And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

by Engel, Richard

  I have a theory about protests learned from covering a dozen of them from the Middle East to Ukraine: To be effective, demonstrators must pick the right square and make it the center of their activities. Tahrir Square was perfect. It was big, it was surrounded by lots of little streets and access roads, it was near a huge population of prospective protesters, and it was overlooked by several big hotels filled with journalists who were keeping an eye on things every minute of the day.

  On February 5, Day 12 of the protests, Gamal gave up leadership of the ruling party, but his father hung on, with the encouragement of other Arab leaders who feared they would be next if he stepped down. The death toll had risen to three hundred by February 7. But the protesters sensed the tide had turned, and Tahrir Square was suddenly transformed from a battleground to a massive campsite. Crowds swelled into the hundreds of thousands on February 8 amid rumors that Mubarak was about to give up office. But in a speech delivered at 11:00 p.m. two nights later, Mubarak was still calling himself president, though he now described it as more of a symbolic role. But on February 11, Mubarak surprised everyone by fleeing to Sharm el-Sheikh—known as the City of Peace because of the numerous international peace conferences held there—at the southern tip of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on the Red Sea.

  “And so began the biggest, most joyful, wildest celebration in Egypt’s modern history,” I reported. The cleanup began the next day. “There is an energy, a can-do spirit in Egypt,” I said on the Nightly News. “Egyptians realize they are setting an example—an example being watched across the Middle East, and Egyptians believe the revolution they have started will spread.” The country was swept up in euphoria, with dancing, singing, and bonfires in the streets.

  The most interesting and portentous day of the uprising may have been February 13, when Egyptians went back to work. Everyone felt a sense of empowerment, and grievances bubbled up everywhere. Men demanded seats on previously all-women subway cars, calling their exclusion unfair. Bus drivers demanded higher pay, and bank employees accused their CEOs of corruption. Journalists charged that their editor in chiefs played favorites. Even the police, who tried to crush the protests, demanded (and later got) a pay hike—but not before they held an apology march through Cairo. “Sorry, we were just following orders,” they chanted.

  It was the day when Egyptians learned they weren’t just demonstrating against Mubarak but also against a million mini-dictators who drew power from him and did his bidding while overseeing state-run companies, state-run newspapers, state-run utilities, and state-run schools. These grievances, and the growing role of Islamic groups, were manifestations of the volatility that would rock Egypt in the months and years ahead. And all the while the new US president was cheering the demonstrators on.

  Egypt’s revolution was in my opinion one of the most decisive foreign events in President Obama’s term in office. I suspect without realizing it, Obama—just like Bush before him—changed the direction that US policy in the Middle East had taken for decades. Since World War II, when the United States replaced Europe in the role of patron of the region, Washington’s goal in the Middle East can be summed up in one word: stability. With the Eisenhower and Carter doctrines, and President George H. W. Bush’s war to push Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait but not overthrow him, Washington had tried to maintain basic stability, keep the region’s oil flowing, and uphold the cold peace with Israel. Suddenly, that all seemed out the window. First, President Bush toppled Saddam Hussein for no good reason except Washington, and the president personally, wanted revenge after 9/11 and wasn’t satisfied with Afghanistan. Now President Obama was turning his back on America’s oldest and closest ally in the Arab world.

  President Mubarak was effectively a US lackey who controlled the biggest country in the Middle East. He was a key asset. If  Washington wanted stability, it should have worked harder to keep him or transition him out smoothly, instead of having him thrown out by the military backed by an angry mob. President Obama unceremoniously threw Mubarak under the bus and watched him toppled in less than three weeks. Suddenly, Obama had a “doctrine” of his own. It was this: if you can get to a square, make a lot of noise, know how to use Facebook and Twitter, speak a smattering of English, and the police and/or army starts to beat you up, Washington is on your side. It was bold and revolutionary, perhaps even noble and correct, but it wouldn’t last.

  President Bush had been aggressive and reckless in the Middle East, attacking Iraq for no reason and then claiming to be fighting terrorism while actually creating more terrorists. I like to think of the Middle East of the Arab big men like a row of old rotten houses. They looked stable and imposing from the outside but were in fact full of mold and termites, which they both contained and created the way old houses do if no one opens the windows or cleans them out. President Bush knocked down the first rotten house by toppling Saddam Hussein, unleashing the anger, ignorance, and Sunni-Shia rivalry inside. President Obama, by turning on old friends, was now helping to knock down another house. Worse still, Obama would later fail to follow through on this new promise when the wave of protest reached Bahrain and then culminated in Syria. The Bush Doctrine was offensive defense: attack foreign nations before they attack you, even if you attack the wrong country for the wrong reason, or for no reason at all. The Obama Doctrine would turn out to be: help those seeking democracy when they are oppressed, except when you don’t want to and prefer to promise help while not delivering it. The combined impact of these two policies—radical departures from decades of trying to find Middle East stability—would be devastating.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME THE ARAB SPRING erupted I had made Istanbul my home base. I bought an apartment there in 2007 as an investment and as a place to go on weekends because Istanbul is a cool city. I’ve since refurbished it, but back then it was pretty run-down. The ceiling leaked, there was no air-conditioning, and the kitchen was a joke. But at least I didn’t have to shuttle back and forth to New York.

  I had just left Istanbul for Egypt when authorities in Bahrain started cracking down on demonstrators there. Even before I got to the capital, Manama, I knew the odds were heavily stacked against the Shia protesters. Bahrain is tiny (pop. 1.2 million, 160,000 of whom live in Manama), 60 to 70 percent of the population is Shia, and it is in the backyard of Saudi Arabia, the powerhouse of the Sunni world. Bahrain’s government is strong and rich. The country is also strategically important as the home of the US Fifth Fleet.

  The protest began at 3:00 a.m. on February 17, 2011, with an Egyptian-style sit-in in Pearl Square. Riot police and soldiers fired tear gas canisters and rubber bullets. I went to Salmaniya Medical Complex and found the staff overwhelmed. The injured said many protesters dropped to their knees, bared their chests, and dared the soldiers to shoot. The soldiers obliged: at least four protesters were killed, fifty more were injured, and sixty were reported missing.

  Bahrain is a case study in how to crush an uprising. The government tracked down people who were organizing protests online, arrested suspected rabble-rousers, and prevented crowds from forming. Determined not to have a repeat of Tahrir Square, the government simply bulldozed Pearl Square into rubble. By February 19, protesters were carrying flowers and shouting messages of peace. Unlike with Mubarak, President Obama said very little during Bahrain’s violent crackdown. Inconsistencies in the president’s policy were already emerging. Why was the United States sympathetic to demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, but seemed uninterested when Bahrain’s monarchy bulldozed Pearl Square? People in the Middle East were left scratching their heads.

  By now, all hell was breaking loose in Libya. From the start, this was not just a protest against economic inequality or religious discrimination, but a revolution aimed at toppling the regime of Mu’ammar Gadhafi. It was, in short, a real shooting war.

  My crew and I gathered in Cairo. We didn’t have visas to get into Libya, and we didn’t know what to expect from the rebels who controlled the territory on the
other side of the Egyptian border. I thought about hiring bedouin smugglers to get us into Libya. Crazy as it sounds, I even flirted with the idea of crossing the desert on camels. Not a lot of hands went up when I asked who was game for the trip. Fine, I said, I’ll go by myself.

  I know how to use a portable terminal that can connect to a satellite Internet network, but I didn’t know how to edit video and upload it to the computer. The guys in my crew tried to show me, but with my primitive technological skills it must have been a pathetic sight. Finally a cameraman named John Kooistra, a good friend of mine, dismissed the tutorial as stupid and said he was coming with me.

  We hired a taxi for the four-hundred-mile trip to Sallum, a village in northwest Egypt about ninety miles from Tobruk in Libya. When we arrived, we heard that CNN’s Ben Wedeman had already crossed the border. That got my competitive juices flowing, especially because I had worked as Wedeman’s freelance assistant when I was starting out in Cairo. The crossing point was a madhouse, with swarms of refugees coming into Egypt from Libya, but we finally got our exit stamps and headed for the no-man’s-land separating the two countries. I tried to call NBC to tell my bosses that we were crossing, but I couldn’t get any reception, which was probably just as well because New York would probably have said it was too dangerous. When we got to the Libyan side, the rebels waved us right in.

  It was a bit harrowing at first because we got into cars without knowing for sure whether the drivers were kidnappers or friendlies. But the rebels and their sympathizers couldn’t have been more helpful and considerate. They had seen how media coverage had helped the opposition in Tunisia and Egypt. If we had been the Al Jazeera team they would probably have carried us all the way to Tobruk on litters. As it was, we had to struggle to pay for drivers, a meal, even a cup of coffee. We hadn’t yet heard a report by Wedeman, which suggested we were close on his heels.

  We eventually made it to Tobruk, the scene of bitter fighting in World War II. Allied forces, mostly Australian, captured it in 1941, but Erwin Rommel, the famed Desert Fox, wrested it away for the Axis Powers the following year. I was reminded then of Rommel’s observation that fighting in the desert was like fighting at sea. There were no population centers or strategic points, distances didn’t mean much, and an army could gain or lose a hundred miles in a single battle. We saw this happen many times in the months ahead.

  From Tobruk we traveled another 290 miles west to Benghazi, the second-largest city in Libya (pop. 700,000) and the rebels’ capital. En route we heard a speech by Gadhafi on state radio. In a weird cadence, sometimes excited, other times slurred, Gadhafi claimed bin Laden and the United States were in cahoots and slipping hallucinogenic drugs into the rebels’ Nescafé, making them crazy. (The Libyans, who were once colonized by the Italians, do amazing things with Nescafé. I became addicted to their sweet cappuccino served in plastic cups, but not because they had any drugs in them.) In my first report from Libya, I said Gadhafi “does not sound like a sane person.”

  In Benghazi, we stayed at the Uzo Hotel, where a media center had already been set up. The rebels had cleared the hotel of regular guests and allotted the rooms to military officers and journalists. A rebel office was downstairs, and if we wanted to go to the front lines, I only had to ask one of the commanders for a ride.

  Most of the rebels were civilians, not trained soldiers, and they had captured Benghazi by acclamation of the populace, not in street-to-street battles with government forces. But like actors donning costumes, they immediately started dressing like Che Guevara—camouflage jackets, bandoliers, scarves, mirrored sunglasses, and, of course, berets. They swaggered around with guns, most of which hadn’t been fired in anger. They fired a lot in the air.

  After a week with the rebels in Benghazi, I wanted to get to Tripoli, the capital and site of Gadhafi’s compound. But how? It was a 630-mile drive along the Mediterranean coast, roughly the distance between New York City and Detroit, but that was not the real problem. At the 350-mile mark lay Sirte, Gadhafi’s hometown, which we figured would be unfriendly to foreign journalists arriving from the rebels’ eastern enclave.

  We considered crossing the Gulf of Sidra, a U-shaped body of water with Benghazi and Tripoli at opposite tips, but we couldn’t find a suitable boat. So we drove twenty-four hours back through Tobruk to Sallum and finally to Cairo, booking a flight from there to Tripoli even though we still lacked visas for Libya. When the plane landed in Tripoli to pick up new passengers, we grabbed our gear and purposely stranded ourselves. We told immigration officials that we were expected at the press center at the Rixos Hotel. This cock-and-bull story bought us some time. After several hours, an immigration official called me into his office and shook my hand, slipping me a piece of paper with his name and phone number on it, then stamped us in. He was clearly hedging his bet on the regime, figuring a contact with an American journalist might come in handy later on.

  When correspondents cover a civil war, they expect to live rough, but that was certainly not the case at the Rixos. This superluxurious hotel had indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a Turkish bath, a gym with thirty brand-spanking-new treadmills, and a nightly buffet with roast meats and chicken, fresh vegetables, and a dozen different desserts.

  After using all our ingenuity to get to Tripoli, it soon became apparent that we had arrived too soon. “We’re in the eye of the storm,” I reported on March 2. I said the city was more ready for tourists than war. Restaurants and hotels were open, and the markets brimmed with Mediterranean produce.

  The same was not true twenty-eight miles to the west in Zawiya, Libya’s fifth-largest city (pop. 200,000). When protests flared there, Gadhafi used airpower and dozens of tanks to pummel the city, leaving it in ruins. We tried to drive to Zawiya but were pulled off the road at a government checkpoint. As we waited to show our identification, I grabbed my BlackBerry and frantically deleted a hundred or so pictures I had taken of rebels in Benghazi, knowing they would probably have landed me in jail.

  Pro-government demonstrations were staged every day in Green Square, adjacent to Tripoli’s medieval old city, whose large port gave way to narrow streets with beautiful homes and courtyards, many of which had been converted to restaurants or hotels. I reported that the government was proclaiming the capture of towns that were still controlled by the rebels. “So people in Tripoli are being told to celebrate victories that aren’t taking place.”

  After eight days in Tripoli, we flew back to Cairo. When you’re covering a story like this, you always want to get to the next place. The grass is always greener. In Benghazi, you report on the rebels, you go to the front lines, you follow the ebbs and flows of the battle, and pretty soon you feel as if you’re doing the same story over and over. Then you jump to Tripoli and find you’re caught in a bubble. You turn on the television and see the competition getting good pictures of the fighting. So you say to yourself, “This battle is serious. Tripoli isn’t cooking. I can hop over to Benghazi, catch some of the fight, and still get back to Tripoli if necessary.”

  We got to Cairo and made the long drive to Sallum to cross back into Libya. Our team was completely frazzled. On March 11, 2011, as we prepared to cross the border, a tsunami devastated Japan, killing fifteen thousand, destroying hundreds of thousands of homes, and causing meltdowns at three nuclear power plants. We knew that story would dominate the news for days, and we wouldn’t be able to get our stuff on the air. So after a heart-to-heart talk, we decided to take a week’s break.

  When we finally returned to Tobruk, US and NATO planes had joined the rebel effort, and just in time. They knocked out government armored vehicles and artillery streaming toward Benghazi. If the heavy weaponry had reached its destination, the city would have fallen and the revolution would probably have come to an abrupt halt. President Obama had committed the US military to protect the rebels and the civilians around them from an advancing army. President Obama became a hero to the Arab street. First he refused to back Mubarak. Now he was saving Bengh
azi. Perhaps Bahrain where Washington failed to act was an anomaly. It was certainly overshadowed by Libya, where Washington and its European allies took direct action, sending jets in to support the rebels. It was dramatic, cheered by Arab television, and raised expectations among rebels and reformers all around the world, especially in Syria, where they would be bitterly disappointed.

  We hung back in Tobruk to see how the US/NATO air campaign played out. Once we felt it was safe, we returned to Benghazi, passing destroyed armored columns by the side of the road. Gadhafi’s forces had come within two miles of the rebel capital.

  We found the rebel forces buoyed by the help from the air. Each day we would venture out from Benghazi and drive to villages along the ever-advancing front. The battle for Ajdabiya, a city of seventy thousand about 125 miles south of Benghazi, was considered crucial because it was the first test of the rebels’ strength since the beginning of the Western air campaign. On March 24, my team and I were doing interviews with a rebel unit about five miles outside Ajdabiya when I encountered a fighter armed with a plastic toy pistol. I never got a chance to learn why. As I was describing the gun on camera, three incoming tank or artillery rounds exploded fifty yards away. We took cover behind a concrete block while the rebels scattered.

  The next day government and rebel forces were fighting inside Ajdabiya. Ordinarily we stayed behind the rebels’ front line, advancing only when they did, but this time we decided to risk moving forward while the battle was in flux.