[IslamCity] West Miscalculated the Middle East & Now History Has It By The Throat

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 05:23:57 -0700

We Miscalculated and Now History Has Us By the Throat

The west profoundly misunderstood how the Middle East works

Martin Woollacott
Wednesday August 10, 2005
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1545861,00.html


Nobody now disputes that misunderstanding has paved every step of the way in Iraq. The misunderstanding, or the lie, about Saddam's weapons continues to be central to western arguments about the war. But, important as that issue remains, there was a more profound set of misunderstandings of the social, political and religious processes at work within the Middle East.

 

They included especially the tense balance between Sunni and Shia, a loss of diversity and tolerance in the Sunni lands, the real impact of Sharon's long reign in Israel, and the effect of demographic changes altering the politics of many countries in the region. It was not that these things were not seen by experts, governments or even journalists, but that they were not added up, or were added up in the wrong way. Some, such as the Shia majority in Iraq, were seen by many only as an asset for an invader. Others, such as the collapsing peace process, were categorised as requiring remedy but not, in spite of much rhetoric, urgency. Above all, the interaction between these processes, still continuing, was only partially foreseen.

 

For example, Iran's resumption of its nuclear programme this week is the act of a government that, although it has serious internal weaknesses, is in a position of strength in its international dealings. The argument going on next door in Iraq over the constitution is also one in which Shia Muslims are in a strong position. In Lebanon, Syrian withdrawal may ultimately benefit an already strong Shia community. In the Gulf and in Saudi Arabia, suppressed Shia aspirations may not remain so for ever. These are all aspects of a shift in power between Sunnis and Shias that always had some potential for violence. But the way in which the Iraqi intervention triggered a violent Sunni reaction - at least as much among Sunnis outside Iraq as among those inside - to a potential Shia gain may come to be seen as its most important, and its most tragic, effect. To gloss this only as "terrorism", and to see it mainly in terms of a conflict between terrorists and the west, is to miss a large part of its meaning.

 

The Iranian revolution had given the region a new kind of state, specifically religious and specifically Shia in a way that the Shah's regime had never been. Much of what Saddam did during his years in power was aimed at staving off a Shia succession, but, especially with Iran's weight on the scales, change in Iraq could not be delayed for ever.

 

That such a succession would have come anyway in Iraq, and would undoubtedly have been accompanied by violence, is not a defence of the war. It could well have been much less violent, and it might well also have taken place - notwithstanding the existence of significant jihadist groups - without inducing such an angry Sunni reaction, for the American intervention gave an inevitable change: the aspect of a western-assisted Shia seizure of power from Sunnis in the best-endowed of all Arab states.

 

Jihad groups, initially more interested in expelling Americans from Saudi Arabia, could also increasingly point to the deterioration in Palestine as proof of encirclement and encroachment on the Sunni world. They can still do so: Netanyahu's resignation this week portends a political contest in Israel, making it even less likely that Gaza withdrawal will be followed by genuine negotiations about the West Bank.

 

The failure of the peace process took place in a region that had lost some of its old diversity and tolerance, because of the migration of minorities to the west, and because of the emergence of more schematic forms of Islam. And it took place in a world in which Europe had, as the American academic Robert S Leiken recently wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine, "in a fit of absent-mindedness ... acquired not a colonial empire but something of an internal colony, whose numbers are roughly equivalent to the population of Syria."

 

The limbo in which some of Europe's Muslims live has suddenly become an object of intense interest, for obvious reasons, again a case of something often seen in the past, and indeed sometimes intensely discussed, but rarely put into the larger context.

 

The reaction of some Sunnis - not just jihadists but people of all classes, in Muslim lands and in the diaspora - has been to see mainly and sometimes only that in Iraq a Sunni place is under siege. It is a view that blanks out the fact that Iraqi Shias and Kurds are Muslims, and that a majority of Iraqi Sunnis want to see the back of the insurgency, although of course they want to see the back of the Americans too. And it also blanks out the democratic argument, which suggests another western misunderstanding.

 

The Americans in particular are wont to see nothing underneath a bad government except a people yearning to be free, and to regard the secular middle classes of countries such as Iraq or Iran as the authentic representatives of everybody else. Like it or not, this is not always the case. In Iraq's war conditions, apart from Kurdistan, these classes have been brutally targeted in Sunni areas and may well end up being outflanked by clerics in the Shia south. In Iran the recent election was a reminder that there is a third party in what from the outside is often seen as a conflict between authoritarian rulers and a liberal middle class. This third party may find itself deceived in its choice in Iran, but it is a constituency of more ordinary folk, with conservative Islamic leanings, a desire for clean government and not much interest in issues of cultural freedom. It is a constituency visible everywhere in the Middle East, in countries that have democracy, such as Turkey, where it sustains the ruling party, and in those that have little.

 

The historian David Fromkin has recorded that he set out to write an account of how Europe changed the Middle East in the early decades of the last century and ended up writing just as much about how the Middle East changed Europe, mainly by wearing it down. Among the things seen but not understood before Iraq were how our own societies would react, mainstream as well as minority. The majority have shown a surprising willingness to operate on the basis of what's done is done. They even seem resigned to the fact that, as Ayman al-Zawahiri's words made clear last week, our freedom from terrorist attack is now specifically dependent on events in Palestine as well as in Iraq. But the readiness of Americans and British to invest more in the enterprise is diminishing almost by the week, and the otherwise incomprehensible plans for partial military withdrawal by both nations are a reaction to that. As the American Iraqi expert Phebe Marr says: "If you can't garner adequate resources - and public opinion at home and abroad - to rebuild a nation, do not start." But we did start, and now history has us by the throat.

 

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AB

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"For to us will be their return; then it will be for us to call them to account." (Holy Quran 88:25-26)

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