Keeping the tragic transformation of ‘Arab Spring’ in historical perspective
(First published by Foreign Policy Journal on 15 Aug 2012)
As the fighting between the government
forces and the rebels intensifies amid visionary planning for post-Assad
Syria, it is easy to point to either the brutality of the Assad regime
or the sectarian tendency of the rebellion,
but disproportionate focus on the daily events on ground has served to
obfuscate some crucial historical realities that are certain to shape
not only the outcome of the present conflict, but also the future of the
entire region. Historically, the manipulation of the rulers of the
region by the West has served to make the division between the states
dominated by two Islamic branches unbridgeable. Threatened by the
popular upsurge against the ‘our bastards’ in the region, the rulers in
the west were prompt in transforming the struggle against injustice into
the ugly sectarian bloodletting by condoning the unceremonious
suppression of the Bahraini uprising by Saudi forces. The same process
of transformation has gone too far in Syria and it is no longer a fight
between good and bad or between pro- and anti-democracy forces.
“Do you think that Mossad will now
liberate Palestinians with due help of CIA, Saudi Arabia and Qatar?”
This was how I retorted to one of the supporters of Syrian rebellion who
had ‘Palestine’ in his Twitter username. In a short but charged
conversation with two of the enthusiastic supporters of the
rebellion in Syria, I alluded the instance of CIA and Saudi support for
Afghan Mujahidin in the 1980s and about the likelihood of same cycle of
the West nurturing the extremists and waging the war against them being
repeated in Syria where it is increasingly clear that Al Qaeda is one of
the important beneficiaries of the dollars and weapons delivered by the
gulf monarchies with due help from U.S. and Turkey.
They tried to argue for some time
deriding the crimes committed by Assad, but eventually ended up alleging
me of “having sniffed some hallucinating stuff” and a moment later I
was blocked so that I cannot even retrieve the whole conversation now.
The debate surrounding the raging war in Syria has polarized people so
much that they are ready to allege those who disagree with them to be
just ‘hallucinating’, and so it was during the NATO bombardment of
Gaddhafi’s Libya. This was not, however, the rule from the beginning of
the ‘Arab Spring’ in Tunisia and Egypt, when even Aljazeera’s coverage
was objective enough to interest a keen watcher. This change in
perception about the apparently similar uprisings has been the result of
the fact that the wave of rebellion having traveled from Tunisia to
Syria has morphed from a true revolt for democracy and human rights to
an armed conflict dictated by vicious tussle among the vested interests
of the regional and world powers.
What makes the trend of events in Middle
East, the Eurocentric name of West Asia and part of North Africa, so
divisive? Outsiders often engage with any region of the world with the
central objective of promoting and preserving their own vested
interests, and it is natural for different powers to have divergent
views and policies. But what divides people and states with similar
economic, social, and political constraints and predicaments forcing
them to take diametrically opposite stances in so many existential
issues? Answers to these questions have to be sought in light of the
larger political and social realities of the region.
Historically, the Middle East has become
a furnace of violence and injustice with perpetual suffering of large
proportion of population while the powers outside the region keep
manipulating the rulers of the region so that the endless flow of oil
away from the deserts remains uninterrupted. Not long before, a swarm of
dictators ironically referred as ‘our bastards’ in the west (of course
with some notable exceptions) were ruling the region, often with an iron
fist and utter disregard for democracy and human rights. The much
touted Arab Spring was hailed for signaling the new dawn of democracy in
this part of the world. But now well in the middle of the second year
since the early uprisings that caught the dictators of the region off
guard, the autocratic pillars of Western domination of the region appear
more powerful and resilient than ever. In fact, a process of replacing
‘their bastards’ with ‘our bastards’ seems to be in full swing.
These developments have given birth to
host of new paradoxes in the region already fraught with plentiful of
them. One of the major paradoxes of the moment is that some of the
apparently most loyal fighters of the Palestinian cause, who have been
resisting the Israeli apartheid founded on support of the West led by
the U.S., have ended up streamlining their priorities in Syria with
exactly those of U.S. and Israel. The shift of Hamas’s headquarters out
of Damascus early in the rebellion speaks volumes about this strategic
realignment. While the real sufferers in Syria have little to choose
between the bullets of the regime and the machine guns and bombs of the
rebels, the war itself is increasingly morphing from a rebellion against
a despotic regime to a brutal and ugly sectarian conflict; something
even the New York Times is forced to entertain in opinion
pages.
For a deeper understanding of the
developments in the Middle East that have taken place since what started
as ‘Arab Spring’ last year, it is necessary to know the dynamics of
engagement of the wWst, which is leading the present day world
militarily and politically, with this part of the world. A useful
starting point could be the creation of the state of Israel in the
erstwhile Palestine, administered by the then receding empire of
Britain. The Arab states were then unequivocally opposed to partition of
Palestine to create two states, let alone the establishment of a bully
Jewish state with no formal existence of the Palestinian state. The
establishment of Israel with forcible eviction of the large majority of
the Arab people from the land was a perfect recipe of long-term
conflict, and the subsequent Arab-Israel wars were inevitable.
Yet where do the Arabs stand today, the
Arab people and the Arab states? How do they see the plight of
Palestinians now? Tragically, today’s reality is that the old rivalry
and acrimony of the Arab states with Israel has been buried down, almost
irretrievably, thanks to the clever maneuverings of the west. The
hatred to and wrath against Israel in particular and the west in general
has been totally replaced by the impeccably engineered rivalry between
the two sects of Islam: Sunni Gulf monarchies are morbidly paranoid
about the Shiite Iranian regime and vice varsa.
What lies at the heart of this strategic
realignment of the ruling powers in Middle East? Why is the West so
capable of dealing with the Muslim world in an unequal arrangement in
which the latter gets perpetual violence and economic hardship while the
former gets the bounty of endless oil and gas flow? How has the West
manipulated the game so as to make the Sunni-Shiite divide unbridgeable?
To put it even more simply, why can’t the Muslims in Middle East just
unite in peace to safeguard their own interests vis-a-vis the west?
In his highly revealing book
“Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”, John Perkins gives the perfect
answer to these questions. On a chapter titled “The Saudi Arabia
Money-laundering Affair” or SAMA, he gives a detailed sketch of how the
events in the aftermath of the 1973 oil embargo
reshaped the world particularly through the intimate engagement of
rulers of Saudi Arabia and US:
“…In retrospect, I sometimes find it
difficult to understand how Saudi Arabia could have accepted this
condition. Certainly, most of the rest of the Arab world, OPEC and other
Islamic countries were appalled when they discovered the terms of the
deal and the manner in which the royal house capitulated to Washington’s
demands.
The condition was that Saudi Arabia
would use its petrodollars to purchase US government securities; in
turn, the interest earned by these securities would be spent by the US
department of Treasury in ways that enabled Saudi Arabia to emerge from a
medieval society into the modern, industrialized world…”[1]
Perkins gives the stark summary of those
developments that the Saudi Royals literally bartered the national
interests, the regional interests and the interests of the oil-producing
countries for one thing: the U.S. support for the autocratic regime in
the pretext of transforming the Arabian deserts into plush western-style
cities. In chapters that follow, Perkins insinuates into the Saudi
behavior in the aftermath of the win-win arrangement with the U.S. when
it tried to compensate for the loss of moral and religious values in the
kingdom brought about by the western commercialism by exporting the
Wahabbi ideological fundamentalism to other countries.
To utter dismay of the U.S. and the
West, the similar arrangement with the Iranian king was obliterated by
the Islamic revolution in 1979. A major conflict with Iran was thus
inevitable, and an all out war on the pretext of the Iranian nuclear
program still looms large. When similar plans failed to convince the
idiosyncratic Saddam Hussein to emulate the Saudi monarchy, that
eventually led to the invasion of Iraq, even though in a paradoxical
turn of events, the Shiite majority in Iraq is now lurching closer to
Iran more perceptibly than ever. The ouster last year of Egypt’s Hosni
Mubarak was another major setback for the West, even though the
time-tested policy of bribing the military for strategic gains is likely
to avert any dreadful possibility of Israel being surrounded by hostile
neighbors.
Yet the emerging reality is that the
U.S. and the West are now forced to depend on and cooperate with the
Gulf monarchies led by Saudi Arabia, the synonyms of an authoritarian
blend of religious fundamentalism and dynastic rule, more than ever.
Although the bizarre outbursts of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan against
Israel in the aftermath of deadly Israeli assault on the Mavi
Marmara caused pretty discomfort in the western capitals, he is
likely to keep serving as a very loyal surrogate of the nexus of the
west and the Gulf monarchies in handling the Syrian situation.
To summarize, do the street battles
razing in Syria represent the whole picture of the process of change the
Syrian landscape is undergoing? Many would like us to believe that, as
well as the assertion that the brutality of the Assad regime has
mandated the kind of overt support to the armed rebellion Turkey and
other U.S. allies are providing. Some have gone as far as alleging the
Obama administration of being ‘absent
without leave‘ in the Syrian crisis, despite the incontrovertible
evidence of the latter’s collaboration with regional foes of Syrian
regime to unseat Assad.
All in all, the developments in the
Middle East boil down to one conclusion: the tragic transformation of
genuine revolts against oppressive politics and economic mismanagement
into the ugly show down between the regional and world powers that end
up fortifying the centuries long dominance of the region by the west by
making the Shiite-Sunni divide further unbridgeable. The largest
regional beneficiaries in the whole shoddy business are likely to be the
House of Saud in Saudi Arabia, the time tested friends of the West; the
ruling dynasty of Qatar, the new emblem of Middle East democracy that
comes by carpet bombing; and Erdogan of Turkey, the most fashionable
supporter of the Palestinian cause who can simultaneously support the
dual and diametrically opposite causes of ‘liberating Palestine’ and
serving the NATO and Israeli interests. The losers in the game are
likely to be the regional rivals of the above trio and most importantly,
the people in region who had hoped for genuine democratic
transformation of the region.
Definitely, I am not hallucinating while
saying all this, and if historically valid conclusions are to be
drawn, it is always necessary to keep such trendsetting developments in
proper historical perspectives before judging them, rather than fixating
into the daily details of a particular conflict. Counting the number of
murders committed by either the Assad regime or the rebels in Syria is
akin to inspecting the trees while the whole forest represented by the
shoddy deals between the western powers and their Gulf allies over the
past many decades is conveniently ignored. Neither the tree-watcher nor
the forest-watcher is hallucinating, but the tree-watcher is more likely
to miss the larger and more relevant picture of the conflict, drawing
misguided conclusions that are valid for a very short historical span.
This is exactly the vision of the West
for every ruler in the region; one who can be satisfied by tending a
tree at the expense of the whole forest. Any tree that digresses from
that path can then be uprooted and replaced by another that is more
loyal, insecure, paranoid and manipulable. It is the extreme tragedy
that even the young and intellectuals from the region have been
following suit behind their sclerotic rulers under careful manipulation
by what goes in the name of mainstream media, owned either by the giant
corporations in West or by the royal houses in Saudi Arabia and Qatar
themselves. In the long run, this may prove even more detrimental to the
interests of the people in the region than ‘hallucinating’ because, for
the west, it is always far more convenient to gratify a ruler (often a
despot) than to ensure the political freedom and economic well being of
millions of people. So long as the core of vested interests can be kept
intact, the fanciful robes of democracy and human rights can always be
worn or castigated as required in particular situation. Add to that the
lucrative prospects of ‘fighting terrorism’ in the region, and the
history of cyclical violence is sure to be repeated with endless harvest
of oil and strategic gains for the West while the people in West Asia
and North Africa are perennially forced into misery and violence.
[1] John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (London: Ebury Press, 2006) pp 81-92
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