When Washington said to Cairo: keep the order domestically, respect your peace treaty with Israel, don't connive against us internationally and here's a few billion dollars for your trouble, the bargain was remarkably durable. When Washington said: you must implement democracy, well look what a mess followed.
None of this is to excuse Washington's many specific mistakes in Iraq. A few weeks ago in Britain I interviewed Jack Straw, Tony Blair's foreign secretary during the invasion of Iraq. He neither regretted nor resiled from his support for intervention in Iraq in 2003, for which there was a compelling case on the facts then available. What he did regret bitterly, however, was the Pentagon's refusal to work with the State Department on a proper post-invasion plan for Iraq, and especially the decision to disband the Iraqi army and dismiss most Iraqi public servants who had any connection with the previously ruling Baathist Party.
What this demonstrates once more is that no theory of any kind - the End of History, the Clash of Cultures or any of that rubbish - is any good in the real world of foreign affairs. The only thing that counts is specific knowledge. Which Sunni tribal leader is a convinced Islamist, which can be bribed, who hates whom, what are the local fault lines?
It is worth remembering that the US has intervened, politically, to great benefit in numerous countries, particularly in East Asia after World War 11, in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea especially. In each case it developed a cadre of military and civilian officers who knew the respective societies intimately and could advise on everything from agricultural techniques to national security. In each case the nation faced serious external security threats and in no case did the internal culture involve at its heart anti-Western sentiment, as is the case in the Arab Middle East.
A couple of months before the invasion of Iraq, Henry Kissinger told me he did not think it was politically sustainable for US troops to occupy a central Arab nation for any length of time. Shrewd thinking like this led a number of policy heavyweights in Washington to argue for the insertion straight away of a provisional Iraqi government in Iraq. They were overruled and we got instead the hapless Coalition Provisional Authority, led by Paul Bremmer. The Americans, and Australians too, who worked for the CPA were brave, intelligent and committed people, but it was in the nature of things that they did not have deep, detailed knowledge of Iraq.
We shouldn't sling off at the Americans here. Our own efforts to produce the political change we want in South Pacific states have had very feeble results compared with the money and effort we have invested.
In the Middle East now we need to work only to secure key Western interests. The broad internal politics of the countries involved, though profoundly unattractive, is not a core part of our business.
