From The Seattle PI
By Amotz Asa-El

Let’s face it: America’s Middle East policy is ablaze.

With Iraq drowning in its people’s blood and Iran thumbing the West while Syria meddles in Lebanon as if it had never left it, very little seems left of the original plan to emancipate, pacify and reinvent the Middle East. In fact, the plan that following the 9/11 attacks became an idealistic quest, and after the swift defeat of Saddam Hussein looked like a realistic prospect, now seems more like diplomatic fiction.

Considering that George W. Bush himself assigned a bipartisan forum to reassess his Middle East policy, and that this forum now reportedly recommends that he dialogue with Tehran and Damascus, it is hard to believe that as recently as spring ‘02 the same Bush publicly demanded that Syria “stop the flow of money, equipment and recruits” to terrorist groups and “oppose regimes that promote terror.”

U.S. dialogue with Damascus surely will include these prickly issues, but with Baghdad now restoring diplomatic ties with an unreconstructed Damascus while Iraqi President Jalal Talabani visits an unflinchingly bellicose Tehran and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki audaciously cancels a meeting with Bush, even Republicans concede that what they face in the Middle East is not a set of setbacks, but a comprehensive policy collapse.

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