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Regional implications of the Iraq war.

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President George W. Bush's vision for the Iraq War was nothing if not expansive. Liberal democracy and popular sovereignty were to supplant tyranny not only in Baghdad, but in nearby capitals as well. And the force of U.S. arms would not be needed to accomplish the latter missions. As Bush asserted to eager applause at the American Enterprise Institute on February 25, 2003, "a new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region." Democracy, the war party believed, would be contagious.

In Syria and Iran, the authoritarian regimes would be chastened by Washington's show of force into acquiescence to U.S. foreign policy goals, and shaken by popular unrest into domestic reforms. In Egypt, Jordan and the Arab Gulf states, the equally brittle regimes would bow to similar popular agitation lest their ties to Washington loosen. Regime change in Iraq would even end the notoriously intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some neo-conservatives promised, by cutting off external support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and erasing the remnants of Arab "strategic depth" for the Palestinian Authority's resistance to Israeli terms for a final settlement.

All the breathless claims for the democracy-and peace-building potential of the invasion were made before it was launched. But no one took them terribly seriously until early 2005, when pro-war commentators convinced themselves that Bush's vision was being realized. Elections were scheduled in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt. In the most dramatic event of the "Arab spring," Syrian troops were pushed out of Lebanon. Bus drivers and teachers launched wildcat strikes in Tehran. Israel announced a unilateral pullout from the Gaza Strip.

Suddenly, the Iraq War loomed even larger in the historical sweep of post-World War II U.S. Middle East policy. For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations alike had pursued three fundamental goals in the region--the security of Israel, the westward flow of cheap oil, and the stability of cooperative regimes. Now Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was telling a Cairene audience the third goal was history. "For 60 years," she said, "my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East--and we achieved neither." It was an accurate diagnosis, but was she serious that Washington had repented of its stability worship? And was the "Arab spring" proving that "Bush was right" about the regional reverberations of the Iraq War, as the likes of Charles Krauthammer were trumpeting?...

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