The redrawn map of the Middle East is fraying at the borders

Yaroslav Trofimov (The Wall Street Journal, April 16, 2015) has written a fascinating summary of the way in which the borders of the Middle East were redrawn with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, with implications for the modern day political conflict in the region.

In a secret pact in 1916―the Sykes-Picot agreement―set out the two allies respective areas of influence and the rules to be used in dividing up the region after the war. The resulting Middle Eastern states were often artificial creations, sometimes with implausibly straight lines for borders. They have kept going since then, by and large, remaining within their colonial-era frontiers despite repeated attempts at pan-Arab unification.

The built-in imbalances in some of these newly carved out states — particularly Syria and Iraq — spawned brutal dictatorships that succeeded for decades in suppressing restive majorities and perpetuating the rule of minority groups. In comparison,the Ottomans ran a multi­lingual, multi-religious empire, ruled by a sultan who also bore the title of caliph — commander of all the world’s Muslims.

Of particular relevance to modern day politic conflict, the huge Ottoman imperial province of Mosul, home to Sunni Arabs and Kurds and to plentiful oil, ended up as part of the newly created country of Iraq, not the newly created country of Syria.

Now it is all unravelling. Syria and Iraq have effectively ceased to function as states. Large parts of both countries lie beyond central government control, and the meaning of Syrian and Iraqi nationhood has been hollowed out by the dominance of sectarian and ethnic identities.

The rise of Islamic State is the direct result of this meltdown. The Sunni extremist group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has proclaimed himself the new caliph and vowed to erase the shame of the “Sykes-Picot conspiracy”.

After his men surged from their stronghold in Syria last summer and captured Mosul, now one of Iraq’s largest cities, he promised to destroy the old borders. In that offensive, one of the first actions taken by ISIS (as his group is also known) was to blow up the customs checkpoints between Syria and Iraq.

In the mayhem engulfing the Middle East, it is mostly the countries created a century ago by European colonialists that are coming apart. In the region’s more “natural” nations (e.g. Egypt, Turkey and Iran), a much stronger sense of shared history and tradition has prevented, so far, a similar implosion.

The Middle East’s “contrived” countries weren’t necessarily doomed to failure, and some of them—notably Jordan—aren’t collapsing, at least not yet. The world, after all, is full of multi­ethnic and multiconfessional states that are successful and prosperous, from Switzerland to Singapore to the US, which remains a relative newcomer as a nation compared with, say, Iran.

In all these places, a social compact—usually based on good governance and economic opportunity—often makes ethnic and religious diversity a source of strength, not an engine of instability. In the Middle East, by contrast, in the cases where the wheels have come off, there was not good governance—there was in fact execrable governance.

century ago, many hoped that Syria and Iraq too would follow Switzerland’s path. At the time, US president Woodrow Wilson sent a commission to the Middle East to explore what new nations should rise from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire.

Under Ottoman rule, neither Syria nor Iraq existed as separate entities. Three Ottoman pro­vinces — Baghdad, Basra and Mosul — roughly corresponded to today’s Iraq. Four others — Dam­ascus, Beirut, Aleppo and Deir ez-Zor — included today’s Syria, Lebanon and much of Jordan and Palestine, as well as a large strip of southern Turkey. All were populated by a hodgepodge of communities — Sunni and Shi’ite Arabs, Kurds, Turkomans and Christians in Iraq, and in Syria, all these groups as well as Alawites and Druse.

Wilson’s commissioners, Henry King and Charles Crane, reported back their findings in Aug­ust 1919. In Europe at the time, the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires was leading to the birth of new ethnic-based nation-states.

But the US officials had different ideas: They advised Wilson to ignore the Middle East’s ethnic and religious differences.

What is now Iraq, they sug­gested, should stay united because “the wisdom of a united country needs no argument in the case of Mesopotamia”. They also argued for a “greater Syria” — an area that would have included today’s Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The end of Ottoman rule, King and Crane argued, “gives a great opportunity — not likely to return — to build … a Near East State on the modern basis of full religious liberty, deliberately including various religious faiths, and especially guarding the rights of minorities”. The locals, they added, “ought to do far better under a state on modern lines” than under Ottoman rule.

The hopes of the Americans didn’t pan out.

In Syria, the French colonial authorities — faced with a hostile Sunni majority — courted favour with the Alawites, a minority offshoot of Shi’ite Islam that had suffered discrimination under Ottoman rule.

The French even briefly created a separate Alawite state on what is now Syria’s Mediterranean coast and heavily recruited Alawites into the new armed forces.

In Iraq, where Shi’ites make up the majority, the British administrators — faced with a Shi’ite revolt soon after their occupation began — played a similar game. The new administration disproportionately relied on the Sunni Arab minority, which had prospered under the Ottomans and now rallied around the new Sunni king of Iraq, whom Britain had imported from newly independent Hijaz, a former Ottoman province since conquered by Saudi Arabia.

Those decisions helped to shape the future of Iraq and Syria once the colonial order was gone. The Assad family has ruled Syria since 1970; Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq in 1979. Notwithstanding their lofty rhetoric about a single Arab nation, both regimes turned their countries into places where the minority ruling communities (Alawites in Syria, Sunni Arabs in Iraq) were decidedly more equal than others.

Attempts by the Sunni majority in Syria or the Shi’ite majority in Iraq to challenge these harshly authoritarian orders were put down without mercy. In 1982, the Syrian regime bulldozed the largely Sunni city of Hama after an Islamist revolt, and Saddam unleashed his wrath to crush a Shi’ite uprising in southern Iraq after the Gulf War in 1991. In Syria today, many Alawites are backing President Bashar al-Assad against largely Sunni rebels out of fear that the regime’s collapse could wipe out their entire community — a threat reinforced by Islamic State, whose Sunni extremists offer Alawites and mainstream Shi’ites a stark choice between conversion and death.

In Iraq, the Shi’ite-dominated governments that have ruled since the US invasion in 2003 have turned the tables on the country’s former rulers by discriminating against the minority Sunnis. As a result, Islamic State managed to seize Sunni parts of Iraq last year largely unopposed because the group was often seen by the locals as a lesser evil.

“It’s not just the territorial boundaries that are an issue, it’s the map of governance that was contrived by Europe,” says Vali Nasr, dean of the school of advanced international studies at the Johns Hopkins University and a former State Department adviser.

“Colonial powers within the states created colonial administrations that educated, recruited and empowered minorities.

“When they left, they left the power in the hands of those minorities — they left the dictatorship of the minorities.”

“Power was so out of alignment in Iraq, Syria and many of these countries, and there is no proper formula of how to make this right. The winners don’t want to share, the losers don’t want to give up power,” Nasr adds.

“The Middle East is going through a period of big turmoil, after which it will end up with a very different political configuration and perhaps also a different territorial configuration.”

The only recent partition of an Arab country — the split of Sudan into the Arab north and the new, largely non-Arab Republic of South Sudan in 2011 — doesn’t provide an encouraging precedent for would-be makers of new borders. South Sudan quickly slid into a civil war of its own that has killed tens of thousands and uprooted two million people.

“There is no alternative to replace the state system,” says Fawaz Gerges, who teaches Middle East studies at the London School of Economics. “Otherwise, you might replace one civil war with multiple civil wars, and that’s exactly what can happen in Syria or Iraq. This is a catastrophic cycle.”

Forging a new bottom-up social compact within the region’s existing borders — something likely to happen only after populations tire of endless wars — is the only way forward, says Stephen Hadley, who served as president George W. Bush’s national security adviser and now chairs the board of the US Institute of Peace.

The real problem in the Middle East, he says, “is a collapse not of the borders but of what was happening inside the borders: governments that did not have a lot of legitimacy to start with and did not earn legitimacy with their people. You’re not going to solve these problems by redrawing the borders.” Finding those solutions, Hadley acknowledges, won’t be easy.

“It may be past redeeming,” he says. “Getting out of this is going to be the work of a generation.”