Opinion: Reagan's Lessons for Obama in Mideast

(Sept. 1) -- There is a nice symmetry between the two major foreign policy events this week in the Obama White House. On Tuesday, President Barack Obama marked the end of a formal U.S. combat role in Iraq. Today he launches a major new effort to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

There is no question that Obama prefers the role of peacemaker to wartime leader. He has accelerated the timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and announced a date to begin pulling out of Afghanistan at the same time he authorized a surge of U.S. troops. But if he's going to succeed in this role, he would do well to look for guidance from an unlikely source -- Ronald Reagan.

While U.S. forces have performed heroically in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is a tragedy -- some might say travesty -- that they were placed in harm's way in both Iraq and Afghanistan with so little preparation for the complex societies they faced.

In Iraq, terrorism is on the rise again, and Iraq's neighbors will take advantage of the weakness of the Baghdad government -- assuming a new one is ever formed -- to support their co-religionists. Many analysts already see Iraq's political future as akin to that of Lebanon at best.

The situation in Afghanistan is even worse. Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, is erratic and his government so corrupt that it is no wonder that the Taliban has been able to make a comeback after being thrown out of power in 2001. There are real questions about whether the country will slip back into the sort of civil war that allowed it to become a sanctuary for al-Qaida in the 1990s.

At a time when the United States desperately needs its own nation-building effort, however, there is a limit to what more it can do abroad. Obama should set minimal goals for both Iraq and Afghanistan and avoid getting embroiled in a third war with Iran.

On that score, he should emulate Ronald Reagan instead of George W. Bush. Reagan, it should be remembered, withdrew U.S. Marines from Lebanon after a terrorist attack in 1983 killed 241 Americans. His administration funneled money and weapons -- not U.S. soldiers -- to anti-Soviet forces in Central America and Afghanistan. His biggest direct intervention was in 1983 against the tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada to rescue U.S. medical students and overturn a pro-Cuban junta. Obama should use intelligence assets -- unmanned drones and foreign proxies -- whenever possible instead of deploying U.S. combat forces to deal with foreign threats.

In his second term, Reagan embraced diplomacy that helped end the Cold War with the Soviet Union. He reached out to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and negotiated key arms control agreements and embraced a vision of an end to nuclear weapons.

Obama faces a more daunting diplomatic challenge in trying to reconcile Israelis and Palestinians. However, success would pay real dividends in terms of shoring up stability in the Middle East and deflating the arguments of Islamic extremists.

The obstacles are clear. Violent opponents of the talks, seeking to end negotiations before they begin, fatally shot four Israelis on Tuesday near a West Bank Jewish settlement. The negotiations themselves will be difficult and could founder over borders, security, Jerusalem and the status of refugees. But Obama has an able envoy in former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and a tested White House team including Dennis Ross, a veteran of Arab-Israeli peace efforts going back 20 years. Robert Danin, a former U.S. diplomat now with the Council on Foreign Relations, says that the U.S. "feels a sense of urgency" about Arab-Israeli peace that is greater than that of Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

In his speech Tuesday night, Obama said, "one of the lessons of our effort in Iraq is that American influence around the world is not a function of military force alone. We must use all elements of our power -- including our diplomacy, our economic strength, and the power of America's example -- to secure our interests and stand by our allies."

After a decade at war, the United States needs a respite from foreign military adventures. As history has taught us, no country can successfully project power abroad for long if it is not strong at home.