The Middle East
For an overall understanding of why the Middle East is a mess, and will continue to be one, take a look at the maps of religion and ethnicity that have been created and maintained by Dr. Michael Izady on a Columbia University site.
After the fall of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, the Europeans drew lines on maps and created countries that suited them, with no regard for who was living there. These artificial constructs are guaranteed to cause problems because they almost require a dictator to maintain the fiction of a single nation.
Look at Syria. The coast along the Mediterranean is ethnically mixed, but the eastern three-quarters of the country is solidly Sunni Arab. If the various groups had been given their own countries, many of the conflicts would never have occurred.
Into that volatile environment there is currently a new stress: drought.
Digby excerpts a relevant portion of a much longer essay on the current situation that points to water, not oil, is the most important fluid in the Middle East, and things are going to get worse until the rains return.
We shouldn’t be sending missiles to blow up Syria, we should be sending food and drought assistance. That won’t happen, because as Martin Luther King Jr. noted: “We have guided missiles and misguided men.”
4 comments
Actually the French did split most of the coast away from Syria proper and named it Lebanon. Most of the northern coast, the area around Latakia, was also split off from Syria proper and called The Alawite State and given autonomy, the original plan was to give it to Lebanon but the Druze and Christians who dominated Lebanon wanted nothing to do with “those deranged hillbillies” (as was the reputation of the Alawi at the time). The mostly-Sunni area along the Turkish border was also split off as the State of Aleppo, but it didn’t stick, they eventually reunited with the mostly-Sunni State of Damascus back into Syria. Both the Alawites and the Druze realized that they didn’t have a viable nation by themselves and re-joined Syria by the end of WW2, it wasn’t something the colonial French did, it was their own decision. The Christians who dominated the State of Lebanon, on the other hand, decided to stay independent. Which is why Lebanon is not part of Syria.
You say that this ethnic mismash requires a strongman ruler to remain peaceful. I’m not sure. Lebanon is even more of a mismash, yet has remained peaceful (other than Israeli invasions like sunspot cycles) since set of compromises that ended the Lebanese Civil War in 1990. But that set of compromises set up a very weak and limited government, not strongman rule. Yet even though Hizballah today has more than sufficient military power to overturn the Lebanese government if they wished, they remain part of the government and keep their guns aimed at the Israelis rather than at their fellow Lebanese. It isn’t an ideal setup because the government is too weak to maintain a real military and thus they keep getting invaded, but other than that it seems to be working better than in strongman-ruled states like Syria.
Which makes me wonder if the “they have to be ruled by strongmen because they’re too primitive to do democracy” types are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy…
The problem for minorities is democracy. Majority rule means that they have no voice in how things are run. Look at how long it took the US to recognize the rights of minorities in this country, and we had long experience with democracy before splitting from Britain.
Democracy can work, but it is a hell of a lot easier when you don’t have ethnic divisions that work against the common goal of establishing a national government. The Turks did it, and it seems to work for them.
Iraq is a good example of what democracy would look like in Syria, and it isn’t pretty.
Part of what Hizballah agreed to in Lebanon that helped end the civil war was, despite the fact that the Shia are the majority in Lebanon now, they agreed to not take majority power and instead share power with the other groups. It’s sort of like the compromise that gave Delaware the same number of Senate votes as New York State despite having far fewer people. You’re right that it isn’t easy, but it’s a problem faced by any heterogeneous nation, including our own, and all it takes to solve it is a willingness to compromise and a desire for peace. Sadly, those two things seem to be in short supply world-wide in many places…
The Saudi jihadis currently fighting Assad’s forces in Syria aren’t interested in any sort of power sharing though. They are like the Taliban in Afghanistan, religious zealots intent upon imposing their own ideology upon others. One of the things that made peace possible in Lebanon was that they managed to neutralize or expel the foreigners who were tromping around making trouble (including the Israelis, the Syrians and the PLO), and could then focus on living together in peace. There isn’t going to be peace in Syria until the foreigners are gone. Probably not even then, but there is at least a chance.
The core problem with Syria is of course water. And food, but that’s because of water. What they really need from the Saudis is desalination plants and the oil to run them, not jihadis. Yeah, fat chance…
Everyone in the region needs more desalination plants and fewer weapons, but the major powers don’t want to give up the profits from weapons sales. Iran has been trying to get a natural gas pipeline through Syria to the Med, as has Qatar, so the fuel isn’t a problem, but the money and resources for the plants is.
Unfortunately the people who started the protests that have led to the civil war have no real power, because they don’t have the training or expertise to be an effective fighting force. Whoever wins is going to crush them. They would be willing to compromise, because they just wanted help, not power, but there is no one to compromise with.