Collapse

Barrett: The Collapse of Iraq and Syria
From British indirect rule in Iraq to the creation of Syria and Lebanon by
the French and the emergence of Israel and Hashemite Jordan, U.S. policy
has pursued stability and political accommodation in the region based on
the premise that all of these entities that emerged in the aftermath of World
War II were in fact nation-states. These policies assumed that arbitrary lines
drawn on a map by Western colonial powers in the aftermath of the First
World War, and then the mandate system, reflected the ‘national’ aspirations
of the peoples that fell within those lines. In other words, arbitrary
boundary delineations drawn by and for the benefit of the Western imperial
powers reflected the reality of the situation on the ground. Now in the
second decade of the 21st century, the West—much to its consternation and
confusion—finds itself confronted by the objective fact that these assumptions
are at the very least no longer valid and more likely never reflected the
political, economic, and social reality of the region.
In short, 20th century nationalists influenced by Western ideologies and
theories concluded that the region had transcended the heterogeneous sectarian
and social fabric of the region and they would form a secular state,
i.e., an “imagined community” as Benedict Anderson would describe it,
from Sinai to Basra and the Gulf. Borrowing from Ernest Gellner’s ideas,
“Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents
nations where they do not exist.” Across the Middle East nationalists were
attempting to invent a nation that had never existed because, as Anderson
puts it, “in the modern world, everyone can, should, will ‘have’ a nationality.”
5 Having been subjected to Western power and imperial expansion, Arab
and Turkish thinkers concluded they had to adopt Western concepts of patria
and patriotism. In 1834, Rifa Rafi al-Tahtawi began to expound on the topic
of watan, or nation, as it applied to the Arab world. Intellectuals in the region
began to argue that ‘patriotism’ was the means by which the gap between
the Middle East and Western powers could be overcome. This was attacked
by traditionalists who saw it as a betrayal of Islam to the West. The Western
concept was countered in the late 19th century by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani
and Muhammad Abduh as a heretical and unnecessary assault on Islamic
culture. In other words, the region could modernize without Westernizing.
They blamed Turkish domination and corruption and pushed for a revival
of Islam, Arabism, and Arab culture as the vehicle for restoration. This was
more pan-Islamic than Arab nationalism. It was the defeat of Ottoman modernism
in the First World War that left the Ottomanized elites of the Levant
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