ISIS CLAIMS SUCCESS BUT TRIBES RULE MIDDLE EAST / THE FINANCIAL TIMES COMMENT & ANALYSIS

Global Insight

July 31, 2014 2:18 pm

Isis claims success but tribes rule Mideast

By David Gardner in Beirut

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Old order had already started to crumble along sectarian lines

©AFP

An image from a jihadist website shows Isis militants after they allegedly seized an Iraqi army checkpoint in Salahuddin

When the jihadis of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, known as Isis, burst out of eastern Syria into north and central Iraq last month, they announced not just a new caliphate but that they had “broken” Sykes-Picot, the secret Anglo-French pact of 1916 to carve up the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces and throw disparate religious and ethnic groups into European-style nation-states.

But Iraq and Syria, created by Britain and France after the 1914-18 first world war to bolster their imperial interests, had already started coming apart.

De facto partition of Iraq, a state shattered by the Anglo-US invasion of 2003, was well under way. Syria, where the regime of Bashar al-Assad has been waging a pitiless war against its own people since the uprising against his tyranny in 2011, was already fragmenting along sectarian lines.

It can look as though the Near East has been pitched back a century into a neo-Ottoman shape: a return to the millet system under which the sprawling Ottoman Empire allowed its Arab subject peoples a degree of autonomy within relatively cohesive ethno-religious units. The would-be new caliphs of Isis proclaim their intention to unite what was then Greater Syria and Mesopotamia, tearing up the Levantine canvas designed by European imperialists and bulldozing its frontiers. But unity of any sort looks forlorn in this region on fire.

Isis, entrenched in a cross-border “jihadistan” in the Euphrates valley, has really stepped opportunistically into a sort of three-dimensional vacuum, characterised by an absence of state, a loss of shared national narrative and the feeble leverage of big powers. In Syria and Iraq, institutions of state have collapsed, throwing citizens back into the arms of sect and militia, clan and tribe.

Partly this is the result of the ideological collapse of pan-Arab nationalism, which long ago became an alibi for dictatorship. The Ba’ath parties in Syria and Iraq were in many particulars an Arab version of fascism. They were also minority regimes: built around the Alawite sect of the Assads, an esoteric offshoot of Shiism, and the (Sunni) Tikriti clan of Saddam Hussein. Their implosion has rekindled the age-old schism between Sunni and Shia Islam into border-busting flame, with Saudi Arabia, a Sunni Wahhabi theocracy, pitted against the Islamic Republic of Iran, a Shia (and Persian) theocracy.

But a huge difference between now and a century ago in the Middle East is the relative weight of the superpowers. Britain and France, although about to enter the twilight of empire, could then shape the region – literally dismember it and stitch it back together. Now, after the Iraq fiasco and US and western mishandling of Syria – let alone Washington’s inability to influence Israel over Palestine – there is real doubt the US can use its diplomatic clout and military power to shape, or even manage, the region. That makes Russia, a subprime superpower, look implausibly good. But even in the Soviet era, Russia never managed to be more than a spoiler in the Middle East.

Yet there is no real meta-narrative for a mess as bloody as the Middle East. Its present condition does date from the aftermath of 1914, but also from the end of the cold war, which often replaced ideological difference with divisions based on identity – from the wars in former Yugoslavia to today’s sectarian carnage in the Levant.

By a geopolitical fluke, the cold war ended just as technology developed unique power to encourage global tribes. As the French-Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf pointed out in his book Disordered World, the digital revolution arrived at a moment when identity politics was unleashed and the triumph of the US as sole, fallible superpower had raised questions of legitimacy at a global level, reinforcing tribal narratives and inherited allegiances.

In the Arab-Muslim world, moreover, disfigured by “a local, nationalistic brand of Stalinism”, a western mix of support for tyranny and tactical alliances with religious-inspired movements such as the Mujahideen in Afghanistan “meant that at the end of the cold war the Islamists were on the winning side”, Mr Maalouf argued. A world, then, much more complex than that of Sykes-Picot.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2014.