by Emile Nakhleh
The international media is currently mesmerized by the advance of Daesh (ISIS or ISIL) on the Syrian city of Kobani near the Turkish border, but Arab states and the US need to look beyond Kobani’s fate and Daesh’s territorial successes and defeats. The crumbling Levant poses a greater danger than Daesh and must be addressed—first and foremost by the states of the region.
The British colonial term, Levant, encompasses modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine, with a total population of over 70 million people. The population—mostly young, unemployed or underemployed, poor, and inadequately educated—has lost trust in its leaders and the governing elites.
The Levant has become a bloody playground for other states in the greater Middle East, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Iran, and Turkey. While dislocations in the Levant could be contained, the regional states’ involvement has transformed the area into an international nightmare. The resulting instability will impact the region for years to come regardless of Daesh’s short-term fortunes.
The Levantine state has become marginalized and ineffectual in charting a hopeful future for its people, who are drifting away from nationalist ideologies toward more divisive, localized, and often violent manifestations of identity politics. National political identity, with which citizens in the Levant have identified for decades, has devolved mostly into tribal, ethnic, geographic, and sectarian identities.
The crumbling state structure and authority gave rise to these identities, thereby fueling the current conflicts, which in turn are undermining the very existence of the Levantine state.
The three key non-state actors—Daesh, Hezbollah, and Hamas—have been the beneficiaries of the crumbling states, which were drawn up by colonial cartographer-politicians a century ago.
Although the so-called deep security state has been able to maintain a semblance of order around the national capital, the state’s control of territories beyond the capital is fading and is rapidly being contested by non-state actors.
This phenomenon is readily apparent in Baghdad, Damascus, Ramallah, and Gaza, partially so in Beirut, and less so in Amman. Salafi groups, however, are lurking in the background in Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine ready to challenge state authority whenever they sense a power vacuum.
Political systems in the Levant are often propped up by domestic ruling elites, regional states, and foreign powers for a variety of parochial and transnational interests. More and more, these ruling structures appear to be relics of the past. A key analytic question thus presents itself: How long would they survive if outside economic, military and political support dries up?
Levant regimes comprise a monarchy in Jordan; a perennially dysfunctional parliamentary/presidential system in Lebanon; a brutal, teetering dictatorship in Syria; an autocratic presidency in Palestine; and an erratic partisan democracy in Iraq. They have subsisted on so-called rentier or “rent” economies—oil in Iraq, with the rest dependent on foreign aid. Providers of such aid have included Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Iran, Turkey, the United States, the EU, Russia, and others.
Corruption is rampant across most state institutions in the Levant, including the military and the key financial and banking systems. For example, billions of dollars in US aid to Iraq following the 2003 invasion have not been accounted for. According to the New York Times, American investigators in the past decade have traced huge sums of this money to a bunker in Lebanon.
The collapse of the Levant states in the next decade is not unthinkable. Their borders are already becoming more blurred and porous. The decaying environment is allowing violent groups to operate more freely within states and across state boundaries. Daesh is causing havoc in Iraq and Syria and potentially could destabilize Jordan and Lebanon precisely because the Levantine state is on the verge of collapse.
As these states weaken, regional powers—especially Saudi Arabia plus some of its GCC junior partners, Iran, and Egypt—will find it convenient to engage in proxy sectarian and ethnic wars through jihadist and other vigilante mercenaries.
Equally disturbing is that US policy toward a post-Daesh Levant seems rudderless without a strategic compass to guide it. It’s as if US policymakers have no stomach to focus on the “morning after” despite the fact that the airstrikes are proving ineffective in halting Daesh’s territorial advances.
Kobani aside, what should the Arab states and the United States do about the future of the Levant?
1) Iraq. If the Sunnis and Kurds are to be represented across all state institutions in Iraq, regional states with Washington’s help should urge Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to complete the formation of his new government on the basis of equity and fairness. Government and semi-public institutions and agencies must be made accountable and transparent and subject to scrutiny by domestic and international regulatory bodies. Otherwise, Iraq would remain a breeding ground for terrorists and jihadists.
2) Syria. If Washington remains committed to President Bashar al-Assad’s removal, it should end its Russian roulette charade toward the Syrian dictator. Ankara’s view that Assad is more dangerous in the long run than Daesh is convincing and should be accepted and acted upon.
If removing Assad remains a serious policy objective, is the US-led coalition contemplating the implementation of a no-fly zone and a security zone on Syria’s northern border any time soon to facilitate Assad’s downfall?
3) Lebanon. If Hezbollah and other political parties do not play a constructive role in re-establishing political dialogue and stability in Lebanon, it won’t be long before the Daesh wars enter the country. Are there regional and international pressures being put on Hezbollah to end its support of Assad and disengage from fighting in Syria?
The upcoming presidential election would be a useful barometer to assess the key Lebanese stakeholders’ commitment to long-term stability. If no candidate wins a majority, does Washington, in conjunction with its Arab allies, have a clear plan to get the Lebanese parliament to vote for a president?
Unless Lebanon gets its political house in order, religious sectarianism could yet again rear its ugly head in that fragile state and tear the country apart.
4) Palestine. If the Obama administration urges Israel to facilitate a working environment for the Palestinian national unity government, to end its siege of Gaza, and dismantle its 47-year occupation, Palestine would no longer be an incubator of radical ideologies.
An occupied population living in poverty, unemployment, alienation, repression, daily humiliation and hopelessness, and ruled by a corrupt regime is rarely prone to moderation and peaceful dialogue. On the contrary, such a population offers fertile recruiting ground for extremism.
5) Iran and Saudi Arabia. It is in the United States’ interest to engage Iran and Saudi Arabia—the two countries that seem to meddle most in the Levant—in order to stop their proxy wars in the region. These sectarian wars could easily lead to an all-out military confrontation, which would surely suck in the US and other Western powers. Israel would not be able to escape such a conflict either.
The Saudi government claims that it opposes Daesh. Yet one would ask: Why hasn’t the Saudi clerical establishment denounced—forcefully and publicly—Daesh’s ideology and rejected the so-called Islamic State Caliphate? Why is it that thousands of Daesh-jihadists are from Saudi Arabia and neighboring Gulf countries?
6) Development. Since Levant countries face high unemployment, it’s imperative to pursue serious job creation initiatives. Arab states, with Washington’s support, should begin massive technical and vocational education programs and entrepreneurial initiatives in the Levant countries. Young men and women should be trained in vocational institutes, much like the two-year college concept in the United States.
Vocational fields that suffer from shortages in Levant countries include plumbing, carpentry, home construction, electricity, welding, mechanics, automotive services, truck driving, computers and electronics, health services, hotels and tourism, technology management, and TV and computer repairs. Services in these fields are badly needed. But thousands of young men and women have yet to be trained to fulfill these needs.
In addition to vocational training, wealthy Arab countries should help the Levant establish funds for entrepreneurial, job-creation initiatives, and start-ups. A partnership between government and the private sector, with support from the US and other developed countries, could be the engine that drives a new era of job creation and economic growth in the region where the Daesh cancer is metastasizing.
Let’s be clear, the United States has significant leverage to help implement these policies should American leaders decide to do so. Yet one could ask why the US should make such a commitment. If Daesh is primarily a threat to Levantine countries, why can’t they deal with it? These are fair questions but, as we have discovered with Ebola, what happens in Liberia doesn’t stay in Liberia. A crumbling Levant will have ramifications not just for the region but for the United States and the rest of the world as well.
]]>As the wobbly anti-ISIS coalition is being formed with American prodding, the Obama administration should take a strategic look at the future of the Arab world beyond the threat posed by the self-declared Islamic State. Otherwise, the United States would be unprepared to deal with the unintended chaos.
Driven by ideological hubris, the Bush administration on the eve of the Iraq war rejected any suggestions that the war could destabilize the whole region and rock the foundations of the Arab nation-state system.
That system, which was mostly created under the colonial Sykes-Picot treaty of 1916, is now being severely stressed. The Obama administration should avoid repeating the tragic mistake of its predecessor. While trying to halt the advance of ISIS by focused airstrikes, and regardless of the coalition’s effectiveness in “degrading” and “defeating” ISIS, President Obama should instruct his senior policymakers to explore possible architectures that could emerge from the ashes of Sykes-Picot.
The stresses and fault lines we are witnessing in the region today could easily lead to implosions tomorrow. Rightly or wrongly, Washington would be blamed for the ensuing mayhem.
As Secretary of State John Kerry shuttles between countries chasing the elusive coalition to fight ISIS, the administration seems to be unclear even about terminology. Is it a war or a multifaceted counter-terrorism strategy against ISIS? Whatever it’s called, if this strategy fails to eradicate the Islamic State and its Caliphate, is there a “Plan B” in the making?
Briefing senior policymakers on the eve of the Iraq war, I pointed out the possible unintended consequences of the invasion. George Tenet, former CIA Director, alludes to several of these briefings in his book, At the Center of the Storm.
One of the briefings discussed the possibility that the Iraq invasion could fundamentally unsettle the 100-year old Arab nation-state system. National identity politics, which heretofore has been managed and manipulated by autocratic regimes—tribal, dynastic, monarchical, and presidential—could unravel if the Bush administration failed to anticipate what could happen following Saddam’s demise.
The artificiality of much of those states and their boundaries would come unhinged under the pressures of the invasion and the unleashing of internal forces that have been dormant. National loyalties would be replaced by religious and sectarian affiliations, and the Shia-Sunni disputes that go back to the 7th century would once again rise to the surface albeit with more violence and bloodshed.
The briefings also emphasized Iraq’s central Islamic dilemma. While for many Sunni Muslims Baghdad represents the golden age of Islam more than 1,200 years ago, Iraq is also the cradle of Shia Islam.
Najaf and Karbala in southern Iraq are sacred for the Shia world because it was there where the fourth Caliph Ali’s son Hussein was “martyred” and buried. Iran, as the self-proclaimed voice of Shia Islam all over the world, is deeply embedded in Iraq and will always demand a central role in the future of Iraq.
Bush administration senior policymakers ignored these warning, arguing Iraqis and other Muslim Arabs would view American and coalition forces as “liberators” and, once the dictator fell, would work together in a spirit of tolerance, inclusion, and compromise. This view, unfortunately, was grounded in the neocons’ imagined ideological perception of the region. As we now know, it was utterly ignorant of ground truths and the social fabric of the different Arab Islamic societies.
Many Bush White House and Defense Department policymakers generally dismissed briefings that focused on the “morning after.” It’s safe to say they cared less about the post-Saddam Middle East than about toppling the dictator.
The region still suffers from those disastrous policies.
ISIS did not emerge in a vacuum, and its transnational ideology, warped as it may be, seems to appeal to Arabs and Muslims who have become disenchanted with the existing political order in Arab lands.
Many citizens view their states as fiefdoms of the ruling elites with no genuine respect for individual rights, personal freedoms, and human dignity. The “securitization” of politics has alienated many young Arabs and is driving them toward extremism.
If the borders between Syria and Iraq are erased by the transnational “Caliphate,” what will become of the borders of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq? Is the Obama administration ready to pick up the pieces when these nation-states disintegrate?
These are the critical questions the Bush administration should have pondered and answered before it invaded Iraq. They are the same questions the Obama administration should ponder and answer before chasing after ISIS in the Iraqi/Syrian desert.
Photo: Then President-elect Barack Obama before taking the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009. Credit: White House/Pete Souza
]]>As it attempts to hammer out a coalition to combat the Islamic State (IS, ISIL or ISIS), the Obama administration is encountering a variety of complications. More strident calls from certain domestic political quarters for broader US intervention threaten to undermine the overall effort, and potentially increase the danger to Americans. The iffy response of many regional and other allies to US requests for meaningful military participation could also harm US efforts. At this point, a clear vision of the situation even a few months from now is impossible to predict.
Some American politicians seem to be implying that ISIS could be confronted in a manner that would involve practically no threat to the “homeland,” such as by committing far larger US forces. That would not be true under any scenario. Indeed, the harder US forces hit ISIS, the more its assets in the region and acolytes far beyond would likely attempt to exact revenge.
Yet, even with all that in mind, no attempt has been made from Congressional hawks to put the ISIS threat at home in perspective. Americans have vastly more to fear every day, for example, from the ongoing epidemic of violent crime and traffic fatalities than ISIS.
Perhaps the wildest comment so far amidst hyperventilating in Washington came from Senator Lindsey Graham on Sept 13: “This is ISIL versus mankind,” he said. “It’s going to take an army [ours] to beat an army.” He also urged President Obama to put combat troops into Iraq and Syria “before we all get killed back here at home.”
ISIS is appallingly barbaric, but the Senator’s comment implies that ISIS could kill millions of Americans as if it had suddenly inherited a sizeable nuclear arsenal. Moreover, the desire to commit US combat troops en masse as crisis firemen probably rests on the delusion that prior robust US military intervention in Iraq was a thumping success.
Ironically, if Sen. Graham’s prime concern is American lives, sending large numbers of US combat troops into battle against ISIS would result in quite a few American fatalities. Even the 1600 US non-combat troops in Iraq now could become victims of ISIS suicide bombings that occur regularly throughout that country. Nonetheless, ISIS still poses a far greater threat to nearby Middle East countries than it does to Europe or the US.
Adverse Effects
The more US allies inside and outside the Middle East get the impression that Washington will increase its military support, the less incentive they will have to bear more of the military burden. In Iraq itself, the more the US does, the less the new Shi’a-dominated government might feel it has to do to woo back Iraq’s Sunni Arabs. And many Sunni Arabs might not make deals with Baghdad if they could do so with US ground forces instead (as they did during the so-called “Awakening”). So, saber-rattling along the lines that the US might commit far more military assets could do more damage to the anti-ISIS cause and long-term stability than to ISIS.
That is why US Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey’s comment on Capitol Hill on Sept. 16 regarding the prospect of greater involvement of US “advisors” on the frontlines against ISIS also serves to muddy the waters. He admitted that President Obama has left open the possibility of employing US troops in more exposed combat-related roles on a “case by case basis.” The White House, however, later stated that no US combat troops would be deployed to Iraq or Syria.
Coalition Foot-Dragging
The last thing Washington needs is more trouble in extracting commitments for concrete military action from its allies. There have been statements that a number of allies—including those in the region—are prepared to participate militarily. Most of these assertions, however, have stopped short, perhaps ominously, of specifics. In the region, especially among Sunni states closest to Iraq and Syria, no less than four concerns have produced widespread reluctance to become involved directly and militarily.
First, these countries fear military operations against ISIS (even limited military cooperation, as in basing) would make them high profile targets for retaliation from the group (as well as its sympathizers among their own populations). Turkey’s refusal to base coalition aircraft was a serious setback. Then there is the desire to avoid conflict with fellow Sunnis, regardless of how wayward they have become. Making confrontation with Sunnis that much more dicey would be doing so alongside a Shi’a-dominated, partially Iranian-backed government in Baghdad.
Lastly, based on its appalling past track record under former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, there are doubts whether the Iraqi government under new Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi will offer full inclusion to Iraq’s Sunni Arabs. Parallel fears exist concerning Iraqi Shi’a militia excesses during an anti-ISIS ground campaign; some already have occurred.
Meanwhile, exposing its iffy ability to chart a more enlightened course, the Abadi government’s defense and interior ministry nominees were once again rejected Sept. 16 by an Iraqi parliament still riven by sectarian and factional differences. This leaves the cabinet’s two premier national security posts in limbo.
European allies also have concerns much like their regional counterparts over making themselves more inviting targets for ISIS terrorism by signing up for greater military cooperation with the US. Memories of large-scale 2004-05 extremist attacks in London and Madrid in retaliation for European participation in US-led military intervention in Iraq remain painful. Aside from grisly beheadings of Western prisoners, there have been online threats of ISIS retaliation in response to allied military cooperation with the US against ISIS.
Even in the United States there can be no genuine political consensus on how to respond to the ISIS threat in the politically heated environment close to November’s Congressional elections. Views range from leaving the mess entirely to Iraqis, Syrians and neighboring countries to calls for massive US intervention along the lines suggested by Senator Graham. Furthermore, broad international coalitions are notoriously unwieldy, and the one now being assembled by the US is shaping up to be no different. At this point, no one is in a position to predict the situation in the region affected by the ISIS challenge a few months from now with any certainty—let alone several years down the road.
Photo: President Barack Obama talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to congratulate him and the Iraqi people on the approval of a new Iraqi government during a phone call in the Oval Office, Sept. 8, 2014. Credit: White House/Pete Souza)
]]>by Jim Lobe
Unsurprisingly, the same people who loudly championed the 2003 invasion of Iraq are clearly at it again, although this time they want not only to see US troops fighting in Iraq, but also in Syria.
Even while they insist that they don’t want a “new American ground war” in [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
Unsurprisingly, the same people who loudly championed the 2003 invasion of Iraq are clearly at it again, although this time they want not only to see US troops fighting in Iraq, but also in Syria.
Even while they insist that they don’t want a “new American ground war” in the region, hard-line neoconservatives, led by “scholars” at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), are urging a commitment of “thousands” of “advisers and trainers” and Special Forces deployed to both countries to roll back and defeat ISIS, which calls itself the Islamic State.
Writing in the London Telegraph over the weekend, AEI’s Fred Kagan made his recipe for victory quite clear.
Defeating the Islamic State…will certainly require a dramatic expansion of air strikes throughout Iraq and Syria.
It will also require the deployment of thousands of American forces – primarily Special Forces – to engage directly with moderate Sunnis in both countries and train the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and the Syrian moderate opposition.
Effective trainers must fight alongside those they are training in order to sustain their respect and trust. Americans must work directly with local tribes to help them survive against the lethal threat that the Islamic State poses.
Similarly, AEI’s vice president for foreign and defense policy studies, Danielle Pletka, teamed up with Gen. Jack Keane (ret.)—widely regarded along with Kagan as a key architect of the fabled 2006-7 “Surge” in Iraq—to outline what they called a “comprehensive strategy” against ISIS (that also, curiously, targeted Qatar—more on that later) in Monday’s Wall Street Journal.
U.S. military support will be key: the U.S. Central Command has a list of ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq…. Advisers and trainers are also needed by the thousands, not hundreds, to assist the Peshmerga, reconstitute the Iraqi army, and assist Sunni tribes now opposing ISIS who must join this fight. Close air support will also be vital.
Baghdadi and his senior leaders aren’t invulnerable, and U.S. special operations forces should be given the mission to target, kill and capture ISIS leaders. We targeted senior terrorist leaders once in Iraq and still do in Afghanistan and elsewhere. ISIS should be no different, particularly after its brutal murder of [James] Foley.
How many “thousands” are they talking about? Well, they don’t say, but a close collaborator organization, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI)—successor to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)—put out a policy paper Monday that cited the recommendations of another big Iraq War booster, Max Boot, who, in an op-ed published by The Spectator last week called for a “western advisory and special operations presence in Iraq [alone] to somewhere in the neighbourhood of 10,000 to 15,000 personnel.”
Advisers should be evenly distributed between the Kurdish peshmerga, the Sunni tribes and some of the more capable units of the Iraqi security forces in order to make clear that we are not playing favourites among Iraq’s sectarian groups. Simply having western advisers present alongside anti-Isis fighters will greatly enhance their morale, professionalism and effectiveness. [Of course, that’s only Iraq; Boot doesn’t address the need for ground troops, advisers, or trainers in Syria].
In other words, almost exactly four years after the last US combat brigade left Iraq, these analysts are calling for US ground forces to play a key combat role alongside whatever presumably friendly forces can be mustered to fight ISIS in Iraq, if not Syria. Without US troops fighting by their side, the implication goes, our putative allies will simply fold, even if US warplanes and drones are striking the enemy from above.
We are supposed to be reassured that the objective of deploying so many US ground forces in both countries is limited, presumably to ISIS’s military defeat. “…[T]his is not a plan for a new American ground war in Iraq seeking to reconstitute a failed state,” argue Pletka and Keane. “It is a mission to help Iraqis and Syrians on the ground help themselves.” To which one must ask, what does that mean?
After all, the aim of the Surge, which has long been extolled as a great success by these same commentators (who have never been shy about taking credit for it), was not just to isolate and defeat ISIS’s predecessor, Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Its strategic objective was to achieve national reconciliation precisely to preserve and rebuild the Iraqi state. It seems now that the neocons are implicitly conceding that the Surge, despite its tactical success, was a strategic failure.
Does Pletka and Keane’s reference to Iraq as a “failed state” mean the neocons are giving up on the unity and territorial integrity of Iraq (especially now that Netanyahu has endorsed Kurdish independence) or Syria? Under their plan, the objective seems limited to defeating ISIS by arming and fighting with whatever buyable or “moderate” groups are willing to join the effort. But what happens when those groups’ broader strategic aims are found to be mutually incompatible? (It bears recalling that the Kurds took advantage of ISIS’s rout of the Iraqi army in the north to send the peshmerga forces into Kirkuk.) Then again, the neocons have never excelled at providing persuasive answers to Gen. David Petraeus’s legendary challenge during the first days of the Iraq invasion: “Tell me how this ends.”
But neocons don’t like people to ponder such questions. Instead, they count on their ability to reduce extremely complicated and difficult situations to urgent, black-and-white choices that appeal more to fear than to reason. “Much will depend on the effectiveness of the combined ground force backed by consistent air power,” write Pletka and Keane in presenting their “comprehensive plan” in which the military component is predictably dominant. “[F]ailure means the destabilization of the Middle East, terrible bloodshed and, ultimately, the murder of more Americans.” Or, as stated even more apocalyptically by FPI and PNAC founder Bill Kristol in his Weekly Standard editorial, “Perhaps the choice is between a new American century or a newly barbaric century.”
Of course, while Obama is clearly pondering further military action against ISIS, including possible air strikes in Syria, the notion of sending 10,000-15,000 US troops to Iraq and Syria appears far-fetched at this point, and it seems clear that the administration is very much aware of the dangers of the kind of “slippery slope” that the neocons are now pushing Washington to plunge down.
Even Richard Haass, the generally hawkish president of the Council on Foreign Relations who acts as a reliable weathervane for elite Republican opinion, describes the introduction of US ground forces as “a political non-starter [that] …is not going to happen,” suggesting instead that the US work with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in fighting ISIS—an anathema to the neocons. And, while we may soon hear echoes of the neocon agenda from prominent hawks like Sens. McCain and Graham when Congress returns to Washington after the Labor Day recess, it seems very likely that, when push comes to shove, the notion of putting thousands of US “boots on the ground” is not going to prove very popular on Capitol Hill.
But the neocons are nothing if not dogged.
]]>James A. Russell
The predictions of doom in the Middle East that are dominating thinking in the foreign policy commentariat of Washington and other capitals over the spread of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) could use a little perspective.
An unlikely source of insight transpired the other day when [...]]]>
James A. Russell
The predictions of doom in the Middle East that are dominating thinking in the foreign policy commentariat of Washington and other capitals over the spread of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) could use a little perspective.
An unlikely source of insight transpired the other day when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, not known for clear-headed strategic thinking, equated Hamas with ISIS. The suggestion was part of a long-running Israeli narrative that seeks to link its periodic muggings of the Palestinians with the American-led war on Islamic extremists launched in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Netanyahu’s suggestion, however, is not far off the mark when it comes to framing regional events—though not for the reasons that he would think. The fact is that the Middle East is mired in several overlapping and competing national wars of liberation and state formation by various factions and states that seek a common variable in these wars: political power and authority over a demarcated geographic area. ISIS and Hamas are certainly participants in these wars, as are the Israelis.
None of these wars are in any way remarkable by historical standards—a point worth remembering as the Obama administration faces massive pressure to “do something” about the advances of ISIS. Americans generally suffer from short historic memories and easily forget their role in post-World War II era wars including in China (1949), Vietnam (1950s-60s), and Greece (1948).
Like the United States, Britain and France involved themselves in these wars directly and indirectly—most of which turned out badly for the Western powers. If anything, the involvement of outside powers in these wars prolonged them—much to the detriment of the groups involved in the struggle for political power.
The Middle East’s wars of national liberation and state formation were never really settled—hence the prevalence of the phenomenon today. The longest running is the unfinished war of Israeli independence launched in 1948. It’s unsettled because Israel’s borders are still in question due to its ongoing annexation of territory that presumably one day will become part of the state. It seems clear that the annexation fits within the governing Likud Party’s vision of “greater Israel,” which includes the Palestinian territories (Judea and Samaria) that stretch all the way to Jordan River.
This war is ongoing because Hamas and Likud share the same objective—achieving a state that stretches from Gaza to the Jordan River. Hamas is a classic radical religious nationalist movement that seeks to create its own state and, like Israel, is prepared to use force to achieve its goals. Thrown into this mix is the Palestinian Authority, the group that initially took up arms to achieve Palestinian independence but which as of late has tried in vain to achieve its objectives of state formation at the negotiating table.
We can expect this war to continue for the foreseeable future. The involvement of the United States and the blank check it has given to Israel has prolonged the battle; the Israelis have to take no responsibility for their actions and hence have no real incentive to reach a negotiated settlement until the Likud achieves its objective.
The other main war for national independence and state formation in the Middle East involves the fight for political power and authority in the Mukhabarat States of Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq—where (except in Saudi Arabia) the security sector created during colonization seized political power after the external powers departed. Libya is also engaged in a war of state formation that, like in Syria and Iraq, will likely be bloody and take a number of years.
Egypt’s internal battles between the security sector and the Islamists, which raged for 20+ years before briefly subsiding in the 1990s, look as if they may start up again due to these two group’s opposing and perhaps irreconcilable goals for the shape and identity of the state. For its part, Algeria won its civil war against the Islamists in the 1990s. In Tunisia, there may be a process of peaceful transition away from the Mukhabarat regime of Ben Ali to some form of representational government that involves all political parties.
In Syria, Iraq, and Libya, the national wars of liberation and state formation are currently underway. ISIS must be seen as an unfortunate but perhaps inevitable consequence of the battle for power in Syria, which has seen the Saudi-Gulf State support network funnel arms, people, and money into the fight against the Assad-Mukhabarat regime.
The historic genealogy of ISIS reaches back into US-occupied Iraq and the Saudi-Pakistani-US supported war by the Mujahideen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Its intellectual and religious roots lie within the toxic mix of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi clerics and the Sayyid Qutb-inspired militant Islamic resistance to Nasser in Egypt.
To a limited extent, Hamas can be considered a distant cousin of ISIS; both spring from radical Sunni Islamic political and religious ideology. Importantly, however, they are engaged in fundamentally different wars of liberation that involve different actors with various objectives in the contest for political power and authority.
In Iraq, the 2003 US invasion turned the existing political order on its head and unleashed long-repressed political aspirations that have blossomed, like in Syria, into another national war of liberation and state formation. ISIS now straddles the Iraqi-Syrian border, and one of the casualties of this war may be the Sykes-Picot boundaries that divided up the Ottoman Empire.
Saudi Arabia is noticeably absent, at least for now, in this intra- and transnational discord in part because, like other Gulf States, it has bought off its population with subsidized good living and sent its radicals to blow themselves up elsewhere. The regime’s periodic muggings of the Shia population in its Eastern Province are supported by the majority of the population. One day, however, the radicals that survived will come home just like those who did from the Afghan jihad in the 1990s.
The only good news on this front is that there is no widespread political support for the Sunni extremist ideology espoused by groups like ISIS. These groups tend to have short shelf lives precisely because they alienate the very people they seek to govern. The bad news is that these groups’ struggle for political power will likely be long and bloody—in part because they are not interested in a negotiated settlement and/or in sharing power with other actors. The blood-soaked Algerian Civil War provides a historic example of what can happen when entrenched, committed Islamic extremists take on an established security establishment.
More bad news: developed states have had almost universally poor results with their interventions in these national wars of liberation and state formation. In almost every case, the developed states were forcibly kicked out of their former domains. The British headlong retreat from Aden in 1967, the French defeat in Vietnam and Algeria, and the American defeat in Vietnam all represented important signposts as the wars of national liberation became prominent in the post-World War II era.
Moreover, the attempts to intervene in these disputes were often marked by ill-informed choices in backing local participants. The American backing of Chiang Kai-shek turned out particularly badly as did the backing of Nguyen Van Thieu. Iraqi leader Nouri al-Maliki and Hamid Karzai must also now be added to the list of bad choices by the United States.
The hysteria sweeping the West today over who’s up and who’s down in the battle for power in Iraq and Syria and elsewhere in the region needs to be placed in this historic context. There is nothing remarkable about these wars. The lessons of past attempts to involve us in these localized struggles suggest that caution should be exercised in committing our militaries to affect the outcomes. A regrettable but perhaps enduring lesson of international politics is that sometimes keeping your powder dry and being patient is just the best option.
Protesters gathered in Ahrar Square, in the Iraqi city of Mosul, on April 3, 2013 against US-backed Nouri al-Maliki’s government. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS
]]>Much current debate in the United States about foreign policy can be boiled down—at the risk of the sort of oversimplification that too often characterizes the debate itself—to the following. On one side are calls for the United States to do more (exactly what it is supposed to do more of often [...]]]>
Much current debate in the United States about foreign policy can be boiled down—at the risk of the sort of oversimplification that too often characterizes the debate itself—to the following. On one side are calls for the United States to do more (exactly what it is supposed to do more of often does not seem to matter) in response to untoward happenings in hot spots such as Iraq, Syria, or Ukraine. On the other side, which includes most of the time the Obama administration, is a tempered restraint based on the limitations and complications of trying to do anything more in such places.
This line-up has some similarities to age-old confrontations between hedgehogs, who know (or think they know) one big thing, and foxes, who pay attention to a lot of things without having any one big idea. The nature of the debate has even more to do with the highly asymmetric nature of any argument between incumbent policy-makers, who have the burden of taking real action with real consequences and of dealing with all the messy and costly details, and of outside critics, who have the luxury of bemoaning bad things happening in the world without actually having to take any practical steps to do anything about them, and without having responsibility for the consequences.
This asymmetry has seemed especially marked with the current president, and not only because some of the biggest burdens of his foreign policy have involved cleaning up leftovers from his predecessor’s foreign policy (including the premiere threat du jour, the group usually known as ISIS, whose birth was a direct consequence of the Iraq War). The current clear preference of the American public to avoid new entangling military encounters naturally gives rise to the charge that President Obama is merely bowing to that public opinion rather than exerting leadership.
The principal features of the non-incumbent side of the debate are seen over and over again, even if looking beyond such prominent and stalwart members of that side as Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who never met an entangling military encounter they didn’t like. One sees these features in the pronouncements of, for example, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker, or of the Washington Post editorial page, which has beaten its drum particularly hard for getting more deeply involved in the Syrian civil war. One familiar feature is the implicit assumption that if there is a nasty situation out there, the United States ought to be able to do something to solve it, coupled with the further assumption that the more actively involved the Untied States becomes in the problem, the more good will come out of the situation.
Another feature is a fondness for applying (again without supporting analysis) the most optimistic assumptions about how some hypothetical alternative policy in the past would have come out. E.g., the idea that if only the United States had done more earlier to assist a “moderate” opposition in Syria, we wouldn’t have Assad, or ISIS, or both to deal with today. Or, if only we had come down harder on Putin he wouldn’t be mucking around in eastern Ukraine today. Yet another repeated feature is an equation of leadership with forceful action, especially military action—as illustrated by Corker’s charge that President Obama is “uncomfortable being commander in chief”.
Also recurrent is the invoking of very hedgehog-like calls for a single “coherent strategy” or “organizing principle” or some such thing, with those making the calls secure in the knowledge that rhetorically such formulations always have an advantage over anything that can be belittled as ad hoc or reactive. The oversimplification involved is grossest when applied to U.S. policy toward the entire world, but there is still oversimplification when such a call is applied even to a single country. We hear, for example, that problems of U.S. policy toward Iraq are a simple matter of deciding whether the United State has a mission of stabilizing Iraq. Actually, it’s not really anywhere near that simple. Instability in Iraq has many different facets, some of which should concern the United States and some of which should not, and some of which are amenable to U.S. influence and some of which are not.
Hillary Clinton, whose recent pronouncements must be dismaying to progressive realists fearing they will not have any acceptable choice at the top of the ballot in November 2016, has been talking in the same mode. She tells us that not doing stupid stuff is not an “organizing principle,” and a great nation like the United States needs an organizing principle for its foreign policy. Two things about that comment make it, well, not quite smart. One is that the world is a very disorganized place, and any single organizing principle is too simple to be effective in dealing with all, or even most, of the problems the world throws at us.
The other thing wrong with that comment is that not doing stupid stuff is so important that it deserves to be at the top of any president’s checklist, just as Hippocrates taught that “first do no harm” should be at the top of any physician’s checklist. Think about the Middle East, and ask what development, whether involving an action or inaction by the United States, has had the biggest effects, for good or for ill, on U.S. interests in recent years. The answer has to be—firmly implanted on the “for ill” side of the ledger—the Iraq War. The most important thing any U.S. president should do is not to do stupid stuff like that, or to get into a position with a serious risk of sliding into something like that.
Mr. Obama’s interview with Tom Friedman last week was a clear statement of the other side of the foreign policy debate. Friedman writes that “the president has a take on the world, born of many lessons over the last six years, and he has feisty answers for all his foreign policy critics.” The president’s observations reflected at least as comprehensive view of the world as those throwing out the buzz phrases ofcomprehensive strategy and organizing principle, coupled with an awareness of the unavoidable complexities whether one is dealing with the whole world or with a single troubling country. His answers were not just feisty but insightful, such as explaining why the idea that putting more arms in the hands of “former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth” was never going to be a solution to the problems of Syria, and why in Iraq the incentives for political deal-makers in Baghdad will have at least as much to do with that country’s future stability as munitions in Nineveh. The least persuasive aspect of his comments concerned his unwillingness to recognize intervention in Libya as a mistake.
One should hope that Mr. Obama, as a second term president, will not let his policies over the next two years be diverted by ill-aimed screeching of hawks. Even if he doesn’t, however, the shape and tenor of current debate risks creating a narrative, the effects of which might not be felt until the next administration, that most of the world’s maladies exist because the United States didn’t do something more, whatever that something might be.
Photo: President Barack Obama meets with National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice and National Security Council staff in the Situation Room of the White House, April 3, 2014. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
This article was first published by the National Interest and was reprinted here with permission. Copyright the National Interest.
]]>