How the US Created Middle East Mayhem

Originally posted at TomDispatch.

To this day, it remains difficult to take in the degree to which the American
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq destabilized the Greater Middle East from
the Chinese border to Libya. Certainly, as the recent Republican
and Democratic
presidential debates suggest, Americans have some sense of what a disaster it
was for the Bush administration to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to take
out Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein. The gravity of the decision to occupy
and garrison his country,
while dismantling his party,
his institutions of state, and much of the economy,
not to speak of his military,
can hardly be overemphasized. In the process, it’s clear that the U.S.
punched a giant hole through the oil heartlands of the planet. The disintegrative
effects of those moves have only compounded over the years. Despite the
many other factors, demographic and economic, that lay behind the Arab Spring
of 2011-2012, for instance, it’s hard to believe that it would have happened
in the way it did, had the invasion of Iraq not occurred.

Though you’ll seldom find it mentioned in one place, in the ensuing years
five countries in the region – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen
– all disintegrated as nation states. Three of them were the focus
of direct American interventions, the fourth (Yemen) was turned into a hunting
ground for American drones, and the fifth (Syria) suffered indirectly from the
chaos and mayhem in neighboring Iraq. All of them are now embroiled in
seemingly unceasing internecine struggles, wars, and upheavals. Meanwhile,
the phenomenon that the Americans were ostensibly focused on crushing, terrorism,
has exploded across the same lands, resulting among other things in the first
modern terrorist state (though its adherents prefer to call it a “caliphate”).

Those two invasions also loosed another deeply destabilizing phenomenon: 24/7
counterinsurgency
from the air and the “manhunting”
drone that was so
essential to it. At first, this was an American phenomenon as U.S.
Air Force planes with their “smart” weaponry and CIA and Air Force
drones, all hyped for their “surgical precision,” began cruising
the skies of the Greater Middle East, terrorizing
parts of the backlands of the region. In effect, they acted as agents
of disintegration as well as recruitment
posters for expanding terror outfits. The “collateral
damage” they caused was considerable,
even if it has, until recently, been largely ignored in our world. Hundreds,
for instance, died in three of those disintegrating countries (Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Yemen) when at least eight
wedding parties were obliterated by American air power, and yet few noticed.
This may recently have changed when an American AC-130 gunship eviscerated a
hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz, Afghanistan. Doctors,
staff, and patients were killed, some burned
in their beds, because American special operations analysts believed, according
to the Associated Press, that a single Pakistani intelligence agent might
be on the premises. (He evidently wasn’t.) Soon after, the
Intercept published a cache of secret U.S. documents from a “new
Edward Snowden” on the American drone program in Afghanistan, Somalia, and
Yemen that offered a strong sense of the “apparently incalculable civilian
toll” taken in the constant search for terror targets.

But here’s the truly grim reality of the Greater Middle East today: what
the Americans started didn’t end with them. The skies of the region
are now being cruised by French,
British,
Jordanian, United
Arab Emirates, Kuwaiti, Qatari, Bahraini, Moroccan,
Egyptian,
Saudi, and Russian
planes and drones, all emulating the Americans, all conducting “counterinsurgency,”
all undoubtedly blasting away civilians.
In Yemen, the Saudi air force, backed and supplied by Washington, recently took
up the twenty-first-century American way of war in the most explicit fashion
possible – by knocking
off two wedding
parties and killing more than 150 celebrants.

And can the Iranians, the Chinese,
and others, all now building or purchasing drones, be far behind? We are, it
seems, already on a Terminator Planet. In that light, as TomDispatch
regular Rebecca Gordon points out today, this year’s Nobel Prize to
a Tunisian foursome of civil organizations that struggled to bring peace, not
war, to their land has special meaning. It offers a tiny window on what the
world of the Greater Middle East might have looked like if Washington had never
intervened as it did. ~ Tom

The Secret to Winning the Nobel Peace Prize
Keep the U.S. Military Out
By Rebecca Gordon

This year’s Nobel
Peace Prize went to Tunisia’s National Dialogue Quartet “for
its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy… in
the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011.” The Quartet is a group
of four organizations – two national labor unions, a business group,
and a lawyers’ association – whose work helped prevent Tunisia from sliding
into civil war in the years following that “revolution.”

Seeing the peace prize go to an organization that actually seems to have
kept the peace is cheering news in a month that witnessed the military of
one former Nobel laureate destroying
a hospital run by another winner. Doctors Without Borders (Médecins
Sans Frontières) certainly earned its 1999 Peace Prize by providing
medical services to people in more than 80 countries, often working in some
of the most dangerous places on earth. On the other hand, as far as anyone
can tell, a weary Nobel committee gave Barack Obama his prize in 2009 mostly
for not being George W. Bush.

Tunisia, home of this year’s winners, is the country where the Arab
Spring began when a vegetable seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, burned himself to
death after the police confiscated the cart from which he made his living.
His lingering death catalyzed a variety of social forces demanding an end
to the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. These included
young people, students, and workers – all with deep economic grievances
– as well as human rights supporters and some Islamists who hoped to
see the country adopt a version of Sharia law. On January 14, 2011, 10 days
after Bouazizi’s death and under popular pressure, Ben Ali gave up power
and accepted asylum in Saudi Arabia.

In October 2011, Tunisia held
parliamentary elections. A right-wing religious party, al-Nahda (“Renaissance”),
took 37% of the vote and formed a coalition government with two other parties,
one on the left and the other composed of secular liberals. Hamadi Jebali,
a solar energy scientist and member of al-Nahda, became the first prime minister.
He later stepped down when fellow party members pressured him to abandon his
efforts to build a coalition government of national unity in favor of a more
explicitly Islamist approach.

In the following years, while the al-Nahda party continued
to rule, several prominent left-wing politicians were assassinated, for which
the far right-wing Islamist militia Ansar al-Shariah claimed responsibility.
Unhappy with the Islamist turn of their revolution and furious at what they
saw as the government’s inaction after the assassination of leftwing
Popular Front politician Mohamed Brahmi, Tunisians once again took to the
streets. There, as Juan Cole wrote
shortly afterwards, they staged “enormous demonstrations.” Unions,
women’s organizations, and student groups all demanded that al-Nahda
step down in favor of a more neutral, technocratic government.

At this point, the profound political conflict in Tunisia could easily have
turned into an armed confrontation. But it didn’t. Instead the country’s
organized political forces, aided by the National Dialogue Quartet, achieved
something remarkable, especially in the context of the present Greater Middle
East. Al-Nahda withdrew from governing and was replaced with a “technocratic”
caretaker government. Under it, a new, secular constitution was written and,
in October 2014, parliamentary elections were
held, followed by presidential elections that November.

Today, Tunisia continues to face economic and political problems, including
two separate
terrorist attacks on foreigners this year, but for now it has something unique
among the Arab Spring countries: an apparently stable, democratic government.

What Made Tunisia Different?

Of all the countries touched by Arab Spring uprisings, including Egypt, Bahrain,
Libya, Yemen, and Syria, Tunisia is the only one that has neither devolved
into vicious internal warfare nor reverted to authoritarian rule. What makes
Tunisia different?

In Tunisia, as Juan Cole has suggested
and the Nobel committee recognized, a uniquely strong, organized, and varied
civil society, especially trade and student unions, was key to the country’s
transition from dictatorship to democracy. There were other differences as
well. Unlike the Egyptian army, which had long supported the Mubarak regime,
Tunisia’s relatively small military was never tightly allied with the
Ben Ali government. And, as Cole says,
almost uniquely in the region, its commanders chose to stay out of the ensuing
turmoil.

Egypt’s military, however, thanks in part to U.S. aid, is among the
20
most powerful in the world, and has long played a central role in that
country’s politics and economy. After the Arab Spring protests in Cairo’s
Tahrir Square brought autocrat Hosni Mubarak down, the first elections put
a religious party, the Muslim Brotherhood, in power. However when (as in Tunisia)
Egyptians started to grow restive under the Brotherhood’s rule and returned
to the streets in protest, instead of allowing a transition to secular democracy,
the military chose to reinsert itself in political life, elevating the head
of the armed forces, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who now serves as president
and supreme military commander.

Among other differences with the rest of the Arab Spring states, Tunisia
is a country, rare in the region, with a certain religious homogeneity: more
than 99% of its population is at least nominally Sunni Muslim, so it has not
experienced the sort of sectarian violence that has roiled countries like
Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. And as Cole also points out, when Tunisia’s
secularists came to power, unlike the Sisi government in Egypt, they did not
outlaw and repress the country’s religious parties.

The Biggest Difference

There is one more key difference to mention: since the revolution the
United States has largely stayed out of Tunisian affairs. Admittedly,
U.S. military aid did rise
from $17 million before the revolution to $29.5 million in 2012 before dropping
again to almost pre-revolutionary levels for the next few years. Perhaps in
response to the growth
of Islamic State adherents, however, the U.S. recently announced that military
aid to Tunisia would triple in 2016. We know that British special forces have
been sent
to Tunisia and it’s certainly possible that U.S. special forces have
been there as well.

For now, however, it appears that the U.S. has not intervened in the governance
of the country. In contrast, Washington has played a significant role in the
affairs of all the other Arab Spring countries. Let’s consider these
situations, one by one:

Egypt: Egypt has long been one of the world’s biggest
recipients of U.S. military aid, second only to Israel. When el-Sisi came
to power, the Obama administration briefly withheld aid, but in March 2015
restored
the full $1.3 billion a year it had slated for the Egyptian military. In fact,
in 2013 when that army overthrew elected President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim
Brotherhood, President Obama took care never to describe this action as a
“coup d’état,” because U.S. law would then have
prohibited any military aid to Egypt. In other words, after Tahrir Square
and the Arab Spring rising, Egyptians essentially traded one U.S.- and military-backed
regime for another.

Yemen: Ali Abdullah Saleh had been president of Yemen for
33 years when Arab Spring demonstrators took to the streets of the capital,
Sana’a, at the end of January 2011. Between 200 and 2,000 died in the crackdown
that followed, but by November Saleh was
out, replaced by one of his deputies, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, who has
since been ousted by the Houthi rebellion.

In Yemen, the United States and Saudi Arabia have taken the side of the now-deposed
Hadi government in an internal struggle with Houthi rebels. The Houthi movement
– like everything in Yemen – is complicated. It’s made up
of rural tribespeople from the northern part of the country and is supported
by the Iranians. Houthis are adherents of the Zaidi
branch of Shia Islam, so Sunni-Shia tensions have played a part in Yemen’s
collapse, as have north-south conflicts. (Yemen only became a single country
in 1990.) In February 2015, a British academic expert writing for the BBC
described Yemen’s condition this way:

“[A]nti-systemic movements
– the ragtag Houthi militia astonished by the lack of resistance to their
advance against the flailing ‘transitional’ regime; the separatist
Southern Movement… marginalized from the National Dialogue but now taking
up arms; fringe Yemeni and foreign Salafist fighters for al-Qaeda; and divisions
of what used to be Mr Saleh’s security apparatus – are jockeying for
power in the new order.”

What could possibly make this situation worse?

How about U.S.-supplied missiles and cluster
bombs delivered by the Saudi air force? Washington, of course, long ago made
Yemen part of its battlefield in the “global war on terror,” using
“kill
lists” to send drones to pick off al-Qaeda terrorists (who might
well turn out to be Yemeni civilians shopping
for supplies to celebrate the end of Ramadan or getting
married). Now, the United States has rushed to support Saudi Arabia’s
intervention against the Houthis in the country’s hydra-headed civil
war, providing
munitions, intelligence assistance, and even mid-air refueling for Saudi bombers,
while a naval blockade of the port of Aden has helped shut off supplies to
the country. Seven months of sustained Saudi bombing, violence, and food and
fuel shortages have helped displace more than a million and a half Yemenis.
In August, the U.N.’s World Food Program warned
that the country faces famine.

The United States has been involved in Yemen for a while. In fact, when announcing
the restoration of Egyptian military aid, the Obama administration stressed
the importance of el-Sisi’s cooperation in the fight against al-Qaeda-style
Islamic terrorism, particularly in Yemen (and also Libya). Now the U.S. finds
itself in tactical agreement with these same Sunni fundamentalists. In a case
of intervention making strange bedfellows, by supporting the Saudis against
the Houthis, Washington has ended up on the same side of this fight as the
Islamic State, which has been using its usual
terror tactics in an attempt to drive the Houthis out of Yemen’s
capital.

Libya: The Arab Spring came to Libya, too, when Libyans
deposed Muammar Gaddafi, who had ruled the country since a 1969 coup.

U.S. relations with Gaddafi had been tense at least since 1988 when a terrorist
explosion brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In 2003,
Gaddafi acknowledged
Libyan responsibility for the bombing and paid compensation to victims’
families (although maintaining his own innocence in the affair). In the same
year, Tripoli abandoned
its nuclear weapons program and allowed international inspectors free rein
in the country. Washington reached an accommodation with Gaddafi in 2006,
ending all previous sanctions. Two years earlier, he had also made peace with
the European Union (EU), and in 2010 accepted 50 million Euros from the EU
in return for help preventing African migrants and refugees from using Libya
as a transit corridor to Europe.

However, in 2011, when it became clear that Libyans were threatening to depose
Gaddafi, the Obama administration abandoned him, pushing NATO into military
action. NATO launched a concerted campaign of airstrikes to cripple his military.
Gaddafi died after a convoy in which he was traveling was hit
by a U.S. Predator drone and French jet fighters. Although accounts of
his death vary, it seems clear that, when Gaddafi was left without protection,
a crowd attacked and killed him.

In reporting on his death, the New York Times presciently referred
to “an instability that could trouble Libya long after the euphoria
fades about the demise of Colonel Gaddafi.” Indeed, chaos followed,
spilling into Mali and other countries as the Colonel’s weapons arsenals
were looted and dispatched across the region as far east as the Sinai
Peninsula and possibly as far south as Nigeria.
In Libya itself, havoc ensued, along with civil war (or wars) and the rise
of a branch of the Islamic State (IS).

As in Iraq, Washington once again proved remarkably skilled at dictator-toppling,
but significantly weaker on its follow-up. Today, post-Arab Spring Libya is
a failed state, riven by violence, and “governed” by rival parliaments.
In September 2015, the Times reported
(with no apparent irony): “Libyans are struggling with a problem that
typically emerges after a bloody regime change: how to reassemble a functioning
country after its brittle, autocratic and repressive government has been fractured
and replaced with warring factions.” This is a question the United States
might have thought to ask before getting into the government-fracturing business.

Bahrain: The Kingdom of Bahrain is a small island on the
western side of the Persian Gulf with a population
of 1.34 million. It provides a vital base for the U.S. military presence in
the Persian Gulf and is home to the Navy’s Fifth Fleet. As the U.S.
State Department puts
it, “The Government of Bahrain plays a key role in the Gulf’s
security architecture and is an important member of the U.S.-led anti-ISIL
coalition. U.S. assistance enables Bahrain to continue to obtain the equipment
and training it needs to provide for its own defense and to operate alongside
U.S. air and naval forces.”

The CIA’s World Fact Book lists Bahrain’s form of government
as “constitutional monarchy,” but it is hardly a democracy. Political
parties are outlawed, and although one legislative house is elected, King
Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa appoints the prime minister, the cabinet, and the
members of the judiciary. He or his sons occupy most of the highest positions.
More than two-thirds of Bahrain’s Muslims are Shia, while the royal
family and the ruling elite are Sunni.

The Arab Spring reached Bahrain in January 2011. In the fashion of Egyptian
demonstrators in Tahrir Square, Bahraini protestors occupied the Pearl Roundabout,
a key intersection in the capital Manama, demanding the king’s ouster.
Al-Khalifa responded by calling on his allies Saudi Arabia and the United
Arab Emirates (UAE) for help. The Saudis responded by sending 1,000 troops;
the UAE sent another 500. Together they routed the demonstrators and ended
the rebellion.

Dozens were killed, thousands were rounded up, and many of the prisoners
were tortured.
Once again, the United States took sides, throwing its support not to the
Arab Spring demonstrators but to the king and his repressive state. Washington’s
strategic interests and the desire to keep the Saudis happy took precedence
over any pretense of supporting civil and human rights. As Middle East expert
Toby Jones told
NPR in early 2012, “If there is a place globally where there is not
just distance but a huge gap between American interests and American values,
it’s in the Persian Gulf.”

Syria: The Arab Spring in Syria began with small demonstrations
in January 2011. These grew larger when people in the town of Dara’a
came
out to protest the torture of young men arrested for putting up political
graffiti. By April, the government of Bashar al-Assad was using tanks and
live fire to put down demonstrations. By July, demonstrators numbered
in the hundreds of thousands. By the end of 2011, demonstrations had given
way to armed conflict as a wide variety of rebel brigades with differing aims
and loyalties began to fight back. Fighters on multiple sides, including the
Assad regime, have been accused of war
crimes – torture, summary executions, the barrel-bombing of civilians,
and the use of poison gas.

The civil war in Syria is the premier humanitarian disaster of the twenty-first
century, spawning the worst refugee crisis Europe has faced since the end
of World War II. As of October 4, 2015, the U.N. High Commission for Refugees
(UNHCR) reports that there are 4,185,302 registered
“persons of concern” (refugees) driven from the country by war.
“This figure,” says the agency, “includes 2.1 million Syrians
registered by UNHCR in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon, 1.9 million Syrians
registered by the Government of Turkey, as well as more than 26,700 Syrian
refugees registered in North Africa.”

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Organization reports
at least another 7.7 million internally displaced people, forced by the conflict
to leave their homes. Of a population of 22 million, almost 12 million, more
than half, have been made refugees. The New York Times reports that
more than 200,000 Syrians – almost one in every 100 – have been
killed. In March 2015, the BBC put
the figure at 220,000, and in August, the UN suggested that figure might even
have reached 250,000.

And Washington has its fingerprints all over Syria’s civil war. As
long ago as 1996, neocons Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, who would later
serve as advisors to Vice President Dick Cheney, participated in a study group
that produced a paper for the Israeli government. In it, they argued
that “Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with
Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.”
Such a campaign would begin, they suggested, by “removing Saddam Hussein
from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its
own right – as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.”

The ultimate goal would be a realignment of power in the Middle East, with
Syria destabilized, a Hashemite king ruling Iraq, and a new regional alliance
among Turkey, Jordan, and Israel. Perle Co. brought this plan to the
Bush White House, where the 9/11 attacks provided a pretext for the first
step: removing Saddam Hussein. It would seem that the neocon dream of destabilizing
Syria has been realized as well, even if not in the way they expected.

When the 2011 uprising became an armed fight, the United States began supporting
the “moderate” Free Syrian Army, initially with “non-lethal”
assistance. Since then, the U.S. has sought to identify non-extremist Sunni
Islamists to equip and set loose on the growing Islamic State, with results
that would be comical if they hadn’t been so deadly and disastrous.
On October 9th, the White House and the Pentagon admitted
that the $500 million program to vet, train, and equip moderate fighters in
Turkey and Jordan to be sent back to Syria had been an abject failure. The
Obama administration’s new strategy, reported the New
York Times, is “a revamped program that briefly screens Arab rebel
commanders of existing Syrian units before equipping them with much-needed
ammunition and, potentially, small arms,” as well as, it turns out,
TOW
anti-tank missiles.

On October 12th, the U.S. airdropped
the first 50 tons of ammunition to these rebel groups, who presumably have
been distinguished from the Islamic State, the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front,
and other extreme outfits by those “brief” screenings. The official
U.S. position on Assad himself remains that his leaving power is a prerequisite
for any peace settlement, but the Obama administration prefers to frame its
intervention as a battle against the Islamic State.

Confronting IS in Syria while also opposing Assad has proved problematic,
to say the least. There may well be non-Salafist forces fighting the Syrian
government, but much of the fight against Assad has been carried out by al-Qaeda
affiliates like the al-Nusra Front, or by IS (when they are not fighting each
other, that is). Just as in Yemen, the United States has, eerily enough, ended
up on the same side as its supposed greatest enemies, al-Qaeda and the Islamic
State.

Meanwhile, the Syrian conflict has been made exponentially more dangerous
for Syrians and the entire world by the intervention of Russia, which opposes
IS, but supports the Assad regime. The last thing the country needed was to
become the site of a proxy war between the United States and Russia.

Suffice it to say that U.S. intervention has in no way alleviated the suffering
of the Syrian people, whether caused by Assad – to whose regime the Bush
administration once sent people to
be tortured – or Islamist groups like IS.

The Peace Prize: A Long Strange Trip

The history of Nobel Peace Prize recipients is an odd one. The first winner
was Jean Henri Dunant, the Swiss citizen who founded the International Red
Cross and inspired the first Geneva Conventions. The Red Cross itself has
won three times, Doctors Without Borders once. My personal favorite laureate
may be the scientist Linus Pauling, who won twice, once for his contributions
to the anti-nuclear movement and the other time in chemistry.

Along with peacemakers and servants of justice like Martin Luther King, Jr.,
the prize has gone to some more questionable figures, including Henry Kissinger.
Fresh from assisting the military coup that resulted in the death of elected
president Salvador Allende and brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile,
Kissinger shared the prize in 1973 with Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam for the
Paris Peace Accords, which were supposed to end the Vietnam War. Tho had the
good grace to decline the prize – partly on the grounds that the United
States had already violated the agreement.

It seems that this year the committee has chosen well, fixing on the Quartet
that helped Tunisia bring the promise of the Arab Spring to flower. It is
sad indeed that the crucial role of the United States in that remarkable moment
was to repeatedly intervene in ways that changed the temperature radically,
helping to bring a cruel and deadly frost of repression,
death, and destruction to too many countries. There ought to be a grim
prize of some sort for such an achievement.

Rebecca Gordon is a TomDispatch
regular. She teaches at the University of San Francisco and is
the author of Mainstreaming
Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and
the forthcoming American
Nuremberg: The Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post 9/11 War Crimes
(Hot Books, 2016).

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