The Middle East That
France and Britain Drew Is Finally Unravelling And there's very little the U.S.
can do to stop it
It is easy to blame what is going on in Iraq or Syria on
dictators and terrorists, but these various bad actors are bit players in a
drama that goes back at least to World War I. What is happening is that the
arrangements that the British and French created during and after World War I—which
established the very existence of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan, and later
contributed to the creation of Israel—are unraveling. Some of these states will
survive in their present form, but others will not. The United States may,
perhaps, be able to slow or moderate the process, but it won’t be able to stop
it.
If you look at a map of the Middle East in 1917, you won’t find
Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, or Palestine. Since the sixteenth century,
that area was part of the Ottoman Empire and was divided into districts that
didn’t match past or future states. The British and French created the future
states—not in order to ease their inhabitants’ transition to self-rule, as they
were supposed to do under the mandate of the League of Nations, but in order to
maintain their own rule over lands they believed had either great economic or
strategic significance.
In 1916, as The Islamic State Report indicates, the
French and British agreed to divide up the Ottoman Middle East in the event
that they defeated Germany and their Ottoman ally. The French claimed the lands
from the Lebanese border to Mosul; the British got part of Palestine and what
would be Jordan and Southern Iran from Baghdad to Basra. After the war, the two
countries modified these plans under the aegis of the League of Nations. At San
Remo in 1920, the British got the territory that in 1921 they divided into
Palestine and Transjordan and all of what became Iraq. (France gave up northern
Iraq in exchange for 25 percent of oil revenues.) The French got greater Syria,
which they divided into a coastal state, Lebanon, and four states to the east
that would later become Syria.
These lands had always contained a mix of religions and
ethnicities, but in setting out borders and establishing their rule, the
British and French deepened sectarian and ethnic divisions. The new state of
Iraq included the Kurds in the North (who were Sunni Muslims, but not Arabs),
who had been promised partial autonomy earlier by the French; Sunnis in the
center and west, whose leaders the British and the British-appointed king
turned into the country’s comprador ruling class; and the Shiites in the South,
who were aligned with Iran, and who had been at odds with the Sunnis for
centuries. After the British took power, a revolt broke out that the British
brutally suppressed, but resentment toward the British and toward the central
government in Baghdad persisted. In the new state of Transjordan (which later
became Jordan), the British installed the son of a Saudi ruler to preside over
the Bedouin population; and in Palestine, it promised the Jews a homeland and
their own fledgling state within a state under the Balfour Declaration while
promising only civil and religious rights to the Palestinian Arabs who made up
the overwhelming majority of inhabitants.
In the new state of Lebanon, the French elevated the Christian
Maronites into the country’s ruling elite, and created borders that gave them a
slight majority over the Shia and Sunni Muslims. In the land that became Syria,
the French initially separated the Alawites (from whom the Assad family would
descend) and the Druze into their own states and empowered the urban Sunni
Muslims in Damascus and Aleppo. During World War II, Syria was finally united
in the state that exists today.
From the beginning, these newly created states were engulfed by
riots, revolts, and even civil war. Most of the early revolts were directed
against the colonial authorities, but after World War II, when these states won
their independence, the different religious denominations, ethnicities and
nationalities fought each other for supremacy—the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites in
Iraq, the Jews and Arabs in Palestine (and later Israelis and Palestinians),
the Maronites and Muslims in Lebanon, and the Alawites and Sunnis in Syria. The
resulting strife was not a product of the Arab character or of Islam. As
University of Oklahoma political scientist Joshua Landis has noted, the turmoil in these lands was very similar
to that which took place, and is still taking place, in the various states
constructed and deconstructed in Central and Eastern Europe in the wake of the
breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires and Germany’s defeat after
World War I.
In Lebanon, the turmoil has been almost continuous. Lebanon
still lacks a stable governing authority. In Iraq and Syria, inter-sectarian
and inter-ethnic conflict were temporarily stilled by dictatorships that
severely repressed any hint of revolt. Israel used its military to contain the
conflict with Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and in Gaza. But in Iraq
and Syria, the lid of repression came off, as a result of the American invasion
in 2003 that ousted Saddam Hussein and as a result of the Arab Spring spreading
to Syria.
Theoretically, the lid could be reimposed in either country by a
brutal dictatorship, but it looks increasingly unlikely that either Iraq’s
Nouri al-Maliki or Syria’s Bashar al Assad will be able to impose order on
their deeply divided states. What’s most likely is that Iraq and Syria, like
the former Yugoslavia, will splinter into separate states. Iraq’s Kurds are
likely to be the first to go. The danger for the United States does not lie in
the breakup of these states, but in the empowerment of terrorist groups like
ISIS that could threaten the region’s oil output and use their base in lawless
areas to spread disorder and terror elsewhere, including the West. In the long
run, the United States has to worry about instability in a region that is so
important to the world economy and that will eventually have more than one
nuclear power.
In the past, the United States has been of two minds in dealing
with disorder in the Middle East. The United States generally backed kings and dictators
as long as they were friendly to the United States. But under George W. Bush,
the United States sought to create a democratic revolution in the region by
ousting Saddam. That proved to be futile and dangerous, but the Obama
administration appeared to endorse those objectives in 2011 in the wake of the
Arab Spring revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. At present, the
administration’s strategy seems ad hoc—enthusiastically embracing
Egypt’s repressive government, while calling for Bashar al Assad’s removal.
What the history of the region suggests is that—to put it in
somewhat vague terms—things are going to have to sort themselves out. The
people of this region will have to learn how to govern themselves through
experience, as the people of other nations, including the United States, have
had to do. Outside of Israel, where the United States can exert pressure to end
the occupation, but is often reluctant to do so, American influence is very
limited. There will be more dictators, but also fledgling democracies. And
American objectives will probably have to be limited to preventing terrorist
attacks on the West, the interruption of oil supplies, and the subversion by
groups like ISIS of the more stable regimes in the region. Its principal tools
are diplomacy (that must include Iran), sanctions, and as a very last resort,
narrowly targeted armed intervention. ISIS won’t get its Caliphate, but the
United States won’t get its United States of Arabia either.
No comments:
Post a Comment