The end of the war brought Saddam one of the most serious challenges to his rule, not from his military commanders but from Iraq’s two main religious and ethnic minorities, the Shiʿites in the south and the Kurds in the north. Iraq is one of the Middle East’s most ethnically and religiously heterogeneous countries. Approximately 15 percent of Iraqis are ethnic Kurds. Moreover, Shiʿites constitute some 50 percent of the total population (the rest are about 40 percent Sunnis and 10 percent members of various Christian sects). Saddam’s relations with these two long-suppressed minorities had long been marked by friction and frequent bouts of violence.41 As soon as the war ended and Baghdad’s central authority was at its nadir, they found the opportunity to rebel against Saddam and his state.
Two major uprisings started in the northern and southern parts of the country, where the Kurds and the Shiʿites predominated, respectively. The close proximity of the Shiʿite regions to Iran made their control more pressing for the government. Beginning in early March, Iraq’s regrouped forces, or what remained of them, launched a massive, brutal campaign to regain the south. Without the foreign assistance they had believed would be forthcoming, the Shiʿite rebels, with little military training and poorly equipped, quickly succumbed to Saddam’s forces. The Iraqi leader then turned his attention to the north, where, within weeks of the cease-fire, Kurdish rebels had gained control over twelve major towns and cities. By the month’s end, most of the north had also been recaptured, but not before an estimated one hundred thousand Kurds had been killed.42
The international community’s condemnation of the massacre of Iraqi Kurds and their mass expulsion to Iran and Turkey was slow in coming, but it eventually did come. Soon the United States and Britain declared the establishment of a “safe haven” for the Kurds in northern Iraq and prohibited Iraq from flying fixed-wing aircraft, presumably jet fighters, in a southern and northern “no fly zone.” A de facto partition of Iraq went into effect, with the Kurdish north outside the government’s reach. Elsewhere in Iraq, however, Saddam’s rule remained unshakable. After years of bickering and finger-pointing, even the UN inspection teams, which had been sent to supervise the dismantling of Iraq’s chemical weapons program, left the country because of the United Nations’ frustration in dealing with Baghdad.
Figure 16. A videotaped message from Osama bin Laden on Al-Jazeera. Corbis.
Once it was all over, Saddam Hussein was still standing, unfazed by the torment he had caused millions of people. Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi human rights activist, eloquently described the situation of Iraq after the Kuwait invasion:
The state that the Baʿth built in Iraq is far worse than one purely built on confessional or ethnic criteria. It is worse because it is consistently egalitarian in its hostility to everything that is not itself. The Baʿth demand from all Iraqis absolute conformity with their violence-filled, conspiratorial view of a world permanently at war with itself. Saddam Hussein invents and reinvents his enemies from the entire mass of human material that is at his disposal; he thrives on the distrust, suspicion, and conspiratorialism which his regime actively inculcates in everyone; he positively expects to breed hate and a thirst for revenge in Sunni and Shiʿi alike. As a consequence civil society, attacked from every direction, has virtually collapsed in Iraq.43
Saddam’s “republic of fear” was not to last indefinitely, however. In 2003, the Iraqi regime succumbed to an all-out invasion and occupation of the country by the United States. Under the banner of “war on terror,” President George W. Bush vowed to effect “regime change” in a country he had branded as a member of an “axis of evil.” By mid-2003, Saddam’s regime was a thing of the past, and Iraq was being run by American occupying forces.
THE POST—GULF WAR MIDDLE EAST
The Second Gulf War turned out to be a major watershed in the international relations of the Middle East. The Gulf War put a definitive end to any doubts concerning the death of Arab unity that had remained after Sadat’s defection from the “Arab cause” in the mid- to late 1970s. Pan-Arabism had suffered its first serious blow as far back as 1967, when the hollow rhetoric of Arab prowess cost each of the Arab participants large pieces of strategic territory. In hindsight, the wounds of 1967 turned out to be mortal, but their lethal effects took decades to materialize. Propaganda aside, the 1973 War was not really designed either to liberate the Palestinians or to vindicate the larger Arab nation. Its main goal was to enhance the position from which Egypt could negotiate the return of the Sinai and Syria could reclaim the Golan. By the time the 1970s were ending, the “focused system” that Nasser had so meticulously crafted had begun fragmenting along multiple axes.44 Egypt was isolated; the oil monarchies sought shelter under the protective umbrellas of the United States; Syria, Iraq, and Libya, with their own internal discords, clung to an increasingly irrelevant rejectionist position in relation to Israel; Jordan was mastering its perennial balancing act; and Algeria and Morocco were grappling with their own mounting political and economic difficulties. Even the interlude of the 1980s, featuring the menace of the common Iranian enemy, failed to rekindle the once-vibrant united Arab alliance. Syria remained supportive of Iran throughout, lured by generous Iranian oil, and Libya and Oman also remained on friendly terms with Tehran’s radical clerics.45 A measure of unity did develop in the cause of defending against Iran’s revolutionary Shiʿism, but that too dissipated within a couple of years. By 1990, the Arab world was arrayed against one of its own members. Iraq’s brutal “rape of a sister country” had to be stopped, no matter what the costs.46
For the following decade, from 1991 until the fateful day of September 11, 2001, the Middle East was utterly fragmented, with each state motivated by self-interest and realpolitik. Even the alliance against Iraq during and immediately after the invasion of Kuwait, hailed by the few remaining Pan-Arabist apologists and hopefuls as a manifestation of Arab unity, came together out of individual national-interest calculations rather than lofty ideals of defending Kuwait sovereignty, let alone saving the larger Arab family from a wayward son.47 The Arab world of the 1990s suffered from internal discord, deepening dependence on international aid providers (Egypt and Morocco) and Western trading partners (the oil monarchies of the Arabian peninsula), and the sudden loss of the Soviet backing with which it could once balance out American influence (Syria). The United States was now the only game in town, and the American president, with his own domestic concerns, was determined to teach Saddam a lesson. Even Jordan’s refusal to join the international coalition against Iraq was motivated by self-interest. King Hussein, always one step ahead of his domestic and foreign opponents, knew well that he could not risk further antagonizing his subjects, who had only recently taken part in troubling “bread riots.” Among Americans, Jordan’s image was tarnished only temporarily, but among Arab peoples it was enhanced. President Bush’s much-heralded New World Order, for the Middle East at least, meant furthering national self-interest under the auspices of American hegemony.
The 1990s featured several significant events, each of which directly influenced Middle East diplomacy: the start of Iran’s Second Republic; Iraq’s de facto truncation; the Palestinian-Israeli signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993; Jordan’s 1994 peace treaty with Israel; the Algerian and Sudanese civil wars; and increasing competition over oil production and pricing within OPEC and between OPEC and nonmember oil producers such as Norway and Mexico. At the global level, meanwhile, the young Russian republic had its own economic and political growing pains, being preoccupied with a dysfunctional economy and an uncontrollable breakaway movement in Chechnya. The United States had neither a coherent vision nor a meaningfully articulated policy toward the Middle East. At best, Washington’s Middle East policy was geographically limited. Under the rubric of “dual containment,” the Clinton administration sought to narrow the options open to Iraq and Iran, America’s most vocal adversaries, in order to ultimately bring about a regime change in Baghdad and policy shifts in Tehran (especially toward the Palest
inian-Israeli peace process).48 Nev-ertheless, as chapter 9 demonstrates, the Clinton administration did become deeply involved in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations near the end of the decade.
There was, quite simply, no common cause around which to rally, no common enemy to unite against, no liberating hero to follow in unison. There were other, more substantial reasons for Arab unity’s demise. Three stand out. First, the Arab world of the 1990s lacked a hegemonic core under whose auspices notions of Pan-Arabism could be reinvigorated and made accessible for the Arab masses at large. Since the 1950s, this historical role had been Egypt’s, as was almost natural given that country’s history, size, population, and heritage. But who would claim Arab leadership once Egypt was gone? And this was not just any ordinary departure. Sadat had betrayed the Arab cause; consequently the Arab League, the very symbol of Arab unity, was moved from Cairo to Tunis, and Egypt was expelled from it. Qaddafi did try to succeed Nasser, but he turned out to be too far from the Arab heartland, too erratic, and, once attacked by an American air raid in 1986, quickly silenced. Iraq would have been a far more likely candidate than Libya by virtue of its geographic position and its history, but its leader was too rapacious of the Arab family to be trusted. As for Saudi Arabia and its conservative Persian Gulf allies, whose economic power and closeness to the United States after the Gulf War were second only to Israel’s, they were in no position to initiate such a regionally hegemonic bid: besides money, they had almost none of the other necessary ingredients for such an endeavor—not enough manpower, no popularity outside their small countries, no salient heritage outside the Arabian peninsula (besides Islam), and no ideological tools.49
A second, equally important reason for the near-complete eclipse of Arab unity in the 1990s was the disappearance of a common Arab identity as a viable source of trans-state unity. We saw in chapter 3 how nationalism in the Middle East has developed different historical layers that sometimes complement and sometimes compete with one another—from Ottomanism to Pan-Arabism to territorially defined nationalisms. Political elites, whether based in imperial Istanbul or in the capitals of sovereign and independent states, have always played a pivotal role in articulating and popularizing each of these different layers of nationalism. By the waning decades of the twentieth century, the exigencies of political institutionalization and legitimacy prompted more and more state elites to articulate nationalism in terms of territorially specific, state patriotism. As the political scientist Michael Barnett observes, “Arab states have had strikingly different views of the desired [regional order]. . . . Although such differences might be attributed to principled beliefs, the more prominent reasons were regime interests, beginning with but not exhausted by survival and domestic stability. As a consequence, over the years Arab leaders have vied to draw a line between the regimes’ interests, the norms of Arabism, and the events of the day.”50 Arab identity, with its own multiple layers of complexity, has not completely dissipated as a factor in foreign policy making.51 But it is only one of the factors, and today it is evoked almost always only when it serves regime purposes.
A third and final reason for the precipitous decline of Pan-Arabism after the Second Gulf War has to do with the absence of viable institutions that could sustain and nurture such a trans-state phenomenon in the face of increasingly narrow, state-centered loyalties. In other words, once Pan-Arabist champions like Nasser were gone or exposed as false prophets (Sadat and Saddam Hussein), there were no institutions to fill the vacuum. For several decades, two overlapping institutions had operated to reinforce Pan-Arabism. One was the official institution of the League of Arab States (the Arab League), originally established in 1945, and the other was the summit system, which Nasser inaugurated in 1964. By the 1980s, the popular excitement and sense of solidarity that both the Arab League and various summits once generated had all but dissipated, victim to the many broken lofty promises and frequent boycotts by the more radical leaders. The league itself was paralyzed. From 1990 to 1996, at a time when momentous developments like the Oslo Accords were taking place, the Arab League did not hold a single summit.52
Amid the disunity of the 1990s, there nevertheless did appear one proposal for region-wide unity in the Middle East. It came, of all places, from Israel. The proposal, under the label “New Middle East,” came from one of Israel’s professional politicians, Shimon Peres. In 1993, fresh from signing the historic Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, Peres outlined his vision of a peaceful, economically integrated Middle East: “Maintaining the present situation is pointless, and . . . the status quo cannot continue in any case. Recognizing the hard truth is a criterion for the success of the peace process—without victors, without victims. War does not solve any problems; peace is the solution. As the results of our accord with Egypt have shown, we can have a peaceful relationship with our neighbors. By compromising—minimum concessions and maximum justice on both sides—we will live to see the day when nations are free of the sorrow of war, including our own nation as well.”53
Before long, however, Peres, who was Israel’s foreign minister at the time, was out of office, and the Oslo Accords were set adrift by the larger vagaries of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. When in November 1997 Israel attended the fourth annual Middle East and North Africa Economic Conference in Doha, Qatar—an event that could have given substance to Peres’s vision—most Arab countries boycotted the conference in protest over Israeli prime minister Netanyahu’s actions in the Occupied Territories. By the end of the year 2000, the Al-Aqsa intifada—the second bloody uprising in the Palestinian territories against Israeli occupation—had all but erased any hopes for peaceful coexistence and regional economic cooperation.
The decline in the salience of Pan-Arabism has had two profound consequences for the Middle East. To begin with, the “Arab system,” which had become “centerless” in the 1980s, shattered in the 1990s.54 Instead, from a balance-of-power perspective, two non-Arab state actors gained increasing military and hence diplomatic dominance over the region: Israel and Turkey.55 The region’s emerging international architecture has turned the Arab-Israeli conflict steadily into the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. As a result, Israel’s policies in relation to the Palestinians since the 1990s have lacked some of the constraints they would have had if the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Syrians, or others had been involved. As for Turkey, Iraq’s northern neighbor and a regional powerhouse among the Central Asian republics, the Gulf War allowed it to regain the position of strategic importance that it was beginning to lose by the Cold War’s end. As if to make a deliberate point of their growing ascendancy, in the late 1990s and early years of the new century, Turkey and Israel entered into a series of unprecedented military and economic alliances. They held joint military maneuvers, expanded economic trade, and further cemented their diplomatic friendship. Meanwhile, in the Arab world, we saw the emergence of what one scholar has called a “balance of weakness.” “Mutual recriminations of ‘stoogism,’ ‘treason,’ and ‘adventurism’ as well as vendettas still linger on [all] sides. In a word, Arab society is seriously bruised, with the marks likely to remain for a long time. This is not a political or psychological context conducive to partnership.”56
A second, related consequence of the decline of Pan-Arabism has been the increasing rate at which political Islam as an alternative has grown over the past decade or so. Political Islam did not emerge in the aftermath of the Gulf War; its roots are much deeper, and its genealogy is much older. Neither are its causes and consequences found only in international developments; every Middle Eastern country has had its own, home-brewed Islamic movement.57 But with the steady decline of Arab unity as a salient form of collective identity, there has been an inverse rise in the popularity of political Islam in all its manifestations—reformist, fundamentalist, populist, domestic, and transnational. It was no accident that political Islam—and, more precisely, Islamic fundamentalism—instigated the next political convulsion involving the Middle East: the attack
s of September 11, 2001.
SEPTEMBER 11 AND ITS AFTERMATH
On a clear and balmy Tuesday morning in late summer 2001, life in New York City was changed forever when at 8:45 A.M. a jetliner full of passengers flew into one of the two main towers of the giant World Trade Center. Twenty minutes later, a second plane flew into the Trade Center’s other tower. Within an hour, the two 110-story skyscrapers collapsed, burying nearly three thousand civilians working there and hundreds of police and firefighters who had rushed to their rescue. Less than an hour later, another passenger plane crashed into the Pentagon building in Washington, D.C., killing all aboard and some 190 employees of the U.S. Defense Department. A fourth jetliner crashed in a field in Somerset County, Penn-sylvania, again with no survivors.
It was quickly learned that all four planes had been hijacked for use as flying bombs. The Pennsylvania plane had apparently been intended for the White House, but its passengers had struggled with the hijackers and had forced the plane to crash far from its intended target. America was shocked and bewildered, attacked out of nowhere, for no apparent reason. For the first time in living memory, what seemed like a coordinated attack on American civilians had taken place on the American mainland—on America’s heartland in Pennsylvania, on its military might in the capital, and on its economy in New York City.
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