And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East (18 page)

The uprising in Tunisia was more than a colorful story. I felt certain that the resentments there would spread elsewhere in the Arab world. Rich countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait could buy their way out of trouble by pumping money into the pockets of their people, but a big, poor country such as Egypt faced a severe reckoning.

Before I could dig deeper, I had a final obligation typical of the scattershot reporting I had been doing over the previous year—an interview in Washington with a Russian dissident who promised to expose corruption by Vladimir Putin. The Russian was visibly freaked-out during the interview, and by the end of the session I was pretty jumpy myself. I was getting phone calls and e-mails about massive demonstrations in Cairo. Protesters in Tahrir Square were clashing with police, who were responding with tear gas.

I rushed to Dulles Airport without stopping to pack, dressed in the same shoes and suit I had worn for the interview. I spent two days covering the riots in Cairo in leather-bottom shoes and suit trousers before I had time to buy rough-and-ready clothes.

This was a different Cairo from the one I knew fifteen years earlier. Back then, everyone was poor but with no dishonor in it, and violence was rare. Many Cairenes were villagers transplanted
to the city, and they brought their rural values with them. Opposing the government often meant a beating at the local police station and maybe a stretch in one of Egypt’s brutal prisons. But the abuses were nothing out of the ordinary in that part of the world, roughly the same as those meted out in Tunisia and Syria, and child’s play compared to the iron-fist punishments in Iraq. Egypt then was a medium-grade police state where people could get hurt, but where everything just kind of rolled along. In many ways, Egypt in 1996 was similar to Egypt in 1986 or even 1976.

But the Egypt of the Arab Spring was an altogether different place. The wealth gap had grown enormously. Garden communities with golf courses had sprung up for the first time, and rich people drove their fancy new Mercedeses to fancy new restaurants, many of which served alcohol, usually anathema in Muslim societies.

Perhaps the biggest change, though, was something small and relatively cheap: the smartphone. Now poor people had a way of communicating with one another. If one man saw an expensively clad guy with a blond woman on each arm, a hundred of his friends soon knew about it too, and so did hundreds more of their friends. Economic resentments, not religious or ethnic divisions, had sent Egyptians into the streets. The Internet, Facebook, and Twitter didn’t cause the revolutions, but like television in Eastern Europe in 1989, technology accelerated the pace of events.

By January 28, 2011, I was reporting that downtown Cairo was in open revolt. Protesters were throwing paving stones, bottles, and Molotov cocktails, amid shouts of “The people want to topple the regime.” Al Jazeera, the Arab-language TV news network underwritten by the emir of Qatar, was pumping up the unrest. Its coverage was breathless and exciting, and guests would sometimes break into song. Al Jazeera became protester TV.

I reported the next day that Hosni Mubarak was under intensifying pressure to step down. I had thought him an old fool when he was in his late sixties, and now at eighty-two he was an even bigger fool. Even though he would have been able to leave the country a free man, he dug in his heels because he thought the whole thing was a conspiracy orchestrated by the emir of Qatar and journalists in general—and because he was determined to have his son Gamal, a conspicuous mediocrity, succeed him as president.

Islamic groups joined the protesters on January 29, and the day after that thousands of inmates, including thirty leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, escaped from prison. Looting became widespread. “From police state to state of chaos,” I said on the air. But Mubarak clung to power, launching a crackdown on journalists, dozens of whom were beaten, harassed, or detained. We used low light and minimal production touches when we filmed our nightly reports in order not to draw attention to ourselves. “If the protesters win, they believe they will win Egypt,” I said on the
Nightly News
.

I have a theory about protests learned from covering a dozen of them from the Middle East to Ukraine: To be effective, demonstrators must pick the right square and make it the center of their activities. Tahrir Square was perfect. It was big, it was surrounded by lots of little streets and access roads, it was near a huge population of prospective protesters, and it was overlooked by several big hotels filled with journalists who were keeping an eye on things every minute of the day.

On February 5, Day 12 of the protests, Gamal gave up leadership of the ruling party, but his father hung on, with the encouragement of other Arab leaders who feared they would be next if he stepped down. The death toll had risen to three hundred by February 7. But
the protesters sensed the tide had turned, and Tahrir Square was suddenly transformed from a battleground to a massive campsite. Crowds swelled into the hundreds of thousands on February 8 amid rumors that Mubarak was about to give up office. But in a speech delivered at 11:00 p.m. two nights later, Mubarak was still calling himself president, though he now described it as more of a symbolic role. But on February 11, Mubarak surprised everyone by fleeing to Sharm el-Sheikh—known as the City of Peace because of the numerous international peace conferences held there—at the southern tip of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on the Red Sea.

“And so began the biggest, most joyful, wildest celebration in Egypt’s modern history,” I reported. The cleanup began the next day. “There is an energy, a can-do spirit in Egypt,” I said on the
Nightly News
. “Egyptians realize they are setting an example—an example being watched across the Middle East, and Egyptians believe the revolution they have started will spread.” The country was swept up in euphoria, with dancing, singing, and bonfires in the streets.

The most interesting and portentous day of the uprising may have been February 13, when Egyptians went back to work. Everyone felt a sense of empowerment, and grievances bubbled up everywhere. Men demanded seats on previously all-women subway cars, calling their exclusion unfair. Bus drivers demanded higher pay, and bank employees accused their CEOs of corruption. Journalists charged that their editor in chiefs played favorites. Even the police, who tried to crush the protests, demanded (and later got) a pay hike—but not before they held an apology march through Cairo. “Sorry, we were just following orders,” they chanted.

It was the day when Egyptians learned they weren’t just demonstrating against Mubarak but also against a million mini-dictators who drew power from him and did his bidding while
overseeing state-run companies, state-run newspapers, state-run utilities, and state-run schools. These grievances, and the growing role of Islamic groups, were manifestations of the volatility that would rock Egypt in the months and years ahead. And all the while the new US president was cheering the demonstrators on.

Egypt’s revolution was in my opinion one of the most decisive foreign events in President Obama’s term in office. I suspect without realizing it, Obama—just like Bush before him—changed the direction that US policy in the Middle East had taken for decades. Since World War II, when the United States replaced Europe in the role of patron of the region, Washington’s goal in the Middle East can be summed up in one word: stability. With the Eisenhower and Carter doctrines, and President George H. W. Bush’s war to push Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait but not overthrow him, Washington had tried to maintain basic stability, keep the region’s oil flowing, and uphold the cold peace with Israel. Suddenly, that all seemed out the window. First, President Bush toppled Saddam Hussein for no good reason except Washington, and the president personally, wanted revenge after 9/11 and wasn’t satisfied with Afghanistan. Now President Obama was turning his back on America’s oldest and closest ally in the Arab world.

President Mubarak was effectively a US lackey who controlled the biggest country in the Middle East. He was a key asset. If  Washington wanted stability, it should have worked harder to keep him or transition him out smoothly, instead of having him thrown out by the military backed by an angry mob. President Obama unceremoniously threw Mubarak under the bus and watched him toppled in less than three weeks. Suddenly, Obama had a “doctrine” of his own. It was this: if you can get to a square, make a lot of noise, know how to use Facebook and Twitter, speak
a smattering of English, and the police and/or army starts to beat you up, Washington is on your side. It was bold and revolutionary, perhaps even noble and correct, but it wouldn’t last.

President Bush had been aggressive and reckless in the Middle East, attacking Iraq for no reason and then claiming to be fighting terrorism while actually creating more terrorists. I like to think of the Middle East of the Arab big men like a row of old rotten houses. They looked stable and imposing from the outside but were in fact full of mold and termites, which they both contained and created the way old houses do if no one opens the windows or cleans them out. President Bush knocked down the first rotten house by toppling Saddam Hussein, unleashing the anger, ignorance, and Sunni-Shia rivalry inside. President Obama, by turning on old friends, was now helping to knock down another house. Worse still, Obama would later fail to follow through on this new promise when the wave of protest reached Bahrain and then culminated in Syria. The Bush Doctrine was offensive defense: attack foreign nations before they attack you, even if you attack the wrong country for the wrong reason, or for no reason at all. The Obama Doctrine would turn out to be: help those seeking democracy when they are oppressed, except when you don’t want to and prefer to promise help while not delivering it. The combined impact of these two policies—radical departures from decades of trying to find Middle East stability—would be devastating.

BY THE TIME THE ARAB SPRING
erupted I had made Istanbul my home base. I bought an apartment there in 2007 as an investment and as a place to go on weekends because Istanbul is a cool city. I’ve since refurbished it, but back then it was pretty run-down. The ceiling
leaked, there was no air-conditioning, and the kitchen was a joke. But at least I didn’t have to shuttle back and forth to New York.

I had just left Istanbul for Egypt when authorities in Bahrain started cracking down on demonstrators there. Even before I got to the capital, Manama, I knew the odds were heavily stacked against the Shia protesters. Bahrain is tiny (pop. 1.2 million, 160,000 of whom live in Manama), 60 to 70 percent of the population is Shia, and it is in the backyard of Saudi Arabia, the powerhouse of the Sunni world. Bahrain’s government is strong and rich. The country is also strategically important as the home of the US Fifth Fleet.

The protest began at 3:00 a.m. on February 17, 2011, with an Egyptian-style sit-in in Pearl Square. Riot police and soldiers fired tear gas canisters and rubber bullets. I went to Salmaniya Medical Complex and found the staff overwhelmed. The injured said many protesters dropped to their knees, bared their chests, and dared the soldiers to shoot. The soldiers obliged: at least four protesters were killed, fifty more were injured, and sixty were reported missing.

Bahrain is a case study in how to crush an uprising. The government tracked down people who were organizing protests online, arrested suspected rabble-rousers, and prevented crowds from forming. Determined not to have a repeat of Tahrir Square, the government simply bulldozed Pearl Square into rubble. By February 19, protesters were carrying flowers and shouting messages of peace. Unlike with Mubarak, President Obama said very little during Bahrain’s violent crackdown. Inconsistencies in the president’s policy were already emerging. Why was the United States sympathetic to demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, but seemed uninterested when Bahrain’s monarchy bulldozed Pearl Square? People in the Middle East were left scratching their heads.

By now, all hell was breaking loose in Libya. From the start, this was not just a protest against economic inequality or religious discrimination, but a revolution aimed at toppling the regime of Mu’ammar Gadhafi. It was, in short, a real shooting war.

My crew and I gathered in Cairo. We didn’t have visas to get into Libya, and we didn’t know what to expect from the rebels who controlled the territory on the other side of the Egyptian border. I thought about hiring bedouin smugglers to get us into Libya. Crazy as it sounds, I even flirted with the idea of crossing the desert on camels. Not a lot of hands went up when I asked who was game for the trip. Fine, I said, I’ll go by myself.

I know how to use a portable terminal that can connect to a satellite Internet network, but I didn’t know how to edit video and upload it to the computer. The guys in my crew tried to show me, but with my primitive technological skills it must have been a pathetic sight. Finally a cameraman named John Kooistra, a good friend of mine, dismissed the tutorial as stupid and said he was coming with me.

We hired a taxi for the four-hundred-mile trip to Sallum, a village in northwest Egypt about ninety miles from Tobruk in Libya. When we arrived, we heard that CNN’s Ben Wedeman had already crossed the border. That got my competitive juices flowing, especially because I had worked as Wedeman’s freelance assistant when I was starting out in Cairo. The crossing point was a madhouse, with swarms of refugees coming into Egypt from Libya, but we finally got our exit stamps and headed for the no-man’s-land separating the two countries. I tried to call NBC to tell my bosses that we were crossing, but I couldn’t get any reception, which was probably just as well because New York would probably have said it was too dangerous. When we got to the Libyan side, the rebels waved us right in.

It was a bit harrowing at first because we got into cars without knowing for sure whether the drivers were kidnappers or friendlies. But the rebels and their sympathizers couldn’t have been more helpful and considerate. They had seen how media coverage had helped the opposition in Tunisia and Egypt. If we had been the Al Jazeera team they would probably have carried us all the way to Tobruk on litters. As it was, we had to struggle to pay for drivers, a meal, even a cup of coffee. We hadn’t yet heard a report by Wedeman, which suggested we were close on his heels.