War
is about bundling and unintended consequence. Do not think
otherwise. At the end of the day, when a hurt America wanted to
strike out most, George Bush offered up the unfinished business of
Iraq. What all went into that decision is meaningless because the
intent was to kick over the sand box to discover if something better
came out of it.
The
surprise was that it meant a long insurgency situation and that was
the real consequence. That taught the Arabs that an angered
population can make life miserable for any despot and even the USA.
It is not decisive but it slowly makes authority untenable.
That
is what has emboldened the Arab Spring and made it work. Libya tried
the bitter end and it is presently Syria's turn. Other potential
autocrats are now been massaged by electoral politics and been ground
up. Democracy is always messy and there are plenty of contradictions
to work out. Yet the outcome will actually be fine provided they can
survive.
Observe
how each time Morsi chooses to step out of line, the people hit the
bricks. We have a few years of this working out. Sooner or later,
though, one of these nations will calve into its natural components
in order to end the bloodshed. Recall Yugoslavia. I do expect a
small Alawite nation and a greater Kurdish nation. There is a lot of
room here for redrawing the map.
KANAN MAKIYA : THE
ARAB SPRING STARTED IN IRAQ / New York Times
By KANAN MAKIYA –
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – 7.4.2013 : – On April 9, 2003, Baghdad
fell to an American-led coalition. The removal of Saddam Hussein and
the toppling of a whole succession of other Arab dictators in 2011
were closely connected — a fact that has been overlooked largely
because of the hostility that the Iraq war engendered.
Few
of the brave young men and women behind the Arab Spring have been
willing to publicly admit the possibility of a link between their
revolutions and the end of Mr. Hussein’s bloody reign 10 years ago.
These activists have for the most part vigorously denied that their
own demands for freedom and democracy, which were organic and
homegrown, had anything to do with a war they saw as illegitimate and
imperialistic.
To see the connection
between the overthrow of Mr. Hussein in 2003 and the overthrow of
Hosni Mubarak in 2011, one must go back to 1990, when Iraq’s army
marched into Kuwait. The first gulf war — in which an American-led
coalition ousted Iraq’s occupying army — enjoyed the support of
most Arab governments, but not of their populations. Mr. Hussein’s
invasion of Kuwait threatened the order that had kept authoritarian
regimes in power for decades and Arab leaders were willing to fight
to restore it.
Citizens tend to rally
around their leaders when faced with external attacks. But Iraqis
didn’t. Millions of Iraqis rose up against Mr. Hussein following
the 1991 war, and did what was then unthinkable: they called upon the
foreign forces that had been bombing them to help rid them of their
own dictator.
Mr. Hussein’s brutal
response to the 1991 uprising killed tens of thousands of Iraqis. For
the first time, the rhetoric used by Mr. Hussein’s so-called
secular nationalist regime turned explicitly sectarian, a forerunner
of what we see in Syria today. “No more Shias after today,” was
the slogan painted on the tanks that rolled over Najaf and fired at
Shiite protesters. The Western and Arab armies that had come to
liberate Kuwait simply stood by and watched as Shiites and Kurds who
rose up were massacred. The overthrow of Mr. Hussein was deemed to be
beyond the war’s mandate.
And so ordinary Iraqis
had to die in droves as the Arab state system was restored by force
of Western arms. Those Iraqi deaths were a dress rehearsal for what
is going on in other parts of the Middle East today.
The first gulf war
achieved America’s goals, but the people of Iraq paid the price for
that success. They were left with international sanctions for another
12 years under a brutal and bitter dictator itching for vengeance
against those who had dared to rise up against him, including Kurds
in the north and Shiites in the south. By the time of the American
invasion in 2003, the Iraqi middle class had been decimated, state
institutions had been gutted and mistrust and hostility toward
America abounded.
Both the George W.
Bush administration and the Iraqi expatriate opposition to Mr.
Hussein — myself included — grossly underestimated those costs in
the run-up to the 2003 war. The Iraqi state, we failed to realize,
had become a house of cards.
None of these errors
of judgment were necessarily an argument against going to war if you
believed, as I do, that overthrowing Mr. Hussein was in the best
interests of the Iraqi people. The calculus looks different today if
one’s starting point is American national interest. I could not in
good conscience tell an American family grieving for a son killed in
Iraq that the war “was worth it.”
We didn’t know then
what we know today. Some, including many of my friends, warned of the
dangers of American hubris. I did not heed them in 2003.
But the greater hubris
is to think that what America does or doesn’t do is all that
matters. The blame for the catastrophe of post-2003 Iraq must be
placed on the new Iraqi political elite. The Shiite political class,
put in power by the United States, preached a politics of victimhood
and leveraged the state to enrich itself. These leaders falsely
identified all Sunni Iraqis with Baathists, forgetting how heavily
all Iraqis, including some Shiites, were implicated in the
criminality of Mr. Hussein’s regime.
Although I always
feared, and warned in 1993, that the emergence of sectarian strife
was a risk after Mr. Hussein’s fall, my greatest misjudgment was in
hoping that Iraq’s new leaders would act for the collective Iraqi
good.
For all its bungling,
the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq exposed a fundamental
truth of modern Arab politics. Washington’s longstanding support
for autocracy and dictatorship in the Middle East, a core principle
of American foreign policy for decades, had helped stoke a
deep-seated political malaise in the region that produced both Saddam
Hussein and Al Qaeda. By 2003, American support for Arab autocrats
was no longer politically sustainable.
The system of beliefs
Mr. Hussein represented had ossified and lost the ability to inspire
anyone long before 2003. And yet he was still there, in power, the
great survivor of so many terrible wars and revolutions. Before the
American invasion, it was impossible for Iraqis to see beyond him.
There was hardly any
war to speak of in 2003. Mr. Hussein’s whole terrible edifice just
came crashing down under its own weight. The army dismantled itself,
before L. Paul Bremer, the American proconsul, even issued his
infamous and unnecessary order to purge Baath Party members from the
military.
Toppling Mr. Hussein
put the system of which he was such an integral part under newfound
scrutiny. If the 1991 war was about the restoration of the Arab state
system, the 2003 war called into question that system’s very
legitimacy. That’s why support from Arab monarchies was not
forthcoming in 2003, when a new, more equitable order was on the
agenda in Iraq.
After 2003, the
edifice of the Arab state system began to crack elsewhere. In 2005,
thousands of Lebanese marched in the streets to boot out the
occupying Syrian Army; Palestinians tasted their first real
elections; American officials twisted the arm of Hosni Mubarak to
allow Egyptians a slightly less rigged election in 2006; and a new
kind of critical writing began to spread online and in fiction.
The Arab political
psyche began to change as well. The legitimating ideas of post-1967
Arab politics — pan-Arabism, armed struggle, anti-imperialism and
anti-Zionism — ideas that undergirded the regimes in both Iraq and
Syria, were rubbing up against the realities of life under Mr.
Hussein.
No Arab Spring
protester, however much he or she might identify with the plight of
the Palestinians or decry the cruel policies of Israeli occupation in
the West Bank (as I do), would think today to attribute all the ills
of Arab polities to empty abstractions like “imperialism” and
“Zionism.” They understand in their bones that those phrases were
tools of a language designed to prop up nasty regimes and distract
people like them from the struggle for a better life.
\
Generations of Arabs
have paid with their lives and their futures because of a set of
illusions that had nothing to do with Israel; these illusions come
from deep within the world that we Arabs have constructed for
ourselves, a world built upon denial, bombast and imagined past
glories, ideas that have since been exposed as bankrupt and dangerous
to the future of the young Arab men and women who set out in 2011,
against all odds, to build a new order.
In the place of these
illusions, the young revolutionaries made the struggle against their
own dictatorships their political priority, just as their Iraqi
counterparts had done in vain 20 years earlier after the first gulf
war.
Ideas are not
constrained by frontiers or borders. Young people in the Arab world
are not constrained by the prejudices of old men, by my generation’s
acquiescence to and compromises with dictatorships. And so in
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, a new movement that
is still in the making has demanded a political order that derives
its legitimacy from genuine citizenship.
It envisions new forms
of community not based on a suffocating nationalist embrace
supposedly designed to hold in check the avaricious intentions of
America and Israel. All the Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi
was asking for in December 2010 was dignity and respect. That is how
the Arab Spring began, and the toppling of the first Arab dictator,
Saddam Hussein, paved the way for young Arabs to imagine it.
THE Arab Spring is now
turning into an Arab winter. The old rules that governed Arab
politics have been turned completely upside down. Here, too, Iraq
offers lessons.
Mr. Hussein used
sectarianism and nationalism as tools against his internal enemies
when he was weak. Today’s Iraqi Shiite parties are doing worse:
they are legitimizing their rule on a sectarian basis. The idea of
Iraq as a multiethnic country is being abandoned, and the same
dynamic is at work in Syria.
The support that
several key Arab monarchies are providing to Syrian resistance forces
fighting against President Bashar al-Assad is further undermining the
legitimacy of the whole Arab state system. The war will go on until
Mr. Assad is gone and perhaps the state we know as Syria is, too. The
only success story seems to be the Kurds — the great losers of the
post-World War I order — who have built a thriving semiautonomous
region in northern Iraq that might eventually require independence to
sustain its success.
Our species, at least
in its modern garb, needs states, even imperfect ones. States are
still the cornerstones of our security as individuals, and provide at
least the possibility of a civilized way of life.
Traditionally
conservative Arab monarchies are now doing the unthinkable and
risking total state collapse in Syria. They are opposing Mr. Assad’s
Arab nationalist regime in an attempt to dictate the kind of country
that will emerge from the chaos and to ensure some form of influence
over the new Syria. That is the only way to salvage something of the
old Arab order that they feel shifting under their feet.
And against these
kinds of forces, unfortunately, the young revolutionaries of the Arab
Spring are helpless.
Kanan Makiya is a
professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis
University and the author of “Republic of Fear: The Politics of
Modern Iraq” and “Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising,
and the Arab World.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/opinion/sunday/the-arab-spring-started-in-iraq.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print
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