By Daniel
Greenfield, 9/16/16, Politichicks
Sum up our failed Middle East policy
in a nine-letter word starting with an S. Stability.
Stability is the heart and soul of
nation-building. It’s the burden that responsible governments bear for the more
irresponsible parts of the world.
First you send experts to figure out
what is destabilizing some hellhole whose prime exports are malaria, overpriced
tourist knickknacks and beheadings. You teach the locals about democracy,
tolerance and storing severed heads in Tupperware containers.
Then if that doesn’t work, you send
in the military advisers to teach the local warlords-in-waiting how to better
fight the local guerrillas and how to overthrow their own government in a
military coup. Finally, you send in the military.
But this gets bloody, messy and expensive very fast.
So most of the time we dispatch
sociologists to write reports to our diplomats explaining why people are
killing each other in a region where they have been killing each other since
time immemorial, and why it’s all our fault. Then we try to figure out how we
can make them stop by being nicer to them.
The central assumption here is
stability. We assume that stability is achievable and that it is good. The
former is completely unproven and even the latter remains a somewhat shaky
thesis.
The British wanted stability by
replicating the monarchy across a series of Middle Eastern dependents. The vast
majority of these survived for a shorter period than New Coke or skunk rock.
Their last remnant is the King of Jordan, born to Princess Muna al-Hussein aka
Antoinette Avril Gardiner of Suffolk, educated at the Royal Military Academy,
Sandhurst, and currently trying to stave off a Muslim Brotherhood-Palestinian
uprising by building a billion dollar Star Trek theme park.
The British experiment in
stabilizing the Middle East failed miserably. Within a decade the British government
was forced to switch from backing the Egyptian assault on Israel to allying
with the Jewish State in a failed bid to stop the Egyptian seizure of the Suez
Canal.
The American experiment in trying to
export our own form of government to Muslims didn’t work any better. The Middle
East still has monarchies. It has only one democracy with free and open
elections.
Israel. Even Obama and Hillary’s
Arab Spring was a perverted attempted to make stability happen by replacing the
old Socialist dictators and their cronies with the political Islamists of the
Muslim Brotherhood. They abandoned it once the chaos rolled in and stability
was nowhere to be found among all the corpses.
It might be time to admit that
barring the return of the Ottoman Empire, stability won’t be coming to the
Middle East any time soon. Exporting democracy didn’t work. Giving the Saudis a
free hand to control our foreign policy didn’t work. Trying to force Israel to
make concessions to Islamic terrorists didn’t work. And the old tyrants we
backed are sand castles along a stormy shore.
Even without the Arab Spring, their
days were as numbered as old King Farouk dying in exile in an Italian
restaurant. If stability isn’t achievable, maybe
we should stop trying to achieve it. And stability may not even be any good.
Our two most successful bids in the
Muslim world, one intentionally and the other unintentionally, succeeded by
sowing chaos instead of trying to foster stability. We helped break the Soviet
Union on a cheap budget in Afghanistan by feeding the chaos. And then we bled
Iran and its terrorist allies in Syria and Iraq for around the price of a
single bombing raid. Both of these actions had messy consequences.
But we seem to do better at pushing
Mohammed Dumpty off the wall than at putting him back together again. If we
can’t find the center of stability, maybe it’s time for us to embrace the
chaos.
Embracing the chaos forces us to
rethink our role in the world. Stability is an outdated model. It assumes that
the world is moving toward unity. Fix the trouble spots and humanity will be
ready for world government. Make sure everyone follows international law and we
can all hum Lennon’s “Imagine”.
Not only is this a horrible
dystopian vision of the future, it’s also a silly fantasy. The UN is nothing
but a clearinghouse for dictators. International law is meaningless outside of
commercial disputes. The world isn’t moving toward unity, but to disunity. If
even the EU can’t hold together, the notion of the Middle East becoming the
good citizens of some global government is a fairy tale told by diplomats while
tucking each other into bed in five-star hotels at international conferences.
It’s time to deal with the world as
it is. And to ask what our objectives are. Take stability off the table. Put it
in a little box and bury it in an unmarked grave at Foggy Bottom. Forget about
oil. If we can’t meet our own energy needs, we’ll be spending ten times as much
on protecting the Saudis from everyone else and protecting everyone else from
the Saudis.
Then we should ask what we really
want to achieve in the Middle East. We want to stop Islamic terrorists
and governments from harming us. Trying to stabilize failed states and prop up
or appease Islamic governments hasn’t worked. Maybe we ought to try
destabilizing them. There have been worse ideas. We’re
still recovering from the last bunch.
To embrace chaos, we have to stop
thinking defensively about stability and start thinking offensively about
cultivating instability. A Muslim government that sponsors terrorism against us
ought to know that it will get its own back in spades. Every Muslim terror
group has its rivals and enemies waiting to pounce. The leverage is there. We
just need to use it.
When the British and the French
tried to shut down Nasser, Eisenhower protected him by threatening to collapse
the British pound. What if we were willing to treat our Muslim “allies” who
fill the treasuries of terror groups the way that we treat our non-Muslim
allies who don’t even fly planes into the Pentagon?
We have spent the past few decades
pressuring Israel to make deals with terrorists. What if we started pressuring
Muslim countries in the same way to deal with their independence movements?
The counterarguments are obvious.
Supply weapons and they end up in the hands of terror groups. But the Muslim
world is already an open-air weapons market. If we don’t supply anything too
high end, then all we’re doing is pouring gasoline on a forest fire. And buying
the deaths of terrorists at bargain prices.
Terrorism does thrive in failed
states. But the key point is that it thrives best when it is backed by
successful ones. Would the chaos in Syria, Nigeria or Yemen be possible without
the wealth and power of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iran? Should we really fear
unstable Muslim states or stable ones?
That is really the fundamental
question that we must answer because it goes to the heart of the moderate
Muslim paradox. Is it really the Jihadist who is most dangerous or his
mainstream ally?
If we believe that the Saudis and
Qataris are our allies and that political Islamists are moderates who can fuse
Islam and democracy together, then the stability model makes sense. But when we
recognize that there is no such thing as a moderate civilizational Jihad, then
we are confronted with the fact that the real threat does not come from failed
states or fractured terror groups, but from Islamic unity.
Once we accept that there is a clash
of civilizations, chaos becomes a useful civilizational weapon.
Islamists have very effectively
divided and conquered us, exploiting our rivalries and political quarrels, for
their own gain. They have used our own political chaos, our freedoms and our
differences, against us. It is time that we moved beyond a failed model of trying
to unify the Muslim world under international law and started trying to divide
it instead.
Chaos is the enemy of civilization.
But we cannot bring our form of order, one based on cooperation and individual
rights, to the Muslim world. And the only other order that can come is that of
the Caliphate. And chaos may be our best defense against the Caliphate.
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