The New Geopolitics of Terror

Demons and Dragons

William Hopkinson, Julian Lindley-French

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138211841
• eBook ISBN: 9781315451992
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The New Geopolitics of Terror examines the impact of global reach terror on states.

This book surveys the current crises and tensions in the Middle East, focussing primarily on the upheavals in Syria and Iraq, and the interaction between groups, such as Al Qaeda and ISIS state actors and Western security. It explains the threat to Western interests and states from wide-reaching Islamic terrorism, geopolitical intervention by outside actors and regional power struggles. It critiques the inadequate political, military and diplomatic responses from Western powers, and the lack of effective leadership, highlighting the potential dangers should the West fail to remedy these. The book also identifies the difficulties and dangers of continued Western involvement in the Middle East, and proposes specific actions and interventions in order to prevent further deterioration in the region and in Western societies. Specifically, the book calls for a grand strategy underpinned by political ambition that combines diplomatic, political, economic and military measures, calls for effective counter-terrorism measures in more resilient Western societies, and highlights the importance of the role that global players outside those regions can and must play if peace is to be restored.

Written by two leading scholars, this book will be of much interest to students of terrorism studies, strategic studies, defence studies, Middle Eastern politics and IR in general.

1
Lessons from a troubled history

Introduction

Understanding why so many Arab states have become precarious at roughly the same time is vital if policy and strategy that can establish effective governance structures are to be crafted. Success in that is a vital Western interest. Although few Western efforts to shape the Middle East have achieved their stated objectives, intervention in the Middle East will be needed again, and that will require a new understanding of the forces at work there.

With some notable exceptions such as Persia and Egypt, the Middle Eastern state largely emerged in the wake of World War I, replacing the Ottoman Empire over much of the region. The aim of Britain and France was to create entities that they could administer either directly or through appointed and ‘protected’ administrations.¹ A century on, many of the regimes that have for decades controlled those states have either been swept away or teeter on the edge of collapse. Regime and state were not always clearly separate, civil society was often under-developed, and no Arab state has developed as a stable, liberal, law-based and democratic country on the Western European model. The forces threatening them include marginalised minorities, and in some cases (e.g. Syria) majorities; economic and demographic pressures; Islamic fundamentalism; and outside interference. In the early twenty-first century, the weakness of the entire Middle Eastern state structure poses two essential questions: can the Middle Eastern state survive, and what effort and resources would be necessary to ensure that?

To understand today’s conflict, one must understand the history of the Middle East over the past century, and the West has failed to learn lessons from that. It intervened in Afghanistan and Iraq and stayed (for a time); the result was disaster. It intervened in Libya but did not stay; the result was disaster. It did not really intervene in Syria; the result was disaster. None of the West’s post-9/11 interventions in the Middle East has been properly planned, and all have failed. Britain’s failure in the 2003 Iraq war is illuminating; the Chilcot report (Chilcot) is damning about Prime Minister Tony Blair’s leadership then, and its condemnation of the failings of Britain’s political, intelligence and military elites bring into question the utility in any circumstances of Western intervention in the region. It implicitly raises a question that the enquiry itself did not answer: how should Western states deal with the very real threats that emanate from such places?

Chilcot makes clear that an intervention must be properly planned and resourced, and it brings out the need for sound strategic judgement that was lacking at times in the post-9/11 political environment; to plan effectively requires a clear view of objectives. It reinforces the need for political leaders to understand what is possible on the ground. There was a marked contrast between the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Gulf War. The former was undertaken to uphold the Middle East state structure; the latter set out to change the very nature of the Middle Eastern state. Major unintended consequences ensued: dangerous forces were unleashed because powerful people, especially in Washington, refused to confront powerful realities, so 2003 became more about politics inside the Beltway rather than the security of the Middle East and elsewhere. Sound planning was indeed undertaken for post-‘conflict’ Iraq by the State Department’s ‘Iraq Shack’. However, the President took responsibility for such planning away from ‘State’ because he did not trust it, and he handed it to Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, which had no experience of such work. The subsequent Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was calamitous.

Chilcot also warns of the dangers of politicising intelligence. Blair had a whole raft of reasons for wanting to stay close to Bush, but his lack of influence in the Bush White House was in stark contrast to that. He treated intelligence purely through the lens of his view of the transatlantic relationship rather than wider British interests, or the needs of the Middle East. The intelligence machinery did not work as it should, and Blair’s ‘sofa government’ way of doing business made it extremely difficult for proposed courses of action to be properly weighed or challenged. Iraq revealed the political undermining of the once masterful British civil service and the London intelligence process.

The British Army was humiliated in Iraq. The gap between the military power that Britain’s leaders believed that they could exert in support of the United States and what they could actually offer was large, though the Americans must share the blame for going into Iraq before the resources necessary for success were in place. Britain’s reinforcing Afghanistan at the same time as it was engaged in Iraq was also a major cause of failure. London’s influence in Washington was sorely damaged as a result, and it has never really recovered.

Britain’s failure in Iraq typified and exemplified the gap between policy, strategy, planning, applied resources and desired outcomes that has bedevilled all Western interventions in Middle East crises. An examination of the Defence Planning Assumptions in the UK’s 1998 Strategic Defence Review shows that putting a front-line force in excess of 40,000 troops into Iraq would break the troop bank. To then ‘plan’ in 2006 to go to Afghanistan as well before the mission in Basra was completed was dangerous military nonsense. The Defence Logistics Organisation effectively collapsed in 2003; therefore, the occupation force was far smaller than the invasion force, and good military commanders and their civilian counterparts struggled to create a secure space in which stabilisation and reconstruction could take place.

If the West is to intervene in places like Iraq, it is vital that the ‘human terrain’ be properly understood and all national and international means – civil and military – be applied carefully and rigorously to generate outcomes that give the inhabitants hope of positive change. This all-important unity of effort and purpose, backed up by sufficient forces and resources, was never achieved in Iraq. Successive military commanders were left trying to close an impossible gap between intent, capability and capacity. Going to war on a false premise, Blair achieved the opposite of what he said he set out to achieve: more than 150,000 Iraqis died, together with some 179 British military personnel, whilst more than 1 million people were displaced.² Although the blame ultimately lies with President George W. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld, who confused the urge for post-9/11 revenge and ideological fervour with sound statecraft, Blair must bear a heavy responsibility.

The world is a dangerous place, and the Middle East particularly so, and there will be occasions in future when interventions will be necessary. If Chilcot leads to improved strategic judgement, better understanding of the challenge, the proper analysis and use of intelligence, the re-establishment (in the UK) of appropriate distance between politicians and civil servants, and the closing of the gap between the roles and missions political leaders expect of armed forces, and the correct resourcing needed to do the job asked of them, then progress will have been made. If, on the other hand, it leads British and other Western political leaders to conclude that they never want to find themselves exposed to such severe media and public opinion criticism, and to abandon the very idea of interventions in extremis, then the post-Chilcot world will have become more, not less, dangerous. The threshold for Western military intervention in the Middle East or anywhere else must necessarily be high, and the Iraq and Afghanistan experience may have led to its being set in popular and political judgement impossibly high. If so, that will have dire consequences, for the West, for the Middle East and ultimately for international peace and security.

Grievance against the West goes well beyond Iraq. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is as far from resolution as ever. Arab nationalism and Arab socialism are seen by many Arabs as having failed to alleviate either the resentment or the poverty that helps stoke it, with distant elites now often viewed as corrupt representatives of factional interests, puppets of powerful external states, or a toxic combination of both. In the perceived political vacuum, a new form of pan-Islamism has emerged which identifies with a virulently novel regime: the caliphate, which is established in turn on a primarily, but not exclusively, anti-Western form of Sunni extremism.

A brief history of instability

However, the rise of Al Qaeda, and more recently ISIS, or even the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, cannot simply be ascribed to a failure within Islam or of Arab nationalism and socialism. Deeper forces are at work, many with their origins in the past and the many failed attempts to apply distinctly Western political templates to bring development and order to the Middle East. Several main strands run through the modern history of the region and shape its contested politics: attempts between 1919 and the 1960s by the two declining imperial powers Britain and France to preserve both their influence and their oil interests in the Middle East in the face of growing nationalist pressures; post-war decolonisation and British and French withdrawal; the ‘triumph’ of Arab nationalism; the emergence of Wahhabism and other forms of fundamentalist Sunni extremism; the creation of Israel and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; the influence of both the United States and the Soviet Union and Cold War rivalry in the Middle East; the further weakening of many Arab states in the face of repeated defeats by Israel; and growing demographic pressures. To those may be added Iran’s regional-strategic ambitions, its consequent rivalry with Saudi Arabia, and the perception across much of the Middle East that the United States, which replaced Britain and France as the main external power-broker, was not even-handed in its dealings with the Arab world.

Oil was and remains a vital factor. Its rise can be pretty much dated to a specific decision. In December 1914 the first of the Queen Elizabeth class of fast oil-burning British battleships was commissioned. The need for secure oil for the fleet made oil discoveries in Persia and across the Middle East an essential British imperial interest.³ The subsequent importance of aviation was another major military factor, followed by the general shift in most Western economies towards hydrocarbon energy sources. These increased beyond measure the significance of secure oil supplies and hence the need for stability and, where possible, control in the Middle East.

This need meant balancing a whole range of competing interests and committing to a programme of massive and risky investments. In 1921 the British installed the Hashemite Kingdom in Iraq and defined what remains to this day the country’s borders. In 1922 and 1923 the French Mandates of Syria and Lebanon were established, and the British Mandate for Palestine came into force, with the Emirate of Transjordan, as an autonomous region. In 1932 the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was recognised, although the process of unifying the Bedouin tribes relied on forces that subscribed to radical Islamic Wahhabi beliefs.

The grip Britain and France could exert on the region was always open to challenge, as revealed by the 1919–1923 Franco–Syrian War. Following several major revolts against British rule, Egypt was granted nominal independence in 1922. After Kurdish revolts against the Turkish republic between 1927 and 1930 threatened British control of Iraq, a 1930 treaty with the newly independent country provided for the retention of British forces in the country. Nevertheless, between 1933 and 1936, tribal revolts by Sunni Arabs around Baghdad, Shia Arabs in the south, and Kurds in the north threatened Britain’s control.

Between 1939 and 1945, the Middle East became a major theatre of World War Two. After the war, Britain and France, exhausted and financially and economically broken, were unable to maintain direct influence over the region. The United States and subsequently the Soviet Union moved in to fill the power vacuum. In 1946, Transjordan became the Kingdom of Jordan. In 1947, the UN General Assembly agreed to divide Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. In 1948, Israel duly declared independence; the first Arab–Israeli war ensued, which Israel rapidly won.

A nationalist wave surged across much of the Arab Middle East. In 1953, after a revolution in Egypt, the monarchy was overthrown, and, in 1955, Gamal Abdel Nasser became President. As the Cold War heated up, the Central Treaty Organisation was created in 1954 to counter the influence of the Soviet Union in the Middle East. Finally, in 1956, Britain and France, with the active collusion of Israel, launched a limited invasion of Egypt that the United States not only condemned but actively obstructed. Britain still retained nominal control over some Gulf territories⁴ – but the Suez Crisis to all intents and purposes ended direct British and French strategic influence in the Middle East, though there remained strong cultural influences, and French rule in Algeria. Thereafter, much of the politics of the region came to be shaped by the US–Soviet Cold War struggle, and Arab hatred of Israel, though there were other tensions – in 1963 the first Iraqi–Kurdish war led to the Baath Party seizing power in Baghdad, which would eventually lead to Saddam Hussein.

The defining event in the post-war Middle East was the 1967 Six-Day War in which Israel launched a pre-emptive attack, crushed a coalition of Arab forces, and seized the entire Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the strategically vital Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip. In 1970, Anwar Sadat became President of Egypt and initially pursued a pro-Soviet policy, completing the Aswan High Dam with Soviet expertise and money. In October 1973 the third Arab–Israeli war was launched by Egypt at the head of a coalition of Arab states. After some initial Egyptian gains, the Arab coalition was defeated. Israel won the war but seemed to lose the peace. In 1974, Tel Aviv’s sworn enemy, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, under its charismatic leader Yasser Arafat, was invited to represent the Palestinians at the United Nations. Following the war, Sadat broke his pact with the Soviet Union, sought the support of the Americans, and moved to make peace with the Israelis, even addressing the Israeli Knesset in 1978. The subsequent 1978 Camp David Accords offered a glimpse of an enduring peace between Israel and its Arab neighbours, but only a glimpse. In 1981, Sadat was murdered by elements of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

Between 1975 and 1990, the second Kurdish–Iraqi War saw Saddam Hussein’s Iraq resort to brutal tactics to suppress the Kurds, including the use of chemical weapons against civilians. In 1976, the Lebanese Civil War broke out, and, in 1978, Syria invaded Lebanon in support of its political proxies in Beirut. Throughout this period Jordan and Lebanon had to cope with huge flows of Palestinian refugees into the two countries, which destabilised both.

In 1979, the Western-leaning Shah of Iran was overthrown by a radical Shia Islamic cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Shortly thereafter, seeing an opportunity to seize large parts of a weakened Iran, Saddam Hussein launched a major war which resulted in more than nine years of conflict during which some 1.25 million people were killed and wounded. Having finally been fought to a standstill with Iran, in August 1990 Saddam launched an invasion of the tiny oil-rich emirate of Kuwait. However, having just won the Cold War, the US-led West was able to rapidly move a huge military force to the Middle East, and, in March 1991, Iraq was roundly defeated, and much of its force in Kuwait annihilated. For a moment the West appeared supreme.

However, the Levant slipped further into disorder with the Israeli invasions of Lebanon in 1982 and 1987. Between 1987 and 1990, Israel tried unsuccessfully to defeat the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia. In 1991 the first Intifada took place as Palestinians revolted against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Hopes for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians with the 1994 Oslo Accords were dashed with the November 1995 murder of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish radical. It was 2003 before Israel left Lebanon, and 2006 before Syrian troops were driven out by the so-called Cedar Revolution, which also saw a short, sharp war between Israel and Lebanon in which the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) for the first time effectively failed against an Arab adversary.

The defining event of the first decade of the twenty-first century in the Middle East was the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and the forced removal of Saddam Hussein and his predominantly Sunni regime. Unfortunately, far from moving Iraq towards stable democracy, the botched aftermath of the invasion helped further destabilize both Iraq and Syria, and it opened the door to other forces, both regular and irregular, most notably Iran and Al Qaeda. Winning the peace has always been the hardest of all battles in the Middle East.⁵ In 2010 with the outbreak of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, elites across the Middle East found themselves challenged for the first time by full-scale popular uprisings. Many in the West hoped the Arab Spring would lead to the advance of democracy across the region. Instead, regimes collapsed, in some cases enabling hard-line Islamists to seize power. In Egypt in 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood came to power using democratic means, but, as President Morsi himself began to move away from democracy, the Egyptian Army arrested him in 2013.

The lessons of a troubled history

The West’s essential policy dilemma over the Middle East has existed for a century and in recent years become more acute: whether to back strong, oppressive regimes that at least provide stability for a time, or whether to back popular movements, some of which at least claim to subscribe to the West’s own values of liberty, prosperity and the pursuit of happiness. Even a brief history of Middle Eastern political fragility demonstrates and confirms the long provenance of today’s tensions and the continuing dilemma such tensions pose for the West. For a century the successor states to the Ottoman Empire have either not worked, or at best worked imperfectly, with the partial exception of Turkey itself, Israel, and the even more partial exception of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the authors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Lessons from a troubled history
• 2 The Middle East today
• 3 The global reach of Islamism
• 4 The new great game
• 5 The scale of the challenge
• 6 The challenge of strategy
• 7 The new geopolitics of terror
• 8 Demons and dragons
• Bibliography
• Index