When the U.S. decided to liberate Iraq only a decade ago, Secretary of State Colin Powell issued a warning behind the closed doors and to the closed minds of the war planners. It was the Pottery Barn rule: you break it and you own it. Before Pottery Barn broke on the mall scene, I remember the same sign in the crowded aisles of antique shops my father used to drag me through. The U.S. has certainly paid enough for this war, but in fact we have yet to acknowledge that we own it or own up to the fact that the meltdown that has spread out of Iraq is our own creation. Yes, the dictators we once showered with weapons or else pretended they were not as bad as the alternative are gone. No more Ben Ali, no more Qaddafi, no more Moubarak, no more Ali Abdullah Salih (well, actually he is still playing politics in Yemen), an almost no more Asad. But as Alice Cooper sang, it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy either.
The Middle East, aka Orient, aka former Omayyad, Abbasid, Ayyubid, Mamluk, Ottoman empires and post-World War I playground of the Great Powers is breaking apart at the seamless borders. ISIS, the rebel horde of suicidal converts, has overrun large areas of Iraq and Syria, raping and pillaging in a frenzy that Attila the Hun would admire. Sunni and shi’a partisans kill each other daily in Iraq, barrel bombs bury historic Syrian cities into rubble, drones blow more civilians than terrorists to bits in Pakistan and Yemen, Afghan Taliban flex their muscles; Israeli planes raze Gaza with impunity; Egypt has a new pharaoh; Libya sinks deeper into hell; and Turkey’s schizophrenia has no Eurozone cure. The monarchies, shored up with oil wealth, are doing fine, spending their billions on weapons and Gucci handbags.
The blame game is in full swing. A quick reality check shows that this stretch of holy land has been blood soaked for millennia. The last time there seems to have been any peace was when Abraham arrived with his sheep. Moses and Joshua led the Israelites into a God-driven carnage of the Canaanites; the Assyrians and Babylonians gave the biblical prophets something to lament; the Romans came through and a new religion was born on the backs of martyrs. Muslim armies carved out a vast empire only to be overpowered by Mongols and Ottomans. The question of who started it all is lost in the mists of history. You might as well blame Cain for clubbing his able brother.
So who is to blame if not everyone? The French for Napoleon in Egypt; the British for their Raj; Italy’s Mussolini for taking Italy? Or the mandates doled out after World War I on Mr. Churchill’s napkin? Or the United States from the shores of Tripoli to the first, second and perhaps third Iraq wars? The first Gulf War was a warning shot, but obviously one that Saddam Hussein did not hear very well. The second Gulf War was supposed to be short and sweet, liberating the Iraqi people from a ruthless dictator. A decade and thousands of sectarian violence victims later everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. It is not simply the case that we broke the pot; we seem to have killed off all the potters. The “we” here is not just the Bush administrations, but every seller of arms, many of which are now in the hands of the ISIS rebels.
The respite of an Arab Spring thrilled the media news outlets. In desperation people took to the streets across the region and some accomplished the unthinkable. One dictator after another bit the dust. Dreams of democracy were touted and then dashed. It had to be a certain kind of democracy, not one with too strong a religious overtone. Meanwhile the death toll mounts, the destruction of buildings and infrastructure devastates local economies, tourism is all but dead and the lives of millions of ordinary people in the region are shattered. Many who fled are now refugees with little hope for being resettled in the near future. This is all happening in 2014 CE not 2014 BCE nor in the heyday of the crusades. It is true that this part of the globe has suffered from broken pots all along, but never before has such violence unfolded in global sight on the nightly news. Colin Powell was right about one thing: something important has been broken. But if the destruction and human suffering is not checked soon, there will be nothing left for anybody to own.
Daniel Martin Varisco is President of the American Institute for Yemeni Studies. He is Research Professor of Social Science at Qatar U. Since 1978 he has conducted ethnographic and historical research in Yemen, Egypt and Qatar. His latest book is Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (U of Washington Press, 2007). He currently serves as editor of Contemporary Islam and Editor-in-Chief of CyberOrient (www.cyberorient.net).