Last Chance: The Middle East in the Balance

Middle East Policy, Fall 2009 by Gaess, Roger

Last Chance: The Middle East in the Balance, by David Gardner. I.B. Tauris, 2009. 288 pages. $27, hardcover.

The Middle East political landscape that Barack Obama has inherited from the neocon-oriented administration of George W. Bush (and a series of predecessors) is, to risk understating reality, incontestably bleak, if not pervasively threatening - Iraq is in a shambles, its government hanging by a thread. Israel's tactic of delay - where any peace process inevitably ends back at square one, with only unchecked settlement expansion to show for the effort - has put the two-state solution in jeopardy. The FatahHamas divide has left the Palestinian Authority with little authority and the Palestinians ever more destitute, vulnerable and adrift. Al-Qaeda is alive and well and now threatening to make Pakistan a failed state. Iran is seemingly seeking nuclear weapons, and Israel, long awash in nuclear weapons of its own, refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Middle East's only established democracy is an apartheid democracy, and tyrannical governments carpet the entire Arab world.

As David Gardner warns in Last Chance: The Middle East in the Balance, the status quo that existed before the second Bush administration is no longer an option. Its foundations were shaken by the 9/1 1 attacks; and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was the last straw in rendering it history, "uncorking the long-fermenting conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims from the Levant to the Gulf and across the Indian subcontinent, as well as proliferating anti-Western bigotry and messianic jihadism."

So what is to be done? What can be done?

Gardner, the Middle East editor of the Financial Times from 1995 to 1999 and now the paper's chief editorial writer, presents a bold plan for the greater region, a plan that is being greeted in some quarters as a kind of European position paper. He acknowledges that his formulation is fraught with risks and inevitable short-term instabilities. In defense, he argues, Western, especially American, policies have long been based on the short-term stability of strongmen, Israel and oil; and such an approach has in turn guaranteed instability in the long term.

Gardner sets forth the outline of his broad proposal early on and then, chapter by chapter, mostly country by country, examines in context the core problems and associated issues. To begin, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict demands "even-handed but assertive" U.S. mediation, with international involvement, to achieve security for the Israelis and justice for the Palestinians. The European Union, he adds, must drop its "unsustainable hypocrisy" of approaching the Israeli occupier and the Palestinian occupied as entities that can bring equal bargaining power to the negotiating table.

As to Iraq, Gardner says the United States must unconditionally declare that it has no designs on the country's oil resources or intentions to establish military bases on its soil. It needs to conduct an orderly withdrawal that ends the U.S. occupation while confronting Iraqis with the necessity "to compromise on the essential elements of a shared future" (not least to avoid a civil war). The United States and Europe, Gardner insists, need to seek "a 'grand bargain' with Iran, offering security to Iran's neighbors but giving Tehran a stake in the stability of the region." Iran, he underscores, is now a linchpin for solving most of the region's problems, given the resurgence of Shia power in the wake of the invasion of Iraq.

And, Gardner cautions, even if all of the above were achieved, if the West continues to collude in sustaining tyranny across the region, "It will abet the onward march of jihadi extremism. . . . There is a precise and identifiable enemy - international jihadism - that must be isolated and crushed" before it wins an even larger following from among the Muslim mainstream. But, he says, Arab regimes have so repressed political activity across the spectrum that opponents have had no rallying point other than the mosque. That pent-up anger has helped galvanize Islamic revivalism. In an effort to outflank the Islamists, the regimes have tended to forge alliances with reactionary clerical establishments, further empowering fundamentalism. Things, in short, are moving toward a boil.

It is with this sense of urgency that Gardner frames his calls to action. The Obama administration, Gardner says, needs to "urgently" restore the U.S. reputation in the Arab and Muslim worlds, which have grown to see the United States as waging a war against Islam. The House of Saud must urgently break with Wahhabism, or the Saudi government will not likely survive beyond the short term. As the book title itself suggests, "There is not much time left.... Unless [Western] policy changes, we can expect at least one generation of conflict, more probably several."

It is not that Gardner is necessarily wrong on any of these counts. It is just that his arguments as to urgency fall a little short of being convincing (and compelling). Forces of repression have, after all, reached a high level of sophistication in recent years, and, as a consequence, vested interests are ever more resilient. What is to prevent them from simply reshuffling the deck and dealing out an ever-new status quo that allows them to keep their requisite power in place? This is not a minor point; a widely accepted sense of urgency can well serve as a mechanism for change. On the other hand, it may simply be that some regional problems have dragged on for so frustratingly long that a new determination to solve them has come into being, irrespective of how urgent the situation may or may not be.