A political analysis of the Middle East, Year 1982

From the note on the weekly portion, I arrived to an analysis of the Middle East quoted by Israel Shahak.

This world, with its ethnic minorities, its factions and internal crises, which is astonishingly self-destructive... is unable to deal successfully with its fundamental problems and does not therefore constitute a real threat against the State of Israel in the long run, but only in the short run where its immediate military power has great import. In the long run, this world will be unable to exist within its present framework in the areas around us without having to go through genuine revolutionary changes. The Moslem Arab World is built like a temporary house of cards put together by foreigners (France and Britain in the Nineteen Twenties), without the wishes and desires of the inhabitants having been taken into account. It was arbitrarily divided into 19 states, all made of combinations of minorites and ethnic groups which are hostile to one another, so that every Arab Moslem state nowadays faces ethnic social destruction from within, and in some a civil war is already raging.

Then goes on to detail the ethnic composition of these states:

(1) The Maghreb states are made up of a mixture of Arabs and non-Arab Berbers. In Algeria there is already (this was written in 1982) a civil war raging in the Kabile mountains between the two nations in the country. Morocco and Algeria are at war with each other over Spanish Sahara, in addition to the internal struggle in each of them. Militant Islam endangers the integrity of Tunisia.
(2) Sudan, the most torn apart state in the Arab Moslem world today is built upon four groups hostile to each other, an Arab Moslem Sunni minority which rules over a majority of non-Arab Africans, Pagans, and Christians.
(3) In Egypt there is a Sunni Moslem majority facing a large minority of Christians which is dominant in upper Egypt: some 7 million of them, so that even Sadat expressed the fear that they will want a state of their own.
(4) Syria is fundamentally no different from Lebanon except in the strong military regime which rules it. But the real civil war taking place nowadays between the Sunni majority and the Shi'ite Alawi ruling minority (a mere 12% of the population) testifies to the severity of the domestic trouble.
(5) Iraq is no different in essence from its neighbors, although its majority is Shi'ite and the ruling minority Sunni. Sixty-five percent of the population has no say in politics, in which an elite of 20 percent holds the power. In addition there is a large Kurdish minority in the north, and if it weren't for the strength of the ruling regime, the army and the oil revenues, Iraq's future state would be no different than that of Lebanon in the past or of Syria today. The seeds of inner conflict and civil war are apparent today already.
(6) All the Gulf principalities and Saudi Arabia are built upon a delicate house of sand in which there is only oil. In Kuwait, the Kuwaitis constitute only a quarter of the population. In Bahrain, the Shi'ites are the majority but are deprived of power. In the UAE, Shi'ites are once again the majority but the Sunnis are in power. The same is true of Oman and North Yemen. Even in the Marxist South Yemen there is a sizable Shi'ite minority. In Saudi Arabia half the population is foreign, Egyptian and Yemenite, but a Saudi minority holds power.
(7) Jordan is in reality Palestinian, ruled by a Trans-Jordanian Bedouin minority, but most of the army and certainly the bureaucracy is now Palestinian. As a matter of fact Amman is as Palestinian as Nablus. All of these countries have powerful armies, relatively speaking.
(8) Alongside the Arabs, split as they are, the other Moslem states share a similar predicament. Half of Iran's population is comprised of a Persian speaking group and the other half of an ethnically Turkish group. Turkey's population comprises a Turkish Sunni Moslem majority, some 50%, and two large minorities, 12 million Shi'ite Alawis and 6 million Sunni Kurds. In Afghanistan there are 5 million Shi'ites who constitute one third of the population. In Sunni Pakistan there are 15 million Shi'ites who endanger the existence of that state.

The analysis proceeds to state that this "house of cards" is about to collapse in any moment, although the West - dependent on oil - desperately wants stability. This was written 25 years ago and the author's prophesy did not come about. Political stability was maintained and the centrifugal forces contained. Even Iraq's violent fragmentation has yet to become official. And most of the countries in the region - Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, Iran, Pakistan, etc. - are all still ruled by the same elites. If anything, the area is frozen, nothwithstanding the hothouse effect. The map show the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire a hundred years ago, whose fragmentation is still going on (the war in Kosovo).

A last thought: On the basis of ethnic harmony, China (a homogeneous block of 1.3 billion Han people) is by far the most powerful political unit on Earth. Its conquest by the Europeans and the Japanese may have been a temporary aberration, caused by internal ethnic contradictions between the Manchu elite and the 99% Han population.