Spring 2013 Issue
Leaving aside the lies, fictions, and questions of morality and personal responsibility, the critical mistake of America’s war against Iraq was the absence of either a viable plan or the necessary strength to enforce a Pax Americana in the Middle East. America was powerful enough to destabilize the existing regional order, but not powerful enough to establish a new one. The US neocons, with their wishful thinking, grossly underestimated the scale of the task at hand – unlike the revolutionaries in Iran, who quickly moved in to reap what the US had sowed. The Iraq war also marked the beginning of America’s subsequent relative decline. Bush squandered a large part of America’s military strength in Mesopotamia for an ideological fiction – strength that is sorely missed in the region ten years later. And there is no alternative to be seen without America. While there is no causal link between the Iraq war and the Arab revolutions that began in December 2010 their implications have combined in a malign manner. Since the war, the bitter enmities between Al Qaeda and other Salafist and Sunni Arab nationalist groups have given way to cooperation or even mergers. This, too, is a result brought about by the American neocon masterminds.
opportunity to extend its influence beyond its western border for the first time since 1746.
“Bush’s war, with its poor strategic vision and worse planning, increased Iran’s regional standing in a way that the country was unlikely ever to have achieved on its own.”
Bush’s war, with its poor strategic vision and worse planning, increased Iran’s regional standing in a way that the country was unlikely ever to have achieved on its own. The war enabled Iran to assert itself as the dominant power in the Gulf and the wider region, and its nuclear program serves precisely these ambitions. The losers in the region are also clear: Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, which feel existentially threatened, and have come to regard their own Shia minorities as an Iranian fifth column. They have a point: with the Shia in power in Iraq, Iran will seek suitable opportunities to use local Shia populations as proxies to assert its hegemonic claims. This is what is fueling Bahrain’s domestic turmoil, beyond the Shia majority’s local grievances.
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And the regional destabilization triggered by the Arab revolutions is increasingly converging on Iraq, mainly via Syria and Iran. Indeed, the gravest current danger to the region is a process of national disintegration emanating from the Syrian civil war, which is threatening to spread not only to Iraq, but also to Lebanon and Jordan. What makes Syria’s civil war so dangerous is that the players on the ground are no longer its driving forces. Rather, the war has become a struggle for regional dominance between Iran on one side and Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey on the other. As a result, the Middle East is at risk of becoming the Balkans of the twenty-first century – a decline into regional chaos that began with, and was largely the result of, the US-led invasion ten years ago. i
About the author Joschka Fischer was German Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor from 1998-2005, a term marked by Germany’s strong support for NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999, followed by its opposition to the war in Iraq. Fischer entered electoral politics after participating in the anti-establishment protests of the 1960’s and 1970’s, and played a key role in founding Germany’s Green Party, which he led for almost two decades.
Source: www.project-syndicate.org
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