Brigadier General (IDF) Mike Herzog said today, during a discussion at the Brookings Institution about the situation in Lebanon and the rest of the Middle East, that where the Bush administration has failed has been in not exploiting the vulnerabilities of the so-called "evil" leaders of the region it says it wants to remove.
He's right. I believe that the Administration has made a deliberate effort to create enemies who can then be slapped down, to the endless joy of the conservative movement, the authoritarian right, and the Christian "base."
Take Iran. The vulnerability of Iran's "evil" government lies in the dislike the Iranian people for their leaders. As noted elsewhere here, the Bush administration has avoided talking with Iran. A wiser policy would have been to work with the people of Iran who have been generally sympathetic to the US and disgusted, for the most part, with their current leadership. Of course the more the Bush administration, now seen as a bunch of irresponsible madmen, opted for isolating Iran, the more popular support and respect for America has been lost.
This morning on the Diane Rehm show, Flynt Leverett* made an interesting point about how the Bush administration has handled Iran.
Leverett pointed out that the Iranians were talking "quietly to the Bush administration three years ago" and then got slapped down and ignored.
Flynt Leverett: Even earlier than that, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the Iranians came to us and offered cooperation on getting rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan and standing up what became the Karzai government instead. That was really quite important to our initial success in Afghanistan. The Bonn conference in December 2001 where the Karzai government was stood up wouldn't have succeeded without US-Iranian cooperation. But from an Iranian standpoint, what they got in return for that, six weeks later, was to be labelled part of the "axis of evil" in President Bush's January 2002 State of the Union address. The Iranians tried again in the spring of 2003. They send a document to us through the Swiss government. The Swiss are our protecting power in Iran because we don't have any diplomatic presence there. But the Iranians sent in a document which essentially laid out an agenda for a diplomatic process aimed at resolving all of the bilateral differences between the US and Iran. It was sent in and presented to us as having the blessings of all the major power centers in Iran including not just, at the time, President Khatami, but also the Supreme Leader, Ayotollah Khamenei. The Administration's response to this was to complain to the Swiss foreign ministry that the Swiss ambassador in Tehran who received this document and passed it to us was overstepping his bounds. I think what it shows... I think this administration is guided in its approach to state like Iran and Syria by a sense that these regimes are so fundamentally illegitimate there can be no dealing with them. There can be no sense that these states might have, in their own way, some legitimate interests that we can engage and that we can help them with in return for more cooperative behavior toward our goals in the region. I think this is a serious mistake. It basically means that, when there are political problems, there is no channel for managing, much less resolving, them. And the risks of escalation and confrontation go up considerably. I think to a large extent what we've seen in the Middle East over the last six weeks is testament to that.
"My way or the highway" isn't the most effective way of solving political and diplomatic differences and the resulting debacles can't be written off as noble policy failures. "We tried" just doesn't cut it with a growing number of Americans who recognize that it was arrogance and domestic political considerations as much as poor judgment which caused the problems.
*Flynt Leverett is a "senior fellow and director of the Global Energy Initiative at the New America Foundation; author, 'Inheriting Syria: Bashar's Trial by Fire;' former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council; former Middle East expert on the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff; former senior analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency."
