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 Robert O. Freedman, Hillel Fradkin, and Alan Dowty. (Click here for Tuesday’s installment, and here for yesterday’s.)

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Robert O. Freedman :: The main blunder of the Bush administration was switching from the war in Afghanistan to Iraq before the war in Afghanistan had been successfully completed. Making matters worse, there was no serious “after action” plan for U.S. policy after Baghdad fell, and there were not enough U.S. troops to deal with the insurgency that followed. Further exacerbating the situation was the decision to dissolve the Iraqi army, which freed up a number of the soldiers to participate in the insurgency.

The administration’s second major mistake, and one related to the first, was not taking strong action against Iran as it moved toward acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. While there was a good bit of rhetoric, the administration proved unwilling to use force, and as the United States got increasingly bogged down first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan the possibility of using force diminished, especially after Robert Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense.

If Iraq and Iran can be described as a series of blunders for the Bush administration, its policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict cannot be seen as a major failure. This is because the U.S. inability to achieve a major breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be attributed more to a lack of a desire of the parties involved, especially the Palestinians, than to errors by the Bush administration, although the administration was not without its mistakes.

On no fewer than three separate occasions the Bush administration made a major effort to bring about an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. The first two—the Zinni missions of 2001 and 2002 and the Road Map of 2003—failed because they were sabotaged by acts of Palestinian terrorism. The third effort, after the death of Arafat in 2004 and the establishment of the Abbas-led Palestinian Authority, failed for a number of reasons. The first was that Abbas was just too weak to crack down on Hamas, and in the absence of such a crackdown, the Israeli governments of Sharon and Olmert were not willing to seriously deal with him. The second mistake was the American insistence,as a result of its ill-fated democratization program, on the participation by Hamas in the January 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections, that resulted in a Hamas election victory and an at least partial international legitimization of the terrorist organization. The third mistake was that the United States did not seriously pressure Israel to dissolve its illegal settlement outposts, whose expansion exacerbated Palestinian anger against Israel.

One might also fault the Bush administration for not being more supportive of Israeli efforts under Ehud Olmert to engage Syria in peace talks. The potential payoffs of such an engagement—drawing Syria away from Iran and cutting Syrian support to Hamas and Hezbollah—were sufficiently large as to warrant an American effort to facilitate, if not mediate, the Syrian-Israeli talks.

In sum, as future historians write about the Bush administration, the Middle East will be seen as one of its major areas of policy failure, although more because of Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan than because of an inability to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.

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Hillel Fradkin :: It is always difficult to assess the foreign affairs legacy of a presidency so close to its end. It is even more so in the case of President Bush and the Greater Middle East. This is because it has involved so many dramatic changes from past American policy and involved so many actions which are still ongoing and whose ultimate consequences are so difficult to see. These include the general war on terror and the struggle with radical Islam; the particular wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and now, in a manner of speaking, Pakistan; and the struggle with Iran over its nuclear weapons program and much else.

Two other things further complicate matters. First is the fact that although the Bush policy and actions began with a view to protecting American security and interests as relatively narrowly defined, they acquired another and different objective known as the “Freedom Agenda.” Second is the new and unpredictable dynamic within the region itself, which was set in motion by American action but of course is not simply controlled by American action.

One way to approach the issue is by starting from the perspective provided by the Gulf region. This has become ever more central to our concerns and ever more the locus of our actions. Here one may appropriately observe that this region has been more or less in permanent crisis for 30 years beginning with the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and continuing through the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the first Gulf War of 1991, the decline of the Iraqi inspection regime and the emergence to light of the Iranian nuclear program. Almost inevitably it was further exacerbated by the consequences of the Afghan jihad and in particular the rise of Al Qaeda.

The Bush policy has had the effect of removing one of the two most dangerous actors—Saddam Hussein—from the scene. However, and as many have observed, it has had the consequence of enhancing the potential danger from the Iranian quarter. However, now that Iraq is moving in a more positive direction, the Iranian impact may be diminished. This is true even if Iraq does not have a fully representative government. For the interests of Iraq and Iran’s respective rulers will almost certainly diverge. This alas is subject to the important proviso that Iran not acquire nuclear weapons, which will give Iran added leverage in Iraq as elsewhere. As the Bush policy has accomplished very little in that regard, its legacy in this area is still very mixed. The one additional positive note has been Bush’s determination to see Iraq through. This has—for the time being—prevented a wholesale stampede of frightened allies into the arms of Iran.

At the moment, there is a new and improved coordination of American and Pakistani policy with regard to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. One may hope that if it continues, then in combination with the thrashing that was administered to Al Qaeda in Iraq over the past year and a half, it will have dealt a very heavy blow to Jihadi Islamism. However, this coordination is still too new to lead to firm expectations, and for now the results are mixed.

So too is the record of the “Freedom Agenda,” if judged by its own standard. As noted earlier, Iraq may still prove to be a partial success in that respect, and may outweigh its failures. But failures there have been. The most important was the failure to come to the assistance of the democracy movement in Lebanon, with the result that the position of Hezbollah has been enhanced. This failure was partially the result of the misguided attempt to invest energy and resources into the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

Overall, the net result is that the United States still has not found policies to address the threat of Iran and its allies and proxies.

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Alan Dowty :: In the long sweep of history, George W. Bush’s legacy—generally, let alone in foreign policy or the Middle East specifically—will be read in the shadow of 9/11. Impending calamity, as Samuel Johnson said in another context, wonderfully concentrates the mind. Accordingly, observers in the distant future will unfailingly note that the Bush administration did not apprehend the top perpetrators of this crime, and that at the end of their term in office Al Qaeda, its Taliban allies, and other Islamic extremists were enjoying a resurgence of sorts.

The intervention in Afghanistan attracted international support and dealt a hard blow to the extremists. But the administration then turned its attention to Iraq, a move that history will probably judge, in the kindest terms, as a diversion. Ridding the Middle East of Saddam Hussein was welcome to many within and outside Iraq, but its linkage to the main U.S. interest in the region—weakening Islamic extremist movements—was unproved at the time and appears to be negative in the sequel. The overall impact on U.S. interests will depend on what comes in place of Saddam; if the outcome is civil war in Iraq or a Shiite-dominated regime dependent on Iran, it would be hard to claim that there is a gain to U.S. interests commensurate with the costs, not just in immediate terms but also in prestige, political leverage, and instability.

Perhaps the most consequential of these costs is the geostrategic gain for Iran, which now profits not only from Iraq’s weakness but also from an enormous increase in oil revenues—reflecting lack of action on the critical issue of world dependence on Middle Eastern oil. And having not chosen clearly either a conciliatory or a totally confrontational approach to Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the administration finds itself facing renewed hostility from an Iranian extremist regime that is eight years closer to the bomb.

In the Arab-Israeli arena, Bush came to power in the aftermath of the Camp David/Taba collapse and the onset of the second intifada. Concluding that too much activism was counter-productive, the administration proceeded in a manner that seemed designed too show that too much passivity could be just as futile. Given the lack of a credible Palestinian negotiating partner, it is quite arguable that there was, in fact, no real point in pursuing a comprehensive negotiated Israeli-Palestinian settlement at that time. It must, however, also be pointed out that the victory of Hamas in Palestinian elections and its takeover of Gaza happened on this watch. And it is legitimate to question whether the prospects for Syrian-Israel negotiations, a favorite of many observant strategists, were pursued as they might have been.

So with a more powerful and potentially nuclear-armed Iran, Hamas in control of the Gaza Strip and powerful in the West Bank, Hezbollah now with veto power in Lebanon, with Osama bin Laden still on the loose and Islamic extremism on the rise on several fronts, and with Iraq still as a large question mark, are we better or worse off in the Middle East than eight years ago? It’s hard to see how or where we are better off.