Six Questions for Frank Anderson on the Middle East

By Ken Silverstein

Frank Anderson worked for the CIA from 1968 until 1995. According to his unclassified biography, he served three tours of duty in the Middle East as an agency station chief, headed the Afghan Task Force (1987-1989), and was chief of the Near East Division. He now runs a consulting practice that focuses on the Middle East. We recently met for breakfast and talked about Iran, Iraq, and how the Bush Administration devises foreign policy.

1. What will Iraq look like five years from now?

There is no prospect under which we will depart from Iraq in better circumstances than we entered. It's probable that every month we stay there our position will be worse than it would have been if we had left the month before. The conflict that is underway in Iraq will continue until a new order is established and there's an equilibrium based on the new reality. In five years, it's not unlikely that U.S. Special Operations forces will be working with Sunnis in western Iraq against a Shiite-dominated pro-Iranian government that controls much of the country. And that's the optimistic scenario, because it assumes that we have the resources and the friends in the area to make those deals with western Iraqi tribes that find it in their interest to work with us.

2. What's the diplomatic fallout from Iraq and the Bush Administration's general Middle East policies?

Our enemies are comforted and our friends are looking elsewhere. The policymaking group that decided to invade Iraq regarded the strategic relationship between the United States and the Saudis as a problem, not an asset. And now the Saudis are quietly shifting their diplomacy and their economic outreach to the Far East—China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan. Saudi Arabia is not going to become our enemy, but they are coming to believe that they can live in a world in which the United States is less relevant.

3. And what's the fallout on the home front?

The war in Iraq is going to haunt us for a long time. When we manage to extract ourselves from Iraq, all the problems that we faced in March 2003 are still going to be there, only worse: the Arab–Israeli conflict, the divide between the rich and the poor, the budget. The Army is stretched to the breaking point, our legitimacy has been expended, and our alliances have been weakened.

4. How did we get dragged into this mess?

It was a group of smart people with a coherent policy. They'd been beaten down during the Reagan and Bush I Administrations. Every great idea they thought they had was stymied by the policy review process. During the Clinton years they were active in the foreign-affairs chattering community, writing monographs and working in think tanks like the Project for the New American Century, and it put them in a strong position when George W. Bush was elected.

And then 9/11 happened. In the traditional foreign policy system, the principals got together and just put the seal on products that had been kicked around and chewed up in the review process. After 9/11 the principals were meeting every day. So instead of policy moving up through the ranks, you had knee-jerk reactions coming from the top.

5. As it turns out, Iraq under Saddam Hussein did not pose any significant threat to American security. How do you evaluate the case of Iran?

Iraq was not a strategic threat—it was in a box for eleven or twelve years. But Iran is not in a box. Iran is stronger in the region than it's been in a long time—and that should be a concern to everyone.

6. So if Iran poses a real dilemma, what's the best course of action?

There was a Defense Science Board task force in 2001 that looked at homeland defense. The board proposed that we look at terrorism in the same way we look at jurisprudence—that we examine means, motive, and opportunity. Look at Iraq. Iraq was not an enabler, nor was it a chief supporter, of terrorism. The invasion of Iraq did not attack the means of terrorism—but by invading we provided a major motive for terrorism and an enormous opportunity by putting 190,000 soldiers there as targets.

Now look at Iran. It hasn't had any fingerprints on international terrorism since the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996. Their capability of hitting us with a strategic weapon is remote. But any military attack on Iran will provide a motive for terrorism in many parts of the world, yet we'll achieve no significant reduction of means with military action. We gain very little, but there's great potential harm.

I divide the world into copers and fixers. The former say, “There's a mess but we can cope with it.” The fixers say “Let's take a risk and try to fix it.” My attitude is that it's better to cope with Iran.

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