The Middle East & The Great Unraveling

Beyond the unaswered siren call of democracy in the Middle East is the larger question of regional stability.

While there is no question that the U.S.-led war in Iraq has had a destabilizing effect on the region, I have believed that several Middle East nations already were showing serious signs of coming apart.

Now comes Rami G. Khouri, a writer for the Daily Star in Beirut, who validates my view in a fascinating piece on what he calls The Great Arab Unraveling:

"Do not pity or jeer Washington alone, for every single player in this tale -- the United States, Hizbullah, the Lebanese government, Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia -- wriggles uncomfortably in the mess they collectively created through their shortsighted policies of recent years. I suspect this mirrors something much bigger: We are in the midst of a potentially historic moment when the modern Arab state order that was created by the Europeans in circa 1920 has started to break down . . ., in what we might perhaps call the Great Arab Unraveling.

"Shattered Iraq is the immediate driver of this possible dissolution and reconfiguration of an Arab state system that had held together rather well for nearly four generations. It is only the most dramatic case of an Arab country that wrestles with its own coherence, legitimacy, and viability. Lebanon and Palestine have struggled with their statehood for half a century; Somalia has quietly dropped out of this game; Kuwait vanished in 1990 and quickly reappeared; Yemen split, reunited, split, fought a war, and reunited; Sudan spins like a centrifuge, with national and tribal forces pushing away from a centralized state; Morocco and the Western Sahara dance gingerly around their logical association; and internal tensions plague other Arab countries to varying degrees."

Khouri concludes by saying:

"Short-term panic, medium-term confusion, and a long-term absence of direction have long defined the policies of all actors in the Middle East. These characteristics have only become more obvious as confrontation, defiance, and war in the region interact to signal the end of an era and the start of a new one. The Great Arab Unraveling is in its very early days. More harrowing changes are yet come."

More here.

Khouri only gives passing mention to the U.S. role in all of this. That's okay, because he covered an extraordinary amount of real estate. But it does piss me off about how tepid American pronouncements before and during the Error . . . er, Era of Bush about building democracy in the Arab world have been so calculatedly hollow.

Egypt, the U.S.'s best buddy in the region, is Exhibit A in this regard, and the brutal rule of omnipotent President Mubarak is merely forstalling some big time unraveling there.

The Guardian scribe Timothy Garton Ash writes that:

"Secular, Muslim and Coptic opposition activists all tell me that American pressure for further democratisation in Egypt dramatically declined last year. The Bush administration apparently now felt it needed all the support it could get from 'moderate Arab leaders', given the bloody mess in Iraq. It also took fright at the fact that Islamists were doing so well in the elections that Washington had pushed for, whether it was Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. And the Mubarak government skilfully played on this fear, as it has for a long time. Early last year, at a press conference after a meeting with her Egyptian counterpart, Rice still talked about democracy and reform in Egypt. Early this year, after another meeting between the two foreign ministers, democracy was not mentioned at all. In practice, the American push for rapid democratisation in Egypt has been abandoned."

More here.

Hat tip to Marc Schulman at American Future and Jeb Koobler
at Foreign Policy Watch. Image by Jouma Hussein