Obama's missed opportunity to pivot away from the Middle East.

• Author: Layne, Christopher
• Position: COMMENTARY

Events in the Middle East, and the wider region, continue to unfold at a dizzying pace. The war in Syria continues unabated. Russia has now intervened militarily to prop up the government of Bashar Assad. Iran is ramping up its military involvement in the conflict. In Iraq, the U.S.-trained army has collapsed, deep sectarian divisions remain, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) controls large swaths of both Iraqi and Syrian territory. Libya has fallen into anarchy. Slightly further afield, the Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan, and President Obama has been forced to do a U-turn on his pledge to withdraw all U.S. military forces--except for a residual force of 1,000 troops to protect the American embassy in Kabul--from that country by the end of his term in January 2017. The spillover from the conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Libya is washing over Europe in the form of a massive stampede of refugees. In short, regional turmoil is at a fever pitch, and it seems that Washington's Middle East policy has reached a dead end.

What explains the failure of America's policy in the region, and where should the U.S. go from here? My argument is that the regional turmoil fundamentally stems from the George W. Bush Administration disastrous decision to invade Iraq in March 2003. Compounding the problem, President Barack Obama's policy has been contradictory and ambivalent. President Obama rightly concluded that the United States needs to extricate itself from the two wars started by his predecessor. He has resisted calls from his critics to step-up U.S. military involvement in the Syrian civil war, and has tightly limited--"no boots on the ground"--the American contribution to the campaign against the so-called Islamic State. At the same time, although his instincts have been to wind down the American military role in the region, when pressed by hard-liners in the U.S. foreign policy establishment, he has often lacked the courage of his convictions. For example, the 2011 Libya intervention, the 2009 "surge" and recent U-turn in Afghanistan, and the reinsertion of U.S. military forces into Iraq in response to the rise of ISIL. When it comes to strategy, there is a good deal of evidence that Mr. Obama favors what is called "offshore balancing," which will be explained in more detail below. However, his inability to hold firm to his preferences in the face of pressure from the U.S. foreign policy establishment means that the United States probably has lost its best chance to come to terms with the intractability of the Middle East's conflicts, and the inevitable failure of U.S. attempts to stabilize, and/or democratize the region.

The George W. Bush Administration's March 2003 invasion of Iraq unhinged an already volatile region. The administration went to war to attain regime change in Baghdad, and to trigger a benign domino effect that would democratize the Middle East. The administration's policy was shaped by the neo-conservative mantra, echoed by liberal hawks, that a muscular U.S. foreign policy-based on military power, and the promotion abroad of American ideology--could transform the Middle East. It was the vision of regime change, the export of democracy, and Washington's own hubris-drenched imperial ambitions that plunged the United States into the geopolitical cul-de-sac in the region, in which it now finds itself. The Bush Administration's Iraq goals were pipe dreams. Any policymaker with a sense of history--not least the Vietnam debacle--should have known that American attempts to impose democracy at the point of a gun invariably end in failure.

Iraq was not about 9/11--there was zero connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda--and it was not about "Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs)," of which there were none. We know--and it ought to have been known at the time to Bush Administration officials--that Washington's articulated rationales for the war were false. Had the Bush Administration allowed the United Nations weapons inspectors to complete their work, the fact that Iraq had no WMD's would have become obvious. Similarly, notwithstanding the administration's claims to the contrary, Saddam Hussein posed no threat to U.S. allies and client states in the region. Iraq had been weakened by years of sanctions, and was effectively hemmed in by American military power. The truth, as the so-called Downing Street memos make clear, is that at least a year before the invasion the Bush Administration had decided to use military force to overthrow Saddam Hussein. As British intelligence warned London in July 2002, "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD." The British also noted that the administration's "case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran."

There were plenty of warnings--which the Bush Administration willfully brushed aside--that an invasion of Iraq would have catastrophic consequences. For example, before the war an independent working group co-sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and Rice University's James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy warned that, "There should be...