General Abizaid Has Good News and Bad News

BOSTON -- Recently, I had the pleasure of spending a morning and lunch with John P. Abizaid, when he visited Northeastern University in Boston. Now retired, General Abizaid served his country for 34 years in a long and distinguished career, culminating in his responsibility for US Central Command, when he led American forces in the Middle East and Asia during the Iraq war's early years. Just as when he provided briefings to the US Congress and the American people on the progress of the war he led in Iraq, there is good news and bad news to report from my encounter with him.

Abizaid is no ordinary soldier or American citizen. He was the youngest four-star general in the Army, the longest-serving commander of United States Central Command, and three times worked on the Joint Staff of the armed forces, including once as director. Now president of his own international security consulting firm, he is also associated with academic projects at Stanford and Harvard universities.

The good news is that he understands the several interlocking challenges and problems that define the Middle East and the wider Arab-Asian region, especially the linkages between the Arab-Israeli conflict, ideological and religious movements, extremist organizations, the use of foreign military power, and securing energy resources.

Abizaid identifies four major strategic problems in the region, which he lists as: 1) the rise of religiously-indoctrinated extremist organizations like Al-Qaeda that are stateless but carry out attacks throughout the world, want the United States to leave the region, yet are rejected by the vast majority of people in the Middle East; 

2) the rise of Shiite extremism that is attached to the state of Iran, wants to dominate the region and expel US influence, but also sometimes comes into conflict with Sunni religious extremism; 

3) the corrosive effect of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which leads to hopelessness and anxiety that can spill over into extremist movements in the worst cases; and, 

4) the need to secure the flow of oil and gas from the Middle East to the entire world.

He also understands the limits of military power, because he knows it intimately, and he also knows that foreign armies in the Middle East can generate a combination of resentment and resistance (which his former civilian bosses in Washington fail to grasp). He says that military force against what he calls “AQAM” (Al-Qaeda and Associated Movements) only buys time, while over the longer run a combination of diplomatic, political and economic policies is required to defeat AQAM. He recognizes that “military actions alone will not stabilize Iraq, which is one of our top priorities now,” but also that American-led military policies in the long run could inadvertently spur the expansion of extremist movements as a response.

“If Al-Qaeda and associated movements ever became mainstream in the Middle East, then we really would have a clash of civilizations. We need to confront extremism in the region now, before it strengthens and spreads as a result of our own actions,” he says. “Too many American forces in the region, in an intrusive posture, for too long a period of time, create conditions that make extremism more dangerous for the United States and for the people of the region themselves.”

Therefore, he suggests, “we must stop leading with our military and work harder at nation-building and giving the people in the region more opportunities to share in the global wealth. We need to change the current pattern of intervention, and get to the point where our engagement in this region is defined by around 20 percent military and 80 percent political-economic actions.”

His view of Iran is also refreshingly realistic. He feels the United States and allies “must do everything we can to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power,” but adds that “a nuclear Iran also does not mean war with Iran, because we've dealt with North Korea, the USSR, and others who had nuclear weapons. We must confront the Iranian regime and not take military force off the table as an option, but it's not clear to me that we must fight them militarily.”

The bad news is that Abizaid's analysis remains incomplete and superficial in places, perhaps because digging deeper into the causes of Middle Eastern tensions and violence would require more stringent analyses of the culpability of the United States, Israel and the pro-Western Arab conservative regimes. He does not seem to probe the complete reasons for the two religion-anchored Sunni and Shiite extremisms he sees as real dangers to the region and to the US, nor the historical and political drivers of Iranian nationalism. I sensed in his approach a tendency to identify only local reasons for the extremism and violence in the Middle East, without acknowledging fully the cycle of extremism, violence and fanaticism that drives policy in Arab, Iranian, Israeli and American official circles alike.

General Abizaid is a man worth listening to, despite weaknesses and gaps in his worldview. Good news and bad news together from a former high-ranking American general are a step forward from the mostly bad news, blinkered militarism and pro-Israeli extremism that broadly define American policy in the Middle East as it has been crafted by civilian zealots in recent years.