In a previous analysis of the War in Iraq, I argued that in the middle of a conflict, one cannot pronounce the final verdict yet, but detect the trends of successes and failures. Between 2003 and 2006, the US led coalition was winning by points while al Qaida wasn’t able to reverse the process yet. The ending of Saddam’s regime, the rise of a political consensus and new Iraqi forces, and the three popular votes is a string of coalition victories. The Salafists and Khumeinists weren’t yet able to crumble the Sistani-backed Iraqi consensus. But there is a bigger picture for US efforts in the region.
1. Iraq: The Baathist army and its projected re-armament are gone. In a zero sum game the defunct dictatorship won’t be able to throw divisions in future battlefields, nor use non conventional weapons against neighbors and beyond. More important, as I argue in my book Future Jihad, any projected axis of terror will operate without a Saddam. Even better, with patience a “new Iraq” will fight along with the alliance and against the axis of Jihadism. That alone is an undisputed change in the map setting.
2. Removing the Syrian army from Lebanon, even partially, would have been hard, had five layers of radicals, Hizbollah, and the four regimes of Lahoud, Assad, Saddam and Ahmedinijad, have been able to form a continuum from the Mediterranean to Pakistan. But with the Baath removed from Iraq, Iran got surrounded, and Assad lost his eastern strategic depth to face off with the US sixth fleet. Hence, without one single shot, he had to pull his forces out of Lebanon. The mere presence of the US forces in Iraq liberated not one, but two countries, though partially still.
3. The US move in Iraq alienated the French Government. But the Lebanese issue, moved Paris back to the Western alliance against Syria’s regime, Hizbollah and Iran. Without that Iraq-generated Lebanon opportunity, France and its European partners wouldn’t have put their weight in the balance. Ironically, the march of US Marines towards Baghdad paved the way for France’s diplomats to follow (along with their US counterparts) the road to UNSCR 1559 in New York.
4. With Lebanon slowly emerging from decades of Syrian occupation, a new balance of power is in the making in that small but strategic country: Hizbollah is not the sole power anymore. With the Syrian forces out, the Iran-dominated terror organization has to keep an eye on its rear-guard pressed by the one million marchers of the Cedars Revolution. Thus, without the change in Iraq, that revolution wasn’t expected to happen soon, or even to happen at all bloodlessly. The weight of US presence in Iraq, freed the energies of another civil society in the region: Lebanon
5. The domino effect reached Iran: With US forces in Afghanistan protecting a rising democracy, coalition forces in Iraq, coaching an expanding democracy, and a UN backed civil revolution in Beirut, Tehran’s environment has been altered: Its strategists are attempting to accommodate evolving situations to their east (Afghanistan), west (Syria) and far west (Lebanon). US soldiers taking back Fallujah and training Iraqis are changing the strategic landscape of the Mullahs threat.
6. The cataclysmic changes in Iraq caused yet remote developments: Gaddafi’s regime surrendered his designs on nuclear weapons, affecting the threat of rogue regimes; Sudan’s Islamist regime moderated its stance on the South, and began to accept the idea of negotiations on Darfur. Absent of the Iraq campaign, it would have been less likely to see Tripoli and Khartoum offering these concessions.
7. In the war of ideas, the change in Iraq mobilized the region’s dissident forces. Watching the rise of 120 political parties in Iraq, women voting in Afghanistan, demonstrators in Beirut, thousands of democracy activists have spread online and in many Arab countries. Another indirect consequence of the sacrifices consented by young men and women from America’s little towns and mega-cities.
The ripple effects of the US campaign are amazingly wider quantitatively and qualitatively than the Iraq-only results. The seven effects above mentioned are only a limited version of the earthquake striking the region and awakening its underdogs to freedom. In the final analysis all perception depends on the understanding of this conflict by average Americans and soon to be by Europeans and Middle Eastern alike. It is about to be or not to be conscious about it.
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