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COMMENTARY
January 15, 2005
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I've been writing less about Iraq and the Middle East lately because I've been taking my breath. Several large matters are in transition and it is almost impossible at this distance (or perhaps at any distance) to see what will come out. One of these large matters is the transition of the Bush administration into its second term. The appointment of Condoleezza Rice to replace the retiring Colin Powell at the U.S. State Department is not a clear shift to right or left an advance or retreat from what has previously been understood as the "Bush doctrine". It will become clearer when Ms Rice has made a statement or two after assuming the office. >From what I've seen so far (things like her appointment of the "pragmatic" Robert Zoellick over the "neoconservative" John Bolton as her deputy) more likely a retreat than an advance. That Ms Rice has also taken Nicholas Burns aboard (he was the ambassador to NATO) and Robert Joseph (over with her from the National Security Council) suggests that she and President Bush have put a premium on rebuilding American diplomatic relations with Europe which can only come at a cost in momentum. But you never know until the rubber hits the road. It would be a mistake to assume that any of these gentlemen let alone Ms Rice herself is a softie. They are all exceedingly tough negotiators and the question is with whom will they find themselves negotiating and over what? Events invariably trump plans. Meanwhile the Rice appointment has not even been confirmed by the U.S. Senate yet. (Next week.) In Israel/Palestine we wait upon repercussions from another re-election of an old regime: Arafat definitively gone ("in stable condition after dying in a Paris hospital" as James Taranto likes to put it) but Mahmoud Abbas pledged to continue Arafat's irredentist policies. Throughout the West we seem to be assuming that Mr. Abbas is a lot more pragmatic than his words would suggest if they were taken at face value. For reasons I gave recently I think the Palestinian people are in the mood for peace even at a fairly high price in abandoned dreams. But again we won't know until the game (of Arab-Israeli peacemaking) resumes in earnest. And while the result of the Iraqi election on Jan. 30th seems foreordained -- the emergence in power of an overwhelmingly Shia coalition definitively breaking with the country's minority Sunni-dominated past -- it is almost impossible to guess what effect this will have on the American engagement there let alone on what is called the "Insurgency" (I think on the false model of the Palestinian "Intifada"). The background indications are nothing new: the Pentagon has been quietly manoeuvring for what could actually be an enlarged U.S. presence -- a kind of mop-up of the rather messy mop-up operations it has attempted in the election's approach. We already know what to think of CIA assessments of the situation on the ground in Iraq. I am more interested in still-untested fresh Iraqi intelligence assessments which hold that the terrorism is likely to continue at a fairly high level of nuisance for another year unless the U.S. does something dramatic to cut off its sources of personnel money and weaponry from Syria and Iran. There are fluid political situations meanwhile not only in Syria and Iran but about five more regional countries including Saudi Arabia and even Egypt. What I mean by this is that each government faces increasingly restive elites within its own ruling structure. At any moment a coup or other revolutionary act could take most foreign observers entirely by surprise in any of these countries. The regimes in each are executing complicated balancing acts -- nowhere more precariously than in Syria where Bashir Assad's Ba'athists seem to be purposely antagonizing the U.S. on the nervy calculation that this will improve their negotiating position and thus their chances of survival in President Bush's second term. The one thing we can observe from all this is the degree to which political developments continue to determine events on the ground throughout the region. This is not a truism. In Ukraine for example the chain of causation has been vice versa. It means the veil of authoritarianism has not begun to lift over the Middle East. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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