[A-List] The Middle East After Iraq

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by Gwynne Dyer

http://www.gwynnedyer.net (June 23 2007)


Israeli historian Benny Morris is famous in his country for reopening
the forgotten history of the expulsion of the Palestinians during the
1948 "war of independence" and deconstructing the Israeli myth that they
freely chose to abandon their homes. By five years ago, however, he had
lost faith in a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians and was
openly saying that everybody would have been better off in the long run
if one side or the other had won a decisive victory in 1948.

If Israel had conquered all of Palestine and expelled all the
Palestinians in 1948, Morris wrote, "today's Middle East would be a
healthier, less violent place, with a Jewish state between Jordan and
the Mediterranean and a Palestinian Arab state in Transjordan.
Alternatively, Arab success in the 1948 war, with the Jews driven into
the sea, would have obtained the same, historically calming result.
Perhaps it was the very indecisiveness of the geographical and
demographic outcome of 1948 that underlies the persisting tragedy of
Palestine."

Well, of course, but most outcomes are indecisive. Like many
knowledgeable people in the Middle East, Morris's mood was strikingly
pessimistic even before the US invasion of Iraq, but five years later
the mood is darker still.  Beyond forecasts of civil war in Iraq,
however, there has been little effort to discern what the Middle East
will actually look like after the US troops go home.

There is already a civil war in Iraq, and it might even get worse for a
time after American troops leave, but these things always sputter out in
the end. There will still be an Iraqi state, plus or minus Kurdistan,
and regardless of whether or not the central government in Baghdad
exercises real control over the Sunni-majority areas between Baghdad,
Mosul and the Syrian border.

With a Shia-dominated government in Baghdad, post-occupation Iraq will
have close ties with Iran, but there will be no Iranian troops there.
Nobody in Tehran is crazy enough to volunteer Iranian troops for
counter-insurgency duty in Sunni Arab parts of Iraq, and Iran lacks the
military capability for adventures in the further reaches of the Arab
world even if it had the desire.

The Sunni Arab parts of Iraq have been turned into a training ground for
Islamist extremists from all parts of the Arab world by the American
invasion. Once the American troops are gone, however, the action will
soon move elsewhere, for the US defeat in Iraq has dramatically raised
the prestige of Islamist revolutionaries throughout the Arab world and
beyond.

That is where the price of America's Middle Eastern adventure will be
paid: not in Iraq itself, but in the Arab states that still have secular
and/or pro-Western regimes.  The main (and generally outlawed) political
opposition in all these countries - Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt,
Libya, Algeria and half a dozen others - has been Islamist
revolutionaries for many years already, and now some of them are going
to win.

It's not possible to predict WHICH Arab states will fall under Islamist
control, and they certainly aren't all going to: the pipe-dream of a
world-spanning Islamic empire remains precisely that. But it will be
astonishing if one or more of the existing Arab regimes does not fall to
an Islamist revolution in the next few years.

For the citizens of the country or countries in question, that could be
quite a big problem, since it would probably mean not democracy and
prosperity but just more decades of poverty and a different kind of
tyranny. For people living outside the Middle East, however, it would
probably make little difference.

Islamist-ruled STATES are not the same as bands of freelance fanatics.
If they have oil to export, then they will go on exporting it, because
no major oil producer can now do without the income that those exports
provide; they need it to feed their people. And they would have little
incentive to sponsor terrorist attacks outside the region, for they
would have fixed addresses, and interests to protect.

For Israel, however, the situation has changed fundamentally. For the
first twenty years of its existence, Israel was a state under siege. For
the past forty years, since the conquests of 1967, it has had the luxury
of debating with itself how much of those conquered lands it should
return to the Arabs in return for a permanent peace settlement. (The
answer was always "all of them", but that was not an answer many
Israelis would hear.)

Now the window is closing. Before long, some of the Arab states that
Israel needs to make peace with are likely to fall to Islamist regimes
that have an ideological commitment to its destruction. (Hamas's capture
of the Gaza Strip is a foretaste of what is to come.) Israelis trying to
evade hard choices have long complained that they had "nobody to
negotiate with".

It is about to become true.

Israel faces another generation of confrontation and quite possibly of
war, and the Palestinians face another generation of military
occupation. Significant chunks of the Arab world face Islamist
revolutions that would bring more poverty and a new kind of oppression.
It is a mess, and it's too late to fix it.

_____

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are
published in 45 countries.

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