[Vision2020] The Mid-East

Fri Feb 22 12:29:20 PST 2008

Copied and pasted below is a commentary by Jim Chase, a professional 
journalist and subscriber to "Washington Veterans", another of the many 
listserves to which I subscribe.

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Hello,

I really appreciate Frank's succinct analysis of the
possible "ways forward" from Bush's Folly (aka, the
Iraq war).  Having spent the summer of 2006 in Baghdad
(on an assignment with the US Agency for Int'l
Development), I must agree that, in the short term,
there appear to be no clean, easy ways out of this
briar's patch.  I do hope that we have learned the
lesson that we need to do a very thorough analysis of
possible unintended consequences BEFORE we send our
troops uninvited into another nation state.

What is especially frustrating to me is that, even
with the administration's wishful, naive planning for
this war, we had a chance for a much better outcome if
we had made fewer ideological (as in "neocon")
mistakes in the early days of "mission accomplished."
Bremer and his supporters in the White House appeared
to be trying to create from whole cloth the ideal
Muslim democracy that would support Israel in leading
the way for a more democratic Middle East/Central
Asia.  In their ideological blindness (and perhaps for
some of them a repressed wish to create an Armageddon
and Jewish supremacy in Jerusalem to clear the way for
Christ's return), they ignored a lot of reality on the
ground.

Thanks to Gen. Petreaus' more sophisticated
understanding of these realities we have regained some
of this lost ground, but there is still a long way to
go.  I would like to close with two thoughts on other
lessons that could be extracted from this morass:

I.  We can be more effective in the long term if WE
REDEFINE THE TERMS OF THE CONFLICT!  That is, we need
to be more careful in our use of the word "terrorist"
and how it informs our foreign and military policy. 
Whether you see a terrorist or freedom fighter depends
not in what they are doing, but your point of view. 
One of the reasons we didn't give adequate support to
the Kurds in 1991-92 when they were trying to topple
Saddam was because we didn't want to offend Turkey,
our other key democratic ally in the region.  Also,
most of the arms, etc. would have to be transported
through Turkey.

BTW, in the Treaty of Versailles that ended WWI, the
western allies divided up the Ottoman Empire and
promised the Kurds a nation state of their own. 
Turkey was instrumental in the non-implementation of
this agreement because we needed their support in
dealing with the Soviet Union.  The successful
conclusion of the Cuban Missile Crisis hinged on the
removal of missile sites in Turkey.

II.  We need to stay engaged in the world, and EVEN
PARTICIPATE IN BALD FACED NATION BUILDING, because we
have something unique to contribute to the world--our
federalist system of governance.  We sometimes forget
that our governmental systems are based on the very
radical Jeffersonian notion that the head of a nation
state (aka President, King, Emperor, etc.) is NOT the
ultimate sovereign.  We are one of the few (if not the
only) nation states to declare that the ultimate
sovereign is the informed citizen in his/her castle,
who agrees to consolidate some power in elected
governmental leaders to pursue the common good.

We sometimes forget that some democracies are quite
authoritarian in structure.  For example, France is
run from Paris using the Napoleonic Code, which was
developed by an emperor and is based on a military
model of centralized command and control.  If France
is providing guidance to a developing country, it will
suggest a much different governmental structure than
the US.

I would argue further that various "empires" have
helped create the boundaries on the current map of the
world--in approximate temporal order China, Greece,
Rome, Muslim Cephalites, Genghis Khan and the Mongol
Hordes, Ottoman Empire, Spain, The Netherlands,
France, Russia, Great Britain, US and other lessor
European colonial powers.  Because these boundaries
were generally created through force or threat of
force there is going to be lots of resentment and
ethnic conflict within certain ethnically diverse
"nation states."

If you want to see how our tax dollars and petroleum
purchases have contributed to the creation of people
labeled both freedom fighters and terrorists along the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border, please read "Ghost Wars"
by Steven Coll.  BTW, the British helped create this
situation by using the "divide and conquer" principle
in dividing the traditional Pashtun homelands between
Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Now it is a border in name
only and will continue to be a festering sore of
terrorism for the foreseeable future.

With the ideal of self determination that our example
represents to the world, we can expect "freedom
fighters" and their evil twin "the terrorist" to
continue to pop up all over the globe, especially in
the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, and the great
Southeast Asian Archipelago (Indonesia, Philippines,
etc.) where Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists,
and most of the "great religions of the world" have
sought converts for many centuries.  BTW, the only
reason that North and South America don't appear on
this list is because of the most effective genocide
the world has ever seen, aided in part by European
diseases like small pox.

Since the "powers that be" in the world have decided
that redrawing national boundaries is not an option, a
very good alternative is to apply the principles of
federalism where the threat of tribalism or ethnic
conflict is either immediate or latent.  In Iraq and
Turkey, for example, the idea would be to give the
Kurds more autonomy--e.g., giving Kurds control over
their independent courts and police forces but NOT AN
INDEPENDENT ARMY; keeping the same currency, but
letting them shape independent economic development
policies in their regions; etc.

Thank you for listening to this set of random,
passionately held ideas.  I will try to make up for
all these words and long paragraphs by sending an
Internet driven map that traces the evolution of
empire in the Middle East and Central Asia over the
last 5,000 years.

Jim Chase

Hello,