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March 21, 2006
I read that Ayad Allawi, the former US-backed Iraqi prime minister, has declared his country to be in the thick of a civil war that could soon "reach the point of no return". In contrast the White House is saying that it is encouraged by progress on forming a unity government in Iraq and that the insurgency in its "last throes". The optimism is duly echoed in Canberra as expected. But who is listening?
Steve Sack
The judgement increasingly is: 'Wrong war. Wrong strategy. Wrong president. Just plain wrong.' President Bush just wants to use the military strength of the US to go around whacking people. Well, Bush and Howard have managed to turned Iraq into a living hell all on their own.The events of the last three years lead to this conclusion: Iraq is a fiasco; George W. Bush is a failed leader and John Howard is subservient to the US.
It's failure written in capital letters. The prospect of an American defeat on the ground is a real possibility. More seriously though the Bush foreign policy logic is plain flawed.
This flaw raises questions about the viability of the US's long-held geostrategic dominance in the oil-rich Middle East. Afghanistan looks shaky and Pakistan very wobbly.
President Bush's position in his 2006 State of Union speech is this:
"Dictatorships shelter terrorists, and feed resentment and radicalism, and seek weapons of mass destruction. Democracies replace resentment with hope, respect the rights of their citizens and their neighbors, and join the fight against terror. Every step toward freedom in the world makes our country safer--so we will act boldly in freedom's cause."
He gets a big applause in Congress for the rhetoric. It is assumed that s democracy also improve U.S. security --as democracy grows in the Arab world, the thinking goes, the region will stop generating anti-American terrorism. It evokes the image of a totalitarian menace that could plunge the world into a century of violence every bit as hellish as the 20th century was.
So how come Hamas? How come the Shiites, who are sympathetic to Iran, will form the Iraqi government? That's what democracy means in the Middle East. Thsi indicates that democratization produces victories for Islamist political groups, because they are the best organized and most popular political movements in the region.
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