“The regional balance of power has shifted and Iran has much more weight than it used to, but this does not mean that Iranian armored divisions will soon be racing across the Fertile Crescent and seizing oil fields on the Arab side of the Gulf. For one thing, Iranian armored divisions do not race; they move at an arthritic crawl, and after the first hundred kilometers or so their logistical support breaks down entirely. For another, why would Iran want to rule some tens of millions of rebellious Arabs and a bunch of burning oil fields? The United States has just given the Iranians a very convincing and entirely free demonstration of why trying to rule Arab states through a foreign military occupation is a very bad idea.”

This quotation captures all the brilliance of good writing and refreshing reason one encounters in Canadian-born journalist Gwynne Dyer’s recently published After Iraq: Anarchy and Renewal in the Middle East (St. Martins Press, 2008). With a paragraph straight out of The Elements of Style Hall of Fame, Dyer delivers his patent brand of informed and unsentimental common-sense analysis. The strength and clarity of his essay-writing is much more than rhetorical talent, drawing as it does on Dyer’s substantial background, which includes military service, academic expertise in military studies and Middle Eastern affairs, and nearly four decades of independent journalism. And every bit is on display throughout After Iraq, whether he is scrutinizing “the putative Iranian bomb,” or deflating the tires on The Terrorist Bandwagon.

"The U.S. armed forces have found the most plausible justification for military spending since the end of the late, lamented Cold War, and they are playing it for all it's worth. There is a good deal of cynicism in this, because in their own staff colleges they teach their officers that terrorism is primarily a domestic security problem, best addressed by police surveillance, intelligence-gathering, and barriers to free movement like airport security checks. Terrorists are civilians, and they are usually to be found in places where the uniformed military are absent. But if the public wants a 'war' on terror, they’ll be happy to provide one. Just give them the budget, and they’ll fight it. To the man who has only a hammer, everything looks like a nail…"

Looking back now on five years of the Iraq War and anticipating eventual U.S. withdrawal, Dyer says, “…its principal long-term effect may be to clarify for the next generation of American policymakers the quite limited extent to which American interests are involved in the Middle East. The gradual emergence of China as a great-power challenger to the United States, and the American alliance-building in Asia that it has triggered, will continue to shift U.S. attention away from the Middle East, so the various upheavals within the region that follow the final American retreat from Iraq are likely to unfold without strenuous U.S. intervention. Only a direct military attack on Iran by the United States would substantially change that conclusion - and even then, one suspects, the subsequent crisis would delay the U.S. exit from the region by only a few years. Like most silver linings, this one comes concealed in some very dark storm-clouds, and some people have already paid a very high price for it: the Iraqis.”

As for Afghanistan, the eventual outcome Dyer expects will be a mixture: “Not the fantasy of a prosperous, female-friendly democratic society that some neo-conservatives entertained at the height of their hubris,” but rather a new version of an old-fashioned Afghanistan - one that has learned, at least, another hard lesson about what foreign guests it should allow to encamp inside its borders, and that “will probably cause little trouble for the rest of the world.”

And, finally, Dyer sees much - everything - depending on how the next U.S. administration reflects upon these past five years. Most specifically, where do we go now, now that we have broken with a half-century of precedent by unilaterally bypassing the UN to go to war, and justified doing the same in the future with a proclaimed policy of “preemptive war?”

“Caught up in the polemics about a minor colonial war in Iraq that has killed fewer American soldiers in four years than died in an average month during the Second World War, people have forgotten that the great international enterprise of the past 65 was to create a system that frees us from the cycle of great-power wars that has blighted all of modern history. Perhaps it was too ambitious an undertaking, although the alternative is probably to accept that one day we will stumble into another world war, and this time a nuclear one.”

Skip Hulett