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Challenges lie ahead of U.S. Mideast policy (2) |
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15:54, September 14, 2007 |
Iran left to grow in strength rapidly
Another unexpected result of the Iraq war is that Iran and Shiites forces are left to grow in strength and expand rapidly in the Middle East. With the toppling of the Saddam regime of Sunnis by the U.S., a "sworn foe" has in fact been removed for Iran and Shiites. The religious hard-liners in Iran soon hosted high the "Anti-America and Anti-Israel" flag. And the government of President Mohamoud Ahmadinejad, while voicing provocative languages, promptly wielded the "big nuclear stick", which was enough to give the Americans the creeps.
Meanwhile, Iraq has been turned into the first nation for Shiites in the Arab world owing to a democratic election masterminded by the U.S. Meanwhile, with the support of Iran, Shiites forces in Syria and other neighboring nations also kept expanding rapidly. And the war between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah guerrilla let an American strategist cry out in alarm: Iran has turned out to be the biggest winner of the Iraq war!
U.S. loses its role of mediation in Palestine-Israeli peace process
Apart from the Iraq war, the failure in the Palestine-Israel peace process also constitutes a major factor in the Middle East dilemma for the U.S., which once played a role of mediation in the peace process during the days of Clinton administration. This role, nevertheless, was restricted dually by both foreign affairs and domestic politics in the U.S. In the diplomatic sphere, the fairness of the U.S. as a mediator has causes suspicions of the Arab world from the very beginning. The Camp David talks ended in complete failure in 2000, and it revealed the weakness of the American role in this regard.
Afterwards Israel took unbridled unilateral actions, with the patronage of new conservative forces upon the assumption of power by Bush administration, The United States abandoned Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, weakened Al Fatah forces and led to the all-round rise of the militant Hamas. Consequently, the U.S. totally lost its role as a mediator in the Palestine-Israel peace process.
Domestic front is in the heat of Presidential campaigns
Domestic politics will be the "last rice straw" for President Bush's Middle East Strategy. Democrats, by capitalizing on the strained situation Bush was facing in Iraq, won the mid term elections in late 2006. The ongoing presidential campaign for 2008, nevertheless, is the first presidential election without an incumbent or sitting vice-president involved since 1952. So, presidential candidates of the ruling Republican Party and opposition, impatient to await any longer, are now bent on making their debuts or extremely busy with their fund raising.
At present, the Bush administration is being confronted with dual pressures from both Democrats and Republicans, with the former setting forth motions or bills repeatedly to call for troop withdrawal with a set time limit and the latter hoping to be extricated from a predicament in the Iraq war. At the start of 2007, the Bush administration promoted a new strategy of escalation in military presence in Iraq, but this strategy cannot tackle problems at its root, as far as the U.S. predicament is concerned. Hence, it is unlikely that vital, great strategic challenge faced by the U.S. can possibly be resolved with a short period of time.
By Yu Wanli, deputy director of the Foreign Affairs Office with the Institute of American Studies affiliated the Chinese Academy of Sciences and translated by People's Daily Online
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