Why the Arab World Fights - William Pfaff
Since
the Ottoman Empire’s collapse in the First World War, Arab Islamic civilization
has been deep in a crisis that can only be resolved from within. Its character
is both political and religious and might be compared with the Thirty Years’
War in Europe that ended in 1648 in the Westphalian Settlement, which created a
new international system of national sovereignties and, in religion, acceptance
of the Augsburg principle (1555) of cuius regio, eius religio. Roughly
speaking, these terms have prevailed in the West to the present day,
notwithstanding a sinister 20th-century totalitarian interlude.
The
unexpected appearance of what claims to be the new Islamic Caliphate—sweeping
all before it, its atrocities demonstrating its power and ruthlessness, its
avowed destiny the restoration of an Islamic Golden Age—should not be seen as
anything new in imperialist and post-imperialist history. It is astonishing
that the debate in Western circles on what (or what not) to do about ISIS has
seemed largely innocent of history and indifferent to the pattern of consistent
futility and failure in the West’s efforts to impose its will on the
non-Western world. A new movement that claims to restore the lost power and
glories of Islam, however unconvincing this claim may be, is actually the
ultimate stage in the crisis that has afflicted the Arab Muslim civilization
since its loss of unity in the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the last political
manifestation of a united Islam.
The
rise of a radical popular movement demanding that a lost golden age be restored
to a fragmented and culturally distraught society occurred at least twice in
19th-century China (the Taiping and Boxer rebellions) and in colonial India
(the so-called Sepoy Mutiny) and Sudan (with the Mahdi Mohamed Ahmed, a
messianic purifier of Islam who captured Khartoum in 1885 and murdered General
Charles Gordon), to take only the best known instances of such uprisings
against imperial powers.
The
phenomenon has appeared in post-colonial Africa: what else is the terrible
Lord’s Resistance Army of children in Uganda, or other radical movements such
as Boko Haram, classified in Western capitals as merely “terrorist”? Their
power lies in that they are motivated by versions or perversions of religion.
All
are political expressions of probably the most important recurrent phenomenon
of history itself: the search for the key to the Millennium, common to
sophisticated as well as simple societies throughout history. What do people
think Communism was, and in fragmented forms remains today? It proposed a
method for engineering what Communists—the Comintern and the Soviet and other
governments—promised, and indeed believed: the coming of the Great Day when
virtue incarnate would manifest itself in a transformed future condition of
permanent happiness conferring justice and happiness upon an afflicted people.
It is secular religion.
This
is a modern phenomenon. In the West during the medieval Age of Religion the
promised paradise was held to exist outside of time and would only be opened at
the end of the dolor of earthly existence by the arrival of the Messiah. The
Millennium marked the end of secular time, when human history would have run
its course and the “Thousand Years” of heavenly reign begun—as promised in the
Book of Revelation. Marxism was the secular translation of that religious
promise, promulgated by the new prophets: Marx himself, Engels, Mao Tse-tung. A
secularized prophecy was necessary because God had been assassinated in the
European Enlightenment.
That
is not the view held in Islam. The Emir Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, supposedly
Islam’s new caliph, awaits fulfillment of the promises of the Prophet Muhammad,
which like those of Christianity are intemporal. The Islamic Caliphate
proclaimed in August declares itself eager to attack the West and especially
the United States, as well as the West’s heretical Arab allies, notably the American-linked
Shia state of Iraq and the established Sunni claimant to Wahhabi primacy, Saudi
Arabia. The Sunni-Shia conflict inside Islam is widening and increasingly
embittered, promoted by big and rich Islamic states, Sunni Saudi Arabia, Sunni
Qatar, and Shia Iran among them. There is plenty of war now in the Middle East,
but it currently is nearly all confined within Islamic society and is mainly
generated by the ancient religious dispute over the true doctrinal legacy of
the Prophet, with subsequent and subordinate political motivations. It is
better to leave it there.
Why
have American opposition politicians been determined that Barack Obama show his
mettle by going to war again? Iraq and Syria in their civil struggles,
Hezbollah against Israel, Sunni rebels and Alawite rulers in Syria, all have by
now demonstrated that they are formidable fighters against their enemies. The
only one recently to fail was the new Iraq army, after a decade of American
training: undoubtedly the result of the Iraq government’s incapacity to
establish the loyalty and national conviction that bind an army to a state and
its people. This is a political failure, a consequence of the George W. Bush
administration’s witless destruction of the secular Iraq that existed before
2003.
The
contemporary crisis of the Arabs began following the Great War when the
winners, the principal European imperial powers of the time, disposed of the
remnants of the Ottoman Empire, using their new instrument, the League of
Nations, to issue mandates of supervisory control over the new monarchies and
other territorial authorities recognized in the war settlements. The quest
nonetheless persisted to reunite the people of Islam, a single if theologically
divided people, united by the Koran and by the Arabic language in which the
Koran was written and still is read.
The
Ottoman system that had replaced the great Arab Caliphates was destroyed in the
19th and early 20th century by resistance within the Slavic European parts of
the empire and then by the collision of the Ottomans with modern, industrial
Europe in the World War. The intellectual and theological challenge that had
been provoked by the European Enlightenment had inevitably influenced Islamic
thinkers, producing the precursor reform currents of the Young Turks’ movement
in the empire.
Following
1918, ageless, Islamic but non-Arab Egypt remained a monarchy, but under
British “protection.” Persia, also non-Arab, another ancient independent
monarchy, had fallen under an informal British ascendancy after the discovery
there of oil to fuel the Royal Navy. Syria, Iraq, and Transjordan had Hashemite
Arab monarchs bestowed upon them—Iraq to be ruled by Faisal, who had led the
“Arab Revolt” with T.E. Lawrence as his British military counselor, and who was
initially made king of Syria until displaced by the French colonial
authorities.
Syria
and Transjordan were made mandated states by the League of Nations,
respectively under French and British control. Palestine—as everyone knows—was
also placed under British Mandate but with no provision made for fulfilling
Britain’s wartime promise to establish a Jewish National Home there (on
condition, as the Balfour Declaration specified, that the rights of the
existing non-Jewish communities of Palestine would be respected).
What
at the time was tribal Arabia was in the course of being conquered by the
puritanical Wahhabi movement under Ibn Saud, his conquered territories being
proclaimed independent “Saudi Arabia” in 1932, while present-day Yemen remained
under tribal rule.
The
European colonial governments were accustomed to rule “lesser” peoples beyond
Europe’s frontiers and beyond the seas in what they considered to be their
subjects’ as well as their own best interests. Now they did so under the
unimpeachable authority of the “international community,” as the League of
Nations would be considered today, destroying the expectation the Arab peoples
had of unity and genuine independence.
The
new monarchies in Iraq and Syria fell to nationalist or military movements in
the 1920s and 1930s. The modernizing and secular pan-Arab Baath party
eventually took power in both countries, influenced by the Christians of
Lebanon, who feared finding themselves isolated in some new Muslim pan-Arab
nation. The closest thing to the pan-Arab ideal—an “Arab Nation”—was achieved
after 1953 by Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser, who introduced “Arab Socialism” into
Arab politics and achieved ephemeral unions of Egypt with Syria and Yemen. The
sectarian radicalism of the Muslim Brotherhood—founded in Egypt in 1928 but
opposed by Nasser—was and remains a pan-Arab movement with multiple
manifestations and probably an important future ahead of it, despite its rout
in Egypt.
Three
decades after the Great War’s armistice, the newly created United Nations, a
Western institution dominated (as still is the case) by the United States,
partitioned British Mandated Palestine in order to establish the Jewish
National Home promised in the British government’s Balfour Declaration of
November 1917, thus creating a permanent conflict with the Palestinian
possessors of the land. Since then there has been a constant struggle between
American-backed Zionists and the existing Arab occupants of Palestine. This has
inflicted a politico-psychical transformation upon the general Arab
consciousness, reanimating the sensibilities of the Crusades, the great
Caliphates, and the Ottoman period when Muslims ruled Balkan Europe from Greece
to Vienna. On both sides, the Palestinian conflict has acquired the quality—to
borrow the adjective contrived by Israeli politicians—of an “existential”
struggle. Death to the loser.
The
independent initiatives of the post-Second World War period meant to unify the
Arabs—the war against the partition of Palestine and creation of Israel, Arab
Socialism under Colonel Nasser, the secular Baath party in Syria and Iraq,
religious initiatives such as the Muslim Brotherhood—all eventually failed.
In
this political climate of Arab national failure and, as it seemed, irresolvable
Israel-Palestinian conflict, the United States determined that it was capable
of imposing a new order. This had been implicit in America’s overall wartime
and postwar world policy. There were two foreign-policy objectives to achieve
in the Middle East. The first was to assure American access to energy supplies.
This had been done in a wartime agreement between Franklin Roosevelt and
Arabia’s Ibn Saud, directly exchanging permanent access to Saudi oil for
permanent U.S. protection. The second was to find an Arab-Israeli solution. Had
Washington been willing to impose one in the 1950s—the creation of two
permanent states underwritten by the United States—the region would have been
spared 60 years of war, open and covert. That was not done, and Israel was
eventually confirmed in its impulse to possess all of the Holy Land, at
whatever cost to the Palestinians, initially dismissed in Israeli propaganda
discourse as an insignificant body of wandering tribesmen. America found itself
bound by domestic pressures to defend the consequences of this fiction.
A
permanent obstacle to American regional success arose in Iran in 1951, when a
popularly elected populist prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalized
British oil interests against the will of the Shah. The Shah fled. But in 1953,
a coup overthrowing the prime minister by street agitation, mustered by British
and American intelligence agencies, restored the Shah. The Nixon administration
later anointed him America’s ally and order-keeper in the Gulf region. However
in 1979, after another period of internal disorder, he was forced to flee a
Shia fundamentalist religious coup d’état, which included capture and
internment of the U.S. Embassy staff and humiliation of the United States
government. This produced the enmity towards Iran that has motivated American
policy ever since.
The
major result was Iraq’s subsequent attack on Iran, concerning territorial
issues, which enjoyed unspoken American support. The war lasted eight years,
and its savagery has been compared with that of the First World War. In 1990
Iraq invaded Kuwait—another territorial claim—and a U.S.-led coalition
liberated Kuwait and its oil in the so-called Gulf War. The United States then
resolved to keep permanent bases in Saudi Arabia, despite Saudi objection to
the presence of such installations near the Muslim holy places. After its 9/11
attacks on New York and Washington, the al-Qaeda movement, composed in
significant part of Saudi Arabians, explicitly stated that its motive had been
to impose God’s wrath upon the blasphemies of the United States in the Middle
East. President George W. Bush reciprocated with his assertion that the
jihadists of al-Qaeda embodied Evil.
The
American invasions of Afghanistan and Arab Iraq were animated by revenge for
the 9/11 attacks and rationalized by a fiction about nonexistent weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq and by the self-serving American chimera of
“democratizing” those two societies and eventually the rest of the region’s
Arab and Central Asian Islamic states—assumed to be candidates for integration
into a Washington-dominated liberal regional system.
The
“New Middle East,” officially proclaimed by NATO at the end of 2003, has
conspicuously failed to appear, but it remains a goal of the expansionist
neoconservative visionaries among the makers of American policy. In Bush’s
government, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote in Foreign Affairs in
2008, “Democratic state-building is now an urgent component in our national
interest” reflecting a “uniquely American realism” teaching that it is
America’s job “to change the world,” and in its own image. On September 11,
2014 the eminent dean of the School of Advanced International Studies of the
Johns Hopkins University, Vali R. Nasr, wrote in the New York Times that
America “must rally the whole region to support power-sharing—and nation
building. This is a tall order. But the crises facing America demand a grand
strategy…” A decade of failures has passed, but the grand design has not
changed.
President
Obama has declared that the jihadism of the new “Islamic State” is itself an
incarnation of evil that must be deterred and destroyed. The two sides in this
renewal of George W. Bush’s War Against Global Terror—Jews and Christians in
the West and their Arab enemies—both consider themselves “people of the Book”
and descendants of the Prophet Abraham. They have now become in their own minds
actors in the apocalyptic destiny described in the Book of Revelation. Many
American Evangelical Protestants have convinced themselves that contemporary
American foreign policy can only be understood in such a context.
Obstacles
to success in Washington’s renewal of war in the Middle East are that the
American political model is no longer widely convincing or respected in the
region; quite the opposite is true. Moreover, Washington’s conduct since the
2001 attack by Islamic radicals on New York and the Pentagon has undermined or
deliberately subverted institutions of international order to which, in the
past, the United States was a leading contributor. The codes of international
justice and morality, developed in the Western community of nations since the
17th century, have when expedient been disregarded or rejected, with demands
that the United States be exempted from the jurisdiction of international law
and even from what until recently were accepted norms of international morality
concerning human rights and national sovereignty.
Thus
the foreign policies of the United States have been stripped of a vital part of
their assumed original moral content. An assimilation of modern totalitarian
influences, values, and practices occurred in the United States after 2001,
with state assassinations, selective drone killings, disregard of due process,
torture, and permanent incarceration without trial justified by American
leaders in their conduct of what has amounted to a war, not really of
religions, as such, but between absolutisms, the one religious, and the other,
ours, a political culture of extreme and solipsistic millenarian nationalism.
One
recalls the theory Samuel Huntington announced late in his career that the
“next world war” would be a war of religions rather than states. The present
writer dismissed this at the time as a simple projection into the future of
20th century experience and the conventional American foreign-policy thinking
of the 1990s, notably that promoted by the aggressively anti-Islamic Washington
neoconservatives.
The
theory’s implausibility was augmented by its argument that China (regarded in
Washington, then as seemingly even now, as a future enemy) was to be part of a
“Confucian-Islamic military connection… to counter the military power of the
West”—an alliance, if it were indeed to exist, one would think of no great use
to China, a nation with a scattered and ill-treated Muslim minority of less
than 3 percent of its population and little to gain from involving itself in
Muslim conflicts with Washington.
The
main effect of the Huntington thesis at the time it was promoted in the United
States was to increase anti-Arab prejudices, especially among friends of
Israel. It contributed to a climate among policymakers that made the Bush
administration’s vengeance for the 9/11 attacks seem an inevitability. It had
an even more significant influence in Islamic intellectual and ideological
circles and among Arab governments because of its Harvard provenance, the
eminence of Professor Huntington himself, considered the dean of the American
academic specialty of political science (which emerged in the 1930s out of the
behaviorist movement) and for years a leading academic influence on Washington
policy-making. Was he proposing a Western attack against the Muslim world? (He
was not; the article was published in 1993, two years after the coalition
attack on Iraq because of its seizure of Kuwait; the U.S.-UK invasion of Iraq
and the “Global War on Terror” occurred only a decade later.)
While
Chinese-Arab military alliance seems hardly a threat today, the Huntington
thesis of a new religious war has been taken seriously in some quarters since
the 9/11 attacks made on Wall Street and the Pentagon and the rise of Islamic
parties and the new wave of jihadism. In 2014, within days of the proclamation
of the new Islamic State, the new Caliphate, the drumbeat demand had begun in
congressional and think-tank Washington for an attack upon ISIS (or ISIL, or
the new Arab Caliphate, or in Arabic DAESH, as it is variously known), together
with criticism of Barack Obama for his initial reluctance to act.
But
why? The previous interventions in the Middle East have proven futile and
damaging to both sides. Americans have attempted to make themselves oligarchs
of the modern Arab Islamic world, introducing invasions and wars whose actual
effect has been to envenom an immense part of the Arabs of the Middle East and
validate the vengeance they and their leaders have sought to inflict on us.
Barack Obama ran for office with a promise of ending two wars, work that he has
yet to complete, but now he is responding to the taunts and murders by which ISIS
wishes draw the United States into further revenge killings, thus justifying
its own actions and ambitions.
This
is a war essentially within Islamic civilization, with religious, ideological,
and political causes sprung from inside that society, as well as from the
external provocations it has endured. It can only be settled by the people of
that civilization. Another foreign military intervention is the last thing it
needs. The first of the post-1918 imperial interventions by Britain and France
shattered Islamic unity as it had existed in the late Ottoman period when the
Sublime Porte was a major European as well as Mediterranean power. The major
nations parceled the region up until after the Second World War, when
successive Arab efforts to recreate the visionary ideal of the Arab Nation were
thwarted.
The
American attempt to make the Shah of Iran its plenipotentiary and his state the
agent of American power in the Middle East ended in provoking a fundamentalist
Iran that became the most important American enemy in the region. The American
invasions of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and Sunni-ruled Iraq turned both into
ruined and corrupt puppet regimes. One might think any new American strategy to
reform the Middle East would universally be regarded as folly, even in
Washington. What the previous attempts accomplished was destruction and the
generation of seething hatred of the United States in much of the Islamic
world—and as well, if you will, the “New Caliphate.” Washington has now
appointed itself leader of still another and predictably unsuccessful military
intervention, in which tens or hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, if this
continues, may eventually die.
The
Saudi monarchy and the United States, as sponsor of what now is the remnant of
Iraq, have announced themselves defenders against the would-be successor to the
major Sunni powers, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant—proclaimed the New
Caliphate of Islam—implicitly demanding the right to possess the holy places.
By
joining the United States in a coalition to battle the New Caliphate, Saudi
Arabia and the rest of its Arab members have once again announced their
dependence upon a foreign and interventionist power to defend their own
integrity, an admission of impotence to restore to the Arab Islamic world the
wholeness and integrity it possessed during the Ottoman period, a confirmation
of their capitulation to partition and imperialism in the 20th century, as well
as their unwillingness or inability to restore the unity of the past, the task
to which a new and barbarous Sunni movement now has committed itself—whatever
the cost of its actions to Islamic civilization.
It
has infrequently been commented upon that the secular political ideologies
dominating post-Enlightenment Western political thought have all been
intrinsically incredible, even absurd by the standards of common sense, when
they have not been sinister and also unachievable—notions of utopian worker
paradises, “perpetual” revolutions, Nordic rule of the world with extermination
of the racially unfit, perfectly harmonious economic realms of self-correcting
markets and perpetual growth, a reordered Islamic civilization, global rule by
the most powerful with oppression of the rest—thus redirecting man’s efforts to
the exploitation of his most backward and cruel energies. Marx said that
history sets no problems that it does not resolve. I suppose that is true in
the sense that all problems of history eventually are resolved one way or
another; but this is no excuse for folly nor consolation to those who suffer
the consequences.
Why
the Arab World Fights by William Pfaff
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