Iran and Israel will be kings of the Middle East jungle (The Guardian)

[kpete]

Iran and Israel will be kings of the Middle East jungle

The US occupation of Iraq has turned its neighbour into a new regional power. But the contagion is likely to spread far wider

David Hirst
Friday January 13, 2006
The Guardian


In March 2003, before US troops reached Baghdad, Middle East scholar Volker Perthes wrote that while the risks of this "illegitimate" war were enormous, those of "a US failure to stabilise postwar Iraq would be even higher". With those words looking increasingly prophetic, no one, in picturing the implications of such failure, is now more lurid than the Bush administration. The direness of the prospect has become its strongest argument for "staying the course", but for others it is already a given, amounting to "the greatest strategic disaster in US history", in the words of the retired US general William Odom.

If so, what will this disaster look like? In scale, it will surely be at least commensurate with the vast ambitions that came with the invasion in the first place, Iraq being cast as the platform for reshaping the entire Middle East.

A general US retreat from the region, with troop withdrawal at its core, is no doubt a prerequisite for, and yardstick of, the emergence of a healthy, self-reliant new Middle Eastern order. But, with the kind of ignominious scuttle from Iraq that failure would presumably entail, the region won't just revert to the status quo ante. Instead of Iraq becoming a beacon of all good things it will become the single most noxious wellspring of all the bad ones the invasion was supposed to extinguish - and new ones to boot.

If the Middle East was a jungle before, it will be a wilder one afterwards, with most elements of the decadent existing order, in their increased insecurity, driven to even cruder methods - increased internal repression or external adventurism - to preserve themselves. And it will become even more anti-American. For while a "good" retreat would decrease such sentiments, a "bad" Iraqi one will only spur and spread the active, often violent expression of them. That is because, for the Arabs, Iraq was only the latest drastic episode in a long history of western interference in their affairs. Until the wider, pre-Iraqi consequences of that interference are remedied, the example of successful anti-American resistance in Iraq will only encourage it elsewhere, especially in Palestine.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1685320,00.html