Middle East Being Redrawn Again

The warm waters of the Gulf look quiet but such tranquillity hardly reflects the conflicts this region continues to generate. The euphoria of the so-called Arab Spring is long gone, what remains is a region that is rich with resources and burdened with easily manipulated history that is in a state of reckless transition. No one can see what the future will look like, but the possibilities are ample, and possibly tragic.

Such a lack of clarity regarding the future has never been witnessed despite the fact that battle lines have been drawn like never before. Governments, intellectuals, sects and whole communities are lining up at both sides of many divides. This is taking place to various degrees everywhere in the Middle East.

Some countries are directly engulfed in bloody and defining conflicts’ revolutions gone stray, as in Egypt, or uprisings turned into most destructive civil wars as in Syria. Conversely, those who are, for now, spared the agony of war, are very much involved in funding various war parties, transporting weapons, training fighters and leading media campaigns in support of one party against another.

Yet in some instances, the lines are not drawn with any degree of certainty either. Within the ranks of Syria’s opposition to the Ba’ath regime in Damascus, the groups are too many to count, and their own alliances shift in ways that few care to notice or report. ‘Opposition’, a word used mostly ‘arbitrarily’ but in reality, there are no truly unifying political or military platforms, whether it be the Supreme Military Council, the Syria National Council or the Syrian National Coalition. The military council claims it ‘commands about 900 groups and a total of at least 300,000 fighters.’ The very claim can be easily contended, and there are numerous other groups that operate based on their own agendas, or unified under different military platforms with no allegiance to any political structure.

This perpetual conflict can be associated with the supposedly inherently-violent Middle East. For nearly two decades, many warned that American military intervention in Iraq would eventually ‘destabilize’ the entire region. The term ‘destabilize’ was, of course, a relevant one, since Israel has done more than its fair share to destabilize several countries, occupy some and destroy others. But the prospects of political destabilization were much more ominous when the world’s most powerful country invested much of its might and financial resources to do the job.

In 1990-91, then again in 2003, and once more in 2006, Iraq was used as a giant field of experimentation for war, ‘state building’ and US-provoked civil war. The region had never experienced such division to accommodate sectarian lines as it did then. The discourse that adjoined the US war was brazenly sectarian i.e. Shia-majority oppressed by the Sunni-minority. They rearranged one of the most complex political landscapes in the world within a few weeks, based on a blueprint imagined by Washington-based ‘experts’ with little real-life experience. Not only was Iraq torn into shreds, but it was remade repeatedly to accommodate America’s inept understanding of history.

Iraq continues to suffer, even after the US’ purported withdrawal. The Iraqi ailment has now become a regional condition. And like the US when it invades sovereign countries and rearranges political borders, groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) operate without any respect for geographical borders. Formed in Iraq in 2006, the ISIS has been a powerful component of the savage war underway in Syria. Worse, in parts of Syria it actually operates a somewhat stable economy that gives it greater privilege than home-grown Syrian groups. Similarly, Al-Qaeda, once a barely-known group 12 years ago, has now become a stakeholder in the future of the entire Middle East.

The countries, which are not undergoing the upheaval being experienced in Syria and Iraq, understand that it would be anserine to be merely a spectator now. It is an all-out war in the making, and there is no time for neutrality. Worrying predictions of the changing physical landscape of the region are well underway and few countries seem to be spared.

In an article ‘Imagining a Remapped Middle East’, Robin Wright wrote:

‘Not only could countries become a few smaller ones, some of the carved territories could tie into the cut pieces of neighbouring countries,’ is a typical speculation made by American political and media elites about the Middle East. They applied it in earnest before and after the US invasion of Iraq, where they carved the Arab country into whatever amalgamation that suited US interests, in a typical divide and rule formula. This time, however, the prospects are frighteningly serious and real.

Even ‘city-states’ oases of multiple identities like Baghdad, well-armed enclaves like Misurata, Libya’s third largest city, or homogeneous zones like Jabal al-Druze in southern Syria ‘might make a comeback, even if technically inside countries,’ she wrote.

Whether such events will ever actualize, the prediction is itself telling of the undeniably shifting nature of conflict in the Middle East, where countries are now embroiled in war. The new battle lines are now sectarian, carrying symptoms of Iraq’s relentless civil war. In fact, the players are more or less the same, except that the ‘game’ has now been spread to exceed Iraq’s porous borders into much wider spaces where militants have the upper hand.