Civil War and End Game in the Middle East

Here are two excellent articles covering the Middle East from Conrad Black and Clifford May that provide ample perspective.  There is actually ample reason to be now tentatively optimistic regarding the ultimate shape of the Middle Eastern polity.

Way more critically, with the advent of the Arab Spring, everything has sped up.  There are also plenty more shoes to drop here although it looks as if nascent movements of the demos are holding themselves in check for now to gain experience  in terms of what can work.  Just do not confuse the quiet for a lessening of the pressure.

A resolution is Syria will be a defacto two ethnic group agreement to share power whenever they get around to a cease fire.  Similar situations are set up to happen elsewhere.

The emergence of a creditable moderate leader in Egypt will quickly quell whatever ambitions remain to the Muslim Brotherhood.  Similar scenarios will work out elsewhere.

Yet it all takes time and that is time that leaves the Middle East in economic stagnation while the rest are all shaking of their slumber and frantically entering the world of modernism.

As it stands, we will see skyscrapers throughout Christian West Africa long before we see much peace in the Muslim portion.

My reason for optimism has a lot to do with the advent of dynamic change throughout.  They are handling it badly, but that had to be expected.  What is inevitable remains the final outcome as communication is sped up.  The Demos will rule and instant communication makes government by lie impossible.  Think about that.  That is authoritarianism by definition.  The whole power of communication is no longer in the hands of the State.

Conrad Black: Imagining a peaceful Middle East

Conrad Black | 13/04/06

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/04/06/conrad-black-imagining-a-peaceful-middle-east/

In the gradual, relatively orderly withdrawal of the United States from global positions it has rightly judged over-exposed, new regional balances of power, or at least correlations of forces, have been forming. This is really what has been afoot in recent years — not, as some claim, some American “pivot to Asia,” as if the United States were merely shifting its weight from one foot to another.

And this trend is, within limits, sensible policy. The United States has had almost its entire conventional ground-based military capacity tied up for a decade in the Afghan and Iraq conflicts. These certainly have dealt a heavy blow to Islamic terrorists (albeit not apparently a mortal one), and have disposed of some odious regimes; but it is unlikely that they have yielded or will generate an adequate return on the investment of lives and resources the United States made there.

Let no one suggest, however, that the American military did not prove its point. It smashed its declared principal enemies — the Taliban, Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime, and al-Qaeda — maintained a strong presence at the ends of the earth, and withdrew when that was the wisest course; not because the United States was evicted or ineffectual, as the Russians were in Afghanistan.

The Chinese are careening about the Far Pacific in the traditional manner of newly important countries — as during the Wilhelmine period in post-Bismarck Germany — announcing chunks of the Pacific to be “Chinese lakes,” and demanding a doffing of the local headgear from Vietnamese, Filipinos and even the Indonesians and Japanese, not to mention the Taiwanese. The Chinese have squandered their former influence in Burma, agitated India, provoked rearmament in Japan (which still has as large, and a more sophisticated, economy than China), while ostentatiously failing to leash their semi-domesticated attack dog, North Korea.

The Chinese policy of massive investment abroad, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, is believed by many to portend vast accretions of influence and security in strategic resources for China. What is more likely is that China will overplay its hand, irritate the countries that are recipients of its investments, and endure suddenly increased local taxes and royalties once Chinese investors have paid to facilitate the accessibility of the resources in question. Capital unsupported by unchallengeable military force never really produces a shift of sovereignty, and China will not be able to assert such a position overseas.

The countries that ring China can, if necessary, resist Chinese hegemony, with or without the collaboration of Russia. That latter country now has the status of gangster-state — an international gadfly that still somehow aspires to the status it had when Russia had twice the population it retains, militarily occupied central Europe up to 100 miles from the Rhine, and was an equivalent military power to the United States. All in all, it is a very unseemly third act after the sometimes considerable grandeur of the Romanovs and the deranged but formidable zeal of Soviet Communism.

Russia poses no threat to Western Europe, which whatever its problems, has more than 10 times the economy of Russia, generally serious political institutions, and a perfectly adequate indigenous military deterrence in the form of British and French missile-firing submarines and Europe’s conventional armies.

The only strategically important region that has seemed to be fluid and unstable, and potentially a source of great danger, is the Middle East. And here is where the recent ineffectuality of U.S. policy seemed to be creating a vacuum.

But there have been, here, too, a number of events that justify tentative optimism.

Barack Obama’s trip to the Middle East last month was occasion for American abandonment of the fraudulent alarm over Israeli settlements: With commendable subtlety, given the extent of the change he presaged, the U.S. President contradicted the Palestinian humbug that a roll-back of Israeli settlements is the key to progress, and said that the two real keys are Palestinian sovereignty and Israeli security. For its part, Israel has demonstrated in Gaza and Sinai that it will uproot its settlers and relocate them as part of a durable peace agreement (and not just another land-for-peace scam such as Oslo).

Israeli settlements take up just 5% of the West Bank, but adjoining highways and defence installations expand that figure to 40%. This latter figure can be rolled back (though a total resurrection of the 1967 borders was never on anyway). In past negotiations, the settlements were the only card Israel had to play to bring the Palestinians to a serious discussion, and to encourage them to concede the legitimacy of Israel as a predominantly Jewish state.

The British sold the same real estate to the Jews and the Palestinians in 1917, and there has never been any other solution than to divide the territory between the two. The sooner the Arabs accept half a loaf and admit that the right of return is to a nascent Palestine, and not to swamp Israel with a deluge of hate-filled Araby, the sooner something useful will happen.

There also are signs that the Iranian theocrats are going slow on their nuclear program, at least until they dispose of the unfeasible Mahmoud Ahmedinejad; and that Obama may actually be considering forceful measures because Iran is affronting his other-worldly affection for the impossible dream of nuclear disarmament.

Last week, Israel began pumping natural gas from its Mediterranean undersea wells at Tamar, which will eliminate most Of Israel’s balance-of-payments deficit and sharply raise tax revenues as well. Israel is proposing to market its natural gas to Europe with a pipeline to Greece via Cyprus. This has caused Turkey to utter dire threats against both Greece and Cyprus — which, in turn, has had the welcome effect of inciting the Russians to come snorting out of the undergrowth as the protector of southern Europe against the Abominable (Turkish) Porte, as if the Congress of Berlin of 1878 merely had been adjourned for the last 135 years.

If a Palestinian state can be established, Israel is officially acknowledged by the Arabs, Iran is deprived of its Syrian conduit to Hezbollah and Hamas and deterred from assuming its nuclear potential, there will be little need for outside intervention in the region, much to the benefit of the whole world.

National Post

cbletters@gmail.com

Clifford D. May: Islam’s global civil war

Clifford D. May, Special to National Post | 13/04/05 

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/04/05/clifford-d-may-islams-global-civil-war/

In much of what we now call the Muslim world, Muslims are fighting Muslims. The conflicts fall into two broad categories: those in which militants battle militants, and those in which militants battle moderates.

The outcomes of these conflicts matter to all of us — Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Syria is the most visible battlefield in these wars. Initially, Bashir al-Assad, satrap of the regime that rules Iran, was challenged by peaceful protesters demanding basic rights and freedoms. He brutalized them. Today, he is in a duel to the death with an opposition increasingly dominated by such al Qaeda-affiliated groups as Jabhat al-Nusra.

When jihadists are slaughtering jihadists, both sides claiming they are “fighting in the way of Allah,” a measure of schadenfreude is probably inevitable among us infidels. But people of conscience should not discount the human cost: 70,000 Syrian men, women and children killed over the past two years, more than a million refugees, ancient cities reduced to rubble.

The strategic stakes are high: The overthrow of Assad would deal a body blow to the hegemonic ambitions of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei. In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s hold on power would be weakened. Maximizing these opportunities should be a priority for Western policymakers. You can bet that Iranian and Hezbollah commanders are working on ways to minimize the damage.

Though we can’t predict what happens after Assad falls, we can plan for a range of contingencies. A rule of history is that those who are doing the shooting today will call the shots tomorrow. That implies that the Sunni jihadists will be in the strongest position post-Assad. The more — and the sooner — we bolster anti-jihadist Syrians the better.

Across Syria’s eastern border, al-Qaeda in Iraq has been revived. Iranian-linked Shia jihadist groups also are active again. Together, they are rekindling sectarian strife, which, it turns out, was not caused by the presence of Americans and has not been dissipated by the departure of Americans. Nor is the Shia vs. Sunni conflict merely a local phenomenon, the result of corralling different groups within European-drawn borders. Wathiq al-Batat, secretary general of the Iraqi branch of (Shia) Hezbollah, recently threatened to wage jihad against the (Sunni) state to the south, or, as al-Batat memorably phrased it, “the infidel, atheist Saudi regime.”

Across the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara Desert, AQ-affiliated jihadists conquered and ruled much of Mali for 10 months. In January, the French — those old colonial masters — drove them out, to the cheers of a local population proud of their history, culture, and traditions, most vividly expressed in Timbuktu’s ancient mosques, shrines, and libraries. All this and more the jihadists had endeavored to destroy. Why? Because they see Africanized Islam as idolatrous, heretical, and, therefore, intolerable. The battle for Mali is not over. Fighting continued over this past weekend.

Another battlefield is in Tunisia. In February, secular opposition leader Chokri Belaid was assassinated by militants. Last week, my colleague Thomas Joscelyn broke the story that Abu Iyad al Tunisi, head of Ansar al Sharia Tunisia — an AQ-linked group that attacked the U.S. embassy in Tunis on September 14, 2012 — has threatened to wage war against Tunisian government officials “until their downfall and their meeting with the dustbin of history.”

The proximate cause: Tunisian prime minister Ali Larayedh dared to criticize Abu Iyan and other Salafi jihadists — Muslims who attempt to live and fight as did the seventh-century followers of the prophet Mohammed — for their “violence and arms trafficking.”

In Pakistan, Muslim-on-Muslim violence has become chronic, including attacks on Ahmadis — Muslims regarded as heretics by, among others, the Pakistani government — as well as on the Shia minority. Most recently, a bomb was set off in a market district of Quetta, killing more than 80 people. The Sunni militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi claimed responsibility.

Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid recently wrote in the New York Times that at “the heart of Pakistan’s troubles is the celebration of the militant.” That rings true, but he went on to blame Pakistan’s “fraught relationship with India … Militants were cultivated as an equalizer, to make Pakistan safer against a much larger foe.”

Really? Libya has no problem with India or any of its neighbors, yet Libyan government officials, including Prime Minister Ali Zeidan, a former human-rights lawyer and diplomat, have been receiving death threats from militants. Over the weekend one of Zeidan’s aides was kidnapped.

Thousands of Libyans have dared to demonstrate against jihadist groups, in September even storming the headquarters of Ansar al-Shariah, the militia linked to the attack that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. Some Libyan protesters chanted: “You terrorists, you cowards. Go back to Afghanistan.”

In Egypt there are protests day after day against attempts by President Mohamed Morsi to replace secular authoritarianism with religious authoritarianism. Militant Muslim Brothers have responded with lethal violence. In 2012, the Brotherhood swept student-union elections at Egyptian universities. Last month, by contrast, it was soundly trounced.

That’s encouraging — though without outside support, it is hard to imagine the moderates prevailing over the militants in Egypt or elsewhere. As for the militant vs. militant wars, it would be best if both sides were to lose. But that outcome is unlikely.