A week is a long time in American politics. When the Iraq Study Group (ISG) report under the leadership of James A Baker and Lee Hamilton was published on 6 December 2006, it gave initial comfort to those hoping and praying for a decisive shift in United States policy in Iraq. Their rising curve of expectation had already been fuelled by the Democratic capture of both houses of Congress in the mid-term elections on 7 November. The wind of change was in their sails.
The moment has passed. President Bush - defying James Baker's pleas not to "cherry-pick" the report, refusing to offer acceptable terms for dialogue with Iran or Syria, disdaining the serious effort needed to break the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock - shows no real sign of movement. Neo-conservatives and rightwing media bullies have recovered their voices to scorn the report ("absurd" - Richard Perle; "stupid" - Rush Limbaugh). The Baker report's champions are on the defensive.
Bad news? Perhaps not. The Baker report is serious and well-intentioned. As it stands, it is a draft of a political, negotiated solution to the disaster that is American policy in the middle east. But it is far from bold enough to indicate to the Washington political class just how far its thinking about Iraq and the wider region needs to go.
Also on the Baker report and Iraq in openDemocracy:
Sami Ramadani, "Iraq: not civil war, occupation"
(7 December 2006)
Tareq Y Ismael, "The Iraq Study Group report: an assessment"
(8 December 2006)
The Iraq effect
A brief review of the scale of the US's foreign-policy disaster makes the point.
The invasion, after all, has achieved none of its objectives, publicly stated or unspoken. It has not pacified Iraq. It has not brought democracy to the wretched people of that country: the much-trumpeted fact that they turned out in their millions to vote only measures the shame of the way their hopes of democracy have been betrayed.
It has delivered bumper profits for a few favoured United States companies, which have performed less than brilliantly at their supposed tasks, and paid spectacular wages to mercenary security guards. It has not even delivered security, electricity or even oil. The operation has probably made terrorism in the middle east and elsewhere more likely, not less. It promises turmoil, not peace, in the wider region. It has weakened, not strengthened, those governments (in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan) that were relatively friendly towards the US.
It has demonstrated the limitations of American military power: the inappropriateness of its doctrines, the ineffectiveness of its overwhelming weaponry, the poor morale and training of its troops. It has revealed too the shortcomings of American democracy, the timidity of most American media, and the incompetence, verging on chaos, inside the federal government in Washington.
It has deeply discredited the United States in its relations with virtually all parts of the world. It has made America look, not just like a bully, but like an incompetent, unreliable bully. This must be the worst of all consequences, from the point of view of Americans themselves as well as those of us who have for decades looked to the United States for leadership and generally not been disappointed.
In light of all this, there has been an understandable desire to see in the Baker report evidence of a route out of America's Iraqi, middle-east, and global nightmare. The logic of this litany is that this sentiment is entirely misplaced. For the uncomfortable truth is that the roots of what has gone wrong in the US's relationship with the middle east go far too deep to be reversed by even the cleverest lawyer's fix, the best-intentioned Washington establishment deal.
Israel
Few in Washington can acknowledge it, but at the heart of America's problems in the middle east and in the Islamic world as a whole is the perception that the United States, as an unconditional supporter of Israel, is not fair to the Arabs and the Muslims.
No doubt, as the conventional Washington consensus holds, Israel is the closest there is to an effective, working democracy in the region. It is also true that Israel's friends in Washington have imposed a climate where it is virtually impossible to say publicly anything seriously critical of Israeli policy or (for example) of the occasionally high-handed behaviour of the Israeli defence forces. Indeed, it is harder to criticise the Israeli government's actions in Washington than it is in Israel.
Wild talk about the dominance of the "Jewish lobby" in the United States is just that: wild talk. It ignores, for a start, the fact that a majority of American Jews vote Democrat. A number of recent incidents in the United States, however, show that even moderate criticism of Israel's policy brings out a posse of angry bullies with automatic accusations of "anti-semitism" (to name just three: the response to the March 2006 article in the London Review of Books by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt; to Jimmy Carter's book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid; and to Tony Judt's invitation to give a lecture at the Polish consulate in New York).
Members of Congress, of both parties, have shown an extraordinary reluctance to challenge the orthodoxy that presents Israel as America's most important ally, and treats Palestinian politics as little more than a front for terrorism. Israel has far more clout in Washington than the next dozen countries put together, in spite of the price prime minister Tony Blair has tried to pay for influence.
It is perhaps naïve to imagine that the Bush administration is likely to make a serious effort to achieve peace on the basis of a genuine two-state solution, as opposed to talking about such a solution while privately making it impossible. But until some administration in Washington repositions the United States as an impartial friend of both parties to the Arab-Israeli dispute, there can be no lasting peace in the middle east.
Oil
Both parties and all recent administrations have been at pains to deny that oil has anything to do with American policies in the middle east. How could the world's only superpower be influenced by anything so mundane as a shortage of energy? Yet the United States is dependent on oil imports for a large and growing share of its energy requirements, and everyone outside the US, not least in the middle east, is perfectly aware of the consequences of that fact.
Those consequences are not trivial. They include at least part of the motivation for the invasion of Iraq itself; the American alliance with Saudi Arabia (one of the direct sources of al-Qaida's attacks on the United States and American interests and bases); the long American quarrel with Iran; American interference, overt or covert, in central Asia; and in a more general way, the presence of the US in such force in the area as a whole.
Also by Godfrey Hodgson in openDemocracy on American politics:
"Can America go modest? "
(October 2001)
"The Senate's filibuster deal: only a truce in the culture wars"
(May 2005)
"American media in the firing-line" (June 2005)
"Gimme five! US Republicans' amoral minority" (June 2005)
"After Katrina, a government adrift" (September 2005)
"Oil and American politics" (October 2005)
"The death of American politics" (October 2005)
"The Democrats' dilemma"
(November 2005)
"The mandate of heaven and the tipping-point" (December 2005)
"The US Democrats' opportunity: can they take it?" (June 2006)
"'Yo, Blair'" (July 2006)
"It ain't necessarily so: if Bush wins again"
(July 2006)
"The next big issue: inequality in America" (13 September 2006)
"American politics: corrosion by the dollar" (6 November 2006)
"Washington: the earth moves"
(9 November 2006)
American exceptionalism
The doctrine of American exceptionalism insists that the United States is not just exceptionally successful and powerful, but morally and politically exceptional as well. It has long been the motor of an American impulse to intervene in many parts of the world.
Ostensibly, this impulse is the antithesis of imperialism. But in the 19th-century era of "manifest destiny", the United States took advantage of a border skirmish to invade Mexico and remove, at gunpoint, roughly half of Mexico's territory. This was called "extending the empire of liberty".
Woodrow Wilson saw the US's entry into the "great war" in 1917 as his opportunity to bring American ideals and institutions to the world. We shall never know whether this would have been a good thing, because he failed to notice that he had been defeated by the operation of democracy in the mid-term elections of 1918, and so found himself unable to get domestic support for imposing his international vision.
In the second world war and during the cold war, the United States continued to spread its ideology (the "four freedoms" of Franklin D Roosevelt's 1941 address). But it did so with, on the whole, a tactful concern for the sensibilities of allies. Unfortunately, since the collapse of communism in Europe, the concept of American exceptionalism has come back into fashion, and in both parties.
In early 1993, President Clinton and key officials of his administration proclaimed that they intended to adopt a "Wilsonian" policy. They would bring democracy to as much of the world as they could.
The Republicans, with their modest proposal for a "new American century", took the project a crucial notch further. They hitched political democracy to the ideal of exporting the "free market" (as practiced by contemporary American corporate capitalism) to the world. In the latest version of the exceptionalist gospel, capitalism has acquired almost equal status with freedom.
The United States has long taught the world much: about constitutional government with the consent of the governed, about law and the rule of law, about education, technology, enterprise, entertainment and civil rights. It would be better (not to mention more effective in making friends around the world) to let those examples speak for themselves, rather than sending what turn out to be inadequate forces under confused leadership to "shock and awe" reluctant nations into following an America pattern.
The next two years, with a newly Democratic Congress confronting a stubborn and recalcitrant president, will be a critical test of the democracy that the current president wanted to export to Iraq. Can constitutional confrontation be resolved without constitutional crisis? Can America understand that it must face its own problems and responsibilities before it can regain its lost moral authority in the world?