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Is Petraeus "Beyond Naive"?
He thinks we should negotiate with our enemies—just like Obama.
Fred Kaplan
posted Oct. 10, 2008
Obama Won the Foreign-Policy Questions
McCain was vague and contradicted himself during the debate.
Fred Kaplan
posted Oct. 7, 2008
She Still Knows Nothing
Palin proved that she can speak in complete sentences, but not that she understands anything about foreign policy.
Fred Kaplan
posted Oct. 2, 2008
Obama Wins on Foreign Policy
He stood up to McCain, and he had a more realistic vision of the world.
Fred Kaplan
posted Sept. 27, 2008
Afghanistan Isn't Like Iraq
Why a "surge" won't work there.
Fred Kaplan
posted Sept. 19, 2008
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war stories: Military analysis.

The Sunni-Shiite FollyThe Bush administration's cockeyed strategy to promote sectarian conflict in the Middle East.

By Fred Kaplan
Updated Sunday, Feb. 4, 2007, at 2:46 AM ET

The Iranians are expanding their presence in Iraq, the Saudis are cutting a separate deal with them to contain the strife in Lebanon, and who can blame either party?

Yes, as the AP reported Tuesday, this surge of Saudi-Iranian cooperation "could complicate Washington's efforts to isolate Tehran." But it is Bush's abandonment of diplomacy that has left the vacuum that the Saudis and Iranians are now trying to fill. And given the alternative of mayhem and anarchy, their new rapprochement might not be a bad thing.

Iran's expansive ambitions these days are fueled mainly by two sources: high oil prices, which swell its treasury and strengthen its leverage over industrial nations; and the evaporation of its closest, most threatening rivals—Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

The irony, of course, is that the United States facilitated both developments—indirectly in the former case (the United States doesn't import oil from Iran, but its extravagant consumption boosts prices on the global market, which enriches the mullahs' regime) and very directly in the latter (the United States overthrew Tehran's chief enemies).

This is not to say that President Bush should have refrained from toppling Saddam or the Taliban in order to keep Tehran holed up. But he should have foreseen the consequences and adjusted his diplomacy accordingly.

In fairness, Bush did just that, initially. In the weeks leading up to the invasion of Afghanistan, middle-level U.S. and Iranian officials held face-to-face talks on cooperative measures for the war. Tehran cut the talks off after Bush's State of the Union Address in January 2002, in which he tied together Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an "axis of evil."

As the invasion of Iraq got under way, the Bush administration's neocons dreamed of fomenting "regime change" in Iran (and maybe Syria) after Baghdad fell. Yet when the American military found itself bogged down in Iraq, Tehran's expansionists were given freer reign still.

Thus was sparked the latest U.S. strategy of herding the Sunni Arab states (especially Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan) into an alliance against the growing Shiite threat (Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah).

There are three serious problems with this idea.

First, as Michael Young points out in a Slate column today, the Sunni states' leaders don't much like it. They face challenges from Shiite militants in their own cities. Joining a war of civilizations against Shiite strongholds, especially a war led by the much-loathed Americans, would jeopardize their own hold on power. (It doesn't matter, in this sense, whether the war is a hot or cold one.)