A History of the Middle East

by Peter Mansfield

  After years of bloodshed, Iraq’s turnaround was most striking. Far from being overrun after the US withdrawal in December 2011, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s hold strengthened. Unencumbered by US oversight, he tightened his control on the levers of repression. In the run-up to elections, his Shia-led coalition banned 500 candidates deemed to be Baathists, and after winning a second term, Maliki set about eliminating or neutering rivals within his own coalition. He had his Sunni deputy, Tarek al-Hashimi, charged with abetting terrorism, and allowed the Kurds nominally in charge of the Defence Ministry to seek kickbacks from arms contracts, while he filled the ranks of Iraq’s special forces, dubbed Fedayeen al-Maliki or Maliki’s guerrillas, with former Shia militiamen, who exercised control on the ground. When Kurdish leaders went to Washington in 2012, they tried to revive their Saddam-era refrain that Iraq’s leader was threatening the autonomy that they had enjoyed since the first Gulf War by stationing his forces along the Green line with Kurdistan, and warned America against supplying Maliki with F16 warplanes. But the US Congress was no longer listening. The economy grew 10 per cent in 2012 and revenues increased as Iraq accelerated oil production, to the point where Maliki suggested that Iraq would challenge Saudi Arabia as the world’s swing-producer.

  In Egypt, too, the ascendant religious parties seemed prone to the lingering ways of the past. Banned, jailed and downtrodden for 48 years, the Muslim Brotherhood ran election campaigns for parliament and the presidency promising to end the repression of the former security regime. They highlighted their leadership, drawn from the ranks of professionals and technocrats, and trumpeted a new notion of government, in which citizens were equal before the law, civilians exercised oversight over the military and leaders ruled with the consent of the governed. But having won power in both parliamentary and presidential elections, the air of Islamist triumphalism rapidly eroded hopes of a more consensual age. Khairat al-Shatr, a Brotherhood leader, declared his intention to appoint loyalists to ‘the 15,000 positions of power’.

  As the Brotherhood consolidated its hold on government, its fleeting alliance with secular forces rapidly unravelled. In opposition, both had protested the mukhabarat’s pervasive intrusion on personal freedoms, the bureaucracy’s repressive and unaccountable ways, the lack of military accountability and the democratic deficit. But in power, the Brotherhood saw advantages in retaining many of Mubarak’s powers that they had previously castigated. Five months after winning the June 2012 presidential elections, the triumphant Islamists rushed approval of a constitution through a constituent assembly in a single overnight session, despite the boycott of Copts and liberals. As in the past, it provided for a presidential system and limitations on labour rights and press freedoms. It also gave Al Azhar, the Sunni world’s prime theological centre based in Cairo, a degree of oversight over legislation. Rather than bring opposition ministers into his cabinet, the new president, Mohammed al-Morsi, himself a former US-trained Brotherhood leader, co-opted conservative Islamists from the Salafis parties who in the parliamentary elections of 2011–12 won more than a quarter of the vote. He passed a decree assuming powers that placed him above the law, and appointed his own public prosecutor, who set to work investigating opposition leaders for ‘inciting against the president’.

  Excluded and targeted by the new power constellation, youth leaders whose Tahrir protests had ignited the fuse that brought down Mubarak laid claim to the mantle of popular as opposed to elected sovereignty and resumed their protests. Judges who had challenged Mubarak’s autocracy laid the same charges at Morsi. ‘Mubarak in beards,’ they chided. Former stalwarts of the Muslim Brotherhood split from the movement in disgust. Kamal al-Helbawi, the Brotherhood’s former spokesman in Europe, returned from exile, but resigned from the movement in protest at its despotic drift. ‘The Brotherhood left Tahrir Square early. They only went to the square for their own interests and described the people in the square as “thugs”,’ he complained. Protestors broke through the cordon of the presidential palace threatening a second revolution, only to face Brotherhood members armed with clubs. Although Morsi managed to persuade the protestors to disperse after cancelling the decree that gave him legal immunity, Egypt was increasingly polarized between rival Islamist and liberal blocs. Sensing the mounting opposition to the Brotherhood’s grip on power, the old security forces flexed their muscles, asserting their authority in Sinai and weighed their prospects for a comeback.

  Sister movements elsewhere in the region appeared similarly bent on monopolizing power. After its 2006 electoral triumph, the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas used its armed wing to oust Fatah-run security forces from Gaza, and resisted calls to hold elections long after its term in office had expired. It jailed opponents, banned protests, and killed armed Salafi jihadis that challenged its legitimacy. Tunisia’s new Islamist rulers continued to retain a state media and censor the press. And they overruled their first prime minister, Hamudi Jebali, who wanted to hand power to a caretaker government of technocrats, prompting him to resign in February 2012.

  As hungry for power as their secular predecessors, the Islamists proved similarly pragmatic. With remarkable ease, they mothballed ideologies which had sustained them in opposition when they cried that Islam is the solution and Sharia their constitution. Hizbollah joined Lebanon’s ruling coalition and built alliances with non-Shia parties, particularly Christian leader Michel Aoun; it downplayed its earlier aspiration to uphold Islamic law, and in its November 2009 update to its founding manifesto of 1985 the movement abandoned its formal allegiance to Iran’s ruling doctrine of velayat al-faqih, or theocratic rule. Once in power, Hamas’s government in Gaza transformed itself from a guerrilla group into a government, and like Egypt’s Brotherhood joined Christians for Christmas celebrations and shelved plans to impose Islamic law. In Cairo, the Brotherhood negotiated backroom deals with Egypt’s military. Although he dissolved the SCAF and dismissed its top generals, Morsi left the military’s former power largely intact. The Islamists’ new constitution left the army in control of its vast assets, spared the defence budget from public scrutiny and pronounced that the defence minister should come from the ranks of the armed forces, an undertaking that Mubarak had shied from.

  The Brotherhood was not alone in shedding long-held positions. Pre-revolution, the quietest Salafi preachers had shown a readiness to deal with the Mubarak regime, on the grounds that regime-change was a matter for God not man, and in return secured state licenses for television stations, which broadcast a Muslim version of American TV evangelism. When Brotherhood preachers used their pulpits to summon the faithful to protest, Salafi muezzins kept mum. Yahya Hajouri, a Salafi savant in Yemen, decried the Arab Awakening as a western virus and ‘a plague sparked by a Masonic doctrine’. But no sooner had the autocrats fallen, than the Salafis adapted their theology to the new order. Their mentors endorsed participation in politics and sanctioned elections as a manifestation not a sacrilege of the divine will. Devotees hurriedly printed campaign posters and erected coloured billboards promoting candidates, including women – albeit with a rose in place of their faces. Unlike the Brotherhood which was increasingly seen as a middle class and white-collar movement, they fared particularly well in North Africa’s urban slums, where their acolytes ran welfare projects reaching the 40 percent of Egyptians who lived on less than a dollar per day.

  Salafis with a jihadi bent proved equally versatile in jettisoning political violence and entering political systems that they had previously pronounced a sin. Freed from the shackles of Egypt’s prisons, which for four decades had served as laboratories for jihadi creeds, they swore oaths of allegiance to Egypt’s parliament. ‘I am taking the political line; I have turned the page on the past, and opened the door to peaceful action,’ declared Aboud al-Zumar, a former Egyptian intelligence officer and emir of the jihad group which killed Sadat in 1981, released from prison after 30 years in jail. He formed a political party which contested Egypt’s first post-Mubarak elections, winn
ing.

  Islamists of all hues proved similarly accommodating to external constraints, readily upholding the status quo they had challenged in opposition. Continued strategic relations with the US appeared a given not least to ensure the continuation of US aid. ‘So long as there is popular will for this, I believe that Egypt will have good relations with the US,’ declared al-Zumar. Remarkably, former al-Qaeda fighters appealed for more rather than less western intervention in their struggle to dislodge Qaddafy’s regime, adopting a discourse which only a few years earlier would have been condemned as treacherous.

  The Brotherhood’s U-turn on Israel was as surprising. When the SCAF had run Egypt, its leaders had praised the protestors who had stormed the Israeli embassy in Cairo, demanded Egypt cancel its gas deal with Israel, and sever the remnants of an Israeli–Egyptian relationship. At the rally announcing Morsi as the Brotherhood’s candidate for president, a cleric had even hailed Morsi as the liberator of Jerusalem and the harbinger of the Caliphate of the ‘United States of the Arabs’. But once in power, Morsi upheld the Camp David accords with Israel. Though he refused to meet with Israelis, he appointed an ambassador to Tel Aviv, and after briefly flirting with the deployment of tanks in Sinai’s demilitarized zone, maintained security coordination with Israel. As Mubarak before him, he brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas after their eight-day confrontation in November 2012. Israeli security officials gleefully noted that Morsi did more to constrain the tunnel traffic and arms-trafficking with Gaza than his predecessor.

  Egypt’s Islamists were not alone in moderating their anti-Israel policies. In its revised manifesto of 2009, Hizbollah advocated the liberation of Jerusalem, whose Eastern half Israel occupied in 1967, but stopped short of calling for Israel’s destruction. After its pummelling in the 2006 war, it ensured its southern border was Israel’s quietest. Hamas’s government in Gaza used its forces to uphold ceasefires with Israel, exposing it to claims, not least from within its own movement, that it had abandoned the founding principles of its full name, the Islamic Resistance Movement, for which hundreds of their comrades had died. It succeeded in rebutting critics who accused it of selling out by launching Palestine’s first rockets against Tel Aviv and Jerusalem after Israel killed its military leader, Ahmed Jabbari, in November 2012; it answered Israel’s bombardment with hundreds of rockets, winning domestic kudos for building a Palestinian deterrent capability. But immediately afterwards, Hamas headed to Cairo for negotiations with Israel, an act for which it had long berated Abbas. In other signs of growing accommodation, it negotiated a prisoner exchange with Israel and the easing of Israel’s siege on Gaza.

  The New Old Middle East

  Though in many ways the new fledging regimes replicated the old, the hubris of the Islamist revolutionaries set against the conservatism of the monarchies conjured up the geopolitical stand-off of the 1950s, when the Arab world’s new republics – with Nasser’s Egypt at the helm – waved the revolutionary flag of socialism and anti-colonialism against a bloc of reactionary royals. Like Nasser before him, Morsi sought to restore Egypt’s role as the dynamo of the Arab world. And as their fathers before them, the Arab world’s kings rallied to resist the regional winds of change.

  The two camps jostled for dominance in shaping a post-Assad Syria. The two Abdullah’s of Saudi Arabia and Jordan sought to assemble a coalition of southern tribes and Syrian army defectors trained and vetted by western and some Arab governments, who would prevent more fiery Islamists from the north backed by Turkey reaching Damascus first. Fearing that the Brotherhood was plotting to propagate its revolution in the Gulf, the UAE spearheaded a campaign against the Brotherhood, detaining members of the movement, including some of Egyptian origin, eliciting howls of official Egyptian protests. In its bid to amass an anti-Islamist centre of gravity, it hosted Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, as well as Mohammed Dahlan, Hamas’s bugbear in Gaza and former Fatah strongman, and backed Jordan’s efforts to vet and funnel arms finance by Gulf States to cooperative rebel forces.

  Much of the sparring occurred on the airwaves. The Islamist republics decried the tired top-heavy systems, which sooner or later would collapse, like their autocrats, under their own weight. For their part, the monarchies peddled the benefits of stability against the bloodshed, chaos and economic recession besetting countries in the grip of transition. Both camps competed for western support. Nervous that the US might abandon them just as it had Mubarak, monarchs toured western capitals warning of the approaching Islamist winter dominated by jihadis who were anathema to western notions of human rights. Somewhat disingenuously, for they were no models of western values themselves, they mocked the Islamists for reversing women’s rights after their brief appearance on the revolution’s barricades. In Morocco, the representation of women fell to one in Benkirane’s cabinet from seven under his predecessor. Only 12 of Egypt’s 498 elected parliamentarians were women. Jordan’s king denounced the Brotherhood as a masonic movement set on establishing another Middle Eastern theocracy, modelled on Iran’s in Qom, and waved the standard of a counter-reformation to restore western values.

  But oftentimes, the rivalries were more polemical than real – designed to shore up domestic public opinion than stoke a new bout of regional confrontation. Most monarchs were not averse to allying themselves with the Islamists at home or abroad if it furthered their interests. Saudi Arabia and Qatar had long since preceded Morocco in co-opting religious establishments – Wahhabi clerics and the Brotherhood respectively – to cement their hold. And with the new leaderships in desperate need of finance, the Gulf States saw fulsome opportunities to use their budget surpluses to exercise leverage. Gulf investors in post-Mubarak Egypt accounted for 50 percent of the country’s stock market, and their governments dangled the promise of aid topping US$20 billion. They were even more proactive in Libya. Ahead of the UN, Saudi Arabia called for international enforcement of a no-fly zone to prevent the Qaddafy regime bombing the rebels, and Qatar and Jordan offered jet fighters. At a time when the rest of the world wrung its hands in Syria, Gulf leaders extended political and military support for the rebels, and dispatched a mission which recommended regime change in Syria and elections – despite their own lack of them.

  Qatar perhaps was most agile in finding new territory to promote its influence. Its unelected emir, long seen as the Arabian peninsula’s maverick, rushed to patronise the forces of regime change and champion the region’s Islamist takeovers. Qatari flags flew from Benghazi’s courthouse, the seat of Libya’s rebel government, to Gaza’s parliament building. After the Assad regime angrily expelled its former ally, Hamas leader Khalid Meshal from Syria in protest at his support for the rebels, Qatar’s leader provided him with a haven. He futher became the first Arabic leader to visit Hamas’s rulers in Gaza, and provided $400 million for reconstructing the war-ravaged enclave under Hamas rule. In so doing, he de facto recognized the Islamists, not President Abbas, as Palestine’s interlocutor. He hosted Yusuf Qaradawi, the ageing Egyptian cleric widely regarded as the Brotherhood’s spiritual guide, who in return for his government villa and salary loyally issued fatwas endorsing Qatar’s foreign policy. From Al Jazeera, Qatar’s satellite station, Qaradawi called on Libyans to rise up against Qaddafy, and called on Egypt’s security forces not to open fire on civilians, while diplomatically refraining from comment on Bahrain’s suppression of Shia demonstrators. Once a respected professional and innovative satellite channel, Al Jazeera degenerated into the Brotherhood’s soapbox, inciting rebellion in Egypt, Libya and Syria.

  That said, for Gulf monarchs the Arab Awakening carried an inherent risk of backfiring. Local detractors tweeted at the hypocrisy, not to mention audacity, of their support for dissent, violent overthrow and democracy in other autocracies, but repudiation of them in their own. They mocked Bahrain’s princes for hosting Syrian rebels on the podia of international conferences while barring their own Shia citizens access to the hall. Saudi Arabia, which remained probably t
he least democratic country in the world with not even the pretence of legislative elections, looked uneasily at the success of the new democratic strand of Salafism sweeping Egypt, fearing it might yet cast the theologies of their own sheikhs who preached the doctrine that ‘60 years under an oppressive imam are preferable to one night without one’. Perhaps to give such views a boost, it released a preacher, Suleiman al-Ulwan, in late 2012, who loyally pronounced that ‘anyone who calls for democracy does not have any concern for or will to implement Islam.’ (For good measure, he also denounced Morsi for not imposing the jizya, or non-Muslim tax, on Coptic Christians.)

  The other regional players, the non-Arab heavyweights – Israel, Iran and Turkey – used the Arab Spring to jostle for influence. For the most part together with Arab states, they fought their struggle for regional dominance not with armies, most of which had seen little fighting in a generation, but with the supply of guns, money, media coverage, religious polemic and aid. With his defence of the Gaza-bound flotilla, for instance, Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan asserted his claim to open new maritime sea routes in the eastern Mediterranean, and possibly even to contest Israel’s claim to the giant gas fields off the east coast of Cyprus. But while deploying proxies like chess-pieces, rarely did the forces of the region’s major powers clash.

  Israel feared that the fall of its autocratic allies would give way to revolutionary enemies who would rupture former treaties and trigger its first state-on-state wars since 1973. Prime Minister Netanyahu turned sullenly inwards, telling his public the region was drunk on anti-semitism while fearing that any intervention might only make matters worse. Israel lost its embassy in Cairo after protestors stormed it in September 2011, and Turkey almost severed relations, after Israel refused to apologize for killing nine Turkish nationals when intercepting a Turkish-led flotilla ferrying humanitarian aid to Gaza in the summer of 2010. In the West Bank and the Golan Heights, Netanyahu used Arab preoccupations with their domestic affairs to consolidate his hold with intensified Jewish settlement expansion, effectively annexing swathes of the 60 per cent of the West Bank that the Oslo Accords had designated under full Israeli civil and military control. Further afield, Netanyahu battened down the hatches. He erected a 240-kilometre barrier along Israel’s border with Egypt, shutting the region out with walls. Unlike his predecessor, he shied from launching a ground invasion after an escalation of missiles from Gaza in November 2012, and restricted his raids to areas far from the Arab heartland such as a strike on a weapons plant in Sudan. And despite the bluster against Iran’s nuclear programme, he refrained from a military strike and left the US and its allies to negotiate.