Sunday, May 1, 2016
Bordershifting in the Middle East
It all started when the West – particularly France and
England – carved up the Ottoman Empire into colonies or spheres of influence
and control before, during and after World War I. These European powers liked
geographical simplicity – straight lines and natural boundaries like rivers and
mountains – and couldn’t care less about how the local peoples thought their
own geopolitical boundaries should be.
Think of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 declaring
Palestine a natural Jewish homeland with little or no consideration as to how a
conflict-free integration could be implemented or the 1916 Sykes-Picot accord
between France and England shoving Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds into an unnatural
country called “Iraq.” Immediately after World War II, with Jews having escaped
Hitler’s genocide, Israel was formed and began what seems a perpetual war with
her neighbors, still battling a nascent Palestinian efforts towards autonomy to
this very day.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, people with little in common
or, much worse, natural animosity, were shoehorned into new “nations” that were
fundamentally ill-conceived. These new borders also meant nothing to nomadic
cultures. Western military assistance to regional monarchs, who played ball
with the West, forced primitives into political configurations that the locals
had little or no say in creating. Let’s just say that power and access to oil
formed the West’s motivations.
When the United States began deep involvement as a major
power, it brought with it the naïve assumptions of a nation with only two
countries on its border – Mexico and Canada – oceans on the other sides…
isolated from a history dealing with hostile ethnic neighbors with powerful
militaries. And very little experience with colonial rule. Europe, correctly at
first, understood this lack of international political sophistication and took
full advantage of our naiveté.
The tables turned when Europe miscalculated Hitler’s rise
in pre-World War II days, as Winston Churchill lost every pre-US-involvement
military confrontation of early WWII with Germany in an effort to preserve
Britain’s colonial holdings, and as FDR confronted Churchill to make colonial
independence a condition of U.S. providing of arms, planes and ships before we
formally joined the Allies in WWII. Hitler did not formally declare war on any
state in that war – he simply attacked and/or invaded – except one: the United
States of America. The carve out and release of colonial control, with much
bloodshed, defined the post-WWII world.
In the middle and end of the twentieth century and clearly
in the twenty-first century, the rotten seeds planted by Western powers in the
WWI era grew to spread their toxic weed throughout the Middle East. The United
States bought into the mythology of these artificial boundaries as if they had
always been there. We imposed what were to be two of the most corrupt regimes
in history in our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, forcing those living in
those countries to accept what we call “representative democracy” defined by U.S.
“nation-building standards. Today, Afghanistan has almost completely returned
to the repressive rule of the Taliban we deposed in 2001.
We took a relatively stable country, Iraq, ruled by a
brutal but efficient tyrant of the minority Sunni side of Iraq (20%), and
handed control to a 60% majority Shiite government that promptly set about
effecting retribution on their former Sunni rulers. The Kurdish north slowly
ignored the fray in the south and set up a de facto autonomous Kurdish enclave
with its own political and economic system that actually worked exceptionally
well. Nervous Turkey and Syria (and even Iran) looked nervously at this
successful Kurdish zone in northern Iraq and began to fear that their own local
Kurds would defect to this autonomous region and form an entirely new nation.
Turkey in particular had been battling internal Kurds factions seeking
independence for many years.
As the great Syrian/Iraqi drought, one of the many
consequences of global climate change, loosed well over a million disenfranchised
and mostly Sunni farmers and their families – no longer able to eke a living
out of now-fallow farmland – into a sea of desperate and angry peoples, the
failure of the Shiite government in Baghdad or the Shiite minority (10%)
government in Damascus to provide needed relief gave rise to the opportunists
from the newly-formed Islamic State to declare themselves as the saviors of
regional Sunnis and punishers of non-Sunnis (primarily Shiites – from Iran and
Iraq – and the West).
Even as the United States looks to Iraqi forces – now
controlled by Shiites who are feared by Sunnis in “conquered lands” more than
ISIS – to provide boots on the ground to crush the Islamic State, it seems that
Iraq itself is unraveling, are finally likely to hive into the three ethnic
states that were shoved into unnatural boundaries after WWI: Shiites in the
eastern sector, Sunnis in the southwest and Kurds in the north.
Shiite strongman and religious leader, Moqtada al-Sadr
(pictured above), and his Mahdi Army defected to the safety of Iran when the
United States invaded Iraq. Four days after the bulk of US-led NATO forces (all
the combatants) exited Iraq, a-Sadr and his militia were back in Iraq, with the
full blessing of the Shiite-controlled government. They asserted their power
against Sunnis and enjoyed almost full military status within this troubled
nation. Sunnis were not even second class citizens anymore. But the Shiite
members of parliament continued to slop at the bribery and corruption trough,
clearly against the wishes of al-Sadr and his followers.
On April 30th,
“Hundreds of supporters of Shi'ite
Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr stormed into Baghdad's Green Zone and entered
parliament on Saturday after Sadr denounced politicians' failure to reform a
political quota system blamed for rampant corruption.
“The
protesters, who had gathered outside the heavily fortified district housing
government buildings and many foreign embassies, crossed a bridge over the
Tigris River chanting: ‘The cowards ran away!’ in apparent reference to
departing lawmakers.
“There were no reports of clashes with
security forces. But an army special forces unit was dispatched with armored
vehicles to protect sensitive sites, two security officials said. No curfew has
been imposed, they said.
“All entrances of Baghdad were shut ‘as a precautionary
measure to maintain the capital's security,’ another security official said.
“A United Nations spokesman and Western
diplomats based inside the Green Zone said their compounds were locked down. A
U.S. embassy spokesman denied reports of evacuation.
“Earlier in the day, a suicide bomber
drove a truck loaded with three tonnes of explosives into a gathering of
Shi'ite pilgrims in the southeastern Baghdad suburb of Nahrawan, killing 19
people and wounding 48 others in an attack claimed by the ultra-hardline Sunni
militants.
“Sharqiya
TV showed Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi walking inside the Green Zone with
dozens of armed guards following the breach, discrediting reports he had fled.
Protesters later entered the nearby cabinet headquarters.
“Such a breach is unprecedented, though
only a few years ago mortars frequently rained down on the 10-square-kilometre
Green Zone, which once housed the headquarters of the U.S. occupation and
before that a palace belonging to Saddam Hussein.
“Checkpoints and concrete barriers have
blocked bridges and highways leading to the neighborhood for years, symbolizing
the isolation of Iraq's leadership from its people.” Reuters, April 30th. They pulled back to allow security
forces to protect pilgrims but pledged to return unless big changes were
implemented. Was this just one more nail in the coffin of the “nation of Iraq”?
Probably. Iraq no longer seems able to sustain the mythology that in is a
viable and coherent nation as currently configured. The bigger question is what
happens next? Do the Kurds make their move? Does Iraq fracture along ethnic
lines? It appears that regional conflicts will get a whole lot worse before
they improve.
I’m Peter Dekom, and
as bad as the Western carve-up of the Middle East was, American foreign policy
in the last two decades has made a horrible situation much, much worse.
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