The new Middle East (16 September 2006)

The US has launched or sponsored four military offensives in the Middle East over the summer. Glen Rangwala examines why all four have failed.

Published in Labour Left Briefing (October 2006)

The four brutal struggles that raged in the wider Middle East over the summer all demonstrated quite how limited the ability of the United States and its two key allies – Israel and Britain – is in imposing their dominance upon that region. The US campaign has been founded, and has foundered, on two false beliefs. First, Washington’s ideologues still think that armed force is an effective and cheap (for them) way of forcing foreign governments and political movements to follow their orders. As a result, there has been little hesitation to use or endorse military means when crises broke out over the past few months in Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Second, they think making compromises is a sign of weakness, and others will not take you seriously unless you hold to your initial demands. This is particularly troublesome as those demands are cast in a lofty, strident way – think of Bush’s claim in 2001 that his objective was “to rid the world of evil-doers” – often for the initial purpose of domestic consumption. The result has been that diplomacy is no longer valued, and conflicts continue with all the death and suffering they entail because US leaders reject dialogue with (or, as they put it, give in to the demands of) those it labels terrorists.

The clearest result of US or US-sponsored militarism in the wider Middle East has not of course been greater toleration for others or democratisation, but this was hardly expected by even the most hardline US policymakers after they accepted in early 2005 that Iraq was not going to be a pluralistic, pro-US, liberal democracy for the foreseeable future. But they did expect Hamas in Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon to collapse as political movements and discredit themselves to their own populations under the simultaneous Israeli assaults, and they still believed that military assaults would have the effect of “stifling” the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the term used by one senior US commander.

Blair, falling in line, has put UK troops on the front line in Afghanistan. He repeatedly used the banal phrase that he would not call for a ceasefire in Lebanon until there was a “sustainable and lasting basis” for a ceasefire – in order words, since he falsely presented Hizbullah’s existence as the cause of the conflict, until Israel had finished its bloody mission in dismantling Hizbullah as a movement through its bombing raids and ground assault.

Each of these assaults has failed or is in the process of failing. In Lebanon, Hizbullah has emerged from the conflict as the most popular political party anywhere in the Arab world, despite the catastrophic damage done to Lebanese infrastructure and society. Palestinians didn’t revolt against Hamas in response to the Israeli airstrikes on Gaza or the capture of leading Hamas members, and most European countries now seem to have recognised that they need to restore funding for the Palestinian government if they are to retain any credibility in the Arab world. In both cases, Israeli leaders knew the US would not criticise their assaults as they were only pursuing what the US had already demanded. But with their goals practically unrealisable and the US unwilling to license a prisoner-exchange agreement with Hizbullah, the casualties could only mount until public disquiet became so great as to force Israel to back down.

As Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert should have now learnt, the US’s unflinching support does little for the long-term security of Israel’s citizens: it has instead misled Israeli leaders repeatedly into thinking that Israel can undertake large military assaults without any serious international political cost. Instead, the cost comes back only indirectly, when the Palestinians and Lebanese on the receiving end of the violence turn, gradually but unmistakeable, against Israel with their own crude and inexpensive weapons.

The new assaults in Afghanistan came with the belief that the Taliban could be crushed for good. The result has been that Afghans who previously did not support but the Taliban but who resented foreign troops killing their neighbours and relatives have now been spurred into action against NATO forces. As the UN special representative in Afghanistan noted in August, the insurgency is made up of much more than the Taliban – it includes warlords previously opposed to the Taliban, refugees returning from Pakistan and a myriad of religious networks. But US officials now just refer to this diffuse set of actors collectively as al-Qa’ida, preventing any accommodation from being reached. Far from containing the insurgency, the NATO assaults in southern Afghanistan led to the most serious rioting in recent history in Kabul in May, which has now turned to a cycle of suicide bombs and assassinations in the capital.

The starkest reminder of how little US military force can achieve remains Iraq. The one major plan of the new government on taking office in May, strongly supported by the US, was to ensure the party militias were dissolved. Those militias are the key actors in the sectarian conflict that is killing dozens if not hundreds of people every day. This plan has now been shelved after strong disagreements between different parties in the coalition government about how it should be implemented. Prime minister Nuri al-Maliki has also begun to realise quite how damaging it is for his credibility to his own constituency to be seen to be America’s friend, and has been vigorously critical of many of the recent offensives of the US military. Faced with decreasing cooperation from the Iraqi government and with a Sunni Arab insurgency that US military chiefs now acknowledge rule over a third of the area of the country, the only US scheme left to tackle the insurgency is in reality just an attempt to stop it getting near to them. The latest scheme, to build a 50 mile series of trenches to encircle Baghdad with 28 perimeter checkpoints controlling all movement into and out of the city, demonstrates quite how futile its attempts to defeat its opponents by military force are.

In July, as the bombs fell on Lebanon, US Secretary of State proclaimed that a “new Middle East” was being forged. The folly of the summer’s ventures has created a new Middle East, but one in which resentment against US and British governments has taken on an ever more militant tone, in a situation that those governments are ever less able to manage.

Author: Glen Rangwala

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