Western intervention in Middle East has produced a harvest of dust and ashes

The results of the West’s interventions in the Middle East in the past decade totter between the counterproductive and the disastrous.

There’s no good reason to add Syria and Iran to this grim tally of own goals.

Several heavyweight historians have made the case that the machinations of Europeans and Americans in the Middle East since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War nearly a century ago have caused nothing but trouble.

But even in the shorter time frame of the last couple of decades, intervention by the Americans, Europeans and Canadians has little or nothing to show for it.

Twenty years after the United States- led first invasion of Iraq and nearly a decade after the second, the country is close to being a failed state with Prime Minister Nouri al- Maliki craftily fashioning a new dictatorship of which ousted president Saddam Hussein would be envious.

As the last American troops leave Iraq, the al- Maliki government is incapable of providing basic services to the country’s people. Unemployment among young men is about 30 per cent, providing a stock of willing recruits for the militias and death squads that every political and tribal faction finds necessary for its survival.

The culture of revenge is rife now that a version of democracy has given power to the once- persecuted Shiite Muslim majority, while the people of Saddam’s once- dominant Sunni Baath party feel under constant siege.

In the north, the Kurds are trying to preserve the quasi in dependence they achieved when protected by the NATO “no- fly zone” in the 1990s.

Al- Maliki meanwhile is steadily demolishing the democratic and human rights institutions left by the Americans. His targets are just as much challengers to his power among his co- religionist Shiites as his rivals in other tribes and sects. Secret prisons, torture and assassination squads are the bequest of the American invasion and the hundreds of thousands of people killed.

Libya, as was widely predicted but smothered by the shouts of the interventionists, is collapsing into tribe- based principalities ruled by clan militias after the NATO- engineered overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi. On Wednesday leaders of the oil- rich eastern sector of Libya, where the revolt against Gadhafi began in the main city Benghazi a year ago, declared themselves an “autonomous state.”

This has been in the cards since it became apparent that the National Transitional Council, theoretically in control since the fall of Gadhafi in August and his killing in October, has little or no authority.

The council failed to disarm the rebel militias, which are intent on amassing their own spoils of war, and doesn’t even control the capital, Tripoli.

The new state, to be called Barqa, corresponds to the old state of Cyrenaica, which with Fezzan in the southwest and Tripolitania in the west made up the kingdom of Libya between 1951 and 1963.

And if one pushes the boundaries of the Middle East to include Afghanistan, the result of 10 years of western blood, sweat, tears and treasure is likely to be a deeply corrupt alliance of regional warlords and the Taliban puritanical Islamists.

The major political achievement of the Afghanistan war is the separation of al- Qaida from its Taliban protectors.

But the country remains a pawn in the regional chess game between India and Pakistan, backed by its sponsor China.

Those experiences alone should warn western leaders that they have no clear idea of what is a desirable outcome of their Middle East ventures, what is achievable or how to achieve it.

The clamour for intervention is being sounded again, this time in Syria, over Bashar Assad’s disgustingly brutal slaughter of his opponents in the Baba Amr district of the city of Homs.

It is undoubtedly true that the Assads run a thoroughly nasty regime, but the results of intervention are likely worse. The outside world doesn’t know for sure what is going on, there has been only sporadic and no general uprising in the past year, defections from the regime and its military have been limited, and the state security apparatus — beastly as it is — remains in control.

U. S. President Barack Obama continues to resist demands at home and from the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the U. S. join or facilitate the destruction of Iran’s nuclear development plants.

Obama is putting his faith in sanctions — and perhaps a sofar unrewarded confidence in the Iranian people to ditch the deeply corrupt religious mountebanks that rule them — while not abandoning the threat of military attack.

Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Somalia and Darfur have bred the doctrine of the “duty to protect.”

But sometimes the most constructive, least hare- brained intervention is to leave a phone number and say: “Call us when you feel better.”