There are many disturbing signs that the West is creating conditions in the Middle East and Asia that could produce a wider war, most likely a new Cold War, containing, as well, menacing risks of World War III. The reckless confrontation with Russia along its borders, reinforced by provocative weapons deployments in several NATO countries and the promotion of governing regimes hostile to Russia in such countries as Ukraine and Georgia seems to exhibit Cold War nostalgia, inciting sectarian encounters between Sunnis and Shi’a, and is certainly not the way to preserve peace.
Add to this the increasingly belligerent approach recently taken by the United States naval officers and defense officials to China with respect to island disputes and navigational rights in the South China Seas. Such posturing has all the ingredients needed for intensifying international conflict, giving a militarist signature to Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia.’ The dogmatic pretense that international law is unalterably opposed to Chinese claims is both wrong and gives fuel to Asian warmongers and those nationalistic Asian forces that think with American backing there is no need to compromise.
These developments are happening during the supposedly conflict averse Obama presidency. Looking ahead to new leadership, even the most optimistic scenario that brings Hilary Clinton to the White House is sure to make these pre-war drumbeats even louder in both the Middle East and Asia. From a more detached perspective it is fair to observe that Obama seems rather peace-oriented, if at all, then only because plausible alternative American political leaders and the Beltway/media mainstream have become so accustomed to relying on military solutions whether successful or not, whether dangerous and wasteful or not, whether in accord with international law or not, that is, only by comparison with more belligerent alternatives.
The current paranoid political atmosphere in the United States is a further relevant concern, calling for police state governmental authority at home, increased weapons budgets, the continuing militarization of policing and law enforcement, and an anti-Muslim and xenophobic approach to immigration policy. Such policy initiatives encourage an even more militaristic approach to foreign challenges that seem aimed at American and Israeli interests by ISIS, Iran, Russia, and China. Where this kind of war-mongering will lead is unknowable, but what is frighteningly clear is that this geopolitical bravado is likely to become even more strident as the 2016 campaign unfolds to choose the next American president. Already Donald Trump, the clear Republican frontrunner, has seemed to commit the United States to a struggle against all of Islam by his ill-advised effort to insist on viewing every Muslim worldwide as a terrorist suspect Islam, which is, as a potential terrorist who should be quarantined to the extent possible. Even Samuel Huntington was still alive he would be appalled by gaining the backing of such a rabid advocate of ‘the clash of civilizations’!
Historical Deep Roots
It has taken almost a century for the breakup of the Ottoman Empire to reap the colonialist harvest that was sown in the peace diplomacy that followed World War I. In the notorious Sykes-Picot Agreement diplomats of England and France in 1916 secretly negotiated arrangements that would divide up the Middle East into a series of artificially delimited territorial states to be administered as colonies by the respective European governments. Among other wrongs, this devious undertaking representing a betrayal of wartime promises made to Arab leaders that Britain, in particular, would support true independence for the Arab nation in exchange for joining the anti-Ottoman and anti-German alliance formed to fight World War I. Such a colonialist division of the Ottoman spoils not only betrayed earlier pledges of political independence to Arab leaders, but also undermined the efforts of Woodrow Wilson to apply the principle of ethnic self-determination to the Ottoman aftermath, which if adopted might have avoided some of the worst ethnic tensions in the region, and above all have recognized the right of self-determination belonging to the Kurdish people.
As a result of diplomatic maneuvers a face saving compromise was reached at Versailles in 1919 that appeared to step back from colonialist claims while sidestepping self-determination solutions. The Versailles outcome accepted the Sykes-Picot borders that were drawn to satisfy colonial ambitions for trade routes and spheres of influence, but to disguise slightly the colonialist character if such a map for the post-Ottoman Middle East, by polishing the image of what was decided at the peace conference. The diplomats agreed to establish an international system of mandates for the Middle East in which London and Paris would administer the territories, accepting a vague commitment to lead the various societies to eventual political independence at some unspecified future time. These Sykes-Picot ‘states’ were artificial political communities that never overcame the indigenous primacy of ethnic, tribal, and religious affinities, and could be maintained as coherent political realities only by creating oppressive state structures, first under European rule, and later run by national elites. If World War II had not sapped European colonial will and capabilities, it is easy to imagine that the societies of the Middle East would have long remained subjugated under mandate banners. Only wars of liberation would have loosened the colonial bonds.
It is similarly important to revisit the colonialist origins of the Israel/Palestine struggle. It was the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that first lent international credibility to the Zionist project started toward the end of the 19th century to establish a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine. Without the slightest effort to consult the resident population of Palestine, of which the vast majority were Arabs in 1917, the British Foreign Office determined the post-Ottoman future for Palestine to the Versailles Peace Conference, and even had it incorporated into the Covenant of the League of Nations in the form of a mandatory arrangement. From these beginnings there has been a steady rise in Zionist and Israeli expectations as to the future of Palestine, with an accompanying ordeal of occupation, annexation, and apartheid imposed on the partly dispossessed and partly oppressed Palestinian population.
After World War II
Is it any wonder, then, that the region has been extremely beset by various forms of authoritarian rule and various forms of strife ever since the countries of the Middle East gained their independence after the end of the Second World War? Whether in the form of dynastic monarchies or secular governments, the stability that was achieved in the region depended on the denial of human rights, including rights of democratic participation, as well as the buildup of small privileged and exploitative elites that linked national markets and resources to the global economic order. And as oil became the prime strategic resource, the dominance of the region became for the West led by the United States absolutely vital, and any external or internal jeopardizing of this control would generate intervention and war. From these perspectives the stable authoritarianism of the region was quite congenial with the Cold War standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. These geopolitical rivals both sought to secure strategic and economic partnerships reflecting their respective ideological outlooks, while being indifferent to whether or not the resident population was being victimized in the interim by abusive and brutal governments, or by various forms of civil strife.
The American commitment to this status quo in the Middle East was most vividly expressed in Washington’s reaction to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the Iranian Revolution of the prior year by the enunciation of the Carter Doctrine. President Carter in his 1981 State of the Union Address was warning the Soviet Union by sending a strong diplomatic signal that the United States was ready to defend its interests in the Persian Gulf by force, if necessary. At the time this assertion was understood in relation to supposed Soviet superiority in ground warfare in the region as making an implied and credible threat to use nuclear weapons if necessary. As such, it was as much a warning as an expression of intent.
It should also be appreciated that the Holocaust strengthened greatly the Zionist hand in Palestine, as did its relative advantages in military training and equipment. The UN tried unsuccessfully to force a partition plan upon the Palestinians in what had seemed until then to be their own country even when administered by the British. When this plan was rejected Zionist forces unleashed a war machine that crushed the Arab forces drawn from neighboring countries, and there started then a long period of occupation, captivity, and exile for the Palestinian people with no end in sight.
After the Cold War
When the Cold War ended, the United States unthinkingly promoted the spread of capitalist style constitutional democracy wherever it could, including the Middle East. The Clinton presidency (1992-2000) talked about the ‘enlargement’ of the community of democratic states, implying that any other political option lacked legitimacy (unless of course it was a friendly oil producer or strategic ally). The neocon presidency of George W. Bush (2000-2008) with its interventionist bent invoked ‘democracy promotion’ as its goal, and set forth clearly in its official formulation of security doctrine in 2002 that only capitalist democracies were legitimate Westphalian states whose sovereign rights were fully entitled to respect. Of course, this kind of ideological purity was never allowed to interfere with expedient arrangements with the most undemocratic of states. Nothing illustrates this better than the ‘special relationship’ formed with Saudi Arabia that has survived for decades despite its horrible human rights record and anti-democratic form of governmental monarchy.
This kind of strident militarism reached a new climax after 9/11. The White House apparently hoped to embark on a series regime-changing interventions in the Middle East and Asia with the expectation of producing at minimal cost shining examples of liberation and democratization, as well as secure the Gulf oil reserves and establish military bases to ensure the capacity in the future to fulfill its regional ambitions. The American led attacks on Afghanistan, and especially Iraq, were the most notorious applications of this misguided approach. Instead of ‘democracy’ (Washington’s code word for integration into its version of neoliberal globalization), what emerged were a blend of strife and chaos, and the collapse of stable internal governance. The strong state that preceded the intervention gave way to localized militias and resurgent tribal, clan, and religious rivalries leading domestic populations to wish for a return to the relative stability of the preceding authoritarian arrangements, despite their brutality and corruption. And even in Washington one encounters whispered admissions that Iraq was better off, after all, under Saddam Hussein than it is under the kind of sectarian and divisive leaders that governed the country since the American occupation began in 2003, and now threaten Iraq with a further implosion that could produce at least two states to replace the shattered one.
The Arab Spring
Then came the Arab Spring in 2011 creating an awkward tension between the professed wish in Washington for democracy in the Arab world and the overriding disguised commitment to upholding strategic interests throughout the Middle East. At first, the West reacted ambivalently to the Arab uprisings, not knowing at first which side would prevail, and thus whether to welcome or oppose. As it became clear that the anti-government forces were succeeding the American effort shifted gears, trying to tame these anti-authoritarian movements of the Arab masses if possible or, if not, then to lament the risks that these new elites might turn away from neoliberal capitalism and strategic partnerships, and worst of all, might be more inclined to challenge Israel and threaten the flow of energy supplies.
What happened in the years that followed removed the ambiguity, confirming that material and ideological interests took precedence over visionary endorsements of Arab democracy. The reality that emerged indicated that neither the domestic setting nor the international context was compatible with the establishment of sustainable democratic forms of governance. What unsurprisingly followed was a series of further military interventions and strategic confrontations either via NATO as in Libya or by way of its regional partners, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates as in Iran, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen.
With few tears shed in Washington, the authentic and promising democratic beginnings in Egypt that excited the world in the aftermath of the 2011 Tahrir Square were crushed two years later by a populist military coup that restored Mubarak Era authoritarianism, accentuating its worst features. What amounted to the revenge of the urban secular elites in Cairo included a genuine bonding between a new majority of the Egyptian people and its armed forces in a bloody struggle to challenge and destroy the Muslim Brotherhood that had taken control of the government by competing and winning a series of elections. Despite its supposed liberalism the Obama leadership, true to its geopolitical pedigree, played along with these developments. It obliged the new Sisi-led leadership by avoiding the term ‘coup’ although the military takeover was followed by a bloody crackdown on the elected leadership and civil society leadership. This Orwellian trope of refusing to call a coup by its real name enabled the United States to continue military assistance to Egypt without requiring a new Congressional authorization.
The folk wisdom of the Arab world gives insight into the counterrevolutionary backlash that has shattered the populist hopes of 2011 in the region everywhere but Tunisia: “People prefer 100 years of tyranny to a single year of chaos.” And this kind of priority is shared by most of those who make and manage American foreign policy. Even more assuredly than the Arab masses, the Pentagon planners prefer the stability of authoritarianism to the anarchistic uncertainties of ethnic and tribal strife, militia forms of governance that so often come in the wake of the collapse of both dictatorial rule and experiments in democratic governance. And the masters of business and finance, aside from the lure of post-conflict markets for the reconstruction of what has been destroyed militarily, prefer to work with dependable and familiar national elites that welcome foreign capital on lucrative terms that benefit insiders and outsiders alike, while keeping the masses in conditions of impoverished thralldom.
In many respects, Syria and Iraq illustrate the terrible human tragedies that have been visited on the peoples of the region. In Syria a popular uprising in 2011 was unforgivably crushed by the Basher el-Assad regime in Damascus, leading to a series of disastrous interventions on both sides of the internal war that erupted, with Saudi Arabia and Iran engaged in a proxy war on Syrian soil while Israel seems to be using its diplomatic leverage to ensure that the unresolved war would last as long as possible as Tel Aviv apparently wanted neither the regime nor its opponents to win a clear victory. During this strife, Russia, Turkey, and the United States were intervening with a bewildering blend of shared and contradictory goals ranging from pro-government stabilization to a variety of regime changing scenarios. These external actors held conflicting attitudes toward the Kurdish fighters as either coveted allies or dangerous adversaries. In the process several hundred thousand Syrians have lost their lives, almost half the population have become refugees and internally displaced persons, much of the country and its ancient heritage sites lie devastated, no real end of the violence and devastation is in sight, and even the territorial integrity of the country is in doubt.
The Iraq experience is only marginally better. After a dozen years of punitive sanctions following the 1991 ceasefire that exacted a heavy toll on the civilian population, the ‘shock and awe’ of US/UK attacks of 2003, an occupation began with the goal of ridding the country of its cruel and oppressive leader, Saddam Hussein, his entourage, and his supposed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction morphed into a form of civil war. What followed politically became over time deeply disillusioning, and actually worse than the overthrown regime, which had been hardly imaginable when the American-led occupation began. The Iraqi state was being reconstructed along sectarian lines, purging the Sunni minority elites from the Baghdad bureaucracy and armed forces, thereby generating a widespread internal violent opposition against foreign occupation and a resistance movement against a sectarian Iraqi leadership that had gained power with the help of the American presence. This combination of insurgency and resistance also gave rise to widespread feelings of humiliation and alienation, which proved to be conducive to the rise of jihadi extremism, first in the form of al-Qaeda in Iraq and later as ISIS.
Toxic Geopolitics
It is impossible to understand and explain such a disastrous failure of military interventionism without considering the effects of two toxic ‘special relationships’ formed by the United States, with Israel and Saudi Arabia. The basic feature of such special relationships is an unconditional partnership in which the Israelis and Saudis can do whatever they wish, including pursuing policies antagonistic to U.S. interests without encountering any meaningful opposition from either Washington or Europe. This limitless zone of discretion has allowed Israel to keep Palestinians from achieving self-determination while pursuing its own territorial ambitions via constantly expanding settlements on occupied Palestinian territory, fueling grassroots anti-Western sentiment throughout the Arab world because of this persisting reliance on a cruel settler colonialist approach to block for seven decades the Palestinian struggle for fundamental and minimal national rights. It has also led to an intensifying militarization throughout the Middle East, anchored in the commitment to provide Israel with qualitative superiority across the entire spectrum of weaponry, and placing no real inhibitions on Israel’s projection of force in the region.
The special relationship with Saudi Arabia is even more astonishing until one considers the primacy of economic strategic priorities, especially the importance of oil supplied at affordable prices. Having by far the worst human rights record in the region, replete with judicially decreed beheadings and executions by stoning, the Riyadh leadership continues to be warmly courted in Western capitals as allies and friends with a blind eye turned to its abysmal human rights record. At the same time, equally theocratic Iran is hypocritically bashed and internationally punished in retaliation for its far less oppressive governing wrongdoing.
Of course, looking the other way, is what is to be expected in the cynical conduct of opportunistic geopolitics, but to indulge the Saudi role as leader in the worldwide promotion of jihadism while spending trillions on counter-terrorism is much more difficult to fathom until one shifts attention from the cover story of counter-terrorism to the more illuminating narrative of petropolitics. Despite fracking and natural gas discoveries lessening Western dependence on Middle Eastern oil, old capitalist habits persist long after their economic justifications have lapsed and this seems true even when such policies have become damaging in lives and financial burdens.
Finding Hope is Difficult
In such circumstances, it is difficult to find much hope in the current cosmodrama of world politics. It is possible, although unlikely, that geopolitical sanity will prevail to the extent of finding a diplomatic formula to end the violence in Syria and Yemen, as well as to normalize relations with Iran, restore order in Iraq and Libya, although such sensible outcomes face many obstacles, and may be years away. The alternatives for the Middle East in the near future, barring the political miracle of a much more revolutionary and emancipatory second Arab Spring, seems to be authoritarian stability or anarchic strife and chaos, which seems far preferable if the alternative is the deep trauma associated with enduring further American military interventions. If you listen to the Republican candidates give their prescriptions for fixing the Middle East it comes down to ‘toughness,’ including the scary recommendations of ‘carpet bombing’ and a greatly heightened American military presence. Even the more thoughtful Democrats limit their proposals to enhanced militarism, hoping to induce the Arab countries to put ‘the boots on the ground’ with nary a worry about either igniting a regional war or the imaginative collapse that can contemplate only war as the recipe for peace, again recalling the degree to which Orwellian satiric irony is being relied upon to shape foreign policy prescriptions by ambitious politicians.
The Asian reality is not nearly as messy as the Middle East, but its dangers are in some ways greater, pitting the two leader military powers in a war for geopolitical dominance. Already, the interaction between China’s regional ambitions and the American effort to maintain its regional ascendancy is producing an arms race in which China is seeking the capabilities it needs to be able to pursue its strategic interest. In Asia, above anywhere else, the United States is disclosing its identity as a ‘global state’ that is not to be geographically delimited by either national boundaries or a regional scope of interests. This pattern does not bode well for the future.
Imaginative diplomacy, talking and listening to the enemy, and engaging in self-scrutiny remains outside the cast iron cage of the military mentality that has long dominated most of the political space in American foreign policy debates with the conspicuous help of the passive aggressive mainstream media. In this respect, American democracy is a broken reality, and conscientious citizens must look elsewhere as a prison break of the political imagination is long overdue.
