Like Vietnam, Iraq will survive US war
I knew the US presidential race was over last week when my son pre-emptively announced that he had lost his bet with me: Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was not going to be the Democratic candidate. The question of whether Senator Barack Obama can beat Senator John McCain is still open, according to the opinion polls, but it probably won't stay open long once the two men go head to head. Senator McCain has many attractive qualities, but he is 71 and Senator Obama is 46.
Senator McCain is also a Republican in a year when the US is heading into a recession after eight years of Republican administration. Even more importantly, he is committed to continuing a war in Iraq that most Americans just want to leave behind. Curiously, this means that the two men with the greatest potential influence on Senator McCain's political future are Osama bin Laden and Moqtada al-Sadr.
The one thing that could swing the 2008 election in favour of the Republicans is another large-scale terrorist attack on the US. If al-Qaeda has any ability to provide that attack, it will certainly do so. But it is unlikely that al-Qaeda has any significant presence within the US.
Mr Sadr is a more interesting case. He is the leader of the Mahdi Army, the biggest Shiite militia in Iraq, and he has just extended his unilateral ceasefire against American troops and rival militias for another six months. His two main objectives in life are to evict the US from Iraq and to gain control of the Iraqi government, and the first is a necessary preliminary to the second. As long as the US presidential election promises to result in an administration pledged to withdraw from Iraq, he doesn't have to lift a finger. But if, by August, it looks like Senator McCain has a chance of winning, then Mr Sadr has every incentive to end his ceasefire and launch a mini-Tet offensive against US troops. The point would not be to win, but to remind American voters that Iraq is a quagmire they should leave soon.
So, one way or another, Barack Obama is almost certain to be the president of the United States by January. Just what will the Middle East look like after the Americans have gone? Iraq, contrary to all the predictions of disaster, will probably be all right after the withdrawal of US troops. It will never again be the secular, female-friendly society of the past, and it will take at least a decade to recover from the economic devastation of the embargo, the invasion and the occupation, but it won't break up.
Iran will indeed emerge as the new paramount power of the Gulf, but its actual influence even over predominantly Shiite Iraq will be quite limited. The real fallout from the US invasion of Iraq is the greatly heightened prestige of Islamist revolutionaries in the Arab world.
It's not much of a headline: 'Small, nasty war in Iraq ends; Middle East largely unaffected.' But, then, history often works like that. The equivalent headline in 1975 would have read: 'US defeated in Vietnam; no wider consequences.'
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries
