Actually, Recent Middle East Developments Are Good for the U.S.

I'm having a difficult time understanding what Stephen Walt means by this:

[Wednesday] we learn that Iran is resupplying the Assad regime in Syria via Iraqi airspace. Hardly surprising, for two reasons. First, Syria is a key Iranian ally, so naturally Iran is doing what it can to keep Assad in power. Second, the al-Maliki government is not nearly as anti-Iranian as Saddam Hussein was, and in some ways is sympathetic to Tehran's position. 

All of which reminds us what dunderheads the neocons were when they dreamed up the idea of invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein. Of course, all those liberal hawks who eventually went along with the idea were nearly as foolish.

No, this is not nostalgia for Saddam Hussein. He was a thug and tyrant with as much blood on his hands as Assad, and I don't mourn either his ouster or his passing. But the negative consequences have been enormous, in lives and money and in geopolitical position, as this latest revelation makes clear.

Emphasis added. The situation that Walt believes indicates that the U.S.'s geopolitical position has been enormously weakened is one in one which its primary rivals in the region (Iraq) has been turned into a weakened neutral state, in which another of its rivals (Iran) has has faced massive internal dissent from the Green Revolution, in which the regime of Iran's chief regional ally is under grave threat from within and without, in which the broader region is undergoing a spasm of democratization, in which the U.S. has been largely successful in working with its allies to build up a strong sanctions regime to hamper Iran, in which the U.S. was able to work with NATO to intervene in Libya (thus preventing the worst of the possible outcomes from occurring), in which nearly all of the terrorist networks that have threatened the U.S. and its allies -- as well as the governments which sponsored or at least tolerated them -- have been dismantled or are in disarray, in which the U.S. is less dependent on the region for energy supply than it has been in decades, and in which the U.S. is able to laugh off a threat from Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz.

How does any of this indicate that the geopolitical position of the U.S. has been weakened? The U.S.'s antagonists are quite literally fighting for their lives, the neocon goal of regional democratization is underway -- albeit not in the way they had expected -- and the broader transformation of the region is proceeding in a direction that is amenable to the U.S.'s long-term interests. The Middle East is less engaged in proliferation than it was a decade ago, Tehran's intransigence notwithstanding. There are fewer security dilemmas in operation than at any point in decades. Moreover, the frictions that many believed had developed between the U.S. and its NATO allies over Iraq appear to have been transitory rather than permanent.


Yet Walt believes that the fact that Iran is cutting through Iraqi airspace in a desperate attempt to keep its primary ally from being decapitated is more telling than all of that. Excuse me?


Put in a way that a realist should understand, it is obvious enough that the relative power gap between the U.S. and its rivals in the Middle East has widened over the past decade, not narrowed. A region of the world that has troubled the U.S. since World War II has now lost enough significance for the U.S. to "pivot" away from it to East Asia. In a short time the U.S. has shown some capacity to work with several newly-democratized governments, laying the groundwork for productive relationships moving forward.

Think back ten years. If you had asked neocons then what the best possible outcome for the next decade of the Middle East, they would probably have listed some of the following: a general process of regional democratization; governments which refuse to democratize face fierce internal opposition movements and strong external pressure from the international community; Hussein, Gaddafi, Mubarak, Saleh and Ben Ali all removed from power, while the grip of Assad and Khameini is tenuous; al-Qaeda dismembered and other terrorist networks contained; Pakistan outed as a basketcase; and where the NATO force has shown a willingness to collaborate in support of political reform throughout the region. Seriously... read the Project for a New American Century's "Statement of Principles" and tell me which recent developments in the Middle East contradict them.

Certainly not everything is wine and roses, but neither was it a decade ago. Certainly things could change for the worse in the future, but at a fundamental level recent developments in the Middle East have a high probability of benefiting the U.S. over the long-run. Perhaps quite a lot. From the perspective of the U.S.'s geopolitical position the current Middle East has been an enormous improvement over the status quo ante.

None of this, or at the very least not all of it, can be attributed to the U.S.'s decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power. But neither can it be said that the Iraq invasion hamstrung the U.S.'s geopolitical ambitions in the Middle East. In the end the costs may have out-weighed the gains, but the final accounting is far from finished and the further out we get the more broadly advantageous the U.S.'s position appears to be.

Walt titles his post, snidely, "Another neocon 'success story'". It's entirely possible that the statement is more accurate without the scare quotes.

Hitchens and Iraq

Two events this week -- the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and the death of Christopher Hitchens -- have brought to mind something that has always bothered me in conversations about the Iraq war: the fact that the "pro-war" side is often made to answer for the crimes of the other side. In the case of Hitchens, a general criticism is that he never changed his mind on Iraq despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed, maimed, or forced to flee the country. Quite often he is accused of having blood on his hands. Here's one good example.

There are, in my mind, two possible answers to this. The first is to turn the logic on its head. If it is true that removing Hussein from power unleashed a "quagmire" in Iraq that could only be resolved when the power vacuum had been filled, then this was inevitable. Hussein was not going to live forever, and there would likely have been a protracted power struggle involving mass amounts of civilians deaths whenever he passed on. In which case the presence of large numbers of American troops may have had something of a pacifying effect; as bad as Iraq was, it wasn't Rwanda or Sudan. It may be true that the presence of foreign occupiers was what was driving the violence, but there are good reasons to think that that is not the case. There were different strong factions within the country, from the Kurds to the Sadrists to the Baathists and others, with fundamentally different interests and a strong desire to control the mechanism of the state to improve their own standing. There were a number of regional powers that would have been happy to encourage violence and instability in Iraq both as a method of proxy warfare and to prevent a strong Iraq from materializing and threatening their interests in the future. It simply is not clear that there was any realistic counterfactual scenario in which there was not large-scale bloodshed in Iraq.

And could you imagine how Hussein would have responded to an Arab Spring in his country?

The second is to flip the logic entirely. The groups most responsible for the violence in Iraq are the groups that Hitchens wanted to fight. The people Hitchens wanted to defend from these groups were the civilians being victimized by them. The level of violence that occurred in Iraq following the invasion can thus taken as vindication for Hitchens: these groups will use violence against civilians or governments whenever it is tactically advantageous to do so, and therefore they should be obliterated. Carrying that out will have costs, but failing to do so will have even greater costs, and for a longer period of time.

Many of the other criticisms of Hitchens' support for the war -- "blood for oil", "imperialism", your typical warmed-over '60s Marxist rhetoric -- have also turned out to be vapid. (Although I do recall Hitchens making the argument that if we were going to fight for any materialist reason, securing the supplies of energy that fuel the global economy was a pretty good one.) And as Nick Cohen once wrote of anti-war protests in London, it was pretty odd to see a bunch of leftists marching in opposition of a war against a fascist regime. It is true that the Bush administration made many excruciating mistakes, such as not getting the electricity back on quickly, or protecting the National Museum. Probably the biggest one was appoint Bremer as Viceroy, and then letting him screw up everything he possibly could. But these were actually less inevitable than the counterfactual that the internal politics of Iraq would have remained peaceful in the absence of invasion. And now there is some real hope that a stable state that is responsive to its citizens will emerge. That would have been exceptionally unlikely in any other state of the world.

Perhaps these reasons are not sufficient for supporting the war in retrospect. But too many people are too glib about it now. It's not enough to simply say it was a "mistake" and let it go at that.

Misc.

Things have been busy around here lately, so in lieu of a substantive post here's some links:

-- Dani Rodrik vs. Turkey. This has been going on for awhile, but in light of the "democratic" revolutions spreading through the Middle East it's worth noting that democracy is a long, uneven process. Rodrik accuses some in Turkey of operating a "state within the state", that is anything but democratic. I'm in no position to evaluate his claims, but if true they are damning.

-- The paradoxical politics of credible commitment. The conclusion is "Neat economic theory trips over messy political reality once again", and it illustrates the importance, but difficulty, of accurately matching interests to actions. Among other things.

-- Paul Krugman's posting template, revealed. Brilliant.

-- Iraq's economy is not doing well.

-- I'm not sure why Stephen Walt is still so concerned with debates that everyone else abandoned two decades ago, but he is. Here he tries to stack the deck in favor of realism in the context of the EU's ongoing debt crisis. I hope to properly smack this down sometime soon.

Known Knowns

Wow. Fred Kaplan goes full-bore on Rumsfeld, in a review of his new memoir and legacy. I'm not going to excerpt it; you really need to read the whole thing.

UN Sanctions Against Iraq Finally Lifted

I'm back after spending a few days in the mountains with spotty internet access, so blogging should return to normal.

Back in September, I wondered what the deal was with the sanctions on Iraq. I had assumed that they had been lifted following the 2003 invasion, but they hadn't been. Well, now they have. The UN sanctions at least:

In a statement, the Security Council said it "recognises that the situation now existing in Iraq is significantly different from that which existed at the time of the adoption of resolution 661" in 1990.

The council also voted to return control of Iraq's oil and natural gas revenue to the government on 30 June and to end all remaining activities of the oil-for-food programme, which helped ordinary Iraqis cope with sanctions.

But there are still some sanctions that remain in place:

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said Iraq must make efforts to agree a border with Kuwait and to agree on a dispute over war reparations if all sanctions were to be ended.

Baghdad still pays 5% of revenues from its oil sales into a fund which pays reparations to Kuwait.

I find it remarkable that the sanctions would not have been immediately lifted in 2003. For the last seven years Iraq has been suffering from devastatingly high unemployment, and few public finances (that weren't provided by foreign governments) to provide security and services to the Iraqi people. These conditions have been identified in many studies as contributing to terrorist and insurgent activity*. As a strategic matter, it seems incredibly short-sighted to invade a country, dismantle the government, privatize the state-run industries (thus causing massive unemployment), and then try to provide security and keep the public from turning to violence, all while preventing access of that state's one primary industry to international markets.

Further, Kuwait should forgive all reparations immediately. We know from history that impoverishing a rival nation following a conflict can be counterproductive, especially following a regime change. Keynes saw it in 1919, and Kuwait would be wise to begin building peaceful relations with Iraq sooner rather than later. If Steve Walt is right that Kuwaitis still have a high regard for the U.S. -- and they certainly still enjoy the security that the U.S. provides -- then the U.S. may have some leverage here. We should pressure the Kuwaitis to forgive Iraq's debt, and explain how it is in their long-run security interest to do so. And ours too. Getting the Iraqi economy moving is the best way to improve its security.

The Iraqi people have been punished enough for the sins of Saddam Hussein.

*The "What Causes Terrorism?" question is anything but resolved, see e.g. this post from Phil Arena, but I think everyone would agree that economic deprivation doesn't have a positive effect on peace and stability.

Iraq Sanctions Bleg

I recently heard that the sanctions against Iraq have not yet been lifted, and won't be until the Iraqi government pays the U.S. government some amount of money, which I believe is related to post-war reconstruction. Perhaps some restitution to Kuwait too. This sounded crazy when I heard it, but it came from a somewhat-reputable source (that I now cannot recall). Wikipedia seems to disagree, although the entry focuses on U.N. sanctions, so I suppose it's possible that U.N. sanctions were lifted while U.S. sanctions persist.

Anyway, now I'm confused. I had believed that the sanctions ended when the war started. Then I read somewhere that they didn't. Now I'm finding sources saying that for the most part they ended then, with some exceptions that have mostly been eliminated in a series of executive orders since. For example, this OFAC summary (pdf), released last week by the Treasury Dept., says:

There currently are no broad-based sanctions in place against Iraq, but there are certain prohibitions and asset freezes against specific individuals and entities associated with the former Saddam Hussein regime, as well as parties determined to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act of violence that has the purpose or effect of threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq or undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people.

Those exceptions are probably wide enough to drive a Humvee through, and could probably be applied to just about any person or group in the country. More confusingly, this article from February indicates that U.N. trade sanctions still apply. A quick Google news search doesn't turn up much since.

Does anybody out there have a clear sense of what's going on with this?

QOTD

Tom Ricks ftw:

Five gunmen attacked an American military convoy south of Baghdad. The troops were not "combat troops," so they used return fire to advise the attackers to die.

via Andrew Exum.

Paul the Octopus Kingmaker

An Iraqi blogger is getting frustrated with the inability of its leaders to form a government following the March election, and has an ingenuous solution:

I suggest that we send a delegation to Germany as soon as possible to bring Paul the Octopus to Iraq before the German turn him into delicious meals and before the Dutch marines assassinate him because he predicted their loss. In this issue, we have to cooperate with Spain to save the octopus's life and prepared a great glass pool for him provided with some good mussels. We should also put each mussel in a small glass box writing the names of the politicians who are fighting over for the Prime Minister position and mainly Nouri Al Maliki and Ayad Allawi and Adil Abdul Mahdi. Of course we will have other names.

from my own point of view, this will be the most democratic experience for one main reason. Paul the Octopus is not Shiite, Sunni or Kurdish. He does not represent any majority or minority. He is not a member of Islamic party or secular party and the most important issue, he is not going to ask for any position in the coming government. He is just a creature who wants to live in peace

PSA: Iraq Election Breakdown

For those curious about the recent Iraq election and what it means, Juan Cole is always a reliable source.

Monetary Policy as Counter-Insurgency Strategy

Via Blattman, here's the abstract of a new NBER working paper [pdf]:

Between 2004 and 2009, Iraq’s currency experienced a massive real appreciation, driven by both nominal exchange rate appreciation and high inflation. The forces driving this appreciation include the end of economic sanctions, the rally in oil prices, and the influx of US aid. During the same period, a number of insurgent groups confronted the Iraqi government. While once posing a formidable threat to Allied forces, the insurgents now seem to be in a terminal decline.

In this essay, we argue that the real appreciation of Iraq’s currency may have played an important role in weakening the various insurgent movements. Many of these organizations were heavily dependent on foreign funding, and the appreciation eroded the purchasing power of their foreign funds. This may have forced insurgents to turn to forms of domestic financing that are inherently inferior for two reasons. The first is that the collection of local “taxes” by insurgents would reduce their popularity. The second is that local collection of revenue increases the autonomy of local insurgent commanders at the expense of central command authorities.

Correlation doesn't equal causation, of course, but it's certainly an interesting thesis.

Revenue Sharing in Iraq: When IPE Meets Security Studies

Christopher Dittmeier, a fellow graduate student at UNC, recently published an article in Georgetown's Democracy and Society on the issues surrounding the elusiveness of a revenue sharing agreement in Iraq. It's a good look at an important (and under-covered) issue, and it highlights the difficulties of reaching an agreement, despite the importance of such an agreement for the security, stability, and legitimacy of the nascent Iraqi state. It may be found here [pdf].

Chris specializes in the Security Studies side of International Relations (boo! hiss!), but in this case as with many others there is significant overlap with IPE. His article is good illustration of that.