PHILADELPHIA, November 5 (RIA Novisti) — If you were trying to imagine a group specifically designed to make a position of strict non-interventionism look ridiculous you could do a lot worse than ISIS, a group of violent fanatics espousing medieval religious views and with a nasty tendency of decapitating anyone who voices disagreement. ISIS is so mind-bendingly horrible, it brags openly about enslaving women in the territories it has captured. Even people who are highly suspicious of the efficacy of military interventions are willing to ascent to a limited campaign of airstrikes. Put in somewhat more blunt terms, if you’re not willing to use military force against ISIS, you’re not willing to use military force against anyone.
But even if we assume that military strikes against the terrorist group are justified, will they actually accomplish anything? In the very narrow sense of preventing ISIS from capturing more territory, yes. ISIS’s formerly rapid advance has already ground to a halt and despite the group’s bravado it has been losing fighters at an extremely rapid clip. Airpower isn’t an elixir, but when it is partnered with tough, determined local fighters like the Kurdish militia defending Kobane, it can be exceedingly effective at killing lightly armed troops without anti-aircraft weapons.
But the airstrikes will do nothing to address the deeper issues that have transformed Syria into such a horrific cauldron of violence and mayhem. The fundamental problem underlying the Syrian civil war, the elephant in the room that politicians from across the region have been desperately trying to ignore, is that the Syrian state has no coherent foundation.
When historians look back on the Syrian civil war, what they will find most shocking is not that it occurred but that it didn’t start much sooner. “Syria,” as even non-specialists now know, is an artificial construct, a state with European-created borders that sit ill at ease with the region’s actual ethnic and religious composition. It is a crude agglomeration of various tribes and ethnicities, people with very little in common and quite a lot that distinguishes them from one another.
What has made the war so intractable, what has persistently prevented any and all attempts to bring it to a negotiated closure, is that Syria isn’t an exception: virtually every other state in the region has a similar problem in terms of ethnic and religious diversity. “Iraq” and “Jordan” didn’t exist in their present forms until after the First World War. Even Turkey, which at first glance would appear to be on much more solid footing, had never previously existed within its current borders.
The rational solution to Syria’s civil war, the one that a political scientist operating without political constraints would dream up, would be to cut it up into several separate countries in much the same way that Bosnia-Herzegovina was partitioned after its own horrific civil war: Alawites would get their own state (or state-like entity) as would Sunni Muslims and Kurds.
Once this process started, though, it would cascade like a tsunami throughout the rest of the region. If Syrian Kurds were able to get their own state, why couldn’t Iraqi Kurds or, for that matter, Turkish Kurds? If Sunni Alawites could have a government, by what logical principle would Shiites in Lebanon be denied their own? The answer, of course, is that there is none, and that minority groups across the region (seeing the independence won by their counterparts in Syria) would be energized and emboldened. It’s true that the process would be exceedingly messy, but in the long haul it’s difficult to see how these groups would be denied: the logic of self-determination is too overwhelming.
Politicians in the region understand this logic all too well, and know that once it got moving there would be no stopping the process of political devolution that I’ve outlined above. This is why they all persist in the illusion that, given the right mix of carrots and sticks, Syria can somehow be stitched back together: to acknowledge otherwise would be to accelerate a process that they know would end in the dissolution of their own states.
As European history attests, the process of creating relatively homogenous nation states is a lengthy and violent one: the continent’s current stability and its more-or-less normal borders were purchased at a cost of millions of lives. It’s terrible, but it’s worth recalling that the “problem” of national minorities in Europe wasn’t solved through any kind of sophisticated political compromise but by the physical transportation of people from one place to another. Does the Middle East have to repeat a similar process? I’m not sure, but given the region’s extremely low levels of economic and social development it’s difficult to find rational reasons why it would be able to perform better than Europe did when it was much wealthier.
As terrible as the current war in Syria is, it looks set to be the region’s “new normal,” at least until a process of sub-national consolidation has started in earnest.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official position of Sputnik.
