The Existential Crisis Of Statehood: Proliferation And Operational Impacts Of Proxy Warfare In Middle Eastern Conflicts

Eurasia Review | Dr. Ramzi Bendebka

Iranian-backed proxy networks are dismantling Middle Eastern statehood from within, Dr. Ramzi Bendebka contends, by arming sub-state actors and breaking the Weberian monopoly on physical violence. Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen hold formal positions yet field independent military wings answerable to external patrons.

Weak post-colonial states invited the penetration, Bendebka says, after pan-Arab unity failed. Gamal Abdel Nasser's United Arab Republic, formed with Syria in February 1958, collapsed after a Damascus coup in September 1961, and the Six-Day War of June 1967 ended the ideology. Wataniyya, loyalty to the territorial state, replaced Qawmiyya. Great powers made matters worse. He describes the United States, Russia and China as treating the region as a zero-sum arena, pointing to Tartus and Khmeimim, the 2003 Iraq invasion and the 2011 Libya intervention. Without respect for territorial sovereignty, he warns, states face continuing institutional collapse, proxy rule and conflict.

Comment

Iraq's 2016 law on the Popular Mobilization Forces complicates the claim that proxies take sovereignty from outside. Parliament itself voted to place the PMF inside the state security apparatus and to pay its members government salaries. Bendebka reads this as incorporation without subordination, yet the legal act was Iraqi and deliberate. The hybrid status therefore rests on a statute, which suggests some of the erosion is authored by Iraqi politics rather than imposed by Tehran.

That legal footing carries a second-order cost: a PMF brigade on the state payroll is, on paper, a state unit. A foreign strike on it could therefore be described as an attack on Iraqi forces rather than on a militia. Baghdad would then face a choice between defending an institution it does not command and accepting strikes on its own salaried personnel. Either course would erode the exclusive authority over force that Baghdad still claims under the 2016 law.

The Iraqi case may therefore sit closer to negotiated delegation than to capture. His Lebanese and Yemeni examples, where Hezbollah holds an effective cabinet veto and the Houthis seized Sana'a in 2014, fit capture better.

Strategic Question for Discussion

What happens to the argument that proxies capture host states if Iraq's 2016 law on the Popular Mobilization Forces was a bargain struck by Iraqi politicians rather than a concession extracted by Tehran?

The pattern suggests capture and consent can coexist, since a salaried militia depends on a parliamentary majority willing to keep paying it. This points to a weaker case for external imposition and a stronger one for domestic complicity. My assessment is that the 2016 law shows hybrid sovereignty is sustained from inside Baghdad as much as from Tehran.

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