POLITICS-MIDEAST:
The Praxis of Upheaval
Analysis - By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 14 (IPS) - ''Whenever I hear policy makers talk about the wonders of 'stability', I get the heebie-jeebies,'' wrote Michael Ledeen, a ''scholar'' at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in early 2000. ''That is for tired old Europeans and nervous Asians, not for us.''
''In just about everything we do, from business and technology to cinema and waging war, we are the most revolutionary force on earth. We are not going to fight foreign wars or send our money overseas merely to defend the status quo; we must have a suitably glorious objective,'' said the former ''anti-terrorism'' consultant for Italian military intelligence and the Reagan administration, who is now counted among the very few foreign policy analysts regularly consulted by Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's political eyes and ears at the White House.
Ledeen, a long-time associate of office-mate and Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, with whom he founded the right-wing Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs (JINSA), is so excited about the impending invasion of Iraq and its regional implications that he can scarcely contain himself.
''As soon as we land in Iraq, we're going to face the whole terrorist network,'' he told the latest edition of 'The American Prospect' magazine, meaning not only al-Qaeda, Lebanon's Hezbollah, the Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but also Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia - what he calls ''the terror masters''. ''I think we're going to be obliged to fight a regional war, whether we want to or not,'' Ledeen added.
''It may turn out to be a war to remake the world,'' he told the Prospect's Robert Dreyfuss.
Ledeen, like his fellow-neo-conservatives in and out of the Bush administration, such as Perle and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, insists that Iraq will be the first ''domino'' to fall in what will become a democratic revolution that will spread the blessings of liberty and representative government across the Arab Middle East.
Indeed, Bush himself adopted that as the official position of the U.S. government three weeks ago in a major policy address at, not insignificantly, AEI itself. ''A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region,'' he told Ledeen, Perle, and their fellow-neo-cons.
But the overwhelming consensus among Middle East experts both inside and outside the government is that such hopes bear no relation whatsoever to an achievable reality. According to one intelligence official, restoring a strong central government in Baghdad would be the best that could realistically be hoped for.
Indeed, the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research circulated a classified report to top policymakers entitled 'Iraq, the Middle East and Change: No Dominoes', which, according to one unnamed official quoted in the 'Los Angeles Times' on Friday, concludes that the notion of a regional democratic transformation is ''not credible''.
The bureau's conclusion, which is said to reflect the views of most Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts as well, also echoes the views of independent analysts and retired diplomats who have spoken out against the current policy and its optimistic assumptions.
''It may be excusable as a fantasy of some Israelis reacting to the trauma of the second intifada,'' said Anthony Cordesman, the normally taciturn Mideast specialist at the conservative Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) here last September. ''As American policy, however, it crosses the line between neo-conservative and neo-crazy.''
''The idea of instant democratic transformation in the Middle East is a mirage,'' asserted four veteran democracy and regional specialists at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Besides, they concluded, ''If a tidal wave of political change actually came to pass, the United States would not be even remotely prepared to cope with the resulting instability.''
Indeed, the consensus position among regional specialists is that, if anything, a U.S. invasion will likely bring instability throughout the region.
''Democratic imperialism promises not only to liberate the Arabs from despotic rule but also to unleash the sectarian, ethnic and ideological animosities that historically have torn them apart'', warned Richard Joseph, a Mideast scholar at the University of Texas, in a recent Financial Times column.
But as frightening a prospect as that may be, it may not be totally unattractive to neo-conservatives like Perle, Ledeen, Wolfowitz and his deputy, Douglas Feith, as one might imagine.
In fact, some analysts here have begun to suggest that, in the probable event that democracy does not sweep the region, the default option - fragmentation and disintegration of Arab states - corresponds all too neatly to the long-held dreams of some on the Israeli right with which the neo-conservatives have long been closely linked.
Such a scenario was spelled out in an influential article published on the eve of Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 by Oded Yinon, who at that time was attached to Israel's foreign ministry.
Published by the World Zionist Organisation, the paper, 'A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s', urged policies that promote the dissolution of Arab states into different ethnic and sectarian groupings, and expressed the hope that the then-raging war between Iran and Iraq would result in the break-up of the latter into at least three states for the three major groups - Kurds, Sunnis, and Shi'ites.
According to veteran Israeli peace activist and former Knesset member, Uri Avnery, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who led Israel's ultimately disastrous invasion of Lebanon shortly after Yinon published his piece, entertained some of the same ideas at the time.
''(Sharon's) head was full of grand designs for restructuring the Middle East, the creation of an Israeli 'security zone' from Pakistan to Central Africa, the overthrow of regimes and installing others in their stead, moving a whole people (the Palestinians) and so forth,'' he wrote last Fall.
''I can't help it, but the winds blowing now in Washington remind me of Sharon. I have absolutely no proof that the Bushies got their ideas from him, even if all of them seem to have been mesmerised by him.''
It may not have been necessary, because Perle, Feith, and David Wurmser, who now works on post-invasion Iraq in the State Department, and other neo-cons were already working on a related scenario in 1996 when they prepared a memorandum for Sharon's Likud rival, former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. In addition to the idea of ousting Saddam Hussein and restoring the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, the paper touted re-establishing the ''principle of pre-emption'' against Syria and threats in Lebanon in part by securing alliances with different ethnic and tribal groups there.
In the end, the administration and its neo-con members and cheerleaders may prefer a democratisation of the region over destabilisation and possible fragmentation of the Arab world, but the default option, in their eyes, is not necessarily a bad one.
''It's a war to turn the kaleidoscope, by people who know nothing about the Middle East,'' a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman, told the Prospect. ''And there's no way to know how the pieces will fall.''
(END/2003)
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