It is possible to think that the great campaign to create a new Middle East and Central Asia, defeat the Taliban, slay Islam's violent extremists, capture or kill Osama bin Laden, and build a radiant new world of democracy and capitalism, may be closer to being called off than one might think.

The campaign has failed. It is not working now, but going backward, as in the case of politically chaotic and sectarian-divided Iraq, recently "liberated" by the United States at the price of more than 100,000 civilian casualties, the flight of two million of its people from their country, and nearly two million more driven out of their homes or otherwise having their lives uprooted. According to The New York Times, the forces opposing the new Nuri Kamal al-Maliki government may demand America's total withdrawal from Iraq, abandoning what currently is supposed to be an "enduring" U.S. deployment there.

In mid-December, the Obama administration revealed the conclusions of the Afghan policy review, which was supposed to fine-tune a grand war-winning strategy in Afghanistan. They offered no fundamental change in the American program and reported that the war against the Taliban goes a little better in some respects, and rather worse in others, and that relations with Pakistan, which supports the Taliban, are bad and getting worse. A U.S. National Intelligence Estimate was published almost simultaneously, which said the American intelligence community is unanimously convinced that the war is being lost.

The U.S. said it will fulfill its Afghanistan troop withdrawal commitments, starting in July, thereby trying to "Vietnamize" America's war, leaving the Afghans to look after their own country, which is what more than half the American public already wants. (Sixty percent of all Americans, according to a recent Washington Post poll, say the war is not worth fighting.) Some suggest that if the Taliban sweep up power as the Americans leave -- if they indeed leave -- Washington will simply blame the Hamid Karzai government for corruption and incompetence.

President Barack Obama -- the foreign affairs novice who was cynically bounced into escalating this war with a troop "surge" by Gen. Petraeus, the ambitious clique of "surge-plus-counterinsurgency" enthusiasts in the Pentagon, and the Washington foreign policy community, plus the neo-conservative claque in the Washington press -- could say in July that he did exactly what the supposed experts told him to do, and it failed.

He did not fail. It was the policy of Petraeus, and the policy of the Washington consensus, that failed. If the president had the political nerve to do it, he might wash his hands of America's current wars, solving the nation's budget and national deficit problems in one fell swoop -- and win the hearts, and second-term votes, of his grateful countrymen and women.

So satisfactory an outcome is nonetheless unlikely. The Pentagon and America's foreign policy community are determined that the U.S. must continue its effort permanently to control the region. The democracy-building mindset, with which all of this began during the Clinton years, confirmed after 9/11 by George W. Bush, still prevails, even in the camp of American foreign policy "realists."

John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago has a major article in the latest issue of The National Interest magazine, which provides a lucid critique of how the U.S. got into these dangerous Asian entanglements, but ends by asserting that to assure its own security Washington must continue to possess Asian domination, blocking any rival (meaning China).

He asserts that "no American leader will accept" a Chinese effort to turn its economic power into military power in order to impose its own hegemony in Northeast Asia. Washington should adopt an "offshore" policy, he writes, that keeps American military power "over the horizon" from East Asia, but ready to intervene against China.

This seems to me to rest on highly exaggerated assumptions about China's ambitions, and about the ease with which a Chinese economy that currently remains a satellite of the advanced European and American economies, and is still dependent on foreign technology, can be turned into a military giant capable of dominating Asia and challenging the U.S.

It also ignores the existence of the world's third largest industrial economy, that of Japan, a nation of highly advanced technology and demonstrated military capacities, should it be threatened. India is another neighbor of China's, as is South Korea.

Finally, this supposedly "realistic" policy recommendation makes vague and controversial assumptions about the American interest in all of this. What, exactly, is China's threat to the U.S.? Mearsheimer is reformulating the same policy of global domination that the American "realists" have opposed in the Middle East, Central Asia and now in Afghanistan/Pakistan. If it is a bad policy there, why is it a good policy in Northeast Asia?

 

 

Available at Amazon.com:

Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World

Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East (The Contemporary Middle East)

Enemies of Intelligence

The End of History and the Last Man

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?

Running Out of Water: The Looming Crisis and Solutions to Conserve Our Most Precious Resource

Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water

Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization

The Great Gamble

At War with the Weather: Managing Large-Scale Risks in a New Era of Catastrophes

Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century

Dining With al-Qaeda: Three Decades Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East

Uprising: Will Emerging Markets Shape or Shake the World Economy

 

 

(C) 2010 BY William Pfaff; DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.