Non-Stop Turbulence

Robert D. Kaplan, The Wall Street Journal:

Between the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in 2003 the political geography of the Middle East remained mostly fixed in the Cold War ice. Vast social, demographic and economic changes that swept through the region for decades barely registered upon its highly centralized dictatorships, run by emergency laws enacted as far back as the 1950s. By leveling one of these regimes, and then brazenly confronting the insurgency that followed, President George W. Bush has set the other regimes in motion for the first time in half a century. Democracy doesn't begin to describe the changes that will follow, as the geographic realities of older eras reassert themselves. READ MORE

Certainly, democracy has turned out to be a more potent force for change in the region than many analysts -- myself included -- had suspected. Whereas students in Lebanon used to interpret freedom in terms of Sunni Arab nationalism, they now do so in terms of the democratic revolution in Ukraine. But the weakening of old dictatorships will bring into question the integrity of some of these states themselves, which have survived without turmoil only through the discipline imposed by internal security services.

Indeed, rather than Iraq, it could be Syria that ends up collapsing. Syria's pan-Arabism was a substitute for its weak identity as a state. Greater Syria was an Ottoman era geographical expression that included present-day Lebanon, Jordan and Israel-Palestine, to which the truncated borders of the current Syrian state do great violence. Ever since France sundered Lebanon from Syria in 1920, the Syrians have been desperate to get it back. The total Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon -- that President Bush is demanding -- will undermine the very political foundation of the minority Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad, whose own ethnic group spills over into both countries and whose political survival depends on proving that he is a better Syrian nationalist than the majority Sunnis.

Syria is but a Levantine version of the former-Yugoslavia -- without the intellectual class which that other post-Ottoman state could claim at the time of its break-up (since Hafez al-Assad's rule was so much more stultifying than Tito's). In Syria, as in the former Yugoslavia, each sect and religion has a specific geography. Aleppo in the north is a bazaar city with greater historical links to Mosul and Baghdad than to Damascus. Between Aleppo and Damascus is the increasingly Islamist Sunni heartland. Between Damascus and the Jordanian border are the Druze. Free and fair elections in 1947, 1949 and 1954 exacerbated these divisions by dividing the vote along sectarian lines. Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970 after 21 changes of government in the previous 24 years. For three decades he was the Leonid Brezhnev of the Arab world, staving off the future while failing to build a national consciousness by virtue of a suffocating and calcifying tyranny. The question is: As President Bush humiliates Assad's son-and-successor into weakness, will Syria become a larger version of Civil War-era Lebanon?

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The implications of this for neighboring Lebanon and Jordan are vast. A weakened Syria could mean the emergence of Beirut as the cultural and economic capital of Greater Syria, with Damascus finally paying the price for its decades-long, Soviet-like removal from the modern world. Of course, Greater Syria would not be a new state, but once again a vague geographical expression as in Ottoman times.

Jordan would survive such a cataclysm better than many suppose, because the Hashemite dynasty -- unlike the Alawite one -- has spent decades building a state consciousness through the development of a unified national elite. Amman is filled with ex-government ministers loyal to the Jordanian monarchy -- people who were not imprisoned or killed as a result of cabinet reshuffles, but who were merely allowed to become rich. Jordan's problem, however, will be the integration of its urban Palestinian majority, once it feels the pull of the new Palestinian state to materialize from negotiations between Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas.

The weakening of Syria cannot bode well for its regional ally Iran , now virtually surrounded by pro-American governments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and new democracies to the north in places like Georgia. When the Shah fell in 1979 and was replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini, one strong and well-organized bureaucratic fear machine replaced another, as the Shiite clerisy -- due to its highly defined hierarchal nature -- already constituted a state within a state. But the next political evolution in Iran must lead to a weaker and less centralized polity -- opening a Pandora's box of ethnic issues in the north related to the Azeri Turks, Turkomans and others who straddle the border between Iran and the former Soviet Union.

Throughout much of history, Iran has been less a state than an amorphous empire, reflecting the richness and dynamism of Persian culture. Once Iran is liberated from the mullahs' puritanical and religious straitjacket, which has little appeal in neighboring Central Asian republics (where vodka is drunk in liberal amounts), Greater Persia could resurface in a cultural sense, even as Tehran's ability to project power contracts.

Think of the changes that would unfold from a democratic evolution in the Arab and Persian worlds as the Mexicanization of the Middle East: Rather than one-party rule with only a few men in control, there would be a whole political class of people who would need to be influenced in each country, in order for American diplomats to make progress on one issue after another. Weak states mean more work for diplomats, but not anarchy necessarily. There would be so many internal problems to keep parliaments busy that hatred of the United States would recede -- especially if such a democratic evolution happened coterminously with a Palestinian-Israeli peace deal-of-sorts.

Democratization means non-stop turbulence. To think Arabs are incapable of democracy is deterministic. But a little bit of determinism in the service of constructive pessimism is indispensable. For example, Central Europe had an easier democratic transition than the Balkans largely because of a Westernized Habsburg and Prussian tradition, associated with a large bourgeoisie, as opposed to the Balkans' more chaotic Ottoman past that featured a large peasantry. Still, compared to the Middle East, even the Balkans represent a wealthier and better governed part of the old Turkish sultanate. Therefore, not to expect trouble across the Middle East -- lots of it -- would be just as foolish as expecting that our military entry into Iraq would be met with flowers, rather than with guns.

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Neoconservatives might have been naïve about ground-level, tribalistic realities in places like Iraq, even as they have demonstrated a grasp of how globalization is affecting the region as a whole. When I last spent considerable time in Lebanon in late 1998, an intellectual here and there would talk of how the democratic upheavals in Central Europe should become the guidepost for his own country. Now such comparisons are widespread. Government-controlled media is slowly dying in the Middle East. The media replacing it -- young, inexperienced, often irresponsible, and sometimes lethal, as in al-Jazeera's case -- is releasing a genie of self-doubt and questioning out of the bottle.

Neoconservatives have intuited this, even as it will take the best Middle East experts to help manage the consequences. The tradition of America's Middle East experts (known as Arabists) is -- like that of the neoconservatives -- a Wilsonian one. In the Arabists' case, it harkens back to the founding of the American University in Beirut (AUB) in 1866, then called the Syrian Protestant College. Throughout the Cold War, Arabists fostered an appreciation for Wilsonian values at the AUB and elsewhere in the Arab world, seen at the time through the prism of the national aspirations of Sunni Arabs in Palestine. The Arabists believed that Sunni Arabs were just as capable of enlightened self-rule as the Israelis. The Bush administration has taken up this cause not just in Palestine, but across the region. It would be historically and philosophically ironic if the area experts at the State Department were not now in the same camp as the neoconservatives.

Mr. Kaplan, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, is the author, inter alia, of "Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus" (Vintage, 2001).