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

particular meant historical rapprochements with Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Because of
Turkey’s economy, so much more technologically advanced than its neighbors—
and growing faster, too—Turkey’s robust influence in the Balkans to the west
and the Caucasus to the east was already an established fact. Bulgaria, Georgia,
and Azerbaijan were all flush with Turkish appliances and other consumer
goods. But it was the Turkish championing of the Palestinians, and the intense
popularity of the Turkish people which that engendered in Gaza, that made
Turkey an integral organizational fact in the Arab world to a degree it had not
enjoyed since Ottoman times. Neo-Ottomanism might have been a specific
strategy developed by Davutoglu, but it also constituted a natural political
evolution: the upshot of Turkey’s commanding geographical and economic
position made suddenly relevant by its own intensifying Islamization. Neo-
Ottomanism’s attractiveness rested on the unstated assumption that Turkey
lacked both the means and the will in this era of globalization to actually carve
out a new-old empire in the Middle East; rather, it rested on Turkey’s
normalization of relations with its former Arab dependencies, for whom
Ottoman rule was distant enough, and benign enough, at least when viewed
across the span of the decades and centuries, so as to welcome Turkey back into

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the fold now that it had turned hostility against Israel up several notches.
Davutoglu’s real innovation was reaching out to Iran. The civilizations of the
Anatolian and Iranian plateaus, Turkic and Persian respectively, have had a long
and complex relationship: Persian, as I’ve said, was the diplomatic language of
the Ottoman Turkish Empire, even as the Ottomans and Safavid Persians were
long at odds militarily in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. One can
say that the Turkish and Iranian peoples are rivals, while, nevertheless, their
cultures and languages deeply intertwine; Rumi wrote in Persian, though he
spent most of his life in Turkey. Moreover, neither Turkey nor Iran has suffered a
colonial relationship at the hands of the other. Geographically, their spheres of
influence, though overlapping, are to a large degree separate, with Iran lying
laterally to the east of Turkey. During the Shah’s reign, both Turkey and Iran
were pro-Western, and even when Iran turned radical under the mullahs, Ankara
was careful to maintain correct relations with Tehran. There is little historically
shocking about Ankara’s embrace of the ayatollahs, even as in a contemporary
political context it had considerable shock value.
Consider: the United States, under a universally popular president at the time,
Barack Obama, was trying desperately, along with its European allies, to
forestall Iran’s march to obtaining nuclear weapons, so as to prevent Israel from
launching an attack on Iran; a nuclear Iran would change the balance of power in
the Middle East dramatically against the West, while an Israeli attack against
Iran might even be worse in terms of destabilizing the region. Yet in May 2010,
Turkey, along with Brazil, acted through a series of dramatic diplomatic
maneuvers to help Iran evade economic sanctions and thus gain critical time in
order to make such a bomb. By agreeing to enrich Iran’s uranium, Turkey
acquired yet more stature in the Islamic world to go along with that which it has
acquired by supporting Hamas in Gaza. Iran has the potential “to help Turkey
realize its core strategic goal of becoming an energy hub, delivering natural gas
and oil [from Iran] to the markets of Western Europe.”
9
 With Turkey an energy
transfer nexus for Iran, as well as for hydrocarbons coming from the Caspian Sea
across the Caucasus, even as Turkey holds the power to divert as much as 90
percent of Iraq’s water intake from the Euphrates and 40 percent of Syria’s,
Turkey joins Iran as a Middle East hyperpower, with pipelines running in all
directions filled with oil, natural gas, and water—the very basis of industrial
life.
10
Before the Oil Age, as I’ve suggested, Turkey advanced into the Balkans and
Europe in order to develop the economic capacity so that it could also advance
into the Middle East. In the Oil Age, it is the other way around. As Turkey

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becomes a European conduit for Iranian and Caspian Sea oil, it becomes too
important an economic factor for Europe to ignore. Rather than be merely a land
bridge, albeit the largest land bridge on the globe, Turkey—a G-20 country—has
become a core region in and of itself, which, along with Iran, has the capacity to
neutralize the Arab Fertile Crescent, whose societies are beset by internal
upheaval caused by decades of sterile national security regimes.
Furthermore, the move by Turkey and Brazil to safeguard Iran’s enriched
uranium was more than a rogue action of little practical consequence to help
fundamentalist Iran acquire a nuclear bomb. It reflected the rise of middle-level
powers around the world, as more and more millions from developing countries
joined the middle class.
The silver lining for the West is the following: without the ascent of Turkey,
revolutionary Iran becomes the dominant power in the Middle East; but with
Turkey’s aggressive rise as a Middle Eastern power for the first time since the
collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Iran will have competition from next door—for
Turkey can at once be Iran’s friend and competitor. And don’t forget, Turkey still
belongs to NATO, and it still has relations with Israel, however frayed. As
difficult as it has become for the West to tolerate, Turkey’s Islamist leadership
still represents a vast improvement over the mind-set of the Iranian clerical
government. Turkey can still act as a mediator between Israel and Muslim
countries, just as Iran holds the potential yet to modify its own politics, either
through political upheaval or through the wages of the regime’s own longevity
and contradictions. What is clear is that as the Cold War fades from memory,
both Turkey and Iran will have their geographies further unleashed in order to
play intensified roles in the Arab Middle East. Turkey is no longer yoked so
strongly to NATO, even as NATO is a weak reed of its former self. And with the
end of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq—itself a vestige of Cold War, Soviet-
style police states—Iran is enmeshed in the politics of the Arab world as never
before. It is all quite subtle: Turkey works in concert with Iran even as it
balances against it. At the same time, Iraq emerges as a predominantly Shiite
alternative to Iran, however weak Iraq may be at the moment. Assisting Turkey
and Iran has been the revolution in global communications that, at least in their
cases, allows people to rise above ethnicity and truly embrace religion as an
identity group. Thus, Turks, Iranians, and Arabs are all Muslims, and all are
united against Israel and to some extent against the West. And so with the
enhanced geographical factors of Turkey and Iran affecting the Arab world, the
vast quadrilateral of the Middle East is more organically interconnected than
ever before.

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Unlike the cases of Turkey and Iran, the Arab countries that lie between the
Mediterranean Sea and the Iranian plateau had little meaning before the
twentieth century. Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq were but geographical
expressions. Jordan wasn’t thought of. When we remove the official lines on the
map, we find a crude finger painting of Sunni and Shiite population clusters that
contradict national borders. Inside these borders, the central governing
authorities of Lebanon and Iraq barely operate. The one in Syria is tyrannical but
under intense siege from its own masses (and may not last to the time this book
is published); the one in Jordan is an absolute monarchy but probably only has a
future as a constitutional one. (Jordan’s main reason for existing always goes
unstated: it acts as a buffer state for other Arab regimes who fear having a land
border with Israel.) When U.S. president George W. Bush toppled the Iraqi
dictatorship, it was thought at the time that he had set history in motion in the
Arab world, roiling it to a greater degree than any Western figure since
Napoleon. But then came the democratic rebellions of the Arab Spring, which
had their own internal causes unrelated to what Bush had done. In any case, the
post-Ottoman state system that came about in the aftermath of World War I is
under greater stress than ever before. Western-style democracy may not exactly
follow, but some form of liberalization eventually must, helped by the revolution
in Egypt, and by the transition away from Cold War–era Arab police states,
which will make the transition in Central Europe and the Balkans away from
communism seem effortless by comparison. Indeed, the Levant is currently
characterized by collapsing authoritarian regimes and democracies here and
there that are unable to get anything done. The aggressive energy that
characterizes the leaderships of Turkey and Iran, partly a product of their
geographies, has for decades been almost nowhere apparent in the Arab world—
another reason why the Arab world has now entered a period of epochal political
transition.
Truly, the 2011 Arab uprisings that swept away several regimes were about
the power of communications technology and the defeat of geography. But as
time passes, the geographies of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and other
countries will reassert themselves. Tunisia and Egypt are age-old clusters of
civilizations, whose statehoods originate in antiquity, whereas Libya and Yemen,
for example, are but vague geographies, whose statehoods were not established
until the twentieth century. Western Libya around Tripoli (Tripolitania) was
always oriented toward the rich and urbane civilizations of Carthage in Tunisia,
whereas eastern Libya around Benghazi (Cyrenaica) was always oriented toward
those of Alexandria in Egypt. Yemen was rich and populous from antiquity
forward, but its many mountain kingdoms were always separate from one

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another. It is therefore no surprise that building modern, nontyrannical states in
Libya and Yemen is proving more difficult than in Tunisia and Egypt.
But it is in the Levant and Fertile Crescent where the next phase of conflict
may unfold.
Iraq, because of the 2003 American invasion, is deep into a political evolution
that cannot but affect the entire Arab world. This is because of Iraq’s vast oil
reserves (the second in the world behind Saudi Arabia); its large population of
over 31 million; its geographical position at the juncture of the Sunni and Shiite
worlds; its equidistance between Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia; and its historical
and political significance as the former capital of the Abbasid Dynasty.
Furthermore, Iraq is bedeviled by three legacies: almost half a century of brutal
military dictatorship under various rulers, culminating in Saddam, that warped
its political culture; a grim and violent history, ancient and modern, that extends
far beyond the recent decades of dictatorship, and which has encouraged a harsh
and suspicious national character (however essentialist this may sound); and
severe ethnic and sectarian divisions.
Iraq has never been left alone. Once again, Freya Stark: “While Egypt lies
parallel and peaceful to the routes of human traffic, Iraq is from earliest times a
frontier province, right-angled and obnoxious to the predestined paths of man.”
11
For Mesopotamia cut across one of history’s bloodiest migration routes, pitting
man against man and breeding pessimism as a consequence. Whether Iraq was
being attacked from the Syrian desert in the west or the plateau of Elam in Iran
to the east, it was a constant victim of occupation. From as early as the third
millennium 
B.C
., the ancient peoples of the Near East fought over control of
Mesopotamia. Whether it was the Achaemenid Persian kings Darius and Xerxes
who ruled Babylon, or the Mongol hordes that later swept down to overrun the
land, or the long-running Ottoman rule that ended with the First World War,
Iraq’s has been a tragic history of occupation.
12
Furthering this bloodshed, Mesopotamia has rarely been a demographically
cohesive country. The Tigris and Euphrates, which run through Iraq, have long
constituted a frontier zone where various groups, often the residue of these
foreign invasions, clashed and overlapped. As the French orientalist Georges
Roux painstakingly documents in