The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate pdfdrive com

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 Mediterranean to the south and west, and
mountain fastnesses to the east and southeast. In this natural 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 ideology
and an attendant personality cult. Photos of President Hafez al-Assad on every
shop window and car windshield defaced the landscape. Geography did not
determine Syria’s destiny—or Turkey’s—but it was a starting point.
Geography and history tell us that Syria, with a population of twenty million,
will continue to be the epicenter of turbulence in the Arab world. Aleppo in
northern Syria is a bazaar city with greater historical links to Mosul and
Baghdad in Iraq than to Damascus, Syria’s capital. Whenever Damascus’s
fortunes declined, Aleppo recovered its greatness. Wandering through the souks
of Aleppo, it is striking how distant and irrelevant Damascus seems. Aleppo’s
souks are dominated by Kurds, Turks, Circassians, Arab Christians, Armenians,
and others, unlike the Damascus souk, which is more a world of Sunni Arabs. As
in Pakistan and the former Yugoslavia, in Syria each sect and religion is
associated with a specific geographical region. Between Aleppo and Damascus
is the increasingly Islamist Sunni heartland of Homs and Hama. Between
Damascus and the Jordanian border are the Druze, and in the mountain
stronghold contiguous to Lebanon are the Alawites, both remnants of a wave of
Shiism from Persia and Mesopotamia that a thousand years ago swept over
Syria. Free and fair elections in 1947, 1949, and 1954 exacerbated these
divisions by dividing the vote along regional, sectarian, and ethnic lines. The late
Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970 after twenty-one changes of government
in the previous twenty-four years. For three decades he was the Leonid Brezhnev

---

of the Arab world, staving off the future by failing to build a civil society at
home. Whereas Yugoslavia still had an intellectual class at the time of its
breakup, Syria did not, so stultifying was the elder Assad’s regime.
During the Cold War and early Post Cold War years, Syria’s fervent pan-
Arabism was a substitute for its weak identity as a state. Greater Syria was an
Ottoman-era geographical term that included present-day Lebanon, Jordan, and
Israel-Palestine, to which the truncated borders of the current Syrian state do
great violence. This historic Greater Syria was called by Princeton scholar Philip
K. Hitti “the largest small country on the map, microscopic in size but cosmic in
influence,” encompassing in its geography, at the confluence of Europe, Asia,
and Africa, “the history of the civilized world in miniature form.”
17
Syria
furnished the Greco-Roman world with some of its most brilliant thinkers, Stoics
and Neoplatonists among them. Syria was the seat of the Umayyad Empire, the
first Arab dynasty after Muhammad, which was larger than Rome at its zenith.
And it was the scene of arguably the greatest drama in history between Islam and
the West: the Crusades.
But the Syria of recent decades has been a ghost of this great geographical and
historical legacy. And the Syrians are poignantly aware of it; for, as they know,
the loss of Lebanon cut off much of Syria’s outlet to the Mediterranean, from
which its rich cultural depositories had breathed life. Ever since France sundered
Lebanon from Syria in 1920, the Syrians have been desperate to get it back. That
is why the total Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon that George W. Bush
demanded in the wake of the February 2005 assassination of anti-Syrian
Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri would have undermined the very political
foundation of the minority Alawite regime in Damascus right then and there.
The Alawites, a heterodox Shiite sect, demographically spill over into both Syria
and Lebanon. An Alawite ministate in northwestern Syria is not an impossibility
following the collapse of the Alawite regime in Damascus.
In fact, following Iraq and Afghanistan, the next target of Sunni jihadists
could be Syria itself: in the Syrian regime, headed through early 2012 by Bashar
al-Assad, the jihadists have had an enemy that is “at once tyrannical, secular, 
and
heretical.”
18
This Alawite regime was close to Shiite Iran, and stands guilty of
murdering tens of thousands of Sunni Islamists in the 1970s and 1980s. Jihadists
have deep logistical familiarity with Syria—sustaining the jihad in Iraq
necessitated a whole network of safe houses inside Syria. Truly, no one has a feel
for what a post-authoritarian, post-Assad Syria will eventually turn out to be.
How deep is sectarianism? It may not be deep at all, but once the killing starts,
people revert to long-repressed sectarian identities. It may also be that a post-

---

Assad Syria will do better than a post-Saddam Iraq, precisely because the
tyranny in the former was much less severe than in the latter, making Syria a less
damaged society. Traveling from Saddam’s Iraq to Assad’s Syria, as I did on
occasion, was like coming up for liberal humanist air. On the other hand,
Yugoslavia was a more open society throughout the Cold War than its Balkan
neighbors, and look at how ethnic and religious differences undid that society!
The minority Alawites have kept the peace in Syria; it would seem unlikely that
Sunni jihadists could do the same. They might be equally as brutal, but without
the sophisticated knowledge of governance that the Alawites acquired during
forty years in power.
Of course, it does not have to turn out that way at all. For there is a sturdy
geographical basis for peace and political rebirth in Syria. Remember again
Hodgson: these countries such as Syria and Iraq really do have roots in
agricultural terrain; they are not entirely man-made. Syria, despite its present
borders, still represents the heart of the Levantine world, which means a world
of multiple ethnic and religious identities united by commerce.
19
The Syrian-
born poet Ali Ahmad Said (known by his pen name “Adonis”) constitutes the
very expression of this other Syria, with its wealth of civilizational interaction,
that, as we know from the work of William McNeill, forms the core drama of
history. Adonis exhorts his fellow Syrians to renounce Arab nationalism and
forge a new state identity based on Syria’s very eclecticism and diversity: in
effect, a twenty-first-century equivalent of early-twentieth-century Beirut,
Alexandria, and Smyrna. Adonis, like the Assads, is an Alawite, but one who
instead of embracing Arabism and the police state as shields for his minority
status has embraced cosmopolitanism instead.
20
Rather than look toward the
desert, Adonis looks toward the Mediterranean, on which modern Syria, despite
the loss of Lebanon, still has considerable real estate. The Mediterranean stands
for an ethnic and sectarian synthesis, which is the only ideational basis for a
stable democracy in Syria. McNeill, Hodgson, and Adonis really do overlap in
terms of Syria’s promise.
21
The implications of this for the rest of geographical Greater Syria—Lebanon,
Jordan, and Israel—are immense. Whether or not there is a jihadist revolt in
Syria to follow the democratic one—in the event that a democracy worthy of
Adonis does not take root—Syria appears destined to become a less centralized,
and, therefore, a weaker state. And it will be one with a significant youth bulge:
36 percent of the population is fourteen years old or younger. A weakened Syria
could mean the emergence of Beirut as the cultural and economic capital of
Greater Syria, with Damascus paying the price for its decades-long, Soviet-like

---

removal from the modern world. Yet with the poor, Hezbollah-trending Shiites
of south Beirut continuing to gain demographic sway over the rest of that city,
and Sunni Islamists having more political influence in Damascus, Greater Syria
could become a far more unstable geography than it is now.
Jordan might yet survive such an evolution, because the Hashemite dynasty
(unlike the Alawite one) has spent decades building a state consciousness
through the development of a unified elite. Jordan’s capital of Amman is filled
with former government ministers loyal to the Jordanian monarchy—men who
were not imprisoned or killed as a result of cabinet reshuffles, but who were
merely allowed to become rich. But, once more, the curse is in the
demographics: 70 percent of Jordan’s population of 6.3 million is urban, and
almost a third are Palestinian refugees, who have a higher birth rate than the
indigenous East Bankers. (As for the East Bankers themselves, the traditional
relationship between the tribes and the monarchy has frayed as tribal culture has
itself evolved, with pickup trucks and cellphones having long replaced camels.)
Then there are the 750,000 Iraqi refugees in Jordan, making Jordan per capita
the host of the largest refugee population on earth.
Again, we are back to the truth of a closed and claustrophobic geography,
according to Paul Bracken, in which the poor and crowded urban masses have
had their emotions further whipped up by electronic media, according to Elias
Canetti. Because of the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade,
we became indifferent to just how unstable are the so-called stable parts of the
Middle East. We did so at our peril—as the Arab uprisings have shown. The
uprisings began as expressions of yearning for civil society and individual
dignity, which calcified national security regimes had robbed people of. But in
the future urbanization and electronic communications could lead to less benign
expressions of public rage. The crowd baying at real and perceived injustices is
the new postmodern tiger that the next generation of Arab leaders will struggle
to keep under control.
I crossed the border from Jordan to Israel several times. The Jordan River valley
is part of a deep rift in the earth’s surface that stretches from Syria for 3,700
miles south to Mozambique. Thus, the switchback, westering descent to the
Jordan River from the biscuit-brown tableland of the Jordanian town of Irbid
was dizzyingly dramatic. The road in the late 1990s was lined with dusty
garages, rickety fruit stands, and knots of young men hanging about, smoking.
At the bottom lay a ribbon of green fields along the river, where, on the other
side, in Israel, the mountains rose just as steeply. The Jordanian border post and

---

customs offices were a series of old cargo containers in a vacant lot. The river is
narrow. You cross it in a bus in literally seconds. On the opposite side was a
landscaped park separating the traffic lanes: like a traffic island anywhere in the
West, but a wonder after the bleak, dust-strewn public spaces of Jordan and
much of the Arab world. The Israeli immigration hall was like any small air
terminal in the United States. The Israeli security men wore Timberland shirts
barely tucked into their jeans to make room for their handguns. After weeks in
the Arab world, these young men seemed so tradition-less. Beyond the
immigration hall lay new sidewalks, benches, and tourist facilities; again, like
any place in the West. And yet it was an empty, unfriendly public space; nobody
was simply hanging about, as in the Arab world, where unemployment was
endemic. The Israelis manning the booths were impersonal, rude. Traditional
Middle Eastern hospitality was absent.
22
Even though I had lived in Israel in the
1970s and had served in its military, arriving here the way I had allowed me to
see it anew. Israel seemed so unnatural to the Middle East, and yet it was such a
blunt, sturdy fact.
To the entire Muslim world, at once united and enraged by mass media, the
plight of the Palestinians represents a totemic injustice in the affairs of
humankind. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank may not have been a visible
factor in the first stages of the Arab Spring but we shouldn’t kid ourselves. The
facts have, to a certain extent, become meaningless; perceptions are everything.
Undergirding it all is geography. While Zionism shows the power of ideas, the
battle over land between Israelis and Palestinians—between Jews and Muslims,
as both the Turks and the Iranians would have it—is a case of utter geographical
determinism.
“Jews will very soon become a minority in the lands they occupy or rule from
the Jordan River to the Mediterranean (by some calculations this has already
happened), and some demographers forecast that in fifteen years they will make
up as little as 42 percent of the population in this area.” So wrote Benjamin
Schwarz, the national editor of