The Arabs opposed the Ottomans and sided with the allied powers in the First World War in the hope of getting the right to self determination.
Veteran foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn (65),
who has reported from the Middle East since 1979, has three full-length
books on Iraq already to his credit. This monograph on the rise of the
ultra-jihadist Islamic State builds on his reportage for The Independent
and long-form writing for the London Review of Books.
It
attributes the birth of IS to the belligerence shown by the West
following the 9/11 attacks. It makes clear that it was not 9/11 but the
reaction of U.S and its allies to the attacks that made al-Qaeda’s rise
and expansion inevitable, giving birth to other splinter groups,
including the most recent and the most violent one. Cockburn says that
if the West’s war on terror has been a spectacular failure, it is
because of its failure to target the epicentres of jihad -- Saudi Arabia
and Pakistan.
Two recent developments that Cockburn
says provided fertile breeding ground for the IS are: marginalisation of
the Sunnis in Iraq; and the hijacking of the Syrian uprising by
jihadists. In both cases, Wahhabi Islam, a puritanical form patronised
and exported by the House of Saud, provided the ideological fuel.
It
is clear from the pessimism expressed by the book about the future of
the region that questions behind the rise of the groups like IS need to
go beyond those merely focused on security and stability: they need to
take into account colonial ambitions that were instrumental in creation
of the nations as such. For, isn’t the rise of non-state actors in the
Middle East a product of the way the states were organised there 100
years ago?
The Arabs opposed the Ottomans and sided
with the allied powers in the First World War in the hope of getting the
right to self determination. However, they were used as strategic
bargaining chips by the victors. The application of Sykes-Picot line to
divide the region into French and the British spheres of influence was
matched in its mendacity only by the Treaty of Versailles signed a few
years later. The people of the region were left betrayed.
As written by T.E. Lawrence -- Lawrence of Arabia -- and quoted by Robert Fisk in The Great War For Civilisation, the Arabs did not risk their lives in battle simply to “change masters.” They wanted independence of their own.
Their
experiments with puppet administrations started in 1922 when Britain
installed King Feisal — neither an Iraqi nor a Shia — in Shia-majority
Iraq. Robert Fisk calls this “our first betrayal of the Shias of Iraq.”
There were more betrayals in store, resulting in societies, with a
glorious record of coexistence, getting split further along sectarian
lines. Cockburn foresees balkanisation of the region into Shia, Sunni
and Kurdish enclaves where the ‘other’ is targeted. Here, he fears we
may see a repeat of the carnage that accompanied India’s partition.
However, military interventions in the form of air strikes continue, in
the hope of defeating the enemy. Assuming that IS can be defeated by
military means, a question that arises is: What could be done to prevent
the future emergence of such groups? This book doesn’t provide many
answers but the corpus of literature on the region does.
The
West needs to attempt a genuine reconciliation with its erstwhile
colonies and present-day clients. The next year will mark a century
since the Sykes-Picot pact was signed. Serious reflection on what went
wrong with the re-organisation of the states in the region needs to take
place. This has to involve acceptance of historical blame.
The
superpowers need to learn from history that Iraq and Syria are
progenies of civilisations which a rich culture of tolerance and state
building. The Mesopotamian civilisation, as fabulously documented by
Jared Diamond in the rambunctious read, Guns, Germs and Steel, had a
centralised state as early as 3500 BC.
The rich
Mediterranean climate of Tigris and Euphrates valleys and the emergence
of writing and irrigation technologies led to the formation of complex
political organisations. What explains the irony that, in a region which
has inherited such a sophisticated system of state building, the most
popular party is a non-state actor?
The prime reason
is the encumbrances thrown in the path of nationalist movements, first
by colonial powers like Ottoman Turkey and Britain and later by
post-colonial ones like U.S. and Soviet Union, which prevented the rise
of modern institutions. Alas, U.S. and its allies show collective
amnesia when it comes to history. The IS has numerous enemies but, as
Cockburn says, they are disunited and have varying ideologies. IS is
neither Islamic nor a state but to “degrade and ultimately destroy” it,
as President Barack Obama put it, the West has to allow the organic
evolution of genuine states, where Islam and democracy can both be
allowed to play a role and where national aspirations, not external
interests, provide the binding force.
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