The Myth of Middle East Stability

At The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky is vexed that “we the United States—not President Obama, not John Kerry, not the Republicans; the whole United States—aren’t doing nearly enough to try to help the region’s democrats and promote our purported values.” While we Americans “have long since learned to live with more or less permanent crisis in the larger Middle East,” he continues, what with the Islamic State, the collapse of Syria, the Gaza war, “things right now feel a little…different.” So why, he wants to know, “isn’t Obama doing more?”

Fortunately, that’s easy to answer: Obama’s not doing more because short of brute force coercion — against Israel as well as the “Islamic State” — there’s nothing more he can do. If there’s one thing Israel’s war against the Palestinians illustrates, it’s the limits of American foreign aid. Though presidents since the end of World War II have promoted the idea that foreign aid — especially military aid — is a kind of “medium-hard” power, one that buys America influence through arms sales and other assistance, Israel’s utter disregard for the consequences of settlement activity and protracted IDF violence — even to itself — suggests that the nearly $242 billion in inflation-adjusted assistance the U.S. has provided Israel since 1949 has purchased rather little, if any, influence.

It’s well past time we stop accepting the delusional idea that America can produce stability in the Middle East, a shibboleth routinely promoted by neocons like former Vice President Dick Cheney, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, and The Washington Post‘s hawkishly pro-Israel blogger Jennifer Rubin, who recently complained that Obama’s “weasel words” were “contributing” to Middle East instability.  If only “we” were “tougher” and more reliably pro-Israel, “we” could “stabilize” the region. Of course, one senses that even as pie-in-the-sky a partisan as Rubin secretly realizes she’s wrong, hedging her argument, as she does, in a litany of inherently subjunctive constructions: we “might not” have instability if only we “could” do this or that such that we “might” see a better outcome.

Karl Rove was wrong: the United States does not “make” reality. The kindest thing we can say about what passes for strategic thinking in the conservative movement today is that it is based upon a make-believe reality.

Here’s the news: there’s nothing – nothing – “we” can do to “stabilize” the Middle East, and the more we try to do the lower the probability we’ll achieve anything noteworthy. Stability in the Middle East is a shibboleth, a myth, a fantasy concocted by those who view the planet as a kind of three-dimensional version of Stratego®, one in which the United States holds the highly collectible, limited-edition American Exceptionalism™ Super Awesome Powers piece.

Not how the Middle East works [game by Hasbro, Inc.]With just a cursory glimpse at the region’s history, even a blind man could see there’s no such thing as Middle East stability. The region is defined by instability, and the best we can do, as Hunter S. Thompson used to say, is buy the ticket and take the ride.

I like to call it the Crème Brûlée Theory of Middle East Politics: for 200 years, there has been a thin, brittle layer of seeming regional stability created mostly by the domestic repression of illiberal regimes – a layer that, once cracked (as it was by the Arab Spring), was unable to restrain the seething, gooey mass bubbling just below the surface — a manifestly unstable mass of resentment, poverty, rival and competing identity claims, territorial conflicts, and sectarian competition for control of the state.

Little wonder that neocons yearn so for a return to the strategic clarity of the Cold War: one of the ironies of our “victory” over the Soviet Union is that it cost us the semblance of a Middle East regional balance of power. For good or for ill, the oppositional tugging of the two superpowers managed to contain a great deal of the latent instability that, since 1991, has come to define the region – though that reciprocal tugging is also very much to blame for today’s manifest instability, inasmuch as it preserved the artificially “stable” layer on top, the layer we saw from 30,000-feet. It looked plenty stable to us.

J.M. Staniforth, News of the World (1898)

There’s a reason why the Ottoman Empire was known as the “Sick Man of Europe” – even the Ottoman sultans couldn’t contain the pressures lingering below the surface and at the geographic margins of their Empire.

Defeated in the 1827 Battle of Navarino, the Ottomans were forced to cede control of the Mediterranean to the British and the French; defeated in the 1829 Russo-Ottoman War, they were forced to cede control of the eastern Black Sea, Georgia, Moldavia, Serbia, and Wallachia to Russia; undermined by sectarian conflict in Lebanon from 1860-61, they were forced to cede autonomy to Lebanon as a Christian-ruled entity under French suzerainty; defeated by the Cretans from 1866-69, they were forced to cede autonomy to Crete as a Christian-ruled entity. Everywhere, the latent instability of Ottoman rule was revealed: in 1878, the British annexed Cyprus; in 1861, the French invaded Tunisia; in 1882, the British invaded Egypt; in 1905, Yemen was split in two; in 1907, Iran was divided into spheres of British and Russian influence; in 1911, Italy invaded Libya; and in 1912, the French occupied Morocco.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement, which so many commentators are fond of blaming for the allegedly “artificial” borders of the Middle East, could hardly have made the region’s manifest instability worse. Short of complete self-determination, which none of the Great Powers was prepared to risk, whatever the political outcome in the post-World War I Middle East it was not going to do much to alleviate the root causes of today’s instability. (For the record, I find the Sykes-Picot blame-game unpersuasive: sure, the region’s borders are artificial — but all borders are artificial, as every American school student who had to learn “Fifty-four Forty or Fight!” should recognize).

The region’s history after World War II hardly validates the rosy-hued notion of a stable past, as even an incomplete list of 2oth-century regional conflicts clearly demonstrates:

• 1948 War
• 1948 Imamate War (Yemen)
• 1954-62: Algerian War of Independence
• 1953-55 Moroccan Rebellion
• 1952-54 Tunisian Insurgency
• 1954-60 Jebel Akhdar War (Oman)
• 1956 Sinai War
• 1958 Lebanese Crisis
• 1961-70 Kurdish-Iraqi War
• 1962-70 North Yemen Civil War
• 1962-76 Dhofar Rebellion (Oman)
• 1963-67 Aden Emergency (South Yemen)
• 1967 Six-Day War
• 1969-70 War of Attrition (Egypt, Israel)
• 1970-71 Black September civil war (Jordan)
• 1971 Iranian seizure of Abu Musa, Lesser & Greater Tunb islands (UAE)
• 1973 Yom Kippur War
• 1973-91 Western Sahara conflict
• 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus
• 1974-75 Second Kurdish-Iraqi War
• 1974-2012 Kurdish insurgency (Turkey)
• 1976-82 Muslim Brotherhood uprising (Syria)
• 1975-90 Lebanese Civil War
• 1978-87 Chad-Libya War
• 1979-88 Soviet-Afghan War
• 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War
• 1982-85 Israeli invasion, occupation of Lebanon
• 1986 South Yemen Civil War
• 1989-96 Iranian Kurdish insurgency
• 1989-96 Afghanistan Civil War
• 1990-91 Second Gulf War
• 1994 Yemen civil war

So where’s this “stability” we keep hearing so much about?

To the extent there’s been regional stability, it’s been an incomplete, artificial stability imposed by the constraints of the U.S.-Soviet strategic competition.  And for a United States unable and unwilling to engage in the kinds of direct colonial and neo-colonial control associated with European Great Powers, “stabilizing” the region historically entailed a kind of strategic subcontracting, first to Turkey, described by the Los Angeles Times in 1957 as the “key to the Levant” and in 1964 as the “eastern anchor” of the Middle East, then in the early 1970s under the Nixon Doctrine to the “Twin Pillars” of Iran and Saudi Arabia, and in 1985 to Iraq, described as the “eastern flank of the Arab world,” holding the Persian hordes at bay.

Throughout the post-WWII era, commentators fretted, as Tomasky does, about regional instability. Would the Communists gain the upper hand in what former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski famously described as the region’s “arc of crisis?”  Replace “Communists” with “Islamists,” and American foreign policy in the Middle East neatly transitions from the 20th-century Red Scare to a 21st-century Green Scare. Hey, another arc of crisis! Hooray, we know how to do that!

The Green Scare is why today’s Christian Zionists and those associated with what the International Relations theorists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt called “the Israel Lobby” so aggressively promote clinging to Israel. Israel is the Not-the-Muslims actor in regional politics today, just as it was the Not-the-Commies actor 40 years ago, and that’s what makes Israel so attractive to the nutters of the Bible-thumping Far Right — Christians United for Israel and their ilk.  They waged a holy war against godless Communism in the 20th-century, and they’re hell-bent on waging holy war against godless Islamism in the 21st.

As a result, we’re forced to start any strategic evaluation of the region — as if by assumption — from the conclusion they want us to reach: namely, that American and Israeli interests are identical. That assumption — and conclusion — is then vigorously enforced by a steadfast refusal to permit a legitimate public debate over whether, and to what extent, Israel fits in the definition of American national interests.

This is why one constantly sees vicious, knee-jerk accusations of anti-Semitism directed at anyone who dares question the U.S.-Israeli foreign relationship, as if questioning Israeli politics is synonymous with hating Jews on the basis of their religious identity. Indeed, Lindsey Graham recently accused the United Nations of “anti-Semitism” for having the temerity to disapprove of Israel’s war in Gaza. It’s the atomic bomb of Middle East policy debates: Have you stopped hating Jews?

Look, I’m from Chicago. To me, politics boils down to a simple question: what have you done for me lately?

No matter which way I cut it, I don’t see that Israel has done a lot for me lately. Does Israel have a right to national survival? Absolutely. Should ordinary Israelis have to go about their daily lives in fear of terrorist attacks? Absolutely not.

But the Palestinians have that right, too.  That’s the trick, you see. We Americans haven’t done a very good job recognizing the right to stable, secure borders on both sides of the equation.

Yes, we have a long relationship with Israel. Yes, we were the first to recognize Israeli independence. But that was then; this is now. Politics is about return-on-investment, and I think it’s fair to ask whether the U.S. is getting any return at all on that $242 billion. Even a passbook savings account pays off at about 0.10% per year — that’s something.

America’s Israel investment is running deficits today. Maybe there was some ROI back in the Cold War, when we could point to Israel and harrumph that it was the “only democracy” in a region of Soviet client states — which was apparently some kind of “victory” over the Bolsheviks.

But the Cold War is over. Heck, even John McCain said so.

Israel is going to pursue its national interests, and that’s as it should be. Tel Aviv clearly thinks that attempting to destroy Hamas and undermine the political influence of the Palestinian Authority is in its interest. Maybe they’re right. Somehow I doubt it.

But it’s just as clear that further enraging the Sunni Arab world is hardly in America’s interest — and when Israel attacks, its victims see “Made in the U.S.A.” stamped on the munitions.

In 2014, the U.S. is confronting the same problem it confronted in 1944, when the issue of a Jewish homeland in Palestine took on renewed significance: should the U.S. side with a regional minority, especially one that — at that time — had no energy resources America needed. Recognizing the state of Israel’s independence was an act of mercy — not an act of sound national policy.

American and Israeli national interests are hardly synonymous; in fact, there’s hardly any overlap between them at all. What has Israel done for me lately?

As the great British statesman Lord Palmerston famously said, there are no permanent friends, and there are no permanent enemies. There are only permanent interests.

The United States has an interest in a stable Middle East, to the extent such a thing will exist. Yes, because of oil. And because of terrorism. There’s nothing wrong with having an interest in oil and an interest in anti-terrorism. What matters is how you go about protecting that interest. The Peace Process, much as I hate to admit it, is not the be-all, end-all for American national interests in the region.

The plain fact is that we are not viewed as a fair broker between the two sides — and rightfully so. We haven’t been a fair broker. Given the distribution of public opinion in this country, historically it has been much easier to twist the Arabs’ arms than the Israelis’. Even given that there’s a growing partisan split between Democrats and Republicans over support for Israel, the fact remains that American public opinion is disproportionately pro-Israel.

Author’s chart from Gallup data

Why do Americans have such negative affect towards the Palestinian side? Blame it on the PLO. Blame it on the mainstream media’s lack of balance reporting on the region. Blame it on the portrayal of Arabs in popular culture. There’s plenty of blame to go around.

And the blame doesn’t really matter. For a politician rationally responding to public opinion, taking sides against the Palestinians is largely cost-free.

What matters is that we’re setting the wrong goal — “establishing stability” — and in so doing are simply setting ourselves up for more foreign policy failure.

Tomasky asked the wrong question: “Is it just me or is the world exploding?”

Yes, it’s just you. And yes, the world is exploding. So what?

What if there’s no such thing as “stability” in the Middle East — at least not in the way we commonly define and understand stability?

The better question is this: does perpetually bearing the costs — direct and indirect — of the U.S.-Israeli relationship promote American national interests or does it stand in the way of American national interests, like an albatross around our foreign policy neck? In other words, does the kind of unstinting, unreserved, unquestioning support — indeed, affirmative endorsement — of Israel’s war against the Palestinians more or less likely to produce the kind of stability Americans seem to think they want in the region?

From my point of view, the answer is clearly, “no.”

If the region’s history teaches us anything, it teaches us that stability can’t be imposed from outside. For example, Britain thought it created a monarchy in Iraq’s Hashemite dynasty in Iraq; instead, it simply created a target, a focal point for resentment. The many underlying social, economic, and political grievances that were so long repressed by that thin layer of “stability” have combined into a perfect storm, a typhoon-strength centripetal force well beyond our ability to control or even influence, and it is reshaping the strategic map.

The Blame-Sykes-Picot hypothesis does make a good point: there’s no reason to assume the map of the Middle East circa 1950 is the map of the Middle East.  We Americans are wedded to a vision of national statehood that has worked out pretty well for us — but which has in many respects been a catastrophe for Arab civil society.

For 20 years, scholars interested in globalization have argued that the acceleration, concentration, and expansion of global flows weakens the nation-state. Comparatively stable, democratic, economically prosperous countries in the developed world could probably do with a little reshaping thanks to globalization — it won’t change them much, except at the margins. There will always be an England.

But the fragile, incomplete polities of the Middle East haven’t had the time or the opportunity to consolidate — to become democratic, prosperous, and stable. We haven’t let them. Whether it was Iran in 1952 or Iraq in 1958 or Libya in 1969, Washington was spring-loaded to see the hand of Moscow behind every indigenous Arab uprising and did everything in its power to undermine — to destabilize — the new regime.  As a result, Arab polities are much less able to withstand the pressures of global changes. Thus, the Arab Spring.

Here’s the news: whether we like it or not, the folks who are going to stabilize the Middle East — if it is to be stable — are the folks of the Middle East. Whether they stabilize it in a way we Americans like, of course, remains to be seen. Either way, we’ll just have to adapt.

So blame it on the Sykes-Picot. Blame it on America’s Cold War tolerance of illiberalism. Blame it on six centuries of Ottoman imperium. Blame it on the bogey-du-jour, the “Islamists” or “jihadists” or “radicals.” Blame it on Obama’s “lack of will.” Blame it on what or whom you like.

But when we’re done blaming, as the Right is so busy doing, perhaps we could stop deluding ourselves into thinking there’s “something” we can do about it. Let John McCain and Lindsey Graham call for “something” to be done on every Sunday talk show there is. They like the air time. And they both very likely know they’re on a fool’s errand, anyway.  The latent and manifest instability of the Middle East is beyond American power.  You simply can’t bomb your way to stability, and having squandered the good will we once enjoyed among Arab civil society, bombs are about all we have left.

In policymaking terms, the most the United States can do is ride it out.  Let’s focus on assessing, defining, and redefining our national interests in the region. Let’s have an open, public debate over just what it is we’re getting from our relationship with Israel instead of instinctively drawing closer to Tel Aviv because an over-loud, over-influential commentariat tells us to.

And above all, let’s break our dependency on the myth of Middle East stability.

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