President Bush seems to manage to find some ratioanle for his foreign policy actions. In 2003 he told us that the bad Saddam Hussain had nuclear weapons, chemical weapoms and what not. The world half believed it then. And we have the US army sitting in Iraq for more than five years now.
But recently things have not gone well in Iraq. The ’surge’ has contained the violence to an extent, but there is no progress on the benchmarks set for Iraq. So voices calling for a pull-out from the country are getting increasingly strident. So Bush has come up with a new reason for staying put in Iraq. He says it is imperative that Iran’s influence in Iraq is contained.
One must admit that this new googly leaves us all stumped. It is true that both the major Shia groups in Iraq (Mahdi army and SICRI) have the blessings of Iran. These groups will act and are acting according to orders from Iran.
But the important point is how did Iran get this leverage in Iraq. Because of Bush. If the US had not barged into the country in 2003 and dislodged the Saddam Hussain regime, there would not have been the rise of the Shia militants and groups. The vaccuum created by the removal of the Saddam regime has created communal groups and offered Iran more than a foot hold in Iraq. We all know Iran and Saddam’s Iraq were bitter foes.
So we see the peculiar phenomenon seen in the present Bush presidency where the president has done things rashly without thinking out things properly. (We talk of Iraq here. ) Then as the mess grows bigger he says it is important we stay on. US foreign policy experts must be praying the Bush presidency ends without further big blunders.
Bush’s blunder in Iraq is nicely summarised by Suzanne Maloney, a Brookings Institution expert, thus
Disastrous Bush policies fostered a sectarian Iraq that has helped empower Iranian hardliners. Rather than serving as an anchor for a new era of stability and American preeminence in the Persian Gulf, the new Iraq represents a strategic black hole, bleeding Washington of military resources and political influence while extending Iran’s primacy among its neighbors
