Ted Galen Carpenter: Winners and Losers Regarding Iraq
[Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of eight books on international affairs, including Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America.]
If one were keeping a scorecard of the geopolitical competition to influence the destiny of post-Saddam Iraq, the identity of the winners and losers is becoming rather clear. And the outcome is not very pleasant.
The two big losers are Saudi Arabia and the United States. For the Saudis, the results of the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq are little short of a disaster. True, Saudi leaders were hardly fond of Saddam Hussein. Even before his attempted forcible annexation of Kuwait in 1990, Riyadh worried about the extent of his territorial ambitions. Even so, the Saudi elite seem even less happy about the “new Iraq,” where Iranian-influenced Shiites are now the dominant political players in Baghdad. Among other concerns, Saudi leaders fret about the possible impact on their country’s own restless Shiite minority.
Developments in Iraq should be almost as unsatisfying to the United States—especially to the neoconservatives who so enthusiastically lobbied for the overthrow of Saddam. Their expectations that Iraqis would greet the American invaders as liberators were quickly discredited, as many foreign policy realists warned that they would be. Now, their other major expectation—that Iraq would become a stable, pro-Western democracy—lies in ruins as well. When sectarian violence continues to simmer, when it took months following national elections for the country’s fractious political system to produce a new government, and when the radical cleric Moqtada Sadr emerges as the key political player—essentially the kingmaker that enabled Nouri al Maliki to stay on as prime minister—it is a real stretch to portray Iraq as a stable, friendly, pro-Western democracy.
By intervening in Iraq, the United States in essence traded an authoritarian, staunchly anti-Iranian, Sunni-dominated regime for a quasi-democratic, generally pro-Iranian, Shiite-dominated regime. Even Pollyanna would have difficulty portraying that outcome as anything other than a defeat for U.S. objectives...
Read entire article at National Interest
If one were keeping a scorecard of the geopolitical competition to influence the destiny of post-Saddam Iraq, the identity of the winners and losers is becoming rather clear. And the outcome is not very pleasant.
The two big losers are Saudi Arabia and the United States. For the Saudis, the results of the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq are little short of a disaster. True, Saudi leaders were hardly fond of Saddam Hussein. Even before his attempted forcible annexation of Kuwait in 1990, Riyadh worried about the extent of his territorial ambitions. Even so, the Saudi elite seem even less happy about the “new Iraq,” where Iranian-influenced Shiites are now the dominant political players in Baghdad. Among other concerns, Saudi leaders fret about the possible impact on their country’s own restless Shiite minority.
Developments in Iraq should be almost as unsatisfying to the United States—especially to the neoconservatives who so enthusiastically lobbied for the overthrow of Saddam. Their expectations that Iraqis would greet the American invaders as liberators were quickly discredited, as many foreign policy realists warned that they would be. Now, their other major expectation—that Iraq would become a stable, pro-Western democracy—lies in ruins as well. When sectarian violence continues to simmer, when it took months following national elections for the country’s fractious political system to produce a new government, and when the radical cleric Moqtada Sadr emerges as the key political player—essentially the kingmaker that enabled Nouri al Maliki to stay on as prime minister—it is a real stretch to portray Iraq as a stable, friendly, pro-Western democracy.
By intervening in Iraq, the United States in essence traded an authoritarian, staunchly anti-Iranian, Sunni-dominated regime for a quasi-democratic, generally pro-Iranian, Shiite-dominated regime. Even Pollyanna would have difficulty portraying that outcome as anything other than a defeat for U.S. objectives...