“Challenges by own making, the U.S. destabilized the Middle East, empowering both Shias and Sunnis against each other”.
With Hamas fighters’ deadly attack on 7th October at Israel, killing almost 1200 Israelis, jolting global affairs, while Middle Eastern security and stability had already been galvanized. The Israeli Defence Forces retaliated with air bombing, a renowned military approach it always considered a collective punishment against the Palestinians, while the decision to ground offensive in Gaza is a new precedent that has not been pursued since 2005, changing the entire threat spectrum in the region. Even with its superior conventional military capacity and traditional reliance on airpower, the IDF has been unable to gain the strategic ends it long envisioned to achieve in the battle zone. Whether the IDF would pin down the Hamas’ safe havens both on the ground and underground in Gaza’s tunnels has yet to materialize, as the bunker-to-bunker urban fighting in Gaza’s rubbles has turned bloody between Hamas fighters and IDF. Resultantly, in the wake of the IDF’s brutal bombing, half of Gaza’s population had to flee from the south toward the north, but the IDF’s airpower was employed indiscriminately throughout Gaza, killing thousands of civilians and destroying larger parts of Gaza City. Since regaining of power by U.S. President Trump in November 2024, its bid to restore “peace” in Gaza through diplomacy—and through its so-called “Board of Peace” plan; just to transferring the IDF’s duty of “disarming Hamas” to the Muslim country forces will only make the matter worse, dragging other nations armies into a deadly urban warfare with far-reaching social and political implications in their own homeland security.
Besides analyzing the current battle zone situation, we need to understand the history of regional anarchy that Hamas and other militants exploited along with the failure of American role as an offshore pacifier that ultimately helped empower a range of agents of chaos in the region. Iran’s Shia revolution in 1979 and its ten years of bloody war with the Sunni Saddam regime of Iraq helped motivate the United States that Iraqi power was ascending in the region and needed to control it. The US wanted to balance Shia Iran with Sunni Iraq; Iran wanted a pro-Iran Shia Iraq; Iraq wanted to crush the newly formed Shia Iran. Things changed unsurprisingly when Saddam’s regime defeated Iran in 1988 and invaded Kuwait in 1990 under the Saddam’s irredentist intent. Saddam’s long-term occupation of Kuwait could be a direct threat to the American design of a regional balance of power in which the Arab monarchs hostile to Saddam, preferred the American protectorates; rather, to accept any Iraqi territorial expansion. Dominating the Middle Eastern inland by any regional power would ultimately build a stronger navy to challenge the American hegemony both in the Middle East and over the high seas—an unwelcoming and unacceptable outcome for the US.
Geopolitically speaking, Iraq a country that sits in the footsteps of Euphrates and being an old center of the Islamic Empire has played an instrumental role in the Muslim world. While Iraq under Saddam’s regime hostile to both the US and its allies including Israel became a permanent headache, the one that could not be fixed both in the Iran-Iraq war and in the Kuwait war. Even though the decision was not rational, and whether it was a debacle to the US regional balance of power strategy, the US invaded Iraq in 2003 to decapitatethe Saddam regime. President Saddam was ousted and a pro-American government was installed after the bloody war. It was considered a major “strategic victory”, at least, for the US’ Neocons who wishfully envisioned that a pro-American Iraq would ultimately usher into a pro-American Iran, bringing the entire Middle East under the US sphere of influence. The US wanted to transform Iraq into a socially liberal and politically democratic; Iran wanted to shape Iraq under its own prism—sponsoring a range of Shia militias and other irregular forces including Hezbollah, Hamas, and Yemeni Houthis, designed to challenge and attack the US and its allies in the region.
After the demise of Saddam’s regime, unchecked Iranian power in Iraq resulted in a clear debacle to US regional order and a resurgence of the Sunni militancy that gave birth to the Islamic State which kept jeopardizing Middle Eastern security for almost one decade even after American withdrawal in 2011. Deviating from its own core values, the US had to cooperate again with Iranindirectly through the Iraqi government by accepting and deploying Shia militias in parallel with the US-supported Iraqi forces to dismantle the Islamic State (IS) expansion. The IS was not the sole product that arose after the Iraqi destabilization; rather, a byproduct of the Arab Spring, a wishful and albeit flawed “democratic movement” that engulfed Middle Eastern security and trapped the Arab youth for a decade to oppose and overthrow the old regimes they considered unlawful. Even though these regimes were considered “less civilized” and more authoritative in the West, they maintained order and prevented any agent of chaos from ravaging their order the IS and Shia militias ultimately destined to exploit.
Two major developments: the rise of Iranian power along with its Shia proxies and the resurgence of Sunni militancy at the cost of ousting Saddam’s regime have exposed that the US approach to regional security and balance of power was a dead end, as the Saddam regime with all its bad effects prevented the Iranians from gaining ground in the so-called Shia-Crescent of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Operation Iraqi Freedom—the one operationally impressive did not unleash and attain strategic objectives, its planners long dreamed of. Challenges by own making, the US destabilized the Middle East, empowering both Shias and Sunnis against each other in an endless war that is continuing even to this day. In spite of global sanctions on the Iranian regime due to its alleged enrichment activities of nuclear fissile material, Iranian subversion is rampant, exploiting the rising Saudi-Israeli closeness, an affair rejected by Hamas that long opposed the two-state solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Had the Saudis and Israelis defined a two-state solution under the so-called ABRAHAM Accord, a supposed agreement the US supervised in 2020 for Arab monarchs to accept Israel in exchange for a proposed two-state design, the Iranians and its proxies would have ultimately become irrelevant in the future’s Middle Eastern order, creating and cementing anti-Iranian order to contain the influence Tehran has had built throughout the region. Since the demise of Saddam regime, US-led balancing approach has created more chaos than order. Anti-Americanism and anti-Israeli sentiments are on the rise, while the current Hamas attacks and the later IDF’sover-reliance on airpower as a strategy of collective punishment of Palestinians will create more chaos than instability, a clear obstacle to the US regional balance of power strategy in the Middle East. Resultantly, this tendency will continue in which the fate of a stable Middle East will remain uncertain.
*Mr. Naveed Mushtaq is a former Subject Matter Expert in Pakistan Navy’s DGPR Directorate and has Master of Philosophy in Defence and Strategic Studies from Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad. Critique and comments are appreciated. His X handle is:@NaveedMushtaqM