Signs of the Middle East falling apart
As the Iraqi Kurds endorse a proposal to secede and declare their own country – with Turkey, Iran and Iraq grumbling – they throw up a vital question about all of the Middle East, writes Robin Wright in The New Yorker. Are some of the region’s countries even viable anymore?
“The world has resisted addressing the issue since the popular protests in 2011, known as the Arab Uprising, or Arab Spring, spawned four wars and a dozen crises. Entire countries have been torn asunder, with little to no prospect of political or physical reconstruction anytime soon. Meanwhile, the outside world has invested vast resources, with several countries forking out billions of dollars in military equipment, billions more in aid, and thousands of hours of diplomacy—on the assumption that places like Iraq, Syria, and Libya can still work as currently configured.”
“The long-term impact of these destructive centrifugal forces is far from clear. But, given the blood spilled over the past six years, primordial forces seem to be prevailing at the moment, and not only among the Kurds. ‘The only people who want to hold Iraq together,’ Lukman Faily, the former Iraqi ambassador to Washington, opined to me recently, ‘are those who don’t live in Iraq’. That sentiment is echoed, if not as concisely, elsewhere.”
Scary parallels
Is there another Middle East in the making? Like the Middle East, is South Asia becoming “a region waylaid by feelings of collective humiliation and violent rivalries, both between and within countries,” asks Dominique Moisi in Project Syndicate.
“What began as a localised tragedy (the Rohingya crisis) has now become an international crisis – and not just because of the refugee flows into Bangladesh and elsewhere. As in the Middle East, national and religious identities tend to be inextricably linked. Like Myanmar, neighboring Thailand is a majority-Buddhist country; Malaysia and Indonesia are mostly Muslim; and India is majority Hindu. Pakistan, for its part, was created as the homeland for the Muslim minority in Britain’s former Indian empire after independence.”
“(And) radicalization within Myanmar’s Muslim community has proceeded alongside the growth of religious extremism among the Buddhist majority. Buddha preached peace and tolerance. Yet some Buddhist priests today are inciting hatred and violence.”
“As religious tensions escalate, regional cooperation is in jeopardy. How can an organization like ASEAN, which has promoted gradual progress on security and economic collaboration, weather the killing and displacement of religious minorities in its member states?”
“If a geostrategic catastrophe is to be avoided, the unholy alliance of religion and nationalism must be broken,” he concludes.
The problem within
There is a huge problem with Islam today, writes Mustafa Akyol in The New York Times. A problem Christianity rid itself of decades ago: The passion to impose religion, rather than merely proposing it.
“Luckily, there are antidotes within Islam to this problem,” Akyol writes. One of them being the Quranic verse: ‘No compulsion in religion’.”
“In fact, mainstream Muslim tradition, reflecting its illiberal context, never fully appreciated the freedom implied by this verse. — and other ones with similar messages. ‘The ‘no compulsion’ verse was a problem to the earliest exegetes,’ as Patricia Crone, a scholar of Islamic history, has noted. ‘And they reacted by interpreting it restrictively’. The verse was declared ‘abrogated,’ or its scope was radically limited.”
“This is still evident in a parenthetical that is too frequently inserted into translations of the verse. ‘There shall be no compulsion in religion (in becoming a Muslim).’…They append the extra phrase because while they agree with the Quran that no one should be forced to become a Muslim, they think that Muslims should be compelled to practice the religion — in the way that the authorities define. They also believe that if Muslims decide to abandon their religion, they must be punished for “apostasy.”
But those seeking to protect Islam by imposing it are caught in a self-defeating web, he writes. “By policing religion, the authorities are not really protecting it. They are only enfeebling their societies, raising hypocrites and causing many people to lose their faith in or respect for Islam.”
The way out
Talk of denuclearising North Korea is all diplomatic fluff, writes Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post. What the US needs now is a definitive strategy.
“The denuclearization of North Korea right now is a fantasy. It will not happen unless the United States is willing to wage a war on the Korean Peninsula. Everyone knows this, but no official in Washington is willing to publicly admit it. So the United States has adopted a zombie policy, one that has no chance of success but staggers along nonetheless.”
Joshua Cooper Ramo, co-chief executive of Henry Kissinger’s consulting firm, has devised and shared with Zakaria a plan. “All existing nuclear weapons states would agree not to test or expand their arsenals for some period of time — say, 36 months. Inspectors would verify that these limits are adhered to. All other nations would affirm that they do not intend to acquire nuclear weapons. Crucially, North Korea would be invited to sign onto this agreement as a nuclear weapons state, with the idea of freezing progress for now and aiming to later denuclearize the country.”
“It (the plan) creates a global coalition that could be marshaled to sanction North Korea if it were to renege or cheat on its commitments, giving cover to China to truly clamp down on its ally.”
Referendum, referendum everywhere
It’s the season of referendums. The Kurds are voting on independence. But it’s not just the Kurds. Miles away, in Spain, Catalans are prepping up for their referendum on independence. The Irish are voting on abortion.
“But do such binary choices ever result in anything more than discord?” asks Richard Russell in The Guardian.
Take Brexit for example. “The campaigns, and results, were undoubtedly divisive – the binary nature of a plebiscite forces the abandonment of nuance and doubt from the debate.”
But without the vote, won’t the resentment just be bottled up, primed to boil over? “As difficult as that has been, it was likely a necessary evil, to lance the boil and move on. Without those votes the split in public discourse may well have become more polarised, and more entrenched. Ripping off the referendum plaster has left Britain, and the entire EU, with a huge task, which is not to be trivialised – as a British citizen living in Spain I’m at the sharp end of this – but it’s unlikely that not having the vote at all would have been any better,” he writes.