The chaos we’re seeing today throughout the Mideast continues to escalate and shows no signs of subsiding. The United States and the West seem unwilling or unable to take the necessary steps to help bring some semblance of order to the region. The Russians have entered the fray further complicating the messy situation.
Syria, Yemen and Iraq are in tatters. Sunnis are fighting Shia. The Kurds are playing an influential role in the battle against ISIS and other extremist groups while solidifying their own territories in Iraq and Syria. Concern about yet another Palestinian Intifada grows as the bloodshed between the Israelis and Palestinians escalates. The dreams for a Palestinian state are at best on hold and at worse, non-existent. ISIS, al-Qaeda and other extremist groups are disrupting the entire region. Saudi Arabia and the other gulf states are pitted against Iran, vying for influence in the region.
It’s hard to imagine how all of this will end, or at least temper down.
Many of the problems afflicting the region are millennia old. The conventional wisdom suggests the problems over the last century were created by the British and French when they drew the borders of Mideast nations following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Imperial interests were the objective, not ethnic, religious and social realities on the ground. And the European powers created artificial countries that were doomed to fail.
Mideast expert Kenneth Pollack pushes back on that notion. “There is no such thing as a natural country,” Pollack maintains. In a conversation with The Cipher Brief, Pollack, who is a senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, said “If you look at the Middle East, a lot of these groups have been together for huge amounts of time.” He cites Iraq as an example. “The Tigris and lower Euphrates Valleys—that area west of Baghdad down to Basra and the mouth of the Persian Gulf—that has been a single political unit for most of the last 4000 years.”
Pollack also points out that the Arab states didn’t really come into their own until after World War II. Iraq and Syria “were known as two of the most nationalistic in the entire Middle East,“ Pollack said. There was no threat of disintegration. The problems came later. According to Pollack, “The U.S. causes state collapse and a security vacuum in Iraq in 2003. The Arab Spring does it to Syria in 2011, and when that happens, it tears the country apart. We’ve seen this in place, after place, after place,” citing Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Afghanistan and the Congo as examples. Furthermore, Pollack said “Even to this day, there are lots of people in these countries (Iraq and Syria) who believe they should be one country. The question is who gets to rule, who gets to be on top.”
Settling the region’s myriad of civil wars has become key to restoring order in the Middle East. Pollack said, “The Syrian civil war helped push Iraq back into civil war. Iraq and Syria are now creating a nascent civil war in Turkey, destabilizing Jordan and Lebanon. Syria and Libya have created a nascent civil war in Egypt.” Settling these wars is not impossible, but it’s “not fun, easy and cheap.” So what does it take? The Arab states must “embrace a program of long term meaningful reform—political, economic and social,” says Pollack, with American and Western assistance in stabilizing the countries.
But there is also the complicating factor of Russia’s military intervention in Syria. Pollack believes Moscow wants a negotiated settlement in Syria that protects the interests of its proxy, the Alawite community and President Bashar Assad. “The Russians have not put anything like the amount of force you would need to allow the Assad regime to reconquer Syria,” said Pollack. “They don’t want another Afghanistan, so they have to be looking for a negotiated settlement. The question now is can the Americans create that negotiated settlement.”
While Pollack credits Secretary of State John Kerry with trying to find a solution, he says Kerry is “a hammer in search of a nail,” that is he is pursuing a diplomatic solution without a military component. Pollack believes that if the Obama Administration actually implemented the plan it announced in September 2014, and then soon abandoned, to build a moderate Syrian opposition force of 15,000 fighters that would enable the opposition to take and hold territory.
And it would provide the U.S. with the leverage to push the Russians to a negotiated settlement in Syria. So far, that hasn’t happened.
Is it likely that at the end of the day, the resolution of the current crisis will also involve the redrawing of some of the borders in the Middle East? Pollack believes the current trajectory is in that direction. “I think there is a pretty high likelihood that in five to ten years we will see at least an independent Iraqi Kurdistan,” says Pollack. However, he’s skeptical that Kurdistan would include parts of Iran, Syria and Turkey, which all have significant Kurdish populations. “The Turks and the Iranians will fight that tooth and nail.” But he also says the Iraqi Kurds may remain part of Iraq, but with even more autonomy than they already have.
He also sees the possibility of a divided Syria, with the Alawites and other minorities forming an independent country in the west, and the Sunni dominated areas in the east becoming a separate state. But the status quo could persist. “Civil wars have a bad habit of going on for decades,” Pollack said, pointing to the 36-year-old Peruvian civil war, and the 37-year-old Afghanistan civil war. Not a very promising prospect.
Pam Benson is the Managing Editor for News at The Cipher Brief.
