The Revenge of Geography (44 page)

Davutoglu’s real innovation was reaching out to Iran. The civilizations of the Anatolian and Iranian plateaus, Turkic and Persian respectively, have had a long and complex relationship: Persian, as I’ve said, was the diplomatic language of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, even as the Ottomans and Safavid Persians were long at odds militarily in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. One can say that the Turkish and Iranian peoples are rivals, while, nevertheless, their cultures and languages deeply intertwine; Rumi wrote in Persian, though he spent most of his life in Turkey. Moreover, neither Turkey nor Iran has suffered a colonial relationship at the hands of the other. Geographically, their spheres of influence, though overlapping, are to a large degree separate, with Iran lying laterally to the east of Turkey. During the Shah’s reign, both Turkey and Iran were pro-Western, and even when Iran turned radical under the mullahs, Ankara was careful to maintain correct relations with Tehran. There is little historically shocking about Ankara’s embrace of the ayatollahs, even as in a contemporary political context it had considerable shock value.

Consider: the United States, under a universally popular president at the time, Barack Obama, was trying desperately, along with its European allies, to forestall Iran’s march to obtaining nuclear weapons, so as to prevent Israel from launching an attack on Iran; a nuclear Iran would change the balance of power in the Middle East dramatically against the West, while an Israeli attack against Iran might even be worse in terms of destabilizing the region. Yet in May 2010, Turkey, along with Brazil, acted through a series of dramatic diplomatic maneuvers to help Iran evade economic sanctions and thus gain critical time in order to make such a bomb. By agreeing to enrich Iran’s uranium, Turkey acquired yet more stature in the Islamic world to go along with that which it has acquired by supporting Hamas in Gaza. Iran has the potential “to help Turkey realize its core strategic goal of becoming an energy hub, delivering natural gas and oil [from Iran] to the markets of Western Europe.”
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With Turkey
an energy transfer nexus for Iran, as well as for hydrocarbons coming from the Caspian Sea across the Caucasus, even as Turkey holds the power to divert as much as 90 percent of Iraq’s water intake from the Euphrates and 40 percent of Syria’s, Turkey joins Iran as a Middle East hyperpower, with pipelines running in all directions filled with oil, natural gas, and water—the very basis of industrial life.
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Before the Oil Age, as I’ve suggested, Turkey advanced into the Balkans and Europe in order to develop the economic capacity so that it could also advance into the Middle East. In the Oil Age, it is the other way around. As Turkey becomes a European conduit for Iranian and Caspian Sea oil, it becomes too important an economic factor for Europe to ignore. Rather than be merely a land bridge, albeit the largest land bridge on the globe, Turkey—a G-20 country—has become a core region in and of itself, which, along with Iran, has the capacity to neutralize the Arab Fertile Crescent, whose societies are beset by internal upheaval caused by decades of sterile national security regimes.

Furthermore, the move by Turkey and Brazil to safeguard Iran’s enriched uranium was more than a rogue action of little practical consequence to help fundamentalist Iran acquire a nuclear bomb. It reflected the rise of middle-level powers around the world, as more and more millions from developing countries joined the middle class.

The silver lining for the West is the following: without the ascent of Turkey, revolutionary Iran becomes the dominant power in the Middle East; but with Turkey’s aggressive rise as a Middle Eastern power for the first time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Iran will have competition from next door—for Turkey can at once be Iran’s friend and competitor. And don’t forget, Turkey still belongs to NATO, and it still has relations with Israel, however frayed. As difficult as it has become for the West to tolerate, Turkey’s Islamist leadership still represents a vast improvement over the mind-set of the Iranian clerical government. Turkey can still act as a mediator between Israel and Muslim countries, just as Iran holds the potential yet to modify its own politics, either through political upheaval or through the wages of the regime’s own longevity and contradictions.
What is clear is that as the Cold War fades from memory, both Turkey and Iran will have their geographies further unleashed in order to play intensified roles in the Arab Middle East. Turkey is no longer yoked so strongly to NATO, even as NATO is a weak reed of its former self. And with the end of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq—itself a vestige of Cold War, Soviet-style police states—Iran is enmeshed in the politics of the Arab world as never before. It is all quite subtle: Turkey works in concert with Iran even as it balances against it. At the same time, Iraq emerges as a predominantly Shiite alternative to Iran, however weak Iraq may be at the moment. Assisting Turkey and Iran has been the revolution in global communications that, at least in their cases, allows people to rise above ethnicity and truly embrace religion as an identity group. Thus, Turks, Iranians, and Arabs are all Muslims, and all are united against Israel and to some extent against the West. And so with the enhanced geographical factors of Turkey and Iran affecting the Arab world, the vast quadrilateral of the Middle East is more organically interconnected than ever before.

Unlike the cases of Turkey and Iran, the Arab countries that lie between the Mediterranean Sea and the Iranian plateau had little meaning before the twentieth century. Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq were but geographical expressions. Jordan wasn’t thought of. When we remove the official lines on the map, we find a crude finger painting of Sunni and Shiite population clusters that contradict national borders. Inside these borders, the central governing authorities of Lebanon and Iraq barely operate. The one in Syria is tyrannical but under intense siege from its own masses (and may not last to the time this book is published); the one in Jordan is an absolute monarchy but probably only has a future as a constitutional one. (Jordan’s main reason for existing always goes unstated: it acts as a buffer state for other Arab regimes who fear having a land border with Israel.) When U.S. president George W. Bush toppled the Iraqi dictatorship, it was thought at the time that he had set history in motion in the Arab
world, roiling it to a greater degree than any Western figure since Napoleon. But then came the democratic rebellions of the Arab Spring, which had their own internal causes unrelated to what Bush had done. In any case, the post-Ottoman state system that came about in the aftermath of World War I is under greater stress than ever before. Western-style democracy may not exactly follow, but some form of liberalization eventually must, helped by the revolution in Egypt, and by the transition away from Cold War–era Arab police states, which will make the transition in Central Europe and the Balkans away from communism seem effortless by comparison. Indeed, the Levant is currently characterized by collapsing authoritarian regimes and democracies here and there that are unable to get anything done. The aggressive energy that characterizes the leaderships of Turkey and Iran, partly a product of their geographies, has for decades been almost nowhere apparent in the Arab world—another reason why the Arab world has now entered a period of epochal political transition.

Truly, the 2011 Arab uprisings that swept away several regimes were about the power of communications technology and the defeat of geography. But as time passes, the geographies of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and other countries will reassert themselves. Tunisia and Egypt are age-old clusters of civilizations, whose statehoods originate in antiquity, whereas Libya and Yemen, for example, are but vague geographies, whose statehoods were not established until the twentieth century. Western Libya around Tripoli (Tripolitania) was always oriented toward the rich and urbane civilizations of Carthage in Tunisia, whereas eastern Libya around Benghazi (Cyrenaica) was always oriented toward those of Alexandria in Egypt. Yemen was rich and populous from antiquity forward, but its many mountain kingdoms were always separate from one another. It is therefore no surprise that building modern, nontyrannical states in Libya and Yemen is proving more difficult than in Tunisia and Egypt.

But it is in the Levant and Fertile Crescent where the next phase of conflict may unfold.

Iraq, because of the 2003 American invasion, is deep into a political evolution that cannot but affect the entire Arab world. This is because of Iraq’s vast oil reserves (the second in the world behind Saudi Arabia); its large population of over 31 million; its geographical position at the juncture of the Sunni and Shiite worlds; its equidistance between Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia; and its historical and political significance as the former capital of the Abbasid Dynasty. Furthermore, Iraq is bedeviled by three legacies: almost half a century of brutal military dictatorship under various rulers, culminating in Saddam, that warped its political culture; a grim and violent history, ancient and modern, that extends far beyond the recent decades of dictatorship, and which has encouraged a harsh and suspicious national character (however essentialist this may sound); and severe ethnic and sectarian divisions.

Iraq has never been left alone. Once again, Freya Stark: “While Egypt lies parallel and peaceful to the routes of human traffic, Iraq is from earliest times a frontier province, right-angled and obnoxious to the predestined paths of man.”
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For Mesopotamia cut across one of history’s bloodiest migration routes, pitting man against man and breeding pessimism as a consequence. Whether Iraq was being attacked from the Syrian desert in the west or the plateau of Elam in Iran to the east, it was a constant victim of occupation. From as early as the third millennium
B.C
., the ancient peoples of the Near East fought over control of Mesopotamia. Whether it was the Achaemenid Persian kings Darius and Xerxes who ruled Babylon, or the Mongol hordes that later swept down to overrun the land, or the long-running Ottoman rule that ended with the First World War, Iraq’s has been a tragic history of occupation.
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Furthering this bloodshed, Mesopotamia has rarely been a demographically cohesive country. The Tigris and Euphrates, which run through Iraq, have long constituted a frontier zone where various groups, often the residue of these foreign invasions, clashed and overlapped. As the French orientalist Georges Roux painstakingly documents
in
Ancient Iraq
, since antiquity, north, south, and center have usually been in pitched battle. Rulers of the first city-states, the southern Sumerians, fought the central-Mesopotamian Akkadians. They both fought the north-inhabiting Assyrians. The Assyrians, in turn, fought the Babylonians. And this was to say nothing of the many pockets of Persians who lived amid the native Mesopotamians, forming another source of strife.
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Only the most suffocating of tyrannies could stave off the utter disintegration to which this frontier region was prone. As the scholar Adeed Dawisha notes, “The fragility of the social order was [throughout history] structural to the land of Mesopotamia.”
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And this fragile order, which pitted group against group in a densely populated river valley with no protective boundaries, led ultimately and seemingly inexorably to a twentieth-century tyranny straight out of antiquity: a tyranny which, the moment it was toppled, led to several years of bloodcurdling anarchy with atrocities that had an ancient aura.

For Iraq is burdened by modern as well as by ancient history. Mesopotamia was among the most weakly governed parts of the Ottoman Empire; another case of a vague geographical expression—a loose assemblage of tribes, sects, and ethnicities further divided by the Turks into the
vilayets
of Kurdish Mosul, Sunni Baghdad, and Shiite Basra, going from north to south. When the British tried to “sculpt” a polity between the Tigris and Euphrates following the Turkish collapse they created a witches’ brew of Kurdish separatism, Shiite tribalism, and Sunni assertiveness.
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To connect the oil fields of Kurdistan in the north with a port on the Persian Gulf in the south—as part of a land-and-sea strategy to defend India—the British brought together ethnic and sectarian forces that would be difficult to assuage by normal means.

The rise of Arab nationalism following World War II led to further divisions. Iraqi officers and politicians were pitted against each other: those who saw Iraq’s problematic identity as best subsumed beneath the rubric of a single Arab nation stretching from the Maghreb to Mesopotamia, versus those who strove against heavy odds for a united Iraq that, despite its geographic illogic, would quell its own
sectarian passions. In any case, almost four decades of fractious, unstable, and feeble democracy since 1921, interspersed with revolts and semi-authoritarianism in the name of the royal palace, came to an abrupt end on July 14, 1958, when a military coup deposed Iraq’s pro-Western government. King Faisal II, who had ruled for the past nineteen years, and his family were lined up against a wall and shot. The prime minister, Nuri al-Said, was shot and buried; afterward his corpse was disinterred, then burned and mutilated by a mob. This was not a random act, but one indicative of the wanton and perverse violence that has often characterized Iraqi political life. In fact, the killing of the entire Hashemite royal family, like that of the killing of the family of Czar Nicholas II in Russia in 1918, was a deeply symbolic crime that presaged decades of state-inflicted murder and torture from which Iraq will take more years to recover. The line of East Bloc–style tyrannies began with Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim and ended with Saddam Hussein, each dictator more extreme than the next; only thus could a state of such disparate groups and political forces be held together.