| by Rami G. Khouri | Released: 28 Feb 2007 |
BEIRUT -- New Yorker magazine investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has sparked fresh debate with his latest article alleging that Washington’s new policy to confront Iran in the region sees it sending American money and other assistance to extremist Sunni groups, sometimes via the Lebanese and Saudi governments, in order to confront and weaken Hizbullah, Syria and Iran.
Do not pity or jeer Washington alone, for every single player in this tale -- the United States, Hizbullah, the Lebanese government, Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia -- wriggles uncomfortably in the mess they collectively created through their shortsighted policies of recent years. I suspect this mirrors something much bigger: We are at a potentially historic moment when the modern Arab state order that was created by the Europeans in 1920 has started to fray at its edges and its core, perhaps in what we might call the Great Arab Unraveling.
Shattered Iraq is the immediate driver of this possible dissolution and reconfiguration of Arab states that had held together rather well for nearly four generations. It is only the most dramatic case of an Arab country that wrestles with its own coherence, legitimacy and viability. Lebanon and Palestine have struggled with statehood for half a century; Somalia has quietly dropped out of this game; Kuwait vanished and quickly reappeared; Yemen split, reunited, split, fought a war, and reunited; Sudan spins like a centrifuge, with national and tribal forces pushing away from a centralized state; Morocco and the Western Sahara dance gingerly around their logical association; and internal tensions plague other Arab countries to varying degrees.
A learned British friend reminded me this week of the mixed legacy of Euro-manufactured countries, in three states that were created at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I: Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Iraq. Not an inspiring record. The Anglo-American war to change the Iraqi regime has triggered wider regional tensions, by unleashing powerful and often antagonistic forces of ethnic, religious and tribal identities, most of which have formed their own militias. All militias thrive on Arab, Iranian and Western support. It is no surprise that Washington now may be indirectly assisting Sunni fundamentalist radicals of the ilk who attacked the United States in recent years. America, welcome to the Middle East. The Middle East is not Orange County, California, and the militias' trucks with anti-tank rockets and other killing machines do not drive around with government-issued EZ Passes to get through checkpoints.
The United States obviously decided several months ago to shift into fallback position and plan B on Iraq. The surge in U.S. troops to Iran probably camouflages the American retreat to more defensible lines in the Arab world, where it can fight against Iran and its mostly Islamist, but also Syrian government, Baathist friends, allies, and surrogates. Washington and its friends are desperate to control the genie they unleashed in Iraq, but they are wrong to see the threat primarily as a Shiite-Iranian one. Those are core elements of the groups that fight the United States, Israel and some allied Arab regimes. It is more useful to recognize that the driving force for the anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli loose coalition of forces in the region is, precisely, U.S. and Israeli policies in the region.
The Middle East has suffered so much homegrown internal tyranny and sustained external assaults that it has become a dangerous pressure cooker, given that the majority of citizens live with enormous and still growing dissatisfactions in their economic, social, ethnic, religious or national lives. If the pressure is not relieved by allowing the region and its states to define themselves and their governance values, the whole pot will explode. I suspect we are witnessing both things happening together these days.
On the one hand, Islamist, ethnic, sectarian and tribal movements grow and flourish all over the Middle East -- and are aided by Iran -- in a dramatic example of collective self-assertion. On the other hand, massive external pressure, led by the United States, some Europeans, Israel, and some Arab governments, fights back, hoping to keep the lid on a region trying to define itself and liberate itself from the modern legacy of Anglo-American-Israeli armies.
The pervasive incoherence of this bizarre picture makes it perfectly routine for Arab monarchies to support Salafist terrorists, for Western democracies to ignore the results of Arab free elections, for Iranians and Arabs, and Shiites and Sunnis, to work hand in hand and also fight bitter wars, for Islamist and secular Arab revolutionaries to join forces, for freedom lovers in London and Washington to support seasoned Arab autocrats and the occasional loveable tyrant, for Western and Arab rule of law advocates to sponsor militias, and for Israel and the United States to perpetuate Israeli policies that exacerbate rather than calm security threats and vulnerabilities for all in the region.
Short-term panic, medium-term confusion and long-term directionlessness have long defined policies by Americans, British, Arabs, Israelis, and Iranians alike in this region. They have only become more obvious these days, as confrontation, defiance and war in the Middle East interact to signal the end of an era and the start of a new one. This spectacle, which includes but transcends the Great Arab Unraveling, is in its very early days. Harrowing things are yet come.
Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.
Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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