The US invasion and occupation of Iraq and the implications for the Middle East: instability and the unravelling of US hegemony

The US invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq polarised notions of the barbaric other in opposition to the civilised self. The 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 provided the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration with the pretext they needed to unleash the overwhelming force of US military power against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. Beginning with Bush’s declaration of an ‘Axis of Evil’ in January 2002, the neo-conservatives in the US government, with the aid of the powerful pro-Israeli lobby, a compliant media, and Bush’s closest international ‘friends’, especially British Prime Minister Tony Blair, initiated a campaign to convince the world of the immediate threat that Iraq posed to world peace and the urgency of a pre-emptive war to remove Saddam Hussein. Despite concerted opposition from the vast majority of the members of the international community, the US and the ‘coalition of the willing’ (as the US allies became known) invaded Iraq on 20 March 2003. Five weeks later on 1 May, the US had deposed Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush landed on the US aircraft carrier, the Abraham Lincoln, to announce to the world ‘mission accomplished’ in Iraq.

George Bush’s premature declaration aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln marked the apogee of the Bush Doctrine and possibly of the Bush 66presidency. From that moment on the repercussions of the ill-advised invasion of Iraq became increasingly apparent. It is now a cliché but while the US undoubtedly won the war in Iraq, they subsequently lost the ‘peace’. Events in Iraq in the years since May 2003 have regularly been described by commentators of all political hues as a mistake, debacle, disaster, shambles and a catastrophe. While the killings in Iraq have diminished since the surge in late 2007, there is still an uneasy feeling amongst a number of Iraq watchers that another outbreak of strife is not all that far away as the precarious sectarian and political alliances that have maintained the uneasy peace begin to tear at the seams (Hanna 2009). Iraq’s severe problems remain the foremost legacy of the US invasion and occupation, and even as the Obama administration aims to successfully rebuild the stability of Iraq to allow an orderly extraction of the military, the repercussions of the US invasion and occupation will take decades for Iraqis to overcome. However, while the deep problems facing Iraq are a major cause of concern, the US intervention has wider ramifications that stretch beyond the borders of Iraq affecting the entire Middle East.

There has been a shift in the balance of power in the Middle East as the newly constituted Iraq rejoined Middle Eastern politics after the lost decade of the 1990s. In some circles, Iraq is believed to connect Iran with the Shi’a communities located in Lebanon, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, thus forming a potentially destabilising Shi’a crescent under the control of the radical Islamist regime in Tehran. While Iran’s danger to the stability of the Middle East has been characterised in sectarian terms, the real threat is not in a Shi’a revival or crescent but in a more worrying radicalisation of the Arab public. There is now a growing fear amongst the conservative monarchies of the Gulf and Jordan, as well as the pro-US bourgeois government in Egypt, of the increasingly widespread popularity of the alternative politics projected by Iran. The result has been an overreaction by conservative governments of the Middle East, led by Saudi Arabia and Israel, to Iran and Iranian allies in the region. A new bellicosity in the Middle East by Arab states towards Iran is illustrated by the Arab support for the Sunni insurgency during the sectarian strife which unfolded in Iraq and the feebleness of the Arab response to the deadly Israeli assault on Hezbollah in 2006. A new ‘Cold 67War’ between conservative governments and revolutionary movements for change has been unleashed by the US invasion of Iraq and is fast permeating the politics of the Middle East.

A major casualty of the largely unpopular invasion of Iraq has been the further erosion of America’s “considerable post-9/11 sympathies of the world, which had even extended to parts of the regime in Iran” (Robins 2008, p. 293). A stronger sense of the negative role the US plays in the region can be seen as one of the deepest of the legacies of US adventurism in Iraq. In turn, the weakening of the US has undermined the existing political and social order, and has strengthened the inclination of disaffected members of the diverse Middle Eastern societies to seek solace in alternative ideologies, especially those put forward by anti-‘Western’ Islamist movements. The long-term impact of the war in Iraq and increased Muslim radicalisation for the Middle East is reminiscent of the situation after the Islamist victory over the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in 1989. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Middle East was left to deal with the tens of thousands of Arabs who returned from Afghanistan extremely ideologically radicalised from their experiences and highly trained in the art of terrorism. It took the 9/11 attacks in 2001 for the rest of the world to understand the implications of the war in Afghanistan but in the Middle East an understanding of the longer term impact of war on regional instability was comprehended much earlier.

The implications of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq has unleashed potentially conflicting forces in the Middle East. Iran’s influence in the Middle Eastern region has experienced a resurgence in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq – the removal of Saddam Hussein and the installation of an Iranian-friendly government in Iraq facilitating Iran’s reach westward. The disastrous democratisation campaign of the Bush government has only served to reinforce to people of the Middle East that the US is not the beacon for change that US self-representation would have the world believe. With the rise of Iran and the increasing sense of disillusion amongst people of the Middle East, the region is set for a major upheaval. The public in the Middle East has lost all faith in the US model and in the governments that have allied themselves to the US, instead increasingly preferring Iranian-style Islamism. The destruction 68of Iraq, witnessed on prime-time television across the Middle East, has only served to radicalise people and create further public discontent, leading to a view that the Middle East is a powder-keg just awaiting a spark to set it off.

The fall of Iraq and the reawakening of Iran

The most apparent repercussion of the US invasion has undoubtedly been the tragedy of Iraq itself. The Iraqi population have paid an incredibly high price for the regime change that brought a putative liberation to that long-suffering country. Other chapters in this book enumerate the cost in human lives and the destruction of vital infrastructure, the devastation of the fabric of social relations, and the continuing insecurity in post-Saddam Iraq. My task, without ignoring the human tragedy, is to concentrate on exploring the political implications of the transition that has taken place as a result of the US invasion of Iraq in the context of the wider Middle Eastern region. One such repercussion is that there are still two million Iraqi refugees in the neighbouring states of Syria and Jordan. The Iraqi refugees present an international humanitarian crisis that threatens the stability of Syria and Jordan, with flow-on implications for Iraq’s other neighbours, particularly Turkey and Lebanon. Syria and Jordan are struggling to accommodate the bulk of the two million Iraqi refugees who have escaped the violence of their own country. This influx of people into Syria and Jordan seeking housing, employment and social services has created a huge strain on the fiscal and human resources of these poor states (International Crisis Group 2008). So far, both Syria and Jordan have successfully managed the thin line between their sense of duty to Arab solidarity by caring for the Iraqi refugees and the necessity of maintaining essential services to the national populous. However, in the face of the global economic downturn, this precarious balance has the potential to falter if an increase in international assistance and aid is not forthcoming, or if Iraqis fail to return home in significant numbers. As important as resolving this humanitarian crisis for the stability of the Middle East is the question of the increasingly threatening geopolitical tensions which have arisen from the US invasion of Iraq. 69

A number of authors have focused their discussion of the impact of the US invasion in terms of the reawakening of the Iranian influence in the Middle East and the emergence of a possible ‘Shi’a crescent’ (Cole 2006; Sirriyeh 2007; Takeh 2008). King Abdullah II articulated Arab government fears that the Shi’a, who form majorities in Iraq, Bahrain, and southern Lebanon, are now controlled by Iran and that this Shi’a alliance is stronger now than at anytime since the fall of the Fatimids almost a millennium ago.1 Another view on the rise of Iranian influence across the region explains Iran’s increased standing in the region as a result of Iran’s leadership in opposing the US in Iraq, and Israel in Lebanon. It has been a shared sense of resentment towards US and Israeli policy that has brought Middle Eastern public opinion in line with Iranian regional geopolitics and not simply Shi’a identity.

Iran’s support for the Sunni Palestinian movement Hamas is just one example of the cross-sectarian nature of power politics in the Middle East. The 2008/2009 Israeli assault on Hamas-controlled Gaza, which claimed the lives of more than 1000 Palestinian civilians including 300 children, demonstrated the extent that conservative Arab governments considered Hamas a creature of Iran, and to a lesser extent Iran’s closest regional ally Syria. During the twenty-two day Israeli onslaught against Gaza, most Arab governments voiced concerns over the number of civilian casualties but showed little interest in supporting Hamas. The isolation of Hamas by the majority of Arab states during the Israeli assault on Gaza confirmed what many commentators had suspected regarding the existence of a schism in Middle Eastern politics between conservative Arab regimes led by Saudi Arabia and Egypt and an alliance of radical states and movements led by Iran and comprising Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas. As these events in Gaza have recently shown, the tensions between conservative Arab governments led by Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and Iran and its regional sub-national allies,

70especially Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas pose a real problem for regional stability (Telhami 2007, p. 108).

The perception that Iran is a threat to the stability of the Middle East is most apparent in the vocal nature of the recurring Middle Eastern opposition to Iran, summed up by the bellicosity of numerous Middle Eastern heads of state. Israeli President Shimon Peres, for example, described the current situation as a “collision between the Middle East, which is Sunni Arab, and the Iranian minority that seeks to take it over” (Haaretz 2009). Peres articulates the division that now exists in the regional politics of which Israel is a major actor within the anti-Iranian bloc. A more precise characterisation of the impending collision, which Peres speaks of, is between a largely entrenched authoritarian ruling elite perceived by the bulk of the Middle Eastern populace as controlled by Washington and popular forces for change, including the grass-roots Islamist movements supported by Iran.

In terms of the implications of the overthrow of Saddam for the immediate regional political relations, as Ray Takeh has argued, the “rise of the Shi’ite community in Iraq is likely to portend better relations with Iran, as many of Iraq’s leading Shi’ite political actors have close and intimate ties with the Islamic Republic” (Takeh 2008, p. 1). There is little doubt that the emergence of an Iraqi government dominated by Shi’a politicians has led to closer and more amenable ties between Iraq and the Iranian government. At the very least, Iran has profited strategically from the rise of a Shi’a-controlled Iraq whose principal leaders are drawn from Shi’a Islamist movements, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Dawa Party. The more sanguine relations between Baghdad and Tehran overturn almost four decades of animosity between the two neighbours. While in itself this portends to a more favourable situation in the region, the reaction of Arab states to this state of affairs has led to a dangerous regional Cold War.

Tehran’s interests in the region seem to have elicited an overreaction from Middle Eastern leaders and the former US administration. Claims that Iraq’s new government is a proxy of Iran, or that Hezbollah and Hamas are controlled from Tehran, serve to undermine the local grievances that are responsible for militancy. A more nuanced view of the 71Middle Eastern and Iranian interests in Iraq is, in reality, very similar to those of the US and other states in the Middle East, in seeking to “prevent Iraq from once more emerging as a military and ideological threat” (Takeh 2008, p. 1). The Iranian government cannot risk further instability and violence in Iraq, nor is the Iranian leadership willing to oversee the dismemberment of its neighbour.2 The US presence in Iraq is double-edged for Iran. On the one hand, Iran is aware that the US knows that the safety of American troops and the future of the American mission in Iraq relies on Shi’a endorsement, which has the potential to be influenced by the political interests from across the border in Tehran. On the other hand, there will be a continuing anxiety in Tehran for as long as there is a massive deployment of US troops in such close proximity to the Iranian border. There is still a danger that the US-Israel alliance will launch an attack on Iran in an effort to reduce the Iranian influence across the Middle East. While this scenario is unlikely, especially since the election of what seems to be a more diplomatic US administration under Barak Obama, the perception that Iran poses a danger to regional and international peace may ultimately prove to be a catalyst for further military intervention by the US and its Middle East allies.

More alarming than the Shi’a/Iranian resurgence is the way that the Iraq war has added to the radicalisation of the Middle Eastern attitudes to the outside world, only a little over a decade after the end of the Islamist-US alliance which vanquished the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Many analysts have commented on the role of the (not so) covert US anti-Soviet strategy of supporting Islamist movements in the 1970s and 1980s (Cooley 2002; Lansford 2003; Dreyfus 2005). By the end of the ten-year war in Afghanistan, tens of thousands of Muslims, mainly from Arab states, had received extensive military training in the numerous camps along the Pakistani-Afghani border. The most widely known of the Islamic extremists to train in Pakistan and operate in Afghanistan are Osama bin-Laden and Ayman al-Zawarihi, today leaders of the terrorist network Al-Qaeda. Thousands of other Muslim extremists returned to their home countries victorious in their struggle against the Soviets with every intention to liberate their own societies from what they

72perceived to be extremely corrupted Muslim governments. In Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan, radical Islamic terrorists were responsible for thousands of civilian deaths. The veterans of the Afghan campaign declared a war on their fellow Muslims that would claim hundreds of thousands of lives in Algeria, and destabilise the region. The reach of Islamist extremists went beyond the immediate impact of the Middle East. As one analyst has argued in regards to the long-term impact of Afghanistan, “the legacy of that conflict, including well-trained terrorist operatives and a worldwide Islamist machine, would continue to plague the United States and the West” (Dreyfuss 2005, p. 302).

The Iraq war provided another opportunity for radical Islamists to enlist disaffected youth and angry Muslims into a liberationary struggle against a non-Muslim invader. Even before the fall of Baghdad, the call for a jihad against US forces was heard across the Muslim world from the prestigious Al-Azhar University to the communiqués from the concealed leadership of Al-Qaeda. What became clear in the days leading to the US invasion was that moderate and extremist Muslims alike viewed the planned invasion of Iraq as a strike against Islam (Shadid 2003). How many Muslims travelled to Iraq to join Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers terrorist organisation is unclear. While the US inflated the numbers of foreign fighters in Iraq as a way of deflecting some of the attention from the size of the insurgency against US occupation, the number of Muslims that joined al-Zarqawi was in the thousands. According to Thomas Sanderson of the Washington-based Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS), “Iraq has become a superheated, real-world academy for lessons about weapons, urban combat and terrorist trade craft” (Sanderson, cited in Rotella 2005). While the number of jihadists from Iraq was far less than the extraordinary number that trained and fought in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1980s, the risk of radicalised Islamic terrorists skilled in terrorism operations carrying on their struggle in their home countries is a major concern across the region. The “sad irony” of the US ‘war on terror’ in Iraq, Fawaz Gerges insists, is that it has “proved to be counterproductive to the struggle against the global jihad movement and has alienated the floating middle of Muslim public opinion. It has given Al Qaeda central and its affiliates a new lease on life” (Gerges 2006). 73

The increase in Islamic extremist activity in the Middle East as a consequence of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq remains a worrying security issue even if the violence in Iraq seems to have subsided. The Islamic extremism fuelled by events in Iraq since 2003 is representative of a much more worrying trend of escalating anti-American and anti-Western sentiments across the region.

How the US lost ‘hearts and minds’ in the Middle East

It is important to view the Arab attitude to the US as an accumulated set of grievances with Iraq and Afghanistan, and as clarifying a position many people in the Middle East had started to adopt prior to 2003. There is little doubt that the hard power of the US reached its zenith with the military occupation of Iraq in 2003. But American ‘soft power’ had declined substantially from the heights of the 1990s when under US auspices an era of peace was seemingly dawning on the Middle East. The US had overseen an end to the sectarian violence in Lebanon in 1989, US assistance had saved Afghanistan from the Soviet threat, and what seemed to be the crowning achievement of US diplomacy elicited widespread applause when on 13 September 1993 Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the lawn of the White House. The Israeli-Palestinian agreement, later to be known as the Oslo Accords, may not have led to acclaim from the Arab states of the Middle East but was seen as a step towards achieving justice for the Palestinian people. While predictions of an ‘end of history’ were being challenged by events in the Balkans and Rwanda, there seemed to be a real sense that the post-Cold War configuration was having a more positive impact on conflict in the Middle Eastern context. However, in the space of less than a decade the Middle East has become, to many commentators, the most violent and unstable region in the world and for the people of the Middle East, blame for the current state of affairs principally rests with the US.

In some ways the US attitude and behaviour towards the Middle East in the 1990s can be said to have brought about the destruction of the goodwill Middle Easterners felt towards American values and foreign policy. When Bernard Lewis (1990) asserted a ‘clash of civilizations’ between the US and the Muslim world, he was projecting onto all Muslims the attitudes of a very small minority of Muslims who were 74antagonistic to the spread of ‘Western freedoms’. Samuel Huntington (1993), in the highly dubious work titled ‘The clash of civilizations’, made Lewis’ polemic accessible to international relations and foreign policy intellectuals and practitioners. However, what both Lewis and Huntington obscured was that they were describing the views of the far-right of the Islamist movement rather than the Middle Eastern mainstream. By the time radical Muslim terrorists had caused massive death and destruction inside the US itself, many Middle Easterners were starting to question both US foreign policy and the sincerity of the US to the liberal-democratic model, but had not accepted the dichotomy of the ‘clash of civilizations’ as argued by Lewis and Huntington. Despite the best efforts of Osama bin Laden and the Islamist radicals on one side and the neo-conservatives on the other side to construct a ‘clash of civilizations’ in the post-September 11 era, the ‘West’ and ‘Islam’ have not entered into a direct confrontation. The terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda and the increasing antipathy to the US by Middle Easterners are unrelated.

Middle Eastern attitudes to the US had definitely soured as they witnessed Israeli contravention of the Oslo Accords and the unwillingness of the US to force successive Israeli governments to abide by the Oslo agreements.3 In addition, the sanctions regime imposed on Iraq since 1994 by the Clinton government had been widely seen to have visited a major humanitarian disaster on Iraqi civilians, and in particular, on Iraqi children. The images of sick and starving Iraqi children that were regularly shown on Middle Eastern television and in Middle Eastern newspapers were convincing proof of the cruelty of American policymakers and their wholesale disregard for Arab/Muslim lives. Despite opposition, even anger, from the Middle East to the sanctions and US policy towards the Israel-Palestine issue, a Pew survey in the days immediately after 9/11 found that as many people in the Middle East had a favourable attitude to the US as those that didn’t (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press 2001). As these figures suggest, the events

75of 9/11 did not vindicate Lewis and Huntington as many immediately claimed. Rather, the clamour in the US to accept the saliency of the ‘clash of civilizations’ has resulted in a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Middle Eastern attitude has been shaped since 2001 by the conduct of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. Middle Eastern public opinion recoils from the images and narratives they are presented with of the brutality of the US invasion of Iraq, the revelations of US interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay and the sense of US complicity in the intensification of Israeli belligerence in the region.

The real turning point for the Middle East in terms of their relationship with the US was the invasion of Iraq and the belief from Iran to Morocco that the US invasion was a war against Iraqis, against Arabs, and against Muslims. According to a 2008 survey conducted by Shilbey Telhami, eighty-one per cent of the respondents drawn from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordon, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates and from Lebanon believed that Iraqis were worse-off (with only two per cent believing Iraqis were better-off) after the US invasion than under Saddam Hussein (Telhami 2008). In the same survey, sixty-one per cent of the respondents had a very unfavourable attitude towards the US and sixty-five per cent did not believe that the US was interested in spreading democracy in the Middle East. The cynicism towards the US in the Middle East in 2008 had risen dramatically since 2002 when the first poll was taken, and according to James Zogby, a long-time observer of Arab public opinion and the director of the Washington based Arab-American Institute:

The results of the Arab Opinion Poll are backed up by the Pew Global Attitudes Project Surveys which also tracks attitudes to the US (Pew Research Center 2005; Kohut 2005). Turkey, a long-time ally of the US, scored the lowest among the forty-seven countries where the survey was conducted, with only nine out of one hundred Turks holding a favourable view of the United States, down a stunning forty-three 76percentage points from a US State Department survey in 2000. In the view of Andrew Kohut and Richard Wike writing for the US-based National Interest magazine, the decline in the positive attitudes held towards the US by Muslims was attributed to “[t]he war in Iraq” which they argued “both solidified anti-Americanism in the Arab Middle East and extended it to other parts of the Muslim world, such as Turkey and Indonesia” (Kohut & Wike 2008).

In most ‘Western countries’, the images and reports of the war in Iraq in 2003, as in Afghanistan in 2001, and previously in Iraq in1991, favoured the US government and military interpretation of the surgical techniques and low-cost in terms of civilian casualties in the method of warfare conducted by the US. Increasingly, it was revealed that US bombs which only fell on ‘military targets’, ‘sparing civilians’ was shown to be an illusion resulting from the US military control of the media (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting 2003; Monbiot 2005; Moody 2005). The civilian casualties may not have figured highly on the US accounting of the war but across the Middle East reports of the Iraqi dead and wounded were widely circulated. Even moderate press agencies like Egypt’s Al-Ahram ran stories on the atrocities committed by coalition forces against Iraqi civilians. As early as April 2003, only five weeks after the war had been launched, an article in Al-Ahram challenged the ‘Western press’ to report Iraqi civilian deaths more accurately, citing the numerous reports of civilian casualties from US missiles that were being completely ignored by the US press and media (Abdel-Latif 2003). Highlighting the difference between the stories seen on ‘Western’ news outlets with those in the Middle East, the article continues,

The war in Iraq, as seen from the Middle East perspective, has resulted in death and destruction for the Iraqi people, so that “Arab viewers have already made a choice … For them, this is an illegal war of aggression” (Abdel-Latif 2003). Little has changed in the Middle Eastern mood since 2003 when Al-Ahram ran that story, except that as the Telhami survey has shown, the attitude towards the US has hardened. The post-September 11 policies of George W. Bush and his administration were designed, or so he told the world, to win the hearts and minds of Muslims, but as events in Iraq unfolded, what became increasingly clear was that the potential for the US to foster goodwill in the Middle East was lost forever amongst the carnage of the US invasion and the devastation suffered by the Iraqi people during the US occupation. However, while the US military hold over the Middle East appears stronger than ever – having deployed over 100,000 troops in Iraq and created permanent military bases in Qatar and Bahrain, as well as the proxy power of the Israeli Defence Forces at the disposal of Washington – the US today is suffering from an image problem that will continue to undermine its position in the region for years to come. The fall of Saddam Hussein was supposed to have led to the transformation of the Middle East as one authoritarian government after another fell to the inexorable forces of democracy unleashed by the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Eight years after Saddam was ousted from power, there has been little discernible change in the architecture of Middle East political systems.

The Iraq war and the subsequent public relations disaster that has befallen the US in the Middle East have turned democratic transformation of the region into a risky business. There is now a perception amongst US policy-makers that if democratic transformation occurred in the Middle East, friendly governments would fall and the governments that would come to power will have one thing in common: a deep distrust of the US and an antipathy for US foreign policy and interests. Thus, one of the lasting results of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq has been to ensure that democracy in the Middle East now receives less support from the US than it would have prior to 2003. This is but one of the ironies of the US intervention in Iraq – one of the few ironies amongst the many tragedies resulting from the irresponsible and immoral decision by the Bush and Blair governments to invade Iraq in 2003. 78

Iraq and the unravelling of US hegemony in the Middle East

It is certainly premature to predict that US power in the Middle East is about to be eclipsed anytime in the immediate future. However, the US invasion of Iraq and the subsequent ongoing occupation of that country have drastically undermined US soft power in the region. In particular, Iran has benefited most from the erosion of the US position in the Middle East, even as US troops continue to sit on Iran’s western border. Rather than a Shi’a crescent emerging after the overthrow of Saddam and the advance of Shi’a power in Iraq, a more likely scenario is the rise of an anti-American crescent constituted by both Sunni and Shi’a opposition to the US and its Middle Eastern allies. Already, the Shi’a Hezbollah is considered a positive force by many in the Middle East – Sunni and Shi’a alike – due to its continued opposition to Israel in Palestine, and the US in Iraq. The US presence in Iraq has led to a moderation in the Sunni-Shi’a divide, which while overstated in some quarters, has existed for centuries in one form or another. Iran’s re-emergence as a significant player in Middle Eastern affairs also benefited from the revenues it accrued during a period of high oil prices, but these are now on the wane since the heady days of US$150 a barrel in 2008. A weak Iraq with a Shi’a-dominated government has provided Iran with security and with the opportunity to project its influence into the Gulf in a way that it could not have anticipated prior to the US invasion of Iraq. In the words of Philip Robins, Iran “had been a threefold beneficiary of the US war in its western neighbour” (2008, p. 298).

Overall, the US invasion of Iraq with its huge death toll and devastation, torture, and the sectarian violence that ensued has ensured that the US position in the Middle East is dramatically weaker than ever before (Telhami 2007, p. 107). US soft power already under challenge in the Middle East after reaching a post-Cold War apogee in the early 1990s was decisively and definitively impaired by the brutality and illegality of the invasion of Iraq. While some people may have attributed the events that occurred in 2003 to George W. Bush and his neo-conservative administration, many in the Middle East are less sanguine and consider the entire US system at fault. The entrenching of the anti-US sentiment in the Middle East is so deep that not even the Messiah-like figure of Barak Obama will be able to restore Middle Eastern confidence in the US 79without a major breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the complete withdrawal of troops from Iraq. In the meantime, the legacy of the US invasion is deepest in Iraq but resonates in a number of negative ways across the entire Middle East and will do so for years to come.