http://nymag.com/news/politics/powergrid/18858/index.htmlThe hands-off attitude of the Bush crowd toward Israel and a potential Palestine owes mainly to the administration’s fixation on the war on terror generally and on Iraq in particular. For the neoconservative theoreticians who conceived the war, Iraq was to be the centerpiece of what Condoleezza Rice has lately taken to calling, with bizarre optimism, “a new Middle East”—precisely the role that more-traditional foreign-policy strategists had long hoped that a coexistent Israel and Palestine would play.
Iraq was also meant to have a catalytic effect: Once established as a model (stable, pluralistic, peaceful), it would, by a kind of chain reaction, weaken the Middle East’s dictatorships and theocracies and strengthen moderate, secular regimes throughout the region. NYU professor Noah Feldman has dubbed this policy “democratization by destabilization.” Another name, equally apt, is the “democratic domino theory.”
Employing that latter term is General William Odom, who in the mid-eighties ran the National Security Agency. As Odom points out in a recent essay for Neiman Watchdog, the original domino theory was invented to justify America’s involvement in Vietnam. And, as everyone knows, it turned out to be bogus.
And so has its democratic variant turned out—so far—to be bogus with respect to Iraq. In fact, what democratization has brought to the Middle East to date has been, most prominently, dangerous instability: the election of thuggish Hamas to control of the Palestinian Parliament; the endowing of murderous Hezbollah with a substantial voice in the Lebanese government; the election of a vengeful Shiite majority in Iraq (where, we learned last week, American generals fear that we are on the edge of civil war). Moreover, as Odom adds, “it is precisely our actions in Iraq that have opened the door for Iran and Syria to support Hezbollah and Hamas actions without much to fear from the U.S.”
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