Has Bush Blundered into Victory?

Did the Bush administration blunder into the best policy in the Middle East?  That is the suggestion of Edward N. Luttwak.

The Bush administration launched the Iraq invasion as the centerpiece of an ambitious effort to bring democracy to the Middle East.  Well, that dream is over.  But it seems that it has inadvertently brought about a strategic win, with “divide and rule, the classic formula for imperial power on the cheap.”

What?  The collapse of Saddam Hussein has meant that that the polarity in the Middle East is now between Sunni and Shia, and with the growing power of Shiite Iran the Sunnis are nervous.  And that is bringing them into the arms of the United States.  In Lebanon there is an open US-Sunni alliance, fueled by Saudi money.

But paradoxically the Shias of Iraq also need an alliance with the US—to help them beat off the Sunni insurgency.

On Dec. 4, 2006, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of Iraq’s largest political party, went to the White House to plead his case with President Bush... [A]s the chief leader of Iraq’s Arab Shiite population, he has no choice... [The Shiites] need all the help they can get, especially American military training for the Shiite-dominated army and police.

Huh?  Yes, it’s all a bit confusing if all you hear is the mainstream media drumbeat of disaster in Iraq.

Not only that, but al-Hakim is willing to help bring down rival Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi militia army.

The Iraq war has indeed brought into existence a New Middle East, in which Arab Sunnis can no longer gleefully disregard American interests because they need help against the looming threat of Shiite supremacy, while in Iraq at the core of the Arab world, the Shia are allied with the U.S. What past imperial statesmen strove to achieve with much cunning and cynicism, the Bush administration has brought about accidentally.

The strategic interest of the United States in the Middle East for the last generation has been to contain the power of militant Iran.  That hasn’t changed.  What has changed is the interest of the non-Iranian parties in the Middle East.  All of a sudden they feel the need to cosy up to the United States.  For now.