以黎戰事改變中東態勢：國際勢力影響力漸弱
News Analysis: Mideast changes push outside influence aside
By Robert F. Worth The New York Times
Published: July 23, 2006
Over the past week, with rockets exploding in southern Beirut and the streets of Haifa, the world has been stunned by the rising ferocity of the war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese guerrilla group.
But equally surprising, to many, has been the way the conflict has illuminated the sweeping changes that are reshaping the entire Middle East.
Behind Hezbollah’s rockets lurks the specter of a newly unleashed Iran, its patron and supplier. Israel, which hoped for some peace after its withdrawal from Gaza, has been emboldened to lash out against its enemies more aggressively than it had in two decades.
Iraq is in ruins, and the Arab countries seem paralyzed. Everywhere, the struts that upheld the region’s tenuous stability are wavering, and fierce new winds are blowing.
Whatever the outcome of the proxy war fought on the soil of the suffering Lebanese, this broader struggle for dominance will continue to play itself out.
So the question arises: What is America’s role in this volatile new world? Arab democracy may be a distant dream, but there is still much to be gained or lost in the region, including access to crucial oil fields, progress against terrorism and the security of Israel.
The Bush administration stuck with its policies through Israel’s initial assault, giving a tacit blessing to Israeli airstrikes and maintaining a studied silence that suggested: We do not negotiate with bad guys like Syria and Iran. That stance has left it with little leverage and virtually no one to talk to.
Some critics of the administration emphasize the benefit of talking with Syria or Iran. Tehran in particular can inflict pain on U.S. troops and allies in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Israel. But it is not clear that such negotiations would succeed.
In any event, all the countries of the Middle East, having seen the administration’s democratic experiment in Iraq go up in flames, may now be less amenable to influence from any of the world powers that have shaped the region for so long.
”My sense,” said Richard Haass, who headed the State Department’s policy planning operation during President George W. Bush’s first term, ”is that we are seeing the Middle East entering a new era, one in which external powers count for less, and local actors - be they states or militias or individuals - count for more.”
That shift is an important one, and it could make relations in the region more complex and unstable for a long time, said Haas, now president of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
For most of the past century, outsiders shaped the politics of the region. Britain and France literally redrew the Middle East’s borders after World War I. After the United States followed Britain as the reigning Western power, policies were guided by Cold War concerns, with U.S. clients warding off Communist influence and maintaining access to oil supplies.
Starting in 1967, the United States also became the chief guarantor of Israel’s security and the lead player in efforts to broker a lasting peace - a process that came close to success in 2000, but that has been in ruins ever since. Over all, stability was the chief goal, and U.S. presidents were criticized for coddling Arab autocrats.
All that changed after Sept. 11, 2001, when the Bush administration embraced a new plan to transform the Middle East by promoting democracy. But by removing Saddam Hussein, who had kept neighboring Iran in check throughout his reign, the new U.S. effort freed Iran to take on a vastly more powerful role.
That transformation is the key to the current conflict in Lebanon. For Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab states, the specter of a Shiite crescent running from Iran through Iraq to the militant Shiites of Hezbollah in Lebanon is terrifying.
It is not just a matter of age-old tensions between Sunni and Shiite Islam. The status, and safety, of the Sunni Arab leadership is at stake.
”The Saudis are truly worried about the Iranians,” said Rachel Bronson, an expert on Middle East politics at the Council on Foreign Relations. ”They think Ahmadinejad is a nut who represents a return to messianic Khomeinism.”
Bronson was referring to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hard-line Iranian president, and to the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s Islamic revolutionary leader. That is why Saudi Arabia, along with Egypt and Jordan, did a turnabout last week and publicly condemned Hezbollah’s attack on Israel. For the United States, this would appear to be a good thing: For once, Arab leaders were saying in public what they once only whispered in private to their American counterparts.
But the new Arab stance may not be worth much. For one thing, the Arab leaders are vulnerable to public sentiment on their streets, where Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel are enormously popular. And the willingness of pro- Western Arab autocrats to ignore or play down their peoples’ fury at Israel hardly supports the broader U.S. project of promoting democracy in the Middle East.
That project has already backfired in several places, with elections bringing anti-American zealots to power in Iraq and in the Palestinian government.
”I think this is a gambit on the part of those regimes to conclusively put an end to democracy promotion in the Middle East,” said Marc Lynch, a scholar of Arab politics at Williams College in Massachusetts. ”They are saying to the Americans: ’Look how useful we are.’”
Iran, meanwhile, seems to move from strength to strength. ”If Iran emerges as a more powerful state, it will make other states in the region, and external powers like Russia and China, more willing to cooperate with Iran on energy, despite U.S. objections,” said Flynt Leverett, a former director of Middle Eastern affairs at the National Security Council and a former CIA analyst.
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