The Struggle for Mastery in the Fertile Crescent, by Fouad Ajami (preview)

THE STRUGGLE FOR MASTERY IN THE

FERTILE CRESCENT

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Copyright © 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

HERBERT AND JANE DWIGHT WORKING GROUP

ON ISL AMISM AND THE INTERNAT IONAL ORDER

Many of the writings associated with thisWorking Group will be published by the Hoover Institution.

Materials published to date, or in production, are listed below.

ESSAY SER IES:THE GREAT UNRAVEL ING: THE REMAKING OF THE MIDDLE EAST

In Retreat: America’s Withdrawal from the Middle EastRussell A. Berman

Israel and the Arab TurmoilItamar Rabinovich

Refl ections on the Revolution in EgyptSamuel Tadros

Th e Struggle for Mastery in the Fertile CrescentFouad Ajami

Th e Weaver’s Lost ArtCharles Hill

Th e Consequences of SyriaLee Smith

ESSAYS

Saudi Arabia and the New Strategic LandscapeJoshua Teitelbaum

Islamism and the Future of the Christians of the Middle EastHabib C. Malik

Syria through Jihadist Eyes: A Perfect EnemyNibras Kazimi

Th e Ideological Struggle for PakistanZiad Haider

Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah: Th e Unholy Alliance and Its War on Lebanon

Marius Deeb

[For a list of books published under the auspices of the WORKING GROUP ON ISLAMISM AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER,

please see page 59.]

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THE STRUGGLE FOR MASTERY IN THE

FERTILE CRESCENT

Fouad Ajami

H O O V E R I N S T I T U T I O N P R E S SStanford University Stanford, California

HERBERT & JANE DWIGHT WORKING GROUP ON ISLAMISM AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER

ESSAY SERIES: THE GREAT UNRAVELING: THE REMAKING OF THE MIDDLE EAST

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Th e Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, foundedat Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who went onto become the thirty-fi rst president of the United States, is aninterdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domesticand international aff airs. Th e views expressed in its publications areentirely those of the authors and do not necessarily refl ect the viewsof the staff , offi cers, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution.

www.hoover.org

Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 649

Hoover Institution at Leland Stanford Junior University,Stanford, California, 94305-6010

Copyright © 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher and copyright holders.

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Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.ISBN 978-0-8179-1755-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-8179-1756-2 (epub) ISBN 978-0-8179-1757-9 (mobi)ISBN 978-0-8179-1758-6 (PDF)

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Th e Hoover Institution gratefully acknowledgesthe following individuals and foundationsfor their signifi cant support of the

HERBERT AND JANE DWIGHT WORKING GROUP

ON ISLAMISM AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER:

Herbert and Jane Dwight

Mr. and Mrs. Donald R. Beall

Stephen Bechtel Foundation

Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

Mr. and Mrs. Clayton W. Frye Jr.

Lakeside Foundation

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vii

Series Foreword by Fouad Ajami and Charles Hill / ix

Th e Struggle for Mastery in the Fertile Crescent / 1

I. Th e Patrons / 1 II. In the Name of the Saints / 6 III. Blowback / 11 IV. A War with No Secrets / 16 V. A War with No Victors / 26 VI. A Foreigner’s Gift : Liberation in Iraq / 31 VII. Th e Matter of State Power / 35 VIII. Th e Last Refuge? / 48

Source Notes / 53About the Author / 55About the Hoover Institution’s Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamismand the International Order / 57Index / 61

CONTENTS

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ix

It’s a mantra, but it is also true: the Middle East is being unmade and remade. Th e autocra-cies that gave so many of these states the appear-ance of stability are gone, their dreaded rulers dispatched to prison or exile or cut down by young people who had yearned for the end of the despotisms. Th ese autocracies were large prisons, and in 2011, a storm overtook that stagnant world. Th e spectacle wasn’t pretty, but prison riots never are. In the Fertile Crescent, the work of the colonial cartographers—Gertrude Bell, Winston Churchill, and Georges Clemenceau—are in play as they have never been before. Arab

SERIES FOREWORD

The Great Unraveling: The Remaking of the Middle East

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nationalists were given to lamenting that they lived in nation-states “invented” by Western pow-ers in the aft ermath of the Great War. Now, a cen-tury later, with the ground burning in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq and the religious sects at war, not even the most ardent nationalists can be sure that they can put in place anything better than the old order.

Men get used to the troubles they know, and the Greater Middle East seems fated for grief and breakdown. Outside powers approach it with dread; merciless political contenders have the run of it. Th ere is swagger in Iran and a belief that the radical theocracy can bully its rivals into submission. Th ere was a period when the United States provided a modicum of order in these Middle Eastern lands. But pleading fatigue, and fi nancial scarcity at home, we have all but announced the end of that stewardship. We are poorer for that abdication, and the Middle East is thus left to the mercy of predators of every kind.

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We asked a number of authors to give this spectacle of disorder their best try. We imposed no rules on them, as we were sure their essays would take us close to the sources of the malady.

fouad ajamiSenior Fellow, Hoover Institution—Cochairman, Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order

charles hillDistinguished Fellow of the Brady-Johnson Programin Grand Strategy at Yale University;Research Fellow, Hoover Institution—Cochairman, Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order

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1

I: THE PATRONS

Nowadays, the shadow of resourceful powers lies across the Fertile Crescent—the stretch of geography that runs from the Iranian border with Iraq to the Mediterranean. Th ese are not the Western powers that enjoyed decades of pri-macy in the region. Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Ara-bia have stepped into the vacuum left by the retreat and disinterest of the West. Of the three powers, Iran must be reckoned to be the stron-gest. It has money to spread and plenty of bravado to impress the gullible, and its Shiite communities help paper over the Arab-Persian

Th e Struggle for Mastery in the Fertile Crescent

FOUA D AJA M I

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divide and the diff erences of language and tem-perament. It is an outlaw power—its Quds Force, a unit of the Revolutionary Guard, can strike at will in the region, blurring the line between poli-tics and terror. Its nuclear ambitions, and the scramble of the world’s powers to contain those ambitions, give Iran great leverage in this regional contest. Th e suspicion arises that the theocracy’s transgressions in this neighborhood can be for-given so long as it is willing to halt its nuclear drive.

Turkey is an odd claimant to infl uence. A century ago, Turkey turned its back to the Arab domains it had governed for a good four centu-ries. Ottomanism was discarded as a new Turk-ish republic looked West, believing there was nothing of value in the old Ottoman provinces. But a neo-Ottomanist temptation was to rear its head with the rise of a younger generation of Islamists in the country’s politics. Th e return to the Arab world was hesitant and rested on the preference of a fairly narrow political class. Th e bureaucratic and military elites and the West-ernized intellectuals wanted nothing to do with



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this new calling. Still, what has been dubbed the “Sunnifi cation of Turkish foreign policy” had plunged the Turkish state into Arab aff airs. A daring leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had suc-cumbed to a grand Islamic ambition for himself and his country. His Arab detractors spoke of him as a new sultan and insisted that they were done with the age of sultans. But geography had its pull, and the disorder so near Turkish terri-tory, in Syria, and Iraq gave the Turkish state new opportunities as it brought dangers aplenty.

In the scheme of things, the third of these powers, Saudi Arabia, is the most cautious of players. Saudis are supreme realists; they are immune to the call of great, risky endeavors. Th ey guard their home turf but, for the most part, steer clear of the quarrels of others. Th ey have wealth, and they rightly suspect that foreign entanglements will be a drain on them. But a new activism came to the Saudi realm of late. Th ere were contests over Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon they could not ignore. A monarch who goes by the title of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques could not avert his gaze from the Sunni-Shia



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fi ght at play in the Fertile Crescent. Iran, a rival in the Gulf, had pulled Saudi Arabia into this contest of nations and religious sects. Saudi Arabia shed its reticence out of a legitimate fear that Iran’s bid for dominion had grown increas-ingly menacing. Saudi Arabia couldn’t sit out the assault of Bashar al-Assad on a Sunni rebel-lion or the brazen conquest of Beirut by Hezbol-lah. In their modern history, the Saudis had an abiding faith in American power. Th e abdica-tion by the Obama administration would, in time, force the Saudis to greater assertiveness than they had been known for. Th e House of Saud has great leeway over sovereign matters, but the rulers still have to be responsive to the ulama (religious scholars) and to laymen off ended by the ordeal of Sunni communities in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.

Th e disorder of the Fertile Crescent—a mag-net that draws outsiders—can be traced to the weakness of Sunni Islam in this region. In the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, and North Africa, mainstream Sunni Islam is ascendant. Th e fault line that bedevils these lands is between secu-



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larists, who want to keep the faith at bay, and Islamists, who have stepped forth in recent decades to assert the hegemony of the sacred over the political. Th e Fertile Crescent presents a diff erent landscape. Here, Sunni Islam was ascendant in the cities and centuries of Otto-man rule augmented Sunnism. Arab national-ism, too, had been a prop of Sunni primacy. But the edifi ce of Sunni power was fragile, and it would be toppled in the course of the second half of the past century. Th e military despotism of the Alawis in Damascus and the rise of the Shia in Beirut and Baghdad were a challenge that Sunnism felt as a great violation. When the rebellion came to Syria in 2011—the last of the rebellions of the Arab Spring—a terrible strug-gle lay in wait for the Syrians and their immedi-ate neighbors. In Syria and Lebanon, the Sunnis, merchant communities, had to take up arms to correct for their military weakness. In Iraq, the Sunnis, suddenly powerless in the aft ermath of an American war, fell into despondency only to be inspired by a Sunni rebellion across a mean-ingless Iraq-Syria frontier.



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The Struggle for Mastery in the Fertile Crescent, by Fouad Ajami (preview)