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5 REVAMPING US FOREIGN POLICY, Part
1 Full speed ahead, with
menace By W Joseph Stroupe
emboldening and
rushing Bush on a dash toward furthering his own
foreign-policy goals while he is still in a
position to do so.
Long-overdue success
or hastened failure? But even if Bush had
finally come to the point where he was genuinely
getting in touch with the position of the
electorate and with the reality of the total
incompetence and profound destructiveness of his
fundamentalist-evangelical, ideologically
oriented, militaristic foreign
policy, and even if he genuinely wanted to find a
multilateral and peaceful solution to the Iraq and
wider Middle East crises that employed soft-power
levers, is there any real basis for concluding
that the door of opportunity to such solutions has
not long since slammed irreversibly shut?
The mounting fear is that attempting now
at this late date, in the aftermath of strategic
blunder piled on top of strategic blunder, to
"save" US fortunes in Iraq and the wider Middle
East may be turning out to be an exercise in
futility. US regional/geopolitical fortunes were
massively imperiled, and likely squandered, nearly
four years ago when Washington shoved strategic
alliances and multilateral considerations aside to
occupy Iraq.
When the US and Britain
rushed to the military option first they
simultaneously scorned as contemptible the germ of
traditional, fruitful, multilateral soft-power
strategies and they extraordinarily sowed instead
the seeds of widespread, thorny, noxious "weeds".
How will they now reap instead the tantalizing
mangoes, grapes and pomegranates of strategic
victory and success?
They have little or
no viable chance of doing so. By their distinctly
ham-handed militaristic approach they unleashed
virulently anti-US counter forces and strategies
that have become deeply ingrained across the
region. They virtually locked themselves, the
wider West and the Middle East region itself into
an impasse whose only "solution" is yet additional
military action.
Soft-power levers In the lead-up to the Iraq invasion of 2003,
the Bush and Blair administrations blatantly
dismissed every semblance of genuine
multilateralism and diplomacy and the traditional,
strategically oriented soft-power levers in a
consequences-be-damned dash to heave themselves on
the military levers alone.
For nearly four
years since then they have conceitedly and
overconfidently continued to disregard both
opening and opportunity to extricate themselves
from a mounting quagmire they blindly refused to
acknowledge, snubbing all along the way the
repeated calls to adopt a policy of genuine
engagement of the region's players in a
comprehensive solution.
They have
continued to pursue one-dimensional militarized
"solutions" at the near-total sacrifice of all
their former soft-power standing and leverage.
They have thereby gravely undercut the meaningful
cooperation and confidence of their allies and
deeply alienated their rivals across the region
and beyond.
The US and Britain now occupy
a position of profound weakness as respects any
possession of genuine and compelling
regional/global leverage and they fully own a
miserable negotiating position, and their rivals
(the "evildoers") fully understand how that
provides them the opportunity to capitalize on
US/British misfortunes and weaknesses that are
largely self-inflicted.
In any
negotiations for a grand (or any lesser) solution,
the US and Britain would either be mostly forced
to accept the favorite terms of Iran and Syria or
be left largely unable to verify compliance with
and enforce the better terms of an agreement, even
if they could get a promise from the regional
players to adhere to desirable terms. This is an
eventuality the US and Britain simply cannot
accept because it would further propel Iran toward
its goal of regional ascendancy over the oil-rich
Arab regimes - that is the nightmare scenario for
the West.
Opportunistic and clever Iran
now has the US and Britain pinned into a position
of strategic disadvantage, and it fully knows it.
So do the much larger sponsoring powers Russia and
China. These two have with adroit strategies
employed Iran, Syria and other Middle East
entities as their proxies and willing adherents in
an insidious game to erode further, and even
collapse, the Middle East and global leverage and
influence of the US.
Syria is offering to
"help" the US in Iraq - but it has said the US
must first set a definite date for withdrawal of
its forces from Iraq. Additionally, ascendant Iran
and Syria have massively upstaged a weakened US
and Britain by inviting the Iraqi leadership to a
closed three-way summit to discuss and plot Iraq's
direction. The Iraqi president has accepted the
invitation. These are examples of the kind of
"help" the US can expect from its regional rivals
now that it owns the severely weakened position
described above.
In the view of the Bush
administration, Iran and Syria have already
acquired too much regional influence and leverage
and they are misusing those assets to cut directly
across US interests and goals. To sit down at this
point with them to negotiate an Iraq or wider
Middle East solution would only further elevate
their respectability, position, influence and
leverage and make the US appear as a weak
supplicant by comparison. This would boost Iran
and Syria along the path of achieving regional
control and even dominance.
From the Bush
administration's perspective, the only conditions
under which the two can be brought into
negotiations are that they must first agree
unconditionally to bow to the will of the US on a
