Editor’s note: This op-ed by Barrie Dunsmore, a retired foreign correspondent for ABC, first appeared in the Sunday Rutland Herald and Times Argus.
When Republican presidential hopefuls try to excuse their lack of knowledge of world affairs – essentially by arguing that such ignorance is really an asset – they are falling back on an enduring American myth. In this mythology, when pitted against an expert, a good person with sound instincts and common sense will usually prevail. While that may occasionally be true, it most certainly is not the case when it comes to conducting policy in the Middle East.
One of the key reasons that region is as volatile as it is today is that European and American politicians who knew little or nothing about the Middle East persistently interfered in its politics. The British and the French bear much of the responsibility for the region’s ongoing struggles by the way they divvied up the Ottoman Empire after World War I – with little regard for the tribal and religious differences among the peoples of the region. In more recent times, America has made its own blunders based on ignorance.
During the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination campaign, I was assigned to Sen. Henry (Scoop) Jackson who was regarded as strong on foreign policy. One morning Jackson suddenly departed from his stump speech and started talking about the Christians being under grave threat in Lebanon and he strongly implied that the United States should be prepared to take action. This became his theme of the day. As I was the only reporter present, fresh from the Middle East, I began asking him if he meant we should send in the Marines as President Dwight Eisenhower had done in 1958. Other reporters followed up. Jackson began to waffle and by the end of the day he suggested we should take the subject to United Nations.
That evening on his campaign plane Sen. Jackson sat down beside me and asked me to tell him about Lebanon. (The plane was an old twin engine DC3, so we had plenty of time.) I explained that Lebanon’s political system was based on a delicately balanced, unwritten agreement reached at the time of its creation in 1943. Under this deal, known unofficially as the “confessional” system, the president would always be a Maronite Christian; the prime minister, a Sunni Muslim; the speaker of the National Assembly, a Shiite Muslim. Political power and its spoils would be split roughly six to five, in favor of the Christians.
As for those Lebanese Christians, I told the senator they were under less of a threat from the Muslims than from each other. Christian political leaders were like mafia dons who thought nothing of killing opponents, occasionally even their wives and children, in wars over turf. This had nothing to do with religion. It was mostly about business – usually illegal business – such as who was in control of the ports where millions could be made through smuggling. For whatever reason, Jackson didn’t talk much about Lebanon after that.
In 1983 when President Ronald Reagan did send the U.S. Marines into Lebanon again, the situation had become even more chaotic. The Israelis, the Syrians and Iran all had troops participating in a Lebanese civil war. Ostensibly, the Americans were there to create stability by getting Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization out of the country. But as was predictable, the Marines were soon seen as being on the side of the Lebanese Christians and the Israelis – against the Muslims. Early one morning, the smiling driver of a Mercedes Benz truck filled with 12,000 pounds of dynamite slammed his vehicle into the Marine headquarters in Beirut killing 241 U.S. servicemen. Reagan quickly decided to redeploy American troops to ships off shore and by early spring, the ships had sailed away. Various terrorist groups, including al Qaeda, would subsequently use Lebanon as proof that America could be rolled by well placed acts of terror. Twenty years later they would try to prove it again in Iraq .
The invasion of Iraq would aptly demonstrate the consequences of not knowing your enemy. Just how little President George W. Bush knew about Iraq was highlighted a few years ago in a book by Peter Galbraith, former U.S. Ambassador, Kurdish specialist, controversial United Nations official in Afghanistan and now a member of the Vermont state senate. In “The End of Iraq,” Galbraith tells of a meeting Bush had just two months before the invasion, with three Iraqi exiles who were urging American intervention. According to Galbraith, the exiles discovered to their astonishment that Bush was perplexed when they began talking about Iraqi Sunnis and the Shiites. “I thought the Iraqis were Muslims,” Bush is reported to have said.
President Bush did not have to know that those two major Islamic sects emerged from a historic seventh century schism over who would succeed the prophet Mohammed. But it would have helped if he had even understood the sectarian divide in the context of the Protestant/Catholic split which had led to so much bloodshed over the centuries. Given that the third of Iraqis who were Sunnis were mainly Saddam Hussein’s supporters – while the third who were Shiites hated Saddam but were linked to Iran as co-religionists- this was a clear signal of major trouble ahead. (The final third are Kurds which was another complication.) But just weeks before the invasion he had virtually already decided to launch, this president had not the slightest understanding of the nature of the most likely major impediment to achieving American victory in Iraq.
At this time of continued uncertainty in the Middle East — how to deal with an Iran with nukes for instance — it is not comforting to know that most of those who are currently running for president have no apparent knowledge or understanding of the region. In today’s complex world, we need leaders with historical perspective who can deal with subtleties and nuance. If you need brain surgery, you want a skilled neurosurgeon to perform this delicate task — not a plumber (nor a journalist), no matter how good their intentions.
