We have today entered a new political — or politico-religious — period in which the Muslim peoples of the Middle East are seizing control of their own fortunes, a control lost as a result of the First World War and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. Few in the West seem to have grasped the significance of the fact that Muslims themselves have taken over the struggle against Islamic radicalism.
The West did not start the war in Syria. Until chemical weapons were used in the war, the West had had no direct implication in it, and feeble indirect ones, other than to assist the victims. It is the Syrians’ war, and that of the other Arabs who have chosen to take part.
The rebellion in Syria has divided into sectarian factions: the Alawites led by President Bashar Assad; Sunni Islamists supported by Saudi Arabia and Gulf Arabs; Shiite radicals supported by Iranians and Hezbollah; Kurds, plus several Christian communities attempting to escape the fighting.
The crisis is essentially an Arab phenomenon, and indirectly a Western one because the Mediterranean is where European (and latter-day American) imperialism interacted most intimately with Islam. This war within Muslim civilization is sectarian — Sunni against Shiite — as well as national because the modern Arab world was defined by imperialists in terms of modern monarchies, which subsequently become republics and/or military or secret police dictatorships.
The Arabs, Egyptians, and Maghrebis are struggling to redefine themselves and their own destinies, which certainly are not, as Washington thinks, eventually to become acolytes and puppets of Western secular, irreligious or antireligious, exploitative globalized and militarized capitalism.
It is essential that the West now cease its interference. It cannot reconcile the Syrians, or the Sunnis and Shiites, nor the conflicts in the Maghreb and the Sahel, mainly produced by climate and history. The West has suffered the delusion that a war on these people would produce modernity and democracy. War is a destroyer, which includes among its victims those who initiate it.