• Strategic interdependence or linkage? -   Anoush Ehteshami

• The Middle East's new map -   Mark Perry

The dominant elements are Islamist and American
 Yossi Alpher

There are currently four major crises or conflict systems in the Middle East:

• In Iraq, a misconceived US occupation and democratic reform process has spawned a Sunni-Shi'ite civil war that empowers Iran and threatens to spread jihadi terrorism and sectarian strife elsewhere in the region, including at the interstate level.
  

• In Israel-Palestine, the conflict has escalated with the advent of a Hamas government--in part a second negative outcome of American-sponsored democratic reform in the region.
  
• Lebanon, following the summer war with Israel, is teetering on the brink of renewed civil strife, with Shi'ite Islamist Hizballah pushing Syria's and Iran's agendas.
  
• And the Islamist regime in Iran, strengthened by events in Iraq and accelerating a nuclear weapons program, is reaching for regional hegemony.
  

Yossi Alpher is coeditor of the bitterlemons family of internet publications. He is former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.

It was the former dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, who in 1990 graphically put forward the notion of "linkage" between the Middle East's different theaters when he suggested that his withdrawal from occupied Kuwait should be linked to an agreed timetable for Israel's withdrawal from the 1967 occupied territories. He of course had traced linkage to a much earlier time in history by suggesting that it was "Cyrus the Persian" who had enlisted a "Jewish fifth column" in Babylon to engineer the city's downfall to the Persian conquerors. Indeed, historical continuity was to be illustrated in the Baath party annals of the 1980s, which were live with the belief that even in modern times you can see a "Zionist-Khomeinist" axis operating against the Arabs and their collective interests.

To be fair, Saddam was neither the first nor the only person to paint a picture of linkage. In fact, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini himself had often spoken of linkage, and Iran's war strategy in the 1980s at least paid lip service to the idea of linkage when suggesting that the path to the liberation of Jerusalem went through Baghdad.

What these leaders saw as linkage, a tactical game that played to a particular gallery, I have always seen as "strategic interdependence". As far back as 1989, in my Nuclearisation of the Middle East (Brassey's Defence Publishers), I was making the argument that the MENA sub-system is now not only increasingly organically linked across its sub-regions, but is also in geopolitical terms in a position to interact with other regional systems, thus creating a wide range of strategic dependencies. I argued then that nuclear proliferation would provide but one example of the strategic interdependencies that I had in mind.

Today, with the dust now fully settled on the Hizballah-Israel "34 day war", the reality of linkage is as clear as day. Indeed, commentators and some policymakers even depicted this conflict as a proxy war between Hizballah's main ally Iran and the United States. Linkage therefore has not only been established, but in a post-Saddam regional environment has also been fully operationalized.

More significantly, the conflict in Lebanon illustrated an altogether new dimension to Iran's regional role in these rather tense circumstances. The perception of a small but dedicated Iranian-backed militia "winning" the first Arab war against Israel in the Jewish state's 60 year history has scarcely been resisted in commentaries. Although the true costs of the war to the Arab side--Israel's unlikely willingness to give up any Palestinian or Syrian territory without cast iron and enforceable security guarantees, death and destruction visited on Lebanon, major loss of life and property among the Lebanese population, the arrival of more foreign military forces in Lebanon and the deepening of factional and sectarian differences in the country--are indeed great, one is still left with the feeling in the region that Hizballah with its 15,000-strong militia has managed to dent Israel's aura of invincibility.

That Hizballah apparently single-handedly fought the Arabs' longest war with Israel to the bitter end, firing some 246 rockets into Israel on the last day of the war, and forced Israel to agree to an internationally-negotiated ceasefire was sufficient reason for it to feel victorious and for Iran to feel proud of its own role and achievements. The Iranian government's open and unreserved support for Hizballah stood in sharp contrast to the Arab regimes' position, which rather swiftly changed from condemnation of Hizballah's action as "reckless" in the early days of the war to a muted expression of support for the "Lebanese resistance" half way through the war. It was clear to all that this Arab adjustment was in small measure a response to a groundswell of support on the Arab street for what was portrayed by the Arab media as Hizballah's heroism in the face of an unjust onslaught.

Furthermore, if this campaign was ultimately a proxy war between Tehran and Washington, then the fact that mighty Israel was being reduced to the status of America's "champion" in the battle against Iran's much smaller Arab protege could play out very badly in terms of Israel's desire to maintain its strategic deterrence against hostile neighbors and particularly against an emboldened Iran. But even more seriously, the fact that in the eyes of the Arab masses Israel (and by extension the US) in fact lost the war will have a much bigger strategic implication as Tehran's neoconservatives begin to position themselves as the only force able and willing not only to challenge the US-dominated status quo but also to change the regional balance of power in favor of "the forces of Islam".

Of perhaps even greater strategic significance for the region are other aspects of the response to the war. At one level, Arab frustration and anger at Israel's overwhelming use of force and at the pro-western Arab regimes' rather mixed response to the conflict has, for the first time in years, facilitated the transformation of the Arab-Israel conflict from a safety valve for channeling internal opposition outwards, into the sharp edge of the weapon with which to attack Arab ruling regimes for their continuing autocracy, economic incompetence and corruption.

Over time, a structural imbalance has begun to emerge between Iran's position in the Arab-Israel conflict and that of the pro-western Arab governments--one that Tehran has been able to exploit to great effect at times of crisis. So far it has been able to do so without too much cost in terms of its relations with Arab states. But this could change at any time if the nuclear issue, or Iraq for that matter, continue to erode confidence in the Iranian administration.

From this vantage point, Tehran (with the help of Damascus, it has to be said) has been able to attack the US and Israel for their apparently anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab positions and set itself up as the true voice of resistance in the region. This, however, is a wholly negative and reactive position to hold. All it takes is a shift in the logjam in the Arab-Israel conflict and Iran's gains could quickly reverse. Furthermore, the line adopted by Tehran under President Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad is not conciliatory and is unlikely to advance the cause of badly needed reforms in the region.

The war dangerously eroded the routine business of the area, forcing a whole new division of social energies in the Arab world: resistance versus restraint instead of democracy versus autocracy. Iran's interventions under its neoconservative president have done little to help heal the fissures permeating intra-Arab relations. This is strategic interdependence at work.- Published 21/12/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org

Anoush Ehteshami is professor of international relations and head of the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University, England.

In 1919, the world humbly bore the loss of one of its most imaginative diplomats, when 39-year-old Mark Sykes (the "6th baronet") succumbed to the Spanish flu in his well-appointed Paris hotel room. Sykes died a happy man, having created (with his boon buddy Francoise Georges-Picot), a "New Middle East", complete with Octavian-era place names: Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia and Iraq. The insipidly industrious Sykes had spent his off-hours over the previous years bent over a map, diligently erasing old boundaries and replacing them with British and French "zones". His vision was now a matter of international law, having recently been agreed to at Versailles, just down the road from the hotel where he breathed his last. His intentions were to do good--so it is, always, with imperialists--to bring the Arabs ("those poor sots" as he once so indelicately phrased it) into the modern world.

The great tragedy of the otherwise insufferable Sykes is not that he died at such a young age, or that his great hope (to serve as His Majesty's Foreign Minister) remained unfulfilled, or even that he died bereft, childless, unmarried, alone--a mama's boy. Sykes' great tragedy was that he created a map of the Middle East that had absolutely no connection to reality. His "red" British and "blue" French "zones" (as well as his pink "spheres of influence" and purple "condominiums") were a melange of borderless intentions that took a score of decades and dozens of conflicts to sort through--and have not been sorted through yet.

Still, Sykes' true legacy was not his vision of the Middle East, but the trail of neo-imperialists he left in his wake: wannabe semiologists and high-falutin' intellectual cartographers who continue to search for a unified field theory of diplomacy--a political phlogiston--that will make the Muslim world explicable, that will explain it all.

In the summer of 2024, Washington's policymaking elites were breathlessly a-twitter about a new book that continued this tradition. "The Pentagon's New Map" was passed hand-to-hand among policymakers, appeared on Pentagon reading lists, and was the subject of endless backhall discussions at Washington think-tanks. The book's author, Thomas Barnett, divided the world into two spheres: the "functioning core" of integrated, democratic and modern states and the "disconnected gap" of poor and poorly run states that are the breeding grounds of terrorism. That is to say, them and us. "The Pentagon's New Map" seemed a natural follow-on to Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat", which posited an ever-expanding global economy that would, eventually and inevitably, breathlessly expand (or is it contract?) our horizons.

There was, in both of these books, a small footnote of warning. Barnett said that a robust US military was essential to providing the means necessary to bring an end to the lawlessness common among the "disconnected gap"--the US needed to create a "Leviathan" that could ensure world peace.

"Any time American troops show up--be it in combat, a battle group pulling up the coast as a reminder, or a peacekeeping mission--it tends to be in a place that is relatively disconnected from the world, where globalization hasn't taken root because of a repressive regime, abject poverty, or the lack of a robust legal system. It's these places that incubate global terrorism...", Barnett says.

Thomas Friedman must have been miffed. Barnett's prescription for spreading "core" values to "the poor sots" sounded a lot like his medicine for ending the strife between those who were all for globalization and those who thought it was threatening their way of life--between those more interested in protecting their olive trees than those who are interested in buying a new Lexus. Or, as Friedman would have it: "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

Washington wonks are not the only ones who slather over this kind of thing. Arabs and Muslims do too. Barnett and Friedman will be pleased to learn that the newest recruits to the set of "flat-worlders" are Arab salafists, who pay no attention to maps at all. Indeed, Sunni opponents ("disconnected gappers" presumably) of America's invasion of Iraq left their olive groves in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia back in 2024, hopped in their Fiats and went out to do battle with the defenders of Silicon Valley in Anbar and Baghdad.

Now, having bloodied the not-so-hidden fist of the "Leviathan", they're returning home--and doing battle with Arab "moderates." But these salafists are not just doing battle with America's "moderate" flat-world friends, those scions of modernity (like Hosni Mubarak, King Abdullah II and Abu Mazen). They are targeting the leaders of Hizballah and Hamas--and of the Muslim Brotherhood--the "Muslim extremists" of George Bush's famous phrase.

What happens in Baghdad today is the talk of Cairo tonight, and the same "gappers" we deride for believing their olive groves are worth defending have learned the lessons of resistance from the Zapatistas--the first group to use satellite phones and the internet to break an economic embargo intended to starve their children. The first known effective "denial of service" attack was launched by the Zapatistas in 1994, and the Mexican government caved in. We might deny that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will help America in Iraq, just as we would deny that "the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad," but we should not assume that interconnectedness is the sole province of the "Functioning Core" or that, Sykes-like, we can split or divide or sketch new boundaries that will somehow federate peace. Then too, our vaunted support for globalization has denied access to the global economy (the one tool we believe is the most moderating of influences) to those we deem our enemies.

The unbelievable condescension of the mapmakers has blinded them to the truth of the current conflict--that the growing resistance to American hegemony represents the first truly global and connected political movement in human history. It plays to a global audience, it accesses the global media, it subverts the strategy of "flat worlders" who would use the world economy to exact political punishment.

"The ultimate benign hegemon and reluctant enforcer" (in Thomas Friedman's phrase) is, for political purposes, rejecting the new flat world of global markets. We are the "turtles" of the modern era, who would rather pull in our heads than to admit that our maps bear no relation to reality. Mark Sykes would recoil in horror--but he would be proud of those who he once dismissed as mere pawns in a game of "influence" and "spheres". The "poor sots" have entered the modern world--we are the ones stuck in the past.- Published 21/12/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org

Mark Perry is the author of "Partners in Command, George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace". His most recent book is "Talking To Terrorists" (Basic Books, 2024).