AFTER IRAQ: The plan to remake the Middle East. (NICHOLAS LEMANN, 2003-02-17, The New Yorker)

In 1999, [David Wurmser, who is now a senior adviser to John Bolton, the Under-Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, and the State Department's most hawkish senior official,] published a book (with a foreword by Richard Perle) called "Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein." It provides a detailed description of a dramatically improved Middle East, from the hawk point of view, after regime change in Iraq. Although Wurmser certainly doesn't lack moral fervor, he is a strategic thinker who wants to realign the power relationships in the region. For Wurmser, the larger enemy is the ideology of Pan-Arabism, which he presents as the Middle East's version of the various forms of totalitarianism that swept across Europe in the twentieth century. The true choice in the region is between "the traditional Arab elite and revolutionary Arab nationalists." In the latter category are Saddam Hussein, the Assad family of Syria (who, like Saddam, subscribe to the Pan-Arabist ideology of Baathism), and the mullahs of Iran—even though those countries have, at times, been mortal enemies. Bringing down Saddam, Wurmser predicts, would have the happy effect of destabilizing both Syria and Iran. "A collapse in either Syria or Iraq would affect the other profoundly," he writes. "Ideologically, a failure of Ba'thism in one implicitly indicts the regime of the other as well." As for Iran: "Launching a policy and resolutely carrying it through until it razes Saddam's Ba'thism to the ground will send terrifying shock waves into Teheran." In Wurmser's scenario, a post-Saddam government in Iraq that includes meaningful participation by Iraq's Shiite majority will remove the Iranian mullahs' most powerful claim to legitimacy, which is that they represent the only regional power center for Shiites. (It's a sign of how rapidly Washington opinion has moved that, writing only four years ago, even Wurmser considered it inadvisable for the United States "to go to war solo, to liberate and occupy an Arab capital," and recommended the empowerment of the Iraqi National Congress to overthrow Saddam.)

One can easily derive from Wurmser's book a crisp series of post-Saddam moves across the chessboard of the Middle East. The regime in Iran would either fall or be eased out of power by an alliance of the radical students and the more moderate mullahs, with the United States doing what it could to encourage the process. After regime change, the United States would persuade Iran to end its nuclear-weapons program and its support for terrorists elsewhere in the Middle East, especially Hezbollah. Syria, now surrounded by the pro-American powers of Turkey, the reconfigured Iraq, Jordan, and Israel, and no longer dependent on Saddam for oil, could be pressured to cošperate with efforts to clean out Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. As Syria moved to a more pro-American stand, so would its client state, Lebanon. That would leave Hezbollah, which has its headquarters in Lebanon, without state support. The Palestinian Authority, with most of its regional allies stripped away, would have no choice but to renounce terrorism categorically. Saudi Arabia would have much less sway over the United States because it would no longer be America's only major source of oil and base of military operations in the region, and so it might finally be persuaded to stop funding Hamas and Al Qaeda through Islamic charities.

A few things should be said about this vision of the near-term future in the Middle East. It is breathtakingly ambitious and optimistic. It might plausibly be described as a spreading of democracy but, perhaps more important, it would also involve, as the "Clean Break" paper said, forcefully altering the regional balance of power. And it differs greatly from the vision of the future of the Middle East that will prevail among liberals, both here and abroad, after the war in Iraq. It treats Pan-Arab nationalism as illegitimate. It does not accept the widespread assumption that no regional good can follow the fall of Saddam unless peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority begin immediately. And it sees the fall of Saddam Hussein less as the end of a great diplomatic and military effort than as a step in an ongoing process.

In some ways the last may be the most important point. Folks, especially those like the protestors this weekend, have worked themselves up to a fever pitch,, as if the future of humankind hangs on this moment. But the war is going ahead regardless of them, will be over fairly quickly, and then it's on to the next phase, whether facing down N. Korea or getting rid of Assad in Syria or helping the democracy movement in Iran or helping Israel unilaterally declare a Palestinian state or whatever. You often see a bumper sticker that says "Think Globally, Act Locally" on these peoples' Volvos, but they're doing the opposite, trying to act on a global scale even though their concerns are personal. This seems to have blinded them to the big picture and deafened them to the oft-repeated statements of George W. Bush that there's an Axis of Evil, not just one evil ruler; that the war on terror is a long term process, not a quick dust-up in Afghanistan or Iraq and then we come home; that Muslim people deserve to live in freedom; etc.; etc.; etc... The Left and the Franco-Germans have put so much on the line in a battle that they can't win, one wonders what they'll have left over for the rest of the war?
Posted by Orrin Judd at February 16, 2003 11:23 PM