by Lin Noueihed
Together with this ran the promotion of a cult of personality. Rulers projected the image that they would be there for eternity and that, if they were not, their son or other relative was waiting in the wings. A giant poster showing Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, his son, the crown prince, and his uncle, the prime minister, hung from the side of a building just a few metres from the Pearl roundabout where protests would be concentrated in early 2011. In Libya, billboards were filled not with ads but with pictures of Gaddafi showing the number of years he had been in power. Faded posters showing the Colonel next to a large number 39 were juxtaposed with newer ones of Gaddafi 40 or 41. Visitors could buy Gaddafi watches, baseball caps and T-shirts from shops in central Tripoli.
Alongside this crude propaganda that appeared to belong to another era, Arab rulers demonstrated a knack for ‘upgrading authoritarianism’ to survive the challenges posed not only by globalization but also by new media and the growing international emphasis on human rights.7 One of several tactics they employed was to curtail, co-opt, compete with and thereby undermine efforts to build a strong civil society through the creation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
Arab NGOs first started to proliferate in the 1980s, largely in response to openings from above. Authoritarian rulers apparently thought that tolerating small and powerless groups would burnish their democratic credentials abroad while incurring little cost at home. But local NGOs that focused on issues from human rights to corruption eventually became a thorn in their sides. Rather than attract bad press by banning all groups, they harassed and repeatedly detained offending members. They introduced laws that required NGOs to register, which then allowed the state to legally reject troublesome critics, limit their sources of funding, or restrict the scope of their activities. While weakening independent groups, Arab governments also set about sponsoring semi-official NGOs that received privileged access to donors, conferences and officials. These could not act independently and were muted in their criticism while competing for funds and publicity with the weaker and smaller independent groups.
Many of these government NGOs, or GONGOs, were led by the glamorous wives of Arab kings and presidents, and were dismissed by grassroots activists as ‘First Ladies’ Clubs’. Asma al-Assad, the wife of the Syrian president, was the sponsor of seven NGOs focused on issues such as youth, women's rights and rural development. All operated under the umbrella of the Syria Trust for Development, which she also chaired, and which advertised itself as a non-profit and non-government organization through which the state would partner with local NGOs to foster development. Yet it was notoriously difficult for any rights-based NGOs to operate legally in Syria, which is home to 1,500 civil society groups compared to 5,000 in its much smaller but much freer neighbour Lebanon.8
Gushing Western media coverage also made it easier to present a sanitized view of developments in the Arab world. Asma al-Assad was glamorous, charming, British-born, and the subject of a fawning Vogue story which described the democratic principles governing her family's life, and was published the same month that Mubarak was overthrown. Jordan's Queen Rania, another beautiful first lady, boasted a string of accolades from Glamour magazine's Woman of the Year to a place on Forbes’ Most Powerful Women list, thanks to her work for charity and for NGOs that sought to empower women.9 These first ladies were popular abroad, but their unveiled, slick and empowered images bore little resemblance to the lives of ordinary women and made no mention of the undemocratic ways of their husbands.10
If one generalization could be made about countries as different as Yemen and Tunisia, it is that their rulers were survivors, adept at repressing or co-opting their enemies and adapting to changes, from the end of the Cold War to the rise of social media. They had simply been around so long that they exuded an air of stability that masked the growing discontent among their people.
The Arab Exception
The club of Arab dictators had proven so resilient that a whole body of academic literature and journalistic commentary had developed to explain why emerging countries were industrializing, growing, creating jobs and shifting towards more representative government, while the Middle East fell ever further behind. Pundits spoke of the ‘Arab exception’, unfavourably comparing Arab countries first to Asia's ‘tiger economies’, then to the BRICs, the rising powers of Brazil, Russia, India and China.
There were several permutations to the ‘Arab exception’ argument, ranging from the suggestion that these societies were simply not ‘ready’ for democracy because their patriarchal nature predisposed them to authoritarian rule, to the opinion that Islam, as a religion, was intrinsically incompatible with democracy. Another explanation was that the United States had propped up authoritarian rulers in countries including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain and Tunisia because a confluence of geopolitical interests in the region – its desire to defend Israel, to ensure a steady supply of affordable oil, to hold back Iranian influence following the 1979 revolution, and to curtail any Islamist threat – trumped any ideological desire to spread democracy.
The US commitment to protecting Israel's security has, indeed, led it to work closely with leaders in Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian territories, all of whom signed peace deals with the Jewish state, and to apply pressure to those who had not. When Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat broke ranks and signed a unilateral peace treaty with Israel in 1979, the deal was sealed with the promise of $1.3 billion a year in US aid and unwavering support from Washington. The Camp David peace accord won back Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, which had been captured by the Jewish state in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, but cost Sadat his life in 1981, when he was assassinated by an Islamist militant.
So unpopular was the agreement both at home and among other Arab states, that Sadat's funeral was attended by three former US presidents, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, but only one Arab leader.11 Once host to the Arab League, Egypt had been thrown out and its leader was as unpopular among his own people as he was in the region. Sadat's economic liberalization, or infitah, policies also cemented Egypt's shift from the Soviet into the Western sphere and, though they provoked bread riots in 1977, the reforms were lauded by the United States.
US financial, military and political support continued under Sadat's successor. Mubarak worked with the United States and Israel to enforce a blockade of Gaza that began in 2007, with the aim of isolating Hamas, despite television images of widespread civilian suffering and protests on the streets of Cairo. Even as thousands of Egyptian protesters braved tear gas and rubber bullets to demand Mubarak's resignation in 2011, US officials appeared reluctant to admit that his record on human rights and democracy was, to put it mildly, an embarrassment.
‘Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things and he's been very responsible … relative to geopolitical interests in the region; Middle East peace efforts, the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing the relationship with Israel,’ US vice president Joe Biden said two days after the start of protests in Egypt on 25 January 2011. ‘I would not refer to him as a dictator.‘12
There was a sense in the region that the United States not only propped up its allies, but also turned a blind eye to its enemies as long as they served its interests. While Syria has sheltered and supported armed anti-Israeli groups such as Hamas and Lebanon's Hezbollah, for instance, both Assads have stuck to a 1974 ceasefire on the Golan Heights, allowing Syria to maintain its anti-Israeli stance while avoiding direct conflict. Whatever misgivings the United States and Israel may have had about the Syrian regime, they appeared more willing to live with the Assads than venture into the unknown.
Many Arabs clearly saw US support for, or tolerance of, authoritarian leaders in Egypt, Jordan, Syria and the Palestinian territories, as serving the Jewish state. Beyond the borders of Israel, however, oil had been a chief strategic consideration for Washington.
The United States, still the world's biggest energy consumer, has sought to en
sure the steady supply of crude to world markets even if that means supporting illiberal and undemocratic rulers who it trusts to keep the taps on. And the Middle East and North Africa is the world's largest energy-exporting region, producing crude oil equivalent to about two-fifths of total global consumption in 2010.13 It includes the world's biggest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia, plus another six of its top 20 producers – the UAE, Kuwait, Iraq, Algeria, Qatar and, before 2011, Libya.14 Saudi Arabia single-handedly produces about 12 per cent of the world's oil consumption, and in 2010 had become yet more important to global energy markets when it completed a $100 billion, six-year expansion programme that upped its total crude production capacity to 12.5m barrels per day (b/d) and provided a generous cushion of unused capacity.15
While the United States pumps a significant amount of oil itself and sources most of its crude imports from countries outside of the Middle East, any serious disruption to Saudi production, whether through domestic unrest or problems in its export routes, would send shockwaves through the famously jittery global oil market.16 In the wake of the global financial crisis, ensuring a steady supply of cheap crude took on added importance. Any repeat of the 2008 spike, which saw prices reach almost $150 a barrel, could seriously undermine any recovery in the United States and, by extension, the global economy. Saudi Arabia, in banking crisis parlance, was too big to fail.
While the Israel and oil arguments apply to some, but not all, of the Arab countries, all rulers worried to differing extents about what they saw as the Islamist threat. This concern was conveniently shared with the United States and its allies in Western Europe. Whereas, with the end of the Cold War in 1989, the United States no longer needed to prop up friendly dictators from Latin America to Asia to guard against democratic movements that threatened to bring in socialist or populist leaders, in Arab countries the threat of communism was immediately succeeded by the threat of Islamists who had once been exploited as a bulwark against the left.
For decades before the 2001 attacks and the ensuing war on terror, Arab rulers from Tunisia's Ben Ali to Egypt's Mubarak had veered between repressing Islamists and co-opting them for their own ends. It is us or the Islamists, they said, and any free and fair elections that had been held in the Arab world, like those in Algeria, Iraq and the Palestinian territories, appeared to prove them right.
When Hafez al-Assad crushed an armed Islamist insurgency that began in the late 1970s and culminated in a bloodbath at Hama in 1982, the United States brought the fighting to the world's attention but took no action.17 Journalists, initially banned from the central Syrian city, had to rely on Western diplomats estimating the death toll at 5,000 people.18 However, in a detailed report published in 2006, the Syrian Human Rights Committee said at least 25,000 people had died.19
Western governments threw money at Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, despite endemic corruption in the public sector, to help him crush an Al-Qaeda franchise active in the lawless south and east of the country. In 2010, the United States more than doubled its official military aid to Yemen after an Al-Qaeda-linked militant trained in the country tried to blow up a passenger plane by hiding explosives in his underwear.20
It was a similar story elsewhere. As long as the alternative was the Islamists, the United States appeared to turn a blind eye to all but the worst repression by Arab rulers. And while it publicly criticized the arrest of activists, it continued to offer some of these rulers financial or military aid that they could direct against their opponents.
The United States had also helped to create a monster. In what proved to be the last decade of the Cold War, it had helped to fund the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union. Thousands of Arab Muslim men, who became known as the ‘Afghan Arabs’, arrived to help expel the ‘Godless’ Soviets from Afghanistan. Many of them were backed by Saudi money, and Pakistani intelligence. Among them was Saudi-born Osama bin Laden. When the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, many of these men, trained militarily and indoctrinated to fight for Islam, went on to fight in other troubled regions such as Chechnya,21 or returned home and turned their guns against their own governments.
Al-Qaeda turned the war against the United States, the Arab rulers Washington supported, and even those rulers whom it did not support. It is worth noting that Libya, not the United States, was the first country to issue an international arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden, via Interpol in 1998, for the murder of a German intelligence officer and his wife four years earlier.22 And when nineteen Arab and Muslim hijackers from Al-Qaeda flew passenger planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania on 11 September 2001, it was not just US-allied rulers such as Egypt's Mubarak who proved indispensable to the ensuing US ‘war on terror’, but also ostensible enemies such as Assad and Gaddafi.
Some Al-Qaeda suspects were subjected to what is euphemistically known as ‘extraordinary rendition’, meaning they were abducted and transferred to secret CIA detention centres or to their home countries, where they faced potential mistreatment. One widely reported case was that of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was arrested in 2002 while passing through New York and transferred to his country of origin, Syria, where he was imprisoned for a year and says he was tortured.23 Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the Islamist and rebel placed in charge of securing Tripoli following the taking of the capital in August 2011, has publicly said he was detained at Kuala Lumpur airport in 2004, questioned by the CIA, and then repatriated to Libya, where he spent the next six years in jail.24
Arab rulers also used the ‘war on terror’ as a handy excuse to round up domestic opponents on the flimsiest evidence. Now, even the most moderate of Islamists could be jailed on charges of supporting terrorism, adding to increasing domestic repression.
As we will discuss in more detail later, Islamists range in their outlooks from religious democrats campaigning peacefully within their own countries to jihadis fighting a global war to establish direct Islamic rule across vast swathes of majority-Muslim land. But in the Western media, the words Islam and jihad were heard together all too often. As US-led forces fought the Taliban in Afghanistan, ordinary people across the world watched news features on women forced to wear the burqa or banned from going to school. A slew of books hit the shelves warning of the dangers of the global jihad, a war against the United States, the West and anyone who did not believe in the narrowest interpretation of Islam.
Samuel Huntington's 1993 prediction of a coming ‘clash of civilizations’ was the subject of renewed debate, while pundits explained how Islam's emphasis on community good clashed with the Western emphasis on individual rights, and why Islam could not provide for the separation between mosque and state required for a liberal democracy.
These arguments are likely to have come as a surprise to Turks and Indonesians, whose majority-Muslim countries were already functioning, if flawed, democracies. They also appear to ignore the historical tradition of shura, or consultation, that the early Islamic community engaged in and that many Muslim scholars consider to embody the democratic values of Islam. Amid the fears that swirled in the aftermath of 9/11, the enormous variety of views held by Muslims, on everything from democracy, to sex, to banking, were glossed over. When George W. Bush declared that you were either ‘with us or against us’, virtually all Arab dictators screamed that they were ‘with’. Without us, they warned, the Islamists will come to power, the borders of Israel will no longer be secure and the supply of oil may be disrupted, and it was hard for the United States, as it hunted down Al-Qaeda supporters and invaded two Muslim countries, not to listen.
Yet the 2003 invasion of Iraq, opposed by many of Washington's Arab allies, inflamed anger across the Arab world and raised a new generation of jihadis. Men too young to have fought in Afghanistan in the 1970s and 1980s now went to Iraq to fight the US invasion. From the perspective of Washington's long-time allies – particularly the Sunni rulers of Saudi Arabia and the other oil-exporting Gulf states – the biggest winner from the invasion of Ir
aq was their common enemy, the Shi'ite Muslim theocracy Iran. Tensions flared between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims from Pakistan, to Bahrain and Saudi Arabia in the Gulf, to Lebanon on the Mediterranean coast. Jordan's King Abdullah spoke with concern in 2004 about the rise of a Shi'ite crescent from Lebanon, through Iraq, to Iran.25 That, along with the widely-held belief that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapons programme, provided another reason for the United States to maintain its support both for Sunni Arab rulers and for Israel.
The Democracy Dilemma
All this did not deter Bush from officially launching his so-called ‘freedom agenda’ in 2005. In it, Bush recognized that US support for authoritarianism in other countries might breed anger against the United States, but apparently failed to grasp that sermons on freedom would ring hollow while hundreds were held without trial in Guantanamo Bay, and that democracy enforced by the barrel of a gun might not be welcomed by all those struggling against unelected rulers. ‘We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one,’ Bush said in his second inaugural address.26
