American influence on the Middle East is past its peak – someone should tell them - Comment - Voices - The Independent Thursday 24 January 2013 i Jobs Dating Property Shop My Account Logout Register Login Register for INDEPENDENT VOICES now to comment on the Independent site, sign up for newsletters, react to articles and more... Already a member? click here to sign in Forgot password? Don't have an account yet? Join Now! We've found an existing account with the given email. To link the social network identity with your site account, please provide the site password for the provided email. Email: Password: Forgot your password ? Email: Registration indicates fields that are mandatory * Email * Password * Confirm Password * First name * Surname * Postcode * Country * United Kingdom United States Republic of Ireland Rest of the World Mobile phone number Username * Gender * Male Female Year of birth * -- 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 The Independent has a range of email newsletters simply choose which ones you want to receive. Please select the newsletters you would like to receive from The Independent IndyNews email: Early morning news headlines (Monday-Friday) Independent Voices newsletter: Updates with the best of our Opinion content IndyFootball email: Lunchtime football and sport headlines (Monday-Friday) Independent Travel newsletter: All the latest travel news and great offers (every Friday) Indy Arts and Entertainment newsletter: All the latest from the world of arts and entertainment (every Monday) The Independent Competitions and Offers email: The best new prizes, offers and bargains (every Friday) Occasionally we would like to send you emails detailing specific offers, from us or carefully selected partners. If you would like to receive these then please tick the appropriate boxes below. We will never pass on your details to anyone else. I would like to receive additional offers and information from The Independent I would like to receive additional offers and information sent by The Independent on behalf of carefully selected partners Terms and Conditions * I have read, understood and agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of Independent Digital News and Media Limited Registration * indicates fields that are mandatory Email * Password * Confirm Password * First name * Surname * Username * Terms and Conditions * I have read, understood and agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of Independent Mail Sent for Registration Confirmation. A confirmation email has been sent. Please activate your account by clicking on the activation link sent in your mail box. Flag Sent for Moderation. The comment you selected has been flagged to the moderators. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. Click here... News Voices Comment Campaigns Child Soldiers Equal Partners Delayed Diagnosis We are Malala Find by writer Yasmin Alibhai-Brown Rebecca Armstrong Memphis Barker Terence Blacker Chris Blackhurst Archie Bland Ian Burrell Andrew Buncombe Katherine Butler Ben Chu Patrick Cockburn Laura Davis Mary Dejevsky Grace Dent Robert Fisk Andrew Grice Viv Groskop Adrian Hamilton Philip Hensher Ian Herbert Howard Jacobson Ellen E Jones Alice Jones Owen Jones Emily Jupp Simon Kelner Dominic Lawson Donald Macintyre Michael McCarthy Andy McSmith Hamish McRae Jane Merrick Matthew Norman Christina Patterson Amol Rajan John Rentoul Steve Richards Deborah Ross Kim Sengupta Joan Smith Mark Steel Harriet Walker Tim Walker John Walsh Andreas Whittam Smith Debate Editorials Letters IV Drip Archive Our Voices Rentoul The Editors The Foreign Desk Battle of Ideas Commentators Yasmin Alibhai-Brown Terence Blacker Simon Carr Rupert Cornwell Sloane Crosley Mary Dejevsky Robert Fisk Andrew Grice Adrian Hamilton Philip Hensher Howard Jacobson Dominic Lawson John Lichfield Hamish McRae Matthew Norman Christina Patterson John Rentoul Steve Richards Sarah Sands Mary Ann Sieghart Joan Smith Mark Steel Janet Street-Porter Andreas Whittam Smith Johann Hari Columnists Dom Joly David Lister Thomas Sutcliffe John Walsh Janet Street-Porter Chris Bryant Democracy 2015 IV Drip Archive Sport Tech Life Property Arts & Ents Travel Money IndyBest Blogs Student Hot Topics EU referendum Trolling Obesity Disability in film Patrick Cockburn Follow Sunday 30 September 2012 American influence on the Middle East is past its peak – someone should tell them World View: Is the US now in the same position as the Soviet Union in 1989, when it had to allow its satellites to collapse around it? Share Tweet +More Are the days of American predominance in the Middle East coming to an end or is US influence simply taking a new shape? How far is Washington, after refusing to try to keep Hosni Mubarak in power in Egypt, facing the same situation as the Soviet Union in 1989, when the police states it had sustained in Eastern Europe were allowed to collapse? The US is obviously weaker than it was between 1979, when the then Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, signed the Camp David agreement and allied Egypt with the US, and 2004/05, when it became obvious to the outside world that the Iraq war was a disaster for America. At the time, General William Odom, a former head of the National Security Agency, the biggest US intelligence agency, rightly called it "the greatest strategic disaster in American history". Since then, the verdict of the Iraq war has been confirmed in Afghanistan, where another vastly expensive US expeditionary force has failed to crush an insurgency. In the last few weeks alone, Taliban fighters have succeeded in storming Camp Bastion in Helmand province and destroying $200m worth of aircraft. So many American and allied soldiers have now been shot by Afghan soldiers and police that US advisers are under orders to wear full body armour when having tea with their local allies. The Arab Spring uprisings posed a new threat to the US, but also opened up new options. Support for Mubarak was decisively withdrawn at an early stage, to the dismay of Saudi Arabia and Israel. But the Muslim Brotherhood had long been considering how it could reach an accommodation with the US that would safeguard it against military coups, and enable it to chop back the power of the Egyptian security forces. This was very much the successful strategy of the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development (AKP) party, explaining why it was prepared to join the US in invading Iraq in 2003 and why it has become the chief instrument of American policy towards Syria in the past year. This alliance with Islamic but democratic and pro-capitalist parties in Egypt and Turkey is obviously in the interests of the US and the Atlantic powers. But their support for democratic change in North Africa and West Asia is determined by self-interest. It does not, for instance, extend to Bahrain where the Sunni al-Khalifa monarchy has been busily locking up its Shia opponents and retreating from promises of meaningful reform. But new allies must at some point mean fresh policies. In sharp contrast to the Mubarak regime, a new government in Egypt is unlikely to support covertly Israeli military action such as the bombardment of Lebanon in 2006 and of Gaza in 2008. A problem for the White House is that American voters have not taken on board the extent to which US influence has been reduced. For all the rhetoric about the Iraq war being a strategic disaster, the American political and military elite has also failed to appreciate the extent and consequences of failure. It is extraordinary to discover, according to recent revelations, that as late as 2010 Vice-President Joe Biden was under the impression that he could blithely decide who would be president of Iraq. Biden's grip on Iraqi geography appears to be as shaky as his understanding of its politics. On one occasion in Baghdad, he lauded all the good things the US had done for Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, having apparently mistaken it for Basra in southern Iraq. The killing of the US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and the burning of the US Consulate in Benghazi could have been a worse political disaster for President Barack Obama than it turned out to be. It highlighted that the rebels who overthrew Muammar Gaddafi were not quite as they had been presented by the US government and media during the war past year. The US State Department appears to have had an unhealthy belief in its own propaganda, not seeing that its consulate in Benghazi was in one of the most dangerous places in the world. The assault did not come out of a blue sky. Fighters had shot at the convoy of the British ambassador, Sir Dominic Asquith, in Benghazi a few weeks earlier. In July last year, the rebels' own commander, Abdel Fatah Younis, was abducted and murdered by men nominally under his command in revenge for repressive actions he had carried out before he defected from Gaddafi's forces. Diplomats and soldiers are often curiously blind to dangers facing them. It may be that both live in very inward-looking communities and somehow cannot internalise how somebody outside may think and act. I remember in 1983 in Lebanon talking to the highly intelligent US marine commander whose soldiers were based near Beirut airport. In theoretical terms, he could see very clearly that American forces had some very dangerous enemies and were vulnerable to attack, but he unaccountably failed to take effective measures that might have stopped a truck packed with explosives killing 241 marines when their base was destroyed. Likewise, the Green Zone in Baghdad from 2003 on had elaborate fortifications, but its outer defences were manned at one moment by former Peruvian policemen from Lima and, at another, by ex-soldiers from Uganda hired on the cheap by a security company. A more effective political opponent than Mitt Romney could surely have inflicted damage on Obama over the Benghazi debacle. A measure of Romney's ineptitude is that he failed to do so and, instead of scoring points, he came across as opportunistic and ignorant. After all, Obama has been conducting a policy of retreat in Iraq, Afghanistan and Egypt without quite coming clean about it. Romney's denunciation of Obama for "apologising" for America was shallow demagoguery, though rhetoric on the American right should not be dismissed too casually. George W Bush's supporters used to spout similar nonsense, but only after 9/11 did it become appallingly clear that they believed a lot of what they were saying. Supposing Obama is re-elected in November, will the US stance change at all? The endlessly repeated Israeli threats to launch air strikes on Iran have always struck me as being most likely highly successful bluff, since threats alone have served Israeli purposes so well, isolating Iran economically and diverting attention from the Palestinians. More immediately, will the US move after the election, possibly acting through Turkey, to take military action to displace Bashar al-Assad in Syria? There is something deceptive about David Cameron implying that Russia and China are responsible for the slaughter of Syrian children. A central problem in getting rid of President Assad and the Baathist regime is that the war against him is not just for and against autocracy. If this were the only issue, how come that the Sunni absolute monarchies of the Arabian peninsula are Assad's fiercest enemies? The struggle is also between Shia and Sunni and between Iran and its enemies, guaranteeing that Assad has support in Tehran, Baghdad and Beirut. The quickest way to end the war is to reassure Assad's allies at home and abroad that they are not next in line for elimination. React Now Tweet Click here... New Hot Commented Disagree with me, sure. But don't wish me dead Philip Hensher Outlandish hope, followed by four years of failure: Obama's next term will be a repeat of his first Tom Mendelsohn If Syria's rebels can't take The Fortress, how can they take the capital? Richard Hall Eden Hazard kicking a Swansea ball boy sums up plenty of the worst aspects of modern life Simon Kelner British stories of Nigerian Cinderellas are no fairy tale Myriam Cherti There’s nothing empowering about girls who expose themselves online. Look what happened to Tulisa Grace Dent Disagree with me, sure. But don't wish me dead Philip Hensher The Daily Cartoon Eden Hazard kicking the Swansea ball boy: The reaction Laura Davis The dark side of Dubai Eden Hazard kicking a Swansea ball boy sums up plenty of the worst aspects of modern life Simon Kelner Debate: After he kicked a Swansea ball boy, do you have any sympathy for Chelsea's Eden Hazard? Independent Voices Eden Hazard kicking the Swansea ball boy: The reaction Laura Davis About time US military allowed women to fight on the frontlines The Game and Real Social dynamics: Is the seduction community pushing the idea that ‘no’ just means ‘not yet’? James Bloodworth Letters: Cameron's empty threat to the EU Click here... SPONSORED FEATURES See in Chinese New Year Celebrate Chinese New Year with Amoy and win a catered dinner party for six Holiday prize Prizes & offers Business videos Win a fabulous 12-night US holiday for two Take the Great American Road trip across Virginia, Maryland and Washington, DC  Amoy Prizes & offers Business videos Enter the latest Independent competitions Win anything from gadgets to five-star holidays on our competitions and offers page. Amoy Holiday prize Business videos Business videos from commercial thought leaders Watch the best in the business world give their insights into the world of business. Amoy Holiday prize Prizes & offers More From Patrick Cockburn 'War on terror' is a tempting defence, but it isn't that simple Suicide bomber kills 21 in al-Qa'ida attack on Kirkuk As long as the cash rolls in, the West appears untroubled by Gulf monarchies' ideology Analysis: The murky motives behind Mali's crisis The war against the Shia catches all in its crossfire iJobs General Commodities Support Team Lead Graduate IT Consultant Programme Family Solicitor NQ+ Deployment / Desktop Support Engineer - 6 Months - Newbury Voluntary Posts View the latest from iJobs Day In a Page Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 January February March April May June July August September October November December 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 Go Read Next   Outlandish hope, followed by four years of failure: Obama's next term will be a repeat of his first Tom Mendelsohn   British stories of Nigerian Cinderellas are no fairy tale Myriam Cherti Modigliani 'expert' accused of being art's biggest fraud Christian Gregori Parisot was recognised as an authority on the Italian figurative artist - until he was arrested There's money in them there hits Channels spawned by YouTube are making a fortune but are the people making the videos missing out? Live and let drive: The future of motoring Will we soon see self-stopping, speed-limited and driverless cars on our roads? The 10 Best new games From console blockbuster to smartphone freebies – here are ten ways to spend some down-time in the next few weeks... Me, myself and I: Confessional poetry Sharon Olds' account of her marital break-up made her a deserved TS Eliot winner. Kenneth Baker: 'This is what pupils should learn' The former Education Secretary publishes his radical vision for the future of schools James Lawton Desperate act of ignominy that reveals the dark mood currently gripping Chelsea State of the six nations Get ready for the greatest rugby show in the northern hemisphere Climate change Obama can believe in Michael McCarthy on the inaugural speech that could herald a new era in the fight against global warming Would you want to live to 100? Remarkably, two in five girls born today will live for a century, and boys are close behind. But, asks Jeremy Laurance, is longevity all it's cracked up to be? There’s nothing empowering about girls who expose themselves online... ... look what happened to Tulisa, says Grace Dent The 10 Best antiques fairs Whether you’re hunting for an heirloom or looking for a bargain, try one of these treasure troves This winter's most exciting mountain festivals The hills are alive... with the sound of electronica, techno, indie, jazz and Beethoven New York by cabbie A new book by one of the Big Apple's legion of yellow-cab drivers reveals a close-up view of life on the city's streets Davos: Change the world? … or just network with the in-crowd? The Independent 2 Derry Street London W8 5TT © independent.co.uk Terms & Policies Privacy Policy Cookie policy Code of Conduct Complaint form Email newsletters RSS Contact Us Subscriptions Apps Work for us Evening Standard Homes & Property iJobs Advertising Guide Syndication Novaya Gazeta (English) ES Business Connections London Private Rentals Please provide search keyword(s) Advanced Search Article archive Topics © independent.co.uk Click here... Click here...