krebscycle

For nearly seven decades, American efforts in the Middle East have been based on a bipartisan consensus—one of the few to be found in U.S. foreign policy—aimed at limiting Moscow’s influence in that region. This is a core interest of American foreign policy: it reflects the strategic importance of the region to us and to our allies, as well as the historical reality Russia has continually sought clients there who would oppose both Western interests and ideals. In less than a week, an unguarded utterance by a U.S. Secretary of State has undone those efforts Tom Nichols, John R. Schindler September 16, 2013, National Interest

What does it mean that a 70+ year bipartisan consensus implemented at the cost of trillions of dollars and millions of lives (dead, wounded, refugees) could be “undone” with a single statement from the U.S. Secretary of State? It means that America’s effort to pick up the imperial mantle from the Brits after WWII has been built on the sands, and only now, under the Obama Administration, are we considering US national interest in place of imperial interest.

Because “limiting Moscow’s influence” is not a coherent policy or a policy that can lead to any positive outcome. It is based on the imperial assumption that the people and governments of the Middle East don’t have interests of their own, but are ready to be suborned by opponents in the imagined Great Game. As a result of this policy, the USA has repeatedly allied itself with dictators, crooks, religious fanatics – and then repeatedly found out that those “governments” are not actually friendly, reliable, or even stable. We crushed every attempt at reform and then were shocked to see the reform movements become hostile to the United States.

The human catastrophe in Syria is fueled by money from our client states on the Persian Gulf – who are also buying power for fanatics in Libya and elsewhere – and by the mess we created in Iraq. From the overthrow of a reformist government in Iran in 1953 by the CIA, to our support for SAVAK, to Brzeznski’s short sighted fatal alliance with Mullahs in Afghanistan to our financing of the Mubarak regime, the US government’s “bipartisan consensus” has been both a moral failure and disaster for US interests. In the long run, the prosperity of the United States is not dependent on whether “Moscow” has influence in the Middle East at all.

Imagine that our human rights President, Jimmy Carter, and Brzezinski had not funded a bunch of superstitious, oppressive, heroin smuggling, theocrats and warlords in Afghanistan and had, instead, allowed Communist Afghans to carry out the land reform that so offended our “allies”. In this alternative history, there would be no Al Qeda. Pakistan would have a secular state on its western border and the unrest in its tribal areas would have been from peasants wanting the same land and liberty that their brothers had on the other side of the pass. Or it could have turned out worse – that seems likely. But one doesn’t have to imagine the Soviets had good intentions or would get a good result to suspect that setting up the Saudi/Gulf-States, Pakistani ISI/ Jihadi network was not a great idea.

Read Brzesinski’s memo to Carter. It has all the same themes we find in Nichols and Schindler: the need to demonstrate “resolve”, the unexamined theory that opposing “Moscow” was obviously important, a marked lack of interest in how local conditions would affect results and a kind of domain expert short sightedness about global effects – by which I do not mean geopolitical chess games. What I mean is that these “experts” did not stop to consider what long term interests of the prosperity and security of the United States might involve or how tradeoffs work. Brezezinski did not even suggest to Carter that maybe in the long run Pakistan might be destabilized by a stronger ISI running a theocrat militia in Afghanistan or that the cost of funding the anti-soviet army might pay for enough oil independence to reduce America’s worries about the Middle East and certainly there was no discussion of what path might create the least human suffering and devastation. These things were outside scope – because “limiting Moscow’s influence in that region” was a “bipartisan consensus” and there was no need to rexamine goals.

When we read that “we must oppose Y’s influence in X” the question to ask is: why? What do we get out of it? What danger are we averting by, e.g. hastening the collapse of Russia’s ally in Syria and its replacement by Quatari funded fanatics? In some cases, the US definitely has an interest in stepping in – I don’t deny that. Neither do I suppose that Putin has good intentions or that lambs will lie down with lions and not get eaten. But if our experts on foreign policy are going to command some of the respect they think they deserve, they need to make a case that goes beyond reflexive great power gamesmanship.