THE MIDDLE EAST:
Signs of Hope

By Victor Davis Hanson

Violence is taking its toll on America’s enemies, too—and the final outcome in Iraq, Iran, and Palestine may still be better than anyone now expects. By Victor Davis Hanson.

The majority opinion is that the occupation in Iraq has been so bungled that the blowback has ruined American efforts to promote positive change throughout the Middle East.

Perhaps. But for all the justifiable criticism of the Iraqi reconstruction, two truths still remain—the United States is taking an enormous toll on jihadists, and despite the terrible cost in blood and treasure has not given up on a constitutional government in Iraq.

The Sunni front-line states, which subsidized jihadists and still enjoy our misery in Iraq, are now terrified that these killers, in league with the Iranians, will turn on them. The result is that some Sunnis not only are helping us in Iraq, but are being urged to do so for the first time by those in the Arab world who would prefer to see the Iraqi government, rather than the terrorists, succeed. And if Iraq is still a terrible disappointment, Kurdistan is emerging as a success few envisioned, refuting some conventional wisdom about the incompatibility of capitalism and constitutional government with Middle Eastern Islam.

Theocratic Iran is not “empowered,” as is generally alleged, but in the greatest crisis of its miserable existence. As the mullahs up the ante in the region, they could very soon lose not only Iraq but also their own dictatorship. Trying to oppose the West in Iraq, Lebanon, and the West Bank is taking an enormous financial toll, as is the general isolation from the world community.

With oil prices at an all-time high, Iran can’t provide gasoline for its own people, who resent the oil billions spent on Arab terrorists abroad. If oil were to dip from near $70 to $50–$55 a barrel, the regime would face abject bankruptcy. For all the criticism of the U.S. position, from the left and the right, we seem now to have found the right blend: the military determination not to let Tehran go nuclear combined with economic and political efforts at containment. An array of future options—stronger embargoes, blockades, and military strikes on infrastructure—is still on the table. The social unrest the mullahs wished for in Iraq is starting to spill over the border into Iran, and its magnitude and final course are still unpredictable.

Syria, for all its acts of terrorism, still can’t overthrow the government in Lebanon, but it has managed the impossible: not only does the Arab world seek to isolate it, but France and the United States are cooperating to thwart it in Lebanon. The last thing we should do is give its terror industry the legitimacy it craves by sending more officials to Damascus.

Hamas is high on victory in Gaza for now, but all it has accomplished is to further concentrate its nexus of terror into one small, miserable— and vulnerable—locale while sacrificing the Palestinians’ greatest advantage: the ability to deny culpability. It will be harder now to assert the tired excuses, such as the blaming of violence on a “militant wing,” and all the other justifications for terror that the Palestinians use. Because Hamas bragged that it had routed (whether true or false) the Palestinian Authority from Gaza, the next barrage of rocket attacks from there, rightly or wrongly, will liberate Israel from past worries about collateral damage. For all the talk of losing the Lebanon war, it is Iran and Syria, not Israel, that are stuck with billions in reconstruction costs for their battered Shiite pawns on the front lines.

After four years of war and acrimony, things are starting to reach a point of resolution. The resources of both the United States and its enemies are becoming strained, but so far there is rioting in oil-exporting Iran over gasoline, not here in the United States. Europeans have gravitated more in the past four years to our views than we to theirs, especially in regard to the dangers of radical Islam. Israel lost some of its precious capital of deterrence in the last war, but ultimately the real loser was a bankrupt Iran, which lost far more materially than did a far wealthier Israel.

Because violence per se is the only narrative from the Middle East, and often editorialized as deriving from U.S. blunders, we are in a state of constant depression. But things are not as bad as they seem and could still turn out far better than anyone might imagine—if we give the gifted General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker the support and time they need to make the necessary military and diplomatic changes.

This essay appeared in National Review Online on June 27, 2007.

Available from the Hoover Press is Foreign Policy for America in the Twenty-First Century: Alternative Perspectives, by Thomas H. Henriksen. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is a classicist and an expert on the history of war. A regular contributor to National Review Online and many other national and international publications, he has written or edited sixteen books, including theNew York Times bestseller Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. His most recent book is A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War. He was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Bush in 2007.