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As Iraq descends ever closer to civil war, no one doubts that George W. Bush's Iraq strategy has been an abysmal failure -- just as Gwynne Dyer argued it would be in both Ignorant Armies and Future: Tense. The question now is what will happen not just in Iraq but in the whole Middle East region once American troops are withdrawn. In The Mess They Made, Dyer predicts that the Middle East will go through the biggest shake up since the region was conquered and folded into the Ottoman Empire five centuries ago.
In his trademark vivid prose, and in arguments as clear as his research is thorough, Dyer brings his considerable knowledge and understanding of the region to bear on the issue of how widespread the meltdown in the Middle East will likely be. In five chapters, Dyer points the way from present policies and events to likely future developments in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and in the various other countries of the region, not least of which is nuclear-armed Israel.
- Sales Rank: #3557719 in Books
- Brand: Brand: McClelland n Stewart
- Published on: 2007-06-11
- Released on: 2007-06-11
- Format: International Edition
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.46" h x .72" w x 5.61" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 280 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"To understand what's really happening in Iraq, most of us could switch off the news and read Ignorant Armies instead."
—Vancouver Sun
About the Author
Gwynne Dyer has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, broadcaster, filmmakter, and lecturer on international affairs for more than twenty years but he was originally trained as an historian. Born in Newfoundland in 1943, he earned degrees from Canadian, American, and British universities, finishing with a Ph.D. in Military and Middle Eastern History from the University of London. He went on to serve in three navies and to hold academic appointments at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and at Oxford University. Since 1973, he has written a twice-weekly column on current events that is published in more than 175 newspapers worldwide and translated into more than a dozen languages. Dyer is the author of the award-winning book War (1986), which was updated and reissued in 2004, and of Ignorant Armies (2003) and Future: Tense (2004). He lives in London, England.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
The Middle East as we have known it for the past ninety years is coming to an end, because the Americans will soon be leaving. President Bush is so determined to resist that conclusion that the legions will not finally depart until he has left office, but it is coming as surely as the sun sets in the west. And although Bush will leave defeated and disgraced, he has set events and emotions in train that will transform the region — if not quite in the way he intended.
Ali Allawi, defence minister in the first American puppet government in Baghdad, got it exactly right in a regional peace proposal he floated recently: “The Iraqi state that was formed in the aftermath of the First World War has come to an end. Its successor state is struggling to be born in an environment of crises and chaos. The collapse of the entire order in the Middle East now threatens as the Iraq imbroglio unleashes forces in the area that have been gathering in virulence over the past decades.”
Allawi is not exaggerating. The destruction of the Iraqi state and the subsequent defeat of U.S. military power there have finally destabilized the Middle East, a notional region that came into being after the collapse of the Ottoman empire in 1918 (though it did not become widely known as the “Middle East” until the Second World War). It was initially controlled by the British and French empires, who drew most of the borders, but a surge of revolutions in the 1940s and 1950s brought independence to the Arab countries. By then, however, both oil and Israel had made the region of great interest to the United States, which took over as the dominant power from the 1960s onwards. And under that American dispensation, there have been no further changes of regime for forty years, apart from the revolution in Iran in 1978 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003: the undemocratic regimes that were in power in 1967 are all still in power, within the borders that the European empires drew in 1918.
It is that Middle East that is now coming to an end. It is ending because defeat and humiliation in Iraq mean that soon there will no longer be the will in the United States to go on with the task of maintaining the status quo, and because the forces unleashed by the destruction of Iraq are going to overwhelm the status quo. Everything is now up for grabs: regimes, ethnic pecking orders within states, even the 1918 borders themselves might change. Five years from now there could be an Islamic Republic of Arabia, an independent Kurdistan, almost anything you care to imagine.
So what should the rest of the world do about this? Nothing. Just stand back and let it happen. Outsiders to the region have no solutions left to peddle any more (nor any credibility even if they did have solutions), and they no longer have the power or the will to impose their ideas. For the first time in a century, the region is going to choose its future for itself — and it may, of course, make a dreadful mess of it. Even then outsiders should not intervene, because foreign intervention generally makes things worse — but also because it’s none of their business.
For several generations the West has insisted that the Middle East is its business, because that is where half the world’s oil comes from. Radical change cannot be allowed there because it might interrupt the flow of oil, and so the region has remained politically and socially frozen for generations. But today every major oil-producing country in the Middle East depends on the cash flow from oil exports to feed its growing population, so they are all compelled to sell pretty much every barrel they can pump — and to sell it into a single global market that sets the price for buyer and seller alike. So it doesn’t matter to us who runs these countries.
It matters a great deal to their own people, of course, but the oil will go on flowing no matter who’s in charge, so it’s all the same to the customers. If the new regime is better than the old, good; if not, too bad. But it’s their business, not ours. There is the question of Middle Eastern terrorism, but Islamist extremism and the terrorism it breeds are both responses to a century of foreign domination and manipulation of the region. It wouldn’t all stop right away if the West ceased meddling in the area, but the resentment and humiliation that fuel it would dwindle rapidly. Just as well, because this is not a policy proposal; it is a prediction. The West will stop meddling in the region’s affairs, because the United States is going home hurt.
Finally, the question of Israel. The Middle East was definitely the wrong place to put a Jewish state if the idea was to create a safe haven for the world’s Jews, but that’s done now and the question is: Will Israel survive? The answer is probably yes, because it has and will retain the ability to take the entire region down with it in a nuclear Armageddon. But the opportunity of the 1990s has been wasted, and it probably faces another generation of confrontation — perhaps, this time, without the comforting support of the United States.
What we are seeing at the moment is a clear demonstration, both to the American and the Middle Eastern publics, of the inability of American military power to dictate outcomes in the region. Once that demonstration has been concluded, we shall see what comes out of the box in the Middle East.
It will undoubtedly be messy, since it will be a sudden thaw after centuries of political glaciation under Ottoman rule, Anglo-French domination, and American hegemony. In places, it will probably be bloody. The West will not like some of the regimes that emerge (but it’s still none of our business). In the long run, it will certainly be better for the peoples of the region than perpetual foreign tutelage. And it will not harm the West’s interests, so long as the oil continues to flow. Apart from that, the entire region is of little economic or strategic importance to the rest of the world. Lie back, and try to enjoy the ride.
Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
A mess indeed - and a good job of explaining it
By Older Dog
George Bush and his neo-con delusionaries set out to remake the Middle East and, by golly, it was going to be easy with predictions of a cakewalk and people littering the streets with rose petals to honor the conquerors of the new American Empire.
They have remade the Middle East, but the rose petals are missing -- along with thousands of young American lives and countless Iraqi civilians who continue to die in the horror of a civil war unleased by a rash, immature president who has always managed to escape any consequences for his behavior. The son who described himself as the"family black sheep to Queen Elizabeth during his father's administration - has fully lived up to it.
But the GOP was going to install the grownups. Instead we've got a wrecked economy that is heavily war dependent, deficit spending greater than WWII, fat defense contractors ladled with corruption and a nation that is more unhappy than ever with where it is going.
But it is the Iraq war that overshadows everything. It was the means for bullied election winning, based on fear. Support the Troops came to mean Support My War and to hell with the troops, who continue to pay the price for idiocy at the top. Iraqis thought for some time before this book was published that they were better off under the brutal rule of Saddam than the brutal mess made by a group of incompetent ideologues, the best and brightest conservatives the GOP could find.
Iraqis who can afford it and many of those who can't are fleeing Iraq for safer havens. There is still the irrational calls for victory in a war that lost its purpose before it started. No WMDS or any of the other fictional intelligence fed us to allow Bush Junior to pretend he had grown up to be a man. Even now, he runs away from what he has inflicted on us.
To be sure, Mr. Dyer, is to some degree rendering a polemic verdict on the Mess of Potamia, but it is an informed one by someone who has written extensively on war and of the Middle East.
What we're failing to understand is what Dyer is talking about. This is not simply a losing war, But a war that is consuming the innards of the World's only Superpower, if indeed, that appellation still applies. We are far more ordinary to the world as a whole, much more vulnerable than ever. Our weaknesses are exposed. And if we could still defeat any conventional military, that is not our choice in a war where we do not even know the enemy. There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before the war and even now, the faction that claims the name is more of a local insurgency than a bin Laden affiliation. It plays a relatively minor role despite yet more Bushian attempts to rationalize his foolish war that had only a beginning and no end in sight. The Democrats have lost their spines and cannot find it in themselves to stop the disaster from getting worse. In the meanwhile, what is left of the GOP subverts free speech, espouses foreign and domestic surveillance of American citizens without cause and continues tp push the boundaries of oppression at home and abroad. If Big Government is such a danger, Big Brother GOP government is unAmerican.
The result in the Middle East is already chaos. We look for scapegoats, e.g. Iran. But we rebuffed signs of progress in Iran in Bush's early bully phase and now in the late bully phase, we blame them for things they may or may not be doing in a war that should never have happened. Israel is more at risk than ever, which should be a warning to those supporters of that nation who cowered before the right wing's attempt to dominate our Israeli policy. We have dismayed our other friends and allies as well. We have diminished the shared interest of nations in the MIddle East and not only is democracy less vital than ever in the Middle East, we have undermined those that do exist and done serious damage at home.
Go back to 2002 nd 2003 and you'll find a lot of today's supposed critics of the Iraq War give loud hoorays for a war they thought was over -- because they weren't looking. Now they find that they were critics all along, except no one can find their criticism unless it's quickly invented.
It was unpopular after 2001 to say that the military was not the answer to terrorist attacks on the U.S., but it was true then and now. There may be instances where military force is useful, but fewer and rarer than anyone thinks. We accept tens of thousands of traffic deaths each year, smoking related deaths in the hundreds of thousands, but we've slobbered and bowed to give away our basic American rights to a president who does not know how to govern, only to rule by fiat.
Perhaps the people who have so blindly supported this mess, its endless abuses and all of its consequences deserve the reverse of the medal, but it would be better if the nation did not endure that as well.
Dyer offers a hard look at some of the consequences of the Bush Presidential disaster, enabled by a corrupt congress of simpering GOP toadies and too many simpering Democrats. We need to understand that much of this damage to foreign policy cannot be reversed. We need to start anew, rebuilding the links and common interests. Others are reaching out to us as the President in denial finally nears the end of his dictate -- and with good luck, people of good will can once again work with the world. We have our interests and they have theirs and we need to preserve the real common ground.
As Dyer suggests, the mess the Bush people made won't just disappear and its consequences will live on. We are almost certainly going to find ourselves having to deal in a more fundamental way with energy issues than more of the same old Texas swagger by people who couldn't find oil with other people's money.
Sadly, we are simply delaying the day of reckoning because Bush will not allow otherwise -- and Congress lacks the backbone. But the crisis is there. It isn't going away and in the end, we won't be able to ignore it as we have the Bush War.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Clarity regarding the Middle East (with some critical concerns)
By Tim Johnson
I have admired and read Dyer in the past and I remain a fan of his insights into an increasingly foggy world. This book, which is in reality a 296 page essay covering the predominant aspects of the contemporary Middle East, blows a clear wind over a media landscape bligted by American conservatives who collectively have the vision of a bat flying in broad daylight.
Dyer's clarity of vision (as opposed to the neocon press) brings the many disparate pieces of this hugely important yet hugely misunderstood area of the world into a clarity that is too often lacking in Washington much less the newsrooms of the American media centres. This vision sees through the disinformation spread by the major players: American neoconservatives and their bedmates, the Protestant fundamentalists, Iran and its trumped up threat, Israel with its Washington puppet and finally Iraq with her three major disfunctional sections, Shia, Sunni and Kurds.
Perhaps the most explosive of these major sections of his book is chapter eight, "Israel's Delemma" because lifting the lid on Israel and the Israli influence that seems to have spread throughout the American political system could prove extraordinarily adversely negative to Israli efforts to maintain a positive impression of all things Israeli.
There are two other primary problems that I have with Dyer's book: I do not believe that al-Qaeda exists as an international organisation as does Dyer and I do not, therefore, believe that such a non-existent organisation planned and carried out the 9-11 attacks. I know that this statement constitutes a very long bow but I have read enough, from both sides of politics, to come to this conclusion. That begs the question, therefore, why does a guy so intelligent and aware of current world events believe otherwise and my conclusion is simply that he is afraid to take the cork out of the bottle. 9-11, since it happened, has become the new worldwide sacred cow; something not to be questioned by legitimate writers becaus to commit the mortal sin (Catholic mythology here) of questioning the "truth" of 9-11 and that is to commit career suicide. I think Dyer is too smart or too rich to do that.
This book is insightful, rich and I would recommend it to any reader.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Sometimes Spotty, Sometimes Spot On
By L. King
I've heard Gwynn Dyer speak and have to say that I enjoy the slow native Newfoundland drawl of his voice that I hear in his writing. To some extent I find his background insights invaluable especially when he looks at the Arab World and identifies different Sunni and Shiah factions. He correctly sees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the "Great Game of Nations" where the United State's main goal is the containment of Russia and China and the Arab/Israeli conflict is just a footnote when larger goals are afoot. I agree completely with his take on the "War on Terror" as being completely misguided and mismanaged and his assessment that the U.S. (up to the time of publication) had avoided falling into Bin Ladin's trap by essentially fighting the Afghan war by using wads of cash to bribe the appropriate war lords rather than putting troops on the ground. He then correctly (IMHO) castigates the Americans for not employing the same strategy in Iraq though if asked I think he ought to approve of some of the more recent changes under General Petraeus.
I have less confidence in Dyer's ability to predict however. For example he points out that in order to develop nuclear weapons Iran would need to develop massive arrays of centrifuges. . Since publication Iran has done that, constructed and a missile system capable to delivery (but may lack accurate targeting - but you can be off with a nuclear warhead and still score a hit) as well as purchase a small fleet of submarines and the latest anti-aircraft and anti-missile systems from Russia. He is correct in pointing out that it is not only the Israelis who worry about Iraq - if one looks at a map one can see that the Saudi Royal Family and the Sunni majority are largely in the West of the Kingdom, and the Shiites are in the East, just across a narrow Persian/Arabian Gulf and that they are sitting on the known oil fields. He also sees the influence of Tehran on the Shiites of Iraq as only slightly problematic - Iran is not likely to invade but may chose to disrupt with support for a Shiah based Islamic revolution.
The assessment of the Kurdish position between Turkey, Syria and Iraq is both fair and encouraging as the coverage of Syrian imperialism in Lebanon and the Alawite minority's hold on power which does have an element of American involvement I found to be enlightening.
What I find disappointing is his chapter "Israel's Dilemma" which he bases on Arab misrepresentations of Zionists quotes. Thus Herzl's singular reference in his 1895 diary to "transference" is made to appear as it it applied to Palestinians, yet Herzl was writing about a potential Jewish homeland in South America at the time, it was purely a diary speculation never meant for publication and he never mentions it again - truly minor material made out to be more significant that it was. Dayan's quote from 1969 omits the phrase "we bought the land" and the context of his delivery which was to a group of students in defense of, not in opposition to the idea of Jews and Arabs living together. Similarly the "land without a people for a people without a land" meme is NOT a Jewish Zionist quote but came from Christian theologians of the previous century. Dyer swallows these and other statements whole, as he does the notion that Arafat "moved the world towards a two state solution" - this appears to be more an American solution and Arafat never viewed it as anything other than an staging process. Nor does his usual insight into asymmetrical warfare serve when he claims that Israel's purported nuclear arsenal make it immune from attack.
I also agree with Trigg's review (above) regarding Dyer's misunderstanding of statistics, but I give it less weight. Dyer is a political journalist and people with his background are notoriously bad with figures.
I give this book a mixed recommendation.
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