The Firestorm Ahead

By Immanuel Wallerstein

Middle East Online - First Published 2009-09-01

Distributed by Agence Global

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=34025


There is a firestorm ahead in the Middle East for which
neither the US government nor the US public is
prepared. They seem scarcely aware how close it is on
the horizon or how ferocious it will be. The US
government (and therefore almost inevitably the US
public) is deluding itself massively about its capacity
to handle the situation in terms of its stated
objectives. The storm will go from Iraq to Afghanistan
to Pakistan to Israel/Palestine, and in the classic
expression "it will spread like wildfire."

Let us start with Iraq. The United States has signed a
Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Iraq, which went
into effect on July 1. It provided for turning over
internal security to the Iraqi government and, in
theory, essentially restricting US forces to their
bases and to some limited role in training Iraqi
troops. Some of the wording of this agreement is
ambiguous. Deliberately so, since that was the only way
both sides would sign it.

Even the first months of operation show how poorly this
agreement is operating. The Iraqi forces have been
interpreting it very strictly, formally forbidding both
joint patrols and also any unilateral US military
actions without prior detailed clearance with the
government. It has gotten to the point that Iraqi
forces are stopping US forces from passing checkpoints
with supplies during daytime hours.

The US forces have been chafing. They have tried to
interpret the clause guaranteeing them the right of
self-defense far more loosely than the Iraqi forces
want. They are pointing to the upturn in violence in
Iraq and therefore implicitly to the incapacity of
Iraqi forces to guarantee order.

The general commanding the US forces, Ray Odierno, is
obviously extremely unhappy and is patently scheming to
find excuses to reestablish a direct US role. Recently,
he met with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq and
President Masoud Barzani of the Kurdish Regional
Government. Odierno sought to persuade them to permit
tripartite (Iraqi/Kurdish/American) joint patrols in
Mosul and other areas of northern Iraq, in order to
prevent or minimize violence. They politely agreed to
consider his proposal. Unfortunately for Odierno, his
plan would require a formal revision of the SOFA
agreement.

Originally, there was supposed to be a referendum in
the beginning of July on popular approval of the SOFA
agreement. The United States was afraid of losing the
vote, which would have meant that all US forces would
have had to be out of Iraq by Dec. 31, 2010, one full
year earlier than the theoretical date in the SOFA
agreement.

The United States thought it was very clever in
persuading al-Maliki to postpone this referendum to
January 2010. Now it will be held in conjunction with
the national elections. In the national elections,
everyone will be seeking to obtain votes. No one is
going to be campaigning in favor of a "yes" vote on the
referendum. Lest this be in any doubt, al-Maliki is
submitting a project to the Iraqi parliament that will
permit a simple majority of "no" votes to annul the
agreement. There will be a majority of "no" votes.
There may even be an overwhelming majority of "no"
votes. Odierno should be packing his bags now. I'll bet
he still has the illusion that he can avoid the onset
of the firestorm. He can't.

What will happen next? At the present, but this may
change between now and January, it looks like al-Maliki
will win the election. He will do this by becoming the
number one champion of Iraqi nationalism. He will make
deals with all and sundry on this basis. Iraqi
nationalism at the moment doesn't have much to do with
Iran or Saudi Arabia or Israel or Russia. It means
first of all liberating Iraq from the last vestiges of
US colonial rule, which is how almost all Iraqis define
what they have been living under since 2003.

Will there be internal violence in Iraq? Probably,
though possibly less than Odierno and others expect.
But so what? Iraqi "liberation" -- which is what the
entire Middle East will interpret a "no" vote on the
referendum to be -- will immediately have a great
impact on Afghanistan. There people will say, if the
Iraqis can do it, so can we.

Of course, the situation in Afghanistan is different,
very different, from that of Iraq. But look at what is
going on now with the elections in Afghanistan. We have
a government put into power to contain and destroy the
Taliban. The Taliban have turned out to be more
tenacious and militarily effective than any one seemed
ever to anticipate. Even the tough US commander there,
Stanley McChrystal, has recognized that. The US
military is now talking of "succeeding" in perhaps a
decade. Soldiers who think they have a decade to win a
war against insurgents have clearly not been reading
military history.

Notice the Afghan politicians themselves. Three leading
candidates for the presidency, including President
Hamid Karzai, debated on television the current
internal war. They agreed on one thing. There must be
some kind of political negotiations with the Taliban.
They differed on the details. The US (and NATO) forces
are there ostensibly to destroy the Taliban. And the
leading Afghan politicians are debating how to come to
political terms with them. There is a serious
disjuncture here of appreciation of realities, or
perhaps of political objectives.

The polls -- for what they are worth -- are showing
that the majority of Afghans want the NATO forces to
leave and the majority of US voters want the same
thing. Now look ahead to January 2010, when the Iraqis
vote the United States out of Iraq. Remember that,
before the Taliban came to power, the country was the
site of fierce and ruthless fighting among competing
warlords, each with different ethnic bases, to control
the country.

The United States was actually relieved when the
Pakistani-backed Taliban took power. Order at last.
There turned out to be a minor problem. The Taliban
were serious about sharia and friendly to the emergent
al-Qaeda. So, after 9/11, the United States, with west
European approval and United Nations sanction, invaded.
The Taliban were ousted from power -- for a little
while.

What will happen now? The Afghans will probably revert
to the nasty continuing inter-ethnic wars of the
warlords, with the Taliban just one more faction. The
US public's tolerance for that war will evaporate
entirely. All the internal factions and many of the
neighbors (Russia, Iran, India, and Pakistan) will
remain to fight over the pieces.

And then stage three -- Pakistan. Pakistan is another
complicated situation. But none of the players there
trust the United States. And the polls there show that
the Pakistani public thinks that the greatest danger to
Pakistan is the United States, and that by an
overwhelming vote. The traditional enemy, India, is far
behind the United States in the polls. When Afghanistan
crumbles into a full-fledged civil war, the Pakistani
army will be very busy supporting the Taliban. They
cannot support the Taliban in Afghanistan while
fighting them in Pakistan. They will no longer be able
to accept US drones bombing in Pakistan.

So then comes stage four of the firestorm --
Israel/Palestine. The Arab world will observe the
collapse of US projects in Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Pakistan. The US project in Israel/Palestine is a peace
deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The
Israelis are not going to budge an inch. But neither
now, and especially after the rest of the firestorm,
are the Palestinians. The one consequence will be the
enormous pressure that other Arab states will put upon
Fatah and Hamas to join forces. This will be over
Mahmoud Abbas's dead body -- which might literally be
the case.

The whole Obama program will have gone up in flames.
And the Republicans will make hay with it. They will
call US defeat in the Middle East "betrayal" and it is
obvious now that there is a large group inside the
United States very receptive to such a theme.

One either anticipates firestorms and does something
useful, or one gets swept up in them.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale
University, is the author of The Decline of American
Power: The US in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright c2009 Immanuel Wallerstein

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Rodney D. Coates
Professor of Sociology and Gerontology
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio 45056
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