A bloody mess, European-style

OzOped illo 19.06.2014. Illustration: Eric Lobbecke.

BARACK Obama must decide whether to engage in airstrikes on Iraq to halt the advance of the murderous Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. The arguments against are powerful. If he hits hard enough to hurt ISIS, which doesn’t possess infrastructure or march in big formations, he will kill a lot of civilians. If he hurts ISIS and a few months later it’s clear that Iran is the dominant influence in Iraq, he will be accused of using the US military to achieve Iran’s strategic expansion.

But Washington has a powerful interest in preventing western Iraq and eastern Syria from falling into the semi-permanent control of ISIS and becoming, in Tony Abbott’s words, a “terrorist state’’. It was the existence of just such a state in Afghanistan that led to 9/11 and all the subsequent mess.

Therefore, the US President will be motivated in part by a desire to hold Iraq together. But this may no longer be realistic. It is impossible to imagine Bashar al-Assad ever reasserting control over all Syria. It is extremely unlikely that a Shi’ite-dominated government in Baghdad will ever again completely subdue the Sunni areas of Iraq.

ISIS has been expelled from al-Qa’ida for its anti-Shi’ite sectarianism. But ISIS is just the old al-Qa’ida in Iraq organisation, which became the Islamic State of Iraq, renamed. ISIS today is in a similar position to that which Sunni insurgents occupied just before the US troop surge in 2007. The surge defeated the insurgents and when the Americans left Iraq the Sunni rebellion was quiet.

Three aspects of that experience are discouraging, however. First, it took 100,000 US troops to do this. Second, it also took huge monetary bribes to Sunni forces to get them to fight the insurgency. Neither of those options is available now. And third, since the surge, Nouri al-Maliki’s government has comprehensively alienated Iraq’s Sunni population, so that many who are not as extreme as ISIS will go along with it.

So we return to the prior question: Is Iraq itself viable? Each of its main constituent groups, the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shi’ites, refuses to be ruled by any of the others. While I am no cultural relativist and do not equate the violent, seething mess of the Middle East with Europe, it is worth recalling that throughout the 20th century European nations went through a remorseless process of ethnic cleansing to achieve the dominance of a single ethno-nationalist group in each state. Each nation wanted a state, and each state wanted to embody a nation.

This is not the way Europe likes to tell its modern story but it is laid out in brilliant detail by Jerzy Muller in a 1998 piece in Foreign Affairs. Like so much today, the Middle East’s illogical national boundaries go back to World War I. The Great War saw the dissolution of three great empires — the Austrian Hapsburgs, the Russian Romanovs and the Turkish Ottomans. These empires allowed, or forced, many different nationalities to live under a common rule. But these nationalities often didn’t like each other, or were segregated by occupation and lived socially within their own spaces. When the empires collapsed, Muller argues: “Much of the history of 20th-century ­Europe has been a painful, drawn-out process of ethnic disaggregation.’’ Out of countless examples, ethnic Greeks in Turkey went to Greece, ethnic Turks in Greece went to Turkey. After World War II, more than a million Poles were expelled from the Soviet Union to Poland, half a million Ukrainians in Poland went to Ukraine. Slovaks were transferred out of Hungary and Magyars sent away from Czechoslovakia. There were countless acts of ethnic cleansing, the most savage Hitler’s murder of six million Jews.

In western Europe, modern states were based on existing ethno-nationalist majorities. The further east you went, the more complex was the mix and the more wholesale the later ethnic disaggregation.

Nor was the process always regarded as disreputable. In 1944, Winston Churchill told parliament it was essential to remove ethnic Germans from non-German nations. He said: “There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble.’’

This process persisted until the end of the 20th century. The three main multinational states to emerge from the Cold War — the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia — all broke up along ethnic lines while the two Germanys reunited on ethnic lines. Of the two remaining multinational European nations, Belgium is always on the brink of break-up and only Switzerland seems completely stable. Even Britain could soon lose Scotland on the basis of ancient, if seemingly minor, ethnic difference.

This is entirely different from the experience of modern immigrant nations like Australia, the US, Canada and New Zealand. Here, immigrants come as individuals or families with a desire to become part of their new nation. To some extent this is now happening in western Europe. But the experience of religiously and ethnically divergent populations within a nation which becomes newly independent is much less encouraging. Throughout 20th-century Europe, ethno-nationalism trumped class solidarity and Marxism, but it also often trum­ped liberalism and democracy.

Now parts of the Middle East are following the old European pattern, with as much ferocity and bloodshed. The conflicts in Iraq and Syria have already seen a massive process of ethnic segregation. Kurdistan is surely destined for, and entitled to, full national independence.

It may even be better to start working with some of these national aspirations — as the West eventually did in Kosovo — rather than pretending that the post-World War I map of the Middle East must survive forever.

The old Iraqi state, set up by the European powers, enshrined Sunni dominance of the Shi’ites and Kurds, although Woodrow Wilson had supported Kurdish national self-determination. The Sunni dominance could only be sustained by a ruthless dictator.

We cannot abandon Iraq, because the consequences of an ISIS style terrorist state would be too dangerous. But there is no chance of US intervention on the ground.

If you’re smart, though, you can achieve a lot with money, training, sometimes weapons, and diplomatic influence. It’s the Great Game re-imagined, and terribly bloody.