Rootless Cosmopolitan – By Tony Karon

Discussing the report of his bipartisan Iraq Study Group with the Senate Armed Services Committee this week, former Secretary of State and Bush-pere fixer James Baker must have already sensed the inevitability that nothing will come of his efforts to salvage the mess young Bush has made in Iraq: “I hope we don’t treat this like a fruit salad, saying, ‘I like this, but I don’t like that,’ ” Baker told the senators, to warn them away from their own line-item-veto approach to it. “It’s a comprehensive strategy designed to deal with the problems in Iraq, but also to deal with other problems in the region. These are interdependent recommendations.” Not according to President Bush, who told a news conference the same day he was sure Baker and Lee Hamilton didn’t expect him to embrace all of their recommendations. He also made it abundantly clear that some of its most important proposals are to his tastes what broccoli was to his father’s. Exhibit A: Talks with Iran and Syria over Iraq — Bush made clear he had no intention of following that one. (Instead, he reiterated his preconditions for allowing Iran and Syria to help the U.S. out in Iraq! Uh, I think you may want to think in terms of incentives; they’re the ones who’re going to have the preconditions, Mr. President…)

That position is likely to be reinforced by such head-in-sand hawks as Cheney and the plays-one-on-TV grand strategist Condi Rice, fiercely egged on by the Israel-first crowd, who see any rapprochement between Washington and either Tehran or Damascus as a danger to be aggressively countered. And the commonsense linkage made by Baker-Hamilton between prospects for success in Iraq and in the wider Middle East showing U.S. willingness to act in an even-handed way between Israel and the Palestinians, first and foremost by forcing them back to the peace table, is, predictably, being hysterically denounced Likud’s American cheering section. Then again, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is so confident that Bush won’t change his position on Iran and Syria that he told his cabinet to keep mum on the issue, lest they make it look as if Israel is inappropriately intervening.

But the Baker-Hamilton bashing bandwagon always has room for more: The Kurds, including President Jalal Talabani, are focusing on issues such as the report’s proposed regional strategy and restraints on “de-Baathification”, but their primary concern is that the report has blown the whistle on their de facto secession from Iraq, questioning whether it suits the wider purposes of stability in the region for the Kurds to take control of the contested oil city of Kirkuk, for example.

Some of the Shiite leaders also appear to be reluctant to embrace the idea of a regional conference, because the Shiite-Sunni balance is far more favorable to them when things are kept at home. (Iran has plenty more influence in Baghdad than does Jordan or Saudi Arabia, so they’d probably be fine with leaving the Iraqis to sort things out themselves.)

The regional strategy has been the focus of most of the criticism of Baker-Hamilton, and yet that regional strategy really is the key component of the course correction it advocates. That’s because his report is premised on the fact that the Bush Administration’s gamble in Iraq has failed dismally t — the unilateral application of America’s overwhelming military might has not created the pro-U.S., Israel-friendly regime at the heart of the Middle East that its architects imagined and hoped would provide the spark that transformed the region on the same lines. Instead, it has produced a failed state at the heart of the Middle East, and those among its political leaders who could be counted as U.S. allies have, for the most part, returned to their homes in London, while the country’s technocratic elite are emigrating in their thousands. Toppling Saddam has immeasurably strengthened Iran, and today the political forces with momentum on both sides of the Sunni-Shiite divide are the Islamists for whom ending U.S. influence in the region is a key point of consensus. Traditional U.S. allies are looking increasingly feeble and isolated, their plight personified by Jordan’s King Abdullah, the charming product of the English public school system, who has taken to telling any U.S. interviewer that will listen that unless the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is solved in a matter of weeks, the sky is going to fall.

Read the Baker report’s proposals carefully, and it’s plain that what it’s suggesting is a framework for managing the failure of Bush the Younger. Those the U.S. loves least in the region will not be swept away by any “democratic tsunami”; reality demands recognizing that their ability to influence events has actually increased while that of the U.S. is in steady decline. Salvaging something from Iraq demands that they be offered incentives for cooperation, as part of a wider “grand bargain” to stabilize the chronic, Chernobyl-like instability that the U.S. has brought to the heart of the region.

Baker knows that regional consent will give the political-military strategy currently being pursued by the U.S. its best chance of achieving something positive, and prepares the way for managing the fallout if it fails. And it certainly recognizes the probability of failure. The report’s political-military recommendations, after all, are simply an intensification of the policies being pursued at present — training and deploying Iraqi security forces to take over from U.S. forces, securing Baghdad, pressing Iraq’s political leadership to rein in Shiite militias and offer accommodation to the Sunni insurgents, and so on. The difference, perhaps, is that Baker-Hamilton says there’s no point in doing this for more than another year — the Sunni insurgency has proved too tenacious to be militarily eliminated; the Shiite militias are part of the ruling coalition and the parties that dominate the government have shown little inclination to make the concessions to the Sunnis necessary to win their assent for the new order, and so on. A regional grand bargain, then, becomes an essential insurance policy — if you have failed to eradicate adversaries and rivals, best to engage with them in pursuit of a framework of understanding that can, at least, manage your differences.

Foreign policy for grownups, in other words. Pity that there aren’t any in control in the White House. Challenged by the British media who, unlike the White House press corps, are willing to rough Bush up when he spews silly spin in defiance of reality, the President last week came back with this marvelously Orwellian formulation: “I am disappointed by the pace of success.” (What was that thing Bob Dylan once sang about “there’s no success like failure…”?)

Teletubbies say “Mission Accomplished”

At this point, it’s worth returning to Mark Danner’s brilliant New York Review of Books essay on the Administration’s “War of the Imagination,” which seeks to explain how it was that the U.S. was able to commit such patent blunders in Iraq that most U.S. officials on the ground could recognize them as that. It really is a fascinating piece, because it sets out just how George W. Bush literally dispensed with the policy process that had served every post WWII president before him — the careful collating and weighing of findings by different arms of the national security bureaucracy into assessments of the balance of forces and the options available and their consequences. Danner writes:

Anyone seeking to understand what has become the central conundrum of the Iraq war—how it is that so many highly accomplished, experienced, and intelligent officials came together to make such monumental, consequential, and, above all, obvious mistakes, mistakes that much of the government knew very well at the time were mistakes—must see beyond what seems to be a simple rhetoric of self-justification and follow it where it leads: toward the War of Imagination that senior officials decided to fight in the spring and summer of 2002 and to whose image they clung long after reality had taken a sharply separate turn. In that War of Imagination victory was to be decisive, overwhelming, evincing a terrible power—enough to wipe out the disgrace of September 11 and remake the threatening world…

Thus the War of Imagination draped all the complications and contradictions of the history and politics of a war-torn, brutalized society in an ideologically driven vision of a perfect future. Small wonder that its creators, faced with grim reality, have been so loathe to part with it. Since the first thrilling night of shock and awe, reported with breathless enthusiasm by the American television networks, the Iraq war has had at least two histories, that of the war itself and that of the American perception of it. As the months passed and the number of attacks in Iraq grew, the gap between those two histories opened wider and wider. And finally, for most Americans, the War of Imagination—built of nationalistic excitement and ideological hubris and administration pronouncements about “spreading democracy” and “greetings with sweets and flowers,” and then about “dead-enders” and “turning points,” and finally about “staying the course” and refusing “to cut and run”— began, under the pressure of nearly three thousand American dead and perhaps a hundred thousand or more dead Iraqis, to give way to grim reality.
The election of November 7, 2006, marks the moment when the War of Imagination decisively gave way to the war on the ground and when officials throughout the American government, not least the President himself, were forced to recognize and acknowledge a reality that much of the American public had discerned months or years before. The ideological canopy now has lifted. The study groups are at their work. Americans have come to know what they do not know. If confronted with that simple question the smiling President Ahmadinejad of Iran put to Mike Wallace last August —”I ask you, sir, what is the American Army doing inside Iraq?”—how many Americans could offer a clear and convincing answer?

Danner outlines how it was that Bush literally shut down the thinking processes of the U.S. government, insulating himself from any information that would offer him shades of gray to muddle his “moral clarity.” Instead, he would follow his gut instinct. Yes, it is bizarre to the point of being almost inconceivable that the leader of the world’s last superpower could aggressively insulate himself from anything approaching a rational policy process. But perhaps it is testimony to the failings of what Greg Palast has called “the best democracy money can buy” that individual whose emotional and intellectual makeup are so obviously those of an angry adolescent has final authority over U.S. foreign policy — or, as he once put, “I’m the decider.”

Baker-Hamilton essentially tells Bush that in order to rescue U.S. strategic interests and avoid a looming regional disaster, he will have to reverse much of the foreign policy he has pursued since taking office. Somehow, I doubt that this is a man who can admit failure, and do what he can to salvage the situation. Instead, Bush will continue to search for signs out there affirming his fantasy, most recently making common cause with Abdulaziz al-Hakim, whom Bush has a strange habit of calling “His Eminence” (Hakim is simply the leader of a political party and the commander of a militia — perhaps the most sectarian of the Shiite parties, and certainly the one closest to Iran). Hakim, of course, has no intention of doing what the U.S. wants the government to do in response to the Sunnis, of course, but no matter. He’s obviously saying something the fantasy-minded Bush wants to hear.

Right now the signs are that it’s already too late to save the Iraq mission, and that this Administration is incapable of either recognizing the scale of their defeat or doing what is necessary to contain the damage. Instead, expect them to muddle along until the problem can be handed over to Bush’s successor. And maybe drop a few bombs on Iran along the way, just to show how “Churchillian” you are.

In lieu of scripture, the reading today comes from Talking Heads “Once in a Lifetime”:

And you may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right?…Am I wrong?
And you may tell yourself
MY GOD!…WHAT HAVE I DONE?

There’s an amusing irony in the fact that Henry Kissinger’s most important piece of advice to the Bush Administration is to avoid spreading panic! This from his interview with New Perspectives Quarterly’s Global View:

Kissinger: …We have to avoid the situation where the moderate states panic, and we have to create a balance. We can’t avoid it.

GV: You mean a balance within Iraq or a balance regionally?
Kissinger: Regionally and therefore within Iraq. You can’t get a balance within Iraq if you don’t have a balance regionally.
GV: Do you think the president and the vice president have absorbed these lessons?
Kissinger: (Long pause.) I have been comfortable talking to the president about my ideas. Of course, as long as one thought we were winning, and as long as he was told he was winning, he had every reason to pursue the recommended strategy. I’m convinced that the president will do what is best for the nation.
GV: Is he still being told we’re winning?
Kissinger: I don’t know. I can’t judge that. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that what we’re seeing now would be an odd appearance for a victory.

But it’s hard to persuade the U.S.-allied Arab regimes not to panic when new signs of panic and confusion emerge every day in Washington. So, as the LA Times reports, the Administration seems to have taken Kissinger’s advice and launched a series of initiatives to calm the fears of its allies in the region, but has instead deepened them.

But instead of flaunting stronger ties and steadfast American influence, the president’s journey found friends both old and new near a state of panic. Mideast leaders expressed soaring concern over upheavals across the region that the United States helped ignite through its invasion of Iraq and push for democracy — and fear that the Bush administration may make things worse.

President Bush’s summit in Jordan with the Iraqi prime minister proved an awkward encounter that deepened doubts about the relationship. Vice President Dick Cheney’s stop in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, yielded a blunt warning from the kingdom’s leaders. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s swing through the West Bank and Israel, intended to build Arab support by showing a new U.S. push for peace, found little to work with.

In all, visits designed to show the American team in charge ended instead in diplomatic embarrassment and disappointment, with U.S. leaders rebuked and lectured by Arab counterparts. The trips demonstrated that U.S. allies in the region were struggling to understand what to make of the difficult relationship, and to figure whether, with a new Democratic majority taking over Congress, Bush even had control over his nation’s Mideast policy.

Indeed, simply following the media traffic, its hard to imagine anyone in control of the policy, for the simple reason that there doesn’t seem to be a policy.

The Rumsfeld memo leaked to the New York Times is but the latest in a series of contradictory prescriptions coming from the heart of the Administration. (Rumsfeld seemed as giddily detached as ever, advocating the use of financial sanctions and troop redeployments to scare the Iraqis into “pulling their socks up” — and as Juan Cole noted, there’s something pretty macabre about the U.S. defense secretary advocating that Washington follow Saddam Hussein’s playbook for governance by buying off Iraqi tribal and religious leaders. (Then again, Rummy was the Reagan Administration’s point man in dealing with Saddam.)

If Rumsfeld is all over the map, Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, has been demanding that Shiite-coalition head Nuri al-Maliki be reinvented as Iyad Allawi, to head a secular-Kurdish-Sunni alliance (perhaps nobody told Hadley that Allawi and the other Iraqi leaders who were partial to such schemes have all quietly moved back to London). Meanwhile, the State Department seems to be advocating the U.S. making common cause with the Shiites, doing exactly the opposite of what Hadley is suggesting. Bush will be told this week by the Baker group that the U.S. needs to begin redeploying troops away from the cities, and also by the Pentagon (with the backing of the likes of Senator John McCain) that the U.S. needs to increase its troop presence in Baghdad to restore control over the capital.

But they certainly seem willing to try anything:

President Bush on Monday will host Abdulaziz al-Hakim at the White House to discuss Iraq: Hakim is the leader of the largest single party in the ruling Shiite alliance (the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq), has his own militia (the Badr Corps) which has been implicated in sectarian bloodletting and is considered even closer to Iran than Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki (of the smaller Dawa party). Hard to see what the U.S. hopes to get out of the meeting, although they may be looking at Hakim’s fierce, occasionally even deadly rivalry with Moqtada Sadr as a useful wedge. Some reports suggested Bush would ask Hakim to support Maliki ditching Sadr. (Why does one struggle, so, to imagine these Shiite leaders who are far closer by history and outlook to Tehran than Washington, suddenly agreeing to follow U.S. guidelines? They’ll certainly do so from time to time, but only when it suits their own narrow power agendas.)

This is certainly getting interesting. And it’s hardly surprising that Arab allies whose own survival depends on Washington’s success are panicking…

Things really are coming apart so quickly in Iraq that some blogging appears to be in order. No sooner had we noted that Washington’s Arab allies are pushing it hard to remain engaged and protect the Sunnis then the Washington Post reports (thanks, Pat!) that the State Department has been pushing for the U.S. to abandon its efforts to draw the Sunni insurgents into a new political order because that is alienating the Shiites — and as I noted below, it’s untenable for the U.S. military to remain in Iraq if it is at odds with two thirds of the population. The proposal to ditch efforts to draw in the Baathists is attributed to Philip Zelikow, which makes the fact that he resigned last week all the more intriguing.

It’s not hard to imagine that the bomb-Iran faction of the Administration is having none of this cozying up to the Shiites business, and Dick Cheney’s huddle with the Saudi king last weekend would certainly have been about mobilizing an alliance of Sunni regimes to push back against Iranian influence both inside Iraq and beyond.

Zelikow is right, of course: The U.S. has alienated the Shiites to the point that its plans (see Hadley entry below) for remaking Prime Minister Maliki as a new interdenominational strongman under U.S. tutelage seem preposterous. Instead, far more likely is that Maliki will move in the direction demanded by Moqtada Sadr of calling for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal. President Bush said at his press conference in Amman on Wednesday that the U.S. would keep its troops in Iraq as long as the government wanted them there, and one has to wonder how long that will be. Maliki notably stressed that Iraqi forces would be ready to take control of Iraq’s security by June 2007 — that’s years ahead of when U.S. military commanders believe they’ll be ready, and years ahead of when they’ll actually be able to protect the country’s sovereignty (never mind suppress the insurgency). So one has to assume that statement is for the consumption of his own political base, the Shiites, who are now overwhelmingly in favor of getting the U.S. out.

Amid these wildly divergent proposals from Washington (between Hadley’s smoke-some-of-this prescription for Maliki — ditch the Shiites — and the State Department’s course correction — embrace the Shiites, f*** the Sunnis — there is, shall we say, rather a lot of daylight) comes the much awaited report of James Baker’s Iraq Study Group. But a body that in its final week of deliberations was taking testimony from that esteemed Iraq expert John Kerry is plainly more about creating a consensus on Capitol Hill then about making nimble strategic adjustments.

Is that a civil war in your pocket?

Indeed, the shallowness of the debate in Washington on these questions is pretty shocking, helped along by the edutainment media, who spent most of the past week locked into a narcissistic debate on whether they should call it a “civil war”. (For the record, I think there are far too many different things going on in Iraq — an anti-occupation guerrilla war, a Shiite-Sunni power struggle, an Arab-Kurd struggle for control over territory, intra-Shiite power struggles, assorted criminality and regional struggles, to make a single label such as “civil war” at all meaningful. But the nomenclature is hardly worthy of the attention it received this week.)

For all the expectation that has surrounded it, the word is that the Baker group’s findings are not exactly earth shattering. They will, we are told, recommend that the U.S. slowly, although with no timetable, begin withdrawing combat troops, hoping to have only advisers present by January 2008. (Surprise! That’s an election year, after all…) They will also advocate a more grownup approach to regional diplomacy than the adolescent Bush-Rice combination has been willing to countenance.

The premise of the “phased withdrawal” being envisaged is that Iraq’s politicians are hiding behind the presence of U.S. troops to save them from the consequences of not following the U.S. plan for national reconciliation. Start pulling the troops out, the reasoning goes, and the Iraqis will be spooked into getting their act together and stopping their internecine war.

It’s a false premise, because it takes at face value to claims by Iraqi politicians that they really, really want to all just get along. Plainly, Maliki isn’t just struggling with the logistics and authority issues that preclude him from doing what the U.S. wants him to do — it’s a political choice. He’s part of a Shiite alliance whose goal is to consolidate Shiite power in Baghdad. That’s the goal for which it was elected, which makes one wonder whether Stephen Hadley was born yesterday when he writes ominously of the suspicion that building Shiite power may be what Maliki is really up to. (It’s like these fools in the Bush Administration didn’t realise that they lost the Iraqi election, and forgot to check what the winners actually stand for…)

If the U.S. begins withdrawing, the Shiite government will move to launch an all-out assault on the Sunni insurgency and its social base, which is the Sunni community. That’s what Maliki means when he tells Bush to take off the shackles and let him deal with the problem (by giving him command of the Iraqi security forces, which remain entirely under U.S. command). And that’s what the Saudis are warning about when they threaten to back the insurgency, which presumably they’re already doing. (See below). The idea that the Shiite-led government is going to start implementing the U.S. program for national reconciliation because the U.S. is moving to leave is an epic exercise in wishful thinking.

So, the much-anticipated Baker report will, in the words of the Financial Times, almost certainly “come too late, given the speed of deterioration on the ground in Iraq.” The paper correctly notes that Bush is unlikely to be shaken very far from his conviction that to talk to Syria and Iran is to reward bad behavior — and he’ll be under strong pressure from the Cheney camp egging on his most infantile, belligerent side — which suggests that the prospects for a move toward grownup diplomacy are grim. I have to find myself agreeing with the neocon ideologue Danielle Pletka, quoted in the story (even if we’d have entirely different ideas about what should be done:

“A lot of people think the Iraq Study Group will come up with a report that is all things to all people in Washington,” said Danielle Pletka, a neoconservative critic of Mr Bush at the American Enterprise Institute. “My hunch is that it will end up being nothing to most people. What we need most is clear leadership from the White House and we are still not getting that.”

Indeed, this Administration appears endemically incapable of of grasping the reasons for its spectacular policy failures in Iraq, Iran, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Afghanistan, North Korea and more — much less of pursuing a reality-based salvage operation.

Never mind the report of James Baker’s Iraq Study Group, whose primary purpose appears to be achieving national unity in Washington, and whose broad recommendations for a slow drawdown of American troops and a new focus on regional diplomacy may already have been eclipsed by events, and will almost certainly be mangled by an Administration still wedded to too many of its most damaging illusions. The most important documents to surface in Washington this week were, instead, the memo by Bush’s national security adviser Stephen Hadley leaked to the New York Times, and an extraordinary op-ed in the Washington Post by a well-known senior adviser to the Saudi regime that threatened, among other things, that the Saudis would provide financial and military support to the Sunni insurgency if the U.S. begins a phased withdrawal from Iraq.

Both documents reflect the extent to which Iraq has been plunged into chaos, although the media may have misjudged the relative significance of each: It was generally reported that it was a fit of pique at the contents of the Hadley memo that prompted Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to snub Wednesday night’s scheduled dinner in Amman with Bush and King Abdulla. But, as my colleague Bobby Ghosh reports from Baghdad, Maliki was snubbing Abdullah rather than Bush:

Analysts say the Iraqi Prime Minister, a Shi’ite, doesn’t trust Jordan’s Sunni monarch and did not want to discuss sensitive issues with Bush in Abdullah’s presence.

Indeed, and that sentiment may have more to do with what is revealed in the Saudi op ed than in Hadley’s memo.

The most remarkable thing about Hadley’s memo is its spectacular naivete. Much of the media has focused on the fact that the document shows the Administration’s real assessment of Maliki is far removed from Bush’s public show of support for him. No question that to anyone who’s read Hadley’s report, or is familiar with the thinking of U.S. officials, Bush’s claim that “Maliki is the right guy for Iraq” sounds almost sarcastic. But even more alarming are the steps Hadley recommends Maliki should be pressed to take — break his alliance with Moqtada Sadr, the radical Shiite sectarian politician on whose support Maliki rode into power, appoint a cabinet of technocrats and abandon his Dawa party circle of advisers in favor of a more “representative” one, make more overtures to the Sunnis and Baathists, etc. Hadley warns

[Maliki] may simply not have the political or security capabilities to take such steps, which risk alienating his narrow Sadrist political base and require a greater number of more reliable forces. Pushing Maliki to take these steps without augmenting his capabilities could force him to failure — if the Parliament removes him from office with a majority vote or if action against the Mahdi militia (JAM) causes elements of the Iraqi Security Forces to fracture and leads to major Shia disturbances in southern Iraq. We must also be mindful of Maliki’s personal history as a figure in the Dawa Party — an underground conspiratorial movement — during Saddam’s rule. Maliki and those around him are naturally inclined to distrust new actors, and it may take strong assurances from the United States ultimately to convince him to expand his circle of advisers or take action against the interests of his own Shia coalition and for the benefit of Iraq as a whole…

…We could help him form a new political base among moderate politicians from Sunni, Shia, Kurdish and other communities. Ideally, this base would constitute a new parliamentary bloc that would free Maliki from his current narrow reliance on Shia actors. (This bloc would not require a new election, but would rather involve a realignment of political actors within the Parliament). In its creation, Maliki would need to be willing to risk alienating some of his Shia political base and may need to get the approval of Ayatollah Sistani for actions that could split the Shia politically.

You have to wonder, where has Hadley been for the past three years? Maliki is a Shiite politician elected in a democratic process in which most Iraqis voted on the basis of sect or ethnicity. His political and quite possibly his physical survival depend on his place at the center of the ruling Shiite coalition, of which he is a partisan. He’s a longtime Dawa activist with historic ties to Iran and Syria. And he is obviously mindful of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani’s injunction that, above all, Shiite politicians are obliged to maintain their united front. And Hadley imagines that at the behest of a hapless Bush Administration, Maliki’s going to give up on everything that he is and instead, be remade as a political creature of the U.S. [EM] a second Iyad Allawi, if you like. (Allawi, the last U.S.-appointed prime minister who pursued a similar strategy to the one outlined by Hadley lost heavily in the last election, and today lives primarily in London.) Hadley appears to be still laboring under the illusions of 2003, in which the U.S. can seek out actors and mould the Iraqi political landscape to its satisfaction. Let’s just say that the week started for Maliki with the U.S. warning him to drop Moqtada Sadr or else, and Sadr telling him to drop the U.S. or else. And it ended with Moqtada saying maybe he wouldn’t quit the government after all. And I’d say it’s a safe bet that Maliki will welcome his renewed support, regardless of Hadley’s coalition plans.

The Saudis, on the other hand, have never shared the illusions that guided Team Bush’s invasion of Iraq. For Nawaf Obaid, known as a top adviser to the ruling royal family who would be unlikely to weigh in unless his views were approved by Riyadh, the current malaise in Iraq is simply vindication of King Abdullah’s warning that invading to topple Saddam would cause more problems than it would solve.

Obaid was blunt: If the U.S. starts scaling down its involvement, the Saudis would be obliged to rally to the defense of the Sunnis, primarily by supporting the Sunni insurgency against what he sees as the Iranian-led Shiites. Indeed, he warns, it would do so on behalf of Jordan and Egypt as well:

Over the past year, a chorus of voices has called for Saudi Arabia to protect the Sunni community in Iraq and thwart Iranian influence there. Senior Iraqi tribal and religious figures, along with the leaders of Egypt, Jordan and other Arab and Muslim countries, have petitioned the Saudi leadership to provide Iraqi Sunnis with weapons and financial support. Moreover, domestic pressure to intervene is intense. Major Saudi tribal confederations, which have extremely close historical and communal ties with their counterparts in Iraq, are demanding action.

Obaid says the Saudis have until now rebuffed those calls having promised Bush they would stay out, and that they couldn’t be sure that Sunni insurgent groups they backed wouldn’t attack U.S. forces. “They will, however, be heeded if American troops begin a phased withdrawal from Iraq,” he warns. Not only would the Saudis start funding and arming the insurgency (as they say Iran is doing to the Shiite militias), they would also — and here it gets plain nutty — consider pumping more oil (!!) to bring down the price and make it harder for Iran to sustain its support of its Iraqi allies. (Imagine if the Iranians took that seriously and decided to respond by stopping Saudi oil shipments through the Hormuz Straits…)

Obaid says the Saudis know they could set off a war, but they also believe that they have no option becuase the U.S. drawing down troops would leave the Sunnis vulnerable to massacre.

This extraordinary intervention not only reveals the extent of panic among Washington’s key regional allies; its willingness to countenance a return to the tradition of funding holy wars abroad in defense of Sunnis under attack — one way to get rid of the challenge of the radicals at home, of course (it was a similar impulse in the Afghan jihad that gave us Osama bin Laden, after all) is pretty bizarre. It also underscores the talk of a Sunni strategy, with Obaid stressing that talks with Cheney had been positive. What’s interesting here, though, is that the “Sunni Front” that the U.S. has hoped to build against Iran may be taking shape, but one of its prime objectives may be rolling back the Shiite-led government that Iraqi democracy produced. (There was a reason, after all, that the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt had supported Saddam in his war with Iran.)

The strategy is a non-starter, of course, not only because it would set the U.S. against the majority of Iraqis, which is an untenable situation for an occupying army, but because the regional dynamic in the wake of the Iraq war has accelerated the collapse of the old regional order on which it is based. For all Obaid’s tough talk, the Iranians are unlikely to be quivering in their boots at the prospect of a more robust Saudi intervention in the region. The response of the region to last summer’s conflagration in Lebanon, where the Saudis initially blamed Hizballah and were then forced to retract as the Arab street rallied overwhelmingly behind the Shiite guerrilla movement, was a sign that as hostile as they may be to Iranian influence, the old Sunni autocracies of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt are increasingly marginal players in the region. Bush succeeded in his aim of breaking the old order when he invaded Iraq, but the new Middle East he has created is nothing like what he intended. But it remains highly unlikely that this Administration is ever going to be ready to engage with the realities that it has helped create — a region in which most of the traditional U.S. allies have been repudiated and the representative political forces tend to be Islamist in character and hostile to Washington’s influence.

So, instead, as Antonio Gramsci warned us about situations in which the old order is dying but the new cannot be born, “in this interregnum, morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass.” Brace yourselves.