Contributors – Page 9

Patrick Seale, “The Rise of Political Islam”

October 25, 2011 - Jahan Salehi

Political Islam is making a dramatic comeback right across the greater Middle East. Some in the West will react with alarm at what they see as a dangerous geopolitical upset. Democrats, secularists, feminists, Christians and other religious minorities may fear that a rigid application of the shari‘a, the body of Islamic law, will threaten their freedoms and their way of life. But these fears are almost certainly exaggerated, if not wholly unfounded, at least in most Arab countries.

The triumph at last Sunday’s elections of Tunisia’s leading Islamic party Ennahda(Renaissance) is the latest example of the revival of political Islam in the Arab world. But it is also cause for reassurance. This moderate Islamic party should not be confused with hard-line Salafis, who demand a return to the uncompromising values of early Islam.

Without an absolute majority in the new Constituent assembly, Ennahda cannot rule alone, nor does it intend to do so. It will seek to form a coalition to carry forward its programme of social justice, economic development, and clean government. It has pledged not to erode or claw back the achievements of the past, notably democratic freedoms and women’s rights.

In Libya, however, the interim leader, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, has aroused fears by declaring that “any law violating the shari‘a will be legally null and void.” If this is implemented, it could have an impact on laws of personal status, for women in particular, in such matters as inheritance, divorce and polygamy. But what it will actually mean in practice has yet to be determined.

The rebel forces that stormed and captured Tripoli were led by an Islamist, Abdalhakim Belhadj, battled-hardened in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Tracked by the CIA and Britain’s MI6, he was returned to Libya and tortured for seven years in Abu Salim prison. His attachment to Western interests should not be counted on.

Why have the revolutions of the Arab Spring brought political Islam to the fore? One reason is that, having suffered decades of persecution at the hands of Western-backed Arab autocrats, Islamists now benefit from a mantle of martyrdom. Hamid Jebali, Ennahda’s secretary-general, spent 16 years in prison, including ten in solitary confinement. Rashed Ghannouchi, the party’s spiritual leader, spent 22 years in exile.

In Egypt, Syria, Libya, Algeria and elsewhere, members of Islamic movements have been hounded, jailed, killed and tortured in great numbers, or have simply fled abroad. In Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood has been outlawed since the 1980s. Membership is a capital offense. If there is a change of regime in Damascus, the Islamists, by far the best organised of the opposition movements, are bound to figure prominently.

Another reason for the emergence of political Islam is the poverty and deprivation of a large part of the electorate in most Arab countries, especially those with little or no oil income. Free elections have at last given this under-class a voice. The Islamic parties have long distinguished themselves by their welfare activities in favour of the underprivileged. Of all the political parties, they can justly claim to be closest to the common people.

The Tunisian revolution was not a middle class achievement but was, on the contrary, driven forward by young men and women on the margin of society, bitter at their own unrelenting misery and at the gross corruption of the former ruling elite, especially the plutocrats close to former president Ben Ali and his wife.

There is a striking contrast in Tunisia between what the tourists see — the coastal hotels, restaurants, comfortable villas, well-tarred roads, efficient services and so forth — and the interior of the country, where jobs are scarce, running water a luxury denied to many, medical services virtually non-existent and government indifference a subject of angry complaint.

The same is true of Syria. The rural poor, which have suffered gravely from drought and government neglect, make up the massed ranks of the opposition, while the well-heeled merchant class of Damascus and Aleppo has so far remained loyal to the regime.

Egypt’s Muslim Brothers are expected to do well at next month’s elections. But, like Ennahdain Tunisia, they do not aspire to rule alone. The task of satisfying the economic demands of the great majority of the population is simply too daunting. The Islamists have no ambition to assume the burden alone. They fully realise that there can be no economic miracle which will, overnight, produce the hundreds of thousands of jobs, the affordable housing, student scholarships, low-cost medical services, and efficient public services which the population is clamouring for. Rebuilding the state institutions and the economy in all these countries will be a long and trying process, and many expectations are bound to be disappointed.

Another winning asset of the Islamic movements, however, is that they express, more clearly than their rivals, the frustrated but largely unvoiced ambition of the masses to affirm their Muslim-Arab identity. Most Arabs, with the exception of small Westernised elites, are God-fearing, socially conservative and attached to their traditional way of life. They are unhappy at attempts — which they attribute to outside powers — to impose on them a Western model of society. Islamic parties are the champions of this aspiration — all the way from the Taliban in Afghanistan, to Hamas in Gaza and, in its own way, even to the moderate Ennahda in Tunisia.

The so-called ‘Arab Spring’, therefore, is far more than a revolt against long-entrenched, corrupt and brutal dictators. It is also a rebellion against foreign values — and foreign military intervention. America’s destruction of Iraq and Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians arouse great anger. What the various Islamist movements have in common — whether in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen — is an ambition to satisfy the thirst of the populations for an Islamic version of social justice freed from foreign tutelage.

It needs to be stressed that each country’s experience will be different. Tunisia, where women are among the most emancipated of the Arab world, is not like Libya or Yemen, nor will it be changed radically when Islamist parties come to power. In countries heavily dependent on tourism like Egypt and Tunisia, wide-ranging compromises with the shari‘a are bound to be made. Tourists will not be denied alcohol, belly-dancers or night-clubs.

In Turkey, Prime Minister Erdogan’s Islamic-coloured Justice and Development Party has had to compromise with the strong secular tradition of Ataturk, the Republic’s founder. The result is Turkey’s special brand of democracy. Likewise, Tunisia’s large and educated middle class will be a force with which Ennahda will have to accommodate. In most Arab countries, Islamists will be constrained by the counter-weight of long-established secularists and the need to satisfy foreign investors, donors, tourists and Western governments.

The West wants to see democracy flourish in the Arab world, no doubt to protect its interests. But the locals want jobs, a better future for themselves and their families, a fairer distribution of the country’s resources, an end to corruption and police brutality. They want good governance and a respect for their traditions rather than Western- style democracy or Western interference.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).

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Released: 25 October 2011

Word Count: 1,177

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Patrick Seale, “Destabilising the Middle East”

October 18, 2011 - Jahan Salehi

The U.S. Government’s excitable accusation that Iran paid a Mexican drug dealer to blow up the Saudi ambassador in a Washington restaurant adds a further destabilising factor to an already dangerously unstable Middle East. It moves the interminable U.S.-Iranian quarrel one step closer to an armed conflict and it fans into flame the latent antagonism between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

A U.S.-Iranian war would have potentially devastating consequences for the region, for the United States and the world. The smaller Gulf States, several of them home to large U.S. military bases, would find themselves in the line of fire. Their spectacular accomplishments of recent decades could be turned to rubble. Attacks against U.S. targets in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere would undoubtedly multiply. The Arab world’s sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shi ‘is, already greatly exacerbated by America’s war in Iraq, would be further increased. For the industrial world, a regional war would immediately disrupt oil supplies, further worsening the current economic crisis.

Not surprisingly, world opinion has reacted with widespread scepticism, even derision, to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder‘s announcement on 13 October of the alleged Iranian plot. Tehran has vigorously denied any connection whatsoever with it. It is, indeed, inherently implausible that Iran would, by means of a terrorist act of no strategic value, risk provoking the U.S. into military retaliation. Most experts agree that the very last thing Iran wants is a war with the United States. The story makes no sense.

If the U.S. government is not to be laughed out of court, it must now produce hard evidence of high-level Iranian implication in the alleged conspiracy. If the plot is no more than an FBI/DEA sting operation which overreached and went wrong, that, too, will need to be candidly examined and explained. If, as some would argue, it is the work of rogue elements in Iran’s Quds Force (a wing of the Islamic Republic Guard Corps which, like U.S. Special Forces, specialises in foreign operations), that, too, will need to be convincingly demonstrated.

In any event, America’s accusations are bound to increase Iran’s paranoid fear that the United States and Israel are planning to attack it, and will therefore drive it to seek deterrence and protection by acquiring a nuclear capability. This is hardly the way to prevent nuclear proliferation. President Barack Obama thus presents the sad spectacle of siding with the war-mongers. He has called for the “toughest sanctions” possible against Iran, as well as repeating the old mantra that “all options remain on the table,” a threadbare reference to military action.

His campaign for re-election has already caused him to woo the Jewish vote by opposing the Palestinians’ bid for UN membership while turning a blind eye to the “Greater Israel” ambitions of Israel’s fanatical settlers. The United States guarantees Israel’s military supremacy over all its neighbours yet is clearly unable to exercise the slightest influence over Israeli policies, even the most extreme. Now – once again perhaps for electoral reasons — Obama has gone a step further by echoing, and seeming to endorse, Israeli threats of military action against Iran.

News of the so-called plot comes at the very time when top Iranian officials — including President Ahmadinejad himself — have called for fresh talks with the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) on Iran’s nuclear programme. That in itself presents a striking contradiction. How could Iran seek talks and yet, at the same time, act in such a way as to make them impossible?

The obvious conclusion would seem to be that the plot was contrived by someone anxious to sabotage the possibility of a U.S.-Iranian dialogue, let alone a compromise over Iran’s nuclear activities. Indeed, the so-called plot reeks of a “false flag” operation — that is to say an operation by a third party deliberately designed to push the United States into conflict with the Islamic Republic.

There are many potential candidates for such a role, all anxious to see the Iranian regime punished. They include Iranian exiles longing to see the mullahs ousted; Lebanese enemies of Hizbullah, whether Sunni or Maronite, many of whom have Latin American connections; opponents of the Iran-backed Syrian regime who believe that Bashar al-Asad would be gravely weakened if the Iranian regime were to fall; American neo-cons itching for war against Iran, the very same people who conned America into war against Iraq; and of course Israel’s Mossad which, by all accounts, is a master at intelligence coups. It is thought to have been responsible for the recent murder of several Iranian nuclear scientists as well as for infecting the computers at Iran’s nuclear power station with toxic viruses such as Stuxnet.

Israel’s right-wing government has spared no effort to demonise Iran’s nuclear programme as a deadly threat to mankind and has been eager to push the United States into destroying it. Israel’s motive is clear. If Iran were it to acquire a nuclear capability, however rudimentary, it would checkmate Israel’s own large arsenal of nuclear weapons, and greatly restrict Israel’s ability to strike its neighbours at will.

Rather than fuelling tensions as Obama is doing, rather than pandering to America’s worst instincts, the wise leader of a superpower should seek to pacify the region, resolve conflicts and cool tempers. Improbable as it may seem, Obama should talk to Iran rather than demonise it; he should devote himself again and again — and this time with more muscle and conviction — to settling the Arab-Israeli conflict, thereby removing a major factor of instability and opening the way for Israel’s peaceful integration into the region; he should seek to calm, rather than inflame, sectarian antagonisms; he should disengage the United States militarily, and as soon as possible, from Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gulf region; and he should halt the counter-productive drone attacks which create more terrorists than they kill and which, under his watch, have brought death and destruction to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

The Middle East needs an end to the imperial ambitions and machinations which have plagued the region since the First World War. Urgently required instead is a massive coordinated international effort to revive the shattered economies of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Syria and the Palestinian territories — and, above all, create jobs. Without jobs, there will be no peace.

The United States is said to be redirecting its efforts to the Far-East in order to contain the rising power of China. The sooner it gives the Middle East a break by turning its attention elsewhere the better.

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Released: 18 October 2011

Word Count: 1,094

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Patrick Seale, “Will Israel Bomb Iran?”

October 11, 2011 - Jahan Salehi

In recent weeks, intense discussions have taken place in Israeli military and intelligence circles about whether or not to launch a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Apparently, the key question in the debate was how to ensure that the United States took part in the attack or, at the very least, intervened on Israel’s side if the initial strike triggered a wider war.

Reports of these discussions have caused considerable alarm in Washington and in a number of European capitals. Some Western military experts have been quoted as saying that the window of opportunity for an Israeli air attack on Iran will close within two months, since the onset of winter would make such an assault more difficult.

Concern that Israel may decide to attack without giving the United States prior warning is thought to be the main reason for the visit to Tel Aviv on 3 October of the U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta. His aim seems to have been to rein in the Israeli hawks.

Amos Harel of the Israeli daily Haaretz summed up Panetta’s message as follows: America is standing by Israel, but an uncoordinated Israeli strike on Iran could spark a regional war. The United States will work to defend Israel, but Israel must behave responsibly.

At his joint press conference with Israel’s Defence Minister Ehud Barak, Panetta said: The United States is “very concerned, and we will work together to do whatever is necessary” to keep Iran from posing “a threat to the region.” But doing so “depends on the countries working together.” He repeated the word “together” several times. In other words, Israel should not act without an American green light.

In recent years, Israel has often threatened to attack Iran. Why has the subject been revived this time? Is Israel worried that Iran is close to acquiring the capability to manufacture a nuclear bomb? Most intelligence experts agree that Iran has not yet made a decision to build nuclear weapons. A more likely Israeli motive is its concern that the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany — the so-called P5+1 — may accept an Iranian offer of renewed talks.

Israel’s greatest fear is that the P5+1 will reach a compromise with Iran which would allow it to continue enriching uranium for civilian purposes. This might then lead in due course to the world agreeing to co-exist with a nuclear Iran. If that were to happen, Israel’s monopoly of nuclear weapons — a key asset in maintaining its regional military supremacy – would be lost.

Iran has, in fact, made several recent overtures to the United States and its allies. When he was in New York last month to attend the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the Washington Post that Iran would stop producing uranium enriched to 20 percent if foreign countries would provide the fuel needed for the Tehran Research Reactor, which makes medical isotopes. Some 850,000 Iranians are said to depend on such isotopes for cancer treatment.

Late last month, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, sent a letter to Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign affairs chief, requesting fresh talks with the P5+1 to try to resolve the longstanding dispute. Yet another overture was made by Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi when, in an interview with Asia Times on 29 September, he said that Iran was “prepared to undertake the necessary efforts to restore mutual confidence, and if there is a specific concern, it should be addressed in talks… We must look for innovative proposals.”

Fereydoun Abbasi, head of Iran’s Atomic Organisation, has invited Yukiya Amano, Secretary-General of the International Atomic Energy Agence (IAEA), to visit Iran and inspect its nuclear facilities. “Our recommendation is that Mr Amano accept this invitation… Today, the situation is that we are again read to consider the fuel swap,” he said. (This was the proposed swap of a large quantity of low-enriched uranium for a small quantity of 20 percent enriched uranium for medical purposes.) Mr Amano’s IAEA board is due to meet in Vienna on November 17-18, a meeting that is keenly awaited.

Several influential voices have been urging the United States to respond positively to Iran’s overtures. “Why not test Iran’s seriousness?” asked Reza Marashi in an article in theHuffington Post on 30 September. Marashi is a former Iran desk officer at the U.S. State Department and is now Director of Research at the National Iranian American Council,

In an article in the International Herald Tribune on 29 September, Charles Ferguson, president of the Federation of American Scientists, and Ali Vaez, director of the Federation’s Iran Project, urged the United States and its allies to take Ahmadinejad at his word. They even suggested that the Western powers should provide Iran with 50 kilograms of fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor as a humanitarian gesture that would buy Washington goodwill with the Iranian people, while curtailing Iran’s enrichment activities.

None of these appeals is likely to be heard. President Barack Obama has collapsed in the face of pressure from powerful pro-Israeli lobbies and a fervently pro-Israeli U.S. Congress. As he is seeking re-election next year, we will hear nothing more of the call he made during his 2008 campaign for the need for diplomacy with Iran.

The danger is that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu may now seek to break out of Israel’s current political isolation by mounting a spectacular attack on Iran. Having lost Turkey and Egypt, and facing a revolt by the international community against his “Greater Israel” ambitions, he may think that the time is ripe to seize the initiative. His calculation may be that a lethal blow against Iran would weaken an already deeply troubled Syria and leave Hizbullah orphaned. Israel would have killed three birds with one stone.

Will Israel seek an American green light if it decides to attack Iran or might Netanyahu believe that Obama, enslaved to Israeli interests, would have no choice but to follow suit?

According to the 6 October edition of TTU, a French intelligence bulletin, the United States and Israel are planning an unprecedented joint land forces exercise next May with the goal of establishing a common “intervention force” ready for action in the event of a major regional war. Admiral James Stavridis, head of Eurocom — America’s European command — paid a recent unpublicised visit to Israel for talks with General Benny Gantz, Israel’s chief of staff. According to TTU, the plan is to set up American command posts in Israel and Israeli command posts in Eurocom. Cooperation between the two powers has rarely been closer.

These are dangerous times in the Middle East.

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Released: 11 October 2011

Word Count: 1,106

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Patrick Seale, “Anwar al-Awlaqi, Yemen, and Obama’s War”

October 4, 2011 - Jahan Salehi

On Friday, 30 September, Yemen announced that a Hellfire missile fired from a CIA-operated drone had killed Shaykh Anwar al-Awlaqi, in the north of the country. His grief-stricken father, once a minister of agriculture in a Yemeni government, went to the scene to collect and bury the pieces of what remained of Anwar’s body. It was the seventh U.S. strike in Yemen this year.

Anwar al-Awlaqi was a virulent critic of American foreign policy in the Arab world, and a passionate advocate of al-Qaida’s form of Islamic jihad. He was also a U.S. citizen, born in New Mexico, with an engineering degree from Colorado State University. His internet sermons, delivered in fluent English, had a devoted following, especially among young Muslims in the West.

His killing inevitably aroused a storm of controversy in the United States about its legality. In an article in The National Interest, Paul R. Pillar, a former senior CIA officer now a university professor, described it as “essentially a long-range execution without judge, jury or publicly presented evidence.” This is a subject which must be left to the Americans to debate.

What are its probable consequences? The most obvious is that it is likely further to inflame some Muslims against the United States, drawing fresh recruits into the jihadist struggle. “Why kill him in this brutal, ugly way?” a member of his Awalik tribe was quoted as saying. “Killing him will not solve the Americans’ problem with al-Qaida. It will just increase its strength and sympathy in this region.”

A key question, therefore, is whether al-Qaida — including its Yemen-based offshoot, “Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula” — is an organisation or a cause. If it is an organisation, killing its leaders must eventually drive it out of business. But if it is a cause, assassinations may have the contrary effect. A ‘martyred’ Awlaqi may prove a more effective recruiting sergeant than he was alive. A young American Muslim cleric, Yasir Qadhi, wrote in the International Herald Tribune on October 3 that “Killing people does not make their ideas go away.”

Awlaqi’s killing has inevitably been compared to that of Osama Bin Laden, shot down last May in his home in Pakistan by a hit-team of U.S. Special Forces. The clandestine mission was seen by many Pakistanis as an intolerable infringement of their country’s sovereignty. The assassination precipitated a grave crisis in U.S.-Pakistan relations. It played into the hands of hard-liners in the Pakistani army and military intelligence service, no doubt causing them to tighten still further their links with jihadi groups, such as the Haqqani network. America’s 10-year war against the Taliban in Afghanistan will thus have been made more perilous and any outcome favourable to the United States more uncertain than ever.

In much the same way as he cheered Bin Laden’s death, U.S. President Barack Obama has hailed Awlaqi’s murder as a major blow to al-Qaida. Many Muslims, however, will see the killing as further evidence that the American President, much like his belligerent predecessor George Bush, is at war with Islam. His slavish support for Israel as it seizes Palestinian land and denies statehood to the Palestinians has aroused great anger. His standing is already close to rock-bottom in the Arab and Muslim world. The killing of Awlaqi will drive another nail in the coffin of what little remains of his reputation.

In an ironic twist of fortune, Dick Cheney, Bush’s war-mongering Defence Secretary, said last weekend that Obama should apologise to Bush for criticising the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ — such as water-boarding — inflicted on al-Qaida suspects, since Obama was himself now resorting to even more robust methods!

The United States is deeply unpopular in Yemen. The divide can be traced to the American-sponsored war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. It will be recalled that, with the help of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the United States recruited, trained and armed tens of thousands of young Muslims from several Arab countries to fight the ‘godless’ Russians in Afghanistan. Some 25,000 of these mujahidin — volunteer fighters in the cause of Islam — came from Yemen alone. Many thousands more came from Algeria, Egypt and elsewhere.

But when the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, the United States callously dropped the mujahidin. Funding for them dried up. A number of these battle-hardened and radicalised ‘Afghan Arabs’ joined Bin Laden’s al-Qaida. Thousands made their way home to Yemen, where they were treated as heroes — at least at first. Some were given jobs in the civil service and the army.

A year later, in 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. To dislodge him, the U.S. dispatched half a million men to Saudi Arabia in what was to become the First Gulf War. Since Yemen had long had close ties with Saddam’s Iraq, President Ali Abdallah Salih refused to join the American-led coalition. Instead, he advocated an “Arab solution” to the Kuwait crisis. This angered Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States who saw Saddam as a dangerous bully who had to be cut down to size — a task they believed only the United States could do.

Saudi Arabia’s response to Ali Abdallah Salih’s pro-Iraqi policies was to expel close to a million Yemeni migrant workers. Their return home deprived Yemen of indispensable remittances and added to already severe unemployment. Yemen became a failing state. This was the beginning of a long dispute between Yemen and Saudi Arabia — and also of a battle between jihadists and the United States, which continues to this day.

At first, the ‘Afghan Arabs’ were useful to Yemen’s President as he battled former Marxists in South Yemen. But when the jihadists started attacking American targets, they got him into trouble with the United States The former heroes became terrorists.

In December 1992, jihadists bombed the Goldmur Hotel in Aden where U.S. military personnel were staying. In June 1996 they bombed the Khubar Towers in the eastern Saudi town of Dhahran, killing 19 American soldiers. In August 1998, they attacked U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In October 2,000, they blew a hole in the side of the USS Cole in Aden harbour killing 17 U.S. sailors. In November 2002, a missile from a CIA-operated drone killed Shaykh Salim al-Harithi, one of the men involved in the Cole bombing.

By this time, the exploits of these local jihadis had been overshadowed by the devastating assault mounted by their mother organisation on the U.S. heartland — the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.The U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq followed.

Meanwhile, the bitter struggle continues in Yemen, a country now on the verge of collapse. U.S. Special Forces are being sucked further into what looks increasingly like a civil war. The killing of Anwar al-Awlaqi must be seen in this context.

But is it not obvious that external force is a blunt instrument in dealing with what is essentially an internal Yemeni contest? Is it not time for Washington to rethink its policy towards the Arab and Muslim world — as the unfortunate Obama had indeed intended to do, before he was defeated by America’s gung-ho militarists, rabid conservatives, pro-Israeli lobbyists and other assorted Islam-haters?

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Released: 04 October 2011

Word Count: 1,177

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Patrick Seale, “Fiascos of American Foreign Policy”

September 27, 2011 - Jahan Salehi

U.S. President Barack Obama is piling up foreign policy disasters. In at least three areas, crucial for world peace and American interests — Arab-Israel, Afghanistan-Pakistan and Yemen-Somalia — he is pursuing a course which can only be described as foolhardy. The anger and hate towards the United States which he is generating could take a generation to dispel.

His abject surrender to Israel on the Palestine question has shocked a large part of the world and gravely damaged America’s standing among Arabs and Muslims. To court the Jewish vote at next year’s presidential election, he has thrown into reverse the policy of outreach to the Muslim world which he expressed so eloquently in his 2009 Cairo speech. If he is now driven to use America’s veto at the Security Council to block the application of a Palestinian state for UN membership, he will have been defeated by the very forces of racism, Islamophobia, neocon belligerence and Greater Israel expansionism he once hoped to tame.

Obama’s policy in Afghanistan is equally perverse. On the one hand he seems to want to draw the Taliban into negotiations, but on the other some of his army chiefs and senior diplomats want to kill the Taliban first. This is hardly a policy likely to bring the insurgents to the table. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Ryan Crocker, America’s new ambassador to Kabul, actually said that the conflict should continue until more of the Taliban are killed. Who, one wonders, is in charge of U.S. policy?

In a message on the occasion of the Eid at the end of Ramadan, Mullah Muhammad Omar, leader of the Afghan Taliban, seemed to hint at his readiness for a comprehensive negotiation. “Every legitimate option can be considered,” he said, “in order to reach the goal of an independent Islamic regime in Afghanistan.” He urged foreign powers to withdraw their troops “immediately” in order to achieve a lasting solution to the problem. In a gesture to his local opponents, he stressed that the Taliban did not wish to monopolize power and that all ethnicities would participate in a “real Islamic regime acceptable to all the people of the country.”

Should not the United States and its allies respond positively to this message? A conference in Bonn next December is due to review NATO’s war in Afghanistan – a war which seems closer to being lost than won. 25,000 soldiers deserted the Afghan armed services in the first six months of this year because they had lost faith in the Karzai government’s ability to protect them and their families. Coalition troops are due to withdraw their troops by the end of 2014. Might there not be an argument for an immediate offer of negotiation together with a pledge of an earlier withdrawal? It is far from clear what strategic interests, if any, the West is defending in Afghanistan.

The subject is of considerable urgency since America’s counter-insurgency strategy is in real trouble. In July, Ahmad Wali Karzai, President Karzai’s powerful brother, was shot dead in Kandahar. In August, the Taliban attacked the British Council in Kabul. On September 10, a truck packed with explosives killed five people and wounded 77 US troops at a NATO military base south-west of Kabul — the highest injury toll of foreign forces in a single incident in the 10-year war. On 13 September, insurgents staged a 20 hour-long assault on the U.S. embassy and NATO headquarters in the heart of Kabul — supposedly the best protected perimeter in the whole country. And on 20 September, Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of the High Peace Council, was assassinated.

Rabbani, an ethnic Tajik, was charged by Karzai with the task of seeking peace with the Taliban. He seems to have made little or no progress. He was a mujahidin leader in the war against the Soviets in the 1980s, then President of Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996, before he was ousted by the Taliban. He then became a leading figure of the Northern Alliance of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras which fought the Islamists until the Taliban were driven from power by the U.S. invasion of 2001. No one has claimed responsibility for Rabbani’s murder but suspicion has fallen on the Pakistan-backed Haqqani network.

Pakistani has a vital strategic interest in Afghanistan. It wants to keep Indian influence out of a country, which it considers its strategic depth. It suspects Karzai of being in league with India. It would seem to prefer a Taliban-governed Afghanistan to Karzai’s American-backed regime. In any event, Rabbani’s death robs President Karzai of a key ally and strains his relations with Pakistan. It could be a step towards a civil war if no early attempt is made to engage the Taliban.

Now entering its eleventh year — at the colossal cost to the U.S. taxpayer of about $120bn a year — the Afghan war has drained U.S. resources, dangerously undermined the Pakistani state and threatened to destroy the U.S.-Pakistani alliance. Addressing the U.S. Senate in mid-September, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, accused Pakistan’s army and the ISI, the powerful military intelligence service, of being in league with the Haqqani network. By using “violent extremism as an instrument of policy,” Mullen said, Pakistan was undermining the American military effort and jeopardizing the U.S.-Pakistani strategic partnership.

Pakistan’s response was not long in coming. Speaking on the BBC programme The World Tonight on 22 September, General Asad Durani, a former head of the ISI, described U.S.-Pakistan relations as in a state of “low-intensity conflict.” Pakistan should back America’s opponents in Afghanistan, he said if the United States continued drone strikes against targets in Pakistan.

Meanwhile, in their hunt for the Taliban and their supporters, US special forces mount frequent night raids in Afghanistan, such as the one on 2 September which killed Sabar Lal, a wealthy Afghan in his home in Jalalabad. According to press reports, the Americans broke in, handcuffed and blindfolded him and his guests, then took him out on the veranda and killed him. He had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, spent five years in Guantánamo, then built a new life for himself and his family. Clearly this was not enough to allay American suspicions of his links with Islamic militants.

In Yemen and the Horn of Africa, America’s increasing resort to drones, with their inevitable toll of civilian deaths, has enraged the local populations and driven recruits into the arms of the militants. According to the Washington Post, the Obama administration has used CIA-operated drones to carry out lethal attacks against al-Qaida in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The drone program has killed more than 2,000 militants and civilians since 2001.

Is it not time to enquire whether U.S. policy has not created more terrorists than the CIA has managed to kill? Would it not be better if the United States were simply to declare victory in Afghanistan — and indeed in all the other places where its Special Forces operate — bring its troops home as soon as possible and turn its attention to tending the wounds in its own broken society?

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Released: 27 September 2011

Word Count: 1,182

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Patrick Seale, “The Middle East’s New Geopolitical Map”

September 20, 2011 - Jahan Salehi

The Arab Spring is not the only revolution in town. The toppling of dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya; the mounting death toll in Syria and Yemen, where the outcome is still undecided; the revival of long-suppressed Islamic movements demanding a share of power; the struggle by young revolutionaries to re-invent the Arab state — all these dramatic developments have distracted attention from another revolution of equal significance.

It is the challenge being mounted by the region’s heavyweights — Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran — against the hegemony which the United States and Israel have sought to exercise over them for more than half a century.

When David Ben-Gurion declared Israel’s independence on 14 May 1948, he held the view that the country’s security could be assured only if it were militarily stronger than any possible Arab combination. This became Israel’s security doctrine. The desired hegemony was achieved by the prowess of Israel’s armed forces, but also by Israel’s external alliances first with France, then with the United States.

Military superiority won Israel outstanding victories in the 1948 and 1967 wars, a less resounding victory in 1973, still more contentiously by its invasions of Lebanon in 1978, 1982 and 2006, and more reprehensively by its operation of unashamed brutality against Gaza in 2008-9 — to mention only the most significant among a host of other Israeli attacks, incursions and onslaughts against its neighbours over the past several decades.

In its early years, Israel’s hegemony was reinforced by its so-called ‘periphery’ doctrine — its attempt to neutralise the Arabs by concluding strategic alliances with neighbouring non-Arab states such as Turkey and the Shah’s Iran. Its 1979 peace treaty with Egypt also proved a vital asset over the past three decades, since it removed the most powerful country from the Arab line-up.

The collapse of Soviet power in 1989-91 contributed to the Arabs’ disarray, as did the huge success of pro-Israeli Americans in penetrating almost every institution of the American government, whether at state or federal level, most notably the U.S. Congress. The message these advocates conveyed was that the interests of America and Israel were identical and their alliance ‘unshakable.’

Over the past forty years, the United States has provided Israel with sustained political and diplomatic support, as well as massive financial and military assistance, including a guarantee, enshrined in American law, of Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge (QME) – that is to say a U.S. pledge to guarantee Israel’s ability to defeat any challenge from any of its neighbours.

Even 9/11 was turned to Israel’s advantage in convincing American opinion that Palestinian resistance to Israel was terrorism, no different from that which America itself had suffered. There followed George W. Bush’s catastrophic militarisation of American foreign policy, and the invasion, occupation and destruction of Iraq on fraudulent premises, largely engineered by neo-cons such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and their colleagues at the Pentagon and in the Vice-President’s office, concerned above all to remove any possible threat to Israel from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

The United States has sought to protect Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly by harsh sanctions against Iran, because of its nuclear activities, as well as joint U.S.-Israeli sabotage operations, such as the infiltration into Iranian computers of the Stuxnet virus. Washington has turned a blind eye to Israel’s assassination of Iranian scientists, and has followed Israel in demonizing resistance movements such as Hizbullah and Hamas as terrorist organisations.

America’s most grievous mistake, however — the source of great harm to itself, to Israel, and to peace and stability in the Middle East — has been to tolerate Israel’s continued occupation and dispossession of the Palestinians. These policies have aroused intense hate of Israel in the Arab and Muslim world and great anger at its superpower protector.

We are now witnessing a rebellion against these policies by the region’s heavyweights — in effect a rebellion against American and Israeli hegemony as spectacular as the Arab Spring itself. The message these regional powers are conveying is that the Palestine question can no longer be neglected. Israel’s land grab on the West Bank and its siege of Gaza must be ended. The Palestinians must at last be given a chance to create their own state. Their plight weighs heavily on the conscience of the world.

Turkey, long a strategic ally of Israel, has now broken with it. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has denounced it as “the West’s spoilt child.” In a passionate speech in Cairo, he warned Israel that it must “pay for its aggression and crimes.” Supporting the Palestinians in their efforts to gain UN recognition as a state was, he declared, not an option but an obligation.

Prince Turki al Faisal, a leading member of the Saudi Royal family and former intelligence chief, has publicly warned the United States that if it casts its veto against the Palestinian bid for statehood, it risks losing an ally. In a widely-noted article in the International Herald Tribune on 12 September, he wrote that “Saudi Arabia would no longer be able to cooperate with America” in the way it has since the Second World War. The “Special Relationship” between the two countries “would increasingly be seen as toxic by the vast majority of Arabs and Muslims, who demand justice for the Palestinian people.”

Last week, the American-brokered 1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty — a key underpinning of Israel’s regional hegemony — came under open criticism from Egypt itself. The treaty was “not a holy book,” said Egypt’s prime minister, Dr. Essam Sharaf. It would need to be revised. Amr Moussa, the leading candidate for the Egyptian presidency, has called for the treaty’s military annexes to be reviewed so as to allow Egyptian troops to be deployed in Sinai.

As for Iran, denunciation of the United States and Israel can be expected from President Ahmadinejad when he addresses the UN General Assembly in the coming days. The failure to engage with Iran — demonising it as a threat to the whole world, rather than working to incorporate it into the security architecture of the Gulf region — has been one of Obama’s gravest policy mistakes.

Turkey, Iran and Egypt, heirs to ancient civilizations, are thus asserting themselves against what they see as an Israeli upstart. Saudi Arabia, the region’s oil and financial giant, guardian of Islam’s holiest sites, is breaking free from the constraints of the American alliance.

Israel stands accused. Will it heed the message or shoot the messenger? If true to its past form, it might well try to fight its way out of the box in which it now finds itself, further destabilising the region and attracting to itself further opprobrium.

As for the United States, bound hand and foot by Israeli interests, it seems to have abdicated the leading role in the Arab-Israeli peace process it has played for so long — but to so little effect. Disillusion with President Barack Obama is now total. Others must now take up the baton. Many believe the time has come to break the dangerous stalemate with some coercive diplomacy. Will Europe take up the challenge?

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Released: 20 September 2011

Word Count: 1,170

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Patrick Seale, “Egypt’s Next President?”

September 13, 2011 - Jahan Salehi

Amr Moussa, 74, the front-runner in the contest for the presidency of post-revolution Egypt, has called for a renegotiation of the military annexes to the Egyptian-Israel Peace Treaty of 1979.

“The Treaty will continue to exist,” he told me in an exclusive interview on 10 September, “but Egypt needs forces in Sinai. The security situation requires it. Israel must understand that the restrictions imposed by the Treaty have to be reviewed.”

Amr Moussa was speaking in Geneva a day after delivering the keynote address at the annual conference of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a leading London-based think tank.

Under the Peace Treaty — signed in Washington on 26 March 1979 by President Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel, and witnessed by U.S. President Jimmy Carter — the Sinai Peninsula, captured by Israel in the 1973 war, was returned to Egypt. In return, Egypt agreed to its demilitarization.

Last January, when protests first erupted against former President Husni Mubarak, leading to his downfall eighteen days later on 11 February, Israel allowed Egypt to move a few hundred troops into Sinai — for the first time since the treaty was signed 32 years ago. Egypt deployed two battalions, about 800 soldiers, in the Sharm el-Sheikh area on Sinai’s southern tip, far away from Israel. But, in calling for a revision of the military annexes, Amr Moussa clearly has something more radical in mind.

The Egyptian revolution has led to acute tension between Egypt and Israel, and to great concern in Israel and Washington about the future of the Peace Treaty. By removing Egypt from the Arab line-up, the Treaty gave Israel three decades of military hegemony in the region. For the Arabs it was a disaster. It exposed them to Israeli aggressions, such as the repeated invasions of Lebanon, the siege and invasion of Gaza, and the relentless seizure of Palestinian land on the West Bank..

On the night of Moussa’s address to the IISS in Geneva, protesters in Cairo stormed the Israeli embassy. The ambassador and his staff fled to Israel. Egyptian opinion was outraged by the killing on 18 August of five Egyptian policemen by Israeli forces inside Egyptian territory, north of the Egyptian town of Taba and the Israeli town of Eilat. The policemen died when Israeli forces crossed the border in pursuit of militants who had attacked Israeli vehicles on the road to Eilat, killing eight Israelis.

“Israel made a great mistake when the Egyptian revolution erupted,” Mussa told me. “It claimed that the revolution had nothing to do with Palestine. I said: ‘Just wait!’ Israel is playing havoc with the stability of the Middle East because it doesn’t appreciate the extent of the changes sweeping the region. It thinks it can go back to business as usual. This is impossible.

“Palestinians are right to seek recognition of their statehood at the United Nations this month. They have no other option. No other offer has been made to them. The peace process is dead. The time has come for the European powers to understand that keeping Palestine on the back burner has been a grave strategic mistake.

“All European states should support the Palestinian move. One cannot close all doors to the Palestinians and expect them to submit. They will not.”

Amr Moussa’s views are important because he stands a strong chance of being elected President of Egypt next year. Other leading contenders are Muhammad ElBaradei, 70, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Abdel-Muneim Abul-Futuh, 60, a medical doctor, with a long history of opposition to the Mubarak regime, who is thought to be a member of the moderate wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. ElBaradei is admired by educated young people, but he has spent much of the past 35 years out of Egypt and can have little first-hand knowledge of Egypt’s domestic problems. As for Dr Abul-Futuh, there is some doubt whether the Muslim Brotherhood would want one of its members to assume responsibility for the awesome task of tackling Egypt’s immense economic and social problems. Depending how they fare at the coming parliamentary elections, when it is estimated they might win 30 to 40 per cent of the vote, the Muslim Brotherhood may prefer the premiership to the presidency, or might even be content with two or three ministries.

Amr Moussa could be a strong president, acceptable to a wide range of opinion. He is known to prefer a presidential to a multi-party parliamentary system of government, which he fears might result in weak, short-lived coalition governments. In standing for President, he has said that he will seek only a single four-year term.

He was not a member of Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party, nor was he part of the corrupt elite around the former president and his son. He has a reputation for probity and for understanding Egypt’s grave domestic problems. As he told the IISS in his keynote address, 50% of Egyptians live in poverty, while 30% are illiterate. The country has to be rebuilt. He is confident it can be done.

He has had extensive international experience having been Egypt’s representative at the UN from 1981 to 1983 and again from 1986 to 1990, before serving as Egypt’s foreign minister for ten years from 1991 to 2001, and then as secretary-general of the Arab League for another ten years from 2001 to 2011. He opposed the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and has been a consistent critic of Israel’s occupation and dispossession of the Palestinians. The Arab League under his direction approved NATO’s operations against Qadhafi’s regime in Libya.

Last April, Moussa called for a No Fly Zone over Gaza to protect it from Israeli bombardment. Israel’s Operation Cast Lead — its brutal assault on Gaza in December-January 2008-9, which killed some 1,500 Palestinians and caused immense material damage — did a great deal to undermine its relations with both Egypt and Turkey, the two major powers of the region with which it used to enjoy close relations. Many Egyptians are profoundly ashamed that Mubarak, their former president, colluded with Israel in the prolonged siege of Gaza.

Amr Mousa would not be a belligerent President. He wants a settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict on a win-win basis, as proposed in the Arab Peace Initiative. He advocates setting up a regional security system, to include both Israel and Iran on the basis of a WMD (weapons of mass destruction) free zone. His vision is of a new, vigorous, stable and peaceful Middle East. ‘The people cannot stand being robbed of their future any longer,’ he says.

Amr Moussa is a profoundly reasonable and moderate statesman. So is Mahmud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, who is seeking UN recognition for a Palestinian state. If Israel wants long-term security and full acceptance into the region, it should heed their views.

As Amr Moussa told me last weekend, there is a popular consensus in the Arab world that the Palestine question must be dealt with properly and fairly. “If this does not happen, things will turn ugly,” he said with great emphasis.

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Released: 13 September 2011

Word Count: 1,184

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Patrick Seale, “America’s Terrible Decade”

September 6, 2011 - Jahan Salehi

After the massive violence and killings of the past decade — in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also in Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere — the tenth anniversary of 9/11 next Sunday might be a suitable moment to take stock.

A good place to start might be to try to understand the motives of the men who flew the hijacked planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Why did Muhammad Atta and his al-Qaida colleagues feel such intense hatred for America that they were prepared to sacrifice their lives in order to punish it?

The American response to the devastating attacks on its heartland was, alas, wholly predictable. The trauma was so painful that the overwhelming instinct of most Americans was not to understand the terrorists but to kill them. The outrage was so great that it blanked out the need to ask further questions.

But ten years have passed and the catastrophic consequences for America and the world of George W. Bush’s belligerent response to 9/11 are now clear for everyone to see. It may, therefore, be useful to probe the motives of the attackers if only to enquire whether a change of Western policies might not be necessary to prevent a similar attack happening again.

What were the origins of Al-Qaida? This militant Muslim group was a product of the proxy war the United States and the Soviet Union fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s. In league with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the United States recruited, armed and trained tens of thousands of Muslims to fight the Soviets. Young men, attracted by the opportunity to wage jihad against the godless Russians, by the manly adventure and also no doubt by the money, were drawn into the conflict from a great belt of countries stretching from Central Asia to Algeria. Yemen alone provided some 25,000 of these volunteer fighters in the cause of Islam, which came to be known as the mujahidin.

Not only did America’s secret war expel Soviet forces from Afghanistan, it also contributed mightily to bringing down the whole Soviet system in 1989-91. It was the final decisive battle of the Cold War.

America’s mistake was to abandon the mujahidin, once they were no longer needed. Thoughtlessly, it dropped them. Funding dried up. Thousands of alienated and jobless youths, often unwanted back in their own countries, turned against their own governments, as in Algeria and Yemen for example, creating mayhem. Some turned violently against the United States. Their names and personal details had been entered into the data-base of a fervent opponent of the Soviets: Osama Bin Laden. The creation of al-Qaida was a direct result of America’s war to destroy Soviet power in Afghanistan.

Some of the mujahidin then turned also against Saudi Arabia, their former paymaster, particularly when the Kingdom in 1991 invited half a million U.S. soldiers on to its territory — a territory Muslims consider ‘sacred’ — to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. The First Gulf War was a highly controversial affair. Many Muslims were outraged by the destruction of Iraqi forces, as well as by the punitive sanctions imposed on Baghdad after the conflict, which were said to have resulted in the death of half a million Iraqi babies.

But these were not the only reasons for al-Qaida to hate America. Another compelling reason was America’s blind support for Israel as it continued to oppress and dispossess the Palestinians.

After Kuwait was freed, President George H.W. Bush, the 41st U.S. President, did make an attempt to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict on the basis of the old principle of land-for-peace. He advised Israel to abandon its expansionist policies, freeze settlement-building and give the Palestinians a chance to build a state of their own. With these ambitious aims, he convened a peace conference at Madrid in 1991, arousing Arab hopes that America could truly be an honest broker.

But Yitzhak Shamir, Israel’s hard-line Prime Minister at the time, was not only determined to continue settlement-building. He also demanded that the United States give Israel $10 billion in loan guarantees to absorb more Jewish immigrants. As George H. W. Bush collapsed under pressure from Israel and its American friends, Shamir got his way.

Pro-Israeli lobbies then contributed to Bush’s subsequent defeat by Bill Clinton at the 1992 presidential elections. Subservience to Israel undoubtedly contributed to stoking the fires of hatred for the United States.

When America was shaken to the core by the attacks of 11 September 2001, an Israeli politician like Benyamin Netanyahu immediately recognised that the strikes against America were “good for Israel.” It allowed hard-line Israelis like him to say that the Palestinians were terrorists exactly like the ones who had attacked America. Israel and the United States were in the same boat, Netanyahu argued — victims of Islamic terror! The poison of Islamophobia spread throughout America and infected several European countries as well. It is no accident that the monstrous Norwegian killer, Anders Behring Breivik, has declared an unbounded love for Israel and its anti-Palestinian policies.

When Barack Obama assumed office on January 20, 2009, as the 44th President of the United States, he knew what needed to be done. He had to throw off George W. Bush’s disastrous legacy and chart a new course. One of his very first acts was to appoint George Mitchell as his Middle East envoy charged with re-launching the moribund Arab-Israeli peace process by insisting on a freeze of Israeli settlement-building. In Cairo on 4 June 2009, Obama pledged that the United States was not, and would never be, at war with Islam — words which awakened immense hope throughout the Muslim world.

But that hope has given way to an equally immense disillusion. Obama has failed to rescue America from the baleful influence of the pro-Israeli neo-cons and other fanatical and deluded conservatives. He has been defeated by Netanyahu and by America’s pro-Israeli lobbies even more resoundingly than George Bush Senior was defeated by Yitzak Shamir a generation earlier.

Instead of a new beginning, Obama has had to assume Bush’s terrible legacy as his own: U.S. military operations continue to kill or displace Muslims in large numbers in different parts of the world; men and resources continue to be squandered on unwinnable wars (according to Noam Chomsky, the Iraq and Afghan wars have cost the U.S. $4.4 trillion); the shameful prison at Guantánamo remains open.

Meanwhile, Israel’s land-grab in the Palestinian territories continues unchecked. America’s inability to rein in its tiny Israeli ally is one of the wonders of international politics. Seeing their country being gobbled up before their eyes, the despairing Palestinians are this month planning to seek UN recognition of their statehood. But the United States has indicated that it will veto any such move in the Security Council. What remains of America’s standing in the Arab and Muslim world will suffer a further blow.

Such is the ground from which terrorism springs.

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Released: 06 September 2011

Word Count: 1,148

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Patrick Seale, “Remaking the Arab State”

August 30, 2011 - Jahan Salehi

The Arabs face a formidable task — nothing less than rebuilding the entire state structure and system of government in countries as diverse as Tunisia and Egypt, Libya and Yemen. In Syria, too, the Ba‘thist state is almost certainly doomed, whether President Bashar al-Asad survives at its head or not. It has lasted 48 years, ever since the Ba‘th party seized power in 1963. If it is to outlast the present uprising, it would need to be profoundly recast and remade in order to accommodate several neglected forces in Syrian society — sects, ethnicities, tribes, disgruntled intellectuals and the rural poor among others.

What form of government will replace the rickety Arab structures, some of which have already been brought down it, while others are still fighting to survive? What state structures will replace the old autocracies, with their bankrupt one-party rule and their all-powerful military and security apparatus? This is the key question posed by events not only in Damascus, but also in Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli and Sanaa. This is the great unknown.

The monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula (with the exception of Bahrain) stand out as islands of relative stability in the current upheaval — possibly the most radical since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. They are protected by their oil wealth, but not by that alone.

Modernised and reformed over the years, their traditional systems of government have, in most cases, proved responsive to the needs of their citizens. They have provided reasonably good governance, whether in the United Arab Emirates or Qatar, in Kuwait or Oman, or indeed in Saudi Arabia itself, the dominant power in the Peninsula. Good governance would seem to be the secret of their continued legitimacy.

We all know — because it has been said so often — that the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring want social justice, jobs, freedom from police brutality and arbitrary arrest, a chance to advance in life, better prospects for themselves and their families, a fairer distribution of their country’s resources, an end to corruption by a privileged elite, dignity and respect from their rulers. In a word, good governance.

That, above all, is what the Arab world would seem to want, rather than democracy on the Western model, of which the Arabs have had little experience; and for which they have little appetite, if it means any form of Western tutelage.

A problem as yet unresolved is the future role of Islamic parties in the countries which are experiencing, or have experienced, revolutions. In Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen these Islamic movements are now above ground and will undoubtedly figure prominently in the new structures of power. In Syria, the Muslim Brothers – the regime’s main enemy since the 1970s — cannot be indefinitely suppressed and will have to be accommodated, one way or the other.

Al-Qaida — a radical Islamic movement not to be confused with the Islamic mainstream — is active in Yemen, engaging in almost daily gun battles with government forces. In Algeria last week, a terrorist attack, claimed by Al-Qaida, against a barracks at Sharshal in the north of the country, killed 18 and wounded many others. Algeria has so far refused to recognise Libya’s Provisional National Council precisely because the Council and its agencies include jihadists wanted for crimes in Algeria. Some members of Qadhafi’s family have fled to Algeria and found refuge there.

For many Arabs, indeed for most Muslims, the West is highly suspect, and its current rampant Islamophobia a source of angry bewilderment. America’s blind support for Israel — for its aggressions against its neighbours and its long and cruel oppression of the Palestinians — is a source of great rage, latent and largely impotent so far, but for how long? The West’s colonial past in the region has also by no means been forgotten – whether in Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, to name only the most obvious countries.

The horrors of the Italian occupation between the wars have not been erased from Libyan minds. Many Libyans will be grateful for the help Britain, France and the United States gave in defeating Muammar Qadhafi, but many others will resent the bombing of their country during the holy month of Ramadan.

There is a level of grievance and aspiration in the revolutions of the Arab Spring, which the West has largely ignored. This is the thirst for national independence. The Arabs have pursued the goal of national independence – not from their rulers but from external powers – ever since the First World War. But they have not yet fully achieved it. It is very much on their current agenda.

Consider for a moment the impact on opinion of America’s invasion, occupation and destruction of Iraq. Imagine the displeasure and anxiety many feel about the vast American bases in the Gulf. Reflect about the bitter resentment aroused by America’s massive subventions to Israel, which allow it to expand its settlements in Palestinian territory, besiege and bomb Gaza, in defiance of the whole Arab and Muslim world and of international law. Imperialism is alive and well.

The Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty of 1979 is a very sore point for many Egyptians, and indeed for many Arabs. It removed Egypt from the Arab line-up, condemning it to American-financed impotence, while exposing the rest of the Arab world to Israeli power. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, during which it killed 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, was a direct consequence of the Treaty. Egyptians certainly do not want another war with Israel, but the treaty is a badge of shame which many would like removed.

In the eastern Arab world, there are some who detest the strength Hizballah has acquired in Lebanon, who dread the role of Iran in Arab affairs, and who want to destroy the Alawi-dominated regime in Syria. But there are many others who understand that the Tehran-Damascus-Hizballah axis has been the main obstacle to Israeli and American hegemony in the region. If the axis is brought down — as Israel and its American friends fervently desire — there are many who fear that the region will lose what little independence and deterrent capability it has managed to acquire.

There is thus a wider geopolitical dimension to the battles being waged inside several countries across the region. National independence – freedom from imperialist and Israeli pressures of one sort or another — is what the revolutionaries demand, in addition to good governance at home.

In dealing with the Arab Spring, the West would be wise not to seek to shape events too blatantly in its own interest – or risk an unpleasant backlash. It is high time the Arabs were left alone to determine their own destiny.

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Released: 30 August 2011

Word Count: 1,097

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Patrick Seale, “Syria’s Assad on the Ropes?”

August 29, 2011 - Jahan Salehi

President Bashar al-Assad is fighting for his political life, perhaps even for life itself. His brutal repression of the protest movement in Syria has earned him international condemnation. Calls for him to step down have come from President Barack Obama and from the leaders of Britain, France and Germany. The Arab world’s heavyweight, Saudi Arabia, has recalled its ambassador from Damascus, as have several of the smaller Gulf states. The UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, has presented a report to the Security Council describing, in gruesome detail, the killing and torture of civilian protesters. There are moves afoot to ban imports of Syrian oil to European markets, which provides about 30 percent of the state’s income.

Yet Assad remains defiant. He seems determined to fight to the end. Undeterred by harsh repression, the Friday demonstrations have swollen week after week, and their tone has hardened. Increasingly, the strident call is for the fall of the regime. Angry protesters say that over 2,000 of their number have been killed and over 13,000 arrested, many of them savagely tortured, while the regime retorts that it is fighting a foreign-inspired “conspiracy” and that 120 security personnel have been killed by “armed gangs.” A sectarian civil war on the Iraqi or Lebanese model is every Syrian’s nightmare. No one really wants that — neither the regime nor the vast majority of the opposition. There is, however, a fringe element that believes any regime, however extreme, would be better than the present one.

The opposition faces a stark choice: either go all out to bring the regime down, as some would like, or cooperate with it in building a new and better Syria. The first course is hazardous: If the Baathist state is torn down, what will replace it? The second course requires an act of faith: It means accepting that Assad truly wants to implement radical reforms and effect a transition to democracy by means of a national dialogue. He has attempted to launch such a dialogue, but has so far failed to convince — largely because the killing has continued. In August, for example, he signed a bill introducing a multiparty system, but no such reform can be implemented while the violence persists.

The regime has not distinguished itself in the trial of strength. Slow to grasp the nature of the popular uprising, it has been incompetent in confronting it. The security services, like Assad himself, seem to have been taken by surprise. By resorting to live fire against protesters at the start, in the city of Dara’a in southern Syria, they displayed indiscipline and arrogant contempt for the lives of citizens — the very contempt that, in one country after another, has been a motor of the Arab Awakening.

The speeches Assad has given since the protests started have been public-relations disasters — far from the rousing, dramatic appeal to the nation that his supporters had expected and the occasion demanded. Above all, he has failed to rein in his brutal security services and put an end to the shootings, arbitrary arrests, beatings and torture that have aroused international condemnation. Meanwhile, the Baath Party — “leader of state and society,” according to the notorious Article 8 of the Syrian Constitution — has been virtually silent, confirming the widespread belief that it has become a hollow shell, concerned only with protecting its political monopoly, its privileges and its corrupt patronage network.

If the regime has shown itself to be weak, the opposition, however, is weaker still. It wants to challenge the system, but evidently does not yet know how to go about it — apart, that is, from staging riots and publishing videos of brutal repression by government forces. It is split in a dozen ways between secularists, civil rights activists, democrats and Islamists of various sorts; between the opposition in Syria and exiles abroad, who are among the regime’s most virulent opponents; between those who call for Western intervention and those who reject any form of foreign interference; between angry, unemployed youths in the street and venerable figures of the opposition, hallowed by years in prison, most of them in late middle age. In a gesture of conciliation, the regime lifted a travel ban on several of them, including veteran human rights campaigner Haitham al-Maleh, 81, who, to his great surprise, was allowed to leave Damascus to attend an opposition gathering in Istanbul in July. But no coherent leadership has yet emerged, some say because its members, at least those inside Syria, fear arrest.

The July Istanbul meeting was the second of its kind to be held in Turkey, and seems to have enjoyed some support from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP, a ruling party of conservative Islamic coloring. But neither conference brought to the fore a united leadership or a clear program, let alone anything that might look like an alternative government. The opposition factions that have so far declared themselves — the National Democratic Grouping, the Damascus Declaration signatories, the National Salvation Council, the local coordination committees in Syria — are loose groupings of individuals with little real structure and few novel ideas, save for the goal of ending rule by the Assad family and its cronies once and for all.

The truth is that, as Tunisia and Egypt are discovering, it is exceedingly difficult to bring about a transition from an autocratic, highly centralized, one-party system to anything resembling democratic pluralism. It is not something that can be done in a weekend or even in a month. In Europe it took a couple of centuries. In Syria — and, for that matter, in most Arab countries — there is no experience of free elections, and there are no real political parties, no free trade unions, no state or civil society institutions, no separation of powers, no independent judiciary, little real political education. The Syrian Parliament is a farce.

Everything in Syria will have to be rebuilt from the ground up — including the ideology of the state. The old slogans of the post–World War II period — anticolonialism, revolutionary socialism, Baathism, radical Islamism, Arab unity and Arab nationalism, Arabism itself — will all need to be rethought, discarded or brought up to date.

As in Egypt and Tunisia, a key puzzle will be how to integrate Islamist movements into a democratic system. In Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood has been banned — membership is punishable by death — ever since it conducted an insurgency against the regime of former President Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, from 1976 to 1982, which ended in a massacre at Hama. According to Human Rights Watch, between 5,000 and 10,000 people were killed as the government fought to regain control of the town from Islamist insurgents. These events have been seared into the collective memory of most Syrians. But they mean different things to different people. For the regime, Hama was a necessary action that saved the country from Islamist terrorism. For the opposition — and especially for Sunni Muslims — it was a criminal massacre that, some would say, must be avenged.

There is, therefore, understandable uneasiness among sections of the population, especially the Christians (10 percent of the population) and the Alawis (about 12 percent). The regime is dominated by the latter, a branch of Shiite Islam, who are heavily represented in the officer corps and security services. They would be an immediate target if an extreme Sunni regime were to come to power. As Syria is a mosaic of sects and ethnic groups, the need for tolerance, reflected in an essentially secular government, is deeply ingrained. Many worried secularists look to Turkey as a model because Erdogan’s AKP has shown that Islam is compatible with democracy.

The Need for Neutral Intermediaries

Since the task of bringing democracy to Syria is so vast, and since any viable transition must inevitably take time, some observers have come to the view that a dialogue between regime and opposition would be the safest way forward. But how to start, when the two camps are separated by an abyss of hate? Clearly, the regime must first stop killing its citizens and the opposition must accept the notion of a gradual transition. A cooling-off period is urgently required.

A peacekeeping mission, staffed by neutral countries such as India, Brazil and Turkey, could do the job. Jimmy Carter could oversee it. His moral stature and his record of conciliation are widely admired. The task would be to create the conditions for a serious exchange of views and hold the regime to its promises of real democratic reforms. Free elections under international supervision should be the ultimate goal.

Assad’s Syria claims legitimacy on two main counts: for standing up to Israel and its American backer, and for having given its citizens — at least until the present crisis — a long spell of security and stability even if the price paid was an absence of political freedoms. Every Syrian knows the terrible fate suffered by two of its neighbors: Lebanon because of its savage civil war (1975–90), and Iraq because of the horrendous bloodletting of the Sunni-Shiite conflict, unleashed by the US invasion of 2003.

So Assad may be on the ropes, but he is far from finished. Some hardline protesters reject any notion of dialogue with him. Other opposition figures are more flexible but insist that the killing must stop first. As repression has intensified, the hardliners are gaining ground.

There are three scenarios that could bring the regime down: a split in the army and security forces; a major dispute within the regime or within the Assad family; or a catastrophic economic collapse. All are possible, but none seem imminent.

Except for some defections, the army and security forces have stayed loyal to the regime. So long as this remains the case, it will be difficult for the opposition to topple it. The ruling family and the regime continue to present a united front. There have been rumors of disputes between the president and his hardline brother Maher, commander of the regime’s Praetorian Guard. But little of this has emerged in public view.

The economy is, of course, a source of great concern. Syria’s tourist trade has collapsed, domestic investment has dried up and the Syrian pound has taken a battering. After the Arab Spring’s first moment of euphoria, most people now realize that the problem is not just one of forging a new political system, whether in Syria or indeed in Tunisia, Egypt or Yemen. It is also a question of tackling the huge social and economic problems Syria and other countries in the region are facing: exploding populations; rampant youth unemployment; an impoverished middle class and a semi-destitute working class; a soaring cost of living; a semi-bankrupt government; policies of economic liberalization that have benefited only a tiny and corrupt elite; and neglect of workers’ rights, whether on the land or in shops and factories.

The rich monarchies of the Gulf can spend their way out of trouble, and are doing so. Saudi Arabia, for example, has announced plans to spend $70 billion on low-cost housing. Syria, with about the same size population, can only dream of such figures. Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, highly prosperous sheikdoms with vast sovereign wealth funds, have promised to help Tunisia surmount its current difficulties. Money has also gone to Egypt, Oman and Yemen, a country of special concern to Saudi Arabia. Syria, too, will need bailing out if the crisis continues. But on whom can it rely? If times get really hard, its Iranian ally might well help out with a billion or two. But Iran has its own problems.

The Syrian economy can probably stumble along for several more months without imperiling the regime. Syria has proved it can withstand sanctions, mainly because, unlike most Arab countries, it can largely feed itself — this year’s wheat crop is estimated at 3.6 million tons. With an oil output of 380,000 barrels per day, and plenty of gas, it also has a measure of energy autonomy. Although Europe is moving closer to a ban on imports of Syrian oil, imposing a worldwide ban would be difficult. In short, for all its faults and weaknesses, the regime is no pushover.

Assad’s Assets

Bashar al-Assad is in deep trouble, but it does not yet look terminal. After the NATO intervention in Libya — not to mention the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan — no external power, and surely no Western country, has an appetite for military intervention. Russia has started to express its alarm at what its Syrian friends are doing, but it will almost certainly block condemnation of Syria at the UN Security Council, as will China. And Syria is too central to the stability of the eastern Arab world for any of the neighboring Arab states to be in a hurry to destabilize it. While the Saudis and several other Gulf states have recalled their ambassadors, and the Arab League and Gulf Cooperation Council have urged Assad to stop the killing, they have not called for him to step down.

Compared with other Arab countries that have experienced this year’s revolutionary wave, Syria is something of a special case. Tunisia, for example, is geographically largely immune from the boisterous currents of Arab politics (although it has had to take in refugees from Libya). Events in Libya, too, violent as they have been, have had little impact on the Arab world. Even Egypt’s revolution has not so far radically changed the Arab political map. Egypt is still self-absorbed, trying to sort out its own immense problems. It will no doubt in the future have a major impact on the Arab world, and on Arab-Israeli relations, but not quite yet.

Syria, in contrast, lies at the heart of the politics of the eastern Arab world. It is on the fault line of the Sunni-Shiite divide. It is Iran’s main Arab ally. It is Israel’s most obdurate opponent. It was, until the present crisis, the linchpin of Turkey’s Arab policy. As Turkey’s relations with Israel cooled, a Turkish-Syrian alliance was formed that has been of great importance for the region’s geopolitics. Strains have arisen because of the brutality of Syria’s security forces, but Turkey has by no means abandoned Syria. It would like to play a key role in stabilizing the situation, and has urged Assad to discipline his forces and stop the killing.

Syria is still the dominant external influence in Lebanon, in alliance with Hezbollah, the strongest party and the most powerful armed force in that country. Israel and the United States continue to demonize Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, whereas it is, in fact, no more than a Shiite resistance movement, which managed to evict Israel from Southern Lebanon after a twenty-two-year occupation (1978-2000). Indeed, it was Israel’s occupation that created Hezbollah. To Israel’s fury, Hezbollah has acquired a minimal capability to deter further Israeli aggression; it demonstrated its strength when Israel last invaded Lebanon, in 2006. Israel would dearly like to disrupt the Tehran-Damascus-Hezbollah axis, which in the past three decades has been the main obstacle to its regional hegemony. But it would not be easy to do so without incurring grave risks.

Hezbollah has attracted some criticism, especially from Syria’s opponents in Lebanon, for siding with Assad’s repression. Its heroic image of confronting Israel has been somewhat dented. But it remains true that Syria, Iran and Hezbollah have together shouldered the confrontation with Israel and the United States ever since the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty removed Egypt from the Arab equation and exposed the rest of the region to Israeli power. This was evident in 1982. In the same year that the Syrian army perpetrated the massacre at Hama, Israel invaded Lebanon, killing more than 17,000 people in an attempt to destroy the PLO and wrest Lebanon from Syria’s sphere of influence, bringing it into Israel’s orbit. Had Israel been successful, Syria’s security would have been fatally undermined and Israel would have reigned supreme in the Levant. However, the late Hafez al-Assad managed to thwart the Israeli plan. He used to claim it was one of his greatest triumphs. It protected Syria and kept Lebanon in the Arab camp.

All these many relationships — with friends as well as enemies — would risk unraveling if the Assad regime were to fall. This is the great worry in the region and beyond, and is one reason Bashar al-Assad may yet survive.

If the protests in Syria become more threatening and the killing continues, no one should expect the regime to go down without a fight. Indeed, few regimes are ready to commit political suicide or willingly surrender to their enemies, especially when severe retribution is threatened. Under father and son, the Assad regime has lasted for more than four decades, survived many a crisis and seen off many an enemy. In this, its ruthlessness is no different from that of others.

China had its Tiananmen Square massacre and Russia its bitter war in Chechnya. Iran crushed the Green Movement, which tried to topple President Ahmadinejad. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has cast aspersions on Assad’s legitimacy and called on the international community to stop doing business with Syria, but Syrians know very well that America’s record in hunting down and destroying its enemies is no better than their own, and perhaps a good deal worse. When it was attacked on 9/11, that great bastion of democracy invaded Afghanistan in 2001, then Iraq in 2003 on fraudulent, trumped-up charges. Hundreds of thousands died, and several million were internally displaced or forced to flee abroad. Syria still plays host to more than 1 million Iraqi refugees, victims of America’s war.

As violence intensifies in Syria, the frightening specter looms of a bloody sectarian settling of accounts. It is already a case of kill or be killed. That is why all those who care about the Syrian people and about regional stability should work to ensure that a national dialogue take place as soon as possible, with the aim of bringing about a transition of power by democratic means rather than by civil war.

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Released: 29 August 2011

Word Count: 3,005

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Patrick Seale, “The Rise of Political Islam”

Patrick Seale, “Destabilising the Middle East”

Patrick Seale, “Will Israel Bomb Iran?”

Patrick Seale, “Anwar al-Awlaqi, Yemen, and Obama’s War”

Patrick Seale, “Fiascos of American Foreign Policy”

Patrick Seale, “The Middle East’s New Geopolitical Map”

Patrick Seale, “Egypt’s Next President?”

Patrick Seale, “America’s Terrible Decade”

Patrick Seale, “Remaking the Arab State”

Patrick Seale, “Syria’s Assad on the Ropes?”

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