After Plans Fail: America's New Policy in the Middle East

America’s old defense policy was aimed at confronting the following dangers: Islam, China, the scarcity of energy resources, population decline in industrialized countries and the rise of four emerging economic powers — Brazil, Russia, India and China — as part of the BRIC association. That meant confronting terrorism in its homeland, twisting the arm of or toppling uncooperative regimes, pushing other regimes toward domestic political openness, directly controlling oil sources through stable, reputable regimes and improving America’s image in the Middle East by exporting its most attractive assets — freedom and democracy — and making the peoples of the region feel like it is a savior that will bring freedom and economic opulence. This policy led to very negative, paradoxical results:

• It turned al-Qaida leaders like Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi into legends.

• It created unprecedented sympathy for Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gadhafi in the Arab street.

• It turned Iraq and then Syria into centers of global jihad.

• It created a fissure between the United States and Islamic world.

• It isolated the United States internationally.

• It caused the United States serious losses: 5,000 Americans were killed and $5 trillion spent in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• It gave new energy to Islamic extremist movements, to the extent that they boosted their operations in stable countries allied with America, like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia.

• It had come to threaten the Republican Party with a continual loss of power in any legislative and presidential elections.

The makers of this policy are still in decision-making centers, and they have decided to capitalize on their failed experiences and modify their methods by turning American policy in the Middle East in a new direction, a direction that they are now implementing on the ground. It will effectively allow America to control the region from afar (or from above) by submerging it in many decades of war, war that it controls and keeps in check.

America’s new direction centers on the following principles:

• Giving free reign to “natural” religious, national, ethnic and sectarian contradictions.

• Inciting division and separation, and not caring about the borders drawn by the countries that emerged victorious in World War I, nor even those drawn by the countries that emerged victorious from the Cold War (at the beginning of the New American Era).

• Not fatiguing American diplomacy with unsolvable problems by instead proposing superficial solutions.

• Creating political balances and ensuring that the wars only continue if they remain contained and do not threaten to upset these balances.

• Closing the book on spreading democracy in the region because it threatens the stability of allied regimes and because every time elections are held, the result will favor Muslim and Christian religious groups. Previous results have confirmed that religious belonging is more dominant and fundamental than national belonging.

• Exchanging military control over oil for control over the oil market by preventing China and Russia from directly controlling the sources of oil.

• Filling the void left by the American military in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Arab Gulf with an invisible American presence protected by lengthy agreements with their governments and intimate relations with local armies. This keeps the armies weak because the central governments are weak.

• Permanently retaining military strike forces in Central Asia, Turkey and Europe, sufficient to strike any enemy, opponent or half-friend that tries to upset the natural political balances.

• Washington learned the enormous moral and diplomatic price of its apathy for international law after it invaded Baghdad and was forced to beg for U.N. cover. Therefore, it will, through media deception and trickery, use international law to achieve its goals. If that proves impossible, it will resort to unilateral economic, diplomatic, legal and technological sanctions.

• Depending externally on the cover of the U.N. and its forces. Should that fail, America will resort to using the NATO umbrella with international authorization, as is the case in Afghanistan.