After Iraq: Where Next for the Middle East?
by Gwynne Dyer
Yale University Press, £16.99
I REMEMBER Saddam Hussein’s last ambassador to London, Dr Mudhafar Amin, telling me years before the 2003 invasion that the country which stood to gain most from the destabilisation of Iraq was Iran. Gwynne Dyer’s excellent analysis of the hows, heres and henceforths of the Iraq catastrophe reminded me of that observation, in addition to offering an insightful critique of the political forces currently shaping the wider region.
Dyer provides a compelling assessment of the question “why Iraq?” ranging from Henry Kissinger’s remark that “Afghanistan wasn’t enough” to al-Qaeda terrorism disinformation and from America’s post-Cold War bipolar versus unipolar realignment strategy to countering the growing threat of China and India to Pax-Americana.
Like the false hysteria whipped up about the Soviet Union’s territorial and military ambitions, he points to the discrepancy between Iran’s revolutionary rhetoric and its aspiration to remain a staus quo power while his hypothesising on the possibility of a US invasion of the country and the likely Shia response throughout the region is lent weight by the astonishing recent revelation that outgoing Israeli PM Ehud Olmert requested permission from George W Bush to attack Tehran but was refused.
As in Lebanon from 1975-1990, Dyer attests, and notwithstanding Shia political supremacy, sectarian wars do end and Iraq’s disintegration is not assured; not least because the constitution mandates oil revenues to be shared equally across all provinces, although pressure to galvanise a state in the north for the region’s 30 million Kurds would send shockwaves through the region as well as risking the wrath of Ankara.
Since the 1970s rage and despair in Arab states corrupted by oil wealth or scourged by Israel have spawned modern Islamic terror – although Dyer believes Islamicism will have a life cycle of no more than a couple of generations.
One criticism is that the book dwells too much on already familiar histories such as the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the development of the Project for a New American Century, with which the informed reader will be well versed. Nonetheless, Dyer presents an engaging and reasoned distillation of the consequences of the 21st century’s greatest foreign policy folly (so far).
James McGowan
