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[tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>]

tvoivozhd---the tangled, ever-shifting alliances necessary to prevent 
Umma and the Khalifate reordering the oil-producing sector of the Arab 
World.

With the advantage of hindsight, it is now apparent the United States 
made a monumental mistake in trying to prevent the Soviets from 
defeating the Mujahedin in Afghanistan. A Soviet regime would have been 
vastly preferable to educating and equipping Jihadists to kill Americans 
wherever they make an appearance in the Middle East


Lines in the sand: Western state building in the muslim world - 
01/26/2005 13:38

Modern day maps of the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia reflect 
a pattern and a principle ingrained in the foreign policies of major 
European, and now American, powers -- the existence of numerous 
sovereign Muslim countries.

While wars and invasions against Muslim states by outside powers have 
taken place in the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, none of 
such major military and political moves in the last several decades 
sought to redraw boundaries or radically change the modern map of the 
Islamic world.

Today's Muslim states -- countries where Islam is a majority religion 
adhered to by the overwhelming percentage of the population -- emerged 
on the ruins of the last major Muslim power -- Ottoman Turkey, and as a 
result of the dissolution of British India. Following the end of WWI, 
and later on, in 1947, young nation-states emerged in place of the 
centuries-old established order and principles. For many decades, 
Western European powers, the United States and the Soviet Union all 
promoted the emergence of these states onto the world arena, and 
supported them based on their own political, military or economic 
interests. Assistance to these states as separate political units drove 
the diverse foreign policies of the major powers after both world wars, 
during the Cold War, and in the current unipolar environment.

Muslim States: Past and Present

Taking a look at the modern map of the Islamic world reveals a rather 
strange picture. In North Africa, and the Middle East, actual boundaries 
of states hardly correspond to the historical, cultural and ethnic 
make-ups of these regions. The prevalence of straight lines on the map 
that cut the Saharan or Arabian Deserts into independent states is just 
that -- lines in the sand. They divide tribes, clans, families and their 
corresponding histories and aspirations in an arbitrary manner.

In some cases, all that is required to cross from one North African or 
Arabian state to the next is to walk over a sand dune. In a region where 
natural boundaries such as mountains, rivers, valleys or seas are 
largely absent, the new "borders" came to represent independent Libya, 
Egypt, Algeria or Jordan. People living on the border areas of these 
states are hardly aware of the fact that they live across another 
country. Likewise, in South Asia, Pakistan and India are divided by 
hastily-designed borders that have been the source of conflict between 
these two states for the last five decades.

The powers that divided the Islamic world into modern states sought to 
preserve their own influence. British, French and Italian colonial 
holdings had to be clearly defined in the newly acquired territories of 
the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. The easiest way to do this was 
to create clearly defined boundaries on the world map. The results are 
straight lines running across the deserts of Arabia and the Sahara. 
These lines, however, did not -- and still do not -- reflect the 
realities on the ground, where people were used to moving around with 
ease, unobstructed by any border checkpoints and patrols.

The Muslim concept of umma, or one's belonging to the worldwide Islamic 
community, is one of the chief principles of Islam. According to the 
Quran, every practicing Muslim's loyalty should be to his religion 
first, and to any other state or political entity second. Furthermore, a 
true believer of Islam should not follow the rules and customs of other 
governments, but instead must obey Islamic principles, as millions of 
fellow Muslims do every day.

Thus, the actual reading of certain Islamic teachings would indicate 
that Muslims living across the globe belong to the worldwide Islamic 
"nation," and not to any particular state on the map. Today's headlines 
are full of statements by some Muslim groups or individuals all over the 
world who refuse to obey the secular laws of various countries, 
preferring instead to establish Islamic rule in those very states. Many 
countries today grapple with this principle, and the state responses to 
such Islamic claims vary considerably.

Until the end of WWI, most Islamic nations were part of great Muslim 
empires. Following the demise of the Mughal and Persian empires, the 
last such empire, Ottoman Turkey, was comprised of what are now nearly 
twelve independent states of the Middle East and North Africa. It was 
once a regional hegemon and a superpower, threatening both Europe and 
Russia. The Ottoman Empire held sway over Islam by controlling two of 
the religion's holiest cities -- Mecca and Medina in present-day Saudi 
Arabia.

While internally weak, and under constant attacks from within and 
without starting with the dawn of the 18th century, the Ottoman Empire 
represented the strength and hope to millions of Muslims around the 
world. As WWI drew to a close and the dissolution of this once-great 
power was imminent, a powerful movement was born in British India, home 
to the majority of the world's Muslims at that time. The movement, 
called the Khilafat -- after the Islamic notion that a Muslim state 
unifying all the world's Muslims should exist, governed by a 
religious-political head, the khalif, or caliph -- sought to preserve 
Turkey's role as the leader of the Islamic world.

While many Muslims living under the decaying Ottoman rule did not 
support such a movement, and fought against it alongside European 
powers, the concept itself was a powerful force to millions of Muslims 
in British India. It eventually died once Turkey became a republic and 
embarked on the road to modernization in the early 1920s. Nonetheless, 
Western foreign policies since that time have been directed at 
preserving the political disunity of the Muslim world, fostering various 
political developments with the eventual aim at avoiding the resurgence 
of a powerful Islamic state that would unify hundreds of millions of 
Muslims into one political, economic and military entity.

That process was greatly assisted by the start of the Cold War and the 
American-Soviet rivalry. As the newly created Islamic states ended their 
domination by the British, French and Italian colonial powers in the 
1950s, they actively sought to protect their newly acquired independence 
from the repeat of colonial encroachment. Both the West and the Soviet 
Union were happy to oblige their new clients, supporting each one 
independently from the other. Pan-Arabic nationalism of the 1950s and 
1960s was a perfect example of such a policy, as the U.S.S.R. supported 
Egypt's nationalism, while the West invested resources to support the 
states of the Arabian Peninsula.

Elsewhere, in North Africa, states like Morocco and Algeria were seen as 
a counterweight to strong claims by Egypt for the leadership of the Arab 
world. Supporting each state separately, giving it incentives to act 
independently of others in the region, made it possible for the Western 
and Soviet world to deal with each Muslim state on its own. Pan-Arab 
national aims replaced religious Islam as a rallying cry for unity -- a 
cry that was followed by various indigenous attempts to modernize the 
Muslim world and bring it closer to Western economic and political 
standards.

While the Soviet Union actively supported secular nationalistic Egypt, 
Syria, and Libya, the United States supported secular Iran and Pakistan, 
as well as Israel and monarchic Arabian kingdoms. Conflicting political 
and economic programs by the Middle Eastern, North African and South 
Asian states replaced relative Muslim unity and cohesion that might have 
existed in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Moreover, these countries 
were drawn into economic interdependence with the West through the 
exploration and trade in oil, the chief source of fuel for the rapidly 
growing Western and Asian economies.

Modern Challenges to the West

The Iranian revolution of 1979 delivered the first shock to the 
established principles of splitting the Muslim world into separate 
political entities. While the coming to power of a theocratic government 
was not by itself shocking -- most oil-producing states of the Persian 
Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula were monarchic theocracies supported by 
the Western world -- the message and policies of the new Iranian 
government were alarming. The new rulers of Tehran sought to export 
their religious revolution to other Muslim countries and to overthrow 
the regimes that were either leaning towards, or were supported by, the 
secular, non-religious United States, Soviet Union and Western Europ.

Their motives met with relative success with the Iranian-style 
revolution in Sudan in the early 1980s, and the creation of the Lebanese 
Hizbollah movement. In effect, the Iranian theocratic government assumed 
the leadership of the movement to unify the Islamic world, hoping to rid 
it of any non-Islamic influence, or to at least unify Shi'a Muslims 
living in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. This has been Iran's 
consistent policy and while it has varied its statements and policies 
since 1979, the overall message is the same. What makes Iran more 
powerful in this scenario is the fact that it is one of the world's 
largest oil producers, and its aims are directed at the main 
oil-producing region of the world that is of immense strategic and 
economic importance to practically every industrialized country.

The second challenge to the non-Islamic governments of the West was 
Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. This time, the United States and its 
worldwide coalition responded with a powerful military operation against 
the Iraqi regime that became known as the Gulf War. Iraq's aims at that 
time were two-fold -- to achieve military hegemony in the Persian Gulf 
and to conquer a major oil-producing state in the region. Throughout the 
Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Saddam Hussein, Iraq's leader, espoused 
claims to the leadership of the Arab world, acting as the protector of 
Arab Sunni countries against a recalcitrant Iranian Shi'a regime.

At that time, many Muslim states supported Iraq as the bulwark against 
Iran. Once Iraq invaded Kuwait, the regional powers and the West saw the 
possible emergence of Iraq as a major power in control of the world's 
oil supplies. Prior to the U.S.-led military action, the Iraqi regime 
stood within striking distance of Saudi Arabia and its massive oil 
fields, a territory that would not have been able to adequately protect 
itself without outside assistance. A military attack on Iraqi forces 
became a necessary option for Western interests to prevent the emergence 
of a powerful Muslim state with the capacity to act as a possible 
unifying force in the Muslim world due to its growing military and 
economic strength.

The third challenge came in the face of al-Qaeda, a powerful worldwide 
militant organization that calls for the unity of the umma against the 
United States and the West; the overthrow of secular, military, 
political or monarchic regimes associated with the West; and the 
establishment of an Islamic khilafat, or caliphate. Al-Qaeda has been 
linked to various Muslim militant groups operating all around the world 
with similar goals.

Recently, it has been suspected of cooperating with the Iranian-backed 
Hizbollah militant organization, as well as other non-Arab groups and 
movements. This particular cooperation is significant because it marks 
the first known operational linkage across religious and ethnic lines -- 
al-Qaeda is an ultra-conservative movement adhering to the Sunni branch 
of Islam, while Hizbollah and Iran follow Shi'a Islamic teachings. This 
worldwide cooperation of this network marks a serious development that 
is already unsettling the entire Muslim world. While al-Qaeda has been 
temporarily crippled by the U.S.-led assault after the September 11 
terrorist attacks, there is no indication that it is letting up its 
efforts in the Middle East, Southeast Asia or even Europe -- in fact, 
its popularity is growing amongst the world's Muslims.

The Western response to Iranian, Iraqi and al-Qaeda threats include the 
support and cooperation with several key Muslim states, such as Egypt, 
Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. All of them receive varying degrees 
of military, logistical, economic and political support. Following the 
defeat of the Iraqi regime in 2003, the United States made public its 
desire to contain Iran and to destroy al-Qaeda. The harder that both 
al-Qaeda and Iran try to create a Muslim movement capable of challenging 
the outside world, the harder the U.S. and its partners push back in 
preserving and supporting regimes as different from each other as the 
military dictatorship in Pakistan, the Saudi monarchy or the 
quasi-military government of Egypt.

From a geopolitical standpoint, it is easier to deal with a relatively 
small state than with a large and powerful country. When Egypt sought to 
create the United Arab Republic in the 1960s by attempting to unify 
Egypt, Syria, Yemen and potentially other states in the Middle East, the 
United States supported Israel's successful military moves and 
countermoves that eventually ended the Egyptian initiative. The U.S. 
invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 did not seek to 
radically change these countries -- rather, it seeks to install a 
friendly government within the existing borders.

The current administration's drive to spread democracy in the Middle 
East does not envision the melting away of boundaries and decades-long 
political sovereignty -- rather, Washington seeks to preserve the 
existing states as they are by hopefully bringing 
democratically-oriented governments to power. This policy is driven by a 
premise that democratic states would not pose a danger to each other, 
would respect each other's sovereignty within the existing borders and 
would not easily launch war on their neighbors for a religious, 
political or ethnic purpose. The collection of pacific, but independent 
Muslim states would allow for unobstructed access to the world's oil 
resources and would preclude the emergence of a regional hegemon capable 
of upsetting the existing balance of power.

That is precisely what Iran and al-Qaeda want to avoid. The melting away 
of artificial Middle Eastern and North African boundaries that were 
imposed by now defunct governments of Western Europe would create a 
massive state with the majority Muslim population in the hundreds of 
millions and in control of the crucial oil and natural gas reserves. 
Such an outcome would effectively create another superpower on the world 
arena. There are indications that Muslim states are seeking to move 
closer to such a reality.

The creation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries 
(O.P.E.C.), a supranational organization comprised of major oil 
exporters from North Africa, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, was a 
major development in the Muslim world. It has already demonstrated its 
power by causing an oil crisis in the United States in the 1970s, and it 
could still be a powerful force affecting world governments that grow 
more dependent on oil imports. The Organization of Islamic Conference 
(O.I.C.) is another powerful organization that unifies Muslim states 
around the world.

The O.I.C. has a major influence in world affairs, since even Russia is 
seriously contemplating joining it in order to foster greater religious 
freedom for millions of its Muslim citizens. Other organizations exist 
that seek to speak with a unified Arabic, North African or Islamic 
voice. While at present these organizations are not powerful or unified 
enough to stop U.S. political and military developments, their clout is 
steadily increasing as the powers of the European Union and China -- 
both entities with a heavy reliance on oil -- grows on the world arena.

Conclusion

Given the historical progression that at one time saw powerful Islamic 
states play a major role in world developments, followed by their 
internal dissolution, later subjugation and colonization by outside 
powers, and the eventual emergence as many distinct entities with 
varying degrees of religious, political and military governance, today's 
Islamic world presents a fragmented picture within artificial political 
boundaries. If the world's current dependence on oil continues to grow 
-- as recent reports about China's oil consumption seem to indicate -- 
many Muslim states will assume greater clout in world affairs, making it 
harder to treat each of them separately as distinct "identities" 
vis-Ю-vis other states.

The latest developments in the "war on terrorism" point to unifying 
movements in the Islamic world, either with Iran's help or under the 
banner of al-Qaeda and its allies -- a more coordinated attack on 
Western principles and Western interests in the Muslim world that cut 
across the religious and ethnic divides. While U.S. efforts in Iraq have 
faltered since 2003, the January 30 Iraqi election following a 
relatively successful election in Afghanistan will prove to be one of 
the turning points in the development of the Islamic world, which will 
either accept and foster the Western model and emerge as a collection of 
distinct and friendly states, or will finally break under the pressure 
of Iran and al-Qaeda and begin to emerge as a unified religious, 
political and military entity, heralding a new chapter in world history.

Yevgeny Bendersky


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