Mideast realities evident in Iraq

WASHINGTON -- As unspeakable violence catapults from one country and capital in the Middle East to the next, it's hard to uncover sense in all of the chaos.
Every day, suicide bombers blow up themselves gloriously in Iraq. Gaza sinks into anarchy. Egypt's police stalk once gracious streets. Jordan knows not who or what is really inside its borders. A new Iranian government, which wants to return to Khomeini's murderous ways, sees nuclear power as the new nationalism in its sick anti-Israel obsession. Syria and Lebanon square off on who can kill their finest journalists faster, while Israel itself wonders: "Who, and what, and why, comes after Ariel Sharon?" and/or "When do we 'get' Iran?"
Yet just below the superficies, there are patterns. Start with what the Bush liberators thought they were going to do in the region when they started the Iraq war three years ago.
False assumptions
Above all else, the radical-right neocons convinced George W. Bush that an invasion of Iraq would: 1) make the Middle East safe for Israel and create a real peace treaty with the Palestinians, and 2) create Iraq, with its rich land mass, as a moderate, sectarian democratic center that would go beyond ethnic and religious hatreds and inspire other countries to emulate it. That was repeated ad nauseum.
And what has happened? In fact, the exact opposite.
Prime Minister Sharon, lying on his deathbed in Jerusalem, has for many reasons already "solved" the Israeli/Palestinian problem -- only on his terms. By withdrawing from the Gaza adventure and building a wall around the rest of Israel, he has established the new borders of Israel. Everything else is irrelevant.
Meanwhile, Gaza, with its 1.3 million people maddened by 39 years of bitter occupation, is sinking into deeper anarchy. A prominent Western diplomat who knows the Palestinians well told me last week: "I think things are very, very bad. You look at Gaza and you see increasing chaos and lawlessness. The Palestinian Authority can't pay salaries; they may go bankrupt. Elections are the only thing that can save them."
But the fear is that Hamas, the radical Palestinian group that is well-based among the people, will defeat the traditional Fatah organization in the parliamentary elections in late January. And so we come to Example No. 1: Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Palestinians, far from working with or toward peace with Israel, have only persistently radicalized.
Then take Iraq, where recent elections for a parliamentary body to choose a president this spring effectively divided the country into the intrinsic divisions of its history: Kurds in the north, Sunni Muslims in the center and Shia Muslims in the south. It would be a small miracle if an "Iraqi state" were to emerge from this potpourri.
Israel's destruction
Next look at Iran, where reformists were in power and were making some muddled progress before the stunning election last year of "man-of-the-people" Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He wants Israel destroyed or, in his more compassionate moments, just moved to Europe.
Last week he took one giant step toward inviting an Israeli or American attack on Iran's nuclear capacity -- "going nuclear" has become the new "Muslim nationalism" -- when he said Iran would resume research and development of sensitive nuclear work that could lead to a bomb. At the same time, the Iranian Shiites are busy infiltrating the Shia areas of southern Iraq, arming them and sharing ideological fanaticism.
Example No. 2: These changes, too, stemmed directly from the American invasion of Iraq. Both the Iraqis' and the Iranians' sublime historical hatred of foreign occupiers has led them away from the relative secularism of recent years (the Baath Party in Iraq, the reformers in Iran) and to their ancient sectarian identities -- and hatreds.
Example No. 3 -- the old Muslim Brotherhood, the granddaddy of all of the radical Islamist groups, gaining dramatically in the recent Egyptian parliamentary elections.
Unfortunately, in virtually every country except the Gulf countries and the Maghreb, the American intervention has led directly away from secular democracy and toward sectarian, religious and ethnic division and domination. Was that really the way it was supposed to turn out?
Universal Press Syndicate