It’s always a good time to review the histrionics that characterized the New York Times editorial board’s coverage of the Iraq War, particularly in the months leading up to the “surge.” With sectarian tensions in the Middle East rising to a level unimagined in even the darkest days of the Iraq insurgency, today is a particularly compelling day to review one of the Bush administration’s most critical news outlets.
“The disaster is Mr. Bush’s war, and he’s already failed,” the Times editors’ averred almost nine years ago to the day. “The nation needs an eyes-wide-open recognition that the only goal left is to get the U.S. military out of this civil war in a way that could minimize the slaughter of Iraqis and reduce the chances that the chaos Mr. Bush unleashed will engulf Iraq’s neighbors.” Today, regional tensions between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims are perhaps as or more strained than they were during the Iraq insurgency.
The reason for the present suboptimal state of affairs is simple: Despite setbacks, the Bush administration’s approach to Iraq and the neighboring region was grounded in a grand strategy. By contrast, the Obama administration’s approach to managing Middle Eastern affairs was from day one rooted in the president’s desire to seek rapprochement with Iran. To the extent that pursuing a thaw in relations with Tehran was a matter of near exclusive primacy, many other pressing regional concerns were deprioritized or disregarded entirely. The terrible fruits of that misguided approach to geopolitics are only now ripening.
Barack Obama’s approach to foreign affairs was never rudderless. It was always founded in what the administration believed provided the president with the most near-term domestic political benefit, which is in part why the only Obama doctrine ever offered by administration officials is inherently retrospective. “Don’t do stupid s***” is a doctrine that can be neither predictive nor prescriptive, since that which is deemed “stupid” is subjective and often only dubbed as much after the fact. For some of this administration’s adventures, though, that which proved in the long run to be “stupid” was foreseeable and obvious. A total reorientation of American alliance structure in the Middle East that shifted Washington away from its traditional Sunni allies in Riyadh and Cairo and toward the region’s Shi’ite-led powers was always going to have a destabilizing effect. It is an effect that has been apparent for months.
When anti-government protests gave way to a civil war, the Obama administration determined that its best course was to avoid any engagement in Syria. The White House did all within its power to evade its commitments to contain that conflict and exact retribution against Bashar al-Assad for violating prohibitions on the use of chemical weapons. As Sunnis from around the Middle East flooded into Syria to take revenge on the dictator who has today slaughtered over a quarter million mostly Sunni Syrians, many of whom became radicalized in the process, the region’s American allies pleaded for Western aid. Their pleas went largely unanswered until the crisis in Syria engulfed Iraq.
This administration’s approach to international affairs in the Middle East was revealed to be hopelessly untethered to anything resembling a strategy when Yemen dissolved into civil war in late 2014. To preserve the White House’s drone war against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula abetted by the ousted government in Sana’a, the administration initially sought continuity by making friendly overtures Houthi rebels now in control of the capital. The Obama White House appeared to disregard the fact that the Houthis were an Iran-backed insurgent force, and their success in Sana’a (and their drive toward the strategically vital port of Aden) was regarded as an acute national security threat in neighboring Saudi Arabia. Only when those overtures were rejected by the “deeply anti-American” Houthi militia did Washington tacitly endorse the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen.
From Syria to Yemen, from Iraq to Bahrain; the Middle East has been characterized by a region-wide proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran since at least 2011, following American withdrawal from Iraq. Obama’s White House should have had no higher priority than to ensure that this conflict retains its character as a geopolitical struggle between two opposing capitals and not come to be regarded as a great sectarian reckoning. It may already be too late to prevent that deadly impression from taking hold.
There was perhaps nothing Washington could do to prevent Riyadh from executing the Shi’ite cleric Nimr al-Nimr. Their leverage over the Saudi Kingdom had long ago been thoroughly squandered. Iran, too, demonstrated its disregard for the West by allowing a mob to ransack the Saudi embassy – a criminal assault on the sovereignty of diplomatic envoys that should offend every nation on Earth. But while Tehran’s contempt for the West is (or, at least, should be) a known quantity, the extent to which Riyadh wanted their dissatisfaction with Washington to be fully understood was staggering.
“Enough is enough,” a source close to the Saudi government told Reuters reporters. “Again and again, Tehran has thumbed their nose at the West.”
“Every time the Iranians do something, the U.S. backs off. In the meantime, Saudi (Arabia) is actually doing something about it in Syria, in Iran and in Yemen,” Reuters’s Saudi source added. “The Saudis really don’t care if they anger the White House.”
Within hours of the start of this new crisis, Iran and Saudi Arabia severed all diplomatic ties. Commercial and travel relations soon followed. Bahrain and Sudan backed Riyadh in the effort to isolate Tehran and both cut diplomatic ties with the Islamic Republic. The Emiratis announced that they had downgraded bilateral relations with Iran, and the governments of Kuwait and Egypt condemned Tehran for its behavior. Two Sunni mosques in Hila, Iraq were attacked by vengeful bands of Shi’ites. Crude oil prices are again on the rise commensurate with increased Middle Eastern tensions, and the United Nations Syria envoy has been rerouted to stave off a new crisis – the prospects for a negotiated peace in the Levant are now as bleak as ever.
If history is any guide, the administration’s response to this instability will be to do everything within its power to preserve the integrity of a dubious nuclear deal with Iran, even at the expense of America’s influence in the wider Gulf region. It is now clear that the next president will inherit a Middle East in which friendly relations between Sunnis and Shi’ites are nearing a nadir. What is unclear is how the New York Times editorial board will blame George W. Bush for that condition.