Winning the Wars
There's progress on a number of fronts.

Nothing has ever been as it seemed in the Middle East, but this condition is more aggravated than ever now. No one really has any idea what is going to emerge from the overthrow of the government in Egypt. There is no precedent for democracy's flourishing in a country with such large problems of poverty and low levels of education, except perhaps India (which had stronger elites and British institutions). And there are no poles of strength in the country except the Egyptian army and the Muslim Brotherhood. The efforts of the Brotherhood, in a public-relations campaign with susceptible and wishful Western media outlets such as the New York Times, to portray itself as the soul of moderation, are reassuring to the extent that the Brotherhood considers Western opinion worth the effort, but are not credible on their merits. The same can be said of the attempt of the former head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, to be accepted as a peace-loving democrat. That pose flies in the face of a long career as an Israelophobic warmonger.

The time-honored first step in the descent to the tawdriest forms of oppression, officially tolerated mob violence against religious minorities, has been conducted against Christians since even before the (unseemly but not exactly premature) departure of Mubarak. Until the latest outrages, the Holy See was the only source of audible foreign protests.

Syria's President Assad and Yemen's President Saleh have long since passed with flying colors the litmus test of whether to fire live ammunition at protesters in large numbers, and whether such orders will be carried out. Less comprehensible is Secretary of State Clinton's comment, four days after the repression began, and well before it reached its recent murderous level, that Assad was "a reformer," a comment she presumably regrets now, whose accuracy depends on to whom she was comparing him. Saleh is a sly old fox who has been fairly helpful to the United States, and the U.S. policy of not encouraging his opponents, who include a sizeable branch of al-Qaeda, is very understandable.

The Euro-American appeasement of Syria's Alawite regime (the Alawis account for only 11 percent of the population) is inexplicable, other than from a conviction that any replacement might be worse. That should hardly be a consideration, as any replacement would be unlikely to be such a slavish puppet of and conduit for the Iranians, vitally assisting Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Jihad, and insurrectionist forces in Iraq. That is the source of Syria's importance; it is not an oil-exporting country and its internal government is of no interest to the Western powers, as long as its millennia-old penchant for repression doesn't descend to Khmer Rouge or Rwandan proportions. No one in Syria is calling for a Libya-style intervention, but the weak response of the West has been contemptible.

Iran is the greatest threat in the region, and the site of the greatest failure of the Obama administration's foreign and security policy. The appeasement of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei after their phony election and the widespread public disturbances, which the regime seriously opposed only with the thugs of the governing political apparatus, not the armed forces — effectively flunking, as Mubarak did, the Assad-Saleh litmus test described above — was a terrible miscue. So has been the feeble response, apart from computer-hacking, to the regime's relentless pursuit of a nuclear military capability. Regimes that the evident majority of the population actively detests, with no institutionally accessible means of regime change, are fundamentally vulnerable, and usually are reduced to the ancient constitutional paradigm of despotism tempered by assassination. This process should be much more energetically assisted, and Iran could be a country sufficiently advanced and rich to be able to support a fairly democratic system.

The Saudi policy of paying Danegeld to malcontents and bankrolling the Wahhabi extremists in most of the world's Islamic institutions, in exchange for their acquiescence in the continuing proprietary reign of the House of Saud, won't work forever. It will come to a test of strength with the blackmailer, and I dare to assume that the West is doing what it can to strengthen our candidate in that bust-up, when it comes. More difficult to fathom is the horribly complicated puzzle of Pakistan. It is a truism to point out the tribal divisions, the large frontier no-go areas, the consistent failure of both civilian and military government (which have alternated through the country's history), and the involvement of the intelligence services and the army with the Haqqani Taliban in Afghanistan — and even, apparently, to some degree, with Islamist extremism within Pakistan.

As in most Muslim countries, and many others (including Russia, China, and even Japan), there is constant friction between the nativists and the West-emulators, as well as a kaleidoscope of religious attitudes, including some very aggressive Islamist strains. And everything in Pakistan is overshadowed by the paranoia about India, the ancient foe, which has a larger Muslim population than Pakistan itself, even though it's only a 15 percent minority of India's mainly Hindu population. If there were now a Republican administration in Washington, the main liberal national media would be swarming it over aid to regimes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, which are much too cozy with this country's enemies and, in the case of the Haqqani Taliban, are killing NATO soldiers every week.

The administration's policy is probably the best that could be devised: keep up the pressure, with both sticks (including the bin Laden raid, and ancillary humiliations such as explaining sending a force adequate to fight its way out if attacked by the Pakistanis) and carrots (money and diplomatic assistance in sensible causes, such as reconciliation with India). Ignore the blustering of the army chief, Kayani, and even more the haverings of the devious, insidious little prime minister, Gilani. Pakistan can be bought, and will go with the winner. With any luck, General Musharraf, the former president and army chief, will be back as an elected leader. He is the best Pakistani we have had for a very long time, and the West should have been more suspicious when the opposition to him was led by a guild of lawyers.

And this leads directly to some good news: The wars are going well and the sinister alignments of hostile or suggestible forces in the region are precarious. The air war in Libya is starting to crack Qaddafi's forces. It broke Milosevic's Serbs, and it will certainly do the same to the rag-bag of support for Qaddafi. Progress is almost continuous in Iraq, one of the stablest Arab countries in the region, and there is definite progress in Afghanistan, as there was bound to be with the injection of that level of force, despite the shenanigans of the Karzai government. The supposed entente between Turkey and Iran will quickly disintegrate; those countries have almost no points of agreement, starting with Iran's nuclear program. And the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation will probably be a dead letter within a month. Rarely will there have been a more perfect example of a quarrel among thieves, though at least the West Bank leaders are numerate, especially in counting evidence of economic growth.

The U.S. should keep three points in mind when navigating this trackless region of violent movements and national pickpockets: It should reduce dependence on Middle East oil, prevent the nuclear armament of Iran by whatever means are necessary, and be faithful to President Bush's promise to make no distinction between terrorists and regimes that support them, even if that point has to be applied gradually at times, as in Pakistan.

— Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. He can be reached at [email protected].

© 2024 Conrad Black