The New Middle East (38 page)

The US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations stated in June 2012, when it was still chaired by John Kerry: ‘There is a new equilibrium in the Middle East, as the Arab Awakening, immense oil and gas reserves, and the war in Iraq have shifted the center of gravity towards the Gulf states.’
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In fact the war in Iraq caused a drift of influence
away
from the Gulf states and towards their enemies in Tehran. The Saudis, in particular, have used the Arab revolts to correct that slide. This wasn’t immediately apparent to the Obama administration in the wake of the uprisings.

The Gulf states and the Western powers may have been on the same side, but their instincts were poles apart. The United States saw much of the early stages of the Arab Spring through the prism of its impact on Israel and oil. It didn’t have a plan for the New Middle East so it defaulted back to the ideas it used to manage the old one. The US sought stability in the region. But the Gulf states, once they were sure they had sorted out stability at home, set about shaking things up everywhere else. They were much quicker to recognise that stability for the sake of stability was pointless at this stage. The region was in flux. Instead of trying to contain it they decided to steer it in the direction they wanted.

So began another round in the decades-long proxy war between the most conservative Shia power and the most conservative Sunni power. Saudi Arabia saw in all the turmoil an opportunity to dramatically weaken Iran’s influence in the region. To do that they needed to reinforce to America, in the years that followed the Arab uprisings, that Tehran was the root of all evil in the region. Sometimes it was, but sometimes it was not.

In the spring of 2011 President Obama offered what seemed like partial mitigation of Bahrain’s actions by saying in the aftermath: ‘We recognize that Iran has tried to take advantage of the turmoil there.’
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In fact the kingdom’s own independent report, published six months later, said: ‘The evidence presented to the Commission in relation to the involvement of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the internal affairs of Bahrain does not establish a discernible link between specific incidents that occurred in Bahrain during February/March 2011 and the Islamic Republic of Iran.’
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The Sunni leadership in the Gulf wrongly present their Shia populations as an Iranian fifth column. Iran may want to use Shia protests in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia to further its aims but that doesn’t mean they own the protestors. But the longer the West continues to turn a deaf ear to the call for human rights and democracy, the easier it will become for Iran to present itself to the demonstrators as their only friend.

America has to contend with the fact that the Arab Spring has dragged it into another battle between Islamic states over the will of God. That struggle will permeate every conflict and affect every decision America must make in the coming years. It involves the 1,300-year-old conflict between Sunni and Shia, but also the decades-long animosity between the Brotherhood and the Saudis. The US now faces its greatest set of challenges in the Middle East since it began to seriously exert its influence there in the 1950s. But this is a much more complicated clash than the Cold War struggle that defined America’s old foreign policy in the region.

The United States entered the Middle East on a wave of good will largely because it was not one of the old imperialists. Events in 1956 would prove conclusively that America was replacing the Europeans as the dominant Western power, but even before the Suez Crisis many could see the writing on the wall.

‘For many years we have had a little American lamb bleating in Cairo, not helping and if anything hindering in most things. Well, he has got his way . . . We are losing our will to rule . . . it is a sorry day for Britain.’
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Those were the bleatings of Captain Charles Waterhouse, one of the Tory ‘Suez rebels’, to his prime minister Winston Churchill on 28 July 1954, following the announcement that British forces would be ‘withdrawn from the Canal Zone’.

The Americans had been trying to get Nasser to compromise with the US’s key ally Britain because they feared the rise of Soviet influence. Nasser’s response was that the Soviets ‘have never occupied our territory . . . but the British have been here for seventy years . . . How can I go to my people and tell them I am disregarding a killer with a pistol sixty miles from me at the Suez Canal to worry about somebody who is holding a knife a thousand miles away? They would tell me “first things first.” ’
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The British could not get over their sense of humiliation, and then they compounded it with the invasion of the Suez Canal two years later. The years of being able to sail around the world doing pretty much as they pleased were over, but the United Kingdom hadn’t grasped that yet.

On Monday 29 October 1956 the State Department’s William Rountree was handed a press ticker tape that read: ‘FLASH-FLASH-FLASH, MAJOR ISRAELI FORCES HAVE INVADED EGYPT AND HEAVY FIGHTING IS UNDERWAY.’
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Six years earlier the US, Britain and France had signed a Tripartite Declaration pledging to oppose any state aggression in the Middle East. Now, with the first serious test of that declaration upon them, the White House issued a statement saying: ‘the President recalled that the United States . . . has pledged itself to assist the victim of any aggression in the Middle East. We shall honor our pledge.’
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But it soon became apparent that his two European allies were in fact in league with the country Eisenhower saw as the aggressor, Israel. The president told his people: ‘We believe these actions to have been taken in error . . . There can be no peace without law. And there can be no law if we work to invoke one code of international conduct for those who oppose, and another for our friends.’
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This is exactly what the US has been regularly accused of doing in the decades since by the Arab states with regard to Israel and the issue of Palestine.

If Eisenhower was seen to be publicly upset by the Suez fiasco, he was privately furious. After he learned of Israel’s attack on Egypt he told his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles: ‘You tell ’em, God-damn-it, that we are going to apply sanctions, we’re going to the United Nations, we’re going to do everything that there is so we can stop this thing.’
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Of Britain and France he said: ‘I’ve just never seen great powers make such a complete
mess
and
botch
of things!’
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The Eisenhower administration’s actions during the Suez Crisis were driven largely by Cold War concerns, and it did not want to fall out with its closest European ally. But there was also a core sense that what London and Paris had connived at was simply wrong. Eisenhower believed America had a role as an honest broker in the region. It was a role almost every president up to and including Barack Obama thought at one time or another that the US could and should play in the Middle East.

It was clear from the Suez Crisis that both European countries were losing their Great Power status and that America had replaced Britain as the key Western player in the Middle East. The consequences of Suez, and the spectre that the Soviet Union would fill the vacuum left behind by the colonial powers, led the US president, the following January, to articulate what became known as the ‘Eisenhower Doctrine’. This reshaped American policy in the Middle East and created the rulebook for the Cold War period and beyond. The first issue Eisenhower spoke about during his address to the joint Congress was oil, and oil was the first thing every subsequent administration cared about. The heavy tilt towards Israel in the following years was checked only by the 1973 oil ‘supply shock’. As Egypt under Nasser slid towards the communists, Israel and all future US administrations became inseparable. Never again would the US publicly side against Israel in a conflict.

The collapse of the Soviet Union changed the problem but not the solution. By that time the preoccupation with the Russians was being run a close second for public enemy number one by Islamists, in the wake of the Iranian revolution in 1979. The fact that the Shia Islamists in Iran were a totally different kettle of fish from the Sunni Islamists who murdered Anwar Sadat was not a key factor. In both cases they related back to the other two core issues of oil and Israel. There were the odd hiccups over the years, but nothing too dramatic. The principles of the system Eisenhower established for the Arab world, oil and stability, seemed to work fine.

Two events changed that. The first took place in 1986 when a man who was trying to jog off a hangover after his fortieth birthday party decided to embrace the power of faith to stop a slow slide into alcoholism and thus transformed himself from a drunk into the most powerful man on earth.
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The second came on a bright September morning nine months after that man had moved into the White House.

‘For most of the Cold War, America’s priority in the Middle East was stability,’ wrote President George W. Bush when he had retired to his beloved ranch to write his memoirs. ‘Then nineteen terrorists born in the Middle East turned up on planes in the United States. After 9/11, I decided that the stability we had been promoting was a mirage. The focus of the freedom agenda would be the Middle East.’
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It took a few years for the title of the ‘Freedom Agenda’ to coalesce around the various schemes to promote democracy of the Forty-Third President of the United States, but it would become what he described as the ‘fourth prong’ of his ‘Bush Doctrine’.
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After the 9/11 suicide attacks by al-Qaeda that crashed civilian airliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, and were narrowly averted by passengers from doing the same to the White House, George W. Bush decided he needed a new strategy to protect America from this new form of warfare. The ‘Bush Doctrine’ began life as the much more folksy ‘War on Terror’. President Bush described it as:

First, make no distinction between the terrorists and the nations that harbor them – and hold both to account. Second take the fight to the enemy overseas before they can attack us again here at home. Third, confront threats before they fully materialize. And fourth, advance liberty and hope as an alternative to the enemy’s ideology of repression and fear.
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If the 9/11 attacks had defined the problem for the new president, its causes had been revealed to him in what would turn out to be a highly influential UN study by a group of scholars from the Arab world called the
Arab Human Development Report
, which was published in July 2002. It was the ‘single most impactful document’ on the president’s thinking on the issue, Condoleezza Rice wrote later.
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The report concluded that ‘three critical deficits face all Arab countries: freedom; women’s empowerment; . . . and knowledge’.
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George W. Bush decided that the ‘most important’ of those was ‘a deficit in freedom’.
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The report was ignored by the Egyptian government, which was just down the road in Cairo from where it was launched, and by every other leader in the region. But it gave George W. Bush some big ideas.

It had not been given its name yet, but the physical embodiment of President Bush’s ‘Freedom Agenda’ landed on 19 March 2003. I was there for its arrival. It was a noisy affair.

It began with the dogs. They knew what was coming just under a minute before we did. The packs of strays roaming the streets of Baghdad would all suddenly howl and bark at the silent night sky. And then there was the boom. It echoed through my body. The ground and walls shook and lurched. As I absorbed the sound, the images had already raced through my brain. A shock of white light, then an orange flash consuming the buildings before me, wrapping itself into a shawl of smoke that sloped across the skyline. Then another flash, and another.

The targets of the cruise missiles launched by the US from beyond the horizon were the symbols of power of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime, which were built to tower above the city and remind everyone who was in charge. Anti-aircraft tracer stuttered its way across the black canvas upon which ‘shock and awe’ made its debut in the world. The noise was like a blow to the head. The scene, as I gripped the balcony of my room in the Palestine Hotel, was awful, but awe-inspiring in its scale. It went on night after night until the capital began to fall.

I was one of a small number of journalists who had stayed on in Baghdad, after many others left, to watch America launch what the next president would call ‘the biggest foreign policy disaster in our generation’.
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I had already witnessed Prongs One and Two of the Bush Doctrine being played out in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but those were actions in reaction to unprovoked acts of war. I was now watching Prongs Three and Four: ‘Confronting threats before they fully materialize’ and the need to ‘advance liberty’. This was ideology in action. It was based on the belief – for there was no real evidence – that the Iraqi regime had weapons of mass destruction. At its core was total faith in America as a force for good. George W. Bush quickly regretted using the word ‘crusade’ to describe the ‘War on Terror’, but it was an accurate description of the fervour of its proponents for the invasion of Iraq. The Bush administration had reached an ‘unquestioned belief in [its] inherent morality’ that inclined it ‘to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions’, wrote the American political scientist Karen J. Alter a few months before the war began.
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