This Tail Is Beginning to Wag the Dog

For years, Gulf Arab states have been taking their cues from Washington but that may be at an end.

According to The Christian Science Monitor, The Bush administration's gambit to get the Gulf Arab leaders to line up against Iran seems to have faltered.

'Everywhere you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos," Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned Gulf dignitaries in Bahrain last month. But in reality, everywhere you turn, from Qatar to Saudi Arabia to Egypt, you now see Iranian leaders shattering longstanding taboos by meeting cordially with their Arab counterparts.

The states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are accommodating themselves to Iran's growing weight in the region's politics. They remain key parts of America's security architecture in the region, hosting massive US military bases and underwriting the American economy in exchange for protection. But as Saudi analyst Khalid al-Dakheel argues, they are no longer content sitting passively beneath the US security umbrella and want to avoid being a pawn in the US-Iranian struggle for power. Flush with cash, they are not interested in a war that would mess up business.

That's why America's attempt to shore up containment against Iran increasingly seems to be yesterday's battle.

Gulf Arabs have thus visibly discarded the central pillar of the past year of America's Middle East strategy. Saudis and Egyptians had been the prime movers in anti-Iranian and anti-Shiite agitation. When they are inviting Ahmadinejad and Mr. Larijani to their capitals, America's talk of isolating Iran sounds outdated.

One hears little today of the "Shiite crescent" threatening the region, against which Arab officials once gravely warned. The Bush administration's proposed "axis of moderation," joining Sunni Arab states and Israel against Iran, has quietly passed from view.

It must be enormously disconcerting to those like Dick Cheney to see America's influence in the Middle East wane just as Russia's and China's is increasing. A good deal of this can be traced back to America's mishandling of its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush and Cheney, chickenhawks through and through, never understood that the most potent weapon a nation has may be the force it never uses. By invading Iraq they showed the Muslim world exactly what they had - and exactly what they didn't have. Huge mistake.