In the 1980s, Israeli analyst Oded Yinon argued that the entire Arabian Peninsula is a natural candidate for dissolution. Current developments in Syria, libya, Iraq and Turkey show that he may have been eerily right
Israel’s Armed Forces invaded lebanon in 1982, with the aim of creating a buffer for the security of its northern borders. Within months, the Palestine liberation Organization led by Yasser Arafat and his armed cadres were forced to leave lebanon, the Syrian Air Force was virtually wiped out in air battles with the Israeli Air Force, and Syrian forces had to be withdrawn from lebanon. In the years following the Israeli action, lebanon was engulfed by ethnic and sectarian conflict. Israel’s first invasion of lebanon was not without its costs. The invasion saw the emergence of Hezbollah as a powerful Iranian-backed militia, which has in subsequent conflicts, seriously challenged the might and avowed invincibility of Israel’s Armed Forces.
Virtually coinciding with the Israeli attack on lebanon, Oded Yinon, an Israeli Government analyst came out with a plan for redrawing the boundaries of what the Americans were to later describe as the ‘Greater Middle East’, extending from Pakistan to Turkey. While advocating a long-term plan for the annulment of Israel’s Camp David Accord with Egypt and its destabilisation, Yinon envisaged “total dissolution of lebanon” as a precedent for the dissolution of Syria and Iraq. Syria, he argued, would fall apart into a Shia Alawite dominated state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state near Damascus, hostile to the Sunni north, and the Druzes with a state in “our Golan” and in the Hauran and northern Jordan.
With the bloody Iran-Iraq conflict triggered by Saddam Hussein and encouraged by the Reagan Administration then gathering momentum, Yinon held: “In Iraq, a division into Provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria, in Ottoman times, is possible. So, three or more states will exist around the three major cities of Basra, Mosul and Baghdad. Shia areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish North. It is possible that the present Iranian-Iraqi confrontation will deepen this polarisation. The entire Arabian Peninsula is a natural candidate for dissolution due to internal and external pressures”. In the years that have followed the Yinon analysis, the Greater Middle East has witnessed traumatic and bloody conflicts and internal turmoil, as civilisational, religious and sectarian rivalries have torn societies and nations apart.
Iraq’s Saddam Hussein brought misery and suffering to his own people after his ill-advised invasion of Kuwait, which followed the war he imposed on Iran with American support. After fellow Arabs, notably Syria and Egypt, joined the Americans to pulverise his armed forces and impose crippling economic sanctions in 1991, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was torn apart in a second American-led invasion. This invasion in 2003 ended minority Sunni domination of Iraq and replaced it with a Shia- dominated Government. No less than 1,33,000 Iraqis perished in this second invasion. The new Shia-dominated dispensation is, however, not only facing de facto Kurdish separation in the north, but also a bloody insurgency by the Sunni-minority, duly backed by its Gulf Arab neighbours.
libya was, thereafter, invaded by Nato forces from France and the UK, backed by the Americans, for regime change, getting the erratic but secular Muammar Gaddafi replaced by Islamist-oriented leaders. libya has not only become a focal point for Al Qaeda activity, but also appears headed towards being administered virtually as two separate entities — Tripolitania and Cyrenaica.
The much touted Arab Spring which was supposed to usher in a new era of democratic change exposed the harsh reality that countries with no experience of democratic traditions and institutions cannot be transformed overnight into vibrant democracies, merely because of demonstrations by an urbanised and educated middle class. Nowhere has this emerged more clearly than in Tunisia and Egypt, where elections produced rulers with Islamist inclinations, who are not exactly votaries of pluralism and modernism. In Egypt, an elected Islamist President has since been overthrown by a largely secular military, which has a tradition of not only dominating political life, but also wielding vast economic clout. It is noteworthy that the monarchies in the Gulf, Morocco and Jordan, with long-standing administrative and traditional political structures, were able to not only survive demonstrations, but emerge more confident of being able to deal with public discontent, than those authoritarian rulers who were forced to succumb to pressures for democratic transformation.
The Arab Spring, however, has had the most destabilising impact caused by demonstrations against the secular and modern minded, but brutally authoritarian regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. An estimated 1,20,000 Syrians have perished in the conflict, which has not only widened the Shia-Sunni rift across the Muslim world, but has also unexpectedly led to the beginnings of Russian-American cooperation, to moderate the American propensity for regime change through military intervention. Syria has been forced to forego its chemical weapons — a development pleasing to the heart of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose Air Force had earlier effectively destroyed Syria’s clandestine nuclear weapons-related facilities. The bloody civil war in Syria, however, continues.
Sunni elements in Syria remain divided between the ‘moderate’ Free Syrian Army which is being armed and backed by the US and its Nato allies, while more extremist Islamist elements are being backed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. The Assad regime, which depends heavily on Russian diplomatic and military support, continues to receive steadfast backing from key Shia allies — Iran, Iraq and the Hezbollah. Unless a UN-brokered peace can be arranged, which presently appears unlikely, Syria appears inevitably headed for a partition along sectarian, ethnic and religious fault lines.
This would be continuation of a trend where Sudan has been partitioned on religious/ethnic lines and Iraq’s Shia-Sunni-Kurdish fault lines have been accompanied by fears of a tacitly US-backed Kurdish separatism. Moreover, after doors for its entry to the European Union were irrevocably shut, Turkey appears to be adopting a more assertive role in the ‘Greater Middle East’. An autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan absorbing Turkey’s insurgent Kurds, with its American-installed oil pipelines traversing through Turkey, would be welcomed by Ankara.
India has quite rightly frowned on separatism in Iraq and built bridges to the new dispensation there. Stability in its neighbouring Gulf region, with its vast energy resources and where six million Indians reside, remains its key area of interest. India has also opposed American/Nato military intervention in Syria, which could destabilise its Gulf neighbourhood. It is really for the people of the ‘Greater Middle East’ to determine their destinies, without destabilising meddling by outsiders.
