Showcase for democratic change?
With the cold war over, Washington’s ostensible new role was to match its deeds to its words by promoting democratic change on a global scale. Regime change in Iraq was supposed to go along with nation-building: the construction of a new state under the tutelage of the US as the occupying power, along the lines of what had happened in West Germany and Japan after 1945. Iraq was slated to become the showcase for democratic change in the Middle East. So compelling would its example be that, combined with US pressure, it would push the other states in the region to imitate this virtuous model, and Washington would at last be able to create a world in its own image.
It goes without saying that such a prospect held little appeal for the Middle East’s autocracies, starting with Washington’s own vassal states, which had long benefitted from the American suzerain’s ‘realist’ accommodation with their despotism. These vassal autocracies launched a battle against the neocons within the Bush administration, relying on the State Department and the CIA. The Saudis in particular sought to persuade the US president to abandon any ambition to fundamentally rebuild the regime in Baghdad. Together with the CIA’s Iraqi ally (and later prime minister) Iyad Allawi, they proposed to Bush that he collaborate with the army leadership, helping them to oust Saddam Hussein and reorient Iraq in a direction compatible with US regional interests. ‘Our idea was to take off the upper crust and leave the rest of the regime intact,’ Allawi later said.
When they got wind of this, the neocons’ allies in Iraq, led by Ahmed Chalabi, sounded the alarm in the media, accusing an Arab-American coterie of wanting to perpetuate Saddamism without Saddam. With backing from British prime minister Tony Blair, the neocons prevailed. But their plan was to prove catastrophic for the US: the dismantling of the Iraqi state in the name of ‘de-Baathification’, inspired by the denazification of Germany, descended into chaos, enabling both Iran to dominate the country’s Shia majority and an anti-American and anti-Shia insurgency to develop across the Arab Sunni regions, with Al-Qaida as its main force. By 2004 Chalabi had been accused of working for Tehran and disowned by Washington. The neocons were ejected from the administration the following year and in 2006 the US Congress formulated an exit strategy, allowing dreams of democracy to wither on the vine.
Henceforth, the lesson from Iraq was taken to be that the fatal mistake had been dismantling the state apparatus, which should instead have been retained to govern the country. So with military-imposed democratisation off the table, Obama attempted democratisation from the bottom up. He sought to back the Arab Spring uprisings with Qatar’s help, banking on the protests being coopted by the Muslim Brotherhood. The failure of this alternative strategy – notably the reassertion of military control in Egypt in 2013, with Riyadh’s support and against Washington’s wishes – hastened its demise.
Only the course that the Saudi leadership had advocated before the occupation of Iraq remained in play: the thinking is that where major interests are at stake, it is better to force existing regimes to comply with Washington’s wishes than to try to overthrow them and risk creating chaos.