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From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Fri Feb 11 2011 - 21:26:20 EST
consortiumnews.com
US-Israeli Strategy Crashes in Egypt
By Gareth Porter
February 1, 2011
*Edit**or’s Note: Since 1978, President Jimmy Carter’s Camp David peace
accords, which ended hostilities between Egypt and Israel, has created space
for a possible long-term settlement of the Middle East conflict, but
hardliners in Washington and Israel successfully rallied to prevent any
further territorial concessions by Israel to the Arabs.*
*Now that three-decade period is coming to a crashing end with the impending
collapse of Egypt’s dictatorship and the start of a new and uncertain
future, as Gareth Porter notes in this guest article:*
The death throes of the Mubarak regime in Egypt signal a new level of crisis
for a U.S. Middle East strategy that has shown itself over and over again in
recent years to be based on nothing more than the illusion of power.
The incipient loss of the U.S. client regime in Egypt is an obvious moment
for a fundamental adjustment in that strategy. But those moments have been
coming with increasing regularity in recent years, and the U.S. national
security bureaucracy has shown itself to be remarkably resistant to giving
it up.
The troubled history of that strategy suggests that it is an expression of
some powerful political forces at work in this society, as former NSC
official Gary Sick hinted in a commentary on the crisis.
Ever since the Islamic Republic of Iran was established in 1979, every U.S.
administration has operated on the assumption that the United States, with
Israel and Egypt as key client states, occupies a power position in the
Middle East that allows it to pursue an aggressive strategy of unrelenting
pressure on all those "rogue" regimes and parties in the region which have
resisted dominance by the U.S.-Israeli tandem: those “rogues” are Iran,
Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas.
The Bush administration's invasion of Iraq was only the most extreme
expression of that broader strategic concept. It assumed that the United
States and Israel could establish pro-Western regime in Iraq as the base
from which it would press for the elimination of resistance from any of
their remaining adversaries in the region.
But since that more aggressive version of the strategy was launched, the
illusory nature of the regional dominance strategy has been laid bare in one
country after another.
--The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq merely empowered Shi'a forces to
form a regime whose geostrategic interests are far closer to Iran than to
the United States.
--The U.S.-encouraged Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006 only strengthened
the position of Hezbollah as the largest, most popular and most disciplined
political-military force in the country, leading ultimately to the
Hezbollah-backed government now being formed.
--Israeli and U.S. threats to attack Iran, Hezbollah and Syria since 2006
brought an even more massive influx of rockets and missiles into Lebanon and
Syria which now appears to deter Israeli aggressiveness toward its
adversaries for the first time.
--U.S.-Israeli efforts to create a client Palestinian entity and crush Hamas
through the siege of Gaza has backfired, strengthening the Hamas claim to be
the only viable Palestinian entity.
--The U.S. insistence on demonstrating the effectiveness of its military
power in Afghanistan has only revealed the inability of the U.S. military to
master the Afghan insurgency.
And now the Mubarak regime is in its final days. As one talking head after
another has pointed out, it has been the lynchpin of the U.S. strategy. The
main function of the U.S. client state relationship with Egypt was to allow
Israel to avoid coming to terms with Palestinian demands.
The costs of the illusory quest for dominance in the Middle East have been
incalculable.
By continuing to support Israeli extremist refusal to seek a peaceful
settlement, trying to prop up Arab authoritarian regimes that are friendly
with Israel and seeking to project military power in the region through both
airbases in the Gulf States and a semi-permanent bases in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the strategy has assiduously built up long-term antagonism
toward the United States and pushed many throughout the Islamic world to
sympathize with Al Qaeda-style jihadism.
It has also fed Sunni-Shi'a tensions in the region and created a crisis over
Iran's nuclear program.
Although this is clearly the time to scrap that Middle East strategy, the
nature of U.S. national security policymaking poses formidable obstacles to
such an adjustment Bureaucrats and bureaucracies always want to hold on to
policies and programs that have given them power and prestige, even if those
policies and programs have been costly failures.
Above all, in fact, they want to avoid having to admit the failure and the
costs involved. So they go on defending and pursuing strategies long after
the costs and failure have become clear.
An historical parallel to the present strategy in the Middle East is the
Cold War strategy in East Asia, including the policy of surrounding,
isolating and pressuring the Communist Chinese regime.
As documented in my own history of the U.S. path to war in Vietnam, *Perils
of Dominance*, the national security bureaucracy was so committed to that
strategy that it resisted any alternative to war in South Vietnam in
1964-65, because it believed the loss of South Vietnam would mean the end of
Cold War strategy, with its military alliances, client regimes and network
of military bases surrounding China.
It was only during the Nixon administration that the White House wrested
control of national security policy from the bureaucracy sufficiently to
scrap that Cold War strategy in East Asia and reach an historic
accommodation with China.
The present strategic crisis can only be resolved by a similar political
decision to reach another historical accommodation – this time with the
"resistance bloc" in the Middle East.
Despite the demonization of Iran and the rest of the "resistance bloc,"
their interests on the primary issue of al Qaeda-like global terrorism have
long been more aligned with the objective security interests of the United
States than those of some regimes with which the United States has been
allied (e.g., Saudi Arabia and Pakistan).
Scrapping the failed strategy in favor of an historic accommodation in the
region would:
--reduce the Sunni-Shi'a geopolitical tensions in the region by supporting a
new Iran-Egypt relationship;
--force Israel to reconsider its refusal to enter into real negotiations on
a Palestinian settlement;
--reduce the level of antagonism toward the United States in the Islamic
world;
--create a new opportunity for agreement between the United States and Iran
that could resolve the nuclear issue.
It will be far more difficult, however, for the United States to make this
strategic adjustment than it was for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to
secretly set in motion their accommodation with China.
Unconditional support for Israel, the search for client states and
determination to project military power into the Middle East, which are
central to the failed strategy, have long reflected the interests of the two
most powerful domestic U.S. political power blocs bearing on national
security policy: the pro-Israel bloc and the militarist bloc.
Whereas Nixon and Kissinger were not immobilized by fealty to any such power
bloc, both the pro-Israel and militarist power blocs now dominate both
parties in the White House as well as in Congress.
One looks in vain for a political force in this country that is free to
press for fundamental change in Middle East strategy. And without a push
for such a change from outside, we face the distinct possibility of a
national security bureaucracy and White House continuing to deny the
strategy's utter failure and disastrous consequences.
*Gareth Porter is an investigative journalist and historian and the author
of Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in
Vietnam<http://www.amazon.com/Perils-Dominance-Imbalance-Power-Vietnam/dp/0520250044/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1289488823&sr=8-1>.
He has written regularly for Inter Press Service on U.S. policy toward Iran
and Iran since 2005.***
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