The most basic problem in the Middle East isn’t the conflict in Palestine or authoritarian Arab governments. The most basic problem is that the nation-states that were created there were artificially drawn and don’t represent coherent communities where consensus is possible among the governed. Tribal, sectarian, and ethnic differences within countries like Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon make it very difficult to organize representative governments where minority rights and majority-rule are respected. Attempts to get the people there to think of themselves as Iraqis or Syrians or Libyans have been only partially successful. If you aren’t a Turk, it’s hard to think of yourself as a Turk, and if you aren’t a member of the House of Saud, it’s hard to think of yourself as a Saudi.
Dictatorial regimes have been the historical solution to this problem, allowing for at least the semblance of civil order. The secular Baathist regimes in Syria and Iraq allowed somewhat ecumenical societies to emerge where religious or ethnic differences were somewhat submerged. But both regimes have now failed in that effort thanks to the United States’ decision to invade Iraq.
The neoconservatives’ simple-minded solution to anti-American Arab radicalism was to encourage democratic reforms in countries where dictatorship existed precisely because there could be no consensus among the governed.
Self-determination and human rights are wonderful ideas, but they don’t work unless there are coherent and cohesive communities in which to implement those ideas. America worked, imperfectly, precisely because Congregationalists and Quakers and Anglicans and Catholics and Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians agreed to live and let live rather than to fight it out for domination. Ultimately, it didn’t matter if you were English or German or Norwegian. We learned to absorb even the Irish and Italians without letting ethnicity become a political determinant.
This was a process that we tend to gloss over. It wasn’t painless and it didn’t occur without creating a political backlash. But it wasn’t what caused our civil war, and we managed to get through it without much violence or too much political turmoil. But we also had a mostly unsettled continent to help us be generous about the available spoils. And we were settled by people from Europe who were sick and tired of religious wars and shared a basic consensus that fighting over religion wasn’t productive.
These conditions simply are not met in the Middle East. They may have to fight until they get tired of fighting. The only advice I really have is that the borders in the Arab world have little inherent value. The people there should not be bound by those borders if they are an impediment to peace. If communities can emerge that discount ethnic and sectarian differences in favor of national identity, that will be great, but it may be more important for communities to exist where the consent of the governed is possible in the here and now.
