THOUGH NEITHER THEY NOR WE WISH TO ADMIT THE FACT, THEY COULD HARDLY FIT THE NARRATIVE BETTER:

Burying Pan-Arabism (Leon Hadar, March 1, 2011, National Interest)

What is happening now in the Middle East may be another chapter in a series of nationalist insurgencies that have been shaping regional politics since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Pan-Arabism and Zionism have been the two nationalist movements that have helped mold the balance of power in the region while interacting with global players like Britain and France, and later with the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, as Iran and Turkey were hedging their bets.

The old Middle East order had already started to shatter during the last decades of the Cold War: Iranian-Shiite nationalism defied U.S. power while backing regional Shiite offshoots; Egyptian nationalism challenged Soviet influence and embraced peace with Israel.

The U.S. tried to maintain the regional status quo in the aftermath of the Cold War by using its military power during the two Gulf wars and through its support for Israel and the autocratic Arab regimes. But these efforts only helped accelerate the revival of nationalism and other forms of ethnic, sectarian, and tribal identities. The “liberation” of Iraq and the ensuing Freedom Agenda have not given birth to liberal democracy in Mesopotamia. The entire project empowered the Shiite majority and the Kurdish minority in Iraq—while emasculating the old Sunni elite.

The resurgence of Shiite identity demonstrated not only in Iraq but also in Lebanon and the Persian Gulf helped shift the balance of power in the direction of Iran. At the same time, Turkey has emerged as a regional power, trying to fill the vacuum created by the decline of effective U.S. power to shape outcomes in the region.

From the perspective of the nationalism narrative, what we are witnessing today is the continuing erosion of a U.S.-backed order by national-based insurgencies. In fact, the first episode in the current series of political changes in the Middle East was not Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, but the collapse of Lebanon’s pro-American government under pressure from Hezbollah, a development that clearly doesn’t fit into the liberal-democracy narrative.

Like those in Saddam's Iraq. the Shi'a of the Lebanon are an oppressed majority. We won self-determination for the former; the latter are taking it themselves.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 4, 2011 6:50 AM