The Middle East's lost decade

THE US has waged three wars since the Al Qaida terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001 - against Al Qaida, in Afghanistan and in Iraq. The first two were forced upon the US, but the third was the result of a wilful, deliberate decision by former president George W. Bush, taken on ideological grounds and, most likely, for personal reasons as well. Had Bush, former vice-president Dick Cheney, former secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld and their neocon allies been forthright about their intentions - to bring down Saddam Hussain by means of war, thereby creating a new, pro-western Middle East - they never would have received the support of the Congress and the American public. Their vision was both naive and reckless. So a threat - Iraqi weapons of mass destruction - had to be created. As we now know, the threat was based on lies (aluminium tubes for a nuclearweapons programme, for example; meetings between the 9/11 plot leader, Mohammad Atta, and Iraqi officials in Prague and even glaring forgeries like supposed Iraqi orders for yellowcake uranium from Niger).

Such were the justifications for a war that was to claim the lives of almost 5,000 US soldiers and more than 100,000 Iraqis. Add to that the millions more who were injured and displaced from their homes, as well as the destruction of one of the world's oldest Christian communities. For this, the US alone spent up to $3 trillion (Dh11 trillion). Bush's war against Saddam did radically change the Middle East, though not as he envisaged. For starters, if the US had set out to destabilise Iraq, its efforts could hardly have been more successful. Ten years later, the country's viability as a single state has never been in greater doubt.

With Saddam gone, Iraq's Shiite majority assumed power after a horrendous civil war, leaving Iraq's defeated Sunnis longing for revenge. The Kurds in the north cleverly and adeptly used the window of opportunity that opened before them to seize de facto independence, though the key question of control over the northern city of Kirkuk remains a ticking time bomb. And all are fighting for as large a share of Iraq's enormous oil and gas reserves as they can get.

Taking stock of ' Operation Iraqi Freedom' a decade later, the Financial Times concluded that the US won the war, Iran won peace and Turkey won the contracts. I can only agree.

In political terms, Iran is the big winner of Bush's war. Its number-one enemy, Saddam, was dispatched by its number-two enemy, the US, which presented Iran with a golden opportunity to extend its influence beyond its western border for the first time since 1746. Bush's war, with its poor strategic vision and worse planning, increased Iran's regional standing in a way that the country was unlikely ever to have achieved on its own. The war enabled Iran to assert itself as the dominant power in the Gulf and the wider region and its nuclear programme serves precisely these ambitions.

The losers in the region are also clear: Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states feel existentially threatened. They have a point: With Shiites in power in Iraq, Iran will seek suitable opportunities to use local Shiite populations as proxies to assert its hegemonic claims. This is what is fuelling Bahrain's domestic turmoil, beyond the Shiite majority's local grievances.

Leaving aside the lies, fictions and questions of morality and personal responsibility, the critical mistake of America's war against Iraq was the absence of either a viable plan or the necessary strength to enforce a Pax Americana in the Middle East. America was powerful enough to destabilise the existing regional order, but not powerful enough to establish a new one. The US neocons, with their wishful thinking, grossly underestimated the scale of the task at hand - unlike the revolutionaries in Iran, who quickly moved in to reap what the US had sowed.

The Iraq war also marked the beginning of America's subsequent relative decline. Bush squandered a large part of America's military strength in Mesopotamia for an ideological fiction - strength that is sorely missed in the region ten years later. And there is no alternative to be seen without America.

While there is no causal link between the Iraq war and the Arab revolutions that began in December 2010, their implications have combined in a malign manner. Since the war, the bitter enmities between Al Qaida and other Salafist and Sunni Arab nationalist groups have given way to cooperation or even mergers. This, too, is a result brought about by American neocon masterminds. And the regional destabilisation triggered by the Arab revolutions is increasingly converging on Iraq, mainly via Syria and Iran.