The Dish

A reader writes:

Wow. You’ve really dug yourself into a deep hole. The country of Syria was given its name by the Greeks before Alexander, and aside from its shifting borders, Syria has remained constant from Greek toRoman to Umayyad to Abbasid to Ottoman to Arab to French to Syrian rule. There as even a Syrian Roman emperor in 244. If Syria isn’t a country, then neither is Turkey, the UK, or any other country. A few seconds on Wikipedia or with the classics confirms all this, with ancient maps of Syria that are as close to modern Syria as is Sykes-Picot’s or T.E. Lawrence’s maps. Compare the map of Roman Syria from the first century BC to the 19th century map of Ottoman Syria. Aside from Palestine, they’re the same province, which is now the same country.

And the theory (which is yours) that the Ottomans gave the minority Shia and Christians “pools of self-governance” and that modern Syria “was precisely constructed to pit a minority … against the majority” is all absurd non-history. Both the Ottomans and the French protected their minority sects, but neither gave them self-governance or control over the majority. The straight line you draw from Sykes-Picot to brutal al-Assad rule does not exist. What’s more, and ironic for your argument, the very name of the al-Assad family comes from Hafez’s father’s opposition to modern Syria! The Syrian military coups that happened 40 years later that ultimately led to Alawite dominance have nothing to do with Sykes-Picot.

There are of course excellent reasons to avoid a foreign entanglement in a sectarian civil war, but unfortunately you’ve badly mangled history and logic to make this point.

It is not “absurd non-history” to note that modern Syria is comprised of a complex mix of extremely different sectarian and ethnic groups who have fought each other for a very long time, and that under French colonial rule, the Alawites were the favored sect. In independent Syria, the Alawites gained real power especially through the military, and ran the country under the Assad dynasty as a deeply sectarian, Shi’a force against the majority Sunni. That also explains their alliance with Iran, the region’s major Shiite power, if you don’t include post-Saddam Iraq. That dynamic means that Syria as a modern state is inherently unstable, unless sectarian identity recedes (fat chance after two years of brutal civil war), and was designed to be inherently unstable. Again, my point was not that Syria is not a name that was attached to the entire region, but that as a unitary state, in its current borders, it is a colonial contraption unfitted to multi-sectarian self-government.  Another informed reader:

I have a Ph.D in anthropology and spent decades working in Syria both with archaeological projects (for fun) and as a researcher in social anthropology studying contemporary society in Syria. I was also a Fulbright Fellow there. Anyway, I have not only read immense amounts of Middle Eastern history but lived at archaeological projects out in the Syria Jazeera as well as done ethnographic research in Damascus. I stumbled on this insight as a grad student (and as some one who had to take long-haul buses around the country). I largely agree with your post on Syria.

Any potential natural “nations” (of course, all nation states are largely imaginary) of the Middle East can best be found in the old Ottoman provinces, which were much more closely aligned with communities of common interest than the Sykes-Picot nation-states. Of the course the Brits/French pissed all over those separations and alliances. Which is the problem.

You should get some true Ottoman scholars to chime in – I am not an Ottoman expert. Also, it’s hard to find a good online map with the detail needed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the best I found is from an Armenian advocacy group which has a vested interest in understanding the administrative units of the Ottoman Empires:

But the Ottomans ran a big empire and the provinces were created to make administration easier. So they tended to fall along natural lines of communication with rivers, mountain passes, changes in elevation or whether or not the land was agricultural or only suited for grazing determining what was part of one province and what areas belonged to another. The Ottoman Empire was in existence for a long time and the provincial borders were fluid and changed over time and were often subdivided into smaller units and these sub-units often had governors drawn from the local population. So the province of Mosul was always quite independent, more likely than not to have locals in administration. Before naval power made control of harbors key, the Ottoman province of Basra might have had a local Arab leader. Once the British peeled away Kuwait in 1899 when it became a protectorate, then Basra became more important to the Ottomans and had rulers sent directly from the capital.

Anyway, the Sikes-Picot treaty collected the Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul into Iraq. Just the part of Mosul that possibly had oil made it into Iraq. Much of its hinterland was sliced away and left in what would become Syria. What is now northeastern Syria – and seems to be largely under the control of the Syrian Kurds at the moment – largely traded with Mosul and Aleppo to the east and west with some trade down the Khabur river to Deir-ez-Zor. These are areas that have been linked by trade since the empires of ancient Mesopotamia! These areas have always contained tremendous ethnic and religious diversity (Arab Sunni Muslim, Arab Shia Muslim, Chaldean and Assyrian Christian, Jews – of both Arab and Kurdish ethnicity – Armenian Christians, Yazidis, as well as tribal structures that often divided and reunited these areas in surprising ways) but the natural landforms united these areas as trading partners. You can see this in the patterns of the Akkadian and Babylonian Empires as well as in the route of the Berlin-Baghdad Railroad!

Notice the southern part of the route with stations in Aleppo, Nusaybin, Mosul, Baghdad, then Basra. That’s the unit in which common economic interest and trade patterns allowed diverse populations to work together. That’s what Sikes-Picot cut apart. Notice also that Damascus, Jerusalem, Beirut, Latakia are not part of that economic/trade cluster at all. Damascus (es-Sham) and its immediate countryside was cut off from the broader territory that made up the Ottoman province of es-Sham by Sikes-Picot too. Even in the 1990s, many more buses ran each day from el-Hasake to Aleppo than from el-Hasake to Damascus, and the bus would only fill up after reaching Deir-ez-Zor.

The Ottoman provinces make more sense because pre-modern limits of communications divided the territories not European interests. The diversity of the population within the Ottoman provinces were often able to work together peacefully because they shared a common economic interest. Sikes-Picot severed and distorted those ties. One quick example, the division of Nisibis, an ancient and prosperous city, into the Turkish city of Nusaybin and the Syrian city of Qamishli. Read its history. The idea that Turkish or Syrian nationalism is strong enough to pull this city apart into two nations is laughable. Yet an international border divides it.

The terror (and the hope) of the civil war in Syria has always been that the country would come apart and with it the punishing dividing lines of Sikes-Picot.

That may be necessary for the Middle East to recover from the toll of colonialism. But it will take a lot of time and probably a lot of blood. It seems insane to me that a distant super-power should be involved in mediating something we cannot even begin to fully understand, let alone control. That fact alone buttresses the case for leaving it to its own devices.

Update from a reader:

I’ve been following the debate with interest. It seems to me that is the perfect opportunity to have someone who REALLY knows this history weigh in. In particular my good friend Scott Anderson, author of Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, currently on the NYT bestseller list. Scott has fascinating stories to tell, as the many amazingly great reviews have noted [here, here, here].

Robert Kaplan considers the parallels:

The supporters of robust military intervention are not sufficiently considering how things could become even worse after the demise of dictator Bashar al Assad, with full-scale anarchy perhaps in the offing; how Assad might still serve a cold-blooded purpose by containing al Qaeda in the Levant; how four or five steps ahead the United States might find itself owning or partially owning the situation on the ground in an anarchic Syria; how the American public’s appetite for military intervention in Syria might be less than they think; and how a long-term commitment to Syria might impede American influence in other regional theaters. The Obama administration says it does not want a quagmire and will avoid one; but that was the intention of the younger Bush administration, too.

He admits that “each war or intervention is different in a thousand ways than any other” and that “Syria will unfold in its own unique manner.” But he can’t help but see the similarities:

[A] happy outcome in Syria usually requires a finely calibrated strategy from the beginning. The Bush administration did not have one in Iraq, evinced by the absence of post-invasion planning. And, at least as of this writing, the Obama administration seems to lack one as well. Instead, it appeared until recently to be backing into a military action that it itself only half-heartedly believes in. That, more than any of the factors I have mentioned above, is what ultimately gives me pause.

The key issue to me is what plan do we have for the demise of Assad? None, so far as I can see. Bob is absolutely right to see anarchy as the most logical result.

And it’s truly outrageous for unrepentant supporters of the Iraq war to make the very same mistake as they did last time – not thinking through the full consequences of action. If you remove a Shiite dictator who has run a brutally sectarian regime against a Sunni majority – after the kinds of atrocities we have seen so far – you will get a cycle of massive revenge. You will get ethnic cleansing of the Alawites; mass murder of Christians; and appalling violence. In that climate, Sunni Jihadists will thrive. I simply cannot see how any political resolution is possible in a country designed to make such resolutions impossible. Which is why, not deposing or helping to depose Assad is, it seems to me, the least worst option for the foreseeable future.

And this is the conservative position. History matters; culture matters. You cannot by force of arms undo decades of history or centuries of religious conflict. We saw that so plainly in Iraq. And yet some seem criminally blind to it now – and dare to call themselves conservatives.

(Photo: An Iraqi hospital worker inspects burned bodies outside the morgue of a hospital in the restive Iraqi city of Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, 23 April 2007. The victims were killed when a bomber exploded his car near the city council building, killing four policemen, police Lieutenant Ahmed Ali from Baquba said. The attack wounded another 25 people, many of them policemen, he added. By Ali Tueijri/AFP/Getty Images.)

Leave aside the fact that the intellectual architect of the Iraq War and of the Bush-Cheney torture program has the gall to call any president “incompetent.”  His column today conveys a very 20th Century mindset. It’s a zero-sum world and the US must control as much of it as possible. So we have this puzzlement:

Take at face value Obama’s claim of authorship. Then why isn’t he taking ownership? Why isn’t he calling it the “U.S. proposal” and defining it? Why not issue a U.S. plan containing the precise demands, detailed timeline and threat of action should these conditions fail to be met?

Because he does not want the US to “own” Syria or this proposal. How’s that for an obvious answer that Krauthammer cannot imagine – because he is so trapped in power trips for a second American Century? But Obama, reflecting American public opinion, is perfectly happy to have Putin assume responsibility for the Middle East. Let Russia be drained, bankrupted and exhausted by managing that fractious and decreasingly important part of the world.

Then we get an honest account of what the architect of the Iraq catastrophe wants now – more enmeshment in the sectarian warfare of the Middle East:

Assad is the key link in the anti-Western Shiite crescent stretching from Tehran through Damascus and Beirut to the Mediterranean — on which sits Tartus, Russia’s only military base outside the former Soviet Union. This axis frontally challenges the pro-American Sunni Arab Middle East (Jordan, Yemen, the Gulf Arabs, even the North African states), already terrified at the imminent emergence of a nuclear Iran.

At which point the Iran axis and its Russian patron would achieve dominance over the moderate Arab states, allowing Russia to supplant America as regional hegemon for the first time since Egypt switched to our side in the Cold War in 1972.

And that would be a terrible outcome for the US because … ? He doesn’t spell it out. Here’s what I think would be a terrible outcome for the US: taking sides in the intra-Muslim endless conflict between Sunni Islam and Shiite Islam. The US has no, zero, zilch, nada reason to take such a position. It infuriates each side in turn – we backed the Shia in Iraq (Krauthammer’s bright idea) and now he wants us to back the Sunnis in Syria. This latter strategy, as Leon Wieseltier explained on AC360 Later the other night, is all about Iran. Where Krauthammer and Wieseltier agree is on perpetual conflict with Iran. Because the other thing they agree on is running American Middle East policy as if it were indistinguishable from Israel’s.

Look: If you accept their premises – that we need to be even more deeply involved in the Middle East, by joining one side in a hugely explosive religious schism – their argument makes sense. But I do not accept the premise. I think engaging in the Middle East to back one sect’s interpretation of Islam over another’s is a mug’s game – as I also think is true of the entire paradigm of unchallenged US hegemony in a uni-polar world. That hubristic, over-bearing posture all but guarantees over-reach and disaster. It has already done a huge amount to destroy this country’s reputation, and thereby soft power. It has led us to alienate almost everyone in the world, including most of our allies. At some point, we ought to question the logic of such a cycle of self-defeat.

And look: We have no serious enemy like we did with the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. No other power even faintly matches our strength. We are in a different world. Moreover, we are bankrupt as a nation.

There is no American public willingness to get involved, and any prolonged conflict right now would increase the already deep and justified disdain for meddling in the Middle East. (As they did with the Iraq war, Krauthammer and Wieseltier keep offering up the same mindset that has actually sowed the seeds for non-interventionism, but that paradox does not seem to have occurred to them.) Obama, in contrast, wants us, it seems clear to me, to withdraw from such self-defeating power trips and was elected precisely to do so. He is living up to that promise – and I see no reason to listen to the unrepentant architect of the greatest foreign policy fiasco since Vietnam when he’s simply calling – again – for a return to Bush-Cheney era policies.

This has not been Obama’s finest hour or finest month. But that should not mean taking the neocon bait of another endless, draining war in a region which has already done its bit to bankrupt us both morally and fiscally. The pressure on Obama to cave to these discredited experts is to be expected. They love to shriek and bully. The test now is not whether Obama can jump through enough hoops to please them (something he will never do anyway). The test is whether Obama can keep us out of that region’s metastasizing war and throw Putin into that nightmare. Just stop arming the Syrian rebels and don’t turn down Putin’s offer to take responsibility for all of it. Then get back to the crucial domestic challenges of immigration, healthcare and the small problem that the entire federal government could be shut down within a week.