The U.S. war on Iraq was short. The dictator Saddam Hussein fell more quickly than expected. The aftermath was far worse. After the United States pulled out, Iraq quickly splintered along ethnic and religious lines: Kurds in the north, Shiites in the south, a Sunni majority in between. Saudi Arabia followed, as the oil-rich east and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in the west broke away from the reign of Riyadh in the center. The fall of the House of Saud was disastrous, ending decades of quiet partnership between Riyadh and Washington that had assured the world of a steady flow of affordable oil.
The Middle East went topsy-turvy. Pro-American regimes were left at odds with their people, undermined by radicals preaching a new Pan-Islamic nationalism. By 2010 Al Qaeda was a name out of ancient history, but the new radical groups operating out of Africa, Europe and even the United States had U.S. policymakers nostalgic for Osama bin Laden.
There were precedents. Israel’s 1967 defeat of the Arab armies–in just six days–shook just about every Arab regime to its foundations and soon brought to power some of the region’s most notorious leaders: Muammar Kaddafi in Libya, Hafez Assad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Islamic firebrands taught that the six-day defeat was Allah’s punishment for attempts to modernize Muslim societies. Al Qaeda, according to many scholars, had its roots in the Muslim humiliation of 1967.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 had an even greater impact, scholars will say. Muslims already felt their faith under assault. In the occupied territories, or Chechnya, the siege was literal. Elsewhere, it took the form of globalization’s threat to Muslim identity. To many Muslims, the attack on Iraq looked like an American imperial grab for Middle East oil. “There is a feeling that we are powerless,” says Tariq Ramadan, an Egyptian scholar whose grandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood. “We can’t speak about a ‘clash of civilizations’ yet, but the ingredients are there, and after an attack on Iraq they will be stronger.”
If there is a new war in Iraq, the Muslim rulers most at risk are those most closely identified with the United States: the House of Saud, Jordan’s King Abdullah, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf. The Bush administration’s sudden public interest in making these regimes democratize is not likely to enhance their stability. When the Carter administration tried to force liberalization on the Shah of Iran in the 1970s, it only hastened the fall of the shah–and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini. If that pattern holds in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan–three of the most powerful Muslim countries–the tremors would rattle the world for decades. As a British officer said after World War I, the last time the Muslim map was redrawn by the West, “this is a peace to end peace.”
