Mr Bush's Unfinished Business

As George W. Bush's second term as president of the United States draws to a close, two of his declared foreign policy aims remain unfulfilled. First, he has not yet captured or killed Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda associates who were behind the 9/11 atrocities. Secondly, he has not carried out his endlessly repeated threat to take military action to prevent the Islamic Republic of Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

With only a few months remaining of his presidency, Bush has seemed increasingly unlikely to be able to attend to either piece of unfinished business. Now, with the rapid deterioration in relations between Russia and the West as a consequence of the August war in Georgia, it seems even more unlikely that President Bush will have the chance to act against these two designated targets.

If Bush was to order a successful military strike which killed or captured Osama bin Laden and his principal associates, this would undoubtedly boost his popularity with the American people and he could leave the Oval Office on a positive note. Whether such an action would have any long term beneficial impact on the 'war on terror' is another matter. As Osama bin Laden himself noted shortly after 9/11, his life does not greatly matter as he has achieved his goal: to set off a major confrontation between the West and the Muslim world. If he was killed, bin Laden would be just another Islamist martyr and in time somebody else would come to take his place. Israel has been killing Muslim terrorist leaders regularly for sixty years with little sign that the terrorist threat will ever come to an end.

Since Osama bin Laden is said to be hiding somewhere in the tribal territories on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan, any major American military strike against him will involve a serious violation of Pakistan's national sovereignty. Civil unrest is already growing in that country and an American invasion would only further inflame the situation. This consideration has so far limited American actions to air strikes by UAVs which both Washington and Islamabad have sought to play down. NATO's war in Afghanistan is going badly at the moment and to spread the war into an already volatile Pakistan would only make a bad situation worse.

The new hostility between NATO and Russia presents a further obstacle to striking against Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Some 90% of supplies for NATO forces in Afghanistan are landed at the port of Karachi and pass through Pakistan to reach the Afghan border. If this route was closed, NATO forces would soon be in a desperate situation, given that Iran is unlikely to let supplies come in through Iranian ports. All that remained would be the northern supply route across Russia and several of the Central Asian republics.

Earlier this year Russia tentatively agreed to the use by NATO of this northern land route if required. The agreement of the Central Asian states was still to be negotiated. However, after recent events in the Caucasus, it now seems unlikely that Russia would be willing to provide this supply route for NATO. Thus America and its allies would be unwise to destabilise Pakistan, their principal supply route to Afghanistan, by carrying out a major military incursion into that country with Osama bin Laden as their target.

With regard to Osama bin Laden the fear that military intervention might make a bad situation worse is a powerful constraint on American action. With regard to Iran, the second piece of unfinished business, the constraint is slightly different. Here the fear is that American military action against Iran might plunge an improving situation in neighbouring Iraq back into chaos.

Whatever the supposed threat posed by nuclear developments in Iran, the fact is that the Iranians have made some contribution to the present comparative peace in Iraq by mediating disputes between Iraqi Shiite factions. They have encouraged those factions to be patient and wait until the United States has withdrawn its military forces from Iraq, as now seems increasingly likely in the next year or two.

If the United States launched military attacks on Iran aimed at destroying its nuclear facilities, such warfare would inevitably spill over into Iraq, where some Shiite groups would undoubtedly launch attacks on American forces. The present comparative peace in Iraq, so dearly bought with American blood and treasure, would be lost in an instant. This consideration does much to prevent President Bush ordering an attack on Iran.

Russia has up to now co-operated with the Americans and the Europeans in imposing sanctions on Iran in order to curb its nuclear developments. Although Russia no more wants to see a nuclear-armed Iran than does America or Israel, its attitude to the Iranians may well change as a result of Western reaction to the Georgian war. Russia could pull out of the sanctions regime and it might increase sales of defensive military systems to Iran as it has already increased such sales to Syria.

Thus the worsening relations with Russia seem likely to create even more obstacles to President Bush carrying out military action against Osama bin Laden and Iran, his two pieces of unfinished business abroad. However, the Bush administration has shown its indifference to rational calculations in the past and its window of opportunity for military action is closing fast. One can only hope that George W. Bush's years in the White House end with a whimper and not a bang.