JIME News Report

The multiple crises of the Middle East

Roger Hardy
Middle East Analyst, BBC News
(10/02/2007)

　The four main crises of the Middle East (Iraq, Iran, Israel/Palestine, and Lebanon) are now interlocked to a new and dangerous degree. While logic would suggest disaggregation – dealing separately with problems which each have their own dynamic – the reality is more complex and messy. These different crises are like four fires, each contributing to a wider conflagration. They fuel one another because they have a set of common features:

they contribute to a pervasive anti-Americanism,
they reinforce the impression that resistance to American influence in the region is led by Islamist groups (Hizbullah, Hamas) and by Iran,
they tend to polarise opinion along sectarian (Sunni-Shia) lines,
and they contribute to a sense of disintegration, a feeling the region is now home to several failed or failing states.

　The continuing violence and instability in Iraq – not the oldest of the crises in the Middle East, but currently the most significant -- is the single biggest factor in exacerbating these trends.

The US military presence in Iraq is a powerful stimulant to anti-Americanism. The Americans face a Catch-22: the longer their presence continues, the more it will fuel hostility towards them – but, at the same time, the possibility of American disengagement arouses fear and indignation among some of their closest allies (for example, the Saudi princes).
The resistance to the US presence in Iraq is being led by Islamists – on the one side, Sunni Islamists backed by neighbouring Arab states; on the other, Shi’ite militias backed by Iran.
The Iraq crisis, more than any other, is fuelling sectarian passions in the region – and polarising opinion about Iran, seen either as an “evil empire” threatening Sunni Islam or as the noble protector and patron of the Arab Shia.
Iraq is not the only failing state in the area -- Lebanon is another, and if the Palestinian territories were a state they would be a failing state -- but it is the most important one, and the possibility of the complete collapse of the once-powerful Iraqi state is a spectre which haunts the region.

　US policy in the Middle East is widely seen – not only in the region but in the think-tanks of the West -- as having failed disastrously. The Bush administration’s entanglement with Iraq – its zig-zag policy on Iran – its tacit abandonment of its much-trumpeted promotion of democracy – its current, widely disparaged, efforts to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process – on all fronts, the US administration is suffering from an acute crisis of credibility.

　A veteran American diplomat with long experience of the Middle East, Thomas Pickering, has remarked that to find any precedent for the current series of disintegrations in the Middle East, you have to go back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. Remedying the region’s multiple crises, and reversing Washington’s flagging fortunes in the region, will be a task for the next US administration – and perhaps the one after that.