Ever-widening ripples from the failed occupation in Iraq threaten to overwhelm the Middle East, writes Ayman El-Amir* The Middle East is on the brink of disaster and the United States is looking for someone to save its failing strategy in the region. After 43 months of war and occupation the Bush administration is watching civil war unfold in Iraq before its very eyes. To the west across Syria, dark clouds of confrontation are gathering over divided Lebanon. In Palestine, attempts by the US and Israel to unseat the democratically- elected Hamas government have led to a Palestinian stalemate that made the chances of a peaceful settlement with Israel ever more remote. Despite the best efforts of the US to contain Iran, the latter's star is ascending higher on the Middle Eastern horizon. The US-led initiative for reform in the broader Middle East has lost its momentum, as evidenced by the third round of the Forum for the Future held in Jordan last week. Tensions are rising in the region and the Bush administration's Middle Eastern strategy is in tatters. President Bush and the few surviving members of his war cabinet are feeling increasingly nervous under the gaze of the new barons on Capitol Hill. Democratic Party congressmen and senators are pushing for a change of policy in Iraq that will bring the troops home. The pressure will mount further as the bi-partisan Iraq Study Group (ISG), headed by former Secretary of State James Baker and Congressman Lee Hamilton, issues its recommendations. Some of the leaked recommendations would call for the removal of some US troops away from combat operations and the redeployment of others to other regional or home bases. Other recommendations would urge for the engagement of Syria and Iran in the settlement of the Iraqi civil war -- a public recognition of the influence the two regional players wield and which President Bush is loath to acknowledge. In a pre-emptive move, President Bush scurried to Jordan to meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki to negotiate US troop disengagement from their security role. Soon afterwards Al-Maliki announced that, come June 2007, Iraqi security forces would be able to take full responsibility for security. However, the prime minister had already undermined his own position at home by meeting with President Bush against the advice of one of his key allies, Shia leader Moqtada Al-Sadr. As President Bush lost his Republican majority in Congress, Al-Maliki is also losing part of the Shia majority that brought him to power in Iraq. Moreover, his commitment to assume full security responsibility was doubted in advance by US National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley. To offset the recommended engagement of Syria and Iran, the Bush administration called for an international conference on Iraq, a call echoed by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. However, this possibility was quashed by the pro-Iran influential leader of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Abdel-Aziz Al-Hakim, who said it would be illogical, illegal and unconstitutional. Iraqi president Jalal Talibani also dismissed it. Al-Hakim met with President Bush in Washington on 4 December in a move to explore the possibility of opening an informal channel for dialogue between Washington and Tehran -- a tacit recognition that salvaging the US misadventure in Iraq requires the help of Iran. Al-Hakim rejected all regional or international intervention that would dilute dominant Shia majority rule in Iraq. Lebanon, too, is teetering on the edge. Compared to the wanton sectarian violence the US invasion unleashed in Iraq, sectarian division in Lebanon is calibrated and institutionalised. Rigid sectarian balance protected by the self-interest of feudal lords and their militias has ruled Lebanon since the Druze-Maronite massacres of 1822 -- a balance that was enshrined in the 1926 constitution as amended in 1943. The present crisis is not, therefore, the result of a Syria-Iran axis wanting to scorch Lebanon's earth under the feet of the Americans and their local surrogates. For much of its history, Lebanon has been the playground of Western and regional powers who created local affiliations based on sectarian and feudal interests. Modern Lebanon is a small and flourishing democracy that is precariously poised on feet of clay. The sectarian formula, frozen in place for decades, is no longer workable, does not reflect demographic reality nor provides for equal economic opportunity. This reality was brought to the fore by Hizbullah's battering of the superior Israeli military machine in the July-August showdown this year. The multi-sectarian sit-in protest by the Lebanese opposition in central Beirut that started last week has put Prime Minister Fouad Al-Seniora's parliamentary majority-backed government in the minority. The protesters were demanding a national unity government that would reflect a fair share of power or early elections. Conservative Arab regimes that have considerable investment interests to protect in Lebanon, or fear a political backlash in their own countries, have sided with the US and France against the Lebanese protest movement. As the confrontation between Lebanese protesters and the government escalates, the proposed exit strategy allowing for dialogue or a parliamentary vote of confidence that would reconfirm the Al-Seniora government is at a dead-end. Arab mediation may or may not defuse the running crisis but will fail to address fundamental problems of the Lebanese political model. This will require a different approach -- the convening of a constituent assembly that would review the constitution and the country's body politics, independent of extraneous influences, sectarian quotas and foreign affiliations. The lessons of the 1975-79 Lebanese civil war should not be missed again. In commenting on the Lebanese situation, following his visit to Prime Minister Al-Seniora on 2 December, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told the press, "this government won an election and has the majority in parliament and therefore whoever wants to keep democracy in this country can't allow this government to be called into question in the streets." Likewise, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressed similar support in a phone call to Al-Seniora. Strangely enough, this political standard does not hold for the Hamas-led Palestinian government of Prime Minister Ismail Hanyieh -- a different creature by Western moral-political values. Since it came to power following the January 2006 legislative elections, the Hanyieh government has been confronted with the US-inspired political boycott, economic embargoes and an Israeli-imposed siege designed push it over the edge because of the politics in which Hamas is grounded. Israel and the US have fuelled Hamas-Fatah factional in-fighting, starved the Palestinian people in Gaza to trigger rebellion against the Hamas government and pressured the malleable President Mahmoud Abbas to oust it because it would not accept the Quartet gift-wrapped Israeli conditions. Should the US and Israel push the Hamas-led government to the wall, with assistance from some Arab leaders, they may trigger a third Palestinian Intifada, as Hamas's politburo Chief Khaled Meshsaal has warned in Cairo. The Palestinian- Israeli peace process is at stake. To ease the economic strangulation of the Palestinians, Qatar offered to pay the salaries of an estimated 40,000 Palestinian education workers and possibly some 1,200 health workers. One year after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the US unveiled a masterplan for reform in the Middle East -- the Greater Middle East Initiative. A free, democratic and prosperous Iraq, reformed by the invasion, was supposed to be the flagship of this movement. It was later downgraded by the G8 summit meeting in June 2004 at Sea Island, Georgia, to become the Broader Middle East and North Africa Partnership that would involve the G8 countries and other partners, including Pakistan and Afghanistan. It was aimed at strengthening the political, economic and social reform in the countries of "the broader Middle East". The initiative's Third Forum for the Future concluded its meetings at the Dead Sea in Jordan a few days ago with a bland statement on the need to continue reform and to resolve the Palestinian problem. It was clear to all participants that the initiative that had initially provoked so much controversy was spiralling downward to a talking shop, now that the Iraq model has failed. Former President Jimmy Carter, more of a statesman in retirement than many of the US presidents who followed him, has bluntly put it that way: "the invasion of Iraq and all its consequences is one of the greatest blunders a president has ever made." The raging civil war in Iraq has cost hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and US casualties, billions of dollars worth of destruction and increasing destabilisation of the region. A cost-benefit analysis would inevitably conclude that Iraq under Saddam Hussein's repressive regime fared much better than liberated, democratic but divided and unstable Iraq under US occupation. With the scurrying now taking place in Washington, London and Paris, and a half dozen Arab capitals, a big sign hangs across the region, wondering "What went wrong in the Middle East?" The question may persuade the Bush administration and its allies to stop pontificating, and start listening. * The writer is former corespondent for Al-Ahram in Washington, DC. He also served as director of United Nations Radio and Television in New York.
