Can American End Its War in the Greater Middle East?

Christopher A. Preble

Security, Middle East

Historian Andrew Bacevich surveys the history of U.S. involvement in the region and comes to a sobering conclusion: it isn’t working.

ISIS continues to hold vast swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria. A civil war rages in Yemen. Turks fight Kurds. A new UN-sponsored unity government struggles to assert its authority in Libya. A military dictatorship controls Egypt. Refugees fleeing chaos in Syria are flooding into Europe, and beyond. The Taliban is still in Afghanistan, and also terrorizing Pakistan. Violence between Israelis and Palestinians persists. And Iranian mullahs, empowered by the relaxation of international sanctions under last year’s nuclear deal, thwart democracy at home and rattle ballistic missiles against their neighbors in the near abroad. This hardly exhaustive list describes the state of affairs in today’s Greater Middle East.

In a sweeping new narrative, historian Andrew Bacevich surveys the history of U.S. involvement in the region and comes to a sobering conclusion: it isn’t working.*

Actually, it’s much worse than that. U.S. efforts have failed to bring peace and order to the region, and have often had the opposite effect. Meanwhile, they have undermined U.S. security here at home.

This, Bacevich explains in Politico Magazine, begs two rather obvious questions:

“First, why has the world’s mightiest military achieved so little even while absorbing very considerable losses and inflicting even greater damage on the subjects of America’s supposed beneficence? Second, why in the face of such unsatisfactory outcomes has the United States refused to chart a different course? In short, why can’t we win? And since we haven’t won, why can’t we get out?”

For answers, he points to the “several assumptions that promote in Washington a deeply pernicious collective naiveté.”