From: Biniam Haile \(SWE\) (eritrea.lave@comhem.se)
Date: Sat Mar 07 2009 - 15:44:49 EST
US Military Dominance in Mideast Proven a Costly Myth
by Gareth Porter
Global Research, March 6, 2009
The arguments for maintaining a major U.S. combat force in Iraq at least
through 2011, escalating U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and
assuming a confrontational stance toward Iran appear to assume that the
United States remains the dominant military power in the region.
But the pattern of recent history and current developments in the region
has not supported that assumption. Not only has the United States been
unable to prevail over stubborn nationalist and sectarian forces
determined to resist U.S. influence, but it has not been able to use its
military supremacy to wage successful coercive diplomacy against Iran.
Furthermore, even the ability of the United States to maintain troops in
Iraq and Afghanistan turns out to be dependent on regimes which are by
no means aligned with the United States.
Six years ago, after the United States had removed the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the U.S. appeared to be
militarily dominant in the region. Apart from its nearly 200,000 troops
in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States had surrounded Iran with a
network of airbases scattered across the region from the Persian Gulf
sheikdoms through Iraq and Afghanistan to the Central Asian republics of
Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, along with aircraft on U.S. ships in the
Persian Gulf.
Since 2003, however, events in the region have dealt a series of blows
to the assumption that the U.S. military presence in general and ground
forces in particular confer real power in the region. The first blow was
the U.S. failure to subdue the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. By mid-2005,
U.S. commanders in Iraq were admitting publicly that the U.S. military
occupation was generating more resistance than it was eliminating.
The next blow was the Sunni-Shi'a civil war in Baghdad in 2006, which
U.S. troops were unable to prevent or stop, even after the Bush "surge"
of additional troops. The "cleansing" of Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad
by Shi'a militias with the tacit support of the government ended only
after a large swath of Sunni neighborhoods in the capital had been taken
over. That fact contradicts the later boast by Gen. Ray Odierno, the top
U.S. commander in Iraq, that "coalition forces" had "broken the cycle of
sectarian violence in Iraq."
The decision by Sunni insurgents to cooperate with the U.S. military in
2006 and 2007 was not the result of U.S. military prowess but of their
defeat at the hands of Shi'a militias and the realization that the
Sunnis could not oppose three enemies (the U.S., the Shi'a militias and
al Qaeda) simultaneously.
It also enabled the Shi'a government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki,
which had close ties to Iran, to consolidate its power and to achieve a
crucial degree of independence from the United States.
The George W. Bush administration and the U.S. military command
continued to assume that it would be able to keep its Iraqi bases
indefinitely. In mid-2007, Defense Secretary Robert Gates invoked the
Korean model - a decades-long garrisoning of tens of thousands of U.S.
troops - as the plan for Iraq.
But in July 2008, the al-Maliki government began demanding that all U.S.
troops leave the country by the end of 2010. After initially refusing to
believe that the troop withdrawal demand was serious, the Bush
administration was forced eventually to agree to withdraw all U.S.
troops by the end of 2011.
The evolution of Iraqi politics belies the popular narrative that Gen.
David Petraeus miraculously rescued the U.S. war from a bad strategy and
ultimately prevailed over U.S. "enemies," including Iran.
In its conflict with Iran over its nuclear program, the Bush
administration tried to intimidate Tehran by seizing Iranians in Iraq
and wielding indirectly the threat of attack against its nuclear
facilities. But coercive diplomacy did not work, largely because Iran
could credibly threaten to respond to a U.S. or Israeli attack with
unconventional attacks against U.S. bases and troops - and possibly even
warships - in the Persian Gulf region.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, where the United States had appeared to be in
control from 2001 to 2005, the Taliban and other insurgent groups have
grown rapidly since then and become the de facto government in large
parts of the Pashtun region of the country. The U.S. military presence
has been unable to slow the rise of the insurgents in those rural areas.
The most recent blow to the image of U.S. military dominance in the
region has been the revelation that the United States lacks a reliable
access route for supply of its troops in Afghanistan. The U.S. military
has long relied on the route through the Khyber Pass in Pakistan to
transport about 80 percent of all supplies for Afghanistan.
But in 2008, allies of the Taliban began disrupting the U.S. logistics
route through the Khyber Pass so effectively that it could not longer be
counted on to supply U.S. forces. That meant that United States had to
find another access route for supplying its troops in Afghanistan.
David Petraeus, the new CENTCOM commander, traveled to Central Asia to
secure promises of a new route into Afghanistan from Russian ports
overland to Kazakhstan and then through Uzbekistan to northern
Afghanistan.
But this alternative scheme would rely on Russian cooperation, giving a
rival for power in Central and Southwest Asia a veto power over U.S.
military presence in the region. The Kyrgyz president announced during a
trip to Moscow in early February that he was ending the agreement on
U.S. use of the air base at Manas. That was a signal that Russia would
cooperate with the U.S. military only insofar as it was consistent with
Russian dominance in Central Asia.
Relying on Uzbekistan for transit of NATO supplies for Afghanistan was
another highly tenuous feature of the Petraeus plan. The Karimov regime,
notorious for its abuse of human rights, faces an Islamist insurgency
that could well disrupt supply routes through the country.
A much shorter and far more secure route into Afghanistan would be from
the Iranian port of Chabahar through the Western Afghan city of Herat to
the Ring Highway which serves all major Afghan cities. NATO's top
commander in Afghanistan said on Feb. 3 that NATO would "not oppose"
bilateral deals with Iran for supplying troops through that country.
Significantly, the Pentagon has made contingency plans for the use of
the Iranian route, according to one well-informed former U.S. official.
That suggests that the Russian-Central Asian route was regarded as far
from certain.
On the other hand, the U.S. military is not likely to regard reliance on
its regional rival for power in the Middle East as a solid basis for its
military presence in Afghanistan.
Obama administration officials are still talking about Middle East
policy as though the U.S. military presence has conferred decisive
influence over developments in the region. However, the events of the
past six years have shown that to be a costly myth. They have underlined
a truth that few in Washington find palatable: geography and local
sociopolitical dynamics have trumped U.S. military power - and are very
likely continue to do so in the future.
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