The Collapse of Order in the Middle East
Amb Chas W. Freeman, Jr.,
Remarks to the 23rd Annual Arab-U.S. Policymakers Conference
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.
Arab US Policymakers Conference AUSPC 2014 Bosch Anthony Freeman
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.
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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.
Source: Middle East Policy Council
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