Sanity in this White House? It’s possible. One feels a sense of great relief to hear the candor of Bob Gates in his Senate hearings. We are losing the war in Iraq; and our incompetence may have triggered the beginning of a massive regional conflagration. At least we now know that someone in this administration is grappling with reality rather than fantasy, that someone has some modicum of responsibility. At last.
My own darkest fear is that the Middle East is at the beginning of its own period that Europe experienced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: a massive, sectarian, regional bloodbath. I hope this won’t happen. I hope to be proven wrong again. But I fear the process is already underway. The best hope for Iraq is perhaps a temporary surge in U.S. troops to make one last effort at some effort at a relatively peaceful de facto partition, before the near-inevitable U.S. withdrawal and subsequent involvement of Saudis and Egyptians in support of the Sunnis and the Iranians on the side of the Shia. (At this point, I’d be relieved if we can save the Kurds.)
The major powers in the Middle East, in other words, are on the verge of behaving like the major powers in Europe centuries ago: they will act as expressions of national interest but also of sectarian theology. And they will fight a terrible war before they agree on a chastened peace.
The difference between now and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe is that this regional war within a divided monotheism will take place in a time of vastly greater technological capacity for destruction. So the consequences of such a war may be far more ominous than the massacres, burnings and civil wars that beset Europe in the past. The silver lining of this terribly dark prospect is that catastrophe may strike sooner rather than later, and that only through such a catastrophe will Muslim Arabs and Persians realize that their best interests lie in forgoing the bromides of fundamentalist certainties for the messy, secular, banal success of liberal democracy. So what took Europe two centuries may take the Middle East a decade.
America’s mistake is to believe it can impose this learning curve on another civilization – in a speed-reading course. We cannot. Moreover, America, because it was an unintended beneficiary and result of Europe’s religious failure, has never experienced this kind of religious conflict itself and so is ill-suited to manage it. Our basic goals, it seems to me, should be to protect those parts of the region not infected with religious madness: the Israelis, the Kurds and the Turks. Keeping the latter two apart and at peace is the great challenge. But a Muslim regional civil war may have the consequence of sidelining the Israeli-Palestinian question in the Muslim psyche. Maybe. Or it may lead to the eradication of Irsael through a nuclear strike from Iran. Such a strike may be the "Hail Mary" of the Shiites – a way of becoming the true savior of Islam by annihiliating the ancient enemy of both Shia and Sunnis.
This, I fear, is the wider context of our intervention in Iraq. Our best bet is a responsible attempt to restrain it, but not a full-scale attempt to stop it. Some things are unstoppable. I fear this looming conflict is close to unstoppable (and Iraq was the trigger, not the cause). Meanwhile, we need a very serious plan for new energy resources – because oil will soon become prohibitively expensive. Environmentally, that may not be such a bad thing. Perhaps such a war could help save the planet in the long run, while it incinerates a part of it in the short run. We must do all we can to ensure we are not the ones incinerated. But I fear some kind of calamity in the West is also an inevitable side-effect at some point. Then the challenge will be stopping a world war rather than a regional one. That much, I think, we can do, with adults in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin (Moscow is a mafia rogue-state beyond reach). At some point, even the Chinese may get real and help. But I wouldn’t count on it any time soon.
Yes, it may be that grim. But at least we have an adult in the administration now who understands that.
(Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP.)
The Dish 