I've asked this before, I know, but since I've yet to get an answer I'll ask again: where exactly do we "enable some of the most despotic regimes on the planet to both remain in power and treat their own populaces with impunity"? We arguably keep the governments of Iraq and Yemen in power, but these governments are less despotic than ineffectual. We pay the government of Egypt not to mix it up with the Israelis (a good deal for them, since they don't want to mix it up with the Israelis anyway), but we don't enable them to stay in power and we don't enable them to oppress their populace: they could and would do both quite well without us.Originally Posted by Bob's World
We don't enable the governments of Saudi Arabia or the Gulf States at all, except perhaps indirectly through our insatiable appetite for oil. They don't need us to stay in power, and they certainly don't need our help or approval to oppress their populaces. Neither do their populaces, even when they dislike their governments, want us interfering in their domestic affairs.
The idea that we somehow enable these governments to stay in power and oppress their people suggests that we have the capacity to remove them from power, or to change the way they relate to their people, if only we cease to enable. We do not actually have that capacity or that influence, and there are few things more dangerous than assuming a capacity that you do not actually have.
We cannot impose the Cold War paradigm where it does not fit. During the Cold War we openly installed dictators, encouraged coups d'etat, kept dictators in power with aid and force. Those dictators depended on us and we did have influence over them (though it was often diluted by our mistaken belief that we needed them to obstruct the commies). This situation does not prevail in the Gulf. There are despots, yes, but we didn't put them in power, we don't keep them in power, and they don't need us. We don't have the influence to change them, any more than we have the influence to change the regimes in China or Uzbekistan. We deal with all of them, because they exist and we have to, but they are not "our bastards".
What policy changes, exactly, would you like to see?
Does bin Laden matter? To AQ, probably not that much. To the US, certainly he does. Killing bin Laden would provide a certain amount of closure an an era that we'd do well to close. It would allow us to put the counterproductive "GWOT" construct behind us and develop a more realistic presentation of the challenge. it would make an Afghanistan exit strategy more palatable.
While we haven't disabled AQ, it would be a mistake to say things have gone well for them. In SE Asia, which some analysts were once calling the "swing state" for the global jihad, they've fallen flat, not because of anything we did, but they have. The end of the oil glut and the consequent huge inflow of money to the Gulf has largely dismantled the 90s narrative of aggressive self-pity and greatly diminished AQ's traction in the Arab heartland. In other places it's been up and down, but you'd be hard pressed to claim realistically that they're ascendant anywhere. Oddly, they've probably seen the greatest expansion of influence in Western Europe, largely due to economic stress.
Certainly there are policy changes we could usefully make, but messing in the internal affairs of Muslim countries is not going to get us anywhere. I'd like to see us continue the withdrawal from Iraq: certainly they'll have issues, but we don't need to make those our issues. I'd like to see Iraqi oil contracts go to the Chinese and Europeans. That would be a minor setback for some US companies but no strategic problem at all for the US, and it would directly challenge the claim that the US is trying to control Iraqi oil.
Changing our rhetoric toward Israel would also help a lot, though in fact our influence there is much lower than it once was.
In short, there are things we can do to undermine AQs narrative, and we should do them. Trying to do what we can't do is only going to snap back in our faces.
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