Summary 

As the war in Iraq moves toward a conclusion, the expectations are that the
end of the war will bring at least a pause in international tensions. We do
not believe this will be the case. Given U.S. war goals, crises -- inside
Iraq, with nations along Iraq's border and between Europe and the United
States -- can be expected to flow directly from war termination, whenever it
comes. As we have said, Iraq is a campaign in a much larger war and not a
war in itself. We now will see what that means. 

Analysis 

Stratfor has argued that the United States had two fundamental reasons for
invading Iraq: 

1. To transform the psychology of the Islamic world, which had perceived the
United States as in essence weak and unwilling to take risks to achieve its
ends. 

2. To use Iraq as a strategic base of operations from which to confront
Islamic regimes that are either incapable of or unwilling to deny al Qaeda
and other Islamist groups access to enabling resources. 

The war in Iraq is not over: There are extraordinarily complex
politico-military missions to confront. This is particularly true in the
north, where some substantial Iraqi forces appear to remain and where the
political situation among various players -- Kurdish, Turkish, Iranian and
Syrian -- remains complex, dynamic and opaque. Nevertheless, it is possible
to make some assessment of the intended and unintended consequences of the
war. 

There already has been a strong impact on the psychology of the Arab world
in particular. During the run-up to the war and until the last week, there
existed a sense of growing anger and radicalization. With the collapse of
resistance in Baghdad, this has given way to a sense of stunned disbelief.
The Arab press appears to be filled with four themes: 

1. A sense of denial, and an insistence that resistance continued but was
being hidden by the world press. 

2. A sense of betrayal by Saddam Hussein, whose failure to resist
effectively was seen as a sign of corruption. 

3. A sense of hopelessness, expressing the view that resisting the United
States is beyond the capacity of Arabs. This was coupled at times with an
expression of determination to rectify the situation. 

4. Bitterness at Europe -- particularly France and Russia, which abandoned
Iraq to its fate. 

U.S. leaders understand that the result of the war will be increased
bitterness, although some argue that Arab bitterness was already maxed out
anyway. What they are driving for with this operation is a psychological
capitulation -- a sense that accommodation with the United States is the
only path. 

The United States certainly has inflicted a massive blow on the Arab, if not
the Islamic, psyche. The only comparable moment was in June 1967, when
Israeli forces defeated the Egyptians, Syrians and Jordanians. It should be
remembered that the defeat had unintended consequences: Not only did Egypt
and Syria attack Israel with some effect in 1973, but the consequences of
the defeat energized the Palestinian movement. The Israelis have begun
warning the Palestinians to think through the lessons of Iraq. On the other
side, the United States must carefully think through the lessons of 1967. 

The simplistic idea that resentment of the United States will generate
effective action by Arabs misses a crucial point. Two scales are at work
here: the radicalism scale and the hope scale. On the radicalism scale, the
level of radicalism and anti-Americanism in the Arab world has been off the
chart for months. Increasing the level would be difficult. However,
radicalism by itself does not lead to action. There must also be hope -- a
sense that there are weaknesses in the U.S. position that can be exploited,
that there is some possibility of victory, however distant. So long as the
hope scale tends toward hopelessness, radicalism can be intense. 

The United States was prepared to allow the radicalism scale to go deep into
the danger zone, but Washington has been trying to keep the hope scale
deeply in the green zone. Israel's failure after 1967 was inherent in its
position: The Israelis depended heavily on outsiders for national security.
The Arab perception was that the Israelis could be attacked by splitting
them from their patrons. This sense of vulnerability led to an active
response to defeat. 

The task facing the United States now is to avoid projecting a sense of
vulnerability. This is easier for Washington than it was for Israel. The
United States comes out of the war less dependent on others; it also has a
strong domestic consensus in favor of the war. The United States presents,
at the moment, a seamless face to the Arab world: It is hated but feared.
Washington now must act now to maintain the fear, while reducing hatred. How
it manages Iraq will determine the outcome. If the United States loses
control of the situation, it quickly could lead to a perception of
vulnerability. It must control the situation in Iraq while maintaining a
benign administration. This will not be as easy it sounds: Where Washington
can choose between unrelenting strength and the risk of perceived weakness,
it will have to carefully choose strength. That is implicit in the strategy.
 

>From a geopolitical perspective, we already have seen the United States
transiting from the Iraqi war phase toward confrontation with the
surrounding states. Saudi leaders capitulated in fundamental ways before the
United States went to war, permitting U.S. aircraft to fly air strikes
against Iraq and allowing U.S. forces to pass through Saudi territory.
Jordan and Kuwait are not problems. But there are three issues: Syria,
Turkey and Iran. 

Syria: Syrian behavior has become unpredictable. The Syrians have long
understood that, as a consequence of the war, their country would be
surrounded by three enemies: the United States, Turkey and Israel. Rather
than trying to reach an accommodation with the United States, Damascus
stepped up its aggressive behavior during the war, permitting volunteers to
go into Iraq to fight coalition forces and apparently permitting Iraqi
personnel to seek shelter in Iraq. The Bush administration has made it clear
that it finds Syrian behavior intolerable, and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld has refused to rule out assertive action against Syria. There was
no question but that the United States was going to confront Syria at some
point from its bases in Iraq, but the Syrians seem to have chosen to
accelerate the process -- perhaps feeling that a better settlement could be
reached earlier in the game. 

Turkey: Washington needs to defuse the bad end to the pre-war confrontation.
Turkey is a geopolitical foundation of U.S. strategy -- not only in the
Middle East, but also north of the Caucasus, in southeastern Europe and
Iran. A permanent rift with Turkey would be intolerable. Similarly, the
United States remains the foundation of Turkish national security policy.
Without it, Turkey has fundamental problems. The two countries may not be
friends at the moment, but they share fundamental interests. Both nations
now will attempt to extract themselves from the unacceptable situation they
created for each other. The key will be limiting Kurdish expectations. 

Iran: the extraordinarily complex game that Tehran is playing makes Syrian
foreign policy transparent. Iran has positioned itself in such a way that
its pro-Iranian Shiite groups in Iraq could wage a guerrilla war against the
United States, while Tehran holds open the possibility of reaching implicit
accommodations with the United States -- all at the same time. Iranian
subtlety notwithstanding, Washington regards Iran as the single most
potentially dangerous regime in the region, because of both its resources
and the complexity of its politics and policies. Iran has positioned itself
to be fundamentally unpredictable -- and having achieved this goal, it
concerns the United States tremendously. 

Therefore, if the goal of the United States was to create a base of
operations in Iraq from which to influence the dynamics of the region
internally, the game is in play even before the war is formally ended. The
Syrian situation will probably be contained, but it represents a
fundamentally destabilizing factor to the region. The Iranian situation is
much more difficult to predict in the long run, even as the Iranians
practice their traditionally complex prudence in the short run. 

In a similar sense, unintended consequences of the war must be managed. The
U.S. relationship with Britain is fundamental to U.S. national strategy --
and Britain, for a host of its own reasons, does not want an outright breach
either with the Franco-German bloc or with multilateral organizations like
the United Nations. The United States must accommodate the British without
losing control of the situation in Iraq. 

The primary purpose of the April 11-12 summit in St. Petersburg between
Russian, German and French leaders is to find a way to limit the
consequences of U.S. victory in Iraq. All of them opposed the war, and the
United States prosecuted it any way. This demonstrated that Washington needs
neither material support from Europe nor political validation. For all three
countries, this represents a fundamental redefinition of their place in the
world. There had been a fixed assumption that in some sense, the United
States remained dependent on them, that they were necessary enablers for
global actions. Alliance for them was not an American choice, but a
necessity. Iraq represented a very public demonstration that they were
irrelevant to U.S. policymaking, either individually or collectively. This
represents a geopolitical crisis of the first order to them. 

These countries' solution will be to try to manipulate the United States
into accepting the United Nations as the primary manager of Iraqi affairs.
To do so, they will use the British desire to maintain bridges to the
Franco-German bloc as a means of forcing the United States to shift policy.
The United States cannot abandon control of Iraq without abandoning the
goals for which it fought the war. This undoubtedly will lead to another
round of unpleasantness with the Euro Three, which would not bother
Washington a bit. U.S. President George W. Bush is positioned domestically
to take advantage of resentment -- particularly of France -- so that their
demand to participate in governing Iraq will be taken as wanting the fruits
of victory without taking the risks. The British, however, will be another
matter. We expect to see growing strains between the two countries as
Britain tries to find balance. 

What we are getting at is that no postwar lull is possible here, even if
there does emerge a clear-cut end to the war. The two goals of the war need
immediate management. The management of Arab and Islamic public opinion
requires exquisite care in the management of internal Iraqi affairs. It also
requires that U.S. power in the region be perceived as irresistible. This
means that U.S. relations with Syria and Iran must be managed aggressively
but without crossing the line to unwarranted belligerence. It means that the
U.S.-Turkish relationship must be managed dispassionately, in spite of
underlying tensions. All of this is urgent. None of it will wait. Finally,
the pre-war battle with the Europeans, while undoubtedly more subdued, still
will define much of the global rhetoric -- save that given its stakes in the
Islamic world, the United States will be even less able and less inclined to
cooperate with European demands. 

Now things get really tricky.