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The Middle East, America, and
the Emerging World Order
Remarks to the National Research University Higher School
of Economics
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Moscow, Russia 29 November 2012
I want to speak
today about the Middle East in global, not just American perspective. Of course, as I’m sure you know, it was Rear
Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, the great American naval strategist, who first
called West Asia and North Africa “the Middle East.” As he saw it, this was the region between
America’s “near east,” that is Europe, and its “far east,” meaning India. For better or ill, the name stuck. Even people in the region now use it. Arabs say “ash-Sharq al-Awsat” to refer to
where they live.
An Arab friend
once told me that God waited till last to create the Middle East. As He did so, He remarked to the Angel Jibril
that He planned to make the region truly special. God said He would put the Garden of Eden
there as well as the three holiest cities on the planet, the world’s most
magnificent desert landscapes, and some of its most beautiful coral reefs. When God went on to say that He also intended
to bestow three-fifths of the world’s energy reserves on the region, Jibril
reportedly tapped Him on the shoulder to ask Him whether He didn’t think He was
overdoing it. God is said to have
replied: “wait till you see the people I’m going to put there.”
The Middle East
is where Africa, Asia, and Europe meet.
That, not the character of its peoples, is the main reason it has been
at the center of so much human history.
The strategic interaction between North Africa, West and Central Asia,
and Europe has been intense. In both the
Second World War and the Cold War, battlegrounds in these areas were closely
correlated. But their strategic
inseparability had long been evidenced in repeated conquests of Europe and
India from the Asian steppe; invasions of Europe from Africa by Carthage and
the Arabs; the Greek and Roman annexations of large parts of West Asia and North
Africa; Islam’s conquest of territories from Spain to India; Ottoman rule in
southeastern Europe, North Africa, and West Asia; and latter day European
empire building in Africa as well as in the Levant. Eight centuries ago, when the Mongols ruled
Eurasia, and again during World War II and the Cold War, the Mediterranean and
Asia-Pacific regions were so conjoined strategically that they functioned as a
single geopolitical precinct.
The Middle East
is where the world’s three great monotheistic religions began, where religious
fanaticism is most highly developed, where both ethno-religious and state
terrorism are most widely practiced, and where the bulk of the world’s
conventional oil and gas supplies are to be found. All four attributes give the region
exceptional geopolitical influence. The
Middle East today is a region in which American primacy is receding amidst an
Islamist awakening, in which terrorists and the risks of nuclear proliferation
are multiplying, and in which the political geography created by the colonial
era can no longer be taken for granted.
The world’s
13.5 million Jews, 2.1 billion Christians, and 1.6 billion Muslims all revere
the city of Jerusalem as a place of pilgrimage.
All are emotionally invested, though from different perspectives, in the
status of that city, its monuments, and the surrounding land of Palestine. The displacement of much of Palestine’s
mostly Muslim Arab population by the partial ingathering of the world’s Jews in
a continuously expanding state of Israel has set in motion global trends of
spreading religious animosity. The
malevolence this hatred fuels is now manifested in wars of religion. These wars are as merciless as those that
attended the death of the Roman Catholic order in Europe during the Thirty
Years War, though not yet as destructive.
Like the Thirty Years War, the conflicts in the Middle East combine
religious fervor with toxic politics and innovative ways of war.
Uniquely among
religious communities, Jews also define themselves as a people. The conflict between Israelis and
Palestinians began under British colonialism, which fostered Jewish settlement
in Palestine. At the beginning, the
competing nationalisms of the European Jewish immigrants and the indigenous
Palestinian Arabs had few religious overtones.
With Israel’s independence, the contention widened to intermittent
warfare between Israeli Jews and Arabs more generally. It has since evolved into a planetwide
religious conflict in which anti-Semitism competes with Islamophobia, and
secularism contends with Islamism.
The violent
antagonism in Palestine has helped to inspire terrorist reprisal against
Israelis and their allies. It has also
spawned retaliatory interventions in the Muslim world that have catalyzed
increasingly savage warfare between adherents of the Sunni and Shiite sects of
Islam. This process has now embroiled
the United States and a growing number of Muslim societies in low-intensity
wars of attrition that no one knows how to end.
Snowballing hostilities are an expanding threat to the peace of both
Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere.
For anyone with
the ability to listen, the causes of virulent anti-Americanism and its spread
in the Muslim world are not hard to understand.
The fanatics who assaulted New York and Washington on September 11, 2001
went out of their way to describe their motivations. They also outlined their objectives to anyone
who would listen. America turned off its
hearing aid. It’s still off. The grievances that catalyzed 9/11 remain not
simply unaddressed but ignored or denied by Americans.
The Islamist
goal is not to impose Islam on
non-Muslim countries. It is to expel non-Muslim influence from Muslim
lands. But, rather than analyzing the
Islamist challenge in its own terms, the United States has analogized the
struggle to past contests for global supremacy, like World War II and the Cold
War. It has compounded this error by
responding to the challenge of Islamist terrorism with a series of military and
paramilitary campaigns that are unlinked to any political strategy. Lacking such a strategy, America has sought
no ideological allies in the Muslim world.
Not surprisingly, the results of this misconceived approach have been
counterproductive. There is little, if
any, prospect that it will yield anything but increasingly costly failure in
future.
Al Qaeda saw
9/11 as a counterattack against American policies that had directly or
indirectly killed and maimed large numbers of Muslims. Some of those enraged by these policies were
prepared to die to achieve revenge. The
chief planner of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, testified under oath that a
primary purpose of al Qaeda’s criminal assault on the United States was to
focus "the American people . . . on the atrocities that America is committing
by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people . . . .” In so-called “fatwas” in 1996 and 1998, Osama
Binladin justified al Qaeda’s declaration of war against the United States by
reference to the same issue, while levying other charges against America. Specifically, he accused Americans of
directly murdering one million Muslims, including 400,000 children, through the
U.S. siege and sanctions against Iraq, while “occupying” the Muslim heartland
of Saudi Arabia.
Al Qaeda
members have described the war strategy they ultimately adopted as having five
stages. Through these, they projected,
the Islamic world could rid itself of all forms of aggression against it.
In stage one,
al Qaeda would produce massive American civilian casualties with a spectacular
attack on U.S. soil in order to provoke American retaliation in the form of the
invasion of one or more Muslim countries.
In stage two, al Qaeda would use the American reaction to its attack to
incite, energize, and organize expanding resistance to the American and Western
presence in Muslim lands. In stage
three, the U.S. and its allies would be drawn into a long war of attrition as
conflict spread throughout the Muslim world.
By stage four,
the struggle would transform itself into a self-sustaining ideology and set of
operating principles that could inspire continuing, spontaneously organized
attacks against the U.S. and its allies, impose ever-expanding demands on the
U.S. military, and divide America’s allies from it. In the final stage, the U.S. economy would,
like that of the Soviet Union before it, collapse under the strain of
unsustainable military spending, taking the dollar-dominated global economy
down with it. In the ensuing disorder,
al Qaeda thought, an Islamic Caliphate could seize control of Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, and the rest of the Middle East and complete the expulsion of non-Muslim
influence from the region.
This fantastic,
perverted vision reflected al Qaeda’s belief that if, against all odds,
faith-based struggle could bring down the Soviet Union, it could also break the
power of the United States, its Western allies, and Israel. This strategy seemed ridiculous when al Qaeda
first proclaimed it. It is still
implausible, but sounds less preposterous than it once did.
Strategies can
only be evaluated in terms of their objectives.
The objective of the 9/11 attacks was to provoke the United States into
military overreactions that would enrage and arouse the world’s Muslims,
estrange Americans from Arabs, stimulate a war of religion between Islam and
the West, undermine the close ties between Washington and Riyadh, curtail the
commanding influence of the United States in the Middle East, and overthrow the
Saudi monarchy. The aftershocks of Al Qaeda’s 9/11 kamikaze operation against
the United States have so far failed to shake the Saudi monarchy but – to one
degree or another – the operation has achieved its other goals.
Among other
things, the violent interaction between America and the Muslim world since 9/11
has burdened future generations of Americans with over $5 trillion in war debt,
with more debt yet to come. This has
thrust the United States into fiscal crisis.
The 9/11 attacks evoked reactions that have eroded the rule of law at
home and abroad, tarnished the global appeal of Western democracy, and
militarized American foreign policy.
They precipitated military interventions in the Middle East that have
energized reactionary religious dogmatism among Muslims. In other words, the continuing struggle is
reshaping the ideologies and political economies of non-Muslim and Muslim
societies alike. And most of the changes
are not for the better.
As Islamist
terrorism has gained global reach, it has provided political justification for
a general retreat from civil liberties and ethical standards of governance in
secular societies everywhere, not just in the United States. Russia is not an exception to this
trend. Ironically, the Middle East was
where the moral values upon which modern societies are founded had their
origin. The European Enlightenment
transformed these norms into secular ideals of reason, tolerance, and human and
civil rights that spread widely throughout the world. Trends and events in the Middle East are now
setting back prospects for the advance of tolerance in that region even as they
drive a widening deviation from the values of the Enlightenment elsewhere.
Although there
is a long tradition of heroic sacrifice in Islam, the use of self-immolation as
a weapon by Muslims began only in the early 1980s, when Israel’s invasion of
Lebanon led to the widening and ultimately successful Shiite use of suicide
bombings against Israeli, American, and French forces. By the early 1990s, Sunni Palestinians had
embraced the suicide belt as a means of resistance and reprisal to the Israeli
occupation and settlement of the West Bank and Gaza. As this century began, various forms of
explosive self-destruction began to be widely employed in acts of terrorism
against non-Muslims outside the Middle East, including with tragic regularity
here in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia, in the 9/11 attacks on the United
States, and subsequently in the capitals of Western Europe.
When the U.S.
invasion of Iraq catalyzed bitterly lethal strife between Iraqi Sunnis and
Shiites, suicide bombing quickly became the weapon of choice for Sunni
extremists there. By the middle of the
last decade, this technique had begun to be widely used in Afghanistan. What began as a means of last-ditch
resistance to invasion and occupation is now a preferred means of retaliation
against foreigners seen to have offended the peace of the Muslim umma.
Although it is completely contrary to Islamic scripture, suicide bombing
has become a predictable aspect of civil strife everywhere in the Islamic world
and beyond it. And civil strife is
widespread. Much-resented foreign
intrusions into Muslim lands have exacerbated intra-Muslim sectarian
differences.
Al Qaeda’s
kamikaze attack on the United States drew America into a punitive raid in Afghanistan. This soon became a campaign of pacification
there. It eventually grew into a
widening circle of armed interventions in other Muslim societies. These include the now-ended, tragically
counterproductive American attempt to transform the political culture of Iraq
and the frustrating, continuing effort by the United States and NATO to do the
same in Afghanistan.
It has long
been said that Afghanistan is where empires go to die. Many would argue that the Soviet Union’s
experience in Afghanistan was what finally broke both its spirit and its
treasury. Most Muslims believe
this. They also believe that America’s
misadventures in the Middle East are having a similar, if so far less decisive
effect on the United States. As they see
it, a great deal of the melancholy among Americans today derives from mounting
recognition that U.S. military campaigns in Muslim countries are failing to
accomplish their objectives, even as they become both apparently endless and
ever more unaffordable.
America’s
almost nine-year war in Iraq claimed at least 6,000 American military and
civilian lives. It wounded 100,000 U.S.
personnel. It displaced 2.8 million
Iraqis and by conservative estimate killed at least 125,000 of them, while
wounding another 350,000. The U.S.
invasion and occupation of Iraq will ultimately cost Americans at least $3.4
trillion, of which $1.4 trillion represents money actually spent by U.S.
government departments and agencies during combat operations; $1 trillion is
the minimal estimate of future interest payments; and $1 trillion is future
health care, disability, and other payments to the almost one million U.S.
veterans of the fighting. The war failed
to achieve any objective other than the removal from power of Saddam
Hussein. The U.S. invasion and
occupation traumatized Iraq, set it ablaze with sectarian strife that has since
spread to Syria and elsewhere, and left the security of Iraqi Kurds and Sunni
Arabs in doubt. It destroyed the balance
of power in the region, allied Iraq with Iran, and estranged Iraq from its Arab
neighbors in the Persian Gulf.
After eleven
years of combat in Afghanistan, the United States alone has spent about $580
billion there. Leaving aside other NATO
members, almost 2,000 Americans have died and 16,000 have been seriously
wounded in Afghanistan. In the end, the
Afghan war is likely to cost Americans about $1.5 trillion. That’s about $50,000 per Afghan. The per capita income in Afghanistan is about
$1,000. The United States and NATO are
now headed for the exits, with no workable plan to deny Afghanistan to
terrorists with global reach, contain the effects of India’s and Pakistan’s
strategic rivalry, or insulate the rest of Central Asia from the spillover
effects of continuing disorder there.
There is no reliable
estimate of the expense of ongoing American combat operations in places such as
the Afghan-Pakistan frontier, the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, the
Sahel, and now – post-Benghazi – in North Africa. Together, however, the various wars the United
States has conducted or is conducting in Muslim countries or against Islamist
guerrillas and terrorists will ultimately cost something approaching $6
trillion dollars. The evidence strongly
suggests that this effort is creating many more terrorists than it is
killing. There is no end in sight and no
strategy for achieving one.
Terrorists are
people with a grudge and a bomb but no air force – and so far no drones – with
which to inflict bodily harm on their enemies.
Suicide bombing allows otherwise impotent peoples to destroy politically
important targets. It reflects the
unfortunate facts that human bravery is the most effective means of breaching
security perimeters and that the human brain is the most reliable guidance
system yet invented for delivering bombs to targets. Until Muslim extremists are either drained of
their resentment or convinced that there are nonviolent means to register their
grievances, they will continue to make their political point through terrorist
acts. Some of these will involve the
willing death of those carrying them out.
Others will rely on innovation, much as improvised explosive devices
have evolved on the battlefields of Afghanistan. The struggle will not be limited to the
Middle East. It will extend to the homelands
of those carrying out military operations in Muslim lands.
There is no
universally accepted definition of terrorism.
In default of one, I defer to former UN Secretary General Kofi
Annan. Speaking as Secretary-General, he
defined terrorism as “any action intended
to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or noncombatants, when the
purpose of such an act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population
or compel a government or international organization to carry out or abstain
from any act.”
Given the
tendency of enemies to copy each other, it is ironic but perhaps not
surprising, that counterterrorism has come to rely upon terrorism to combat
terrorists. America’s expanding drone
wars along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier and in Somalia, Yemen, the Sahel, and
elsewhere fit the definition of terrorism except for the fact that they are
directed against loosely associated Islamic civilian militants rather than a
government or an army. Israel’s
occupation and gradual annexation of Palestine as well as its brutal siege and
occasional battering of Gaza also rely heavily on state terrorism intended to
intimidate Palestinians into passivity.
Quite aside from the betrayal of traditional values and the forfeiture
of the moral high ground that this represents, using terrorism to fight
terrorism invites rather than discredits terrorist retaliation,
especially when the political drivers of terrorist violence remain unaddressed.
History
strongly suggests that the only way to end terrorism – short of the genocidal
annihilation of intransigent populations – is to take action to address the
grievances and apprehensions that inspire the terrorists. Jewish terrorism against the British in
Palestine ended when the United Nations General Assembly authorized what became
the State of Israel. Irish terrorism
against the United Kingdom ended when Britain took advantage of mutual
exhaustion on the battlefield to redress political and social grievances in
Northern Ireland while opening the political process to its terrorist
opponents.
More recently,
the successful suppression of terrorism in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has
famously involved the rehabilitation through religious reeducation of would-be
terrorists and their subsequent reintegration in society. It has also entailed ruthless action to kill
or bring to justice those who actually engage in terrorism. But the prerequisites for progress against
terrorism in the Kingdom have been the removal of the politico-religious
irritant of the U.S. military presence on Saudi soil and, even more
importantly, a well-conceived, state-sponsored religious campaign to refute and
discredit Islamist justifications for terrorism.
Terrorists are
inspired by passionate resentment of perceived injustice and by the belief that
there is no effective alternative to violence as a means of halting this
injustice. To end terrorism, both these
motivations – that is, the sources of the resentment and the absence of an
alternative to violent means of curing them – must be addressed. Given the large role of American policies in
stoking the anger that powers terrorism with global reach, this means that
there must be major adjustments in U.S. policy.
Unfortunately, given the range of difficult domestic issues now confronting
America, it is unlikely that such policy adjustments will take place for the
foreseeable future. The American
paramilitary contention with Islamist terrorists is therefore much more likely
to escalate than to subside. This
suggests that the threat to the security of both the American homeland and
Americans abroad will also escalate.
The
implications of this dynamic are dire, not just for the United States but for
other non-Muslim nations afflicted by Islamist terrorism. Nations that support Israel or have
disgruntled Muslim minorities on their soil will face a protracted struggle to
sustain domestic tranquility. The United
States will continue to support Israel.
So, I believe, will Russia. The
Russian Federation borders the Middle East and includes restive Muslim
minorities. Russians can expect to
continue to suffer terrorist attacks.
The countries of Western Europe have too many Muslim immigrants to be
insulated from the spreading violence.
U.S. and Israeli policy may bear a disproportionate share of the blame
for the phenomenon of Islamist terrorism, but it is not a purely American or
Israeli problem.
Continuing
challenges to the internal security of nations perceived to be persecuting
Muslims will guarantee continuing pressure on domestic civil liberties and the
tightening of police controls on freedom of movement, expression, and religious
belief everywhere. In the face of
protracted struggle with Islamist extremists, America is more likely than not
to continue its pull-back from the rule of law abroad as well as at home. Other nations will react with their own
parallel measures. We must anticipate a
period of increasing illiberalism in the world’s industrial democracies and a
relapse into authoritarianism in many societies that have aspired to leave it
behind.
In these
circumstances, the United States is certain to remain heavily invested in the
Middle East. This means, among other
things, that America is very unlikely to have either the resources or the
leadership time to address the challenges to its primacy in other regions, like
the Indo-Pacific. The pivot to Asia may
turn out to be a pirouette, as the Middle East refuses to release America from
its various preoccupations there. But
continuing heavy investment by the United States in the Middle East does not
mean a reversal of America’s ebbing sway there.
The United
States no longer makes any pretense of the evenhandedness that once enabled it
unconditionally to support Israel while simultaneously maintaining cordial
relations with the major nations of the Arab world. The U.S. effort to broker peace between
Israel and the Palestinians has lost all credibility in the region and
internationally. Israel has deliberately
overwhelmed the two-state solution with “facts on the ground” in the form of
illegal settlements in the occupied territories of the West Bank. As a byproduct of this strategy, Israel has
evolved a political order that treats the Arabs in its charge as second-class
citizens in Israel proper, as helots – wards of the state with no rights – in
the West Bank, and as objects of sadistic punishment in Gaza.
A shrinking
part of the Jewish population outside Israel remains identified with Zionism
and prepared passionately to defend it.
A clear majority does not wish to bear the taint of such
association. A growing number of
Americans, including Jewish Americans, are disturbed by Israel’s policies and
resentful of its leaders’ contemptuous dismissal of U.S. interests and views. The more thoughtful members of the Jewish communities
in the United States and elsewhere understand the risks to their standing in
their own societies of their being implicated in Israel’s morally unacceptable
behavior. Still, a significant minority remains committed to Israel, right or
wrong. This minority contains many
individuals of considerable wealth and consequent political influence.
The question of
how to deal with the issues posed by Zionism and its consequences for the Arab
population it has subjugated promises to be increasingly divisive in the United
States and other countries long committed to the Jewish state. The United States remains committed to Israel
but demands for boycotts, disinvestment, and sanctions against Israel are
growing. Racism of the sort now built
into the Israeli political system is a problem Americans understand from our
own experience, see as fundamentally wrong, and have repudiated. Similarly, the world decisively rejected
apartheid in South Africa. It is most
unlikely to accept it in Israel.
Meanwhile, the
Arab uprisings promise to strip Israel of even the minimal acceptability that
past American diplomacy had won for it in its region. The Arab world is no longer sleepwalking
through history. Its governments now
seek legitimacy in the support of their people, not in endorsements or
subventions from foreign protectors.
Arab political parties increasingly identify with Islam and reject
secularism. The clear trend is toward
both greater religiosity and greater identification with the Palestinian cause.
Arab
governments have long been prepared to make peace with Israel but Arab peoples
have yet to be convinced that Israel can be an acceptable part of the Middle
East mosaic. Israel’s cruelties to its
captive Arab population, its scofflaw settlement practices, its periodic
maimings of Gaza and Lebanon, and its short-sighted, self-destructive
alienation of powerful neighbors like Turkey call into question the continuing
viability of a U.S. Middle East policy aimed at achieving a secure place for
Israel in the regional order. It is
becoming harder to paper over the gap between American and Israeli values and
the tensions between Israel’s purposes and competing American interests and
strategic concerns.
Since 1979, the
Camp David accords have been the linchpin of U.S. policy in the Levant. They are now in jeopardy. Egypt has begun to demand that Israel, too,
fulfill its promises at Camp David.
(Israel’s treaty commitments included its withdrawal from the
territories it seized in 1967 and facilitation of Palestinian
self-determination there. Instead, it
has swallowed up the land for itself, while ghettoizing its Palestinian
inhabitants.) Jordan now faces
simultaneous demands for domestic political reform and a less accommodating
posture toward Israel. The Camp David
accords were conceived as a platform on which to build a broader peace. With no such peace in the works, the platform
itself is beginning to wobble and show signs of future collapse.
Egypt and
Jordan are not the only neighbors of Israel whose future orientation is in
doubt. Despite the hard line Damascus
has traditionally taken on Israel-Palestine issues, Syria has been reliably
passive as an enemy of Israel. In
contrast, Syria today is a wild card in Middle East politics. No one can be sure of its future roles and
orientation vis-à-vis Iran, Israel, and Lebanon, not to mention Turkey and the
Arab Gulf states. It is hard to predict
when and how Syria will emerge from its current anarchy but it is even harder
to imagine that, when it does so, it will sustain its past pattern of
coexistence with Israel.
The existing
diplomatic mechanisms for managing Israeli-Palestinian relations no longer have
credibility. Talk of a resumption of the
so-called “peace process” evokes cynical sarcasm. The convening of the “Quartet” is greeted
with indifference. Things have
changed. Everyone in the region knows
that Israel is obsessed with land. No
one now believes it is interested in peace.
Mr. Netanyahu’s mid-November assault on Gaza has simply reinforced the
regional view that Israel is an enemy with which it is impossible peacefully to
coexist.
The Palestinian
leadership in the West Bank remains committed to a two-state solution based on
self-determination in a mere 22 percent of the original Palestine Mandate. Hamas has indicated that it is prepared to go
along with this. But it has been almost
twenty years since there has been any progress toward peace between Israel and
the Palestinians. Israel’s seizure and
settlement of land beyond its 1967 borders now effectively preclude a separate
Palestinian state. The trend in
Palestine and abroad is therefore shifting rapidly toward support for a
struggle for equal civil and human rights within an unpartitioned Palestine.
The Arab
reawakening of 2011 was accompanied by the beginnings of an intense political
conversation among all 340 million Arabs.
Within this newly aroused Arab community, change has taken place one
Arab nation at a time, reflecting national rather than pan-Arab circumstances,
interests, and concerns. Still, there
are some trends that span the Arab world.
All Arab states are trying to attenuate their dependence on their
previous foreign protectors and to diversify their international
relations. None seems likely to be
willing in future to rely exclusively on a particular foreign power. All seek new balance in their international
orientation. The nations of the Middle
East were once subjected to European colonial powers, then divided into spheres
of American and Soviet influence, and finally dominated by the post-Cold War
United States. They are now
promiscuously engaged in building relationships with a widening list of
external powers.
Aided by the
eclipse of American influence, the diplomatic lassitude of a self-absorbed Europe,
and the rise of Islamist populism, Middle Easterners, not foreigners, are
deciding what happens in their region.
New coalitions are forming between them.
In the new Middle East, outsiders no longer call the shots. They are business partners, mercenaries,
potential hired help, or simply bystanders.
Nowhere is this
more apparent than in Syria. The strife
there is the product of domestic turmoil inspired by Arab uprisings
elsewhere. It is also the outcome of
foreign covert action intended to overthrow the Assad government and install a
Sunni Muslim regime, thereby depriving Iran of Syria as an ally, isolating
Hezbollah in Lebanon, and flanking Shiite-ruled Iraq. Given the linkages between Syria and its neighbors,
civil strife in Syria could easily spread more widely in the region. The division of Syria and Lebanon was an
artifice of French colonialism. If
Syria disintegrates, Lebanon will almost certainly do likewise. If Syria comes under unchallenged Sunni
Muslim domination, it will suppress both Shiite political sway and Iranian
influence in Lebanon. That, presumably,
is one factor motivating states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar to support the
mostly Sunni Syrian opposition to Alawite rule in Syria.
Short of the
obvious implications of developments in Syria for the continued existence of
Lebanon as an independent state, the potential regional impact of what is
happening in Syria is far-reaching The
situation of Syria’s Kurds affects Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. Syria’s Sunni Arabs have tribal as well as
religious links to Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. Syria’s ruling Alawites are linked to
Alawites and other Shiites in Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, and even farther afield.
Syria’s current
distress devalues it as a strategic asset for Iran almost as much as regime
change might. Despite their
protestations of concern about the humanitarian costs of the fighting in Syria,
governments bent on undercutting Iran’s influence in the region feel no real
urgency about ending the conflict there.
Iran remains traumatized by its historical experience of Arab, Russian,
British, and American dominion over it.
Iran’s theocratism estranges it from much of the rest of the Muslim
world. The peculiar separation of powers
inherent in the doctrine of “guardianship by jurists” – wilayat al faqih – raises
doubts about who has the authority to speak for Iran internationally. The Shiite doctrine of “calculated deception”
– taqiyyah – adds to this perplexity by inspiring
distrust of Iranian policy statements and assurances.
Iranian-American
relations are at their lowest level since the two countries first began to deal
with each other officially 137 years ago.
There is much talk of war but no serious dialogue between the two
governments. People-to-people exchanges
between the U.S. and Iran are nearly nonexistent, and media on both sides are
biased and inaccurate in their reporting about the other. The United States has effectively outsourced
its Iran policy to Israel. The issue
Israel cares about is whether Iran acquires nuclear weapons, not Iran’s
aspirations for hegemony in the Persian Gulf region, its struggle with Saudi
Arabia for leadership of the world’s Muslims, or its search for strategic
advantage in Bahrain. In virtually every
respect, the official American view of Iran mirrors Israel’s rather than that
of the Arabs.
Israel’s
perspective consists in part of psychotic fears that Iran might attempt to
annihilate the Jews in the Holy Land. It
also proceeds from entirely rational apprehensions about the impact on Israel’s
military freedom of action if it loses its nuclear monopoly in the region. Few outside Israel believe that Iran’s
possession of nuclear weapons would embolden it to attack Israel, given
Israel’s ability to obliterate Iran in response. And no one has suggested that Iran might
attack Israel with anything other than nuclear weapons – which it doesn’t yet
have. But Israel’s threats to attack
Iran give Iran a very convincing reason to secure itself by developing a
nuclear deterrent. Given this logic,
Israel’s fear of losing its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East seems likely to
become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Iran claims
that, inasmuch as nuclear weapons are immoral, it will not acquire them. Yet Iran seems to be reenacting Israel’s
clandestine weapons development program of five decades ago, developing
capabilities to build and deliver nuclear weapons while denying that it intends
actually to do any such thing. Israel
lacks the capability to eliminate Iran’s nuclear programs but keeps threatening
quixotic military action to do so.
Israel’s purpose is clearly to force the United States into a war with
Iran on its behalf.
As an
alternative to war, the United States, joined by some of its allies, has
bypassed the UN to impose what American politicians describe as “crippling
sanctions” on Iran. American pundits
gloat over the suffering these are causing the Iranian people. Real as this suffering is, however, it has
not caused Iran to change course. The
belief that it will is an expression of faith rather than reason. Washington has so far offered Tehran no way
to achieve relief from these sanctions other than complete capitulation to U.S.
and Israeli demands. Meanwhile, the U.S.
Congress has provided generous funding to efforts to overthrow the Iranian
regime. America is working with Israel and the Mujahedin-e Khalq to carry out
cyber warfare and assassinations inside Iran.
By any standard, these are acts of war that invite reprisal. There is no negotiating process worthy of the
name underway between the United States and Iran.
On the other
hand, there are also no good military options for Iran, Israel, or the United
States. Iran is too realistic to start a
war it could only lose. An attack by
Israel on Iran would thrust the entire region into turmoil and deal a heavy
blow to the world economy, while stoking Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Such an attack would damage but not cripple
Iran’s ability to go nuclear.
American air
and related attacks on Iran could set back its nuclear program more
substantially but would still not eliminate Iran’s capability to build nuclear
weapons. Any attack by either Israel or
the United States would, in fact, unite Iranians in demanding that their
government develop and field a nuclear deterrent. It would result in Iranian retaliation
against Israel and the Arab countries of the Gulf, while creating a far more
active, long-term Iranian threat to the region than at present. It would also further inflame Muslim opinion
against the United States, making the continuing American military presence in
the Gulf Arab countries politically precarious and precipitating an upsurge in
anti-American and anti-Israeli terrorism.
So far the
world’s diplomacy toward Iran resembles its approach to north Korea. In the absence of major adjustments in policy
to facilitate a compromise, this diplomacy seems likely to yield the same
result with Tehran that it drid with Pyongyang.
The most likely prospect is therefore that Iran, like north Korea, will
eventually get its bomb. This will
ensure that other countries in the region seek their own nuclear deterrents,
either on their own or through arrangements with powers like Pakistan to
station nuclear weapons on their territory.
The world has
come to rely upon American domination of the Middle East to serve the global
interest in stability and secure access to energy supplies there. American military strength remains without
peer but the political and economic capacity of the United States to be able
indefinitely to play the role of stabilizer of balances and lubricator of
interactions between states and peoples in the Middle East is now in
doubt.
The United
States has neither the political will nor the diplomatic credibility to
resurrect the defunct peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. There is no apparent substitute for the past
American role as the manager of that conflict.
But without some new temporizing proposition, the Camp David framework
and other elements of the status quo have a limited half life, and the cycle of
Islamist terrorist action and U.S. and other non-Muslim military reaction will
continue to escalate.
America has
demonstrated the capacity to organize severe economic pressure on Iran but not
the ability to curtail Iran’s regional influence, to carry on a strategic
dialogue with it, or to persuade it to provide credible guarantees against its
acquisition of nuclear weapons. Israel
will not give up its own nuclear arsenal to preclude others from acquiring
one. Nuclear proliferation looms as a
real possibility for the Middle East sometime in this decade.
The conflict in
Syria also has the potential to transform the map of the Middle East in highly
destabilizing ways. The United States is
part of the conflict in Syria, but not a plausible source for an answer to
it. For varying reasons, no great power
wishes to see the Libyan precedent applied to Syria. The Libyan experience stiffened international
disagreement about the permissibility of humanitarian intervention in sovereign
states. NATO transparently abused the
UN’s authorization of a no-fly zone in Libya in order to engineer regime change
there. The outcome of that regime change
has been sobering for those who sponsored it.
Mutual mistrust between the region’s and the world’s great powers and
their differing stakes in what happens ensure that the outcome in Syria will be
decided by Syrians, regardless of the views of outsiders.
Israelis and
Palestinians, too, are entering an era in which their own actions and interactions,
not those of outsiders, will be decisive.
Israel would be in difficulty even if America’s ability to protect it
from the regional and global political consequences of its actions were not
rapidly weakening. The only credible
threat to Israel’s existence is internal, not external. It arises from Israel’s deviation from its
own founding values and its inability to find a way to grant dignity and
equality to its captive Arab populations.
Israel remains a state isolated and alienated from its own region,
dependent on external support for its survival, and devoid of a sustainable
basis for governing the territories and peoples it controls. Like apartheid South Africa, it is a vigorous
democracy for some of its people and a harsh tyranny for others. This is not a sustainable status quo.
What is
different is that there is now nothing the United States or any other external
actor can do to help Israel resolve the existential dilemmas it faces. The two-state solution having been precluded,
the achievement of peace for Israel now depends on fundamental change in Israel
itself. As in South Africa, such change
cannot be imposed from outside, though outside pressure for it can help. Solutions must be crafted by Israel itself
with Palestinians and other Arabs. And
if there is to be a mediator in this process, it can no longer be the United
States. It would take years of effort to
rebuild the lost confidence of the parties in such an American role. There is not time to do this.
There is no
current possibility of a renewed balance of power in the Persian Gulf, given
Iraq’s alliance with Iran. Thanks to new
technologies that allow the exploitation of oil and gas in shale deposits, the
United States is moving rapidly toward energy self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency will reduce American concern
about supply disruptions. Arguably, the
American willingness to continue unilateral guarantees for global access to
Middle Eastern energy could be affected.
Still, oil prices everywhere, including North America, are set by the
global balance between supply and demand.
The United States will continue to have an interest in assuring that
this balance is not upset by instability in the Persian Gulf. It is not too soon to begin to discuss how
the burden of sustaining peace and freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf
region could be shared more equitably by the world’s energy producers and
consumers.
The changes
that are taking place in the Middle East are part of a broader evolution toward
a more pluralistic world order in which international affairs are regulated
more at the regional than at the global level.
In the case of the Middle East, as American dominance and influence
recede, the direction of events is being taken up by regional powers and by
political Islam. A region accustomed to
looking to the United States for answers to its multiple dilemmas is now
challenged to craft its own diplomatic processes and solutions. As it struggles to do so, the rest of the
world is being reminded that the Middle East is too important to be left to its
own devices. But the rest of the world,
like the Middle East itself, has yet to organize itself to deal with the
changes that are taking place there, still less their consequences. Those consequences are potentially far-reaching
and grave. The argument for a concerted
international effort to deal with them is compelling.
This text can be accessed at: http://mepc.org/articles-
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