The New Middle East (66 page)

The conflict between faiths will often boil over now that the dictator’s hand is off the lid of the pot he so carefully stirred. The sectarian wounds of civil war in Iraq have yet to heal. Christians across the region seek shelter from a hurricane of change that is randomly crashing into their fragile communities. The oppressed Shia faithful are fighting for equality within the Sunni states of the Gulf. And at the heart of the Arab world there is raging one of the most complicated and devastating civil wars the region has ever known. The UN says Syria has produced the greatest humanitarian crisis the institution has had to tackle. Its high commissioner for refugees, Antonio Guterres, warned, ‘The political geography of the modern Middle East emerged from the Sykes–Picot agreement . . . The conflict in Syria might for the first time put that political geography into question.’
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Men drew the lines that formed the old Middle East. God will shape the new one.

Now that the people of the Arab world have risen up to kick out their dictators and have held internationally acknowledged free and fair elections, does Israel still think it is the only democracy in the Middle East? ‘Yes!’ President Shimon Peres told me.

President Obama asked me ‘Who is against democracy in the Middle East?’ I answered him, ‘The husbands.’ They won’t give equality to their wives. They won’t permit women to play an equal role. If they don’t do it [then these countries] won’t recover. If the women are not educated, neither are the children. And half of the children are illiterate. And today without knowledge you cannot move around. Look, I don’t want to smear them, why should I, draw your own conclusions. I think, for example, if you don’t give equality to women you don’t have a democracy.

My conclusion is that President Peres is wrong. There are now other democracies in the Middle East. The popular coup in Egypt though was a step backwards. Deeply conservative views on the role of women are widespread in the region, but they are not exclusive to the Arab world. They can be found within walking distance of where I sat with President Peres in Jerusalem, in Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community. The rights of women though are much better protected in Israel than they are anywhere else in the region. The potential for women’s rights to be rolled back in these new democracies is very real, but so is the fact that women played a huge role in the revolutions. They too showed immense courage and fought for their countries’ new freedoms. They will have a tougher road ahead than the men, but that doesn’t mean they won’t walk it.

The Gulf countries have been driving policy since the secular dictatorships began to collapse. It is hard to see how that can last. Qatar has locked itself into giving, no matter how ungrateful the recipients may become, because that’s the only foreign policy tool it has. The Libyans were the first to tire of the meddling by the Qataris. The Egyptian economy has only been kept afloat because of their loans, but the Egyptian people increasingly saw Doha as just bailing out the Brotherhood for their own political ends. Similar sentiments can be found in Tunisia. Qatar stands tall now only because the countries shaken by the Arab Spring are still on their knees. Once these nations find their feet, they will send Qatar back to its gilded playground.

Things will be less cheery for Qatar’s only other competitor in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia. The problems within its society are unlikely to be resolved after the passage of time ends the succession crisis of its gerontocracy. There is no guarantee that a new generation of cosseted princes will bring with it any new ideas. And even if they do, they have very little experience of managing transition, because changing Saudi society has been something they have only ever been taught how to avoid. The Gulf countries should enjoy their moment in the limelight because it is likely to be fleeting. Money has bought them time, nothing more. The only real question is how quickly will change come and how brutal will it be? The Gulf kingdoms keep saying, ‘It will not happen here.’ So did Mubarak and then Gaddafi and then Assad. The Arab monarchies are now scared of their people. They should be.

Over time Egypt will regain its rightful place as the most important and influential Arab nation. Egypt’s problems are huge but they are not insurmountable. The Muslim Brotherhood has looked at Turkey as a model. A more realistic one is India. India has the same sectarian divide, the same disastrous infrastructure, a bloated, corrupt bureaucracy and huge tracts of poverty. Like Egypt’s, India’s political establishment, with a few notable exceptions, is divided, self-serving and incompetent. But, also like Egypt, India is a democracy with a huge, ambitious, educated middle class that believes its nation’s manifest destiny is to be great again. India works despite its politicians. Egypt is going to have to learn to do the same. The crucial thing for Egypt’s success is to make sure that its army acts like the Indian one, by being subservient to the state, rather than the one across India’s border with Pakistan. All old soldiers think they know better than the civilians. A professional army doesn’t try to prove it. This is where the Egyptian generals’ American paymasters have a crucial role after the July coup.

The war in Syria sums up the complexity of the New Middle East. No one had foreseen the revolutions before they happened. There was an attempt afterwards to suggest that the White House had been busying itself for just such an event. The existence of a Study Directive signed by President Obama in August 2010 to look into the potential for change in the Arab world was offered as an example of prescience that really didn’t exist.
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The study got no further than initial discussions about the merits or otherwise of preemptively engaging with the forces of political Islam. The project soon descended into interagency fighting, with the State Department on one side and the CIA and the Department of Defense on the other. It never reached the stage of predicting a timescale for what would happen and what the Obama administration was going to do about it.
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There were very few specifics and it ended up being delayed and then overtaken by events. But more than two years after the revolts, when it was now into its second term, the Obama administration had still not got its ducks in a row on some of the key challenges in the region. There were still signs of that disconnect between the State Department and the Department of Defense. On the same day at two different hearings in Congress John Kerry and Chuck Hagel gave two different assessments of the trustworthiness of the Syrian opposition and the state of the conflict.
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With Syria now in its third year of crisis, Congress asked Hagel, if the US policy to try to bring about an end to the violence and produce a political transition to a post-Assad authority was working. ‘It hasn’t achieved its objective obviously,’ he said ‘That’s why we continue to look for other options and other ways to do this.’ If the US still cannot resolve its interagency differences over Syria then there’s little hope of achieving unity in the more fractious UN Security Council.

Only people with no long-term vested interest in the wellbeing of the subjects of the state could have conjured up Syria and Iraq. Neither the countries nor the political power structures within them would have naturally come about without the mischievous hand of foreigners. Ba’athism was a reaction to the selfish audacity of colonial rule. Neither country necessarily has a future within its present borders. In both nations removing the Ba’athist regimes has been a thoroughly brutal exercise. Fortunately it only has to be done once, but that’s no comfort for the people who have to live through it.

The battle between the Sunni and Shia forces in the Middle East will continue beyond the outcome of the war in Syria. The more the Gulf states turn the Syrian crisis into a proxy war over God, the more that sectarian poison will flow out into the region. If the Sunni and Shia are seen to be slaughtering each other in Syria that will impact on communal relations in countries not directly connected to the conflict. America and its allies may be able to contain the physical war within Syria’s borders, but it’s already clear they will not be able to contain its influence on the region.

George W. Bush led America into Iraq without a plan. Barack Obama kept America out of Syria without a plan. Not acting is not passive. Not acting is a decision that has consequences. The Obama administration made a mistake allowing the untried and undemocratic Gulf states to run the show at the beginning. The opportunity to stop the descent into bloodlust has been lost. There can now be only a policy of containment. The warring sides will have to exhaust themselves into a solution.

The Iranians though will not want to sacrifice Hezbollah for Assad. The militant group has been their most successful foreign policy tool in the region and hanging on to it will be their priority. The Syrian regime long threatened to drag Lebanon down with it, but that is not in Hezbollah’s interest, because whatever might emerge from another civil war in Lebanon would only leave it in a worse place than it is today. A new Sunni power in Syria though may embolden Sunni groups in both Lebanon and Iraq. In the coming years there will be tensions and violence. Lebanon will keep trying to pull itself back from the edge no matter how hard forces in Syria push. Memories of the last civil war are too raw for the Lebanese people to forgive anyone who tries to take them down that path again. The Iraqis will also hope they can weather a storm which is unlikely to respect their borders.

That young state senator from Illinois would probably have had some harsh words to say about the world sitting back and watching live on TV, day after day after day, the brutal murder of tens of thousands of people at the centre of the most volatile region on the globe. The killings in the Congo and Syria may be equally brutal. European colonialists planted the seeds of the present-day carnage in both countries, but that is where the comparison ends. The repercussions for the rest of the world of both states collapsing are nowhere near the same. Obama began his presidency promising the Muslim world ‘A New Beginning’. What happened to it?

Whatever the West does now to help the rebels could have been done earlier. The Arab world won’t forget that. The inaction over Syria may end up harming America’s standing in the Muslim world just as much as the worst excesses of the ‘War on Terror’. One wonders whether a few years from now another US administration will be looking for a venue in Cairo and crafting a speech to explain why the last guy got it wrong and offering a better deal for the future.

America believes that what it calls the ‘Islamist phase of terrorism’ is receding and could end by 2030.
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That may be true with regard to the Global Jihadists, but the war in Syria has prolonged their presence in the region, though they are becoming less global and more local. That makes them much more of a problem for Israel, which has not faced a violent Salafist threat before on this scale. What the jihadists won’t be though is more legitimate, because the Arab Spring has proven that their ideology is bankrupt. Real change does not come only from the barrel of a gun. The overwhelming majority of Muslims always believed that to be true. They never bought into the ideology of al-Qaeda. It frustrates them enormously that sections of the Western world even now still don’t believe them when they say that.

The Arab Spring was the beginning of the reshaping of the Middle East. The process is not over yet. Now that it is under way China has been looking to fill any space the US leaves behind if it does begin a slow withdrawal. China will not champion human rights and support the region’s fledgling democracies. Europe is becoming more engaged in the Middle East but it is too divided to speak with one firm voice. The temptation to leave the Arab people to sort things out for themselves may be strong for the US, which has reaped very little reward for its efforts in the region. But to bow to it would be a mistake. America’s decades-long support for the dictatorships helped break the Middle East. The US should help fix it.

But in the eyes of the Arab world America has lost too much credibility; first over the peace process, then in Iraq and now in Syria, to entitle it to claim the role of ‘honest broker’ again. The US has an agenda just like every other player in the Middle East. It would be more honest to stop pretending otherwise.

The region has huge problems but equally great opportunities. Under the corrupt dictatorships the Arab people usually had to leave the Middle East if they wanted both a clear future and a clear conscience. Now, apart from Syria, the other countries of the Arab Spring have the chance to use their ingenuity and creativity at home and to build new states. They will need help with their economies and to resolve their differences. However the revolutionaries expect to be treated with the respect they now feel they have earned. The new societies emerging from the uprisings intend for the first time in their history to shed their client-nation status.

The people of the New Middle East now have a voice. Whether the West likes what they have to say or not, the world after the Arab Spring means it is going to have to listen to them.

Notes

Introduction

 
  
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   Megan Price, Jeff Klingner and Patrick Ball,
Preliminary Statistical Analysis of Documentation of Killings in the Syrian Arab Republic
(commissioned by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights)
, The Benetech Human Rights Program, January 2013.