US Gets No Traction in the Middle East

More than five years after invading Iraq as a first step toward "transforming" the Middle East, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush seems to have lost its footing – let alone its unquestioned domination – throughout the region.

The talk of "democratizing" the region has almost entirely disappeared from the administration's rhetoric as Washington has had to sacrifice whatever pressure it had been willing to exert on "friendly authoritarians" among Arab states to bolstering their rule against popular sentiment that has become considerably more hostile toward the U.S. than before the invasion.

Similarly, its plan after the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war to forge a de facto coalition between Jewish state and those same "moderate" authoritarians against the threat posed by Iran, Syria, and their allies in the Levant has also come a cropper.

Not only has the administration repeatedly refused to pay the Arabs' price for such an arrangement – putting serious pressure on Israel to reach a peace accord with a unified Palestinian government based largely on a return to the 1967 borders – but the assumption that the Arab Gulf states, in particular, would support – or even welcome, as some hawkish officials believed – an eventual military confrontation between Washington and Tehran has also proved illusory.

The one area in which Washington has made some progress has been in Iraq, where sectarian violence has fallen sharply over the past 18 months in good part as a result of more successful counter-insurgency tactics pursued by Gen. David Petraeus during the "Surge" of some 30,000 additional troops.

But the Surge's strategic goal – national reconciliation between the key sectarian and ethnic groups in Iraq – remains elusive, as evidenced by the latest impasse between Arabs and Kurds over Kirkuk and the certainty that long-promised regional elections will be delayed until next year. Even Petraeus continues to warn that the security gains made since the Surge got underway in February 2007 remain fragile and could be reversed in the absence of significant political progress.