The problem with Ukraine and Iraq isn’t Putin and Islamic State: It’s that both countries are basket cases
“The gods help them that help themselves.” – Aesop
When it comes to the seemingly intractable crises in both Ukraine and Iraq, a comforting, if wholly untrue, narrative has taken hold. The chaos that has laid low these two plucky, overmatched, but deserving states is entirely the fault of the world’s two most obvious Bond villains – Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Isis.
While not for one minute wanting to defend the horribly disruptive tactics of either disruptive power, or the evil the wars they have indulged in have brought to the world, such a fairy tale has things precisely back to front. Putin and Isis are diseases, symptoms that feed on the inherent weaknesses of both countries. However, they are not the cause of the dysfunction.
In the case of Iraq, the snake in the garden is the inherently unstable nature of the Iraqi state itself, an artificial construct only brought into being to suit short-sighted British imperial interests in the 1920s. Until then, the Ottomans had sensibly enough divided the area into three sanjaks, or provinces: a Kurdish dominated one in the north, the Sunni province in Baghdad, and the Shia province in Basra. This roughly corresponded to political legitimacy on the ground and worked well enough. The British, in forcing together three groups with no historical record of co-existing in a single country, created the unworkable mess the rest of us have been dealing with ever since.
The well-meaning current Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, has so far failed utterly to bring the long-suffering Sunni in from the political cold. While promising, in February 2015, that the Sunni militias fighting their co-religionists in Isis would be integrated into the country’s overall military force, Iraq’s Shia-dominated parliament has opposed this, as well as the arming of Sunni fighters. So nothing has actually happened.
Read more: Putin is playing bad cards well – but his days are numbered
Even if Isis were (as we hope happens in the medium term) eradicated from the earth, Iraq will not exist as a real country and Sunni radicalism will not be quelled (look at how al-Qaeda in Iraq, once “defeated”, effortlessly morphed into Isis) until the Shia leadership in Baghdad actually makes real policy moves to confederalise their country to fit the ethno-religious political realities on the ground.
No amount of outside help, training, aid, trade, loans, guns, advice, or even the destruction of Isis changes the basic uncomfortable reality that, unless the Shia leadership do this, we are all largely wasting our time.
Which brings me seamlessly along to Ukraine. Here the able and cynical master of the Kremlin has made a wise political risk wager which governs everything that has happened in the crisis: the corrupt, incompetent, Ukrainian elite will never get their act together, and Putin can simply freeze the conflict as is, with Ukraine serving as a warning as to what happens should other countries in his perceived sphere of influence wish to join the West.
At the time of the overthrow of his stooge, former President Viktor Yanukovych, Putin lost his favoured strategic option for Ukraine, that of supine satellite. However, the Russian President soon realised that the one strategic outcome that actually imperilled his rule, that of a prosperous, democratic Kiev successfully joining the West, was far from certain.
In terms of both his military intervention and the ultimate strategic outcome in the country, Putin bet that the new rulers in Kiev would prove as corrupt and gormless as those that came before. It was a political risk gamble based on the prevailing empirical facts of the time and it has been vindicated by recent events.
Ukraine’s economy remains a basket case (even relative to Russia), with its corrupt, oligarchic elite unwilling or unable to mount the serious structural reforms that would give the country a fighting chance in the world. Short of that, Putin can live with Ukraine as a failure, as there is no effective demonstration of an alternative way of life threatening his own rule.
In both cases, no one doubts that Isis and Putin acted like villains, but that is not the point. Instead, analysts have failed to look at why these countries were so ripe to be taken advantage of in the first place, and that these endemic, intractable problems, and not the presence of aggressive forces in the world, is what will doom them to weakness at best (and chaos at worst) even if Isis and Putin were to be swallowed by the earth this morning.
We must be careful not to support countries that have no desire to help themselves.