington should try to end its policies of isolating Syria and Iran. While Hezbollah is not a puppet of these two governments, they do exert an enormous influence on it.

A dialogue between Washington and Damascus and Teheran could help create the regional environment in which a Hezbollah, weakened by the military confrontation with Israel, would have no choice but to disarm while moving to complete its political integration as a political party into the Lebanese system. At the same time, international peacekeeping troops could be deployed into southern Lebanon to prevent Hezbollah from threatening Israel’s security.

Such constructive diplomatic engagement by the US could lead eventually to negotiations between Washington and Teheran aimed at providing support for the government in Baghdad and maintaining security in Iraq as well as resolving the current nuclear crisis. Next on the agenda should be a renewed effort to reactivate negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, perhaps by engaging the political wing of Hamas and the moderate Fatah group.

Reforms needed

No one denies that the Middle East needs a shot of political and economic reform. That should take place peacefully with diplomatic and economic engagement with the world and not through violent revolution imposed from the outside.

More specifically, one hopes that the states in region will not embrace radical forms of identities, including militant political Islam and that the concept of a modern nation-state in which ethnic and religious groups can coexist and women enjoy equal rights should become the norm, not the exception in the region.

Defusing tensions in the region, including by resolving Palestinian-Israeli conflict, providing stability to Lebanon and preventing a full-scale civil war in Iraq could help accelerate the process of peaceful evolution.

These are the kinds of goals that Washington should place on the top of its agenda instead of pursuing New-Middle-East fantasies. It should remake its policy of remaking the Middle East before it’s too late.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

US President George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisers had pledged that after ousting Saddam Hussein they would succeed in transforming "liberated" Iraq into a prosperous democracy that would serve as a model of political and economic freedom for the Middle East.

Remember the Domino Effect that Westernized and secular Mesopotamia would have had on the rest of the authoritarian governments in the region?

The withdrawal of Syria’s troops from Lebanon and the so-called Cedar Revolution in that country was supposed to help eradicate the sectarian splits and, in particular, to make it possible to disarm and co-opt the Shiite-led Hezbollah into the political system. That would be followed by the collapse of the Ba’ath regime in Damascus and perhaps lead even to the downfall of the Ayatollahs in Teheran.

And finally, as the Bushies envisioned it: "The road from Baghdad would lead to Jerusalem." That is, the dramatic explosion of freedom in the Arab World would make it more likely that the Palestinians would move ahead to establish their own independent state and to conclude a peace accord with Israel. In the first stage in that process, the Palestinians would hold a free election that would bring to power a moderate and peace-oriented leadership.

More than three years after the inauguration of President Bush’s project to remake the Middle East, it’s becoming clear that the New Iraq did become, indeed, a model for the entire Middle East, a model of sectarian violence, religious extremism and growing anti-American and anti-Western sentiments.

Power shift

If anything, as the recent developments in the region are demonstrating, Bush’s policies have made the Middle East more safe — not for democracy, but for ethnic and religious strife. His policies have helped to shift the balance of power in the region in the direction of Iran and Shiite and Sunni radicals. What Iraq seems to be exporting to the Middle East is war and instability, a lot of war and instability.

Just this week in Iraq, Arab-Shiites and Arab-Sunnis were massacring each other in several parts of the country which is in the process of degenerating into a civil war that could split it into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish mini-states. In Baghdad, the secular regime of Saddam has been replaced through an open election by a coalition of Shiite religious parties with links to the ruling Shiites in Iran and who have taken steps to limit the rights of women and religious minorities.

The main beneficiary of these developments has been Iran and its religious Shiite rulers who have strengthened their influence in Iraq and are encouraging radical Shiite groups in the so-called Shiite Triangle stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Levant — including Hezbollah in Lebanon — to reassert their power and to challenge the ruling (pro-American) Arab-Sunni governments there.

And in Iran itself, instead of the Democratic Spring that the neocons had predicted, the Ayatollahs have actually strengthened their hold over power and a virulent anti-American (and anti-Israeli) figure was elected as president through a mostly democratic process.

In Lebanon, US pressure forced the withdrawal of Syrian troops that were invited by the Arab League to bring stability into that country in the aftermath of the civil war and the Israeli occupation in early 1982 (that also helped give birth to the Hezbollah). Then the Americans celebrated the sectarian-based parliamentary election that took place in Lebanon and that helped to increase the political power of Hezbollah and brought it into the government.

Hence Hezbollah gained more power and representation while a weak central government didn’t have the power to disarm its militias that continue to dominate southern Lebanon and the border with Israel.

And the road from Baghdad didn’t lead to Jerusalem. The Bush Administration has failed to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and increased US backing for Israel. At the same time, the Americans, resisting advice from Israelis and moderate Palestinians, insisted on holding free elections in the West Bank that led to the victory of Hamas, an anti-Israeli and anti-American radical Arab-Sunni group that is opposed to holding peace negotiations with Israel.

Hamas is also an offshoot of the Moslem Brotherhood which aims at replacing the current regimes in Egypt and Jordan with anti-American religious parties. Israel and the United States refused to talk with the new Hamas government and took steps to strangle the economy of the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

Revolutionary process

So on one level, on the "democratic" side of the Democratic Empire in the Middle East, the Bush Administration launched a revolutionary process that has brought to power and played into the hands of the more radical and anti-American players in the region: Iran and its alliance of Shiite groups in Iraq and Lebanon as well as the Hamas (Moslem Brotherhood) in Palestine, and by extension, in the Arab-Sunni world.

On another level, on the "imperial" side of the Democratic Empire in the Middle East, the Americans moved aggressively to strengthen their hegemony in the region directly (Iraq), indirectly (Lebanon) and through proxies (Palestine). They attempted to build up an international coalition to contain and isolate Iran and force it to give up its ambition to develop nuclear capability and adopted a similar punitive approach against Damascus while tying to oust Hamas from power.

Was it surprising therefore that these mishmash of idealistic democracy-promotion crusades in the Middle East and a unipolar approach aimed at establishing US hegemony in the region ended up producing an ad-hoc and informal coalition of anti-American players, who were emboldened thanks to Washington’s policies and who were trying now to challenge US power?

An Iran, whose leaders sense that it is gradually becoming a regional power and an isolated and angry Syrian regime, decided to utilize their proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas to deliver an indirect blow to American power by taking aggressive moves against an American proxy, Israel.

Indeed, it is in that geopolitical and regional context that one should focus on the killing and kidnapping of the Israeli soldiers on Israel’s borders with Gaza and Lebanon. The goal of this action was to demonstrate that against the backdrop of the US quagmire in Iraq and the increasing influence of Iran, Washington would find it difficult to maintain the status-quo in the region.

If the Americans decide to get involved in the current fighting in the Holy Land and Lebanon, they would be drawn into another military front in the Middle East, where like in Iraq, they would be embroiled in more bloody ethnic and religious clashes, helping to accentuate the claim that a US-Israel axis wants to control the region and are at war with Islam.

Or if the Americans refuse to intervene, the continuing fighting and TV images of Muslims being killed by the US and Israel in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, and Afghanistan would play into the hands of the emerging radical forces and erode the foundation of US hegemony in the region.

In any case, as Teheran and Damascus see it, the Americans will have no choice but to deal with Iran and Syria directly — or indirectly through the United Nations — in order to achieve an end to the hostilities. These governments and the non-government entities that are allied with them will now be in an improved bargaining power vis-à-vis Washington and be able to extract concessions from it on various issues — Syria in Lebanon and Iran over the nuclear issues.

The Bush Administration is hoping that Israeli military power will succeed in defeating Hezbollah and Hamas and as a result, the Americans will be in a position to counterbalance Iran’s growing power.

But it’s not clear how the Israelis could actually defeat Hamas and Hezbollah, short of re-invading southern Lebanon and Gaza and finding themselves once again engaged in a never-ending and bloody warfare with guerilla forces, not unlike what is happening now to the Americans in Iraq.

As a result, radical Shiite and Sunni forces will be in a better position to stir up the Arab masses against the pro-American old regimes in the region. That explains why the Egyptians, the Jordanians and the Saudis seem to be backing Washington’s efforts to disarm Hezbollah.

But here is the catch: The Shiites constitute today at least 40 per cent of the population of Lebanon and any attempt to destroy the military infrastructure of Hezbollah could ignite a civil war in Lebanon.

Perhaps then the Americans would have no choice but to invite the Ba’athists in Syria to impose order in Lebanon. Indeed, they might use that occasion to ask Saddam Hussein to do the same in Iraq.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

Some critics of the security barrier that the Israeli government has been constructing in the West Bank and Gaza have compared it to the infamous Berlin Wall that had separated the Soviet-occupied part (East Berlin) of the city from the one controlled by West Germany (West Berlin), and by extension, that had divided Europe between the Communist bloc and the Free World.

Israeli officials have suggested that the barrier would enhance Israeli security by hindering potential Palestinian terrorists and suicide bombers from infiltrating Israel. But detractors have argued that only a viable peace pact between the Israelis and the Palestinians would provide Israel with real security and that the Israeli Wall, like the now smashed Berlin Wall, would only help to perpetuate the conflict between Arab and Jews in the Holy Land.

In fact, the bashers of the Israeli Wall have advanced a misplaced historical analogy. The East Germans and their Soviet backers had built the Wall not as part of an effort to protect themselves from attacks by the US-led alliance but in order to block their citizens from fleeing to the West (and to some extent, the Wall made it harder for liberty seekers to cross into West Berlin).

That the Berlin Wall remained until 1989 reflected the willingness of both parties in the Cold War conflict to preserve the status quo in Germany and in Europe. To put it differently, it was NATO and the Warsaw Pact — and not the Wall — that was responsible for helping to maintain the peace in Berlin.

A more appropriate historical analogy to apply to Israel’s security barrier would be the Maginot Line, that is, the line of concrete fortifications, tank obstacles, machine gun posts and other defenses which France constructed along its borders with Germany (and with Italy) in the wake of World War I, which they believed would help them prevent a German invasion by providing time for mobilization in the event of a German attack and also compensate for French numerical weakness.

The Maginot Line worked as long as the German military was weak and the German leadership had no plans to invade France. When these two conditions changed, the Maginot Line proved to be nothing more than — to use a contemporary term — a virtual line. In fact, its existence only helped create a sense of misplaced confidence among the French and caused their defeat in 1940.

In a similar way, the Israeli public and leadership assumed that the 465-mile barrier that is expected to be longer and wider than the Berlin Wall and backed by razor barbed wire, deep trenches, and electronic fences would make it next to impossible for the Palestinians to attacks targets inside Israel.

The decision to build the Wall was an integral part of a wide strategy based on the notion that the Palestinian side was either unwilling or unable to reach a formal accord with Israel.

Hence, the need to move unilaterally and withdraw Israeli troops from large centers of Arab population in the West Bank and Gaza and to erect the barrier along the lines that Israel regards as "defendable."

And, indeed, Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip last year, including the dismantling of the 21 settlements there and the removal of over 8,000 Israeli settlers, was considered to be one of the first steps in implementing this unilateral strategy. It was not supposed to provide Israel with a formal cease-fire, but with security.

But it didn’t. On June 25, Hamas guerrillas infiltrated Israel from the Gaza Strip through a tunnel, killed two Israeli soldiers and kidnapped a third who was then dragged back into Gaza through the tunnel under the border.

Moreover, since Israel had withdrawn from Gaza, hundreds of homemade Kassam rockets were launched from Gaza into Israel, targeting populated urban centers, including the thriving resort town of Ashkelon. In reaction, Israeli bombers and gunboats pounded the Gaza Strip, killing several Palestinian guerrillas and civilians while Israeli troops and tanks moved into the northern parts of Gaza.

The Israelis insist that they would continue with their military operation in Gaza until the Palestinians return the Israeli soldier. The Palestinians say that they would do so only if Israel frees a number of Palestinian prisoners. So much for Israel’s "security barrier" and "disengagement."

It’s true that after erecting the barrier in some strategic areas in the West Bank, there was a drop in terrorist violence inside Israel. But while they give high grades to Israeli’s counterinsurgency tactics, many analysts also insist that the drop in terrorist attacks could be temporary and may have to do with a political decision by the Palestinian groups, including the ruling Islamic party Hamas, to maintain an informal cease-fire in Israel.

From that perspective, the recent Palestinian infiltration by guerrillas and launching of rockets into Israel should be seen as a Palestinian response to an earlier assassination of a Hamas official by the Israelis and perhaps, also as a way of challenging the current status quo under which Israel is maintaining an economic siege on the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority (PA).

All these recent developments, including the Israeli punitive measures against the Palestinians in Gaza, suggest that the Israeli unilateral strategy of withdrawing from parts of the occupied territories and erecting a security fence may not even provide the Israeli with short-term security, not to mention long-term peace.

In fact, when it comes to some parts of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the current Israeli government has stressed that even under its plans for unilateral withdrawal it would maintain control of some of the large blocs of Jewish settlements as well as the Arab parts of Jerusalem.

The security fence that Israel is building will end up dividing Arab towns and villages in the West Bank and make it impossible to form a contiguous and viable Palestinian entity there. Any of the choices that Israel faces in its dealings with the Palestinians will prove to be costly. It could continue controlling the West Bank and perhaps reoccupy the Gaza Strip. But that would make it likely that it would end up being transformed into a Middle-Eastern version of South Africa under which a Jewish minority would rule the Arab majority residing between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

Or it could grant these Arabs full Israeli citizenship which would mean that Israel would cease to be a Jewish state and become a bi-national entity. In order to avoid such scenarios, the Israelis have decided to take steps to withdraw from the occupied Arab territories either under a peace accord with the Palestinians or through the combination of a security fence and unilateral disengagement policy. But such moves seem to lead to a dead-end or, more specifically, to continuing Israeli-Palestinian violence

The only alternative would be to negotiate with the current Palestinian leadership which Israel and the United States (as well as the European Union) have rejected as an option as long as Hamas refuses to abandon its platform to call for the establishment of an Arab-Muslim state in the area between Jordan and the Mediterranean (including Israel).

Some observers are speculating that Israel, with US support, would try to destroy Hamas (which ironically came to power through elections promoted by the United States). But it’s doubtful that what would replace Hamas would be a stable PA with the will and legitimacy to make a deal with Israel.

Instead, such a move would probably ignite even more chaos and violence in the Palestinian territories instead of creating the conditions for the revival of the peace process.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

Please name the US presidential candidate who made the following point during the 2000 race for the White House: "I think that one of the problems that we have faced in the world is that we are so much more powerful than any single nation has been in relationship to the rest of the world than at any time in history, that I know about anyway, that there is some resentment of US power. So I think that the idea of humility is an important one."

Yep, that was Texas governor George W Bush commenting on the US approach to global affairs during a televised debate on Oct. 11, 2000, with Democratic presidential candidate, vice-president Al Gore who was promoting a more activist role for the United States around the world, including sending American troops to engage in nation-building operations in Haiti.

"You mentioned Haiti," Bush responded. "I wouldn’t have sent troops to Haiti. I didn’t think it was a mission worthwhile. It was a nation building mission. And it was not very successful. It cost us a couple billions of dollars and I’m not sure democracy is any better off in Haiti than it was before." (Admit it: Don’t you now feel this urge to substitute "Haiti" with "Iraq"?) And please read carefully these wise and Realpolitik-style advice that the same Bush made in the same televised debate, resisting the appeal by Gore for an energetic global US interventionist policy of changing regimes and spreading democracy.

"I’m not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say this is the way it’s got to be. We can help," Bush declared. "And maybe it’s just our difference in government, the way we view government. I mean I want to empower people. I want to help people help themselves, not have government tell people what to do. I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, we do it this way, so should you."

To suggest that President George W Bush has not been practicing what presidential candidate George W Bush was preaching once upon a time would be the understatement of this century.

Indeed, President Bush’s grandiose and expansive vision of America’s mission in the world — "support(ing) the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world" — promoted in his second inaugural address and again in his State of the Union address this year, would have made even president Woodrow Wilson who wanted to make the world "safe for democracy" sound like a flaming isolationist.

But as more Americans are concluding that President Bush’s crusade of nation-building and democracy promotion has been failing, candidate Bush’s plea for US "humility" in world affairs is gaining more popularity among policy analysts in Washington, DC, and elsewhere.

The latest indication that a sense of “superpower fatigue” has been spreading in the US capital – as former CIA official Graham Fuller has suggested in The National Interest magazine – is the “buzz" ignited by a new book critiquing American (and Western) tragic hubris of trying to reshape the rest of the world in its image.

In The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), William Easterly places Bush’s appeal for excessive US (and Western) interventionism in the Rest (the term he used to describe the non-Western parts of the world) in a larger policy context.

Easterly, a former economist with the World Bank where he had spent 16 years, is a self-described "noninterventionist" who is very skeptical of the notion that The Planner — whether it’s a World Bank official or the head of a US foreign aid agency, a British imperialist (in, say, Iraq) or American nation-builder (in, say, Iraq) — can impose the grand Western political and economic schemes and the various forms of utopian social engineering on the Rest.

Much of Easterly’s critique targets the US-led foreign aid industry that after 50 years and more than US$2.3 trillion in aid spent in Asia, Africa, and Latin American and other parts of the Rest has shockingly little to show for it.

This huge amount of foreign aid "had not managed to get 12-cent-medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths," writes Easterly who teaches economics at New York University. Utilizing his field experience with the World Bank, Easterly demonstrates with both statistics and anecdotes the failure of the foreign aid organizations to fulfill their stated mission of eradicating poverty and building nations in the Rest.

As he sees it, the fault lies with The Planners who control these gigantic bureaucracies but who lack accountability, incentives for improved performance, and methods for receiving feedback from the people they are supposed to help.

Easterly would like to see The Planners be replaced by what he calls The Searchers, that is, social entrepreneurs who are less concerned with inspiring mission statements and grand designs and who would apply a bottom-up approach in their dealing with the poor Rest and use innovative solutions as they adjust to the needs of the people they need to assist.

"All the hoopla about having the right plan is itself a symptom of the misdirect approach to foreign aid taken by so many in the past and so many still today," Easterly argues. "The right plan is to have no plan."

Indeed, from Easterly’s perspective, the free market and not the centralized government provide the most effective solutions to meeting the needs of people in the West — and in the Rest. But he cautions Americans and Westerners to recognize that the market requires certain norms and institutions that may not exist in many parts of the Rest.

Hence policymakers in the White House and the World Bank should recognize that many regions of the world are not yet ready to operate according to utopian free market solutions (witness the disastrous attempt to force "shock therapy" on the former Soviet Union).

"Markets everywhere emerge in an unplanned spontaneous way, adapting to local traditions and circumstances, and not through reforms designed by outsiders," Easterly writes.

"The free market depends on the bottom-up emergence of complex institutions and social norms that are difficult for outsiders to understand, much less change," he concludes. Hence the need for The Searchers to recognize the limits under which they are operating in the Rest, and in particular the reality in which ethnic, tribal, and clan loyalties impact on the way individuals make their political and economic decisions.

Notwithstanding all their good intentions and big ideas, outsiders cannot transplant Western institutions onto foreign soil and ensure that they take root there. Instead, the Searchers should learn to accept the reality in the Rest as it is and not as it should be according to some utopian vision and try to advance small, piecemeal solutions that take place at the grassroots levels.

American and Western policymakers should certainly refrain from using their available resources to subsidize corrupt and bankrupted governments in the Rest and admit that in many cases, channeling more economic assistance to this or that regime will only help perpetuate a destructive political and economic status-quo and produce even more misery to most of the people in the country targeted for aid.

After all, as Easterly points out in The White Man’s Burden, some of the success in the Rest, like Singapore and Hong Kong, or for that matter China and India, had little to do with foreign aid and more with the ability of these economies to marshal their human resources in the most effective way through workable solutions that reflect their unique experiences.

Taking into consideration the spectacular failures that resulted from foreign intervention in the Rest, Easterly is astounded that US policymakers and their cheerleaders in the media and the think tanks are advancing a strategy based on the use of military power as part of an effort to impose the American solution in the Middle East and elsewhere.

"Military intervention and occupation show a classic Planner’s mentality: applying simplistic external answer from the West to a complex internal problem in the Rest," Easterly writes, as he surveys the history of imperialism, colonialism and Cold War intervention in the Rest and warns that the West, and in particular, Washington, "should learn from its colonial history when it indulges neo-imperialist fantasies," concluding that "they didn’t work before and they won’t work now."

Interestingly enough, two books that were creating some "buzz" in the immediate invasion of Iraq, when President’s Bush role of the The Planner of nation building in Iraq was being celebrated, were Niall Ferguson’s Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire and Max Boot’s The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power.

That Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden, is creating a similar "buzz" now is a sign that presidential candidate Bush’s suggestion that Americans should play the role of The Searcher, that "I want to help people help themselves, not have government tell people what to do" and that "I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, we do it this way, so should you" are becoming more popular.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

It was only yesterday that American pundits were writing political obituaries for US President George W. Bush and his Republican allies on Capitol Hill. With the anti-American violence in Iraq showing no signs of ending any time soon and helping to force Mr. Bush’s approval ratings in the public opinion polls to the low 30s, the consensus among political analysts in Washington was that the Republicans would suffer a major blow in the coming mid-term Congressional elections in November.

Indeed, some observers speculated that if the opposition Democrats took control of the House of Representatives and the Senate, they would not only launch investigations into the Bush administration’s conduct in the events leading to the decision to attack Iraq, but they might event consider taking steps to impeach the current White House occupant.

This doomsday scenario (from the Republican perspective) seems less likely now that President Bush and the Republicans have decided to embrace an aggressive nationalist agenda aimed at igniting more fear of The Terrorists (or anyone who looks and sounds like The Terrorists) and hostility towards those who allegedly appease The Terrorists, including the "liberal" press and the Democrats.

Effective strategy

The strategy promoted by Mr. Bush’s top political aide Karl Rove (who contrary to earlier expectations won’t be tried for perjury; another piece of good news for the Republicans), which seemed to have worked quite effectively during the 2004 mid-term elections and the 2006 general election, could probably help the Republicans hang on to power in Congress while providing the War President with an opportunity to rally the American voters behind him. In a way, the killing of terrorist gang leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ended up as the opening shot of sorts in the Bush administration’s nationalist campaign. His death and the formation of a new Iraqi government helped to produce another we-are-turning-the-tide-in-Mesopotamia media spin which was crowned by Mr. Bush’s visit to Baghdad’s Green Zone.

It was a bit ironic that the White House moved ahead in promoting its contention that We-are-winning-the-War-on Terrorism at the same time that that war seemed to suffer major setbacks in both Afghanistan and Somalia where radical Islamic guerillas were on the offensive.

Well, never mind — the Bushies and the Republican forces on Capitol Hill were themselves on the offensive, politically speaking, charging that the Democrats who were urging that the Bush administration start setting a timeline for withdrawing the US troops from Iraq were in favor of "cutting and running" — one Republican lawmaker accused the Democrats of supporting a "cutting-and-jogging" strategy — that supposedly will play into the hands of the "terrorists." So in a demonstration of nationalist histrionics, the Republicans forced Congress to adopt a resolution expressing solidarity with the men and women fighting in Iraq and opposition to setting a deadline for withdrawal. And a few days after the resolution had passed, the commander of the US forces proposed such a deadline for withdrawal.

Well, never mind — this Let’s-not-stab our-troops-in-the-back and Let’s-rally-behind-our-War-President Republican-induced frenzy was also stirred up through a fierce, and somewhat nasty, attack by the White House and Capitol Hill Republican on the New York Times and other publications for revealing several government surveillance programs.

The Times revealed programs to track terrorist financing by monitoring the international banking system and to secretly monitor, without a court warrant, thousands of telephone calls made by Americans. Some Republican lawmakers and pro-administration pundits have even accused the Times of "treason" and proposed that its editors be jailed.

The Times and other news organizations have argued that their conduct was a legitimate (and legal) effort to bring public attention to a continuing (and illegal) attempt by the Bush administration to increase its powers in a way that violates basic civil rights.

Interestingly enough, the US Supreme Court seemed to have reached a similar conclusion when it repudiated the US military commissions for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in a ruling last Thursday, suggesting that after a long deference to the executive branch, the court is starting to check or question the Bush administration’s attempts to broaden the wartime power of the presidency.

Well, never mind — the Bush administration also seems to be trying to fan the fears of terrorism by making dramatic announcements about new discoveries of alleged terrorist cells in the United States like the recent arrest of a group of Miami-based men whom the government accused of concocting a plot to kill "all the devils we can," starting by blowing up Chicago’s Sears Tower.

Obscure group

But according to press reports, the men were members of a tiny and obscure religious group, some of whom were entrapped by government informants to fantasize about imaginary plots. They certainly didn’t have the arms and equipment to blow up targets.

Well, never mind — the point is that this kind of Be-Afraid-Very-Afraid strategy could work, especially if it’s followed by never-ending Red Alerts and leaks about foiled terrorist plots.

Indeed, the most recent opinion polls suggest that the Bush administration’s political jihad against the defeatist Democrats and the treasonous Times coupled with the highlighting of the Tipping Points in Iraq may be working.

Mr. Bush seems to be gaining a few points in the public opinion polls while voters conclude that the Republicans are more effective in fighting terrorism than the Democrats. By November, these sentiments could translate into a Republican victory, especially as the leaderless and clueless Democrats are failing to come up with an alternative policy that could win voters’ support.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

For a day or two after the killing of terrorist gang leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, I was fantasizing that US President George W Bush and his aides were finally getting smart when it came to Iraq.

A few hours after the Jordanian-born head of al-Qaeda in Iraq was killed in a US air strike, a cool, non-smirking and somewhat subdued Mr. Bush showed up at the White House’s Rose Garden to address the press. No "Mission Accomplished" banner was displayed in the background.

And while hailing the death of Iraq’s top terrorist as well as the belated confirmation of the last three members of the Iraqi Cabinet, Mr. Bush actually made a few cautionary comments, warning for example that "we can expect the terrorists and insurgents to carry on without (Zarqawi)" and "the sectarian violence to continue."

I suppose we needed to thank God… I mean, Karl Rove for what seemed to be, for a change, a strategy of lowering expectations in Iraq. Indeed, for three years, since Mr. Bush declared from the deck of an aircraft carrier that America had accomplished its mission in Iraq, the administration’s spin doctors with the help of neoconservative propagandists have been trying to counter-spin the depressing reality that we have been watching on television by celebrating the many "tipping points" that were supposed to herald the dawn of democracy, peace and prosperity in Mesopotamia. I almost lost count of how many times we were "turning the corner" in Baghdad.

So here is a brief reminder for those of you who suffer from short-term memory loss: the bringing down of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad; the capture of the Iraqi dictator (remember the intrusive examination of his mouth and beard?) and the killing of his sons; the "handover of sovereignty" to a provisional Iraqi government; the first parliamentary elections with the voters happily waving their purple fingers; the adoption of an Iraqi Constitution and the start of Saddam’s trial; the second parliamentary elections in which a larger number of Arab-Sunnis had voted; and more recently, the formation of the new government in Baghdad led by the supposedly "tough" and "competent" Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

And now comes the killing of Zarqawi the "evil doer" and the filling of the three remaining Cabinet positions, including the defense and national security posts by Arab-Sunnis formerly affiliated with the Ba’ath regime.

All these tide-turning moments have failed to turn the tide in Iraq, where the real reality is very different from the media events being choreographed in the Green Zone of Baghdad, where the huge political and military American contingency is based, and where PM Maliki, the members of his Cabinet and the elected lawmakers reside and work, stepping occasionally outside into the Real Iraq — as opposed to the Green Zone’s Virtual Iraq — under the tight protection of US security guards.

In the Real Iraq, the violence instigated by a mix of Sunni jihadists, former Ba’athists, Shi’ite militias and criminal gangs is continuing uninterrupted. Millions of Iraqis live in fear and without jobs and electricity in a country with one of the world’s largest oil reserves, and whose economy has yet to experience the level of growth of the Saddam years.

Discouraging reality

With the coming to power of Shi’ite political parties in Baghdad and the provinces, women have experienced a major challenge to their rights, while members of secular professional classes, including the cosmopolitan Christian community, have been fleeing the country, to countries including authoritarian Syria.

Most analysts agree that the country is already experiencing what could be described a low-level civil war that could explode any day into a full-blown one.

Against the backdrop of this discouraging reality, it is not clear how Zarqawi’s killing or the appointment of a new Cabinet — events that at best have some symbolic significance — are going to make a big difference.

In fact, as Mr. Bush suggested in his appearance in the Rose Garden, it is quite possible that the violence is going to increase in the coming days and weeks. Unfortunately, Mr. Bush and his aides, after the initial and very brief demonstration of good sense, could not resist the temptation to once again produce another publicity stunt la "Mission Accomplished" with the US President making a dramatic landing in Virtual Iraq to do a few "photo-ops" with the new Iraqi PM and to proclaim that Zarqawi’s death and the new Iraqi Cabinet mean that "freedom has achieved a great victory in the heart of the Middle East."

The problem that Mr. Bush is facing in Iraq — the point that never seems to tip — has to do with the entire faulty strategy that led to the invasion of Iraq. When it comes to civil and international wars, their "tipping point," the one that marks the victory of one side over the other, is actually the outcome of a process consisting of three stages.

First, one side is being crushed on the battlefield and is unable to fight anymore. Then the defeated party raises the white flag. And finally, the losing side "embraces defeat" and agrees to accept the political terms imposed by the winner.

In Iraq, the United States was able to crush one element, Saddam and his military, representing the interests of the Arab-Sunni minority. But the Arab-Sunnis have never raised the white flag and have certainly not embraced defeat. At the same time, the power in Iraq shifted to a coalition led by the Arab-Shi’ite religious political parties who see themselves — and not the Americans — as the victorious party and are unwilling to accept the political terms dictated by the US. And in the middle are a divided group of Kurdish nationalists who have allied themselves with the Americans on a conditional ad-hoc basis.

Groups’ interests

If anything, from the perspectives of the Arab-Shi’ites in Baghdad and their co-religionists in Teheran and the Iraqi Kurds, the "tipping point" has already occurred with the collapse of Saddam and the Sunni-led Ba’ath regime.

Now these two groups are ready for the next campaign to advance their own respective interests — and not that of the Americans. The Shi’ites hope to consolidate their power in Baghdad, a process that could involve struggles among the various Shi’ite militias, and would do very little to advance US interests or values, unless the strengthening of Iran’s power in the Persian Gulf and the establishment of a quasi-theocracy in parts of Iraq can be spun as triumph for "freedom."

Similarly, the Kurds are interested in strengthening the foundations of their autonomy, cleansing their area from Arab-Sunnis and pressing forward for political independence for the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq and Syria, a process that would run contrary to US interests in the region. In that event, another pseudo-event will be staged in the Green Zone in Baghdad and in Washington to persuade us once again that the tide is turning, the point is tipping, and the mission — was or is or will be — accomplished.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

For several years I have argued that Washington should adopt a Realpolitik-type approach to dealing with Iran, including by opening a direct diplomatic dialogue with Tehran aimed at resolving some of the differences between the two governments.

In particular, I’ve been critical of the Bush administration’s neocon-driven policy of promoting "regime change" in Iran and of its rejection of diplomatic overtures from Iran. And I’ve called on President George W Bush to follow the example of another hawkish Republican President, Richard Nixon, who reshaped global politics by going to communist China, and adopt a similar strategy by going to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

So it’s not surprising that the recent news about the US decision to agree to negotiate with Iran resulted in quite a few e-mails from colleagues who wanted to know whether I thought that the recent development reflected a change in US position towards a more "realistic" approach vis-à-vis Iran.

"Don’t you agree that President Bush and Secretary (Condoleezza) Rice have finally distanced themselves from the neoconservative agenda and have embraced a Kissinger-like policy towards Iran?" one of my correspondents e-mailed me. The simple answer is that, no, I don’t agree with the notion that the recent move by the Bush-Rice team to agree to talk with Iran (under certain conditions) recalls the decision by the Nixon-Kissinger crew to open diplomatic negotiations with China. The latter move was one major step in the implementation of a coherent strategy whose goal was to change the balance of power in the Cold War by forming a Sino-American alliance that would counter Soviet power around the world.

President Nixon and his top foreign policy advisor Dr. Henry Kissinger were determined to establish diplomatic links with Beijing and ensured that their project would succeed by conducting preliminary secret negotiations with the Chinese. One could compare their policy to a powerful bulldozer running over all the obstacles as it pressed ahead towards the final destination.

President Bush and Ms Rice, on the other hand, resemble the exhausted and disoriented drivers of a broken-down vehicle who cannot operate the GPS in the car and who are not even sure what address they should be looking for. But driving around town for hours and hours they are relieved to discover a gas station where they hope to make a phone call and perhaps purchase a map. And who knows? They might even end up being on time for their job interview.

Indeed, when it comes to the Bush administration’s policy towards Iran (and other global problems), much of what the pundits describe as "diplomacy" is actually nothing more than an attempt to "muddle through" one crisis after another; to come up with ad-hoc responses that reflect the existing political pressures at home and the balance of power abroad without advancing a consistent policy that articulates US interests by utilizing available power and selecting the necessary means to advance realistic goals.

Hence in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq War, when the Bushies were celebrating what they expected to become the first stage in the spread of democracy in the Middle East, the talk in Washington was about achieving "regime change" in Tehran through a mix of diplomatic and military pressure. In fact, Washington dismissed at that stage several diplomatic advances from Iran and expressed confidence that the Iranian people would soon take to the streets and topple the mullahs.

When Iraq turned into a mess and the Iranians elected an anti-American populist president while cementing their links to the Shiite majority in Iraq, the military option was placed on the backburner while the Europeans were encouraged by Washington to negotiate with the Iranians on their alleged nuclear program.

Dead ends

The Americans were hoping that the failure of the talks between the EU3 (Britain, France, Germany) would create the conditions for winning support from the UN Security Council for sanctions against Iran. The talks had indeed collapsed — but rising oil prices helped to strengthen Iran’s hand and made it less likely that Russia and China, or for that matter, India or Brazil, would jump aboard the sanctions ship. And the US military power overstretched in Iraq and elsewhere, rising American public impatience with the military adventures in the Middle East, the American voters angry at high oil prices and the opposition from Europe made it clear to the administration that using the military option against Iran would be very (very!) costly.

And it was at this stage that our perplexed US drivers saw the lights of a gas station — and since real men don’t ask for directions — Mr. Bush asked Condi to get out of the car and find out where the hell they were going and where they should make the next turn.

With Britain’s Tony Blair and Germany’s Angela Merkel playing the role of the friendly gas attendants, Mr. Bush’s diplomatic sidekick discovered that Military Drive, Sanctions Road and No-Direct-US-Negotiations-with-Iran Avenue were all leading to dead ends.

If anything, the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s letter to Mr. Bush, which was dismissed by the Americans as nothing more than a publicity stunt proved to be a successful publicity stunt that increased the pressure on Mr. Bush and Ms Rice to "do something" just as the Wise Men and Women in Washington (including Dr. K himself) were suggesting that the time has come to talk with Iran as opposed to using the EU3 as diplomatic contractors. That explains why Mr. Bush and Ms Rice are now turning on to the Direct-US-Negotiations-with-Iran alley.

The tendency among critics of the Bush administration’s Iran policy is to argue now that this alley will also lead to a dead diplomatic end, noting that the White House attached a precondition that Tehran would never accept — a halt to its uranium-enrichment program — so that it could claim an attempt at diplomacy on the way to its real objectives of economic sanctions or perhaps military action.

But even these critics should admit that the recent American move — while not to be compared to the opening to communist China — is a step in the right "realistic" direction. Ms Rice has not filed for divorce from Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, but she and her advisors have recognized the diplomatic, economic and military constraints that make it impossible for the US to force Iran to accept its demands.

The Americans have concluded that they need to reach a consensus with the Europeans, Russians and Chinese, since only the combined power of these players could make a difference. That means, however, that Washington needed also to modify its position on Iran which is exactly what happened here.

We Realpolitik types have never advocated "multilateralism," which is based on the assumption that Washington needs to get a green light from Madagascar before going to war. Instead, real realists are in agreement that the US should work together with the other Great Powers through a diplomatic consortium la Congress of Vienna in dealing with major global problems.

Of course, Bush administration apologists are spinning the latest US decision as a great diplomatic victory for the Bushies which supposedly reflects the willingness on the part of Europe, Russia and China to back the tough US position and use all necessary means to force Iran to give up its nuclear military program, or else!

But that’s not the case as most diplomatic outcomes are non-zero-sum by definition. You gain some (The ball is in Iran’s court). And you lose some. It’s obvious that the neocon fantasy of "regime change" in Iran is out.

Yes, Washington will continue to hope that the ayatollahs will be replaced by political and economic reformers (in the same way that we hope for political change in China, for example). But the willingness to engage diplomatically with the current regime in Tehran means that we accept it as legitimate.

In fact, it is clear that any possible accord with Iran would probably lead gradually to diplomatic links between Washington and Tehran. This is the same process that has already taken place on the US-North Korea front.

Remember that other member of Mr. Bush’s "Axis of Evil?" We are not only negotiating with these Bad Guys, as part of another Great Power Consortium, but we now seem to be ready to recognize them and sign a peace accord with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il who seems to be (at least to me) as deranged as Mr. Ahmadinejad.

Sticks vs. carrots

And we are willing to provide the Iranians with "carrots" while in the past we only threatened them with "sticks." Washington and Teheran are now joined together on the Diplomatic Slippery Slope. The Bushies opened the diplomatic door — and it would be difficult for them to close it now even if initial Iranian reactions to the American proposal are bound to be negative.

There will be pressure on both sides to make more concessions (which worries Mr. Cheney) or else face the prospects that they’ll have a military collision on the Road to War (which would be Mr. Cheney’s dream come true).

It seems quite obvious to me that the top political leaders on both sides want to avoid a costly war. But both sides have different expectations as they enter (hopefully) into the negotiations mode. The Americans have yet to devise a coherent strategy on Iran that could lead to a bilateral deal involving not only the nuclear issue, but common US-Iran interests in Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf.

At the end of the day, the Iranians want Washington to recognize it as a major player in the Persian Gulf (including Iraq) which challenges the notion backed by both Democrats and Republicans, and mainstream liberals and conservatives, of US hegemony there. Mr. Bush and Ms Rice want Iran to "do a Libya" — Teheran must give up its entire nuclear program in exchange for the carrots. That isn’t going to happen. It’s possible that someone would come up with some creative ideas that would slow down the Iranian drive towards nuclear military power while allowing them to save face.

But I’m not sure that that is going to work out. So if I had to make a bet, I would put my money on the military-collision scenario taking place sometime after the Congressional elections and before Mr. Bush leaves office.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

Compare the two American dramas that the world was watching last Thursday.

In Houston, Texas, two former Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were convicted of fraud and conspiracy for their role in the energy trader’s collapse in 2001 and could end up spending the rest of their lives in prison. The jury concluded that Lay and Skilling lied to their employees, shareholders and the public about corporate finances; that their actions should be considered as crimes; and that the two should punished for that.

And in Washington, DC, two current national leaders, US President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair conceded that there had been a few "missteps" and "errors" in the conduct of the war in Iraq that mostly had to do with style and management.

But they insisted that the ousting of Saddam Hussein was justified and suggested that they had no plans to withdraw the occupying troops from Iraq. Mr. Bush expressed regret for the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and some of his tough-talking comments.

Mr. Blair said the "de-Ba’athification" of Iraq — the clearing out of Saddam followers from the bureaucracy — had been badly handled. The two seemed to be somewhat chastened but unrepentant on the Iraq war.

We now know that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair led their nations into war based on false pretenses (nonexistent weapons of mass destruction to Iraqi links to al-Qaeda) and without any serious political, economic and military postwar planning.

The result has been a bloody mess and a country descending into civil war. Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed as well as a few thousand US and coalition soldiers. At the same time, the financial cost of the war is now estimated at US$320 billion and is expected to end up being higher than the Vietnam War.

And with all the misinformation and mismanagement that characterized the handling of the war, not to mention Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and other human rights violations, the credibility and prestige of the United States around the world has never been so low, with Washington finding it difficult to mend ties with allies in Europe and the Middle East.

At home, Mr. Bush’s approval ratings have sunk to some of the lowest numbers for any president in decades, while Mr. Blair’s Labour Party suffered in recent elections. In the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, 32 per cent of Americans approved of Mr. Bush’s handling of the war and 37 per cent said it has been worth the cost. The support for the war in Britain is even lower.

American news publications reported last week that thousands of middle class and professional Iraqis, including many Christians, are fleeing the country. Their major destination? Syria. In the last 10 months, the Iraqi government has issued new passports to 1.85 million Iraqis, 7 per cent of the population and a quarter of the country’s estimated middle class, according to the New York Times.

The New Republic reports that according to Iraqi estimates, between 40,000 and 100,000 Iraqi Christians have fled since 2004, many following their own road to Damascus across the Syrian border or to Jordan, while many more have been displaced within Iraq.

In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, a spokesperson for Human Rights Watch praised the role that Syria has played in absorbing Iraq’s refugees. "Middle East governments should follow Syria’s example in accepting refugees and asylum seekers fleeing violence in Iraq," the organization said in a statement.

So . . . let’s see: America "liberated" Iraq in order to transform it into a model of political and economic freedom that could bring about similar changes in neighboring authoritarian Syria which was (at one point) targeted for "regime change" by the Bush administration. And now, members of Iraq’s middle class and Christian communities, the most westernized, educated and professional segments of Iraq’s population are fleeing to . . . Syria.

All of which gives a new meaning to Mr. Bush’s "Mission Accomplished." Indeed, trying to weigh the devastation that the Bush-Blair duo have inflicted on their countries and the world as a result of the Iraq War against the damage produced by the Lay-Skilling pair, is like comparing a splash your kid made in the swimming pool to the Indian Ocean tsunami.

Yet neither leader is going to be punished anytime soon for their "missteps" and "errors" in Iraq. Mr. Bush will complete his second term in office at the end of 2008, while Mr. Blair will be recalled as one of the longest-serving prime ministers in British history.

The only verdict they’ll have to face will be that of history.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

The conventional historical narrative of US President George W. Bush’s foreign policy has traced the ascendancy of the neoconservative ideologues in his administration to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and the ensuing war in Iraq. The common assumption among analysts is that if it was not for the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the current White House’s approach towards the world would have followed the more traditional internationalist stance adopted by former presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush.

Moreover, most observers assume that the foreign policy hardliners in the Bush administration have focused most of their attention on the Middle East. In fact, that the neoconservatives were emerging as players in devising and implementing President Bush’s foreign policy was becoming quite obvious before 9/11 and in the earlier weeks of the administration and had nothing to do with Iraq, Iran and the Middle East.

It was in shaping Washington’s policies in East Asia — first on the North Korean issue and later with regard to China — that the neocons demonstrated their willingness to challenge the policies of Mr. Bush’s predecessors. Indeed, within days of taking office, the foreign policy hawks in the Bush administration succeeded in making it clear that they were in charge when they humiliated then secretary of state Colin Powell when he had stated that the new administration would continue the Clinton-era policy of engagement with North Korea by providing incentives to Pyongyang in exchange for verifiable steps to end all military nuclear activity.

The hardliners in Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office and in the Pentagon achieved their first political-bureaucratic victory by getting President Bush to publicly repudiate Mr. Powell and by insisting that the North Korean regime could not be trusted and needed to be "changed." Mr. Powell and the realists in the administration were checkmated by the neocons to the chagrin of South Korea and China. And that uncompromising stance towards Pyongyang was highlighted a year later during President Bush’s State of the Union address when he labeled North Korea, together with soon-to-be-occupied Iraq and (soon-to-be-bombed?) Iran, as a member of the "Axis of Evil."

Six years following that first neocon triumph, it is becoming clear that US policy towards North Korea has proved to be a major diplomatic loser. North Korea withdrew from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The six-party talks have been going nowhere and South Korea and China have rejected US demands to isolate the North Koreans. Moreover, North Korea’s ability to continue in pursuing its nuclear program has led many observers to conclude that Pyongyang has already become a nuclear military power and is now in a position to deter the US from attacking it (a move that, in any case, both Seoul and Beijing oppose).

In a way, Iran’s current policy is based on the assumption that all it needs is "to do a North Korea," that is, to be in a position where its nuclear military program has reached a point of no return and thus making it even more costly for Washington to attack it. So the time has apparently come to face the harsh reality of a US diplomatic flop. According to a recent report in the New York Times, the Bush administration has decided to — OOPS — reverse its course on North Korea in a way that makes even the Clinton approach seem dovish. (And we’re so, so sorry Secretary Powell.)

For all practical purposes, the neocons have already lost the North Korea portfolio which now seems to be in the hands of the diplomats in the State Department who have persuaded President Bush to accept the Chinese formula of negotiating with the North Koreans on returning to the NPT and a verified scrapping of their nuclear military program in exchange for various "carrots," including security guarantees and the normalization of relations.

Now the Bushies, according to the Times, suggest that Washington would be ready to open direct negotiations aimed at reaching a comprehensive peace accord with Pyongyang (a long-standing North Korean demand) as part of the effort to get Pyongyang to return to the six-party talks and end its nuclear military program. It is not clear yet whether the North Koreans would agree to return to the talks. And it is not inconceivable that the hawks in the Bush administration, led by Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, will refuse to admit that they were checkmated and try to place obstacles on the way of the realists in the State Department.

The question that would probably be raised in the coming weeks in Washington and other world capitals is: if the US is ready to take regime change off the table when it comes to nuclear talks with North Korea and Libya, why not apply the same approach towards Iran?

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

The conventional wisdom in Washington is that President George W. Bush hasn’t been rewarded politically for a mostly booming U.S. economy. Indeed, his approval rating in the public opinion polls is now somewhere in the low 20s, despite the fact that the indicators reflecting the resilience of the U.S. economy — inflation (low), interest rates (relatively low), consumer spending (relatively high), unemployment (relatively low) — should have helped transform the current White House occupant into a popular president.

Most pundits explain that paradox by suggesting that Mr. Bush’s policy failures in Iraq, his dealing with Hurricane Katrina, a series of scandals involving officials and Republican lawmakers, and recent rising energy costs have counteracted any positive effect that the booming economy should have had on his standing in polls. But pollsters also point out that notwithstanding the good economic news, most Americans are uneasy about their long-term prosperity as a nation.

In a way, the anxiety among Americans reflects concerns over the continuing effects of globalization on the American economy and society — the slow erosion in the U.S. manufacturing base as a result of technological changes and competition from emerging economies; the dramatic demographic changes that have been produced by rising illegal (and legal) immigration; and the financial and human costs involved in maintaining the preeminent U.S. global military position.

There is, however, another indicator that may explain why Americans seem so irritable these days. That has to do with the value of the U.S. dollar falling 28 per cent against other currencies between 2002 and 2004. It then bounced back slightly, only to fall again against the euro and the yen in recent weeks. Representative Ron Paul, a Republican, who is the leading "goldbug" on Capitol Hill, traces today’s financial problems back to the removal of gold backing from global currencies. He argues that the real measure of just how far the U.S. dollar has fallen can be found in the price of gold, which has reached a 25-year high of more than U.S.$700 per ounce.

"It’s much more accurate to measure the dollar against a stable store of value like gold, rather than against other fiat currencies," Mr. Paul writes in LewRockwell.com, a web site affiliated with the Mises Institute.

According to him, the declining U.S. dollar as measured by the rising value of gold will continue "until the American people demand an end to deficit spending by Congress and unrestrained creation of new dollars by the Federal Reserve and Treasury department."

Or to put it differently, "voting" for gold is a vote of no confidence in the ability of the Administration and Congress to control the budget and trade deficit, the Fed’s ability to control the money supply, and by extension, the ability of Washington to pursue its hegemonic policy in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Most investors recognize that the federal government’s huge debt and deficit spending will continue to grow as the costs of U.S. military intervention abroad will rise and make the American economy more dependent on foreign governments and central bankers.

Indeed, in 2005, America’s current account deficit with the rest of the world exceeded U.S.$800 billion or about 6.5 per cent of GDP. As any economist will tell you, at some point Americans will have to start repaying what they borrowed abroad or they would face a world that refuses to lend them more money. Such a repayment of debt would have to be linked up to a big drop in the value of the U.S. dollar.

Michael Mussa, former director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) told John Maggs of the Washington-based National Journal that the value of the U.S. dollar would have to drop by 25 per cent to have any impact on the U.S. current account deficit. In turn, a lower U.S. dollar will force higher interest rates, which will slow economic growth.

It’s not inconceivable that foreign investors will decide at some point that the risk of investing their capital in the U.S. outweighs the benefits and will shift their investments to other currencies. According to Mr. Mussa, the worst-case scenario would be a "dollar crash" which could take place if speculators bet that the U.S. dollar will continue to fall and devaluation begins to feed on itself, threatening China and other economies that tie their currencies to the U.S. dollar.

Mr. Paul believes that the world financial markets are already starting to bet against the U.S. dollar. "Our creditors, particularly Asian central banks, are losing their appetite for U.S. Treasuries," he writes. The long-term significance will sink in when Americans understand that the steady erosion of the value of the U.S. dollar means they will all be poorer in the future.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

Are US and Iranian officials holding secret talks to try prevent the diplomatic tensions between them from deteriorating into a military confrontation?

That’s the question being asked now by diplomats and news organizations as they search through the current heavy "diplomatic fog" for some signs of what’s really happening out there, as opposed to what both sides are saying publicly, whether it’s the 18-page letter that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had sent to US President George W Bush, or Washington’s most recent statement about the need for a "regime change" in Tehran.

That experts around the world are considering the possibility that — notwithstanding the non-friendly rhetoric emanating from both Washington and Tehran — emissaries from both countries are meeting at some secret location in Pakistan or Germany reflects probably a wishful thinking, but this is based on a reading of Cold War history.

Indeed, some of the most critical moves during two major developments that took place at the height of Cold War — the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and the US opening to China in 1973 — involved secret negotiations between representatives of US administration and officials in Moscow and Beijing.

In fact, most historians agree that the back-channel communication between US President John Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev during the 1962 crisis may have helped prevent a major military confrontation between the two nuclear superpowers.

Moreover, the crisis was resolved only following a series of secret negotiations between the two sides that involved agreements that weren’t disclosed until a few years later, including a decision by the US to remove its nuclear missiles from Turkey, a move that would have been certainly rejected by the Republicans in Congress.

Similarly, it would have been unlikely that President Richard Nixon could have reached any agreement to open talks between the two powers, including his historic visit to Beijing, through public negotiations with "Red China."

Interestingly enough, during a discussion about Mr. Ahmadinejad’s letter to Mr. Bush that took place in a think tank in Washington last week, one of the participants recalled that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Mr. Khrushchev sent Mr. Kennedy a rambling and threatening letter which Mr. Kennedy decided to ignore, in his response to the Soviet leader and instead accepted an offer that Mr. Khrushchev made in another letter.

The foreign policy analyst was proposing in the discussion that Mr. Bush respond to the Iranian leader’s recent letter by ignoring some of the more controversial elements in it, while accentuating the need for refocused attention on common interests and values.

Another participant in the discussion interpreted Mr. Ahmadinejad’s letter from another perspective: Mr. Ahmadinejad would have no role in US-Iran negotiations, which would have to involve emissaries speaking for the executive branch in Tehran that is controlled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In fact, that analyst suggested that the more radical Iranian president was trying to preempt a more serious negotiating initiative from Tehran, referring to an article by Hassan Rohani, the Supreme Leader’s representative on the National Security Council, that was published in Time magazine last week and offered a negotiated solution on the issue relating to Iran’s nuclear program.

Hence the Americans need to pay less attention to the Iranian president’s sermons and talk directly (and in secret) with Mr. Khamenei’s emissaries.

Diplomatic negotiations

There is no doubt that Mr. Bush, like Mr. Nixon in 1973 will be facing powerful forces in Washington, including the neoconservative ideologues in his administration and the powerful Israel Lobby if and when he decides to engage the Iranians.

But like the anti-Communist Mr. Nixon, Mr. Bush would not be accused of "appeasing" the mullahs in Tehran but will be seen by most Americans as a leader who was trying to advance US national interests through diplomatic negotiations and by avoiding a costly war. Indeed, in Realpolitik terms, it is in both sides’ interests to open a dialogue. Mr. Bush could certainly emerge as a "big winner" out of successful negotiations with Iran: He will be able to use Iranian influence among the Shiites in the region to stabilize Iraq (and Afghanistan) while Tehran’s cooperation could help enhance US pressure on Syria and the Palestine’s Hamas government.

Oil prices will drop and Mr. Bush could emerge as a "man of peace." That would be great for his "legacy" not to mention to his Republican party in the coming Congressional elections in November. At the same time, the Iranians will also win. They would be recognized by the US and its allies as a regional power, not to mention the American money and businesses that could start flowing into the country.

While at this point, it seems that the Bush administration is offering nothing by way of diplomatic initiatives, there are signs that its European allies, led by Germany are pressing Washington to encourage an evolving Iranian diplomatic initiative.

Hence as it’s becoming clear that the chances for getting the United Nations Security Council to adopt a resolution to "punish" Iran are close to zero, and that the costs of a US military attack on Iran are going to be enormous, the choices that are before Washington now are either to maintain the dangerous status quo, or to open a dialogue with Iran.

Which explains why talks with Iran could happen. If they do, we won’t be hearing about them until they conclude. Watch if a leading US diplomat "disappears" for a few days and be suspicious if US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice extends a visit to Turkey or one of the Central Asian states.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

Most of us are familiar with the saying: "Time flies when you’re having fun." After all, five hours of flight turbulence feels much longer than five hours on a beach resort. In fact, scientists have demonstrated that patterns of activity in the brain tend to accelerate in response to positive emotional stimulations, and vice versa.

That perhaps explains why the booming 1990s time seemed to have passed without us noticing it, and why, on the other hand, the next three years of the Bush Administration will probably seem to drag and drag.

Indeed, the NBC television comedy show, "Saturday Night Live" featured recently a (make-believe) President George W. Bush sitting in the (make-believe) Oval Office and admitting to his (make-believe) Vice-President, Dick Cheney, that all he was hoping for was to be transported by a time machine to the last months of 2008 during which his term in office would end.

And who could blame him? With his approval rating in the polls down to the low 30s, President Bush and his aides are, to paraphrase Dusty Springfield, wishing and hoping and thinking and praying, planning and dreaming each day and night for just one tiny piece of good news that would help get the White House occupant and the Republicans into the arms of not-so-loving public.

But it just isn’t happening. In Iraq, notwithstanding the Bushies’ rhetoric about "freedom on the march" and even as a new Shi’ite prime minister takes office, the political instability, economic deterioration and violence perpetrated by a mishmash of anti-American insurgents, ethnic and religious militias, and criminal gangs, isn’t going to come of an end any time soon.

At the same time, there are no indications that the Bush Administration is about to resolve the dangerous Iran nuclear crisis. Iran’s mullahs continue to insist on their right to pursue their nuclear program while Washington has yet to win the support of members of the United Nations Security Council for taking action against Teheran.

There are even signs that the Taliban guerillas are expanding their influence across some parts of Afghanistan and threatening the power of the pro-Western central government in Kabul.

And as we get close to the fifth anniversary of 9/11, the architect of that terrorist crime, Osama bin Ladin hasn’t been captured by the Americans or their allies. He is probably hiding somewhere in Pakistan

If the Bush Administration’s prestige and influence has been in continuing decline abroad, its standing at home has been going downhill as evidenced not only by those devastating opinion polls, but also by never-ending reports about bureaucratic mismanagement and political corruption, the latest one being the "resignation" of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Porter Goss against the backdrop of chaos in the organization that had failed to… (well, it’s a very long list) and rumors about members of Mr. Goss’ staff with ties to a corrupt Congressman, a sleazy lobbyist and a prostitution ring.

And apropos the CIA. Washington now is holding its breath as Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is wrapping up his investigation into that leak case, involving top White House officials, including Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove.

Unfortunately for President Bush and the Republicans even the overall good news on the economy — low interest rates, falling unemployment, and a rally in the stock market — has been not helped to provide the White House with political momentum. Most Americans are not crediting President Bush with this economic progress and instead are blaming him for the economic problems — the growing health care costs, the struggling manufacturing sector, and of course, the rising price of oil.

The result is that while close to 60 per cent of American are saying that the American economy is doing well, about 30 per cent of them are disapproving of the way Bush is handling the economy.

But most distressing to President Bush and his Republican party are those polls’ results that indicate that most Americans have lost their trust in Mr. Bush and believe that the country isn’t moving in the right direction, reflecting a growing sense that the American public is in a very angry mood.

To say that the Republican lawmakers are in panic would be an understatement. Opinion polls as well as anecdotal evidence have led political experts to conclude that the Democrats have a chance of regaining control of the House of Representatives and perhaps even of the Senate in the coming Congressional elections in November.

The worst-case-scenario from the perspective of the White House and the Republicans is that a new Congress controlled by the Democrats would launch numerous investigations of the Bush Administration’s Iraq misadventure and the many related scandals (very likely) and perhaps even try to impeach the White House occupant (less likely).

All of that explains why leading Republicans on Capitol Hill are now distancing themselves from the White House on a variety of issues, including immigration, trade, Iraq and the selection of new candidates for positions in the administration.

Hence several top Republican lawmakers have expressed opposition to Mr. Bush’s choice of General Michael Hayden to replace Mr. Goss as head of the CIA. These Republicans are taking steps to ensure that they won’t be kicked out of office by November.

The results of the Congressional races and even more important, the major themes that would be highlighted during the campaign would help determine the direction of the race to the White House in 2008.

If Iraq becomes the central issue in the 2006 campaign and candidates calling for the withdrawal of US troops from that country win in some of the important races this year, that could weaken the administration’s ability to pursue its ambitious policy in the Middle East and around the world.

It could also slow down the electoral momentum of the top presidential candidates in the two major parties — Republican John McCain and Democrat Hillary Clinton — both of whom supported the war in Iraq and believe that the US should "stay the course" there while preparing for a diplomatic and military confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program.

Instead, antiwar candidates like Republican Charles Hagel and Democrat John Edwards (and even former vice-president Al Gore) could improve their position as potential presidential candidates.

President Bush will not be running for reelection in 2008 and his vice-president insists that he isn’t planning to replace his boss in the White House. But a US president who has staked his historical legacy on the outcome of the Iraq War, a rising anti-Iraq-War tide during the 2006 election could force him to reverse his policies in the Middle East and damage whatever would be left of his reputation.

So what is he going to do in order to save his legacy?

Some have speculated that a military confrontation with Iran on the eve of the 2006 race could be just what a political doctor like Karl Rove would order to help his White House patient. A spectacular US attack on Iran’s nuclear military facilities could help re-ignite nationalist sentiments among voters and encourage them to rally behind their War President, just like the military victory in Iraq permitted Mr. Bush and the Republicans to win electoral victories in 2002 and 2004.

The problem is that no one really knows how a military and diplomatic conflict with the Iranians would end, although one thing is sure: It would ignite major increase in oil prices and after a long summer in which US consumers/voters would see the costs of their petrol double or even triple, Mr. Bush’s party is bound to be smashed in the Congressional elections.

So the only realistic choice open to Bush is to continue increasing the diplomatic pressure on the Iranians without resorting to use of military force which would only help to accentuate his weakness vis-à-vis the mullahs in Teheran.

There is also no doubt that starting to withdraw some of the 140,000 US troops in Iraq before the November elections would play well among voters. While US officials have hinted that they were hoping to do just that in the coming months, most military experts are warning that the Iraqi military will not be ready any time soon to assume the responsibility for fighting the insurgents. Such a US move could create the conditions for a full-blown civil war in the country. In turn, that would only increase the political pressure in Washington to withdraw totally from Iraq.

Hence the expectation in Washington is that the Bush Administration would try to do a lot of media spinning in the next months that would create the impression that it was planning to withdraw US troops from Iraq while at the same time it will be preparing for the permanent presence of the American military in the country.

In a way, a politically weak President Bush will be embracing a form of preemptive action against a victorious Democratic Congress in 2006 and a Democratic president that could be elected in 2008. By building new US military bases in Iraq and by accelerating the momentum towards confrontation with Iran, President Bush will be ensuring that even his opponents on Capitol Hill and his successor in office would have no choice but to continue his hegemonic policies in the Middle East.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

Sometime in the mid-1990s, during the roaring days of globalization, the high-tech boom and a soaring market, I had published a commentary in the Business Times, titled "One Bill’s Washington vs. the Other Bill’s Washington: Guess who is Winning?"

I actually wrote the piece upon my returning from a visit to the Microsoft "campus" in Redmond which is located in the state of Washington – where chairman Bill Gates and his nerdy whiz-kids were building the world’s leading software company, to my office in Washington, DC – where President Bill Clinton was under pressure from Congress to punish Japan (or was it China?) for this or that "unfair trade practice."

In fact, the then Clinton administration was even toying with the idea of "breaking up" what some critics argued was a "monopolistic" Microsoft.

The point I was trying to make then was the following: Who really cares what the members of the declining political class in the US capital were doing in those days? Those guys in the White House and Capitol Hill were history, I argued.

The future was in the hands of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley who were remaking the world as we knew it and there was not a lot that those anachronistic group of politicians could do about it.

Bill Gates and his partners in Redmond, Washington, were leading the process of globalization, including the free flow of products, investments, and labor, and creating the foundations of a unified global economy, while Bill Clinton and his buddies in Washington, DC, were playing catch-up as they were trying to protect the dying nation-state.

So they were attempting to place a few more obstacles in the way of free trade, but at the end of the day, they were on the losing side. When we would meet 10 years from now, I predicted, we would discover that it was Microsoft Bill and not White House Bill who ended up determining the way our political and economic system would look in the early years of the twenty-first century: Our trade and investment ties with China and other Pacific economies would flourish and Microsoft would be leading the way.

Well, on one level I was right. The efforts by the government lawyers to split up Microsoft had failed and the company continues to be one of the main business engines that is driving US economic ties with China and the rest of East Asia. That clearly was evident two weeks ago when Chinese President Hu Jintao was the guest of honor in Bill Gates’ mansion in Seattle. With the State of Washington exporting more than US$5 billion to China in 2005, it was not surprising that China’s leader and his entourage were welcomed to America’s Pacific Northwest by Mr. Gates and the other leaders of the nation’s high-tech industry as close friends and allies. But as a headline in the New York Times made it clear, the Chinese president didn’t get the same kind of warm reception on the East Coast, where he met with Bill Clinton’s successor, George W Bush, and had to suffer many indignities, including quite a few anti-China demonstrators.

"China Wins Over Washington (State), But DC Proves a Bit Tougher," noted the Times, pointing out that what the White House occupant and the politicians in Washington seemed to be focusing on was the US$202 billion trade deficit with China, its growing military power and its human rights conduct.

While Bill Gates and his business allies were celebrating their rising investment in China, Mr. Bush and his political buddies were responding to pressure from lobbyists, interest groups, and members of a bureaucracy that perceive China as a threat that is supposedly responsible for the loss of US manufacturing jobs, that refuses to embrace the American concept of democracy and that challenges US military dominance in East Asia.

When I compare my predictions from the 1990s to the political and economic realities of 2006, one point becomes clear: I certainly played down the ability of the members of Washington’s political class to protect their interests and even to expand their influence.

Microsoft and the other American companies that helped produce the Internet explosion and the amazing global economic growth of the 1990s weren’t able to get rid of the nation-state (assuming that they even wanted to do that) which remains alive and well, thanks in large part to dramatic developments in the global political arena, including 9/11 and the war on terrorism.

The mounting sense of nationalism in both the United States and China combined with the economic dislocations that result from globalization and the introduction of new technology and the impact of interest groups and electoral politics play into the hands of "political entrepreneurs" who exploit these trends by demanding that the Bush administration "do something" about restricting imports and punishing China.

Indeed, as the rejection in Washington of bids by a Dubai company to manage US ports and by a Chinese company to buy a US energy firm demonstrate, when push comes to shove, the Political Man overpowers the Economic Man.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that the China-bashing forces in Washington are bound to crush the efforts by Microsoft and other American businesses to expand trade and investment ties with China. But the only way to ensure that the interests of Washington State and Washington, DC, converge with regard to China is by establishing a coherent and effective strategy to manage the diplomatic and military ties between China and the United States.

For better or for worse, that remains the responsibility of the politicians in Washington, DC, whose performance during Mr. Hu’s visit wasn’t very impressive. It’s too bad that Bill Gates and his colleagues in Washington State only produce and sell computers and software and don’t also do foreign policy.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

For about two decades after World War II, a powerful coalition of US Congressmen, publishers, businessmen and military generals operating close to the highest levels of government in Washington tried to ensure that the United States would not recognize "Red China" and would continue backing Taiwan (the Republic of China) with its goal of ousting the communist regime in Beijing. The coalition included figures such as Republican Senator Richard Nixon, Henry Luce, the publisher of the Time and Life magazines, his wife Clare Boothe Luce and renowned author Pearl Buck (The Good Earth).

Indeed, the common perception in Washington was that the so-called "China Lobby" was politically invincible and that no US president would dare challenge it by taking steps to establish ties with the People’s Republic of China.

I was reminded of the "China Lobby" when I was attending an event in Washington last week where the main topic of discussion was a controversial study by two noted American political scientists who allege that the Israel Lobby exerts enormous influence on US foreign policy in the Middle East by tilting it in a pro-Israel direction.

The two scholars — Professors John Mearsheimer of University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University — argue in their report, The Israel Lobby (which was published in a condensed version in the London Review of Books), that the powerful lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), as well individuals operating in the bureaucracy, think-tanks and editorial pages are responsible for the pro-Israeli slant of US policy-making and of the American media.

"No lobby has managed to divert US foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US and Israeli interests are essentially the same," Prof. Mearsheimer and Prof. Walt write. "The United States has a terrorism problem in good part," they add a few pages later, "because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around."

The study ignited very strong reactions not only in the media and academic circles but also among many bloggers who criticize the authors for questioning the loyalty of American Jews who support Israel and for perpetuating anti-Semitic stereotypes.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz called the study "paranoid and conspiratorial" while military historian Elliot Cohen described it as "anti-Semitic" in an op-ed article in the Washington Post.

Indeed, following some of this bashing of the two scholars, one would have to conclude that they had authored a sequel to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. This kind of criticism is unfair and, in a way, malicious. Criticizing Israel and/or those lobbying on its behalf in Washington should not be equated with "anti-Semitism" in the same way that criticism of "affirmative action" policies, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, or South Africa’s Aids policies should not be regarded as "racism."

Israel and its political lobby in the US are political entities that promote the specific interpretation of the political concept of Jewish nationalism (Zionism) that is not shared by most of the Jews who do not live in Israel and by more than 25 per cent of Israeli citizens who are not Jewish.

Whether an American citizen supports close ties with Israel depends on whether he or she perceives that to be in line with US interest and/or values and not on whether he or she is pro- or anti-Semitic.

In fact, some US political figures like Presidents Richard Nixon and Harry Truman, who shared some negative stereotypes of Jews, were still in favor of strong political US ties with Israel while many American Jews have been very critical of Israeli policies.

So if Prof. Mearsheimer and Prof. Walt have concluded that Israel is pursuing policies that run contrary to US interests and/or values, raising that as part of public discourse is as legitimate as if they two would be criticizing US ties to France or Japan. Similarly, the Israel Lobby should not be treated any differently than other domestic or foreign interests, including those of Saudi Arabia. In the same way, one has the right to challenge any critic of Israel or its lobby by challenging the criticism on its merit and not by applying "negative stereotypes" to the critic, that is by suggesting that he or she is an anti-Semite.

Unlike many of the critics of Prof. Mearsheimer and Prof. Walt, I have actually read their study and cannot find any flaw with their argument that the Israel Lobby in the form of Aipac, not unlike the old "China Lobby," is a very powerful player with enormous political and financial resources that exerts a lot of influence on the executive and legislative branches when it comes to US policy towards Israel and in the Middle East.

I also agree in general with their observation that there is a very influential pro-Israeli community in the US that includes many influential Jews and non-Jews (including many Christian evangelists). It seems to me that Israel and its supporters in America should be proud over their success in mobilizing so much support for that country.

That explains why so many foreign countries envy Israel and try to model their lobbying efforts in Washington after Aipac and its satellites. To put it differently, you cannot have it both ways. If Coca-Cola succeeds in becoming the most popular soft drink in America, it cannot then bash those who point to that fact by accusing them of exhibiting "anti-Coca-Colaism."

Moreover, the two authors are correct in pointing out the role of neoconservative ideologues and policy-makers, most of whom would describe themselves as supporters of Israel, in driving the US into the war in Iraq and the costly Imperial-Wilsonian project in the Middle East. Many of these neocons accept as an axiom that what is good for Israel is good for America and vice versa and that American hegemony in the Middle East would help protect Israel while Israel would help secure American hegemony there.

Prof. Mearsheimer and Prof. Walt, like many other analysts, disagree with that axiom and insist that American and Israeli interests are not always compatible. Interestingly enough, while there is a growing recognition in Washington that the invasion of Iraq and the entire neocon agenda of "democratizing" the Middle East have run contrary to US interests, many Israelis seem to be also reaching the same conclusion: this agenda harms long-term Israeli interests by destabilizing the Middle East.

There is no doubt that US support for Israel has been responsible for much of the Arab hostility towards Washington. Ending the alliance with Israel would certainly reduce some of the Arab hostility and, by extension, the costs of US intervention in the Middle East.

But it is the US intervention in the region in its totality — support for Israel AND the alliance with the pro-American Arab regimes — that is responsible for the current anti-American sentiment in the Arab world.

The Israel Lobby, like the Saudi Lobby or the Iraqis who lobbied for US invasion of their country, could be compared to what economists refer to as "rent seekers," that is, interest groups who profit from government policies, in this case US interventionist policies in the Middle East.

From this more balanced perspective, the Israel Lobby is no more responsible for current US policies in the Middle East than the China Lobby was responsible for US policies in East Asia in the 1950s and 1960s (which were then driven mostly by Cold War-era strategic considerations).

Powerful lobbies can only operate and thrive in the context of existing consensus in Washington over the US national interest. When that consensus changes, any lobby, even the most powerful one, loses its influence and its relevance.

US presidents have resisted the power of the Israel Lobby in the past when it came to crucial decisions like selling arms to pro-American Arab countries or to pressing Israel to make concessions as part of the peace process.

That President George W Bush and his top foreign policy aides (Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice) have decided to adopt the neocon agenda has to do with their perception of US national interests and not the power of the Israel Lobby or, for that matter, American Jews (the majority of whom did not vote for Mr. Bush and were against the war in Iraq).

And if and when President Bush or another US president decides to change policies in the Middle East based on calculation of American interests — for example, by launching an opening to Iran — even the most powerful lobby in Washington would not be able to prevent him or her from doing that.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

In the 1993 movie comedy Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays a weatherman who is reluctantly sent to cover a story about the rodent whose internal clock is believed to be affected by annual changes in the amount of daylight and who is supposed to start ending their hibernation on the second Feb. 2 (marking the midpoint of winter).

This is the weatherman’s fourth year on the story, and he makes no effort to hide his frustration. On awaking the following day he discovers that it’s Groundhog Day again, and again, and again. First he uses this to his advantage, and then comes the realization that he is doomed to spend the rest of eternity in the same place, seeing the same people do the same thing EVERY day. In short, he is having the worst day of his life… over, and over…

I was reminded of that movie during a lunch with an old friend who works on Capitol Hill and who insisted on using Yogi Berra’s famous line: "It’s like deja vu all over again" when discussing the Bush Administration’s evolving strategy to do a "regime change" in Iran, ranging from the recent announced plans to spend US$85 million to "support the cause of freedom in Iran this year" to the proposals to impose economic sanctions against Iran and perhaps even use military power to bomb its nuclear facilities.

My friend told me that he was starting to feel indeed like the weatherman in Groundhog Day, as though he was being transported back in time to the period in 2003 that preceded the US invasion of Iraq and the ousting of Saddam Hussein.

"Once again, we are having the same kind of secret briefings, based on mysterious documents and CIA sources that should convince that Iran is a potential nuclear military threat," he noted. "Then there are all these shady figures representing Iranian ‘exile groups’ who show up on Capitol Hill and who are ready to go and ‘liberate’ their country, that is, with just little help from us, and all the many lobbyists for pro-democracy-in-Iran front organizations who are asking us for our US dollars to pay for their propaganda campaign against the Ayatollahs in Teheran."

Repeat performance

And of course, there is Vice-President Dick Cheney who in a repeat performance of his role in the pre-Iraq-War Be-Afraid-Very-Very-Afraid blitz has already appeared before an audience in Washington threatening Iran with American action. "The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose meaningful consequences," Mr. Cheney said in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. "We join other nations in sending that regime a clear message: we will not allow Iran to have nuclear weapons."

Then there is the U.S.-led effort to get the United Nations Security Council to adopt a resolution calling on Iran to suspend its nuclear enrichment efforts, or else. And I suppose that based on the script of the old regime-change movie, we should get ready for an appearance by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice before the UN Security Council in which she reveals the “intelligence” collected by the U.S., British, and Italian agencies about Iran’s weapons of mass destruction.

Iranian exiles, not unlike Iraq exiles before the invasion of Iraq, are positioning themselves to get support from the Bush Administration in the hopes of being able to fill any ensuing power vacuum in the wake of a possible regime change in Teheran, according to an article by Connie Bruck in a recent issue of the New Yorker.

Ms Bruck also reports that the man being groomed by the neocons to lead the March to Freedom in Iran is Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and that one of the Iranian exile organizations that enjoy the support of Capitol Hill is the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (People’s Mujahideen), or MEK. It is the best-funded and best-organized of the groups — and has been on the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list since 1997.

Then they said "Chalabi," and now they say "Pahlavi." Indeed, those neo-conservative operators who persuaded President George W Bush to buy a used rug from Mr. Ahmed Chalabi and the rest of the crew of Iraqi con-men, are now certain that Mr. Pahlavi and his potential allies will soon establish democracy in Iran.

In a way, as we listen to what the former fans of Mr. Ahmed Chalabi are saying about their new man, Mr. Pahlavi, one can paraphrase Karl Marx and add that Yogi Berra touch and conclude: Dj vu repeats itself all over again, first as tragedy, second time as farce.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

American officials, lawmakers and pundits have been analyzing — overanalyzing is probably the right term — US President George W Bush’s new National Security Strategy (NSS), leading one to conclude that the document that was issued last week has major significance in terms of gaining insights into what kind of approach to world affairs the Bush administration would be pursuing in the last three years of its term.

In a way, it is not surprising that the pundits have been trying to deconstruct the 2006 NSS in order to gain possible insights into the Bushies’ foreign policy. Has President Bush and his national security team adopted a more "realistic" orientation? Will the United States attack Iran’s nuclear facilities? Will there be more of an effort to apply a multilateral strategy in dealing with international crises? Is China now being regarded as a "threat" by the Americans?

It is very much the same way that the Cold War-era "Kremlinologists" pored over public documents issued by Moscow so as to figure out what the Kremlin bosses were really thinking. The reason for that is that not unlike the ideologues who were guiding Soviet foreign policy were focusing a lot of their energy on propaganda, the neoconservatives who have been behind the US diplomacy since 9/11 have been confining their public discussion of America’s role in the world to bombastic and shallow propaganda about exporting "democracy" to the Middle East and elsewhere.

Hence the need to try reading "between the lines" of addresses and policy papers by US officials and find out what Washington is "really" planning to do in, say, Iran or China, since no one seriously assumes that President Bush and his aides "really" believe in their utopian global freedom-is-on-the-march visions.

The problem is that parts of the long-overdue NSS sound very much like propaganda marching orders for US diplomats and military personnel, a kind that recalls Why-Are-We-Fighting? documentaries of World War II.

It lays out a robust view of America’s power and an assertive view of its responsibility to bring change around the world, and underscores in a very thematic way Mr. Bush’s desire to make the spread of democracy the fundamental underpinning of US foreign policy, as he expressed in his second inaugural address last year.

In fact, the opening words of the new document are lifted from that speech and proclaim that "it is the policy of the United States to seek and support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

And when it comes to the most controversial elements in Mr. Bush’s strategy, the new document does not provide any news. Indeed, it reaffirms the doctrine of "preemptive" war against terrorists and hostile states with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, which is exactly the same doctrine that had been enunciated in the 2002 NSS document and which has been applied with disastrous results in the war in Iraq.

After the 2002 NSS was published, observers noted that the new strategy of preemption shifted US foreign policy away from decades of deterrence and containment towards a more aggressive stance of attacking enemies before they attack the US.

But in the aftermath of the war in Iraq, the general consensus among foreign policy analysts in Washington was that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq fatally undermined an essential assumption of the strategy of preemption — that intelligence about an enemy’s capabilities and intentions can be sufficient to justify preventive war.

Against the backdrop of the mess in Iraq, the conventional wisdom among policy wonks in Washington has been that under the leadership of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice the Bush administration has abandoned its more unilateralist foreign policy and its schemes to oust unsavory regimes around the world, and moved in the direction of more realism in dealing with world affairs.

Pundits have been proclaiming in the op-ed pages of leading newspapers and on television news shows that Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have been losing their influence and that Dr. Rice and her team of "realists" are now in charge of foreign policy in Washington.

And, indeed, the expectation in Washington was that the revised version of the NSS would offer fresh thoughts about the preemption policy and send new signals about the Bush administration’s modified strategy.

Instead, the 2006 NSS insisted that the preemption policy "remains the same," defending it as necessary for a country in the "early years of a long struggle" akin to the Cold War. "If necessary, however, under long-standing principles of self-defense, we do not rule out use of force before attacks occur, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack," the document continues.

"When the consequences of an attack with WMD are potentially so devastating, we cannot afford to stand idly by as grave dangers materialize." In that context, the new document seemed to imply that the Bush administration was planning to apply its preemptive doctrine once again, but this time against Iran.

"We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran," the 2006 NSS says. It recommits to efforts with European allies to pressure Teheran to give up any aspirations of nuclear weapons, but then adds ominously that "this diplomatic effort must succeed if confrontation is to be avoided."

Interestingly enough, the document with its threatening language directed against Teheran, including the implication that Washington is considering launching a preventive war against Iran, was issued in the same week that reports from the Middle East indicated that American and Iranian officials would be meeting soon to discuss their common concerns in Iraq and find ways to stabilize that country.

So what is going on here? On the one hand the Americans are sending signals that they are planning to use military force against Iran, while on the other they are expressing their willingness to open a diplomatic dialogue with the Iranians. How can one square the reiteration of a preemptive policy towards Iran with the taking of a step towards détente with it?

And while we are discussing inconsistencies in US foreign policy, how can we explain the attempts by Washington to win the diplomatic support of Beijing and Moscow for punitive measures against Iran at the United Nations Security Council as a way of forcing the Iranians to end their nuclear military program, while at the same time, Dr. Rice is trying to enlist Australia and Japan to form an alliance aimed at containing China and is also condemning Russia for its failure to measure up to US democratic principles?

But inconsistencies in foreign policy exist only when one assumes that the government in questions is committed to a set of consistent foreign policy principles, like the kind that the pundits have been searching for in the 2006 NSS.

But my reading of what is going on in Washington is that when it comes to foreign policy (or for that matter, trade policy), the Bush administration is now basically just muddling through. It does not have a coherent policy on how to get out of Iraq, how to resolve the Iranian and North Korean nuclear crises, how to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process or how to deal with China and Russia.

So the Bush administration gives a green light to the Europeans and the Russians to negotiate with the Iranians, while at the same time it is pushing for sanctions against Teheran. It calls for regime change in Teheran while helping to bring to power the pro-Iranian Shi’ite clerics in Baghdad.

It announces an ambitious program to "export democracy" to Iran but then it also agrees to negotiate with the Iranians on Iraq. And it certainly applies double standards when it comes to the issue of nuclear proliferation in Iran, India and Israel.

If you accept the notion that the modus operandi of the Bush administration’s foreign policy is muddling through, that it really does not have a "National Security Strategy," all the "inconsistencies" suddenly make a lot of sense.

For some, it might sound like bad news. Perhaps we should regard it as good news if we recall that the only time that the Bush administration was not muddling through was when it decided to invade Iraq. It thought that it knew what it was doing. Now it finally recognizes that it does not. And that’s progress.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.

by Leon Hadar by Leon Hadar

Philip Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (Alfred A. Knopf) received a few glowing reviews when it was published in early 2002 but did not get much attention beyond the confines of think-tanks and academia.

Perhaps the book was too heavy for the broader readership (well, with more than 1,000 pages, it certainly was) and it is quite possible that in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, not a lot of people were interested in reading a Big Picture analysis on the future of globalization.

But, in fact, the scenarios about the prospects of globalization drawn up by Bobbitt were — and are — very relevant to any discussion of the post-9/11 global reality and the campaign against terrorism. If anything, as the controversy over the sale of US port operations to an Arab-owned company has demonstrated, the kind of American nationalist fury that exploded after 9/11 and the ensuing Afghanistan and Iraq wars that have helped ignite Arab and Muslim rage and stir up anti-American sentiment worldwide could become a volatile political mix, and together with more economic nationalist pressure in Europe and the coming to power of left-wing governments in Latin American could end up blowing up the open global economic system, with its emphasis on the free flow of products, investments and people.

Or to put it differently, rising sense of nationalism that manifests itself in antagonism to the "other" — Arab companies in the United States, American companies in Latin America, Arab immigrants in Europe, Latin immigrants in the United States — are likely to provide momentum to the forces of economic nationalism and prove to be the most serious challenge to the idea of globalization.

In his book, Bobbitt sketches the outlines of three possible worlds that could be brought into being by the choices that nation-states, and in particular the global hegemon and other leading powers, make in response to the political, economic and cultural pressures that globalization produces:

First, there is the world of The Meadow that is a society of states in which entrepreneurial "market-state" — replacing the archaic nation-state — has become predominant. In this world, success comes to those who exploit the fast-moving opportunities brought about by high technology and the global market which transcends the borders of the state. The United States, the political-military and economic hegemon becomes the locomotive the drives this global transformation by providing the global "public goods" that are necessary in order to maintain the open system, including by forming coalitions aimed at containing military aggressors and leading the efforts to liberalize trade and investment.

Then there is the world of The Park which reflects an international society in which the values and attitudes of the managerial market-state have prevailed and government plays a far larger role in defining the common interest and using the political power of government to assert that interest. ). Political and economic interest groups play a crucial role in determining policy outcomes in Washington (and other world capitals). The global economy is being grouped in competing regional markets: a U.S.-led hemispheric bloc; the European Union; an East-Asian system dominated by China.

Finally, there is The Garden in which government’s role is less a regulatory and more a central-supportive one, providing long-range strategic planning based on the perceived good of the national society where a sense of common identity based on ethnicity, religion and race overrides individual assertiveness and the power of interest groups. The states here have become more and more protectionist, ethnocentric, and more protective of their respective cultures, creating the condition in which international conflicts, ranging from trade war to military confrontations become more likely.

Bobbitt had written the book during the height of the roaring 1990s, during which political and economic elites, the Davos Men and Women were quite confident that globalization — dramatized by the growing flow of trade and investment across borders, the integration of the former Soviet bloc and China, a booming Wall Street and the birth of the Internet — would indeed create a global political, economic and cultural environment in which would resemble The Meadow. Those were the years when pundits were speculating about the Decline of the State and the rise of the Sovereign Individual and proposing that in a world of corporate mergers, rising immigration, and peaceful coexistence, the answer to "Who is US?" was not as simple as it used to be.

When the book was published against the backdrop of the bursting of the high-tech bubble, a bearish stock market and 9/11, things were starting to look a bit different. "US" was suddenly perceived as a national community being under attack by pre-globalization (pre-modern, some would argue) religious fanatics. We were discovering that the Dow would not rise forever to the stratosphere and that the Business Cycle was still alive and well. In fact, Bobbitt warned in the book that a failure by the United States to lead the campaign against terrorism through a multilateral front combined with protectionist pressures in the US would make it more likely that the international system would take the form of The Park and encourage the creation of regional security and economic blocs. In retrospect, he seems to have been too optimistic.

Public pressure

Indeed, it is looking more and more that many of the elements in The Garden scenario are becoming dominant in the evolving international system as the leaders of the global hegemon are beginning to respond to pressure from a public that is less willing to pay the costs of providing those "public goods" that Bobbitt argued were needed in order to maintain the stability of a free and open global economy and to counter the challenges from nationalism.

Bobbitt introduces us to The Garden by imagining the results of the future 2008 US elections, which led the new leaders in Congress and the White House to conclude that the governance of the preceding years, both Democratic and Republican, has been misguided. A slow recovery from an economic recession encouraged protectionist barriers to trade; these further constrained the global recovery and invited foreign criticism that Americans found irksome.

Moreover, "American preeminence in many arenas was perceived abroad as hegemony and contributed to a US/European estrangement. Traditional ethnocentrism in Asia coupled with mercantile trade policies intensified the sense of mutual alienation that arose between Americans and Asians."

And "in a stunning repudiation of previous policy, a public consensus in the United States emerged that the multilateral interventions in the previous twelve years had been a mistake," creating pressures for US disengagement from the Middle East and other parts of the world, with the Muslim world being the first "to turn its back on the West and the ethos of consumerism, secularism and libertarianism that was the engine of economic growth of this era," leading to increasing suspicions and tensions — and eventually to military confrontations — between the Muslim world and the West.

Bobbitt’s book was published before the US invasion of Iraq and even he could not have predicted the disastrous outcome of that military adventure and the way it would affect America’s global status, its ties with its European allies and its relationship with the Muslim world.

It is also very doubtful that even Bobbitt’s creative imagination would have led him to propose the following scenario: US Congress, reflecting the rising fears and prejudices of their constituents, succeeded in blocking a Dubai-owned company from taking over the management of terminals at six US ports. Considering that Dubai is an model of American-style capitalism in the Middle East and a reliable trade and military partner of the US, Bobbitt would have found it difficult to conceive a scenario in which a company from Dubai would become the target of a nationalist campaign that in the name of national security was setting to close the American market to foreign trade and investment. Such a development would not have made sense under the conditions prevailing in The Meadow or even The Park.

According the Washington Post, the successful effort by US Congress, which was backed by close to 80 per cent of the American public, to force Dubai Ports World to abandon its attempt to take over terminal operations in the US (after buying the British company that operates terminal in five US ports) suggested that "the global message (America) sends — and in particular, to friendly Arab and other Muslim countries — is that we don’t really need your money, and in this post-9/11 world we’re going to be very picky about whom we do business with."

Other observers would probably dispute such dramatic interpretation of the Dubai debacle, pointing out that if a rival Singaporean bid for the British-based Peninsular & Oriental Steam would have taken control over the US ports, the issue would not have aroused any public and Congressional attention. In fact, foreign companies, including those from Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Denmark, are managing the majority of the terminals at US ports, especially the big ones such at Los Angeles and Long Beach in California and New York and New Jersey, and much of the US merchant marine fleet was bought by foreigners, including by Singapore’s Neptune Orient Line.

Those who argue that Dubai flap is not a reflection of a growing economic nationalist sentiment are proposing that fears over Arab terrorism were translated into concerns over the possibility of US strategic assets being owned by Arab companies.

But the fact of the matter is that Americans were sending the same message last year when a company controlled by the Chinese government was bashed and hounded out of town after trying to bid on an American oil firm, UNOCAL. Like in the case of Dubai, a coalition of economic nationalists and security hawks argued that China should be considered as a threat to US national interests and should not be allowed to take over so-called strategic assets as American energy companies.

"Strategic asset" test

And in fact, there is growing pressure on Capitol Hill to adopt legislation that would make it even more difficult, if not impossible, for foreign firms — not only those owned by Arab and Chinese interests — to take over a US firm with national security implications. Hence a Congressional committee has already voted to block the implementation of a new "open skies" accord that would permit foreign investors to own more than 25 per cent of the voting stock of a US airline, and there is now more talk in Washington to apply the "strategic asset" test to other business sectors.

Economists would argue that with the US trade deficit reaching a record US$724 billion, the slowing down of foreign investment in the US economy could lead to higher interest rates and weaken the US dollar. But the fact is that the anti-Dubai campaign had to do more with politics and less with economics. The revolt by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers against the Bush administration’s decision to give a green light to the Dubai deal exposed the rising anxiety among most Americans about their country’s place in the world. It doesn't make a lot of sense to the Davos Men and Women who dominate The Meadow or to the government and business technocrats in charge of The Park. But in The Garden, it's The Political Man — a master in exploiting these fears and anxieties — and not the Economic Man who calls the shots.

If Chinese and Arab companies are helping produce economic nationalist pressures in this country, similar trends can be seen in Europe where a multi-billion dollar bid by Mittal Steel, the global company headed by Indian entrepreneur Lakshmi Mittal has been greeted with hostility in France, Luxembourg and Spain. At the same time, the French government has designated 11 "sensitive" economic sectors to "protect" against foreign bids, after locking out an Italian company from its energy market, while in Latin America, the backlash against American-led "neo-liberalism" has manifested itself in the election of leftist governments in Brazil and Argentina, and the growing power of movements representing the indigenous populations in Bolivia and Peru.

Historians would probably be intrigued by the fact that the first White House occupant to hold an MBA ended up making it possible for the Political Man to make a comeback. But it was President Bush's post-9/11 nationalist agenda, leading to the mess in Iraq and to bloody quagmire in Mesopotamia that is responsible for the current angry mood among Americans: They watch on television every day the way US designs to bring democracy to the Middle East produce anti-American terrorism and the rising costs on terms of US lives and money: US soldiers are killed, its embassies are attacked and its flags are burned and spit on.

They blame the erosion in US industrial base on the "outsourcing" of jobs to places like China and India. And they are angry over the continuing flood of illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America. In a way, the controversy over the US ports — where trade is being conducted and where immigrants disembark — has become a symbol of this angry public sentiment that is directed against the outside world and is putting pressure on Washington to reexamine US engagement with the world.

And it is only an opening shot in what could become a very nasty mid-term election campaign during which those wishing to get elected (or reelected) could be expected to bash China and India who are now replacing the United States as the engines of world economic growth of "stealing" American jobs, to call for taking more drastic steps to restrict immigration and to demand that American troops withdraw from Iraq. If the Democrats gain control of Congress in 2004, one could envision how Capitol Hill, in the form of Congressional committees would become a forum in which the Bush Administration's Iraq fiasco would be investigated in the next two years and ignite even more public pressure to reevaluate U.S. foreign policy.

Welcome to Bobbitt’s Garden.

Leon Hadar [send him mail] is Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore and the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan). Visit his blog.