The Middle East: New strategic realities

After half a century of stasis, there are big new strategic realities in the Middle East, but people are having trouble getting their heads around them. Take the United States, for example. Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state in President Barack Obama’s first administration, is still lamenting her former boss’s failure to send more military help to the “moderate” rebels in Syria.

“The failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton told Atlantic magazine recently. She’s actually claiming that early and lavish military aid to the right people would have overthrown Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, while freezing the al-Qaeda/Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) jihadists out. If only.

Clinton travels a lot, but she never really leaves the Washington bubble. There are intelligence officials there who would gladly explain to her that almost all the desirable weaponry sent to the “moderates” in Syria ends up in the hands of the jihadists, who either buy it or just take it, but she wouldn’t listen. It falls outside the “consensus.”

Yet that really is how ISIL acquires most of its heavy weapons. The most striking case of that was in early June, when the Iraqi army, having spent $41.6 billion in the past three years on training its troops and equipping them with American heavy weapons, ran away from Mosul and northern Iraq and handed a good quarter of them over to ISIL.

In fact, that’s the weaponry that is now enabling ISIL to conquer further territory in eastern Syria and in Iraqi Kurdistan. Which, in turn, is why Barack Obama has now authorized air strikes in Iraq to stop ISIL troops from overrunning Arbil, the Kurdish capital.

But Obama has not yet dropped the other shoe. A lot of people have not dropped their other shoes yet. They all know that the whole strategic environment has changed. They realize that may require new policies and even new allies. Changing horses in midstream is always a tricky business, so the realignments are only slowly getting underway, but you can see where they are going to go.

The proclamation of the “Islamic State” in eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq has huge implications for every country in the Middle East, but for most of the great powers – Russia, the United States, China, India, Britain, France and Germany – it is almost the only thing they still care about in the region.

They all have Muslim minorities of their own, and they all want the Islamic State stopped, or at the very least isolated, contained and quarantined.

That means that both the Syrian and Iraqi governments must survive, and they will probably get enough outside help to do so (although it will take time for the U.S. and the major European powers to switch sides and openly back al-Assad). The army of the Iraqi Kurds might hold its own against the Islamic State if it had better weapons, so it will get them (although Baghdad will not welcome a more powerful Kurdish army).

Containing the Islamic State to the north will be a simpler task, because Iran and Turkey are very big, well-organized states whose populations are relatively invulnerable to the ISIL brand of Sunni fundamentalism. But to the south of the Islamic State is Saudi Arabia, and that is a country that faces some tough decisions.

The Wahhabi strand of Sunni Islam which is Saudi Arabia’s official religion is very close to the beliefs of the jihadists who now rule the Islamic State to their north. Much of their financial support and even their weapons have come from Saudi Arabia. But the rulers of that kingdom would be extremely unwise to assume that the jihadists regard Saudi Arabia’s current political arrangements as legitimate, or that gratitude would restrain them.

Further afield, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s new regime in Egypt can count on strong American support, and may even be encouraged by Washington to intervene militarily in Libya and shut down the Islamist militias there. Tunisia will be the only remaining flower of the “Arab Spring,” although there has also been a certain amount of progress in Morocco. But in the heartland of the Arab world, war will flourish and democracy will not.