Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

ARTICLE: “Arab Democracy, a U.S. Goal, Falters: Early Moves Are Followed by Setbacks,” by Hassan M. Fattah, New York Times, 10 April 2006, p. A1.

ARTICLE: “In Stock Market, the Bears Gnaw at Iraq’s Confidence,” by Edward Wong, New York Times, 11 April 2006, p. A4.

OP-ED: “Yes He Would: When a president wants a war,” by Paul Krugman, New York Times, 10 April 2006, p. A25.

ARTICLE: “Bush rejects ‘wild’ claims of US plan to attack Iran,” by Edward Alden and Demetri Sevastopulo, Financial Times, 11 April 2006, p. 8.

EDITORIAL: “Military Fantasies on Iran,” New York Times, 11 April 2006, p. A20.

ARTICLE: “At the White House, Engaging Iran With Words Over Action,” by David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, New York Times, 13 April 2006, p. A8.

ARTICLE: “Aloof Khamenei faces dilemma over US talks,” by Gareth Smyth, Financial Times, 11 April 2006, p. 6.

ARTICLE: “Key Diplomats Together Again, But Not Meeting On North Korea,” by Norimitsu Onishi, New York Times, 11 April 2006, p. A16.

ARTICLE: “First Muslim sorority hopes to forms chapters across USA: Group promotes campus camaraderie with religious principles,” by Donna Leinwand, USA Today, 10 April 2006, p. 3A.

COLUMN: “U.S. Sees Europe as Front Against Radical Islam: Senior Bush Aides Conclude Continent’s Extremists Pose A Rising Security Threat,” by Frederick Kempe, Wall Street Journal, 11 April 2006, p. A8.

The Big Bang is perceived as receding in the Middle East. Freedom House sees more movement toward democracy in the region last year than in any year of its surveying, and yet there is the unmistakable sense of the tide starting to move out to sea.

The biggest external driver? The growing realization of the burgeoning post-presidency of the Bush administration. We are heading into lame-duck-ville internationally far earlier than we realize back here at home. Bush and his policies become less a power calculation now, and more a time calculation. The tie-down in Iraq achieves that effect, showing just what a huge deficit it is to go to war nowadays without that Department of Everything Else [Sean: we need a glossary entry on this!].

There is that old and truly telling joke that says, You don’t pay the prostitute for sex, you pay the prostitute to leave. We have bought the force that lays the Big Bang (pun intended), but the force we need to pay is the one that lets us leave successfully, with an integrated country in our wake.

You want a sense of how costly it is to not have that SysAdmin force, that DOEE? We’re just waking up to that international reality now. When the leader of Sudan can thumb his nose at you, you’re truly whipped as sole military superpowers go. Look at how Kim has basically been given his get-out-of-the-Axis-of-Evil pass for the next three years.

You want to not just have the world’s biggest gun but be able to use it for good (as we did so well in removing both the Taliban and Saddam)? Then you better get used to the idea of paying for the SysAdmin force and having both forces submit to some larger, Core-wide rule set on processing politically-bankrupt regimes in the Gap. We act reckless (which I define as invading Iraq for all the right reasons and then blowing off the postwar for basically an entire year) and we’ll be marginalized by other powers, and yes, they have several trillion little strings to yank our chain with.

The other big reason for the slowdown, I would argue, is the Bush White House’s choice to simply repeat the WMD dynamic with Iran. We put Iran in the driver’s seat throughout the region by triggering the rise of repressed minorities, which tend to be Shiite, and then we decided that despite the tie-down in Iraq, despite the fact that Iran is Persian and not Arab and Shiite not Sunni/Salafi, and despite the reality that it’s the most coherent nation-state in the region (it goes way back in its identity) and features a public that loves America, we’d commit ourselves to a policy of hard-kill threats and pointless sanctions and attempted isolation RIGHT at the moment when we need their help most in continuing the Big Bang’s effect in the region--not to mention our drawdown in Iraq.

And so strategic despair is spread in the region, and we dissipate the original Big Bang impact, betraying all the possibilities and neutralizing too much of the heroic sacrifices of our fallen troops.

And yes, I can’t help thinking that 50k votes in Ohio gives us a very different four years, and possibly a very different and far better pathway in the Middle East. Bush set the table but he could not serve the meal. He knew when to say no but shows no ability to know when--much less how--to say yes. He was brilliant in pushing through a raft of new global security rules and forcing the Big Bang decision, but then he was unable to follow through--to win the peace, to win the allies both old and new, to play the board he so masterfully shook up in the Middle East.

He goes down as a very strong one-term president who unfortunately won re-election.

So please put down your latest Chicken Little piece from Seymour Hersh, who’s getting played more like a pawn by bureaucratic insiders with each passing year (not that there’s anything wrong with that, because I love a free press so easily manipulated for political infighting). The NYT is right, and its editorial comes awfully close to making my original so-called let-Iran-have-the-bomb proposal in Esquire seem more than reasonable.

All idiotic bragging from that jackass Ahmadinejad aside, Iran has truly already achieved a MAD-like stand-off with the U.S.: we either go nuclear to stop their going nuclear in slow motion (my God, it’s almost tantric, Tehran’s great “rush” to the bomb!), or Iran most certainly has the bomb, in about five years at the earliest.

All that tells me is that the next administration has a good couple of years to co-opt Iran, unless Bush does the right thing (and I truly pray he does) and does a Reagan on them in his last couple of years (start talking in his sleep, Laura).

Failing that late administration change-of-heart, the next best hope is that other Core powers simply beat us to the punch and declare they’re okay with a nuclear Iran.

I know, I know, it risks the end of all global security as we know it, according to a host of nonproliferation and arms control experts whose entire careers depend on nonproliferation and arms control seeming to remain important and effective when it’s neither and never has been. I mean, doesn’t it amaze how Americans blow off gun control at home, yet somehow believe it will magically solve all our security fears abroad?

Seriously, we screw up both Khamenei and (remember, Iran has a SUPREME LEADER and his name is not--) Ahmadinejad best by simply letting them have their bomb of the distant future. Imagine what each faces domestically if their current strategy of go-nowhere-on-economic-reform-but-pretend-we’ll-live-on-oil-windfall-
with-70-percent-of-our-population-under-30 is actually addressed in their domestic politics, instead of being shunted aside by the Bush administration’s extremely unwise choice to ask the Iranian people to choose between nationalism and perceived humiliation.

Once you bargain with the Great Satan, you lose the moral whatever-ground. That’s how Nixon and Kissinger killed global communism with détente, and that’s how Bush and his two “brilliant” SECSTATEs should have started the mullahocracy’s demise in Iran.

Instead, that Nixon-goes-to-Tehran moment is lost with Khatami, and we end up with Ahmadinejad bragging on his enriched uranium.

And meanwhile, the Big Bang dissipates… much like the embryonic Iraqi stock exchange…

As for the argument that scary words from the White House are worth pursuing, to remind Iran of what could be. That one just doesn’t fly.

Perhaps most stunning is “One of Bush’s most senior foreign policy advisers” telling a gathering of academics and strategists that “the problem is that our policy has been all carrots and no sticks. And the Iranians know it.”

That is such a massive misstatement of the truth to send me back to reading Maureen Dowd, for chrissakes! Anyone who swallows that one just hasn’t been paying attention. There have been so serious carrots offered, just labeling Iran a member of the Axis of Evil and then invading countries to its left and right. Honestly, how anyone of stature can make that claim with a straight face is beyond me. One is tempted to label it an outright lie, or at least crass propaganda that assumes a very stuuuupid public.

To me, this shows the strategic bankruptcy of the current administration is near complete. These guys are spent. They had their day and did some great things with it, but they are spent. Now, it’s just spinning and playing out the clock.

In the end, though, the Big Bang will inevitably follow through. The internal trigger is clear: demographics. The Middle East middle ages in the next 25 years. Clock is ticking on Osama, the House of Saud, Mubarek, the mullahs.

Externally, the three big blowbacks are the religious reformation coming out of America (watch those Muslim sistas!), the political reformation coming out of Europe (watch the rise of Islamist parties and their eventual mainstreaming everywhere, just like the Marxist parties in Europe during the Cold War), and the economic reformation coming out of Asia (where those lead geese like Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore give lie to the myth that Islam and markets cannot thrive when coupled).

When you really master the ability to look ahead, you have no choice but to the be the optimist. So hold your head up as the naysayers and Chicken Littles rule the day (and I do mean “day”) in the headlines.