THE LYMAN REPORT: WARS WITHOUT END

by Ray Lyman

 

 

The modern Middle East was born on October 1, 1918, when the Arab irregulars under Prince Faisal and British Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence, backed by an Australian cavalry corps, entered the city of Damascus, effectively ending the 600 year Caliphate of the Ottoman Sultans in Constantinople. Few military triumphs have had such long-lasting and profound effects, not only on the region but also on the entire world. The echoes of Lawrence’s camel-riding guerrillas, festooned in traditional Bedouin robes and bandoleers of ammunition, on the cobblestone streets of what was then one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world are heard today from Washington and Moscow to Baghdad and Tehran. A month after the fall of Damascus, the remnants of the Ottoman and German forces in the Middle East were driven from Syria into the Ottoman heartland of Anatolia, or Asia Minor, which would become the modern state of Turkey in 1923. It was the ignominious end of a great empire that had once held dominion over conquests stretching from Morocco to Armenia and from Yemen to the gates of Vienna on the Danube.

 

 

When multicultural empires decline, recede, and fall — whether Persian, Roman, Habsburg, Romanov, Soviet, or Ottoman — what remains in the wake is a power vacuum that inevitably is filled by some other powers or would-be powers. In the Arab Middle East of 1918, the initial successor powers were the victors of World War I, Great Britain and France, which had already, and long since, carved the region into zones of influence so that neither would step on the toes of the other after the hostilities with the Central Powers had ceased. A few crumbs were tossed to the Greeks and Italians, but by and large the lion’s share of the spoils were reserved for the British and French under the terms of the Sykes-Picot agreement, signed by both parties in 1916. The French found themselves occupying Syria and Lebanon, where they had traditional interests as protectors of Christian minorities, and the British gained influence over far more valuable and oil-rich Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf emirates and, less fortuitously, the mandate over Palestine, which by 1919 was already proving more trouble than it was worth.

The leaders of the Arab Revolt of 1916–18 had been promised rather passionately by Colonel T.E. Lawrence and in more vague terms by General Sir Edmund Allenby, the Allied commander in the Middle East theatre, that Great Britain would honor and satisfy the aspirations of Arab nationalists and the greed and ambitions of the Hashemite princes in the Hejaz (today the Red Sea coastline of Saudi Arabia) for thrones on which to rule over other Arab tribes. They made similar promises to the Zionist Jews with the Balfour Declaration of 1917. All of which was done in 1916 and 1917, when the war was far from won and the Allies needed the help of anyone who would provide it, whether it was from an Arab revolt in the Hejaz or Zionist financiers in London and Paris. As much as they were able, the British government tried to keep those wartime promises while at the same time protecting British interests in the region, which meant permanent military bases, like the Royal Air Force base at Habbiniyah in Iraq’s Anbar Province, and control of oil resources, vital to the Royal Navy’s supremacy at sea.

 

None of the parties was satisfied by the decisions made in cabinet rooms in London and at the Versailles Peace Conference in Paris. In 1922, British map makers under Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill created the brand-new nations that currently, at least on maps, still make up the Middle East. Churchill and his geographers invented such artificial countries as the Emirate of Transjordan (the present Kingdom of Jordan), Iraq, and Kuwait from the former Arab provinces of the defunct Ottoman Empire. The Hashemite princes, Abdullah and Feisal, were placed on the thrones of Transjordan and Iraq at the very same time as the Hashemite tribes were losing power in what was then known simply as Arabia to the Islamic fundamentalist House of Saud, a Wahhabi tribe that had avoided involvement in the Arab revolt against the Turks. This 1925 victory of the Saudis over the Hashemite tribes and capture of Mecca by Sheik Ibn Saud is one of the lesser-known decisive battles of history.

In 1932, the Saudi Sheik Ibn Saud, the conqueror of the Hejaz, established the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a nation under strict Islamic law. The king wasted no time before inviting geologists from American oil companies to look for oil deposits in his realm. What they discovered, after four years of exploration, under all that sand was enough petroleum to make his kingdom one of the wealthiest per capita nation states on Earth. After 1945, as the once bottomless oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma started to run dry (long before anyone discovered fracking or developed shale deposits), the American oil companies joined with the Saudis to form Aramco, the American Arabian Oil Company, to exploit those vast oil reserves for a petroleum-addicted postwar world. The Americans provided the technology and expertise and the Saudis the oil and the labor. This marriage worked out for a quarter century until the Saudis nationalized the company after the 1973 oil embargo.

The rulers of Saudi Arabia have since played a careful game in the region as any rich autocrats must do if they lack the population and nationalism to become a really formidable military power. The cornerstone of their security is the de facto security guarantee they have from the United States. In exchange for keeping the petroleum flowing without interruption to the West, the Americans since the late 1970s have defended the Saudis from their powerful and covetous enemies. In the 1980s, that enemy was the Soviet Union and its regional clients, in 1990 the enemy was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and since then Shia Iran and now the ISIL quasi-state that is emerging in western Syria and northern Iraq. Any threat to Western access to the petroleum of the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia is a casus belli or and automatic red line for the United States and will likely be a red line for war 30 years from now. No matter who resides in the White House, no American president can ever allow that flow of petroleum to stop for more than a few days. The global economy depends on this, and although no official spokesman in Washington can come out and say this publicly, that is a major reason we are bombing ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant; also called ISIS) targets right now and may bomb Iran’s nuclear centrifuges in the future.

 

 

History’s forgotten loser from the 1919–1922 division of Middle East pie was the Kurds. If any ethnic minority needs a state of their own, far more than Palestinian Arabs, it is the Kurds, who live as persecuted and hated minorities in Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran, and the Transcaucasia region. They have been massacred, deported, gassed, and generally suppressed by some of the worst players in the region, including the Stalinist Soviets, Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, the Turkish army, and now the ISIL Islamic State, which has a compelling urge to kill any and all not in strict conformity to its totalitarian religious ideology. After a century as a dispersed people without a state, the Kurds seem to finally be getting a country to call their own in northern Iraq. No one has officially recognized the independence of Kurdistan, but it is here to stay and has, for all practical purposes, been an autonomous ethnic region of Iraq since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. The emergence of Kurdistan, the most pro-American state (aside from Israel and perhaps Georgia) in that part of the world, may be the only positive event to come out of the current upheaval. Few if any U.S. military or coalition personnel were killed in the Kurdish province during the Iraqi insurgency, which says a great deal about how important a regional ally it can be in the future.

Iraq — that artificial construct of Shias in the south, Sunni tribes in the center, and Kurds in the north — has ceased to exist. There are no king’s men nor a coalition army of the willing to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The fanatic legions of ISIL have revealed the artificial Iraqi state to be a sham, with a U.S.-trained and -equipped army that, except for a handful of elite units, has no loyalty to the state it serves, most of the soldiers wearing the uniform to collect a regular paycheck. While a national unity government has been formed to try to salvage the sinking ship of state, it is a case of too little too late. Dislodging ISIL from its control over the cities and towns in the north and west will take more than the application of airpower, which can do little more than inhibit the movement of vehicles on the roads during the day, knock out some command and control buildings, and suppress artillery and mortar fire. Since the first military use of aircraft by the Italians in Libya in 1911, there has never been a single case of aerial bombing alone taking ground from an enemy with shovels to dig holes and a will to win, which the ISIL army, for all its atrocities, has in abundance.

The overwhelming Shia majority in Baghdad will likely make it impossible for ISIL to capture that enormous city by storm, but it might succeed in cutting the city off from the south and starving it into submission. Should that happen — and it may with ISIL forces already in the suburbs of Baghdad — it will make the evacuation of Saigon in 1975 look like a routine military exercise. President Obama would be faced with the prospect of organizing the greatest evacuation by air in history or standing by watching a horrific massacre of U.S. and Western diplomats, soldiers, Iraqi Christians, Shia Muslims, and anyone who ever worked for the coalition forces or in the Green Zone. It would mean that Obama would have to put U.S. troops on the ground, a lot of them, to protect the airport and the highway from the Green Zone to Baghdad International Airport. This would also mean that U.S. ground troops would inevitably be engaged in combat with ISIL forces and there would be more casualties to add to the more than 4,300 Americans who have already died in Iraq with very little to show for the sacrifice in blood and treasure (aside from the removal of Saddam Hussein from power). It is the nightmare scenario that the White House must dread, an action that would alienate the president’s most ardent supporters, who have opposed the Iraq War since day one. Live on television, this fiasco would look like Dante’s Inferno, and the reality would not be far off from that vision.

It is perhaps time to define just what our national interests and strategic aims in the Middle East should be in the immediate future and in the next 20 years. The threat from ISIL, for all the horrors its forces perpetrate, is only one among many that we face. Our enemy, the enemy that “dare not speak its name” (with apologies to Oscar Wilde), self-identifies as Islamic, and we should acknowledge that they are so instead of simply calling them extremists, a relative term that has no meaning. Despite the assurances of Presidents Bush and Obama, Islam is not a religion of peace and never has been. The very core of Islam is jihad and has been since the death of the Prophet Mohammed in 632. This was not a religion spread by proselytizing disciples traveling through the Mediterranean, as was the Christian faith; it was a religion spread by conquering armies that barely a century after Mohammed’s death stood less a hundred miles from Paris and at the gates of the center of Byzantine power at Constantinople. This is not to say that there are no peaceful Muslims, but the faith has always advanced through war and the Koran authorizes this war against nonbelievers as jihad. The modern jihadists consider themselves at war with us, whether or not we consider ourselves at war with them. The first thing we should do is recognize that we are at war and that it will last at least through the end of this century. It is still not clear who will prevail in this longest of wars, one that may never end.

Now that we have identified the enemy, it is time to face the unpleasant truth that, like Jason in Greek mythology, we are doomed to sow dragon’s teeth and create new generations of jihadist recruits with each war we fight. For our resistance in itself is a crime against the Islamic jihad, which offers only the options of conversion to Islam, submission (dhimmitude), and death to nonbelievers. ISIL takes that one step further and simply demands conversion to its fundamentalist Sunni Islam or a cruel death by beheading or crucifixion. One has to admire ISIL’s clarity of purpose, if nothing else. In most wars that we have fought since 1775 the objective was not so much to kill the enemy as to apply enough lethal force to end his will to resist and compel the majority of his soldiers to surrender and march obligingly into POW pens. In a conflict with ISIL and other Islamic jihadists, that is not a viable objective. You have to kill or incapacitate all of them or enough of them so that the survivors are reduced to banditry. It becomes a Battle of Iwo Jima, where the Imperial Japanese garrison died almost to a man, on a global scale.

It is estimated, I think conservatively, that only 10 percent of the world’s 2.1 billion Muslims support the jihad against nonbelievers, but how many more are in sympathy and passive supporters? Another 15 to 20 percent in all probability, which means we are at war with as many as 700 million people. Wherever Islamic majority populations share a border with non-Muslim majority populations, there are wars of blood and faith. In Nigeria, Sudan, Kashmir, the Balkans, the Russian Caucasus region, and Palestine, these low-level conflicts continue decade after decade and now we are starting to see them within Western societies that find themselves with large Muslim minorities, primarily in their urban centers. Parts of Paris and London now live under virtual Sharia law, and the police and nonbelievers enter these neighborhoods at their own peril. The enemy is now within as well as without. Sooner or later, the odds almost guarantee it, a car bomb will explode in Time Square or someone will drive a truck bomb into a stadium or government building in an attempt to replicate the bombing of the Marine barracks at the Beirut airport in 1983. As with the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston, the perpetrators are very likely to be legal residents or American citizens who were radicalized at the local mosque and on the Internet. This is the brave new world in which we must learn to survive.

Our current immigration policies with regard to refugees and family unification will probably have to be modified, although I think it will require a shocking terrorist event to motivate Congress and the president to take action to protect the American people. Other than that, we will once more need to heed the advice of founding father Thomas Jefferson that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Like the British people during the 1940–41 blitz and the buzz bomb and rocket attacks of 1944–45, Americans will be forced to stay calm and carry on in the face of what will be a never-ending conflict with what are the most implacable enemies we have ever faced. And we must learn to live with overseas wars that will have no clear day of victory we can celebrate with parades and sailors kissing random women on the street (which would probably be considered sexual harassment these days). These will largely be wars of frustration, quagmires that drain our strength and treasury, and cost too many lives and too many limbs. If we could walk away from the world, as the isolationists like Ron and Rand Paul urge on the stump, I would be among the first to start walking, but this is not 1918 and the world will not let us walk away. The enemies will follow us home to finish what they started. It was not such a good idea, as it turns out, in 1918 either.

The last but certainly not least of our national interests is to not see any of our admittedly flawed allies in the Islamic world fall to the jihadists. These American and Western-friendly allies are the highest priority targets of al-Qaeda and ISIL. Not only do al-Qaeda and ISIL fervently hate the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, military-ruled Egypt, and now Kurdistan, but also they know that for their caliphate to be viable and achieve it messianic objectives, these regimes will have to be toppled. In the next decade our allies will be under threat from Islamic fundamentalists, through subversion and direct attack, both from the Sunni jihadists and the Shia Iranians, who have their own sinister agenda and nuclear ambitions. What these pro-Western governments will not need is any pressure from the U.S. government and non-government organizations to democratize their autocratic regimes. Democracy in Egypt put the Muslim Brotherhood, the original fountainhead of all the jihadists, in power, temporarily, and it would put the same kind of people in power in most of our other allies. King Abdullah of Jordan, like his father and grandfather, rules a fragile kingdom in which a Bedouin minority rules over a Palestinian majority that is unlikely to choose a moderate government. We have seen the results of democracy in Iraq and Egypt, and it seems to confirm the famous quote of Edmund Burke that “it is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions form their fetters.” And Burke had never been to the Middle East.

So here we are, more than 13 years after 9/11, in a war without end against the Islamic jihadists. Well, nobody ever predicted that the future would be an easy path. The world has morphed since 1900 into an increasingly small bad neighborhood inhabited by gangs of psychotics, bullies, gangsters, burglars, and irrational enemies with a grudge against the productive, liberal, and tolerant West, particularly the United States, which, like Marshal Will Kane in the 1951 Western High Noon, has reluctantly taken on the job of planetary constable, for no other reason than there is no one else with either the capability or the will to do it. Time will tell whether we have that strength of will over the long haul. I fear that our current president, for a variety of reasons, does not have it, but he will in a relatively short time be riding off into the sunset and I hope into well-deserved obscurity, and there will be new sheriff in town.

 

Ray Lyman worked for Paladin Press for more than 20 years, during which he authored Paladin’s popular line of military history calendars. Another function he so ably filled was chief historian and fact checker. In the days before Google, Ray was our go-to guy on any historical, political, military, or current events question. Through this column, Ray is simply resuming that role for Paladin.