I just thought to add this comment. A few weeks ago I saw an interview on the US PBS Newshour program. Two ‘experts’ were debating the Arab/Israeli conflict. One was an Arab academic at a US university and the other was a retired military strategic specialist. I didn’t bother to note their names I’m afraid.
I used to be immediately sceptical of anything anyone from the US military establishment had to say, until I realized that there is quite a variety of opinion and degrees of expertise amongst such specialists and analysts. They are not all neo-con apologists.
The thing that caught my attention was the return to the same old territory. The Arab academic claimed the problem in the ME is largely the West’s fault. This is actually a critical issue. There is no doubt that the West has interfered in the ME but whether or not this is the primary cause of its problems is open to debate.
The military strategist argued the problem was really that Islam is a failed civilization and its problems are primarily caused by the internal fallout. I must admit to now favouring this idea.
There is a common argument that the West props up dictatorships in the ME. This claim largely falls down when you look at the detail. I do not deny that the West has interfered and has a vital strategic interest in the ME. I do not deny that the West (and other countries such as Russia) seek allies in the region. Nor do I deny that the West (and Russia) have engaged in covert activities. The involvement of the CIA in supporting the Shah of Iran is a well known case. But even this bares a closer examination. Even the noted ‘leftist’ writer Tariq Ali acknowledges that the Western left made a huge mistake in simplifying the internal politics of Iran. The left supported the Islamic revolution simply on the grounds that it’s public rhetoric was anti-US. Tariq goes on to say that the left failed to understand that some of the same clerics who came to power using anti-US rhetoric happily took CIA money to topple Mossadeq and install the Shah. The clerics hated the socialist, Russia friendly Mossadeq more than they hated the Shah. They turned against the Shah when he put forward a number of secular reforms. So who used who? Did the CIA use the clerics or did the clerics use the CIA? What the CIA largely did was fund the opposition to Mossadeq, but there had to be an opposition to fund in the first place. The CIA did not create the opposition out of thin air. Tariq Ali admits that Mossadeq was unpopular and that his time was short. His fall was inevitable.
But Iran forms the model for a suspicion about the rest of the ME. (Incidentally, oil was first discovered in Iran by a joint German and British company just before WW1. We can’t forget that the Germans had just as much a stake in the ME as the allies). So who are all these ME leaders that are propped up by the West? How are they propped up?
There is a naive assumption that if these leaders weren’t ‘propped’ up they would naturally fall and the people would triumph and establish what, democratic states? Or would one dictator fall to be replaced by another dictator aligned to another group, say Russia and China?
Let’s look at Saudi Arabia as an example. There is US/SA co-operation but the US actually has very little say in domestic SA politics. It has failed to pressure the Saudis to undertake democratic reforms. I seriously doubt that if the US stopped buying Saudi oil that the Saudi regime would collapse. And if the rule of the al-Sauds failed there is every chance a more fundamentalist coalition of families would take over. The same applies to many of the gulf states ruled by particular families and clans. This pattern of governance is uniquely Arabic and existed before oil and it will likely continue after oil.
Next let’s look at the Ba’athist states of Syria and Iraq. How much influence did the West have in these countries? I’m sure the CIA tried and I’m sure they were involved in several plots. I’m also quite sure the Russians were equally involved. What, do we ignore the Russians and only concentrate on the CIA? Seems to me that the West has failed to get either Syria or Iraq on side.
When it all comes down to it the two countries that seem firmly in the West’s pocket are Jordan and Egypt, and Egypt is wonky. So that makes one stable and firm ally propped up by the West. Wow! Great! Anyone else might see this as evidence that the West has largely failed to have much influence at all. And what would replace the rule of the Hashemites? Something even more democratic or something more fundamentalist?
I think we can largely ignore the argument that the West props up governments in the ME. They are dictatorships because the ME model has always been authoritarian. And this, I believe, is the real problem. As Europe grew in economic might it was inevitable that Islam would have to deal with it. There were trading opportunities and especially new technology. As Islamic civilization engaged with Western civilization it was also inevitable that Western ideas found their way into Islamic civilization. When you read Islamist literature you see a very clear condemnation of Western culture, not just Western power. The Islamists know that if allowed to the majority of people in the ME will gradually adopt Western ways.
Islam is collapsing, failing. The fundamentalist backlash is a futile attempt to hold the tide back. It succeeds temporarily through repression and authoritarian rule. In fact the very reason the fundamentalists are prominent is because they are prepared to be strict and harsh. They think they are saving Islam, returning it to a pure state. They will succeed in the short term but repression eventually creates opposition.
There was never any doubt that the Shah of Iran sowed the seeds of his own demise through the savage actions of Savak, his secret service. But is Iran better today? There was another, disturbing documentary about the public execution of a 16 year-old girl. It was a Kafkaesque scenario. Her mother had died when she was young and her father was incapacitated by grief and turned to drugs. She was left largely to her own devices. In Iran the age of consent is 9 – or rather, a girl is considered to become a sexual temptation at the age of 9, consent has little to do with it. She is supposed to don the burqa and only go in public escorted by a male relative. She had no male relative she could turn to. She defied custom and wandered the streets. In Iranian society a lone girl over the age of 9 is considered fair game and a moral threat. So a cycle of arrests began. But here’s the nasty twist. It is the moral police who do the arresting and they are usually ex-revolutionary guards. They have the idea that they can rape these women because once charged they are despised and considered the problem. So this young woman was raped and became known to the moral police. She was ‘protected’ by a taxi driver who was a former revolutionary guard, but only if she had sex with him. She was protected by him from 12 to 15. Then an anonymous complaint was filed against her and she was charged again. Under recent reforms adolescents under the age of 21 could not be executed, but someone deliberately made her out to be older than she was. It seemed to be an inside job, the judge rushed the case and one day she was hung in the local square. What they do is drive in a crane and attach the rope to the jib. Then they haul the struggling body up so the crowd can see. She was 16, She’d been raped by the moral police since she was 11.
Hezbollah is inspired by the Iranian revolution.
And as a final note, the military strategist said he had gone to the ME to do some consulting work and he met with both Israelis and Palestinians. He said the difference was remarkable. The Israelis were frankly discussing their mistakes and working out how to avoid them. The Palestinians were blaming others and speaking conspiratorally of Mossad and the CIA. They were not looking at their own failings.
The word I keep hearing from both Muslims and non-Muslims is ‘humiliation’. But what can anyone do about humiliation? Someone can be humiliated by their own failings. Pride and honour will prevent them from seeing where they were at fault. Honour is an important value in the ME.
“What the CIA largely did was fund the opposition to Mossadeq, but there had to be an opposition to fund in the first place. The CIA did not create the opposition out of thin air. Tariq Ali admits that Mossadeq was unpopular and that his time was short. His fall was inevitable.”
That is highly debateable (to be charitable). See the book All the Shah’s Men. He was not highly unpopular. He was a hero to a great many Iranians, and to many people of other nations. He was not 100% popular–no leader is–and the CIA worked on that. In any poor country, there are very few people so enamored of their leader that they won’t work against him if the pay is good enough. There were some discontents, and the CIA paid them to stage destructive rallies, which a campaign of deliberate disinformation made appear the result of Mossadeq’s supporters. As the chaos became worse, more and more people turned against him.
It was hardly inevitable. There were a number of key little things that had to happen for his overthrow, one of them being that Mossadeq, being so committed to civil liberties, did not clamp down hard on the opposition after the first coup attempt failed. Had he done that, it is highly unlikely he would have fallen. Kermit Roosevelt had been called back to the U.S. after the first failed coup attempt, he basically ignored orders and stayed on, tried one more last-ditch effort, and got very lucky.
To say that Mossadeq’s fall was inevitable because he was unpopular is to say that the leader of any relatively weak and undeveloped country in the world could be overthrown by the CIA. You should know, Ray, that the nature of pollitics is such that a wealthy and strong country can always drive a wedge between a leader and some of its people, if it chooses to.
Thanks, I will check this out further. But I see one flaw in your argument. If Mossadegh was so popular how could he have been overthrown by rabble in the streets? Surely his supporters would have rallied to his aid? It’s always a question of numbers.
I don’t doubt the nastiness of US interference, one only has to look at South America. But interference can also backfire. As you say, Mossadeq contributed by not clamping down, it was not a certainty.
This really is my main point. The West has had shaky success in the ME.
Lyndon Johnson in 1964 won re-election by one of the largest landslides in American history. He was immensely popular, as his long experience in Congress enabled him to broker deals for his so-called Great Society legislation. Four years later he was so unpopular he didn’t even run for re-election. Why?
The war in Vietnam. It started with a “rabble”, a relatively small number of intellectuals, academics and hard-core Lefists. An extremely small minority. It eventually grew to topple his Presidency. Part of the effect of the massive demonstrations was to raise public awareness, and to bring more people over to the anti-war effort. But another large part was just to cause social disorder. Even those who supported Johnson’s policies–and eventually Johnson himself–came to realize that he lacked authority to govern–that the country was in effect out of control. If a small rabble could do this in America, imagine what it could do in a third-world country, where people are so poor that just the promise of money will persuade many of them to change their positions on an issue.
Mossadeq, at the end, had lost the ability to govern, to maintain order. But as the American experience showed, it doesn’t take a majority to do that. A very tiny minority can create that level of disorder. In a third world country, where poverty makes public officials as well as private citizens so much more vulnerable to corruption, it is far easier to do this than in America. Mossadeq’s supporters did demonstrate, but they didn’t have the weapons, the control of the media, and the organization that CIA money could buy for the opposition.
On a related note, let’s hope the rising anti-Bush-and-cronie tide in the US will vote in some liberals to take back the Congress in mid-terms! Then they can investigate the numerous crimes of this administration and perhaps get rid of it.
Hi Andy,
Sure, the CIA funded the opposition and they could pay for a rent-a-crowd. But these things are not an exact science. There were internal factors. A catalyst cannot act on non-volatile substances.
An example of where it does not always go the way the CIA hopes is the Chavez regime in Venezuela. They have tried.
I’ve had this discussion with a critic in Argentina who was pushing a South American victim of US imperialism line. And it is. But I also suggested that the US could have no effect without his own countrymen collaborating. He wanted to put all the blame on the US and I said the conditions for South American dictatorships existed within those societies and their particular class system. In the end it was Argentinians who killed Argentinians, Chileans who killed Chileans, etc.
And my point is the same in regard to the ME. Let’s do a thought experiment. What if the British and French had never interfered in the ME after WW1 and there was no Sykes-Picot agreement? What would have happened? Suppose oil was never found in the Gulf?
My guess, based on exptrapolating the past, is that rival groups in the region would have fought each other to fill the power vacuum and that dictatorships would have continued, just slightly different dictatorships.