Читать книгу Arab Spring, Libyan Winter - Vijay Prashad - Страница 5

Part I: Arab Spring.

I. Bread

When the unwashed began to assert themselves in France, the royalty scoffed at them. What they wanted was bread, whose price skyrocketed in 1774–75. Taking to the streets in remarkable numbers, the people demanded fair prices for bread, their main staple. In reaction to la guerre des farines, the flour war, Marie Antoinette proposed that the poor “eat cake.” After the Revolution removed the monarchy and its élèves from the thrones of power, the new government hastened to subsidize bread. Hunger broke the back of fear. It is the lesson for the ages.

It was a lesson for North Africa in late 2010. In the last two quarters of 2010, the IMF Food Price Index rose by thirty percent. Grain prices soared by sixty percent. Protestors in Tunisia came onto the streets in December with baguettes raised in the air. In Egypt, protestors took to the streets in January chanting, “They are eating pigeon and chicken, and we are eating beans all the time.” Hunger and inequality drove the protests. Their governments hastened to up their subsidies, but it was too little, too late.

The question of bread reveals a great deal about the delinquent states in Egypt and Tunisia. The Nasserite state in Egypt well understood the importance of a bread subsidy, and it encouraged the domestic production of wheat for the bread needs of the citizenry. When Anwar Sadat came to power in the 1970s, he gradually cut off the bread subsidy, what the Tunisian intellectual Larbi Sadiki calls a “democracy of bread” (dimuqratiyyat al-khubz). This was part of the wave of “reforms” in North Africa against the economic policies that favored national development. In Egypt, these “reforms” were part of the phase of infitah, the openness of Egyptian society to the Atlantic world’s economic needs. Sadat opened a correspondence with the IMF: the Law of the New Economic Measures (1974) was the opening gambit, sealed in a Letter of Intent to the IMF (May 1976) and a second Letter of Intent (June 1978). Robust national development went by the wayside. More important was the will of the IMF and the international bond markets. Nationalization and subsidies ended, and free enterprise zones were created by February 1974. Sadat wanted a “blood transfusion” for the Egyptian economy, and so the Atlantic banks began to draw pints of blood from the ailing Egyptian working-class and peasantry. The “democracy of bread” was a casualty of the new thinking. In 1977, the Egyptian people rose up in a “bread intifada,” with additional targets being the nightclubs and liquor stores, symbols of the “openness.” The regime’s guns killed 160, and shut down the protests. Lessons were hastily learned. Subsidies returned.

The new regimes tried to maintain the subsidies along with the new “openness.” There was to be no subsidy to the small farmer, the fellahin of the Nile’s fertile plains. Instead, the Egyptian regime, for instance, relied upon US Agency for International Development assistance that amounted to $4.6 billion over the next three decades. This money was used to buy the massive output of the industrial farms in the United States. Wheat came into the country, but at the expense of the restive peasantry, now increasingly under-employed. In 2010, Egypt was the leading importer of wheat in the world. Egypt relied upon its rent income for survival (remittances from payment for privatization, among others). The ruling clique diverted a substantial part of the rent into the coffers of the Swiss banks. Democracy did not live within this economy. The tyrant here was the ruling clique but not operating alone. It had close collaborators in the IMF, the World Bank, the Banks, the bond markets and the multinational corporations.

Oil did not flow liberally under the sands of Tunisia and Egypt, but it did in the rest of the Arab world, from Libya to the Arabian Peninsula. It has long been a question of the Arab Revolution that opened in the 1950s: When will the economies of the Arab region be able to sustain their populations rather than fatten the financial houses of the Atlantic world, and offer massive trust funds for the dictators and monarchs? Cursed with oil, the Arab world has seen little economic diversification and almost no attempt to use the oil wealth to engender balanced social development for the people. Instead, the oil money sloshed North, to provide credit for overheated consumers in the United States and to provide the banks with the vast funds that are otherwise not garnered by populations that have stopped saving (in the United States wages have been stagnant since 1973 but cultural expectations for lifestyle have not declined, which means that the credit provided by the petro-dollars artificially closed the gap between empty coffers and lavish dreams). The oil money also went toward the real estate boom in the Gulf, and the baccarat tables and escort services of Monaco (the Las Vegas of Europe, which has another decrepit monarch, Albert II, at its head). It did not flow into the pockets of the Arab Street.

The contradictions of the neoliberal security state in Egypt were plainly exhausted by 2008, when the “bread intifada” returned in force (protests in much smaller scale were seen across the Arab world, from Morocco to Syria). The pressure was such that lines for bread increased, and by March 2008 about a dozen people died in scuffles or from exhaustion, waiting on bread. Hosni Mubarak, the heir to Sadat’s policies, sent in the army to quell protests over these “bread martyrs.” On April 6, 2008, a mass protest in al-Mahalla al-Kubra went from the issue of bread to unemployment and onward to the normal excesses of the security state. Mahalla is no backwater. In 2006, twenty-four thousand workers went on strike in the textile mills of this industrial town not more than a few hours drive north of Cairo. They were the backbone of the 2008 events.

US Ambassador Francis Ricciardone arrived in Cairo in 2007. This Turkish speaker and veteran of the Foreign Service was confounded by the “paranoia of the Egyptian dictatorship” (cable sent on May 14, 2007). A year later, Ricciardone sent his assessment of Mahalla and of the tremors underfoot to his superiors at the State Department in Foggy Bottom: “Although not on the scale of the 1977 or 1986 riots, Mahalla is significant. The violent protests demonstrated that it is possible to tear down a poster of Mubarak and stomp on it, to shout obscene anti-regime slogans, to burn a minibus and hurl rocks at riot police. These are unfamiliar images that lower-income Egyptians thrill to. In Mahalla, a new organic opposition force bubbled to the surface, defying current political labels, and apparently not affiliated with the MB [Muslim Brotherhood]. This may require the government to change its script” (cable sent on April 16, 2008). The government did not change its script. This new opposition, strengthened by factory workers and students, the unemployed and the embittered, would take the name of April 6—and eventually find themselves in Tahrir Square by January 2011.

In 2010, twenty-first century plagues reduced the Russian wheat harvest to a third. As the journalist Annia Ciezadlo put it, “a combination of factors—droughts, wildfires, ethanol subsidies, and more—converged into a global food crisis.” The epicenter of this was North Africa. World wheat prices rose beyond imagination. Tunisia and Egypt, both importers of wheat, could not maintain the “democracy of bread.” Inequality flourished in Egypt, and neoliberal policies produced an haute bourgeoisie, fanned on by Mubarak’s son Gamal, with more investment in London than in Alexandria. In October 2010, the courts directed the government to raise the minimum wage from $70/month to $207/month. Unbalanced by the rising tide of discontent, Mubarak tried to return to the “democracy of bread.” It was far too late. As the economic belt tightened, the Egyptian population inhaled for a political battle.

II. Dignity

On January 4, 2011, Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire and died. Bouazizi was the breadwinner of his family, and well known in his modest neighborhood for distributing food from his cart to the poor. Harassment by the Tunisian police over his inability to pay their bribes or purchase their permits dogged Bouazizi through his life. This was the mandate of the hard-working informal sector, to be ceaselessly humiliated by the security state for the mere fact of existence. When the dejection got too much for him, he poured gasoline on his body in front of the governor’s office, set himself alight and yelled, “how do you expect me to make a living?”

An act of immolation in central Tunisia would normally matter very little to the intelligence and diplomatic corps in Washington, London, Paris and elsewhere in the advanced financial world. But Bouazizi’s suicide before the town hall had an electric effect. It galvanized the people of Tunisia against their suave and ruthless leader, Zein el-Abidine Ben Ali, who had been praised by the governments of France and the United States, by the International Monetary Fund and by the bond markets. In 2010, the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report picked Tunisia as the leading country for investment in Africa. Neoliberal policies pleased everyone but the Tunisian working people, who took Bouazizi’s sacrifice as the spark to rise up and send Ben Ali into his Saudi exile.

Astronomic poverty rates bedevil the region (in Egypt, half the population is under the $2/day poverty level). The infitah “reforms” crushed the social possibilities of the organized working-class and the peasantry, who drifted into the world of informal work. More and more Bouazizis inhabit the streets and the souqs of North Africa. A decline in rent incomes and a reduction in tax rates reduced the budgets of the state governments, who then cut subsidies and social services to the people. Less income and less services produced slumlands whose frustrations led in two directions, as the Cairo-based scholars Helmi Sharawy and Azza Khalil noted: “acquiescence or revolt.”

Revolts of various kinds were the order of the day, since at least 2006. Egyptian society sprouted a series of organizations in addition to the April 6 Movement: March 20 Movement, March 9 Movement for the Independence of Universities, Egyptian Movement for Change (Kefaya), Women for Change (Mesreyat Maa al-Tagheer), the Coordination Committee for the Defense of Worker Rights, Committee for the Defense of Insurance Funds, Centre of Manual Workers of Egypt, Federation of Pensioners, Engineers Against Sequestration, the Mahallah Committee for Workers’ Consciousness, Workers for Change and so on.

Rural Egypt did not sit passive, waiting for urban Egypt to act. Over the past decade, peasant struggles in Sarando, Bhoot and Kamshish have been commonplace. The latter, Kamshish, is not twenty kilometers from the birthplace of Mubarak (Kafr el-Meselha) and only eight kilometers from that of Sadat (Mit Abu al-Kum). In May 2011, as Tahrir Square remained the focal point of the Arab Spring, the farmers of Kamshish honored the forty-fifth anniversary of the death of Salah Hussein who led the charge against the local landlord al-Fiqi family by founding the Union of Egyptian Farmers. The doctors at the Zazazig Hospital and the lawyers of Port Said and Cairo, as well as the school principals of Minieh inspired other professionals to toss aside their hesitancy for dignity. “In Egypt,” economist Omar Dahi writes in the IDS Bulletin, “some 1.7 million workers took part in over 1,900 strikes between 2004 and 2008, before the financial crisis, when the number of strikes and work stoppages reached into the thousands. The laboring classes were reacting in fury not only to their higher cost of living, but also to the mounting extravagance and conspicuous consumption of the elite.” It was the rate of social inequality and the neoliberal consumerism of the upper ranks that unshackled the people’s hesitancy.

In Tunisia, the depth of an obvious political society such as in Egypt is not apparent. Nonetheless, as political scientists Laryssa Chomiak and John Entelis point out in the Middle East Report, “Tunisia’s disenfranchised masses developed mechanisms for dodging the tentacles of the authoritarian state, including tax avoidance, illegal tapping of municipal water and electricity supplies, and illicit construction of houses. Within this atmosphere of circumvention, moments of contentious politics nonetheless occurred eventually leading to the precipitous puncturing of Ben Ali’s system of control.” One of the most spectacular punctures took place in the southwestern mining town of Redayef (near the mining area of Gafsa) in January 2008. The state-owned phosphate company conducted a fraudulent hiring process, cashiering the unconnected and hiring eighty-one people with connections to the upper state apparatus. Redayef is the Tunisian Mahallah. The street protests of the workers and the unemployed expanded to include students in Tunis, Sfax and Sousse, and the broadest of the social classes from the Gafsa governorate. The main axis here was the underground cadre of the banned Workers’ Communist Party, whose cells among the Tunisian diaspora in France hummed with solidarity activity. Wives and widows of the imprisoned workers captured the streets in April, and the police responded with their own habits. In June, two protestors were killed. The dynamic smoldered, not erupting, but not dying down either. Bouazizi’s action would oxygenate it.

It has been a long-standing question in the Arab world: When will we rule ourselves? Not long ago, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and America’s Hillary Clinton offered praise for their “democratic” friends, Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Mubarak. To top the obscenity, during the capture of Tahrir Square, Obama conferred with the Saudis on the democratic transition in Egypt: this is like asking a carnivore how to cook tofu.

In 1953, the aged King Farouk of Egypt set sail on his yacht, al-Mahrusa. Guarded by the Egyptian navy, he waved to people who he considered his lesser: Nasser, son of a postman, and Sadat, son of small farmers. Their Colonel’s Coup was intended to break Egypt away from monarchy and imperial domination. Nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy came alongside land reforms. But these were ill conceived, and they were not able to throttle the power of the Egyptian bourgeoisie (whose habit for quick money continued, with three quarters of new investments going to inflate a real estate bubble). The economy was bled to support an enlarged military apparatus, largely to fight the US-backed armies of the Israelis. Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 War led Nasser to resign on June 10. Thousands of people took to the streets of Cairo, and filled Tahrir Square, this time to ask Nasser to return to office, which he did, although much weakened.

The democratic opening of 1952 was, however, unable to emerge. Military officers, even if temperamentally progressive, are loathe to hand over the reins of power. The security apparatus went after the Muslim Brotherhood certainly, but it was fiercest against the Communists. Nasser did not build up a strong, independent political culture. “His ‘socialism,’” as the historian L. S. Stavrianos put it, “was socialism by presidential decree, implemented by the army and police. There was no initiative or participation at the grass-roots level.” For that reason, when Sadat moved the country to the Right in the 1970s there was barely any opposition to him. Nasserism after Nasser was as hollow as Perónism after Perón.

The revolt that broke out in 2011 was against the regime set up by Sadat and developed by Mubarak. The Sadat-Mubarak regime was a national security state that had no democratic pretensions. In 1977, Sadat identified Nasserism with “detention camps, custodianship and sequestration, a one-opinion, one-party system.” Sadat allowed three kinds of political forces to emerge, but then hastily defanged them (the leftist National Progressive Grouping Party), co-opted them (the Arab Socialist Party and the Socialist Liberal Party), or tolerated their existence (Muslim Brotherhood). Cleverly, Sadat put in place what he accused Nasser of building. It was under Sadat, and Mubarak (with his own Oddjob, Omar Suleiman, in tow) that the detention camps and torture centers blossomed. Egypt’s 2006 budget provided $1.5 billion for internal security. There is about one police officer for every thirty-seven Egyptians. This is extreme. The subvention that comes from the United States of $1.3 billion per year helps fund this monstrosity. This archipelago of torture would be essential when the United States needed to send those who had been placed in the “extraordinary rendition” program after 9/11 to sing their songs under distress.

The revolt of 2011, in addition, was egged on by sections of the business elite who were disgusted with the neoliberal consumerism of the clique around Gamal Mubarak, the president’s son. This repulsed national bourgeoisie was no match for multinational capital and understood that the cannibalization of the country would not be a benefit to them in the long term: it would simply cut the heart out of the vast masses, whose anemic social condition would mean that the Egyptian economy would not be able to demand any of the goods produced and sold by the national bourgeoisie. No wonder then that on January 31 notable businessman Naguib Sawiris joined the Tahrir Square dynamic. As Paul Amar put it at jadaliyya.com, “Sawiris and his allies had become threatened by Mubarak-and-son’s extreme neoliberalism and their favoring of Western, European and Chinese investors over national businessmen. Because their investments overlap with those of the military, these prominent Egyptian businessmen have interests literally embedded in the land, resources and development projects of the nation.” Their interests paralleled those in the military who were also disgusted by the corruption and a policy of privatization that was plainly the defenestration of the national economy. That is why Gamal Mubarak and his cronies were ejected from the cabinet on January 28, and this is why the military gleefully put Gamal, his brother and his now hapless father on trial in August 2011.

In Tahrir Square, twenty-two year old Ahmed Moneim told the BBC, “The French Revolution took a very long time so the people could eventually get their rights.” His struggle in 2011 is to repeal the national security state and to bring into place a dignified society. That is the basic requirement, to return to the slogan of the French Revolution. The dynamic that Ahmed identifies returns Egypt to the original movement of 1952, but this time it asks that democracy be a fundamental part of the equation, and the military remain in its barracks. That is one of the lessons of history that was clear in the battlements of Tahrir Square.

The other lesson emerges as it often does in the midst of modern revolts: that women form a crucial part of the waves of revolt, and yet when the revolt succeeds women are set aside as secondary political actors. It was after all the twenty-six year old member of the April 6 movement, Asmaa Mahfouz, who posted a video challenge on January 18, “If you think yourself a man, come with me on 25 January. Whoever says women shouldn’t go to protests because they will get beaten, let him have some honor and manhood and come with me on 25 January. Whoever says it is not worth it because there will only be a handful of people, I want to tell him, ‘You are the reason behind this, and you are a traitor, just like the president or any security cop who beats us in the streets.’” Women such as Mahfouz and Azza Soliman of the Centre for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance, and the thousands of women who took to the streets in rural and urban Egypt were central to the revolt. “What are the possibilities for a democratization of rights in Egypt,” asked Nadine Naber at jadaliyya.com, “in which women’s participation, the rights of women, family law, and the right to organize, protest and express freedom of speech remains central?” Naber repeats a question raised in 1957 at the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference by Karima el-Said, the deputy minister of Education of the United Arab Republic (the confederation of Egypt and Syria), “In Afro-Asian countries where people are still suffering under the yoke of colonialism, women are actively participating in the struggle for complete national independence. They are convinced that this is the first step for their emancipation and will equip them to occupy their real place in society.” It is history’s second lesson, that the democracy that emerges be capacious.

One of the curious manifestations of Americanism is to try to bring control of every dynamic into its own circuit. The Tunisians and Egyptians rose up, and the establishment media in the United States wanted to give the glory to Facebook or Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech or the handbook by philosopher Gene Sharp—not to the ordinary people of North Africa themselves. In Cairo, Obama said, “we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” During the Tahrir Square standoff, protestors chanted, “we have extended our hand, why have you clenched your fist?” Their words came as they foisted in the air tear gas canisters that read Made in the USA. They fully grasped the hypocrisy of imperial liberalism. Facebook certainly allowed for some creative organizational work amongst the literate, but it was not significant.

On January 28, Mubarak, along the grain of this kind of Americanism, hastily cut Internet and cellphone service. It had little impact on the protests. As Navid Hassanpour shows in a paper presented to the American Political Science Association meeting in 2011, “The disruption of cellphone coverage and Internet on the 28th exacerbated the unrest in at least three major ways. It implicated many apolitical citizens unaware of or uninterested in the unrest; it forced more face-to-face communication, i.e., more physical presence in streets; and finally it effectively decentralized the rebellion on the 28th through new hybrid communication tactics, producing a quagmire much harder to control and repress than one massive gathering in Tahrir.” In fact, the closing down of Facebook provided new opportunities to reach new constituencies and to broaden the movement. It would be a surprise to the workers of Suez or the cadre of the Muslim Brotherhood or even the students of Cairo’s universities that they were unwitting pawns of someone else’s dreams. This was an Egyptian Revolution. It did not seek permission from elsewhere.

The Arab revolt that began in Tunisia and spread to Egypt and onwards seemed on the surface like a “1968” for the Arab World. Sixty percent of the Arab population is under the age of thirty (seventy percent in Egypt). Their slogans are about dignity and employment. The resource curse brought wealth to a small percentage of their societies, but little economic development. Social development came to some parts of the Arab world: Tunisia’s literacy rate is seventy-five percent, Egypt’s just over seventy percent and Libya’s at ninety percent. The educated lower middle class and middle class youth have not been able to find decent jobs. The concatenation of humiliations disgust these young people: no job, no respect from an authoritarian state, and then to top it off the general malaise of being second class citizens on the world stage (the suppression of the Palestinians and the crushing of Iraq are indices of the Arab gloom; it was the solidarity committees for the second intifada of the Palestinians and of the anti-war rally of March 20, 2003 that formed Kefaya and the March 20 Movement): all this was overwhelming. The chants on the streets of Tunisia and Egypt were about this combination of dignity, justice and jobs.

III. God

The Muslim Brotherhood came onto the Cairene streets. It set its own ideology to mute. Its spokesperson, Gamal Nasser, said that they are only a small part of the protests in Tahrir Square. This is a protest about Egypt, he said, not Islam. Much the same kind of statement came from the mullahs in Iran during the massive protests of 1978–79, the precursor of the creation of the Islamic Republic. Organized into a panoply of organizations, the Egyptian people filled their squares and refused to leave. When the camel-riding thugs of the Mubarak regime entered the square on February 2, the organized and disciplined Brotherhood gathered in formation to defend the square. As Dyab Abou Jahjah pointed out on his blog on that day, “Today the revolution needs structured organizations to form a fighting machine, and the Brotherhood has experience, resources, and the will to play that role. And they are doing it for the movement without claiming it.” That evening the Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Yusuf Abdullah al-Qaradawi spoke to al-Jazeera from his Qatar exile, “The Egyptians know that their peaceful democratic revolution, their remarkably responsible and intelligent mass movement, is being crushed by America and Israel as much as by Mubarak’s dictatorship. I will make a prediction: if this revolution fails, America will face an unprecedented wave of Arab anger, and Egypt will be plagued by violence from now on. The Muslim Brothers who have escaped from prison, for instance, know that their fate in the coming weeks is to be rearrested and tortured to death. They will fight.”

Much the same sort of attitude was struck in Tunisia. The no. 2 in the Islamist Nahda Party, Abdelfattah Mourou told al-Jazeera on March 10 that his party was out on Avenue Habib Bourguiba for the sake of all of Tunisia. He used the term sha’b, the people, not Islam or Muslims. “When asked about Nahda’s position toward partisan politics, often considered to contradict Islamists’ ideal of unity,” Nadia Marzouki points out at the Middle East Report, “Mourou insisted on ‘the right of the people to its self’ (haqq al-sha’b li-nafsihi).” “The people may have different feelings,” Mourou conceded, “but the only parties that will win will be those chosen by the people.” The deep desire and commitment to some form of democracy is underlined.

We tend to exaggerate the authority of the clerics, or at least to treat it as natural, as eternal. Al-Qaradawi came to Tahrir Square in late February, once Mubarak went to the seaside at Sharm al-Sheikh for his enforced retirement (and where he would later be brought before a court, in his gurney). Rather than offer himself as an Islamic leader alone, he first asked for blessings from the youth (a reversal itself) and then greeted the Christians and others, saying, “In this Square, sectarianism died.” These were brave words, but also frayed at the edges since some sectarian attacks had already begun and others would follow (it had become commonplace to blame these on remnants of the Mubarak regime, eager to sow suspicion and fear). “The revolution isn’t over. It has just started to build Egypt,” announced the cleric, “guard your revolution.” Raymond Baker and Karen Aboul Kheir were right to point out at ZNET that al-Qaradawi’s son is a supporter of the liberal political figure Mohamed ElBaradei, and his granddaughter had joined the brigades busy with the cleaning of the square. They had secular affiliations.

Since the 1970s, clericalism in the Arab World and in Iran has had the upper hand in oppositional struggles. This has everything to do with the calcification of the secular regimes of the national liberation era (the new states formed out of the export of Nasserism: from Egypt to Iraq, Syria, Yemen and into Libya by 1969), the deterioration of the Third World Project (especially the fractures in the oil cartel OPEC that opened up in the summer of 1990 and fed into the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait), and the promotion and funding of the advance guard of Islamism through the World Muslim League by the Saudis from Chechnya to Pakistan and Indonesia, with its greatest impact through small Salafist bands across North Africa and the Middle East.

If you go back and look at the period when Nasserism and the Third World Project were dominant, what you will find are the clerical intellectuals in the midst of ideological battles against radical nationalism and Marxism, all the while borrowing from Bolshevik techniques of party building to amass their own organizational strength. For example, in Iraq, it was the Communist Party that dominated the working-class regions of Baghdad. Unable to fully confront this political force, the clerics of working-class Shi’ism, such as the al-Sadr family, had to evoke a politics through and against the Communists. Baqir al-Sadr’s intellectual work took on Marxism (his Iqtisaduna was a critique of Capital, vol. 1) and his organizational work (through the al-Da’wah al-Islamiyah) was modeled on the Iraqi Communist Party. Clericalism, on the back-foot, had to engage with the dominant tendency, which was radical nationalism and Marxism. If you go farther East you would run into Haji Misbach, an Indonesian cleric, also known as Red Haji, who confronted the dynamic Indonesian Communist Party with his own brand of Islamic Communism in the sugar belt of central Java. Like Baqir al-Sadr, Misbach was perplexed by the popularity of the CP in his society. He wanted to find a way to bring the spiritual to socialism. These are all precursors of Ali Shariati, the great Iranian thinker who was influenced by the Third World Project, and by Marxism, but once more wanted to bring Islam into it. For all these thinkers, the problem was quite the opposite of what it is today: the workers seemed ascendant, driven by the science of secular socialism at least in the domain of politics and production. It terrified the clerics.

The Communists and the radical nationalists crumbled under the weight of several factors. Preeminent among them was the pressure from the camp of imperialism, led by the United States, but with the Europeans and the Gulf Arabs in eager tow. Economic pressure combined with commitments made to Salafi opposition figures (via the World Muslim League) undermined the attempt to create new foundations for these societies. It did not help that the radical nationalists had little solidarity with the Communists, and nor did the Soviet Union, which routinely sold out their local fraternal parties for better relations with the nationalist strongmen, the megalomania of realpolitik eclipsing social justice and internationalism. Repression of the Communists (in Sudan, Iraq and Egypt for example) weakened the left pole in these societies. Additionally, the Atlantic powers built up a strong network of sympathetic countries, the Gulf Arabs at the top of the list at the center of West Asia and North Africa, but with a Maghrebian pro-Atlantic bloc of Tunisia and Libya (the treaty of January 6, 1957) and the Mashriqain Baghdad Pact of Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Turkey (the treaty of February 25, 1955). The Pacts and the bloc would wither (after the Iraqi coup of 1958 and the Libyan coup of 1969), but the Atlantic world hastened to create new alliances and allegiances, rooted mainly in the implacable Gulf Arab region (the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Arab NATO, was formed in 1979, and provided the most resolutely loyal force for the interests of the Atlantic world, and decisively opposed radical nationalism, Communism and eventually the post-1979 Iranian Revolution).

Such pressure from the outside world exaggerated and sharpened the failures of statecraft within the Arab governments. The new regimes were unable to found their society on a platform that included the widest spectrum of rights and responsibilities, from the requirements of decent employment to the provision of safe and stimulating social life, from the imperatives for political freedom to the decency of intellectual development. Paranoid about genuine threats from outside and from the oxygenation of toxic forces within, they held back on political rights and attempted to stifle political and intellectual freedom. They provided social welfare, but did not fully recreate the realm of production to facilitate worker and peasant control over their economic lives. The growth of the neoliberal security state in Egypt is emblematic of this failure to engender a new society that would be able to withstand external threats and to model an alternative path for social development for the other post-colonial states.

The collapse of the national liberation project by the 1980s came alongside the slow demise of the USSR, and its role as the upholder of the Utopian horizon of socialism. With the eclipse of that horizon, it became harder to assert the need for people to risk their lives in struggle for what appeared to be in fundamental retreat, namely socialism. The idea of the inevitability of socialism inspired generations to give themselves over to the creation of the Jacobin force, the Party that would, under relentless pressure, lead the working-class and peasantry to certain revolution. As well, the failure of the national liberation project meant the whittling down of the realm of production, and so the organized working-class found itself cast into the unsavory and unpredictable world of informal work. The main organization force of the Communist parties, the organized working-class, began its slow disappearance from world history.

It is this combustive situation that amputated the socialist dream in the Arab lands, and drew the now informal workers of hitherto Communist strongholds such as al-Thawra (Baghdad) and Haret Hreik (Beirut) into the parties of God, such as the Sadrites and Hezbollah. Religion has an unshakable eschatology, which a post-utopian secular politics lacks. No wonder that religion has inspired action in the Arab lands, even if destructive rather than revolutionary, whereas secular politics has become less inspirational.

With Mubarak gone and the squabbles of the post-Mubarak era in the open, the Muslim Brotherhood seeks its place at the table. It has long turned its back publicly on violence, which was why Ayman al-Zawahiri founded the Islamic Jihad, to absorb the extremist, terrorist space abjured by the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood’s Issam al-Aryan laid out the line for his organization years ago, saying, “The Brothers consider constitutional rule to be closest to Islamic rule. We are the first to call for and apply democracy. We are devoted to it until death.” Which is indeed what one saw at the borderlands of Tahrir Square when it was attacked. As the electoral process unfolded in 2011, it was inevitable that the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party and the Salafi Al-Nour party would do well. Mubarak’s electoral machine had no more legitimacy. The persecuted left had little of its previous mass character. The liberals generally eschew any mass organizing, and had only a moral claim to make on the population. It was left to the Brotherhood and the Salafis, who did not initiate the protests but who participated in them, to stake an electoral claim. Their activists were familiar with the interior of Mubarak’s prisons, but their parties were tolerated by the state—used when it suited Mubarak, jailed when he willed it. The avuncular support of money and al-Jazeera from the emirate of Qatar also helped the Islamists. In other words, the political Islamists captured a considerable amount of the political space in Egypt.

Election results from Tunisia also followed the predictable path. The Islamist party, Harakat an-Nahda (or Ennahda) faced brutal repression from Ben Ali, with Ennahda’s leader, Rashid Ghannouchi going from prison to exile to prison to exile without losing his political stamina. Before his return from exile in London, Ghannouchi stopped off in Qatar. Even as Ghannouchi has been outspoken against the Saudis (calling the decision to let in US troops in 1990 a “colossal crime”), the Gulf Arabs provided Ghannouchi and Ennahda with the monetary and institutional support essential for its rapid re-emergence in Tunisian society. There was no question that it would trounce the enfeebled left and liberals in an election that catapulted it to victory in November 2011.

Little wonder that the Iranian Ayatollah Khamenei proclaimed confidently on February 4, 2011 that the uprisings would spur on an “Islamic Awakening” across the region.

The calculation for how to deal with the parties of God is fairly simple. They are certainly a legitimate part of the political process, and their role in political life cannot be banned into oblivion. They also appear to be somewhat committed to democratic developments, even if these are narrowed when it comes to their own program. For example, in a place such as Lebanon, as Fawwaz Trabulsi points out, Hezbollah largely restricts its charity to its own sect, and within that sect it promotes private religious education and the obligatory veil at the same time as it erases all awareness of social rights. It is important to offer a scrupulous and forthright criticism of the shortcomings and social degeneration of the parties of God. In 2007, the Communist Parties in India held an anti-imperialist meeting in Delhi. A Hezbollah representative, Ali Fayyad, came for it. At the plenary, Aijaz Ahmad lit into Fayyad regarding Hezbollah’s position on women’s rights. It is just what should be done. The parties of God have virulence at their fingertips, particularly as it relates to matters of social equity and economic policy. That has to be scorched. Clara Zetkin warned that the emergence of fascism could be laid partly on the failure of the workers, their intellectual allies and their revolutionary parties to form tactical alliances that are also founded on honest and serious criticism of those alliances. That is how one moves effectively toward the future, particularly when the context is such that the left pole is weak and the national-popular domain is largely in the hands of the parties of God.

Most indications point to the fact that the parties of God are unable to fully take on board the grievances and needs of the people. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt hastily came to an accommodation with the neoliberal agenda and suggested that it would not be averse to the Camp David treaty with Egypt. The United States reached out to the Brotherhood, and in the interests of expediency and in their lust for power, the Brotherhood reached back and made these concessions. Such departures from the popular agenda will turn the Brotherhood into a more socially cruel force (to shore up its base) and so might make it marginal to the political process. If the Brotherhood goes fully in this direction, suggests the University of Tehran’s Seyed Mohammad Marandi, it “will probably at some point split into two or more separate parties, which will then provide competing interpretations of how society should be run.” Or, if the parties of God entirely fail to make their mark on the world of today, this might provide an opening to more authentic working-class and peasant parties that are yet to make themselves manifest.

The clerics do not command the total field. In Egypt, hope vested for a while in the emergence of a secular bloc. But here the catapult would not shoot hopes too far out of the fortress of the military and neoliberal consumerism. Mohamed ElBaradei flew into Tahrir Square from his diplomatic exile in Geneva. In 2010, he returned to his native Egypt to declare his intention to bring “good governance” with him. If this meant the removal of Mubarak and the opening of political space, it was welcome. ElBaradei sounded like one of many World Bank advisors, who had come to terms with the fact that neoliberal consumerism had failed to bring positive change, and had now articulated Structural Adjustment, part 2, with “good governance” as the leading edge. No sense in opening up the economy if the politics is not also opened up was the new mantra. But when Tahrir filled up, ElBaradei seemed enthused. With Ayman Nour in poor health, he took up the mantle of the liberals. The fact that he spent the better part of his career and the worst years of Mubarak’s rule outside Cairo gave him credibility. A man of his class would have been co-opted into the Mubarak web. Only an outsider like him could be both of the ruling bloc (in terms of class position and instinct) and outside the ruling apparatus (that is, of Mubarak’s cabinet circle). It was a point of great privilege.

People like ElBaradei cannot be reduced to being more sophisticated puppets for the Atlantic world. Early in his career, in the 1960s, he served in the Nasserite Ministry of External Affairs. He then moved to the Foreign Ministry under Ismail Fahmi, one of the most impressive of the Nasser-era bureaucrats. When Sadat went to Jerusalem and then to Camp David, Fahmi resigned from his cabinet. For one year, ElBaradei served with Boutros Boutros Ghali at the Foreign Ministry. Unwilling to bend to the wiles of Sadat, both ElBaradei and Boutros Ghali fled into the UN bureaucracy. It was this Nasserite training that schooled both of them, and forged them as strong pillars of international law and the rights of all nations. No wonder that ElBaradei would not wither before US pressure as the Director of the International Atomic Energy Agency during the lead-up to the war on Iraq (2002–2003). It is the reason why the IAEA and ElBaradei as its head won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. ElBaradei’s residual Nasserism shows us that the threats to the US pillars of stability (pliancy to US will, protection of Israel) are real whether the Brotherhood wins the democratic process of not. In this regard, the gap between ElBaradei’s liberal bloc and the Islamist bloc is narrower than one might expect. ElBaradei’s 2012 suggestion that he would not enter the presidential election because the military has yet to fully open space for civilian politics is welcomed, but it also suggests that ElBaradei recognizes that the liberals would at this time only have a shallow support base compared to the far more popular Islamists.

The Tunisian trade unions (the Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail or UGTT) and the Egyptian labor and peasant movement played essential roles in the uprisings of 2011. Millions of people participate in these platforms, and millions more are loyal to them. Yet, these organizations have not asserted themselves into the electoral domain, even though they were major political actors during the uprisings. There are rumbles of discontent amongst the unions of the dangers of letting political Islam command the electoral field, and therefore government. The danger is not only social. Most of the forces of political Islam are quite comfortable with neoliberal economic policies, and with making adjustments of various kinds (brokered through Qatar) with the capitals of Atlantic imperialism. The recognition of the political limitations of political Islam are not unknown to the labor leadership of North Africa. Habib Jerjir, a leader of the Regional Workers’ Union of Tunis, told the AP, “I’m against political Islam. We must block their path.” Whether this sentiment will translate into the creation of a mass working-class political party is to be seen. It would provide the only alternative to neoliberalism and social suffocation in the region.

IV. Ben Ali and Mubarak Go to the Seaside

On January 14, 2011, Zein el-Abidine Ben Ali fled with his family to the Red Sea port city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He was welcomed by King Abdullah, and told he could stay as long as he kept out of politics. Uganda’s Idi Amin lived on the top two floors of the Novotel Hotel in Jeddah and then in a luxurious villa, but these are no longer available. Ben Ali was provided with a vast palace, surrounded by high walls and tall palm trees, accessed by seven gates guarded by armed guards. It is a sumptuous prison.

On February 11, after thirty years at the helm of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak and his family departed for the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh on the southern tip of the Sinai. Sixteen days of resolute protest by a cross-section of the Egyptian public put enormous pressure on the Egyptian military. It is the institution that held the keys to Mubarak’s future. Most autocratic societies hollow out political institutions that might balance power in the State. That is why the legislature is weak, and that is why there are no legal political parties apart from Mubarak’s façade of a party (when its headquarters were burnt down, the party effectively ceased). Absent of other political challenges, the tussle came down to a test of wills between the protestors and the military.

The rank and file and the divisional commanders had the closest ties to the protestors, and they signaled their willingness to see Mubarak leave. The top generals, who served alongside Mubarak in the armed forces and then in the government, were less happy to send him off. It was this internal struggle in the army that delayed matters. Fear that the Tunisian contagion would spread even more rapidly if Egypt fell to it made the Royal Families of the Gulf burst into shivers. They pledged to back Mubarak to the hilt. The Saudi offer in particular gave Mubarak the confidence for his bizarre television address on February 10, where even his translator seemed hesitant, embarrassed to have to render the clichés into English.

Eventually, the Saudi money and the loyalty of the Generals were not sufficient. The tide from below prevailed. Mubarak and his family boarded a helicopter and went off.

History is filled with bizarre analogies. February 11, Mubarak’s day of departure, is also the day when the Shah of Iran’s regime fell in 1979. The emergence of an Ayatollah Khomeini in Egypt had given pause to some outside the country; would the Muslim Brotherhood take over, they suggested? Iran has a well-organized clergy who had taken a defiant position against the Shah. These clergy also had a charismatic leader, exiled in Paris, whose return to Tehran was greeted by millions of people. No such clergy exists in Egypt, and nor is there a person such as Khomeini. Iran is a bad analogy for Egypt.

Better yet is South Africa. On February 11, Nelson Mandela was finally released after twenty-seven years in jail. I remember watching television in 1990, as Mandela hesitantly walked out of the prison in Paarl. Egypt has had its own exit from Babylon moment: its jailer has departed. It has walked into the light.

For the Arab lands, the events of early 2011 were not the inauguration of a new history, but the continuation of an unfinished struggle that is a hundred years old. Some people already despair, discounting the remarkable victory of ejecting Ben Ali and Mubarak. The military remain in power in Egypt, the older social classes of property and power are not dislodged in Cairo and Tunis. But their figureheads have been jettisoned. Such acts raise the confidence of the people and propel other struggles into motion. The old order might yet remain, recasting itself in different clothes, speaking a different vocabulary. But it knows that its time is at hand. In Gladiator (2000), the Germanic barbarians sever the head of a Roman soldier and toss it in front of the Roman battle lines. One of the Roman generals says, “People should know when they are conquered.” He means the barbarians. The dictators of the Arab world, our barbarians, might yet throw some heads before the advance of the people. But they know that they are defeated. Faith and fear in them has now ebbed. It is simply a matter of time: a hundred years, or ten. ‘U’balna kulna, is the phrase: may we all be next.

The tidal wave that lifted Ben Ali and Mubarak out of their palaces to their exiles inspired millions across West Asia and North Africa. Protests had already broken out on the Arabian Peninsula, in Yemen and Bahrain, protests would soon break out in Libya and Syria, and a new energy manifested itself among the Palestinians in exile and in the occupied territories. Historical grievances combined with inflationary pressures now met with the subjective sense that victory might be at hand—this was not simply a protest to scream into the wind, but a protest to actually remove autocrats from their positions of authority. The facts of resistance had given way to the expectation of revolutionary change.

V. Bagman of the Empire

Washington was convulsed by Tahrir Square. The tidal wave of protests threatened its prejudice toward stability. Events had run out of control. The main features of US power in the region seemed on the horizon of being compromised. If the Mubarak regime fell, what would this mean to Israel? If enthusiasm about Mubarak and Ben Ali’s ousters escalated the protests in Bahrain and Yemen, what would this mean for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates? Something had to be done to manage what had begun to seem like a revolutionary situation.

From inside the bowels of Washington’s power elite, Frank Wisner emerged, briefcase in hand. He had met the President, but he was not his envoy. He represented the United States, but was not the Ambassador. What was in his briefcase was his experience: it includes his long career as bagman of Empire, and as bucket-boy for Capital. Pulling himself away from the Georgetown cocktail parties and the Langley power-point briefings, Wisner found his way to the Heliopolis cocktail parties and to the hushed conferences in Kasr al-Ittihadiya. Mubarak (age 82) greeted Wisner (age 72), as these elders conferred on the way forward for a country whose majority is under thirty.

Obama came to Cairo in 2009, and said, “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone.” Those words should have been cast in gold and placed in the portico of the White House. Instead, they drift like wisps in the wind, occasionally cited for propaganda purposes, but in a time of crisis, hidden behind the clouds of imperial interests (or those of Tel Aviv and Riyadh). America presumes to know, and presumes to have a say equivalent to those of the millions who thronged Egypt’s squares, streets and television sets (one forgets about the protests of the latter, too tired to get to the square, nursing sick children or adults, a bit fearful, but no less given over to anger at the regime).

The Republicans have their own ghouls, people like James Baker, who are plucked out for tasks that require the greatest delicacy. They are like diplomatic hit-men, who are not sown up by too much belief in the values of democracy and freedom, but to the imperatives of “stability” and Empire. The Democratic bench is lighter now, as the immense bulk of Richard Holbrooke has departed for other diplomatic assignments. He had been given charge of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he found little traction. The Taliban could not be cowered, and nor could the Pakistani military. Holbrooke had much easier times in the Balkans, where, according to Diana Johnstone, he instigated the conflict by refusing the road of peace. Wisner comes out of the same nest as Holbrooke. He is the Democrat’s version of James Baker, but without the pretend gravity of the Texan.

Wisner has a long lineage in the CIA family. His father, Frank Sr., helped overthrow Arbenz of Guatemala (1954) and Mossadeq of Iran (1953), before he was undone in mysterious circumstances in 1965. Frank Jr. is well known around Langley, with a career in the Defense and State Departments along with ambassadorial service in Egypt, the Philippines and then India. In each of these places Wisner insinuated himself into the social and military branches of the power elite. He became their spokesperson. Wisner and Mubarak became close friends when he was in the country (1986–1991), and many credit this friendship (and military aid) with Egypt’s support of the United States in the 1991 Gulf War. The delusions are many. George H. W. Bush calls his presidential counterpart, Hosni, in the afternoon of January 21, 1991. They are discussing their war against Iraq. “How is public support there,” Bush asks him. Mubarak answers hastily, “It is still good.” For Mubarak, “public” meant his clique, not the eighty odd million. Not once did the US provide a criticism of Egypt’s human rights record. As Human Rights Watch put it in their 1992 World Watch Report, the George H. W. Bush regime “refrained from any public expression of concern about human rights violations in Egypt.” Instead, military aid increased, and the torture system continued. The moral turpitude (bad guys, aka the Muslim Brotherhood and democracy advocates, need to be tortured) and the torture apparatus set up the system for the regime followed by Bush’s son, George W. after 9/11, with the extraordinary rendition programs to these very Egyptian prisons. Wisner should be considered the architect of the framework for this policy.

Wisner remained loyal to Mubarak. In 2005, he celebrated the Egyptian (s)election (Mubarak “won” with 88.6% of the vote). It was a “historic day” he said, and went further in a report for the Baker Institute, “There were no instances of repression; there wasn’t heavy police presence on the streets. The atmosphere was not one of police intimidation.” This is quite the opposite of what came out from election observers, human rights organizations and bloggers such as Kareem Suleiman and Hossam el-Hamalawy. The Democratic and Republican specters came together in the James Baker Institute’s working group on the Middle East. Wisner joined the Baker Institute’s head, Edward Djerejian, and others to produce a report in 2003 that offers us a tasty statement, “Achieving security and stability in the Middle East will be made more difficult by the fact that short-term necessities will seem to contradict long-term goals.” If the long-term goal is Democracy, then that is all very well because it has to be sacrificed to the short-term, namely support for the kind of neoliberal security state embodied by Mubarak. Nothing more is on offer. No wonder that a “Washington Middle East hand” told The Cable, “[Wisner’s] the exact wrong person to send. He is an apologist for Mubarak.” But this is a wrong view. Wisner was just the exact person to send to protect the short-term, and so only-term, interests of Washington. The long-term had been set aside.

I first wrote about Wisner in 1997 when he joined the board of directors of Enron Corporation. Where Wisner had been, to Manila and New Delhi, Enron followed. As one of his staffers said, “if anybody asked the CIA to help promote US business in India, it was probably Frank.” Without the CIA and the muscle of the US government, it is unlikely that the Subic Bay power station deal or the Dabhol deal would have gone to Enron. Here Wisner followed James Baker, who was hired by Enron to help it gain access to the Shuaiba power plant in Kuwait. Nor is he different from Holbrooke, who was in the upper circle of Credit Suisse First Boston, Lehman Brothers, Perseus and the American International Group. They used the full power of the US state to push the private interests of their firms, and then made money for themselves. This is the close nexus of Capital and Empire, and Wisner is the hinge between them.

One wonders at the tenor of the official cables coming from Cairo to Washington during January 2011. Ambassador Margaret Scobey, a career official, had been once more sidelined. The first time was over rendition. She is known to have opposed the tenor of it, and had spoken on behalf of human rights champion Ayman Nour and others. This time Obama did an end run around her, sending Wisner. Scobey went to visit ElBaradei. Similar treatment was meted out to Ambassador Anne Patterson in Islamabad. Her brief was narrowed by Holbrooke’s appointment. What must these women in senior places think, that when a crisis erupts, they are set-aside for the men of Washington?

Wisner urged Mubarak to concede. It was not enough. More was being asked for in the Egyptian streets. Emboldened, Mubarak’s supporters came onto the streets with bats in hand, ready for a fight. This was probably sanctioned in that private meeting. It is what one expects of Empire’s bagman. At a security conference in Munich shortly after his Cairo trip, Wisner made a historic gaffe. Mubarak needed time to sort out his legacy, Wisner intimated, and whatever should take place must keen a keen eye on stability. “You need to get a national consensus around the preconditions of the next step forward, and the president must stay in office in order to steer those changes through,” he said via satellite feed. This embarrassed the Obama administration, which wanted to appear both for stability and for change. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s team dismissed Wisner for his poor choice of words, at the same time as Clinton seemed to pursue his suggestion. She recommended an “orderly transition,” and proposed that Mubarak leave and give the keys to the state to his deputy Omar Suleiman. Such an “orderly transition…takes some time,” she noted, “There are certain things that have to be done in order to prepare.”

VI. Edicts of the Status Quo

“[The Arab Revolt] aroused mixed feelings and made strong friends and strong enemies, amid whose clashing jealousies its affairs began to miscarry.”

—T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1922.

Ululations of joy broke out in Tel Aviv when it became clear in late January 2011 that neither the United States nor the Egyptian ruling elite wanted to succumb to the torrents from below. It was all very well to allow managed democracy in Eastern Europe or in Central Asia, but such illusions were out of the question for the Middle East. A cobwebbed tradition of Orientalist scholarship had proclaimed the Arab incapable of Enlightenment inventions such as democracy (a convenient example is Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind, 1973). Their policy cousins, in the diplomatic hovels of Foggy Bottom and in Kiryat Ben Gurion, absorbed this twaddle. For them, the Arab World would only ascend to Democracy in the long-term. In the short-term, where we all live, it would have to make do with Stability. When the masses gathered in Tahrir Square, they were not harbingers of Democracy for Washington and Tel Aviv: instead, they augured something worse than Mubarak—rule by the Muslim Brotherhood. Visions of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas ran through their future plans. Israel would be encircled by cartoon character Ayatollahs who resembled Jafar, the Grand Vizier of Agrabah (from Disney’s 1992, Aladdin). It was all too much to bear.

Obama’s White House and State Department seemed unable to keep up with the pace of events in Egypt and in the Arab world in general. One revolutionary wave after another put various scenarios for diplomacy and intervention into the shredder. The popular uprisings did not keep to any timetable, and their phases seemed hard to predict. The intransigence of the people in Tahrir Square, in particular, dazzled the planners. Frank Wisner’s friendly chat with Mubarak got the old man to agree to leave by September. In his place came Intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, an old friend of Israel and the United States. But the people in Tahrir Square seemed to know that if they went home and disbanded the fist that they had created, in the dark night Suleiman’s agents would swoop into their homes, take them to Abu Zaabal to be hung upside down and beaten. Too much is known of the ways of the secret police to allow the dynamism of Tahrir Square to be so easily broken. Mubarak’s gambit was patently insufficient.

But this is all that the United States could offer. Too much was at stake. The four pillars of US foreign policy had to be allowed to remain intact. If they fell, then the US would lose the Middle East in the same way as it has substantially lost South America. These defeats and retreats portend the collapse of US hegemony.

The first pillar is US reliance upon this region for oil, which must be allowed to flow freely into the car culture of Europe and the United States. The second pillar is that its allies in the Arab World (such as Ben Ali, Mubarak, the Saudis and Qaddafi) must stand firm with the Atlantic powers in its war on terror. Omar Suleiman had opened his jails to the CIA “ghost prisoners” and Qaddafi had closely collaborated with the US intelligence services and with Suleiman in the transit and torture of suspected al-Qaeda members (such as Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi). The third pillar is, of course, that the Arab allies have to tether their own populations’ more radical ambitions vis-à-vis Israel. Egypt accepted a US annual bribe of $1.3 billion in order to honor its 1979 peace agreement with Israel, and this has allowed the Israelis to conduct their asymmetrical warfare against the Palestinians and the Lebanese. The fourth pillar is related to the previous three. It is to circumvent what the US State Department calls “Iranian revisionism” against the status quo. The maintenance of these four pillars is a fundamental goal of US foreign policy in the Arab world. Little needs to be said about pillar no. 1. It is the obvious one. The other three are less established.

Oil.

“Middle East oil was as essential to mutual security as atomic warheads.”

—US Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson, National Security Council, July 15, 1960.

Industrial society relies upon oil to power itself, and to derive materials for much of its industrial production (it is a crucial raw material for plastics, for example). The United States is the world’s largest consumer of oil, a fourth of the total, but most of its oil is not from the Middle East. Rather, it gets its oil from the Americas (Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela and domestic production), from Africa (Nigeria and Angola), as well as from Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Reliance upon Middle Eastern oil is a global phenomenon, and its production affects global oil prices—it is not the physical delivery of Middle East oil to the United States that is the issue, simply that the oil must be kept flowing to maintain low oil prices and to enable industrial society to proceed at its exponential pace. It is also an imperative for the private multinational oil corporations who require their protection costs to be borne by the public sector, namely to the US armed forces. That is the reason why the United States, as the world’s largest economy since the 1920s and the world’s most powerful military since at least the 1990s, has become the de facto policeman of the world’s oil supply.

After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the United States pledged through the Carter Doctrine that the defense of the Saudi realm was tantamount to the defense of the United States, and that the full might of the US military would be used to counter any attempt by “any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region.” The “outside force” referred equally to the Soviets and to the Iranians (ironic, considering that the name “Persian Gulf” is given to the waters from the ancestors of the Iranians). The Atlantic powers joined with the Carter Doctrine in principle, knowing full well that the weight of the responsibility would fall on the United States. It had to counter the Soviets and the Iranians, and it would do it with its Gulf allies. The French and the British did not want to get their hands dirty. This was unseemly work.

When Saddam Hussein’s armies invaded Kuwait in 1990, it threatened the delicate balance that the Atlantic powers held over the oil lands. Earlier in that year, Saddam went to claim his prize for going to war against Iran during the 1980s. He went to OPEC to raise the target oil price, to censure Kuwait for lateral drilling into Iraqi oil fields and to suggest that the oil profits no longer be held in dollars. This was unthinkable. On August 10, 1990, US Secretary of State James Baker went to NATO to underscore that the alliance “could not allow any hostile power to gain a stranglehold over its energy resources. Now Saddam Hussein poses just such a threat. Given the central importance of Gulf oil to the global economy, all of us share an interest in thwarting this dictator’s ambitions. We all have a critical stake in this.” Two days later, Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times, “The United States has not sent troops to the Saudi desert to preserve democratic principles. The Saudi monarchy is a feudal regime that does not even allow women to drive cars. Surely it is not American policy to make the world safe for feudalism. This is about money, about protecting governments loyal to America and punishing those that are not and about who will set the price of oil.” No more need be said. America went to war, clobbered Iraq, put in place a garrisoned sanctions regime till 2003, when its armies returned to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Misery came to Iraq because of its oil underfoot.

Arab Friends.

The second pillar is to maintain Egypt as a firm ally in the US-led war on terror. Here the Mubarak regime was not following the United States. It had interests that parallel those of Washington. The secular regime set up by Gamal Abdul Nasser was already at war with political Islam within Egypt. Nasser’s popularity held the Muslim Brotherhood in check. Nasser’s aide, Anwar Sadat, had been the Egyptian military’s liaison with the Muslim Brotherhood since the 1930s. When he took over from Nasser, Sadat tried to outflank the Brotherhood from the right, calling himself the Believer President (al-rais al-mou’min), and bringing the shari’a into the constitution of 1971. Sadat could not complete the job. The Islamists killed him in 1981.

Sadat’s successor, Mubarak, also tried to dance with the Islamists, but was not successful. In 1993, Mubarak picked a career military man, General Omar Suleiman, to run his internal security department, the Mukhabarat el-Aama. Two years later, Mubarak was to go to a meeting in Addis Ababa. Suleiman insisted that an armored car be flown to Ethiopia. Suleiman sat beside Mubarak when the Islamist gunmen opened fire on the car. The armor saved them. Mubarak signed legislation that made it a crime to even sympathize with Islamism, and his regime built five new prisons to fill with Brotherhood members. Some of these prisons became the torture chambers after 9/11 run by Suleiman on behalf of the CIA. Mubarak and Suleiman matched Bush and his clique in their hatred of the Brotherhood, as has been shown by Lisa Hajjar at al-Jazeera. They were natural allies.

But Egypt’s willingness to be a partner had been strained by the Iraq War. In 2008, Ambassador Margaret Scobey worried that Egypt’s eagerness had flagged. “The Egyptians have lost confidence in US regional leadership. They believe that the US invasion of Iraq was an unmitigated disaster that has unleashed Iranian regional ambitions and that the US waited far too long to engage in Arab-Israeli peacemaking efforts.” Ambassador Scobey worried in a diplomatic cable leaked by WikiLeaks that “Egypt’s aging leadership” was averse to change. Defense Minister Field Marshall Mohammed Hussein Tantawi had been in office since 1991, and he had “been the chief impediment to transforming the military’s mission to meet emerging security threats.” Mubarak “is in solid health,” she wrote, and would run and win in the 2011 election. “Despite incessant whispered discussions, no one in Egypt,” she noted, “has any certainty about who will eventually succeed Mubarak.”

The US had long considered Omar Suleiman to be the best bet. In 2006, the Cairo Embassy wrote, “Our intelligence collaboration with Omar Soliman [sic] is now probably the most successful element of the relationship.”

Suleiman saw Iran under the hood of every Brotherhood car. In 2009, he met General David Petraeus in Cairo. Ambassador Scobey wrote a note back to the State Department on July 14. “Soliman [sic] stressed that Egypt suffers from Iranian interference, through its Hezbollah and Hamas proxies, and its support for Egyptian groups like Jamaat al-Islamiyya and the Muslim Brotherhood,” she wrote. “Egypt will confront the Iranian threat, he continued, by closely monitoring Iranian agents in Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and any Egyptian cells.” This was music to the ears of the Washington Hawks. Suleiman was a reliable upholder of Pillar no. 2.

Wisner’s visit to Cairo was not idiosyncratic. It was to put some stick about in the Arab World’s most important capital, Cairo. If Mubarak had to go, then Mubarak’s regime had to remain in place and the public outcry had to be slowly silenced. The Egyptian military, well-funded by the US, came in to do the work, but it had to be pressured. State Department Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Bill Burns and National Security Council’s Senior Director David Lipton hastily traveled to Cairo. They needed to shore up people like Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, the head of Egypt’s Higher Military Council (and later the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the SCAF). When the Tahrir Square protests began, Mubarak sent Tantawi to Washington to seek support for his regime, and for anti-riot equipment. Tantawi was an old war-horse of the Mubarak regime, and in 2008 the US State Department said of him that he wanted to make sure that the US would not “reduce military assistance to Egypt in the future.” He is committed, in other words, to the US-Egypt alliance, which means to the dispensation with Israel (the cable from the Cairo embassy said that Tantawi is “frozen in the Camp David paradigm,” good news for Tel Aviv).

Israel’s Supremacy.

The third pillar of US foreign policy in the region is to protect Israel. Israel has faced no existential threat since the 1973 war, when Egypt’s powerful army took it on. The Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979 allowed Israel to pivot its entire security strategy to face off against much weaker actors, such as Lebanon and the Palestinians. Egypt’s withdrawal has allowed Israel to exert itself with overwhelming force against the Palestinians, in particular. As well, Egypt’s volte-face in 1979 allowed Israel to reduce its defense spending from 30% of its Gross National Product to 7% of its GNP.

As part of this deal, the United States has provided each country with a large bursary each year over the past thirty years: Israel receives about $3 billion and Egypt receives $1.5 billion. Most of this money goes toward the military and security services of these two allies. The US subvention and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty create an exaggerated asymmetry between the Israeli armed forces and the Palestinian fighters.

Protests in Egypt, with the Muslim Brotherhood as part of the action, sent a tremor through Tel Aviv’s establishment. If a new government came to power with the Brotherhood in alliance, this might lead to the abrogation of the 1979 treaty. If this were to occur, Israel would once again be faced with the prospect of a hostile Egypt, and its Goliath stance against the Palestinians would be challenged.

In 2008, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak visited the Egyptian leadership in Cairo. When his team returned to Tel Aviv, his adviser David Hacham debriefed the US embassy’s Luis G. Moreno. Hacham said that the team was “shocked by Mubarak’s appearance and slurred speech.” They talked about Iran and Mubarak and Barak agreed, “Israel and Egypt have a common strategic interest in stopping the expansion of Iranian influence in the region, as well as a common view of the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program.” Then, strikingly, Moreno wrote a parenthetical note, “We defer to Embassy Cairo for analysis of Egyptian succession scenarios, but there is no question that Israel is most comfortable with the prospect of Omar Soliman [sic].”

If Suleiman took the reins, in other words, the third pillar of US interests would remain stable.

The actions of US foreign policy have not progressed much from the inclinations of Teddy Roosevelt. In 1907, he wondered if “it is impossible to expect moral, intellectual and material well-being where Mohammedanism is supreme.” The Egyptians were “a people of Moslem fellahin who have never in all time exercised any self-government whatever.” This was disingenuous. Roosevelt knew of course that the British ruled over Egypt. The Egyptians rose in revolt in 1881 under Ahmed Arabi against the Khedive (the British puppet Twefik Pasha), and once more in Alexandria in 1882. These rebellions, or the urge for self-government, were interpreted cynically by the British as its opposite: a reason to stay, to tame the passions of the population. The British would withdraw, the Foreign Office wrote, “as soon as the state of the country and the organization of the proper means for the maintenance of the khedivial authority will admit it.” This promise was repeated almost verbatim sixty-six times between the early 1880s and 1922. It was Nasser who tossed them out in the 1950s. Roosevelt threw in his lot with the British consul, Lord Cromer. Cromer, he said, “is one of the greatest modern colonial administrators, and he has handled Egypt just according to Egypt’s needs.” This is what Omar Suleiman said in those February days, that Egypt is too immature for democracy in the Enlightenment sense. Wisner whispered just this nonsense in his ear when he was in Cairo.

Tahrir Square burst with enthusiasm and resilience on February 8. The US hastily told the Egyptian authority to make a few more concessions. Anything would do as long as the three pillars remained intact. Joe Biden called Suleiman and told him to make “immediate, irreversible progress.” The US and Israel wanted Suleiman to take the reins at least four years ago. The protests simply hastened the script. The people of Egypt wanted to write a new play. But Suleiman was not to their taste. He had to be jettisoned. It was Suleiman who announced that Mubarak was to leave, and as Vice President he hoped to step into his shoes, to be Mubarak II. It was not to happen. The next day, the Armed Forces Supreme Council, led by General Tantawi, took over. Suleiman was not a member. He had to retire.

Matters were not so easily left to chance. In late February, much to the consternation of the Israelis, General Tantawi’s military council allowed an Iranian frigate, the Alvand, to use the Suez Canal for the first time since 1979. More surprises were to follow. Tantawi chose as foreign minister a very conventional figure, Nabil Elaraby, who has worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs since the 1970s (he was ambassador to India in the 1980s). In this period, Elaraby led the legal team to Camp David (1978) and to the Taba Conference (1985–89) to settle the terms of the Egyptian-Israeli peace. Nonetheless, right after the February ouster of Mubarak and the entry of Elaraby into office, the old legal advisor sought out Hamas and began to talk about a new strategy for Egyptian-Palestinian relations. Some of this was driven by the role of Kefaya, one of the core organizations of the Tahrir protests whose own roots are in the Palestinian solidarity work during the second intifada of 2000. One outcome of the talks was the freeing up of restrictions on the Rafah Border Crossing between Egypt and Gaza on May 28. There is pressure on the parties that are now part of the political class to revoke the peace agreement and to pressure Israel to forge a lasting peace with those whom they should really be talking to, the Palestinians. Absent a genuine dialogue, the Egyptian people released their frustrations with the 1979 treaty on the Israeli embassy in Cairo in September 2011. Such a move is obviously detrimental to peace, and a violation of the sanctity of diplomacy. Nevertheless, it revealed an Egyptian public whose views on Israel have been suffocated by the enforced peace deal. There is little public support for the 1979 peace deal, and whatever patience existed in Cairo vaporized when Israel conducted its campaign to prevent the Palestinians from taking their case to the United Nations in late September.

Money and threats from Washington fall daily on Tantawi’s head. The direction of the Egyptian revolution in the future will have to settle this central question of the core pillar of Atlantic stability in the region, Israel.

The character of the settler-colonial Israeli state and its security are certainly under threat. If it is to be a Jewish State and yet not make a comprehensive and real deal toward the creation of a Palestinian State, it is fated to be mired in a fatal demographic contradiction: by 1976, in the Koenig Memorandum, it was clear that there was going to be an increase in the Arab population (now about 20%) and a flattening or even decrease in the Jewish population (hence the insistence on bringing into Israel the Russian Jewish migrants and others from the Diaspora). The only way to seal off a Jewish State, for those who are so inclined, is to ensure that the Palestinians have their own state. But that is not going to happen unless Israel concedes certain fundamental demands, namely questions of security for the new Palestinian State and reasonable borders. Unless Israel is willing to allow certain demands for the creation of Palestine, it is going to run up against a serious threat to the character of Israel as a Jewish State, as the Koenig Memo made clear. Israel is unwilling to grasp this contradiction. Its elites are in denial. They think that the security (or military) solution is going to be adequate to preserve their hopes. These are rancid, particularly if the non-violent mass demonstrations like those in the first Intifada begin again.

The Arab Spring has provoked three new elements in the Palestinian struggle: first, a surface political unity between Hamas and Fatah; second, the nonviolent protests on the Israeli-Syrian border; third, the push by the Palestinians to go to the United Nations General Assembly and ask for a formal declaration of statehood. The nonviolent protests are a real threat to Israel. In February 2010, Israel’s military chief Amos Gilad told the US embassy in Tel Aviv, “We don’t do Gandhi very well.” If more peaceful protests continue, the Israeli Defense Force warned that they would turn to harsher techniques (given the IDF’s track record, one wonders what would be harsher than firing into crowds). It was to undercut this that President Obama tried to offer a concession, the declaration of a state of Palestine based on the 1967 border, with swaps to preserve Israel’s sense of security. Obama wanted to make a few modest concessions to circumvent the Palestinian positive dynamic (it would look appalling in the context of the Arab Spring for the US to have to wield its veto against the Palestinians in the Security Council). Netanyahu had none of this. He chose to hold fast, believing that the US had to follow his lead as long as Israel remains a major pillar of the old order in the West Asia and North Africa. He was not wrong. The US has a hard time pulling itself away from the most outrageous positions taken by Israel in its dealings with its neighbors, and with the Palestinians. If these three new elements (the unity of the political forces, the nonviolent protests, and the move to the UN) continue, it is going to make things very difficult for the Israelis and for the US—they have gotten used to Hamas’ rockets, which are easy to manipulate. It is much harder to legitimize what Baruch Kimmerling calls the “politicide” of the Palestinians because of peace marches toward the Israeli line of control.

Over the question of the Palestinian case to the UN, the pillars of stability rub against each other. The United States fought off a bid by the Palestinians to make their case before the UN Security Council. The Israelis won that gambit. UNESCO accepted the Palestinian Authority as a full member, and the United States declined to honor its fiscal contributions to the cultural agency. To rebuke the Palestinian state rebukes the Arab Spring. To do so also threatens the viability of the other pillars of stability, such as the Saudi monarchy. Hence, in the tumult over the UN vote, Prince Turki al-Faisal wrote in the New York Times (September 12), if the US did not support the Palestinians it would lose Saudi Arabia. “With most of the Arab world in upheaval,” he wrote, “the ‘special relationship’ between Saudi Arabia and the United States would increasingly be seen as toxic by the vast majority of Arabs and Muslims, who demand justice for the Palestinian people.” If Saudi Arabia remained a pillar of stability, it would lose its own people. If the United States abandoned Israel, it would gain Saudi friendship and it would have an opportunity to “contain Iran and prevent it from destabilizing the region.” This is a dilemma: it gave the White House sleepless nights.

By August 2011, Israel was in ferment. The pathways along Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv were packed with Israelis furious at their government for its refusal to engage with their real lives. Inflation and a housing crisis dogged the lives of Israelis, and following the example of Egypt, they convened in their squares, manifesting their discontent. Netanyahu had bragged during the high point of the Arab Spring that such events could not take place in Israel, the “only democracy in the Middle East.” Musician Noy Alooshe’s video took that line about the world shaking and remixed it with images of crowds in Tel Aviv shouting with the spirit of the Spanish indignados, “The People Want Social Justice.” Shake Bibi Shake, goes the video, a sort of Ibiza on the Rothschild Blvd. There was no indication that these protests had more than economic goals. There was no link between the unemployment question and the permanent warfare state. There was no open frustration with a government that is keen to bash Palestinians on the head and call that governance. If Israeli political life is able to cleave out a genuine dynamic against its settler-colonial situation, this pillar of stability might make its own accommodation with its neighbors.

Encircle Iran.

Geopolitical ambitions easily overcame any dedication to values of human dignity. Political scientists whose writings are legible to Washington bureaucrats have long divided the Middle East along a simple cardinal line: the status quo powers and the revisionist powers. The status quo powers are those who enable the imperial interests of the Euro-American capitals, and the revisionists are those who threaten these interests.

From 1952 to 1979, the principle status quo power in the Middle East was Iran, with the Shah as the bastion of Progress against the revisionism of the Arab renaissance, under the star of Nasser. Nasser’s Free Officers coup of 1952 sent a tremor through the Arab world. The creation of the United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria) in February 1958 pushed Lebanon into almost terminal civil chaos in May, and in July the Iraqi Free Officers overthrew their feeble king. Inside the palaces of Saudi Arabia, the Free Princes formed a battalion to diminish the autocracy of King Saud. The fusion of Egypt with Syria was not a progressive action in itself. It was done, largely, to eliminate the dynamic Communist Party and the pro-Communist General Afif al-Bizri. The anti-Communism of Nasser was not sufficient to ingratiate him with the bureaucrats in Washington. They despised his anti-imperialism, and later, his unrelenting position on Israel. To be a status quo power, then, was to be a defender of the interests of Washington and London (with Paris in tow) and to be an ally of Israel’s erratic strategy for its singular objective. The Shah of Iran stood fast against Nasserism.

A geo-political earthquake tore open the foundation of this map. The first event took place in 1973, when the Yom Kippur War turned out to be a fiasco for the Arab states. Sadat had already turned his back on Nasser’s economic and political policies in 1971; foreign investment was being courted and Egypt’s constitution adopted a more Islamic tone. Now, Sadat turned tail for Camp David in March 1979, where he accepted an annual American bribe for a peace treaty with Israel. Sadat took home the Nobel Peace Prize, which went on the altar of the new dispensation. A few months before Sadat went to Camp David, his friend Reza Pahlavi, the deposed Shah of Iran, arrived at Assuan, Egypt to begin his long exile around the world before he returned to Egypt’s Al-Rifa’i mosque to be buried. The Shah’s departure from Iran and Sadat’s return from Camp David set in motion the new alliances. Washington now saw Iran under the Mullahs as the leading revisionist power. The bulwark for the United States and Israel was now Sadat’s Egypt and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which was hastily sent off with a pot of money to begin hostilities against Iran (the war lasted from 1980 to 1988, with little territorial gain but a massive loss of life and treasure).

Washington’s steady ally before and after this cataclysmic shift was of course Saudi Arabia, and its satellite Gulf emirates. The Saudis’ deal with the US goes back to the 1950s, when the steady stream of oil from the Gulf lanes to the gas stations of the heartland was guaranteed as long as the US pledged to protect the shaky monarchies from their hostile neighborhood, and their often hostile populations (by the Saudi Arabian National Guard, heavily armed and often trained by the United States). Nasserism came into the palaces with the Free Princes, who were ejected to exile in Beirut. Then, after 1979, an older danger threatened the Royals. The working-class in eastern Saudi Arabia and in the cities that run from Kuwait to Muscat along the eastern rim of the peninsula are mainly Shi’a. Oil worker protests in Qatif (also called Little Najaf, the religious city in Iraq) date back to the emergence of the oil industry in the Kingdom. In 1979, after the Iranian Revolution, the workers in the area again went out on strike, but were beaten back ferociously. The New York Times did not complain. It was as it should be.

Since 1979, any attempt to move a democratic agenda forward in the Arab world has been tarred with the brush of Iranianism, what is generally called “Islamic fundamentalism.” It is not Islam or autocracy that worries the planners of the World Order. If that were the case, they should be apoplectic about the Saudi monarchy, whose Sharia laws would make the Iranian mullahs blush. What drives Langley and The Harold Pratt House crazy is the issue of Iranian influence, and so of the revision of the power equation in the Middle East. These intellectual bureaucrats stretched the short, tight skin of Shi’ism over the gigantic body of the Arab world. Hamas and Hezbollah are treated as Iranian mailboxes in Palestine and Lebanon respectively.

The Iranian Revolution certainly gave the historically oppressed Shi’a population of the Arabian Peninsula courage to call for self-respect. Eager to live dignified lives, these populations took refuge in religious organizations that provided them with a framework to make their call for dignity comprehensible. Bahrain’s al-Wefaq National Islamic Society is, as a US State Department cable candidly noted (September 4, 2008), neither a fundamentalist nor a sectarian party, but it “continues to demand a ‘true’ constitutional monarchy in which elected officials make policy decisions, the prime minister is accountable to the parliament, and the appointed upper house loses its legislative power.” These are elementary, civic claims. But they cannot be honored because they come from al-Wefaq against the power of a King who allows the US to base its Fifth Fleet in his archipelago, and who is fiercely against Iran. It is far easier to tar parties like al-Wefaq as Iran’s proxies, and to categorize the simple demands of the people for dignity as “the Shia revival” (as Vali Nasr does in his 2006 blockbuster, The Shia Revival).

The uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere threw the geo-political equation into disarray. If Hosni Mubarak looked out of his villa in Sharm el-Sheikh a few days after his arrival there, he would have seen two Iranian vessels (a frigate and a supply ship) power around the bend at Ras Mohammed, up the Gulf of Suez and cross into the Mediterranean Sea through the Canal. These two “war ships” docked in Syria on February 24. That Egypt allowed the Iranians to use the Canal for the first time since the 1979 revolution threatened the architecture of US power in the region.

Alireza Nader, of RAND, told the New York Times, “I think the Saudis are worried that they’re encircled—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon; Yemen is unstable; Bahrain is very uncertain.” The US war in Iraq handed the country over to a pro-Iranian regime. In late January, the Hezbollah-backed candidate (Najib Mikati) became Prime Minister of Lebanon, and Hamas’ hands were strengthened as the Palestinian Authority’s remaining legitimacy came crashing down when al-Jazeera published the Palestine Papers. Ben Ali and Mubarak’s exile threw Tunisia and Egypt out of the column of the status quo states. Libya’s Qaddafi and Yemen’s Saleh have been loyal allies in the War on Terror. Their fall was preordained.

As the status quo withered, its loyal dogs tried out the old chant about the threat of Islamic Fundamentalism. Mubarak’s chorus about the Muslim Brotherhood was off key. When Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi returned from his exile in Qatar, he did not play the part of Khomeini. The Sheikh opened his sermon in Tahrir Square with a welcome to both Muslims and Christians. Qaddafi’s shrieks about a potential al-Qaeda in the Maghreb being formed in the eastern part of Libya repeated the paranoid delusions of the AFRICOM planners. Bahrain’s Hamad al-Khalifa hastened to kiss the hem of King Abdullah’s substantial jalabiya, and to plot together about the Shi’a challenge to the Sunni monarchs. They wished to convert their sectarian histrionics onto their dissenting populations, but al-Wefaq’s Khalil Ibrahim al-Marzooq quickly warned that the Saudis might try to flood Bahrain with the kind of mercenary thugs that they would send into Yemen to disrupt the Marxist republic in the 1970s. He was prescient. This is exactly what happened, as we shall see.

In 2008, during the armed confrontation between the Lebanese government and Hezbollah, the Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal met with the US Ambassador David Satterfield. Saud feared an “Iranian takeover of all Lebanon.” He wanted armed intervention. The Lebanese Armed Forces were not up to the task. Nor was the UN force in south Lebanon, “which is sitting doing nothing.” What was needed was for the US and NATO to provide “naval and air cover” and for an “Arab force” drawn from the “Arab periphery.” It did not come to pass. But the idea percolates on the surface of Riyadh’s palaces.

The Saudis, the anchor of anti-Iranianism, did not believe that the US had the spine to act as it must. The uprisings in Bahrain and Yemen had to be crushed. It would look bad if this was sanctioned in the name of the preservation of the monarchy. Far better to see the protesters as terrorists (as in Yemen) or Iranianists (as in Bahrain). Or even better yet, to turn this largely peaceful wave into a new military confrontation. The hawks of Order had every incentive to enchain the doves of Change.

VI. On the Rim of Saudi

When Ben Ali flew to Saudi Arabia, he brought with him to the peninsula the magic of the wave. That’s where events ran into some trouble. The Saudi monarchy found it intolerable that democracy dare to make its presence felt on its borders. The various sheikhdoms, some that predate the Saudi one (such as Bahrain, 1783 to al-Saud’s 1932), are ideological and practical buffer zones. The idea of the Arab monarchy would be harder to sustain if the only such were in Riyadh, however rich. It becomes easier to point the royal finger toward Manama and Kuwait, to suggest that it is in the temperament of Arabs to be ruled by their royals, or their tribal chiefs. Saudi Arabia was prepared to go to any length to vanquish the protests in Bahrain, which it did with armed force after doing a monumental deal to which we shall return eventually. In Yemen, matters were simplified. There was no need to do a deal to send in troops. The president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, is clever. He played the crowds carefully, holding his own support base together with tribal blandishments and with threats about the fear of the notorious South, once home to Marxism and now, by his lights, home to al-Qaeda. Saleh had two other cards in his pocket: (1) that the Saudis did not want instability on the Peninsula, and besides, after attempting to overthrow him in 1994 they have now come to terms with his rule; (2) that the United States and Saudis are petrified of al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP). Yemen remained on the front pages of the newspapers of the region, and on the inside pages of the Atlantic papers only because of the courage of the Yemeni people. But there was no real pressure for regime change from either Riyadh or Washington. In fact, Saleh was allowed to get away with murder, as the Saudis have in Manama, because there are limits to what Power is willing to concede in the region. Bahrain and Yemen illuminate the manuscript of Imperialism, a concept that many have increasingly come to deny or misrepresent.

Such protests appear unlikely only because the wave of struggle that broke out on the Peninsula in the late 1950s and peaked in the 1970s was crushed by the early 1980s. Encouraged by the overthrow of the monarch in Egypt by the coup led by Nasser, ordinary people across the Arab world wanted their own revolts. Iraq and Lebanon followed. On the peninsula, the people wanted what Fred Halliday called “Arabia without Sultans.” The People’s Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf emerged out of the Dhofar (Oman) struggle. It wished to take its local campaign to the entire peninsula. In Bahrain, its more timid branch was the Popular Front. It did not last long. With Nasserism in decline by the 1970s, the new momentum came to this Arabian republicanism from the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain attempted a coup in 1981. They had the inspiration, but not the organization. This Arab archipelago could not go the way of Yemen, where a revolution allowed a Marxist organization to seize power in 1967. Yemen’s Marxists faced ceaseless pressure from the Saudis, their Yemeni allies and the forces of the Atlantic world. In 1990, with the Soviet Union on the wane, the North (led by Saleh) absorbed the South. It was the peninsula’s Die Wende, the turning point, at about the same time as the two Germanys were united. The pendulum swung in favor of the status quo.

Rumbles have been heard in Saudi Arabia itself over the years. Liberals and Islamists held the center of the opposition to the regime. The former were constrained by threats and material advances, while if the latter were not susceptible to bribes they were sent off to do jihad elsewhere or to contemplate their errors in prison and re-education camps. One has to only look at the kleptocracy that goes by the name Al Saud Inc. to understand the frustrations of the people. Each of the major royals gets a monthly bursary of $270,000 while minor royals get $800 per month (with a bonus of $3 million at marriage and at the construction of a palace). Of the total Saudi budget of $40 billion, $2 billion goes to the core of the al-Saud family itself, who are, the US Embassy in Riyadh complained, “more adept at squandering than accumulating wealth.” Popular revulsion against this kind of expenditure is quite general. As Egypt rumbled, the regime put into place its typical maneuvers. Pre-emptive arrests removed some of the typical culprits. Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz met with Saudi newspaper editors and told them that the events in Egypt were the work of outsiders, a theme familiar to tyrants. His half-brother, the King, hastily opened the family’s treasury and disbursed $36 billion to quell the economic worries. The official opposition formed a platform of unity: it included the Islamic Umma Party (led by ten well-regarded clerics), the National Declaration of Reform (led by Mohammed Sayed Tayib), al-Dusturieen (a lawyers movement led by Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz) and a host of reform websites (such as dawlaty.info and saudireform.com). The Islamic Umma Party’s Abdul Aziz Mohammed al-Wohaibi told the Christian Science Monitor, “We think the royal family is not the only one who has the right to be leader of the country. We should treat the royal family like any other group. No special treatment.” This was heresy.