Winners and Losers in the 'Arab Spring'

Profiles in Chaos

Yossi (Joseph) Alpher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000020595
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book looks at the way primarily external actors influenced and were influenced by the revolutionary chaos that erupted in the Arab Middle East in 2011. The Arab revolutions radically altered the Middle East dynamic and particularly the strategic standing of key actors, both locally and globally.

The 'winners' are leaders with strategic understanding of the region and a scheme for exploiting the chaos–Putin, Netanyahu and Iran's Qasem Soleimani–along with, strikingly, the very institution of Arab monarchy. The 'losers' are the Arab autocrats who were deposed in Egypt, Libya and Yemen. The Palestinians, seemingly bypassed by the dynamic of Arab revolution, are also losers. So are the American presidents—Bush 43 and Obama—whose disastrous strategic decision-making catalyzed Arab state fragmentation and opened the gates of the Levant to Iran's drive for regional hegemony. Western democratic society suffered too—from waves of Islamist terrorism and the effects of Muslim migration generated at least in part by Arab chaos. Only in the case of two leaders was the jury still out by 2019. The effects of the high-risk policies of Saudi Arabia's crown prince Mohamed bin Salman and the strategically incoherent policies of US President Trump remain to be seen.

Winners and Losers in the 'Arab Spring' takes a global look at a massive regional upheaval that is far from over. It is an essential read for everybody interested in the Arab revolutions, Middle East and international strategic affairs.

Part I
Abetting the chaos

Western losers

1
Presidential blunders

Bush (and Blair), Obama, Trump

In 2003, US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair promoted and launched a military invasion of Iraq. The justification for the invasion on the part of the Bush administration and Her Majesty’s Government was at best wishful thinking and at worst consciously mendacious. The issue has been carefully documented and analyzed in numerous books and, most recently and officially, in the 2016 Chilcot Report in Great Britain.¹

The many issues in question involved fabricated or distorted intelligence regarding both an Iraqi program for producing weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s apocryphal links to Islamist terrorism. Additional motives attributed to Bush and Blair touched on the need and capacity to ‘democratize’ post-occupation Iraq and a desire to place Iraq’s ample energy reserves under western commercial auspices. In the background was the imperative of promoting and preserving the autonomy and well-being of the Kurds of northern Iraq. At the psycho-political level some speculated that Bush, the 43rd US president, sought to avenge an abortive Iraqi attempt to assassinate his father, the 41st, who had presided over the First Gulf War of 1991. Then too, we cannot ignore the pre-2003 Clinton era backdrop: retaliatory attacks against Iraq, claims that Saddam Hussein was producing new weapons of mass destruction, etc. The ideological agenda of Vice-President Cheney, a powerful figure in the Bush 43 administration, was also undoubtedly a factor.

Yet another explanation for the 2003 invasion of Iraq centers on deceptive lobbying by a variety of con-artists, intelligence hucksters and narrowly focused lobbyists. These included the Iraqi Shiite exile and fabricator Ahmad Chalabi and naïve westernized Iraqis like author and scholar Kanan Makiya. In the context of this discussion, the blame falls not on Chalabi and Makiya but rather on the Americans who found them credible – in the intelligence establishment and the White House – and on those like Cheney who saw in them a convenient vehicle for advancing their own misbegotten agendas for Iraq. The pro-Israel advocacy organization AIPAC and Israel’s own Benjamin Netanyahu (at the time a minister in Ariel Sharon’s government) argued in Washington that Saddam’s removal would benefit Israel and the Middle East in general. (Sharon himself actually warned Bush about the consequences of an ill-considered invasion of Iraq.²)

Finally, there is some evidence that even before the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan the Bush administration contemplated invading and occupying Iraq. This was apparently an expression of Bush’s resolve to promote democracy and his drive to project plain old American imperial power: Iran and Syria, both bordering on Iraq, were considered possible additional candidates for democratization by dint of American power projection.

What concerns us here is neither the reasons for the US-led intervention in Iraq nor the explanation for British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s dogged resolve to follow the misplaced leadership of George W. Bush. Rather, we need to look at the consequences for Middle East chaos.

The occupation of Iraq removed from power a nasty and loathsome dictator, Saddam Hussein, who certainly deserved the fate that befell him. Saddam was a brutal ruler who had invaded neighboring countries Iran and Kuwait and launched chemical attacks on the Kurds of northern Iraq. (These attacks were conveniently ignored at the time by Washington, to its shame, because it favored Iraq over its then-adversary in war, Iran, which was loosely allied with the Kurds.) A Sunni Arab, Saddam violently suppressed his country’s Kurds and majority Shiites. He also cultivated a nuclear weapons program prior to 1981 and fired missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia without direct provocation in 1991.

But Saddam’s regime had two saving graces. First it held together, however cynically and cruelly, a country made up primarily of three very disparate ethno-religious elements. Iraq’s majority Shiite Arabs, minority Sunni Arabs and Kurds were at least partially divided geographically as well. Once Saddam’s regime was toppled, the naïve occupiers proceeded in the name of western-style justice and democratization to radically weaken the centralized Iraqi state structure by neutralizing all remnants of Saddam’s authority. They disbanded Saddam’s army and dismissed and in some cases incarcerated his Baath party faithful, including many capable administrators. Then they implanted a foundation-less democracy that enfranchised a vengeful Shiite majority, many of whose leaders were allies of Iran.

The result was internal chaos that to one extent or another prevailed at least into 2018. Angry and frustrated Iraqi Sunnis not happy with their summary disenfranchisement first embraced al-Qaeda and then created ISIS. Strikingly, even some of Saddam’s ostensibly secular-socialist Baath faithful and army commanders were prepared to offer the extremist Islamic State their expertise. Several million Arab Iraqis fled the violence to Jordan, Iraqi Kurdistan and Syria. All the efforts of Iraq’s American occupiers since 2003 to design a political system for holding the country together have registered very limited success.

Saddam’s second and arguably more important saving grace prior to his downfall was that he kept the Shiite Islamic Republic of Iran out of the Arab Middle East. Ever since the 1979 Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran had sought to incite and organize Arab Shiite or Shiite-related minorities in Lebanon, Bahrain, Iraq itself and most recently Yemen. It had backed the Alawite regime in Syria with its semi-Shiite religious credentials. And in some instances it had tried to incite the Sunni Arab masses as well against their rulers.

Small wonder that Sunni Arab monarchies in the Gulf region were prepared to rally behind Saddam when he invaded Iran in 1980. They supported his objective of exploiting post-revolutionary Iranian disorder and weakness to rebuff or at least radically weaken the Islamic Republic. Fast-forward 23 years: remove Saddam from power without replacing him immediately with an equally high-handed and effective ruler, and Iraq will fall apart. Worse, the gates of the Levant to its west will be opened wide to Iranian hegemonic aspirations and power projection.

Accordingly, the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 by the US and its allies must be understood as the effective launch point for Arab state fragmentation and chaos. Of course we cannot ignore earlier historical contributions to the Arab collapse. The 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement divided the Levant – mindlessly, from an ethnic-tribal standpoint – between colonial powers Britain and France. The successful covert US operation to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan during the 1980s spawned the emergence of al-Qaeda. The 1979 Iranian revolution itself provided a revolutionary precedent and model. And the First Gulf War of 1991 witnessed, for the first time, massive US military intervention in the Middle East. But it is from the misbegotten March 2003 invasion of Iraq that we can draw a straight line to the disaster that began in January 2011 and that we still confronted in 2018.

As we follow that straight line, we note that after Iraq in 2003 additional Arab states fragmented, as did the Palestinian Authority. Mismanaged and clumsy as the US democratization effort in Iraq was, it nevertheless helped inspire westernized minorities in Tunisia and Egypt to struggle, with few very mixed results, to democratize their countries. After 2011, the earlier US and UK occupation of Iraq provided a precedent and a rationale for further armed external intervention in additional Arab countries like Libya and Syria – by NATO, Russia, Turkey and Iran.

Hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the post-invasion violence in Iraq were a mere prelude to the exodus of many millions of Arab and African refugees seeking safety and a livelihood in Europe. And every single one of these phenomena of Arab chaos nurtured a wave of Islamist-inspired and in many instances Saudi-bred terrorism against half the world, from the US, Europe and Russia via Turkey to Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh.

Algerian writer Kamel Daoud commented in 2015, ‘Daesh [ISIS] has a mother: the invasion of Iraq.’³ I would amend and expand that astute comment to read, ‘Arab chaos has a mother: the invasion of Iraq.’ Bush and Blair intervened directly, militarily, in 2003. Theirs was a war-by-choice that was not forced upon them and that many wiser leaders and advisers counseled against. They bear a significant share of the blame.

In the aftermath, Blair’s political reputation was essentially destroyed by the reverberations of his failure in British society. The American public has been kinder to Bush and his successor, Barack Obama, who had opposed the 2003 invasion. In running for the presidency in 2008, Obama vowed not to repeat Bush’s folly. Accordingly, he initially intervened only rhetorically. But while he is a master of rhetoric, in retrospect the outcome merely extended the damage of Bush’s 2003 Iraq war.

Obama appears to have believed in a radical revision of US relations with the Middle East region through three initiatives. He would encourage democratization and human rights. He would withdraw from Iraq and avoid additional military engagement in the region. And he would make a nuclear deal with Iran that would generate a radical enhancement in Iran’s relations with the West and thereby help stabilize the Middle East. Other than the very important Iran nuclear deal per se, the efforts of the Obama administration proved counterproductive in all of these endeavors, thereby contributing directly to Arab chaos. Indeed, even the aftermath of the Iran deal contributed to that chaos.

Obama assumed the presidency in January 2009. His opening strategic outreach to the Middle East featured key speeches in Ankara in April 2009 and Cairo in June 2009. He sought to catalyze a close US working relationship with Arab, Turkish and even Iranian Islam and to inspire Middle Eastern peoples to embrace America’s finest values. The recently elected president was extremely intelligent, a brilliant speaker and a black man with a developing world and social worker background that included youthful exposure to Islam. He appeared to be firmly convinced that he could talk to and interact with the Arab and Muslim worlds far more fluently and effectively than his predecessors.

Thus Obama would embrace cultural relativity. He would acknowledge America’s ample mistakes as well as those of its ally Israel. He pledged to extract the US from Middle East wars and close the Guantanamo Bay prison whose very existence contradicted core American values. And he would encourage Muslims to look at their own problems with a degree of sophistication rather than blame Israel for everything. In a 2008 campaign speech in Berlin – itself an odd globalist gesture considering that there were few potential voters in Germany – he had stated to the world, ‘This is the moment we must help answer the call for a new dawn in the Middle East.’

Obama’s Cairo speech dwelled optimistically on these themes. It began, ‘I’ve come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.’ In retrospect, it sent all the wrong messages. We can only conclude that in fact Obama was ignorant of the civilizational, political and cultural morass that had enveloped the region.

In Cairo, Obama called upon Muslims to render Islamic extremists ‘isolated and unwelcome’. Yet he never called the extremists militant Islamists or radical Islamists or even just plain Islamists. America was not ‘at war with Islam’. On the contrary, ‘America and Islam … overlap, and share common principles – principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.’

Avoiding language about Islam that some would deem inciting but others accurate was a rhetorical ground-rule observed by the US president throughout his eight years in office. Thus in Cairo Obama walked a fine line. Muslim women need education yet should have the right to wear the hijab, he stated. He ignored the fact that Egypt has one of the world’s highest levels of female genital mutilation and women there are targets of frequent sexual harassment in public. This was cultural relativity ‘lite’, in which interests temper ideals.

By the same token, ‘threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong.’ But ‘the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable.’ In the same spirit of balance, Obama told his Cairo audience that the next day he would visit Buchenwald, where the Nazis incarcerated and murdered Jews. Because he did not visit Israel on this trip (or any other, until 2013) but did visit Buchenwald, his speech had the effect of reaffirming an Arab stereotype regarding Israel’s creation: as penance by the West for the Holocaust, implemented at the expense of innocent Arabs.

This is not at all the Israeli mainstream narrative, which focuses on the sovereign rebirth of the Jews as a nation in their ancient homeland (the Holocaust is readily invoked by the Israeli political right, but for demagogic purposes). Accordingly, Obama’s Cairo-Buchenwald route contributed to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s antipathy toward him throughout the ensuing eight years. By the same token, Obama’s soft language on Islam alienated Americans and others who thought they should confront the issue directly and use terms like ‘militant Islam’ and ‘jihadis’.

Amazingly, nowhere in his Cairo speech did Obama thank or even mention his host Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak or Mubarak’s corrupt and dictatorial regime. This unprecedented snub was not lost on Obama’s Arab audience. In contrast, two months earlier, Obama addressed the Turkish Parliament in Ankara and conveyed his conviction that Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan’s policies represented a successful formula for combining Islam and democracy. Accordingly, Obama supported Turkish European Union membership and Erdogan’s democratic reforms and concern for minority rights. And he identified with the country’s tough response to militant Kurdish terrorism.

The overall message was that Islam and democracy are compatible and that this works in Erdogan’s Turkey but not or not yet in Mubarak’s Egypt.

These two speeches, in which early in his presidency Obama laid out his approach to Islam and the Middle East, raise two key issues when viewed in retrospect. For one, how do they stand the test of time? And more importantly for the subject at hand, what effect if any did they have on the subsequent deterioration of the Arab world into chaos some 19 months after the Cairo speech?

In February 2011 President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was forced out of office by the Egyptian Army, under pressure from masses of primarily secular demonstrators. The Obama administration had never been happy with Mubarak’s human rights abuses, suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood and rigged elections. Once demonstrations against him went into high gear in January the administration pressured hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Map of Middle East
• Preface: two images
• Introduction
• Part I Abetting the chaos: western losers
• Part II Reaping the benefits: local winners
• Part III Conclusion: understanding a global grand strategic event
• Timeline of Arab chaos through December 2018
• Bibliography
• Index