Inchoate Imperialism. Part I: A New Narrative
The Need for a New Narrative
It is hardly a secret that the nature of our involvement in the Middle East has changed significantly over the past few years. This change, which has manifested itself in both American military and diplomatic involvement and in the interest and education of individual Americans, is likely to be long lasting. In the early phases of this education process, most Americans who had not exhibited much prior interest in the region took their cues from leaders they trust: those partial to the Bush Administration took most of its assertions at face value, while those who dislike it rejected most of those assertions with equal ease, and turned instead to leaders of the left.
Over the past several months, however, an increasing number of bright, educated people of various political and philosophical orientations without deep prior backgrounds in Middle Eastern history who have reached a common conclusion: there’s something wrong with the stories we’ve been hearing. Those reaching this conclusion may or may not question the veracity and the good intentions of the leaders they once chose to follow, but they all question the quality of the lessons.
People are beginning to realize that neither the “right wing” nor the “left wing” stories seem to hold together, and that their predictive power is nil. Since 2000: We have watched the Palestinian leadership reject the independent state we’ve been told they seek; We have learned that our Saudi friends fund the world’s largest network of anti-Western, anti-liberal indoctrination institutes; We have seen a Lebanese government, finally free of Syrian occupation, content to leave a heavily-armed Hizbollah running a mini-state blessed with its own foreign and defense policies; We have seen the “moderating” Islamic Republic of Iran lurch backwards into an aggressive, expansionist, revolutionary mode; We have squirmed as Islamic countries condoned the wholesale slaughter of black Sudanese Muslims at the hands of Arab Sudanese Muslims; We have reaffirmed the fecklessness of the “international community” at holding Arab states to even the most basic levels of decent behavior; We have listened to vitriol that implausible blames all of the region’s problems on Israel; and above all, We have become unwitting participants in Iraq’s Muslim v. Muslim civil war. And those are merely the headline stories.
Americans have discovered a region in which none of the proffered narratives seem to explain either the major or minor stories. The only predictions that ever seem prophetic are those that promise that the situation will degrade with time. Americans are finally getting more than just an occasional glimpse of a region that has been in steady slow decline since its last hegemonic ruler, the Ottoman Empire, slipped into history’s dustbin with the Treaties of Sevres and Lausanne in the early 1920s. Since then, Western powers seeking “stability” have helped to ensure that no battle was ever definitive and that no issue was ever resolved. The region has slid into a seemingly perpetual cycle of crisis, cries to restore the status quo, grudging restoration of something resembling that status quo with no attempt to resolve the issues that created the crisis, and the inevitable next crisis. Americans are justified in asking: What’s going on here?
Given queries of this nature, it’s important to recall Occam’s Razor—a common yet powerful problem-solving paradigm asserting that the simplest explanation available is typically the correct one. In the case of Middle East rhetoric, the most likely explanation is that the narrative is wrong. Our so-called experts all share some common foundational assumptions—or as it is more often known, “conventional wisdom.” These assumptions, embedded deeply in the way that our academic institutions approach the region and train generation after generation of experts, define the orthodoxy of the field. Those who reject them are summarily dismissed as “unserious” or “biased.” As in any field of inquiry, however, flaws in our foundational narrative in the Middle East will lead to unfulfilled predictions and inappropriate actions. How can we detect whether such flaws exist? Empirical data provide the best indication.
Thomas Kuhns’s analysis of the structure of scientific revolutions described the ways in which mounting empirical data eventually overcome flawed conventional wisdom in the sciences, and lead to fundamentally new foundational stories consistent with empiricism. Such revolutions, however, are properties of the institutions and societies within which we conduct scientific research, not of the scientific disciplines themselves. Academia, media, and government all play critical institutional roles in this game. They all promote shared orthodoxies in all fields, or at times a small number of competing orthodoxies (most of which, at heart, rest upon some common assumptions). They are ill equipped to address revolutionary possibilities: What if the conventional wisdom with which all recognized experts agree is wrong?
Such questions need not imply that everything that our experts have told us is wrong. It simply implies that they are overlooking a foundational element that caused many of the seeming anomalies to arise. In the sciences, atoms, germs, genes, DNA, relativity, and uncertainty all played such revolutionary roles. They maintained all previously recorded empirical data, swept aside the increasingly implausible explanations for “anomalies,” and replaced them with simple elegant explanations blessed with first explanatory then predictive power.
The time has come for a revolution in our thinking about the Middle East. It is blindingly clear that something has been missing from our discourse. People take actions and events unfold for a reason. Contrary to popular opinion, residents of the Middle East are no less rational than are residents of other regions. If their behavior seems impervious to common sense, the flaw likely lies with common sense, not with their behavior.
Where can we look for a new narrative? Again, in keeping with Occam’s Razor, the simplest explanation is likely the correct one. In a region that Sunni Arabs dominate, the missing piece is most likely to lie within the Sunni Arab community. The element that has been missing from previous analyses is an inchoate form of pan-Sunni Arab Imperialism. With this piece added to the puzzle, explanation and prediction both become possible.
Inchoate Imperialism?
What does “inchoate imperialism” mean? The best guide to an answer remains Hannah Arendt’s brilliant The Origins of Totalitarianism. In this book, which she wrote between the fall of Hitler and Stalin’s death, Arendt provided an insightful re-interpretation of nineteenth and twentieth century European history. She showed how various trends led inevitably to the monstrosities of Hitlerism and Stalinism. In particular, she focused on precursor movements: anti-Semitism and imperialism. She showed how the toxic combination created a glide path to totalitarian states.
Of particular relevance, Arendt saw nation building (to use a contemporary term) as the primary objective of nineteenth century Europeans. The notion of a “nation state” is actually a complex agglomeration of two distinct concepts: statehood and nationhood. States are relatively easy to create; lines drawn on a map do the trick. If the “governments” on both sides of the line consolidate power on their own side and relinquish claims to the other side, the states emerge. Creating nations is much harder. The governments leading states must convince the people living within their boundaries that they share some common notion of “nationhood” that differentiates them from those living in other states—or at a bare minimum, that a critical number of them share that “nationhood” concept. In a contemporary context, few can doubt that the European powers successfully crafted an Iraqi state more than eighty years ago; the existence of an Iraqi nation remains questionable even today.
But back to Arendt. By the nineteenth century, Europe boasted many nationless states. Their governments worked hard to craft national identities—most explicitly and most successfully in France, but also throughout the continent. At the same time, however, Europe also boasted many stateless nations. Some of these nations occupied small plots of land that eventually achieved statehood (e.g., the Irish, the Czechs, the Lithuanians); some are still fighting for it today (e.g., the Basque, the Corsicans). Two of them, however, posed a particular challenge: the Jews and the Gypsies were pan-European stateless nations. Their insistence upon maintaining their own identities complicated the European social experiment in nation building. It also exacerbated a problem that was among the greatest causes of social instability in nineteenth century Europe: that of permanently stateless people.
Jews and Gypsies were hardly the only nations whose membership confounded state boundaries. Arendt identified two much larger and more important groups whose notions of nationhood and statehood seemed misaligned: Germans and Slavs. This misalignment gave birth to pan-Germanic and pan-Slavic movements of “Continental Imperialism” (to use her term). The key element to take from her analysis of these “movements” when contemplating the modern Middle East is that they shifted over time. Bismarck and Hitler were both pan-Germanic leaders who sought to unify the Germanic Volk into a single state—reconciling the notions of Germanic nationhood and German statehood. Czarism and Stalinism both took similar views about the Slavic people and the Slavic state. In both cases, the notion of unifying two of Europe’s largest “nations” into states served as an undercurrent for numerous movements—royalist, socialist, authoritarian, totalitarian, and otherwise.
Different factions within the “pan” movements may have hated—and attacked—each other, but they shared this bedrock concern. Different factions also showed differing levels of tolerance to smaller or lesser nations living within the boundaries of the putative unified state. Even the most tolerant among them, however, rejected the notion that any of these “minorities” had a “right” to a state of their own—or at the very least, a “right” as strong as that of the “majority” Germans or Slavs. Minority rights and ethnic self-determination are anathema to all pan movements and imperialists.
Fast forward to the modern Middle East. Lines drawn on maps between about 1920 and 1950 created numerous states. Few have coherent notions of nationhood. Pan movements seem to come and go—pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, etc.. Stateless people abound—some as fourth-generation “refugees.” Coalitions seem to shift overnight. How can outsiders understand this morass? Arendt’s analysis points the way. In particular, to understand the forces that made the modern Middle East, it is important to consider the region’s one important “pan” movement—Sunni Arab Imperialism—and three sectarian movements—Khomeinism, Zionism, and Kurdish nationalism. A consideration of these movements explains much of twentieth century Middle Eastern history, as well as much of what we see today.
Sunni Arab Imperialism is far and away the most important force in the modern Middle East—even though few “experts” or leaders identify it as such. As most people know by now, Sunnism has always been the majority and dominant branch of Islam. It controlled the entire Islamic world until a few centuries ago, when a Shiite dynasty assumed control of Persia. Beyond Persia, there have been few if any Shiite rulers of note. The rulers of the Ottoman Empire were Sunni Turks, and throughout the Empire those of different ethnic groups (including Jews and Christians, as well as Shiites) assumed lesser legal and social status. When the Ottoman Empire fell at the end of the first World War, the Sunni Arabs—the largest single ethnic group in an ethnically diverse region—saw themselves as the obvious inheritors. They believed that Sunni Arabs should rule everywhere, from the straits of Gibraltar to the Shatt-al-Arab. Members of other ethnic groups living within that territory were to become second-class citizens at best, exiles and victims at worst. The Sunni Arabs were the sole worthy inheritors of the Empire, their inability to either wrest a unified state from the Ottoman Empire’s ruins or to unite behind a single leader notwithstanding.
In the African part of this world—the part of Dar-al-Islam that the Ottoman Empire had lost long before WWI—the imperial objective became a reality despite the fragmentation into numerous states. Every government in North Africa is Sunni Arab. Shiites were always a small minority, and they remain so today. The larger historic communities of Jews and Orthodox Christians were mostly (though not entirely) exiled to France, the United Kingdom, Greece, Cyprus, Israel, and elsewhere. Tension remains with the Berbers and the Coptic Christians. Black Africans, whether Islamic or not, have been marked for genocide. Northern Africa is more ethnically homogenous today than at any point in recorded history, and it is becoming ever more so (see Darfur). Sunni Arabs have been quite successful at purging the other ethnic groups from its confines.
The drive towards Empire in “Arab” West Asia has proven much more difficult—and for our purposes, more interesting. Before considering the action there, however, it is important to state another reality about the pan movement that I call pan-Sunni Arab Imperialism: It has always been an inchoate movement. Its single greatest success came with Nasser’s creation of the Arab League, a club of Sunni governments whose primary purpose is to preserve the integrity of the empire while its various factions struggle for supremacy. Arab League rules require unanimity before action. They are thus structured to ensure that the hardest-line voices will always win. For the League’s first few decades, Egypt possessed that voice. When Anwar el-Sadat made peace with Israel, the Arab League ejected Egypt; Saddam’s Iraq soon assumed the lead-rejectionist seat. The League readmitted Egypt only when Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait threatened to fracture the entire edifice (more on that period below).
The Arab League notwithstanding, the Sunni Arab world is hardly unified. It has given us numerous royal families, none of whom would ever willingly cede control to another for the sake of unity. Its various manifestations have given the world Baathism, an explicitly fascist movement originally conceived to expand the “natural party of government” to include all Arabs; Nasserism, an explicitly Sunni movement that gave some lip service to the broader Arab world; and Islamism, which attempted to expand not in the Arab direction, but rather across the Islamic world; and numerous smaller, hybrid, and splinter movements in-between. No matter where they start, who they claim to represent, or how they ground their ideology, however, the upshot of all of these movements is the same: Sunnis end up dominating the movement and relegating all others to second-tier positions (with the interesting exception of Syrian Baathism, which I will discuss in greater detail below). The struggle for supremacy within that movement accounts for most of the wars and much of the tension in post-Ottoman Middle Eastern history. Few but students of the region would know this statistic, however, because few of these wars generate much interest beyond the region; inter-ethnic conflicts generate many more headlines than do intra-ethnic ones.
Pan-Sunni Arab Imperialism accounts for one side in most of the region’s inter-ethnic conflicts, as well. This observation is unsurprising. As the region’s dominant ethnic group, Sunni Arabs should feature prominently in most of its stories—both the positive and the negative. What is surprising, however, is how often this simple truth seems to evade analysis. Nevertheless, it is critical to understanding some of the Middle East’s most vexing problems. Iraq’s longstanding desire for Kuwait and Syria’s longstanding desire for Lebanon strike most Sunni Arabs as little more than anschluss; whether they favor such annexations at any given moment depends on the politics of day rather than on any fundamental commitment to the sanctity of state borders. After all, eventual unification is necessary if the Empire is ever to become whole.
Pan-Sunni Arab Imperialism, and reactions to it, thus explain many of the region’s most vexing problems. These include: the unremitting hostility toward Israel; the Palestinians’ status as the world’s only “multi-generational” refugees; the general ambivalence toward Lebanon; the resistance to the tripartition of Iraq; and Syria’s seemingly permanent position as both “odd man out” and “staunchest anti-Zionist” in Arab politics. The connection to each of these “permanent crises” warrants a bit of explication.
The Permanent Crises
Israel is the only genuine example of ethnic minority self-determination in all of West Asia. Recognition of Israel’s legitimacy simultaneously narrows the Empire’s borders and affirms a concept of minority rights and ethnic self-determination as antithetical to pan-Sunni Arab Imperialists as it was to the English, French, German, and Russian Imperialists who preceded them. Israel’s fundamental illegitimacy is a non-negotiable point within the Sunni Arab world. There are no dissenting voices capable of speaking for more than the single individual uttering them. In recent years, pragmatic voices have started to come forward. Some Arabs, including some influential Sunni leaders, have recognized that Israel is unlikely to disappear within the foreseeable future, and that accommodations with illegitimacy are occasionally necessary. Leaders asserting this view often earn the label “moderate,” yet another mislabeling for which we can thank conventional wisdom; their position rests entirely upon pragmatism rather than upon moderation. As a result, every suggestion of Israel’s potential impermanence suggests to them that their pragmatism may have been premature—and thus leads to an otherwise inexplicable reduction in their moderation. This simple fact explains the phenomenon that every Israeli concession leads to increased violence and terror—often in inverse proportion to the size of the concession.
Of perhaps greater significance, however, even these pragmatists seem incapable of acknowledging the pressing need to resettle the region’s stateless people. The twentieth century saw far too many refugee crises. Many of these refugees were fortunate enough to land among ethnic kinsmen. In almost all such cases, the governments of those kinsmen, despite fairly abject poverty and extremely limited resources, embraced their brothers and sisters. These governments elevated the integration of their kin above all other priorities. This behavior cut across many different cultures and political regimes; countries with exemplary records in this respect include Greece, Turkey, Israel, India, and Pakistan. In the entire Arab world, only Jordan has done its share. The establishment of a permanent UN agency (UNWRA) dedicated to preserving the refugee status of the Arabs who happened to live in Western Palestine in the mid-1940s and their descendants (the technical definition of Palestinian refugees), remains one of the great humanitarian scandals of the modern era. In any other parallel situation, the more professional UNHCR would have worked with ethnically related host countries to ensure that those displaced through population exchanges were resettled and integrated into culturally related societies. The Sunni world’s steadfast refusal to extend this basic decency to their recognized kin makes sense only within the context of an Imperial drive. These hapless, expendable foot soldiers serve the Emperor well as permanent refugees—no matter who that Emperor might be. They shine a perpetual light on the illegitimacy of the tiny ethnic Jewish state in the midst of the Empire’s rightful land. They also prevent the sort of regional stability that might lock the state system—including Israel—in place, precluding the eventual emergence of a unified Empire.
Lebanon, like Israel, was supposed to have been an exercise in ethnic self-determination; in this case, France’s gift to Maronite (Western rite) Christians. In a lesson that modern Israel should heed, this experiment in Christian self-determination has proved much less successful than the neighboring experiment in Jewish self-determination. Why? The most likely reason combines overreach, demographics, and ambivalence. When the United Nations drew partition lines across the western portion of Britain’s Palestine Mandate, it carefully gerrymandered Jews and Arabs into separate states. The refugee crises emanating from the subsequent Arab efforts to eradicate both the nascent Jewish state and the Jewish populations living within their own borders accelerated the sorting. Had the Arabs accepted the 1947 partition plan, the resultant Jewish state would have had a small Jewish majority—one that demographic trends might have dissipated by now. By the time the dust settled on the refugee flows in the mid-1950s, Israel had a sizable Jewish majority. These demographics allowed the country to stabilize and to thrive as a liberal democracy (albeit one with an initially statist economy). By way of contrast, when the French Mandatory authorities drew the lines around Lebanon, they gave the Maronites the largest state in which they would be a majority—albeit a small majority. The Maronites, in turn, responded by creating a confessional state with spoils divided according to the size of the ethnic community; as the majority, of course, they retained the lion’s share of those spoils. At the same time, they chose to identify Lebanon as an Arab state (a perfectly reasonable choice under the circumstances) rather than as a Mediterranean state (an equally reasonable one). As Lebanese demographics shifted and as pan-Sunni Arab Imperialism progressed from fighting European powers to internal governance, Lebanon found itself increasingly isolated: a shrinking Christian plurality government holding down Shiite, Sunni, and other groups, within an Arab League designed to promote Sunni supremacy. For decades, Lebanon’s image reflected this duality: part European, part Arab. In the final analysis, that duality precluded effective Western involvement when inter-Arab tension tore the country apart. The problem persists to this day, and seems unlikely to abate soon.
Given the Imperial attitudes towards these two instances of “secession,” Sunni opposition to the tripartition of Iraq becomes clear. A Shiite state in the south and a Kurdish state in the north would both reduce the imperial boundaries. They would be the greatest affronts to the integrity of the putative Empire since Israel’s birth in 1948. This parallel also explains the role of both Zionism and Kurdish nationalism in the regional mosaic. As legitimate movements of ethnic self-determination, they are necessarily Western implants. From the days of the Prophet, the Islamic world was organized as a series of Empires, with a single elite group in charge and everyone else of lesser stature. Minority rights and ethnic self-determination were ideals of the late European enlightenment. The idea of compounding the crime of creating a Jewish state with the creation of a Kurdish one seems too much to bear; it would truly demonstrate the crumbling of the dreams of Empire. The aversion to tripartition also clarifies both the Sunni and the Arab nature of the Imperial drive; Kurds are non-Arab Sunnis, while Iraqi Shiites are non-Sunni Arabs. Neither is worthy of self-determination—at least not within the boundaries of the Empire.
The crumbling of the Imperial dream also explains the strange role of Syria. Like most Arab states, Syria is majority Sunni. Alone among the Arab states, however, Syria’s ruling elite is non-Sunni. Hafez al-Assad consolidated his control of Syria in the early 1970s, nominally on behalf of the explicitly fascist Baath Party, but actually on behalf of his Alawite kinsman. The Alawites are a secretive religion, typically considered an heretical offshoot of Islam, living along the Syrian coast of Latakia (where they form a majority, and could reasonably claim the right to a small state paralleling Israel and Lebanon). Little is known of the Alawites. They maintain an entirely oral tradition, and do not teach their rites to outsiders. I have read that some consider them an aberrant form of Christianity; others a unique strain of Shiism. What is clear, however, is that they are a distinct ethnic group—and through much of their history, a despised ethnic group. I have also read analysts comparing the idea of an Alawite President of Syria to a Jewish Czar or a Gypsy assuming the Hapsburg throne—clearly an indigenous people, but not one that is “supposed” to assume power. The Alawites’ wholly illegitimate control of a Sunni country puts the Syrian regime in a perpetually precarious position; it cannot trust any other members of the Arab League, but it also cannot withdraw without facing significant repercussions. In a masterful move, the Assads (now a mini-dynasty) have finessed this situation by combining strident pan-Arabist anti-Zionism and an alliance with the traditionally anti-Arab Shiite of Iran. These twin pillars sustain the regime in power. It is hard to see how it could survive if either one were to weaken.
That alliance with Iran brings the region’s fourth significant philosophy into play: Khomeinism. Contrary to common perception, Khomeinism is not and never has been an Islamic movement, much less a Shiite one. It is a true European revolutionary movement, of the sort hatched in many a nineteenth century café or salon. The Ayatollah Ruholah Khomeini (who happened to be living in France during much of his movement’s intellectual development) chose to wrap it in Shiite rhetoric, but fellow travelers like Marx and Bakunin would have felt comfortable with its political agenda. Shiism, like most minority religions and decidedly unlike Sunnism, always believed in separating clerical authority from temporal authority. The Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is thus a much more traditional Shiite cleric than does Ali Khameini in Iran: he may advise, exhort, and suggest, but would never claim temporal power.
Khomeinism hit the region like a bolt from the blue. Though alien to Shiism, its potential appeal among the region’s long downtrodden Shiites seemed obvious. After all, Zionism had managed to turn the world’s politically flaccid Jewish community into a positive force for ethnic self-determination in the space of a few short decades (for the first time since the Romans completed the destruction of Judaea in 136). Could Khomeinism do the same for the equally flaccid politics of Shiism? Given the sizable Shiite population scattered throughout the Sunni world—with a particular concentration in the oil-rich arc around the Persian Gulf—few sane Sunni leaders wanted to risk learning the answer.
The Arab League managed to coordinate its response with surprising speed. Within a year of the revolution’s consolidation of power in Iran, Saddam Hussein launched a brutal attack. His nominal reason—reclaiming rights to the Shatt-al-Arab waterway that he had relinquished to the Shah under duress—should have been of little interest to the other Arab countries. Nevertheless the Arab oil states shouldered the entire financial burden for this eight-year war, whose real objective was to serve as a bulwark against the spread of Khomeinism. (Syria was Iran’s sole Arab ally) When the war finally ended, Saddam turned to the Arab League expecting payment for services rendered: control over OPEC policy and an anschluss with Kuwait. Things didn’t quite work out the way that he planned.
Iraq’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait was the watershed event that should have transformed the region. For only the second time (Nasser’s early years were the first), a Sunni ruler had proposed a plan capable of creating the Empire. Saddam’s absorption of Kuwait would have doubled his capacity for oil production. His control over OPEC policy, strengthened by his proximity to Saudi and the UAE, would have allowed him to cut overall supply—thereby doubling oil prices. This nearly instantaneous quadrupling of his revenues would have thrown the entire OECD into deep recession. Flush with cash and with a stranglehold over the global economy, Saddam could have invested in an army formidable enough to finally vanquish the Zionists and eliminate Israel. With that feather in his hat, he would consolidate at least de facto control over the entire region bounded by Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and the Persian Gulf—and elevate the power of the Sunni Empire into a major world power. From the perspective of Sunni Arab Imperialism, it was not a bad plan.
Unfortunately, most other Arab rulers had gotten used to ruling. Saddam’s play put them in an untenable position. He forced them to choose between the unspoken, inchoate Imperialism at the bedrock of all Sunni Arab movements, and the state-centric benefits that they had come to enjoy. The Saudis, their smaller GCC allies, and the Jordanian all found themselves in a situation that they shared with the Israelis: as potential targets of a putative Emperor’s guns. In a shocking display of status quo thinking, the team of George H.W. Bush and James Baker worked to alleviate the choice. This team, which had failed to prevent the transformation of the former Soviet Union, succeeded beyond its wildest expectations in the Middle East: it prevented the emergence of modern ideologies by maintaining an untenable status quo through the sheer force of foreign intervention. A combination of military force, diplomacy, sanctions, and inspectors, kept these tensions bottled up for more than a decade. Throughout that decade though, no one made any attempt to alleviate the inherent internal conflicts or the underlying tension. After 9/11, the U.S. shifted strategies. By toppling Saddam’s regime, the George W. Bush administration unleashed all of these forces at once—as if suddenly removing the lid from a cauldron that had long been welded shut over a high flame. These are the forces that we are witnessing today.
All of which, of course, leads up to the question that really interests most Americans: What are we supposed to do now? Not surprisingly, I have some thoughts about that, as well. Unfortunately, this essay is getting quite long, and forecasting is very different (and much harder) skill than diagnosis or explanation. I therefore defer my policy recommendations to a separate essay that I hope to write and post soon. So if you have read this far, stay tuned . . .
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