The Solution for Peace in the Middle East?

Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | 1/24/2008
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is John Myhill, a linguist in the English Department at the University of Haifa. He has been living in Israel since 1995. He has a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania (1984) and has written extensively on the connection between language and nationalism. His two most recent books are Language in Jewish Society (Multilingual Matters 2004) and Language, Religion, and National Identity in Europe and the Middle East (John Benjamins 2006). FP: John Myhill, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Myhill: Thank you. Good to be here.

FP: You are one of the proponents of the idea that only self-determination can save the Middle East. Tell us what this concept is about and how realistic it is in terms of bringing peace to the region.

Myhill: Thanks Jamie.

The general point, and the common sense point, is that groups of people who have a lot in common in terms of how they speak and their religion should be together; groups who are radically different in these terms and can't get along with each other should be separated by borders. That's why we have peace in Europe now. How do we do this in the Middle East?

Take Iraq as an example. It needs to be divided into three states. Now. For sure keep protecting the Kurds—they want the U.S. there. Then divide up the Sunnis and Shiites into separate states. If they don’t like it, let them fight it out for exclusive control until they figure out neither side can win, and then they’ll do it themselves.

A separate state is needed for the Maronites on Mt. Lebanon. They can’t live with Muslims, it’s obvious. If someone like the Americans will just impose this militarily, no problem. If the Americans don't want to do this (probably not), support the Maronites in their efforts to revive Syriac—that’s their sacred language— as a spoken language like the Jews revived Hebrew, and the result will be a separate Maronite state in a generation or two, because everyone will recognize that they aren't Arabs and need their own state.

Sudan needs to be partitioned -- by force. Now. Get the Arabs and the non-Arabs apart. They’ve been fighting for 50 years with more than 2 million dead already.

Writing Classical Arabic—the language of the Koran—is a big big problem. It’s totally different from how people speak, it’s created this idea that there’s an 'Arab people’ stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, it’s giving legitimization to religious fanaticism, it’s terrible. Make up standard written versions of the 6 or 7 different spoken dialects, call them different languages, Levantine, Yemenite, Egyptian, Maghrebi, Sudanese, whatever you want, just not 'Arabic.’ Each of these will be a nationality with their own written language, they’ll have their own states, they’ll stop interfering in each other’s business, and they stop following each others’ religious fanatics. That’s how people turned Latin into French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese—they just started writing the way they spoke. Put writing in these new languages—newspapers, essays, translations of books, everything—onto the internet, that’s where everyone’s reading and writing these days, and this trend is only going to get stronger.

People will read in these new languages and write in these new languages, because it’s much easier than Classical Arabic. After a generation or so, they’ll start to forget about this silly idea that they’re 'Arabs’—because the only reason they have for thinking that they’re Arabs is because of Classical Arabic—and they’ll want to divide up into different nationalities according to how they speak and write these new languages, like Europeans have.

Then we have the Alawites in Syria, who’ve managed to take control of the government and have to support all these radical movements so that people forget that they aren’t Muslims. Tell them they can have their own state in the homeland in northwestern Syria. The US will protect them there until the Muslims accept it. That'll stop all the trouble coming out of Syria.

FP: The lessons of history bear out the need of a redrawing of political borders in certain dire situations, don’t they?

Myhill: For sure. We need to learn from history. Peace only came to Europe when political borders were drawn according to the language and religion of people living in different places, so that each group had its own independent state and the right to self-determination. If people had realized that this was the problem in 1900 and just redrawn the borders in a reasonable way right off the bat, we could have skipped the two world wars and70 million deaths. The problem was, if someone had gotten up and proposed these borders in 1900, people in general would have said it was a very unrealistic scenario. Instead, they tried to deal with a big general problem with short-term solutions but no general plan, and the result was disaster.

The general principle, therefore, is just like in Europe, self-determination is necessary for all national groups. The question then becomes what is a 'national group'? It's about spoken language and it's about religion. 'Arab' isn't a national group--it's a superconglomerate of many national groups.

'Lebanon' or 'Syria' aren't national groups--they're states whose boundaries were arbitrarily drawn by colonial powers. Concepts like 'Arab' and 'Lebanon' and 'Syria' -- the way people understand them today -- are part of the problem, and we have to see past them. For example, if the US was going to go into Iraq, they should have done it explicitly for the purpose of freeing the Kurds and the Shiites from Sunni domination and divide up the country. They shouldn't even be thinking in terms of 'democratizing the Iraqi government.' It's hopeless and silly. Why should Iraq even exist? Because some British general said so in the 1920s?

The problem is that in the Middle East, the borders were drawn by colonial powers and their local clients and almost all of them don’t make any sense ethnically. There are all sorts of groups who don't have the right of self-determination—the Maronites in Lebanon, the Alawites in Syria, the Dinka and Fur in Sudan, the Kurds in Iraq, the Shiites in Bahrain—and they're using all sorts of tactics to try to get this right. In some cases two groups don't recognize each others' right to self-determination, for example the Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq or the Jews and Palestinians in Israel/Palestine.

Think about this new map: 12-14 states in the territory called 'the Arab world,’ including Israel; this is a little more than half the states which now exist. Sure it looks unrealistic, but history has taught us that nothing else is going to work. We’re going to have to get around to something like this eventually. If we do it sooner and in a more organized way, the amount of bloodshed can be limited. But if we mess around with solutions which aren’t going to work, like trying to turn Iraq into a single stable democratic state, or if we sit on our hands until one of the Arab states gets nuclear weapons, then in a generation or two we’re going to find ourselves in a situation where tens of millions of people are going to get killed before it dawns on people to turn to the solution which is obvious now.

FP: Ok, but Middle East countries are not going to agree to this. All of this is unrealistic, no?

Myhill: I have to say in general that it's absolutely necessary to get past the idea of 'the countries' agreeing, if by 'countries' you mean the governments, the states. This kind of thinking is exactly the problem, exactly why the West is getting nowhere in the Middle East. The Arab states, the Arab governments, they're silly and artificial creations. That's my whole point. Forget the Arab governments. They're weak, they have no legitimacy with the people. Every single one of them. Islamists understand this and that's why they're so effective; Westerners don't understand this and that's why they're so ineffective. You don't do it through the states, you do it through the people.

The Kurds and the non-Arabs in the Sudan want protection. They’ve been begging for it for years. The Maronites are fed up with trying to live in the same state with Muslims, it just doesn’t work. For sure they’ll want to revive Syriac as a spoken language once they realize it’s possible; we’ve already put a team and a project together to do this, but we need money. The Alawites would love to have their own state, if they knew they’d be safe it in. That’s what they asked the French for in the 1930s and the French turned them down. And Arabic speakers are sick of reading and writing standard Arabic. It’s totally different from how they speak, it’s unnatural. It’s like an English speaker reading and writing Old English. What would you rather read and write, English or Old English? It’s the same for Arabic speakers. They’re already writing their dialects in email messages, SMS, things like that, because it’s easier and more natural. They just don’t realize yet you can do the same thing with books and newspapers.

And also, in reply to the charge that is made that this is all unrealistic: is the assumption that if a plan takes more than 6 months in the future it sounds like pie in the sky? Or if it's something which calls for something other than military force it's too abstract? Or is there a problem with having a general vision rather than just looking for ad-hoc quick fixes? Or is there an assumption that borders are inviolable unless you can convince a government to agree to them? The Middle East has deep deep problems and, in case people haven’t noticed, solutions which look realistic just plain aren’t working. And the things which I’m suggesting did work to finally bring peace to Europe, so that looks pretty realistic to me.

FP: Well, I thought I would just add that the U.S. is getting somewhere in Iraq in the sense that Al-Qaeda is on the ropes now because of the success of the surge and also because the Sunnis have joined with American forces.

Myhill: If America is going to actually do something to improve the situation in the Middle East, Americans have to learn to look ahead, beyond the next press conference, beyond the next elections. They have to see the big picture.

Al-Qaeda itself isn’t the problem. The problem is that Arab Sunnis refuse to live in a country under Shiite domination, even if they’re only 20% of the population. First of all, they’ve ruled over the Shiites for 1300 years; why should anything change now? And second of all, they’ve got the support of their Sunni Arab brothers in other countries, who outnumber the Shiites by a huge margin overall. It’s the same reason they can’t accept Israel, except in Iraq the problem is Shiites instead of Jews, but it’s basically the same problem. So when there’s a danger of this, some militant Sunni organization has to come in to fight for the Sunni cause. In Israel it’s Hamas or now Islamic Jihad, in Lebanon it’s Fatah al-Islam, in Iraq they decided to call themselves an affiliate of Al-Qaeda, it doesn’t matter, it’s just a name. The important thing is to achieve Sunni domination.

There were national elections in January 2005, the Shiites predictably won, Al-Qaeda predictably started actions in Iraq in September 2005 to disrupt the establishment of the government and prevent the Shiites from taking over the country. Everyone in the Sunni world knew this was going to happen. After fighting went on for awhile and Sunni leaders in some areas of Iraq started to see that the Shiite-dominated government and Shiite militias weren’t a problem for them at the moment, they decided to get rid of Al-Qaeda and so they turned to the US for help.

But let’s assume that Al-Qaeda can be weakened in the short run (a big if, but let’s assume that) and the general situation in Iraq gets stabilized for the moment. Will that solve the problem for the Sunnis in Iraq? Of course not, they’ll still be under the control of a Shiite government with Iranian backing, right back where they were in the summer of 2005. When that happens, the Americans won’t give them weapons to fight the government. So Al-Qaeda, or some other militant Sunni organization, will just come back to protect Sunni interests, and Iraqi Sunnis will let them get started there because they’ll have forgotten how bad Al-Qaeda was because they’ll only be thinking about Shiite oppression. If the country could be partitioned, all this could be avoided.

FP: When you say, “You don't do it through the states, you do it through the people.” I am not really sure what this means. “Doing it through the people” might sound nice but one could argue that it is a meaningless statement that has no bearing on any reality. How exactly are you going to do it “through the people” in an undemocratic region ruled by despots?

Myhill: In the case of Iraq, talk to the moderate Sunni tribal leaders, remind them of the scenario I just illuminated and try to convince them that the only way to keep out Al-Qaeda and avoid Shiite rule is to accept partition. If they don’t listen, let them go through another round of Shiite domination followed by Al-Qaeda domination and then try suggesting partition to them again.

In the case of Syria, establish secret connections with the Alawite government, tell them the US wants to support an Alawite state in the northwest of the country and will send soldiers to protect it. Make sure there are no Sunnis around at these discussions. Ask them how they suggest this be done, then do what they suggest. I’m sure they’ve thought about this a lot.

In the case of the Kurds in Iraq and the various non-Arab groups in Sudan, they already control sections of the countries. The Kurds have already formed a regional government and there’s already coordination with the American military there. The same thing has to be done in Sudan. Hundreds of people have been dying in Darfur every day since 2003. Send in a military force to stop the killing, then start talking with the rebels about setting up a separate government.

In the case of partitioning Lebanon, there are plenty of Maronites who support this idea. Basically everyone except the businessmen in East Beirut and the diaspora who the West has unfortunately been listening to so far. Just go into any city or town on Mt. Lebanon, tell them what you want, and the whole town will be behind you within hours. And to revive Syriac as a spoken language so everyone will see that the Maronites aren’t Arabs and need their own state, we’ve already put together a team and we have the contacts. We just need some money.

And in order to break up the Arabs into 6 or 7 different nationalities on the basis of their spoken language, put together teams of native speakers of these dialects and give them money to put materials in these dialects on the internet. I could put together a team of Israeli Arabs, who speak the Levantine dialect, in a few weeks.

FP: In the context of all these recommendations, how can Islamo-Fascism be stopped?

Myhill: First of all, it can’t be stopped with democracy. When the whole nationality is sick, democracy doesn’t help. Hitler and Mussolini were both democratically elected. Attempts at democracy in the Arab World have just made things worse. And it can’t be stopped by fighting poverty; more money will just go to more support for terrorism. Osama bin Laden didn’t become a terrorist because he was poor.

Islamo-Fascism can only be stopped by building nation-states so that there is self-determination for each nationality (I mean real nationalities based on some commonality, not artificial conglomerates like the 'Arab nationality’). Each state needs to be understood to be the political vehicle of a single nationality with its own language based upon how people actually speak there. This is how Westerners stopped religion from intervening in politics and this is how Muslims have to do it as well. Some Muslim states are already doing this. Turkey for the Turks. Uzbekistan for the Uzbeks. Albania for the Albanians. Bangladesh for the Bengalis. Malaysia for the Malays. In these states Islamo-Fascism is kept under control, because religion is subordinated to the state. But the Arab states, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia have rejected the model of the nation-state, and it’s exactly in these states that we see Islamo-Fascism developing and either destabilizing the government or taking it over altogether.

The way to stop Islamo-Fascism is to turn the areas of these countries into nation-states. This is going to mean drawing some new political maps according to how people actually speak, and in some cases according to their religion.

FP: John Myhill, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview and for contributing these ideas to our discourse on the Middle East.

I just thought I would add that the claim that democracy has just made matters wrose is, from some angles, a subjective rhetorical ploy. It dismisses a whole movement that hasn't been given a chance to get underway yet -- and hasn't had a chance to prove itself. It can't be proven to be a failure in the matter of a few years. It takes time for these institutions to grow in a soil where there was tyranny.

Also, within the limits of the possible, in terms of the Middle East that we actually have to deal with, the effort to bring democracy has been successful in many areas – and there are many stories of how peoples' lives have been improved in both Iraq and Afghanistan etc. And there are many legitimate reasons to believe that this effort – the Sharansky thesis – in installing democracy in the Middle East, in the imperfect world within which we live, will have a deadly impact on Islamic terror, and that is exactly why the jihadists are panicking about the process of democratization in Iraq and Afghanistan etc.

Your point is instructive, of course, that one ultimately can't separate self-determination from democracy. And naturally many of the points you bring up are legitimate: surely a Middle East where people of the same language and religion live together in nation states would be a region of more peace and one of larger possibilities of democracy. And yes, there is the darker reality that if some of these problems you point to are not fixed, that many of the solutions being imposed may exacerbate the conflicts, rather than cure them.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us.

Myhill: I understand that Westerners feel a natural urge to experiment with democracy within presently-existing borders because that is how things work in their own societies, they don’t really understand the Middle Eastern societies they’re venturing into, and they assume that things must be pretty much the same; in any case, if there’s a disaster, it’ll basically be local non-Westerners who’ll get killed, so why not experiment?

I am convinced that for countries such as Iraq and Lebanon with incoherent combinations of different ethnic groups this experiment will fail; although there may be short-term lulls in the conflict which make it seem as though there is some hope for democracy catching on, the problems will return before long, as for example we are seeing in Lebanon today.

The problem is that people are getting fed up with US interventions, so that if (I would say when) the present attempt at democracy in Iraq fails, no one is going to be able to convince the US to go into Iraq again in order to try partition, and so the locals will go about the business of partition themselves, with Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites following policies of mass genocide against each other, as bad or worse than what’s happening in Sudan today.

I recognize that unfortunately the great majority of Westerners won’t recognize that their faith in democracy is misplaced until the level of catastrophe is so great, with millions of people dead, that there is no alternative and it’s too late to save the lives that will have been lost.

You’re right, there are places where US intervention has improved the situation—in Iraqi Kurdistan for example. But that’s specifically because it’s had the effect of partitioning the territory into different national groups.

FP: Well my friend, you have brought up many important issues today, issues that need to be gauged very carefully in any of our policy decision-making. To be sure, incoherent combinations of different ethnic groups within borders in places like the Middle East is not a reality one can or should ignore.

Perhaps there is a possibility that people in non-Western societies can also be inspired by freedom and a good standard of living, and that such inspiration can surpass their ethnic and religious affiliations. There is much evidence that this is happening in Iraq, where many citizens, regardless of ethnicity and religion, are grateful to the U.S. for their liberation and are interested primarily in living free lives and taking care of their families.

But we'll have to continue this in another forum. Thank you for joining us.

Myhill: Thanks to you too.