After ISIS Is Defeated, What Next?
A modest proposal for a new start by Canada the ‘honest broker.’
Could Trudeau ever find common ground between combatants in Syria? Photo by Chris Wattie, Reuters Media Express.
Let’s just imagine that we and the other enemies of ISIS have won. We’ve occupied Raqqa and Mosul, imprisoned Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and their fighters have deserted or surrendered.
What happens next?
If generals always want to fight the last war again (and do it right this time), governments always want a peace that will advance their own interests and be politically popular at home. Finding such a peace in the Middle East will be almost impossible.
At the end of World War One, almost exactly a century ago, the West defeated the Ottoman Empire. Its provinces, from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, were at the mercy of the armies of Britain and France, whose governments had already secretly divided those provinces, with arbitrary new boundaries drawn by a disastrously clever woman named Gertrude Bell.
With few political institutions above the tribal level, the Arab world was unable to resist what the Western victors imposed, let alone establish self-governing states along the lines of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points for post-war peace. Self-government might apply to Europe, but not to regions still considered colonies by Europe’s victors.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
