Roger Boyes The Times

The direction of events in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Iran should keep us awake at night. History is taking a dangerous turn

The guns of August, usually held to describe Europe’s slide to war in 1914, are now rumbling in Egypt. It is a dangerous moment, not just because a large, influential country is grappling with its own ungovernability, but because the galloping crisis signals a more general collapse of statehood in the Middle East. “Things fall apart,” wrote W. B. Yeats in the aftermath of the First World War. “The centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

The region certainly cannot sustain two wars — Syria’s bloody insurgency and a near-civil war in Egypt — without wrecking established peace treaties and the normal mechanisms for defusing conflict. If the Egyptian army loses its grip on the Sinai, if a radicalised Muslim Brotherhood seeks to heat up the neighbourhood, if Bashar Assad in Syria cannot control jihadist activity on the Golan Heights, then Israel will be drawn into the fire.

You know it’s bad, really bad, when on a single day four Arab cities, cradles of lost civilisations — Damascus, Beirut, Cairo and Baghdad — are sucked into violence, rocked by car bombs, explosions and shoot-outs. Lebanon in the grip of the Hezbollah; Jordan flailing in its attempts to shelter refugees fleeing from Syria; Iraq barely able to lay claim to statehood. More than 4,400 people were killed in Syria during the Ramadan fast.

It’s a pretty rum month when the only “positive” news in the region emanates from Tehran, where a new president, speaking with the thinnest of credibility, hints there might yet be talks about talks about talks on Iran’s nuclear programme.

We should have seen it coming last week when Mohamed ElBaradei resigned as Egyptian Vice-President, unable to accept the violence deployed by the military. Mr ElBaradei is made of glass. You could read his despair from the hang of his shoulders. The Nobel peace laureate has abandoned the fight for that narrow strip of middle ground between a military dictatorship, an Islamic autocracy and the roar of the crowd. He was the closest the West had to a placeman in this crisis but most Egyptians barely registered his departure. For them, Mr ElBaradei was a symbol of an unsuccessful, even doomed engagement with the West.

It was Britain and France that drew up the map of the region when the Ottoman Empire collapsed. The Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 — an academic footnote for the English but a matter of burning interest today for Arab intellectuals — sought to defend minorities in the newly created states by putting them in charge. The French promoted Alawites in Syria. The British ruled Iraq through a pro-Hashemite Sunni elite. Christians were given power in a “Greater Lebanon”. After independence the states were governed by authoritarian leaders heavily dependent on security services and military elites recruited from ruling dynasties. The result: a 15-year civil war in Lebanon after 1975, and a groundswell of bitterness against leaders who were toppled, or almost toppled, by the Arab Spring.

Now, with some delay, comes the re-ordering of the region. Syria looks as if it may be sliced up, with Assad’s Alawites claiming a heartland. Thousands of Syrian Kurds, opposed to Assad but also to al-Qaeda affiliates who have been fighting with the insurgents, have been crossing into Iraqi Kurdistan. They are keen, if the tide of battle changes, to form a Syrian Kurd statelet, perhaps together with Turkish Kurds (much to the dismay of Turkey). Libya’s eastern Cyrenaica wants greater autonomy and may press for more. Yemen is by most definitions a failed state. All this is beginning to unfold and in its unfolding lies the peril.

William Hague was right to say that the events in the Arab world were as momentous as the financial crisis. That crisis was triggered by our failure to grasp the interconnection between different markets. By the same token, the First World War broke out because of the interconnectivity of the alliance of tired empires, and it is this that contains the true warning. Nobody in the imperial capitals was paying attention to Sarajevo. While Egypt is occupying minds there is a sense in the West that this can only turn nasty for us if Israel is attacked or the Suez Canal is blocked. In August 1914 there was a lot of grouse shooting going on. In August 2013, politicians prefer to read doorstopper biographies in Tuscany and Cornwall. Yet the spreading Middle East crisis, its multiple flashpoints, is every bit as ominous as the prelude to war in 1914.

The coming break-up of at least part of the Middle East reflects the inability of badly governed states to deal with transnational challenges: the new Sunni assertiveness, the rise of the jihad, the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood not only in Egypt but in every Arab society.

Egypt is the trigger yet there is a deafness to change in the Egyptian military. As Yeats has it “the falcon cannot hear the falconer”. The army is reverting to vintage Mubarak by slamming the Muslim Brotherhood in jail. Although Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the army leader, is a devout Muslim he cannot puzzle out a middle way between God and the gun. For now he is sticking to the gun. The risk, unlike in Syria and Yemen, is not that Egypt will fall apart but that it takes the path of Algeria in 1991. There the army annulled an election won by Islamists and a long, bloody civil war ensued; 200,000 died and a quarter of a century was squandered.


The sudden acceleration of Arab politics has rattled the neighbourhood. Fear of regional war has flushed normally reticent governments into openly declaring their allegiances. On the Sisi team are Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. Even Israel — softly, softly, but unmistakably — is supporting the generals. All share an antipathy to the Muslim Brotherhood and believe that a US-trained officer corps is less likely to rock the boat.The Muslim Brotherhood’s supporters, meanwhile, include Turkey, Qatar and, although the Brotherhood are Sunnis, Iran. Saudi Arabia has become particularly active. Not only is it offering fat cheques to the Egyptian Government — in effect undermining the US attempt to use its Pentagon money to buy influence — it is paying for weapons for the Syrian rebels and its intelligence chief has been trying to strike a deal with Russia that would dilute the Kremlin’s support for Assad. The Saudis know they can only lose if war and insurrection spread.
And so will we. There must be a better way to influence events than to bankroll a military that has just ousted an elected leader. It is welcome that Barack Obama has at last decided to suspend military aid, but the fundamental aim has to be de-escalation of the crisis. Sadly, the odds are stacked against this succeeding.


On Sunday the trial of three Muslim Brotherhood leaders will begin. Their supporters have promised to take to the barricades. When the first Arab Spring demonstrations poured on to the streets, optimists called it a fragrant Lotus Revolution. Today Egyptians smell nothing but tear gas.