Indicative of the inter-connectedness of a globalized world, global level events, such as the Russian intervention in Georgia, Chinese energy policy and the Western financial crisis have somewhat reshuffled the cards in the struggle over the Middle East region between the US and its opponents.
The conflict in Georgia has reverberated in the region, in some respects backfiring on the US which has sought to challenge Russia in its “near abroad” sphere of influence, just as it has tired to establish its hegemony over the Middle East. It was the US training and provision of military equipment to Georgia's army that emboldened President Saakashvili to attack the breakaway province of South Ossetia. His bombardment of civilians gave Russia as excuse to intervene and defeat the Georgina army. The defeat of a US client and the animosity created by the episode between Russia and the West cheered public opinion in the Middle East which fervently hoped that it marked the onset of a new Cold War in which Russia would return to its old role of checking American power in the Middle East. The autonomy of regional states has been sharply constrained under the post-Cold war unipolarity in which the US has extended its hegemony into the Middle East, to the benefit of Israel and at great cost to Iraq, once seen as the leading Arab power.
Syria, which has long urged Russia to assume a more active role in the Middle East, was conspicuous as one of the few countries to support the Russian actions in Georgia. Syrian President Bashar al-Asad, seeking to use the opportunity to strike a new arms deal, traveled to Moscow. Syria sought to obtain advanced antiaircraft and antitank missile systems that would allow it to shore up its crumbling deterrent against Israel's aerial and armored dominance. The ease with which Israeli jets penetrated Syrian airspace a year ago to bomb an alleged nuclear facility starkly exposed the country’s continued vulnerability. Additionally it is an article of faith in Syria that negotiations with Israel cannot be successful unless there is a sufficient balance of power between the two countries. So while Syria has engaged in Turkey-brokered indirect talks with Israel over the terms of a peace settlement, Syria’s hand in negotiations is thought ultimately to depend, not just on its ability to offer peace but to threaten that, in the absence of peace, it can resort to asymmetric warfare. The main instrument by which such warfare has always been conducted is Hizbollah, but support for Hizbollah remains risky as long as Syria cannot defend its own airspace against Israel or blunt an Israeli military thrust into Lebanon’s Bekaa valley, a gateway to Syria. Israel for its part, fears that new weapons delivered by Russia to Syria could end up in Hizbollah’s hands. Indeed, Hizbollah effectively used advanced Russian antitank missiles against Israeli armored vehicles during the 2006 war and is seeking new air defense systems to counteract regular Israeli air incursions over Lebanon. Seeking to head off this scenario, Israeli politicians are shoring up their ties with Moscow, even as the West has sought to demonstrate its disapproval of Russia’s Georgia intervention. Russia, for its part, asserts that it will only supply Syria with “defensive weapons” which do not upset the regional balance of power. This could, however, very well include anti-tank and air defense systems, which arguably are stabilizing insofar as they support a certain Syrian-Israeli power balance (Nicholas Blanford, Christian Science Monitor Published: August 28, 2008, 23:44). Syria also hoped to exploit the South Ossetia conflict to further ease its way out of the isolation the US has tried to impose on it for its opposition to the Iraq war, using the Hariri assassination to freeze Syrian efforts to reach a partnership agreement with the European Union and to foster anti-Syrian forces in Lebanon. The victory of Hizbollah, Syria’s ally, over these forces in the May 2008 showdown in Beirut opened the door for French President Sarkozy to invite the Syrian president to Paris.
Iran, Syria’s ally, also seems likely to benefit from the Georgia conflict since it makes it less likely that Moscow will cooperate with U.S. and European efforts to impose additional UN sanctions on Tehran over its uranium enrichment program. Curiously, however, Iran has proved less keen than Syria to use the conflict to seek favour with Russia. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad expressed disapproval of the Russian action, particularly its recognition of the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia, because the territorial integrity of multi-national states, of which Iran is one, is a major principle of Iranian foreign policy. Moreover, Tehran sees Russia as an unreliable partner that has been prepared to use Iran as a bargaining chip in its relations with the US; thus, it did allow several rounds of sanctions on Iran to pass the UN Security Council. Iran, like Syria, may feel it is inching its way out of US orchestrated attempts to isolate it. Switzerland signed a 25-year, 42-billion-dollar gas supply and pipeline deal with Tehran last March over strong U.S. objections. Meanwhile Israel was trying to convince Russia not to supply Iran with the sophisticated S-300 anti-aircraft missile system that would make an Israeli or American strike at Iran's nuclear facilities much more difficult.
Meanwhile, the US effort to pacify resistance in Muslim states has met with uneven results. While the concentration of US forces in Iraq has yielded some success, insurgency and resistance to the US and its allies has intensified elsewhere and military power has not translated into political control in a straightforward way.
The military pacification of Iraq appears to have been consolidated, although periodic bombings continue, the capital has been fragmented into sectarian enclaves, and US forces continue to hold nearly 20,000 Iraqis in detention camps without trial. But the death-toll among American troops in 2008 was lower than during the first five years of the war. The military struggle in Iraq is, however, being superceded by a political struggle over the long term American presence in the country. The US invaded Iraq in order to capture a strategically pivotal state with the world’s second largest oil reserves and it is determined to maintain an indefinite domination of the country. It has built the world’s largest embassy in Baghdad, the centre of a veritable pro-consulate from which it seeks to pull the strings of any future Iraqi government. It seeks to maintain massive military bases containing helicopter-gunships and strike-aircraft, large quantities of forward-based equipment and many tens of thousands of personnel (Patrick Cockburn, "Revealed: Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control", 5 June 2008). From a political viewpoint, the Bush administration sees control over Iraq as essential to justify the costs of the war, especially important for the electoral prospects of the republican presidential candidate, John McCain.
The irony of the US situation in Iraq is that, even as it has established an improved military security situation, it has thereby relatively reduced the dependency of the client regime of Nouri al-Maliki. This new independence is manifest by the hard bargain al-Maliki has been driving in the negotiations over a treaty normalizing a US presence in the country. Al-Maliki appears to be demanding that US forces leave Iraqi cities as early as 2009, the prelude to a wholesale pull-out by 2011, a demand that threatens US gains in the country. Al-Maliki must be aware that his regime has little chance of acquiring any long term nationalist legitimacy if it concedes a neo-colonial presence to the US; such a move would also antagonize Iran, with whom his regime has close connections and whose sufferance is essential to the stabilization of his support among his own Shia constituency. Indicative also of the al-Maliki government new autonomy is that the West is not having everything its own way in the struggle over control of Iraqi oil. While three transnational oil companies - Shell, BP and Exxon Mobil – have not yet been able, against expectations, to finalize concession deals in Iraq, remarkably, China has concluded what the Wall Street Journal called "the most significant foreign-investment commitment in Iraq's vast but creaking oil industry in years." The Iraqi deal is part of a pattern that includes Chinese oil-and-gas development agreements with Iran. With its oil-deals, China is penetrating in a region that the United States had come to consider as firmly under its strategic control (Paul Rogers, Iraq, Iran, China: the emerging axis www.opendemocracy.net/)
Afghanistan is superseding Iraq as the main combat-zone between western and insurgent Islamic forces. While the Taliban are the dominant insurgent group there, many of the "old mujahideen" - such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani - have also joined the fight against the US-led coalition. The Taliban have re-emerged from their 2001 defeat as a much-improved military organization, both in terms of manpower, funding and the sophistication of its operations. For example, it possesses an 82-millimetre recoilless rifle capable of puncturing armored vehicles. Insurgents have attacked fuel and food convoys, killed nine US soldiers in an attack on a northern outpost and freed hundreds of prisoners from a Kandahar jail. The Taliban’s successes reflect, not just its new prowess, but also the political failures of its opponents. The Western backed Afghan government has delivered neither security or services to the population while Western, particularly American forces continue, as usual, to use their massive firepower in indiscriminate ways that cost the lives of Afghan civilians. Thus, on August 21 U.S. bombing killed 90 civilians, 60 of them children in the Heart area. This has led many Afghans to resist the occupation. British commander Brig. Mark Carleton-Smith told the Sunday Times that it was not realistic to expect the Western coalition to defeat the Taliban and that the best that could be achieved was to sufficiently contain it to allow Afghan forces to deal with it. This accords with the view of detached observers that the war is not winnable militarily and requires a political solution that would lead to power sharing with the opposition and hence abandonment of the attempt to transform Afghanistan into a Westernized client state.
One of the most remarkable developments in the past year has been the way Pakistan, a US ally but Muslim country has, in an incremental way, been alienated or destabilized by its association with the US war on terror in Afghanistan. It was of course, the US together with Saudi Arabia and Pakistani dictator General Zia Ul-Haq, that sponsored armed and financed the Afghan mujahadeen against the Soviet Union in a war that in time gave birth to al-Qaida and led to the spread of jihadist militants across the Middle East. Later when the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan left a chaotic power vacuums there, Pakistan sponsored the Taliban as an instrument of influence in the country, largely recruited from the Pashtun ethnic group that bridges the Afghan-Pakistan border region. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks by al-Qaida on the US, Washington demanded that Pakistan president Musharraf break links with the Taliban and support the US war against Pakistan’s erstwhile ally. Threats against Pakistan were combined with the delivery of some $12 billion in aid, including advanced weapons systems that were only of significance in Pakistan’s power balance with India. The alliance with Musharrif proved of uncertain benefit to Washington. On the one hand, the Pakistan military made some efforts to pacify the lawless Pashtun tribal regions bordering Afghanistan where the Taliban and al-Qaida had found some refuge after being driven out of Afghanistan by the 2002 US invasion. But Musharraf reached a truce with tribal leaders after the Pakistan army suffered casualties in the region. Under US pressure, Pakistani military and security forces have resumed their pacification efforts, but at the same time, US cross-border strikes at the Taliban in Pakistan have sharply antagonized Pakistan. The latest episode in the struggle, the bombing of an international hotel in Islamabad by jihadists is a retaliation against the Pakistani military for its collaboration with the US and the killing of some 20 people In South Waziristan, primarily women and children, in a US strike. Pakistan’s participation in the US war on terror is highly unpopular with the Pakistani public who resent being drawn into a war with Islam and a conflict that Washington brought on itself by its policies in the region. There are more Pashtuns, the ethnic support base of the Taliban, in Pakistan than in Afghanistan, and they make up a significant component of the Pakistani army. The new civilian government is already losing the confidence of the public for its perceived collaboration with the US war. It would be ironic, but consistent with the US record in the Middle East if, in its effort to defeat its enemies in Afghanistan, it destabilized or radicalized Pakistan, a traditional ally, with six times Afghanistan’s population and in possession of nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, according to former US government al-Qaida expert Michael Scheuer, the world is much more afflicted with jihadism today than it was before the start of the US war on terror. Al-Qaida has succeeded in luring the US into over-stretching its military forces. Particularly where there are weak or failed states it continues to find new sanctuaries.. Beside Iraq and Pakistan, Somalia has become a battleground between Islamist radicals and Ethiopian invaders who were encouraged by Washington to occupy Mogadishu in 2006. The ongoing war and increasing hunger in the country is, according to a Horn of Africa expert, creating "a population radically angry at... [the United States] and [a] very fertile ground for al-Qaida."
Finally, the world financial crisis, itself a product of malpractices in the predatory US financial services industry, but also the ingrained propensity of the US economy and government for deficit financing and debt, may end up undermining Washington’s capacity to continue its global drive for supremacy against a perceived Islamic terrorist threat. Coming on top of the Bush administration’s unprecedented deficits (squandering the surplus left by Clinton) to fund military over-spending and its 15-billion-dollar-a-month wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the major new burden imposed on U.S. taxpayers by the bank bail-out could undermine the Bush project both at home and abroad. A recent poll by the Pew Research Centre found a sharp decline in public support for an assertive foreign policy. Charles Kupchan, a Council on Foreign Relations analyst, judges that "…from a psychological perspective, this financial crisis, coupled with America's troubles in Iraq and Afghanistan, will take a toll on respect for and deference to American strength as concerns both hard and soft power." However, Boston University Prof. Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel and author of 'The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism' doubts whether it will be enough to sober the US ruling class, pointing to its “strange unwillingness…to simply acknowledge that American power has limits…” (Jim Lobe, “Financial Crisis Likely to Further Erode U.S. Influence” IPS, 25 September 2008). Yet, if the financial crisis means America is finally suffering the consequences of “imperial overreach,” much of the costs of Washington’s hubris are, as usual, are being paid by others: this time, by taxpayers and small investors worldwide.
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