Arabs (102 page)

The Arab world had grave reservations about President Bush’s accusations. Arab governments believed—erroneously—that Saddam Hussein probably did hold an arsenal of chemical and biological agents. After all, he had used chemical weapons against both the Iranians and the Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s. Even the UN’s top weapons inspector, Dr. Hans Blix, believed Iraq held such weapons. However, the Arab states knew that Iraq had played no role in the September 11 attacks and strongly doubted any connection between the Islamist al-Qaida movement and the secular nationalist Iraqi Ba’th party. Saddam Hussein headed precisely the type of government that Osama bin Ladin sought to overturn. The Arab world simply did not accept what the Bush administration was saying, and it suspected the United States of ulterior motives—of coveting Iraq’s oil, and of seeking to extend its domination over the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

The invasion of Iraq, which began on March 20, 2003, was widely condemned internationally and across the Arab world. The United States, seconded by Great Britain, had invaded an Arab state without provocation or UN sanction. Saddam Hussein remained defiant in the face of superior Western forces, and, as it had during the Gulf War in 1991, his stance generated widespread Arab public support, which Arab governments disregarded at their peril. All twenty-two members of the Arab League except Kuwait supported a resolution condemning the invasion as a violation of the UN Charter and demanding a complete withdrawal of all U.S. and British troops from Iraqi soil on March 23. Yet no one seriously expected the Bush administration to pay heed to the concerns of the Arab world.

Though the Iraqis put up stiff resistance, they were completely overpowered by superior British and American forces who enjoyed unchallenged control of the skies over Iraq. On April 9, the Americans secured Baghdad, signalling the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government within three weeks of the start of hostilities. The Iraqi people had mixed feelings, celebrating the overthrow of a much-hated dictator while resenting the Americans and British for invading their country.

Celebrations gave way to chaos, as crowds of vandals attacked government buildings and presidential palaces to vent their anger and plunder whatever they could lay their hands on. The looters did not confine themselves to hated government offices
but attacked cherished institutions of national heritage as well. Iraq’s national museum was stripped of its priceless archaeological treasures, and both the national library and the state’s archives were set on fire while the occupation forces stood by and watched. Arab journalists noticed that the only public building secured by the Americans was the Iraqi Ministry of Petroleum, feeding conspiracy theories that the whole invasion had been motivated by American interests in Iraqi oil. Statements by American officials did little to assuage these concerns. When asked by journalists why the American authorities did not do more to stop the looting, the U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld dismissively quipped, “Stuff happens.”

The overthrow of the Iraqi government left the United States in control of the country. The Bush administration established a governing body called the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Two early decisions by the CPA transformed the chaos of postwar Iraq into an armed insurgency against American rule. In May 2003, the head of the CPA, L. Paul Bremer, passed two decrees. The first outlawed Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Ba‘th party, barring former Ba’th members from public office. Bremer then passed a second order disbanding the 500,000-member Iraqi military and intelligence services.

The American authorities wanted to purge Iraq of Saddam Hussein’s malign influence, much as the Allied occupation authorities had done to Nazi Germany after the Second World War. They hoped by these measures to enjoy a free hand to build up a new, democratic Iraqi state that would respect human rights. In fact, what Bremer had done was to make a number of well-armed men unemployed, and stripped Iraq’s political elites of any interest in cooperating with America’s new democratic Iraq. What followed was an insurgency against the American occupation and a civil war between Iraqi communities. Iraq quickly became a recruiting ground for anti-American and anti-Western activities.

As the insurgency began to take hold, the casualty figures in Iraq began to mount. New organizations emerged, such as al-Qaida in Iraq, an Iraqi terror group with only nominal ties to Osama bin Ladin’s organization, which deployed suicide bombers against foreign and domestic targets. They drove the United Nations to close their offices in Iraq after targeted bombings in August and September 2003 killed the senior UN envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and over twenty of his staff. Westerners were taken hostage, and many were brutally murdered. Military patrols became the target of increasingly sophisticated attacks. Insurgents killed an average of 60 U.S. service men per month in the six years following the 2003 invasion. By 2009, more than 4,300 Americans and 170 Britons had been killed and over 31,000 foreign soldiers wounded by the insurgents.

The full horror of the Iraqi insurgency is reflected in the suffering of the Iraqi people themselves. Though the casualty figures for Iraqi civilians since the 2003 invasion are widely disputed, the Iraqi government estimates that between 100,000
and 150,000 civilians have been killed. Suicide bombers have wreaked daily carnage in the markets and mosques of Iraq’s cities. Graphic images of Iraqi death and suffering have been broadcast across the Arab world by satellite TV. The true cost of the war on terror, it seemed, was borne by the Arab people.

And in the end, what was the U.S. invasion of Iraq all about? No weapons of mass destruction were ever found. No connection was ever established between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida or the September 11 attacks. Although the United States had promised to replace Saddam Hussein’s tyranny with a new regime of democracy and human rights, graphic photographs of prisoner abuse demonstrated that the Americans were using torture and humiliation reminiscent of Ba’th practices in Abu Ghurayb Jail. The United States seemed to be operating by double standards that only alienated Arab public opinion further.

 

The spread of democracy was a recurrent theme in America’s war on terror. President Bush and his neoconservative advisors believed that democratic values and participatory politics were incompatible with terrorism. One of the key advocates of these views was Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. In a speech to a foreign policy forum in California in May 2002, Wolfowitz asserted, “To win the war against terrorism . . . we must speak to the hundreds of millions of moderate and tolerant people in the Muslim world . . . who aspire to enjoy the blessings of freedom and democracy and free enterprise.”
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Secretary of State Colin Powell launched his own still-born Middle East Partnership Initiative in December 2002 to bring “democracy and free markets” to the Middle East.
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The Bush administration argued that a democratic Iraq would prove a beacon to the rest of the Arab states and set off a wave of democratization that would sweep the Arab world.

The Bush administration’s expectation that democracy would spread like wildfire across the Arab world had little grounding in the realities of the region. The inconvenient truth about democracy in the Arab world is that, in any free and fair election, those parties most hostile to the United States are most likely to win. This is not because of any animosity toward Americans per se, but because Arab voters are increasingly convinced that the U.S. government is hostile to their interests. The war on terror has only confirmed Arab voters in this view. American hostilities against Muslim and Arab states, combined with unconditional American support for Israel, led many Arab citizens to conclude that the U.S. was exploiting the war on terror to extend its domination over their region. This has made Islamist parties who advocate resistance to America more attractive to voters than moderates seeking accommodation with America. Elections in Lebanon in 2005, and in the Palestinian territories in 2006, bear this out.

The Palestinians, more than any other Arab people, had grounds to doubt America’s intentions, given U.S. support for Israel. The Palestinian Authority was therefore
relieved to see the Bush administration draw Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations—three bodies the Palestinians knew to be sympathetic to their aspirations—into the peace process. Known as the Middle East Quartet, the partnership in April 2003 drafted a “road map to peace in the Middle East” to give direction to the Bush vision of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict first elaborated in his June 2002 speech.

There were a number of problems with the Road Map that detracted from its credibility. The Quartet’s peace plan set out an unrealistically ambitious timetable for resolving all of the outstanding differences between Palestinians and Israelis. When Bush formally presented the document to the Israelis and Palestinians in June 2003, he was already off schedule: the first phase of the three-phase plan, in which violence and terror were to be ended and Palestinian life “normalized,” was due for completion in May 2003. The second phase, which was to span the last six months of 2003, was to witness the creation of provisional Palestinian state within temporary borders. The third and final phase was to be completed between 2004 and 2005, during which time Palestinians and Israelis would resolve the final status issues: borders between the two states, the status of East Jerusalem, the resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem, and the future of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. By the end of 2005 the states of Israel and Palestine would exchange recognition and declare their conflict at an end. While the Palestinians were in more of a hurry to secure statehood than anyone else, they wanted to see a realistic peace process achieve tangible gains. A plan that raised hopes and then failed to deliver would only leave the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority open to criticism from its Islamist opponents.

Israel’s attitude towards the Road Map further undermined its credibility as a peace plan. While the Palestinian Authority accepted the Quartet’s plan outright, the Israeli cabinet only approved the peace initiative subject to fourteen reservations. The Palestinian Authority was left clutching to the Road Map to demonstrate their commitment to peace and secure some relief from Israel and America’s war on terror. Their failure to secure any tangible gains through working with the Americans—no progress towards an Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian territories or a halt to settlements, let alone Palestinian statehood—played straight into the hands of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas.

Palestinian voters soon got the chance to express their views at the polls. In November 2004 Yasser Arafat, the historic leader of the Palestinian national struggle and besieged president of the Palestinian Authority, died of medical complications in a Paris hospital. Though the Palestinians mourned Arafat, the Bush administration insisted that his death opened opportunities for the Palestinians to elect new leaders “not compromised by terror.” On January 9, 2005, the Palestinians voted for a new president. Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas won an outright majority of 63 percent to
succeed Arafat. The Bush administration applauded the result and declared Abbas a man they could work with.

Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, on the other hand, refused to deal with Mahmoud Abbas. In 2005, Sharon announced his intention to withdraw all Israeli troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip. Israel’s position in Gaza was untenable, with thousands of soldiers providing securing for 8,000 settlers in a hostile population of 1.4 million Palestinians. Withdrawal from Gaza was popular with the Israeli army and voters. It also allowed Sharon greater freedom to ignore the Road Map, claiming to be pursuing his own peace with the Palestinians. Yet Sharon refused to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority to ensure a smooth handover in Gaza. In so doing, when the Israelis completed their withdrawal from Gaza in August 2005, Sharon left behind a dangerous power vacuum in Gaza and handed Hamas an important victory. The Islamist party naturally took credit for driving Israel from Gaza through their years of resistance.

The true extent of Hamas’s gains only emerged in the January 2006 elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council. The two leading parties were Arafat’s Fatah, now under Mahmoud Abbas’s leadership, and Hamas, led by Ismail Haniya. It was widely expected that Hamas would enjoy strong support and reduce Fatah’s majority in the PLC. However, the magnitude of Hamas’s victory was a shock to Palestinians and foreign observers alike. Hamas took 74 of the 132 seats in the PLC. Fatah managed to retain only 45 seats. A party officially boycotted by the United States and the European Union as a terrorist organization won a sufficient majority in an election deemed by international monitors as free and fair to form the next government of Palestine. It was a shattering reversal for America’s war on terror. And the Palestinian people would pay the price.

The new Hamas government of Prime Minister Haniya openly rejected the Quartet’s Mid East policies. Haniya refused to recognize Israel, to end armed resistance, or to accept the terms of the Road Map. Consequently, the Quartet cut all assistance to the Palestinian Authority. Until Hamas proved willing to renounce terror, neither the EU nor the U.S. would support a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority—even a democratically elected one.

 

In Lebanon, the Islamist Hizbullah party also proved its appeal to voters for its politics of resistance against Israel and the United States. The strength of Hizbullah came as a surprise to the Bush administration, which upheld Lebanon as an example of citizens who had succeeded in preserving their democratic rights—in this case from Syrian oppression.

Lebanon’s democracy movement, which came to be known in the West as the Cedar Revolution, was provoked by the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister
Rafik Hariri on February 14, 2005. Hariri’s son Saad led the nation in mourning, and made clear his belief that Syria was responsible for his father’s violent death. The assassination set off waves of mass demonstrations that brought politics in Lebanon to a standstill. On March 14, one million Lebanese descended on downtown Beirut to demand Syria’s complete withdrawal from Lebanon. The movement met with full support from the United States, which accused Syria of sponsoring terrorism. Under intense international pressure, the Syrian government agreed to withdraw its soldiers and intelligence forces from Lebanon. The last Syrian troops crossed out of Lebanon on April 26.