Is international relations scholar Mohammed Ayoob’s superficial analysis of the reason for the failure of Arab states presented in The National Interest typical of IR scholars, Middle Eastern thinking, Middle Eastern IR thinking or all three? There is a bit of wisdom that goes back at least a millennium in the West:
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
The implication of that little bit of doggerel is that events happen for reasons; things are connected even if the connection isn’t immediately apparent.
Here’s an example of what I mean:
The process of state failure in the Arab world, in its most recent phase, has its roots neither in the Quranic verses flaunted by the jihadis to justify violence nor in the 1,400-year-old history of the divide between the Sunni and Shia, which sectarian entrepreneurs use to justify antagonism toward the “other.†It owes its origins to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was accompanied by a deliberate program aimed at destroying both military and civilian organs of the state, a project euphemistically called de-Baathification. The American invasion by decimating the Iraqi state also let loose forces of radicalism, extremism, jihadism—all interchangeable terms in the current political vocabulary, which are now blamed for the chaos and mayhem in the Middle East. It did so by creating a huge political vacuum into which extremist forces, some of them on the run from Afghanistan, moved in. Thus was created Al Qaeda in Iraq, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which after his death mutated into ISIS.
I thought and continue to think that our multiple interventions in the Middle East and North Africa have been bone-headed and futile. But that doesn’t mean that all of the problems of Arab states are a consequence of those bone-headed and futile interventions. We invaded Afghanistan and Iraq because we had been attacked. We were attacked because we had troops stationed in Saudi Arabia. We had troops stationed in Saudi Arabia because Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait because he was a dictator and he could.
Let’s ask the obvious question: why were there no Arab democracies prior to our invasion of Iraq in 2003? And there are just barely a couple now. That Arab states required dictators isn’t a sign of the strength of the state but a sign of their weakness.
For the last millennium Arabs have either been governed by strongman governments or by foreigners. The U. S. invasion of Iraq didn’t cause that. I submit that has been true because of some pathology in Arab society and that pathology has resulted in weak Arab states.
Dr. Ayoob is confusing causes with effects.
In the modern world nation states that have their shit even moderately together, do not get invaded in the first place. If you look up one day and see the troops of a foreign nation it’s not because you’ve done such a great job running things on your own. It’s been about 70 years since a competent nation has been troubled by invasion or civil war.
Ayoob is essentially making the case that Muslims can only be governed by dictators, and once a dictator is knocked off, society will instantly descend into chaos. Granted, recent history suggests that’s true, but that points to pre-existing conditions which cannot be blamed on US actions, however inept.
Yup. But Arab states being governed by dictators implies that every other country in the world should just sit there and take whatever is dished out by the dissatisfied residents of those countries because the alternative is state collapse.
He’s making my argument for isolating the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa pretty well.
In one sense, I agree that jihad is not the source of state-failure in the Muslim world, its current role as empowering non-state actors is a response to the collapse of the caliphate and the religious implications that set in motion.
All of the blame for the second Gulf War is nonsense. Does this sentence work in other contexts?
“The American invasion by decimating the [German / Japanese] state also let loose forces of radicalism, extremism, jihadism . . ..”
The enemy is Salafism, and its home is Saudi Arabia. Our slavish devotion to the House of Saud leads to our deliberate obfuscation of Saudi responsibility and distorts the entire battlefield. The key enemy here is our good friend the KSA. It’s the Sauds that feed Salafism because the Sauds fear that Salafists can or may challenge the Sauds on Mecca. So we blame and frequently attack absolutely everyone but the Saudis. It’s like a bad Die Hard where Bruce Willis goes after everyone but Alan Rickman.
Of course the bitch is that whatever comes to Saudi Arabia after the corrupt, irresponsible, infantilized house of Saud will almost certainly be worse. But fall they will, in the end, which is why it is both necessary and smart to reach out to Iran, and to do all we can to strike at the source of middle-east relevance: oil. Notice how well we ignore misery in Congo? Guess what Congo doesn’t have. A middle-east where oil is irrelevant is a middle-east we can step back from.
Look for ways to lower the temperature with Iran, and pursue domestic and renewable energy. Nothing hurts middle-eastern tyrants more than a new well in Texas or, even more, a wind farm in Connecticut. Iran and renewable energy. Two things Mr. Obama has done to endless attacks and ridicule from the right.
PD:
Of course not, because we won that war and forced the losers to accept a new approach to government. Which is why early on in the Iraq war I was freaking out. It was quickly obvious that no one in the Bush administration read history. Occupations 101, Lesson One: Place boot firmly on neck. And if you’re not willing to do that, then stay home.
@michael, it seems that there are three possible distinction that can be drawn btw/ invading Iraq and Germany/Japan:
1. The U.S. didn’t decimate the state;
2. The U.S. didn’t properly reconstitute the state;
3. “Radicalism, extremism, jihadism” or not common to all three.
I think 3 is more likely than 2 is more likely than 1.
In World War II the Allies killed about 10% of the population of Germany and about 4% of the population of Japan directly. It’s a reasonable inference that the objective was not merely to defeat the German and Japanese government but to defeat the German and Japanese people.
We never had that objective in Iraq. The objective was to remove the government not defeat the Iraqis. The pre-invasion estimate of the population of Iraq was around 25 million people. Killing 2.5 million people is simply not an outcome that can be accepted in an open society like ours in a day of 24 hour news and full action video.
In a nutshell that’s why my view was (and is), as Michael put it above, “stay home”.
Today, Pres Obama told the U. N., We must go forward, not backward. At least he was clear, forward means Global Integration, like busing on a global scale. Great! Grand! Except most of us don’t want it. Tell it to the Japanese, the Koreans, the Native Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, ect, ect. You take them in! Oh Yes, also Israel. Or Pallistine for that matter.
Well, I am trying to breakdown the components of Ayoob’s assertion which appears to be (a) the destruction of the _state_, (b) unleashed “Radicalism, extremism, jihadism,” (c) implicitly by creating a power vacuum, which I take to mean a failure of nation-building. I assume most people disagree with the assertion, though for different reasons.
My view is that (b) is sue generis to the Arab Muslim world, due to religion, history and a number of ideologies that developed after the end of the caliphate, which legitimized non-state action in opposition to post-colonialism, Israel, the invasion of Afghanistan, the conflicts in Kashmir and Chechnya, and rule by pharaohs in general.
Germany and Japan were strong states engaged in total war, and defeating them required a lot of killing. Destroying the state was sufficient to destroy the will of the people to fight. There was not a widespread belief system that would support a successful insurgency.
Iraq was and is a weak state, and the government did not enjoy strong allegiance from the people. The British invaded Iraq in 1941, and it didn’t require a lot of killing, nor did it result in “Radicalism, extremism, jihadism.”
PD:
I think the problems go back far, far past that—all the way back to the fracturing of the caliphate back in the 10th century.
“You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders – The most famous of which is “never get involved in a land war in Asia” – but only slightly less well-known is this: “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line”! ”
When will we ever learn?
Steve
There is a huge difference demographically between Japan/Germany and Iraq. Iraq was a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian state created by the British. Germany and Japan were/are mostly homogenous nation-states. Invading Iraq and toppling the government exposed the internal fissures of Iraqi society which, despite a half-century of unity, did not form a single coherent political community. In Germany and Japan there were no internal religious/ethnic/sectarian fissures to expose. That is why the results of the invasions were different. Iraq is a country in name only – it will never look like Germany or Japan because those internal fissures still exist and won’t go away in our lifetimes.
As for the article, I kind of agree with Michael. The KSA’s exporting of Salafism and its variants has been a huge problem – one that we have had a hand in and not just by supporting the KSA. This cancer has mostly consumed Arab culture and is eating away at other Sunni Muslim cohorts.
I think you might want to look into Germany a bit more closely. I think it might be more accurate to say that exposing the fissures didn’t cause the Germans to go for each others’ throats as has happened in Iraq. And during WWII Germany had ethnically cleansed big chunks of its non-ethnic German population.
When WWII broke out German identity was about as old as Iraqi identity was when we invaded Iraq.
The fissures among Germans were nothing compared to Iraq and you’re right that Germans did benefit, in a way, from a variety of ethnic cleansing – first they did the cleansing, then the allies did after their defeat. By contrast it’s impossible to ethnically cleanse Iraq, the factions are too large and powerful.