Winners and Losers... The First Geopolitical Law in the Middle East

The First Geopolitical Law in the Middle East

Thinkers, politicians, and diplomats have spilled much ink to interpret the failure of the United States of America in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Middle East in general. The conundrum to explain is its field victory in the battles and frontlines, its victory over its enemies of leaders and soldiers, followed by the defeat of its geostrategic projects despite trillions of dollars spent in the Middle East and Central Asia since 1990, which caused the death of thousands of its soldiers in its quest to realize its strategic goal and geopolitical purposes. The United States sent Marines to Somalia in 1993 to implement Security Council Resolution 790, which resulted in the toppling of General Mohamad Farrah Aidid’s fighters, two Delta Force helicopters, and the killing of twenty American soldiers from the elite forces, whose bodies were mutilated and dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in front of the media, which caused US President, Bill Clinton at the time, to issue an order to withdraw from Somalia.

Furthermore, in 2003, the US army attacked Iraq, occupied Baghdad, and toppled Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the ruling Ba’ath Party. Paul Bremer, serving as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq back then, oversaw the breakup of the Iraqi army and security forces, disbanded the Ba’ath Party, and pursued its leaders in 2004. The Iraqi allies and friends of the US, who rose to power through American efforts and American soldiers’ blood spilled, demanded the withdrawal of the US from Iraq in 2011.

These allies, who achieved their objectives on the back of the American military machine, let the Americans down. When they attained their goals, they turned against them and demanded they leave Iraq. This is when Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki signed the strategic framework agreement with Washington, which called for the Americans to leave Iraq after spending over two trillion dollars on the liberation process. They shed the blood of almost 4,000 American soldiers slain and many more injured after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003.

The same in Afghanistan: no example is clearer and more straightforward in terms of evidence than the facts at the Afghan geopolitical juncture. The United States of America and its NATO allies, after the events of September 11, 2001, came to invade Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban from power. They aimed to crush the al-Qaeda organization barracked in the mountains of Tora Bora. They did and coexisted in Afghanistan for twenty years with an allied regime that they installed in Kabul led by Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani after him. They ended up leaving in August 2021, disappointed, having accomplished nothing and wasting the efforts of twenty years, having spent another two trillion dollars and causing the death of over two thousand American soldiers and many times more injured and wounded. The Taliban movement once again established itself in power and monopolized the rule, more powerful, rooted, and mighty than it was 20 twenty years ago.

What led the Americans to the stunning, dumbfounding, and disgraceful defeat in accomplishing their strategic projects and to utter disappointment in reaching their geopolitical goals? They had firm field plans and consolidated their military alliances. They undoubtedly only fought victorious battles and inflicted defeat on their enemies. No armies, groups, or factions met them except with disappointment and retreat. Despite this, their major projects and strategic goals failed to stop the chaos, quell the civil war, provide relief to people in need, and spread stability in Somalia in Operation “Restoring Hope” in 1993. They built a model democratic system and an example of good governance in Iraq after 2003 for the Greater Middle East that could have shown the way for a more suitable geopolitical reconfiguration and a better rebuilding of regional relations and systems. They also failed to build a modern state in Afghanistan, liberate people from traditional tribal and religious ideas and outdated customs and traditions, build modern institutions, empower women, spread the rule of law and education, and the establishment of a fair government composed of all nationalities and sects.

Much has been written in an attempt to interpret this unfathomable American quantic political and strategic situation based on victory in military battles and the field. Still, failure and defeat in wars, political projects, and final goals contradict the Clausewitzian relationship that posits that strategy must harness victory in battles to triumph in wars. In the American case, the facts contradicted this relationship and the well-known Clausewitzian law that prevailed during the past two centuries in analyzing strategic events and interpreting the Napoleonic wars and the major events that followed. Nevertheless, it fails to explain the American strategic failure, despite the Americans’ serious pursuit to fulfill Clausewitz’s conditions.

Intellectuals and experts in research centers and think tanks elaborated on explaining this failure, but they could not determine its fundamental cause. The matter reached the American administration in the White House during the era of President George Bush Jr., who appointed a committee to investigate the reasons for that failure.

In 2006, after nine months of scrutiny, the Baker-Hamilton Commission issued its report on the American failure in Iraq, but it was unable to identify its real cause. It hovered around several causes and factors, all of which were far from the real issue. And so did the British government, ten years after the work of the Baker-Hamilton Commission, to investigate the British failure in Iraq during Tony Blair’s premiership. The Chilcot Inquiry report was issued in 2016, and this report, like the American report, could not uncover the cause of the failure.

In this and subsequent studies, we will mention some geopolitical laws and geo-Islamic causes that thwarted American strategies in the Middle East and other geo-Islamic circles in Asia and Africa, and which the US neglected considering, intentionally or unintentionally, keeping in mind that these laws and causes are the fundamental factors that obstructed those strategies.

It has become a commonplace belief that Western political thought in general, and American political thought in particular, is based on strategic compromises and political half-solutions and that the Founding Fathers designed the American political system in such a way that makes it impossible to centralize power in the hands of one of its branches. They established it so that the existing executive power in the White House cannot supersede the US Congress with its two chambers: The House of Representatives and the Senate. If a dispute and disharmony occur between these two branches of the system, the third branch in charge of the Supreme Court will arbitrate between them. American political thought favors settlements and compromises between these branches that satisfy all parties with no winners or losers. It is impossible for one party in the Western political system to entirely win all it wants and achieve all its goals while the other party realizes none of its goals. An example of that is what happened on May 31, 2023, when US President Joe Biden, the Democrat (i.e., the executive power), agreed with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the Republican (the legislative power), on a compromise that satisfies the two parties without either of them fully achieving its objectives when suspending the public debt ceiling of $31.4 trillion.

This agreement also occurred in 2011 between US President Obama and the House of Representatives on raising the debt ceiling, which amounted to 16 trillion US dollars, thus averting a financial catastrophe.

Similarly, at the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018, US President Donald Trump and the House of Representatives set a temporary budget of one and a half trillion dollars to provide the resources for US government expenditures until a compromise and settlement was reached between the two parties to raise the debt ceiling at that time.

This also occurred when Medicare and Obamacare Acts passed, and the annual general budgets of the United States were approved.

It happened as well with international relationships between the US and other countries, such as the amendment of the NAFTA agreement with Canada and Mexico in 2018 to the satisfaction of all parties involved, the temporary trade agreement with China in 2019, and with NATo during the Berlin summit in 2018 when it was agreed that every NATO state would increase its military spending by 2% of its GDP.

We can investigate more facts and evidence that indicate the same result, but what we presented so far suffices for reasons of brevity.

Britain, France, Germany, and others use the same approach. Whenever a dispute occurs between the branches of power, they resort to compromises and concessions.

When the US attacked Somalia in 1993, Iraq in 2003, and Afghanistan in 2001, it brought with it its political approach of settlements and half-solutions to these nations and to the Middle East in general. It dealt with political occurrences in them as it deals with them in American internal politics. It appeased the Taliban and then negotiated with it in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, finalizing a political agreement. It did not eradicate the foundations of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime and the remnants of the Iraqi Ba’ath Party, instead it wanted to pressure Iraq’s successive governments since 2004 to negotiate with those in the orbit of the Ba’ath Party, luring them into a pattern of compromises in the state including Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds.

The 5+1 negotiations and the agreement with Iran on its nuclear program, aka the Iran Nuclear Deal, was part of that “no winners and no losers” approach of settlement, half-solutions, and a midway solution between Iran and the international parties. Iran could not attain all its objectives, just like the other parties. The latter could not impose all their demands on Iran in the agreement either. The current negotiations between the US and Iran in the Sultanate of Oman, the UAE, Iraq, and others are happening following this rule: freezing in return for freezing.

The “no winners and no losers” approach, settlements, and half-solutions are suitable for political realities in the West, where this has been the custom for over 200 years. Whoever looks at the major political treaties in Europe and the United States of America finds them based on this rule that grants half of the goals and objectives to each party and does not grant any of them all that they require. No party emerges as a winner or a loser in the political game.

Although this rule provides immediate solutions for imminent crises, it sows the seeds for subsequent crises and provides the factors leading to major wars and strife that will occur later. If we inquire into major global and regional wars, we will find them to be a result and consequence of previous treaties based on the rule of “no winners, no losers” settlements and half solutions. The First World War (1914-1918) was the result of the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, which did not give the European powers what they wanted, preventing Serbia from reaching the Adriatic Sea, preventing the Austro-Hungarian Empire from seizing Bosnia and Albania, and preventing Bulgaria from reaching the Mediterranean, so the war began in 1914 when an extremist Serbian nationalist assassinated the Archduke of Austria in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia.

For the sake of brevity, we only mentioned some of the many examples in modern Western political history that are based on compromises and half-solutions.

Conversely, political realities in the geo-Islamic arena are based on a distinct geopolitical law that contradicts the mechanism of settlements and compromises and is premised on the law of winners and losers, victors and vanquished.

This is one of the geo-Islamic arena’s core, formative political rules, and whichever system follows this rule cannot be governed with settlements and half-solutions. Rather, an approach using settlements corrupts the geopolitical arena, destroys facts and conditions, spreads turmoil and chaos, and starts wars. This is what ruined American strategic projects and thwarted Washington’s endeavor to spread democracy in the Greater Middle East and establish a valid Iraqi model and example in 2003 and thwarted the American goal of establishing a modern state and modern institutions in Afghanistan.

We will provide conclusive evidence and arguments that the rule of “winners and losers” is a formative fact and a geopolitical law in the geo-Islamic circle, where facts occur in accordance with the requirements of this law, and whoever violates this law will see their strategic projects fail.

Islam appeared in Makkah, then the Prophet of Islam migrated to Madinah, and the geopolitical conflict between Makkah and Madinah ended with the victory of Islam and the Muslims and the defeat of the people of Makkah. Despite the offers of settlement and reconciliation between the two parties, they failed to establish a peace agreement between them. The conflict ended with the Muslims entering Makkah and defeating it. Before the death of the Prophet of Islam, he ordered the expulsion of the Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula, saying:

“Two religions cannot inhabit the Arabian Peninsula.” This was the geo-Islamic circle’s first geopolitical rule, and it was based on clear winners and losers.

When some Arab Muslim tribes and neighborhoods decided to revert from Islam and separate the peripheries from the geopolitical center in Medina during the reign of the first Caliph, Abu Bakr Al Siddiq, they offered him a settlement and a compromise which was to pray and refrain from paying zakat. Abu Bakr rejected their offer, and the historian Shams ad-Din ad-Dhababi mentioned a foundational text for the winner-loser rule and the first geopolitical rule in the geo-Islamic sphere based on a sound and valid transmission from Imam Al-Thawri: “When a delegation from Bouzakhah -Asad and Ghatfan- came to Abu Bakr asking him for peace, Abu Bakr demanded they choose between an eradicating war or an absolute surrender, so they said: O successor of the Messenger of God, as for war, we have tried it, but what is the absolute surrender? He said: You will be disarmed, and you will leave and follow the tails of camels, and you will repay what you got from us, and we will not pay back what we got from you, and you will bear witness that our dead are in paradise and that your dead are in hell, and you pay diyya for our casualties, and we do not pay it for your casualties.”

This formative event shaped the geopolitical rule of the Middle East and was followed by subsequent facts and events and the rest of the history of Islam. The political rules and principles of international and regional relations in the geo-Islamic circle have not yet escaped this formative rule, and they will not diverge from it in the future.

This rule still governs Islamic history’s local, internal, regional, and global geopolitical realities. Wherever they marched, Muslim armies offered one of three choices to their opponents: converting to Islam (religious submission), paying jizya(political submission), or armed conquest. The relations between Muslims and others did not deviate from this rule (see Principles of Politics and Rules of Governance in Islam, chapter four: International Relations in the Islamic Political System, where we expanded on the topic).

Throughout Islamic history, Muslims offered these possibilities to their enemies during the geopolitical reconfiguration of the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. Khalid bin Al-Walid, Saad bin Abi Waqqas, Al-Moughira bin Shu’bah, and Al-Nu’man bin Muqrin offered them to the Persians during their war against Iraq. Abu Ubaidah bin Al-Jarrah, Ayyad bin Ghanem, and Amr bin Al-Aas presented them to the Byzantines in the Levant and the Copts in Egypt at the founding of the Muslim Empire. Stories of this kind abound in Islamic political history books.

The second Khalifa, ‘Umar ibn Al-Khattab, expelled the Jews from Khaybar to Damascus, he the Christians of Najran to Iraq, and purged the Arabian Peninsula from all non-Muslims. The first purely Islamic geopolitical circle emerged based on that geopolitical rule.

This rule did not only apply between Muslims and non-Muslims. Evidence of that is when Imam Ali bin Abi Talib rejected the arbitration verdict in Dumat al-Jandal between arbitrators Abu Musa Al Ash‘ari and Amr ibn Al-Aas in 37 AH, 658 AD.

And this is an incident of reconciliation, settlement, and compromise in Islamic political history. However, the events that followed confirm what we have argued as to the impossibility of compromise in Islamic political thought, and the necessity of implementing the rule of winners and losers. Historian and scholar Mohammad bin Sa’ad mentions in Kitab At-Tabaqat Al-Kabir with a sound sanad (chain of transmission) that “Mohammad bin Al Hanafiah said: My father wanted to seize Damascus, so he raised his banner and swore not to lower it until he marched on, and people refused to march with him. He repeated that four times.”

The turmoil of civil war and the first major sedition in Islamic history revealed the validity of the first geopolitical law in the dispute between Imam Ali bin Abi Talib and his Shi’as and between Mu’awiyah bin Abi Sufyan and the People of the Sunna and Congregation. That law remained in effect at the time of Imam Hussein bin Ali bin Abi Talib’s killing, following the impossibility of a settlement between him and Yazid bin Mu’awiyah, and during the era of the Umayyad Marwanid state.

There is no clearer evidence than Abd al-Malik bin Marwan’s rebellion against Khalifa Abdallah bin Az-Zubayr and his slaying next to the Ka’aba in 73 AH/693 AD, crucified upside-down. Historian Az-Zahabi cited a definitive text that strongly indicates the veracity of what we claimed when Abd al-Malik bin Marwan and his army battled Musab ibn Al-Zubayr in Iraq. The Rabi’a tribe betrayed Zubayr and joined bin Marwan’s army. “Abd al-Malik sent word with his brother to Musab that they are safe. Musab replied: A person like me does not come out of circumstances such as these except as a winner or a loser.”

Had Musaab bin Al-Zubayr been aware of the prevailing geopolitical rule, he would not have turned away from a massive army and fought with a few of his followers until they were all killed. He did not see a satisfactory solution in the settlement Abd Al-Malik bin Marwan offered him because of the animosity and fighting between them.

This remained the status quo in all the following historical facts, at every imperial geopolitical reconfiguration, at the Abbasid Empire’s emergence on the Umayyad Empire’s ruins and the impossibility of settlement and compromise between the two parties. This continued in subsequent eras when the Seljuk Empire was established on the ruins of the Persian Buyid Empire, the Kurdish Ayyubid sultanate was established on the ruins of the Nuri Zanki state, the emergence of the Mamluk state on the ruins of the Ayyubid sultanate, then the emergence of the Ottoman sultanate on the ruins of the Mamluk state and the demise of their rule and authority.

Accordingly, the United States has failed to complete its geostrategic projects in the geo-Islamic arena driven by its tendency to judge situations based on its political law that is valid in its political environment and with its allies in a different sphere where its political approach to solutions is impossible to apply. Instead, it should have resorted to geopolitical laws ruling the geo-Islamic circle.

Geopolitical laws are material laws similar to universal laws of physics. When a law of physics is disrupted or impossible to enforce on a universal material fact, another law must apply. The same is true in the geo-Islamic arena. Its geopolitical law is still valid and governing realities since the geo-Islamic structure of the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa. Western laws of settlements and half-solutions will fail to function in this geopolitical area.

The United States is still committing the same strategic mistakes without consideration or lessons learned from its previous failures in Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Just as the American failure in Afghanistan and its settlement with the Taliban Movement led to the Movement’s return to power in Kabul with global acceptance and satisfaction that it lacked during its first term (1996-2001), it is establishing relations with China today. It hopes to partake in its “Road and Belt” geopolitical project, attracting huge Chinese investments, while Russia hopes to establish a gas pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan, and while calling on the United Nations not to leave Afghanistan despite the return of the Taliban movement to its previous policies of preventing women from studying and working and other policies that drew outrage from all over the world. The United States failed to eradicate Al-Qaeda after the invasion of Afghanistan. Despite the killing of its leader Osama bin Laden in 2011 and the killing Ayman Al-Zawahiri in 2022, and perhaps because of it, Al Qaeda spread in the Middle East and North Africa, and many offshoots of the organization emerged in several geopolitical circles, most notably the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). The settlements and half-solutions in Yemen between Saudi Arabia and the Yemeni government in Aden and the Ansarullah movement (Houthis) in Sana’a will lead to the hoarding and accumulation of wealth, an arms race, the manufacture of large quantities of ballistic and winged missiles, the development of their range, and the provision of microelectronics to direct and control them, along with the construction of new factories for drones, increasing their range and their explosive loads, training many crews to manufacture and use it, and recruiting thousands to join its ranks. The Ansarullah movement will become a great relentless regional military force and an army that cannot be defeated. It will seriously threaten Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries within two or three years and return to launch military campaigns changing the geostrategic rules of engagement, with the war revealing new geopolitical realities with the emergence of a winner and a loser, a victor and a defeated.

In addition, the peace and settlement agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March 2023 will lead to the accumulation of power resources and provide the factors for Iran’s regional and international rise. In the coming years, Saudi Arabia will fear an attack by Iran’s nuclear might and its strategic weapons. This will uncover a winner and a loser in the regional system in the Middle East.

Just as the settlement and compromise with North Korea in the first decade of this century led to Pyongyang’s possession of nuclear weapons and an arsenal of intercontinental missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, the settlement with Iran will elevate it to the status of a nuclear state and the possession of nuclear weapons within two years and must.

Likewise, settlement and compromise with China in its endeavor to reannex Taiwan to the Chinese mainland by force is invalid. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s endeavor will fail. Within a few years, compromise with Beijing will lead to an increase in the concentration of power factors and the accumulation of resources necessary to launch a military campaign and a major war to invade Taiwan, cross the straits, land on the island, occupy it, and declare its reannexation.

Since the law of “winners and losers” is a Chinese geopolitical law and a formative political fact as well, the current settlement and compromise with China in the issues of Taiwan and the South China Sea is a license for China to gather the resources of power during the coming years and prepare appropriately for the invasion of the island and the extension of total control over that sea after the confiscation of what the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia own as strength factors today.

The same goes for Sudan. Settlements and compromises between the Sudanese army led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces led by General Mohammad Hamdan Dagalo will inevitably lead to the spread of war and strife from Khartoum to other states until it ends with the disintegration of Sudan into several geopolitical circles, and to become the land of a new caliphate and the “Dar Al-Islam,”a destination for Islamists from all over the world, proliferating training and mobilization camps, with a spillover to neighboring countries in Africa, and carrying out new invasions and acts of terrorism in European countries and the United States.

Only the rule of “winners and losers” is operational in Sudan, which uproots the defeated and spreads the domination of the victor and stability on the land. In contrast, settlements lead to the expansion of national, ethnic, and tribal rifts beyond repair.

Accordingly, if the United States does revert from its failed strategy of imposing its rules on geopolitical arenas in which they are not valid or operational and does not govern them according to the rules specific to these arenas, it will see several more defeats in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.