The Collapse of Order in the
Middle East
Remarks to the 23rd Annual Arab-U.S.
Policymakers Conference
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Washington, D.C.
October 28, 2014
Will Rogers
once observed that “when you get into trouble 5,000 miles from home, you’ve got
to have been looking for it.” It’s a
good deal more than 5.000 miles to Baghdad or Damascus from here. And, boy, have we gotten into trouble!
We are trying
to cope with the cumulative consequences of multiple failures. Just about every American project in the
Middle East has now come a cropper.
There is a new velcro-backed military campaign morale patch
commemorating this. It is available
through Amazon.com for $7.45. The patch
bears an escutcheon with a logo that, in the interest of decorum, I will not
read out. It sounds like Operation
Enduring FlusterCluck.
If you’re a
Middle East groupie, which your presence here suggests you may be, you need one
of these patches for your jacket. It
describes what is now the characteristic within-the-Beltway approach to problem
solving. If at first we don’t succeed,
we do the same thing again harder, with better technology, and at greater
expense. The patch provides a cogent –
if uncouth – summary of the results of this approach so far this century.
We’re once
again down to the wire in our decade-long negotiations with Iran to cap its
nuclear program in return for sanctions relief.
There is no evidence that sanctions have had any effect at all on Iran’s
policies. Maybe that’s because it
doesn’t have the nuclear weapons program our politicians say it has. Our intelligence agencies tell us there’s no
evidence it does. No matter. Iran’s mastery of the full nuclear fuel cycle
and its development of missiles could give it “nuclear latency” – the future
capacity to weaponize nuclear materials on short notice. The deadline for the latest and likely final
round of negotiations is now only 31 days away.
The failure to reach agreement could drive Iran to decide to build a
bomb sooner rather than later. Still,
those in the region against whom such weapons would be deployed seem to want
the talks to fail. Agreement with Iran
would, after all, open an ominous path to better relations between it and the
West.
The half-century-long
US-managed effort to achieve acceptance for the Jewish state in its region has
meanwhile died of a fatal build-up of glib hypocrisy, sometimes called
Netanyahu Syndrome. Despite decades of
trying, American diplomacy has also definitely failed to reconcile Palestinians
to indefinite existence as disenfranchised captives of Israel’s Jewish
democracy. The so-called “peace process”
will be missed. Eventually there will be
an exhibit about it in the museum of diplomatic debacles. In the meantime, politicians will visit its
grave at opportune moments. There they will pray, piously, for peace, by which
they mean entirely unclear and incompatible things.
The region’s
leaders were long worried that Israel’s abuse of its captive Arab Muslim
population would radicalize their own citizens and destabilize their
societies. Now that this radicalization
has actually occurred, Israel’s cruelty to the Palestinians has become just
another outrage that Muslim extremists cite to justify terrorist reprisals against
the West. Fixing the Israel-Palestine
conflict would no longer call off the anti-American terrorism and wars of
religion it helped catalyze. This does
not remove the Israel-Palestine issue as a motivator for anti-American
terrorism but, in the years to come, you’ll hear a lot about why curing
injustices in the Holy Land need no longer be a concern for American
diplomacy.
There has been
a not-entirely-unrelated discovery that,
in the contemporary Middle East, elections -- at least the first round of them
-- invariably empower Islamists. This
has dialed down the American passion for free elections in Arab societies. Think Palestine and Egypt. The revelation that anarchy also empowers
Islamists is now cutting into American enthusiasm for regime removal. Think Iraq, Libya, and Syria. But as Americans trim our ideological
ambitions, the so-called “Islamic State” – which is as Islamic as the Ku Klux
Klan is Christian so I’ll call them Da`ish
– is demonstrating the enduring potential of religious fanaticism to kill
men, maim children, and enslave women in the name of God.
The United
States and many NATO countries are now engaged against Da`ish from the air,
with a bit of help from a few Arab air forces.
So far, however, the Shiite coalition of Iran, Hezbollah, and the Iraqi
and Syrian governments has been and remains the main force arrayed against
Da`ish on the ground outside the Kurdish domains. This has exposed the awkward fact that Iran
has the same enemies as the United States, if not the same friends. In the region that coined the adage, “my
enemy’s enemy is my friend,” everyone is waiting to see what – if anything –
this might mean. For now at least,
Da`ish is a uniquely brutal force blessed with an enemy divided into
antagonistic and adamantly uncooperative coalitions.
Da`ish has been
out to make itself an irresistibly attractive nuisance by committing dramatic
atrocities and publicizing them to an easily vexed Western world. It is battling to energize the disaffected
among the Islamic faithful against the West and to cleanse the Arab world of
Western influences. It wants to erase
the states that Western colonialism imposed after the collapse of the Ottoman
Empire. It regards them as illegitimate
entities that could not survive without continuing support from the West.
Da`ish judges
that both its policies and its narrative have been validated by the American
and European response to its provocations.
The major contributors to the US-led military coalition opposing Da`ish
are the former colonial powers. These
are Western, predominantly Christian nations, some of them with reputations in
the region for recent sacrilegious mocking of Muslim piety. Token participation in the US-led bombing
campaign in Syria by the air forces of Jordan and some Gulf Arab states fits
easily into the Da`ish narrative. Da`ish
portrays those arrayed against it as a new Crusader army with Arab lackeys
attempting to restore the broken framework of Sykes-Picot.
In this
context, Western-led military intervention is not just an inadequate response
to the threat from Da`ish. It is a
preposterously counterproductive response.
It is as if the Ottoman Sultanate had attempted to deal with Europe’s
Thirty Years War by condemning Christian atrocities and treating them as a
military problem to be resolved by the intervention of Muslim Janissaries.
Admittedly, the
United States cannot escape responsibility for policies that helped birth
Da`ish in Iraq and mature its fighting forces in Syria. The U.S. invasion of Iraq kicked off an orgy
of intolerance and sectarian killing that has now taken at least 700,000 lives
in Iraq and Syria and traumatized both, while threatening the existence of the
other states created by Sykes-Picot a century ago. The rise of Da`ish is a consequence of
anarchy brought on by Western attempts at regime change, but it is ultimately a
deviant cult within Islam. Its immediate
objective is to destroy the existing order in the Muslim world in the name of
Islam. Its doctrines cannot be credibly
rebutted by non-Muslims. The threat it
poses requires a Muslim-led politico-military response. A US-dominated bombing campaign with token
allied participation cannot kill it. The
United States is well supplied with F-15s, 16s, and drones, but it lacks the
religious credentials to refute Da`ish as a moral perversion of Islam. Arab air forces are helpful. Arab religious engagement and moral
leadership are essential to contain and defeat Da`ish.
Da`ish and the
15,000 foreign jihadis it has attracted are an existential threat to Arab
societies and a potential menace to Muslim societies everywhere. Da`ish poses no comparable threat to the
United States. Some Americans argue
therefore that Da`ish doesn’t matter. A
few suggest that, because tight oil and shale gas production is making North
America energy self-sufficient, what happens in the Middle East as a whole
should also no longer matter much to Americans.
But the Persian Gulf is where international oil prices are set. If you doubt this, ask an American tight oil
producer what’s happening in today’s energy markets and why. Without stability in West Asia, the global
economy is also unstable.
Da`ish aspires
not only to destroy the states of the Mashriq – the Arab East – but to conquer
their territories and use their resources to mount attacks on the United
States, European countries, Russia, and China.
It wants to get its hands on the world’s major energy reserves. Its depredations are a current threat only to
stability in West Asia, but its recruitment efforts are as global as its
aspirations. Quite aside from the
responsibility the United States bears for creating the conditions in which
this dangerous cult could be born and flourish, Da`ish threatens American
interests abroad today. It promises to
threaten American domestic tranquility tomorrow. It sees inflicting harm on the West as a
central element of its mission.
For all these
reasons, Da`ish cannot be ignored by the United States or other nations outside
the Middle East. It requires a response
from us. But Da`ish must be actively
countered first and foremost by those it targets within the region, not by the
United States and its Western allies.
This means that our response must be measured, limited, and calculated
to avoid relieving regional players of the primary responsibility for
protecting themselves from the menace to them that Da`ish represents.
Muslims –
whether Shiite or Sunni or Arab, Kurd, Persian, or Turk – now have an expanding
piece of Hell in their part of the Earth, a growing foulness near the center of
Islam. It is almost certainly a greater
threat to all of them than they have ever posed to each other. Da`ish will not be contained and defeated
unless the nations and sects on its regional target list – Shiite and Sunni
alike – all do their part. We should not
delude ourselves. The obstacles to this
happening are formidable.
Virtually every
group now fighting or being victimized in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon has engaged
in or been accused of terrorism by the others.
Sectarian violence continues to stoke hatred in the region. The religious animosities between Shi`ites
and Sunnis are more intense than ever.
The geopolitical rivalry between Iran and the Gulf Arabs remains acute.
The political resentments between Turks, Kurds, and Arabs and between Arabs and
Persians are entrenched. Each
describes the other as part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Unity of
command, discipline, and morale are the keys to both military and political
success. Da`ish has all three. Its opponents do not. Some are dedicated to the defense of Shiite
privilege. Others assign priority to
dislodging Shiite or secular authority.
Some insist on regime change.
Others seek to prevent it. A few
support Islamist democratic movements.
Others seek to suppress and eradicate them. Some fear terrorism from the victims and
enemies of Da`ish more than they fear Da`ish itself. Most treat opposing Da`ish as a secondary
strategic objective or a means of enlisting American and other foreign support
in the achievement of other priorities, not as their primary aim.
With few
exceptions, the states of the region have habitually looked to outside powers
for leadership as well as firepower and manpower with which to respond to major
security challenges. Despite vast
imports of foreign weapons systems, confidence in outside backing has enabled
the countries in the region to assume that they could avoid ultimate
responsibility for their own defense, relying instead on their ability to summon
their American and European security partners in times of crisis. But only a coalition with a strong Muslim
identity can hope to contain and shrink Da`ish.
There is no
such coalition at present. Every actor
in the region has an agenda that is only partially congruent with the
Da`ish-related agendas of others. And
every actor focuses on the reasons it cannot abide or work with some or all of
the others, not on exploring the points it has in common with them.
The United
States has the power-projection and war-fighting capabilities to back a
Muslim-led effort against Da`ish, but lacks the political credibility,
leadership credentials, and diplomatic connections to organize one. Since this century began, America has
administered multiple disappointments to its allies and friends in the Middle
East, while empowering their and our adversaries. Unlike the Gulf Arabs, Egypt, and Turkey,
Washington does not have diplomatic relations with Tehran. Given its non-Muslim identity, solidarity
with Israel, and recent history in the Fertile Crescent, the United States
cannot hope to unite the region’s Muslims against Da`ish. Da`ish is a Muslim insurgency. A coalition led by inhibited foreign forces,
built on papered-over differences, and embodying hedged commitments will not
defeat such an insurgency with or without boots on the ground.
There is an
ineluctable requirement for Muslim leadership and strategic vision from within
the region. Without it, the existing
political geography of the Arab world – not just the map drawn by Sykes-Picot –
faces progressive erosion and ultimate collapse. States will be pulled down, to be succeeded
by warlords, as is already happening in Iraq and Syria. Degenerate and perverted forms of Islam will
threaten prevailing Sunni and Shi`a religious dispensations, as Da`ish now
does.
Where is
regional leadership with acceptable credentials to come from? The Sunni Arab states of the Gulf will not
accept guidance from Iran, nor will Iran accept it from them. The alternatives are Egypt and Turkey. Both are partially estranged American
allies. Their relations with each other
are strained. But, any strategy that accepts
the need for leadership from within the region must focus on them. They are the only plausible candidates for
the role. But both are problematic.
Egypt is
internally stressed and dependent on support from Gulf Arab partners whose main
objectives are to carry out regime change in Damascus, push back Shiite
dominance in Iraq, and contain Iran. The
Egyptians themselves put the suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas
ahead of dislodging Mr. Assad or defeating Da`ish. Turkey is more eager to remove Assad and roll
back Kurdish factions associated with its longstanding domestic terrorism
problem than it is to contain Da`ish. It
does not want problems with Iran. Until
the governments in Cairo and Ankara conclude that containing and defeating
Da`ish deserves priority over other foreign policy objectives, neither will
assume a leadership role in the struggle against it. In time, they may come to that
conclusion. But, in the meantime, the
fact that none of our major security partners in the region agrees with
American priorities suggests that we are right to proceed with caution.
To be
effective, any American strategy for dealing with the menace of Islamist
terrorism of the sort Da`ish represents must not only find regional partners to
support, it must address the pernicious legacies of past U.S. policies. These include the legacy of the botched
“peace process” in the Holy Land and the more general problems inherent in
moral hazard, the confusion of values with interests, and the illusion that
military power is a substitute for diplomacy.
The
Israel-Palestine issue remains a substantial burden on the effectiveness of
U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East. As
far as I know, the United States has never killed a single Palestinian. Americans have just given Israel the arms,
money, and political protection it has needed to oppress and massacre
Palestinians. In the region, we are not
seen as having much of an alibi for our role in fostering Palestinian
suffering. Willingness to give us the
benefit of the doubt and time to produce justice for the Palestinians expired
forever along with the US-led “peace process” we had claimed for decades was
going to accomplish this and cited as a reason for the world to leave
Palestinian self-determination to the Israelis.
The next
non-violent phase of the struggle for Palestinian liberation from Israeli
occupation and dispossession is likely to take place not at the negotiating
table but in the courts of international law and opinion, as well as other
venues the United States cannot control.
Given the intimacy of American political, economic, cultural, and
military relationships with the Jewish settler state in Palestine, there is a
strong prospect that the mounting international effort to boycott, sanction,
and disinvest from Israel – including especially the Arab lands it seized in
1967 – will directly affect American companies and individuals in ways it has
not since the Oslo Accords brought about the suspension of the Arab Boycott of
Israel.
More to the
point, the Palestinian cause seems certain to prove irresistible to Da`ish as
it consolidates and expands its hold on the region, as there is currently every
reason to believe it will. After all,
Palestine combines the perfect mix of issues for Da`ish – foreign occupation,
suppression of Muslims, and interference with worship at important Islamic holy
sites. With diplomacy having
definitively failed, the Palestinians believe they face a choice between
capitulation and violent resistance.
Da`ish is reported to be gaining ground as an alternative to more
moderate movements, like Hamas. To a
majority in the region, continuing Israeli cruelty to Palestinians justifies
reprisal not just against Israel but the United States.
Palestinian
refugee communities provide a deep reservoir of recruits for terrorist attacks
on Israeli and American targets. The growing sympathy for the Palestinian
plight in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia offers opportunities to
recruit Western cohorts. Assaults on
Israel and its American supporters meet every criterion of political
constituency-building Da`ish could hope to find.
Israel’s
right-wing government has inadvertently been doing everything it can to incite
Da`ish to focus on the Jewish state.
During Israel’s recent rubbling of Gaza, its deputy minister of defense
threatened Palestinians there with a “Holocaust.” Not to be outdone, a senior figure in the
HaBeyit HaYehudi party, which is part of the governing coalition in Israel,
called for the destruction of “the entire Palestinian people . . . , including
its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its
infrastructure.” And a deputy speaker of
the Knesset called for the forced depopulation of Gaza.
This brings me
to a core issue in U.S. policies in the Middle East: the moral hazard inherent
in U.S. unilateralism. Moral hazard is
the condition that obtains when one party is emboldened to take risks it would
not otherwise take because it knows that another party will shoulder the
consequences and bear the costs of failure.
US-Israel relations exemplify this problem. American political and legal protection plus
subsidies and subventions enable Israel to do whatever it feels like to its
Arab neighbors with no concern for the consequences. But the same phenomenon has been at work in
Arab approaches to the nuclear disarmament of Iran. If America can be induced to take the lead in
handling the Iranian threat, why should anyone in the region try to do anything
about it themselves? Similarly, why
should any Muslim country rearrange its
priorities to deal with Da`ish when it can count on America to act for it? If America thinks it must lead, why not let
it do so? But responsible foreign and
defense policies begin with self-help, not outsourcing of military risks.
U.S. policy
should encourage the nations of the Middle East to develop effective political,
economic, and military strategies to defend and advance their own interests,
not rush to assume responsibility for doing this for them. Part of such a policy adjustment toward
emphasizing the primary responsibility of the countries of the region for their
own security would involve weighing the opinions of our partners in the region
much more heavily in our decisions than they have in since 9/11. Had we listened to our Gulf Arab friends, we
would not have invaded Iraq in 2003.
Iraq would still be balancing Iran.
It would not be in chaos and it would still have a border with
Syria. The United States needs to return
to respecting the views of regional powers about the appropriate response to
regional threats, resisting the impulse to substitute military campaign plans
made in Washington for strategies conceived by those with the greatest stake in
their success.
The need for
restraint extends to refraining from expansive rhetoric about our values or
attempting to compel others to conform to them.
In practice, we have insisted on democratization only in countries we
have invaded or that were otherwise falling apart, as Egypt was during the
first of the two “non coups” it suffered.
When elections have yielded governments whose policies we oppose, we
have not hesitated to conspire with their opponents to overthrow them. But the results of our efforts to coerce
political change in the Middle East are not just failure but catastrophic
failure. Our policies have nowhere
produced democracy. They have instead
contrived the destabilization of societies, the kindling of religious warfare,
and the installation of dictatorships contemptuous of the rights of religious
and ethnic minorities.
Americans used
to believe that we could best lead by example.
We and those in the Middle East seeking nonviolent change would all be
better off if America returned to that tradition and foreswore ideologically
motivated intervention. Despite our
unparalleled ability to use force against foreigners, the best way to inspire
them to emulate us remains showing them that we have our act together. At the moment, we do not.
Finally, we
should have learned by now that military might, no matter how impressive, is
not in itself transformative. American
military power has never been as dominant in the Middle East as in this
century. Yet its application has
repeatedly proved counterproductive and its influence limited. It shattered rather than reshaped Iraq. It has failed to bring the Taliban to heel in
Afghanistan or Pakistan. It did not save
Mubarak or the elected government that followed him from being overthrown by
coups d’état. It does not intimidate
either Bashar Al-Assad or Da`ish. It has
not shifted Iran’s nuclear policy. It
does not obviate military actions by Israel against its neighbors. It has had no impact on the political
kaleidoscope in Lebanon. It does not
assure tranquility in Bahrain. It did
not produce satisfying results in Libya.
Its newest incarnation – drone warfare – has not decapitated
anti-American terrorism so much as metastasized it.
War is an
extension of policy by other means. If
the policy is incoherent, the use of force to further will be purposeless,
military action in support of it will be feckless, and the results it produces
will be contradictory. Bombing first and
developing a strategy later does not work.
But that’s what our political establishment stampeded us into doing with
Da`ish. President Obama was right to
insist that we take the time to develop a strategy before resorting to the use
of force. Unfortunately, he did not have
the courage of his convictions.
Where this
leaves us is in an unfortunate position.
Without a strategy that addresses the socio-political factors and
grievances that have empowered the so-called Islamic State, or Da`ish, and its
predecessors, we are going to lose this war.
We have a
military campaign plan but lack a political program. We are bombing Da`ish to contain it. There is little reason to believe this will
prove effective. Based on past
experience, there is no reason to believe it will evolve into a strategy.
We and our
European allies are, in many ways, the wrong leaders of the struggle against
Da`ish. It can only be defeated by a
coalition with credible Islamic credentials.
Our armed forces and intelligence services could provide decisive
support to such a coalition, but none is now in prospect.
Da`ish displays
unity of command, strong discipline, and elevated morale. The coalition we have assemble to oppose it
has no agreed objectives. It is divided,
disjointed, and demoralized.
Da`ish is
taking territory and seizing strategic positions. We are using air power tactically for mainly
humanitarian and propaganda purposes.
This has led us to defend areas that are of little or no strategic
importance. We are not blocking Da`ish
from expanding its territory, population, and resource base.
There is no
concerted effort outside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to refute and discredit
the deviant theology that inspires Da`ish and its sympathizers. It has gobbled up large parts of Iraq and
Syria. Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine
could well be next.
Even if Da`ish
can somehow be eliminated, Arab backlash to the distress of foreign attack from
the air, sectarian violence, and civil strife ensures the birth of successor
movements. Adding yet another factional
force to this mix is not going to alter this reality. It may exacerbate it.
The approach we
are using to deal with Da`ish is a variant of the bomb-first,
develop-a-strategy-later approach we have used over the past decade and
more. This has helped to spread
Islamist terrorism across an ever wider swath of territory from Mali to
Kashmir. There is no reason to believe
that air force and drone attacks will produce a different result now.
If we cannot
correct these deficiencies, we are very likely to see widening multinational
and Palestinian terrorist activity against Americans and Israelis, coordinated
by Da`ish or something like it. No Arab
or Muslim country will be immune to disruption.
If there were ever a moment for Arabs and Americans to work together, it
is now. If there were ever a moment for
the United States to insist on Arab commitment and leadership of such a joint
effort, this is it.
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