ABSTRACT
Throughout recorded history, the urge to dominate the region from the Nile to the Tigris has been the principal theme of power politics in West Asia. Every regional power in all periods of history, and many extra-regional ones, particularly in recent times, has responded to the impulse and developed an imperative. The region has also been a graveyard of empires. Arnold Toynbee, who drew a distinction between ‘the diversity of growth and uniformity of disintegration’, described the latter process vividly:
Where there is no creation there is no mimesis. The piper who has lost his cunning can no longer conjure the feet of the multitude into a dance; and if, in a rage and panic, he now attempts to convert himself into a drill-sergeant or slave driver, and to coerce by physical force a people that he can no longer lead by his magnetic charm, then all the more surely and swiftly he defeats his own intentions; for the followers that had merely flagged and fallen out of step as the heavenly music died away will be stung by a touch of the whip into active rebellion.1
