Scott Macleod — Five Fatal Mistakes of Bush’s Mideast Policy
Scott Macleod writes in Time about Five Fatal Mistakes of Bush’s Mideast Policy.
[tease]
President Bush travels to Jordan this week amid a consensus among U.S. allies in the Middle East that the region is monumentally worse off now than it was when he took office six years ago.
In Iraq, there seems little prospect of achieving anything that could be construed as a U.S. victory — and as a result, it is unlikely to send the promised tidal wave of freedom crashing across the Arab world. Instead, Iraq has effectively disintegrated into a Sunni-Shi’ite civil war that threatens to spread instability throughout the region.
Elsewhere, Israelis and Palestinians have descended into one of the most intractable cycles of conflict in their long struggle. In Lebanon, the national unity agreement that ended almost two decades of civil war in 1990 appears to be unraveling, as sectarian factions are again edging toward another bloodbath.
Meanwhile, Arab autocrats remain entrenched, Arab democrats are feeling abandoned, and Iran’s Islamic revolution is enjoying a second wind.
For all the grand ambition of President Bush’s interventions in the Middle East, a veteran Western diplomat recently offered TIME the following glum assessment: “The region is in as serious a mess as I have ever seen it. There is an unprecedented number of interconnected conflicts and threats.”