A History of the Middle East

by Peter Mansfield

  The costs of Shia victory were huge. Seven years on, 5 per cent of Iraq’s 27 million people had been killed, wounded or uprooted. Twice as many Americans had been killed as had died on 9/11, and the estimated cost – according to a US Congressional report – topped $4 trillion. For all the talk of reconstruction, the only cranes on Baghdad’s horizon pre-dated the war and were stationary. Oil production remained below pre-war levels. And power and water cuts in the oil-rich state were the norm.

  The Region-wide Rise of Popular Movements

  The colonial powers that carved countries out of the Ottoman Middle East had predicted that over time they would gain weight as independent states, acquire national identities and win the ensuing loyalty of their subjects in return. Eighty years on, they were struggling to keep afloat. People increasingly identified and expressed a sense of belonging to pre-existing tribal or other bonds, not their nation. Hybrid populations fractured according to ethnicity or sect. Marriage between sects, once common, waned. Walls divided cities, mapping sectarian or ethnic boundaries.

  Centrifugal forces were most striking in the once unified state of Iraq. Kurds turned their safe haven into a virtual protectorate, with their own flag, language and parliament; Shia factions campaigned for a nine-province autonomous zone in the south; and Sunni groups declared their own emirates. The same forces unravelling Iraq spilled into neighbouring states, tearing at their seams. Lebanon’s 1990 Taif agreement, which ended the civil war and promised an abrogation of confessional politics, remained ink on paper.

  Young Lebanese – more than their parents – grew up first and foremost Maronites, Shiites, Sunnis or Druze. Jewish irredentist parties in Israel campaigned to rid their state of many of its Arabs. Moments of crisis, such as the 2006 war with Israel, amplified Lebanon’s communalism. Berber movements in Algeria and Morocco struggled against the ruling ideology of Arabism and clamoured for minority rights and recognition of their tongue, Tamazight, as an official language. Even Saudis began defining themselves not by their kingdom but by their region – the Hejaz coastal strip in the west, the Shia Hasa region in the east, and the tribal rump in the middle.

  A key cause of the draw of transnational ideologies and the erosion of belief in a nation state was the failure of Arab regimes to meet the needs of their people. Mismanagement, inequalities, corruption and state violence eroded their credibility. Saddled with rapidly growing populations and archaic economies, they struggled to maintain patronage mechanisms and provide jobs. In many Arab states, oil exports cushioned the authorities from addressing the malaise as long as prices remained high. But when prices fell (for instance from $145 a barrel in July 2008 to $35 five months later) and the global economy slumped, governments were forced to slash subsidies. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad failed to deliver promises to lift 14 million of his country’s 70 million-strong population out of poverty, and faced mass urban opposition in 2009 when he stood for re-election. Syria struggled to deal with the loss of Gulf largesse, free Iraqi oil and Lebanese resources. Economic crisis in Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest state, sparked provincial revolts, as oil production levels almost halved in a decade across the region. Mounting corruption and human rights abuses further undermined confidence in the state’s provision of law and order.

  Overburdened central governments increasingly surrendered their roles as ultimate welfare provider, social safety net, judicial arbiter and protector to clan, confessional and ethnic movements. Tribal sheikhs and ayatollahs filled the vacuum left by ineffective heads of state. Local leaders derived further strength by rallying with kin or co-believers beyond national boundaries, creating supranational or transnational identities which further weakened the state.

  A stream of refugees criss-crossing the region helped to transfuse the communalism, as well as in some countries tilt demographic balances. Shia communities expanded rapidly in the UAE, Jordan and Syria. Iraq’s Sunni exiles, too, set up base in neighbouring states, carrying their animosities with them.

  Sweeping media innovations further helped carry the transnational identities to a mass audience beyond the reach of state media. The advent of fax, the internet and satellite television brought voices hitherto stifled by the regimes’ monopoly on information and bans on public protest into the home. The initial challenges were costly and cumbersome: in 1993, Saudi dissidents – the Committee for the Defence of Legitimate Rights, or CDLR – fled to London and each week spent thousands distributing a newsletter alleging rampant immorality within the House of Saud. Electronic mail and the internet much reduced costs while raising awareness with targeted reports. Egyptian students and workers defied government efforts to thwart labour protests by organizing a general strike via internet chat-rooms; and tens of thousands of Saudis used Facebookto expose officials behind the bureaucratic failings which led to the deaths of hundreds in flash floods in Jedda in November2009. Mobile phones and such web community sites as Twitter helped stoke Iran’s countrywide protests following the contested 2009 elections.

  Satellite television further enchanced the capablilities of transnational movements, and enabled leaders to reach the disenfranchised and illiterate, who comprised a third of the Arab population. Unencumbered by censorship restrictions, regimes that sent their dissidents into exile soon found them beamed back by satellite. Saudi dissidents demanding political liberalization, an end to a one-family kingdom, and even the separation of religion and state went from jail to the television studio. Iranian supporters of the deposed Shah in Los Angeles brodcast calls for a royalist rebellion to the disaffected in Tehran. Qatar’s al-Jazeera, the most popular, innovative and earliest Arabic satellite station, gave the Muslim Brotherhood’s televangelist, Yusuf Qaradawi, his own prime-time programme, Sharia and Life, and procured exclusive coverage of bin Laden’s homilies. In 1990, Saudi state radio suppressed news of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait for three days. Ten years on, such censorship was inconceivable. Much as the age of printing in Europe challenged fifteenth-century Christian orthodoxy through unmediated access to sacred texts, so the information age enabled the region’s population to challenge the established order.

  Initially, some governments sought to proscribe the medium. Egypt confiscated satellite dishes on grounds of curbing pornography and upholding Islamic mores, and Teheran dispatched gangs of religious vigilantes to rip them from rooftops. But they failed to quell demand. Unable to silence the technology, the regimes adopted it. Iran launched its own satellite channel in late 1997, as well as a 24-hour Arabic-language station, al-Alam, broadcasting to Shia communities in Iraq and the Gulf.

  Struggling to bolster their legitimacy, some Arab regimes sought to pin their national identities to transnational ones. Many Sunni states launched heavily publicized campaigns against alleged Shia missionaries, banned Shia places of worship and ran news bulletins that reported Sunni suicide bombings in Iraq as legitimate acts of resistance. In his eulogy, President Mubarak called Saddam a martyr, and charged that, Arab or not, Shias were loyal to Iran. Muammar Qaddafy commissioned a statue of Saddam to stand next to Omar al-Mukhtar, the Libyan resistance leader hanged by the country’s Italian occupiers. Jordanian immigration police questioned Iraqi refugees with the words, ‘Muslim or Shia?’ Shia politicians also let barbs fly. Iraq’s interior minister, Bayan Jabr, mocked the Saudi foreign minister as ‘a Beduin on a camel’, after the latter warned of rising Iranian influence inside Iraq.

  Fuelled by the rhetoric, new regional blocs began to crystallize. While Sunni Arab regimes shunned the Shia-majority Governing Council, Tehran was the first to recognize its authority as Iraq’s representative body. It opened ‘consulates’ in Iraq’s Shia shrine cities, ostensibly to oversee the welfare of the thousands of pilgrims, and facilitated the return of Iraqi exiles from Iran, some of them armed. Several Shia militias, particularly the Badr forces, continued to benefit from Iranian training and logistical support.

  Fear of encroaching Iranian influence induced neighbouring Sunni states to seek
footholds inside Iraq. Jordan and Saudi Arabia set up military field hospitals in the Sunni outskirts of the capital and in Fallujah, the springboard of Sunni resistance. Turkey, nervous of rising Kurdish clout on its borders, bolstered its pre-war presence of 2,000 troops and forty tanks in northern Iraq with military ‘liaison’ offices, and opened a new office in Kirkuk. Fearing Shia revanchism, Jordan and other Sunni Arab states for a time gave free passage to Sunni jihadi fighters. (‘We cannot prevent people from choosing to commit suicide,’ observed Jordan’s information minister, Mohammed Adwan.) By 2005, half the thousands of foreign jihadis in Iraq were Saudis. Yet while successful in rallying their subjects around a common cause, Arab regimes’ actions reinforced the very non-state actors that eroded their sovereignty.

  Shia Non-state Actors

  Iraq’s transformation galvanized Shiites across the region who were seeking to shrug off their second-class status, and produced a new benchmark for securing their rights. Released from the Baath’s shackles, the city of Najaf served as a dynamo energizing Shia movements, particularly in Iran where many considered Sistani their spiritual leader. In response to President Ahmadinejad’s contested election victory in 2009, frustrated youth led by dissident clerics sympathetic to Sistani’s school of Shiism took to the streets in the country’s biggest political awakening in decades.

  Ayatollah Sistani’s religious endorsement of elections and mass demonstrations ignited similar protests in the Arab heartland. When Iraqis went to the polls in 2005, tens of thousands in Bahrain, the Gulf archipelago where Shias comprised a majority, staged protests demanding King Hamad ibn Isa al-Khalifa introduce similar reforms there. ‘I think that Iraq could represent a democratic model for the Arab-Muslim world,’ Ali Salman, a leading Shia politician and cleric in Bahrain told the crowds. After attempting to quell the protests with his security forces, the king agreed to hold parliamentary elections in November 2006. Despite gerrymandering, Shia opposition candidates won sixteen of the seventeen seats they contested, or 40 per cent of the total.

  In Saudi Arabia, the authorities restricted Shia residency to particular zones, and barred them from working in the security forces and the courts. The Saudi embassy in Washington had no Shia staff, and some Saudi schools – a traditional Wahhabi domain – taught that Shia Islam was a Jewish heresy. Following Saddam’s downfall and inspired by Najaf’s ayatollahs, 450 Saudi Shiites presented a tractate to King Abdullah – entitled ‘Partners in the Homeland’ – demanding an end to religious discrimination and the establishment of a Shia religious authority to regulate their internal affairs. A month later, Abdullah announced municipal elections for spring 2005, the kingdom’s first, granting Shias and Sunnis limited, but equal, electoral rights. There were numerous restrictions. Half the seats on the council were appointed, and both women and political parties were banned, but Shia leaders opted for political participation not boycott, citing Sistani’s fatwa declaring voting a religious duty.

  Candidates in the predominantly Shia Eastern Province played down calls for autonomy, and played up demands for equal rights to local civil service posts, hitherto staffed by Sunnis parachuted in from other provinces. The results were impressive. While Sunni Saudis trickled to the polls, Shias flowed. In the town of Qatif – where the bulk of Sistani’s adherents lived – almost four-fifths of registered voters cast their vote, the highest turnout countrywide, compared to less than a third in the capital, Riyadh. Shias who had hitherto organized underground now campaigned publicly. And following the vote, the Saudi provincial governor eased restrictions on Shia religious activity.

  Against the backdrop of increasing external intervention in Lebanon, many Lebanese, across the sectarian divide, also adopted Sistani’s model of mass action. The catalyst was the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri, in February 2005. Hariri was a businessman who had hitherto worked closely with the Syrian regime, but amid mounting resentment at the continued presence of Syrian forces in Lebanon – particularly after Israel pulled its forces from southern Lebanon in 2000– the relationship had grown increasingly strained. In 2004, exasperated by Syria’s logistical support for Iraqi insurgents, the Bush administration oversaw the passage of Resolution 1559 through the UN Security Council, demanding all foreign forces leave Lebanon and paramilitary forces disband – an unstated reference to Hizbollah. Sensing Syria was on the back foot, Hariri and other politicians voiced support.

  To secure his silence, Syria responded with its time-tested formula of violence, and on Valentine’s Day 2005 Hariri was killed by a car bomb. The assassination backfired, provoking mass anti-Syrian protests which military orders to disperse failed to deter. Met with flowers, Lebanon’s security forces themselves beat a retreat. Sensing a sea change in the public mood, Assad recalled his forces, ending a three-decade presence. By April 2005, the last Syrian soldier had left. Lebanon’s confessional factions rushed to fill the vacuum, literally, by calling on their followers to converge on public squares. On 8 March 2005 Shias – the country’s largest but poorest sect – converged on Beirut’s plush city centre, the showpiece of Lebanon’s civil war reconstruction, and led by Hizbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, demanded an end to the quota system which divvied-up Lebanon’s cabinet and government posts by sect and diminished their demographic weight. A week later Lebanon’s other sects united to stage a counter-rally against a ‘one person, one vote’ electoral system they feared would create another Shia-dominated state. This rally was larger and certainly more colourful, bringing the kaleidoscope of Lebanon’s cultures into Martyrs Square: Sunni preachers in white tunics, Druze in woolly white hats, coiffured Maronite dames with their Pekinese and Filipina maids in tow, and above all young Lebanese in Western dress and hairstyles. For years, the two marches referred to by their dates – 8 March and 14 March – defined the two Lebanese camps vying for power.

  Lebanon held successive elections which took place peacefully, but although all sects participated and formed coalition governments, both camps prepared for a showdown. Facing continued demands for it to disarm from a common alliance of non-Shia sects, Hizbollah – which maintained the country’s only active militia – increasingly opted for violence. To justify its retention of resistance forces six years after Israel’s withdrawal from Southern Lebanon, it launched a border attack on Israel in July 2006. Over the following month it fended off a counter-attack by the region’s most powerful military. Its medium-range missiles repeatedly struck Israel’s third largest city, Haifa, as well as an Israeli battleship, and its electronic intelligence penetrated Israel’s mobile telephone network. Even on the last day of battle, it retained sufficient muster to fire hundreds of missiles.

  Externally its regional political capital soared, salvaging some of the Arab honour lost when the US invaded Iraq. Unlike Saddam’s army, no Hizbollah soldier surrendered, and Iran quickly replenished its arsenal. Internally, however, Hizbollah suffered at the ballot box, 1,500 Lebanese civilians were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced. On the defensive politically, but with its military prowess strengthened in the battle with Israel, Hizbollah increasingly put its forces to use internally as well. Car bombs killed and maimed 14 March politicians and activists, and rival militias fought street battles. The government tried to curb Hizbollah’s state-within-a-state, but overreached. In May 2008, it tried to size control of Hizbollah’s internal telecommunications system, prompting the militia to send its forces into central Beirut, the seat of government. Lebanon’s army only averted a civil war by staying out of the fray. ‘We wanted the army to give us security. But what can the army do when Hizbollah is stronger than the army?’ grumbled Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader in the beleaguered 14 March camp, while gunmen paraded outside his Beirut home.

  The Doha agreement broke the stalemate: Hizbollah translated its military presence into political gain – withdrawing from West Beirut in return for enough seats in government to veto any unilateral move by the 14 March majority. Elections a year later resu
lted in a surprising victory for the 14 March camp, but in backroom deals Hizbollah and its backers continued to deny it power. After five months in limbo, the parties announced a coalition restoring the status quo ante. Hizbollah held a third plus one of the thirty cabinet seats, giving it the veto power necessary to protect its militia. Unable to rely on Obama’s support to the same degree as the Bush administration’s, one by one 14 March’s leaders trooped to Hizbollah’s neighbouring backer, Damascus. Jumblatt, a longstanding bellwether of Lebanese politics, went there first. Prime minister Saad Hariri, who had led the campaign to indict Syrians for his father’s death, followed soon afterwards. In his government policy statement he recognized Hizbollah’s right to maintain its resistance. Ultimately, Hizbollah’s power rested in its diplomatic and military clout as much as its vox populi.

  Perhaps the most remarkable Shia awakening was in northern Yemen, where most of the population are Zaydis, a Shia offshoot. Zaydi rites and practices are closer to Sunni Islam than the Twelver Shiism predominant in Iran and Iraq, and until toppled by the 1962 revolution its Imam had ruled over both Sunnis and Shias in Yemen for a millennium. Though himself of Zaydi origins, Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Salih, remained deeply nervous of Zaydi stirrings. In the 1990s he posted Iraqi Baathists schooled in suppressing Shiism to the northern provincial capital and Zaydi heartland, Saada; later he encouraged Salafi veterans of the Afghan jihad, who were even more implacably opposed to Shiism, to settle, study Wahhabi doctrines and train in Damaj, a desert oasis nearby.