As I read this interview with Joshua Landis, one passage in particular leapt out at me:
The West falsely believes that it can separate the regime from the state. It argues that it can pursue regime-change while simultaneously preserving the state and its institutions. Washington believes it can avoid the chaos it sewed in Iraq. I don’t believe it can. It wasn’t only Bremer that criminalized the Baath Party and disbanded the army. The Shiite politicians he empowered insisted on it. In most Middle Eastern countries, the regimes, for better or worse, have transformed the states into reflections of themselves. They have cannibalized the state. They have crammed their loyalists into every nook and cranny of the national institutions. They had to in order to coup-proof their regimes. They justified it in the name of bringing stability. State institutions are not autonomous. Westerners believe that because their own state institutions are run by professional civil servants, Middle Eastern states are too. But they aren’t. Political appointees make up the entire edifice. They cannot simply be swapped out. Regime-change for an Arab country is not like administration change in a Western country. Destroying the regime means destroying the state. The price of regime-change is chaos.
That the countries of the Middle East and North Africa have, by and large, been dominated by autocratic regimes may not be an accident. It could be the foreseeable outcome of social institutions of family, clan, village, and tribe are not only more compelling than loyalty to the state but overwhelm it. I don’t know enough about Arab culture or Arab society to comment but I’ll appeal to those who do. Is that a characteristic of Arab societies?
If it is, it puts things in a new light. The condition of strong regimes and weak states may not be a result of post-colonialism; rather having been colonized may be a result of failure to unify beyond family, clan, or tribe.
And if that’s the case, the prospects for liberal democracy with the rule of law and protections for speech, the press, and the rights of minorities may be bleak. It would take generations of fostering of institutions, something I don’t think that we have the patience to do. As to whether liberal democracy can grow endogenously in the region, we’ll soon see. If democracy can’t survive in Tunisia, it probably can’t survive anywhere in the Middle East or North Africa.
Undermining states, something we have persistently done, certainly doesn’t help.
An interesting link, but I disagree with the presumption that the West (U.S., France and U.K.) doesn’t know what they want. They want peace, stability and an end to the migration crisis, but they believe that none of this will occur with Assad in power. ISIS could be defeated or at least largely marginalized to the periphery, but the 2011 civil uprising, which were entirely domestic, led to a series of reprisals and escalations that exposed the Assad regime. He had lost control in a way that his dad never did.
Syria has an Alawite-controlled government, when Alawites make up 10% of the population, and those Alawites mostly live in the Latakia province, f/k/a the Alawite State. By some accounts one-third of young Alawi men have died in the civil war, and many Alawi are fleeing to Europe. There is no Muslim country in the Middle East ruled by a religious minority, except Syria.
The rise to power of a minority group was under the Baathist ideology of arab unity under vaguely Leftist orientation. The unifying ideology has slowly evaporated, particularly as the son is not the father either in ruthless cunning or in power-sharing with Sunni leaders. The fall of Communism hollowed out Baathism, and the other minority groups that helped support the Alawites, particularly the Christians, have left for Europe. It may also be that the military powers of insurgencies in the Middle East is far greater than it was 30 years ago.
I don’t think its unreasonable to conclude that regime change will occur before lasting peace, and the Russians can only make another Chechnya.
Historic U. S. policy has been for its neighbors to be weak but durable states. Nowadays all states are our neighbors, the worse for them. To date the only durable Arab states in the Middle East have been autocracies of one form or another. In North Africa there’s Morocco, a monarchy. I won’t dare to analyze why Morocco is so temperate in comparison with its neighbors.
Alawites have been in charge in Syria for 45 years and Bashar-Al Assad since 2000. There was no Syrian refugee crisis until 2012. I don’t see how that supports the idea that “Assad must go”. What it suggests to me is that Gulf Arab sponsorship of Sunni Arab terrorism has to go.
There was another: Iraq. Among the Arab countries of the Middle East only secular autocracies have tolerated substantial religious minorities. I guess that depends on how you think the Shi’a minority in Saudi Arabia is being treated.
In Iran the Shah was a secularized Muslim. Does that count as a religious minority? By Iranian standards I think it might. The Shah’s sin wasn’t the suppression of liberal democracy in Iran but his suppression of Khomeinist Islamist. It seems to me that in the Middle East majority Islamist rule has gone hand in hand with increasing radicalism.
Your assumption that American policy moves all events in the world is misplaced. The Syrian uprising began in 2011 without external assistance and Assad was perceived to have lost control in 2012.
The Alawites have existed for a thousand years, but only in the last 45 years have they, meaning the two Assads, ruled over a majority non-Alawite state. There are several reasons to believe the situation has changed, and that 45 years of emergency rule are not permanent features.
Lebanon is another example of a minority-ruled Muslim state.
I don’t assume that. Quite to the contrary and I don’t see how you infer that from my comment.
Like what other than the civil war? And how do you know that started without outside support?
Can someone tell me what leverage we have with Saudi Arabia, to beg the question, why we don’t use it, and why energy independence isn’t a cornerstone of our strategy, especially with a friendly like Canada??
And before someone talks about oil being a global commodity, there’s a lot of “managed trade” going on out there.
The U. S. gets about 2/3s of its oil from the Western Hemisphere (mostly the U. S., Mexico, and Canada) and 16% from the Gulf which includes Saudi Arabia. I’ve been arguing in favor of greater oil independence for forty years, largely for geopolitical reasons.
However, since KSA is the low cost producer for high quality oil and there’s a global market for oil, actual independence is beyond our reach. Saudi will have considerable influence as long as that’s the case.
“There are several reasons to believe the situation has changed.”
I gave examples above:
1. Demographics have and continue to shift towards Sunnis.
2. Assad is not as resilient and smart as his father, in particular he got rid of Sunni old-timers appointed by his father to positions of power and replaced them with relatives.
3. Loss of ideological currency of Baathism and pan-Arabism.
4. Rise of ideological power of pan-Islamic movements.
5. Collapse of Communism undermined Arab socialism as a independent pillar from Islamicism and liberalism.
6. Increased military strength of non-state actors.
Fair enough. Why 2011 rather than 2009 or 2005? Tipping point? Or something else?
I think things have been trending badly since ’79 with Iran and Afghanistan, but have no idea what seemed to galvanize the Arab Spring at that particular point in time. I guess something happened and people started reflecting and talking about it. There is a growing disparity between the lives of people in the Middle East and what they see in the world media. Islamicists are the only ones effectively messaging a protest against Caesars and kings.