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Item of Interest
May 31, 2007

 

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The Future of the Middle East:
Strategic Implications for the United States

Part 1 - Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr.
 

Editor's Note:

The Middle East Policy Council, a non profit educational organization that seeks to "expand public discussion and understanding of issues affecting U.S. policy in the Middle East," recently held the forty-ninth iteration of its Capitol Hill series. This session, which tackled the tough questions about what the Middle East is going to look like from the perspective of US interests, met the MEPC's objectives to "challenge the conventional wisdom, ask the difficult questions, encourage a wide spectrum of views, [and] provide forums to stimulate thinking."

We begin with MEPC President and distinguished diplomat Chas Freeman, a former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who provides a narrative of the situation America faces in the region. "Not a pretty picture," he calls it, in a comprehensive recitation of profound failures and challenges. But it is a situation he said has "now become almost a national obsession in the United States."

We follow Ambassador Freeman's introductory remarks, today, with a presentation by F. Gregory Gause, Professor of Political Science from the University of Vermont. That item will be provided in a separate item with the balance of the presentations circulating in the next several days.

As always we are indebted to the Ambassador Freeman and the Middle East Policy Council for permission to share these insightful and important discussions with you.

Here, now, Ambassador Chas Freeman.

The Future of the Middle East: Strategic Implications for the United States
Middle East Policy Council Capitol Hill Conference Series on U.S. Middle East Policy

Moderator/Discussant

Speakers

Chas W. Freeman, Jr.,
President, Middle East Policy Council
Washington, D.C.
June 26, 2007

I would like to welcome you all here. I'm Chas Freeman, president of the Middle East Policy Council, which is a small impecunious, struggling organization, which will welcome your donations.

We do three things: We come up here on Capitol Hill to the heart of darkness and light a candle to enlighten its denizens by inviting intelligent, well-informed people to discuss politically incorrect subjects. Second, we publish a quarterly, Middle East Policy, which is the most-often cited in the field, both domestically and internationally. I commend it to your attention.

And, third, throughout the United States, we train high school teachers how to teach about Arab civilization and Islam. We have trained about 18,000 such teachers. We think we reach about 1.4 million kids a year with a fact or two that confuses them and complicates their minds in ways the public school system would not.

Now, to the subject at hand. The subject we are talking about today, which is the future of the Middle East and its implications for the United States, is a subject that wasn't of interest to many people not so long ago, but quite tragically, it's now become almost a national obsession in the United States.

The Middle East is frankly not a pretty picture for American foreign policy. Our backing of Israel's efforts to pacify the Palestinians rather than to negotiate peace with them has discredited us as peacemakers without gaining security for Israel. Our attempt to isolate the democratically elected Palestinian government has further discredited us as supporters of democratization in the region. Among other results, our policy has quite predictably left Hamas nowhere to go but deeper into the embrace of Iran.

It has also catalyzed armed conflict among Palestinians, partitioned the occupied territories, encouraged the Israeli effort to crush or starve the Gaza ghetto into submission, and very likely made the prospect of a just and lasting peace based on a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians more remote than ever. To Israel's north, our open encouragement of its war with Lebanon last summer succeeded in installing Hezbollah as the dominant political force in that country while cementing its ties to Iran.

Our recent efforts to block peace talks between Israel and Syria ensure a continued state of war between those two countries, continued proxy wars in Lebanon, continued Syrian alliance on Iran, and continued stalemate in U.S.-Syrian relations. But the best is yet to come. Further to the east and north, we are locked in a stalemate with Iran, which is building a nuclear deterrent against the attacks on it we and Israel now feel obliged to threaten in order to deter it from acquiring a deterrent.

Our relations with Turkey are unprecedently chilly and a war between Turks and Kurds in Iraq now seems quite possible. Meanwhile, the strategic ambush of Iraq continues to pin us down strategically to the benefit of al Qaeda and other enemies of the United States. Iraq itself is now a country occupied militarily by us and politically by Iran. Our transformation of diplomacy there, to borrow a phrase, has produced a catastrophic mixture of anarchy and gang warfare, mounting civilian casualties and collapsing infrastructure and an eruption of embittered Sunni refugees who are spreading to every corner of the mostly Sunni Arab world.

About the only way we've managed to unite Iraqis is in opposition to our plan to retain bases in Iraq from which to dominate the region for the long term. We have finally recognized, however, that Iraq requires a political, not a military solution, something our military were telling us from the outset. But in practice, we're still trying to impose a military solution on Iraq. Ironically, by doing so, in my view, we are actually precluding political solutions in Iraq, so we're caught in a feedback loop in which we have to put ever more troops into Iraq to counter the resistance that the troops we already have there have generated. We now face the prospect that bringing in more troops may simply generate more resistance.

The terms of domestic debate about Iraq in the United States has now shifted to one topic, and that is how to create conditions that will enable us to withdraw. When you look below the surface rhetoric, that is the topic that everybody is discussing. Many believe that we cannot withdraw without making the situation even worse, but that seems very unlikely to deter the American public from pulling the plug on this adventure. So this is not a pretty picture at all.

If I have misdescribed the situation, I will be duly corrected by the five brilliant panelists who are here as well as by members of the audience, who will have their chance to go at us after the opening presentations..

..We have a truly remarkable panel today..

Greg Gause is a noted scholar of the Gulf based at the University of Vermont. I am not going to read the biographies which are on the back of the programs. Our panelists are all people who are I think very well known to anybody who follows the region. Greg, I think is going to talk about the GCC and the Gulf area and its reactions to all of the things that I mentioned, and some I probably forgot to mention.

Fareed Mohamedi is with PFC Energy. He is an expert on energy matters. He will talk about the implications of developments in the region on that front, I think.

Wayne White was a very noted analyst at the Intelligence and Research Bureau at the Department of State. He has emerged as a great resource for the public of the United States now that he has broken his cover and is out in the open. Wayne will talk about Iraq mainly.

Tony Cordesman is, I think, a national treasure. He is someone who has focused on issues of relevance to the matters we are discussing for much longer than he would probably like to admit, and he has been very prescient in his comments on the same. He will talk about the situation generally in the Levant, meaning Israel and adjacent areas.

So with this introduction, I would like to ask the first speaker, Greg Gause to take the floor.

[Presentations by Professor Gause and other speakers provided separately via email and on www.SUSRIS.org ]

Related Material

On SUSRIS

Capitol Hill Series:

Saudi Arabia's Accession to the WTO: Is a "Revolution" Brewing? - Middle East Policy Council Capitol Hill Conference Series on US Middle East Policy - January 13, 2006

How Can the U.S. Re-Open for Business to the Arab World? - Middle East Policy Council Capitol Hill Conference Series on US Middle East Policy - April 7, 2006

Saudi Arabia: Enemy or Friend? - Middle East Policy Council Capitol Hill Conference Series on US Middle East Policy - January 23, 2004

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