Reason magazine which is the premier and most popular libertarian magazine has published in its new issue a special focus on the Iraq War which includes a contribution by yours truly as well by two supporters of the war. Many of the editors of the magazine have been supportive of President Bush's position so I think it's significant that they are giving an opportunity to the "other side" to express its view. Leon Hadar

http://www.reason.com/0606/fe.my.three.shtml
You Can’t Bring Order to the Middle East
Leon Hadar

After a storm, be it political or meteorological, passes over the Middle East, the region returns to its eternal stillness. The people come out of hiding, remove the sand from their faces, and return to the desert’s routine: the daily struggle over water wells and grazing spaces. The desert’s tribes go back to the ritual of signing and breaking alliances, and their leaders meet at night before the fire to contemplate the next raid against their hostile neighbors.


If an American guest is there, he’ll be treated to another ritual of Middle Eastern hospitality. The tribe’s elders listen to his advice and nod with polite approval as the foreigner, the child of some faraway green pasture land, suggests that the time has come to replace despotic rule with liberal government and primal desert hatred with eternal peace. As the American guest outlines his vision of a new Middle Eastern order in a Power Point presentation, the Arab elders recall the foreigners who have passed through the region: the Greeks, the Romans, the Crusaders, the British, the French, and now the Americans.


Those foreigners hoped to recreate the Middle East in their own image, only to retreat from the region humiliated and exhausted, leaving nothing more than their imprint on the archaeological record. (“And this is a relic of Baghdad’s Green Zone, which the Americans had constructed around 200 years ago, several decades before the start of the Chinese Era.…”)


Washington is finding that notwithstanding all the great expectations, the post-Saddam Middle East looks quite familiar. The stable, democratic Iraq that would serve as a shining model for the entire Middle East and its peripheries has failed to materialize.


Following the end of the Gulf War in 1991, Washington also expected a new American-led order would arise in the region. The Madrid Peace Conference and the ensuing Oslo peace process were supposed to lay the foundations for a New Middle East, in which Israelis and Palestinians would make peace and the region would be integrated into the expanding and prosperous global economy, with young and hip Israelis and Palestinians making money, surfing the Internet, watching MTV, and launching high-tech start-ups in Israel’s Silicon Wadi. That was the vision promoted by Shimon Peres and echoed by America’s leading fan of globalization and Oslo, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.


Ten years later it is mostly the same old Middle East. Notwithstanding the neoconservative dreams of unleashing a democratic revolution in Iran, the ayatollahs are still in power in Teheran and the radicals there seem to be strengthening their grip. The Hashemites are still in control in Jordan with its Palestinian majority, and their traditional rivals, the Saudis, remain firmly in control of their oil-rich country. The military is still in charge in Egypt, and authoritarian regimes, “soft” and “hard,” are in power all over the Arab world.


The ouster of Saddam was supposed to usher in a new era of political freedom in Iraq, where the country and its people would be united behind a pro-American, democratically elected government. Iraq would be pluralistic, secular, and committed to women’s rights, and it would help spread political and economic freedom all over the Middle East.


Instead, open elections have made Iraq and Palestine safe not for liberal democracy but for nationalism and other atavistic and combative forms of identity—religious fundamentalism, ethnicity, and tribalism. In Iraq, the power of Kurdish separatists and Shiite clerics with ties to Iran has been consolidated while the Sunni minority has been “Al Qaedicized.” The rise of Hamas in Palestine has made it even less likely that Israelis and Palestinians will find peace anytime soon.


The history of “great power” intervention in the Mideast should have warned Bush and his advisers to proceed with caution and humility. The Greater Middle East that stretches from the Balkans to the borders of India is what political scientists would describe as the most “penetrated” area of the world—one where numerous tribal, religious, ethnic, national, regional, and extra-regional political players combine and divide in a shifting pattern of alliances. Chaos and instability have been the rule, not the exception, since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Outsiders who want to play the Middle East game should expect to become part of this chaotic system, not vehicles to stabilize it.


In the old imperial movie, the British created Iraq. They put the Hashemites and the Saudis in power. They maintained influence in Egypt. They tried to end this or that cycle of violence between Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land. We know how that movie ended. Resistance from regional players (including terrorism), challenges from global powers (including their U.S. ally), economic decline, and opposition at home led eventually to a long and painful British withdrawal from the region, culminating in the 1956 Suez debacle.


“Our armies do not come to your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators,” General F. S. Maud, the British commander who occupied Baghdad in 1917, pledged to the people of Mesopotamia back then. The U.S. said the same thing in 2003. The name of the movie is now The American Unilateral Moment in the Middle East. The actors are different, but the script is familiar: The Americans are trying to recreate Iraq, navigate between the Saudis and the Hashemites, preserve influence in Egypt, and bring an end to another cycle of Arab-Jewish violence.


The neoconservatives driving this imperial project have added a Wilsonian soundtrack to the old realpolitik script and raised the costs of the American production by suggesting that the United States has the power and the will to create an Iraqi federation of Arabs, both Sunni and Shiite, and Kurds based on liberal principles and trickle-down democracy, secularism, and pro-Americanism. Once we accomplish this, all the dominos of Middle Eastern instability, including rogue regimes and terrorist gangs and centuries of tribal and religious strife, will smoothly fall.


History has shown that outside powers may indeed tilt the Middle East kaleidoscope. But the many tiny pieces of colored glass promptly fall into a new configuration that looks very different from what the tilter expected. The ousting of Saddam Hussein from power, for example, is creating an environment in the Middle East in which nationalism, religious extremism, and tribal warfare are becoming the central driving forces. Consider the dilemmas the U.S. faces in finding the right balance in its relations with Israelis and Palestinians, and multiply that again and again, and you will get a sense of the enormous problems Washington will be facing in Iraq and its peripheries in the coming years.


Americans should recognize that their interests in the Middle East are not only not being advanced; they are actually harmed by pursuing a hegemonic policy there. Americans should regard the Islamic Green Crescent of Instability ranging from the Balkans to the borders of China with a sense of benign neglect coupled with effective security measures to contain the destructive effects of the political chaos and violence that will probably dominate that region for years to come. Constructive disengagement from the Middle East—“We’ll leave, and you’ll let us live”—needn’t be seen as a sign of weakness. Not if it’s bolstered by an active containment policy that makes it clear that those who dare harm us will be punished.


Those involved in the formulation and implementation of U.S. policy in the Middle East assume that people in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan think like them and want the same things they do. At a 2004 conference at the Pentagon, a U.S. Army colonel asked Thomas Barnett, a strategic thinker at the U.S. Naval War College who was trying to convince a group of military officers that American power could be used to democratize the Middle East, whether that assumption was justified. “Everyone wants a better future for their kids,” Barnett said. “I’ve been around a lot of people who don’t think like us,” the colonel replied.


In the Middle East, Americans are encountering a lot of people who don’t think like us and who see U.S. power as an obstacle to achieving their goals or as a tool to advance their own tribal, ethnic, religious, and national interests. We should—for our good, not theirs—remove that obstacle, reclaim that tool, and advance our own interests.


Leon Hadar, a Washington-based journalist and a research fellow at the Cato Institute, is author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). He blogs at globalparadigms.blogspot.com.