Charles Elias Chartouni/A Decaying Middle East: Failed States, Iran, Turkey and the Spawning of Civil Wars/شارل الياس شرتوني: الشرق الأوسط المتداعي: الدول الفاشلة إيران، تركيا وتناسل الحروب الأهلية

A Decaying Middle East: Failed States, Iran, Turkey and the Spawning of Civil Wars
Charles Elias Chartouni/May 29/2021
شارل الياس شرتوني/الشرق الأوسط المتداعي: الدول الفاشلة إيران، تركيا وتناسل الحروب الأهلية

The parody of Syrian elections, the Iranian terror squads deliberate destabilization of the consensual government in Baghdad, the Hezbollah destruction of Constitutional Statehood in Lebanon, the instrumentalization of Palestinian power politics and the creeping civil war, the manipulation of Yemeni tribal and regional conflicts, are relaying Saudi political leverage and rivaling with Turkish erratic inroads and ISIS attempts at creating a new version of Islamic political order. What’s really perplexing is that none of these ongoing scenarios aim at geopolitical stabilization, systemic reforms, progressive social and cultural liberalization in a region that failed its first modernity, and is doomed to repeat its failures with less fortunes, namely the downfall of functional Statehood, and the demise of modernity as a cultural paradigm. What’s worrisome and adds to the drama is the congery of violence, bloody disintegration, and the unleashing of an updated version of the mass murders which succeeded the end of the Ottoman era and the rise of the Nation-States. In counterpart, the Iranian regime is determined to eradicate any sort of opposition, double down on repression and cultural wars, overlook its structural impairments and the aspirations of a civil society engaged in an open conflict with it and its bankrupted dystopia. The estrangement that took hold of Iran traces back to the earlier days of the Islamic revolution, and evolves on a par with the growing chasm between the Neo-Ottoman Islamism setting in Turkey, the liberal secularism of the Iranian post-Islamist era and Turkish post-Kemalist epoch, and the repudiation of the totalitarian Islamism featured by ISIS and al Qaida. This region has failed, all along, to engage modernity and spent the centennial courting dictatorships, political authoritarianism, cultural wars, regimented socialism, Anti-Western Xenophobia (Gharb Zadegi, the Western pollution, غرب زادكي, التغرب), intellectual self-referentiality and repudiation of pluralism, liberalism and constitutional democracy.

The grotesque elections in Syria with the awaited 95/100 unanimity contrasts with the dark realities of a destroyed country: 11,000.000 displaced Syrians and ethnic cleansing, ruined and mafia-controlled economy relaying the traditional economic oligarchies, socio-economic dislocations, ethno-religious conflicts, shared condominiums among Russia, Iran and Turkey, absence of conflict resolution scenarios, faked constitutional reforms simulations, and demise of U.N. arbitration. This dark picture offers no perspective for political reconciliation and moral atonement (secularization of a Christian theological predicate), reconstruction, and structural reforms. The regime’s control of 40/100 of Syrian territories under the plea of the “Useful Syria”, its hard wired illusions about an eventual recapture of the whole territory and the ability of the autocrat to outmaneuver his mentors, the monumental reconstruction undertaking (1.200.000.000 dollars), and the cynical rejection of a negotiated political settlement, tallies with the overall picture of a derelict Middle East unable to set a center of moral gravity along which proceed, peace-making, reconstruction and reform processes.

The attempt of the Iraqi Hezbollah and the cohort of Iranian piloted militias to derail the reconstruction process led by Prime Minister Mustapha al Khadimi, antagonize the Sunnite Al Anbar governorate (138.501 km2 / 53476 Sq mi, population / 1771,656), elicit anew Sunnite radicalism, destabilize the shared borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and consolidate the strategic continuum, extending between the vast stretches of the Iraqi-Iranian borders and the newly established Syrian-Lebanese annexes, managed by the Hezbollah and the Iranian revolutionary guards, are compromising the chances of civil peace in Iraq, putting at stake its incipient consensual political culture, the viability of its federal political system, and the vast program of reforms considered by the current coalition in power. It seems that this scenario is replicated throughout the Iranian landscapes of power, and partake of the same “divide and rule” pattern of domination. Endemic instability, power vacuum and protracted social conflicts were readily engaged by Iran and Saudi Arabia when challenged by the tidal reformism of the “Arab spring” in 2011.

The Lebanese case illustrates the deliberate subversion scenario, whereby the Hezbollah challenges the historical legitimacy of the country, its national meta-narrative, cultural and political consensuses and the very notion of constitutional Statehood. The compounded (financial, economic, social, educational environmental and public health) crises have put at stake the viability of its governance, the sustainability of its coping mechanisms, the systemic equilibriums of polity, society and economy, the pliability to foreign power politics, and challenged the exemplary civil society movements antithetical political culture and reformist agendas, counter-models of governance, civic commitments and public ethics which have questioned a well entrenched culture of corruption, clientelism and misuse of discretionary power. Lebanon’s ability to reform itself, put an end to its travails, deal with its manageable problems, however critical and intractable they have become, has become highly tentative with its compounded and protracted fractures. The proto-nuclear explosion at the Beirut Harbor, its massive destructions and devastating humanitarian consequences, is quite emblematic of the terrorist objectives and deliberate targeting of the Christian population, and its corollary urban, demographic, economic, social and political dynamics. Iran is determined to reconfigure the Lebanese human and political geography, along the new demarcation lines and strategic appendages, adumbrated by the Syrian civil war.

The Palestinian geopolitical landscapes and power turfs have been historically subjected to the swaying impact of Arab and Muslim power politics, with very few exceptions and interludes correlated with the PLO extra-territorial status in a disintegrated Lebanon. Having missed repeatedly the chances of a negotiated settlement, starting with the 181 U.N resolution (1947, which set the precedent of the Two States solution) and ending with the Camp David accords and their finalization, which ended the state of Denial at both ends and paved the way to their respective creation. The end of this promising interlude opened up the road to radicalization, on both sides: bolting Israeli annexation politics versus Palestinian revisionism (no peace, no negotiation, no acknowledgement) and revived violence. The Iranian sabotaging strategy through military subversion, instrumentalization of Palestinian power politics and human shields victimization, managed to create a platform of direct intervention and enduring political influence among Palestinians.
The Yemeni historical contentions between the North and the South and its shifting dependencies, tribal, and personalistic triangulations have kept this country under the mercy of open-ended conflicts,shifting loyalties and discretionary violence enacted alternatively by domestic actors and regional players. The ongoing surrogate conflicts set the conflict coordinates between Iran and Saudi Arabia and bring us back to the crisis of territorial Statehood and its geopolitical, anthropological, legal matrices, and its competing loyalties at both end of the spectrum: the tribal centripetal tendencies, and the Islamic Ummah centrifugal tendencies and their swaying dialectics and power politics. The relegation of political dynamics to raw power politics, zero sum games, and away from political modernity, the federating and developmental role of State institutions, sets a major obstacle to conflict resolution and reformist policies.

The Middle East is still, hundred years, after the onset of political modernity and the formation of the contemporary State system in the throes of an unending political infancy, whereby geopolitical contentions, Statehood riddles, and endemic crises of governance are preempting the respective countries from developing inner cohesion, generating and solidifying national and civic loyalties, and creating working State institutions enabled to steer a modern governance, create the sense of the common good, and tackle ethno-political problems on the basis of mutual acknowledgement, equal entitlements, and participatory politics, away from the politics of denial, open discrimination and outright exclusion, and on the basis of nomothetic and autonomous State institutions. However cursory, this recapitulation enables us to realize the need for manifold international arbitrations to adjudicate disputes, contain subversion politics, induce concertation and working negotiations, and put an end to the enduring political stalemate at the regional level, promote political accommodation, break down oligarchic foreclosures and allow countries to engage the virtuous cycle of institution building, public policy reforms and Human Rights policy framing. Short of these conditionalities, this region has the ability to generate its toxins indefinitely, export its problems to the Democratic World, and put at stake World peace and European security.