The Revenge of Geography

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Nevertheless, as Dawisha writes, “Historical recollection is neither linear nor cumulative.… So while undoubtedly much of Iraq’s history was authoritarian, there also were rays of democratic hope.”16 As Iraq struggles to avoid slipping back into either tyranny or anarchy under the burden of primordial loyalties, it is worth keeping in mind that from 1921 through 1958 it did know a functioning democracy of sorts. Moreover, geography itself is subject to different interpretations. With all of Mesopotamia’s proclivity for human division, as Marshall Hodgson makes us aware, such a state, in fact, is not wholly artificial, and does have a basis in antiquity. The very panel of cultivation generated by the Tigris and Euphrates makes for one of the Middle East’s signal demographic and environmental facts.

  Still, any Iraqi democracy that emerges in the second decade of the twenty-first century is going to be uncertain, corrupt, inefficient, and considerably unruly, with political assassinations possibly a regular part of life. In short, a democratic Iraq, despite prodigious petroleum wealth and an American-trained military, will be a weak state at least in the near term. And its feuding politicians will reach out for financial and political support to contiguous powers—principally Iran and Saudi Arabia—and, as a consequence, become to some extent playthings of them. Iraq could become again a larger version of civil war–wracked Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s. Because the stakes are so large in Iraq—those in power will have corrupt access to the incredible oil wealth—the infighting, as we have seen, will be severe and persistent. A pro-Western outpost in the heart of the Arab world requires the state to be internally strong. There is little sign of that yet.

  A weakened Mesopotamia would seem to represent an opportunity for another demographic or natural resource hub of the Arab world to assume prestige and leadership. But it is difficult to see in what direction that will come. The Saudis are by nature nervous, hesitant, and vulnerable, because of their own immense oil wealth coupled with a relatively small population that, nevertheless, is characterized by hordes of male youth prone to both radicalization and a yearning for democratization—the same cohort that we have seen spark revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. The post-Mubarak era in Egypt, which has the Arab world’s largest population, will feature governments whose energies, democratic or not, will be devoted to consolidating control internally, and attending to the demographic challenges that are associated with the headwaters of the White and Blue Niles being located in the two Sudans and Ethiopia. (Ethiopia, with 83 million people, has an even larger population than Egypt, while both northern and southern Sudan have over 40 million. Struggles over water use will increasingly burden all these governments in the twenty-first century.) It is the very weakness of the Arab world that Turkey and Iran, with their appeals to the larger Muslim Umma, will seek to take advantage of.

  This weakness is not only expressed by post-invasion Iraq, but by Syria, too. Syria is another critical geographic pole of the Arab world—both in medieval and modern times. Indeed, it laid claim to being the Cold War era’s throbbing heart of Arabism.

  Leaving the Taurus Mountains in a southeastward direction in 1998, and descending steeply from Asia Minor into the Syrian plain—punctuated by pine and olive trees with the occasional limestone hill—I left behind a confident and industrialized society in Turkey, its nationalism bolstered by the geographical logic of the Black Sea to the north, the Mediterranean to the south and west, and mountain fastnesses to the east and southeast. In this natural fortress, Islam had been subsumed within the rubric of democracy. But now I entered an artificial piece of territory on a sprawling desert, held together only by Baathist ideology and an attendant personality cult. Photos of President Hafez al-Assad on every shop window and car windshield defaced the landscape. Geography did not determine Syria’s destiny—or Turkey’s—but it was a starting point.

  Geography and history tell us that Syria, with a population of twenty million, will continue to be the epicenter of turbulence in the Arab world. Aleppo in northern Syria is a bazaar city with greater historical links to Mosul and Baghdad in Iraq than to Damascus, Syria’s capital. Whenever Damascus’s fortunes declined, Aleppo recovered its greatness. Wandering through the souks of Aleppo, it is striking how distant and irrelevant Damascus seems. Aleppo’s souks are dominated by Kurds, Turks, Circassians, Arab Christians, Armenians, and others, unlike the Damascus souk, which is more a world of Sunni Arabs. As in Pakistan and the former Yugoslavia, in Syria each sect and religion is associated with a specific geographical region. Between Aleppo and Damascus is the increasingly Islamist Sunni heartland of Homs and Hama. Between Damascus and the Jordanian border are the Druze, and in the mountain stronghold contiguous to Lebanon are the Alawites, both remnants of a wave of Shiism from Persia and Mesopotamia that a thousand years ago swept over Syria. Free and fair elections in 1947, 1949, and 1954 exacerbated these divisions by dividing the vote along regional, sectarian, and ethnic lines. The late Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970 after twenty-one changes of government in the previous twenty-four years. For three decades he was the Leonid Brezhnev of the Arab world, staving off the future by failing to build a civil society at home. Whereas Yugoslavia still had an intellectual class at the time of its breakup, Syria did not, so stultifying was the elder Assad’s regime.

  During the Cold War and early Post Cold War years, Syria’s fervent pan-Arabism was a substitute for its weak identity as a state. Greater Syria was an Ottoman-era geographical term that included present-day Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel-Palestine, to which the truncated borders of the current Syrian state do great violence. This historic Greater Syria was called by Princeton scholar Philip K. Hitti “the largest small country on the map, microscopic in size but cosmic in influence,” encompassing in its geography, at the confluence of Europe, Asia, and Africa, “the history of the civilized world in miniature form.”17 Syria furnished the Greco-Roman world with some of its most brilliant thinkers, Stoics and Neoplatonists among them. Syria was the seat of the Umayyad Empire, the first Arab dynasty after Muhammad, which was larger than Rome at its zenith. And it was the scene of arguably the greatest drama in history between Islam and the West: the Crusades.

  But the Syria of recent decades has been a ghost of this great geographical and historical legacy. And the Syrians are poignantly aware of it; for, as they know, the loss of Lebanon cut off much of Syria’s outlet to the Mediterranean, from which its rich cultural depositories had breathed life. Ever since France sundered Lebanon from Syria in 1920, the Syrians have been desperate to get it back. That is why the total Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon that George W. Bush demanded in the wake of the February 2005 assassination of anti-Syrian Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri would have undermined the very political foundation of the minority Alawite regime in Damascus right then and there. The Alawites, a heterodox Shiite sect, demographically spill over into both Syria and Lebanon. An Alawite ministate in northwestern Syria is not an impossibility following the collapse of the Alawite regime in Damascus.

  In fact, following Iraq and Afghanistan, the next target of Sunni jihadists could be Syria itself: in the Syrian regime, headed through early 2012 by Bashar al-Assad, the jihadists have had an enemy that is “at once tyrannical, secular, and heretical.”18 This Alawite regime was close to Shiite Iran, and stands guilty of murdering tens of thousands of Sunni Islamists in the 1970s and 1980s. Jihadists have deep logistical familiarity with Syria—sustaining the jihad in Iraq necessitated a whole network of safe houses inside Syria. Truly, no one has a feel for what a post-authoritarian, post-Assad Syria will eventually turn out to be. How deep is sectarianism? It may not be deep at all, but once the killing starts, people revert to long-repressed sectarian identities. It may also be that a post-Assad Syria will do better than a post-Saddam Iraq, precisely because the tyranny in the former was much less severe than in the latter, making Syria a less damaged society. Traveling from Saddam’s Iraq to Assad’s Syria, as I did on occasion, was like coming up for liberal humanist air. On the oth
er hand, Yugoslavia was a more open society throughout the Cold War than its Balkan neighbors, and look at how ethnic and religious differences undid that society! The minority Alawites have kept the peace in Syria; it would seem unlikely that Sunni jihadists could do the same. They might be equally as brutal, but without the sophisticated knowledge of governance that the Alawites acquired during forty years in power.

  Of course, it does not have to turn out that way at all. For there is a sturdy geographical basis for peace and political rebirth in Syria. Remember again Hodgson: these countries such as Syria and Iraq really do have roots in agricultural terrain; they are not entirely man-made. Syria, despite its present borders, still represents the heart of the Levantine world, which means a world of multiple ethnic and religious identities united by commerce.19 The Syrian-born poet Ali Ahmad Said (known by his pen name “Adonis”) constitutes the very expression of this other Syria, with its wealth of civilizational interaction, that, as we know from the work of William McNeill, forms the core drama of history. Adonis exhorts his fellow Syrians to renounce Arab nationalism and forge a new state identity based on Syria’s very eclecticism and diversity: in effect, a twenty-first-century equivalent of early-twentieth-century Beirut, Alexandria, and Smyrna. Adonis, like the Assads, is an Alawite, but one who instead of embracing Arabism and the police state as shields for his minority status has embraced cosmopolitanism instead.20 Rather than look toward the desert, Adonis looks toward the Mediterranean, on which modern Syria, despite the loss of Lebanon, still has considerable real estate. The Mediterranean stands for an ethnic and sectarian synthesis, which is the only ideational basis for a stable democracy in Syria. McNeill, Hodgson, and Adonis really do overlap in terms of Syria’s promise.21

  The implications of this for the rest of geographical Greater Syria—Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel—are immense. Whether or not there is a jihadist revolt in Syria to follow the democratic one—in the event that a democracy worthy of Adonis does not take root—Syria appears destined to become a less centralized, and, therefore, a weaker state. And it will be one with a significant youth bulge: 36 percent of the population is fourteen years old or younger. A weakened Syria could mean the emergence of Beirut as the cultural and economic capital of Greater Syria, with Damascus paying the price for its decades-long, Soviet-like removal from the modern world. Yet with the poor, Hezbollah-trending Shiites of south Beirut continuing to gain demographic sway over the rest of that city, and Sunni Islamists having more political influence in Damascus, Greater Syria could become a far more unstable geography than it is now.

  Jordan might yet survive such an evolution, because the Hashemite dynasty (unlike the Alawite one) has spent decades building a state consciousness through the development of a unified elite. Jordan’s capital of Amman is filled with former government ministers loyal to the Jordanian monarchy—men who were not imprisoned or killed as a result of cabinet reshuffles, but who were merely allowed to become rich. But, once more, the curse is in the demographics: 70 percent of Jordan’s population of 6.3 million is urban, and almost a third are Palestinian refugees, who have a higher birth rate than the indigenous East Bankers. (As for the East Bankers themselves, the traditional relationship between the tribes and the monarchy has frayed as tribal culture has itself evolved, with pickup trucks and cellphones having long replaced camels.) Then there are the 750,000 Iraqi refugees in Jordan, making Jordan per capita the host of the largest refugee population on earth.

  Again, we are back to the truth of a closed and claustrophobic geography, according to Paul Bracken, in which the poor and crowded urban masses have had their emotions further whipped up by electronic media, according to Elias Canetti. Because of the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, we became indifferent to just how unstable are the so-called stable parts of the Middle East. We did so at our peril—as the Arab uprisings have shown. The uprisings began as expressions of yearning for civil society and individual dignity, which calcified national security regimes had robbed people of. But in the future urbanization and electronic communications could lead to less benign expressions of public rage. The crowd baying at real and perceived injustices is the new postmodern tiger that the next generation of Arab leaders will struggle to keep under control.

  I crossed the border from Jordan to Israel several times. The Jordan River valley is part of a deep rift in the earth’s surface that stretches from Syria for 3,700 miles south to Mozambique. Thus, the switchback, westering descent to the Jordan River from the biscuit-brown tableland of the Jordanian town of Irbid was dizzyingly dramatic. The road in the late 1990s was lined with dusty garages, rickety fruit stands, and knots of young men hanging about, smoking. At the bottom lay a ribbon of green fields along the river, where, on the other side, in Israel, the mountains rose just as steeply. The Jordanian border post and customs offices were a series of old cargo containers in a vacant lot. The river is narrow. You cross it in a bus in literally seconds. On the opposite side was a landscaped park separating the traffic lanes: like a traffic island anywhere in the West, but a wonder after the bleak, dust-strewn public spaces of Jordan and much of the Arab world. The Israeli immigration hall was like any small air terminal in the United States. The Israeli security men wore Timberland shirts barely tucked into their jeans to make room for their handguns. After weeks in the Arab world, these young men seemed so tradition-less. Beyond the immigration hall lay new sidewalks, benches, and tourist facilities; again, like any place in the West. And yet it was an empty, unfriendly public space; nobody was simply hanging about, as in the Arab world, where unemployment was endemic. The Israelis manning the booths were impersonal, rude. Traditional Middle Eastern hospitality was absent.22 Even though I had lived in Israel in the 1970s and had served in its military, arriving here the way I had allowed me to see it anew. Israel seemed so unnatural to the Middle East, and yet it was such a blunt, sturdy fact.

  To the entire Muslim world, at once united and enraged by mass media, the plight of the Palestinians represents a totemic injustice in the affairs of humankind. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank may not have been a visible factor in the first stages of the Arab Spring but we shouldn’t kid ourselves. The facts have, to a certain extent, become meaningless; perceptions are everything. Undergirding it all is geography. While Zionism shows the power of ideas, the battle over land between Israelis and Palestinians—between Jews and Muslims, as both the Turks and the Iranians would have it—is a case of utter geographical determinism.

  “Jews will very soon become a minority in the lands they occupy or rule from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean (by some calculations this has already happened), and some demographers forecast that in fifteen years they will make up as little as 42 percent of the population in this area.” So wrote Benjamin Schwarz, the national editor of The Atlantic, in that magazine in 2005, in an article entitled “Will Israel Live to 100?” Since then little has changed to affect those calculations, or his dispassionate analysis. The birth rate in the occupied Arab territories is ludicrously higher than in Israel: in Gaza, population growth is double that of Israel, with the average woman having more than five children over her adult lifetime. Consequently, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a consensus emerged within the Israeli political, military, and intelligence communities that Israel must withdraw from virtually all of the occupied territories or become an essentially Apartheid-like state—if not immediately, then over time. The result was “the fence”: an Israeli-built barrier that effectively seals off Israel from the demographically expanding and impoverished Palestinian population in the West Bank. Arnon Soffer, an Israeli geographer, calls the fence “a last desperate attempt to save the state of Israel.” But Jewish settlements close to the Green Line in the occupied territories may, as Schwarz writes, “have roots too deep and may well be too integral to the daily life of too many Israelis to be forsaken.”23 And then there is the basic principle and premise of Palestinian ideology, the “right of return�
�: which applies to the 700,000 Palestinians displaced from Israel upon its birth and their descendants, a population that may now number five million. In 2001, 98.7 percent of Palestinian refugees dismissed compensation in place of the right of return. Finally, there are the Israeli Arabs to consider: those living within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. While the population growth among Israeli Jews is 1.4 percent, among Israeli Arabs it is 3.4 percent: the median age of Jews is thirty-five; that of Arabs is fourteen.

  In a rational world, one might hope for a peace treaty between Israelis and Palestinians in which the Israelis would cede back the occupied territories and disband most settlements, and the Palestinians would give up the right of return. In such a circumstance, a Greater Israel, at least as an economic concept, would constitute a regional magnet on the Mediterranean toward which not only the West Bank and Gaza, but Jordan, southern Lebanon, and southern Syria including Damascus would orient themselves. But few peoples seem psychologically further apart as of this writing, and so divided amongst themselves—and, therefore, politically immobilized—as Israelis and Palestinians. One can only hope that the political earthquake in the Arab world in 2011 and early 2012 will prod Israel into making pivotal territorial concessions.

  The Middle East hangs on a thread of fateful human interactions, the more so because of a closed and densely packed geography. Geography has not disappeared in the course of the revolutions in communications and weaponry; it has simply gotten more valuable, more precious, to more people.

  In such a world, universal values must be contingent on circumstances. We pray for the survival of a Hashemite Jordan and a united post-Assad Syria, even as we pray for the end of the mullahs’ dictatorship in Iran. In Iran, democracy is potentially our friend, making Greater Iran from Gaza to Afghanistan a force for good rather than for evil. Thus might the calculus in the entire Middle East be shifted; thus might Hezbollah and Hamas be tamed, and Israeli-Palestinian peace prospects improved. But in Jordan, it is hard to imagine a more moderate and pro-Western regime than the current undemocratic monarchy. Likewise, democracy in Saudi Arabia is potentially our enemy. In Syria, democracy should come incrementally; lest the political organization of Greater Syria be undone by Sunni jihadists, as happened in Mesopotamia between 2006 and 2007.