U.S. plays dangerous game in Mideast

WASHINGTON — Just before the first Gulf War, during that ominous fall of 1990, I spent some time in Saudi Arabia and in the region. I explored the eastern provinces, where Americans and other troops in the coalition were pouring in. I drove with my young guide, Adel al-Jubeir — now Saudi ambassador to the U.S. — along the Persian Gulf, gleaming in the sunlight, until we reached the dusty, end-of-the-line town of Khafji.

From Khafji, where American troops were already casually ensconced in rundown houses, we could look across at “occupied Kuwait” only a few yards away. What was happening there with Iraqi troops all over the place? We found out soon enough. It was horror on a mass scale: piles of women’s breasts were found in bags, Kuwaiti men were hustled into the streets and killed, gold and treasure were taken the few miles back to Iraq. And when the Iraqis thought they were losing, they torched the Kuwaiti oil fields.

But what I remember in addition to the obvious horrors at the time was that every single person I talked to — including American generals, the Saudi chief of staff, American Ambassador Charles Freeman and many others — agreed on one thing: When this war was over, no matter what, Iraq must not be broken up. That would allow Iran (Persia) to take the southern Shia part; the Kurds, the north; and the Sunnis, the center. The entire Middle East would be in chaos.

At the time, I was not sure. I thought there was a strategy between occupying Iraq and leaving the country intact. I thought Saddam should be brought to the south to accept the defeat, for instance, and that his helicopters should not be allowed to fly (and thus, wipe out the Shiites in the south). But moderate, workable strategies seldom have constituencies.

Now we are in another era and an infinitely worse situation.

Workable democracy

We went into Iraq, say the White House and the Pentagon and their imperially-minded cohorts who dominated the original thinking on the war, to establish a workable democracy within that strange country, strangled as it was by the history of the great cultures destroyed there. Instead, not only has the country effectively splintered, as my 1990 colleagues feared, there has appeared an entirely new confrontation, a fatal division of the Middle East into Sunni vs. Shiite and Arab vs. Persian.

If there is anything one could have dreamed of that would be worst than this, it is hard to imagine. The Middle East may have been a mess before, but power was too dispersed to present the danger of major confrontations. Here is what now is coming out of the unbelievable chaos. Because we fear the approximately 60 percent of Iraqi Shiites who sympathize with their brothers, sisters and cousins in Iran (and why would they not, after years of being persecuted by Sunnis?), the United States has fallen back on the Sunni tribesmen, as in Anbar province, who are being funded by the U.S. and probably by the Saudis and the Jordanians as well. The fact that these were Saddam’s men, whom we fought the war against, is now conveniently forgotten.

Having fallen back on the Sunnis, the United States is already quickly moving to establish a major Arab-Persian confrontation across the region — from Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, with their large underprivileged Shiite populations, to Sunni Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait, and against Iran itself and its “landsmen” in Lebanon’s Hezbollah as well as other Shiite minorities.

Arms deal

The administration’s latest idea — to give a $30 billion new arms deal to the Saudis and other Gulf leaders, and more billions to Israel — is the down payment on the “new configuration” of the Middle East. (Note that the administration gives out money like this without asking anything in return — some diplomacy!) Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Bob Gates (were) in the region (last) week trying to hammer it all down.

Gary G. Sick, National Security Council adviser on Iran during the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations and now at Columbia University, sees the U.S. attempting “to use the threat of Iran and a Shia political emergence to mobilize Arab support and perhaps even a degree of tacit Arab-Israeli cooperation. The strategy would also intend to shift attention away from the U.S. catastrophe in Iraq.”

So we are trying not only to democratize a country that doesn’t want to be democratized, we are also trying to set two dangerously different parts of the Middle East at ideological and religious war with each other.

Universal Press Syndicate