Change In The Middle East And The Future Of Iraq - Analysis
By <
http://www.eurasiareview.com/author/the-journal-of-turkish-weekly/> JTW
-- (March 21, 2013)
By Vedat Bilgin
The end of the Cold War meant that political regimes in every country of the
Middle East entered a more difficult period as far as managing their own
internal problems was concerned.
The changes which the Middle East is currently experiencing cannot simply be
explained in terms of regional conditions. These are societies which entered
a period of colonialism or semi-colonialism after World War I and the fall
of the Ottoman Empire. The process may further be said to have been
completed during the Second World War after which a different trend emerged.
It needs here to be noted that as regards politics and ideology two
important events are currently taking place. The first of these is the
movements in the Middle East seeking independence; the second is concerned
with the real nature of political ideologies, institutions, and new
political regimes. The independence movements in the Middle East emerged at
the time when the world was bipolar. When they won their independence some
of these countries established regimes in close contact with the Western
bloc in the Cold War, whereas for others political regimes came into being
which were relatively close to the Soviets or had connections with them.
A third stage for the Middle East, after the period of colonialism and
independence, opened with the collapse of the Cold War world. The events of
this period will be discussed later. It is first necessary to deal with
various institutions and events from the Cold War period whose repercussions
today continue in the Middle East to this day. Two ideological and political
currents in the Middle East which appeared in the post-colonial period are
important. The first of these are Arab National Socialist movements which
were organised around Ba'athism and the Ba'athist parties. Ba'athism can be
regarded as the idea of depriving the peoples of the Middle East of their
historical and cultural identity and re-establishing them along Western
lines and as such it may be regarded as authoritarian Arab Westernisation
and therefore mainly the ruling ideology of bureaucratic-military groups. We
say 'ruling ideology' because coups and juntas, other than those military
elements who adopt these ideologies and organise on the basis of them, have
generally found it hard to establish long-lasting rule.
The second important ideological and political formation in the Middle East
has grown up around the idea of an Islamic revolution. During the Cold War,
Iran tried to export the Islamic revolutionary model to the whole Middle
East. This approach led the existing authoritarian governments to tighten up
and caused traditionalist authoritarian regimes, i.e. ones whose form of
government was kingdoms or emirates or sheikhdoms, to become more repressive
and more authoritarian.
In the political picture of the Middle East no country other than Turkey
which was relatively open to democratic values and where popular preferences
played a role in politics as the dynamic of change. So the countries with
closed regimes saw things in terms which were quite remote from basic human
rights and liberties and thus utilized the state as an instrument of
ideological and political repression in a fashion which excluded the people
completely from power.
In short one might ask how, in this picture of the Middle East which we have
just sketched out, any kind of change could happen and how it is happening.
Put another way, one needs to understand the condition for change emerging
here and the process which has brought them into being.
If we look at the problem in the context of Iraq, we see that, as with many
countries, no matter how internally closed the political regimes of the
Middle East may be, the existence of an economic resource, such as petrol
and natural gas, connecting them with the outside world or more correctly
opening the rest of the world to them exerts an inevitable influence. In one
sense, energy resources are a dynamic force for potential change which might
render the survival of the Middle East's close regimes either possible or
impossible.
So when energy resources were being administered in the Middle East, if a
country did so by keeping its relations with the West in step with the
interests of the West, that did have the effect of helping the dictatorships
to continue, as happened in Iraq, but if a country slipped into
confrontation with the West or a disagreement with it or experienced a
problem, that would trigger changes which would make the survival of the
dictatorship impossible.
It should not be forgotten that the West did not stop just at regulating and
assessing energy resources and asking to use them, it also viewed its own
future and the perspective of its security and interests as indispensable
for the continuation of these relations.
It is because of this that striking developments took place in the societies
of the Middle East in the wake of the Cold War. There can be no doubt that
with the ending of the Cold War, the political regimes of all these
countries entered a period in which their own domestic problems became more
unmanageable. In the period that began with the destruction of the Berlin
Wall, a system of priorities now arose all across the world which reflected
a scale of values based on the concepts of democracy, liberties, and human
rights. All the socialist regimes within the former bipolar, beginning with
Poland evolved into democracies, but this, it needs to be understood, made
the repressive systems of somewhat similar closed "national socialist"
regimes much more isolated. The trouble which cased these regimes to
experience problems in carrying on with their economic with the West in
harmony at the military and regional level emerged as a result of this. The
USA and the West no longer needed to preserve the balances of the Cold War
and allies, and so the prospect increased that they might interfere in
various ways with any countries they had problems with, i.e. ones with whom
their good relations had turned into confrontation.
Very important events occurred in Iraq between the American occupation and
the present. The first of these events was the establishment of the Kurdish
Regional Government in Northern Iraq; second was the steady increase of the
influence of the Shi'a majority in Northern Iraq. The third is the growth of
national feeling below the surface in Iraq and the possibility of creating a
new kind of integration.
In the first stage a new government system was established in Northern Iraq
by relying on organisations based on tribal and clan structures which had
traditionally struggled against the Ba'ath regime in Iraq. This was not
difficult since it had the support of the occupying powers. The difficult
part was for this administration to recreate political ties linking it with
Iraq as whole.
The second issue was to secure a transition in Iraq from a closed regime
i.e. that of the Arab National Socialism to democracy based on elections and
to construct a politically pluralistic regime in a social order dependent on
religious majorities.
The third question, that of the Iraqi identity, arises from the country's
experience in becoming a national community. One should not overlook the
possible contribution of various dynamic factors in this process. These are
(1) the awareness of a local identity stimulated by the occupation and the
need for the liberation of the fatherland and living in freedom on Iraqi
soil; (2) the high probability that dividing the economic resources of the
country or dividing the on the basis of religious and ethnic identity would
be impossible in practice and lead to new problems; (3) ultimately,
establishing the new system which was needed after the occupation, to
rebuilding the cities, reviving markets, and getting the economy going
despite all the problems of Iraqi society. We can summarize these as
prioritizing the process of democratization linked to these factors and
consequently emphasising the need for a new political identity transcending
creed and ethnic identity but linked to these dynamic forces.
One must view the change which the Middle East is undergoing as depending on
each country getting to grips with its own internal problems but even more
than this, interacting with global and regional processes. The global
process, it needs to be emphasized, is creating a comprehensive network,
stretching from technology to economics, and from international relations to
financial movements. The regional process is modernisation in all its
aspects and Turkey is at its centre. Consequently I think that it would not
be simply optimistic to say that each Middle Eastern society is shaping its
response to its own internal problems and opportunities by interacting with
these external dynamic processes. It could also reflect the potentiality for
change existing in their social realities.
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Received on Thu Mar 21 2013 - 19:08:30 EDT
