Posts
America’s Persian and Arabian Wars
Remarks to Diplomatic and Consular Officers, Retired
(DACOR)
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
DACOR Bacon House, Washington, DC 4 March 2016
Sometime
between 460 and 450 B.C.E., Herodotus wrote The
Persian Wars, his account of the Greeks’ two wars with the Persians, which
spanned thirteen years. Even in a time
when trends and events unfolded more slowly than they seem to now, that was a
famously lengthy conflict. But the
ancient Greeks and Persians have nothing on us Americans in that regard.
The United
States has now been engaged in a cold war with Iran – Persia – for thirty-seven
years. It has conducted various levels
of hot war in Iraq for twenty-six years.
It has been in combat in Afghanistan for fifteen years. Americans have bombed Somalia for fifteen,
Libya for five, and Syria for one and a half years. One war has led to another. None has yielded any positive result and none
shows any sign of doing so.
The same might
be said for the wars of others we Americans subsidize and supply. Israel’s wars to subdue the Palestinians and
deter other Arabs from challenging its ongoing dispossession of them are now
sixty-eight-years-old – and counting.
U.S. drones have been killing Yemenis for fourteen years, Pakistanis for
twelve, and Somalis for nine. Saudi
Arabia’s bloody effort to reinstall an ousted government in Yemen is almost a
year old. In none of these wars is an
end in sight.
It’s hard to
put a price tag on these inconclusive misadventures. The unsuccessful Afghan and Iraq pacification
campaigns alone have cost the United States an estimated $6 trillion in outlays
and obligations. Over 7,000 Americans
have died in combat since these wars kicked off in 2001. At least another 50,000 have been
maimed. A million have filed claims for
war-related disabilities. And well over
two million Afghans, Arabs, Persians, and Somalis have perished. This is a great deal of sacrifice and
suffering for no apparent gain in the region and continuously escalating risks
to our homeland. Perhaps a bit of
reflection is in order, followed by a change of course.
It is said in
this regard that before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their
shoes. (That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away, and you have
their shoes.) In that spirit, let me
offer a few thoughts as well as a question or two about America’s Persian and
Arabian wars.
What it is that
we Americans are trying to accomplish?
Is there no better way than warfare to protect and advance our
interests? How can we finally end the
many wars we have begun? On what terms
should they be ended and with whom? At
what point is enough enough?
Unraveling the
tangle of wars in which the United States is now engaged with or against Arabs,
Berbers, Hazaras, Israelis, Kanuris, Kurds, Palestinians, Persians, Pashtuns,
Somalis, Syrians, Tajiks, Tuaregs, Turkmen, Turks, and Uzbeks – as well as
Alawites, Christians, Druze, Jews, secular Muslims, Salafis, Shiites, Sunnis,
and Yazidis – will not be easy. In large
measure through our involvement, their conflicts have become interwoven. Ending one or another of them might alter the
dynamics of the region but would not by itself produce peace.
That is
certainly true of the longest-running of these hostilities – the struggle by
Zionist settlers to displace Christian and Muslim Arabs from the Holy Land and
to establish a Greater Israel [Eretz Israel] with indefinitely expandable
borders. This is shaping up as a
tragedy with no catharsis. Israel’s cruelties to Palestinian Arabs provide
daily reminders of two centuries of humiliating Muslim impotence in the face of
Euro-American intrusions into the realm of Islam [Dar al Islam]. Israel’s policies have been a major driver
of radicalization in Arab politics and in the popularization of terrorism as a
tool of resistance to oppression and ethnic cleansing wherever it occurs in the
region.
Resentment of
Jewish colonialism, and American support for it, is now an elemental feature of
Arab and Persian politics, with much
resonance among Muslims all over the world. U.S. identification with Israel and its
policies has made the United States the target of Israel’s burgeoning
enemies. Peace in the Holy Land now
would not soon erase these resentments, which have become deeply entrenched.
More than most,
Israel’s ongoing wars have also become a laboratory in which ways and means of
waging war are developed. I’m not just
speaking here of Israeli innovations like targeted killings, enhanced interrogation
techniques, drones, and pervasive surveillance systems. Suicide bombing is a form of asymmetric
warfare now identified with Islam. But it
came to the Middle East only when Lebanese were unable to find any other means
of raising the cost to Israel of its insolent occupation of their country. The technique had been invented by East
Asians – Japan’s kamikaze pilots and the Viet Minh resistance to French rule in
Indochina – and perfected by the Tamil Tigers.
It remains anathema to most Muslims.
First used in
the Middle East by the Shiites of Hezbollah, suicide bombing was then taken up
by Sunni Palestinians and applied to both soldiers and civilians in Israel and
the occupied territories. First used to
strike the United States with airborne improvised explosive devices [IEDs] on
September 11, 2001, suicide bombing then became an oft-used weapon in the
resistance to U.S. pacification operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It now routinely spearheads assaults by the
so-called “Islamic caliphate” (or “Daesh”) in its savage wars on the West, in
the Fertile Crescent, and in Arabia and North Africa.
Suicide bombing
is the poor man’s precision-guided munition.
It blows up targets of politico-military importance by using the human
brain as a sophisticated guidance system and the human body as a versatile
delivery mechanism for explosives. So
far – the splendidly uniformed men and women of TSA notwithstanding – there is
no reliable counter to it.
The unending
contention between Israelis and Arabs has also become a major factor in both
Iran’s regional role and its estrangement from the United States. Iranian support for Hezbollah and its Arab
Shiite constituency during and after Israel’s assaults on Lebanon has given
Iran significant sway in Lebanese politics.
Iran’s anti-Israel rhetoric was particularly noteworthy during the
populist presidency of Iran’s version of President Donald Trump, Mahmoud
Ahmedinejad. It frightened Israelis
while gaining Iran traction among Sunni Arabs dismayed by their own governments’
unwillingness to take action against Israel or to break with the United States
on the issue. Among other things, this
enabled Shiite Iran to build a cooperative relationship with Hamas, a
broad-based Sunni democratic movement that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other Sunni
Arab autocracies as well as Israel and the United States have sought to
isolate.
Iran came to
contemporary Baghdad as a hitchhiker on America’s 2003 experiment with
hit-and-run democratization, which installed a pro-Iranian Shiite government in
Iraq. Our invasion eliminated Iraq as a
balancer of Iran and enabled Iraq’s Kurds to achieve their independence in all
but name, thus straining our relations with Turkey. The so-called “surge” of U.S. troops to Iraq
in 2007 consolidated the Shiite monopoly on political power in the
Arab-inhabited regions of Iraq, leaving Arab Sunnis disaffected and
rebellious. In 2011, the smoldering
sectarian warfare in Iraq spread to Syria, which – with a little help from the
Gulf Arabs, Turkey, and the United States – it promptly engulfed. Iran now presents itself as the protector of
Shiite rule or rights in Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and
Yemen. Such protection is proving
dangerous to the health of the protected.
Iran’s inroads
in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq greatly increased anti-Iranian and anti-Shiite
sentiment in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The Gulf Arabs see themselves as threatened
and encircled by surging Iranian influence.
Although they have little faith in America these days, they regard
continuing American estrangement from Iran as a vital strategic asset to be
preserved at almost any cost. They would
not acquiesce in the Iran nuclear deal until they received assurances that it
would not open the way to Iranian-American rapprochement.
At the same
time, Israeli paranoia about Iran found expression in unprecedentedly brazen
manipulation of U.S. politics. A senator
wrote to the Iranian leadership urging them to reject the president as the
representative of the United States in foreign affairs. Presidential candidates declared that, if
elected, they would obey Israeli dictates and repudiate what the Obama
administration, Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia have agreed with
Iran. In these circumstances,
cooperation between the United States and Iran is essentially impossible.
This means that
for now nothing can be built on the significant interests that the United
States and Iran have in common. This
restricts options for dealing with Islamist terrorism in the Fertile
Crescent. It helps fuel the destructive
region-wide geopolitical and religious rivalry between Iran and the Gulf
Arabs. It reduces the prospects for
peace in Syria. Even if refugees from the
Levant did not threaten the unity of Europe, decency demands that ending the
carnage there be an urgent policy objective.
In the past five years, half of Syria’s prewar population has been
forced to flee their homes. Somewhere
between 350,000 and 470,000 Syrians have been killed.
The impasse in
U.S. relations with Iran also complicates the prospects for stability in
post-NATO Afghanistan, where the Obama administration has punted a lost war to
the next administration. It denies the
American economy a market that its European and Asian competitors are now
vigorously pursuing. It perpetuates the
rancor and mutual recriminations that require Americans to garrison the Persian
Gulf at the expense of attending to strategic challenges elsewhere in Europe
and Asia. And while a freeze in US-Iranian
relations may slow the worsening of US-Arab relations, it does not halt or cure
it.
A parallel
deterioration has taken place in US-Turkish relations. Turkey has joined the Gulf Arabs in seeking
regime change in Syria by supporting Islamist extremists. It is determined to prevent the emergence of
yet another Kurdish quasi-state on its southern border. Turkey has always been an essential partner
on a uniquely long list of issues.
Without Turkish cooperation or acquiescence, one cannot conduct policies
toward Iraq, Syria, Iran, Israel, Central Asia, including Afghanistan, the
Caucasus, the Black Sea countries, Russia, Greece, Cyprus, the Balkans, North
Africa, the EU, the Gulf Arabs, NATO, or the Islamic world and its
institutions. Migration from the Levant
has just joined that list. But Turkey
and the United States are at cross purposes over the Kurdish role in opposing
Daesh and not in agreement about what else should happen in Syria.
This is as
complex a skein of strife as one can imagine.
Like the Gordian knot, the beginnings of the tangle cannot be found to
unsnarl it. And the knot is visibly
rotting, which risks releasing new horrors.
What is to be
done?
We must begin
by admitting that various projects to which we have given rhetorical, if not
practical, support are now infeasible.
The “two-state solution” in the Holy Land is first among these. Israel continues to insist that it can find
no partner for peace. In this argument,
Israelis resemble no one so much as the kid who kills his parents and then
appeals for sympathy on the grounds that he is an orphan. Under cover of the so-called “peace process,”
Israel has assassinated every Palestinian leader of promise – by some counts
some 800 individuals over the years – while incarcerating many others and recruiting some to serve as kapos for the
occupation. Guns, bombs, booby traps,
poison, biological agents, and drones have ensured that there is indeed no one
with the vision and political standing to agree to a further subdivision of Palestine.
But, as the
South African example shows, democracy in a master race cannot legitimize
tyranny over other populations. Young
Palestinians no longer have even a Bantustan to look forward to. Their despair has become anomie – a collapse of social norms and constraints. The result is an upsurge in random violence
by young Palestinians against their Jewish oppressors.
American
leaders spent more than four decades attempting to secure acceptance for a
Jewish state in the Middle East. We had
some success in this regard, brokering peace with Egypt in 1978 and with Jordan
in 1994. In 2002, the Arabs offered
Israel a comprehensive peace. They
received no reply at all. The price of
domestic tranquility for Israel has always been an end to its land seizures and
ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Israel
has been unable to curb its appetite for Arab land. Now the world is no longer prepared to give
Israel – or the United States – the benefit of the doubt. There will either be a one-state solution or
escalating low-intensity conflict with increasing collateral damage to American
global and regional interests.
It’s impolitic
to say so, but the United States and Israel are now seriously estranged, with
little prospect of reconciliation.
Israeli accommodations of its captive Arab population or its Arab
neighbors seem less likely than ever, given the Jewish state’s
settler-dominated politics. In the absence of efforts by Israel to reconcile
others in the Middle East to its existence, its international delegitimization
will accelerate. The United States can
no longer protect Israel from the consequences of its own behavior.
What’s worse –
the interests of Israel and the United States now clash on a growing list of
issues. Iran, the security architecture
of the Persian Gulf, and the imperative of cooperation with Turkey are at the
head of the list. But US-Israeli
differences now prominently include relations with Islam, which Israel has
sought to demonize, a task in which it has had enormous help from Islamist
extremists. Absent American
self-identification with Israel, the United States has nothing to gain and much
to lose by allowing an establishment of religion to guide its foreign policy.
Contemporary
Israeli values are also increasingly at odds with those of both the United
States and Jewish tradition. Doctrines
of racial supremacy, religious intolerance, and ethnic cleansing were once very
American but un-Jewish. They are now
anathema to Americans even as they flourish in Israel. American Jews find it hard to overcome the
tribal impulses that incline them to rally behind the Jewish state but are more
and more offended by the way an aggressively expansionist Israel is redefining
Judaism and its image.
The
partnerships of the United States with Saudi Arabia and others in the Gulf are
also in increasing jeopardy, as the Gulf Arabs double down on foreign policies
based on sectarian intolerance of Shi`ism as well as rivalry with Iran, the
self-proclaimed protector of Shi`ites everywhere. Like Israeli Jews, Saudi Muslims react badly
to even the most well-meant criticism by outsiders. They talk about their problems only to
themselves, reinforcing their self-righteous self-perceptions and failing to
understand the way others see them. (It
couldn’t happen here!)
Islam is
inherently among the most tolerant and humane of faiths. But Saudi Islam is intolerant of other
traditions within Islam, the other Abrahamic religions, and actively hostile to
faiths not rooted in Judaism like Animism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shamanism,
Shintoism, Yazidism, or Zoroastrianism.
And it is adamantly opposed to secularism and secular doctrines like
Confucianism.
More to the
point, Saudi Salafism – pejoratively labeled “Wahhabism” abroad – is kin to the
xenophobic doctrines espoused by Islamist extremists, like Daesh or al Qaeda,
even if it clearly lacks the zeal for bloody massacres that is their
hallmark. This theological affinity
makes Saudi Arabia either a reluctant opponent or even clandestine collaborator
with Islamist extremists or the ideal partner to combat the perverted Salafism
of Daesh. It has been hard for either
Americans or Saudis to sort out which it is. That’s a problem.
Saudi and
American values never coincided. The
European Enlightenment occurred while Arabia was remote from it and in an
Islamic Reformation, inspired by Mohammed ibn `Abd al-Wahhab. The Saudis are Muslim originalists and
profoundly anti-secular. They are not impressed by democracy as a political
system – especially in its current dysfunctional state in America – and do not
aspire to adopt it. These differences
never mattered in the past because U.S. and Saudi interests coincided in so
many ways. But they matter now.
Until recently,
the United States had no political or ideological agenda of its own in the
Middle East. It was satisfied to enjoy
preferred access to the region’s oil and to provide the Saudis and others
protection in return for this. A grateful
Saudi Arabia had America’s back on foreign policy issues affecting its region
or the realm of Islam. On occasion, it
was helpful farther afield.
For decades,
the shared American and Saudi obsession with countering Soviet communism
sidelined differences over Israel and its policies as well as human and civil
rights in the Kingdom. No more. Since 9/11, the entrenchment of U.S.
Islamophobia, American unilateralism, and Saudi ambivalence about Salafi
jihadism have soured the undemanding friendship of the past.
Contradictions
between the American and Arab political cultures were increasingly prominent
even before the 21st century began.
With the end of
the Cold War, Americans felt free to insist that the price of good relations
with us was to accept our deeply held conviction that Western democratic values
are self-evidently universal and to demand that foreign partners act
accordingly. This inevitably distanced
the United States from conservative non-Western societies, of which Saudi Arabia is the epitome. The emergence of feminism and libertarian
tolerance of a variety of sexual orientations and behavior in America has added
to the mutual distaste. Restoring a
sense of common purpose will not be easy, despite the existence of a common
enemy in Daesh.
American
policies in the Middle East have produced a mess in which we are estranged from
all the key actors – Arab, Iranian, Israeli, and Turkish – and on a different
page than the Russians. The state of our
relations with the region is symbolized by the sight of U.S. diplomats cowering
behind barriers surrounding fortress embassies that resemble nothing so much as
modern-day Crusader castles. Diplomacy
is all but impossible when we must ask host governments to protect our
diplomats from their people by placing our embassies under perpetual siege by
police. The fact that other countries
don’t have to do this is suggestive of something. After so many years, it should be obvious
that bombing, drone warfare, and commandos just make things worse. It is time for Americans to end our wars and
support for the wars of others in the Middle East and to try something else.
What might that
be? Well, we might start by recognizing
a few unpalatable realities. In the
Levant, the world brought into being by Messrs. Sykes and Picot has ended. All of our bombers and all of our men can’t
put Humpty Dumpty together again. We and
our friends in the region are going to have to accept the rise of new states
within changed borders. Where we cannot
fix things, we must at least do no harm.
The Arabs have
made it clear that they recognize the reality of Israel’s presence in their
midst and do not expect it to disappear.
It’s clear that, if Israel did indeed disappear, this would be because
it did itself in, not because it was militarily overwhelmed. Israel has had a free ride on the United States
for forty years. It is in denial about
the ultimate consequences for it of moral self-destruction, political
self-compression, and rising personal insecurity. Israelis will not address these perils
without shock treatment. They need to
make short-term political sacrifices to secure domestic tranquility and
well-being over the long term.
If Americans
could muster the political will, we could easily administer the requisite tough
love to Israel through selective suspensions of the unconditional UN vetoes,
aid, and tax subsidies that make counterproductive behavior by the Jewish state
cost-free. If we are politically unable
to cease the enablement and creation of moral hazard for Israel, we should
consider how best to minimize the damage to ourselves as Israel
self-destructs. We should not support or
appear to support Israeli policies we consider misguided.
Similarly,
America should restructure its relationship with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf
Arabs to be more two-sidedly collaborative.
Like Israel, these countries have effectively declared their
independence from us. Their continued
dependence on us does not oblige us to support their policies. When these policies do not serve American
purposes we should withhold our backing for them.
Americans
neither understand nor have any interest in involving ourselves in theological
rivalries between Sunnis and Shiites.
When it is in our interest to do so, we should feel free to cooperate
with Iran, as we do with Israel, rather than automatically deferring to Gulf
Arab (or Israeli) objections. Our
policies in Syria are the palsied offspring of an unholy marriage of
convenience between liberal interventionists and Gulf Arab rulers obsessed with
deposing Bashar al-Assad, establishing Sunni dominance in Syria, and breaking
Syria’s alliance with Iran.
But, with the
exception of the Iranian angle, would these outcomes necessarily serve U.S.
interests? Is the unconditional support
of the Gulf Arabs for military dictatorship in Egypt likely to end well? Is the perpetuation of the fighting in Yemen
something we favor? It is time to
restructure U.S. relations with the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and Iran
to reflect the challenges of the post-Sykes-Picot and Cold War eras, the need
for mutual accommodation between Arabs and Persians, and the rise of Daesh.
Greater
flexibility in the U.S. relationship with the Gulf Arabs as well as with Iran
is essential to end our cold war with Iran and our hot wars elsewhere in the
region. It is necessary to restore a basis
for a balance of power in the Persian Gulf that can relieve us of the burden of
permanently garrisoning it. We should be
looking to internationalize the burden of assuring security of access to energy
supplies and freedom of navigation in the region. We should be using the United Nations to
forge a coalition of great powers and Muslim states to contain and crush Daesh,
criminalize terrorism, and build effective international structures to deal
with it.
It is time to
cut a knot or two in the Middle East. Enough is now enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment