Tiny Lebanon, where a struggle for power threatens to rip the country apart for the second time in a generation, has become a central battleground of the complex set of rival forces now confronting each other across the Middle East. Iran and Syria back one side, the United States, Europe and the Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia back the other.

Elsewhere, Iraq, Iran, the Gulf states, Jordan, Egypt, Israel, and the Palestinian territories are all in turmoil or facing upheaval as a new era unfolds in the Middle East. According to the Iraq Study Group, the blue-ribbon US commission that has called for changes in the Bush administration’s Middle East policies, the various struggles taking place around the region are “inextricably linked.” That may have come as a revelation to American policymakers, but it was no surprise to the people of the Middle East, who have borne the brunt of decades of misguided and often calamitous US foreign policy.

And the consequences for the Americans in the era that is now unfolding, where the Bush administration’s efforts to pacify the region through democratic reform has been one of the main casualties, could well be equally as devastating as the one that is fading.

“The events of 9/11 gave the United States an opportunity to enforce its domination in the Middle East,” said Ghassan Attiyah, the director of the Iraqi Foundation for Development and Democracy in Baghdad. “The United States’ influence reached its peak in the Kuwait war of 1991 when it was able to lead the region and the world into a war against Iraq – one America did not start – to restore the freedom of Kuwait. By the same standard, the status of the United States in the region and the world reached rock bottom as a result of the war the US did initiate to occupy Iraq.” This, he argues, indicates “the end of American domination in determining the fate of the region, though this does not mean an end to its role or significance.”

Maintaining a presence. Although the US is widely reviled in the Muslim world and the Middle East in particular, it is unlikely that the Americans will withdraw from the region. It will pull out large numbers of troops from Iraq eventually, but it will still maintain a major military presence, particularly naval and air forces, in the Gulf and large amounts of pre-positioned equipment such as tanks and artillery in the Gulf, in Israel and possibly in Jordan as well.

Yossi Melman, an Israeli intelligence expert, believes US involvement in the region is far from over. “The US still needs Middle East oil. America must remain involved in the region for this reason. Pro-Western states that favor the status quo, like Israel, and the Sunni world … all need America’s security umbrella. These states fear the growing expansion of Iran’s Shi’ism.”

The Russians, increasingly at odds with the US over Iran, Caspian Sea oil, NATO’s expansion eastward and other issues, are only too keen to restore Soviet-era influence in the region and have concluded or are negotiating arms sales to Egypt, Yemen, Algeria and Libya, all Cold War allies of Moscow. China, ravenous for energy sources, will increasingly challenge the US in the region, as will the European Union, which now dominates the expanded UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon, a vital toehold in the region.

The conflict in Iraq, Iran’s defiance of the West and the erosion of Israel’s deterrence capabilities at the hands of Hezbollah and the Palestinians have made it harder for the US and Israel to control events in the Middle East. This makes them more vulnerable. As their power seemingly recedes, so the potential for cataclysm has grown, between the US and the Islamist jihad; between Sunnis and Shi’ites; between pro-Western Arab regimes and their misruled populations.

Israeli military commanders expect to fight another war against Hezbollah in 2007 as the Iranian-backed Shi’ite movement, emboldened by its self-proclaimed “divine victory” against the Jewish state in their summer war, rebuilds its forces and infrastructure. The 34-day conflict in July-August is widely perceived in the region as having been instigated by Israel at the behest of the US.

In the next war, Israel will again face renewed – and possibly more intense – missile bombardment from the north – and probably this time from the Palestinians as well. “The conflict is inevitable and unavoidable,” asserts prominent British military historian John Keegan. Syrian forces are on alert in the Golan Heights and Israeli military intelligence has warned of the possibility of another war with Syria over the disputed territory. It has been seeking Russian weaponry to upgrade its long-neglected armed forces.

Grip on power. The Palestinians, still battling Israel, face another conflict: a power struggle between the mainstream Fatah movement and the fundamentalist Hamas in the Gaza Strip that could, as in Lebanon, ignite a civil war as bloody as the one in Iraq. The rulers of Egypt, Syria and Jordan are struggling to head off political reforms that will weaken their longtime grip on power – but time is not on their side and they live in fear of new Islamist uprisings. Iran, confronting the US and Europe over its nuclear program, faces the possibility of military assault, probably a campaign of missile and air strikes, by the Americans and possibly the Israelis.

Iran’s drive to acquire nuclear weapons appears unstoppable and could well trigger a new arms race in the region. The December 10 announcement by the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council’s member states that they are studying a joint nuclear energy program is ringing alarm bells. This is largely seen as a response to Iran’s nuclear drive and presumably a warning to Western states that they should intensify their efforts to halt the Iranian effort. Egypt has said it is reviving its nuclear energy program, shelved in 1986; and Algeria, Tunisia, Yemen and Morocco are reported to be heading in that direction too.

Once a nuclear infrastructure is in place, there is little to stop a move toward nuclear arms. This would also challenge the nuclear arms monopoly that Israel has held since the 1960s. An added danger is that in the Middle East there is no guarantee that the deterrent factor of mutually assured destruction that prevented nuclear war between East and West throughout the Cold War would function.

Running like a sizzling gunpowder trail through all of this gloom is the growing hostility between Shi’ites and Sunnis, religious rivals since the early days of Islam in the 7th century, a schism that predates Muslim hostility toward the West by 300 years. It is this looming confrontation, the result largely of US bungling in Iraq, that is arguably the greatest danger in the region.

The turbulent modern history of the Middle East has produced many bizarre alliances, but the threat of a nuclear Iran has driven Israel and the Sunni states, including Saudi Arabia, together to counter a common danger. Their leaders have established an intelligence group to monitor this crisis, and Israel has agreed to endorse the Saudi peace plan put forward by King Abdallah in 2003. How far this cooperation will go is the big question, but it does show what can be done if the political will is there.

In George W. Bush’s global war against terrorism, Al-Qaeda has never seemed stronger. In a dozen places, militants, inspired by or linked to Al-Qaeda, are flourishing, most notably in Iraq. Despite growing international cooperation against the Islamist radicals, terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman of the US’s Rand Corp. believes “Al-Qaeda is more dangerous than it was on 9/11 because you now have a vast sea of self-radicalized in many places … They have shown themselves to be more formidable and perhaps more dangerous than we imagined.”

Beyond simple. The boundaries between the Middle East’s various flashpoints seem to be eroding and a growing number of political leaders, among them Tony Blair and King Abdullah II of Jordan, believe that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would go a long way toward restoring stability across the region. Philip Zelikow, who recently resigned as one of the top advisors to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, averred that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was “the essential glue that binds a lot of these problems together.” The recommendation by the Iraq Study Group that renewed efforts by the Bush administration to broker a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has bolstered this argument. It was underscored by Rice’s visits to Iraq and diplomatic efforts in Iraq and the West Bank.

To be sure, the seemingly endless Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a primary source of instability. But many believe that the spread of Islamic militancy, Iran’s nuclear drive and its ambitions to become the paramount power in the region, the mounting tension between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims, and ill-conceived US policies have placed the conflicts beyong the reach of a simple solution.

“Progress between Israel and the Palestinians is good for efforts to deal with other conflicts in the Middle East,” said security analyst Yossi Alpher, the co-editor of the online Middle East journal Bitterlemons.org. “But I’m very wary of arguments which we increasingly hear, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the key to everything. Nothing could be farther from the truth.”

Iran has become the strongest regional power in the Middle East confronting Israel, due in large part to the US miscalculation in invading Iraq. With its controversial nuclear program and its defiance of the US, Iran is determined to become the paramount power in the richest oil region in

the world. Shi’ite Iran is bigger and more powerful than Iraq, and it enjoys much more international legitimacy than Saddam’s Iraq ever did, even under its firebrand president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Sunni states quail at the Tehran-led empowerment of Shi’ism triggered by events in Iraq.

With diplomacy making little headway on the nuclear issue, the prospect of military action against Iran’s strategic infrastructure remains an option that George W. Bush has not discarded, even if his military is overstretched fighting a losing battle in Iraq. Indeed, as Time magazine recently noted, given Tehran’s ambitions and its threats against Israel, “a showdown … may be impossible to avoid.”

“The way that the US has handled the Iraq issue has provided Iran an open door to the Arab world,” said political analyst Ghassan Khatib, former planning minister in the Palestinian Authority. “Iran has exploited the exposed sectarian tensions in Iraq as well as the lack of solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Lebanese conflicts to extend its influence further than ever before.”

Combat laboratory. The Iranians have threatened to use the oil weapon if they are attacked by the US and/or Israel: blocking the Strait of Hormuz, the only gateway in the Gulf and through which around one-fifth of the world’s oil supplies pass every day. To do that would obviously impact on Iran’s oil and gas exports as well. But a recent flurry of large scale military exercises by Iran, three over eight months, underlined the unease prevalent in Tehran. The profligate use of short-range and long-range missiles, some of which Tehran claimed were new sophisticated weapons developed by Iranians, was not lost on Western military experts who monitored the maneuvers.

Thanks to US bungling, Iraq has become a breeding ground and combat laboratory for militants from across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. Shi’ites and Sunnis are slaughtering each other daily in what is becoming a civil war. The Kurds and some of the majority Shi’ites want to establish statelets for themselves, the Kurds in three northern provinces and the Shi’ites in the six southern provinces.

The north contains the Kirkuk oilfields, with pipelines to Turkey’s Mediterranean terminal at Ceyhan, the south has the main oilfields that sit on 60 percent of Iraq’s oil, and probably much more in unexplored reserves. The minority Sunnis, the backbone of Saddam’s grotesque regime, would be left with the central region, most of its desert stretching to the Jordanian border and without resources. They are understandably opposed to the fragmentation of the state carved out of the rump of the Ottoman Empire in 1922. Northern and southern Iraq could become bonanzas for foreign oil companies. The Kurds, who have fought long and hard for an independent state, have already signed deals with Western oil companies.

If the Americans do pull out, the Saudis and their friends, who prefer that Iraq remain intact, will go to the aid of their beleaguered co-religionists against the Iranian-backed Shi’ites. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was an Arab bulwark against the ancient Persian enemy, but it was also a Sunni rampart against Shi’ite encroachment by the radical mullahs in Tehran.

Saudi intervention on behalf of Iraq’s encircled Sunnis would heighten the growing antagonism between Shi’ites and Sunnis from Iraq and the Gulf to Lebanon. The Saudis fear an Iranian-controlled state in Iraq, whether all of the country or just the south, and have threatened to use the oil weapon against Tehran.

Oil weapon. In November, Nawaf Obeid, then a senior security advisor to the Saudi government, wrote in The Washington Post that Riyadh might just boost its oil production and dump crude in the market to push oil prices down with the aim of slashing Iran’s oil earnings to force it to cut funding of its Shi’ite allies in Iraq. Most oil industry analysts doubted that the Iranians would be hit very hard, but the mere fact that a senior Saudi official was openly discussing the use of the oil weapon against another Muslim state underlined the depth of concern in Riyadh.

Turkey, NATO’s only Muslim member and with an Islamist government, seems set to play a pivotal role in the region amid the current convulsions, particularly as a key conduit for Caspian oil and gas to the West. Turkey is also an increasingly important military power in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East that is now asserting itself with a new self-confidence.

As much of Europe continues to resist Turkish membership of the European Union, Turks, predominantly Sunnis, will look more toward the east and the south, to the lands of the old Ottoman Empire over which the Turks ruled for more than 500 years. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Turks have sought to reestablish influence in the predominantly Turkic-speaking – and energy-rich – former republics of Central Asia.

Democracy has taken firm root, even if Turkey’s generals remain the true power. Only a few years ago Turkey seemed to be on its last legs, but these days its economy has been thriving, recording an annual growth rate of about seven percent over the last three years. Inflation, which hit triple digits in the late 1990s, is now held to 10 percent. If Turkey joined the EU tomorrow, it would be the sixth largest economy in the 25-state bloc.

Many in Europe see Turkey’s resistance to comply with EU conditions as what one analyst terms “self-defeating obstinacy.” But others view it as the result of the republic’s newfound confidence and its growing strategic importance. According to Stephens, the “US failure in Iraq is being mirrored by Europe’s loss of nerve over Turkey … Both in their different ways speak to a failure to engage with Islam. The long-term consequences are comparably dismal … If Turkey is lost, Europe’s crimes of omission will in due course take their place alongside America’s sins of commission.”

Historical rethink. It may well be that the Islamic regime in Ankara (if it is not overturned by yet another intervention by the generals who consider themselves the guardians of Kemal Attaturk’s secular state) will seek to reassert Turkish dominance of the Sunni nations.

“We have started to think very differently about our history,” Leyla Neyzi, an anthropologist at Turkey’s Sabanci University told The New York Times. “The past is being re-thought in terms of the demands of the present.”

In this scenario, Turkey would shepherd and protect the Sunnis from Shi’ite encroachment from Iran and Iraq, as well as from the imperialist US and Western oil giants which are increasingly seen in the region as rapacious and imperialistic – in essence, filling the vacuum that was left with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.

That, of course, would pit it against Saudi Arabia, which sees itself as the beacon of the Muslim world. Although largely secular, Turks, like the rest of the Muslim world, have grown angry with the West and particularly the US because they feel Islam has been targeted.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared during a visit to Afghanistan on November 20: “Here, in this extraordinary piece of desert, is where the fate of world security in the early 21st century is going to be decided.” But the war in Afghanistan, which began with a US-led assault in October 2001, only weeks after 9/11, against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, has been worsening as the Islamist militants have reorganized and gone back on the offensive against coalition forces and President Hamid Karzai’s beleaguered government in Kabul.

NATO, which now commands most of the coalition forces in Afghanistan, has been unable to contain the Islamists, largely because of European reluctance to commit large numbers of troops to the conflict and US preoccupations with Iraq. The effects of this could be disastrous for the West. US interest in Afghanistan is inseparable from the Caspian Basin’s vast oil and gas reserves to the northwest, as it is in Iraq.

Karzai claims neighboring Pakistan is backing the Taliban and allowing its members to use the unruly tribal regions along the border as a sanctuary and as a springboard for their attacks. Islamabad denies that, but President Pervez Musharraf’s inability – or unwillingness, in the face of strong internal opposition from Islamist radicals – to impose control over the mountainous region casts considerable doubt on that assertion.

“The Afghanistan-Pakistan insurgency currently bears all the hallmarks of a trans-boundary civil war; and one that risks undermining the stability of the entire length of the Afghan-Pakistani-Indian border,” according to British security analysts Peter Middlebrook and Sharon Miller. They argue that the states north of Afghanistan, including the energy-rich former Soviet republics of Central Asia that the West wants within its orbit, will eventually realign with China and Russia and strengthen ties with Iran unless an “unbreakable political and military consensus linking Afghanistan, Pakistan and India” is achieved – a tall order if ever there was one.

Karzai, staring impeding disaster in the face, declared on December 13 during a visit to Kandahar, a city beset by suicide bombings, that the “problem is not with the Taliban. The problem is with Pakistan.” And he warned that if NATO failed to crush the Islamist insurgency “it’s not going to be like the past where only we suffer. Those who cause us to suffer will burn in hell with us. I hope NATO recognizes this.”

If Musharraf is toppled by Pakistan’s Islamists, possibly aided by segments of the military and the notorious Inter-Services Intelligence agency that largely created the Taliban and has long had close ties with Osama bin Laden, the consequences for the radicalization of Pakistan and the support this will provide the militants could be terrible indeed. n