The Bush Strategy's Failure
    By Gilles Kepel
    Le Monde

    Tuesday 08 August 2006

    The stakes of the new war Israel is conducting simultaneously in both Lebanon and the Gaza Strip far exceed those of the armed clashes chronically opposing the Hebrew state and its Arab neighbors since 1948.

    The war ratifies the failure of the Bush administration to secure the Middle East through unilateral use of force after the fiasco of the Iraq occupation - while the region's two great fault lines, which run through the Israeli-Palestinian question and the tension in the Gulf, now join in preparation of earthquakes to come. By overthrowing the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and promoting the democratization of the Middle East, the "war against terror" had, in fact, the mission of pacifying this recalcitrant part of the world - which would have no other choice than to bend to the benevolent hegemony of the United States - for good.

    "The road to Jerusalem goes through Baghdad," people were saying in Washington, meaning that the Palestinians, deprived of the support of a stunned Arab world and conquered in the Second Intifada, would resign themselves to the conditions of an Ariel Sharon who systematically destroyed the Palestinian Authority's infrastructure before evacuating Gaza, and would elect an accommodating majority party in February 2006.

    We know the result - from Hamas's victory to its gag order, from the kidnapping of Corporal Shalit to the return of IDF tanks to Gaza.

    During that time, in Iraq, the United States got further bogged down in the face of the Sunni insurrection, while in Tehran - the main support for the Shiite religious parties - President Ahmadinejad seized that political opportunity to assert his nuclear ambitions, all the while calling for "Israel to be wiped off the map." The missiles of Iran's Lebanese prot g , Hezbollah, that beat down on Haifa are, in the eyes of Israeli public opinion, a foretaste of that objective and mean that the roads of Haifa and Tel-Aviv run through Tehran. They are also proof of the inability of Washington, bogged down in Baghdad, to guarantee its principal ally's security.

    For its part, Israel plunges into the abyss of a country the government of which, originating - with Washington and Paris' support - from the Spring 2005 "Cedar revolution," had freed itself from Syria's tutelage. Beirut, in its turn, is learning the bitter lesson that the American alliance is not a security guarantee.

    By posing as the champion of resistance in the region to the United States' policies and as the Hebrew state's adversary through the interposition of Hezbollah, Tehran leaves the leaders of most Arab states out on a limb. But in Arab cities, the demonstrations of solidarity with victim-Lebanon highlight Sheikh Nasrallah's portrait, while Al Jazeera offers him three hours of interview - consecrating the secretary general of the Shiite "Party of God" as the hero of Sunni crowds and television watchers. An ecumenism against the "Zionist enemy" that comes just in time to wash clean Iraq's Shiites - even in the eyes of the Sunni - of the accusation of collusion with the American occupation.

    Such a disaster for the security policy implemented by the United States in the Middle East does not come unattended: democratic engineering, which was supposed to bring the "war against terror" to conclusion by bearing Western-loving civil society elites to power has translated, in most of the countries where free or semi-free elections have taken place, into significant gains or victory for anti-Western Islamist parties from Iran to Palestine, including Kuwait, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.

    These successes were motivated by the voters' refusal to ratify a unilateral American policy, the inanity of which they see daily on Arab satellite television channels, where preachers vituperate from the small screen, calling for jihad to liberate Islam's lands from the domination of infidels and glorifying the "martyrs" who die in suicide-attacks.

    Since then, democratization is no longer a priority for Washington, to the great relief of authoritarian regimes, and to the bitterness of the Middle East's democrats, who deem themselves all the more betrayed in that in the only country where elections did not result in an Islamist victory - Lebanon, excepting Hezbollah's success in Shiite ballot boxes - the United States did nothing to protect its territory in the face of Israeli strikes and is in no hurry to demand a cease-fire.

    >From this general discomfiture, several lessons emerge that condition the future of a region crucial to the planet - which cannot forgo the hydrocarbons principally produced by the Middle East for a single day. Security, which rests on a balance of forces, must translate into negotiation and a taking into account of the interests of communities or peoples in situations of weakness - otherwise they risk becoming free radicals.

    Israel's destruction of the Palestinian Authority brought on Hamas's victory; the American occupier's marginalization of Iraq's Sunnis - the insurrection. These security guarantees cannot be furnished by the United States alone, but must involve the states of the region and of Europe.

    In this regard, the deployment of an international force to the Israeli-Lebanese border to prepare it for control by the Lebanese army in application of Resolution 1559 will be a test of the international community's ability.

    The combining of the Israeli-Arab crisis and the Gulf crisis is the other major challenge. For the moment, it makes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran one of the main beneficiaries of the situation, creating a destabilization threat for the Arabian peninsula, the leaders of which fear a return to the Messianism of the Khomeini era.

    The uncoupling of the two crises can only happen if international guarantees for the security of the Gulf - in the waters of which tankers from all countries transit - are established. Beyond its belligerent rhetoric, Tehran is staking its all: it knows that it cannot achieve civilian nuclear power if it doesn't negotiate a regional security pact with its neighbors and the great powers.

    In this domain, the European initiative is the only one capable of stopping the spiral of one-upsmanship and of promoting long-term structural changes in Tehran - without which there will be no escape from a military confrontation that will take the entire world hostage by endangering its supply of hydrocarbons.

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    Gilles Kepel is a professor at Sciences Po-Paris (Middle-East Mediterranean Chair).