Middle East
Thomas Ricks, author of the acclaimed Fiasco, argued recently in the Washington Post that US involvement in Iraq may be only half over.
“A smaller but long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq is probably the best we can hope for,” he writes, because Iraq is more fragile than it now seems.
- Iraqi factions will likely try to break out of the current arrangements now enforced by the US. This could mean full-scale civil war.
- A military takeover is possible. An expert suggests to Ricks that “the classic conditions for a military coup were developing — a venal political elite divorced from the population lives inside the Green Zone, while the Iraqi military outside the zone’s walls grows both more capable and closer to the people.”
- Power centers in Iraq are diverse and obscure, and include former Sunni insurgents and Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Ricks suggests al-Sadr is likely to gain more power — and that he might become an American ally, as the Sadrists are Iran’s Shiite Iraqi foes, historically.
- The Iraqi army may revert to brutal Saddam-era tactics without American supervision.
The consensus in the US military, Ricks suggests, is that Americans will still be fighting in Iraq in 2015.
“Israeli leaders are seriously considering a dormant Saudi plan offering a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab world in exchange for lands captured during the 1967 war,” reports say.
The 2002 Saudi plan is unusually straightforward, and has been endorsed by the 22-member Arab League: Arab states would fully recognize Israel in return for Israel’s relinquishing the territories it occupied in 1967–the West Bank, Gaza Strip, east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
Israelis in favor of the plan still have qualms about elements that may endorse some kind of large -scale “right of return,” in which Palestinians could go to Israel if they or their families were uprooted in 1948.
Parag Khanna, author of The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New World Order, offers some tips for a new US president in the October issue of Wired, in an article by Daniel Pink.
- The United States can avoid decline by “tightening trade and energy ties to the rest of the hemisphere, pursuing economic innovation at home, and establishing a ‘diplomatic-industrial complex.’”
- The US should create “an energy partnership with Mexico, Canada, Venezuela, and Brazil,” reducing dependence on oil from the Middle East.
- The US should treat Mexico as the EU does Turkey, “integrating, elevating, and partnering with it.”
- Egypt is “ripe for revolt. We should make friends quickly with other power centers in the country, including the Muslim Brotherhood.”
- The US should offer Iranians a deal: oust President Ahmadinejad, and they will get “everything they want in terms of of Western investment in energy, freer trade, diplomatic recognition, and increased cultural and student exchanges.”
- Uzbekistan merits attention, as the most populous and industrialized country in Central Asia, and the only state that shares borders with all the other “stans.”
- “India will never rival China . . . It’s not a superpower.”
- China’s rise will not be hindered by “demands for such niceties as transparency or free expression,” as “the Chinese people have a preference for stability over another revolution.”
- Russia has more problems than potential: it is “in demographic free fall” and “Chinese immigration is blurring the border.”
A new analysis by the Institute for Science and International Security attempts to answer that question, the Washington Post reports.
A military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities would probably only delay the country’s progress toward nuclear-weapons capability, according to a study that concludes that such an attack could backfire by strengthening Tehran’s resolve to acquire the bomb. The analysis by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security found that Iran’s uranium facilities are too widely dispersed and protected — and, in some cases, concealed too well — to be effectively destroyed by warplanes. And any damage to the country’s nuclear program could be quickly repaired.
Moreover, Albright told the Post, Iran would likely emerge more intent on acquiring nuclear weapons. He said that:
an Israeli or U.S. attack would result in broader popular support for Iran’s ruling clerics and could lead Tehran to sever ties with the U.N. nuclear watchdog. “Iran would likely launch a ‘crash’ program to quickly obtain nuclear weapons,” Albright said in an interview. “An attack would likely leave Iran angry, more nationalistic, fed up with international inspectors and nonproliferation treaties, and more determined than ever to obtain nuclear weapons.”
The Post notes an indicator of deteriorating stability in Lebanon: the price of weapons is rising.
Many weapons that had been stowed away since the civil war ended in 1990 are going onto the market.
Writes the Post, “many people now worry more about the potential for conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Although few expect a conflagration on the scale of the last war, many are preparing for the worst.”
This week provided a clear example of dyschronicity, from Saudi Arabia.
The Washington Post reports that the kingdom’s “most revered cleric” has issued a fatwa demanding apostasy trials for two writers who questioned an aspect of hardline Saudi Islam in articles.
The cleric decreed that the writers should be tried and executed if they do not repent.
Hence the 400-plus year gap between Sweden and Saudi Arabia on the dyschronicity map: Western Europe gave up this conception of the role of religion around the 17th century.
(Image usable with credit and link to FutureAtlas.com)
New polling in Iran offers mixed signals to those who hope for “moderation.”
A strong majority of Iranians favors allowing all reformist candidates to contest elections, and 86% say that all leaders of their country should be elected.
At the same time, a slim majority of Iranians says that Iran should develop nuclear weapons–51% are in favor of this, with only 39% opposed.
So Iran’s potential interest in nuclear weapons is not confined to a tiny ruling group, and even the advent of full democracy might not dispel it.
The International Herald Tribune details the process of Islamization, using the case of Egypt.
In Egypt and other Arab lands, faced with frustrated hopes and poor economic prospects,
the young are turning to religion for solace and purpose, pulling their parents and their governments along with them. With 60 percent of the region’s population under the age of 25, this youthful religious fervor has enormous implications for the Middle East. More than ever, Islam has become the cornerstone of identity, replacing other, failed ideologies: Arabism, socialism, nationalism.
The article offers these implications:
- “The focus on Islam is also further alienating young people from the West and aggravating political grievances already stoked by Western foreign policies.”
- An Islamized populace has less distance to travel to reach Islamic radicalism.
Curiously, one of the drivers of social frustration in Arab countries is delayed marriage, due to high marriage costs, the article explains. In other words, given that these economies are not producing widespread wealth, the social system has developed a malfunction.
This trend has implications for stability:
- States may find it harder to control populations that have been primed for political Islam.
- Populations used to thinking in terms of Muslim solidarity may be more actively provoked by the current Israeli-Palestinian situation, and hostile to the impotent peace practiced by states such as Egypt and Jordan.
- Political Islam, with its statist inclinations and hostility to aspects of scientific reasoning, could reinforce the economic malaise that many Middle Eastern countries tend to suffer.
In the Nov. 19th New Yorker, John Lee Anderson concludes that “Iraq’s future, for the moment, is in limbo. The best one can say, perhaps, is that the U.S. has bought or borrowed a little space to work with.”
This is partly because the cause of the current decline in violence is not at all clear:
- The surge in American troops seems to be working, but only in some areas.
- On the other hand, “analysts credit much of the recent drop in Iraqi civilian deaths not to the surge but to Sadr’s decision, in August, to order the Mahdi Army, which is believed to have been responsible for much of the Shiite-on-Sunni sectarian killing in and around Baghdad, to “freeze” its activities for six months.”
- Also crucial is the fact that “the surge also coincided with the so-called Sunni Awakening, the decision by some Anbar tribesmen to ally themselves with the Americans and to fight against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia—a shift that was not foreseen in Petraeus’s plan.”
In other words, at least two of the elements of recent gains are not under American control at all, and thus subject to reversal, whatever future policies the US pursues.
In a harbinger of future instability, Anderson writes that “Many of the players in Iraq seemed …. to be positioning themselves for the next battle.” A Sunni leader now working with the US says, “Once Anbar is settled, we must take control of Baghdad, and we will.”
A second ominous sign is that, while the American relationship to various Iraqi players has shifted, internal Iraqi reconciliation is not proceeding, despite that being the central goal of the surge. Shiites in the Iraqi government feel the new Sunni “allies” that the US has enlisted are the militias of the future. Meanwhile, efforts to create nonsectarian security forces–essential to a post-occupation Iraq’s stability–are still faltering. The national police, for instance, are “still part of the problem,” an American officer tells Anderson.
The Washington Post reported yesterday that there is a way for things to suddenly get much worse in Iraq: a giant dam could collapse, releasing a 143-square-mile reservoir on the Tigris River. This would destroy much of the city of Mosul, which lies downstream, and could drown as many as 500,000 people.
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No one interviewed for the article ventures an estimate of probabilities for the event. Some Iraqi engineers are skeptical about the level of danger, while some American officials are said to think that “the dam could collapse any day.”