Middle East Strategy at Harvard

As the presidency of George W. Bush draws to a close, MESH members have been asked to assess his legacy. What did the Bush administration do right and do wrong in the Middle East? What is the proper yardstick: Administration rhetoric or the range of the possible? Finally, as the pollsters put it, are we better or worse off in the Middle East than we were eight years ago?

MESH members’ answers are appearing in installments throughout the week. Today’s responses come from Michael Mandelbaum, Mark N. Katz, and Michael Horowitz. (Click here for yesterday’s opening installment.)

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Michael Mandelbaum :: Asked what he thought of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai is supposed to have replied, “It’s too soon to tell.” Similarly, it is too soon to render a verdict on the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s Middle East policy, the attempted political transformation of Iraq. To be sure, the American public has already decided that the effort has gone on too long and has cost too much in blood and treasure. Historians may, however, be kinder, if Iraq eventually becomes a stable country with a reasonably representative government and a free press in which Shia, Sunni and Kurds coexist more or less peacefully.

The administration was correct in believing that democracy—which includes liberty and the rule of law as well as free elections—would be a potent antidote to many of the Middle East’s pathologies and correct, as well, to believe that a democratic Iraq could serve as a positive example for the rest of the region. It erred insofar as it believed that democracy could take root there quickly or easily, or that the United States could do much to hasten this generations-long process.

What is most important for American interests in the region, however, is not a democratic Iraq, welcome though that would be, but rather a non-nuclear Iran. Here the administration has not done well. The mullahs are surely closer to having the bomb now than they were in January 2001. Just what could have been but was not done to slow or stop them will inevitably be a matter of controversy: perhaps, short of the use of force, nothing would have worked. My own view is that the foolish and pointless American alienation of Russia, beginning in the mid-1990s with the eastward expansion of NATO, cost us Russian support for maximal pressure on Iran, which might at least have helped to restrain the Islamic Republic.

Whatever its failings concerning Iran, the Bush administration is not guilty of the frequently-made charge that it missed the opportunity to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If, as Samuel Johnson observed, patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, then the Middle East peace process is both the last refuge of the exhausted administration and the first recourse of those who aspire to replace it. The next administration, if it plunges immediately into negotiations, will not do better; it will simply fail sooner, absent fundamental changes in the attitudes toward Israel of the Arab world in general, and the Palestinians in particular, changes that are not within the power of the United States to bring about.

In the Bush Middle East policy, finally, and indeed for the outgoing administration’s foreign policy in general, one grand failure does stand out: in energy. The global pattern of the production and consumption of oil, leading to massive transfers of wealth to oil-exporting countries, has created or aggravated virtually every problem American foreign policy confronts. It funds terrorism and the global spread of the Wahhabist form of Islam. It props up the anti-American regime in Iran, as well as the rule of Vladmir Putin in Russia and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. It worsens the American current account deficit and global warming.

The key to alleviating all these problems is to lower the world’s consumption of oil. That in turn requires higher prices for gasoline, which would promote both conservation and substitution. The Europeans and the Japanese have done their part by imposing high taxes on gasoline. The United States has not. Here the Bush administration has done badly, but its would-be successors offer no improvement. Both candidates have promised the American public lower gasoline prices, which is the opposite of what is needed.

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Mark N. Katz :: Perhaps the best way to assess President George W. Bush’s legacy in the Middle East is by measuring it against the standard that he himself set in his November 6, 2003 speech marking the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy.

On that occasion, President Bush stated:

Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe—because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.

Therefore, the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results. As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace.

Nearly five years later when he is about to leave office, it is easy to point out where President Bush’s Middle East policy has fallen short. The United States has fostered democracy in Iraq, but it is extremely fragile. There is reason to doubt whether it could survive the withdrawal—or even the reduction—of American armed forces. Afghanistan appears to be a democracy in name only despite the continued presence of American and NATO troops. The Bush administration’s hopes for progress toward democratization in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories, and elsewhere in the Arab world have not been fulfilled. Pakistan may have become more democratic, but it certainly does not appear to have become more peaceful or willing to cooperate with the United States vis-à-vis the Taliban.

Many will conclude, then, that President Bush’s foreign policy in the Middle East has failed. Such a conclusion, however, might be premature. President Bush himself has frequently claimed that despite those who assess his Middle East policy as a failure now, history will vindicate him. He may be right.

President Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a peaceful, democratic Europe appeared overly optimistic and naïve not just in the immediate aftermath of World War I, but for decades afterward. Yet ninety years after the November 11, 1918 armistice, his vision has largely been fulfilled in Europe.

Why did this happen? Two key components were 1) the spread of democratic values first in Western and later in Eastern Europe, and 2) America’s commitment to supporting West European democracies after World War II (though not after World War I) and East European democracies after the Cold War.

The main problem with Bush’s support for democratization in the greater Middle East was that demand for it in the region has been weak. But the demand for democratization was also weak in much of Europe after World War I—especially after the onset of the Great Depression. This, however, did not prevent the demand for democratization from growing in Europe later. And American support was crucial for transforming this demand into actual democracy first in Western and later in Eastern Europe.

The demand for democratization may be weak in the greater Middle East now, but Europe’s experience suggests that this need not prevent it from developing later. If and when the demand for democratization does grow in the Middle East, American support will also be crucial for transforming it into actual democracy. But for this to happen, a future American president must first be willing to acknowledge that it can happen, as President Bush was.

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Michael Horowitz :: Is the United States better off in the Middle East now than it was eight years ago? We probably will not know the real answer for quite a while. Though the short-term implications of policy choices often reveal themselves fairly quickly, the long-term implications often escape easy analysis. It is through the actions of the next administration that we will find out about the Bush legacy in the Middle East from an American policy perspective; once in power and away from the rhetoric of the campaign trail, what they choose to continue, what they choose to discard, and how things turn out. The United States, along with other states, has set in motion a series of events in the Middle East that could end with vast improvements in regional security and the welfare of the people of the Middle East. However, that same series of events could easily lead to a set of outcomes that destabilize the region and fail to improve the welfare of the people of the Middle East.

Evaluating the short term, the answer is decidedly mixed. On the plus side, the Bush administration helped the Iraqi people rid themselves of a brutal despot: Saddam Hussein. For that they should always get credit. However, it does not take a trained strategist or brilliant military mind to recognize that things in Iraq did not go as planned.

On Iran, eight years ago the Iranian regime was pursuing nuclear weapons and the United States had to choose between dealing with the regime, pursuing a containment strategy, or taking more aggressive action. It seemed like some progress had been made in the later few years of the Clinton administration in improving U.S.-Iranian relations and that the people of Iran might be ready for a thaw. Back-channel communication apparently continued in the early days of the Bush administration, but then halted. Eight years later, the United States faces the same choices it did in 2001, while in the interim Iran has made more progress towards a nuclear bomb.

(I will leave it to people far more expert than me to comment on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.)

What about the status of the region as a whole? Data from the Polity IV dataset, a popular political science dataset measuring the characteristics of individual regimes, suggests that the Middle East remains one of the most fragile regions in the world. Many states in the region have fragility “scores” at the medium or high levels, indicating significant regime instability. Yet this was also true before the Bush administration ever took office. At the end of the day, perhaps the greatest feeling is that of a missed opportunity. It seemed like great progress in the region was possible, yet great progress was not made. Perhaps that merely indicates the short attention span of Americans, but it also suggests that we will be debating the legacy of the Bush administration in the Middle East for years to come.