“No Substitute For A Saudi-Iranian Dialogue”: Blame These Two Countries, Not The United States, For The Current Crisis In Iraq
There is plenty of blame to go around for the current mess in Iraq, but reprimanding Washington, Iraqi President Nouri Al-Maliki, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) will solve nothing. The real fault should be assigned to those actors who, despite having tremendous influence and real leverage over the majority of the Iraqi antagonists, have so far decided not to intervene politically. That’s Iran and Saudi Arabia.
A dialogue between the Iranians and the Saudis is desperately needed not just to stop Iraq’s bleeding and prevent another full-blown civil war, but to extinguish at least the major Sunni-Shi’ite fires throughout the Middle East that are fueling this violence and chaos.
This is not a naive call for putting an end to an old and fierce rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran and to an historic feud between the two biggest branches of Islam. That’s just not going to happen. Instead, this is a realistic invitation for two regional heavyweights who, for better or worse, speak for the majority of Sunnis and Shi’ites in the Middle East, to negotiate a path out of this catastrophic situation. Call it arms control, dialogue, or cooperation. The bottom line is that they need to sit down and talk about ways to manage or stabilize their regional competition by agreeing to hard rules that would benefit both, otherwise Arab League chief Amr Moussa’s nightmare scenario of the gates of hell opening in the Middle East will turn into a reality.
In Iraq, Al-Maliki is a big part of the problem, but he is a problem that the Iranians (along with the Americans) created and can easily solve. Saudi Arabia knows that Al-Maliki is Iran’s man in Baghdad, so the first item on the hypothetical Saudi-Iranian negotiating agenda is a new power-sharing arrangement in Iraq that removes Al-Maliki and reintegrates the Sunnis into political life. Because the Shi’ites are the majority in Iraq, the balance of power will always tilt in their favor, but this doesn’t have to translate into Sunni exclusion and Shi’ite domination (as it has been the case under Al-Maliki), and the Iranians and the Saudis can negotiate that.
In Bahrain, Yemen, and Lebanon, similar realistic bargains can take place. Iran should have no business fomenting unrest in Saudi Arabia’s backyard: in Bahrain by supporting radical segments of the opposition there, and in Yemen, where Iran is suspected of sending arms to the Houthi rebels. In Lebanon, while Iran will not instruct Hezbollah to relinquish its weapons (it’s much more complicated than that), it certainly can influence the powerful Shi’ite group’s future in ways that can help it address the concerns of Lebanon’s Sunni players (and Christians and Druze), the most relevant of whom are allied with Riyadh. And even inside the Saudi Kingdom, Iran should reassure Saudi Arabia that it has no intentions of stirring trouble in the Eastern Province, which is predominantly Shi’ite.
Syria will be the toughest nut to crack. The Saudi-Iranian differences there are most acute. Saudi Arabia has spent a vast amount of material resources to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad while Iran has had to incur even heavier costs to do the exact opposite. At present, Iran seems to have the upper hand in Syria, but the conflict is anything but stable and Saudi Arabia has not said its final word yet. Progress on the other regional issues could help pave the way for some sort of deal that cuts Saudi losses, caps Iranian gains, and preserves major Saudi and Iranian security interests in the country, including the defeat of extremist elements that are associated with ISIL and Al Qaeda.
As the United States mulls its options in Iraq, the smartest thing it can do is encourage, with the help of Britain, France, and Russia, the Iranians and the Saudis to announce a summit for high-level, comprehensive political talks between their leaders.
This is the most important conversation that should be happening today in the Middle East, and we are not too far from it. Today, there is an open invitation from Saudi Arabia to a dialogue with Iran, but Iran has yet to respond. Instead, it seems to be more interested in brokering deals with Washington in Vienna by offering security cooperation in Iraq. A potential U.S.-Iran meeting in Vienna could produce tactical gains but it is absolutely no substitute for a Saudi-Iranian strategic dialogue.
By: Bilal Y. Saab, Senior Fellow for Middle East Security at the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security: The New Republic, June 16, 2014
“They Have Earned The Right Not To Be Listened To”: All They’re Doing Is Embarrassing Themselves And Annoying The Rest Of Us
In mid-January 2002, the Weekly Standard published a piece from Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol on the need for a U.S. invasion to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. The headline read, “What to do about Iraq.”
Yesterday, the exact same publication published a piece from the exact same authors with a headline that was almost exactly the same: “What to do in Iraq.”
James Fallows mocked the discredited conservatives, highlighting their consistency “in attitude as well as typography and headline writing and page layout,” before lowering the boom.
Am I sounding a little testy here? You bet. We all make mistakes. But we are talking about people in public life – writers, politicians, academics – who got the biggest strategic call in many decades completely wrong. Wrong as a matter of analysis, wrong as a matter of planning, wrong as a matter of execution, wrong in conceiving American interests in the broadest sense.
None of these people did that intentionally, and many of them have honestly reflected and learned. But we now live with (and many, many people have died because of) the consequences of their gross misjudgments a dozen years ago. In the circumstances, they might have the decency to shut the hell up on this particular topic for a while. They helped create the disaster Iraqis and others are now dealing with. They have earned the right not to be listened to.
And yet, listening to them has become harder than avoiding them. As Rachel noted on the show last night, the very same people who were “disastrously wrong about what it would mean for the United States to toss a match into the tinderbox of the Middle East by toppling Saddam, all those guys who were so wrong, they either never went away in the first place or they have recently been dug back up over the last few weeks, simply for the purpose of arguing that we ought to invade Iraq again.”
I’ve seen some suggest that those who got U.S. policy in Iraq completely wrong in 2002 and 2003 need not wear a permanent scar. It’s not an entirely unreasonable point – some sensible people fell for a con job. They know better now and want to contribute to a constructive conversation about U.S. foreign policy more than a decade later. It’s hardly ridiculous to think some of them should have a voice in the discussion.
But that’s not quite what’s happening here.
When we see Kristol, Kagan, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Paul Bremer, Ken Pollack and their cohorts all over the print and broadcast media, their chosen task is not to be the target of rotten vegetables. Rather, these men still choose to present themselves as experts whose advice has merit.
It would be challenging in its own right if, say, Paul Wolfowitz showed up on a Sunday show to declare, “Look, my buddies and I may have flubbed U.S. policy in Iraq the last time around, but we’re totally right this time.” But neither he nor his pals are saying anything of the kind – the usual suspects still think they were right in 2002 and 2003, and can’t imagine why their words of wisdom would be ignored now.
Accountability may seem like a quaint, almost antiquated, concept in today’s political discourse, but that’s a shame. When life and death decisions are being made, here’s hoping accountability can still make a comeback, forcing the discredited voices among us towards obscurity.
I’m not arguing that everyone who was wrong about Iraq 11 years ago must remain silent now. I am saying that those who were wrong then but remain convinced of their own self-righteous credibility now, certain that the 2003 invasion was wise and that Iraq’s deterioration should be blamed on that rascally President Obama, all they are doing is embarrassing themselves – and annoying the rest of us.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 17, 2014
“Another New Low”: Dick And Liz Cheney Return To Trash Obama Foreign Policy
The neoconservative campaign to discredit President Barack Obama’s foreign policy in Iraq — despite the fact that the critics themselves started, and bungled, America’s military involvement in the country in the first place — hit another new low on Tuesday evening, in the form of an op-ed and accompanying video from former vice president Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz.
“Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many,” the Cheneys write in The Wall Street Journal, apparently unacquainted with the concepts of irony or shame.
“Al Qaeda and its affiliates are resurgent and they present a security threat not seen since the Cold War. Defeating them will require a strategy – not a fantasy. It will require sustained difficult military, intelligence and diplomatic efforts – not empty misleading rhetoric,” they continue.
In fairness, if anyone knows about the dangers of substituting strategy for fantasy, it would be the vice president who promised that Americans would be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq. And if anyone knows about misleading rhetoric, it would be the failed U.S. Senate candidate who can hardly go two sentences without uttering a crazy lie.
In addition to the op-ed, the Cheneys also released a video announcing the formation of their new 501(c)(4) “dark money” group, The Alliance for a Strong America.
“Threats to America’s security are on the rise. Iran is marching towards a nuclear weapon. Al Qaeda is resurgent, establishing new safe havens across the Middle East, including in Iraq where President Obama withdrew all American forces with no stay-behind agreement,” Dick Cheney says in the video, ignoring the fact that President George W. Bush was the one who signed the Status of Forces Agreement mandating that all U.S. forces depart the country by January 1, 2012.
Despite the Cheneys’ bluster, they are unlikely to sway the public back toward a neoconservative foreign policy; both polls and elections have shown that that bridge is burned. And Democrats certainly don’t seem too concerned with the Cheneys’ re-emergence on the national stage. As Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) put it on Wednesday: “Being on the wrong side of Dick Cheney is being on the right side of history.”
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, June 18, 2014
“Just Like Us”: Obama’s Iraq ‘Nap’ Represents Who We Are; Sick Of Being The World’s Policeman
Conservative critics of Barack Obama’s foreign policy are right: it’s vague when articulated and contradictory when enacted. He refuses to act decisively and tunes out the rhetorical bravado of foreign leaders. And if the United States is to avoid another round of pointless bloodshed in the Middle East, that’s the kind of foreign policy our country needs right now. Indeed, it’s the one we want.
On Sunday’s Meet the Press, Mitt Romney added to the existing critique of Obama as feckless-bordering-on-fey. The president, his former challenger asserted, was not just ineffectual in his stance toward Iraq and Syria – he was also ignorant. The president, said the former one-term governor of Massachusetts, has “repeatedly underestimated the threats” posed by chaos in Iraq – or “Russia or Assad or Isis or al-Qaida itself”.
The terror that has gripped Iraq over the past week is, no doubt, horrific. When militants claim they’ve massacred 1,700 soldiers, it would be foolish not to give yourself options by moving an aircraft carrier here and toughening up an embassy there – which Obama has done, actively, not through “neglect” or “a nap”, as still more critics claimed over the weekend.
But let’s remember the way we got in too deep: it wasn’t by underestimating the threat Iraq posed to US interests, it was by overestimating it.
“Overestimating” may even be too generous. We created a threat when there was none, not out of whole cloth so much as a web of pride, avarice and insecurity. Obama’s haters on the right – and maybe even some formerly hawkish apologists on the left – need a refresher course on just how much of the Iraq invasion hinged on ego and imagined taunts. It wasn’t all about revenge for Daddy’s loss. Don’t forget the perception in the Bush White House that the president was “weak” in the immediate aftermath of 9/11: the frozen look as he read from My Pet Goat, the hours of hop-scotching around the country, out of sight, as the carnage and panic continued to unfold.
It was Bush’s improvisation of macho defiance – in those moments following his 9/11 lapse into visible doubt – that created the blueprint for these wars that have refused to end. The declaration that the US would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbored them” was made in a speech given less than twelve hours after the first tower was hit. Today, we call that formulation the Bush Doctrine, though anything so hastily conceived hardly merits the title of “doctrine”.
Governments are supposed to be slower to act than people. They are supposed to filter our instinctive desires, not jump on them. It is probably not a coincidence that support for the death penalty in America is at a record low as well. The state’s power to take a life is democracy’s most dubious gift. We have learned that the hard way.
That the Bush administration misled the American people about the reasons for invading Iraq is now all but common knowledge; what we talk about less is why Americans were moved so easily from concern about possible attacks from overseas into almost pornographic nationalism.
Clearly, we were intoxicated by some heady perfume of testosterone and saddle leather that pulled along George W Bush by the nose. When the Iraq war began, nearly 80% of Americans thought it was a good idea. Almost as many approved of how the president was handling it. Irrational exuberance is not just for markets.
How we have sobered since then!
A record high number of people (53%) believe that America is “less powerful and less important than it was ten years ago”; the percentage of those who believe that America should “mind its own business internationally” (52%) is the highest it’s been in 50 years. And support for specific foreign interventions is as wobbly as the reasoning for undertaking them: only 25% of Americans supported air strikes on Syria; just 14% approved of a Nato-led military action in the Ukraine.
The existing members of the GOP leadership, whether visiting Romney’s weekend retreat or a Sunday show set on their way to re-intervention, might well wonder where that reliably woozy patriotism has gone. Certainly, Republicans haven’t developed a tolerance. They sniff the air and howl: “This is another 9/11 in the making,” Lindsey Graham said Sunday on CNN, three days after saying “we’ve got another Benghazi in the making here”. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon blustered: “The White House has a history of ‘considering all options’ while choosing none.”
Would that Bush have been so indecisive.
The mistake by Republicans – and it is one they make in all sorts of situations – is that they confuse a desire for small government and more individual freedom with a government that acts like an individual. They project onto government the desires and fears that animate a person; in the imagination of Republicans “the government” wants all kinds of things: your guns, for instance. And when Republicans have one of their own in the White House, it pleases them to think that he doesn’t just represent the country but is the country.
Perhaps it is a function of having a president who is so radically (including, yes, racially) different from all the ones who came before that Americans seem comfortable with – or at least have accepted the fact of – some distance between who they are, who the president is, and that for which the country stands. It is most certainly a function of having seen so many lives lost, but the American people are comfortable with inaction. Barack Obama’s foreign policy is less of a doctrine than a stance – guarded but cautious, careful but alert … just like us.
By: Ana Marie Cox, The Guardian, June 16, 2014
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