The Ghosts of August are haunting our Middle East

It was almost one hundred years ago to the day (June 28) that the crown prince of Austria-Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by Bosnian-Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip. This act of aggression by an individual belonging to a small group was enough to push the whole of Europe over the edge into industrial-scale war where machine guns, some of the heaviest caliber artillery ever used and poison gas shared the battlefield with horses and sabers. It must have been a surreal landscape, one that film makers have ever since sought to replicate when retelling the story of the repetitive, murderous misery of trench warfare, if only for the sheer impact such images have on audiences.

 

To mark the occasion, the point at which Western civilization was placed on hold and replaced with the insane logic of total war, I purchased the DVD box set of ‘Fall of Eagles’, the BBC historical drama that follows the steady decay and collapse of three European empires: the German, Austrian and Russian. It’s sad that the Ottoman story was not included in that historical televisual diorama, but then Europeans never considered the Ottoman Turks part of Europe and its wars, not even when the Sultans adopted Western dress, architecture and habits.

World War I is the singular most important event in our modern history; in fact, it marks the start of the modern era. It also marks the point when the over inflated bubbles, which constituted the great empires of the East, burst showering their respective precincts with shards of Bolshevism, revolution, nationalism and fascism. It’s that great bubble bursting event that spawned our modern Middle Eastern national States, our own Big Bang, if you will.

At the end of four years of slaughter, the former territories and peoples of the defunct Ottoman Sultanate had national self determination shoved down their naïve throats. Just a Bedouin prince from Hejaz and a handful of nationalists from the urban centers like Damascus, Beirut and Cairo, had even the vaguest idea of what they wanted out of the detritus of the dead empire, but to imagine that the vast bulk of the Arab populace were remotely ready to become citizens of egalitarian national republics or constitutional monarchies, is absurd. We are still, in many ways, not ready.

Today, in the Middle East, we face a similar crisis to that faced by Europe one hundred years ago. We have stubborn regimes that are set in their ways, unimaginative and unsympathetic political leaders, and the whiff of revolution emanates from every poverty stricken ghetto and hovel, from both ethnic and religious minorities whose aspirations have long been ignored and suppressed and that feel the time is ripe to take their fair share of the pie.

Our Arab governments, regardless of which country we talk about, do not have the capacity or ingenuity to stem the tide of revolution and religious extremism, nor do they have the capacity to prevent the region’s slide down this slippery slope towards total war, not one merely fought between revolutionary groups and their governments, but a real shooting war between the leading regional powers.

Its ironic how, one hundred years on from the biggest act of folly committed by Europeans, we, the citizens of their former colonial possessions, seem doomed to repeat that folly in our own region, albeit for very different reasons and with very different and unpredictable consequences. In many ways, the borders drawn by Mr. Sykes and Mr. Picot, apportioning the territory of the Ottoman Empire to whom they believed were loyal Arab princes, are the very borders that are being fought over by groups like ISIS, by the Kurds who want their own independent national homeland. The modern inheritors of the Ottomans, the Arab States, are desperately trying to maintain their territorial integrity against an overwhelming tide.

The fact that ISIS and its ideology are rejected and are repugnant to every moderate, mostly urban-based, middle class Arab Sunni, Shiite and Christian is not enough to stop their advance and military successes. What is needed is a new State structure that addresses all the deep rooted dissatisfaction felt by ethnic/religious minorities and the poor and disenfranchised in these States, something that has not happened. In fact, many Sunnis in Iraq faced with the advance of ISIS, initially voiced support for anything that rids them of the despotism of Maliki, even ISIS. Maliki had a golden opportunity early in his rule to promote and create a secular Iraq in which every Iraqi is equal regardless of ethnic or religious affiliation. That was an opportunity lost.

Today, the glaring inconsistencies, multiple injustices and corruption built into the traditional Arab regimes are helping to promote the popular appeal of revolutionary movements like ISIS. The question now is what will Iran do in response to the threat from ISIS? What will Saudi Arabia do if Iran intervenes militarily in Iraq to prop up the Maliki regime? Indeed, what will the Saudis and Jordanians do in response to ISIS incursions into their own territories? How will ISIS fever impact countries like Lebanon and Palestine? All these are questions that are up in the air right now and the possibility of all out war between Arab armies and these movements and between Arab Sunni powers and Iran is very likely, especially in view of the weak and reckless US foreign policy in the region.

World War III could start right here in the Middle East. If it does, one could argue that the seeds for that war were sown in the aftermath of the 1914-1918 war. So, the noblest prayer one could raise up to the heavens today, one hundred years after WWI, is to ask the Almighty to save our region and the world from a new global war whose spark emanates from our Middle East.