Friday, July 11, 2008
So says this hopeful Stratfor analysis speculating that a Middle East peace deal between Israel and its neighbors, particularly Syria, may fall into place far more quickly than anyone has imagined: The New Era [h/t to Adam Solomon in the comments] A snip:
...The Middle East is a region rife with petit geopolitics. Since the failure of the Ottoman Empire, the region has not hosted an indigenous grand player. Instead, the region serves as a battleground for extra-regional grand powers, all attempting to grind down the local (petit) players to better achieve their own aims. Normally, Stratfor looks at the region in that light: an endless parade of small players and local noise in an environment where most trends worth watching are those implanted and shaped by outside forces. No peace deals are easy, but in the Middle East they require agreement not just from local powers, but also from those grand players beyond the region. The result is, well, the Middle East we all know.
All the more notable, then, that a peace deal — and a locally crafted one at that — has moved from the realm of the improbable to not merely the possible, but perhaps even the imminent.
Israel and Syria are looking to bury the hatchet, somewhere in the Golan Heights most likely, and they are doing so for their own reasons. Israel has secured deals with Egypt and Jordan already, and the Palestinians — by splitting internally — have defeated themselves as a strategic threat. A deal with Syria would make Israel the most secure it has been in millennia...
Reading things like this are always fun and interesting...sort of the speculative fiction based on educated guesses like you get at sites like Debka. It's logically self-contained and reads well. Is it right? Who knows. History has a way of sneaking up on you.
Think of this type of analysis (Petit vs. Grand Geopolitic) as a sort of transparent overlay for the map of the Middle East. Certainly with the demise of the Soviet Union, many of us felt that Middle East peace would certainly be a possibility. Without the two world powers playing their regional clients as pawns, left to their own devices, indeed, with the encouragement of previously chafing superpowers, it didn't seem unlikely that regional players would come to a self-interested peaceful accommodation -- or fight a decisive war and come to it that way, where previously such instances were held to half-measures by external pressures.
It didn't quite work out that way, at least it hasn't worked out as quickly as we had hoped. Russia maintains influence, and other regional actors like Iran stepped into the breach. International fora like the UN have also done damage by acting as a force that combines the strength of petit actors (like the regional despots) into a pseudo-grand political entity.
I would add another, perhaps more important overlay to the map: Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. Remove the political players and there's still a perhaps even deeper and intransigent clash in motion. Stratfor:
Syria, poor and ruled by its insecure Alawite minority, needs a basis of legitimacy that resonates with the dominant Sunni population better than its current game plan: issuing a shrill shriek whenever the name “Israel” is mentioned.
Yes, there is this feeling that if proper leadership emerged in the Middle East and stopped demagoguing the issue, peace couldn't help but break out eventually. This is the Sharansky-esque, spread of democracy, view. It's compelling and I agree with it to a great extent. Free societies will lead to more openness and more peace among neighbors.
But how do you reach that point? Is it simply a matter of replacing a few of the playing cards at the top of the deck, of "electing leaders not compromised by terror?" -- visionaries, real leaders?
I would submit that the Middle East produces the leadership it does because that's what the societal superstructure that underlies it produces. It's not the leader that produces the society, it's the society that produces the leader. The dictator's portrait doesn't hang on a wall it created, the wall makes the space that the portrait consumes. Sometimes, even in a dictatorship, we get the leaders we deserve.
So while some analysts, used to looking at the world through one overlay-lense, may sense great and imminent change, they miss that there are deeper, far more intransigent civilizational issues at play. The tribal politics, the Jihad ideology, the religious and even racial supremacy that created the fish tank the petit leadership swims in, are far too ingrained to be overcome by the simple shifting sands of great power political fortunes.
It's certainly true that with Russia and China occupied, we have a layer of complication removed from the board, but only a layer. The grid still remains to be dealt with. That's not to say the Stratfor outcome couldn't happen, merely that it's probably too rosy by half. The Cold War interregnum may indeed be coming to a close, but that doesn't mean peace is at hand. It may just be clarifying some of the real, deeper, structural, problems.
Yes, there is this feeling that if proper leadership emerged in the Middle East and stopped demagoguing the issue, peace couldn't help but break out eventually. This is the Sharansky-esque, spread of democracy, view.
But first one must get rid of a 1400 year old culture that thrives on Sharia.
Getting an independent judiciary, etc., means taking away the power of the Imams and the war lords, the clan culture and the honour/shame paradigm.
The outline of the deal, then, is surprisingly simple: Israel gains military security from a peace deal in exchange for supporting Syrian primacy in Lebanon. The only local loser would be the entity that poses an economic challenge (in Lebanon) to Syria, and a military challenge (in Lebanon) to Israel — to wit, Hezbollah...A deal with Syria would make Israel the most secure it has been in millennia.
Let me get this straight. We're supposed to hand Lebanon over to Syria (which might also make some non-Hezobllah supporters in Lebanon peeved) and in return Syria will offer an oh, so heartfelt promise to eliminate Hezbollah -
And we're supposed to buy this? Gimmie a break! What are they smoking at Stratfor?
First of all, most of the violent, rabid Sunni fighters in Lebanon have been supplied, not by the Syrians but by our Saudi allies. A deal with Syria would do nothing to control or influence the most radical Sunni elements in Lebanon.
Secondly, Israel should ask themselves if Syria has ever lied before. I mean, really. Hezbollah is the most powerful army that Iran and Syria have. They're not going to dismantle this army, no matter what they say. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't. And the Sunni supporters of al Qaeda have shown that for all their bluster and cruelty, they can't fight worth a damn.
Third, calling the mafia-esque dictatorships in the Middle East "petit" makes them sound much larger and more influential than they really are. We could eliminate the lot of them in an hour if we used nukes. Without nukes, using only targeted assassination and some CIA maneuverings, we could decimate them, weaken them to the point where they existed, but just barely, in weeks. They only have the power we give them. The best solution is to take that power away.
Our Saudi allies have shown us that they're incapable of controlling the price of oil. In Lebanon, they showed us that they are incapable of protecting our interests or the interests of the Lebanese. We're wasting our time and money propping them up.
If the Chinese and the Russians are withdrawing, they may have noticed that they're wasting their time and money too. They may have learned something from Reagan, who encouraged the commies to overspend on pointless political games. Now they're encouraging us to overspend - and win big! Should we believe them?
The games we're playing in the Middle East, and the money we've been giving to our mafiesque pawns has empowered them, It's made them a lot stronger than they should be.
The best way for Israel to achieve peace is to encourage all of the rational players to stop playing this idiotic game. The irrational players in Syria, Iran, the KSA and the UAE will continue to be irrational, because that's their tradition. These are very traditional societies.
But at least they'll be a lot weaker, only able to harm themselves.
Mary,
If one thinks of Iranian efforts to control the ME in terms of a pincer movement, then Lebanon is the northern half. And what better way to control it than with their Foreign Legion, Hezbollah.
Syria has been and will be, for some time into the future, part of the Axis.
If suddenly the Allawite control (Assad) could be removed and Sunni influence intrude it might change, but then again Iranian operatives are busy at the moment converting quite a few Syrians to Shiitism.
Now if only America would resolve its energy problem and get their petroleum needs down to a minimum they could reduce the influence of those irrational players very much.
Then again America also needs to clean out the State Department, because if one looks back with hindsight one sees that just about every Secretary of State has been a wimp and their advice when taken by the Commander in Chief, wrong and not in America's long term interests. Basically because the State Department has heavy leanings towards those "irrational players", from way back to the time of the Dulles brothers at least.
The Pentagon also has its problems with too many lawyers influencing the military to try and fight politically and not physically. Just look at the mess they produced until Patraeus was found.
A big pity is that most of America's representatives in Congress are not up to the job of overseeing the Administration (That goes for most countries, exposing the failure in a democracy which assumes that the man in the street is equipped to effectively evaluate who to vote for).
The Syrians are a dirty bunch and at the very moment that Barbara Walters was having tea with its dictator
Perhaps realizing her own gushiness about Assad Walters pre-empted accusations and denied she is "brainwashed."
political prisoners were being killed in its military prison, allegedly because of a riot. Some of those held there are Lebanese taken at the time of Syria's de facto occupation.
Now why didn't the MSM bring this to public attention as Ms. Walters was 'excusing her behaviour'?