In the lead
article in the new issue of
Foreign Affairs (full text online), Richard Haass writes an obituary for U.S. dominance in the Middle East. While his coroner's report lists various causes of its demise, he finds that:
The most significant has been the Bush administration's decision to attack Iraq in 2003 and its conduct of the operation and resulting occupation.
Haass, currently the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, served on the National Security Council in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations and was Director of Policy Planning under Secretary of State Colin Powell in the first term of President George W. Bush. During the Clinton administration Haass was director of Foreign Policy studies at the Brookings Institution.
In short, Haass is a core member of the realist Republican foreign policy establishment who is now trying to chart a way forward given the inescapable reality of U.S. defeat in Iraq. As
Bill in Portland Maine noted, Haass told the
New York Times:
The Iraq situation is not winnable in any real sense of the word "winnable."
Looking beyond the inevitable more or less ignominious U.S. disengagement from Iraq, Haass sees a "New Middle East" over which the U.S. and all outside powers have less influence that in several centuries. The region will be dominated by a conflict between Israel, the militarily and economically strongest state in the region, and Iran, a rising regional power with greater aspirations.
While he does not say so explicitly, Haass implicitly accuses Bush 43 of undoing all the achievements in the region of the Bush 41 administration, whose Middle East policy Haass helped to shape:
One casualty of the war has been a Sunni-dominated Iraq, which was strong enough and motivated enough to balance Shiite Iran. Sunni-Shiite tensions, dormant for a while, have come to the surface in Iraq and throughout the region. Terrorists have gained a base in Iraq and developed there a new set of techniques to export. Throughout much of the region, democracy has become associated with the loss of public order and the end of Sunni primacy. Anti-American sentiment, already considerable, has been reinforced. And by tying down a huge portion of the U.S. military, the war has reduced U.S. leverage worldwide. It is one of history's ironies that the first war in Iraq, a war of necessity, marked the beginning of the American era in the Middle East and the second Iraq war, a war of choice, has precipitated its end.
The article deserves careful reading. While the content is sobering and even frightening, it is clear headed and devoid of fearmongering. If people like Haass every regain influence in the Republican Party, we can return to an age of rational debate of foreign policy.