Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 with the aim of creating a buffer for the security of its northern borders. Within months, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), led by Yasser Arafat, was forced to leave Lebanon.
In the years following the Israeli action, Lebanon was engulfed by ethnic and sectarian conflict. Lebanon’s invasion saw the emergence of the Hezbollah as a powerful Iranian-backed militia which, in subsequent conflicts, seriously challenged the might and avowed invincibility of Israel’s armed forces.
Sunni-Shia divide
Virtually coinciding with the Israeli attack on Lebanon, Oded Yinon, an Israeli Government analyst, came out with a plan for redrawing the boundaries of what the Americans later described as the “Greater Middle East”, extending from Pakistan to Turkey. While advocating a long-term plan for the annulment of Israel’s Camp David Accord with Egypt and its destabilisation, Yinon envisaged “total dissolution of Lebanon” as a precedent for the dissolution of Syria and Iraq.
With the bloody Iran-Iraq conflict, triggered by Saddam Hussein and encouraged by the Reagan administration, then gathering momentum, Yinon held: “In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria, in Ottoman times, is possible. So, three or more States will exist around the three major cities of Basra, Mosul and Baghdad. Shia areas in the South will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish North. It is possible that the present Iranian-Iraqi confrontation will deepen this polarisation. The entire Arabian Peninsula is a natural candidate for dissolution due to internal and external pressures.”
In the years that followed the Yinon analysis, the “Greater Middle East” has witnessed traumatic conflicts and internal turmoil, as civilisational, religious and sectarian rivalries have torn societies and nations apart.
Saddam Hussein brought misery and suffering to his own people after his ill-advised invasion of Kuwait, which followed the war he imposed on Iran with American support. After fellow Arabs — notably Syria and Egypt — joined the Americans to pulverise his armed forces and impose crippling economic sanctions in 1991, Iraq was torn apart in a second American-led invasion in 2003 that ended minority Sunni domination of Iraq and its replacement by a Shia-dominated Government. About 133,000 Iraqis perished in this second invasion.
Syrian war continues
The new Shia-dominated dispensation is, however, not only facing de facto Kurdish separation in the north, but also confronts a bloody insurgency by its Sunni minority, duly backed by its Gulf Arab neighbours. Libya was thereafter invaded by NATO forces from France and the UK, backed by the Americans, for regime change, getting the erratic, but secular, Gadaffi replaced by Islamist-oriented leaders. Libya has not only become a focal point for al-Qaeda activity, but also appears headed towards being administered virtually as two separate entities — Tripolitania and Cyrenaica.
The much-touted Arab Spring which was supposed to usher in a new era of democratic change exposed the harsh reality that countries with no experience of democratic traditions and institutions cannot be transformed overnight into vibrant democracies, merely because of demonstrations by an urbanised and educated urban middle-class. Nowhere has this emerged more clearly than in Tunisia and Egypt, where the elected rulers had Islamist inclinations and were not exactly votaries of pluralism and modernism.
In Egypt, an elected Islamist President has been overthrown by a largely secular military, which has a tradition of not only dominating political life, but also wielding vast economic clout. The Arab Spring, however, had the most destabilising impact, caused by demonstrations against the secular and modern minded, but brutally authoritarian regime of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. About 120,000 Syrians died in the conflict, which not only widened the Shia-Sunni rift across the Muslim world, but also unexpectedly led to the beginnings of Russian-American cooperation to moderate the American propensity for regime change through military intervention. Syria was forced to forego its chemical weapons; yet, the civil war in Syria continues.
Unless a UN-brokered peace is be arranged, which appears unlikely now, Syria appears inevitably headed for a partition along sectarian, ethnic and religious fault lines.
India has quite rightly frowned on the separatism in Iraq and built bridges with the new dispensation there. Stability in its neighbouring West Asian region, with its vast energy resources and where six million Indians reside, is a key area of interest. India has also opposed American/NATO military intervention in Syria, which could destabilise its Gulf neighbourhood. It is really up to the people of the “Greater Middle East” to determine their destinies, despite destabilising efforts by outsiders.
(The author is a former High Commissioner to Pakistan)