Gareth Stansfield has a new briefing paper out at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) on "
The Remaking of Syria, Iraq and the Wider Middle East." (Summary page at the link;
full PDF of the report is here). From the summary:
Important as events in Cairo are, they distract Western
attention from the much bigger game being played out in Syria which
significantly risks changing the Levant after a century of relative
territorial stability, according to a new paper from the Royal United
Services Institute (RUSI).
The Remaking of Syria, Iraq and the Wider Middle East
written by RUSI's senior associate fellow Professor Gareth Stansfield
analyses the impact the Syrian civil war could have on the future of the
Middle East state system across the Levant. The report warns that
ongoing conflict may prompt the fragmentation of the region's
twentieth-century defined states. Stansfield outlines how Lebanon,
Jordan - and the interests of Israel and Turkey - could all be
profoundly affected; but the most important casualty of the war is
potentially Iraq, with inter-communal conflicts driven by deeply held
and murderous sectarian hatreds that continue to stalk its political
landscape today.
'Is Syria on the verge of collapse? And could Iraq, in particular -
as well as Lebanon, Jordan and Israel - survive this eventuality? The
answer is a tentative Yes to the first question and a probable No to the
second,' writes Stansfield.
'There seems to be growing regional and international acceptance of
the possibility of erasing the once-rarefied, externally imposed
boundaries that have divided peoples as much as they have united them,
with greater emphasis on the need for state structures to be tied more
authentically to the peoples they encompass.'
'Therefore, if it is now no longer possible to simultaneously
maintain the integrity of the extant state system while advocating
democratisation - which may result, among other things, in the removal
of existing dictatorships - then a different, and even more worrying,
set of questions need to be posed. The problem now is how to ensure that
the ongoing, escalating instability in Syria and Iraq does not
deteriorate further into a region-wide war.'
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