One thing about dictators is that they're usually the most brutal in countries that were made up by others in the first place. Take the atrocities of Saddam Hussein, who was allowed to run roughshod over his straight-lined piece of desert because of other people's desires for oil and cold wars. We even encouraged him to gas people when we were fighting the Iranians.
Another thing about dictators is that when their authority is questioned, they usually say that the country will fall apart without them. If there's one thing we've learned in the 21st century, it's that they're usually right. We don't have to like them, but they're not stupid.
As a nation of immigrants ourselves, America has no natural ability to understand what sectarianism really means to people whose families have been killing one another for generations. Our collective boat ride over the proverbial ocean erased those instincts from our psyches, and replaced them with clear borders and a constitution that we hold sacrosanct. So we're left with pious theory. In come the neo-cons; people whose lack of instinct and skillful amnesia could only come from America. Denial is not just a river in Egypt. It flows right through our own country.
Watching events unfold in Iraq, Syria, and to a lesser extent in other parts of the middle-east, I sometimes imagine the raspy laughter of Saddam Hussein, followed by endless "I told you so's." I can easily picture just how absurd it must have seemed to him for our haughty generals to believe that we could replace what he controlled only through great bloodshed with peaceable, pluralistic, semi-secular democratic institutions.
For those who think that if we'd just stayed longer, dug in deeper instead of "cutting and running," it's worth considering now not whether nominal peace could have been assured in Iraq, but whether we could have achieved it without the level of tyranny that men like Saddam Hussein believed necessary. The tyrant has a natural constituency, speaks the local language, and has everything to lose by his defeat. These are inborn advantages to running a highly fractious, largely contrived nation that no amount of military hardware can surmount.
Others can relitigate the decision to go into Iraq. I'm actually grateful that the matter is up for discussion once again. It's the only way we have any hope of not repeating its mistakes. I'm more interested in what we should do now. While it was apparently news to some a decade ago, we know by now that in the Levant and Greater Mesopotamia there are several ethnic and religious groups that have never gotten along. Why should we force them to live in the same country?
Yugoslavia came into existence in the same era as Iraq and Syria, and for many of the same reasons. Once the dictators fell, it wasn't long before a nasty civil war broke out, followed by a plodding though eventually successful political resolution. Its progress strikes me as an excellent model for foreign involvement in a seemingly intractable ethno-religious conflict. Perhaps if the Kurds, Alawites, Christians, Sunnis, Shi'ites, and a handful of others had their own states, they'd relax a little.
Perhaps those who live in nations that aren't ethnically their own would be viewed less as separatist enemies, and more as minorities that deserve protection. Nations with large separatist factions might even consider giving the separatists what they want. The Kurds of Turkey might drop the freedom-fighter bit if there was an actual Kurdish homeland, instead of a theoretical one that must still be fought for. If I was Turkey, I'd even donate some acreage, perhaps in exchange for a sweetheart oil deal.
My belief is that people who have a long history of hating one another might be better served by having their own borders, and answering to their own leaders. It's not to say that nations can't be very diverse. Perhaps levels of economic development or cultural heritage play roles. Whatever the case, when people start hurting one another, these sorts of solutions ought to be high on the list of anyone interested in stopping it.
