The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
I knew the US presidential race was over two weeks ago when my son preemptively announced he had lost his bet with me: Hillary Clinton was not going to be the Democratic candidate. The question of whether Barack Obama can beat John McCain is still open, but it probably wonÕt stay open long once the two men go head to head. McCain has many attractive qualities, but he is 71 and Obama is 46. McCain is also committed to continuing a war in Iraq that most Americans just want to leave behind. Curiously, this means that the two men with the greatest potential influence on McCainÕs political future are Osama bin Laden and Moqtada al-Sadr. The one thing that could swing the 2008 election in favour of the Republicans is another large-scale terrorist attack on the United States. If al-Qaeda has any ability to provide that attack, it will certainly do so, for bin Laden knows his greatest recruiting tool in the Arab world is the American military presence in Iraq. But it is unlikely that al-Qaeda has any significant presence within the US. A more interesting case is al-Sadr. He is the leader of the Mahdi army, the biggest Shia militia in Iraq, and he has just extended his unilateral ceasefire against American troops and rival militias for another six months. His two main objectives in life are to evict the US from Iraq and to gain control of the Iraqi government, and the first is a necessary preliminary to the second. So long as the US presidential election promises to result in an administration pledged to withdraw from Iraq, he doesnÕt have to lift a finger. But if by August it looks like McCain has a chance of winning, then al-Sadr has every incentive to end his ceasefire and launch an offensive against US troops. The point would not be to win, but to remind American voters that Iraq is a quagmire that they should leave really soon. So one way or another, Obama is almost certain to be the president of the United States by January of next year. He has hedged his commitment to withdraw American troops from Iraq in various ways, but there is little doubt in most peopleÕs minds that he really intends to do it. What will the Middle East look like after the Americans are gone? Iraq, contrary to predictions of disaster, will probably be all right. It will never again be the secular, female-friendly society of the past, and it will take at least a decade to recover from the economic devastation of the embargo, the invasion and the occupation, but it wonÕt break up. Most of the smaller ethnic and religious minorities have fled from Iraq or been killed, and the larger groups Ð Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, Kurds Ð have mostly retreated into homogeneous districts and neighbourhoods, so thereÕs not much left to fight about except along the boundary between Arab Iraq and Kurdistan. ItÕs even possible that the more or less democratic system imposed by the US occupation will survive the departure of the Americans. Iran will indeed emerge as the new paramount power of the Gulf, but its actual influence even over predominantly Shia Iraq will be quite limited. Farther afield, the notion of a dangerously radical ÒShia crescentÓ running through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon is sheer nonsense: Shias are a minority in Lebanon, and a very small minority in Syria. It is mainly the US that promotes this fantasy, with the aim of scaring Sunni Arab states into a new, US-dominated alliance against Iran. The real fall-out from the invasion of Iraq is the greatly heightened prestige of Islamist revolutionaries throughout the Arab world. Whether this will ever result in a successful Islamist revolution in a major Arab country remains to be seen, but the odds have probably shifted somewhat in that direction. ItÕs not much of a headline: ÒSmall, Nasty War in Iraq Ends; Middle East Largely Unaffected.Ó But then, history often works like that. The equivalent headline in 1975 would have read: ÒUS Defeated in Vietnam; No Wider Consequences.Ó
