Neocons had a fantasy that the US could crush the strongmen of the Middle East – and usher in a bucolic age of democracy, á la americain. They were deluded. The region doesn’t do democracy.
On the other hand, the goal of practitioners of realpoltik is stability. And ironically our best allies to that goal are Iran and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. If the neocons had got their way and Iran been attacked – and Assad’s foes armed – the instability in the region would have been catastrophic.
Let me explain.
Democracy is a noble aim, but it isn’t learned overnight. European democracy traces its roots to the Magna Carta (1215). It took centuries to arrive at the democratic governments of modern Europe. The genius of the United States was that it had the intellectual talent to create a peoples’ government and the good fortune to have a blank slate to start with.
The Middle East, on the other hand, is mired in a culture of autocracy and lacks the Jeffersons and Madisons to write a new path. Further, it is riven by a divide between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.
It may be simplistic, but the wellspring of the conflict in the Muslim world is the disagreement over who is Mohammed’s rightful heir. If you believe that is assinine, consider the bloody history of the Catholic/Protestant divide in Europe.
To understand the political/religious blocks in the Middle East, the following map is useful:
The astute reader will notice that Shiites are a majority in Iran and Iraq – which both have Shiite governments. Syria also has a significant Shiite population and its leadership is drawn from the close allies of the Shiites, the Alawites.
It is clear from the map that Iran is a natural ally of Al-Maliki’s Shiite government in Iraq. And has no desire to see a Sunni presence reestablished in Iraq – (Note: Saddam Hussein was a Sunni.)
It is doubly ironic that by toppling Hussein, the US opened the door to Shiite Iran’s influence in Iraq. And now that Iraq’s Shiite government is threatened by the Sunni insurgent group, ISIS, we are looking to the Iranians to backstop that government.
On the other side of Iraq, Assad’s seemingly solidifying grip on Syria will aid in containing Sunni adventurism from that direction.
Further, the power center of organized Sunni Islam is the Saud family in Saudi Arabia. And they have no more interest in seeing a chaotic Middle East than the US.
There is one significant fly in the ointment, Iran and Syria are virulently anti-Israeli. Iran is once again, after an estrangement engendered by a disagreement over Syria, a major supporter of Hamas – a Palestine group that actively denies Israel’s right to exist.
And Hamas is Sunni.
Well nobody said the Middle East was uncomplicated.
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