The Modern Middle East (37 page)

A second, equally important reason for the near-complete eclipse of Arab unity in the 1990s was the disappearance of a common Arab
identity
as a viable source of trans-state unity. We saw in chapter 3 how nationalism in the Middle East has developed different historical layers that sometimes complement and sometimes compete with one another—from Ottomanism to Pan-Arabism to territorially defined nationalisms. Political elites, whether based in imperial Istanbul or in the capitals of sovereign and independent states, have always played a pivotal role in articulating and popularizing each of these different layers of nationalism. By the waning decades of the twentieth century, the exigencies of political institutionalization and legitimacy prompted more and more state elites to articulate nationalism in terms of territorially specific, state patriotism. As the political scientist Michael Barnett observes, “Arab states have had strikingly different views of the desired [regional order]. . . . Although such differences might be attributed to principled beliefs, the more prominent reasons were regime interests, beginning with but not exhausted by survival and domestic stability. As a consequence, over the years Arab leaders have vied to draw a line between the regimes’ interests, the norms of Arabism, and the events of the day.”
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Arab identity, with its own multiple layers of complexity, has not completely dissipated as a factor in foreign policy making.
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But it is only
one
of the factors, and today it is evoked almost always only when it serves regime purposes.

A third and final reason for the precipitous decline of Pan-Arabism after the Second Gulf War has to do with the absence of viable institutions that could sustain and nurture such a trans-state phenomenon in the face of increasingly narrow, state-centered loyalties. In other words, once Pan-Arabist champions like Nasser were gone or exposed as false prophets (Sadat and Saddam Hussein), there were no institutions to fill the vacuum. For several decades, two overlapping institutions had operated to reinforce Pan-Arabism. One was the official institution of the League of Arab States (the Arab League), originally established in 1945, and the other was the summit system, which Nasser inaugurated in 1964. By the 1980s, the popular excitement and sense of solidarity that both the Arab League and various summits once generated had all but dissipated, victim to the many broken lofty promises and frequent boycotts by the more radical leaders. The league itself was paralyzed. From 1990 to 1996, at a time when momentous developments like the Oslo Accords were taking place, the Arab League did not hold a single summit.
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Amid the disunity of the 1990s, there nevertheless did appear one proposal for regionwide unity in the Middle East. It came, of all places, from Israel. The proposal, under the label “New Middle East,” came from one of Israel’s professional politicians, Shimon Peres. In 1993, fresh from signing the historic Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, Peres outlined his vision of a peaceful, economically integrated Middle East: “Maintaining the present situation is pointless, and . . . the status quo cannot continue in any case. Recognizing the hard truth is a criterion for the success of the peace process—without victors, without victims. War does not solve any problems; peace is the solution. As the results of our accord with Egypt have shown, we can have a peaceful relationship with our neighbors. By compromising—minimum concessions and maximum justice on both sides—we will live to see the day when nations are free of the sorrow of war, including our own nation as well.”
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Before long, however, Peres, who was Israel’s foreign minister at the time, was out of office, and the Oslo Accords were set adrift by the larger vagaries of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. When in November 1997 Israel attended the fourth annual Middle East and North Africa Economic Conference in Doha, Qatar—an event that could have given substance to Peres’s vision—most Arab countries boycotted the conference in protest over Israeli prime minister Netanyahu’s actions in the Occupied Territories. By the end of the year 2000, the Al-Aqsa
intifada
—the second bloody uprising in the Palestinian territories against Israeli occupation—had all but erased any hopes for peaceful coexistence and regional economic cooperation.

The decline in the salience of Pan-Arabism has had two profound consequences for the Middle East. To begin with, the “Arab system,” which had become “centerless” in the 1980s, shattered in the 1990s.
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Instead, from a balance-of-power perspective, two non-Arab state actors gained increasing military and hence diplomatic dominance over the region: Israel and Turkey.
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The region’s emerging international architecture has turned the Arab-Israeli conflict steadily into the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. As a result, Israel’s policies in relation to the Palestinians since the 1990s have lacked some of the constraints they would have had if the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Syrians, or others had been involved. As for Turkey, Iraq’s northern neighbor and a regional powerhouse among the Central Asian republics, the Gulf War allowed it to regain the position of strategic importance that it was beginning to lose by the Cold War’s end. As if to make a deliberate point of their growing ascendancy, in the late 1990s and early years of the new century, Turkey and Israel entered into a series of unprecedented military and economic alliances. They held joint military maneuvers, expanded economic trade, and further cemented their diplomatic friendship. Meanwhile, in the Arab world, we saw the emergence of what one scholar has called a “balance of weakness.” “Mutual recriminations of ‘stoogism,’ ‘treason,’ and ‘adventurism’ as well as vendettas still linger on [all] sides. In a word, Arab society is seriously bruised, with the marks likely to remain for a long time. This is not a political or psychological context conducive to partnership.”
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A second, related consequence of the decline of Pan-Arabism has been the increasing rate at which political Islam as an alternative has grown over the past decade or so. Political Islam did not emerge in the aftermath of the Gulf War; its roots are much deeper, and its genealogy is much older. Neither are its causes and consequences found only in international developments; every Middle Eastern country has had its own, home-brewed Islamic movement.
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But with the steady decline of Arab unity as a salient form of collective identity, there has been an inverse rise in the popularity of political Islam in all its manifestations—reformist, fundamentalist, populist, domestic, and transnational. It was no accident that political Islam—and, more precisely, Islamic fundamentalism—instigated the next political convulsion involving the Middle East: the attacks of September 11, 2001.

SEPTEMBER 11 AND ITS AFTERMATH

On a clear and balmy Tuesday morning in late summer 2001, life in New York City was changed forever when at 8:45
A.M.
a jetliner full of
passengers flew into one of the two main towers of the giant World Trade Center. Twenty minutes later, a second plane flew into the Trade Center’s other tower. Within an hour, the two 110-story skyscrapers collapsed, burying nearly three thousand civilians working there and hundreds of police and firefighters who had rushed to their rescue. Less than an hour later, another passenger plane crashed into the Pentagon building in Washington, D.C., killing all aboard and some 190 employees of the U.S. Defense Department. A fourth jetliner crashed in a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, again with no survivors.

It was quickly learned that all four planes had been hijacked for use as flying bombs. The Pennsylvania plane had apparently been intended for the White House, but its passengers had struggled with the hijackers and had forced the plane to crash far from its intended target. America was shocked and bewildered, attacked out of nowhere, for no apparent reason. For the first time in living memory, what seemed like a coordinated attack on American civilians had taken place on the American mainland—on America’s heartland in Pennsylvania, on its military might in the capital, and on its economy in New York City.

All fingers pointed to the Middle East, this time with justification. A few years earlier, in 1995, when the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed, many Americans had suspected a Middle East connection, only to discover that the attack had been the work of domestic terrorists. But this was no Oklahoma City. The September 11 events had all the hallmarks of earlier attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 (this one with very limited success) and on American targets abroad—in Somalia in 1993, in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996, in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and in Yemen in 2000—which had all been linked to a wealthy Saudi national named Osama bin Laden. Attacked so callously, the American public demanded retribution and revenge. Whoever the culprits were behind the attacks—whether bin Laden or the people who gave him shelter and refuge, or anyone else directly or indirectly involved—had to be brought to justice.

With American patriotism at an all-time high, the new administration in Washington had to act quickly and decisively. President George W. Bush had come to office following a questionable election the previous November. The “accidental president,” for whom some 75 percent of the American electorate had either actively or passively not voted, could now ill afford to be seen as weak.
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Almost immediately, the president declared that the United States was engaged in a “war on terrorism.” Within a month, American military forces and equipment had been deployed in efforts
to defeat the network of terror that had wreaked such havoc in September. The primary targets were bin Laden, his organization, called Al-Qaeda, and his hosts in Afghanistan, the Taliban. The war in Afghanistan, code-named Operation Enduring Freedom by the U.S. Central Command, was to start a new chapter in the political history of the Middle East.

The shape of the world order to emerge in the aftermath of September 11, and more specifically the roles of the United States and the Middle East within that order, are still not fully clear, at least as of this writing. Nevertheless, some of the more noticeable trends that point to an emerging global order in relation to the Middle East are highlighted below. For now, it is important to ask
why
the attacks of September 11 occurred. In particular, why was the United States the target? To blame the attacks on Islamic fundamentalism is, at best, simplistic. The culprits were, of course, Islamic fundamentalists. In chapter 7 we examine why and how Islamic fundamentalism has spread in the Middle East over the past couple of decades. But why did the fundamentalist disciples of bin Laden choose to attack the United States?

The answer is found in the exercise of American foreign policy in relation to the Middle East, both historically and especially after the Gulf War. By virtue of its position as a global superpower, and after the end of the Cold War the
only
superpower, the United States provoked the anger and resentment of many Middle Easterners by its policies and agendas throughout the world, especially in the strategically important Middle East. Following the Gulf War, American involvement in the Middle East became more pervasive than at almost any other time in the past, with the U.S. Navy maintaining a seemingly permanent presence in the Persian Gulf and American troops stationed in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain. This new “pax Americana” was sure to inflame the simmering anger of the economically frustrated, politically repressed Middle Easterners. They channeled this anger toward local rulers and their powerful patron, the United States. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the deepening penetration of the Middle East by the United States provoked increasing anti-Americanism. As the scholar Fouad Ajami has keenly observed, “From one end of the Arab world to the other, the drumbeats of anti-Americanism had been steady. But the drummers could have hardly known what was to come. The magnitude of the horror that befell the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, appeared for a moment to embarrass and silence the monsters. The American imperium in the Arab-Muslim world hatched a monster.”
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America’s role in the Middle East after the Gulf War was an outgrowth of its pursuits in the region as far back as the late 1940s. American policy
toward the Middle East since World War II has all too often been incoherent, reactive, and inconsistent. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern three primary objectives or guidelines that have generally informed U.S. policy toward the Middle East: maintaining the region’s territorial status quo in terms of the post-1948 boundaries; securing relatively easy access to the region’s vast oil resources; and containing the threat posed to U.S. interests by regional or global rivals, whether that threat came from the former Soviet Union during the Cold War or from Iran and Iraq afterward. The degree to which successive administrations in Washington have succeeded in defending U.S. interests in the Middle East has varied greatly from president to president or, in volatile Middle Eastern politics, from year to year. The Carter administration, for example, started off on a high note in terms of its Middle East policy, thanks to the Camp David Accords, but it ended badly with (and because of) the Iran hostage crisis. The one factor that has remained almost always consistent throughout each of the U.S. presidencies, however, has been the resentment that American policies have caused among many average Arab and Muslim Middle Easterners. These individuals by no means have been a majority of the population, but they have often been vocal and determined, and at times violently radical.

To better understand the causal relationship between American foreign policy and the prevalence of anti-American sentiments in the Middle East, we should look more closely at the consequences of each American policy objective in the region. Let us begin with the goal of maintaining the Middle East’s territorial status quo. For American policy makers, this has basically meant unqualified support for Israel, whose international boundaries have been subject to the most recent changes. To be certain, some American presidents and policy makers have adopted a more balanced, less lopsided policy toward the Palestinian-Israeli question.
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Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, and George H. Bush at one point or another in their presidencies tried to initiate policies that were sensitive to Palestinian and Arab aspirations. By and large, however, attention to the predicament of the Palestinians has paled in comparison to the amount and nature of the support that the United States has provided to Israel, which by some accounts hovers around $3 to $4 billion a year in assistance.
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