In March 2003, Middle East scholar Volker Perthes wrote that while the risks of this “illegitimate’’ war were enormous, those of “a US failure to stabilise post-war Iraq would be even higher’’. With those words looking increasingly prophetic, no one is now more lurid than the Bush administration. The direness of the prospect has become its strongest argument for “staying the course’’, but for others it is already a given, amounting to “the greatest strategic disaster in US history’’, in the words of the retired US general William Odom.

If so, what will this disaster look like? It will surely be commensurate with the vast ambitions that came with the invasion in the first place, Iraq being cast as the platform for reshaping the entire Middle East.

A general US retreat from the region is no doubt a prerequisite for the emergence of a healthy Middle Eastern order. But the region won’t just revert to the status quo ante. Instead of Iraq becoming a beacon of all good things it will become the single most noxious wellspring of all the bad ones the invasion was supposed to extinguish and new ones to boot.

If the Middle East was a jungle before, it will be a wilder one afterwards, with most elements of the decadent existing order, in their increased insecurity, driven to even cruder methods to preserve themselves. For while a “good’’ retreat would decrease such sentiments, a “bad’’ Iraqi one will only spur and spread the active, often violent expression of them. That is because, for the Arabs, Iraq was only the latest drastic episode in a long history of western interference in their affairs. Until the wider, pre-Iraqi consequences of that interference are remedied, the example of successful anti-American resistance in Iraq will only encourage it elsewhere, especially in Palestine.

Saddam’s Iraq was the very model of Arab tyranny. With American failure it will become the model of Arab anarchy, embodying the two most disruptive forces in the Middle East today. One is a sectarianism or ethnic antagonism as malevolent in its new pluralist form as it was in its more familiar despotic one. The other is universalist, ideologically driven Islamism.

Elections show that this is the dominant or rising force on both sides of Iraq’s widening sectarian divide. Islamism will spawn its inevitable fanatical progeny and Iraq, till now mainly a magnet for pan-Islamic jihadists, will become, Afghan-style, a main exporter of them too; it already is, in fact, as the Jordanian suicide bombings illustrated.

The Arab states will be sucked into this Iraqi maelstrom. With the world’s only superpower on its way out, who but they — along with Turkey and Iran — are left to replace it there? But they will fail disastrously in their turn. In the past the regimes more or less controlled the business of interference in each other’s other affairs, as they exerted such control over their domestic arenas. Now they will be competing with those non-state forces, primarily the ethnic/sectarian and Islamist ones, which also increasingly challenge them.

In fact almost all these countries are latent Iraqs, especially Ba’athist Syria. Far from mastering Iraq, it is Iraq that is more likely to master them. Nor will Turkey and Iran be immune from the contagion, with Iraqi Kurdish emancipation already contributing to a resurgence of Kurdish resistance in both.

For Iran, the sectarian/ethnic and Islamist factors are now potent assets. Its Kurdish vulnerabilities are more than offset by improved Shia influence throughout the region. This is a reality, which, within the Sunni-dominated Arab establishment, Jordan has been most publicly alarmed about.

Non-Arab Iran is now the main patron of radical Islamism in the Arab world, and Palestine is its most profitable arena. Long an advocate of Islamicising the Palestinian struggle, nothing could better serve its ambition than the effect that US failure in Iraq will have on Hamas, which is now close to supplanting the secular-nationalist Fatah as the dominant force in the occupied territories.

But the thing that will really make it and Israel the most dangerous animals in the post-Iraqi Middle East jungle is Iran’s apparent quest for nuclear weapons. This commands grassroots popularity among the Arabs. They see it as a self-assertion that no Arab leader would dare offer against colonial-style western bullying and the hypocrisy of the west’s acceptance of Israel’s nuclear monopoly.

No one invested greater expectations in the Iraqi adventure than Israel. US success, it thought, would transform its strategic position. But with US failure, Israel will grow more repressive against the Palestinians. Should the US itself deal with Iran in the same violent and partisan fashion as it did Iraq, the adverse consequences of that new adventure will outstrip those of the earlier one. For there is no reason to doubt that Iran’s response, from both itself and its strengthened Shia and Islamist allies in the region, will be the devastating one it constantly promises. — The Guardian