They share the mistake of denying people in the region their own agency

From Two Speeches and a Tragedy by George Packer.

A rather good essay on the Middle East, striking many themes with which I agree. Pleasant in that it actually attempts to look at the nature of the beast rather than use the circumstances for partisan sniping. Packer is observing the contrast between two early speeches in Obama's presidency and his current actions and inactions.

In his first year in office, President Obama gave two speeches—one in Cairo, the other in Oslo—that bear directly on the crisis in the Middle East today. The Cairo speech, in June, 2009, offered a message of peace and coöperation between America, the West, and the Muslim world. It sketched an optimistic vision of the future based on principles of mutual respect, tolerance, human development, and democracy. It quoted verses of the Koran to claim Islam as a religion devoted to these principles. The Cairo speech, coming just five months into his Presidency, depended heavily on Obama’s rhetorical power—and on the very fact of his Presidency as a world-changing event. Not only was he not George W. Bush, he was a black President with the middle name Hussein, who had opposed the Iraq War and spent time in places like Indonesia and Pakistan. It was like a campaign speech directed at Muslims. There was very little follow-up in the way of policies and programs. Today, from Tripoli to Raqqa, from Mosul to Ghazni, from Karachi back to Cairo, that speech is in tatters.

It turned out that the winding down of the American war in Iraq, and the end of the Bush torture policy, and a hands-off approach toward internal conflict in countries like Egypt, Syria, and Iran, did not create the space for a new partnership between the United States and the Muslim world, or allow for positive change within those societies. It’s hard to think of a worse year in modern history for the life conditions of Muslims internationally than 2014 (and there’s been plenty of competition). This has very little to do with what Obama and the United States have done this year—or, more often, failed to do. It turned out that there were violent, intolerant, destabilizing forces within Muslim societies that go deeper and farther back than recent American actions and policies.

It’s very hard for Americans to accept that we are not the root cause of all the world’s good or evil. A kind of nationalistic narcissism joins the left and the right in a common delusion: the first believes that American support for Israel and the invasion of Iraq are behind all the turmoil in the Middle East today; the second sees American ideals and military might as the answer to that turmoil. If only we’d stay the hell out; if only we’d go all in. Both views have a piece of the truth but far from the whole thing, and they share the mistake of denying people in the region their own agency. It’s undeniable that the invasion of Iraq created the vacuum in which Al Qaeda has flourished, and that American support for dictators, from the Shah of Iran to the Saudi royal family, has stoked discontent around the region. It’s also the case that, without American leadership, there would be no international coalition against the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham like the one Obama has belatedly formed.

But the original sources of the extreme violence and social disintegration in North Africa, the Middle East, and South and Central Asia are bad government (autocratic, sectarian, corrupt); marginalized, undereducated, economically deprived publics; and homegrown or imported religious ideas within Islam that turn mass murder into an obligation of the faithful. The first two are common enough around the world. It’s the third that turns ordinary misery into the region’s brand of endless horror.

"They share the mistake of denying people in the region their own agency." Everyone wants to use coercion to achieve ends when the reality is that most of what we can do is influence the ends. All these countries and all individuals have to work towards their own goals in their own circumstances in their own fashion. We can influence that to some degree. We cannot both grant everyone agency but then also exercise coercive action over them in such a fashion that they have no choice but to comply.

Without exercising that coercion, we perforce have to grant that their resolution may not be towards means or ends that we like or endorse.

I have been interested to note that I very rarely see anyone discussing, over the past dozen years, the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s (100,000 dead). It didn't make headlines in the US all that often but all the same dynamics and brutalities we are witnessing today in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Pakistan, etc. were on display then. The Algerian military almost solved the problem. The massacres and beheadings came to end but enough of the fanatical strain survived to resurrect itself as Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in the 2000s. I wonder what might be the lessons we could learn from the Algerians?