How the West Can Help to End the Crisis in the Middle East - Part I

Most of the countries of the Middle East, spanning from Yemen to Turkey and from Egypt to Iran have been involved in a constant, seemingly never-ending stream of crisis. While the Middle East makes only 5% of the world population, it hosts 20% of it’s armed conflicts. Currently, the Israel-Palestine conflict reached a new, frustrating but - sadly - also not too unaccustomed peak, the Syrian Civil War still claims the lives of 140 people each day (without getting any media attention any more), Yemen is going through nearly three years of turmoil between different sectarian tribal militias, facing a secessionist movement in the south and a rebellion in the north and, in addition to that, large parts of Iraq and Syria are occupied by a self-proclaimed Islamic Caliphate, to name only the worst on a list of worrisome cases. To add to that, many of the neighboring countries in the wider Islamic World are struggling as well. Libya is confronted with a powerful islamist insurgency, Pakistan’s military launched yet another attempt to burn out islamist strongholds in North Waziristan while the seemingly never-ending spiral of violence in Afghanistan got into a new turn not only thanks to the Taliban's annual summer offensive, but also because of the growing activity of groups like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Haqqani Network and Pakistani Taliban who shirk from fighting their country’s military and instead help unleashing yet another wave of violence in the war-torn country that Afghanistan continues to be.

Coalition forces demolish a Taliban safehouse in Afghanistan

 There is no way for the West to resolve all these and the many other unmentioned issues at once as the title might suggest, and any attempt would certainly be political suicide. But what we can do is to think of a new policy, a renewed perspective that allows the West to change the way we deal with the Middle East and the wider Islamic World. To some this might seem fairly useless as most of the problems in this region appear internal, but in fact they are not as much as you might think and in this and the next entry I’m going to show you why. So let’s try to find out what can be done to achieve stability, development and prosperity in the Middle East.


Why is there so much chaos and violence in the Middle East?

To understand why political violence is periodically flaring up the Middle East and large parts of the Islamic World we have to look back into the history of that region (for a very brief review of the Middle East’s history you might also want to check out my previous entry). There are two (and a half) things that - in my opinion - share the main responsibility: The way colonialism in the Middle East and North Africa was settled and the West’s (and the Soviet Union’s) policies regarding the Islamic World’s countries during the Cold War and today (the Western policies haven’t changed all that much since its end). The “half” issue is sort of a wild card, take a guess or find out more in the next entry. I will begin with the first issue, colonialism and how it was settled.

The Ottoman Empire, its dissection and the direful consequences

Long before the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers (an alliance composed of the latter and Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria) to take part in World War I on their - eventually losing - side, European leaders referred to the sultanate as the “sick man of Europe”. After centuries of expansion and glory, the Ottoman Empire was incapable to keep up with its European competitors. After falling under their financial control and suffering painful military defeats (meeting their own Waterloo called the Crimean War), the sultans were trying hard to reform the empire and catch up with the European powers. This shift caused much turmoil among their own ranks, some arguing that the reforms were not radical and secular enough while others opposed them because they saw the traditional way of life endangered. One of the most famous intellectuals of that time, Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, was a bit of both. But after he realized the enormous (and destructive) impact that westernization would have on the culture of islamic countries and the lives of their people, he and many of his disciples changed their mind and argued against an opening towards Europe and its economical, political and societal models.

Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani

After the inevitable collapse of the Ottoman Empire four years after WWI, two European powers - Britain and France - took charge over its Middle Eastern territories, and they were some of the worst executors of a testament one could imagine. At this point, a short explanation is needed. The subjects of the Ottoman Empire were in fact not one united people, neither by religion, nor by ethnicity, nor by a sense of national identity. The sultanate was a conglomerate of various ethnic, religious/sectarian and tribal groups and it’s subjects identified themselves rather along these lines than referring to their nationality. The idea of a nation state was in fact an entirely new concept to most people in the realms of the former sultanate and was met with much skepticism when introduced by their European colonial masters. If ever, an idea called “Arab nationalism” existed among intellectuals of that time, but this was far from what the Europeans had in mind. Now I invite you to take a short moment, grab a world map and search for straight lines, borders that look like they were drawn using a ruler. Just to make sure, I’m not getting at the US-Canadian border, as their populations are composed of outside invaders that completely disrupted the indigenous inhabitants’ tribal life and had no trouble adapting to a randomly drawn border. What I am talking about are the countries in the Middle East and in Africa. While Europe has - to my knowledge - only a single straight border (a very short one in the south of the Russian region Kaliningrad Oblast), the majority of countries of these regions do. Many of them, while having liberated themselves from their colonial masters, are still experiencing internal as well as external struggles. In the case of the Middle East, seemingly arbitrary borders dividing and thereby creating nations that never existed before were agreed upon by foreign politicians. One example (that I used already in an earlier post but that illustrates the situation too well to disregard it here) is how Winston Churchill, then state secretary for the colonies and later Prime Minister of the United Kingdom claimed that the creation of Trans-Jordan (today’s Kingdom of Jordan) in 1921 was made “with the stroke of a pen, one Sunday afternoon in Cairo”. To make matters worse, some sources suggest that this very afternoon followed a particularly liquid lunch.

The Middle East before and after WWI. Source: Der SPIEGEL

To make a long story short, dividing certain groups while at the same time forcing others into nation states for strategic and economic reasons (crude oil was already on the agenda in the 1920s) was a terrible mistake that destabilizes the Middle East up to this day.

Islamic nation states and the West

After the colonial powers withdrew between, the newly born nation states found themselves in a world that fast slid into what was to become the Cold War. They had to learn quick and find a cure for the weaknesses of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey, the heartland of the former sultanate was never colonized and went on a path of secularization under her leader Kemal Atatürk. Many Arab countries followed her lead, drawing on older concepts like Arab nationalism or newer ones like Arab socialism (or both in combination). Yet others became monarchies (for example Saudi Arabia or Jordan) that last to this day. But what most counties had in common was the almost or de facto dictatorial style of leadership, and those who didn’t could trustingly count on foreign help, for example in the case of Iran where the democratically elected government was toppled by an Anglo-American coup in 1953 that replaced it with a western-controlled dictator - the infamous Shah of Persia. The reason for this is widely know: Oil. Can you imagine that Iran’s former prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, had the cheek to consider nationalizing his own country’s British-run oil industry? This incredible brashness had to be countered by the industrialized and, therefore, highly oil-dependent West. This law-of-the-jungle mentality went so far that former French President Jacques Chirac warned in 2006 that his country is prepared to secure the guarantee of her strategic supplies (such as oil) with nuclear bombs if necessary.

The industry as the economic motor of the West, and by now also of the East, especially when we talk about China, heavily relies on oil. Securing access to it and harming the Soviet block were the main imperatives in the West’s policy towards the Middle East (and vice versa for the Soviet Union). To achieve this, every means was justified. That meant in particular to back some of the worst dictatorships and even to, in the case of Iran, put them in charge first. Many people in the Middle East

Sayyid Qutb

soon realized that their liberation from colonialism was nothing but a Pyrrhic victory as they were still far from being truly free. Men like Sayyid Qutb, today a famous figure and must read in islamist circles from London to Lahore, were disillusioned by Western concepts like nationalism or socialism (despite its application in the East, it is in fact a Western concept as well) and promoted the cleansing from those ideas. Instead, he and many others promoted Islam as the only acceptable political concept for the Muslim world. While Qutb was hanged by the Egyptian regime, his ideas lived on and formed the basis of the islamist extremism the West is battling today.

So after humiliating the people of the Ottoman Empire, after destroying the power that protected them, after colonizing them and forcing them into mostly random nations the West moved on to support their new oppressors. Among the countless kicks in the teeth of Muslim pride, the stationing of American soldiers on the soil of Saudi Arabia in 1990 in preparation of the (first) Gulf War was certainly one of the hardest. Saudi Arabia is home to two of the three most sacred places of Islam, Makkah as the birthplace of Prophet Mohammad and Islam, and Medina, where he is buried. Prophet Mohammad prohibited the presence of non-Muslims on the Arab Peninsula, but Saudi king Fahd “asked” his hired clerics to reinterpret the Prophet’s words and miraculously found a way to justify their presence. And yet today, more than a decade after the Second (!) Gulf War, the American soldiers are still there. Admittedly, this might not seem to be such a big issue, but for many Muslims it is, and if you try to imagine Iranian or Saudi Arabian soldiers having military camps all over the United States in order to attack countries in Central America whenever they feel that they have to, you have to agree that that would be more than disturbing.

The list of grievances is much longer, but I hope this gives you an idea of what the people in the Middle East had to deal with, and the Western powers often played a crucial role in increasing the tension.

In the second part of this entry I will reveal the "wild card", but I am sure you already have an idea of what I am having in mind. I will also explain how I think the West could improve its relationship with the Middle East and thereby also take the wind out of the islamists' sails. I'm sure you don't want to miss that, so stay tuned!

UPDATE: You can find part II of this entry here.