The Coming Collapse of the Middle East? By Fred Kaplan. Slate, March 11, 2013.
Kaplan:
On Feb.
26, 2003, President George W. Bush gave a speech at the American Enterprise
Institute, spelling out what he saw as the link between freedom and security in
the Middle East. “A liberated Iraq,” he said, “can show the power of freedom to
transform that vital region” by serving “as a dramatic and inspiring example …
for other nations in the region.”
He
invaded Iraq three weeks later. The spread of freedom wasn’t the war’s driving
motive, but it was considered an enticing side effect, and not just by Bush.
His deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, had mused the previous fall
that the spark ignited by regime-change “would be something quite significant
for Iraq . . . It’s going to cast a very large shadow, starting with Syria and
Iran, but across the whole Arab world.”
Ten
years later, it’s clear that the Iraq war cast “a very large shadow” indeed,
but it was a much darker shadow than the fantasists who ran American foreign
policy back then foresaw. Bush believed that freedom was humanity’s natural state:
Blow away the manhole-cover that a tyrant pressed down on his people, and
freedom would gush forth like a geyser. Yet when Saddam Hussein was toppled,
the main thing liberated was the blood hatred that decades of dictatorship had
suppressed beneath the surface.
Bush
had been warned. Two months before the invasion, during Super Bowl weekend,
three prominent Iraqi exiles paid a visit to the Oval Office. They were
grateful and excited about the coming military campaign, but at one point in
the meeting they stressed that U.S. forces would have to tamp down the
sectarian tensions that would certainly reignite between Sunnis and Shiites in
the wake of Saddam’s toppling. Bush looked at the exiles as if they were
speaking Martian. They spent much of their remaining time, explaining to him
that Iraq had two kinds of Arabs, whose quarrels dated back centuries. Clearly,
he’d never heard about this before.
Many of
Bush’s advisers did know something about this, but not as much as anyone
launching a war in Iraq, and thus overhauling the country’s entire political
order, should have known.
