From December 2006 through the late
summer of 2007, four foreign policy commentators
reached for the same 1980s movie title, Back
to the Future, to describe the peregrinations of US
Middle East policy in the oft-proclaimed twilight
of the neo-conservative moment. There was confusion,
however, as to what past was being summoned to
replace the present. For Washington Post columnist
David Ignatius, the failure in Iraq has forced
the White House back to the immediate aftermath
of the 1979 Iranian revolution, when the US acted
as armory and automated teller for an Arab-Israeli
entente assembled to stare down the Islamic Republic.
For Fouad Ajami and two fellow neo-conservative
sympathizers, it is the State Department “realists”
who have reset the time machine, hearkening back
to the realpolitik of the Cold War to thwart President
George W. Bush’s democratizing instincts.
This magazine never believed that
the neo-conservatives were rooting out Cold War
thinking from Washington nor that their commitment
to democracy was terribly deep. If anything, the
neo-conservative moment, as epitomized by the invasion
of Iraq, evoked an age before the United States
aspired to supremacy in the Middle East, a time
of conquest and colonial mandates. Nonetheless,
we share the affinity for the phrase “back to the
future,” precisely because it hints that a simple
return to the past is impossible.
The occasion for Ignatius’ column
was the July 2007 announcement by the State and
Defense Departments of $63 billion in new military
aid for Egypt and Israel and arms sales to the
Arab Gulf states. It is hard to conceive a move
more at odds with pressure on these governments
to democratize. More to the point, the deals were
a reminder that US ties to these governments have
been heavily militarized—and conceived primarily
in geostrategic terms—for years. Massive transfers
of weaponry have long been Washington’s preferred
method of propping up client states from afar.
Flush with oil money, the Gulf states are spending
on military hardware and infrastructure in amounts
that recall the sprees of the 1970s and the early
1990s. At the same time, US-allied armies in Egypt,
Jordan and elsewhere are taking advantage of the
inflows of American cash to become serious players
in their respective economies, in effect, catching
up to their counterparts in Pakistan, where the
military owns a disproportionate share of the productive
assets. Thus does the US secure the assent of Middle
Eastern officers’ corps to its overall strategy,
and perhaps, as in Pakistan, to the detriment of
the civilian component of the state.
After the September 11, 2001 attacks
and the invasion of Iraq, however, there is no
going back to the realists’ edifice of preceding
decades. Nor can the strategic picture be encapsulated
as an inflammation of the “arc of crisis,” the
term popularized by Carter-era National Security
Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski for the stretch of
autocracy and insurgency from South Asia to the
Horn of Africa. The number of clients has increased:
Not only is the US arming and training new allies
in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is also airlifting
war materiel to Lebanon, not a major recipient
historically, and renewing the once suspended armament
of proxies in Pakistan, the empire’s eastern reach.
And, of course, a physical US military presence
undergirds the regional order more than ever before,
with hundreds of thousands of combat troops in
Iraq and Afghanistan, and bases sprinkled liberally
across the Mediterranean and the Gulf. As is obvious
from the headlines, the destabilizing effect of
these US deployments on the region is greater than
the garrisons of the past, even as client states
increasingly depend on American soldiers and weaponry
for their
own stability.
The “Middle East,” then, is expanding—on
Pentagon wall maps and in the media ether. With
the outbreak of civil war in Iraq came the genre
of news analysis that fixates on the ethnic-sectarian
divides of the Middle East as dispositive of the
region’s hopeless fragmentation and illiberalism.
As Western observers present it, these divides,
too, are spreading inexorably eastward to engulf
Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nothing can be done to
stop the fission, this media genre posits, and
so a clutch of self-anointed big thinkers are tempted
to redraw the boundaries of states along more “natural”
lines.
Witness the widely circulated article
in the January/February 2008 edition of the Atlantic
Monthly by Jeffrey Goldberg entitled “After Iraq.”
Noting that Middle East watchers once pondered
the question of whether there would be one or two
states in Israel-Palestine, he continues: “Today,
that question seems trivial when compared with
this one: How many states will there one day be
between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates River?
Three? Four? Five? Six? And why stop at the western
bank of the Euphrates? Why not go all the way to
the Indus River?” The Atlantic Monthly editors
helpfully illustrate Goldberg’s musings with a
multi-colored map showing a Greater Jordan that
has swallowed the West Bank and the northern Najd;
a Greater Syria that has annexed central Lebanon
and northwestern Iraq; and a Greater Yemen that
has taken over the mountainous ‘Asir province of
southern Saudi Arabia. Iraq is predictably split
in three. A new Kurdistan straddles modern-day
Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. Iran (identified
as “Persia”) has also lost majority-Arab Khuzestan
and Balochistan to independence, and its northwestern
valleys to Greater Azerbaijan, but expanded eastward
toward Herat. Pakistan has been stripped of Balochistan
and Pashtunistan. Afghanistan has ceased to exist.
The map traces its lineage to a similar exercise
printed in the July 2006 Armed Forces Journal and
devised by an American Colonel Blimp named Ralph
Peters, who, with characteristic bluntness, calls
his new boundary lines “blood borders.”
Goldberg
decries “a poverty of imagination” among those
who would dismiss his remapping project as disruptive
of the current state system. The state system is
dissolving anyway, he says. Of course, it is nowhere
written in stone that today’s borders must perdure—and
realist fretting about the stability of client
states has indeed helped to crush many movements
for self-determination in the Middle East and beyond.
But Goldberg and Peters, like the more consequential
proponents of “soft partition” of Iraq in official
Washington, seem oblivious to the crucial distinction
between genuine movements from below and separatism
stoked by (in Goldberg’s own words) “white men
wielding crayons.”
A related Western optic that has widened
of late is that of “the tribe.” In a reprise of
classic colonial thinking, US planners in Iraq
are busily gathering as much information as possible
about which confederations predominate on what
alluvial plain and which clans police what hamlet.
Tribal affiliation, a famously slippery and historically
constructed concept among anthropologists, is a
key feature of the “Human Terrain Systems” whose
contours the US military endeavors to record in
conflict zones (perhaps, they hope, with the aid
of a few anthropologists). Bush’s wars have birthed
a generation of intelligence analysts who may not
relate to the reasons why Iraqis resent foreign
occupation, but definitely know their Dulaymis
from their Jabouris and their Abu Hasanayns from
their Abu Samhadanas. It is almost as if, having
appreciated the limitations of the “clash of civilizations”
theme during the war on terrorism, the war’s prosecutors
have found comfort in the shop-worn tropes of deep-seated
sectarian-ethnic conflict and tribalism.
The categories
of sect, ethnicity and tribe are not, of course,
mere figments of the Western imagination. These
subnational identities exist, and Middle Eastern
regimes and other elites have long manipulated
and exacerbated them for their own purposes. But
taxonomies of communal difference simultaneously
oversimplify the region by erasing other kinds
of solidarity—say, class—and render it overly complicated
by missing more prosaic (even American) drivers
of fragmentation, say, wariness of central authority.
Further, just as one must study the policies of
Saddam Hussein to understand sectarian tension
in Iraq and one must learn about the practices
of Pakistani juntas to fathom ethnic insurgency
in Pakistan, so the interventions and perceived
goals of the region’s superpower—now, not so distant—help
to structure the inter-communal contention of the
expanded Middle East.
Heading back to the future, there
can be no restoration of the American century in
the Middle East, either the one over which realists
and liberal internationalists thought they presided
or the one of which neo-conservatives dream. Power
is too diffuse and fluid, the means of subversion
and resistance too plain. The scope and magnitude
of the disaster in Iraq will defeat any effort
to escape without serious consequence for US hegemony.
Seen in this light, Washington’s attempts to manage
Pakistani politics and its profligate transfers
of the instruments of war to Middle Eastern allies
seem like pieces of an improvised frame of containment,
aimed at reining in forces of indeterminate strength
and direction, but whose orientation is palpably
uncongenial to US grand strategy. Sadly for the
peoples of the expanded Middle East, however, it
is only the cultural dominance of imperial logic,
and not its practice, that is behind the times.
