The autumn of the Arab patriarchs
Hisham Melhem/Al Arabiya/January/16
Five years ago this month, a 26-year old Tunisian street vendor known only to his family and friends died after he set himself on fire. The self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, who snapped after another humiliating encounter with local police, also set ablaze the cruel and unforgiven world that millions of angry and desperate Tunisians and Arabs inhabited. Bouazizi’s fiery end sparked the Arab uprisings that are still smoldering with varying degrees of intensity. Few days later, the mostly peaceful demonstrations inspired by Bouazizi’s ultimate protest swept away Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who became the first Arab tyrant to be overthrown by his own people in modern Arab history. The powerful political winds from Tunisia moved the fires eastward and consumed Egypt and Libya, then moved to another continent, to engulf Syria, Bahrain and Yemen. And the rest as the saying goes is history. In the early days of unbridled enthusiasm, there was a sense that the people were shaping their own future, without the intervention of an outside powerful Deus ex Machina, but time will show that the actions and inactions by outside forces were crucial determinants in the unfolding of these tales of promises and woes. Five years later, most of The Arab world is more firmly than ever in the grip of the Arab patriarchs, who defy time and who live in splendid solitude in a never ending autumn.
The Tunisian exception
Five long years have passed, and the early hopes and promises of the uprisings for democracy, empowerment, inclusive government, personal dignity and economic opportunities have been dashed. The autocrats, who were removed, were replaced either by civil strife or all out civil wars, or by new vengeful autocrats. The only exception is Tunisia, whose transition from autocracy to democracy was not without considerable pain and even violence. Tunisia today has earned the status as the only democratic Arab country according to Freedom House; a U.S. based non-governmental Human rights organization.
There was never a ‘fierce urgency of now’ when it came to reform and democracy in the Arab world, regardless of the eloquent speeches of Obama, and there is no ‘new beginning’ with anyone in sight
Democracy in Tunisia is still fragile, but the country has the necessary attributes for a full democratic transformation, attributes other Arab states lacks. Tunisia is largely a homogenous state with a clear national identity and a relatively developed civil society. Tunisia has been experimenting with modernization and political reforms since the reign of the enlightened modernizer Khayr al-Din Pasha al-Tunisi in the middle of the 19th century. Tunisia was a trailblazer when it became the first Arab country to outlaw slavery in 1846, a year before Sweden and 17 years before the United States. Tunisia’s first president after independence from France. Habib Bourguiba, abolished polygamy, and enacted laws allowing for women’s suffrage and education. Modern Tunisia developed a secular tradition, with a polity that was more open than its neighbors, and a more prosperous economy not shackled by oppressive centralized control. Political violence has been rare, and the country’s small armed forces were not designed as a praetorian guard and were never used to suppress domestic dissent.
The despot is gone but his despotism lingers
None of the other uprisings came to a happy interlude. Libya’s implosion created rebellions that led, with international military intervention to the overthrow of the Qaddafi regime, and Yemen’s implosion led to spasms of bloodshed until Saudi Arabia and other GCC state mediated the end of the Ali Abdallah Saleh’s reign, but only temporarily, before Yemen resumed its descent to the abyss. Egypt’s tale is a classic version of ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’, from Mubarak, to the faceless Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), to the paranoid Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood, and finally to the military patriarch Sisi. In Bahrain, more of the same, but in Syria all the imaginable horrors have materialized and metathesized.
In Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen, the uprisings removed the tip of the old despotic pyramid, but the leaders of the uprisings soon realized that the pyramid itself had thick immovable parts; the political, economic, security and cultural structures, that supported the Pharaohs and enabled them to deeply scar and even pulverize their societies, and that these structures are still in place. Undermining these structures will require time, strategic patience, and legitimate, accountable leadership. The counterrevolution began, the moment the peoples in the streets were toppling their former tormentors. Years after the despots have gone, their despotism still lingers.
What the Obama administration did or did not do in the countries swept by the uprisings and Iraq, is very crucial to their current trajectories, and is only partially responsible for the horrific agonies being experienced by most people in the region. The despotism, autocracy, that was at the heart of Arab governance and infected majority Arab societies, and left their indelible mark on Arab culture since WWII, is in the main responsible for the political and societal dysfunction in most Arab states.
Iraq’s unraveling began with Saddam Hussein’s breathtakingly reckless decision to invade Iran, an ancient land three times the size of Iraq. Moreover, Iran was in the grip of a revolutionary moment of enthusiasm. And countries in such revolutionary rapture don’t react like states living in normal conditions.
But Iraq’s current upheavals were set in motion by President George W. Bush’s inexplicable almost religious calling to invade Mesopotamia to erect on the banks of the Tigress and Euphrates Rivers a mythical Arab Jeffersonian democracy. The invasion unleashed the pent up violent shock waves of sectarianism, political repression and sectarian cleansings. Iraq’s unraveling will continue to reverberate for years, if not decades to come.
The uprisings and their discontents
Initially, President Obama instinctively welcomed the demands of the Arab uprisings for dignity, justice and economic opportunities, and he saw in these spontaneous mass movements a rebuke of the dark violent vision of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. He was relatively quick to call on Egyptian President Mubarak to prepare for a “transition to democracy,” and began to prepare for the post-Mubarak phase. In the following months, Obama asserted that “it will be the policy of the United States to promote reform across the region and to support transitions to democracy”. In a seminal speech he delivered on May 19, 2011 at the State Department, Obama put the United States firmly on the side of those seeking to topple the oppressive status quo, and who are seeking “a chance to pursue the world as it should be”.
During the brief rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) from February 2011 to June 2012, and the short term of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was overthrown by a military coup in July 2013, many acts of violence against civilians occurred along with other violations of human rights. Following the violent crackdown on Islamists after the overthrow of the deeply flawed but legally elected Morsi, which was the worst in modern Egyptian history, the Obama administration’s reaction was tellingly timid.
In Libya, a war Obama owns fully, his concept of “Leading from behind” was disastrous and in part explains his failure to follow up on the political challenges after the fall of the Qaddafi regime. Here at least Obama admitted that the lack of political follow up was his failure.
From the beginning of the Syrian uprising President Obama tried to avoid involvement in what he called ‘somebody else’s civil war’ even when the conflict was not at that stage. All of Obama’s decisions on Syria were tentative, and even when he authorized military support to the opposition, his heart was not in it. In September 2014, one month after the modern day hordes of ISIS occupied Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, Obama admitted that “we don’t have a strategy yet” to combat ISIS. Almost a year later, Obama said in a press conference in Germany that the Pentagon has not presented him with a “finalized plan” to combat ISIS, hence “ we don’t yet have a complete strategy“. Russia’s recent military rampages on behalf of the Syrian regime are in part the result of President Obama’s dithering and inaction in Syria. Indecision means supporting or tolerating the status quo.
But beyond the specifics and the various struggles unleashed by the uprisings and their humbling discontents, it seems that President Obama, when he looked at the enormity of the challenges posed by the Arab uprisings, particularly when they became more violent, that he simply flinched, and gradually lost the emotional and intellectual interest needed to shape the course of the region. Asia is beckoning and who could ignore the new economic hub of this century, and Obama’s domestic agenda is not fully realized. Obama’s supporters say that he has invested too much time and energy in the Middle East trying to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and both sides are ungrateful, and besides, the President who from day one kept his eyes fixed on the real prize (the nuclear deal with Iran) has clinched his Middle Eastern win. The limited war against ISIS will continue but will not be decisively settled, and along with the two longest wars in American history all will be bequeathed to his successor. There was never a ‘fierce urgency of now’ when it came to reform and democracy in the Arab world, regardless of the eloquent speeches of Obama, and there is no ‘new beginning’ with anyone in sight. Obama is leaving those Arabs he wowed in Cairo andbeyond in 2009 to their own devices and to the tender mercies of their rulers. This is indeed the long unending autumn of the Arab Patriarchs.
What Middle East are we to expect in 2016?
Eyad Abu Shakra/Al Arabiya/January/16
Pictures of an emaciated man from the besieged Syrian town of Madaya in the Rif Dimashq Governorate, who died after failing to exchange his car for some food, may best reflect the latest development of Syria’s debacle which welcomes 2016 with new and old baggage that threatens the Middle East with the worst. This may not be a suitable introduction to what to expect in the Middle East in 2016, but any optimistic talk given the current situation is outright stupid; as the region, whether we like or not, is in a real, multi-faceted state of war. Any ballistic missile launched from the Yemeni mountain hideouts of Iranian backed Houthis and former dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh targeting civilians in the towns and villages of southern Saudi Arabia proves that the GCC military intervention on the side of Yemen’s legitimate government has been more than necessary; even though, some may say, it has come a bit late.
In the meantime, in Syria, carrying out the plan hatched and imposed by Iran’s IRGC for population exchange involving the Sunni population of Damascus’ western countryside and the Shiite enclaves of Aleppo and Idlib Provinces with the military support of Iran’s subservient Iraqi, Lebanese and Afghan Shiite militias and the Russian air force, any peddling of a ‘peaceful settlement’ becomes a travesty.
Iraq and Iran
As for Iraq, the role given to and played by the Shiite dominated ‘People’s Rally’ which at present forms the backbone of field armed forces claiming legitimacy, leaves no doubt that Iran now controls the political and security processes in Baghdad. The battle to ‘liberate’ the town of Ramadi by driving out ISIS, in all declared and undeclared circumstances, in addition to Baghdad taking the issue of a military Turkish presence in northern Iraq to the Arab League, are further signs that the ‘new Iraq’ created by Washington in 2003 under the pretext of non-existing arms of mass destruction is barely distinguishable from the ‘new Syria’ whose map is being drawn by Washington, Moscow and Tehran who use the war against ISIS as a pretext. There are several question marks surrounding the future of the Middle East as we welcome in 2016. Now free of American sanctions and military pressure, Iran is now behaving like another Israel but much larger and even more ambitious and expansionist; it is hell-bent on re-drawing the borders of its neighboring countries, deciding the limits of their sovereignty, fabricating and imposing their leaders and then lecturing about ‘human rights’, defining ‘terrorism’ the way it pleases, expropriating Islam and offering its ‘services’ to world powers as a regional client. The latest has been the long expected threat to Saudi Arabia after Riyadh executed a number of extremists (the vast majority of whom are Sunnis) convicted of involvement in terrorist crimes. Iran’s reaction would have been expected had it come from a country that does not carry out the death sentence against political and sectarian opposition activists; but coming from a country that ranks second (after China) in the executions’ league table and accuses Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries of aiding and abetting terrorism and al-Qaeda-style terrorism, such a reaction means that Iran is actually in a state of war with its Gulf neighbors. Indeed, it may not take the Turks and Kurds too long to begin to realize the threat of Iran’s ambitions to their own territories. There are several question marks surrounding the future of the Middle East as we welcome in 2016; but while many argue about whether Russia’s military intervention in Syria is intended to contain Iran’s overreach or compliments its regional project which seems to enjoy American, Israeli and European approval, we are clearly witnessing two salient facts.
Russia and Turkey
The first is that Russia’s political and military presence in the eastern Mediterranean is now a fact that has negative repercussions on Turkey and its regional influence. Washington’s policies and recent stances point to its deep dislike of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and its efforts to weaken and undermine him in parallel with its support of Iran’s ascendancy and Kurdish secessionist endeavors. This is what one can read from NATO’s reluctant sympathy with Moscow following threats to the Turks after the Russian jet fighter incident as well as the generous and continuous American support of the Kurds which is hardly comparable with the pitiful support we have been told has been received by Syria’s moderate opposition. The second fact is that as the U.S. presidential elections campaign gathers momentum, certain ‘specialized’ quarters begin their own campaign of – what I reckon –well-planned political and even partisan ‘leaks’. The Wall Street Journal reports about an unsuccessful coup against Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad were pretty exciting, and would surely lessen the pressure on Barack Obama in particular, as well as that on the Democrats in next November’s presidential, congressional and gubernatorial elections. Definitely more exciting is what American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has reported about “intelligence sharing” between the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and De fence Intelligence Agency with their Russian, Israeli and German counterparts in order to keep the Syrian dictator in power ostensibly without the knowledge of the White House. One reason why such ‘info’ has been made public by Hersh may have been to exonerate Obama of GOP accusations of hesitation, betrayal of the Syrians and giving in to Moscow and Tehran. The logical question here, besides who the main beneficiary is, must be “why now?” Given the present military situation in Syria, most of what Hersh has reported is true regardless of whether one believes in ‘conspiracy theories’ or not. But why now? After the realities on the ground– the secret about “intelligence sharing” is divulged? How is it possible to continue with fake declarations, deceitful conferences, manoeuvres and training and arming programs for two years? In any case, the acute and defining crises the Middle East is facing at present merit realistic actions without illusions. The ‘hot spots’ like Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and of course Palestine, provide early tests of ability after intentions of all concerned have become clear. If the Russians carry on with their ‘blitz’ in Syria in order to radically overturn the equation before the promised peace talks, Americans continue to regard Haider Al-Abadi’s government in Iraq as an avant-garde in the ‘war against terror’, and Iran swims deeper and deeper in the blood of innocent citizens of Yemen, GCC states, Iraq and the Levant through its Houthis and other local militant henchmen, the victory in the ‘war against terror’ will be costlier and will take a very long time.
