A Plea for Mideast Policy Realism
Over the past two decades, a neoconservative-driven foreign policy has led to
strategic disaster after disaster, but neocon belligerence continues to dominate
Official Washington, a dilemma that former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas
W. Freeman addresses.
By Chas W. Freeman
Twenty-six years ago, when the elder President Bush asked me to be his
ambassador to Saudi Arabia, he assured me that “nothing much ever happens in
Arabia.” That had been the case for quite a while. Now no one would refer to any
part of the Middle East even the Arabian Peninsula as a zone of tranquility. It
was a different world back then.
Mistakes made here in Washington had a great deal to do with why and how that
relatively stable world disappeared.
–In 1993, the United States unilaterally replaced reliance on the balance
between Iraq and Iran with so-called “dual containment” of both directly by the
U.S. armed forces. This created an unprecedented requirement for a large, longterm U.S. military presence in the Gulf. That, in turn, stimulated the birth of
anti-American terrorism with global reach. One result: 9/11.
–From 2003 to date, Americans have racked up $6 trillion in outlays and unfunded
liabilities for two wars we have lost. That $6 trillion much of it yet to be
borrowed might otherwise have been invested in America’s human and physical
infrastructure. We live amidst the falling educational standards, collapsing
bridges, man-eating potholes, transportation gridlock, and declining
international competitiveness that are the consequences of our not spending that
money here.
–After 9/11/2001, in America’s zeal to track down and kill our enemies and
terrorize their supporters, we embraced practices like kidnapping, torture, and
political assassination. By doing so, we voluntarily surrendered the moral high
ground the United States had long occupied in world affairs and forfeited our
credentials as exemplars and advocates of human rights.
–Since 2001, Washington has quixotically attempted to exclude both militant
Islam and the Pashtun plurality from a significant role in governing
Afghanistan, while making it safe for homegrown narcocrats. Afghanistan is now a
political debacle, human rights disaster, terrorist training camp, or drug bust
waiting to happen.
–In 2003, the United States decapitated and destabilized Iraq, erasing
inhibitions to sectarian strife there and, ultimately, in Syria as well. This
fostered anarchy and religious extremist movements that have brought untold
suffering to millions, driving them to seek refuge, first in neighboring
countries, then beyond.
–For almost five decades, the United States aided and abetted a fraudulent
“peace process” and the institutionalization of intolerable injustice for the
Arabs of the Holy Land. This enabled Israel to keep expanding but eroded the
Jewish state’s democracy, alienated the majority of the world’s Jews from it,
delegitimized it in the eyes of the international community, gravely damaged its
prospects for domestic tranquility, and placed its long-term survival in doubt.
–In 2011, Americans mistook mob rule in the streets of the Middle East for
democracy and turned our back on leaders we had previously supported. This cost
us our reputation as a reliable ally and helped install incompetent government
in Egypt, state collapse and anarchy in Libya, and civil war in Yemen.
–For most of the past 20 years, Washington demanded that Iran end its nuclear
program but declined to speak with it.
By the time American diplomats finally
did sit down with the Iranians, their program had expanded and advanced.
Despite some rollback, we ended up accepting Iranian nuclear capabilities much
beyond what they had earlier offered.
–Over the course of this decade, instead of a strategy to combat Islamist
violence, the Obama administration executed a campaign plan involving the
promiscuous use of drone warfare.
This multiplied America’s enemies and spread
terrorism to ever more parts of West Asia and North Africa. One result: the socalled “Islamic State” Da’esh now has more foreign recruits than it can induct
or train.
–Since 2011, Americans have put neither our military power nor our money where
our mouths were in Syria. The continued mass death and dislocation there is in
part a result of a uniquely American combination of policy overreach,
operational hesitancy, and ideologically palsied diplomacy. The strife we helped
kindle in Syria (and Iraq) continues to have unforeseen knock-on effects, like
the incubation of Da’esh, the destabilization of the European Union by
overwhelming refugee flows, and the reappearance of Russian power in the Middle
East.
By now, the consequences of multiple U.S. missteps
are obvious to all but the
most determined American partisans of diplomacy-free foreign policy. Our many
bruising encounters with the inconvenient realities of the Middle East should
have taught us a lot about how to conduct or not conduct diplomacy and war, as
well as the limitations of purely military solutions to political problems.
But, for the most part, American politicians and pundits have been more
comfortable reaffirming ideological preconceptions and tendentious partisan
narratives than facing up to what the policies and actions they have advocated
have actually produced and why they did so.
Our continuing misadventures in the Middle East and much of the turmoil there
are consequences of this evasion of any “after-action review” process. The
misadventures began as we still affirmed our fidelity to the United Nations
Charter and international law. They continue amidst our studied disregard of
both.
It has been a quarter century since Saddam Hussein decided to celebrate the end
of the Cold War and his American and Gulf Arab-supported assault on Iran by
invading, looting, and annexing Kuwait. Iraq’s brazen aggression united the
United Nations behind Western and Islamic coalitions that came to Kuwait’s
rescue.
The rescue took place in the name of defending the sovereignty and independence
of the weak and their immunity from bullying or invasion by the strong. That’s
what the UN Charter was meant to guarantee.
Since then, almost no one in American public office has referred to either the
Charter or international law. When President Obama did so in the UN General
Assembly at the end of September, there was stunned silence in the hall as other
countries’ leaders marveled at his chutzpah. He was, after all, extolling
principles Americans once upheld but now refuse to apply to ourselves or our
friends.
The President’s castigation of other great powers for their deviations from the
Charter and international law simply reminded many present of U.S. actions in
Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. These have marked the relapse to a state
of international disorder in which the strong do what they will and the weak
suffer what they must. That was, of course, precisely what the war to liberate
Kuwait was meant to prevent becoming the post Cold War norm.
What might we learn from our continuing misadventures in the Middle East? One
key conclusion is that, just as diplomacy without military backing is hamstrung,
military power, however great, has limited utility and can even be dangerously
counterproductive unless it is informed and accompanied by diplomacy.
We have shown that force can remove regimes. We have seen that it cannot replace
them or the political structures it destroys. Our armed forces can shock, awe,
and vanquish their foes on the battlefield. But we have learned the hard way in
Afghanistan and Iraq that wars do not end until the defeated accept defeat and
stand down their resistance.
Translating military outcomes into lasting adjustments in the behavior of those
we have defeated is the job of diplomats, not warriors. For the most part, we
have not called on our diplomats to do that job.
Judging by the plague of incompetent campaign gerbils and carpetbaggers we
appointed to manage Iraq and Afghanistan after we occupied them, our government
lacks the diplomatic professionalism, expertise, and skills as well as the
politico-military backing and resources needed to craft or sustain peace.
We have no war termination strategies and no one who would know how to implement
them if we did, so America’s wars never end. We have also come to understand
that threats to attack projects like Iran’s nuclear program are more likely to
stiffen the backs of those we are trying to intimidate than to bring them to
their knees.
As the German proverb cautions: “the best enemies are those that make threats.”
Threats offend the pride of their targets even as they menace their
security. Warning that you plan to attack an adversary stimulates military
countermeasures and efforts at deterrence on its part. It also promotes hatred
and bravado, not thoughts of surrender. If you are serious about attacking a
foreign adversary, better get on with it!
But we have learned from studying our options vis-Ã -vis Iran that bombing can
destroy program infrastructure but probably not all of it. Assassination can
murder key project personnel but most likely not all of them. Cyber attacks can
cripple software and even destroy some equipment but they invite retaliation in
kind.
None of these aggressive measures can erase a society’s scientific,
technological, engineering, and mathematical skills. The competencies that
created complex defense programs remain available to reconstitute them.
Short of occupation and pacification, the only way to eliminate or at least
mitigate latent menaces like that of the Iranian nuclear program is through the
negotiation of a binding framework of impartially verified undertakings to
constrain them. That is what we have finally worked out with Iran. But in
negotiations, the perfect is often the enemy of the good and ripe moments soon
rot away.
In 2005, Iran offered a deal. We rejected it, refused to talk to Iran directly,
and doubled down on sanctions. Ten years later, we settled for much less than
what was originally offered. It’s important to know when time is on your side
and when it isn’t. And it’s important to understand what sanctions can do and
what they can’t.
A century ago, Woodrow Wilson declared that “a nation that is boycotted is a
nation that is in sight of surrender. Apply this economic, peaceful, silent,
deadly remedy and there will be no need for force.” We’ve spent a hundred years
testing this alluring theory. It’s now clear that, when he articulated it,
Wilson was out to lunch.
If sanctions are not linked to a diplomatic process aimed at dispute resolution,
they entrench differences rather than bridge them. Our recent experience with
Iran bears this out. So, by the way, do the results of sanctions against Mao’s
China, Kim Il-sung’s North Korea, Castro’s Cuba, and Putin’s Russia.
Sanctions make some people poor and others rich. But, on their own, they neither
bring about regime change nor break the will of foreign nationalists.
Dean Acheson was right when he said: that “to determine the pattern of rulership
in another country requires conquering it. . . . The idea of using commercial
restrictions as a substitute for war in getting control over somebody else’s
country is a persistent and mischievous superstition in the conduct of foreign
affairs.”
Sanctions quite predictably did not suffice to bring about Saddam’s withdrawal
from Kuwait. Air and ground attack were needed to achieve that. Nor could
sanctions topple the regimes in Iraq and Libya. For that, the direct use of
force was required.
Syria has since underscored the reality that sanctions also come up short even
when buttressed by covert action to foment and intensify rebellion. Despite
tough sanctions, ostracism, and multiple foreign-supported insurgencies,
President Bashar al-Assad is still the head of what passes for a national
government in his country.
The case of Iran further buttresses Acheson’s point. Thirty years of escalating
sanctions on Iran did nothing but reinforce its obduracy. Only after the
reopening of direct diplomatic dialogue finally enabled hard bargaining were we
able to trade sanctions relief for restrictions on the Iranian nuclear program.
Ironically, it turns out, the only utility of sanctions in terms of changing
behavior lies in their agreed removal. Imposing them doesn’t accomplish much and
may even be counterproductive. Yet, as a political cheap shot, sanctions,
combined with diatribe and ostracism, remain the preferred response of the
United States to foreign defiance.
That’s because, as someone wise in the ways of Washington once pointed out,
“sanctions always succeed in their principal objective, which is to make those
who impose them feel good.” But gratifying as it may be to politicians trying to
show how tough they are, the pain inflicted by sanctions is meaningless unless
it leads to agreement by their target country to change its policies and
practices.
Agreed change can only be achieved through trade-offs. And these need to be
arranged in negotiations focused on a “yes-able” proposition. Sanctions relief
can be a useful part of the bargaining process. But sanctions that are imposed
to give the appearance of changing behavior without bargaining with those on
whom they are inflicted are diplomatic and military cowardice tarted up as moral
outrage.
Which brings me to our recent experiences with the deployment and use of the
U.S. military in the Middle East. These ought to have taught us a lot about
strategy and the conduct of war as well as what is required to translate the
results of war into a better peace. They have certainly demonstrated beyond a
reasonable doubt that strategic incoherence invites punishment by the
uncontrolled course of events.
A strategy is a plan for actions that can achieve a desired objective with
minimal investment of effort, resources, and time. The objective must be clear
and attainable. The operational concept must be realistic and simple enough to
avoid tripping on itself. To promote efficiency, it should draw on the synergies
of all relevant elements of national and international power
political,
economic, informational, and military.
For a strategy to succeed, the tactics by which it is implemented must be both
feasible and flexible. The strategy must weigh the interests and changing
perceptions of affected parties and consider how best to accommodate, counter,
or correct these.
Since we became a world power 70 years ago, the United States has sought to
sustain stability in the Persian Gulf. A related objective has been to preclude
monopoly control of the region’s energy resources by a hostile power.
We accomplished these tasks successfully for decades without stationing
significant forces in the region by ensuring that Iraq and Iran balanced each
other, by arming the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to buttress
that balance, and by showing that if our friends in the GCC were threatened, we
could arrive in time and with sufficient firepower to defend them. Our strategy
protected the Arab societies of the Gulf at minimal cost, with a minimal U.S.
troop presence, and minimal social or religious friction.
The 1990-1991 Gulf War validated this strategy. The United States led forces
that joined with a Saudi-led coalition to liberate Kuwait and chastise
Iraq. Together, Western and Islamic coalition air forces and armies reduced the
military power of Iraq to levels that enabled it once again to balance Iran
without threatening its other neighbors.
But in 1993, the Clinton administration abruptly abandoned the effort to use
Iraq to balance Iran. With no prior consultation with either the U.S. military
or our security partners in the Gulf, the White House suddenly proclaimed a
policy of “dual containment,” under which the United States undertook
unilaterally to balance both Baghdad and Tehran simultaneously.
This made sense in terms of protecting Israel from either Iraq or Iran, but not
otherwise.
It deprived the Gulf Arabs of a role in determining a low-cost
national security strategy for their region and required the creation of a longterm American military presence in the Gulf.
The irritations that presence entailed gave birth to al Qa`eda and led to
9/11. The subsequent U.S. invasion and destruction of Iraq’s power and
independence from Iran ensured that there was no way to sustain a stable balance
of power in the Gulf that did not require the continuation of a huge, expensive,
and locally burdensome American military presence there. So Americans garrison
the Gulf, and there we will remain.
No one openly questions this situation but no one is comfortable with it. And
with good reason. It is politically awkward for all concerned. It presupposes a
degree of congruity in U.S. and Arab views that no longer exists. And,
notwithstanding the Obama administration’s considerable efforts to allay Gulf
Arab concerns, they suspect that the logic of events in the region could yet
drive America toward rapprochement with Iran and strategic cooperation with it
against Sunni Islamism.
In assessing American reliability, our partners in the Gulf cannot forget what
happened to Hosni Mubarak. Not surprisingly, they want to reduce dependence on
America for their protection as much as they can. This is leading to a lot of
arms purchases and outreach by Saudi Arabia and other GCC members to countries
in Europe as well as China, India and Russia. It has also stimulated assertively
independent foreign policies on their part.
But the capacity of the GCC countries for self-reliance is limited. No matter
how heavily they arm themselves, they cannot match either the population or the
potential for subversive trouble-making that their Iranian adversary and its
fellow travelers possess. Sadly for the GCC, there is no great power other than
the United States with power projection capabilities and an inclination to
protect the Gulf Arab states from external challenges. So there is no escape
from GCC reliance on America.
Meanwhile, however, the apparent contradictions between U.S. interests and
policies and those of our GCC partners are widening. The United States now
asserts objectives in the region that do not coincide with those of most GCC
members. These include support of the Shi`ite-dominated Iraqi government against
its Sunni opposition and assigning priority in Syria to the defeat of Da’esh
over the ouster of President Assad.
U.S. support for the Kurds disturbs our Arab friends as well as our Turkish
ally. America supports the GCC’s military operations in Yemen less out of
conviction than the perceived need to sustain solidarity with Saudi Arabia.
The United States and Gulf Arab governments have in effect agreed to disagree
about the sources of instability in Bahrain and Egypt and how to cure
them. Where a common ideology of anti-communism once united us or caused us to
downplay our disagreements, passionate differences between Americans and Arabs
over Salafism, Zionism, feminism, religious tolerance, sexual mores, and
democratic vs. autocratic systems of governance now openly divide us.
Neither side harbors the sympathy and affection for the other that it once did.
Islamophobia in the United States is matched by disillusionment with America in
the Gulf. But the ultimate sources of mutual discomfort are the strategic
conundrums of what to do about Syria and how to deal with Iran.
Wishful thinking about the region’s strategic geometry and determination to
exclude powerful governments and leaders from participation in the region’s
politics have failed to curb endless warfare, mass flight to safe havens, and
the promotion of extremist ideologies. Diplomatic processes that leave out those
who must agree to an altered status quo or acquiesce in it for it to last are
exercises in public relations flimflam, not serious attempts at problem solving.
No party with proven strength on the ground, however odious, can be ignored. All
parties, including what’s left of the Syrian government led by President Assad
and its external backers, must sign on to a solution for it to take hold. Russia
has just forcefully reinforced this point.
President Putin, not President Obama, now holds the keys to a solution of
Europe’s refugee crisis. As long as one or more of the external and internal
parties in Syria is willing to fight to the last Syrian to get its way, the
anarchy will continue. So will the refugee flows. Assad will remain in power in
part of the country. And Da’esh and its like will flourish in the rest. This
situation is and should be acceptable to no one.
It is almost certainly too late to put the Syrian Humpty Dumpty together
again. The same is likely true of Iraq (as well as Libya). The future political
geography of the Fertile Crescent now looks to be a mosaic of religiously and
ethnically purified principalities, statelets, and thugdoms. If this is indeed
what comes to pass in the region, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and great
powers outside the area will all play destabilizing games aimed at dividing and
ruling it.
Conceivably, Da’esh could forge a viable Levantine “Sunnistan” that balances
both Iran and Israel, but that is hard to imagine and would be unacceptable to
all but the most religiously constipated Salafi Muslims. Even less plausibly,
portions of Iraq and Syria could come together in some sort of federal structure
that can play a regional balancing role.
With Turkey sidelined, Russia doubling down on support for the Assad government
in Syria, and no potential Arab partner available to help balance Iran, the GCC
states have been driven to deconflict some of their Iran policies clandestinely
with Israel. But Israel’s treatment of its captive Arab population and neighbors
makes it morally and politically anathema to other actors in the region.
And Israel’s use of negotiations to deceive its negotiating partners and others
interested in brokering peace for it with the Palestinians and other Arabs has
gained it a worldwide reputation for diplomatic chicanery that it will not soon
live down. As long as it continues to oppress its captive Arab population,
Israel will disqualify itself as any country’s public partner in strategy and
diplomacy in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, in Iraq and Syria, the attempt to use air power to stop Da’esh and
training a ground force to oppose it without fixing the broken political
environment in which extremism flourishes has failed. This should not be a
surprise. Analogous Israeli campaigns against Hamas and Hezbullah had earlier
failed.
The Saudi-led GCC campaign in Yemen is unlikely to prove the exception to the
rule that you can’t accomplish objectives you can’t define. Nor can you
overthrow or install a regime from the air, even when you totally dominate the
airspace.
The Iran nuclear deal shows that diplomacy can solve problems that bombing
cannot. Political problems, including those with a religious dimension to them,
require political solutions. And political solutions depend on politico-military
strategies that inform sound policies.
There is no such strategy or agreed policy for dealing with Iran now that its
nuclear program has been constrained and sanctions will be lifted. The United
States seems to have no clear idea of what it now wants from Iran, and Iran just
wants America to go away.
The GCC would like Iran isolated and contained, as it was before the United
States helped install a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad and connived with
Israel to propel Hezbullah to the commanding heights of Lebanese politics. But
there is no GCC strategy with any prospect of achieving this result. Wars of
religion, not strategy, are shaping the future of the Middle East.
As refugees overwhelm Europe and both Assad and Da’esh continue to hold their
own against the forces arrayed against them, the world is moving toward the
conclusion that any outcome in Syria any outcome at all that can stop the
carnage is better than its continuation. The ongoing disintegration of the
Fertile Crescent fuels extremism; empowers Iran; drives Iran, Iraq, Russia and
Syria together; weakens the strategic position of the GCC; vexes Turkey; and
leaves the United States on a strategic treadmill.
The region seems headed, after still more tragedy and bloodshed, toward an
unwelcome inevitability the eventual acknowledgment of Iran’s hegemony in Iraq
and Syria and political influence in Bahrain, Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen. That is
not where Americans and our Gulf Arab friends imagined we would end up 25 years
after liberating Kuwait from Iraqi aggression. But it is where protracted
strategic incoherence has brought us.
We can no longer avoid considering
whether an opening to Iran is not the key to peace and stability in the Middle
East.
Whatever our answer to that question, the 70-year-old partnership between
Americans and Gulf Arabs has never faced more or greater challenges than at
present. We will not surmount these challenges if we do not both learn from our
mistakes and work together to cope with the unpalatable realities they have
created.
Doing so will require intensified dialogue between us, imagination, and openness
to novel strategic partnerships and alignments. There are new realities in the
Middle East. It does no good to deny or rail against them. We must now adjust to
them and strive to turn them to our advantage.
Chas W. Freeman was U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1989 to 1992.
In 2009, Freeman was the Obama administration’s first choice to chair the
National Intelligence Council, which oversees U.S. intelligence analysis, but
withdrew his name after several weeks of fierce criticism from supporters of
Israel’s foreign policy. His above comments were made in a speech to the 24th
Annual Arab-U.S. Policymakers Conference on Oct. 14, 2015. [Reprinted with the
author’s permission.]