The Arab Spring at Nine Months
What a whirlwind nine months it's been for the Arab world. As I wrote at a much earlier point in this phenomenon called the 'Arab Spring', it is as if some tremor in the long-frozen tectonic plates of the region's political geography had suddenly burst through all those plates, freeing up waves of long-frozen political energy that have ricocheted-- and continue to ricochet-- through all the region's countries.
This is a phenomenon of an almost Biblical 40-year periodicity: After all, it was back in around 1970 that the Arab world's political shape settled into broadly the same pattern that it then retained until January of this year.
(As it happens, I made my first visit to the region-- to Beirut-- in 1970. This is, I realize, neither here nor there... Mainly, it makes me feel old.)
It was in 1969 that a young colonel called Muammar Qadhafi had toppled "King" Idris in Libya... The political shifts that occurred in the Arab world the following year were more closely related to Palestine since they stemmed in good part from the tragic battles of 1970's 'Black September'. In those battles, Jordan's U.S.-backed (and discreetly Israeli-backed) King Hussein reimposed an oppressive system of total control on his kingdom (and on its national population which then as now included a numerical majority of 'West Bank' Palestinians) by chasing out the Palestinian guerrillas who had become well established there over the preceding three years... Provocatively well established, one could say. The king's Black September campaign was, indeed, directly precipitated by an action in which the PLO-affiliated Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked four international aircraft and landed them at an airstrip in northern Jordan...
During Black September, the Cairo-based Arab League worked hard to try to negotiate a settlement between Hussein and the Palestinians. On September 27, Egypt's iconic, strongly Arab-nationalist president Gamal Abdel-Nasser convened an emergency summit meeting of Arab leaders in Cairo in an attempt to hammer out an agreement. The next day, he suffered a heart attack and died. (Five million Egyptians flocked to the streets to witness the passing of his cortege.)
Nasser was succeeded in the presidency by his vice-president, Anwar Sadat, a man who shared Nasser's military background but not his commitment to a broadly 'non-aligned' form of Arab nationalism. Throughout Sadat's eleven years in office, his main goal was to steer Egypt into a close alliance with Washington; and he seemed more than willing to enter into the bilateral peace agreement with Israel that was the entry-fee for that alliance. The Egyptian-Israeli peace of 1979 decoupled mighty Egypt from the Palestinians' long-running quest for national liberation. After Sadat was assassinated in 1981, his vice-president, Hosni Mubarak, succeeded him. Mubarak hewed just as closely to the pro-American path as his predecessor. His longevity and the hyper-alertness of his ever-repressive mukhabarat gave him the time in office that neither Nasser nor Sadat had, in which to build the basis of dynastic rule..
Notably, in all the time Mubarak was president, he never named a vice-president... He also increasingly evidently started to groom his son Gamal to succeed him.
Meantime, back in the Black September of 1970, the conflict in Jordan soon enough made its effects felt on Syria, as well. The 'leftist' wing of the Baath Party, which until then was in power in Syria, had sent tanks into northern Jordan to help the Palestinians. But when those tanks came under threat of serious attack from Hussein's tanks, the ground forces commanders in Damascus begged for air support from Syria's air force. The air force commander, Hafez al-Asad, turned down their request. Without any air support, the Syrian tanks retreated speedily back to Syria; and amidst the political chaos and bouts of recriminations that ensued he undertook a swift coup in Damascus that brought his much more cautious, centrist wing of the Baath Party into power...
Where it has stayed until today.
Asadist Syria pursued, by and large, a much more 'statist' and less ideological set of policies than its predecessor. On many occasions that involved taking very harsh actions-- against Syrians, against Lebanese, and against the Palestinians in both Syria and Lebanon.
... In Syria, Hafez al-Asad was almost seamlessly followed into power by his son, Bashar. In Jordan, Hussein was almost seamlessly followed by his son, Abdullah II. In Egypt and Libya, over the decade of the 2000s, it became increasingly clear that the rulers, despite claims of allegiance to republican idealism, were preparing an 'Asadist' type of familial succession...
In the PLO, Yasser Arafat was followed into power by his decades-long Fateh colleague Abu Mazen. No generation change there. And over the years Fateh, too long in power with too little to show for it except the continuous expansion of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, suffered increasing internal rot.
* * *
Of course, many other huge things were happening in the Arab world in the 40 years that followed 1970. There were numerous important wars. There was the landmark Madrid peace conference of almost exactly 20 years ago today. There was the whole inglorious 'Oslo' episode, whose endless rounds of useless negotiations ended up merely providing cover for Israel's continued paving over of the West Bank... There was the bloody and horrendously traumatic American invasion of Iraq... an action that-- as soon as it became abundantly clear that the original casus belli of forestalling a ready-to-go Iraqi WMDs program was a figment only of the U.S. neocons' over-active imaginations-- was retroactively redefined as having had the purpose of "bringing democracy to the Arab world."
That ideological repositioning of what, as everyone in the region quickly saw, turned out to be a bloody and longlasting disaster, wrought havoc on the dreams and projects of the many democrats throughout the Arab world. Along with all their other compatriots, those democrats looked at the fitna (social breakdown) and grand-scale human suffering that followed the conducting of no less than three popular votes in Iraq, under the auspices of the US military occupation, in the period 2005-06... And they concluded, quite reasonably, that U.S.-imposed democracy was certainly not the way to go.
Indeed, it's quite possible to surmise that the 'Arab Spring' might have happened several years earlier, if the dead weight of the Iraqi experience had not been hung around the neck of Arab democrats over the past few years.
* * *
A full history of the 'Arab Spring' needs to take into account the many more proximate influences that led up to it... The inspiration of the Palestinians' First Intifada of 1987-93... and of the early months of the Second Intifada of late 2000. (Westerners forget too often that the first 6-8 weeks of the Second Intifada were almost wholly nonviolent on the Palestinian side. It was only after the Israeli forces had killed more than 200 unarmed Palestinians that the Palestinian factions decided to take up arms.) ... The disturbing sight of Pres. Mubarak (and Jordan's King Abdullah) lining up time after time after time to support Israel's extremely destructive and lethal attacks against its neighbors... The rampant takeover of so many economies in the Arab Mashreq by self-interested crony capitalists, and all the disruption, privation, and human misery that resulted from that (See this recent strong reporting on the role that US aid programs played in this regard, in Egypt. Also, go and buy Rami Zurayk's fabulous book, Food, Farming, and Freedom, to see the account he gives of the role that US-imposed trade and aid policies played in bringing about the destruction of rural livelihoods and rural communities all around the Arab world.)... The intensification of campaigns of repression by so many Arab governments, that in the cases of Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Libya, and the Palestinian Authority-- okay, not strictly a 'government', but still-- were all actively supported by Washington... The repeated, glaring instances of the double standards Washington applied to any matter concerning the region, running the gamut from accusations of nuclear weapons programs (Iran's, vs. Israel's), to support for democratization and freedom of expression (Iran, vs. Egypt, the PA, Jordan)... The humiliating knowledge that all the important decisions in so many Arab countries were being taken with Washington and Israel's interests in mind, way above any interest in the citizens' own wellbeing...
Yes, no wonder that under the tectonic plates of the long-ossified Arab political system, huge forces of dissent were simmering.
Starting last December 17, within short order, the following things happened:
- Vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated in a provincial town in Tunisia, sparking a mass protest movement nationwide;
- Tunisian president Ben Ali fled the country (January 14);
- mass demonstrations convened in Cairo's Tahrir Square (January 25 and 28);
- the Egyptian military stepped in and removed Mubarak from power (February 11);
- the Security Council issued a first stern demarche to Libyan ruler Qadhafi warning him to stop armed attacks against unarmed civilian demonstrators (February 26-- in resolution 1970);
- and followed up (March 17, resolution 1973) with a resolution authorizing members states, "to take all necessary measures... to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory"...and two days later, French jets roared over Benghazi to start the NATO-plus, stand-off operations against Libya that seven months later resulted in the rebels' takeover of the whole country and the grisly killing in captivity (October 20) of Muammar Qadhafi.
* * *
Meanwhile, extremely large-scale and well-organized pro-democracy movements in two key countries in the Arabian Peninsula-- Bahrain and Yemen-- were being very violently repulsed by national governments that have long been key allies of the United States.
In the tiny island monarchy of Bahrain (home to the U.S. Navy's 'Fifth' Fleet), an amazingly well disciplined pro-democracy movement had grown up over the years and, as the Tunisian and Egyptian mass movements came out onto the streets, Bahrain's democrats decided to do the same, as well. Their main occupation/claiming of public space occurred at the Pearl Roundabout, a hub graced by a towering sculpture of a pearl... (Pearl diving had been the traditional occupation of the Bahraini indigenes, most of them Shiite, long before Sunni travelers from across the water in the Arabian mainland had come across and established trading-posts, followed by an 'emirate', and even more recently, a 'monarchy'.)
On March 16-- just one day before Washington so hypocritically supported resolution 1973 against Qadhafi-- the Bahraini forces, aided by Saudi forces sent in along the causeway Saudi Arabia had built to Bahrain some years ago-- moved in to crush the democracy movement. Two days later, they even demolished the whole of the 'Pearl' monument. Read Amnesty International's reports of continuing gross rights violations in Bahrain since then.
The situation in Yemen is at this point far less clear-cut. Indeed, it has always been so, Yemen is a massive country. Its population of 23.5 million citizens is easily the largest citizen body on the whole Arabian Peninsula. But it doesn't have oil; and it is far and away the poorest country on the Peninsula.
Look, I don't know a lot of detail about Yemen's internal politics. It is a mountainous country, and as a result home to many different kinds of social groups, nearly all of them Arabic-speaking. There are reportedly some strongly matrilineal tribes there, where the men sit around and braid their hair all day. There are very dark-complected African communities that retain many of their African folkways. There are some expanses of flat cultivated land where farmers wear conical straw hats. There are northerners and southerners, easterners and westerners, Zaidis and Houthis and Hadhramautis and more... (Probably one of the best sources for good information about Yemen-- as for so much else-- is the Jadaliyya website, where you can find the work of Sheila Carapico, Stephen Day, Fawwaz Trabulsi, and more... Or, these two very informative recent pieces in Middle East Report: by Sheila Carapico, in May, and Stacey Philbrick Yadav, last week.)
One snapshot picture I have of Yemen is that it is "Saudi Arabia's Gaza." That is, it's the place from which Saudi Arabia took some of the best land-- and then, to which, in 1991, it relegated huge numbers of people who had previously labored hard in the Saudi economy... in this case, more than a million... while it replaced them with short-term contract laborers imported on very short-term and repressive contracts from Asia.
Just like Israel, with the Palestinians of Gaza...
Pertinent fact: GDP per capita in SA (2005):$14,979. GDP per capita in Yemen (2005): $923.
But I do recognize that the situation in Yemen is far more complicated, politically, than the situation in Gaza.
One of the complications is the U.S. hand in Yemen, which is exercised almost wholly by the U.S. military, in its pursuit-by-drone of alleged leaders and members of the group described as "Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula" (AQAP). Pres. Ali Abdullah Saleh evidently entered some years ago into a pact with Centcom whereby Centcom or the Special Operations Command had considerable freedom to "hunt down" alleged AQAP people in broad areas of Yemen on the basis of "plausible deniability" by Saleh himself-- and in return for significant, broader security and political support by the U.S. (and Saudi Arabia) for Saleh, against any domestic opponents.
(Okay, in this respect, much like Washington's relationship with the Pakistani military.)
Politically, the Obama administration has apparently reached the (not unreasonable) conclusion that it really does not know how to "intervene" effectively in Yemen; and it has subcontracted this job-- as in Bahrain?-- to the Saudis. Hence, Saleh has made a number of trips to Saudi Arabia over recent years-- and remember, the intense internal unrest in Yemen antedates Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation, by several years, going back (at least) to the outbreak of the Houthi rebellion in 2004-2005. Some of those trips by Saleh to Saudi Arabia were under the guise of "getting medical help"; some under other pretexts. Earlier this year, it seemed that the Saudis had "decided" to replace him in power in Sana'a during one of his absences from the city-- but then, there he was again recently, back in Yemen with the apparent blessing of the Saudis.
We should not, of course, in this survey of "where we are the Arab Spring", ignore the role that the Saudis-- and to a lesser extent the Qataris-- have played... At the regionwide level, the Saudis' main contribution has been to bankroll the counter-revolutionary (anti-democratic) forces. But for the Saudi rulers, both Bahrain and Yemen are crucial components of their own back yard.
Of course, Saudi Arabia is now itself in the midst of an extremely long-drawn-out succession crisis. Saudi "diplomacy" has anyway always been a very episodic, personality-driven business, with very little institutional basis for sustained follow-through or monitoring of anything that's happening in foreign affairs. But now, King Abdullah is stumbling ever closer to his 90th birthday. (Question of the day: How much longer can the most expensive advances in American medical science keep this man alive?) His designated 'Crown Prince', Prince Sultan, finally passed away last week. (As'ad AbouKhalil thinks he died a long time ago. But anyway, the death got announced last week.) And then, as I've noted here before... the crown is likely to pass along the long line of still-surviving sons of King Abdul-Aziz bin Saud, all of them now aged between their late 60s and their late 80s, before a transition of some peaceable or non-peaceable form takes place to a member of the next generation.
So we should not necessarily expect any very intelligent or reasoned set of policies to be emanating from Riyadh, with regard to any of these 'Arab Spring' developments.
This is probably a very important place to note the importance of Sunni-Shia differences, or perceptions or fears of such, in what's happening in many places during this 'Arab Spring'-- most especially in all the Gulf Countries (including inside Saudi Arabia), and also in Syria.
Yes, I'm getting to Syria here. Bear with me.
In regard to the Sunni-Shia 'issue', the experience of Iraq in the wake of the U.S. invasion of 2003 has had huge effects in the region. Prior to March 2003, Saddam's regime was seen by all the Sunni-dominated regimes of the Gulf as a very valuable "bulwark" against any encroachment of Shiite power from Iran. In the view of the GCC monarchs, the U.S. invasion ended up simply "giving" Iraq to the Shiites and also to Iran. They don't tend to focus on the fact that the vast majority of the Shiites in Iraq-- as in their own countries-- are ethnically Arabs, not Persians; and they are not necessarily pre-disposed to prefer Tehran's rule over self-rule. Shiaphobia, that is, an exaggerated fear of Shiites, is a huge driver of the foreign policies pursued by all the GCC governments; and as in the case of all such phobias, this one cannot easily be assuaged by reference to such mundane things as facts, or the existence of a long history of a shared life together, or even much basic human decency...
Bottom line on the Saudis: expect continued erratic flip-flops in the way they pursue their regional interests. Also, expect that the succession issue will dominate the attention of all senior princes; and it may well interact in interesting and surprising ways with Riyadh's pursuit of its regional diplomacy.
Bottom line on Yemen: expect a lot more tragedy, conflict, and suffering ahead-- unless the forces of the country's impressively resilient and focused opposition movement can succeed in slowly expanding their power until Saleh decides to do the decent thing and follow Ben Ali into exile.
* * *
So now, Syria.
Back in May, I was articulating my judgment that the country has both a resilient government and a resilient opposition movement... And therefore, sadly, that the stand-off between them would most likely continue for a further long while. And that has been the case.
Back in May, I was arguing that the best way to break this stalemate, and thereby to save the Syrian people from the huge amount of suffering that it would necessarily involve, would be to have some kind of authoritative, externally mediated negotiation between the regime and the opposition, over the modalities of how real democratic reform could speedily be instituted in the country.
Neither side was willing to enter such a reform process voluntarily. For the regime, any hint of entering serious negotiations with the opposition would seem to give the opposition some legitimacy. For the opposition, the only thing that most of its supporters were willing to negotiate about back then-- and probably, still today-- was the exit of the regime. Many of these oppositionists felt, too, that even letting the regime's leaders leave the country safely, in the manner of Ben Ali, would not be enough: They wanted to see Asad and his cronies "brought to justice", "held fully accountable", humiliated, punished, and brought low.
There was also (and remains) the question of the ability of leaders on each side to enter into a negotiation, as well. On the regime side, how much freedom of action does Pres. Bashar al-Asad actually have, in such matters? And on the opposition side, it is not as if you have one single, dominating and disciplined pro-democracy movement along the lines of, say, the ANC in late-apartheid South Africa. The Syrian opposition has been marked by a cacophony of voices (despite the best efforts of the U.S. government, Turkey, and others, to persuade its figures and personalities to try to unify and get their act together.)
Back in May, I was arguing that of the available outside negotiators, the government of Turkey seemed to be the one best placed-- and also, most highly motivated-- to try to lead the mediation mission. The good positioning came, I thought, from the good relations that Ankara had built with both the regime and some parts of the Syrian opposition-- as well as from the general attitudes of Syria's people toward Turkey, which shifted to being extremely favorable over the past few years, especially in light of the "no visa" policy between them and the attractiveness of the "Turkish model" for economic affairs and governance, which a vast majority of Syrians have seen as distinctly preferable to that offered by their other major partner in the region, Iran.
Turkey's motivation, I argued, would come from the facts that its border with Syria is by far the longest of any of its land borders; and that Syria is an important transit country for Turkish companies doing business with Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and several other Arab countries.
But I guess that Turkey's AK Party leaders saw things differently. In the weeks after I was writing and speaking about this topic back in May, Ankara (and perhaps a large part of Turkish public opinion, as well?) started shifting noticeably toward giving ever stronger support to the Syrian opposition. I have wondered what motivated this shift, which seemed to fly in the face of the AK Party's longstanding policy of seeking "zero problems with the neighbors". Was it merely a desire to try to be "on the right side of history", that was arrived at after conducting some form of analysis that the Asad regime's days were numbered? Earlier in the spring, Ankara had undertaken just that kind of a recalibration with respect to Libya: There, Turkey had previously had extensive business links with the Qadhafi regime. But on March 19 (or shortly thereafter), Ankara was lining itself up with those of the NATO forces who were participating in the sea blockade of Libya-- that, after it had successfully extracted the thousands of Turkish workers who had previously been working on huge construction contracts in Libya (along with, as I recall, some number of wounded Libyans who needed to be evacuated from encircled cities.)
Or was Ankara's shift motivated by more ideological, Sunni-ist concerns? Who knows?
Anyway, suffice it to say that Ankara's increasing identification with the Syrian opposition played a role in hardening the political positions espoused by many oppositionists. In addition, various outside forces proved themselves able to push significant amounts of arms into Central Syria (to Homs, from the north Lebanese city of Tripoli and elsewhere in Lebanon), and into northeastern Syria, from Iraq. The fact that the Israeli secret services have strong networks in both some areas of Lebanon and some areas of northern Iraq should not be ignored-- but there are plenty of other actors who could also be suspected of having a hand in this.
It has been really hard to get solid news out of Syria. Nir Rosen has done some good work for the Al-Jazeera website. But much of Al-Jazeera's reporting has been hyperbolic and based on the thinnest of sourcing. Since Qatar started working openly with NATO in Libya, the Qatari government seems to have exercised a lot more control over Al-Jazeera's reporting; and in Syria, Qatar's deeply Wahhabist government seems to have decided at some point-- along with the Saudis-- to throw its weight behind the Sunni-ist portions of the Syrian opposition.
For a while, some opposition voices in Syria were openly calling for NATO to repeat, in their country, the same kind of operations they had mounted against Libya. But a number of things stopped that from happening. The most important was the veto that both China and Russia cast on October 4, against a resolution that seemed (though in slightly softer tones) to deliver the same kind of demarche to Syria that resolution 1970 had earlier delivered to Libya, and thus to prepare the way for a military intervention-enabling resolution like 1973 at some later point.
That draft resolution did receive the nine votes that, absent any vetoes, would have allowed it to pass. It was a notable moment in the dynamics of the world system when China and Russia delivered their vetoes. Brazil, India, South Africa, and Lebanon also abstained during that vote. It is entirely possible that the two veto-wielders-- and possibly the other 'BRICS' members on the Security Council, where by chance all five were present-- were worried about the 'R2P'-derived precedent that the Libyan intervention had set, which might one day be used against any of them. It is possible that many of those BRICS countries found that the way the situation had unfolded in Libya (where the anti-Qadhafi rebels had already seized Tripoli and were exhibiting a notable lack of ability to govern fairly and effectively) was also of great concern to them. And it is possible that for some of them, the sovereignty of Asad's Syria was seen as in some way more deserving of their support than that of Qadhafi's Libya-- especially given Qadhafi's wholesale leap into the pro-western camp in recent years. We should note, however, that South Africa was already strongly opposed, for African-solidarity reasons, to the NATO intervention in Libya; so its failure to support the west's resolution on Syria was really no surprise.
No matter what the motivations of individual BRICS countries, the fact of the Russian and Chinese vetoes changed the calculus of all involved in Syria, making it very clear that no Libya-style, overt western military intervention would be happening there any time soon.
Another development that almost has almost certainly affected the regional environment around Syria has been the resurgence of Kurdish (PKK) anti-regime violence in Turkey. Activating "the Kurdish issue" is something that all those four countries with significant Kurdish populations-- Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey-- know how to do against each other. And of those four countries, probably Turkey, with its in-my-opinion genuine aspirations to move toward greater democracy and its very significant Kurdish population, is more vulnerable to the re-emergence of a "Kurdish issue" than any. Regardless of the nature of any external sponsorship Turkey's Kurdish militants may have received-- and both Iran and Syria have their own separate reasons to have done this-- the re-emergence of PKK violence was doubtless a huge headache for Ankara.
In the end, though, in the aftermath of the failure of the western move at the Security Council, it was the Arab League, not Turkey, that stepped in to explore the possibilities for brokering a negotiated end to Syria's internal strife. An Arab League delegation arrived in Damascus yesterday. It was greeted by large pro-Asad demonstrations in the capital and some reported instances of anti-Asad strikes being observed in Homs and other cities.
(One word of warning to the Arab League negotiators: Remember the fate of Gamal Abdel-Nasser, 41 years ago.)
The commentary that the FT's Roula Khalaf had on the Arab League mission yesterday is probably worth reading. She wrote:
- Qatar, the exceedingly wealthy autocracy which has emerged as the unlikely champion of the oppressed across the Arab world, is leading the delegation, despite initial grumbles from Damascus. But the six-member mission also includes Egypt, Oman, Algeria and Yemen...
Needless to say the presence of the foreign minister of Yemen on the delegation to Damascus should reassure Assad. In fact, Sana’a could give the Syrian strongmen some good advice – namely to take a page out of Saleh’s book and pretend to agree to Arab initiatives without implementing any of their stipulations...
The whole point of the Arab League mission is also puzzling. The foreign ministers are giving Assad and the Syrian opposition two weeks to hold a national dialogue. But, as many diplomats in the Arab world know, if such a meeting were ever to take place – and it is unlikely – it will be based on a reform plan that seems to be unworkable. Assad is not about to agree to share power with the opposition. And after nearly seven months of atrocities, the Syrian national council, the umbrella opposition group, is not about compromise with the regime or wait, as the plan suggests, until 2013 to have free presidential elections.
Diplomats tell me that the Arab League has no choice but to tread carefully when it comes to Syria, which is far too important strategically and still has a few good friends in the region...
* * *
So, there is a massive amount of geopolitics swirling around-- and often penetrating deeply inside-- the politics of the Arab Spring. And there remains a lot of uncertainty about the outcomes-- in all the Arab countries, and indeed in the region as a whole. Here, though, are some of my preliminary thoughts at this stage:
- 1. The overwhelmingly peaceable and overwhelmingly civilian mass movements that swept the dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt from power were unalloyed good news. The outcomes in both those countries may not be as truly wonderful as we might hope. But the peoples of the two countries have provided themselves with a decent chance of being able to build robust and largely accountable and democratic political systems, in place for the repressive systems they have labored under for so many years. Read this account, from JWB's upcoming, Cairo-based author Issandr El-Amrani, on how exhilarating he found Tunisia's recent elections... (Okay, Issandr is less optimistic regarding Egypt. But still, I am sure he would agree with me that the prospects for serious positive political developments there are still far, far greater than any of us would have imagined just one year ago.)
2. The overwhelmingly civilian mass pro-democracy movements in Bahrain and Yemen also been deeply inspiring. Hey-- I never gave a shout-out yet to Yemen's fabulous, inspiring leader Tawakkol Karman for being a co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize this year. Huge congratulations, Ms. Karman! despite the creativity and commitment of the members of the movements in those two countries, however, both have met serious resistance... And in both cases, that resistance has been supported by Washington. Shame, shame shame! (And something that all of us in the pro-justice movement here in the United States ought to be working hard to reverse.)
3. In Syria and elsewhere there have also been large-scale civilian mass movements taking real risks to fight for political reform. But it's been harder to gauge the real reach and influence of those movements. And in Syria, as in Yemen, there have been serious armed elements involved alongside the unarmed mass movements.
4. Libya has been seen as a real test case for the whole western liberal notion of 'R2P'-- which far too many western liberals take to mean that "international community" (however fuzzily defined) has a prima facie duty to support the human rights of beleaguered peoples in all other countries. Actually, the UN's R2P documents don't say that. They say that governments everywhere have the first duty to protect the the lives and safety of their peoples; but that if they fail to do so, then the UN can step in to take such steps as are deemed necessary to save the peoples' lives. Big difference.
So what we saw in Libya was a UN-allowed, NATO-led military intervention that was launched in the first instance under the rubric of enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya in order to protect the civilians of Benghazi from what was described to us all as a completely certain humanitarian disaster. The western leaders never paid any heed to the facts that-- as I blogged at the time-- the humanitarian situation in Benghazi was actually getting better in the days immediately before their bombings started; or, that the African Union leaders were poised to undertake the kind of tension-deescalating negotiations that resolution 1973 had also specifically called for.
Since March 19, Libya has seen scores of thousands of conflict-related deaths and maimings, and the country's political space has been largely taken over by a clutch of mutually competing armed gangs. It looks very like Iraq in 2006 or so. And in keeping with that "Iraqi" theme, we saw the disgusting scenes of Muammar Qadhafi being brutalized while in captivity and then turning up shortly afterwards having been executed by a gunshot to the head.
Like Iraq before it, what happened in Libya is surely not a "model" for any people-- in the Arab world or elsewhere-- who seek a life of human dignity, security for their families, and accountable governance.
So the "balance sheet" for the Arab Spring is at this point decidedly mixed, but still on balance positive. What is clear is that the social and political forces that were unfrozen by Mohamed Bouazizi (and before him, to be fair, by Khaled Said in Egypt) have set the whole Middle East on a political course whose dynamism still has a lot more unfolding to do.
In upcoming blog posts I plan to examine the effects of the Arab Spring so far on the Palestinian issue; and also (in more depth than previously), on the response of the western media to the Arab Spring. Stay tuned.
Getting back to the blogosphere
So much has been happening in the world... The horrible killing of Qadhafi; an earthquake in Turkey (preceded by an upsurge in PKK-Turkish violence); some great-looking elections in Tunisia; continued strife in Syria; the Hamas-Israel prisoner exchange, etc etc...
But for the past few weeks, I've been almost completely consumed with the nuts and bolts of running Just World Books. Yikes!
On the assumption that I still have some readers here at JWN, I just want to put in a really heartfelt plea that you all do whatever you can to support the book company. I would love to find a better work/life/blog balance. But as of now, I have to spend a massive amount of time worrying about JWB's bottom line and how to turn it around.
Do whatever you can to help, please!
You can buy individual books from our growing list. We now offer a growing number of titles as ebooks, as well as in paperback form... Or you could buy a small stack of books, to give them away as holiday gifts. (If you're buying more than five, contact me to learn the discounts we give on bulk sales.)
In addition, you could urge your local bookstore to stock some of our titles; or press your college or community library to buy some of them... Or, write a good review someplace and generally recommend the books to friends, etc, etc...
Okay, please think really seriously if there's anything you can do to support JWB...
So then... I have been developing a little plan for transitioning back into refinding my blogging voice. Sometimes, it's hard. Very often, the longer I go without blogging here, the harder it is to get back into it... and I see that now, it's been really quite a while. So my plan has been this. First, today, I went to an event at the Brookings Institution on Turkey, where Soli Ozel (one of the contributors to JWB's super latest book, Troubled Triangle: The United States, Turkey, and Israel in the New Middle East) was speaking.
Rather than blog that, I tweeted it... then I compiled a Chirpstory out of the tweets. (Okay, I know some of you don't like it when I tweet. Deal with it. For me, it's a good warm-up exercise for getting back to blogging.)
Step 2 is I'm planning to do a longer blogged think-piece on the Arab Spring at nine months... And then, after that, I have a couple of ideas for other serious blog posts, as well.
But for the present blog post, I want to leave you with the idea that there are things you could do that would really help Just World Books... Which is worth doing because the company does already have some fabulous books... because we have plans for other great ones* in the coming months... and because if JWB's finances get healthier that will help me regain some good balance in my life, including regaining my blogging voice...
Thanks!!!
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* Other great books we have in the coming months include:
-- A book by Issandr El-Amrani of 'The Arabist' that traces the roots of Egypt and Tunsia's democracy movement(s) through six years worth of tracking them closely on the ground, and
-- A reflection by Israeli-American activist Miko Peled on the intriguing personal journey he has made to being an advocate for a one-state solution.
(and much more!)
The American MSM and the Arab Spring
This is the very short version of the presentation I made at the Algiers Book Fair Colloquium on Sunday:
1. The elite (editors, commentators, and leading journalists) of the U.S. news media is part of-- indeed, an important pillar of-- the country's continuing political elite and plays a singularly important role in defining and framing the political culture of this elite-- including, in defining the limits of "acceptable" political discourse. Believe me, I know about this, based on my long decades of working with and in the MSM.
2. Like the rest of the U.S. political elite, the MSM elite has seen a significant increase over recent decades in the degree of its interpenetration and intermingling with the Israeli political elite.
3. Prior to the Arab Spring, the most common meme in the MSM was that Arabs were somehow "incapable" of democracy. The first glorious weeks of the 'Arab Spring' pro-democracy movement therefore came as a huge surprise to commentators in the MSM.
4. Their first reaction was one of delight. Both the natural human delight of people anywhere seeing their fellow-humans rise up en masse against autocracy and corruption-- but also a kind of 'self-interested' delight based on the ideas that:
- (a) the protesters looked and acted 'just like us', and therefore could naturally be expected to be pro-American and bring about the kind of pro-American order that emerged after the 'color revolutions' of a few years ago in Ukraine and Georgia;
(b) an initial perception that, because of the absence of any explicitly Islamist slogans and banners, these movements signaled the rise of new-- and in the MSM view, more 'modern' and 'realistic'-- secular movements in Tunisia and Egypt; and
(c) an initial perception that the protesters were not concerned at all about Israel and Palestine, and that therefore the 'Arab masses' had finally 'gotten over' their previous, inexplicable obsession with Palestine.
- (a) extremely harsh in their critiques of the degree to which the U.S. had propped up their previous dictators and were complicit in their misdeeds;
(b) composed in good part of smart, influential, and well-organized Islamist movements who had considerable experience of working well alongside their more secular compatriots; and
(c) strongly concerned about the issue of Palestine.
7. But luckily, the MSM don't monopolize all media in the country any more. There has also been a considerable fragmentation of the media environment over recent decades That has allowed the rise of terrifyingly rightwing, Islamophobic, and hateful new phenomena like Fox News, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, etc. But it has also allowed the rise of significant organs and personalities within the progressive wing of the new media; and the progressive movement within the U.S. has shown a welcome and necessary new openness to including the Palestine Question among its concerns rather than continuing to exclude it, which it did for so long, previously.
Amos Gvirtz's bulletin, "#282"
- Over recent years, the tireless Israeli peace activist Amos Gvirtz, from Kibbutz Shefayim, has been issuing regular warnings about the misdeeds of various of his countryman. These simply worded bulletins shine a much-needed light on some of the little-known details of what has been going on in occupied Palestine. Here is his latest:
On Thursday, 29th September, 2011, Palestinian farmers from the village Shweiki, in the South Hebron Hills, discovered that settlers had uprooted 50 of their olive trees on their land.
The farmers called the army and police. An army tracker traced the vandals' footprints, leading to an outpost called Mitzpe Eshtamoa. On a rock was written: "Halhul price tag."
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On Friday, 30th September, 2011, in the afternoon, several settlers and a dog entered the Palestinian village Yasuf (near the settlement Tapuah). The dog tried to attack people in the village. Villagers threw stones at the dog and the invaders, and managed to get them out. IDF soldiers then arrived and threw teargas grenades in the village and fired volleys into the air.
Questions & queries: amosg-at-shefayim.org.il
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אל תגידו לא ידענו
ביום חמישי ה-29.9.2011 גילו חקלאים מהכפר הפלסטיני , שבדרום הר חברון, שווייקי, שמתנחלים עקרו כחמישים עצי זית באדמתם. הם הזעיקו את הצבא והמשטרה. גשש של הצבא מצא את עקבות העוקרים, שהובילו למאחז מצפה אשתמוע. עוד גילו על סלע כתובת "תג מחיר חלחול".
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ביום שישי אחה"צ ה-30.9.2011 נכנסו מספר מתנחלים עם כלב לכפר יאסוף (ליד ההתנחלות תפוח). הכלב ניסה לתקוף אנשים בכפר. אנשי הכפר זרקו עליו ועל הפולשים אבנים וגרשום. חיילי צה"ל שהגיעו, זרקו רימוני גז בכפר וירו באוויר.
שאלות וברורים: amosg-at-shefayim.org.il
In Algiers: Book Fair and Colloquium
Posted by Helena Cobban
October 4, 2011 7:35 AM EST | Link
Filed in Africa , Arab Reform , HC's travels, general , Writing and publishing
I'm writing this on a plane, at the end of a four-day visit to Algiers... In Algiers I was participating in a big international Colloquium on the Arab Spring organized in conjunction with the 'Salon Internationale du Livre d'Alger' (SILA-- the Algiers Book Fair.) It was really interesting to return to Algeria. I hadn't been there since 1989; in the interim, the country passed through a truly terrible, lengthy civil war that lasted throughout most of the 1990s and was laced with repeated atrocities, committed by both sides: both the very secular government and the ferocious Islamist opposition. In 1998, at the end of what Algerians today refer to as "the Black Decade", the government finally won.
On Friday morning, participants in the Colloquium were taken on a tour of the city's historic Casbah, the labrynthine, historic area of four- and five-story dwellings that clings to a steep hillside in the center of the capital city. Yes, we walked right by the (under-reconstruction) house in which famed national-liberation activist "Ali La Pointe" was entombed along with two other militants, when the French colonial powers blew up the house during the national liberation war, as memorialized in "The Battle of Algiers". And that night we dined with Madame Zohra Bitat, one of the liberation heroines who figured in the war (and in the movie), who is now Vice-President of the country's Senate...
When we toured the Casbah our guide told us that for several years up until 1998, the country's security forces were unable to go into it, so strongly did the Islamists control it. That's how grave and present the threat was, that the regime felt itself under.
It is notable to me, during the present Arab Spring, that the Arab countries that have experienced grave internal conflict in the past 15 years have not witnessed the kind of mass pro-democracy movements that marked the Arab Spring. We didn't discuss that phenomenon very much during the colloquium. But we did have a very rich discussion of, in particular, developments in Egypt and Tunisia. There were some excellent analysts-- and analyst-participants-- from those countries, from several other Arab countries, from the U.K., U.S., Turkey, etc., who also participated. I believe the organizers are hoping to publish some kind of a 'proceedings' volume from the gathering. (At which point, you can read the presentation I gave on the reactions of the Anglo-Saxon media to the Arab Spring. A shortened version is here.)
Continue reading "In Algiers: Book Fair and Colloquium"Updates, Sept.26
Posted by Helena Cobban
September 26, 2011 5:16 PM EST | Link
Filed in Appearances , Writing and publishing
I have found it really hard to find time and energy to blog recently. Lots has been going on with Just World Books. This very evening, we are launching Manan Ahmed's terrific book Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination. I'm in New York to do this. It's being hosted by the Asian-American Writers' Workshop-- starts 90 minutes from now!
Timely, huh? Also timely: our next book, Troubled Triangle: The United States, Turkey, and Israel in the New Middle East, edited by the fabulous William B. Quandt.
Wednesday, I'm leaving for the Algiers, where Bill the spouse and I are both taking part in a "Colloque" on the Arab Spring being organized in conjunction with the Algiers Book Fair. I am also hoping to meet some Arabic-language and French-language publishers who might be interested in buying other-language rights to some of our books.
I know there has been a lot happening recently (especially, here in New York) around Abu Mazen's last-ditch effort to save his legacy by taking the "Palestinian statehood" request to the Security Council. There's been a lot of dissension in Palestinian ranks about the value of this effort. And yes, it does seem very possible that the statehood request might just languish for months or years in some subcommittee of the Security Council... The matter would be a lot more straightforward if Abu Mazen and his people were to insist on taking a request for enhanced recognition to the General Assembly, and forcing a vote there...
Whatever happens to this particular initiative at this particular time, it already seems that pressure is mounting in the non-U.S. 95% of the global community that the United States has monopolized all Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy for too long now; and that the U.S. has proven itself uniquely unqualified and/or unable to do anything to bring about a fair and sustainable peace... and therefore, that some other, more authoritative and capable form of international sponsorship is needed in order to deal successfully with this important item on the world's agenda.
I haven't been able to blog much about this recently. Last week I had a flare-up of horrible back pain, which laid me somewhat low. But next week, on October 4, I'm speaking on the Palestinian statehood issue at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. (I think that's an open meeting: Check their website over the next few days, for details. They don't have any up there yet.)
For September 11, ten years on
... I want to link, first, to these reflections on 9/11, that I published in Friends Journal in 2007, and to this column, that I wrote for the Christian Science Monitor on 9/11 itself, and which ran in the paper two days later.
Tomorrow, on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I'll be spending a lot of time with my fellow Quakers here in Charlottesville. It feels like the right thing to do. At the Quaker meeting for worship (worship service) that we held very soon after the original 9/11, I said that then was the time that "the rubber really hit the road" for the adherence nearly all Quakers profess to the testimony of nonviolence and to the avoidance not just of all wars but also of the causes of war.
I believe that today, more Americans understand the futility and damaging nature of wars-- all wars-- than did ten years ago. But still, far too many of our countrymen and -women remain susceptible to arguments like those made in favor of the military "action" or military "intervention" in Libya earlier this year. (The advocates of such "interventions" are nowadays careful not to come straight out and call them "wars".)
I mourn for each of the lives cut short on 9/11. But I mourn equally for each one of the lives cut short as a result of all the American and American-led wars since then. I bear a heavy weight of concern for the men still incarcerated under inhuman conditions and with no access to due process and no hope of any timely and fair trial-- in Guantanamo and other elements of the U.S. 'black' prison system worldwide. I mourn for the moral blindness and real spiritual wounds suffered by all those who act with, or condone, violence. And I am staggered to think of the "opportunity costs" the whole world has incurred as a result of all the United States' military spending since, and largely as a result of, what happened on 9/11: All the wonderful, life-supporting projects that that money could and should have been used for instead, which would have made the world a far safer place for everyone-- including Americans.
Since 9/11, my own three children have grown into mature, capable, and wonderful adults. Two of them have married and now have children of their own. We all have a new generation to raise. The need to build a better world for these little ones-- for all the little ones around the world!-- has never felt more urgent. Our generation has a lot to apologize for. But luckily, many of us are still around, with a good few years of energetic and loving activism left in us, to try to make some good amends and get the global situation turned back onto a better track...
Here's what I'm going to be doing next weekend: Friday night, speaking at the Annual Conference of the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation in Washington DC; and Sunday noon, speaking at the second conference this year that marks the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's 1961 warning about the dangers of the emergence of a "Military Industrial Complex." This one's in Charlottesville.
These both feel like great ways to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the tragedies of 9/11. Come to one or both, if you can.
9/11, Iraq, and the historical record
The U.S. discourse space is filling up rapidly with "ten years after" pieces related to 9/11. Me, these days I mainly just feel tired, tired. People in the U.S. political elite never listened to those of us who, prior to September 2011, had spent a whole career studying and interacting with the problems of the Middle East and the world, and who warned as loud as we could about the dangers of over-reacting and of taking that oh-so-tempting path toward militarism and U.S. unilateralism.
Actually, it was far worse than that. It's not just that they did not listen to us. They derided us and our expertise and many well-connected members of the elite went to great lengths to exclude our voices from the national discourse. Many of us suffered great professional harm from those campaigns.
So how do I feel today when I see this piece from WaPo uber-columnist Richard Cohen? In it, Cohen finally comes straight out and calls the situation in Iraq in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion there "a disaster" and notes,
- It was not Saddam Hussein who attacked us, and it was not Saddam Hussein who had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons or a nuclear program. None of these existed — not a mere intelligence mistake, as is now claimed, but a mistake caused by preconceived notions, an insistence on seeing a goblin in every shadow, a nuclear program in the weak glow of a watch face, a lust for the head of Saddam Hussein. Oops, we marched smartly off to the wrong war.
- I went home on Sept. 11 with my shoes dusted with the detritus of the World Trade Center. I felt a hate that was entirely new to me. Soon after, the anthrax attacks began, and I was ready for war — against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, for sure, but against Saddam Hussein as well. I was wrong, and for that I blame myself, but I blame us all for going along with it and then rewarding incompetence with another term...
There were a good few of us who did not "go along with" the whole project to invade Iraq, who questioned the flim-flammy evidence being adduced to justify that invasion from the very beginning. Go back and read the CSM columns I was writing in the months before March 2003. Go and read what I was blogging in February 2003... The record is there.
And now, Richard Cohen, you have the gall to say, "I blame us all"??
What a self-referential, sad, and immature person you are, Richard Cohen, for (a) completely ignoring the contribution made by all those of us who warned against the invasion of Iraq from the get-go, and then (b) trying to dilute the level of the "blame" you allot to yourself by trying to make the claim that, "everyone else did it too."
Everyone else did not do it.
So now, firstly, you owe us an apology. Secondly, you need to tell us what you will do to rebuild the basis of the national discourse so that that wilfull, ideologically manipulated "manufacturing of consent" that happened in the lead-up to March 2003 never happens again.
This is not all about you, Richard Cohen. It is about steering this country back to a foreign policy that is based on a solid respect for both facts and the principles of international law. And no, we are not there yet, by any means....
Libya: The longer view
The NATO-assisted uprising in Libya is now in the last phases of taking the whole country. These phases may well be marked by some major rights abuses-- conducted in the name of "mopping up" operations and motivated by some combination of vengeance and triumphalism.
I hope that such excesses are kept to a minimum and that reporters on the ground are careful both to pay attention and to report accurately what they see.
Meanwhile, I see that Ben Rhodes, a former speechwriter who somehow got elevated to "deputy national security adviser for communications" has been doing a bit of a victory lap with Foreign Policy's Josh Rogin.
This part of Rogin's report struck me as particularly worrying:
- President Barack Obama's strategy for the military intervention in Libya will not only result in a better outcome in Libya but also will form the basis of Obama's preferred model for any future military interventions, Rhodes said.
"There are two principles that the president stressed at the outset [of the Libya intervention] that have borne out in our approach. The first is that we believe that it's far more legitimate and effective for regime change to be pursued by an indigenous political movement than by the United States or foreign powers," said Rhodes. "Secondly, we put an emphasis on burden sharing, so that the U.S. wasn't bearing the brunt of the burden and so that you had not just international support for the effort, but also meaningful international contributions."
But more to the point, the real "victory" for Libya's people, if there is to be one, is still very far indeed from having been won.
Do we have any assurance at all at this point that the situation in Libya, in 2020, will be any better than the still-tragic situation in Iraq today, eight years after the U.S. "victory" on the battlefield there in 2003... Or, than the still-horrendous situation in Afghanistan today, nearly ten years after the U.S. "victory" on that battlefield, in 2001?
Libya, after 36 years of brutal Italian colonial rule, 40 years of Qadhafi's rule, and the most recent five months of armed conflict, has very few institutions of good governance and almost no culture or tradition of good governance. We have also seen very disturbing social fissures opening up during these most recent months of war-- between easterners and westerners, and between Arabs and Imazaghen. I am trying hard to muster some hope that the country's "transition" to a decent level and quality of self-governance can be well achieved within the next 2-3 years, but it is really hard to see any indications of how this might be achieved.
What is true is that, given its geography, Libya is a real and present challenge primarily for Italy and the other countries of Europe-- and also for its two in-transition Arab neighbors Egypt and Tunisia. But Egypt and Tunisia are both extremely (and rightly) busy with their own concerns; and Egypt is anyway somewhat buffered from events in Libya by large expanses of desert.
As for Italy and the other European countries-- well, they all also have huge concerns of their own right now, and probably not a lot of attention or resources to devote to providing useful help to the Libyans.
It is thus almost impossible to identify any non-Libyan power who can provide solid, disinterested, useful help to Libya's people as they face the present challenges of post-war social reconstruction. Possibly Turkey? Who knows?
What is clear now, though, is that this task will be huge, and it has barely even begun...
