This is a series on Discordia, the Greek name for the goddess of strife, and it examines and seeks to explain why our world is moving from a period of lesser to greater chaos and what we can expect in the near future. It began in Europe in part one, where the deficiencies in the organization of the European Union perpetuate the disorder of the 2008 crisis long after other regions had cleaned up the most obvious symptoms[1] of the disease. The second article looked at the Americas: superficially better off, but no more capable of dealing individually with the deep forces at work in the world than any of their Old World counterparts. Brazil is regressing into violence, depression and political chaos; Mexico faces the serious prospect of another 1992-style tequilazo, collapsing oil revenues and a brutal escalation of the narco-war. Even the United States is being racked by internal discord of such magnitude that the resulting political paralysis poses grave threats to our society.
This article focuses on the Islamic World rather than a defined geographical space, though it roughly translates into the arc encompassing everything north of Saharan Africa, the Middle East and parts of Southern Asia. Nevertheless, the diaspora of Muslim communities touches every continent and developments in those communities are of critical importance not only for the United States[2], but for strategically vital nations like France, Germany, Russia, India and China. Embraced by 1.5 billion people and the most rapidly growing faith in the world today, developments in Islam may be the defining issue throughout the rest of the 21st century. But the Muslim world is also made up of nations, and these face the problems and challenges that the traditional nation-state is facing around the world. These twin motors of strife combine to make the Middle East and North Africa the most unstable and dangerous places in the world today.
The average American reader, especially a millennial, might respond by saying “that’s nothing new, the Middle East has always been unstable,” but that is profoundly untrue. For decades the Middle East was remarkably stable, locked into glacier-like state by the Cold War. The main source of conflict was the Arab-Israeli dispute, which broke out into major wars 4 times between the birth of the state of Israel and the signing of the Camp David agreements. These were unsettling, bloody and dangerous affairs, no doubt; but they were the traditional wars of nation-states which the international community was well-prepared to deal with using traditional tools. This article is focused on a different class of chaos, one in which the Second Palestinian Intifada is far more characteristic and dangerous than the Six Day or Yom Kippur Wars were[3]. If I might borrow a term from warfare, these problems are “asymmetrical” and therefore resistant to the usual policy devices available to governments.
For most of the 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970’s, the Middle East and North Africa was actually quite peaceful. The people there were held in the iron grip of detestable, murderous dictators to be sure, and enemies of the state disappeared if they could not flee into exile quickly enough, but day-to-day life was relatively safe for those who did not dabble in politics. Wars were extremely rare, except for the periodic go at the Israelis. As late as 2000, an American could travel through Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Turkey with less worry for their personal safety than in many parts of Latin America[4]. That is clearly not the case today: the old order has collapsed so thoroughly that there is no possibility of reconstructing it, and no new order has yet arisen that promises any stability to the region. This is especially true in the Levant, but the motives forces at work are spreading it across all Muslim lands.
2016, our year of Discordia, has started on the worst possible notes: an intensification of the Russo-Alawite offensive in Syria; more terrorism and death in Istanbul and Jakarta; and the cutting off of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced that American troops[5] would be returning to an active combat role in the liberation of Mosul, though on a “very limited basis”. ISIS is reeling from the loss of Sinjar and Ramadi, but retains a potent military in the field and, more importantly, is winning the propaganda war against its enemies. Brute force, the ultima ratio regum[6], may not be enough to defeat ISIS: like Vietnam, we might win all the battles and still lose the war.
To understand what the near future holds in store, we must be go back and understand the rapid evolution that has occurred with overwhelming strength.
Agents of change
The end of Cold War brought about the return of old style geopolitics to the region; frozen conflicts unfroze, traditional rivalries resurfaced, and balance-of-power calculations became more important than the old East-West alignment[7]. Yet conflict in the region long predates either the United States or Russia and is tremendously influenced by the realities and limitation imposed by geography. It is bounded by the Zagros Mountains to the east, the Taurus Mountains to the north and the sandy wastes of the Great Nafud to the south; the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys have formed the natural – indeed only – path of invasion since the dawn of recorded history.
As the Cradle of Civilization, the Tigras-Euphrates Valley hosted its share of empires, but as civilization spread east and west, it came more and more to be a battleground and frontier region: the region was easy to invade and difficult to defend. Thus Alexander conquered the Persian Empire, including Mesopotamia; upon his death, his general Seleucus took over the whole region, but geography dictated that the highlands of Anatolia and the Iranian Plateau would quickly revolt and break away. When the Romans came, they quickly conquered Anatolia and the Levant, but realized that they had reached their “natural frontier” in Mesopotamia. For the most part, that frontier held for the next 700 years, despite the varying fortunes of Romans, Byzantines, Parthians and Sasanians. The early Arab conquests of the 7th century shattered the frontier and united the region from the Mediterranean clear across to Baluchistan; but only temporarily. Within 100 years, geography reimposed itself in the split between the Levantine Umayyads and Persian Abbasids, who again turned Mesopotamia into a conflict zone.
It is a region made for war.
Today, the Great Game continues. The faces have changed since the 15th century, but the actors are the same. Turks, Arabs and Persians are again fighting to dominate their neighborhood, and the stakes are far higher for them than for the outside powers who are intervening on one side or the other, making compromise elusive. The Sunni-Shia divide is an important factor that exacerbates tensions, but this is not exclusively a sectarian conflict. Syria and Iraq would still find themselves as pawns in the game even if the Persians were all Sunnis[8].
The Islamic State is not a new development, it is the natural evolution of a transnational Arab movement that seeks to dominate “its heartland,” to the exclusion of Persian and Turkish influence, and which lacks any other unifying power than Islamic fundamentalism. Understanding that ISIS is not an aberration is crucial to combating it. Yet the outlook is grim: military force may be able to contain the military power of Al Baghdadi’s warriors, but the ideology that drives the recruitment and radicalization that fuels the movement is only strengthened by every bomb that falls and by every repressive measure that is promulgated against Muslims[9]. The powers that today support radical jihadist groups – principally Saudi Arabia – do so out of a logical calculus: if the goal is to dominate Mesopotamia, then an Arab-dominated Sunni Caliphate is as good a way to accomplish it as any. So long as it can be controlled by Riyadh.
ISIS is no more “aberrant” than Hezbollah, though the organizations reflect the different goals and impulses of their genesis. Both are, to a certain extent, the result of the triumph of liberal capitalism over communism in the Cold War. To see the relationship, it is necessary to understand that from the 1950’s to the 1980’s, the principal unifying ideology of the Arab world was anti-imperialism; and that the principle exponent of anti-imperialism after the Second World War was the Soviet Union. The newly independent countries of the Middle East and North Africa, freed from the chains of European dominance more or less violently, came to be dominated by charismatic, populist military dictators who preached the rhetoric of anti-colonialism, of socialism and of pan-Arabism[10].
Pan-Arabism involved many efforts to unify the Arab World: the formation of the Arab League in 1945; the short-lived United Arab Republic of Syria and Egypt of 1958; the even shorter-spanned Arab Federation of Jordan and Iraq, also in 1958; another abortive attempt to form a United Arab Republic of Egypt, Syria and Iraq in 1963; and the 5-year Federation of Arab Republics, the brainchild of strongman Muammar Qaddafi that was based on Libya, Egypt and Syria, but included Sudan at times. All these attempts ended in failure – dismal failure sometimes – but expressed the continued recognition of the transnational character of the Arabs and their realization that strength and security against outside threat lay through union, which is why neither Turkey nor Iran were ever considered for membership.
The Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party was the child of this ideology; and if it never gained a foothold in Egypt, it was because Nasserism predated it. Its most important characteristic, for our modern circumstances, was its secularism. The Ba’athists were enormously tolerant of ethnic and religious minorities as long as these did not compete for political power. This led to problems with the larger non-Arab ethnic minorities, such as the Kurds; but it allowed Sunnis and Shiites to live together in considerable harmony so long as the Shiites did not organize themselves as such, an exclusionary religious identity with political demands. This model was already breaking down in the 1980’s, with the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood across the Sunni world. The Lebanese Civil War was a sign of things to come. But with the final dissolution of the Soviet Union and the – perceived – utter discrediting of Socialism-Communism, the Ba’athist ideology lost one of its key pillars. It became nothing more than a cult of personality to the dictator of the day.
There were only two forces capable of replacing the secular socialist ideology that had just been discredited: the liberal democracy of the West or a homegrown version of Islamism. That fight is not yet decided; but the Middle East has proven to be very stony ground for the seeds of democracy, whereas Islamism has home-field advantage and powerful, rich patrons in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. The Arab Spring movement demonstrates conclusively that there is a genuine yearning for more political freedom, more accountability in government and more democracy. The almost universal failure of the Arab Spring and the governments that have been elected demonstrates conclusively that the type of democracy the inhabitants of the region desire is unlikely to be the secular, liberal kind the West desires.
The Arab World is not the only one that has suffered from the temporary end of the ideological conflict between East and West, Left and Right. The Western powers have reacted to their victory and the vindication of their ideology by shifting into a hyper-reactionary mode of thought. The message of the Cold War, “democracy is the better way”, to the message of the neo-conservative movement, “democracy is the only way” even if we have to kill you to set you free. The shift from liberalism to neo-liberalism has been one of revolutionary idealism. Francis Fukuyama wrote in “The End of History”, if liberal democracy is the culmination of human political development, and some states had already reached this felicitous state; it was no great leap for neo-cons to then justify any means, including war and assassination, to “accelerate history” for the rest of the world. It is curious to note how closely this form of thinking mirrors that of the early Bolsheviks, who set about to bring about the “final” socialist revolution and the birth of the New Soviet Man.
The New Democratic Man has not, unfortunately, appeared in the ashes of Ramadi, Tikrit or even Benghazi. ISIS appeared in his place. The European version of the neo-con delusion, the enforcement of respect for human rights by precision airstrike, was as abject a failure as the Iraq War that preceded it. “Democracy by fiat” failed spectacularly and the neo-con fantasy of a string of liberal democracies from Tunis to Baghdad became nothing more than a Roman campaign: “(they) make a desert and call it peace.”[11] So long as we rely on military power alone, our efforts to destroy the roots of ISIS are doomed to failure; and every sacrifice of our civil rights, every repressive measure we pass to falsely increase our perceived security only makes our liberal democracy less appealing as an alternative to Islamism. That’s not how we won the ideological battle of the Cold War.
The regional competition has will continue to intensify: having already consumed Syria and Yemen, it now threatens to escalate to direct conflict between the powers. Tensions between Turkey and Iraq ran high in December after Baghdad demanded a withdrawal of about 120 Turkish military advisors near Mosul, calling the normal rotation of these forces “an invasion.” Saudi Arabia cut diplomatic ties with Iran this month over the latter’s support for Shiite Houthi forces in Yemen, a country that Saudi Arabia has effectively invaded as part of its efforts to combat a perceived encirclement by Iranian proxies. These conflicts will continue regardless of what the American, Europeans or Russians say or do; it is a question of national security for the Saudis to maintain their proxies in the field and prevent a strengthening of Persian influence in Mesopotamia. For the moment, the Saudis enjoy a slight advantage: it has the advantage of a larger economy, which at USD 800 billion is slightly less than twice that of Iran’s. But the Saudis have a far smaller population than either: only 31 million compared to 78 million Persians. Nor has the Saudi military ever fought a modern, conventional war on its own, whereas the Iranians have considerable experience in this respect[12].
Unfortunately for the House of Saud, the balance of power is shifting. The price of oil – Saudi Arabia’s only commodity – has fallen by 75% in 2015 and there is little to indicate that it will soon climb again. Iranian oil is about to reenter the market; and with China in turmoil, Europe still in stagnant and the American economy slowing down as well, there is going to be a glut in the market for the next few years. That in turn means that the Iranian economy and budget will begin to rebound even as Saudi Arabia’s tanks: very bad news for a country that is used to spend its way out of trouble. Not only is this bad news for the Saudis in their competition with Iran, it is bad news for the coalition against ISIS. Unrest in Saudi Arabia may lead to a further radicalization of the population there, and the Salafism of Al Baghdadi is only a hop-skip-and-jump from the Wahhabism prevalent in Arabia, the birthplace of Al Qaeda. King Salman is new to his throne and wears the crown very unsteadily; outside pressure and lose of prestige are already leading to calls for regime change by insiders. ISIS may end up winning by fundamentally changing the game: with the overthrow of the House of Saud and an alliance with its replacement.
This promises to be a crucial year with regards to the Middle East; if the Syrian Civil War continues, it may lead to a breaking point for Europe, Russia and the Saudi-Iranian competition. The immigration flood threatens to overwhelm the inefficient mechanism the EU has available to deal with it, leading to nations of Central and Eastern Europe to take more drastic measures that would threaten fundamental policies like Schengen and the free movement of peoples. Russia is also feeling the pain of lower oil prices, as well as Western sanctions over Ukraine, and though the air campaign in Syria has stabilized the situation for Bashar al Assad’s government, it seems unlikely to prove strategically decisive. That leaves Mr. Putin in a very bad quandary; pull out and lose massive prestige along with a useful ally in Damascus – neither of which he can afford – or allow the Russian military to be sucked into a continued escalation that would strain his budgetary resources and undermine his popularity at home – also things he can’t easily afford.
The sectarian aspect of the violence demonstrates an interesting dimension about Islam. Though many commentators focus on the “inherent violence” of the Koran, with its call to jihad or else on the early history of the religion and its relationship with the Arab conquests of Byzantine and Sasanian territories, there are merely canards. Both Christianity and Judaism have scriptural passages that could be read as inciting to violence; and both religions have had historical periods of war, conquest and persecution. The real difference, at least in terms of this analysis, is the difference in institutional organization.
Islam is a highly decentralized religion, with the ummah[13] being led by a mass of scholars (uluma), jurists (qadi, mufti) and preachers (a’immah)[14]. Although the Arabic version[15] of the Quran is considered definitive by all Muslims, the rest of the considerable body of Islamic religious text and jurisprudence is very much open to interpretation by the experts: the Hadith, the Sunnah, Sharia, the Fiqh, and the Ilm al-Kalam. This makes Islam an extraordinarily conservative religion: no single Muslim has the authority to radically reinterpret how Islam interacts with the world. Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity are both significantly different in this respect[16]: a single reforming Pope or a Synod of Bishops can have an enormous influence on thought and practice in Christianity. There can be no Providentissimus Deus[17] in Islam, no single encyclical that changes the doctrinal direction of that religion.
The fundamental “problem” with Islam, its steady refusal to reconcile with the age of reason and scientific rationalism, will therefore continue. There will be no Martin Luther in Islam, as there is no Pope to rebel against; and even if there were, he would be unlikely to affect a substantial enough body of the ummah to make a difference. Does that mean that Islam is a hopeless case? Of course not. Change can still come; but it will be at a glacial pace rather than the operation of a hierarchy adapting to changing circumstances. If anything, there is every indication that Islam is growing more conservative, not less.
Discordia imperat omnia.
[1] Certainly the United States, for example, has dealt with the gross outward symptoms more quickly and completely than Europe; but no one has dealt with the underlying diseases. The US recovery is, therefore, superficial and Americans know this to be true, if only by instinct. But at least in the US there is the semblance of a recovery – Europeans, as a whole, have not even reached that stage.
[2] The Muslim population of the US is insignificant in percentage terms; but not so those of Europe, Russia, India or even China.
[3] Precisely because the international community is ill-equipped to deal with problems that are outside of the experience of the nation-state.
[4] This was, at least, my personal experience (barring Iraq, for which visit I did not have time to get a visa).
[5] Led by my beloved old unit, the 101st Airborne.
[6] “The last resort of kings,” i.e. war
[7] The old alignments didn’t disappear, of course; and the continued military connection with Russia is what has saved Bashar al Assad’s bacon, to use a non-Halal expression.
[8] I don’t mean to imply that religious divisions are unimportant, however; the Shia-Sunni divide certainly adds a dimension of uncompromising viciousness that worsens the conflicts that have erupted. But the Turks and Arabs fought viciously over the same ground during the First World War even though they shared the same version of Islam.
[9] Whether the repression is perceived or real is somewhat irrelevant; discriminatory measures, like those proposed by Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen, only serve to substantiate the Islamic State’s message that the West in on a crusade to destroy Islam.
[10] This was distinct from the Arab nationalism of the Great War era, which retained its tribal and dynastic qualities through the Colonial period.
[11] Tacitus, Agricola, Chapter XXX
[12] Though dating back to the 1980’s Iran-Iraq War, the Iranian Army and Revolutionary Guard are almost certainly more capable than their Saudi equivalents.
[13] Arabic for “community”; the body of the faithful, equivalent to the Catholic ecclesia or more precisely, the ecclesia militans
[14] There are different levels of scholars, jurists and preachers as can be imagined in a religion that is over 1000 years old; and regional usages differ. I have chosen some of the most common terms known in the West for the different “functions” within Islam.
[15] Most Muslims consider only the Arabic version of the Quran to be definitive, since Mohammed received the revelations of God in that language and therefore any translation inevitably introduces errors and interpretations which God did not intend. Most Quran’s I have read have the original Arabic text side-by-side with the translation.
[16] It should be noted that Judaism and many strains of Protestantism are similar to Islam in this respect. In Judaism, the most orthodox members of society are growing to be an increasingly vocal, ultraconservative, and even dangerous segment in Israeli society. In the United States, creationism and the literal interpretation of the Bible are almost entirely Protestant traits; Catholic doctrine no longer adheres to either.
[17] The encyclical of Leo XIII in 1893 which in many ways ended the “cultural war” between Catholicism and scientific rationality (at least as far as Catholicism was concerned).
