21st Century Middle East = 16th Century Europe?
Finally, someone makes a historical analogy that makes some sort of sense to the lemur. Forget the left's Vietnam talk, that doesn't fit the bill. And forget the WW2 chatter the administration was emitting for most of 2006. A blogger draws an extended analogy with the European wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, and I find myself nodding.
Original post:
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:My own darkest fear is that the Middle East is at the beginning of its own period that Europe experienced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: a massive, sectarian, regional bloodbath. I hope this won't happen. I hope to be proven wrong again. But I fear the process is already underway. The best hope for Iraq is perhaps a temporary surge in U.S. troops to make one last effort at some effort at a relatively peaceful de facto partition, before the near-inevitable U.S. withdrawal and subsequent involvement of Saudis and Egyptians in support of the Sunnis and the Iranians on the side of the Shia. (At this point, I'd be relieved if we can save the Kurds.)
The major powers in the Middle East, in other words, are on the verge of behaving like the major powers in Europe centuries ago: they will act as expressions of national interest but also of sectarian theology. And they will fight a terrible war before they agree on a chastened peace.
The difference between now and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe is that this regional war within a divided monotheism will take place in a time of vastly greater technological capacity for destruction. So the consequences of such a war may be far more ominous than the massacres, burnings and civil wars that beset Europe in the past. The silver lining of this terribly dark prospect is that catastrophe may strike sooner rather than later, and that only through such a catastrophe will Muslim Arabs and Persians realize that their best interests lie in forgoing the bromides of fundamentalist certainties for the messy, secular, banal success of liberal democracy. So what took Europe two centuries may take the Middle East a decade.
America's mistake is to believe it can impose this learning curve on another civilization - in a speed-reading course. We cannot. Moreover, America, because it was an unintended beneficiary and result of Europe's religious failure, has never experienced this kind of religious conflict itself and so is ill-suited to manage it. Our basic goals, it seems to me, should be to protect those parts of the region not infected with religious madness: the Israelis, the Kurds and the Turks. Keeping the latter two apart and at peace is the great challenge. But a Muslim regional civil war may have the consequence of sidelining the Israeli-Palestinian question in the Muslim psyche. Maybe. Or it may lead to the eradication of Irsael through a nuclear strike from Iran. Such a strike may be the "Hail Mary" of the Shiites - a way of becoming the true savior of Islam by annihiliating the ancient enemy of both Shia and Sunnis.
This, I fear, is the wider context of our intervention in Iraq. Our best bet is a responsible attempt to restrain it, but not a full-scale attempt to stop it. Some things are unstoppable. I fear this looming conflict is close to unstoppable (and Iraq was the trigger, not the cause). Meanwhile, we need a very serious plan for new energy resources - because oil will soon become prohibitively expensive.
A reader responds, with some noggin-provoking ideas of his own:
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:First, you mention that the technology of destruction has improved dramatically since the seventeenth century. This is clearly true. But you cannot necessarily extrapolate from this that a Moslem equivalent of Europe's religious wars will be that much more lethal. I say this for two reasons. The first is that wars simply don't get much more lethal. The Thirty Years War killed off a third of the population in much of Europe, and by some estimates fully half the population in Germany. The capability to organize the conduct of war simply cannot survive casualty rates much worse than this.
The second reason is that the improvement in technologies of destruction has been matched by improvements in technologies that save lives. Modern logistics can feed huge populations whose indigenous food sources have been destroyed. Modern medical and public health knowledge can prevent the much of the disease associated with war that traditionally (before antibiotics) killed far more people (soldiers and civilians alike) than enemy soldiers did. A Muslim war of religion would certainly not be a pretty sight, and by contemporary standards the human costs would be horrendous and appalling. But these costs would probably not be on the same scale as the Thirty Years War.
Second, you speak of Saudis and Egyptians and Iranians, but make no mention of Turkey. I seems to me that the biggest danger facing out Middle East policy, and our Muslim policy, right now is taking Turkey for granted. We are so accustomed to thinking of Turkey as being with the West (although not necessarily of the West) that we tend not even to consider the possibility of losing Turkey to the West. But we are (arguably) closer to this possibility than at any time since the consolidation of Ataturk's republic. A quick look at a map establishes Turkey's strategic importance. Add to this an economy twice the size of Egypt's, and a formidable army. What are the odds of a regional conflagration that does not draw in Turkey? This is a question that we need to be paying more attention to in discussing the Iraqi quagmire (and certainly in discussing any "Kurdish Option").
Interesting enough that I thought it worth sharing with the Backroom.
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Re: 21st Century Middle East = 16th Century Europe?
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Originally Posted by IRONxMortlock
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