US must act like a hegemon and be the dominant millet in the Middle East

Yesterday, in an opinion piece in the Daily Beast, Leslie Gelb, the eminent foreign policy expert, voiced opposition to renewed American military intervention in Iraq and proposed that the United States attempt to arrive at a "diplomatic solution" under which Iraq would become a loose federation of three autonomous regions with a viable central government in Baghdad:

[B]efore the U.S. government starts to do the next dumb thing again, namely provide fighter aircraft and drone attacks and heaven knows what else, it should stop and think for a change. ... I am in favor of trying ... the diplomatic route, which we seem to approach as a last resort, not a first one. In Iraq, this means Washington’s offering up some version of the federal plan that then-Senator Joe Biden and I proposed almost a decade ago. The idea was to keep the country whole, but to let each major group essentially run affairs in its own region. The Kurds are already doing so in the north, and many Shiites are doing so in the south. With some prompting from Washington, Maliki needs to empower a Sunni region in the center and give it its fair share of Iraq’s oil revenues. Then, maybe, the majority of moderate Sunnis and the Shiite soldiers will stand up to the crazed jihadis. A similar decentralized approach might be the only way to lessen or eventually stop the fighting in Syria and to provide some measure of peace in the future Afghanistan. [emphasis added]

As Mr Gelb observes, he and Mr Biden have made this same proposal in the past:

[O]ur plan is not partition, though even some supporters and the media mistakenly call it that. It would hold Iraq together by bringing to life the federal system enshrined in its constitution. A federal Iraq is a united Iraq but one in which power devolves to regional governments, with a limited central government responsible for common concerns such as protecting borders and distributing oil revenue.

In fact, what Mr Gelb is proposing is very similar to the old millet system of the Ottoman Empire. In his book The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years, Bernard Lewis defines millets as follows:

A millet was a religio-political community defined by its adherence to a religion. Its members were subject to the rules and even to the laws of that religion, administered by its own chiefs, naturally in so far as these did not conflict with the laws and interests of the state. In return for this measure of religious freedom and communal autonomy, non-Muslim millets owed allegiance to the state and accepted the limitations and disabilities of dhimmi [non-Muslim] status.

Wikipedia describes millets as follows:

People were bound to their millets by their religious affiliations (or their confessional communities), rather than their ethnic origins, according to the millet concept. The head of a millet — most often a religious hierarch such as the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople or, in earlier times, the Patriarch of the East — reported directly to the Ottoman Sultan or the Sassanid king, respectively. The millets had a great deal of power — they set their own laws and collected and distributed their own taxes. All that was required was loyalty to the Empire.

The main difference between the federal system that Mr Gelb is proposing and the millet system is that the former is somehow supposed to spring spontaneously into existence (to judge from what Mr Gelb says) while the latter is a system by which the conqueror controlled and administered those groups that he had conquered. In the millet system, a thin layer of a conquering class had to exist at the apex of society to maintain its structure and keep it from crumbling. Viable centralized governance that guaranteed peace between the various millets and allowed culture and commerce to flourish only came into existence when it was imposed by a conquering force from outside. This is obvious from the fact that in the past millets were answerable either to the Ottoman Sultan or the Sassanid king, who were conquerors. It is also implicit in what Mr Gelb says himself. He states: "With some prompting from Washington, Maliki needs to empower a Sunni region in the center and give it its fair share of Iraq’s oil revenues." Some "prompting" is indeed required, but the idea that diplomatic suasion, and not the application of military force, will be the kind of prompting that will get the job done is simply naive.

[Aside: in a somewhat incoherent sentence Mr Gelb writes: "Iraqis have no familiarity with federalism, which, absent an occupier or a dictator, has historically been the only path to keeping disunited countries whole." On the contrary, Iraqis certainly do have experience with federalism in the form of millets, and, yes, the millet system was always held together by an "occupier or a dictator." If history tells us anything, it is that in the Middle East there has to be some element of force that holds millet, or federal, systems together.]

In sum, the problem with Gelb's proposal at this point in time is that there is no way it can be achieved through a purely "diplomatic route." Something similar to this proposed regime could have been imposed on Iraq when we had American troops on the ground (and perhaps George W. Bush is to be faulted for not having followed Mr Gelb and then-Senator Biden's advice and for not having imposed such a regime, although at the end of the surge American troops were, in fact, serving as a buffer between various factions), but, now that President Obama has withdrawn all American troops from Iraq and reduced American influence in the country to nothing, the hope of achieving a federal state in Iraq is a pipe dream unless we intervene militarily again. If Obama had not withdrawn American troops from Iraq, those troops could serve as a buffer to keep Sunnis and Shiites apart and America could seek to mediate the conflict.

Where does that leave us, then?

To start, we can conclude that Obama never, ever should have withdrawn all American forces from Iraq. At the end of the surge, a fragile peace had been achieved between the various factions in Iraq, but Obama's withdrawal of all American troops left the various factions without a mediator and this caused the peace to fall apart. So, once again, the United States (or a coalition led by the United States) will be forced to intervene militarily in Iraq, and also now in Syria, and we will also be forced to keep troops in Afghanistan, too. (It is a sign of how out of touch Obama is that, at the very moment when he was laying out in his West Point speech his strategy for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, the growing insurgency in Iraq was demonstrating that this strategy was doomed to failure.)

The purpose of such a military intervention will be to impose by force a kind of millet (or federal, to use Mr Gelb's term) system on the region. Now, obviously, there will be differences between the old Ottoman millet system and a millet system imposed by the United States. Millets will not be defined exclusively in terms of religious affiliation but in terms of several dimensions (a complicating factor). Most notably, in the Ottoman Empire the dominant millet was the Muslims. In a millet system imposed by the United States, the dominant millet will be the United States. Individual sub-millets composed of Kurds, Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Middle Eastern Christians (and other minority groups) will be controlled by the dominant millet.

In return for submission to the dominant millet, a large degree of autonomy will be given to the various sub-millets, so long as these groups demonstrate allegiance and behave in accordance with the interests of the conqueror. This model of a dominant millet is similar to the concept of protectorate or mandate that was once so common. The dominant millet will provide central administration and mediate between the various sub-millets (protecting boundaries and fairly distributing oil revenues, for example). But, the one thing that must be acknowledged is that, without a dominant millet, sometimes one that even exercises force and coercion, there is simply no way that a loose federation of ethnic and religious sub-groups can remain united for long.

It must also be acknowledged that the fact that Obama rails against a "tyrant" like Assad in Syria and declares that "Assad must go" shows how little Obama truly understands about the region. Assad, as brutal as he is, is a figurehead for the Alawites in Syria and embodies all their hopes, aspirations, and fears, just as Saddam Hussein was a figurehead for the Sunnis in Iraq. Even if Assad is overthrown, there will still remain an enormous population of Alawites in Syria whose legitimate interests will need to be represented, just as the overthrow of Hussein and the handing over of the reins of government to the pro-Shiite, pro-Iranian Maliki left an enormous group of Sunnis in Irag, whose legitimate aspirations needed to be taken into account. The problem is that these aspirations were ignored by Maliki, so that it is now those Sunnis (along with Kurds) who are now leading the new insurgency in Iraq.

In sum, the only solution is to recognize that the region is made up of a patchwork of various communities, all of whose legitimate interests (even if they are minorities) must be represented in some kind of fair fashion. A federal or millet system imposed and maintained by the United States (or some coalition led by the United States) seems to be the only answer. It is remarkable to me that Americans do not even seem to have learned the lesson of their own Senate, which was devised so that the interests of particular, often small, groups of people in particular regions (states) were not overwhelmed by the kind of majority rule found in the House of Representatives.

The only way to allow the various interests of particular factions to be represented and mediated is for the United States to assert itself with military force, to act like a conqueror, or hegemon, and to play the role of dominant millet. The Obama Doctrine of "leading from behind" and "not doing stupid shit" is an abject failure. And the Gelb-Biden proposal of trying to conjure up a federal state through purely diplomatic means is just a fantasy.

[Aside: my argument that the Middle East would benefit from an extended period of American hegemony in the region is similar to arguments that Niall Ferguson has made in his book Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire.]