Price of failure in Iraq is that the worst is yet to come

IRAQ/Commentary: US efforts to pacify Islamist extremism have had the perverse effect of empowering the forces America sought…

IRAQ/Commentary: US efforts to pacify Islamist extremism have had the perverse effect of empowering the forces America sought to vanquish, writes David Hirst in Beirut.

In the New York Review of Books, veteran commentator Edward Sheehan wrote from Nablus recently about a Palestinian expectation that this summer would witness a simultaneous "explosion" in both Iraq and the occupied territories. That amounts to an ironic comment on perhaps the most fundamental aspect of the Iraqi enterprise. For the Bush Administration's neo-conservatives, overthrowing Saddam Hussein was to be nothing if not region-wide in purpose, transforming the entire Middle East, and bringing a final Arab-Israeli settlement.

The neo-cons were right about one thing: the Arab world, however fractious, is bound by strong psychological and cultural ties, and whatever happened in Iraq would profoundly affect the whole. The trouble is that just as American success in Iraq would have made it likelier elsewhere, the American disaster that now so ominously threatens there has the built-in propensity to become a regional one.

For years it had been all but axiomatic that any Western intervention in Iraq had to be matched by intervention in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The West created the Israel settler-state at the Palestinians' expense, and any settlement should so far as possible redress that historic injustice. Otherwise, all the war's official objectives would be dismissed as just another episode of Western conquest and exploitation.

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The neo-cons bought the axiom - but reversed it. Thanks to them, the invasion was really the supreme expression of American double standards in the region. In theory, the settlement was to come about through region-wide democratisation. In practice, it would do so through a higher level of external coercion than ever applied before, and by a yet more extravagant bias in Israel's favour.

Even as he slips deeper into the Iraqi quagmire, Bush, far from compensating in pro-Palestinian coin, has put America openly behind Sharon's Greater-Israel, expansionist designs.

So while the Palestinians have their own, American-created reasons for stepped-up resistance, they naturally view the Iraqis as an integral part of the same anti-imperialist struggle. More tellingly, Iraqis, despite a certain disillusionment with pan-Arabism, have adopted Palestine as part of their own struggle. In Falluja, Sunni Islamists do battle in the name of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin.

In Iraq and Palestine, more obviously than anywhere else, the US has now directly or indirectly empowered the very forces - Islamist and nationalist, populist, violent and fanatical - it came to quell. That is because that is where Western interference has gone further than anywhere else. But such forces also stem from the moral and political bankruptcy of Arab governments, which have failed in what should be the basic duty of any state, the defence of land, people and sovereignty against foreign assault and domination. From that standpoint, the Islamists are simply non-state actors who have assumed that duty themselves, with jihad, terror and suicide as their means. "They are profiting from a climate in which", said a Palestinian scholar, "the Arab masses' greatest joy is to see the US invasion of Iraq becoming ever more painful". Al-Qaeda, pan-Islamic in outlook and action, is the most fearsome of profiteers. America has turned Iraq into the perfect arena for conducting the pan-Islamic struggle against the western infidel and Arab "apostates". Lebanon's Hizbullah is strictly local in origin, but it enjoys greater region-wide prestige than al-Qaeda, because it confined itself to fighting - and besting - Israel in a classical guerrilla war. It regards Iraqi resistance as accessory to its own. Increasingly accused by Israel of helping Palestinian Islamists, it is ready and waiting for a cross-border conflagration; but it wants Israel to start it, so that its re-entry into the jihadist arena is legitimate as well as dramatic. Iraq cannot but hasten the day.

A triumph for Islamists, an American failure will give free rein to another category of non-state forces. Some are Islamist too, but their defining characteristic is that they are ethnic or sectarian, and hostile to each other. The danger will be anarchy and civil war, Lebanese-style. In 1990, Arab regimes finally put out the Lebanese fire that threatened to burn them all. But Iraq will be a Lebanon writ large. So pivotal a country at inter-communal loggerheads with itself will infect a whole region replete with potential conflicts of the same kind. Kurdish disturbances in Syria, stirrings among Shias of the Gulf, are premonitory tremors of convulsions to come.

The flow of oil and the security of Israel are fundamentals of US Middle East policy. As its soaring price portends, the spread of the Iraqi contagion to the Gulf will pose a real threat to the first. As to the second, Israelis already voice fears that the US public will blame them for pushing their government, via the neo-cons, into catastrophic misadventure, that America's will to stand by Israel whatever the cost to its interests in the Arab world will be grievously impaired, and that the region's anti-American forces will strive to make the cost unbearable. How the likes of Sharon would react to the mere hint of abandonment by Israel's indispensable superpower patron will be a pregnant question in a Middle East where the worst is yet to come.