Middle East Threat Overrated

Our look at the Islamic threat has twice told us we’d better be prepared for dire consequences following U.S. defeat in Iraq. Both al-Qaeda expert Lawrence Wright and the defense specialists interviewed by Thomas Ricks are people who don’t like our Iraq intervention, but who view the war as important because U.S. defeat there will make militant Islam far more of a threat than ever.

In Prospect’s most recent cover story, Edward Luttwak, a specialist on the Middle East and on military affairs, takes a contrarian view. Luttwak argues that what happens in that region doesn’t really matter to the West. His perspective best justifies getting out of Iraq. For you see, if Iraq is important, then we should stay to win there. But if it is unimportant, we should leave.

Here’s why Luttwak feels the Middle East isn’t so important:

Strategically, the Arab-Israeli conflict has been almost irrelevant since the end of the cold war. And as for the impact of the conflict on oil prices, it was powerful in 1973 when the Saudis declared embargoes and cut production, but that was the first and last time that the "oil weapon" was wielded. For decades now, the largest Arab oil producers have publicly foresworn any linkage between politics and pricing, and an embargo would be a disaster for their oil-revenue dependent economies. In any case, the relationship between turmoil in the middle east and oil prices is far from straightforward. As Philip Auerswald recently noted in the American Interest, between 1981 and 1999—a period when a fundamentalist regime consolidated power in Iran, Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war within view of oil and gas installations, the Gulf war came and went and the first Palestinian intifada raged—oil prices, adjusted for inflation, actually fell. And global dependence on middle eastern oil is declining: today the region produces under 30 per cent of the world's crude oil, compared to almost 40 per cent in 1974-75. In 2005 17 per cent of American oil imports came from the Gulf, compared to 28 per cent in 1975, and President Bush used his 2006 state of the union address to announce his intention of cutting US oil imports from the middle east by three quarters by 2025. . .

Arab-Israeli catastrophism is wrong twice over, first because the conflict is contained within rather narrow boundaries, and second because the Levant is just not that important any more. . .the fraternity of middle east experts. . . persistently attribute real military strength to backward societies whose populations can sustain excellent insurgencies but not modern military forces. . . Saddam's army was the usual middle eastern façade without fighting substance. . .

[Iran’s] Pasdaran revolutionary guards, inevitably described as "elite," who do indeed strut around as if they have won many a war. . . have actually fought only one—against Iraq, which they lost. As for Iran's claim to have defeated Israel by Hizbullah proxy in last year's affray, the publicity was excellent but the substance went the other way, with roughly 25 per cent of the best-trained men dead, which explains the tomb-like silence and immobility of the once rumbustious Hizbullah ever since the ceasefire. . . As for the claim that the "Iranians" are united in patriotic support for the nuclear programme, no such nationality even exists. Out of Iran's population of 70m or so, 51 per cent are ethnically Persian, 24 per cent are Turks ("Azeris" is the regime's term), with other minorities comprising the remaining quarter.

The operational mistake that middle east experts keep making is the failure to recognise that backward societies must be left alone. . . With neither invasions nor friendly engagements, the peoples of the middle east should finally be allowed to have their own history—the one thing that middle east experts of all stripes seem determined to deny them. . . We devote far too much attention to the middle east, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created in science or the arts. . . The middle east was once the world's most advanced region, but these days its biggest industries are extravagant consumption and the venting of resentment. According to the UN's 2004 Arab human development report, the region boasts the second lowest adult literacy rate in the world . . . at just 63 per cent. . . manufactured goods account for just 17 per cent of exports, compared to a global average of 78 per cent.