Secret US report scorns Bush policy attacks Middle East
policy
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
15 March 2003
A classified State Department report has poured scorn on George Bush's
much-touted policy that a military invasion of Iraq will lead to a
flowering of democracy across the Middle East.
The report, leaked to the Los Angeles Times, is the latest indication of
divisions within the Bush administration on the goals and even the wisdom
of the war it is itching to start. And it offers a rebuke to
neo-conservatives whose grandiose theories about refashioning the world
in America's image have been central to the Iraq enterprise from the
start.
"Political changes conducive to broader and enduring stability
throughout the region will be difficult to achieve for a very long
time," the report says. It cites corruption, serious infrastructure
degradation and overpopulation as reasons to doubt whether any kind of
stability, much less fully functioning democratic government, will be
possible in the foreseeable future, in Iraq or in many of its neighbours.
"Liberal democracy would be difficult to achieve," the report
goes on. And it warns that any electoral democracy would be subject to
exploitation by "anti- American elements" � a reference to the
Islamist parties that American foreign policy has been at pains to
exclude from government across the Middle East, even if that means
supporting autocratic and repressive regimes. The intelligence source who
leaked the document concluded: "This idea that you're going to
transform the Middle East and fundamentally alter its trajectory is not
credible."
The date on the report, 26 February, was the very day the President laid
out his vision of a domino effect, in which a US invasion of Iraq would
be the beginning of a democratic revolution throughout the Middle East.
"A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring
example of freedom for other nations in the region," Mr Bush
said.
The State Department report, by contrast, dismisses the domino theory in
its title: Iraq, the Middle East and Change: No Dominoes.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=387231
