After the Bush years, Barack Obama has far from satisfied the enormous expectations he raised in the Middle East. Nonetheless, the biggest break would be reconciliation with Iran. But we’re not there yet.
“A new beginning.” On June 4, 2009, in a speech at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, close to six months after his inauguration as president of the United States, Barack Obama wanted to underscore his break with George W. Bush’s policies in the Middle East, and rebuild the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world — a relationship jeopardized after Sept. 11, 2001 by his predecessor and the “neoconservatives” determined to restructure the Middle East in the image of the United States. But this “new beginning” doesn’t seem to have gotten past promises.
Five years after that speech, which had raised so much hope in the Arab world, the first black American president finds himself in the same dilemma as his predecessor. Should the American military intervene in Iraq? Should the United States drive out of power in Baghdad the people in charge, who are incapable of carrying out a policy of enforcing national unity? Certainly, the circumstances and the motives for an intervention in Iraq are different. Likewise, the means that could be used by the 44th American president are far from being the same: There is no comparison between ground forces supported by combined American and British air strikes, as in 2003, and the sending today of several hundred instructors to help Baghdad defend itself while faced with Sunni jihadis from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). This has nothing to do with the pretext of George W. Bush’s neoconservatives: eliminating weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime in order to establish a regime in Baghdad favorable to Washington — a pretext which proved to be dishonest, since Saddam Hussein’s WMD had been destroyed after the first Gulf War in 1991. All that in the name of a concept: that of pre-emption, attacking before your enemy has even formulated a plan of attack, and imposing democracy. Bush considered this strategy “Wilsonism in boots,” in a reference to President Woodrow Wilson and the entrance of the United States in World War I, in the name of the fight for democracy.
There are similarities, however. Certainly, the notion of pre-emption is absent from Obama’s speech; the notion, so dear to Bush, of the Greater Middle East, an area going from North Africa and Mauritania up to Pakistan and Afghanistan, is no longer at the center of his vocabulary. But it’s not certain that it has completely disappeared from American strategic thinking. As was promised in 2009, at the time of his arrival in the White House, the president got American troops out of Iraq by the end of 2011 and is preparing a gradual departure from Afghanistan for the end of 2014, after 13 years of military presence in the county. But he hopes to leave, after Dec. 31, close to 10,000 soldiers and several American bases there. The total withdrawal shouldn’t take place until the end of 2016, just before his departure from the White House. In Iraq, the situation is different and the Americans have not left forces already in place. But deploying special advisers recalls the mistaken decision of President Kennedy to send advisers to Vietnam, which marked the beginning of the costly American engagement in that Asian country. On the other hand, even if Barack Obama never defended, in 2003, the principle of intervention in Iraq, a number of Democrats, like his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, blindly supported George W. Bush’s plan to invade the country.
The resemblance doesn’t stop there. The American president, without using the terms of his predecessor, has pursued the fight against terrorism through sometimes identical means, as with the pursuit of the drone strikes in Pakistan. This implies a conflict covering an area going from Northern Africa — including Libya — and the Middle East right up to the borders of Pakistan.
Certainly, history is more complicated and the world today is confronted with another order, unforeseen in the Cairo speech in 2009: the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya that brought down (secular) dictators and opened the door to Islamic fundamentalists, which has pushed the American president to realpolitik. Washington is, in short, relatively satisfied to see the return in Egypt of a strongman in the form of General el-Sisi, after an unfortunate experiment in power with the Muslim Brotherhood. In Libya, the Americans are ready to support General Khalifa Haftar to reestablish a semblance of order. And will they have to support the Iraqi prime minister, the Shiite Nouri al-Maliki, to the very end? Nothing is sure.
At any rate, the great hopes raised by Obama and his current secretary of state, John Kerry, with a revival of the peace process in the Middle East have flown away. Obama must contend with another reality: the United States is no longer the only post-Cold War superpower, but rather one power among others. After having guaranteed that if the Bashar al-Assad regime used chemical weapons against its population, a “red line” would be crossed, and threatening to launch air strikes on military targets, Barack Obama backpedaled when confronted with Russia’s fierce opposition. But the biggest change in the Middle East is still to come: that of a possible reconciliation between the United States and Iran — a paradigm shift after 35 years of fierce hostility between the two countries. It would be the greatest break with the Bush era, which gave this country a place in “the axis of evil.”
Key points: Five years ago, Barack Obama wanted to break with the policies of his predecessor in the Middle East by giving a speech of reconciliation in Cairo. He finds himself today in the same dilemma as George W. Bush: Should the United States intervene in Iraq? And if so, by what means? Deploying special advisers recalls the mistaken decision of President Kennedy to send men to Vietnam, the first phrase in a costly American engagement in the country.
True dat! Advisers (and perhaps no one has told Obama this) are popularly conceived as the camel’s nose under the tent flap. As an older person, I knew people who slipped into VietNam as advisers and got stuck there and shot up in the streets.
We need to try to find areas of agreement so as to cooperate with Iran and wind down the stupidly foolish hostility between what used to be a secularist Islamic state, and the pretty theocratic USA.
True dat! Advisers (and perhaps no one has told Obama this) are popularly conceived as the camel’s nose under the tent flap. As an older person, I knew people who slipped into VietNam as advisers and got stuck there and shot up in the streets.
We need to try to find areas of agreement so as to cooperate with Iran and wind down the stupidly foolish hostility between what used to be a secularist Islamic state, and the pretty theocratic USA.