In my desire to get a fresh perspective on the Middle East while also enjoying a white Christmas and New Year’s eve, my wife and I traveled to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, and succeeded in achieving both aims, along with seeing some dear old friends. The view of Vilnius in the snow is enchanting, but the view of the Middle East is frightening. An end-of-year glance around the region suggests that political conditions have deteriorated to a large extent in many parts of our region, with very few countervailing improvements to be noted.
While existing conflicts or tensions in Palestine and Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia, Sudan and Lebanon continue to plague those lands and ripple out to neighbors, I have no doubt that the single most troublesome new development during the past year has been the escalating fighting in Yemen. Almost imperceptibly, Yemen has transformed itself into a place where three different political or military contests are under way (the government versus the Houthis, versus some secessionists in the south, and versus a growing Al-Qaeda network), while the Saudi Arabian and American armed forces are directly engaged in warfare against two of them (the Houthis and Al-Qaeda), and the Iranian government is increasingly weighing in on the Houthis’ side.
Here, at the end of the year, we have all the major tension points of the contemporary Middle East converging in a single place – Al-Qaeda versus everyone in the world, Iran versus Arabs, the United States versus Al-Qaeda, Shiites versus Sunnis, rich Arabs versus poor Arabs, and the failing centralized modern Arab security state versus it own tendency to disintegrate into tribal or regional units.
When we think things cannot get any worse in the Middle East, they do. This should not surprise anyone, because this has been the pattern for over three decades now – ever since the combination of the 1967 war’s outcome and the advent of the oil boom in the early 1970s cemented the modern Arab security state order, Israeli colonial policies, direct American military involvement to protect the global energy reservoir, and the slow disintegration of the concept of an Arab citizen who has rights he or she expects to be delivered by his or her state.
The fighting and ideological confrontations in Yemen are only the latest and most glaring examples of the wider underlying forces of tension that continue to plague the Middle East. The year now ending is not only a sad one that generates concern; it should also be a learning experience to help us probe why the Arab world persists in being the only collectively turbulent and non-democratic region in the world.
In that respect, 2009 has highlighted the three principal issues that drive the conflicts proliferating across the region. These three vectors of turbulence and conflict are, in their order of their importance, in my view, first, the brittle states that define the modern Arab order, with their fundamental autocracy, occasional illegitimacies, prevalent corruption and mismanagement, and widespread mediocrity in meeting citizens’ needs; second, the persistent direct or indirect interference in the region of foreign powers, militarily, economically and politically; and, third, the impact of the Arab-Israeli conflict on publics and state policies alike.
It is not mere coincidence that the year ended with an attempted attack on an American civilian airliner over Detroit, committed by a Nigerian former student in London who apparently prepared for his crime via links with an Al-Qaeda-related group in Yemen. The gravity of the attempted crime and the complex web of relationships allowing it to reach the point of implementation cannot be explained by a simple reason, whether the psychology of a single young man, the foreign policy of a single country, or the pressures on citizens of any one Middle Eastern or African country.
The end of 2009 sees the US actively involved in four wars – in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. If this is not a wake-up call for Americans, I do not know what is. But it is a greater wake-up call for the people of the Arab world themselves, who remain fractured and in disarray due to their own domestic national incoherence and the persistent need among many to actively resist American-Israeli policies and those of some allied conservative Arab governments.
This year ends with Yemen and Detroit beckoning to us to try harder and act more intelligently in understanding the root causes of our wars, conflicts and profound irrationalities and excesses, reflected in our common savageries: Arabs oppressing and killing each other and trying to kill civilians in distant lands; Israelis colonizing and killing Arabs; and the American armed forces attacking and killing simultaneously in four distant lands. Unraveling the madness starts with connecting the dots, because these are not isolated, unrelated dynamics.
Rami G. Khouri is published twice-weekly by THE DAILY STAR.
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