Restless Empire: Washington's Goals and Problems in the Islamic Arc

The Bush administration has pursued an extraordinarily ambitious agenda in the Islamic Arc—that region from Egypt to the border between Pakistan and India—since the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. In the two years since that catastrophic event, Washington has taken a number of actions with far-reaching implications. U.S. military forces attacked and occupied Afghanistan, ousting the Taliban government and putting the regime's al Qaeda allies on the run. Any intention that U.S. troops would leave Afghanistan in a short period of time was quickly forgotten, and American policy makers have put their full support behind the new government of President Hamid Karzai. Washington also has stationed forces in neighboring Central Asian countries as part of its campaign against al Qaeda. ¹

In the lead-up to the war in Afghanistan, the United States forged close ties with Pakistan's military dictator, Pervez Musharraf. Washington's pressure induced Islamabad to abandon its Taliban client. U.S.-Pakistan ties have since deepened with President Bush's announcement in July 2003 of a $3 billion, five-year military and economic development aid package to Pakistan.

The capstone of the U.S. strategy in the Islamic Arc to date has been the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Washington's military victory was extraordinary both in terms of its speed and the surprisingly low number of U.S. battlefield casualties. As in the case of Afghanistan, however, U.S. policy in Iraq does not seem to be going according to the original plan. The assumption of U.S. policy makers was that once Saddam Hussein's regime was crushed, Iraqi military resistance would fade quickly. According to that scenario, American military commanders would transfer political power within weeks to an Iraqi transition government and begin to draw down U.S. forces from the 150,000 who waged the war to 50,000 or so by the end of summer 2003. It has not worked out that way, however, and U.S. leaders now speak of keeping troops in Iraq for years.

The unexpected difficulties encountered in Iraq have done little to dampen Washington's policy ambitions in the Islamic Arc. As his father attempted to do after the first Persian Gulf War, President George W. Bush has sought to parlay the U.S. victory into greater influence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Outlining the Road Map for peace, the administration has pursued a strategy to sideline Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat in favor of Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, hold out the prospect of creating a Palestinian state by 2005, and jump-start negotiations between Abbas and Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon.

Although the Bush administration has cultivated the image of peacemaker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it has adopted a very different posture toward Iraq's neighbors, Syria and Iran. Relations with Syria became so tense during the final stages of the Iraq war and the immediate postwar period that there was speculation in the United States that U.S. forces might attack that country. Tensions with Syria continue to simmer, and those with Iran are building at an alarming rate. Most ominous, the Bush administration is leveling some of the same accusations at Damascus and Tehran (alleged ties to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups and alleged programs to build weapons of mass destruction) that it directed against Baghdad in the months before the Iraq invasion. ²

All of this indicates a wide-ranging and ambitious U.S. policy in the Islamic Arc. Whether by improvisation or design, Washington has become the dominant power in the region, and with its military forces occupying both Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States is playing an imperial role. Unfortunately, not only is that imperial role highly controversial with Islamic populations, it is a disturbingly incoherent and impractical form of imperialism. All of Washington's initiatives are in trouble to one...