Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Still, any Iraqi democracy that emerges in the second decade of the twenty-first century
is going to be uncertain, corrupt, inefficient, and considerably unruly, with political as-
sassinations possibly a regular part of life. In short, a democratic Iraq, despite prodigious
petroleum wealth and an American-trained military, will be a weak state at least in the
near term. And its feuding politicians will reach out for financial and political support to
contiguous powers—principally Iran and Saudi Arabia—and, as a consequence, become
to some extent playthings of them. Iraq could become again a larger version of civil
war-wracked Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s. Because the stakes are so large in
Iraq—those in power will have corrupt access to the incredible oil wealth—the infighting,
as we have seen, will be severe and persistent. A pro-Western outpost in the heart of the
Arab world requires the state to be internally strong. There is little sign of that yet.
A weakened Mesopotamia would seem to represent an opportunity for another demo-
graphic or natural resource hub of the Arab world to assume prestige and leadership. But
it is difficult to see in what direction that will come. The Saudis are by nature nervous,
hesitant, and vulnerable, because of their own immense oil wealth coupled with a relat-
ively small population that, nevertheless, is characterized by hordes of male youth prone
to both radicalization and a yearning for democratization—the same cohort that we have
seen spark revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. The post-Mubarak era in Egypt, which has
the Arab world's largest population, will feature governments whose energies, democratic
or not, will be devoted to consolidating control internally, and attending to the demograph-
ic challenges that are associated with the headwaters of the White and Blue Niles being
located in the two Sudans and Ethiopia. (Ethiopia, with 83 million people, has an even lar-
ger population than Egypt, while both northern and southern Sudan have over 40 million.
Struggles over water use will increasingly burden all these governments in the twenty-first
century.) It is the very weakness of the Arab world that Turkey and Iran, with their appeals
to the larger Muslim Umma , will seek to take advantage of.
This weakness is not only expressed by post-invasion Iraq, but by Syria, too. Syria is
another critical geographic pole of the Arab world—both in medieval and modern times.
Indeed, it laid claim to being the Cold War era's throbbing heart of Arabism .
Leaving the Taurus Mountains in a southeastward direction in 1998, and descending
steeply from Asia Minor into the Syrian plain—punctuated by pine and olive trees with the
occasional limestone hill—I left behind a confident and industrialized society in Turkey, its
nationalism bolstered by the geographical logic of the Black Sea to the north, the Mediter-
ranean to the south and west, and mountain fastnesses to the east and southeast. In this nat-
ural fortress, Islam had been subsumed within the rubric of democracy. But now I entered
an artificial piece of territory on a sprawling desert, held together only by Baathist ideo-
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