The Telegraph, UK
Nov 26 2006

To understand the Middle East today, turn to Romeo and Juliet
By Niall Ferguson
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 26/11/2006

It was three years ago that a prescient Beirut journalist I know
predicted that Iraq would end up as "Lebanon to the power of 10";
meaning Lebanon during its 16-year civil war between 1975 and 1991.
This year, his prophecy has been fulfilled as Iraq has spiralled into
bloody fratricidal strife.

By contrast, my friend was quite optimistic about Lebanon’s future.
But last week’s assassination of the industry minister, Pierre
Gemayel, raises the grim possibility that Lebanon may now go the way
of Iraq.

Civil war is the disorder of the day in the Middle East.
Unfortunately, politicians in the United States and Europe remain
chronically incapable of understanding how civil wars work. As a
result, not only do they struggle to stop them once they get going,
they also sometimes inadvertently fan their flames – a good
illustration being the way that Germany’s ill-considered recognition
of the independence of Slovenia and Croatia in December 1991
accelerated the break-up of Yugoslavia and the "ethnic cleansing" of
Bosnia.

advertisementToday’s equivalent idiocy is the enduring belief that,
by over-throwing Saddam Hussein and "liberating" Iraqis, the United
States could unleash a wave of democratisation throughout the Middle
East. It was in those terms that many commentators interpreted the
mass demonstrations in Beirut in March last year – the so-called
"Cedar Revolution" – that led to the withdrawal of Syrian troops from
Lebanon. Those events were also triggered by an assassination, that
of former prime minister Rafik Hariri. It will be ironic indeed if
this latest political murder sets the cedars of Lebanon blazing once
again.

The dream of a democratised Middle East had its origins in another
bad idea: the notion that the principal conflicts in the post-Cold
War era would be clashes between civilisations, in particular those
of Islam and the West. Turning Iraq into a democracy was supposed to
initiate a fundamental transformation of Islamic civilisation: to
westernise it politically and therefore to neutralise it
strategically.

The reality, however, is that the majority of conflicts in our time
have been within civilisations, not between them: civil wars, not
holy wars. And, as the cases of Lebanon and Iraq clearly illustrate,
such wars tend to be fought by neighbouring ethnic groups. Only
occasionally are the Muslims all on one side and the "westerners" –
shorthand for Christians and Jews – all on the other.

Remember Romeo and Juliet? The Montagues are not followers of Sharia
law; nor are the Capulets upholders of Judaeo-Christian values. They
are just "two households, both alike in dignity / In fair Verona".
Yet that does not stop an interminable civil war being waged between
these two clans, who "From ancient grudge break to new mutiny / Where
civil blood makes civil hands unclean".

Shakespeare calls the families "profaners of this neighbour-stained
steel… you men, you beasts / That quench the fire of your pernicious
rage / With purple fountains issuing from your veins". Those lines go
to the heart of what civil war is about: mutual hatred between
neighbouring groups, sustained by a cycle of violence.

It was not so very different in the Glasgow of my youth. No one could
conceivably call the ancient grudge between Rangers fans and Celtic
fans a clash of civilisations: more like a clash of barbarities.
True, the former are the Protestants and the latter are the
Catholics. But those are both Christian sects and, in any case, the
finer points of Reformation doctrine were seldom mentioned when the
rival gangs were kicking each other’s heads in.

The stakes are higher and the weapons much deadlier in the Middle
East. Take Lebanon. It certainly would be easy if the population
could be divided into Islamist bad guys and "pro-western" good guys.
Officially, it’s true, Muslims account for just under 60 per cent of
the population and Christians just under 40 per cent. But the former
can be sub-divided into Druze, Isma’ilite, Alawite or Nusayri, Shiite
and Sunni Muslims, while the latter include Catholics (Armenian,
Maronite, Melkite, Roman and Syrian) and Orthodox (Armenian, Greek
and Syrian) – not forgetting the Assyrians, Chaldeans, Copts and
Protestants. Officially, Lebanon’s population is divided into no
fewer than 17 religious sects.

Last week’s scenes in Beirut perfectly illustrate the complexity of
the conflict that is now simmering. The murdered man was himself a
Maronite Christian, the grandson of the founder of the Phalange Party
that once allied itself with Israel (Jews) to fight the Palestine
Liberation Organisation (Muslims). But the mourners spat on pictures
of General Michel Aoun, a Christian who has aligned his party with
Hezbollah (Muslims).

Ominously, one woman demonstrator was quoted by the New York Times as
saying: "There will come a day when we have revenge." One of Mr
Gemayel’s relations? No: a 39-year-old Muslim woman who attended the
demonstration with her seven children. She is almost certainly a
supporter of the Future Movement, a Sunni party whose leader, Saad
Hariri, is the son of the former prime minister whose assassination
began the Cedar Revolution.

Remember how the 1970s comedy Soap used to begin: "Confused? You will
be."

In one respect, in fact, it’s not that confusing. The paths of
Lebanon and Iraq diverged in 1991, when the United States waged its
first war against Iraq. At that time, a deal was quietly cut that
ended the civil war in Lebanon by handing the country over to Syria.
The recent spate of political assassination against anti-Syrian
politicians such as Mr Gemayel suggests that the Syrians have no
intention of letting Lebanon go.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, Bush Jnr is realising just why Bush Snr did not
march all the way to Baghdad back in 1991. For regime change in Iraq
has unleashed Lebanese-style centrifugal forces. Here, once again,
it’s not a clash between civilisations. True, the war between
American troops and al-Qaeda insurgents is not over, but it’s now a
sub-plot in a wider civil war between Shias and Sunnis. Thursday’s
lethal car bomb explosions in the Shiite district of Baghdad known as
Sadr City were just the latest and biggest of a succession of
sectarian attacks that dates back to the bombing of the Askariya
mosque at Samarra last February.

The key, as in Romeo and Juliet, is that each such attack begets
another attack, in an almost unstoppable cycle of tit-for-tat
killing. In retaliation for the Sadr City car bombs last week,
militiamen belonging to the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi
army fired mortars into the Sunni neighbourhoods of Adhamiya and
Ghazaliya.

The Bush administration still believes that Iraqi politicians can be
browbeaten into sharing power with each other and taking
responsibility for security. Dream on. Last week, Sunni gunmen
attacked the health ministry, because it is run by a Shiite minister,
in retaliation for earlier Shiite kidnapping raids on the education
ministry, which is run by (you guessed it) a Sunni minister. In civil
wars, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And often more
than equal.

In Baghdad these days, Mahdi army thugs drive around with kidnapped
Sunnis in their car boots, offering on-the-spot revenge to bereaved
Shias. Three Sunnis for a dead brother is the going rate. That is the
psychology that made October the bloodiest month in Iraq since the
American invasion.

The bad news, as James D Fearon of Stanford University explained to
members of the US Congress in September, is that withdrawing American
troops from Iraq will only accelerate Iraq’s descent into the abyss.
The worse news is that increasing troop numbers may only slow the
descent. The worst news is that civil wars like these tend to last a
long time. Of 54 major civil wars since 1945, half lasted more than
seven years. And most such wars don’t end with power-sharing
agreements, but with victory for one side or the other, often as a
result of foreign intervention.

Did I say "end"? The real lesson of Lebanon – and, indeed, of Bosnia
– may be that some civil wars never really end. No amount of tragedy
brings the real-life Montagues and Capulets to their senses. There
are merely ceasefires. And then the cycle of killing resumes.

– Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard
University and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution (as was Milton
Friedman)