Foreign Policy: How’s That Working Out?

Sometimes people say things so well that there is no point in rewriting what they have said. This morning I have come across a wealth of insightful writing on Bush’s foreign policy in the Middle East. It’s not going well. I’m copying some rather lengthy excerpts because they are making points that I have been making and would like to make. And they really don’t need any improvement.

Financial Times (subscription):

America’s stance on the Lebanon war has had a wide range of negative consequences for America. It has driven Sunni and and Shia Arabs together in an anti-US front, at a time when potential US allies among Sunni Muslims were themselves worrying about the rise of Hizbollah and Iran. It has provoked and empowered the Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, just as Washington is deploying more troops to Baghdad to try to quell the violence there. It has distracted attention from the Iranian nuclear issue, just as the United Nations Security Council was coming together to threaten sanctions on Tehran. It has destroyed whatever remaining hope there was for the US to be perceived as an honest broker between Israelis and Arabs in the search for peace in the Middle East. It has undermined US allies and democratic reformers in Arab states. It has also created a new crisis of confidence with America’s European allies just when transatlantic relations were starting to improve.

More below the fold:
Saad Eddin Ibrahim via Belgravia Dispatch:

President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice may be quite right about a new Middle East being born. In fact, their policies in support of the actions of their closest regional ally, Israel, have helped midwife the newborn. But it will not be exactly the baby they have longed for. For one thing, it will be neither secular nor friendly to the United States. For another, it is going to be a rough birth…

…According to the preliminary results of a recent public opinion survey of 1,700 Egyptians by the Cairo-based Ibn Khaldun Center, Hezbollah’s action garnered 75 percent approval, and Nasrallah led a list of 30 regional public figures ranked by perceived importance. He appears on 82 percent of responses, followed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (73 percent), Khaled Meshal of Hamas (60 percent), Osama bin Laden (52 percent) and Mohammed Mahdi Akef of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (45 percent).

The pattern here is clear, and it is Islamic. And among the few secular public figures who made it into the top 10 are Palestinian Marwan Barghouti (31 percent) and Egypt’s Ayman Nour (29 percent), both of whom are prisoners of conscience in Israeli and Egyptian jails, respectively.

None of the current heads of Arab states made the list of the 10 most popular public figures. While subject to future fluctuations, these Egyptian findings suggest the direction in which the region is moving. The Arab people do not respect the ruling regimes, perceiving them to be autocratic, corrupt and inept. They are, at best, ambivalent about the fanatical Islamists of the bin Laden variety. More mainstream Islamists with broad support, developed civic dispositions and services to provide are the most likely actors in building a new Middle East. In fact, they are already doing so through the Justice and Development Party in Turkey, the similarly named PJD in Morocco, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in Palestine and, yes, Hezbollah in Lebanon.

These groups, parties and movements are not inimical to democracy. They have accepted electoral systems and practiced electoral politics, probably too well for Washington’s taste. Whether we like it or not, these are the facts. The rest of the Western world must come to grips with the new reality, even if the U.S. president and his secretary of state continue to reject the new offspring of their own policies.

Billmon:

Update 3:25 PM ET: Matt Ygelsias gets it, even if Shrub doesn’t:

In essence, through two consecutive bait-and-switches —
first over the wording of a UN resolution, and second over the
deployment of French troops to Lebanon — France managed to get both
parties to agree to a return to the status quo ante, which is better
for both sides (that’s why the tricks worked), but that neither side
could admit to wanting. That’s a pretty good result, especially
considering that Chirac spent essentially none of France’s resources
achieving it.

Considering that the French basically invented modern diplomacy, and
were pitted against the tag team of John Bolton, Madame Supertanker and
the moron, we certainly shouldn’t be surprised by the result.

My only quarrel with Matt’s analysis is that I don’t think
the status quo ante is what the Israelis wanted, nor is it “better” for
them — unless Matt means better than having hundreds of rockets a day
pouring down on northern Israel. Given the Olmert government’s track
record of cluelessness, I think it might have actually believed the
Americans would be able to deliver a robust international peacekeeping
force in southern Lebanon. (If so, chalk it up as yet another failure
of Israeli intelligence — in both senses of the world.)

Now that that pipe dream has been exposed, the Israelis are going to
have to decide how long they can tolerate the status quo ante before
they make their next move. And of course, they’ll have to decide what
that move will be and who will be the target. I doubt the French
seriously expect the truce to hold for long.

The real beneficiaries of the French manuever (whether or not
they realize it) were the Americans, who otherwise would have had a
devil of a time escaping the trap they created for themselves: Unable
to give Israel enough time or sanction the level of destruction
required to neutralize Hizbullah, unable to mediate a cease fire deal
(since the Cheney Administration refuses to talk to the other side) and
unable to order the IDF to stop — both for internal political reasons
and because it would have shifted responsibility for the fiasco from
the Israelis to Shrub and company.

The UN resolution is a pretty small fig leaf, but Shrub can thank Jacques Chirac for having one to wear at all.

More Billmon:

When [Isaiah] Berlin divided writers and thinkers (which leaves Shrub out) and human beings in general (I suppose we have to include him) into two categories — the hedgehogs and the foxes — he didn’t mean for either label to be taken pejoratively. After all, his list of hedgehogs included Dante, Plato, Dostoevsky and Proust, while Shakespeare, Aristotle and Erasmus were among his foxes.

What Berlin meant, I think, is that hedgehogs try to integrate all of their experiences and thoughts into a single, overarching concept of life and their place in it, while foxes, as he put it, have ideas about the world “without . . . seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.”

At this point, I would say Shrub is acting like a hedgehog on hallucinogens. His one big integrative idea — exporting American-style “democracy” to Iraq at the point of a gun — has proven fatally, disasterously wrong, but he can’t let go of it, because it’s the only idea he’s got. He’s fully vested in it, like a ’90s e-trader who decided to throw caution to the wind, empty his retirement account and bet it all on pets.com.

I think if Shrub were ever forced to let go of his vision, his one big idea, it would not only crush his fragile ego, it would leave him completely incapable of making any sense at all out of his presidency, out of America’s role in the Middle East, out of the universe.

One last piece of Billmon:

The bottom line, which an odd member of the punditburo
might even reach one of these days, is that this is an administration
that no longer makes any sense at all — not even on the most formal,
semiotic level.
Whiskey Bar
Facts on the Ground
August 15, 2006

There is a very good reason that the administration doesn’t make sense. They are pursuing a totally incoherent strategy in the Middle East. What little security Israel has obtained since the 1973 war has been acheived through close America ties (including military) with Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. That has not endeared the leaders of those countries to the Arab people. And those leaders are forced to resort to ever increasing oppression and corruption to maintain their grip on power. As the Palestinian situation grinds on in an ever-descending nightmare, the possibility of democracy in those countries becomes less and less possible. Meanwhile, Bush further undermines their credibility by pushing for democracy in nations that are not American puppets.

So far, we have seen Iraq elect a pro-Iranian Shi’a Resistance Theology government, Lebanon elect members of Hizbollah, and Palestine elect Hamas. Israel’s reaction? Imprison a huge chunk of the Palestinian parliament and destroy Lebanon’s infrastructure. Meanwhile, Iraq lays in ruins.

At this point we should not be waiting for George W. Bush’s fragile ego to be crushed. We should impeach him and his quail hunting sidekick.

Author: BooMan

Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.