Farewell Sykes-Picot. You will be much missed..

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-26/dozens-killed-from-tunisia-to-france-on-caliphate-anniversary

“For India, it means security and peace resulting from an internal balance of power; for Islam, an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp that Arabian Imperialism was forced to give it, to mobilise its law, its education, its culture, and to bring them into closer contact with its own original spirit and with the spirit of modern times.”

It is a staple Western left-liberal talking point (picked up and used by Islamists and by other imperial powers like Russia as needed) that British and French imperialists created the modern Middle East via the Sykes-Picot agreement and messed it up, leading to all or most current problems. This is obviously not true in any strong sense. Britain and France did not look at some blank piece of paper and convert it into the modern Middle East. They grabbed and missed opportunities galore (as did the Turks, who chose the losing side in world war one when they didnt have to do any such thing), worked around existing populations and structures (many of them Imperial Ottoman in origin), argued and tried to double-cross each other before and after Sykes-Picot, were resisted by new forces, adjusted to the results of world wars and local wars, and so on..in short, history happened; not just two people meeting and making up what they wanted and determining all that has happened since then. But let us leave details for another day. Let us use Sykes-Picot as short hand for the modern post World War II Middle Eastern system of nation-states that arose after the brief British and French colonial interlude, primarily (but not always) under the control of local elites groomed or put in place by those two powers.
These elites ruled what were formally (if not very deeply), “Westphalian” nation-states on the “European model”. What that means and why that is so bad (or such an improvement) over past models is another debate we can leave for another day. But the modern Middle East came into being. The states that were created were like most postcolonial states, a mixture of past divisions and new creations, some of them more arbitrary and artificial than others (Pakistani nationalists, take a bow).
Israel was the obvious outlier. With a more Westernized/modern population and with a direct (and at least temporarily, mostly sympathetic) connection to the Western world, it was an order of magnitude more capable (in terms of knowledge, organization, sophistication, ability to fight) than it’s unfortunate neighbors and it’s own aboriginal inhabitants. Even though the physical infrastructure of the state (and the weapons it was able to acquire) were not (at least initially) that much superior to those of its enemies, the software was so much better that they were able to whip larger opponents with some regularity. Even so, an order of magnitude is still only an order of magnitude. It may have reached or exceeded the limits of it’s superiority by now. Or it may not. In a battle, it does not matter who is absolutely good at fighting, just who is relatively better. In purely military terms, the Israeli advantage may yet grow; and if present trends accelerate and the Sunni-Shia-Wahabi-Whatever shit totally hits the fan, they may well annex some more territory. History can be cruel. Vae Victis and all that. But moving on..
What about the Arab states of the region? what becomes of them if Sykes-Picot finally dissolves? let us start with the worst cases:

1. Iraq has splintered after the American invasion and is unlikely to see peace in the immediate future. Some sort of three way division seemed possible, but with ISIS taking over the role of “Sunni resistance”, enough Sunnis may prefer cohabitation with Shias, so maybe the split is not totally final. On the other hand, with Saudi Arabia trying to consolidate as a Sunni hegemon in the region, anti-Shia forces will get enough weapons and money to keep fighting for a very long time. The safest bet is “more of the same”. But whatever happens, in the near future it will not be able to contend for regional hegemon, that much is given.
2. Syria has totally crashed and burned. Neither the Assad regime nor its various opponents(including irreconcilable Sunni-Jihadists) are in a position to win completely anytime soon. Continuing violence seems to be the near and medium-term future.
3. Yemen is in flames and has now been invaded by a multi-national coalition led by Saudi Arabia (ostensibly in support of the last “elected” government of the state). Conquering North Yemen has never been an easy prospect and great powers from Rome to the Ottomans have tried and failed to impose their authority over the whole country. The British took control of Aden (all they really wanted?) and managed the surrounding tribes with bribes and punitive policing, but never controlled the whole country. The Egyptian adventure in the 1960s also ended up being “Egypt’s Vietnam”, so the chances that the Saudis will prevail completely are pretty much nil. Stil, in the near-term it is likely that the people of Yemen will pay the heaviest price, not the people or the elites of Saudi Arabia. Yemen is broken and no policy, no matter how sensible (a faint possibility in any case) will put it together again in the foreseeable future.

For some (mostly White or Desi (as in Indian-ish) Leftists, this is time to say “I told you so”. Some of them have reacted to these implosions with barely disguised glee, celebrating the collapse of the borders and states they had always decried as a colonial imposition, and throwing in formula appeals for a “revolutionary” or “pro-people” program to build a new future, blah blah blah. We can ignore this lot. Other Leftists (especially those with family and friends in the region, who do not have the luxury of simply enjoying being “right” about Sykes-Picot) are more confused. They know there is no leftist hegemon or potential hegemon in view that has a reasonable chance of building a new peace out of this chaos, and they have too much local knowledge to blithely generate fantasy stories about the heroic Syrian regime, tor the Yemeni rebels for that matter. Between Asad and Sisi and ISIS, who is one to root for? Many of them will likely end up rooting for the existing “Sykes-Picot” states and forget the dream of erasing those hated borders?  But in many ways, that order was neo-colonial and will not return to status quo ante even if many people wish it were so. As colonial and new-colonial order fades, what will replace it (in the region as a whole)? With little local knowledge and limited book knowledge, it is not for me to attempt a detailed prediction, but even with limited knowledge, we can say this much: as in any region, the powers that impose order will have to possess sufficient solidarity and ideological clarity to be able to ensure the loyalty of their own core and to compel the loyalty of a critical mass of those they incorporate into their system of rule. What ideal will provide that glue and that motivation?

The death of arabia http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/18224

Good summary http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2014/08/tragic-cycle-western-powers-and-middle-east

Arrogant meddling caused the problem http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/01/18/terrorism-paris-sydney-legacy-colonial-blunders/oEY5qPo1uGRIZDC8UfNEyH/story.html#

Sykes picot is a myth http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0322-mcmeekin-middle-east-sykes-picot-boundaries-20150322-story.html

The map is durable http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141934/steven-simon/the-middle-easts-durable-map

State system should survive http://www.dw.de/opinion-not-the-end-of-the-sykes-picot-order/a-17728749

Sykes picot myth making http://blog.oup.com/2015/02/dont-blame-sykes-picot/

ISIS as cancer of capitalism http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/cancer-modern-capitalism-1323585268
The arc of Muslim state-failure


In Iraq and Syria, where IS was born, the devastation of society due to prolonged conflict cannot be underestimated. Western military invasion and occupation of Iraq, replete with torture and indiscriminate violence, played an undeniable role in paving the way for the emergence of extreme reactionary politics. Before Western intervention, al-Qaeda was nowhere to be seen in the country. In Syria, Assad’s brutal war on his own people continues to vindicate IS and attract foreign fighters.


The continual input of vast quantities of money to Islamist extremist networks, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of material resources that no one has yet been able to quantify in its totality – coordinated by the same nexus of Western and Muslim governments – has over the last half century had a deeply destabilising impact. IS is the surreal, post-modern culmination of this sordid history.


The West’s anti-IS coalition in the Muslim world consists of repressive regimes whose domestic policies have widened inequalities, crushed legitimate dissent, tortured peaceful political activists, and stoked deep-seated resentments. They are the same allies that have, and are continuing to fund IS, with the knowledge of Western intelligence agencies.


Yet they are doing so in regional circumstances that can only be described as undergoing, in the last decade, escalating converging crises. As Princeton’s Professor Bernard Haykel said: “I see ISIS as a symptom of a much deeper structural set of problems in the Sunni Arab world… [It has] to do with politics. With education, and the lack thereof. With authoritarianism. With foreign intervention. With the curse of oil … I think that even if ISIS were to disappear, the underlying causes that produce ISIS would not disappear. And those would have to be addressed with decades of policy and reforms and changes – not just by the West, but also by Arab societies as well.”


Yet as we saw with the Arab Spring, these structural problems have been exacerbated by a perfect storm of interlinked political, economic, energy and environmental crises, all of which are being incubated by a deepening crisis of global capitalism.


With the region suffering from prolonged droughts, failing agriculture, decline in oil revenues due to domestic peak oil, economic corruption and mismanagement compounded by neoliberal austerity, and so on, local states have begun to collapse. From Iraq to Syria, from Egypt to Yemen, the same nexus of climate, energy and economic crises are unravelling incumbent governments.


Alienation in the West


Although the West is far more resilient to these interconnected global crises, entrenched inequalities in the US, Britain and Western Europe – which have a disproportionate effect on ethnic minorities, women and children – are worsening.


In Britain, nearly 70 percent of ethnically South Asian Muslims, and two-thirds of their children, live in poverty. Just under 30 percent of British Muslim young people aged from 16-24 years are unemployed. According to Minority Rights Group International, conditions for British Muslims in terms of “access to education, employment and housing” have deteriorated in recent years, rather than improving. This has been accompanied by a “worrying rise in open hostility” from non-Muslim communities, and a growing propensity for police and security services to target Muslims disproportionately under anti-terror powers. Consistently negative reporting on Muslims by the media, coupled with grievances over justifiable perceptions of an aggressive and deceptive foreign policy in the Muslim world, compound the latter to create a prevailing sense of social exclusion associated with British Muslim identity.


It is the toxic contribution of these factors to general identity formation that is the issue – not each of the factors by themselves. Poverty alone, or discrimination alone, or anti-Muslim reporting alone, and so on, do not necessarily make a person vulnerable to radicalisation. But together these can forge an attachment to an identity that sees itself as alienated, frustrated and locked in a cycle of failure.


The prolongation and interaction of these problems can contribute to the way Muslims in Britain from various walks of life begin to view themselves as a whole. In some cases, it can generate an entrenched sense of separation and alienation from, and disillusionment with wider society. This exclusionary identity, and where it takes a person, will depend on that person’s specific environment, experiences and choices.


Prolonged social crises can lay the groundwork for the rise of toxic, xenophobic ideologies on all sides. Such crises undermine conventional mores of certainty and stability rooted in established notions of identity and belonging.


While vulnerable Muslims might turn to gang culture, or worse, Islamist extremism, vulnerable non-Muslims might adopt their own exclusionary identities linked with extremist groups like the English Defence League, or other far-right extremist networks.


For more powerful elite groups, their sense of crisis may inflame militaristic neoconservative ideologies that sanitise incumbent power structures, justify the status quo, whitewash the broken system that sustains their power, and demonise progressive and minority movements.


In this maelstrom, the supply of countless billions of dollars to Islamist extremist networks in the Middle East with a penchant for violence, empowers groups that previously lacked any local constituency.


As multiple crises converge and intensify, undermining state stability and inflaming grievances, this massive input of resources to Islamist ideologues can pull angry, alienated, vulnerable individuals into their vortex of xenophobic extremism. The end-point of that process is the creation of monsters.


Dehumanisation


While these factors escalated regional vulnerability to crisis levels, the US and Britain’s lead role after 9/11 in coordinating covert Gulf state financing of extremist Islamist militants across the region has poured gasoline on the flames.


The links these Islamist networks have in the West meant that domestic intelligence agencies have periodically turned blind eyes to their followers and infiltrators at home, allowing them to fester, recruit and send would-be fighters abroad.


This is why the Western component of IS, though much smaller than the number of fighters joining from neighbouring countries, remains largely impervious to meaningful theological debate. They are not driven by theology, but by the insecurity of a fractured identity and psychology.


It is here, in the meticulously calibrated recruitment methods used by IS and its supporting networks in the West, that we can see the role of psychological indoctrination processes fine-tuned through years of training under Western intelligence agencies. These agencies have always been intimately involved in the crafting of violent Islamist indoctrination tools.


In most cases, recruitment into IS is achieved by being exposed to carefully crafted propaganda videos, developed using advanced production methods, the most effective of which are replete with real images of bloodshed inflicted on Iraqi, Afghan and Palestinian civilians by Western firepower, or on Syrian civilians by Assad.


The constant exposure to such horrifying scenes of Western and Syrian atrocities can often have an effect similar to what might happen if these scenes had been experienced directly: that is, a form of psychological trauma that can even result in post-traumatic stress.


Such cult-like propaganda techniques help to invoke overwhelming emotions of shock and anger, which in turn serve to shut down reason and dehumanise the “Other”. The dehumanisation process is brought to fruition using twisted Islamist theology. What matters with this theology is not its authenticity, but its simplicity. This can work wonders on a psyche traumatised by visions of mass death, whose capacity for reason is immobilised with rage.


This is why the reliance on extreme literalism and complete decontextualisation is such a common feature of Islamist extremist teachings: because it seems, to someone credulous and unfamiliar with Islamic scholarship, to be literally true at first glance.


Building on decades of selective misinterpretation of Islamic texts by militant ideologues, sources are carefully mined and cherry-picked to justify the political agenda of the movement: tyrannical rule, arbitrary mass murder, subjugation and enslavement of women, and so on, all of which become integral to the very survival and expansion of the “state”.


As the main function of introducing extreme Islamist theological reasoning is to legitimise violence and sanction war, it is combined with propaganda videos that promise what the vulnerable recruit appears to be missing: glory, brotherhood, honour, and the promise of eternal salvation – no matter what crimes or misdemeanours one may have committed in the past.


Couple this with the promise of power – power over one’s enemies, power over Western institutions that have purportedly suppressed one’s Muslim brothers and sisters, power over women – and the appeal of IS, if its religious garb and claims of Godliness can be made convincing enough, can be irresistible.


What this means is that IS’s ideology, while important to understand and refute, is not the driving factor in its origins, existence and expansion. It is merely the opium of the people that it feeds to itself, and its prospective followers.


Ultimately, IS is a cancer of modern industrial capitalism in meltdown, a fatal by-product of our unwavering addiction to black gold, a parasitical symptom of escalating civilisational crises across both the Muslim and Western worlds. Until the roots of these crises are addressed, IS and its ilk are here to stay.

Shit, meet fan. Hayat Alvi http://projects21.com/2015/03/28/millions-in-us-military-equipment-lost-as-yemen-heads-down-syrias-path/

Pakistan in coalition http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/03/30/uk-pakistan-saudi-arabia-yemen-idUKKBN0MQ1G520150330

Chinese options http://warontherocks.com/2015/03/chinas-middle-east-choice/?singlepage=1

 I disagree enough that I am thinking of writing something about it…not disagreeing that it is a cancer. Just disagreeing with the non-seriousness of the historical and sociological “analysis”. its not that he dislikes this “system” (which I dont think is even a good way to describe “all that is”) and I, God Forbid, like it. Or that I understand it better than he does. I make no such claim. But at least I dont take some superficial and shallow talking points from some fashionable left wing writers and pretend that they explain or even accurately describe the world as it is. ….I am not too optimistic either. And maybe you are actually more pessimistic than he is. But you KNOW more about history than he does., so when you say things, we have to take them seriously. This guy…not so much…. . Until i manage to better write the rant rattling around in my head right now, this will have to do…  . Blowing off steam. Not to be taken too seriously. And of course, he has several good points scattered within the overall varguely “left wing” framework. ..see what i have done? I have dug a hole from which i cannot emerge unless I write a clearer explanation of my reaction to this guy

I understand what you’re saying, and probably agree with it. I don’t put any store in this “wages of capitalism” crap. However, I agree with him on two points. First, that the West’s lovefest with countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar is incredibly hypocritical and counterproductive – and is at least partly driven by an oliocentric worldview. Second, and more importantly, that this entire “we have a plan to fix things because we’re cleverer than reality” approach – e.g., as embodied in the Iraq invasion, the Libya affair, and now the Yemen adventure – is a ludicrous one. The situation is too complex to be addressed through linear thinking and plans seeking short-term gratification. This problem will get far, far worse before it gets any better, but the “solutions” being suggested, both by the Right and the Left, often make things even worse. The time constants of political campaigns may make anything else impossible, but the need is for very long-term strategies and great patience. Perhaps someone up there in the NSC is playing a deep game that we don’t understand, but if so, the game is so deep that most of its steps so far appear as disasters to the naked eye.

I also think – as the author seems to imply too – that, for whatever reason, an obsession with Iran has distorted a lot of Western policy in the region. The Iranian mullahs are no saints, but really no worse than the Saudis or our other esteemed allies. By so decisively taking sides with the Arab establishment against Iran, the US has put itself in a weaker position in the region, actually strengthened Iran’s political stature, and taken short-term steps that clearly hurt our long-term interests (again, such as the Iraq invasion). It is politically incorrect to say this, but a big part of the problem is that the US-Israel relationship has been taken hostage by the neocon-Likudnik paranoid wing of the foreign policy universe. As we know, the stalwarts of this viewpoint are spectacularly short-sighted and idiotic in their understanding of both history and politics – as exemplified by the “Always Wrong” Bill Kristol, who thought that the road to Middle East peace went through Baghdad where we would be greeted as liberators. Obama’s current negotiations with Iran are the first sustained attempt to counter this trend, but it will almost certainly fail. This is what I mean by short-sighted actions that make things worse. Appeasing Sheldon Adelson is far more important to the idiots in Congress than actually making things better on the ground.

Robert Fisk http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-battle-for-the-middle-easts-future-begins-in-yemen-as-saudi-arabia-jumps-into-the-abyss-10140145.html

Myths of Yemen http://www.huffingtonpost.com/graham-e-fuller/decipher-yemen_b_6965564.html?ir=India

Vijay Prashad http://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/2015/4/1/the-sultans-of-arabia-intervene-in-yemens-domestic-conflict (sane mode)

The Saudi view (Salman Doctrine) http://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2015/04/01/The-Middle-East-beyond-Decisive-Storm-.html

UAE upset at Pakistan http://www.khaleejtimes.com/mobile/inside.asp?xfile=/data/nationgeneral/2015/April/nationgeneral_April110.xml&section=nationgeneral#.VShDJgcrwvx.twitter