The Modern Middle East (40 page)

Figure 20.
Iraqi women inspecting the site of a car bomb explosion in the Bayaa district. Corbis.

The 1980s and 1990s saw two bloody and devastating wars in the Middle East, the first between Iran and Iraq and the second between Iraq and an international coalition assembled to eject it from Kuwait. Saddam Hussein initiated both wars, hoping in the first instance to exploit the weaknesses and self-inflicted wounds of Iran’s ruling ayatollahs and, later on, to finally give his army a victory to cheer about. Whereas Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980 was motivated by Saddam’s overconfidence, the invasion of Kuwait a decade later was a product of his desperation and panic. Saddam had originally counted on a quick and easy victory over the Iranians, and his campaign to bring Tehran’s revolutionaries to their knees won him the diplomatic
and material support of most other Arab states in the Gulf and elsewhere. However, this partial Arab unity did not outlast the Iran-Iraq War. Almost as soon as the war was over, former friends turned on each other, sobered now by the loss of a common enemy and the difficult realities of political normalcy. Saddam, the self-described Nasser of his age, needed another enemy and, more than ever before, a quick and decisive victory. That the new enemy was a former ally was only a minor inconvenience. The benefits, Saddam calculated, far outweighed the risks.

The Second Gulf War brought destruction first to Kuwait by the invading Iraqis and then to Iraq by the allied coalition. In the course of the two wars, hundreds of thousands of lives were lost in successive tragedies of epic proportions: first in Iran and Iraq, then in Kuwait, then among the Iraqi Shiʿites, Kurds, and ordinary citizens. By the time his regime was toppled in 2003, Saddam had left behind a trail of ruin and shattered lives, of broken spirits and destroyed homes. Iraq, once a cradle of civilization, was plunged into darkness, and its capital, once proud and magnificent, had been looted and plundered.

In many ways, the tragedy of Iraq has come to symbolize the larger predicament of the whole region. Institutional decay and atrophy, despotism, cross-border conflicts, ethnic and sectarian tensions, foreign invasions—all relics of the past—continue to haunt much of the Middle East to this day. In some ways, the Middle East appears to be trapped in a vicious circle from which it cannot escape. But there are also profound changes. After more than a century of denying the right of the other to exist,
some
Israelis and Palestinians are finally talking to each other. The whole region has seen levels of economic growth and development that would have been unimaginable only a few decades ago. While different shades of authoritarianism continue to remain pervasive throughout the Middle East, halting steps toward democratization are being taken in a number of Middle Eastern countries. These are all signs of change—change amid continuity. And change was to come to the region in the most dramatic fashion.

CURRENTLY, THREE PRINCIPAL ISSUES SHAPE THE
politics of the contemporary Middle East. Perhaps the most decisive of these issues has been the struggle between dictatorship and democracy, or, more accurately, between state authoritarianism and social resistance. From the 1960s through the 1990s, authoritarian states devised multiple means of political power and control, integral to which were repression and fear. In the 1980s and the 1990s, as their ideological and developmental sources of legitimacy became increasingly bankrupt, and as their promises of controlled liberalization turned out to be hollow and meaningless, their reliance on fear and repression increased exponentially. But the politics of fear is inherently unstable and is untenable in the long run. Once the fear barrier cracked in the late 2000s, revolutionary movements aimed at overthrowing dictatorships emerged in many of the region’s countries. The politics of repression and of resistance are explored in chapters 7 and 8.

A second salient issue in Middle Eastern politics is the ongoing inability of the Palestinians and the Israelis to come to terms with each other’s legitimate national rights and to peacefully coexist. For more than a century now, the intertwined histories of Israel and Palestine have been written in blood and tears. On rare occasions it has seemed as if peace were on the horizon, as in the early 1990s. So far, however, the drumbeats of war and mutual recrimination have drowned out the voices of dialogue and peace. Chapter 9 examines the makeup and perspectives of the two sides and the history of the conflict between them.

A third defining feature of Middle Eastern politics is the issue of economic development. As the coming chapters demonstrate, one of the pillars of politics in the Middle East has been an implicit “ruling bargain” between the state and society. This bargain has been predicated on certain key
assumptions: the state’s guarantee of physical and national security; the provision of economic goods and services by the state as a trade-off for lack of elite accountability; and, when necessary, the state’s resort to repression to maintain power. For some decades, the question of Palestine was often also part of the ruling bargain, as heroes near and far promised to bring about the liberation that many others had failed to provide. Increasingly, however, the
Arab
-Israeli conflict has turned into a
Palestinian
-Israeli struggle once again, and the deinternationalization of the Palestinian cause is removing it from one Middle Eastern national agenda after another.

Nevertheless, economic performance—such simple questions as “What do I have?” and “What has the state done for me?”—remains at the core of the ruling bargain. And as technology and circumstances change in the twenty-first century from what they were in the 1960s and 1970s—as alternative energy sources become more widespread, single-commodity economies experience more stress, and the forces of globalization intrude—there is increasing need to renegotiate some of the basic premises of the ruling bargain. Again, how the challenges of economic performance are resolved and in what direction the ruling bargain changes remain to be seen. No doubt, however, economic challenges will be central to the politics of the Middle East in both the near and the distant futures. The topic of economic development will be explored in chapter 10. The conclusion, chapter 11, examines some of the pressing challenges that are likely to define Middle Eastern politics in the coming decades.

7
States and Their Opponents

Democracies, it is often assumed, do not wage war on each other, since they are made up of institutions through which international conflicts can be peacefully mediated and resolved.
¹
The absence of “democratic peace” in the Middle East, as chronicled in the preceding chapters, results from the region’s main political dilemma, namely the absence of democratic political institutions. In fact, as we have seen so far, in the Middle East the state and war have historically assumed a symbiotic relationship: war has been waged by Middle Eastern states, and these states have in turn been shaped by war. By the end of the twentieth century, state formations in the Middle East had come to reflect the imperatives of military security as safeguarded throughout the political arena. Various conceptions of “national security” became the overriding concern of state elites and the institutions they crafted for governing. Real or imagined threats to national security, and the near-constant drumbeats of one war or another, helped foster oversized states for which notions of civil liberties and democracy became irritants, even outright threats, that diverted resources and attention from the far more urgent task of defending the motherland. With only a few exceptions, therefore, nondemocratic states in the Middle East have become the norm and, as chapter 8 explains, have so far kept the prospects for democracy at bay. The question of democracy and the prospects for and patterns of democratization in the Middle East are explored in that chapter. Here we examine the historical and political dynamics that have given rise to the varieties of nondemocratic, or at best quasi-democratic, political institutions found throughout the Middle East.

Middle Eastern states can be classified into four ideal types: exclusionary, inclusionary, sultanistic, and quasi-democratic.
²
Exclusionary states survive primarily by excluding the masses from the political process. They
are “praetorian” dictatorships built on repression, relying on policies that stifle not only dissent but also other unauthorized expressions of political opinion by social actors.
³
Up until the 2011 uprisings, Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen belonged in this category. Only two of these states, Algeria and Sudan, relied solely on sheer repression to stay in power, and the Sudanese state did so only in the south. Most of the other authoritarian dictatorships managed to manipulate enough social dynamics to reign over largely placated and effectively repressed societies. Inclusionary states, on the other hand, thrive on populism, perpetuating and then relying on a myth of popular participation in order to survive. But their populism varies greatly in nature and in degree, and they may in fact be more exclusionary in reality than in appearance. Ruling for more than forty years, within a couple of decades of having come to power Muammar Qaddafi had turned Libya into a far more exclusionary than inclusionary state. With wars subsiding and the list of enemies nearing exhaustion, it became harder for the Libyan state to sell the myth of revolutionary democratic inclusion to the populace. From the very start, Saddam Hussein’s rule in Iraq tended to be just as autocratic as it was populist, although to the bitter end he held on to the illusion of including the masses in the Iraqi body politic. During the First and to a lesser extent the Second Republic, Iran also had an inclusionary state, although the dynamics characterizing the country’s Third Republic are decidedly different.

Sultanistic states are the monarchies of the region—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Morocco—although Jordan and Morocco differ fundamentally from the rest in that neither has a wealthy economy or the benefits of a political history that makes the state seem almost a “natural” corollary of social forces.
⁴
Thus they have to rely more on a deliberately propagated civic and political-historical myth. But this “civic myth” has been subject to a variety of challenges, especially from the emerging urban middle classes. As we will see later, in the late 1980s and early 1990s the correlation between structural characteristics and liberalization seemed the strongest in this category of Middle Eastern states. Having neither the vast riches enjoyed by the wealthy oil monarchies nor the historical reservoir of tribal and traditional legitimacy, when confronted with structural difficulties (such as economic downturns or international crises) the civic myth monarchies were more likely to resort to liberalization as an option, even if only as a survival strategy. Chapter 8 charts the halted liberalization processes of both states. For a variety of reasons, Jordan’s liberalization became comparatively “frozen,” while Morocco’s continues to proceed, albeit slowly.

Finally, in three Middle Eastern countries—Israel, Lebanon, and Turkey—the state has conventionally been given the label
democratic.
In all of these, democratic institutions and practices have been part of the political landscape, even if in the latter two on a sporadic and imperfect basis. Of the three states, Israel comes closest to approximating a liberal democracy, but even it places significant limitations on the scope and nature of its citizens’ democratic liberties. For these and other reasons explored below, all three of the Middle East’s democracies are best categorized as quasi-democratic.

Each group of states has a markedly different historical genesis. Most Middle Eastern monarchies are colonial constructions, although indigenous historical and political forces eventually severed the connection with the colonial power. Some of the monarchies fell to revolutions and became, at least initially, inclusionary. These included Nasser’s Egypt after 1952, Qaddafi’s Libya (1969–2011), the Islamic Republic of Iran from 1979 until about 1997, and “revolutionary” Iraq from 1958 into, with some interruptions, the 1990s. Other monarchies, notably in Morocco and Jordan and in the Arabian peninsula, have managed to stave off revolutions and have remained sultanistic. A number of other inclusionary states—postindependence Algeria, Habib Bourguiba’s Tunisia, Hafiz Al-Assad’s Syria, the Egypt of Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, and Sudan—steadily lost their populist zeal and, with their revolutions increasingly institutionalized, became more and more exclusionary. By itself, historical genesis does not guarantee the political longevity of autocracies. What appears to be key is the evolution of the institutions of repression and their ability to suppress or manipulate society.

Before each of the regime categories is examined in greater detail, a couple of cautionary notes are in order. First, the categories outlined here are ideal types. It is extremely rare to find a state that fits entirely within one category and has no characteristics in common with a state belonging to a different category. This holds especially true for the Middle East’s nondemocratic states, which often employ a combination of political and economic formulas—such as charisma and repression, exclusion and patronage, or religiosity and modernity—to stay in power. For example, almost all the sultanistic states of the region are exclusionary also. While sultanistic states rely heavily on tradition as a source of political legitimacy, all have poor human rights records and will not hesitate to quell political opposition by whatever means necessary. Similarly, while the Tunisian state remained essentially exclusionary under Ben Ali’s rule, in the late 1980s it embarked on a number of highly successful populist campaigns aimed at boosting the
popularity of the state in general and of President Ben Ali in particular.
⁵
Political repression and exclusion have long been staples of Bahraini and Saudi politics, especially since the polarizing Shiʿa-Sunni tensions following the Iranian revolution.
⁶
And Iran, with its unusual mix of open parliamentary politics, revolutionary flavor, and theocratic underpinnings, could just as validly be placed in the exclusionary category as in the inclusionary or even quasi-democratic category. What is important is the
degree
to which a state exhibits the characteristics that predominate in one category as opposed to another: the Iranian state, especially during the First and Second Republics, was more inclusionary than anything else; President Ben Ali’s Tunisia was more exclusionary than populist; the states of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar are more sultanistic than exclusionary; and so on.