IRAQ:Through a lethal cocktail of arrogance, ideology and ignorance, George Bush's foreign policy master plan imploded this year, leaving a huge mess, writes Lara Marlowe
There were no limits to George Bush's plans for the Middle East. For more than a year after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US president dreamed of a "greater Middle East initiative" based on neoconservative ideology. The initiative was supposed to usher in freedom and democracy, free markets and women's rights, from Arab north Africa all the way to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
This was the year, 2006, when it all fell apart. The autumn brought a cascade of disavowals. Outgoing UN secretary general Kofi Annan described Iraq with the dreaded words "civil war". Henry Kissinger, adviser to US presidents since 1959, told the BBC that the war in Iraq could not be won.
Robert Gates, who was summoned to replace defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was asked by the Senate armed services committee: "Do you believe that we are currently winning in Iraq?"
He replied: "No sir".
No one in Washington talks any more about the greater Middle East initiative. Ambitions for Iraq, which was to have been the linchpin of the new Middle East, have been drastically scaled back. As quoted in the Iraq Study Group report published on December 6th, President Bush's goal is now an Iraq that can "govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself".
Forget about the beacon of democracy whose example was going to undermine neighbouring regimes.
From the Mediterranean to the Asian subcontinent, the entire zone that Bush sought to civilise has festered. Iran defies the US and Europe by continuing its uranium enrichment programme. Five years after the US "liberated" Afghanistan, that country is again the world's number one opium producer and the Taliban is resurgent.
To a large extent because of Israeli military assaults and Western indifference, the Lebanese and Palestinians are also on the verge of civil war.
Iraq is, of course, the nightmare by which all other conflicts are measured. Sectarian violence reached the civil war threshold last February, when Sunnis blew up the golden-domed mosque of Samarra, which is holy to Shia Muslims. Some 1,300 Sunni were massacred in retaliation.
More than 100 Iraqis are murdered every day now and nearly that many are kidnapped by sectarian militia men or gangsters. Their bodies are later dumped by the roadside, in vacant lots or fields, or wash up on the banks of the Tigris. The situation is so desperate that US troops tried building high walls between Sunni and Shia neighbourhoods of Baghdad to stem the bloodbath.
A UN report issued on September 21st says torture by sectarian groups and security forces in Iraq is systematic. The bodies of former detainees bear the marks of beatings with electric cables, wounds to the head and genitalia, broken hands and legs, electric shocks and cigarette burns. Corpses delivered to the Baghdad morgue have been burned with acid, skinned, had eyes and teeth pulled out, or have been pierced by drills or nails.
Another UN report, issued this month, says between 2,000 and 3,000 Iraqis flee the country every day. At least 1.5 million Iraqi refugees have already reached Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, and another 1.5 million are displaced within Iraq.
Afghanistan, alas, is beginning to resemble Iraq. With more than 3,000 Afghans and 150 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation soldiers killed this year, 2006 was the bloodiest year in the five years since the Taliban was overthrown.
There were at least 80 suicide bombings, a four-fold increase on 2005. Afghanistan now supplies 92 per cent of the world's opium supply while opium accounts for 60 per cent of the country's economy.
The US recently shifted responsibility for southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the Taliban is strongest, to Nato but, as in Iraq, there are simply too few soldiers. Also as in Iraq, costly attempts to train local police, often by private contractors, have failed. Material and weapons issued to security forces have simply disappeared. Incompetence and corruption further undermine US attempts at "nation-building".
Lebanon's "cedar revolution" provided prized evidence that democracy was coming to the Middle East, but that too unravelled this year. More anti-Syrian politicians, most recently the industry minister Pierre Gemayel, were assassinated.
In July and August, Israel bombarded the country for 34 days, in retaliation for the abduction of two Israeli soldiers by the Shia Muslim militant group Hizbullah.
Some 1,200 Lebanese and more than 100 Israelis were killed in the summer war. Lebanon's infrastructure was shattered, but the most serious casualty was the fragile consensus among the country's religious groups. The body politic split between Christians, Sunnis and Druze on the one hand, and Shia Muslims, supported by the breakaway Maronite Catholic Gen Michel Aoun, on the other.
The former group is allied with Paris and Washington, the latter with Tehran and Damascus.
This month, the pro-Syrian, pro-Iranian camp staged weeks of mass street protests in the hope of bringing down prime minister Fuad Siniora's pro-Western government. "There is no longer a place for America in Lebanon," Sheikh Naim Qassem, the deputy leader of Hizbullah exhorted one rally. "Do you not recall that the weapons fired on Lebanon are American weapons?" he added.
The situation in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories is as volatile as that in Lebanon. The Palestinians elected a Hamas-led government at the end of January 2006, in elections which were deemed exemplary throughout the Arab world.
Israel and the international community punished the Palestinians by blocking $50 million a month in customs duties that rightfully belong to the Palestinian Authority, and by withholding all aid that might transit a government ministry controlled by Hamas.
The situation worsened further when Palestinians abducted Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit at the end of June. As international attention shifted to Lebanon and Iraq, Israel killed nearly 400 Gazans between June and November. During the same period, Palestinians killed five Israelis. Hamas and Fatah, the former ruling group founded by the late Yasser Arafat, failed to form a "unity government" and have repeatedly clashed.
All attempts to restart peace talks run up against the three conditions imposed by Israel and adopted by the US and EU: that Hamas recognise Israel, renounce violence and abide by past Israeli-Palestinian peace accords.
No one seems to notice that Israel has not recognised a Palestinian state, renounced violence nor abided by past accords. The British prime minister Tony Blair offered the faintest glimmer of hope when he said he would search for a different way forward.
If there is one winner in this Middle East cauldron, it is the Islamic Republic of Iran. As the extent of the disaster in Iraq became evident, talk of "regime change" in Tehran subsided. Iran's influence with Iraq's Shia majority, in Syria, Lebanon and among radical Sunni Islamists in the Palestinian territories has never been greater.
The US ostracised the moderate Iranian president Mohamed Khatami, who pleaded for a "dialogue of civilisations," and reaped the far more radical Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. On April 11th, Ahmadinejad announced triumphantly that "Dear Iran has joined the club of nuclear countries" by enriching uranium. The UN Security Council demanded that it stop, yet proved incapable of agreeing on punitive measures.
Ahmadinejad continued to thumb his nose at the West, holding a revisionist conference on the "myth" of the Holocaust in Tehran. In an alarming sign that Iran's nuclear programme may start off a nuclear arms race in the region, six Sunni Muslim Gulf emirates announced they are considering their own atomic energy programme.
George Bush thought he could transform the Middle East into a pro-American oasis of democracy that would embrace Israel. Instead, Iraq has become a staging ground for al-Qaeda and the scene of a Shia-Sunni civil war that risks spreading throughout the region.
This mess was created by a lethal cocktail of arrogance, ideology and ignorance. In The End of Iraq, former US ambassador Peter Galbraith tells how shortly before the Iraq invasion, Bush's Iraqi guests in the White House were stunned to find the US president didn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia. Jeff Stein, national security editor of the Congressional Quarterly in Washington, found that intelligence and law enforcement officials involved in the "war on terror," as well as members of Congress in relevant committees, didn't know the difference either.
The Iraq Study Group report notes that only six of 1,000 staff at the US embassy in Baghdad are fluent Arabic speakers. US statistics on attacks in Iraq were "systematically collected in a way that minimises . . . discrepancy with policy goals," the report says.
Many US analysts have fallen into the trap of believing that if the US had put more troops into Iraq in the first place, or managed the transition better, or had better intelligence, things might have worked out differently.
An intelligence analyst told the Iraq Study Group: "We rely too much on others to bring information back to us and too often don't understand what is reported back because we do not understand the context of what we are told."
The US Congress spent nearly $2 billion this year on countermeasures to protect troops in Iraq against improvised explosive devises (roadside bombs). "But," the report laments, "the administration has not put forward a request to invest comparable resources in trying to understand the people who fabricate, plant and explode those devices."