by Jay Solomon
The early days of the revolutions appeared to mark a strategic setback for the United States, Europe, and their Mideast allies. Many of the leaders who were under threat or deposed, including Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, Bahrain’s ruling Khalifa family, and Tunisian leader Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, were close U.S. allies who helped Washington ensure security in the Middle East and promote the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. And Bahrain hosted the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, a key platform for the Pentagon to police the shipping lanes of the Persian Gulf and guard the West’s oil supplies.
The weakening of America’s allies provided a major opportunity for Iran and the Axis of Resistance to spread their influence. Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas seized on the political revolts as proof of the crumbling U.S. presence in their region. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei cited the uprisings as another step forward in the Islamist wave that had gripped the Mideast since Iran’s 1979 revolution, even though many of the protestors on the Arab street were secular and touting Western democratic ideals. The popular movements in the region “indicate a fundamental change in Arab and Islamic countries,” Khamenei told his supporters in a March 2011 speech commemorating the Persian New Year. “The presence of the people on the streets and their religious orientation are two characteristics of these popular movements.”
The Assad regime also rejoiced in the fall of Mubarak, who the Syrians believed had betrayed the Arabs by promoting Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel in 1980. Hamas saw Egypt’s revolution as an opening for its parent organization, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, to seize power in Cairo and support the Palestinian group’s political and military campaign against the Jewish state. Russian and Chinese officials, though concerned the political unrest could hurt their own economic interests, also gloated that the Arab Spring represented blowback against the United States’ foreign policies, and they predicted that it would have ripple effects across the globe.
President Assad, just days before Mubarak’s fall in February 2011, spoke confidently about his hold on power, telling me the U.S.-backed order in the region was crumbling. Members of his Axis of Resistance, he argued, were on the ascent. “From the outside, what is the role of the West? It’s now been twenty years since we started the [Arab-Israeli] peace process in 1991. What have we achieved?” he said in fluent English from his office atop Damascus’s Mount Qasioun. “The simple way to answer this question is to say is it better or worse? We can for example say that it is five percent better than before we started the peace process. I can tell you, frankly, that it is much worse.”
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INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE and State Department, the Arab Spring was initially treated as an opportunity to spread democracy. But what originally looked like an opportunity for hope would prove far thornier. And U.S. foreign policy would be pulled by currents it couldn’t control or predict.
In Cairo’s Tahrir Square, scenes of young political activists (some organized by high-tech executives and Western-educated lawyers) taking on Egyptian security forces fueled hopes in Washington that the Middle East was awakening from decades of political slumber that had created sclerotic ruling classes and moribund economies. Tunisian mobs overran the loot-filled palaces of President Ben Ali, revealing the extraordinary level of corruption that had infected the region’s monarchies. Hillary Clinton condemned the abuses of the region’s old order. “In too many places, in too many ways, the region’s foundations are sinking into the sand,” she told an audience of foreign ministers, businesspeople, and rights groups in Qatar in January 2011. “The new and dynamic Middle East that I have seen needs firmer ground if it is to take root and grow everywhere.”
A few months later, the Obama administration told the Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak to stand down, abandoning a U.S. ally of more than thirty years over the objections of countries such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, who feared an Islamist government would follow. President Obama and his young foreign policy aides also pressed Bahrain’s Sunni royal family, the Khalifas, to open up their political system to a disadvantaged population that was at least 60 percent Shiite. The White House called for the leaders of Yemen, Libya, and Iraq to embrace reform, hoping that Western-inspired activists would prevail against Islamist groups or political parties with close ties to Iran, though the United States knew this would be a struggle. In Yemen and Libya in particular, militant Islamists, some with links to al Qaeda, were seeking to exploit the upheaval to further their aims, U.S. and Arab intelligence officials concluded.
The United States’ Arab allies were unnerved by what they viewed as an imbalance in Obama’s response toward democracy movements in their region. The White House largely remained quiet when Iranians rose up against Tehran’s Islamist regime in 2009. But the U.S. administration, conversely, pressed for the removal of Sunni Arab leaders.
The United States’ closest allies in the Mideast, particularly Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, pushed back hard against U.S. efforts to promote regime change in the Arab countries. They believed Obama and his aides were playing right into the hands of not just Iran but also Sunni Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during a string of phone calls and meetings in early 2011, cautioned the White House against pulling its support for Mubarak without knowing who or what would replace him. The Egypt-Israeli peace agreement, the bedrock of the U.S. security framework for the Mideast, would be at risk if Mubarak was deposed, Netanyahu argued. He and his aides warned that the Muslim Brotherhood was almost certain to gain power in Cairo.
The Saudis, Emiratis, and Jordanians, meanwhile, cast the Arab Spring largely as a proxy battle between their Arab allies and Iran. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was adamant the United States should continue to back the Khalifas in Bahrain, arguing that Iran’s proxies would come to power if any political transition took place in Manama. Iran and its Islamist allies in Egypt were also angling for influence once Mubarak fell, the Saudis argued. And the Iranians were increasingly active in Yemen through the Revolutionary Guard’s backing of a Shiite militia and ethnic group called the Houthis.
The Saudis made it clear to the United States that they would act unilaterally to protect the kingdom’s interests and push back against what they viewed as Iran’s regional advances. In March 2011, the State Department’s top Mideast official, Jeffrey Feltman, traveled to Manama to broker a political agreement between the Khalifas and the mostly Shiite political parties who had taken to the streets of Bahrain to demand more political rights. Thousands of them had been arrested and dozens killed. Scenes from a Manama hospital of young Shiite activists dying increased the pressure on the United States to find a political compromise. The Khalifas’ decision to arrest some of the doctors treating the patients only hardened criticism of the Bahraini government in the West.
Feltman believed he had negotiated a political formula between the two sides that would address many of the Shiite parties’ basic demands, but without mortally threatening the future of the Bahraini monarchy, according to U.S. officials. The deal included more seats in the parliament for the Shiite parties, a more inclusive government, and an advisory council that would directly communicate their grievances to Bahrain’s crown prince, a Westernized monarch who had studied at American University in Washington and the University of Cambridge. But the deal wouldn’t require the Khalifas to accept the protestors’ most extreme demand: a quick move to the formation of a constitutional monarchy.
Feltman left Manama after three days of talks believing he had clinched a deal. But in the early hours of March 14, the Saudis, supported by a grouping of Arab states known as the Gulf Cooperation Council, sent thousands of troops over Saudi Arabia’s causeway into Bahrain, backed by tanks and mechanized units. The officially stated mission of the Saudi-led force was to help Bahrain’s military restore order and guard the country’s key infrastructure. But the broader impact was that the political reconciliation process Feltman had promoted
ground to a halt. Saudi officials were adamant that they wouldn’t agree to any political process in their tiny neighbor that could open the door even a little for greater Shiite, and possibly Iranian, influence. “We were straightforward with the Americans from the beginning,” said a senior aide to the Saudi royal family. “We had to protect Bahrain from Iranian influence, even if the Americans didn’t seem committed as well. The risks were too high for us.”
U.S. officials, used to some level of compliance from their long-standing ally, were incensed by the Saudis’ move. But the position of Washington’s Mideast allies increasingly recast how the Obama administration framed the Arab Spring. After Saudi forces entered Bahrain, the United States significantly muted its calls for political reforms in the country and didn’t pursue any major new initiatives to promote a power-sharing agreement with the Shiites. U.S. officials also increasingly viewed Yemen and Syria as proxy battles with Iran.
As senior U.S. officials deliberated over the possible use of force against Gadhafi in the fall of 2011, Tehran and its nuclear program were strongly on their minds. President Obama had set a clear red line for Iran: Tehran risked facing U.S. military action if it took clear steps to develop nuclear weapons, such as the production of highly enriched uranium. But he’d also set one for the Libyan strongman, warning that the United States wouldn’t allow Gadhafi’s military to slaughter his political opponents as the world watched. When Gadhafi began moving his troops and militias into the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi and threatened to kill his rivals like “stray dogs,” the Obama administration concluded it had to act, as much as a warning sign to Tehran that U.S. red lines would be enforced as out of concern for Libya’s internal security. “We needed to send a clear signal to the Iranians,” said a senior White House official who took part in the discussions at the time. “We knew they were testing our resolve. We knew they were watching to see if we’d act.”
The United States would go on to remove Gadhafi in late 2011 by backing a NATO air campaign targeting his troops.
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CONDITIONS IN SYRIA WOULD provide the Obama administration with its greatest opportunity to challenge, if not roll back, Iran’s regional power. After taking office in 2009, the Obama administration faced the grim reality that U.S. policies in the Mideast over the past decade had significantly strengthened Tehran by eliminating its two biggest regional rivals, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Growing U.S. sanctions on Iran were hurting Tehran’s finances, but had done little to constrain Iran’s regional actions or subdue its efforts to destabilize Washington’s allies. American officials marveled at how Iran could fund its proxies on a shoestring budget.
“I was amazed at what I saw that Iran had done throughout the region,” said a senior Pentagon official tracking the Revolutionary Guard at the time. “Their effort through the Gaza Strip, Syria, Lebanon, in which Hezbollah had become a virtual partner…all of this was going on around the Iraq situation.”
Early in 2011, U.S. officials said they saw little chance of a major uprising breaking out against Assad, even while Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya were fully subsumed by revolutions. Diplomats based in Damascus said Assad and his family ran a system so dominated by fear that they were skeptical many Syrians would risk torture or prison to try to upend his family’s four-decade rule. U.S. officials also believed Assad still possessed a significant measure of support inside Syria, especially among the country’s Alawite, Christian, and Druze communities, who viewed him as their protector against a potentially hostile Sunni majority, but also among the Sunni middle class and elites, who saw him as a youthful modernizer. Israeli officials, meanwhile, were cautious about supporting any uprising against the Syrian regime, thinking Assad’s possible successors might pose an even greater security threat to the Jewish state. Realizing the risk of direct escalation, first Hafez al-Assad and then his son Bashar had kept the Syrian-Israeli border almost totally quiet since the 1973 war.
Small protests in Damascus and some provincial Syrian capitals did break out in the weeks following Hosni Mubarak’s fall. But the Obama administration didn’t try to quickly capitalize on the unrest and deal a blow against Assad and Iran. Instead, Hillary Clinton and other U.S. officials, aping John Kerry’s beliefs, said Bashar al-Assad could still emerge as a political reformer and had the ability to douse the flames of any broader rebellion. The United States didn’t initially offer any encouragement to Assad’s political rivals or signal they wanted him to stand down. “There’s a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer,” Clinton said during a March 2011 television appearance on Face the Nation. “What’s been happening there the last weeks is deeply concerning. But there’s a difference between calling out aircraft and indiscriminately strafing and bombing your own cities [in Libya] than police actions which, frankly, have exceeded the use of force that any of us would want to see.”
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IN THE SPRING OF 2011, more than a dozen small children were detained in the southern Syrian province of Deraa for allegedly scrawling graffiti on a Baath Party school. After a month, some of the children were released bearing signs of torture. But when family members demanded the release of the others, Assad and his generals dispatched troops to the province to put down what was then a peaceful protest movement.
In late April, Syrian security forces entered Deraa on a day its residents cited as the beginning of the war in their country, according to an account in The Wall Street Journal. What ensued was a nearly two-week siege that saw the residents of the province’s capital cut off from food, water, and baby formula. Funerals for the dead became rallying cries for the largely Sunni population. At least three hundred people died, and the government arrested hundreds more across Deraa. Videos and photos from the assault fueled protests in many other parts of Syria.
U.S. officials believed Assad’s heavy hand was resulting in the very type of armed insurrection he said he wanted to avoid. As the regime’s crackdown intensified, arms from Libya and other Arab states started to flow to Syrian rebels. Militias began to form; some were made up of military officers who had defected from the state plus ordinary men, but others had ties to Islamist groups to Washington’s chagrin. Assad’s main financial and military backers in Iran and Russia, however, joined the Syrian regime in deflecting calls for political reforms. Moscow made it clear it would block any censure of Damascus in the United Nations Security Council.
Empowered, Assad repudiated growing calls from the West and the Arab states for him to negotiate with his political opponents. In speeches and interviews, he described the protests as being stoked by “terrorists” bent on destroying Syria’s secular government. He accused the United States and its Sunni allies in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar of conspiring against Damascus in a plot aimed at advancing Israel’s interests. Protestors were using calls for reform “to fragment Syria, to bring down Syria as a nation, to enforce an Israeli agenda,” he said in a widely watched speech before the country’s parliament. Assad’s supporters in the legislature responded with lyrical poems and chants, including “The people want Bashar al-Assad” and “Allah, Syria, and Bashar.”
By July, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, echoing comments she had made about Hosni Mubarak, said Assad had lost his “legitimacy” by resisting his people’s calls for reform. It was a sign that the White House had exhausted its patience with the Syrian leader. U.S. ambassador Robert Ford, who had arrived in Damascus with instructions to engage Assad, began to agitate against him. The diplomat made an unsanctioned trip to the central Syrian city of Hama that month in an effort to prevent the regime from using force against unarmed protestors there. The diplomatic mission set in motion a yearlong conflict between Ford and Assad, who repeatedly used armed gangs to attack the ambassador’s motorcade and embassy compound. The White House ultimately recalled Ford, worried that the Syrian regime might attempt to assassinate him.
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ASSAD’S BARBARITY AND STEADFASTNESS forced the United States and its allies to increasingly engage in a covert proxy war with Assad and his Iranian backers for control of Syria, despite President Obama’s worry that the United States would be dragged into another Middle East conflict. The battle lines that formed included the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and numerous oil-rich Gulf states backing a ragtag group of anti-regime militias and political parties. Supporting Assad, meanwhile, were Iran, Russia, and Tehran’s network of Shiite militant groups, which included Hezbollah in Lebanon, a rash of Iraqi militias, and Shiite fighters whom the Revolutionary Guard recruited from as far away as Afghanistan and Yemen for this battle. The stakes were exceptionally high. The winners would control Syria and from there might dictate events across the region, from Israel to Iraq. The battle also risked fueling radical Islam across the Middle East even more, as militias with links to al Qaeda increasingly streamed into Syria to join the insurgency against Assad. The United States hoped moderate rebels could stanch the tide.