Halliday: A long view of Middle East politics

Fred Haillday, distinguished British scholar of the Middle East, puts the Iraq debacle in longer-term context:

For all the dangers of speculating on the long-run significance of recent events, it is at least plausible to say that the United States invasion of Iraq in that year, with all its consequences within Iraq and the region, may prove to be as important an event as 1967 and, in some respects, on a par with the reordering of the region after 1918. It has already set in train six major processes, which will take years to work themselves through:

• the wholesale discrediting of the US, its allies, particularly Britain, and any campaign for the promotion of democracy in the Arab world;
• the unleashing across the middle east, and more broadly within the Muslim world, of a revitalised militant Islamism, inspired if not organised by al-Qaida, which has used the Iraq war greatly to strengthen and internationalise its appeal;
• the shattering of the power and authority of the Iraqi state, built by the British and later hardened by the Ba'athists and the fragmentation of Iraq into separate, antagonistic, ethnic and religious zones;
• the explosion, for the first time in modern history, of internecine war between Sunni and Shi'a in Iraq, a trend that reverberates in other states of mixed confessional composition;
• the alienation of all sectors of Turkish politics from the west and the stimulation of an authoritarian nationalism there of a kind not seen since the 1920s;
• the fomenting, albeit in slow motion and with some constraints, of a new regional rivalry, between two groupings: Iran and its allies (including Syria, Hizbollah and Hamas), versus Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan - a rivalry made all the more ominous and contagious by Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

This is, in Abdelrahman Munif's words, very much a quaking era. People, within the region and without, are alert to the distant thunder; they do most certainly await the morrow with dread. As should all of us. "Mission accomplished" indeed.

This war will continue to haunt us long after the date when US forces withdraw from Iraq, if they ever do.