Incompetent Team America lacks leverage in the Mideast

By Thomas L. Friedman
Published: Saturday, May 17, 2008 1:28 a.m. MDT
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The next American president will inherit many foreign policy challenges, but surely one of the biggest will be the Cold War. Yes, the next president is going to be a Cold War president — but this Cold War is with Iran.

That is the real umbrella story in the Middle East today — the struggle for influence across the region, with America and its Sunni Arab allies (and Israel) versus Iran, Syria and their non-state allies, Hamas and Hezbollah. As the May 11 editorial in the Iranian daily Kayhan put it, "In the power struggle in the Middle East, there are only two sides: Iran and the U.S."

For now, Team America is losing on just about every front. How come? The short answer is that Iran is smart and ruthless, America is dumb and weak, and the Sunni Arab world is feckless and divided. Any other questions?

The outrage of the week is the Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah attempt to take over Lebanon. Hezbollah thugs pushed into Sunni neighborhoods in West Beirut, focusing particular attention on crushing progressive news outlets like Future TV, so Hezbollah's propaganda machine could dominate the airwaves. The Shiite militia Hezbollah emerged supposedly to protect Lebanon from Israel. Having done that, it has now turned around and sold Lebanon to Syria and Iran.

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All of this is part of what Ehud Yaari, one of Israel's best Middle East watchers, calls "Pax Iranica." In his April 28 column in The Jerusalem Report, Yaari pointed out the web of influence that Iran has built around the Middle East — from the sway it has over Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to its ability to manipulate virtually all the Shiite militias in Iraq, to its building up of Hezbollah into a force — with 40,000 rockets — that can control Lebanon and threaten Israel should it think of striking Tehran, to its ability to strengthen Hamas in Gaza and block any U.S.-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian peace.

"Simply put," noted Yaari, "Tehran has created a situation in which anyone who wants to attack its atomic facilities will have to take into account that this will lead to bitter fighting" on the Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi and Persian Gulf fronts. That is a sophisticated strategy of deterrence.

The Bush team, by contrast, in eight years has managed to put America in the unique position in the Middle East where it is "not liked, not feared and not respected," writes Aaron David Miller, a former Mideast negotiator under both Republican and Democratic administrations, in his provocative new book on the peace process, titled "The Much Too Promised Land."

"We stumbled for eight years under Bill Clinton over how to make peace in the Middle East, and then we stumbled for eight years under George Bush over how to make war there," said Miller, and the result is "an America that is trapped in a region which it cannot fix and it cannot abandon."

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@ anonymous 11:23 - the reason why I would support a strike on Irans...

ten dollars a gallon | May 17, 2008 at 4:42 p.m.

I heard Tony Snow say that the average Iranian citizen is more pro...

George | May 17, 2008 at 12:30 p.m.

"I'll pay ten dollars a gallon to knock out their nuclear...

Anonymous | May 17, 2008 at 11:23 a.m.