Military Politics of the Contemporary Arab World 9781108477420, 9781108769839, 2020018245, 2020018246, 9781108708685

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Military Politics of the Contemporary Arab World

Aside from large-scale civic mobilizations, no force was more critical to the outcomes of the 2011 Arab uprisings than the armed forces. Nearly a decade after these events, we see militaries across the region in power, once again performing critical roles in state politics. Taking as a point of reference five case studies where uprisings took place in 2011, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria, Philippe Droz-Vincent explores how these armies were able to install themselves for decades under enduring authoritarian regimes, how they reacted to the 2011 uprisings and what role they played in the post-uprising regime re-formations or collapses. Devoting a chapter to monarchical armies with a special focus on Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Droz-Vincent addresses whether monarchies radically differ from republics, to compare the foundational role of Arab armies in state-building, in the Arab world and beyond. Philippe Droz-Vincent is Professor of Political Science at Sciences-Po Grenoble, France. He has written widely on Arab political regimes, authoritarianism, armies and American foreign policy in the Middle East. He is the author of The Middle East: Authoritarian Regimes and Stalled Societies (2004), Dizziness of Power: The American Moment in the Middle East (2007) in French and numerous articles in journals including the Middle East Journal, the International Spectator and the International Journal of Middle East Studies.

Military Politics of the Contemporary Arab World Philippe Droz-Vincent Sciences-Po Grenoble

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108477420 DOI: 10.1017/9781108769839 © Philippe Droz-Vincent 2021 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2021 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Droz-Vincent, Philippe, author. Title: Military Politics of the Contemporary Arab World / Philippe Droz-Vincent, Sciences-Po Grenoble. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020018245 (print) | LCCN 2020018246 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108477420 (hardback) | ISBN 9781108708685 (paperback) | ISBN 9781108769839 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Civil-military relations – Arab countries. | Arab countries – Armed Forces – Political activity. | Arab countries – Military relations. | Arab Spring, 2010| Arab countries – Politics and government – 21st century. Classification: LCC JQ1850.A38 D76 2021 (print) | LCC JQ1850.A38 (ebook) | DDC 909/.097492708312–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018245 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018246 ISBN 978-1-108-47742-0 Hardback ISBN 978-1-108-70868-5 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgments

page vi vii

Introduction

1

1 The Surge of Armies in Arab States

26

2 Changing Dynamics with the Rise of New Kinds of Authoritarian Regimes

62

3 Armies Living under Enduring Authoritarian Regimes: The Officer as an (Influential) Bureaucrat

107

4 Are Arab Monarchical Militaries Different?

158

5 Agency Restored? Uprisings, Surprise and Army Interventions

185

6 Post-uprising Eras and (Tentative) Regime Re-formations

216

Conclusion: Arab Armies Once Again at the Forefront

279

Index

295

v

Figures and Tables

Figures 1 Total of armed forces personnel 2 Military expenditure (current US dollars) 3 Military expenditure (% of GDP)

page 64 123 124

Tables 1 The many faces of the military in six cases where significant uprisings took place before 2011 2 The many faces of the military and developments in six cases after 2011

vi

9 284

Acknowledgments

First of all, I would like to thank all those local actors, officers, NCOs or soldiers and civilians (social activists, jurists, journalists, academic colleagues and former politicians) who helped me better understand the topic at hand, despite its extreme sensitivity, to say the least! Having worked on Arab politics for some time (and on the military before 2011), my debts of gratitude go to numerous friends, academic colleagues, humanitarian colleagues (for Syria) and fellow students of the Arab World. At a later but critical stage, I would like to single out those who read the whole text or selected chapters and helped me a great deal with their feedback. In alphabetical order, they are Zeinab Abul-Magd, Lisa Anderson, Clement M. Henry, (the late) Roger Owen (who sadly did not see the end product; I hope he will still maintain the “with a final ‘Bravo’” with which he ended one of his answers), Yezid Sayigh, Robert Springborg and John Waterbury. Their answers were an essential impetus. Cambridge University Press reviewers were especially helpful and highly constructive in their various comments on the text. Of course, I remain the only one responsible for its content. At Cambridge University Press, I would like to sincerely thank those who followed this book, Maria S. Marsh, then Dan Brown and Atifa Jiwa. I would also like to thank in the production stage, Stephanie Taylor, Sudarsan Siddarthan and his team and Muhammad Ridwaan.

vii

Introduction

A cursory look at the recent stage of Arab politics will easily vindicate a return to the study of the military. In Egypt in 2011, the fall of Mubarak brought the army back into politics in the shape of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces; then in 2013, after an unprecedented one-year period of civilian rule, the military toppled President Morsi; since then, President/Field Marshal al-Sisi has consolidated – and even increased to an unprecedented level – the army’s role in the governance of the country. In Libya after the fall of Qaddafi through civil war, an ensuing power struggle opened up between, on the one hand, rising new elites calling themselves “revolutionaries,” namely, civilians turned militia commanders and specifically integrated in the rebuilt security sector, and on the other hand, some officers from Qaddafi’s former army, especially in the East (Cyrenaica). That struggle was relatively subsumed under restarted yet chaotic political processes from 2011 to 2014, until it turned into an open battle between a coalition of “revolutionaries” and officers coalesced behind General Haftar. In Yemen, the reform of the military and of the associated military-security nexus was a top priority for President Hadi to bring about a successful transition. Hadi faced major difficulties to tame elite army units loyal to former president Saleh, until the latter became instrumental to help a peripheral northern rebel movement, the Houthis, seizing power. And the army was again a key factor in the overthrow of Sudanese President al-Beshir and the decisive sidelining of Algerian President Boutefliqa in April 2019. When open conflict broke out in Syria after 2012, and in Libya and Yemen after 2014, the role of these respective armies became even more obvious, complemented by foreign military interventions (Iran and Hezbollah in Syria, Saudi Arabia and the UAE in Yemen, various regional actors in Libya). Arab armies have not had much fighting after 1973, with the exception of the Iran-Iraq War (1980– 1988), but, in 2020, it is hard not to find many that are not fighting armed groups, militias or defecting parts of their own military apparatus. In other cases, the new acuteness of “securitizing” borders and 1

2

Introduction

fighting terrorist groups has reinforced the role of the army, even in Tunisia, the exceptional case with the dominance of civilian-driven transitional politics. Similarly, in Algeria, in the context of the power struggle around (then the sidelining of) President Boutefliqa and with new tasks to police southern (Sahara) and eastern (Tunisia) borders following instability in Libya and Mali, the army’s high command has expanded its influence in politics. And the region’s armies will continue to play a major role because, in the foreseeable future, the Arab World will continue to be an unstable and conflict-ridden region. The armies of the Arab World are one of the least understood sectors in Arab politics. This book seeks to redress this common shortcoming, which often neglects to refer explicitly to the military, military policies or influences and the characteristic ways of thinking of the officer corps. The problem in this book is not to subsume armies into larger categories, such as regimes, authoritarianism, uprisings, revolutions, counterrevolutions and so forth, but to understand their many faces and roles in their respective polities. Armies are not the whole substance of Arab politics; yet, in order to understand the latter’s core dynamics, there is a need to focus specifically on them. “State of the Art”: From Scarcity to Plethora After independence in the 1950s and 1960s, the political role of Arab armies received extensive attention. Scholars and journalists concentrated on coups d’état, the most conspicuous phenomenon at the time. Talks about revolutions were commonplace and the officer corps was the specific focus of most studies, with the notion that officers were modernizers, “new men” eager to radically revamp politics. Studies focused on the social background of officers, what kind of social and economic policies they carried out and how they radically reshuffled political systems. At the same time, the most valuable studies, and those whose reading is still rewarding today, described how officers built, with various degrees of success, authoritarian political machines to monopolize power with the essential help of larger social groups (technocrats, new urban elites, “new middle classes,” village notables or rural mid-level elites, intellectuals). That signaled a shift from a direct focus on the military as the carrier of a political project to the study of authoritarian regimes as instruments of rule. Increasingly, regime dynamics and the consolidation of power around a few authoritarian leaders at the top took precedence. Reference books on Egypt still devoted a substantial chapter to the army, but amidst other developments related to the complex strategies devised by regimes to stay

“State of the Art”

3

in power.1 In Syria, the military was at center stage; yet the main focus was not on the army per se but on confessional strategies and how the army served as a channel for the Alawis and other minorities to entrench themselves in power.2 This specific focus pointed to an important argument: regimes got the upper hand and, though hailing from the military, they retook control over the armed forces. As a consequence, the army returned back to oblivion as a kind of black box concealed into a given regime. No wonder that the main literature on authoritarianism focused on regimes’ strategies to endure in power: selective economic openings (infitah) after the 1970s; truncated political openings in the 1990s and authoritarian reversals in the 2000s; state retreating from within society, from many social and welfare policies (left to “civil societies” or various societal actors) to the transformations of the public sphere at a time of satellite channels, the Internet and then blogging, Facebook and Twitter.3 The coercive potential was left unaddressed by students of Arab politics and its main pillar, the military, under-investigated.4 Armies were portrayed as black boxes whose role in a given polity was scarcely defined beyond their being an essential foundational pillar of authoritarian regimes. And from the late 1960s all the way up to the 2011 uprisings there were few studies directly focused on the region’s armed forces.5 All of this changed in 2011 when the political role played by the armed forces in the Arab Spring reminded us of their importance. The various armies played a crucial role to determine the course of events. For sure, they were not the core initial factors behind the wave of changes that rocked the Arab World in 2010–2011. The most obvious revolution occurred at the level of individuals who transformed themselves from passive subjects to protesting citizens and when Arabs mobilized in mass protests in public spaces.

1 2

3

4 5

John Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Robert Springborg, Mubarak’s Egypt (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989). Nikolaos Van Dam, The Struggle for Power in Syria (London: Tauris, 1996); Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Oliver Schlumberger, ed., Debating Arab Authoritarianism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); Laura Guazzone and Daniel Pioppi, eds., The Arab State and Neo-liberal Globalization (Ithaca: Ithaca Press, 2009); Marsha Pripstein Posusney and Michele Penner Angrist, eds., Authoritarianism in the Middle East (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2005). Oren Barak and Assaf David, “The Arab Security Sector: A New Research Agenda for a Neglected Topic,” Armed Forces & Society, 36(5) (October 2010): 804–824. Jacob Hurewitz, Middle East Politics: The Military Dimension (New York: Praeger, 1969); Elizer Be’eri, Army Officers in Arab Politics and Society (New York: Praeger, 1970).

4

Introduction

But the ensuing shows of force between regimes (their coercive apparatuses) and social mobilizations reintroduced militaries into the equation with their role as ultimate guarantors for regimes. When they refrained from using force to crush protests, they eased out the rapid end of authoritarian regimes (Tunisia, Egypt). When they fractured in two halves (Yemen) or imploded (Libya), they also played a crucial role in regime breakdowns, along with regional or international interventions. When armies entered into repression, either for a short time (Bahrain) or, more crucially, in a context of militarization of the uprising followed by civil war (Syria), their fate was carefully looked at, as it was directly related to the potential for regime breakdown or conversely regime reconsolidation. And, in general, all across the Arab World and not just in the abovementioned countries, the crucial role of officer corps and armies was scrutinized to assess the potential for regime downfall or conversely regime maintenance, and an hypothesis vindicated by Algeria and Sudan in 2019. Soon after the 2011 popular uprisings, a flurry of studies, either articles or collective books, was published.6 The number of publications on Arab armies has waned since then with the rise of new topics of interest such as the so-called Islamic State/Daesh (until 2017–2018). But a genuine interest about Arab armies prevails among scholars and practitioners.7 Most studies of these pivotal 2011 events adopted a “decisionist” view of the military, faced with a decision “to shoot or not to shoot” at mass protests. Decisionist views described systematic variations in the capacity and will to repress weighting directly on the fate of regimes, that is, allowing them to stay in power or easing their fall. Studies were often based on an ex post reading of the army’s actions or reactions. They adapted to the changing course of events, following rapidly changing events and rubber-stamping arguments rather than really deciphering the military’s concrete course of action. For instance, the Egyptian military did not intervene to save the Mubarak regime in 2011 (as in 1986), but it took power two years later. And during 2011–2012, the Egyptian military proved indecisive, stressed, yet highly threatening and 6

7

Zeinab Abul-Magd and Elke Grawert, eds., Businessmen in Arms: How the Military and Other Armed Groups Profit in the MENA Region (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016); Holger Albrecht, Aurel Croissant, and Fred H. Lawson, eds., Armies and Insurgencies in the Arab Spring (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). See also the symposiums published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, 43(3) (August 2011) and the Journal of Strategic Studies, 36(2) (2013). William C. Taylor, Military Responses to the Arab Uprisings and the Future of Civil-Military Relations in the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Stephanie Cronin, Armies and State-Building in the Middle East (London: Hurst, 2014); Florence Gaub, Guardians of the Arab State (London: Hurst, 2017).

“State of the Art”

5

dangerous. Decisionist views tended to ignore more complex and enduring trends that weighted on alleged decisions and made them a long time coming and intricate: the Egyptian army’s key role close to power centers but at some distance, or the Tunisian army’s abstention from any politics. The military’s behavior would be accounted for far more adequately with the weight of central characteristics of the military shaped in response to longer-term influences (including what I will call below the embeddedness of the armed forces in enduring authoritarian regimes) and not forged only on the eve of military decisions in 2011. Decisionist views were complemented with comparisons across time or regions to find other instances of armies either entering into repression or shirking away from it. Such comparative views, to some extent, denied the importance and the specificity of the 2011 protest movements in the Arab World, subsuming them into a broader category of repression against unarmed civilians. In reality, events in 2010–2011 were especially stressful for the various Arab polities, because the Arab World had not undergone transformations of similar importance since the 1950s–1960s, whatever their complex end results nine years later. The sharpness of the 2011 uprisings (Arab Spring) would explain alleged decisions made by the military apparently in opposite directions; for instance, in Egypt from unease in power (2011–2012) to retreat back to the barracks (2012–2013), then direct intervention (2013). The importance of such challenges reverberated on the military that represented the quintessence of the state. The military could then act, at different moments, in hectic times of accelerated transitions, as an agent or a voice for that state, also for a particular set of strata or groups within it and finally a stakeholder defending its parochial institutional interests and own goals. The new search for big rationales to explain Arab armies’ behavior in 2011 expanded further, relating characteristics of the military (as analyzed) with their alleged decisions about intervention (as observed). Usual dichotomies set a bar, following Max Weber’s distinction,8 separating an institutionalized officer corps where recruitment and promotion were based on performance, discipline, enforced hierarchy and a sense of a commitment for the state rather than politics and cronyism (Egypt, Tunisia), and a patrimonial officer corps where officers were linked to the 8

On the importance of institutionalization, see Eva Bellin, “The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East,” Comparative Politics, 36(2) (January 2004): 139–157; for critiques, see Jean Lachapelle, Lucan Way and Steven Levitsky, “Crisis, Coercion, and Authoritarian Durability,” American Political Sciences Association annual meeting, New Orleans, August 31, 2012; Holger Albrecht and Dorothy Ohl, “Exit, Resistance, Loyalty,” Perspectives on Politics (Washington, APSA), 14(1) (March 2016): 38–52.

6

Introduction

regime by bonds of blood, sect and ethnicity (Syria, Iraq, Yemen). Yet such characterizations should not be pushed too far. In Egypt, for instance, above a certain rank (medium officers), promotions were based on strict allegiance, a strict political quietism and officers were positioned in a kind of “waiting game” to climb up ranks, waiting to access high and lucrative positions, especially after retirement.9 And the institutionalized Egyptian officer corps acted with great overtones of praetorianism in 2011–2013, not to speak about its coup in 2013, far from an alleged institutionalized actor in the Egyptian polity.10 Conversely, so-called patrimonial armies behaved very differently from Syria to Libya, Yemen and Bahrain with very different consequences (respectively, individual defections, implosion, rift between the main commanders and loyalty): confessional or tribal stacking was part of the story but not the whole of it. The infusion of Alawi high officers en masse in the Syrian officer corps was a key coup-proofing and control strategy. But the only focus on it was too simple and unidirectional. And the Assad regime in large part lost control and was unable to use its own (and supposedly patrimonial) military in repression in 2011–2012 with the exception of a few praetorian units. The regime brutalized its military in 2012–2013 as much as it brutalized its society (a better-known feature) to re-entrench itself in power at the price of precipitating the country into civil war, which was an indication that the Syrian military could not just be analyzed as (neo-)patrimonial. Main Arguments: Three Cycles of Military Involvement in Politics The starting point of this book is that, in general, Arab armies have been crucial if not the most important political institutions in their respective (and variously arrayed) polities, either republics or monarchies, whatever the disparities between these armies on numerous variables (size, institutionalization, capabilities, relationships to security structures, links to society, etc.). This might not be apparent at first sight. In Egypt under Mubarak, the interior ministry was the day-to-day and most visible enforcer of order under the domineering command of the presidency and its extensive powers of nomination. In Iraq and Syria under Saddam Hussein and the Assads, respectively, the Baath hierarchy, the 9

10

Yezid Sayigh, “Above the State: The Officers’ Republic” (Beirut: Carnegie Middle East Center, August 2012); and (his massive and exhaustive) Yezid Sayigh, “Owners of the State” (Beirut: Carnegie Middle East Center, December 2019). Alain Rouquié, The Military and the State in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), chapter 11.

Main Arguments

7

intelligence apparatus or various networks (ʿasabiyyat) familial or confessional in their link to the president, were endowed with much political clout. In Arab monarchies since the 1970s, kings and their court have been those pulling the strings. My main point, however, is that in most Arab states the army has enjoyed substantial political and institutional influence, or at least was active in core networks of power, with key differences across regimes. That does not imply that military politics would encompass all politics (as in Latin America in the 1960s–1970s), but it was influential to crucial degrees and forms that should be specified. This view was again vindicated during the 2011 Arab Spring, when the military revealed itself as a crucial institution. Perhaps the most important feature everywhere was not only whether the military did intervene on behalf of the incumbent regime, but also that, in some cases, it remained the only institution keeping afloat in a context of regime breakdowns and potential transitions (Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen until the rise of the Houthis in 2014). Conversely, in other cases, the melting down of the military in such a stressful and hectic environment, as a consequence of mass civic mobilizations or other factors, was a negative starting point for regime reformation (Libya, Yemen after 2014) and an indicator of subsequent state weakening and even civil wars. Again, all politics after 2011 was not restricted to dynamics in the army but military politics proved crucial. A qualification should be added to the above-stressed crucial political role of armies: Arab militaries’ political power has not been constant but rather has evolved. The relationship between the military and politics (regimes) was not static, whatever the stasis of regimes in power. The armies’ political role as state-builders in the postindependence period (the 1950–1960s) was decisive in several countries. Military coups were crucial to initiate authoritarian tenures yet not sufficient to understand regimes that came out of them, built upon them, but that also departed from strict military rule in Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Algeria and Libya. As a consequence, I will depart from the “one-shot theory of military intervention”11 to understand Arab armies’ roles. In all cases, either republics or monarchies, military politics in the officer corps was thereafter superseded by pervading “regime logics,” that is, the deepening of the roots of regimes (with links to civilian political elites, the bureaucracy, entrepreneurs, new social elites, etc.) in their respective societies beyond pure military networks. At the same time, the seeming “civilianization” or “demilitarization” of Arab regimes (Chapter 2) witnessed the expansion of military networks in the state. And, in some cases, the military has been 11

Dankwart A. Rustow, “Turkey,” in Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey, ed. Robert Ward and Dankwart Rustow (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 378.

8

Introduction

perfectly capable of maintaining or reasserting its institutional primacy or at least importance, a feature well revealed in most cases in the aftermath of the 2011 uprisings. Armies were said to be ruling but not governing,12 though that general description should be better deciphered. This book will also highlight how the generic terms of military rule or guardianship used in the literature on armies in politics have masked huge differences between the Arab World and the archetypical area of military politics, Latin America. The problem is not to rehearse once again the old story about the politicization of the officer corps – Arab officers in the 2010s were different from their counterparts in the 1950s–1960s – but to understand the functions of the army under enduring authoritarian regimes, how officers were close to decision-making circles and positioned at key junctures inside regimes, the interplay of military and regime decision-making at various levels, from top positions for high generals to much more numerous posts in the state apparatus and public enterprises for a larger number of colonels. This book will also highlight the diversity of cases beyond general military influence in Arab political systems and the looming presence of armies. There is no generic (cultural) model of specific “Arab armies,” but similar configurations of power where the military is (more or less) strategically positioned in a given regime. The similarity lies in this enduring pattern in the Arab World. Tellingly, what was common among the very different armies was that none, or little, of their behavior and choices (i.e., whether to intervene or not) in 2011 was based on or presented in terms of their commitment to constitutional rule or principles. My framework deciphers the multifarious roles of the military according to three cycles that installed different inscriptions of armies in politics: state formation, enduring authoritarian regimes and post-uprisings regime re-formation (neo-authoritarianisms) after 2011 (for a graphic summary, see Table 1). The Lure of Power Seizure in Late State Formation Processes A first cycle was the result of watershed events related to postdecolonization independences and in particular stressed the linkages between the military and the state with specific overtones in the Arab World. This starting point was famously clarified by Prussian historian Otto Hintze, “if we want to find out about the relations between military 12

Steven Cook, Ruling But Not Governing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

Strictly legalist

Not crucial

Strong showing

No

Economic encroachment and interests Cultural and ideational power

Relations to foreign powers

Big economic empire

Conscription

Distance to society and recruitment

US aid, FMF, IEMET

Conscription

Huge corps

Small

Size

Founder of the republic

Quietist, closed on itself, yet participant

Away from statebuilding

Relation to the state

Egypt

Embeddedness in the At distance incumbent regime

Tunisia

The military and . . . Pillar of the republic

Yemen

Syria

Bahrain

Coups d’état + The state = the royal family the military wing of the Baath “Sunni-tization” of Qaddafi’s familial Northern Assad’s the officer corps + networks commanders as engineering in the officer corps officers-princes stakeholders + its “securitization” Small in Huge corps Huge corps Small in relation with manpower, small population huge in equipment Unorganized Filtered Conscription + Very filtered conscription + filtered tribes recruitment No Yes + corruption Military-private Not much and smuggling entrepreneurs links Abandoned Nationalist Nationalist + Obedience to the Khalifa obedience to the Assad state Under embargoes US aid to counter USSR then Russia US 5th Fleet + terrorism mercenary units

Eccentric statebuilding by Qaddafi

Libya

Table 1 The many faces of the military in six cases where significant uprisings took place before 2011

10

Introduction

organization and the organization of the state, we must direct our attention particularly to two phenomena, which conditioned the real organization of the state. These are first, the structure of social classes, and second, the external ordering of the states – their position relative to each other, and their over-all position in the world.”13 Charles Tilly further deciphered these relations by positing that war, coercion and capital affected how state-forming processes operated – Tilly latter added connection among social sites.14 Threats (standing for war as used here) tended to be external and related to the “anarchical” nature of the European state system. Tilly explained that “war made the state and the state made war,” namely, that states were the unintended consequences of the competition among “wielders of power” for control over capital and territory. In the European context, he described three long-term subprocesses driving state-building: war pushed leaders to establish centralized control over the means of coercion and finance; power holders developed state apparatuses to administer these centralized means; and centralized administration created civilian groups that bargained “a civilianization of government and domestic politics.”15 Tilly, however, concluded that his argument was not universally applicable outside Europe.16 In the Arab World, relations between the military and the state, though historically also developed along the long-term relationship between coercion, capital and war/threats, obtained differently in these late statebuilders/developers. I don’t deny the crucial importance of the “Ottoman background” in the political emergence of the modern Arab World,17 but I will stress all its contradictions concerning the military and state formation in an imperial setting. The Ottomans first relied on the Janissaries (yeni-ceri, literally “new troops”) in the fourteenth century, recruited from war captives to be a permanent army of salaried troops and thereafter the true caretakers and guardians of the Ottoman state. The devshirme, the rounding up of young Christian children especially in the frontier provinces of the Balkans, helped 13

14

15 16

17

Otto Hintze, “Military Organization and the Organization of the State,” in The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze, ed. with an introduction by Felix Gilbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 178–215. Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 42; Diane Davis and Anthony Pereira, eds., Irregular Armed Forces and Their Roles in Politics and State Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 206. Or as put by Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (New York: Polity Press, 1990), the military reflects both the world military order and is part of the domestic order with its distinctive issues and concerns. Albert Hourani, The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (London: Croom Helm, 1981); “Djaysh,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2015).

Main Arguments

11

fill the ranks of the Janissaries (as well as high posts in the administration) – devshirme was ended in the seventeenth century. These shock troops, however, were a legacy of the past. With the growing threat of European powers, a modern military was gradually introduced by Ottoman reforms (Tanzimat) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that targeted the creation of a modern army along the lines of successful and influential European role models such as the Prussian military.18 The Ottomans endeavored to organize a modern army amidst deep contradictions: the empire was borrowing the tools of European nation-states, that is, the military with its organized bureaucracy and specific new functions (sappers, artillery, etc.), while at the same time trying to remain a multinational “traditional” (though reformed) empire with a mostly static social order (and far away from a nation-state with some sense of citizenship). The Nizam-i Jedid (“new system”) of Sultan Selim III in 1792 was an essential milestone and a sustained attempt to transform an old-style military into a modern instrument with proper uniforms, training, cohesion, discipline, drills and so forth, but with strong opposition from society (against conscription) and especially by the Janissaries – the order was abolished in 182619 – and the empire collapsed after World War I. The following colonial period represented a clean break between ancient Islamic empires, the Ottoman background and new nationstates, but it initiated a bumpy road of development for armies.20 States were a new “imagined” reality carved out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire and placed under the scrutiny of French and British colonial powers within the frame of their mandates under the League of Nations. Colonial rule was based on a mixture of neglect – the overriding concern of France and Great Britain was maintaining maximum influence at the lowest possible cost – and the manipulative “divide-and-rule” policies in these newly created nation-states. Colonial powers were not state-builders, but they needed paramilitary forces to maintain internal order – the British also employed the Egyptian army in Sudan against the Mahdist revolt. Colonial powers limited local armies’ combat effectiveness and their size as these forces were also prospective loci of anticolonialism. The French-built Syrian army resulted in a collection of minority brigades in the so-called Légion d’Orient (1916–1919), then in the Troupes Supplétives (1925), thereafter revamped as the Troupes Spéciales du Levant (1930) and consisted of supplemental troops: its size 18 19 20

V. J. Parry and Malcolm E. Yapp, eds., War, Technology and Society in the Middle East (London: Oxford University Press, 1975). Erik Zurcher, Arming the State (London: Tauris, 1999). Majid Khadduri, “The Role of the Military in Middle Eastern Politics,” American Political Science Review, 47(2) (June 1953): 511–524.

12

Introduction

was reduced by more than a half between 1920 and 1946. The British broke existing military structures and cut the size of the Egyptian army after its involvement in the ʿUrabi uprising. The Iraqi Hashemite monarchy built its military with former Ottoman officers integrated into the new national army – a primary (ibtidaʾiyya) military school had been set up by the Ottomans in Baghdad21 – whose size was limited by the British and reduced in 1941 after a nationalist revolt – Iraq was granted “formal” independence in 1932 and was the first Arab state to join the League of Nations; the first coup d’état by Chief of Staff Bakr Sidqi occurred in October 1936. As a corollary, colonial rule unwittingly narrowed the traditional gap between the army with its Islamic/Ottoman background of detachment from the general population at a time of growing Arab nationalism. But it did not favor state-building (and its military component). The crucial link between coercion (represented by the military), capital and war was decisively accelerated after independences with the surge of armies in the state in “a moment of enthusiasm.”22 In particular, the context of deep social transformations of the 1950s brought armies into politics in many states with coups d’état, nationalist takeovers and restructuring in Egypt, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Algeria, with one noted exception, Tunisia. And in the Third World and in particular in the Arab World,23 late state formation was different with the importance of domestic insecurities and states’ weak legitimacy. The “anarchy”/external environment was a threat-generating place, with Arab-Israeli wars. Yet, this setting was different from Western Europe studied by Tilly with the more important role of preparations for war and military buildups by regimes that concentrated most of their (repressive) energy on patrolling their societies. Latin America will also highlight a weaker connection between war, coercion and capital, with limited wars in number and intensity, and less developed armies in number24 – but the latter would surge in the state in the name of internal national security (Conclusion). Rather than state formation along with the Western European model and rulers delineating relations with armies, the surge of Arab military institutions in newly created polities created a series of seismic shifts in power 21 22 23

24

Batatu, The Old Social Classes. Leonard Binder, In a Moment of Enthusiasm (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Mohammed Ayoob, The Third World Security Predicament (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995); Bahgat Korany, Paul Noble and Rex Brynen, eds., The Many Faces of National Security in the Arab World (London: Macmillan, 1993); Barry Buzan, “People, State and Fear,” in National Security in the Third World, ed. Edward Azar and Chung-In Moon (Aldershot: Elgar, 1988), 14–43. Miguel Centeno, Blood and Debt (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).

Main Arguments

13

relations: military institutions became one essential component of the political scene that they could fill entirely or partially, but in all cases crucially. In the Arab World, military rulers settled in the state, installed their grip on capital, endowed themselves with various missions for the state in an accelerated technocratic and developmental manner and used coercion to stay firmly in power without sowing the seeds of political bargains with their respective societies. The power of the gun and the numbers of the peasantry, or at least the agency of officers with rural roots and relatively underprivileged social status, helped entrench armies in states more deeply than mere defense tools and differently from Tilly’s bargains. And in this first cycle, monarchies stayed closer to Tilly’s model of equilibrium between armies, civilian (nascent) administrations and courts (Chapter 4). Becoming Embedded under Enduring Authoritarian Regimes In a second cycle, armies settled in enduring authoritarian regimes, and this is one which departed from that of state formation or military coups and vindicated a separate treatment,25 with self-referential political systems based on the exclusive control by a restricted elite (authoritarian core), often with a military background but not exclusively based on the army. The remarkable longevity of political regimes appeared to have put the armed forces back to the barracks in the early 1970s. This feature was signaled by the waning of the number of coups d’état.26 Regimes endeavored not just to build themselves upon the military – and in turn strictly control the army – but also to shift their center of gravity away from the exclusive support of the military while stabilizing their relationship with it, and to expand their social basis of support in civilian sectors, in the first place the bureaucracy,27 and with some form of a (civilian) support party. However, the political quietism of the army and the apparent durability of regimes did not reflect the estrangement or separation of the military from civilian politics or economy. And the army’s roles in Arab politics could not be understood through a conventional focus on civil-military relations, because those called “civilians” at the helm of a given state in such a set of relations often came from military careers or participated in and used military networks. 25

26 27

Lisa Anderson, “Students, Bases, Parties, Movements,” World Bank conference, Arusha, December 12–15, 2005; Lisa Anderson, “Authoritarian Legacies and Regime Change,” in The New Middle East, ed. Fawaz Gerges (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 41–59. Eliezer Be’eri, “The Waning of the Military Coup in Arab Politics,” Middle Eastern Studies, 18(1) (1982): 69–81. Edward Feit, Armed Bureaucrats (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1973).

14

Introduction

Within such settings, armies in the Arab World (and everywhere else, for that matter) could be defined in a first approach as state institutions. Classic studies of institutions take them as a set of rules, procedures and norms that regularize (with institutional effects) the behavior of actors who operate within them under principals’ command.28 Studies about weak institutional environments have provided me with inspiration on how to study such military institutions under authoritarian regimes. Insights from Guillermo O’Donnell, at a time when the literature on institutions was taking off, introduced caveats.29 O’Donnell’s subject was democratic institutions with a specific focus on Latin America, when most of the studies on democracy were based on Western European cases. He argued that democratic politics functions differently in weak institutional environments such as Latin America characterized by poor enforcement of rules and low institutional durability. Latter studies of Latin America argued that institutional change could be “serial,” namely, frequent and radical change (in constitutions, economic liberalization, electoral systems, decentralization, all core elements of democratic institutions). Such institutional instability mattered a lot to explain political outcomes, namely, how democratic systems were working.30 Keeping such studies in mind, I contend that institutions such as the military work differently in authoritarian settings, especially under enduring authoritarian Arab regimes that represent weak and unstable institutional settings. Military institutions cannot be analyzed separately from the whole picture of regimes’ institutional architectures. Also specific institutional structures should be viewed not just as merely “the epiphenomenal manifestation of macro-structural forces,”31 but rather as crucial independent factors that sustain authoritarian regimes.32

28

29 30 31

32

The classic rational choice view is Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). See also the sociological perspective of Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, eds., The New Institutionalism and Organizational Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and the historical one by Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen and Frank Longstreth, eds., Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Guillermo O’Donnell, “Democratic Theory and Comparative Politics,” Studies in Comparative International Development, 36(1) (Spring 2001): 7–36. Steven Levitsky and María Victoria Murillo, “Variation in Institutional Strength,” Annual Review of Political Science, 12 (2009): 115–133. James Mahoney and Richard Snyder, “Rethinking Agency and Structure in the Study of Regime Change,” Studies in Comparative International Development, 34(2) (June 1999): 3–32. Jason Brownlee, Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Lucan Way, Pluralism by Default (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).

Main Arguments

15

The institutionalization of Arab armies displayed a picture more of a roller coaster than a straight line of development. Nor did armies necessarily expect all the existing rules and norms to endure. There were many trade-offs between the trappings of institutional stability and other (more political) “logics” within Arab armies, with the requirement of a strong and threatening (military ultimately supported) coercive tool for regimes, while regimes at the same time saw the army as a potential rival/threat. These often-unseen features made a great difference beyond the veil of armies as professional institutions within states and armies as black boxes. That is not to say that institutions had no effect in authoritarian settings: militaries under authoritarian regimes increased their degree of institutionalization. But these institutional effects were also “truncated” and limited by other regime logics, especially through the maintenance of networks (ʿasabiyyat) linked to the regimes’ inner core (president, king). Still, Arab armies differed widely from one another with the more or less pervading role of “primordial” elements (blood, confession, ethnicity, tribalism, etc.) in some cases. To put it bluntly, the military institution was maintained in an otherwise weak institutional environment characteristic of enduring authoritarianism. I argue that this very specific modality of institutionalization resulted in armies becoming progressively “embedded” in authoritarian orders. Within the context of enduring authoritarian rule, in general, Arab militaries embedded themselves in regimes, in a subordinated (to “regime logics”) yet powerful (as they were cultivated by regimes) stance. Regimes would favor such embeddedness to obtain at least a tacit consent of the army to their rule, sealed at minimum in specific relations between high commanders and rulers. As such, embeddedness was directly related to the inherent limits of authoritarian rule, namely, the lack of readiness or capabilities in other power centers (institutions, parties, unions, associations or even public opinion) to back up decisively the regime; hence the crucial importance of its military pillar – all institutions were defanged by authoritarianism. Rulers implicitly (or in some cases explicitly) wielded the support of the army that gave them a kind of “right to rule” rather than relying on the building of state-society relations (with some form of representation, social contract, more or less competitive electoral processes, etc.) and the related legitimacy associated with them. In this sense, the Tunisian case acted as the exception or the counterexample in our sample, differentiating itself from all other cases. Conversely, the interstices (and inherent limits) left by regimes would allow some leeway for armies when they kept some coherence, whether parts of them or the whole army as a relatively autonomous corps within the state. Hence military embeddedness would mean some relative

16

Introduction

autonomy for the Egyptian military; the military would be much more penetrated by the systematic manipulation of the bonds of minorities/ confessionalism/tribal links in Syria, Iraq and Yemen; or it would be “subsumed” under monarchical mechanisms (familial ties, specific monarchic state formation) in the Gulf. These various modalities (of embeddedness) were very different from the fluid quality of institutions studied by historical institutionalists in strong (democratic) institutional settings: when, for instance, these studies stress how actors gradually build around, subvert and change institutions, and identify models of (gradual) change, by displacement (of existing rules and the introduction of new ones), layering (with the creation of parallel new rules), drift (the alteration in the impact of rules due to change in the environment) and conversion (with new interpretations of rules).33 The fragmented or disaggregated nature of authoritarian states offered opportunities for the military to expand institutionally, with institutions circumvented,34 marred by profound disorganization (a way for regimes to “govern” from above in an institutional mess) and without much ideological glue (a key characteristic of authoritarianism).35 That left ample leeway for the army to position itself below the “threshold of the regime” (its furcae caudinae to borrow the Roman expression) as a powerful, intrusive and activist institutional actor. As a corollary, that pattern explained why and how in some cases the military quickly shifted from total invisibility to pivotal actor in 2011 at times of regime crises and breakdowns. Arab armies differed according to varieties of embeddedness and to the various range of wherewithal/benefits and constraints/costs for armies resulting from such relationships. The military was as everywhere in the world a key nodal institution, with linkages to numerous dimensions, the state, the regime, society, the economy, the country’s cultural fabric, its ethnic/confessional equilibrium and so forth. Yet in the Arab World and with no equivalent in other areas, armies were also characterized by their proximity to core power networks, their ability to get some autonomous institutional leeway, their economic activities, their historical role and the ensuing cultivated aura (ideology) associated with it, their cultural footprint and reach into society and so forth. This was not just a question of coercive power, but was related to their ability to be located at key 33

34

35

James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen, “A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change,” in Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power, ed. James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–37. Roger Owen, “The Middle Eastern State: Repositioning, Not Retreat,” in The State and Global Change, ed. Hassan Hakimian and Ziba Moshaver (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001), 232–247. Juan Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000).

Main Arguments

17

junctures in a given polity. The extent of this embeddedness ranged much farther than simple “reserve domains” or “prerogatives” as analyzed by students of Latin America militaries. In Latin America, the heartland of military politics, military rule was either personal with one officer at the helm (Chile, Paraguay), or collegial with the general staff controlling government appointments and the policy process (Argentina, 1976–1982), even defining rotating rules to participate in government (Brazil, 1964–1985).36 There was also an “invasion” of the state by the military, but these trends were gradually reversed by political liberalizations, then a qualified return to civilian democratic politics. Latin American armies did not “fuse” with regimes as deeply as in the Arab World and, as a result, could envision going back to the barracks in the 1980s. The Arab problem was not just, as in Latin America, that of armies surging in the state and politics in the name of national security or the defense against Marxist-Leninist threats . . . followed by the transformation of armies, along the civil-military relations continuum, from political predators into more or less compliant partners with elected civilian politicians. In the Arab World, the military was deeply embedded in decades of authoritarian rule: armies displayed numerous enclaves of military autonomy, reserve domains controlled by the military and institutional or informal army veto points in decisionmaking. The wherewithal of the military was not just a product of military factors, but their combination with the nature of regimes. Finally, military embeddedness in authoritarian regimes should be contrasted with the more familiar notion of militarism. Sociological studies by Michael Mann about nation-states in Western Europe signaled that militarism remained central and that particular, segregated and cohesive armies could become caste-like in modern industrializing societies, displaying a kind of “Westphalian professional militarism.” “The combination of bureaucratization, professionalism, military-industrial technocracy, old-regime domination of high command and diplomacy, and insulation of military and diplomatic decision-making have recreated an autonomy of military power that its formal incorporation into the state merely masked.”37 Dangers remained acute, especially with what Mann calls armies geared up for a “world-historical moment” of power demonstration, namely, great wars. Yet as a qualification for the above argument, military caste autonomy was reduced in several ways by the interaction of the armies with societies (and the prospects/risks of 36 37

Karen Remmer, Military Rule in Latin America (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume 2: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 439; Hazem Kandil, The Power Triangle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

18

Introduction

domestic repression), professional caution and military-industrial complexes. And the growth of civil rights and industrial capitalism created new expectations among societies with respect to the state that acquired a new legitimacy based on its capabilities to run the economy and generate social policies. Western civil-military relations, as theorized famously by Morris Janowitz in the US case, hypothesized that the military of the future would become more like other societal organizations, with officers like other managers of corporations or bureaucracies and armies embracing civilian-like skill sets.38 In the Arab World, the process headed very differently and did not lead to the same end results as armies kept close relations with regimes and their inner workings. Armies were embedded in political regimes and, conversely, they were transformed by them, although the military should not be conflated with the regime. Whatever the dimensions of autonomy described by sociological studies of Western nation-states – the defense sector could be sheltered from democratic procedures, it could obtain a considerable portion of the national budget, defense policy could not be aligned with national interests – these dimensions were sustained to a much higher degree in the Arab World by the fact that the military was very close and related to the dynamics (workings and legitimacy operations) of the regime. Institutional boundaries were blurred with senior echelons of the military becoming parts of the cliques that govern these countries or at least part of informal networks at the top of power echelons, and many more military prerogatives or encroachments at lower levels. Reacting to the 2011 Uprisings and Regime Re-formations or Fragmenting This book also deals with the potential emergence of a third phase after 2011. It was initiated by an essential moment of change that resulted from the return of Arab societies to the fore, even if the latter had a crucial activist role only for a limited period of time – this wave perhaps restarted in April 2019 in Algeria and Sudan. Arab societies had seemingly been “securitized” by regimes in the 1970s–2000s, but, in a surprise surge with the 2011 uprisings, they came back with agency roles and provoked landslide political changes similar in importance to the revolutions of the 1950s–1960s. That social surge en masse and with imitative effects across the region was a new factor with immediate consequences and medium-term underground effects. The dichotomous view of success or 38

Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier (New York: The Free Press, 1972).

Main Arguments

19

conversely failure of the Arab uprisings was too simplistic and could not account for the way the 2011 uprisings transformed the underlying dimensions of authoritarianism and at the same time to understand the assertion of recombinant authoritarianisms. And with consequences for armies. Rational choice institutionalists, in general, do not consider change as problematic a priori, as change can be the product of rational strategies: when underlying power and preference distributions change, the equilibrium changes. Yet, such “decisionist” views were too simple to account for the complexity of the uprisings and subsequent trajectories after 2011, because they did not pay close attention to how the military was embedded in a given polity – reactions/decisions were not just rational choices made under constraint. Historical institutionalists, by contrast, tend to highlight the stickiness of institutions because change is “path dependent”: once institutions get established they tend to perpetuate themselves and become resistant to change. Yet, few would have forecast the extent of the 2011 uprisings and the pressure they exerted on authoritarian institutions. In general, institutionalist views understand change as radical change in the rules of the game, periods of continuity punctuated by crisis (the model of the punctuated equilibrium) or “critical junctures” when a significant change occurs and produces a legacy.39 Such views, differentiating settled times in which rules apply and unsettled times during which they are established, do not account for the complex processes at stake in the Arab World. And tellingly, in most cases, nine years after the 2011 uprisings, institutional actors failed to recover and settle on new rules, procedures or norms. In short, today’s recombined authoritarianism is less secure, more frightened and less business as usual, though it is able to entrench itself in power – with the essential caveat about the difference between durability/longevity (enduring rule) and stability for political regimes. Rather than simply analyzing the reassertion of pre-uprisings authoritarianism, I hypothesize that the Arab World has been witnessing the gradual transformation of authoritarian rule in this third cycle, with renewed roles and consequences for the armed forces. The most remarkable feature in 2020 is how Arab armies in countries where they historically played the most proximate political role (Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iraq) have been forced to shake off their torpor, that of embeddedness into enduring authoritarian regimes, after 2011–2012. 39

Respectively, North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance, 89; Stephen Krasner, “Approaches to the State,” Comparative Politics, 16 (January 1984): 223–246; Ruth Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

20

Introduction

And they have been overwhelmed by challenges in complex new settings. Furthermore, most armies have also been engaged in fighting (Syria, Iraq, also to a large extent Egypt in the Sinai) or engulfed by the changes that resulted and even questioned their durability (Yemen, Libya) – even the small and weak Lebanese army40 has found a new lease of life and a new national role in struggling to stop the conflict in Syria from spilling over in the country and has been engaged in military operations against battlehardened jihadist groups or Salafists crossing the border with Syria. Armies in monarchies are following this third cycle with the rise to the fore of Gulf small armies and their interventionist turn (Chapter 4). A noted feature in this third cycle is the increased use of military and security power, with the deployment of violence and coercive power in state-society relations in a kind of unprecedented brutalization (Egypt, Bahrain) and with open civil wars (Syria, Yemen, Libya). And these changes had consequences for armies with an increased “hybridization”41 of armies (a military-security reinforced nexus, state/ non-state straddling), no longer a strategy (from above = regimes) of coup-proofing or regime maintenance, but the consequence of regimes’ enfeeblement, the decline of states and the many challenges to the polity and national identity. And with direct consequences for armies that came to be engulfed or even cannibalized by processes of militia-nization and patronage with regional and international dimensions. A Few Words on Time Frame and Case Selection One way to make sense of the above complex dimensions is by offering a historical view of the different armies; hence the importance of dealing with the postindependence period. To paraphrase Tilly, my inquiry will try to decipher “big structures, large processes, and huge comparisons”42 in the specific case of Arab armies. For editorial (space) reasons, I won’t deal with endogenous experiments in military modernization such as Mehmet Ali in Egypt, the Husseinids in Tunisia, the Zaidi Imams in Yemen and Ottoman reforms (Tanzimat) copying European nation-states with their “modern” military and Weberian bureaucracy.

40 41 42

Oren Barak, The Lebanese Army (New York: SUNY Press, 2009). Yezid Sayigh, “Hybridizing Security: Armies, Militias and Constrained Sovereignty” (Beirut: Carnegie Middle East Center, 2018). Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984); Doug McAdam, Sydney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, “Methods for Measuring Mechanisms of Contention,” Qualitative Sociology, 31 (2008): 307.

A Few Words on Time Frame and Case Selection

21

The main focus of this book is on postindependence trajectories. Only one element of the pre-independence (colonial) history of these armies will be mentioned when useful. Colonial powers often tried to take advantage of specific social groups, thereby installing enduring features in Arab politics inherited by independent states. Some illustrative examples include: the role of the military in politics and the Sunni dominance in the Iraqi state;43 the role of southern Bedouins and the rural population in al-Jaysh al-ʿArabi (the Arab Army/Legion), under the guidance of John Glubb coming from Iraq in Transjordan/Jordan;44 the role of former French sous-officiers in Algeria;45 the stirrings of the role of minorities in Syria.46 Concerning case selection, in any event, a comprehensive study of all Arab countries is impossible and would be a huge encyclopedic project. It would be more suited for collective books, although the weakness of this kind of study remains that it is often reduced to a pure juxtaposition of cases without much cross-thinking. To offer reasonably comprehensive case studies in country chapters, I focus mainly on states where significant uprisings took place in 2011. I concentrate on five cases: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen. The main reason for this editorial choice is that the 2011 uprisings acted as revelators of the way these contested regimes were built, how various components, among them the army, interacted and opened up, at least for some time, the military black boxes. The uprisings offered in concreto the display of the various dimensions of embeddedness identified above, as the military was (unwillingly) pulled into new and destabilizing settings of mass politics. And these armies provide somewhat of a cross section of Arab militaries. I will expand from Bahrain, a case where a genuine uprising took place (and was repressed) in 2011, to the more general case of monarchical armies, especially the influential Saudi Arabia and UAE. Other cases where uprisings did not occur at least in the same manner (until 2019, 43 44

45

46

Mohammad Tarbush, The Role of the Military in Politics (London: KPI, 1982); Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq (London: Tauris, 2007). Riccardo Bocco, “Etat et Tribus Bedouines en Jordanie 1920–1990” (PhD diss., Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, 1996); Saʿad Abu Diyeh, al-Jaysh al-ʿArabi (Amman: alQuwwat al-Musallaha al-Urduniyya, 1987). In Algeria, the end of the independence war saw the fusing together of two groups, those who joined the guerrillas in November 1954 and those who deserted long after. For instance, Defense Minister Khaled Nezzar and Chief of Staff Mohammed Lamari in the crucial 1990s were two former NCOs (sous-officiers) of the French army who joined the ALN after 1954. A third group was made up of young undergraduates (lycées) sent into military academies in Egypt, Syria and Iraq (then USSR) by the FLN such as the president at the time, General Liamine Zeroual. Alasdair Drysdale, “Intra- and Inter-generational Conflict in the Syrian Army” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1971).

22

Introduction

Algeria) will be referred to in the following chapters and the general arguments apply to them with the necessary qualifications. I will also return to possible implications for Iraq in the Conclusion. A Road Map to the Book Chapter 1 starts with a critical juncture that installed a new pattern with the political surge of armies in many Arab states. The mid-twentieth century signaled a clean break with the past by installing the military at the core of state-building processes, after nation-states carved out of the Ottoman Empire a few decades earlier became independent. Newly independent states engaged in the complex task of building their armed forces, also a symbol of their newly gained sovereignty. During this foundational period, the complex processes of nation- and state-building went hand in hand with the politicization of the officer corps so that the army was propelled as the founder of new postcolonial political orders and as a specific incubator, in control of real power and endowed with huge power resources. Within this general trend, some militaries were much more submitted to social trends and penetration by societies in the form of ethno-confessional or tribal dimensions, when compared with the relative closure of the Egyptian armed forces to society and its dynamics. Rather than their exhaustion in the framework of national armies, subsequent political developments witnessed the enhancement of these dimensions, as exemplified by Syria and Yemen. And, in this overall picture of heightened militarization in the Arab World, Tunisia appeared as the negative and exceptional case with its armed forces remaining a subservient part of the (civilian) Tunisian state and regime alike. In Chapter 2, I argue that military politics was laid down in a renewed pattern after the 1970s under enduring authoritarian regimes that were characterized as “demilitarized” or “civilianized.” In most cases, officers did not rule (or did not want to rule) but one of them was at the helm. I argue that Arab armies were state institutions of great importance, at least compared with other “ghost” or “void” institutional dynamics in Arab polities (such as dominant parties, electoral dynamics, economic openings, etc.), and especially as the holders of last-resort heavy coercion. The creation and management of political quietism within armies was a key issue for such authoritarian regimes. This imperative of control was pushed to the limit in some cases: with the “social engineering” in the officer corps by Hafez al-Assad and its turning into “the Assad army” (jaysh al-Assad) as Syrians would put it, or with the hijacking of the Yemeni military by Ali Abdallah Saleh and its transformation into “the family army” (al-jaysh al-awsri) as Yemenis put it in short, after

A Road Map to the Book

23

the systemic positioning of close relatives (sons, half-brothers, nephews) in command posts. In the eclectic Libyan case, Qaddafi, though an officer, distrusted the army, as the most serious challenges to his regime came from within the officer corps, and he spent decades ripping it apart. Conversely, the tradition of civilian control endured in Tunisia from Bourguiba to Ben Ali, though the latter was an army officer, quickly turned “securocrat.” In Chapter 3, I specify the status of armies under authoritarian regimes beyond their proximity to regimes. I want to offer a better understanding of what is distinctive about the armed forces in Arab authoritarian regimes. First, in most cases, armies have been huge bureaucratic actors seated in the state, living in and often above the state. Second, and in contrast, in most cases armies have, however, kept some relations with their respective societies at least through the institution of (more-or-less filtered) conscription, also an important source of legitimacy. Third, armies have been budget-hungry actors, whose expenses have often been covered with access to foreign military aid. And fourth, in some cases and with different overtones from Egypt to Syria, armies have become powerful economic actors in the (civilian) economy. Chapter 4 will deal with monarchical armies, as these allegedly specific cases are usually less addressed in studies about Arab militaries. It will also delve into differences within the monarchies, with Jordan, Morocco and Oman closer to the model of professional/institutionalized Arab armies (with these terms strongly qualified), in contrast to the specific militaries of the Gulf oil states, characterized with overspending in some areas (infrastructure and equipment), the maintenance of an understaffed (yet well-paid and “cocooned”) army and the overreliance on the American (or Western) security alliance. It shows that monarchies are not so alien to the military, though they maintain a specific makeup of regime-army relations. Whatever the differences (and violent encounters) with republics in their trajectory of political development in the two postindependence decades, both types of regimes, monarchies as well as republics, converged in similar authoritarian control after the 1970s. And this chapter will also explore a new sense of military assertiveness after 2011 in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Chapter 5 focuses on the 2011 uprisings. In the complex interplay of factors involved, armies have played a crucial role, either by keeping cohesive or by disappearing or by fracturing. When the Ben Ali system crumbled, the small Tunisian military revealed itself as the only institution keeping afloat, until other dynamics of civil society took back the upper hand in channeling political transition. The veiled and unspoken power of the armed forces in the Egyptian political system came back to open light

24

Introduction

and might. The Yemeni model of enduring authoritarian power was severely shaken by the uprising that also unleashed parallel power struggles. The 2011 transition revealed how crucial the Libyan army was, with its specificities; furthermore, in a transition eased out by an eight-month civil war and an international intervention. The use (and abuse) of the Syrian army was pushed further as it was pulled by the (Bashar al-Assad) regime into heavy-handed repression, then full-scale civil war. Chapter 6 covers the post-uprisings period. Whatever the poor harvest in terms of democratic advances nine years later, many Arab states have witnessed an unprecedented wave of changes and reactions (counterrevolutionary moves) similar in importance to the revolutions of the 1950s–1960s. The term revolution (thawra) was first widely used, with the Tocquevillian caveat about the relevance of the state and the power structures of old regimes, both for the breakdown and then regime reformation – and the effect of huge social mobilizations should not be assessed only with the notion of a unified outcome (success or failure) at the macro-level in the short term. This chapter will show the tentative deployment of the military’s institutional power with different outcomes. Notwithstanding the enduring Tunisian exception and the case of full civil war in Syria, the picture is mixed with reinforced militarism in Egypt, attempts elsewhere in a context of acute threats and boiling regional relations, yet with inherent weaknesses and risks of fragmentations. In the Conclusion, I summarize the essential political embeddedness of armies in Arab polities above all other considerations about their roles. Then I put Arab armies in comparative perspective, in particular with the heartland of military politics in the 1970s–1980s, Latin America. I stress the extreme difficulty of “demilitarization” of Arab polities by comparison. A Short, Historical Backgrounder: Jund, Jaysh, ʿAskar . . . Historically, civil and military functions were not differentiated in Islamic empires for at least two centuries after the emergence of Islam. Conquering troops were built on individual tribes or sections of tribes united under the banner of the new Islamic faith and regrouped in garrisons (amsar), hence the military organization stemmed from the very structure of Arab society (= tribal allegiances).47 With the Abbasid Empire in the ninth century, the entire setting changed with the stabilization of power or its “sedentarization” to borrow the expression from the 47

Hugh Kennedy, The Armies of the Caliphs: Military and Society in the Early Islamic State (London: Routledge, 2001).

A Short, Historical Backgrounder

25

fourteenth-century Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun – by sedentarization, Ibn Khaldun meant the building of imperial institutions along with the disarmament of the population. This development led to a differentiation between the salaried military (al-jaysh or al-ʿaskar) regularly paid out of the state treasury (bayt al-mal) and volunteers (jund) recruited on a local basis according to needs in a given area of the empire. The term jund, or “people in arms,” is still used in the Maghreb to designate the military. In the Mashreq, however, the term jaysh is more common. The small, semi-bureaucratized and professional standing army played a decisive role in an empire where the majority of the population was unarmed. It maintained security and helped collect taxes, fulfilling two of the main functions of empires according to Ibn Khaldun.48 A very specific feature of Islamic empires was that these professional soldiers were recruited mainly from peripheral and marginal groups, hence differentiating them from “chevalerie” or “noblesse” in Western Europe – although the term used for the cavalry (faris), namely, the shock troops of the Islamic military (al-jaysh), bears strong resemblance to it. Thus, there were no noble lineages in Islamic armies as there were in their European counterparts. Military functions were assigned to marginal groups or individuals hailing from peripheral provinces, the “limes” territories of the empire (to use the Roman conception of the periphery) or areas designated by the word “wahsh” (barbarian) by Ibn Khaldun. Hence military recruitment was based on a differentiation between the military and society, with the military (al-jaysh) hailing socially from peripheral areas and introduced in the very center of power by its link of allegiance to the sultans (the executive power of the empire). The personal relationship of the army to the rulers was the key to the former’s allegiance. A well-known vizier (wazir, or prime minister, in modern parlance) like Abu Ali al-Hassan, better known under the name of Nizam al-Mulk (literally “order of the state/power”) in his famous Siyasat Nahme, argued in favor of competing ethnic groups in the military to maintain cohesion and allegiance. The flip side was the risk of recurring infighting between rival groups inside the jaysh. This factor was at the root of the demise of several early Muslim states, such as the Fatimid caliphate (Turks vs. Nubians), the caliphate of Córdoba (Slavs vs. Berbers), the Ayyubids (Kurds vs. Turks and the rise of enslaved child soldiers, the Mamluks). Muslim empires and dynasties built strong armies but at the same time these very same armies often weakened them or even caused their fall.

48

Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal, abridged and ed. N. J. Dawood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

1

The Surge of Armies in Arab States

This chapter will concentrate on the first cycle of my framework and a pivotal moment with the surge of armies in Arab states. Studies about the nexus of war, coercion and capital in Western Europe (Introduction) showed that war/threats and preparation for war helped build the institutional basis of the modern state or left important institutional residues with new political structures (increased political capacity, centralization of power, mobilization of societies).1 Hence, much academic literature on the military differentiated between the civil and the military domains (civil-military relations), namely, the way rulers (state-makers) brought military power under their control. Tilly stressed three stylized paths of change in state-forming processes, coercion-intensive state formation, capital-intensive state formation and capitalized coercion – further complexified with his analysis of the role of popular contention in the interplay of military activity, regimes, contention and democratization. And outside Western Europe, processes of political development heading differently were famously theorized by Huntington as praetorian, with generalized political action from various groups (students, intellectuals, revolutionaries, politicians, rural folk, urbanites and officers) whereby “private ambitions are rarely restrained by a sense of public authority and the role of power is maximized.”2 In reality, in the Arab World (with one exception, Tunisia), the relationships between coercion, capital and war obtained differently with a specific role for military institutions. Coups d’état connected Arab armies with state-building and politics in an accelerated way. Military coups were easily mounted against disorganized and fractious civilian politicians.3 Syria was flooded by coups, beginning with three in the year 1949. Another milestone was the political awakening of Egyptian officers that materialized in the 1 2 3

Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), chapter 7. Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), especially 241–242 and 424–425. Panayotis J. Vatikiotis, The Egyptian Army in Politics: Pattern for New Nations? (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961).

26

A New Social Trend

27

coup of July 1952. Monarchies were overthrown and republics were established in Iraq in 1958, in Libya in 1969 and in North Yemen in 1962. Most classic studies of the military in the Arab World were building upon the implications of these formative moments. Yet, the sole focus on overt military interventions conceals a lot of roles that Arab armies assumed in these states and their enduring consequences. Studies rereading Tilly’s arguments (and linkages/brokerages) from the Arab World4 indicated that the link between war-making and state structure was less evident (than in Europe between 990 and 1990) and stressed the importance of war preparation, uncorrelated with the outbreak of war, as a way for military institutions to dominate and govern their respective countries. They also showed that capitalized coercion or resource extraction through direct taxation was not as important as access to strategic rents, indirect taxation or the benefits of biased liberalizations.5 And military institutions invested themselves in and crucially filled (the “nerves” of) Arab polities. This chapter also recalls the fundamentally unstable nature of these regimes whatever their short-term legitimacy and nationalist (Arabist) revivals. A New Social Trend: From New States Building Armies to Military State-Building The enduring and domineering role of the military, even the entrenchment of the army in many postindependence states, did not follow a random course related to the eclectic emergence of cliques of politicized officers. The army’s role was strongly related to deep social changes and, at a time of heightened nationalism and newly obtained independence, social change had an essential political meaning. The military career was attractive for the middle strata in rural provinces (sons of provincial centers and market towns, not the poorest and landless peasants as often claimed by officers in search of legitimization) and in cities (a kind of “petite bourgeoisie”),6 and sometimes for the lower classes – Hafez al-Assad was from a poor 4 5 6

Steven Heydemann, ed., War, Institutions and Social Change in the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Alexander Wendt and Michael Barnett, “Dependent State Formation and Third World Militarization,” Review of International Studies, 19 (1993): 321–347. Hanna Batatu, “Some Observations on the Social Roots of Syria’s Ruling, Military Group and the Causes for Its Dominance,” The Middle East Journal, 35(3) (Summer 1981): 331–344; on the PLO, see Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); on the FLN, see William Quandt, Revolution and Political Leadership (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969); Mohamed Harbi, Le FLN mirage et réalité (Paris: Editions Jeune Afrique, 1980); Gilbert Meynié, Histoire intérieure du FLN (Paris: Fayard, 2002).

28

The Surge of Armies in Arab States

family – because it offered security of employment, shelter, insurance, family benefits and pension. The military was thus embodying social change and officers represented the linkage with mounting social trends: the rise of the petite bourgeoisie in Egypt, the role of certain social classes/ factions or communities – in Syria, intra-Sunni politics in the 1950s and early 1960s was far more important than interconfessional dynamics – the transformation of tribes in Yemen, the modernization of formerly closed societies in Libya and Yemen. A dominant interpretation associated the army with modernization. “New salaried middle classes”7 were said to form a critical mass in Arab modernizing societies in terms of size, qualifications and new social roles (professions).8 This emerging social group had an important military component: officership enjoyed an image of modernity with access to technology, generalized education, a better organization, while at the same time, and differently from previous imperial Islamic models of military elites cut from society, officers were increasingly recruited with a nationwide selection process and embodied the ideology of the nationstate. A caveat should be added that qualifies the literature of the 1960s on armies inspired by modernization theory. The proponents of modernization theory – Manfred Halpern, Daniel Lerner, Lucian Pye – made theoretical virtue of empirical realities by defining the new military rulers by their “revolutionary” attitudes as founders of “mobilizational” regimes or “enlightened” military regimes. They concentrated on presumed behavioral and attitudinal changes, the rise of a “modern” personality among “new middle classes” with an active military component. But that view was too unilinear. The policies thought to be designed for state-building, social reforms and economic redistribution were also indistinguishable from coercion, inter- and intra-elite conflicts and did not ipso facto contribute to institution-building, on the contrary. Consequently, the military became much more than a mere institution of the state. It began to embody strong expectations of social change and, at the same time, became interventionist and a crucible to reach the heights of power. The state as envisioned by officers was a vibrant 7

8

Manfred Halpern, The Politics of Modernization in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963); for a scathing critique, see Eliezer Be’eri, Army Officers in Arab Politics and Society (New York: Praeger, 1970); Jacob C. Hurewitz, Middle East Politics: The Military Dimension (New York: Praeger, 1969). Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society (New York: The Free Press, 1958); on Aleppo, see Keith Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); on Iraq, see Issam Al Khafaji, Tormented Birth (London: Tauris, 2004).

A New Social Trend

29

nationalist entity engaged in development and social integration, also fighting enemies, in the first place Israel, and playing a role in Arab integration. First, the military endowed itself with a specific sense of mission or vision for the state, trying to integrate its social fabric through conscription and develop it economically, socially, politically and even culturally. Officers also redefined norms of legitimacy for governments by strengthening the authority of the state and the government’s penetration in society not just with coercive power but also through redistributive policies. Young officers were ambitious state- and nation-builders in many newly independent Arab countries.9 They were eager to energize social and economic development with land reforms, nationalizations, transformational projects of infrastructures and a huge expansion of educational opportunities and redistribution policies. They introduced a new political language with a key emphasis and focus on what they called their “realizations” (injazat), namely, roads, dams, infrastructures, factories, industrial complexes, and so forth, built to benefit the national community. During the first decade of their rule, Arab military officers generally succeeded in achieving impressive economic growth, developing backward infrastructures and opening up new opportunities for upward social advancement for large groups in society and in the first place their social bases. Military men offered a new legitimizing discourse boasting about their alleged humble social backgrounds (largely a myth, as explained above) and their dedication to the nation-state.10 In particular, the army was instrumental in the integration of the peasantry and recently urbanized rural communities into the mainstream of national politics and helped transforming them into “the masses” (al-jamahir) or “the people” (al-shaʿab). In Egypt, after the signing of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 giving the monarchy greater internal leeway, a policy sanctioned by the British as preparation for a possible world war, the army was expanded. As a consequence of the need for trained cadres, reforms opened access to the military academy, with classes shifting from an annual selection of 15 cadets to 100 and with the growing professionalization of officers who received British military education. There was a “democratization” of officers’ recruitment. Those selected no longer hailed exclusively from the small Ottoman-Albanian-Circassian (yet substantially Egyptianized) 9

10

Elizabeth Picard, “Arab Military in Politics: From Revolutionary Plot to Authoritarian State,” in The Arab State, ed. Giacomo Luciani (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 190. Fuad Khuri, “The Study of Civil-Military Relations in Modernizing Societies in the Middle East,” in Soldiers, Peasants and Bureaucrats, ed. Roman Kolkowicz and Andrzeij Korbonski (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1982), 9–27.

30

The Surge of Armies in Arab States

upper class, but they were also recruited from among the sons of the small bourgeoisie and rural notables, such as Gamal Abd El-Nasser, Anwar ElSadat, Zakaria Muhieddin, Abd al-Hakim Amer and others.11 These new officers were heavily influenced, as other strata of their society, by the reformist discourses of the 1930s propagated through the expanded access to education and by a sense of nationalist duty for their country – tellingly, in their communiqué Number 1 on July 23, 1952, they spoke of a “renaissance” (nahda) and of the “blessed movement of the army” rather than a “revolution” (thawra).12 Many of them were close to two youth organizations: Young Egypt (Misr al-Fatat), an Egyptian chauvinist nationalist group with influence from Italian fascism, German Nazism and the Muslim Brotherhood; and the Communists.13 Officers were nationalists, modernizers, and reformists and aimed at creating a more egalitarian society – Nasser was the first to introduce the concept of equal opportunities in Arabic. Officers did not act out of (middle-)class sensibilities, but as a professional and modern group in Egyptian society, a kind of vanguard (taliʿa) displaying an acute sense of Egyptian national interest and national pride, and an eagerness to free the country from the threefold system that ruled Egypt (Britain, King Farouk and the Wafd Party).14 Building upon a British tradition of officers’ clubs, young Egyptian officers made a concerted effort to cultivate close ties with officers of similar background and build a secret network of cells that gave birth to a strong organizational structure, the Free Officers (alDubbat al-Ahrar) in 1949. The Egyptian trendsetting case had consequences all across the Arab World, most famously in Libya. After December 1951, the newly independent federal kingdom of Libya undertook the modernization of its armed forces. Bedouin tribes of Cyrenaica, claiming membership in the Sanousiyya, a mystical/Sufi order (tariqa) originally introduced by alSayyid Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanousi (1787–1859) and that had built a Libyan state, were at the core of the reborn state. The latter reemerged after the shock of the brutal Italian occupation, the largely Cyrenaican-based 11

12 13

14

Leonard Binder, In a Moment of Enthusiasm (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). These reforms should not be exaggerated: there was a release of constraints in 1936, but fees were important; officers were hailing from well-to-do (but not rich) families. Be’eri, Army Officers in Arab Politics and Society, 101. Ibid.; see also Sherif Yunis, Nidaʾ al-Shaʿab (Cairo: Dar al-Shourouk, 2012); Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Egypt, Islam and the Arabs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Confronting Fascism in Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); and the special issue “Islamofascism” of Die Welt des Islams, 52(3–4) (January 2012). Jacques Berque, Egypt, Imperialism and Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1972); Afaf Lutfi al-Marsot, Egypt’s Liberal Experiment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).

A New Social Trend

31

resistance with crucial British help, and the British military administration (1943–1951), but it never recovered its initial strength. With independence in 1951, a national Royal Libyan Army was set up. Its strength, however, amounted to no more than 6,500 lightly armed men with Cyrenaican Sanousi officers in command posts. At the same time and as a counterweight to the Royal Libyan Army, King al-Sayyid Idriss maintained trusted paramilitary provincial forces, especially the 6,000-strong Cyrenaican Defense Forces (CYDF) with officers coming from World War II, Sanousi veterans or recruited from tribes loyal to the monarchy.15 The regular military was a small corps but with an increasingly conscious, cohesive, disciplined and technocratic officer corps, maintained in somewhat inferior positions to the high commanders who were members of the Sanousi tribes. Young officers came from Libya’s peripheries and rural areas and were not affiliated with prestigious tribes or families related to the Sanousi dynasty. Officers resented their own deficiencies and limited means and the elite status of paramilitary forces. They also resented the pervasive atmosphere of corruption and deadlock in the country.16 To talk about a “new middle class” in motion in Libya would be far-fetched, although the country saw an explosion of new institutions and opportunities for large-scale patronage in the bureaucracy with the rise of oil revenues. Young officers also found some cohesion in a common emotional expression in Arabist sentiments, in particular the growing nationalist rhetoric inspired by Nasser in Egypt. And they relied on Libyan nationalism. They promoted opposition to the Sanousi regime and its links with foreign powers controlling foreign bases in the country.17 Finally, there was the example of military rule elsewhere in the Arab World. The Libyan army came to bustle with groups of Nasserist, Baathists or Arab nationalist officers even while being closely monitored by the secret police. One of the small groups of junior officers was known as the Free Unionist Officers. Virtually all its members, coming mainly from the seventh and eighth classes of the military academy, were of humble origin, as exemplified by the figure of Captain Qaddafi, the son of a poor seminomadic family from Syrt (in the area between Tripolitania and Cyrenaica). He moved to Sabha (in the Fazzan) in 1956, a Baathi fiefdom, where he began to build political cells based on personal

15 16

17

Hurewitz, Middle East Politics. John Wright, Libya: A Modern History (London: Croom Helm, 1983); Ruth First, Libya: The Elusive Revolution (London: Penguin, 1974); Mirella Bianco, Gadafi: Voice from the Desert (London: Longman, 1974). The Sanousi monarchy, with mounting oil revenues, raised the level of education in the country, but most of the professors in secondary schools were Egyptians and most of the textbooks used in Libya between 1952 and 1969 were in fact those used in Egypt.

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The Surge of Armies in Arab States

relations. He relocated to Misrata in 1963 where, along with other young Libyans, he enlisted in the military academy in Benghazi. The military career offered new opportunities with the large expansion of the army in independent Syria – the French legated a small army of some 5,000 men. At the same time, the 1950s witnessed a Syrian society put in motion by new social developments: the emerging bourgeoisie was more visible in new affluent neighborhoods in big cities; the educated urban middle and lower classes expanded considerably – the number of civil servants tripled from 1939 to 1947 – big landownership increased after independence as did the number of peasants evicted from land; and factory workers became increasingly vocal. In this society in motion, young officers were influenced by new (civilian) political parties. The maverick politician from Hama, Akram al-Hourani (legal adviser of the defense ministry under Zaʾim, agriculture minister under Hinnawi, and a close friend of Shishakli), encouraged youth from his region of origin to become officers to fulfill the huge demand for cadres in the new Syrian military – his Hizb al-Shabab (Party of the Young), later revamped as the Arab Socialist Party, fused in 1953 with the Baath Party created in 1947. The Baath Party and the Communists were influencing officers with poor social background in Damascus or Hama, and the Baath Party, in rivalry with the Syrian Social National Party (Hizb al-Qawmi al-Ijtimaʿi al-Suri), was increasingly recruiting lots of officers, especially from low social class backgrounds or minorities from the Latakia area. The Muslim Brotherhood was another political influence on the officer corps. Even in Yemen, a site of pre-Islamic ancient states with a millennial state tradition and governed by Zaydi adepts, a specific branch of Shia Islam,18 the state fell prey to young politicized officers. From the late ninth century until 1962, Zaydi sada (sing. sayyid), the alleged descendants of Prophet Muhammad and a privileged social group at the apex of the social pyramid, governed themselves autonomously under the leadership of their Imams – it was the first Arab state to declare independence in 1919. The Zaydi Imamate fitted well into Max Weber’s category of patrimonial traditional politics.19 The military was a priority for the Imam, amidst intensive international struggles for influence played in the Gulf and Indian Ocean with the Ottomans, the British in Aden and the new expansionist Wahhabi state (thereafter Saudi Arabia) with ill-defined borders and internal revolts 18

19

On Zaydism, see the special issue of Arabica, 59(3–4) (January 2012); Wilfred Madelund, Der Imam al-Qasim ibn Ibrahim und die Glaubenslehre des Zayditen (Berlin: Gruyter, 1965); Franck Mermier, “Récit d’origine et ritual d’allégeance,” Peuples Méditerranéens, no. 56–57 (1991): 177–180. Muhammad Said al-Attar, Le sous-développement économique et social du Yémen (Alger: Editions Tiers-monde, 1964).

A New Social Trend

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by restive and armed tribes in the northern mountainous highlands.20 The core tribal force was made up of tribesmen recruited mainly from Zaydi tribes – the Hashid and the Baqil tribal alliances were known as the wings of the Imam – and “disciplined” through tribal organized service to serve as a praetorian corps.21 With the end of the Ottoman Empire, the Imam coopted Turkish officers stationed in Yemen to build an additional, small, professional “regular military,” then a Syrian military officer to establish a military compulsory service among landless farmers.22 That regular army was tasked with less sensible activities such as guarding the frontiers and countering Wahhabi/Saudi attacks. With acute external and internal threats, the Imam undertook an activist military modernization policy taking opportunity of the numerous offers made by Italy (1926), the Soviet Union (as soon as the 1920s and with purchases of Czech arms in 1957), Sweden (to build the air force). And Yemeni cadets were sent to the Baghdad military school in 1935. There they were exposed, during their studies, to political ideas the Imam feared: among the first batch of Yemeni trainees, half of them were latter involved in conspiracies against the Imamate. The flip side of modernization programs, with Iraqi thereafter Egyptian advisers brought in from Yemen (as the Imam thought he would better keep a watchful eye on them at home), was that the military became a site of numerous coups d’état in 1948 (with the killing of Imam Yahya) and 1955 (the attack of his son Imam Ahmad’s palace) or assassination attempts (one left Imam Ahmad gravely crippled in 1961).23 Various cells calling themselves “Yemeni Free Officers” were active in plots. The coupmakers who toppled the Imamate in 1962 were young officers trained in Egypt and influenced by Nasserism.24 As a second specific feature of Arab officers in power, the military presented itself as the defender of the state, protecting the state from internal (regional, ethnic or confessional) fissures and most prominently from external threats, the most crucial ones being the series of wars and enduring confrontations with Israel. Repeated Arab-Israeli wars (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973) were a major cause of military interventions in politics. Young nationalist Syrian officers after independence famously resented 20 21 22 23 24

Mohammed al-Basiqi, “The Moroccan Tourist,” al-Ahram, reproduced in al-Ahram Weekly, May 17–23, 2011. Sultan Nagi, al-Tarikh al-ʿAskari li-l-Yaman (Beirut: Dar al-Awda, 1985). Khaled Fattah, “A Political History of Civil-Military Relations in Yemen,”Alternative Politics, no. 1 (November 2010): 25–47. J. Leigh Douglass, The Free Yemeni Movement, 1935–1962 (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1987). ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Baydani, ʿAzmat al-Umma al-ʿArabiyya wa-l-Thawra al-Yamaniyya (Cairo: 1984); ʿAbdallah al-Juzaylan, al-Tarikh al-Sirri li-l-Thawra al Yamaniyya (Cairo: Manshurat al-ʿAsr al-Hadith, 1993).

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The Surge of Armies in Arab States

“defective munitions” and put the blame on incompetent civilian rulers. In their memoirs Egyptian Free Officers invoked the humiliating defeat in the 1948 war in Palestine as a motivator of their movement and put the blame on civil politicians’ bickering in Cairo – the real “front” (jabha) was the rotten regime at home for them.25 Nasser was also able to gain credit and burnish his reputation owing to his numerous foreign confrontations and alleged exploits in defending Egypt, the decision to buy arms from Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union in 1955, the American mishandling of the Aswan Dam financing and the nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956, the conversion of the defeat in the Suez war into a political victory – and interestingly, it coincided with the rise of his close associate, the incompetent Amer inside the officer corps. After 1969, Libyan officers were also eager to buttress independence; in particular, to terminate the military agreements on bases with the British and the United States – Libya was a strategic location at a time of escalating Cold War and the US air force rented the reactivated Wheelus Bay base in 1948 – to nationalize foreign assets (especially of the small Italian community), to eliminate all traces of the colonial presence and to establish new terms with oil companies that concentrated revenues in the hands of the Libyan government.26 Preparation for war with Israel was a critical justification for increasing military expenditure and expanding the role of the armed forces in the state.27 Without this context of war, it is impossible to explain the expansion and increasingly domineering public behavior of military establishments. Interestingly, the numerous wars Arab armies lost did not distract them from their internal transformational roles nor did it reduce their enduring influence in domestic matters. Syrian officers in the 1960s displayed an inflammatory war discourse against Israel, while at the same time doing little against their neighbor and concentrating mostly on power games in Damascus. And as a third characteristic of the officers’ surge in politics, the military was said to (re)build the state in connection with long-term “missions,” for reaching goals such as Arab unity, Greater Syrian unification, or Arab socialism – what Jean Lacouture compares with the Zollverein movement 25

26

27

Gamal Abd El-Nasser, The Philosophy of Revolution (Cairo: Dar al-Maʿarif, 1959); Muhammad Neguib, Egypt’s Destiny (Garden City: Doubleday, 1955). Among hundreds of books, see Ahmad Hamrush, Qissat Thawra Juliyo (Cairo: Dar al-Mawqif al-ʿArabi, 1987); Kirk Beattie, Egypt during the Nasser Years (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1994). Jacques Roumani, “From Republic to Jamahiriya: Libya’s Search for Political Community,” The Middle East Journal, 37(2) (Spring 1983): 151–168; Lisa Anderson, The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). Heydemann, ed., War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East.

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35

from which German unity originated.28 The Syrian army was pulled into politics in the context of the state’s relative novelty – only one generation had passed since the demise of the Ottoman Empire – along with the intensity and frequency of regional calls for Arab unity coming from Egypt, Hashemite Transjordan/Jordan and Iraq. The Libyan officer corps played a major role in strengthening the pan-Arab and Islamic dimension of Libyan identity,29 a policy of political, economic and cultural integration with the Arab East and the rejection of Western influences. In general, Arab officers gave Arab nationalism its true ideological vigor and strength and opened up an era of ideological politics. This was reflected in slogans such as “the people’s army” (jaysh al-shaʿab) or “the ideological army” (al-jaysh al-ʿaqaʾidi) used respectively in Syrian and Iraqi armies in the 1960s. Interestingly, religious issues were seldom discussed, although Arab officers were respectful of religious devotion.30 In sum, in the 1950s and 1960s, the military had thus a very different manifestation in Arab states, with its transformational and even revolutionary roles, when compared with the early European (especially Prussia in the beginning of the nineteenth century) and American trajectories, where settling civil-military relations within political institutions proceeded with some difficulties, but not with the same encroachments of the military in the state.31 In the Arab World, as in other parts of the developing world, officers were boasting about founding new political orders and embodying the enduring influence and affinity of the military with the state. The Grandiloquent Projects of Officers: From Praetorianism to the Exclusive Control of the State Four elements characterized military-led rule in the Arab World. First, the army’s relations with political and social (civilian) forces became strained or at least made of mutual ignorance, thereby installing a longterm feature in Arab polities. Role beliefs prevalent among officers tended to consider civilian rulers as incompetent, ineffective and corrupt, and endowed the military with a sense of guardianship and a highly positive 28 29 30 31

Jean Lacouture and Simone Lacouture, L’ Egypte en mouvement (Paris: Seuil, 1956), 485. Omar El-Fathaly and Monte Palmer, Political Development and Social Change in Libya (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1980). On school textbooks in national curricula, see Olivier Carré, La légitimation islamique des socialismes arabes (Paris: Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1979). Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957); Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960). Cf. Manfred Halpern, “Toward Further Modernization of the Study of New Nations,” World Politics, 17(1) (October 1964): 157–181.

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The Surge of Armies in Arab States

self-image. Conversely, civilians were fearful, or very reluctant to address military topics, hence explaining the lack of civilian (societal) counterweights to the military institutional weight.32 The Egyptian 1952 coup was a purely military undertaking with little civilian participation and no mass support, although officers claimed to act in the name of the Egyptian people. Free Officers had no real ideological program about how to rule (apart from the vague “six principles” they proclaimed in July 1952) and no real idea about what kind of political system they would prefer. The Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) issued an agrarian reform in September 1952, modest in scope, but targeting the big landowners’ class, which was the social basis of the monarchy. The RCC kept the monarchy that was eventually abrogated in July 1953. It first chose trusted civilian ministers with care, with army officers serving as liaison in the background, then directly entrusted officers. Lieutenant Colonel Nasser received his first ministerial post (interior and deputy prime minister) in June 1953. The Wafd Party had some favor among officers, while some were members of the Muslim Brotherhood (or of its military wing, the “Secret Organization”) or not far ideologically. But the officers’ key catchword was “discipline” and increasingly their preference was to rule without opposition. The army’s uncompromising stance to political and social issues and strong defiance toward organized (Communist) activism was exemplified by its tough reaction against strikers in Kafr al-Dawar near Alexandria in August 1952 – two workers were hanged and 1,000 were lined up to hear the sentence and face armed troops. The army’s show of force with political parties ended with a law outlawing all political parties in January 1953. The Muslim Brotherhood was the only organization allowed to conduct activities until the crisis of January 1954. A new ad hoc institution was then created as a one-ruling party by the RCC and conceived to play a mobilizational role, the “Liberation Rally.”33 In Libya, the Free Unionist Officers represented their regime not as one born of a military coup (inqilab) but the result of a revolution (thawra), even though there was certainly no popular revolution. The RCC was composed entirely of military officers and the government was only an executive organ. Despite revolutionary slogans and rhetoric, the RCC had little 32

33

Philippe Droz-Vincent, “Prospects for Democratic Control of the Armed Forces? Comparative Insights and Lessons for the Arab World in Transition,” Armed Forces & Society (March 2013): 696–723; Robert Springborg, “Arab Militaries,” in The Arab Uprisings Explained, ed. Marc Lynch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 142–159. Be’eri, Army Officers in Arab Politics and Society.

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37

contact with the general population, but they had the coercive means to control Libya. They purged the upper echelons of the entire administration, including the military, of Sanousi cadres. Officers harbored defiant attitudes toward civilians and a strong desire to control them, holding trials against media editors and figures, reining in the students in a unique association, forbidding strikes by law, then all political activities (hizbiyya), other than membership in the Arab Socialist Union modeled after Egypt’s political organizations, and setting up the Superior Council for National Orientation to “safeguard the unity of thinking among citizens.”34 Officers were unable to reach out to society to the point that they used their familial linkages to buttress their power, although the RCC policy was officially anti-tribal. RCC officers were not members of the main tribes, but tribal fluidity (the tribe as an idiom of interconnection) explained how members of minor and unimportant tribes, after their coming to power, could play on tribal links. In Syria, the first three military rulers – Chief of Staff Colonel al-Zaʾim, who was overthrown five months later by the chief of the Armored First Division, Colonel al-Hinnawi, who in turn was expelled in less than four months by the commander of the prominent First Division, Colonel Shishakli – described the coup that inaugurated their regimes as a revolution (thawra), but they did not fit any conventional definition of revolutions. All these rulers were genuinely moved by the difficulties of statebuilding in their country and sought to symbolize and engineer profound changes in their society, but they came to build personal dictatorships.35 They had no links with political parties – they forbade them – and did not develop links with Syrian society – they even shocked lower middle-class and conservative societal segments with their reforms. At the end of the day, these early military rulers alienated the army that helped them come to power and eventually caused their fall. Their successors would be close to political parties but not give them any margin of maneuver. The gap between the military and society was much wider in Yemen. The armed forces played a crucial role in the 1962 coup/revolution, proclaiming a republic and mimicking in their communiqués their counterparts in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Libya. But the armed forces never emerged as the leading and hegemonic actor in the country. Plotting officers totaled perhaps 80 among the 400-strong officer corps. The rank and file were cautiously locked into barracks for fear that tribal loyalties would make them support the embattled Zaydi Imam.36 There 34 35 36

“Chronique politique Libye,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (Marseille: CNRS, 1975). Ellen Trimberger, Revolution from Above (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1978). Fred Halliday, Arabia without Sultans (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974).

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was no popular participation except from a few intellectuals. These features of pristine weakness were indeed prevalent in the cases of the Egyptian Free Officers in 1952 or their counterparts in Syria in 1949–1963. But, contrary to Egypt and Syria, there were no social groups to mobilize, no big projects to capitalize on, no confessional cleavages to play on – the coup was not a Shafii movement against Zaydi powerbrokers – that is, there were no social trends, whether based on classes, a petite bourgeoisie or a developmental thrust, for military rulers to build upon, what was called an “arrested state.”37 And an immediate problem for officers was that they did not kill the Imam who escaped to the North then Saudi Arabia and organized the royalist counterrevolution. Yemen plunged into a civil war from 1962 to 1967. Hence, a major difference was that Yemeni officers were limited in their ability to govern and, without the Egyptian immediate intervention in September 1962, the Yemeni republican officers would have ended in a failed coup d’état as in 1948 and 1955. As summarized by Be’eri, the coup produced a military dictatorship, but that of the Egyptian troops.38 The Egyptian huge intervention – 1,000 Egyptian troops in 1962, 20,000 under the direct command of Egyptian commander, Marshal Amer, in 1967, to peak around 70,000 in the mid-1960s39 – prevented the defeat of the republic in the hands of Saudi-backed tribal Imamate forces. Second, armies became specific incubators in their respective states’ social fabric displaying a strong historical legitimacy as crucial agents of national modernization or even revolution. Officers positioned the military as a key channel of socialization to fulfill state positions and in particular with an endeavor to impress their will and ideas on societies. Membership in the Egyptian Free Officers in 1952 ranged from 70 to 300 mostly middle-ranking officers.40 The RCC had to expand its membership to include some commanders of key units that were pivotal for the coup. There was a whole reconfiguration of the officer corps. Nasser expanded the promotion of NCOs into the officer corps, compensating for the purges in the military following the coup. Starting in the 1950s, 37

38 39

40

Robert Burrowes, The Yemen Arab Republic (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987); Robert Stookey, “Social Structure and Politics in the Yemen Arab Republic,” The Middle East Journal, 28(3) (1974): 248–260. Be’eri, Army Officers in Arab Politics and Society. A host of Egyptian advisers supervised brand new institutions copied from Egypt and called by Yemenis “ghost institutions” to account for their deep estrangement from reality. Dana Adams Schmidt, Yemen: The Unknown War (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968); Saeed Badeeb, The Saudi Conflict over Northern Yemen (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986). Lacouture and Lacouture, L’ Egypte en mouvement; Gamal Hammad, Asrar Thawra 23 Yulyo (Cairo: Dar al-ʿUlum, 2011).

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39

measures were taken to make military careers attractive for university graduates. The number of officers was increased by several thousand with a further “democratization”/opening of the entry to the military academy by officers now in power. Dozens of officers were sent abroad, first to the United States and then hundreds to the USSR, especially to the prestigious M. V. Frunze Military Academy, and thereafter infused in key posts in the state. In parallel to military positions, lots of officers were infused deeply into the state machinery, including public companies (e.g., running public transport in Cairo), editorial boards of press organizations, the national radio and television company, supervisory organisms for land reform, political and societal mobilization vehicles (Liberation Rally, renamed National Union and then Arab Socialist Union, ASU), and even to oversee cultural activities (theaters, music and film festivals, book fairs, antiquities). War Minister Amer issued a series of decrees and laws to establish the army’s complete autonomy in administrative terms and expanded its jurisdiction to all administrative and budgetary matters having to do with the armed forces. A regulation even forbade civilian ministries to fill a position in the bureaucracy by external recruitment before they had offered the post to the military. Military patronage under Amer was widespread, with the positioning of “the field marshal’s men” in the state apparatus. For two decades, but especially between 1958 and 1968, hundreds of officers were given positions in the state. In some cases, their military background was intended to be hidden and they would be known as engineers with their army rank going unmentioned. Many officer-technocrats went back to college after entering the military and obtained degrees in engineering, management, physics, medicine, law, journalism and political science enabling them to enter more technical ministries. As a testimony to the extent of the army’s intrusion into the state, in 1967 after Amer’s disgrace, the “civilianized” organs of the regime retook control over 367 public sector companies from his military appointees. Egypt, in effect, became a “military society”41 governed by and with cadres coming from the armed forces. The armed forces were publicly celebrated with frequent parades, exhibitions and the introduction of military education in school programs. The essential discourse on the army underscored their service “for the people.” The culture, information and education ministers were at times officers as well. And the National Military Service Law of 1955 introduced key changes, starting with mandatory conscription. The new republican constitution put the military service on a pedestal. 41

Anwar Abd al-Malek, Egypt, Military Society (New York: Random House, 1968).

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Coups differed across the Arab World. In Egypt, the coup d’état was staged by colonels and captains who were commanding units, and the state apparatus was sufficiently developed by 1952 to allow them to sweep all their rivals and rule by taking control of its administrative heights. By comparison, the first three coups in Syria were not the moves of an expanded group of organized Free Officers as in Egypt, but more personal dictatorships by chiefs of staff or commanders in chief (Zaʾim, Hinnawi, Shishakli). Yet, behind conspiratorial coup-makers, new mounting trends and in particular an ambitious social stratum of officers were pushing to the fore. After independence, the expanding Syrian army became a melting pot that fused groups of multiple backgrounds, reinvigorating the link between the army and the social diversity of Syria more widely and opening up the military route for social mobility. Unlike in Egypt, the parallel birth of the military and the independent nation-state led to a distinctive relationship between the army, the state and society in Syria, with a more important “social capture” of the Syrian army, during the short “liberal era” (interrupted by the three coups d’état in 1949) and even under military regimes (until the arrival of the Baath Party). Egypt, in contrast, could claim an “autonomous” (from society) military tradition that went back to the nineteenth century with Muhammad Ali’s reforms. The first independent Syrian government opened up the Homs military academy to all Syrians without fee, even lowering academic and physical admission requirements and paying each student a small stipend. As a result, in the 1950s, a great number of soldiers and officers came by design or by default from Syrian peripheries, whether social, ethnic or geographical (rural). They expanded a tradition of the army linked to Sunnis from the peripheral rural areas and minority communities looking to improve their socioeconomical conditions through military enrollment. The army reflected, with some bias, the general situation of the Syrian society as “transformed” or “accelerated” by the expansion of the educational system that resulted from reinforced national education policies. Education was an essential intervening/independent factor whose expansion (from the capital to medium cities, thereafter to small cities and finally from cities to rural areas) allowed many young Syrians access to the military academy. In the countryside, sons of modest peasants had few means of improving their life chances other than a military career after they got access to education. For instance, the young Hafez al-Assad opted for a military career (in 1952) after completing his secondary education given that his family was unable to finance his studies in medicine in Beirut.42 As 42

Patrick Seale, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

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41

a consequence of social change combined with expanded education, the military became the most representative institution in Syrian society, much more representative of the diversity of Syria’s socioeconomic landscape than the country’s political class or economic elites dominated by urban elite Sunni families. A quick flashback before independence should be made, because much ink has been written about French manipulations whose consequences were inherited by the postindependence Syrian military.43 Indeed, in line with British colonial officers in Africa and South Asia, the French in Syria were fascinated with what they considered “martial races,” ethnic and tribal groups with supposedly superior fighting ability (Druzes, Alawis, Circassians and Ismaelis) owing to their alleged record in guerrilla wars. The argument that the French recruited for their colonial Syrian army mainly among minorities at the expense of the Sunni Arab “majority” was disputed in studies arguing that, during the mandate, the majority of the population was not “urban Sunnis”: there was a small Sunni plurality if one lumped together (erroneously) Sunnis of various kinds, especially rural Sunnis (Arab Sunnis and other Sunnis, in the first place Kurds) and urban Sunnis, all with very different social histories. Different social groups embraced diverse political stances, far from a unified “Sunni” position. Furthermore, soldiers were recruited from specific minority clans, then purged from the military after some of them revolted against the French mandate, a classic feature of colonial governance. But indeed, when the French created the Damascus military academy in 1921, most officers were Christians, Cherkess, Circassians and Druzes, and not urban Arab Sunnis, along with a few Alawis. Conversely, Sunni urban landowners and commercial elite families close to the nationalist movement did not send their sons to the military, which they saw as a tool of French imperialism. Alawis were disadvantaged by their lack of education.44 Among ordinary soldiers, though, Alawis, who tried to escape the poor economic conditions and a simple life in the mountainous Latakia region by enlisting, were dominant. This was the beginning of an enduring and important social trend where minority young men with lower-class social backgrounds enlisted en masse in the army, which they considered a channel of social mobility – and this trend would

43

44

Michael Van Dusen, “Intra- and Inter-generational Conflict in the Syrian Army” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1971); N. E. Bou Naclie, “Les Troupes Spéciales: Religious and Ethnic Recruitment, 1916–1946,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 25 (1993): 645–660; Jacques Weulersse, Le pays des Alaouites (Tours: Arrault, 1940). Stefan Winter, A History of the Alawis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

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amplify with postindependence expansion of educational opportunities with other social groups. The three leaders of the inaugural 1949 coups were holdovers coming from the French colonial Troupes Spéciales du Levant (see Introduction). The ethnic or confessional identity of coup-makers caused no particular panic, as coups in 1949 were led by ethnic Kurds or part-Kurdish officers (Zaʾim, Shishakli, Fawzi Silo). They hailed from minority communities but didn’t favor their respective or “allied” communities and they were reformists, who adapted a kind of Arab Kemalism advocating reforms from above and a sense of nation-state. Their identity was seen as a proof that the Syrian military was genuinely an agent of national integration. Moreover, minority officers had a tradition of shifting identities; for instance, playing “Kurds” under the French (who were looking for “martial” groups against what they saw as a majoritarian “Sunni threat”) and having played “Sunnis” under the Ottoman Empire (most Kurds are Sunnis). And that game of identity shift was not fully politicized and interpreted as the rise to power of “the Kurds” but rather as the slow rise of officers in the state. Yet, in sharp contrast to the common view of a continuity and massive minority (especially Alawi) overrepresentation in the officer corps, most of the officers involved in politics in the 1950s were actually Sunnis.45 Minority officers were more often purged; for instance, Kurds after Zaʾim, minority (Alawi) officers linked to the Syrian Social National Party outlawed after the assassination of Captain al-Malki in 1955, an influential instructor in the Homs military academy, close to the Baath Party and whose aura was often compared to that of Nasser in the Egyptian War College – one of the three assassins was allegedly Badia Makhluf, a cousin of Anissa Makhluf, later Hafez al-Assad’s wife (1958). And middle-class Sunnis accounted for 80 percent of graduates in the first five postindependence classes. The obvious appeal of soldiering for the most disadvantaged sectors of the population, hence minority sectors (first among them Alawis), continued unaltered in the non-officer ranks, with consequences for the coming years. By contrast, despite a context of war and yet not to foster any risk of the military becoming an incubator, the Egyptians did not expand and modernize the Yemeni armed forces from 1962 until 1967, except the creation of a paratroopers and commandos brigade that played a political role after their withdrawal as one of the best organized units. They played on ad hoc (tribal) forces.46 During the war, both sides (royalists and republicans/Egyptians) subsidized tribes to recruit, thereby renewing the old practices of the 45 46

Philippe Droz-Vincent, Moyen-Orient: Pouvoirs autoritaires, sociétés bloquées (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999). Gregory Gause, Saudi-Yemeni Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Jesse Ferris, Nasser’s Gamble (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012);

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Imamate. That trend initiated, in the republican side, the tradition of “republican shuyukh/mashayikh” (sing. shaykh) (Abdallah al-Ahmar of the Hashid confederation, Naji ben Ali al-Gadr of the Baqil, etc.), leaning toward the republic and acting as recruiters of auxiliary “Popular Forces” (Quwwat Shaʿabiyya).47 Regular Yemeni officers sent to the Soviet Union for training after 1962 were sidelined by Egyptians after their return to their country. The Egyptians even had the Soviets cancel the supply of military support.48 Egypt did not give any autonomous leeway to its Yemeni (military) allies. Third, the army, especially in its high ranks, became the core of power and not a transitional actor leaving room for civilians. In Egypt, military men controlled key ministries (war, military production, local administration, intelligence), the interior ministry (with some exceptions) and its appendage, the information ministry. Only technical ministries were the preserve of uninterrupted civilian leadership.49 Officers also served as vice presidents or deputy prime ministers supervising clusters of other ministries. They were the real masters. Indeed, the bureaucracy was not as thoroughly “infiltrated” by military officers as commonly thought.50 Civilians, engineers, in particular, had considerable clout in it. Officertechnocrats, in contrast, were less successful in holding on to their ministries than civilians. But, without access to military networks, civilians had no political leverage and those without the backing of some military constituency or patron wielded little power. The regime attempted some window dressing: around 1954–1955, officers were given a choice of returning to the military or wearing civilian clothes. A differentiation developed between those in the barracks and those in political and administrative posts. With the newly adopted constitution (and the abolition of the RCC) in June 1956, the regime could claim that it was “civilianized” because all its members adopted civilian dress with the exception of War Minister Amer. Yet, during this first phase of the Nasser regime (until 1966–1967), all five prime ministers were officers. And officers were associated with key decisions. The army prepared and took charge of most of the work for the building of the Aswan Dam in January 1960. The military took an essential role in the implementation of the United Arab Republic (UAR, 1958–1961), and furthermore, the

47 48 49 50

Asher Orkaby, “The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962–68” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014). Eric Rouleau, “L’or du cheikh Ghader,” Le Monde, May 12, 1967. Halliday, Arabia without Sultans. Hrair Dekmejian, Egypt under Nasser (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1971). Nazih Ayubi, Bureaucracy and Politics in Contemporary Egypt (London: Ithaca Press, 1980); see also Clement Moore, Images of Development (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1994).

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military “czar” Amer headed a Superior Council of Public Enterprises tasked with coordinating economic activities in the two “provinces,” Egypt and Syria. The number of military personnel in politics increased after the dissolution of the UAR in September 1961. With the regime’s turn toward state socialism – the second turn, in fact, after state socialism was first introduced in 1957 – with the promulgation of the 1961 socialist laws nationalizing banks, insurance companies and commercial companies, reinforced with the lowering of land reform ceilings in 1962 and 1965, the army became responsible for economic matters. In the 1964 revised constitution, the position of (first) vice president was introduced (Article 110) and assigned to Field Marshal Amer, placing very symbolically the army as the guardian of the regime. In a similar way, the involvement of the Syrian military in politics took the form of the advent of “soldier-politicians” intervening against the oligarchy of civilian politicians. After 1949, civilians never regained back a mastery of the state and civilian control over the armed forces. And this feature was not lost too to regional and foreign powers in the regional “Struggle for Syria”:51 Zaʾim’s coup was supported by Iraq (and later rival Egypt) and the US embassy (with the role of one of its members, Miles Copeland); Hinnawi was backed by Iraq and presumably Britain; and Shishakli by Saudi Arabia and Egypt and this trend heightened afterward. Politics came to be embodied by the Syrian military: “in Egypt two bureaucracies came into being: one civilian and one military, the first subordinated to the second,”52 while in Syria, plenty of officers were in power but did not hold power for long or just held power for the purpose of preventing other officers from taking power. Coups became a normal means of changing politics in Syria and, when civilians were intermittently in power, the general staff imposed a close watch or played a key role as kingmaker. Officers, even after they returned to the barracks, remained influential on key issues. Sometimes actual intervention was not even necessary, and phone contact between commanders of various units determined where the balance of power lay and reverberated in power alignments in Damascus. Tellingly, some Baathi politicians were willing to use the shortcut to power represented by the military. This change in scale was especially visible in the process that led to the most galvanizing and destabilizing event, the union with Egypt, or the UAR, in January 1958. Despite the Baath Party’s broad appeal and desire to achieve power through 51 52

Patrick Seale, The Struggle for Syria: A Study in Post-Arab Politics, 1945–1958 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Hurewitz, Middle East Politics.

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democratic means, it never achieved major national successes. It turned to officers to reach what couldn’t be achieved through normal political processes. The union was accomplished by a fourteen-man military delegation led by Chief of Staff ʿAfif al-Bizri, who headed secretly to Cairo to ask Nasser for an immediate union, along with the essential role of the head of intelligence, Abdelhamid Sarraj, without any reference to the civilian government, a move that constituted in all but name a kind of coup d’état. The crucial importance of the Syrian military incubator was well understood by Nasser after the union between both countries (1958). Despite (or because of) the reluctant agreement of Syrian officers to withdraw from politics, the Egyptians purged the Syrian army of Communist, “progressive” and Houranist officers, then Baathists, what came to be seen in Syria as a process of “Egyptian colonization.” The Syrian officer corps was reduced by a half to become “the First Army” of the UAR under a centralized defense ministry based in Cairo. Syria’s air force was dismantled, the system of military conscription was abolished, the Homs military academy and the air force college were transferred into Egypt, a total of 4,800 commissioned officers and NCOs were ousted or transferred, many to civilian posts, in the Egyptian tradition to cut them from operational posts in the army – among them some of the most brilliant and best trained (many abroad) – and some 2,300 Egyptian officers went to Syria where they were appointed to senior executive posts. Fourth, the flip side of this specific relationship of the military to politics was the immense resources amassed by the army. It had the ability to circumvent rules to “make things happen,” in general to the benefit of the military. And that true power of the military was often veiled and unspoken. The military became the most resource-rich organization in Egypt. After 1952, the army was expanded from 30,000 in 1948, to 100,000 in 1954, to 180,000 in 1965. Most importantly, it secured access to key resources in the country, in a context of internal resource constraints. Precise figures on defense outlays in the 1960s were not made public though they were easily more than a quarter of the budget. And it was very difficult to speculate given the considerable expenses on additional programs of weapons (missile) development, investments in military industries, plus the significant cost of the war in Yemen. External arms deliveries came as a crucial complement. Famously, in 1954, the US$20 million American weapons agreement was delayed and then sidelined by an arms deal with Communist Czechoslovakia in September 1955, which paid half price and with very low interest rates for the rest. Those foundational moments have resonated among officers

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who feared foreign domination and were also determined to modernize the country’s army. For the first time since the nineteenth century, Egypt had an opportunity to acquire massive supplies of military equipment from abroad. All of these outlays resulted in a massive military debt toward Egypt’s main supplier of arms, the Soviet Union, cushioned by debt rescheduling and additional Soviet aid, not to speak of the structural burden on the (civilian) economy and the diversion of resources toward the military.53 Fundamentally, the Egyptian officer corps became a privileged group in an enduring “love affair” with the state. The army was the favored child of the new regime. The lifestyle of military officers improved with cost-of-living allowances and privileged access to two middle-class status symbols, automobiles and apartments, through low-interest loans for furniture and cars and flats in military cities. Marriage strategies reflected the high standing of military men: an officer became a good “catch” in the 1960s (although this changed by the 1980s). Officers rose to the top of the ladder of social prestige often associated with arrogant behavior befitting those who were members of the ruling group. During his May 1964 visit, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev called the emerging Egyptian model “a military clan and a neo-bourgeoisie class on the Nile.” Tellingly, promotions were accelerated and Egyptian officers of the same age and years of service were higher in grade when compared with their Syrian counterparts in the UAR. Officers were also able to pocket kickbacks from imports of luxury and consumer goods that were scarce in Egypt’s socialist economy, and acquire properties and income through appropriation or management of properties sequestered through nationalization. During the Yemen war, children of officers (regardless of their grades) were accepted in universities and veterans (and their families) gained access to superior medical care. After the Yemen war, a large number of Egyptian officers easily converted back to professional lives at home; many of them were reassigned to nonmilitary duties in the state bureaucracy before being recalled for service in the wars with Israel. Officers became part of a military caste that also included their nephews, cousins and other kin and came to live in the country. Symptomatically, riots in 1965, blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood, signaled in reality the difficulty of life for ordinary people not related to military networks. And, after the 1967 disaster, popular anger was openly directed at officers and their privileges.54 53 54

Michael Barnett, Confronting the Costs of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Heydemann, ed., War, Institutions and Social Change in the Middle East. Beattie, Egypt during the Nasser Years.

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This trendsetting Egyptian case was reproduced everywhere. In Syria, the first coup-maker in 1949 promoted the military with a special day to commemorate it and organized a fund drive to help refinance it, along with an increase of its force level and many promotions (among them Shishakli, the author of the third coup). The small army, fewer than 10,000 men in 1949, was steadily expanded to 35,000 in 1960, 60,000 in 1965 and 80,000 in 1970. Military modernization with a constant increase in military spending enjoyed high priority – funds devoted to the military since the 1950s have always overlapped those devoted to development.55 In Libya, the armed forces were doubled in size virtually overnight. They grew from 22,000 men in 1969 to 37,000 in 1979, 55,000 to 65,000 in 1981, to 86,000 in 1988. In the 1970s, many Egyptian officers came to serve as cadres for lack of proper Libyan human resources. New equipment was ordered, especially from France (in great numbers: 100 French Mirage 5 fighters were ordered in 1970).56 In Yemen, the small republican armed forces, no less than 6,000 men in 1965 according to some estimates,57 were regularly and significantly expanded after the Egyptian withdrawal and they developed their own institutional interests. In the mid-1970s, this was signaled by the rise of new power brokers with enduring influence in Yemeni politics: Ali Abdallah Saleh, the military governor of Taiz, or Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, in charge of the Central Command’s (the military district that includes the capital) headquarters. Tellingly, the Military Economic Corporation (al-Muʾassassa al-Iqtisadiyya al-ʿAskariyya, renamed Yemen Economic Corporation, YECO, after unification in 1994) was founded in 1973 and used to serve the interests of the military servicemen: it provided them with boots and uniforms and cared for their basic needs with the production or import of bread and canned food (by its Consumer Institution, alMuʾassassa al-Istihlakiyya). And officers received petrol subsidies, clothes, food, housing and even vehicles as a compensation for their low salaries. Officers were everywhere at the center in their respective states. The “Weaknesses” of Armies in Politics and the Dead-Ends of Military Rule In reality and after a few years in power, Arab armies did not display a marked superiority in organization, coherence and military “virtues,” and even proved dangerous for themselves. A classic theme in studies on 55 56 57

Tabitha Petran, Syria (London: Ernest Benn, 1972). “Chronique politique Libye.” Edgar O’Ballance, The War in the Yemen (Hamden: Archon Books, 1970), 145.

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the military in politics is armies’ weaknesses and inabilities when in power, counterintuitively analyzed by Samuel Finer at a time of triumphant military politics among modernization theorists.58 Army officers in power could abolish organized political life, control media, reform the economy, but they were not well equipped to manage day-to-day politics. They were more accustomed to giving and implementing orders than debating policies or entering into political bargains. In Egypt, the experiment in ruling with the military proved disastrous. The Egyptian army close to politics and its dangers gave the image of a rather monolith entity dominating the state, but was actually riddled with rival factions originating in various sections of the military.59 This encouraged “double loyalty,” power struggles (between Nasser and the handpicked Major General Neguib, from an older generation, president of the RCC, prime minister, and commander in chief of the armed forces),60 mutinies (among artillery officers with links to the Muslim Brotherhood or cavalry officers after Neguib’s resignation in 1954) and prospective coups. Military factions played the role of competing political parties and engaged in harsh confrontations. The struggle for power between Nasser and Neguib well illustrated the different conceptions of the political role of armies held by the older and younger generations of officers at that critical juncture, with the former of the view that the military should essentially run the state, while the latter thought that once it purged the ancient regime of undesirables it should return back to the barracks. Strangely and though an officer himself, Nasser ended up with a situation where the military was an essential backbone of the regime but, under War Minister Amer’s control, it became what was called in Egypt an autonomous “center of power.” Amer and Nasser came to a showdown during the Yemen war (1962–1967), where one-third of the army manpower was deployed but it turned into a catastrophic operation that Nasser famously called “my Vietnam” (in conversations with the US ambassador in Cairo).61 This setting also partly explained its modest performance in the Six-Day War (1967) – the army lost 11,500 lives, 80 percent of its equipment was destroyed, including all 58

59

60 61

Samuel Finer, The Man on Horseback (London: Pall Mall, 1962); for another convergent view, see Hurewitz, Middle East Politics, 161–162, on the difference between “durable military regime” and “durable military condition.” Intelligence Czar Salah Nasr, Mudhakkarat Salah Nasr, Vol. 1 (Cairo: Dar al-Khayal, 1999); Air Force Chief ʿAbd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, Mudhakkarat (Cairo: al-Maktab alMasri al-Hadith, 1977); and Interior Minister Khaled Muhieddin, Wa-Alaʾan Atakallam (Cairo: al-Ahram, 1992). Muhammad Neguib, Kuntu Raʾisan li-Masr (Cairo: al-Maktab al-Masri al-Hadith, 1984). Avi Schlaim and William Roger Louis, eds., The 1967 Arab-Israeli War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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its fighter jets and bomber airplanes not to mention the entire armored corps.62 It took the disaster of the Six-Day War and the Amer coup attempt in August–September 1967 for Nasser to sideline Amer, who officially “committed” suicide. After 1967, never again would the military be allowed to accumulate such political leverage. Tellingly, the rank of field marshal was canceled and the numbers of generals (expanded during Amer’s years of extensive patronage) were reduced. The system could only work with the essential role of Nasser, his persona, his character and charisma, who literally exhausted himself physically in stabilizing it (and died at the age of fifty-two). In the most classic way in Libya, the army remained a source of constant threat for the regime and the new charismatic leader who emerged from it, Colonel Qaddafi. The most serious attempts to overthrow Qaddafi originated from the military. Two colonels, Adam Hawwaz and Musa Ahmad, the defense and interior ministers, respectively, were arrested for a plot in December 1969. The atmosphere full of conspiracies was exploited by Qaddafi’s close supporters to reinforce his power within the RCC and led to an expanded role of the security services. In August 1975, a coup attempt led by two RCC members – Bashir alHawadi (the alleged inventor of the term “third universal theory” used by Qaddafi) and Umar al-Muhayshi (one of the first recruits by the young Qaddafi when in Misrata) – with the involvement of twenty to thirty officers from Misrata failed. Qaddafi’s relations with the military became increasingly ambivalent, a fracture summarized by his saying that “the military would not guide the popular revolution.”63 The picture was even worse in other Arab states that were more insecure, more fragmented, more open to social influences (and external influences of the Arab Cold War) in the army. The Syrian military became a shortcut to power and the real political power, not just a state within the state. But at the same time, it was destabilized by its vanguard political stance and was to a large extent destroyed in the process. It also overturned the whole political system or what remained of it in civilian terms. Politics in Syria after the “secessionist” (infisal) coup (against the UAR) was literally determined by balances of power inside the officer corps with cliques of officers related to various political parties (“rightists,” independents, Nasserists, Baathists, Houranists, etc.) and/or cities (Damascus, Hama, etc.). In particular, the Baath Party (along with the Syrian Social 62

63

Police (mukhabarat, GIS) officer and War Minister Amin Huwaidi, Khamsin ʿAm min alAwasif (Cairo: al-Ahram, 2002); Sami Sharaf, ʿAbd al-Nasser, Kayfa Hakam Masr (Cairo: Madbuli, 1996). Diederick Vandewalle, Libya since Independence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 86.

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National Party with a more Syrianist ideology) had offered the hope of social mobility and organized networks to many Syrian youths of loweror middle-class provincial background. Divergent political visions were thus deciphered not through political processes but through the army and coups. The discipline within the armed forces was so far weakened that the general staff even called in April 1962 a military congress in Homs to restore order and discipline attended by forty-one top officers – thirty-six were Sunnis.64 Social change took a specific form in Syria (when compared, for instance, with Egypt), because the Syrian population was more diverse and army officers were drawn from a wider range of class and confessional backgrounds, hence opening the officer corps to sharp class and confessional antagonisms. The social rise of officers coming from rural classes and with communal ties had destabilizing consequences.65 Rather than a grand design of Alawis to conquer the military, a different, multifactor process took place in a context of heightened rivalries played out in the army. Alawis were not so numerous in the officer corps prior to 1963 when compared with Sunnis, especially rural Sunnis. Sunnis were numerous yet divided; Damascene Sunni officers were Nasserists, close to the old elite or to the Muslim Brotherhood; Sunni officers from the agricultural Hawran plain and Deir ez-Zor were either Nasserists or Baathists; Hamawis were close to the old elite, Akram al-Hourani’s party or the Baath Party. The more numerous (Sunnis) were eliminated by the various coups, countercoups and frequent purges in the early 1960s that depleted the officer corps of many of the (middle-class, then rural) Sunnis who had enlisted in the postindependence era. As a corollary, there was no direct connection between the pre-independence character of the small Troupes Spéciales du Levant and the predominant influence of Alawi and minority officers after 1963. Incidentally in this process, young politicized officers from the countryside or low middle classes of small provincial cities (the Hawran, Jabal Druze, Latakia, Deir ez-Zor), increasingly with ethnic, regional and confessional links, came to rise, among them Alawis.66 For some time, they played on national ideologies, Arabism (qawmiyya) or Syrian nationalism 64 65

66

Van Dusen, “Intra- and Inter-generational Conflict in the Syrian Army.” On Iraq, see Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); and on Syria, see Hanna Batatu, Syria’s Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Notables, and Their Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). Nikolaos Van Dam, The Struggle for Power in Syria (London: Tauris, 1996); Munif Razzaz, al-Tajriba al-Murrah (Beirut: Dar Ghandur, 1967); Sami al-Jundi, alBaʿath (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 1969); Michael Van Dusen, “The Syrian Armed Forces in National Politics: The Role of Geographic and Ethnic Periphery,” in Soldiers, Peasants

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(wataniyya), rather than just on communal links. Then, the critical mass attained by minority, especially Alawi, officers allowed them to take control of sensitive posts (transfer and management of officers). Alawis became more numerous due to their preponderance among NCOs and in the ranks – in depressed economic conditions they were unable to buy exemption (badal) from the military service – who were able to climb the ranks as positions were emptied by purges. Moreover, after the expansion of secondary education, particularly in the Latakia province, Alawis were able to apply to the Homs military academy in larger numbers. Nevertheless, a caveat should be added: Alawis themselves were divided, with those from the mountains (around Latakia and Tartus) different from those of the plains (al-Ghab, al-Marj); they were also divided between native-born Syrian Alawis and Alawi migrants from the Alexandretta/Hatay province; and there were even different Alawi tribes (e.g., Haddadin vs. al-Kalbiyya) and among al-Kalbiyya (from Qardaha), traditional order of precedence (hasab wa-nasab) among families (buyut) highlighted rivalries between the Assads, the Ismaelis, the Khayyers, the Jerkes and so on.67 At first, Alawis acted as Baathists, but found themselves surrounded by other Baathi minority officers, Druzes, Ismaelis or Christians. At the end of the day, political rivalries and strategies to control powerful positions got the upper hand. Confessional factors were not so much about religion and bonding among actors due to shared religious identity, than about trust in small groups. Crucially, among Syrian officers stationed in Egypt during the UAR, a group of Baathi officers – initially four, Muhammad ʿUmran, Hafez alAssad, Uthman Kanaʾan and Karim al-Jundi, then six with Salah Jedid and Salim Hatum, i.e., four Alawis, one Druze and one Ismaeli, expanded to fourteen or fifteen in 1963 – secretly formed the “Military Committee” (al-Maktab al-ʿAskari), without telling the Baath leadership about their organization, because the civilians of the dissolved Syrian Baath Party were in Nasser’s government. Most of its members were of lower or middle (village notables) rural origins, reflecting the “ruralization” (tarif) of the armed forces, with a disproportionately high number of Druze, Ismaeli and Alawi officers. The real center of gravity of the “neo-Baath” or “transitional Baath” of the 1960s became the Military Committee. The “traditional” civilian Baath (of Aflaq and Bitar) and its Regional Command fell victim to the military, unable to rein in officers. The Military Committee, along with an

67

and Bureaucrats, ed. Roman Kolkowicz and Andrzeij Korbonski (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1982), 52–76. Seale, Asad of Syria.

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important, mainly Nasserist, non-Baathi contingent formed the National Council of the Revolutionary Command (NCRC) – exclusively staffed by officers – and executed a coup in March 1963 that brought the Baath Party to power. The Baath (civilian) leadership played no significant role, but the military, without political organization of its own, needed the Baath as a party structure. The end result was the “militarization” and “confessionalization”/“ruralization” of the Baath Party – interestingly, this process played out differently in Iraq, where the Baath Party kept control of the military by building a strong apparatus of control. Officers in Syria controlled key posts in the government (defense and interior), the exclusive control of the so-called Military Bureau in the Baath Party (by the Military Committee) and formed at least one-third of the Regional Command of the Baath Party (until 1965). The “neo-Baath” regime was destabilized by rivalries between Baathi and remaining Nasserist officers and more generally by the politically unstable atmosphere of growing social malaise, economic decline, land reform and socialist transformation – the Syrian military was engaged for the first time in internal repression in Damascus in July 1963, again in Hama and Damascus in April 1964. A renewed alliance of officers and neo-Baathists emerged in February 1966 for the new and bloodiest coup d’état. The army was the real kingmaker and the pillar of the Baathi socialist (called at the time “Castrist”) regime that came to initiate most of the important development projects in Syria – dams on the Euphrates, a network of highways and so on. This regime was hardly more cohesive than its predecessor, weakened by a coup attempt by Druze Baathi officers and the (intraAlawi) rivalry between Salah Jadid and Hafez al-Assad. The Syrian army came out to a large extent destroyed. The Baathi officers of the Military Committee, integrated into the Regional Command of the Baath Party (but remaining largely autonomous), were engaged in a “Baathization” of the military. This was accomplished with extensive purges, sectarian discriminations in promotions, biased transfers or acceptance of students in the military academy and the wholesale recruitment of politically loyal new elements – the latter were often former primary and secondary schoolteachers of Baathi loyalty and reserve officers. Baathi officers used their control of strategic positions in the army – especially in the chief of staff’s organs, e.g., the personnel officers’ affairs bureau (maktab shuʿun al-dubbat) or G-1, military intelligence (maktab thani) or G-2 – to build a social base of solid military support. This process was also done in the name of the indoctrination of the army in order to create “the ideological military” (al-jaysh alʿaqaʾidi) with intellectuals in uniform, in the words of General Suweidani (from the Hawran), a Sunni chief of military intelligence and

The “Weaknesses” of Armies in Politics

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subsequently chief of staff (1966–1968). A few officers, mainly rural Alawis, were the kingmakers. They included Lieutenant Colonel Hafez al-Assad at the helm of the air force, Major General Salah Jedid as head of the G-1 and then chief of staff Major General Muhammad ʿUmran as commander of the Seventieth Armored Brigade, along with a group of Druzes, Sunnis from the Hawran and Deir ez-Zor – and Lieutenant General Amin al-Hafez, a Sunni of lower middle class from Aleppo, a former schoolteacher and trained by the late captain al-Malki. The officer corps, wracked by acute internal factionalization (kutlat) and politicization, and despite its acute confessionalization (supposedly a source of cohesion), almost disintegrated after 1966.68 The army’s poor performance during the 1967 war reflected these developments.69 After the Tenth Extraordinary National Baath Party Congress in November 1970, Hafez al-Assad invited 500 officers to a special meeting at the air force headquarters. Three days later, his “rectification (or corrective) movement”/coup (al-harakat al-tashihiyya) deposed Jedid. Similarly, fragmentation installed itself in Yemen. After the withdrawal of Egyptian troops in 1967, the Yemeni military was rebuilt as a fragmented corps and became a durable crucible for instability. The stabilization of the northern republican system was rocked by intense violent conflicts (the siege of Sanaa in December 1967–February 1968, the assassination of the president in October 1977, the killing of the president by a bomb allegedly carried in the briefcase of the southern president’s emissary in June 1978), repeated and regular coups (in November 1967, a week after the withdrawal of the bulk of Egyptian troops, “the June 1974 Corrective Movement”) and external interventions (Saudi Arabia). Also, the composite Yemeni army was a key stake in power plays. During the siege of Sanaa in November 1967– February 1968, a symbolic defining moment that pitted troops loyal to Imam Muhammad al-Badr against a coalition of pro-republican forces, the latter were wholly composite, made up of some units of the small regular armed forces, civilians (called Popular Resistance Forces, Quwwat al-Muqawama al-Shaʿabiyya) to whom weapons were handed out, radical leftist forces influential among junior military cadets and in the paratroopers and commandos brigade (inherited from the Egyptians), loyal republican tribes, volunteers from the National Liberation Front (of South Yemen). 68

69

Mustafa Tlass, Mirʾat Hayati, Vol. 3 (1968–1978) (Damascus: Dar Tlass, 1992); former commandant of the National Guard, Muhammad Ibrahim al-ʿAli, Hayati wa-l-Iʾdam, Vols. 2 and 3 (Damascus: 2007). Charles Wakebridge, “The Syrian Side of the Hill,” Military Review, 56(2) (February 1976): 20–30.

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The Yemeni military, until the 1970s, was weaker than tribal forces. So-called republican tribes sought integration in the new center and especially through the armed forces: tribal units were incorporated into the still small army and tribal leaders were posted in key commands, also a way for them to defend their own power with (and within) the state. Republican tribal chiefs (shuyukh) began to play key roles in the elitist compromise that sustained the northern power, particularly in military posts. The Yemeni army after the Egyptian withdrawal was much more “penetrated” by social trends active in the country and in the first place tribal dynamics than other cases – in Syria these trends were related to confessional dynamics. Tribes conveyed an assumption of existing, stable and enduring units embodying “anti-statism” but, in fact, they were fundamentally an idiom of connectedness and a fluid social element. As a consequence, they were eager to be incorporated in the state, especially through links to the military in the new republic. Conversely, the weakness of the center in Sanaa favored tribal power and autonomy and the reliance on units/militias with a local agenda. Rulers that came to power had a narrow support base, mainly in the army and often buttressed by their relatives or friends in elite units in the fragmented armed forces; and they collided with “republican shuyukh.” A Yemeni pattern of civilmilitary relations entrenched itself. The army became a channel to power or a privileged stakeholder where power struggles were mostly deciphered. It also became the place where various groups (leftist modernists in the Yemeni way, republican tribalists, local provincial elites) vied to ensure that their interests would be preserved, gaining some assets from the control of key army units. Such factional composition was often summarized with a clear-cut opposition between modernist centralizers (officers) in the regular armed forces and conservative tribal forces (republican tribalists), a largely false dichotomy. Tribal leaders (shuyukh) played with ease between traditional roles and modern (ideological) professional politics.70 Tribal leaders took military commands, and those tribal chiefs who did not have a connection with the state witnessed a rapid decline of their power. Mid-level tribal leaders used to send one of their sons for military service – some were trained in the military academy. At the lowest levels, they selected young members of their tribe to join the military (or security) as rank and file. Conversely, allegedly more professional officers were no less “tribal” in their behavior as recruitment was largely based on 70

Fadhel Abu Ghaneim, al-Qabila wa-l-Dawla fi l-Yaman (Cairo: Dar al-Manar, 1990); see also Martha Mundy, Domestic Government (London: Tauris, 1995); Paul Dresch and Bernard Haykel, “Stereotypes and Political Styles,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 27 (1995): 405–431.

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similar tribal or regional origins. The army was tribal in the high levels as well as in the low levels in the sense that a lot of professions were limited informally by membership in a confession (Shafii, Zaydi) or tribe or region (that of the unit commander).71 The most important officers were from around Sanaa and a Zaydi elite, though not playing on a Zaydi revivalism that did not exist and came later in the 1990s. The majority of the army was recruited among tribal people (qabili) – a term used in Yemen to oppose them to those called urban, madani, individuals – hence rural Zaydis, as a consequence of their military tradition since the Imamate and because poor tribesmen went into the military with the reduction of tribal subsidies in the 1970s. The issues of enrollment and training were controlled by unit commanders and were not done according to rules and regulations that did not exist.72 This Yemeni pattern of political rivalries, bargaining and patronage was riddled with tensions in a model where the factionalized army was virtually at cold war with itself, and very concretely for the control of weapons shipments obtained from external military aid. Tellingly, the reform of the armed forces was a key political topic after 1970 with a (delayed) reform plan prepared by the high command in early 1974, a move advised by Jordan and financed by Abu Dhabi. The formation of a defense ministry to bring the military under direct government control and no longer let it report directly to the executive (the republican council) through unit commanders went nowhere. That plan tried to curtail the power of unit commanders, but those in power or their allies needed the support of some key units.73 Furthermore, Yemen remained a fully “penetrated” state, adding complexity to the levels of influence involved. In particular, the Saudis developed patronage relations with officers. Saudi Arabia’s financial assistance combined side payments to influential individuals, first of all tribal leaders, and an annual budgetary allocation (directly channeled to the Yemeni Central Bank) to help the government in Sanaa pay its civil servants and in the first place the military. And Saudi power holders such as Prince Turki al-Faysal, the son of King Faysal and a key intelligence Saudi official, became insiders in Yemeni politics and had personal contact with key members of the 71

72 73

Manfred Wenner, The Yemen Arab Republic (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991); Paul Dresch, Tribes, Government and History in Yemen (Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 1989). Interview with a Yemeni officer associated with SSR in 2012–2013, Geneva, February 2014. Robert Burrowes, “State-Building and Political Construction in the Yemen Arab Republic,” in Ideology and Power in the Middle East, ed. Peter Chelkowski and Robert Pranger (Durham: Duke University Press, 1988).

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northern Yemeni elite, including officers. In sum, armies engulfed into politics risked being destroyed rather than becoming rulers. Is Military Involvement in Politics Inevitable? The Tunisian Exception or State-Building without a Military Tunisia should be examined in contrast with the above cases. Decolonization was an essential moment to plant the seeds of the new Tunisian republic proclaimed in July 1957, with Habib Bourguiba its first president. The military had a marginal function in it when compared with other French colonies or protectorates such as Algeria and Morocco. Most decisively, the process was guided by the nationalist movement (Neo Destour) that was a product of what Clement Moore called “the colonial dialectic” whereby “a modernist elite absorbs most of the alienated sectors under its nationalist banner, while overpowering recalcitrant traditional sectors.”74 The (civilian) nationalist new middle classes (pharmacists, lawyers, doctors, professionals, bureaucrats) originating from the Sahel between Sfax and Sousse and educated through the Sadiqi College were the leading elements of the nationalist Tunisian movement. They did not see the military as a specific constituency, as their counterparts did in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Yemen or Libya. They built a tight-knit party machine through the Neo Destour Party, which gave them an hegemonic role in the nationalist movement. Bourguiba was the son of an NCO, then junior officer (lieutenant) in the beylical guard, from the small coastal town of Monastir, but, as a graduate from the Sadiqi College, his horizon was that of the emerging middle classes, not that of a military caste perpetuating a military ethos.75 Indeed, strong differences emerged within the Neo Destour Party between Bourguiba and his rival, Salah Ben Youssef, the secretary-general of the party, who, related to the Maghreb Liberation Committee in Cairo, was betting more on the guerrilla to rid Tunisia of the French rule.76 But the recourse to military/guerrilla tactics began late and never took the upper hand on the nationalist political track in Tunisia. In contrast, in Algeria, it was a formative experiment in the context of the 74

75 76

Clement Henry Moore, Tunisia since Independence: The Dynamics of One-Party Government (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 26. Symptomatically there is no mention of the military in this still relevant book for the postindependence era of Tunisia. Michel Camau and Vincent Geisser, eds., Bourghiba, La Trace et l’Héritage (Paris: Karthala, 2004). Ben Youssef was exiled in 1956 until his uninvestigated murder in Germany in 1961.

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militarization of the struggle for national liberation: the état-major of the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN) sidelined the GPRA (Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne) and the ALN took the upper hand on the party (Front de Libération Nationale, FLN) and even hindered the emergence of an autonomous party on the basis of a specific ideology according to the model of the Baath Party – the FLN was always submitted to the ALN, renamed Armée Nationale Populaire (ANP). The Tunisian guerrilla fighters, called by the derogatory term fellagha (allegedly from fallaq, literally “the one who cuts,” hence designating bandits), never grew large and did not have the opportunity to cultivate political ambitions. They returned their weapons at the command of Bourguiba and were disbanded as the prospects for internal autonomy were becoming a reality – and the French army helped Bourguiba clean up the Youssefist resistance in 1955. With France conferring full sovereignty to Tunisia in March 1956, Tunis gained responsibility for its own foreign affairs, security and defense. As a consequence, a Tunisian national army would be constituted. It was also a necessity for Tunisia’s rulers as tensions were mounting with Algeria and as Ben Youssef was organizing a “Tunisian Liberation Army” from Egypt and neighboring Libya, threatening to return to Tunisia “on an FLN tank.” The early years of the Tunisian military were mostly spent with a lot of tinkering. An enduring feature of the Tunisian military surfaced: it would be a small and relatively under-equipped force, especially when compared to its counterparts in the Mashreq in the 1950s–1960s. France transferred 25 officers, 250 NCOs and 1,250 soldiers to form the nucleus of the Tunisian military in 1956 – but Tunisians in the French army were few, especially when compared with the number of Moroccans. Officers coming from the French army such as Habib Tabib, a captain in the French army in Indochina, or Mohammed Kefi, the father of the future first wife of young military graduate Ben Ali, were appointed as generals and incorporated as the first cadres of the new Tunisian military in the making. The reliance on former Tunisian soldiers of the French colonial army to build the new military in independent Tunisia was a way for Bourguiba to benefit from their loyalist and apolitical spirit and to marginalize more politicized members of the rural anti-colonial insurrection. To some extent, the French model of civil-military relations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a strong administrative apparatus taking control over the military77 was replicated in Tunisia. 77

Raoul Girardet, La société militaire de 1815 à nos jours (Paris: Perrin, 1998); and the groundbreaking Robert Paxton, Parades and Politics at Vichy (Princeton: Princeton

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The military was unambiguously subordinated to civilian authorities. This was the product of the history of civil-military relations complemented by the Bourguiba regime’s strong agency. Bourguiba never thought Tunisia could become a credible military power – he was a lawyer by training, a Francophile, who sought to model Tunisia after French republican principles, rather than after the models of military modernization so influential in the 1950s. He even considered that building a sizable force would waste scarce resources for development and encourage military coups. In December 1962, the attempt against his life in which eight officers were implicated (including one of his bodyguards), along with one of the leaders of the nationalist partisans/fellaghas, signaled a clear warning for Bourguiba.78 Bourguiba became obsessed with the risks of coups d’état79 – not surprising as coups were taking place at a hectic pace all over the Arab World. As a legacy of the bloody power struggle between Bourguiba and Ben Youssef, officers from the Sahel and from Tunis were overrepresented in the army’s high leadership, when the central and southern regions that supported Ben Youssef were underrepresented – low-ranking officers and NCOs came mostly from the latter areas. And that disjunction was not politicized later (as with the role of regional differences and minorities in Syria) as the military was kept small and never a centerpiece of the independent state in terms of political influence. Bourguiba outlawed political activities by military personnel, denied them the right of legal association and membership in the Destourian Socialist Party, and even deprived them of their voting rights (law of January 10, 1957).80 Hence Bourguiba effectively closed officers’ access to the one-party system, a crucial institution of elite politics in Tunisia. For example, in January 1978, after his regime was enfeebled and called upon the military to quell riots, when Bourguiba caught word that military officers had helped the organization of the 1979 congress of the Destourian Socialist Party in Sfax, he refused to attend and dismissed his defense minister for involving the military in political matters. The first military officer to be appointed to a cabinet-level post was Ben Ali (as interior minister) in April 1986. And, as the head of military intelligence (1964–1974), Ben Ali built a service whose key role was to spy on the army.

78 79

80

University Press, 1966); see also Nicolas Rousselier, La force de gouverner (Paris: Gallimard, 2015). “Trajidiyya dawla al-istiqlal,” a documentary by Khaled Abed, Tunis, Cité de la Culture, January 2019. See the speech after the execution of some of the 1962 putschists by Habib Bourguiba, “The Army at the Service of the State (al-jaysh fi khidmat al-dawla),” Fundouk Jedid, March 15, 1963. Discourse by Habib Bourguiba, “The Army in the Nation,” October 14, 1965.

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The Tunisian military has had no political influence and no input in security policy. Tunisia has had civilian defense ministries (a unique feature when compared with the rest of the Arab World), all Bourguiba loyalists, who reinforced the tradition of civilian control over the military. A civilian elite, rather than uniformed officers, was in charge of defense issues. Chiefs of staff had only a technical advisory role with orders coming from the prime minister. The position of general chief of staff often went unfilled, something that would have been unthinkable in other Arab countries. The military was even not allowed to assist in drawing up policies in the defense sector, hence constraining its participation into policy-making circles. The Tunisian military has always answered to the authority of civilians through a civilian defense minister. The military was a functional sector of Bourguiba’s state.81 On the one hand, there was a recurring concern for improving the skills of officers in accordance with Bourguiba’s endeavor to govern Tunisia with enlightened elites. In his worldview, the military was a rational technocratic actor. In his first years in power, Bourguiba tended to appoint officers based on their loyalty to him, out of fear of military coups. Things changed over time, however, and officers increasingly earned their positions based on merit. A whole system of training for cadres was devised with 200 to 300 Tunisians studying in French schools (Saint Cyr, as was the case for Ben Ali) and 60 to 70 in the US each year. After its foundation in December 1966, a new generation of officers was trained in the Tunisian military academy Foundouk Jedid – the first promotion included Rachid ʿAmmar, the future chief of staff in 2011. Another state program integrated some orphans, called Bourguiba’s sons (atfal Bourguiba), into the military, sort of like the old janissaries in a new guise. On the other hand, the military was in charge of numerous “social functions,” such as alphabetization, infrastructure building, professional training and border policing in the South, and all those missions were carried out on behalf of the state.82 At a time of economic difficulties and rising youth unemployment in the 1970s, the army helped organize a “service national,” in parallel to conscription (service militaire), to dispatch youth within “development units organized under military norms” or individually to staff administrative departments in rural areas (at military pay rates) given the shortage of manpower in underprivileged 81

82

Bourguiba, “L’armée une école de civisme,” speech to the military academy, December 21, 1967; and “L’armée au service de l’Etat,” speech to the Fondouk Jedid academy, March 15, 1963 (a few months after the coup attempt). This is echoed in Ahmed Mestiri, Témoignage pour l’histoire (Tunis: Sud Editions, 2011), 596; see also, by a former prime minister and dauphin of Bourguiba, Mohammed Mzali, La parole et l’action (Paris: Publisud, 1984).

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areas – this was reinforced after the January 1978 riots. As such, the military was part of the Tunisian system of rule and so-called consensus. Furthermore, the public knew little of the armed forces and the officers played no role in public life, quite differently from Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Egypt. Even the symbolic charisma of the Supreme Combatant (al-moudjahid al-akbar) was embodied by Bourguiba. Tunisia under Bourguiba and during his most successful decades (before the mid-1970s) leads us to slightly modify the argument about the rise of “the new middle classes”: there was in Tunisia a similar rise of new middle classes83 and they had a small military component. But quite differently from other Arab states, that military component did not act as a vanguard group. Rather, it was subsumed under the civilian umbrella built by Bourguiba and his close associates, among whom no one had a military background. Those attracted into the military hailed from middle classes, not the rising and ambitious ones who were the backbone of the Neo Destour Party, but more modest ones.84 And conversely, such a constrained role was taken for granted within the officers’ corps, for a military of limited size, struggling to modernize itself just as the rest of Tunisian society. Officers did not expect many privileges from Bourguiba and internalized constraints in the form of an institutionalized patriotism to the cause of civic virtue (“école de civisme” as Tunisian elites put it in French). Conclusion The formative era deciphered in this chapter installed the military into the state on a large scale with an infusion of the army into it, independently of the occurrence of coups. In general, military establishments were instrumental to redefine states and national identities, promoting national Arabist (qawmiyya) and state (wataniyya) nationalisms and revamping state-society relations. And the army developed a pervasive ideational power, so that generations of Arabs have been encouraged to think of the military and the state as essentially indistinguishable terms. In the process, the army managed to build huge military apparatuses, either in terms of manpower or amassed equipment, and to carve out numerous advantages and power broker functions for itself.

83

84

Henri de Montety, “Old Families and New Elites in Tunisia,” in Man, State and Society in the Contemporary Maghrib, ed. William Zartman (London: Pall Mall Press, 1973), 171–178. Souhayr Belhassen, “L’armée tunisienne, une grande inconnue,” Jeune Afrique, no. 1043, December 1980.

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Yet, politicization severely weakened armies and even political systems in general. In some cases, in Syria or Iraq in the 1960s, coups d’état encouraged countercoups, hence weakening the army to the point of near explosion. Social transformations in the 1950s–1960s gave rise to acute factionalism (kutlat) in the officer corps, resulting in the role of networks (ʿasabiyyat) based on confessional, ethnic, regionalist or other specific ties in Syria or Yemen. And rather than their exhaustion in the framework of national armies, subsequent political developments witnessed their enhancement, a social process that sustained in return new social cleavages in the country. Coup politics was only a first phase that introduced officers at close distance to the state, yet it was also destructive and highly unstable.

2

Changing Dynamics with the Rise of New Kinds of Authoritarian Regimes

“Pure” military politics was only one part of the story of regime-building in the Arab World. Regimes changed as a consequence of fraught relations between military-originating regimes and the army itself as exemplified by the complex relations between Nasser and Amer or the quasi-implosion of Syria and Iraq under army coups. A coup d’état did not ipso facto lead to an enduring military regime. In this second cycle (Introduction), new kinds of regimes – one might call them “demilitarized” or “civilianized” – followed a period of destabilizing military politics and entrenched themselves in power. They installed new political orders. On the one hand, in terms of day-to-day workings, after the 1970s, Arab authoritarian regimes were no longer just military regimes per se, but they relied on an expanded (civilian) security/ police sector, known in Arabic under the generic name of mukhabarat, and related to the interior ministry. They became much more police states than military ones, at least in their appearances. The comparison (and transfers of technologies of power) with the Soviet Union and its satellites comes to mind: from 1953 to 1985, Soviet civil-military relations were characterized with less military intervention as a result of the very stable political order, the oversight of the Main Political Administration (Glavnoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie, the Communist Party’s organization in the armed forces), the counterbalancing by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and the KGB’s special sections monitoring.1 On the other hand, their key features increasingly became pervasive power networks – or neo-ʿasabiyyat (feelings of and also groups of solidarity) to borrow the term from Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century and modernize it (neo-) at a time of expanded state bureaucracies – whether ethnic, religious/confessional, familial or tribal or a combination of these, linked to the ruler and “infused” deeply by clientelist ties into the state apparatus. That mixture of networks and institutions was driven by the role of the executive taking a prominent role. These ties were used as “nerves” for 1

Brian Taylor, Politics and the Russian Army (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Timothy Colton, Commissars, Commanders and Civilian Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).

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63

a small ruling clique to control the state, steer it and manage/manipulate statesociety relations to its benefit, by using the state’s transformational capabilities or “infrastructural power.”2 Very tellingly, rulers exchanged military uniforms for civilian suits. These leaders hailed from the army, relied on the armed forces as a fundamental pillar on which their power ultimately rested, but managed to wrest control of the military as much as they took control of their state and society. This chapter will detail the relations of the armed forces with the regime as distinguished from the state. Guillermo O’Donnell, known for an influential book on (military) bureaucratic authoritarianism, made a distinction between the state as a collection of institutions and the political regime defined as the ways in which these institutional positions are filled.3 In democracies, the ways of staffing institutional posts can be via relatively open procedures, especially compared to the processes interrupted by many checkpoints, barrages or restrictions in semidemocratic and authoritarian regimes. The crux of this chapter is to understand the organic nexus of control between armies and regimes in the Arab World (for comparative yet tentative figures on armed forces personnel, see Figure 1). The Military as the Crucial Behind-the-Scenes Pillar of Regimes . . . Arab regimes often hailed from the army, in almost all cases kept specific organic relations to the military and at least needed the supportive role of the armed forces as an essential pillar of their rule. The military was an essential behind-the-scenes pillar of the regime, whatever the tendencies toward apparent demilitarization or civilianization. Often unseen, inside most regimes, the military cultivated specific contacts and had “representatives,” those high officers posted in core centers of power – in general, they still harbored a military ethos though in contact with “regime logic.” Their importance did not lie in their numbers (which diminished), but in the symbolic roles and key functions they took. In Egypt after 1967–1970 (and a specific period of escalation toward war), some high cadres of the army continued to fill key posts in the core of the system, beside other and more numerous key civilian insiders, policemen, cronies or politicians. Under Mubarak, the top brass and the many former military personnel 2 3

Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results,” European Journal of Sociology, 25(2) (August 1984): 185–213. Guillermo O’Donnell, “Human Development, Human Rights and Democracy,” in The Quality of Democracy, ed. Guillermo O’Donnell, Jorge Vargas Cullell and Osvaldo M. Iazzetta (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2004), 15.

Number

Armed forces personnel, total

85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance. License: CC BY-4.0

Yemen, Rep.

Tunisia

Syrian Arab Republic

Saudi Arabia

Jordan

Egypt, Arab Rep.

Figure 1 Total of armed forces personnel

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Algeria

The Military as the Pillar of Regimes …

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working at the presidency – along with the commander of the Republican Guard and the Senior Protocol Officer – enjoyed privileged access to the Office of the President. Every time Mubarak took an important decision – even without seeking prior advice from the high command – he followed up with consultations with the military, hence giving decision-making the aspect of a two-level game (the presidential coterie of decision-makers around Mubarak and the army). The military governors in the strategic Cairo, Suez and Sinai provinces were selected from the most important services in the armed forces, the Second or Third Field Armies and the Republican Guard. In Syria and Iraq after the 1970s, officers populated crucial posts in the state and key governing organs of the Baath – National Command, Regional Command. Among (Hafez al-)Assad’s networks “infused” in the Baath Party, the state, the public sector and trade unions, many originated from the army. Interestingly, the interplay between the military and the regime even surfaced in Lebanon after the Taʾif Agreement (1989), under Syria’s increasing influence: the army had not played a role as state-builder and did not rule, but high officers slowly took key roles – tellingly, former chiefs of staff became presidents (Lahoud, Sleiman, Aoun) – not to mention the role of intelligence. Most importantly, coercion, or the threat of coercion, has remained one of the foundations of authoritarian rule, beyond the everyday political work and the mobilization of legitimizing resources of various kinds (e.g., redistribution, allocation, promises of reforms) in governance under the grip of the security apparatus.4 The army’s ultimate responsibility was to be the last line of defense for the regime, when the police and paramilitary components of the state’s coercive apparatus were not fit for that task – reflected in the high figures of armed forces personnel (see Figure 1). And this potential was tested at various and crucial junctures for regimes. Depoliticization (of the military) away from praetorianism should not conceal its enduring centrality. Consider Egypt: Sadat’s rise to power had an important military component. Sadat was the speaker of parliament, a key member in the ASU’s Supreme Committee and was named vice president in 1969. The struggle to control the army was crucial for him after the death of Nasser. The military remained an essential constituency for political power, especially at a time of prospective war with Israel in the balance of power among Egypt’s divided “centers of power” in 1970. Furthermore, the Soviet connections of Ali Sabri, ASU’s senior chief and a powerful rival to Sadat, were resented in the officer corps, which was dissatisfied with Soviet advisers and lagging 4

Michael Hudson, Arab Politics: The Search for Legitimacy (Yale: Yale University Press, 1979).

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Soviet weapons deliveries in the 1967 war. The army was also the cheerleader for de-Nasserization (read depoliticization), notwithstanding its concerns about Sadat’s ability to pursue the military option with Israel.5 All in all, the military supported “legitimate” authority as embodied by Sadat and thereby helped smooth the transition from Nasser to Sadat. The latter spent time in military units meeting with officers, even informally, and cultivating goodwill. Revealingly, Sadat was wearing the military uniform more often than Nasser including in his very last military parade on October 6, 1981. And, although the army lost a direct and visible role under Sadat, it remained the ultimate mainstay of the regime, whatever the talks about apparent demilitarization. This state of affairs was well illustrated by the January 1977 food riots (intifadha al-khubz), which broke out as a result of price increases after the ending of some subsidies on basic commodities based on IMF recommendations, and which overwhelmed (anti-riot) security forces. Sadat was compelled to call in the army to reestablish order even though using it against citizens evoked the image of a weak presidency and security (i.e., interior ministry) apparatus. The military procrastinated before intervening and War Minister General al-Gamasi made it clear to Sadat that the army would not intervene before price increases were canceled. Once he did, the soldiers reestablished order and then returned to the barracks. The Egyptian military was again a crucial pillar of the regime after Sadat’s assassination in 1981 and despite some doubts about its failures/leniency to protect the president in a military parade (see Chapter 3). Thereafter under Mubarak, in February 1986, when some 17,000 conscripts of the paramilitary Central Security Forces, related to the interior ministry, rioted over low pay and after rumors of a one-year extension to their three-year service term,6 the military harshly put down the mutiny on the second day by deploying one-quarter of its ground forces and helicopters and then returned back to the barracks, a symptom of preserved military loyalty. A decade later, in the 1990s, at the peak of the offensive by armed Islamists against the Egyptian state, the military trained and supported (with special units or air cover) the police and the CSF, which were the frontline forces against an Islamist insurgency in Upper Egypt. At the great relief of its high commanders, who were concerned by risks of national strife, the army kept its distance from the problem of Islamism, in sharp contrast with its Algerian counterpart 5 6

Kirk Beattie, Egypt during the Sadat Years (London: Palgrave, 2000); Anwar al-Sadat, alBaʿth an al-Zat (Cairo: al-Maktab al-Masri al-Hadith, 1978). Philippe Droz-Vincent, “Le militaire et le politique en Egypte,” Monde arabe MaghrebMachreq, 162 (July–September 1999): 24–26; Hillel Frisch, “Guns and Butter in the Egyptian Army,” Middle East Review of International Affairs, 5(2) (Summer 2001): 2–6.

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in the same period. The most prominent role of the military against Islamists under Mubarak was the use of its courts (mahakim ʿaskariyya) to try civilians charged with involvement in terrorism (Presidential Decree no. 375 of October 1992), with speedy trials and swift verdicts, over 1,000 in the 1990s.7 Not to mention the regular support of the army to get out of intricate crises. For instance, in the summer of 2008 in the middle of the bread shortage crisis, Mubarak called upon the army to get involved by increasing the output of giant military-owned bakeries to reduce prices and to distribute bread to deprived areas. In Syria, the military helped the regime overcome internal challengers and supported it at crucial junctures. First, when the conflict between the Assad regime and the Muslim Brotherhood shifted toward urban warfare in Aleppo, Jisr al-Shughur and Hama in 1980, the “regular” army was used to support and complement praetorian units (Third Armored Division, Defense Companies).8 The major confrontation took place in Hama with a full-scale urban insurrection in February 1982 that was unprecedented in scale, even compared with that of 1963–1965. The regime deployed between 12,000 and 20,000 men who belonged to regular army units – soldiers hailing from Hama were excluded and some executed for insubordination – to supplement praetorian Alawi-dominated forces. This mobilization of military resources was seen by the regime as a real test, “it was more of a civil war, testing soldiers’ loyalties to the limit.”9 Many soldiers were sons of peasants with the living memory of past humiliations inflicted by landlords upon villages around Hama.10 And they stifled the insurrection. The second critical juncture for the Assad regime came in November 1983, after the president suffered a heart attack. Most army commanders took the president’s side forcing Hafez’s brother Rifaat at the helm of the expanded and well-armed praetorian Defense Companies (some 50,000 men) to give up his pretense to replace him and resulting in shoot-outs between both sides – the Defense 7

8 9 10

Nathalie Bernard-Maugiron, “Les tribunaux militaires et juridictions d’exception en Egypte,” in Juridictions militaires et tribunaux d’exception en mutation: perspectives comparées et internationales, ed. E. Abdelgamad (Paris: AUF, Archives Contemporaines, 2007), 191–231; Michael Farhang, “Recent Development, Terrorism and Military Tribunals,” Harvard International Law Journal, 35 (1994): 225–237. Gérard Michaud [Michel Seurat], “The Importance of Bodyguards,” MERIP, 110 (November–December 1986): 29–33. Patrick Seale, Asad of Syria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 333. They also fought because they were fearful of the support given to the Muslim Brotherhood by sons and grandsons of the former big landowners or as a form of revenge on the quarters from which these landowners came. The resentment of the regime toward the city was interpreted by the Muslim Brotherhood as “a plot against the city.” Interview with a local historian, location withheld, February 2014.

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Companies were gradually transferred into the regular military and their security apparatus was swallowed up by other agencies.11 A third key juncture was the preparation for succession in the second half of the 1990s, then the actual succession in June 2000. Succession should not be taken for granted, even in an authoritarian regime, as it was actually an “inheritance of power” (tawrith al-sulta) in a republic, quite different from the party-smoothed process of succession.12 Very tellingly, the grooming of Bashar al-Assad began in the military when he came back to Syria after the accidental death in January 1994 of his brother, the presumed/“anointed” heir, Bassel. Thereafter in 1998, Bashar was entrusted with political posts, Syria’s Lebanon policy and a highly publicized “campaign against corruption.” Bashar was only a lieutenant (mulazem awwal) or captain (naqib) – depending on the source – in the military in 1994. Hafez guided Bashar with accelerated (by the standards of the Syrian army) promotion to tank battalion commander, brigade commander in the Republican Guard, lieutenant colonel (muqaddam, 1997) and colonel (ʿaqid, 1999), followed by a crash military training in command and staff courses. At the same time, Hafez reshuffled the officer corps at enhanced speed in June 1999 and February 2000, with changes in the senior military command and at the helm of key units, replaced by “fresh blood,” mainly younger officers associated with Bashar. The military, or, more specifically, a loyal base within the officer corps, was a key source of legitimacy and political support during the succession in June 2000, a brief yet crucial moment during which everything seemed suspended for forty-eight hours. Members of the senior officer corps pledged their allegiance to a “dynastic succession” and secured the smooth transfer of power for fear of a potential power struggle for all. This view was implicitly confirmed by former vice president Khaddam (after he defected to France) when he said, “a cooperative decision among us was taken to hand over power in order to protect Syria.”13 And the army was a key factor.

11 12

13

Hanna Batatu, Syria’s Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Notables, and Their Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). Philippe Droz-Vincent, “Syrie: la ‘nouvelle génération’ au pouvoir,” Magheb-Machrek, 173 (2001): 14–35; Volker Perthes, “The Political Economy of Syrian Succession,” Survival, 43(1) (2001): 143–154; Najib Ghadbian, “The New Asad: Dynamics of Continuity and Change in Syria,” The Middle East Journal, 55(4) (Autumn 2001): 624–641; Eyal Zisser, Commanding Syria (London: Tauris, 2007); Eyal Zisser, Asad’s Legacy (London: Hurst, 2001); Joshua Stacher, “Reinterpreting Authoritarian Power,” The Middle East Journal, 65(2) (Spring 2011): 197–212. Interview with Al-ʿArabiyya TV, December 31, 2005.

… Yet Armies Should Not Be Equated with Regimes

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. . . Yet Armies Should Not Be Equated with Regimes Regimes increasingly became “much more” than the army and expanded their “nerves” (of power) beyond pure military networks. This was a key question for various regimes, namely, for them to “soft-land” (as the economic expression from central bankers puts it) from the times of unstable and weakened (pure) military powers. In Egypt, after 1967 and the quasi-collapse of his regime in defeat, Nasser did not rebuild a pure military regime. “Civilianized rule,” first promised in Nasser’s March 30 (1968) program, then adopted by referendum in May 1968 in a context of popular anger at military defeat with slogans like “down with the military state” (a reference to Amer),14 was privileged by Nasser. By Law no. 4 of 1968 (on “Control of State Defense Matters and the Armed Forces”), Nasser retook control of the military and created a National Defense Council (1969) chaired by the president, hence diluting the power of the military-generated Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). Further, he restructured the high command to place the presidency at the center with services reporting directly to him. Nasser built new governing institutions autonomous from the army, although their cadres were sometimes ex-/officers. He was a proficient “builder” of intelligence services (the General Investigation Directorate (Mabahith ʿAmm), the General Intelligence Services (Mukhabarat ʿAmma), the President’s Bureau of Information), often services with identical, overlapping, hence rival tasks, and also as a counterweight to the regular military.15 He also relied on a powerful tool of political mobilization, the Arab Socialist Union (ASU), which had cells everywhere16 and was led by a former State Security Investigation (Mabahith Amn al-Dawla) deputy director – its secretary-general was the first chief of the Presidential Guard (or Republican Guard). And the “Vanguard Organization” (al-tanzim al-taliʿa) inside the ASU also had intelligence functions. Tellingly, in 1962, Nasser transferred his office 14

15

16

In February 1968, sentences to be meted out to the senior officers for their bungling of the June 1967 war with Israel were fairly lenient for most and provoked workers’ protests in military factories in February 1968. Hazem Kandil, Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen (London: Verso, 2013); Owen Sirrs, A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service (London: Routledge, 2010); the intelligence chief Salah Nasr, Thawrat Julyo bayna al-Masir wa-l-Massir (Dubai: Dar al-Ittihad, 1986); Salah Nasr, Mudhakkarat Salah Nasr, al-Juz al-Awwal, al-Suʿd (Cairo: Dar alKhayal, 1999); Salah Nasr, Mudhakkarat Salah Nasr, al-Juz al-Thani, al-Inqilab (Cairo: Dar al-Khayal, 1999); Muhammad Hafiz Ismaʿil, Amn Masr al-Qawmi fi ʿAsr alTahadiyyat (Cairo: Ahram Publishing, 1987). Ilya Harik, The Political Mobilization of Peasants (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974); Robert Springborg, Family, Power and Politics in Egypt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).

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from a military facility to the ASU’s headquarters in central Cairo. Of course, the army remained the most privileged sector in Egypt, whose centrality was “guaranteed” by its control of the vice presidency. The bulk of the army’s role was preparation for war with Israel away from the lures of politics. And the Egyptian army’s (half) victory in 1973 was also due to the professional rebuilding of the armed forces under Nasser after the disaster of 1967.17 Sadat treaded this path while buttressing the “civilianized” model of regime inherited from Nasser’s last years. He rebuilt a system of power centralized in the presidency. Presidential power did not just depend on the president’s ability to maintain a base of support within the officer corps. Rather, executive power was premised on the presidency’s wide powers of appointment and control over a wide array of significant positions – presidential supremacy was written “in stone” in the 1971 constitution (Article 143). By using his political clout, Sadat set himself apart from the military’s only support, and further reined in officers away from power networks at the top. The president was the supreme commander of the armed forces with the war/defense ministry channeling orders and assuming control of the armed forces with direct presidential connections. Sadat undertook a noted “demilitarization” of the cabinet18 and the top elite (also among governors), whereby key posts in the top elite were no longer filled by officers, with the exception of a few ex-Free Officers. The rising group of core elites tended to be made up of civilians, engineers, technocrats, new economic elites from the emerging private sector, party apparatchiks or those related to the powerful interior ministry19 – tellingly, prime ministers under Sadat were exclusively civilians when they were always officers under Nasser. Even the conduct of war was no longer left solely to the army. Sadat undertook an active preparation for war with the support of professional officers who were tired of politics and impatient of anything that could distract them from war. In a symbolic move, he reinstated most of the 17

18

19

Chief of the canal front ʿAbd al-Ghani al-Gamasi, Mudhakkarat al-Gamasi, Oktober Harb (Cairo: al-Hayat al-Masriyya al-ʿAmma li-l-Kutub, 1998); Hamada Hosni, Shams Badran (Beirut: Maktaba Beirut, 2008); War Minister Muhammad Fawzi, Harb Thalaf Sanawat (Cairo: Dar al-Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, 1990); future war minister Kamal Hassan ʿAli, Mashawir al-ʿUmar (Cairo: al-Shuruq, 1994); Chief of Staff Saadedine Shazli, The Crossing of Suez (San Francisco: American Mideast Research, 1980). Mark Cooper, “The Demilitarization of Egyptian Cabinet,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 14 (May 1982): 203–225; Raymond Hinnebusch, Egyptian Politics under Sadat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Mark Cooper, The Transformation of Egypt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Hilal Dessouki, Tatawwur al-Nizam al-Siyasi fi Misr (Cairo: Center for Political Research and Studies, 1997).

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officers held responsible for the Six-Day War fiasco and involved in the Amer plot in August 1967. In reality, Sadat was planning to launch a limited war against Israel and did not want to empower the military, whose high command kept insisting on liberating the whole Sinai Peninsula through a long war of attrition. Sadat conducted war while he developed a systematic policy of “constructive” instability within the high officer corps with regular purges, a strategy aimed at pushing the army out of politics and weakening entrenched military leaders20 – furthermore at a time of war where military “heroes” could arise. From 1971 to 1980, Sadat had seven war ministers. For some time, he boasted of his new status as “the hero of the crossing” (of the Suez Canal) (batal al-ʿubur), thereby signaling that the president was in command, not the military top brass. The (military) men who led the 1973 war under Sadat’s leadership were later sidelined, along with transfers and dismissals of many commanding officers. Presidential Decree no. 35 of May 1979 barred the military high command in 1973 from active command positions afterwards or from entering politics. In October 1978, the renaming of the war ministry as defense ministry was not just rhetorical but also symptomatic of major changes. Propelled to power by Sadat’s assassination, Mubarak built upon the regime revamped by Sadat and based on the presidency with its extensive powers of nomination and manipulation. Tellingly, Mubarak refused to name a vice president until his final days in power in early 2011. He ruled by manipulating the “fragmentation of the political order,”21 playing off different groups against each other in a divide-and-rule style, while also checking the development of autonomous elites in his authoritarian coalition, made up of the hegemonic NDP, new rent-seeking entrepreneurs (after he went through major liberalization reforms, moving faster after 1991) and numerous, bribe-taking apparatchiks and opportunists in an expanded bureaucracy.22 Mubarak pulled the military into that system, 20

21

22

M. H. Haykal, The Road to Ramadan (New York: New York Times Books, 1975); M. H. Haykal, Autumn of Fury (New York: Random House, 1983); Saadeddine Shazli, Harb Oktober (Cairo: Dar Ruʾya li-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawziʿ, 2011); ʿAbd al-Ghani alGamasi, Harb Oktober 1973 (Cairo: al-Haʾiat al-Masriyya al-ʿAmma li-l-Kutub, 1989); Muhammad Fawzi, Istratejia al-Musalaha (Cairo: Dar al-Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, 1986); Matti Golan, The Secret Conversations of Henry Kissinger (New York: Times Book, 1976); George Gayrych, “The Egyptian Army Command in the 1973 War,” Armed Forces and Society, 13(4) (Summer 1987): 535–559. Robert Springborg, Mubarak’s Egypt (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989). See also John Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). On the NDP, see Jason Brownlee, Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). On the economy, see Yahya Sadowski, Political Vegetables? (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1991);

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keeping it a politically subservient though strongly privileged group in the Egyptian polity. Regarding coercion, an essential feature of authoritarianism, Egyptian regimes “balanced” their military pillar with the day-to-day use of other state organs linked to the (civilian) interior ministry. In 1969, Nasser created a new anti-riot paramilitary unit of 10,000 men, the Central Security Forces (CSF, Quwwat al-Amn al-Markazi) placed under the control of the interior ministry.23 These measures introduced the stirrings of a history of a de facto separation whereby the army was the ultimate guarantor of the regime while the interior saw to day-to-day management. Sadat reinforced the latter with a police apparatus that was tasked with rigging elections and repressing opponents and the CSF with maintaining public order. The CSF were greatly expanded to 100,000 men recruited from army conscripts assigned to the interior ministry – those with a low education and no skills, who were of no great use in the military under modernization. They were positioned in new camps ringing major cities, guarded public buildings, embassies, hotels and curbed riots. They were the iron fist and brutal force that acted as the front line protecting the regime. This shift in internal security was also designed to weaken the powerful army, at least rendering it less visible, hence less influential. (Civilian) security organs answering to the interior ministry (and the presidency) such as the State Security Intelligence (Mabahith Amn alDawla) also assumed growing responsibility for the surveillance of officers promoted to high positions and of middle-ranking officers, arms procurement and security clearances of unit commanders – Sadat was even said to ask the interior ministry to handle his own security when he was inside military complexes.24 At the same time, the Presidential Guard was reinforced with American help after 1978 as an autonomous force within the army, tasked with acting as a counterweight to the huge regular military.25 Under Mubarak, the interior ministry was greatly expanded, especially after 1986 (Presidential Decree no. 702) to become the day-to-day

23

24 25

Ilya Harik, Economic Policy Reform in Egypt (Gainesville: Florida University Press, 1997); Samia Said Imam, Man Yamlik Misr (Cairo: Dar al Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, 1983); Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); for some quotations of al-Adli, such as his saying “I thought I entered another world” when introduced as a key pillar (interior minister) in the Egyptian pyramid of power, see Bilal al-Dawi, al-Adli wa-l-Mushir (Cairo: Maktaba Jazira al-Ward, 2012). The CSF were initially recruited from the police and had to undergo military training by the army. Muhammad al-Gawadi, Qudat al-Shurta fi al-Siyasa al-Masriyya (Cairo: Madbouli Publishers, 2003), 68. For examples, see Kandil, Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen. ʿAdel Hammuda, Ightiyal Raʾis (Cairo: Dar al-Sina li-l-Nashr, 1986).

… Yet Armies Should Not Be Equated with Regimes

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pervasive tool of governance patrolling society with enormous personnel. These included plain-clothed officers to thugs, or baltagiyya, riot police, special forces, security personnel watching from street corners and surveillance services, amounting, in total, to more than three times the army’s size and with a huge budget. This choice was based on the regime’s rationale not to overuse the military as the day-to-day line of defense, for fear that the army could dispense with the regime in the same loop. Quite differently from Tunisia, however, the military remained the gold standard. Tellingly, it was better paid and equipped than the interior ministry’s troops. The interior ministry was also weakened by disorganization and corruption, as signaled by its difficulties to combat an increasingly able Islamist insurgency in the 1990s. And the autonomization of the Egyptian regime at some distance from the military could not go too far since this kind of regime lacked legitimacy and other sources of effective support. A similar rebalancing of power away from the army took place, to some extent, in Syria. Though a military officer who came to power with the essential help of the army, Hafez al-Assad deliberately refrained from establishing a military regime (a junta of officers convened from the main services of the army). The (Hafez al-)Assad system was based on the workings of a broad coalition of key elites, chief among them Alawi high officers, also top “representatives” from other minorities and rural Sunnis in the military and security apparatuses; this was replicated at various levels in the (civilian) state apparatus and the Baath Party, endowed with a “leading role” (Article 8 of the 1973 constitution). Pivotal sectoral elites, such as prominent Damascene merchants, small-scale agriculturists of Tartus, the Hawran, Western Hama and Homs plains, organized industrial and peasant trade unionists, and new infitahi entrepreneurs, representatives of various confessional minorities and various media or religious elites in the 1990s were co-opted in a wide system of state-directed patronage (wasta). They were “infused” into a larger structure of power constituting the Syrian state and the Baath Party as the frame of politics in the country, and dominated by a strong and centralized presidency. The Assad regime, though strongly “Alawitized,” was not merely an Alawi regime. Indeed, it pursued its policies, in the first place to stay firmly in power, by using Alawi networks. Yet, it was also based on the instrumentalization of ethno-confessionalism and especially of the Alawi community by some specific Alawi networks and subclans (for instance, the Kalbiyya subgrouping). The Syrian complexity lay in the mixture of confessionalism/sectarianism, state control, ideology (Baathism) and military power combined in such a system of authority, with neither one level sufficient for itself without the hypercentralized presidential approval. Ideology (and partisan resources of the

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Baath Party), “bureaucratization” (control of the state and the role played by holders of state power in extracting and distributing economic resources and determining the shape and direction of various state sectors, regime-controlled professional organizations and “publicgenerated” private economic actors), class (under-class origin for some marginalized peripheries among them Alawis) and ethno-confessionalism (as a protection and a political resource to build networks) were mixed in the system of power built after November 1970.26 And the army, through the officer corps and a key element to steer the military, was pulled and incorporated into the Assad organic system of power. In Yemen, the first years (1978–1981) of the promoted lieutenant colonel and new president, Ali Abdallah Saleh, were fraught with internal and external dangers. Yet, the Saleh regime entrenched itself by promoting initiatives that differentiated it from a classic military ruler who survived out of good fortune in the messy Yemeni setting. Beyond the arrival of an increasing number of his relatives and members of the Sanhan tribe in the military (a classic feature in Yemen), Saleh extended his social base of support beyond the military with a mixture of coercion and co-optation/reconciliation: with tribal figures, regarded technocrats, former military politicians, security officials who worked for his predecessors, ex-presidents, the oppositional National Democratic Front, new elites in the appointed People’s Consultative Assembly, the Advisory Council and the National Dialogue Committee, along with plans for a General People’s Congress (GPC) – the GPC was convened in 1982 with Saleh as secretary-general.27 From a weak successor to President alGhashmi, Saleh became the linchpin of the political system. By the way, after the discovery of oil in the Maʾrib al-Jawf area in early 1984, Yemen was transformed from a poorly resourced state – before, the main sources of revenue were the remittances from Yemenis working abroad, mainly in the Gulf, hence autonomous from the state – to a relatively rent-rich state, with a (modest when compared to Gulf rates) income, roughly equal to the sum of all Yemeni workers’ remittances and external aid to the country and whose allocation by the regime allowed huge patronage. 26

27

Raymond Hinnebusch, Authoritarian Power and State Formation in Ba’thist Syria (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990); Volker Perthes, The Political Economy of Syria under Asad (London: Tauris, 1995); Yahya Sadowski, “Ba’thist Ethics and the Spirit of State Capitalism,” in Ideology and Power in the Middle East, ed. Peter Chelkowski and Robert Pranger (Durham: Duke University Press, 1988), 160–184; Elizabeth Picard, “Les appareils de la dictature,” unpublished, 1985; Steven Heydemann, Authoritarianism in Syria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); for an analysis of “the mechanisms of power reigning without limit in Damascus,” see Salah Eddin Bitar, “Point de vue: Chrétiens et Musulmans,” Le Monde, September 21, 1976. Robert Burrowes, The Yemen Arab Republic (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987).

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And Saleh would also tread a well-known path by counterbalancing the army with the expansion of the interior-led security apparatus and, in particular, the creation of the Central Security units (al-Amn al-Markazi) in 1992, a new 50,000-strong paramilitary force to secure infrastructures and function as anti-riot police under the purview of the interior ministry (within which a new counterterrorism unit was also created), but in fact operating independently under a Saleh family member. Rushed unification with the southern People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) in May 1990, whereby Saleh became head of state (and the former southern president the head of government), was a stroke of genius that gave breathing space to his regime – furthermore, oil was discovered in the border region.28 Plus, the control over the (potentially unified) army was a key stake. Controversial issues arose one month after unification when the North rejected the (former southern chief of staff and) defense minister’s plan for the unification of both armies. An additional dispute flared up over the fate of 164 tanks that were ordered by the former PDRY and that arrived in the country. Steps were taken to move military units away from cities, especially in Aden and Sanaa, during the first months of unification – they returned back after the 1994 war. Controversies raged about the control of the Republican Guard and the air force. Another major topic of contention was how to separate the military from party politics (hizbiyya) and with similar problems in the interior ministries: the North understood it as the discarding of soldiers who belonged to political parties, a feature more common in the South where they had to hold party (PDRY) cards, while the South understood it as the removal of Saleh’s relatives and tribesmen from the army.29 The question of the unification of the armed forces proved intractable because the control of the armed forces (and security services) in both Yemens was central to gain supremacy in the unified state – and neither side was willing to place trust in a truly reunified army. Furthermore, the whole process of unification could not play the role of a political momentum to solve problems in the security sector later. In April 1993, rather than offering a way out, elections created a political stalemate that could only be deciphered through war: election crystallized oppositions rather than solved them because the northern GPC (and alIslah) won a plurality in northern districts when the southern YSP won with landslide margins in southern districts.30 In January 1994, in a last 28 29 30

Charles Dunbar, “The Unification of Yemen,” The Middle East Journal, 46(3) (1992): 456–476; Lisa Wedeen, Peripheral Visions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Brian Whitetaker, The Birth of Modern Yemen, book published online, www.al-bab.com, May 1989. ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-Manzub, al-Intikhabat al-Balamaniyya fi al-Yaman (Sanaa: 1995).

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protracted effort to save the process of unification, and with the help of Jordan, the “Document of Promise and Agreement” addressed all the problems that would have allowed a better civilian control of the army, as if reforms on paper could supersede the struggle for power, an error that would be repeated by President Hadi in 2012–2013. War broke out soon after. The more powerful North conquered the weakened South (in particular, after internal fighting in 1986),31 and the Saleh regime gained a new lease of life. Libya, which pushed the logic (of rebalancing power away from the army) to its limit, merits special attention here. Among the original Free Unionist Officers, Qaddafi rose to prominence and completely autonomized himself from the military and even the Revolutionary Council Command (RCC). He forcefully engaged in an era of eclectic experimentation for a stateless society, or “people’s power” (sulta al-shaʿab), that was codified in his Green Book (al-Kitab al-Akhdar), also called the “third universal theory” between communism and capitalism in 1975. This eventually led to a transformation of Libya into a Jamahiriyya (“state of the masses”) in 1977, based on popular rule with “committees everywhere” (lijan fi kull al-makan) at the local level. All this was not just a matter of pure ideology. Advancing Libya into the constant “relaunch” (tasʿid) of revolutionary waves to foster “popular rule,” that is, “the constant/unending revolution” (al-fateh abadan) and the unknown path of federal unions (with Egypt, Tunisia, etc.), was also a way for Qaddafi to control Libya from above.32 Additionally, this was a way to turn the collegial military rule of the RCC into a one-man rule behind the veneer of generalized people’s power by creating a haphazard process of eccentric government from below – Qaddafi held no formal position in the new system except the title of al-qaʾid al muʿallem (the guide). Tellingly, in 1977 the RCC was dissolved. After 1976–1977, the process of rule from below in the Jamahiriyya was controlled (or “contained”) by the rise of the “Revolutionary Committees” (al-Lijan alThawriyya), designed to “guide” the masses into assuming direct power within basic popular congresses – in fact, they engaged in ideological 31

32

The North was three to four times more populous than the South. The northern military was larger than the southern, respectively, 37,000 and 27,000 men. Whitetaker, The Birth of Modern Yemen. The conquest of the South was also carried out by Islamist militias and the so-called mujahidin, the Yemeni fighters returning from Afghanistan and recruited by the northern Political Security Organization (Gihaz al-Amn al-Siyasi). Gregory Johnsen, The Last Refuge (New York: Norton, 2013). Ali Mohsen was married to the sister of Tareq al-Fadhli (the latter was involved in Bin Laden’s jihad). Omar El-Fathaly and Monte Palmer, Political Development and Social Change in Libya (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1980); Rémy Leveau, “Le système politique libyen,” in La Libye nouvelle, rupture ou continuité?, ed. Hervé Bleuchot (Paris: éditions du CNRS, 1975), 83–100.

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surveillance, replaced ineffective leaders in committees and reported directly to Qaddafi.33 This period also witnessed the beginning of a steady influx of individuals close to, or actually related to, Qaddafi in key positions: Abdallah al-Senousi (married to the sister of Qaddafi’s second wife and hailing from the Magharba tribe heavily incorporated in the security sector) as chief of the Jamahiriyya Security Organization; Musa Kusa, as chief of external security; and others. The entire system was controlled from above, as rule by basic popular committees did not apply to some sectors that were crucial for regime survival: the army, the police and the oil sector. These stayed in the hands of Qaddafi and his close associates. This period also coincided with massive revenues from oil exports that helped fuel a political logic from above relying on the distribution of resources to the regime’s clients with huge money flows.34 In sum, authoritarian regimes became much more than mere armies in power. Very symptomatically but differently from the 1950s-1960s, when dynamics within the officer corps (ideological divides between officers, alliances between various groups) were the privileged avenues to understand regimes in the Arab World, tentative typologies of civil-military relations in the 1990s–2000s related the specific and qualified roles of armies to other social relationships that constituted political regimes and balanced or complemented their relations to the military by creating other parallel power networks. Cases were differentiated according to the role of the presidency and its powers of nomination (Egypt, Tunisia), or confessional networks (ʿasabiyyat) infused in the state and party apparatus (Syria, Iraq) or tribal equilibriums (Yemen, Libya),35 hence clearly displaying the apparent “autonomization” of Middle Eastern authoritarianisms from their military roots. The army was one component in these new political systems rather than their formative institution. Yet, if regimes were more than armies, that does not mean that the army was a simple functional sector in charge of external defense and endowed ipso facto with (a functional) autonomy. As argued above, armies were too crucial for political equilibriums to be left autonomous. Here enters the crucial question of control.

33

34 35

The most important source is the chronicles in the Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (Marseille, CRESM-CNRS) available online (http://aan.mmsh.univ-aix.fr) and the collection by Hervé Bleuchot, ed., Chroniques et documents Libyens (Paris: CNRS, 1983). Diederick Vandewalle, Libya since Independence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). For inclusionary states, exclusionary states and monarchies, see Mehran Kamrava, “Military Professionalization and Civil-Military Relations in the Middle East,” Political Science Quarterly, 115(1) (Spring 2000): 68–69; for bunker regimes, bully regimes and monarchies, see Clement M. Henry and Robert Springborg, Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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Creating Political “Quietism” among Armies: The Imperative of Control for Regimes The key question is to understand how Arab authoritarian regimes enduring for decades managed to produce “political quietism” in military institutions once characterized by politicization and coups d’état. The common explanation recounts how, in order to control their armed forces, Arab regimes have developed a variety of coup-proofing methods.36 First, these included close supervision of promotions to sensitive commands, the regular rotation of senior officers between different units and regions, periodic purges of the officer corps to sow anxiety and fear among its members and so on. The executive was taking a careful look at all promotions to senior grades (above the rank of colonel), above a certain level (unit commander) that were decided by presidential decrees – in general, it did not allow any charismatic figures to reach the senior ranks. More generally, Arab officers and soldiers were also spied upon to ensure their loyalty. The Egyptian army was monitored by the regime’s security structures but was left relatively autonomous in the management of its own security affairs with its military intelligence. In other cases, from Tunisia to Syria, multiple security agencies (not just military organs) were monitoring the armed forces. Second, authoritarian regimes also built parallel forces to counterbalance the regular military and keep its plotting impulses under check. These forces – republican guards, regiments of special forces or counterterrorism units in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen – were often better equipped and trained than the regular military. Third, Arab armies have been more institutionalized yet, beyond the surface, networks have played a crucial role. Networks exist in military institutions everywhere – even in what Charles Moskos called the “post-modern military” with the US model in mind – as they have developed between the military and political elites or economic interest groups.37 In Arab authoritarian regimes such networks created informal command channels used as governing tools. They were the real channels of power as regimes created behind-the-scenes, informal chains of commands parallel to institutional chains of command. For instance, the supreme institutional structure of the army, the SCAF, held no regular meetings under Mubarak, indicating his aversion to the potential 36

37

James T. Quinlivan, “Coup-Proofing: Its Practice and Consequences in the Middle East,” International Security, 24(2) (Fall 1999): 131–165; Risa Brooks, “PoliticalMilitary Relations and the Stability of Arab Regimes,” Adelphi Paper no. 334 (London: IISS, 1998). Gabriel Sheffer and Oren Barak, Israel’s Security Networks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Charles Moskos, John A. Williams and David R. Segal, The Postmodern Military (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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institutionalization of the army’s decision-making processes. Mubarak kept in close and direct contact with the staff of the defense ministry, key military regions such as the central command that guarded Cairo or the Suez Canal region and key combat unit’s commanders. Fourth, in some cases, parallel forces and informal command chains were systematized (and to some extent “formalized”) with a “familialization,” “clanification” or “confessionalization” of some elite parts of the armed forces. Saleh, Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad all placed their relatives, in-laws and allied families into virtually all of the most sensitive security-military sector positions. Fifth and finally, in some cases, size mattered as an additional factor to ensure control and to very different regimes, from Tunisia or Libya to the Gulf monarchies (Chapter 4), who have deliberately undersized their regular armies. An essential complementary limitation to the role of the small-sized Tunisian military was its poor equipment (Chapter 3). In line with the emphasis in this chapter on the new kind of regimes involved and the strong imprint of authoritarianism, it is crucial to understand these coup-proofing strategies not just as multifarious technical measures undertaken by regimes, but also as systematically integrated and rationalized according to a regime logic driven by a clique in power and as symptomatic of the relation the regime had with its crucial behindthe-scenes pillar. First, in some cases, this resulted in maintaining some distance between the regime and the army, as exemplified by Egypt. The army was in the regime, yet at some distance and with some degrees of selfautonomy. It was also a way to protect the army from the vagaries of direct rule.38 This was a complex relationship, made up of absolute subordination at a distance, sealed with a sort of informal but special understanding between the regime and the top brass in charge of operational and administrative matters and of the army’s economic empire. The military would only act and, in particular, move troops, after a direct presidential order, even in cases of civilian catastrophes when its units were close to the area.39 The armed forces’ chain of command was overcentralized with the defense ministry acting as the unique representative channeling orders of the presidency.

38

39

Philippe Droz-Vincent, “The Military amidst Uprisings and Transitions in the Arab World,” in The New Middle East: Protest and Revolution in the Arab World, ed. Fawaz A. Gerges (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 190. Norwell De Atkine, “Why Arabs Lose Wars,” Middle East Quarterly, 6(4) (December 1999): 17–27; and see anecdotes from the inner workings of the military in ʿAbd alHazim Hamad, al-Thawra al-Taʾiha (Cairo: Markaz al-Marosa, 2012).

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For instance, Sadat maintained the emblematic link of the regime with the military through key personalities co-opted in top positions. One prominent example was Mubarak, who was sidelined by Nasser as the director of the air force academy and thereafter appointed by Sadat as commander of the air force (the weakest service in the military in terms of political clout) and then to deputy war minister in 1972, further elevated as vice president in 1975 and appointed as secretary-general of the ruling party in 1980. Another key figure was Abd al-Halim Abu Ghazala, who was named field marshal and defense minister in March 1981.40 Mubarak was much more of a military man than Sadat, less openly antagonistic toward the military leadership, but nevertheless cautious of the fact that he was at the helm of this crucial pillar, which was due to be maintained in complete subordination. He maintained Abu Ghazala as defense minister and named him deputy prime minister in 1982. But when Abu Ghazala became too popular in the military (some officers compared him to Amer), in society (by cultivating his image as a pious Muslim and an articulate public speaker) and even in foreign affairs (he developed intimate links with American elites), Mubarak did not fail to react, installed a loyal and less conspicuous chief of staff in 1987 and sacked Abu Ghazala in 1989. In May 1991, Mubarak appointed Hussein Tantawi to defense and military production minister. He was considered a submissive officer whose rapid promotion was rumored to come from his position as head of the Presidential Guard (1989–1991) – mid-ranking officers would refer to him as “Mubarak’s poodle.” Tantawi exemplified the prudent and loyalist officer who reached his position only because of unwavering loyalty to Mubarak, more of a bureaucrat than an assertive general.41 In fact, Mubarak would regularly “put him in his place” and humiliate him in public “to show who was boss,” what in Egypt was called “to break the defense minister” (kasar wazir al-defaʿ). Tantawi served for the longest period (1991–2012) in the post of defense minister since the creation of the modern army – the irony is that this was the same man who ousted Mubarak in 2011. Conversely, that does not mean that the Egyptian military was totally pliable on everything. Generals retained a decisive voice in policy areas of special concern to them. And among all other things, after Amer’s removal, the most important point was that divergent views between the military and the supreme leader would no longer be expressed openly. 40 41

Amira Fikri, al-Mushir ʿAbd al-Halim Abu Ghazala, Masira Hayat (Cairo: Kitab alJumhuriyya, 2010). See Wikileaks cables, among others, “Academics See the Military in Decline, but Retaining Strong Influence” (cable dated: 2008–09-23) and “Scene Setter for Mindef Tantawi’s Visit to the US” (cable dated: 2008–03–16).

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They would rather take the form of dissimulated confrontations settled in private circles. For instance, the military did not have clear ideas on economic or social policies. But it did object to some developments. In the 1980s, the army was wary of the growth of Egyptian debt and the risks of foreign dependence. It also feared reforms perceived to erode central government power. In the 1990s, the military resented (and let it be known) accelerated privatizations in the huge public sector and the social costs of economic liberalization that were felt by NCOs and junior officers, who saw their living standards diminish. More forcefully, in the 2000s, the military voiced its displeasure with the rising influence of the president’s son Gamal, his political ambitions to succeed his father and the prospects of neoliberal reforms. Gamal’s shadow cabinet of liberal economists and businessmen in the influential “Policy Council” of the NDP fostered privatization seen as dangerous by the generals in “strategic sectors” such as steel, the cement industry or banks. The military waged bureaucratic battles with Gamal and his clique, blocking the sale of military lands with the help of military intelligence or supervisory bureaucratic organs dominated by the military. In order to temper the army’s objections, the investment minister transferred to the armed forces several privatized state-owned enterprises. The army resolutely opposed Gamal’s attempts to develop networks inside the military, especially the air force, by interfering with arms procurements (a presidential preserve).42 And finally, in the context of Gamal’s political ambitions clarified after 2005–2007, his father, Mubarak, well aware of the army’s desire as expressed by top-ranking officers led by Tantawi, that his successor be drawn from the military, coached Gamal into interacting with the country’s military top brass in national events and connected him with the powerful intelligence general Omar Suleiman. In effect, Mubarak was betting that the military would defend its privileges and interests by preserving the status quo and retaining access to political supreme power, hence tacitly acquiescing to Gamal’s ascent. In spite of the Mubaraks’ efforts, Tantawi conveyed to the president the military’s strong opposition to “dynastic succession” (tawrith al-sulta), an opposition expressed even more openly in 2010 when (private) emails were circulated in the military.43 But, importantly, that was not a sign of 42

43

See anecdotes in Hamad, al-Thawra al-Taʾiha. In 2003, when President Mubarak fainted in the middle of a discourse while addressing the People’s Assembly, the military and Tantawi took charge and marginalized Gamal before Hosni Mubarak recovered. For the public display of some of these internal information circulating by email messages, see “Succession Gives Army a Stiff Test in Egypt,” The New York Times, September 11, 2010; complemented with an interview with a professor of political science with close connections, location withheld, January 2014.

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insubordination and returned praetorianism; rather, it only covered contestation contained within the military institution – with no linear causality with what happened in January 2011, and the result of a strong stress test for the polity (Chapter 5). Second, the creation of a distance (between the army and the regime) was not a fixed feature or an easy objective and, in other cases, it was difficult to obtain. Distance was not “objective control” (as formulated by Huntington, i.e., “maximizing military professionalism”),44 because the army was deeply embedded politically in the regime and its equilibriums. Algeria, a case not fully examined in this book, should be introduced to buttress the comparison. (Colonel) Boumediene relied on army backing (more precisely, the rebuilt military after 1963), but he did not leave all decision-making powers to it, and instead built a more complex political system, relying in particular on civilian industrialist technocrats. The Algerian regime became much more than the military. Tellingly, the general staff was established by Boumediene in 1960, abolished after a tentative putsch in December 1967 and reinstated in 1984 under (Colonel) Chadli. Control never reached the point of reining in the army in a subordinated position (to the regime). Since Chadli and after 1979, the Algerian president was only a primus inter pares and would need solid military backing among high officers – Chadli happened to know this in January 1992 when he was deposed. The general staff, therefore, played a key role of behind-the-scenes manipulator or “supra-constitutional” arbiter/regulator (called “le pouvoir,” the power in French, by Algerians), with its offshoot, the Sécurité militaire (SM), renamed Direction de la recherche et de la sécurité (DRS) after 1990, and whose crucial role was well exemplified during the savage Algerian Civil War (1992–1999). In January 1992, the army disabled the regime’s civilian wing (the FLN) in disarray, replaced by the Haut conseil de sécurité, and military intervention precipitated a descent into civil war with insurgent Islamists. The dreaded DRS took an expanded and autonomous role to govern the country behind the veil of institutions and became a hydra with its various subdivisions: its own judicial service (Service central de police judiciaire, SCPJ) in charge of corruption cases; the Direction de la sécurité intérieure (DSI), in charge of counterinsurgency; the Centre de communication et de diffusion (CDD), monitoring and manipulating the press; the Direction centrale de la sécurité de l’armée (DCSA), monitoring the regular army. The DRS even had its own intervention forces (Groupe d’intervention spécial),

44

Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 83.

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a kind of parallel military.45 In the 1990s, the military was directly involved in the fight against Islamist groups. Within the regular army (ANP), the Special Forces, created in September 1992 (and popularly dubbed “the Ninjas”), spearheaded the counterinsurgency campaign uneuphemistically called “eradication” – tellingly, their commanders were promoted to key posts in February 2000, the most important reshuffle in the Algerian army leadership since December 1988. After the restoration of the presidency and the arrival of President Boutefliqa (April 1999), an astute and ambitious politician, huge power struggles continued unabated to find some degree of consensus among various clans at the helm of power: between Boutefliqa networks, rising pressure groups made up of new rich entrepreneurs or oligarchs, the general staff and the DRS. The DRS was reformed in 2013–2014 and most of its subdivisions were returned to the general staff – it was (allegedly) disbanded and renamed Direction des services de sécurité (DSS) in January 2016, but the decree of dissolution was never published, hence casting some doubts about its reality. In April 2019, at a time of mass civic demonstrations against Boutefliqa’s (fifth) candidacy, the general staff (General Ahmed Gaid Salah) pushed him toward resignation in a soft (medical) coup. The Algerian specificity lied in the factionalized (jamaʿat) nature of its army that had no equivalent in Egypt – in the 1960s, some 20 colonels around Boumediene were influential, while things were more complex in the 2010s with 300 generals and 1,200 colonels. Most of the officers were professionals but the commanding core at the helm was a key political player (nominating ministers, ambassadors, etc.) and was involved in economic business (Chapter 3) and in power games with other networks (security, entrepreneurs, political apparatchiks). In this specific sense, Algeria could not be put on the same level as Egypt, whatever the centrality of the army in both regimes. The army, or at least essential parts of it, was included in the regime’s inner core and its subterranean networks of coercion with varying degrees across cases, from key individuals (Egypt) to more organic interrelations (Algeria) close to some sort of “shadow” or “deep state” (derin devlet or parallel devlet, to borrow the Turkish model, until the 2000s and Erdogan’s bid for civilian supremacy). To use the vocabulary introduced here, the distance between the regime and the army, though prevalent, was difficult to maintain or unstable in Algeria. Third, in other cases, qualified distance and control involved more intrusive methods distancing the army from politics (and the regime) but also differentiating it from the state (having a national army) by transfiguring it – 45

“The In Amenas Attack,” report prepared for Norwegian Statoil ASA’s board of directors, 2013.

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not surprisingly, as exemplified in Chapter 6, these were the very cases where transitional dynamics became more intricate or failed after the stress test of 2011. Recruitment of officers in ethnically and religiously more homogeneous countries like Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia were national in scope – although, for instance, there has been an implicit glass ceiling (at the rank of colonel) barring Christian Copts from top command posts in Egypt. In countries divided along ethnic, religious, tribal or regional lines, authoritarian regimes, however, targeted alleged supportive communities. In Syria and Iraq (under Saddam), for instance, Alawis and rural Sunnis, respectively, have filled the majority of the officer corps and virtually all top command positions. In Libya and Yemen, the tribes affiliated with and supportive of presidents Qaddafi and Saleh enjoyed preferential treatment. Beyond discourses about national armies, Arab regimes in divided countries (ethnically, tribally, confessionally) were eager not to have a national army, but to favor some specific constituencies – rural Alawi areas (in Syria), Sunni areas (in Iraq), northern areas (in Yemen), Qaddafa and allies (in Libya) in the officer corps and in more praetorian units – while keeping the appearances of a national army in general. Tellingly, general political equilibriums in the country tended to be assessed in society in view of the ethno-confessional composition of the high officer corps: that is, the number of Alawis in Syria or Sunnis in Iraq in key military posts was used to qualify Syria as “an Alawi regime” or Iraq (under Saddam) as “a Sunni power.” To summarize differences with the first batch of cases, Egypt differed markedly from Syria or Yemen in terms of penetration by the regime and its security networks inside the military and conversely the regime’s ability to build upon the army to develop its security networks. In all cases, there was some straddling between the military and the security services, although it was important to functionally differentiate the military from the political police and from the intelligence services (mukhabarat) in general – a differentiation that surfaced again in 2011. In Egypt, the General Intelligence Services’ (renamed in 1971 the State Security Intelligence, or Amn al-Dawla) high cadres were heavily drawn from the army. This was initiated with the role of infantry officer and Nasser’s security wizard Zakaria Muhieddin. Under Sadat then Mubarak, the interior ministry became the backbone of the regime with its own (civilian) cadres, but some key posts in the security continued to be filled by army officers transferred there. Yet, quite differently from Egypt,46 in Syria, there was a kind of “straddling” of positions between 46

Policing the Egyptian society was the job of the General Intelligence Service (Mukhabarat ʿAmma) and State Security (Amn Dawla), staffed with officers selected from the Police Academy (then renamed Mubarak Security Academy) or often former police officers having worked in criminal investigation divisions. Muhammad al-Jawadi,

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the military and security that was deeper than in Egypt. In Syria, security organs, those charged with “patrolling” not just the army but also society, were much more related to the military, most famously, the dreaded Air Force Intelligence (in short, amn jawi), or used resources and cadres from within the military. As a result, the Syrian army had a much more organic role or was more “embedded” in the regime’s security than other cases. The same held true for Yemen: the intelligence apparatus, the Political Security Organization (al-Jihaz al-Markazi li-l-Amn al-Siyasi), established in 1992, and the new National Security Bureau (al-Jihaz al-Amn alQawmi), created with American support in 2002, was expanded. These were, in fact, supra-ministerial units answering directly to the presidency. Numerous Yemeni military officers shifted to security organizations in a straddling of functions whereby the lines between classic military roles and internal security functions became increasingly blurred. A final, internal differentiation within this third category would differentiate Syria from Yemen and Libya. In the latter cases, tinkering by autocrats was more destructive than just a thorough organization of authoritarianism, to the point of weighting and even threatening the cohesion of the army. This is detailed below. Transfiguring the Army: The Deep “Social Engineering” in the Syrian Officer Corps Hafez al-Assad turned the military into an obedient tool for the regime, one that could act as its loyal supporting column and defense shield. As the general commander (al-qaʾid al-ʿamm), he devoted his primary energies for thirty years (1970–2000) to military affairs, followed by regional and foreign policy. The army’s reliability under Hafez was not based on the automatic support for the supreme commander by a unified professional officer corps steering the military, but primarily built upon the support of trusted individuals/networks systematically posted along hierarchical chains to manage the military and based on blood, confessional or patron-client ties. Three elements were pivotal in the regime’s strategy: a systematic “social engineering” in the officer corps, a “dualization” of the military and a tight security-military nexus. First, the Assad regime undertook a lot of tinkering within the officer corps, an essential asset to steer the military as a whole in the direction of loyalty toward itself. On the one hand, behind the facade of reQadat al-Shurta fi-l-Siyasa al-Masriyya (1952–2000) (Cairo: al-Haʾiat al-Masriyya alʿAmma li-l-Kutub, 2008). There was a military intelligence directorate attached to the ministry of defense.

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professionalization, or in parallel to it, top appointments (a dozen of highlevel generals) were made on the basis of total political and personal convenience among Hafez’s personal friends, allies or family members. This web of patron-client ties ensured complete loyalty and backing. Hafez allowed high commanders to retain their positions for long tenures in office, as officers who had shown personal loyalty and included: Mustafa Tlass, Hafez’s personal friend from 1953 and defense minister from 1972 until 2004; Ali Duba in the military intelligence from 1974 to 2000; Ali Saleh in the missile corps; Ali Haydar in the Special Forces; Hikmat Shehabi as chief of staff from 1974 to 1998; Ali Aslan as chief of staff from 1998 to 2002; and others.47 This practice was a source of stagnation for the armed forces, which mirrored that of the regime itself, but it was also an important source of control and stability. High-ranking generals turned their units into political and economic fiefdoms under the regime’s guidance; the only way they could fall out of grace was if they crossed the line of strict and absolute obedience. And competition between a few cognoscenti, the military barons of the Assad regime, was acute. On the other hand, Hafez undertook a complete social engineering in the officer corps and carefully hand-picked officers for three decades through a close monitoring of promotions. Anecdotes recount that he knew personally many officers and their families. Just how important this intimate knowledge of the armed forces was for Hafez was indicated by his making his son Bashar spend a lot of time in military units during his preparation as a potential successor after 1994. More generally, programs were set up to groom young officers known as dubbat al-qadah (officers for leadership) to create the future generation of military leaders by offering them educational opportunities: they were supervised by his son Basel from the mid-1980s until his death in 1994, then by the latter’s brother Bashar, under his overall guidance. Students in the military academy did not choose their specialization but were forwarded in various services, hence the regime was able to push forward systematically Alawi cadets into the most important specializations (infantry, artillery, armor) and into combat units.48 These officers were filling in the informal Alawi-dominated grid of control behind the institutional facade in the military, either the predominantly Alawi praetorian units or other regular units. A few of them were then selected as senior officers who advanced through the ranks. The charge that the Syrian military was a preserve of Alawis is simplistic because a lot of Sunni officers (perhaps 40–50 percent of the officer corps), especially with lower-class and peasant origins and from small towns and villages, were recruited – as demonstrated by the number of 47 48

Mustafa Tlass, Mirʾat Hayati, Vol. 4 (1978–1988) (Damas: Dar Tlass, 2004). Interview with a retired Syrian staff officer, Paris, January 2014.

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Sunni officers who defected in 2011–2012. Sunnis made up the bulk of the army ranks for demographic reasons. But those (Sunnis) who rose to senior ranks or, in some cases, to the top, were assigned to administrative functions and technical tasks rather than command or strategic positions. In many instances they were “doubled-checked” (as wing commanders, defense minister, chief of staff) by “minority” officers who served as deputies, intelligence officers, ammunition officers and so on – Christian and Circassian officers were also overrepresented. Most of the senior posts in armored or mechanized divisions or positions dealing with personnel, security and intelligence matters were more or less exclusively held by high-ranking Alawi officers. More than 90 percent of officers holding the rank of general were Alawis.49 The majority of the highestranking officers were not just Alawis, but came from an even more exclusive group, the Kalbiyya tribe, to which the Assad family belonged, or allied tribes such as the Haddadin where Hafez’s wife, Anissa Makhluf, came from. The regime did not rely on one confession and jockeyed between different subtribes or on religious subdivisions in the Alawis. The Assad regime’s social engineering in the officer corps was systematic, scrupulous and very dynamic: the regime could quickly tip the balance by playing on the rapid injection of cadets from the military academy where a majority of students were said to be Alawis.50 Such intended and calculated discrimination was done through vetting: officers were assessed by “the security” (al-amn), a nebulous apparatus providing the chief of staff with names of officers to be promoted. To borrow the expression of a high-level defector, the military was “the executive power” (sulta tanfiziyya) of the security apparatus (either military or civilian), which was more sectarian (Alawi) than the military in general, and not of the chief of staff.51 Hence, the Assad regime infused “loyal” officers into the whole army and reshuffled the officer corps when needed, a policy that was accelerated at every crucial stage for it – in November 1970 after the coup d’état, in the early 1980s after years of turmoil in Syria,52 at the end of the 1990s when Bashar al-Assad was groomed for power by his father and in 2012–2013. 49

50

51 52

Alasdair Drysdale and Raymond Hinnebusch, Syria and the Middle East Peace Process (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1991); and sources seemingly close to defecting former defense minister Ali Habib, Reuters, September 4, 2013. Fierce opponents of the regime would argue that to change the balance of power young, radical Muslim Brothers (“those who have a sense of God, rabbaniyya”) should enlist in the army and alter the traditional Sunni aversion to the military profession. Saʿid Hawwa, Jund Allah, Thaqafa wa-Akhlaq (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1979), 46. Interview with a former administrative cadre of the army, location withheld, January 2014. Michel Seurat, L’Etat de barbarie (Paris: Le Seuil, 1989).

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Second, the Assad regime created a kind of dual army or a dual positioning of the military: it differentiated the army in at least a two-tier force, with, in parallel to regular units, numerous praetorian forces (in rivalry among themselves) built to defend the regime from any threat, even from within the army’s own ranks. The main task of these units (Fourth Division, Republican Guard divisions, Special Forces regiments, alwahdat al-khassa) was regime protection. Correspondingly, they were staffed with Alawi-trained officers, sometimes with a whole Alawi rank and file and were granted the best training and equipment, such as modern Russian tanks. These units were placed in purpose-built, strong fortifications, often in mountainous positions overlooking cities.53 Conversely, other units, including a new division created in the end of the 1990s in the Golan to protect frontiers, had less modern equipment, not even modern tanks, and were seldom resupplied. Dualization was dynamic and related to challenges for the regime. As the Assad regime was shaken by contests at a time of Syria’s intervention in Lebanon in 1976, a Presidential Guard was set up under the command of Adnan al-Makhluf (a relative of Hafez’s wife, Anissa Makhluf, from the Haddadin Alawi tribe) and the rival Defense Companies (saraya al-defaʿ) (created in 1971) were reinforced by Hafez’s brother Rifaat, who turned them into the best armed and paid units in the Syrian army; and they were complemented or counterbalanced by Special Units led by Ali Haydar. These units were then converted into a regular army division and reintegrated in the Republican Guard divisions in the 1980s. In the 1990s–2000s, Special Forces regiments were more or less integrated into the military but headed by an Alawi close to Bashar. In times of crisis or confrontation, the regime tended to concentrate on a confessional inner core of trusted aides in key positions, a kind of “contraction” on crucial aides in key security and military posts. In “normal” times, however, things were more relaxed and the army was endowed with a more conventional format. Another channel of dualization, hence control, was the Baath Party. It had branches in army units at all levels (comprising perhaps as many as 10 percent of its total membership), with an exclusive right of propaganda in the military. The armed forces operated a special military committee within the Baath Party, which was reorganized after 1970 along very hierarchical quasi-military lines and included many officers. Baath Party membership was not, strictly speaking, mandatory for officers but was 53

For instance, Damascus International Airport, Mezzeh Air Base, Qasioun Base, Al-Dreij Complex, Qataneh Base, among others; there is, for instance, a big fortified military base behind the Qalamoun, which, since 2011, has been used to bomb restive neighborhoods around Damascus with long-range artillery and as a base from where helicopters with barrel bombs fly.

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a crucial factor to advance to flag ranks. The high echelons of the Syrian army were packed with careerists and profiteers. Senior generals were associated with the Baath Party and lavishly displayed their loyalty in the Central Committee or in the Regional Command. Dualization was further increased by the fact that the military and the security apparatus organized volunteer militias and security organs linked to the Baath Party, the General Peasant Union, the so-called “popular organizations” (almunazzamat al-shaʿabiyya) and various administrative departments in the public sector. These militias were used to crush the Islamist insurgency in the 1980s, in a kind of “militia-nization” of Syrian society. The difference with Iraq after 2014–2015 (the so-called al-Hashd al-Shaʿabi, the Popular Mobilization), for instance, was that Syrian paramilitary units were dissolved or reintegrated into the military when dangers evaporated, also a way for Hafez to insist that the military was the sole and enduring pillar of his state/regime. “Dualization” was further reproduced below within the chain of command and units. A system of checks and balances prevailed inside the military. The decision to move any Syrian military unit was doublechecked (even triple-checked in periods of crisis) by numerous actors placed in the chain of command who were rivals for high posts and also by multiple security services. Those in key positions, such as chief of staff or defense minister, were often checked by their deputies who also had their say in critical decisions. All of this overlapped with confessional tactics: each of the twelve divisions (firqa) of the Syrian army was headed by a general, and when the ranking commander was Sunni, his deputy was Alawi, his security chief a Druze or a Christian, his chief of logistics came from yet another confession and so on. A lower-ranking officer with ties to the Assad family might possess greater authority than his superiors, simply due to family connections. Informalization of the chain of command was pushed to a high degree, with the real chain of command often different from the one on paper, thereby giving more leeway to those who “held the keys,” namely, those at the top. Third, the regime’s social engineering in the military had thorough consequences not just inside the army, but also with the building of a pervasive security-military nexus. In Syria, the fusing to some degree between military and security considerations, with the presence of powerful security organs within, originating from and around the military, was pushed very far, and by comparison, much farther than in other cases in the Arab World. Hafez built a strong security-military nexus instilling fear into the hearts of all Syrians, including officers and soldiers. The security services – known under the generic term of mukhabarat but, in fact, comprised of

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several competing services, Amn al-Dawla, al-Amn al-Siyasi, al-Amn alʿAskari, Idarat al-Mukhabarat al-Jawwiyya – were a powerful and nebulous sector, with an estimated 100,000 personnel (and perhaps as many as 200,000 according to other estimates) and related to the interior or the defense ministry or directly to the presidency.54 And the strictly military security apparatus (Idarat al-Mukhabarat al-Jawwiyya, al-Mukhabarat alʿAskariyya) did not functionally “spy” only inside the armed forces: after Hafez took power, they gained the prerogative to watch after (civilian) Syrian society, as exemplified by the dreadful role of the Air Force Intelligence (Idarat al-Mukhabarat al-Jawwiyya), whose authority did not stay within the confines of the air force, or even within the military, but entailed widespread repressive and administrative (known by its stamps “Amn Jawwi”) powers in Syrian society, which significantly overlapped with “civilian” security organs. In Syria, numerous officers in the security services were coming from the military: though a large part of the armed forces remained professional and did not ipso facto participate in the military-security nexus, the army (or at least specific branches of the army) significantly served as a cradle for the expansion of the security apparatus that hailed organizational, human and coercive resources from it and amounted to a “mukhabaratization” of the armed forces. Mid-level or low-level military officers, especially when they were educated and considered loyal, alternated between field commands and administrative positions in the security organs within the military. The latter entailed administrative tasks, writing reports sent to security organs and, after March 2011, wearing civilian clothes and spying inside opposition demonstrations. In Syria, security services were much more “militarized” than in other Arab authoritarian regimes, displaying a kind of military-security nexus that was very specific to Syria in comparison with other Arab cases. As a consequence, the military was much more part of the regime and related to its inner workings and its essence, a regime based on security networks infused in all institutions. That explains why some (defecting) officers after 2011 called the Syrian army “a security army” (jaysh amni).55 The Perils of Authoritarianism: From Tinkering in the Army in Yemen to Destroying It in Libya All the above points applied to Yemen and Libya with adequate qualifications, but the latter cases also stressed the limits of authoritarian 54 55

Perthes, The Political Economy of Syria under Asad. Anonymous, “Interview of a Defector,” Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2011.

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engineering, in terms of messy consequences rather than control. They crossed the nebulous limit between tinkering for control and the destructive organizational consequences of authoritarianism (see Introduction). In Yemen, the problem for Saleh was not only to extend control on the country by using the army, but also to keep tabs on it: Saleh as a successful coup plotter himself was well aware of the risks involved and “infused” allies and familial cronies as a way to create divisions and counterweights in the armed forces. Sanhan officers – from the name of the president’s small tribe, but also crucially differentiated along various and rival subclans – were injected by hundreds into the officer corps.56 And this “infusion” extended to mid-level officers all across the military not just high commanders. Furthermore, tribal (northern) actors continued to seek out positions as unit or regional commanders (sing. ʿaqid or colonel) to reinforce their tribal power; hence, linking themselves more closely to the regime and giving the latter opportunities for patronage in exchange for loyalty, according to the model of “state-created” or “regime-made” shuyukh with their redistributive potential.57 Sons of tribal leaders joined the military, then received officer training in foreign military academies and joined one of the numerous security institutions.58 All tribal shuyukh did not have access to the upper echelons, kept for Sanhan officers or specific tribes. The northern Hashid (a small but cohesive confederation) and to some extent the Baqil (a much more lax grouping) tribal alliances had disproportionate access to employment in the military. The grid of familial, tribal and regional control was paralleled by a pervading political control system that to some extent dissimulated too much reliance on familial elements: the northern party-state, the General People’s Congress (GPC), had branches in all army brigades through the Political and Morale Direction Department (Firʿa Idarat al-Tawjih alSiyasi wa-l-Maʿanawi) and military intelligence officers (al-Istikhbarat alʿAskariyya) were affiliated to the GPC. Furthermore, after the civil war (between North and South Yemen, 1994) and with lasting consequences (Chapter 6), southern brigades were 56

57 58

The first stirrings was an alleged “covenant” (al-ʿahd for Yemenis), though never made explicit, between Sanhan officers (Ali Abdallah Saleh, Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, Muhammad Ismail al-Qadhi, commander of the Eastern military region) and Shaykh Abdallah al-Ahmar (Hashid) to share power during the transitional period in June– July 1978. US State Department, “Will Saleh’s Successor Please Stand Up,” September, 172005, Wikileaks. Mariecke Brandt, “The Irregulars of the Sa’ada War,” inWhy Yemen Matters?, ed. Helen Lackner (London: Saqi, 2014), 105–122. Steven Caton, Yemen Chronicle (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), notes the changes that took place in the status of tribal shuyukh in two decades of new tribal chiefs with their newfound wealth, links to government and expensive way of life when their predecessors were very different.

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marginalized or dissolved: in July 1995, arguing about austerity measures, Saleh announced a reduction of 50,000 men in the armed forces, but these cuts were mostly restricted to the recruits of the South and those deemed not loyal to the GPC – at the same time, he announced the modernization of the army (meaning the Republican Guard) and the purchase of sophisticated military hardware.59 Only 30 percent of the southern army stayed in the barracks and many received their salaries (but not additional benefits if they were officers) and stayed at home – even southern allies of the North were posted on the borders with Saudi Arabia, far from cities and often without their heavy weapons that were taken by northern militias. That created a lot of resentment. Many former southern soldiers were forced to retire.60 The “Association of Military Retirees” surfaced in 2007 among former southern officers who reconciled with each other and tried to promote their interests. In 2008, they abandoned the above name, replacing it with “The Peaceful Movement for the South” (al-Haraka al-Salmiyya li-l-Janub, also called the Southern Movement, or al-Hirak al-Janubi). They cooperated with a larger and new generation of civic activists who mobilized against authoritarianism, corruption, the looting of southern natural resources, equality with Northerners, greater local autonomy in what was perceived in the South as a “colonization” (istiʾmar) (and land grabs) by the northern tribalists and military commanders.61 The resulting military apparatus was highly fragmented and personalized, signaling a Yemeni national military hijacked by power networks (ʿasabiyyat) made up of powerful unit commanders. The latter managed their brigades (and paid them) like separate private fiefdoms split in loyalty and with little contact with one another, in the manner of those called “warlords” in the jargon of contemporary peace-building studies, with the great (tentative) manipulator, President Saleh, above them, to whom brigade commanders reported directly and not through the defense or interior ministries – Saleh issued decrees granting himself these powers.62 Tellingly, the private houses of unit commanders were also military bases and served as army recruitment centers. The most sophisticated and loyal units were tactically dedicated to protect the 59

60 61 62

International Crisis Group, “Yemen’s Southern Question”(Brussels: International Crisis Group, September 25, 2013); Paul Dresch, “Colonialistes, communistes et féodaux: rhétoriques de l’ordre au Sud-Yemen,” in Emirs et Présidents, ed. Pierre Bonte, Edouard Conte and Paul Dresch (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2001), 219–246. Stephen Day, “Updating Yemen National Unity,” The Middle East Journal, 62 (Summer 2008): 417–436. Al-Haqq fi l-Tajammuʿ al-Salmi (Sanaa: Yemen Human Rights Organization, 2008). When talking with journalists Saleh used to liken his role with “dancing on the heads of snakes.”

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presidential palace and key infrastructures in Sanaa. Professional competence and war missions took a backseat to other considerations, namely, the army’s role in the regime, the cultivated loyalty of the officer corps and the manipulation of familial, tribal and regional affiliations and so on, in a systematic and convoluted way – this was the core critic of YSP southerners in 1990–1993, dating back from protracted talks of unification. Even the way the 1994 civil war went evoked more reminiscences of a coup d’état than classic military confrontations between two armies; or, to quote Paul Dresch, “indeed, to call this a civil war was to stretch a point – to call it an extended coup d’état would be as accurate.”63 Within this system of control on the armed forces, rivalries were acute and even cultivated by Saleh with constant reshuffles and bad tricks to weaken potential rivals. The resulting outplay was much more unstable than Hafez’s systematic social engineering in Syria by comparison and where no stakeholder could emerge with the same power. In the 1980s, a key insider, Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar (and commander of the northwestern military region) who came from the same village as Saleh (Bayt al-Ahmar, near Sanaa), established and expanded the so-called First Armored Division (al-Firqa al-Awwal) by reinforcing it as an elite unit with priorities in terms of funding and arming and allegedly incorporating contingents from al-Islah party-related militias – note that the al-Ahmar family dominant in al-Islah are from the Hashid confederation and not relatives of Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar (hereafter called Ali Mohsen to avoid confusion). In the 2000s, the balance of influence in the military shifted away from the regular army and the First Division (Ali Mohsen) toward new special units or counterterrorism teams financed by the US in the context of the Global War on Terror of the G. W. Bush administration and commanded by Saleh’s direct relatives, sons, half-brothers or nephews, posted in the military and security apparatus64 – the Saʾda wars against the nascent Houthi rebellion in the North were also a way for Saleh to get the powerful stakeholder Ali Mohsen bogged down in war. The most prominent example was the Republican Guard (al-Haras 63

64

Paul Dresch, “The Tribal Factor in the Yemeni Crisis,” in The Yemeni War of 1994, ed. Jamal S. al-Suwaidi (London: The Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research and Saqi Books, 1995), 33. In the 1990s–2000s, his eldest son and presumed heir, Ahmed Ali Abdallah Saleh, in the Republican Guard; his younger son, Khaled, who graduated from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, UK, in 2010, in the missile corps (artillery and missile brigades are held separately from other units in the Yemen military); his half-brothers Mohammad Saleh al-Ahmar, as air force commander, and Ali Saleh al-Ahmar in the office of the commander in chief; and nephews Tareq Mohammad Abdallah Saleh, as head of the Presidential Guard, Taysir Abdallah Saleh, as military attaché in Washington, Yahya Muhammad Abdallah Saleh, as deputy commander of the paramilitary CSO, and Ammar Muhammad Saleh, as deputy director of the National Security Bureau.

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al-Jumhuri), initially a small unit protecting the presidential palace established in the 1960s after the Nasserist model and remodeled by Iraqi advisers in the 1970s. With the help of Jordanian advisers, it was transformed from a single-brigade-sized force (3,000 troops) in the 1980s to a reinforced and well-equipped (eight-brigade) division of mostly mechanized brigades, totaling a force of some 30,000 men and even with its own Counterterrorism Unit (Wahda Mukafaha al-Irhab) created with US financing. It was commanded by one of Saleh’s half-brothers, then his eldest son and putative heir, Ahmed Ali Saleh. The Yemeni Special Forces (al-Quwwat al-Khassa) were another specific brigade formed in 1999 and expanded afterward. Tellingly, these new units received new weaponry, better training and superior benefits (health care in specific hospitals, housing, sports clubs) when compared to others. All these units had parallel chains of command, reporting directly to the president through the office of the commander in chief run by one of Saleh’s half-brothers and not under the purview of the defense minister. The military was also involved in internal security matters and the regime’s internal equilibriums. Tellingly, since 1978 and before he fell into discredit with the rise of Saleh’s direct relatives in the 2000s, the commander of the First Division, Ali Mohsen, was instrumental in every major military or security event, from the recruitment of the Yemeni “Afghan-Arabs”65 – to help recruit for jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviets, then to manage their “return” as many of them were “enlisted” in the armed or security forces – to the Houthi wars referred to by Yemenis as “Ali Mohsen’s wars.” The country was divided into five military zones, most of which controlled by the president’s relatives or Sanhan officers: army commanders were the real authority in governorates, parceling out infrastructure, doling out funds for local development and water projects (and withdrawing them to punish disloyal areas) and had the final say in numerous matters over the local administration. Northern cities were deeply “militarized” with units stationed in them, living in them, playing politics in them and often policing them (because the ineffectiveness of the police enhanced the army’s role). The expanded physical presence of army brigades in cities, and in Sanaa in particular, was directly related to their political functions – very tellingly in 1990–1993, the southern YSP asked for the “demilitarization” of cities, one of the key power assets of Saleh. Similarly, as the word of mass civil disobedience spread in the southern provinces with the Hirak movement after 2007, the military set 65

Gregory Johnsen, The Last Refuge (New York: Norton, 2013); Robert Burrowes, “Yemen: Political Economy and the Effort against Terrorism,” in Battling Terrorism in the Horn of Africa, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2005), 141–172.

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up bases in the main cities to intimidate crowds. High-ranking officers were members of the GPC. A military high position plus other characteristics (northern origin, tribe and family) was also a key asset to enter into politics. And Saleh utilized the military to bolster his electoral chances during election campaigns, dressing troops in civilian attire to give the impression of increased numbers of supporters at his rallies, using the security apparatus to intimidate political opponents or moving units so that they could vote for him in competitive electoral districts. The Yemeni military was fully involved in political games. In Libya, the question of control caused headaches to Qaddafi. He juggled inconclusively to pull the military in his grid of exclusive control in the Jamahiriyya. On the one hand, the need to create basic Revolutionary Committees in the military was announced in April 1979, but was met with strong corporatist opposition within the army and never really materialized. The Revolutionary Committees were used to threaten or even mete out harsh punishments on the upper echelons of the armed forces. In terms of power rebalancing between the regular military and new paramilitary forces, that system of Revolutionary Committees, however, bore no resemblance to the crucial role played by the Sepah-e-Pasdaran and Bassijis in Iran, because Qaddafi didn’t wish to transform them into powerful stakeholders. They were also seen as an irritant by Qaddafi after 1987, targeted as “deviationists” in 1987–1988 and downgraded a few years later. Furthermore, the armed forces were crucial for the regime in 1986 when the Revolutionary Committees failed to crush a scattered unrest spreading throughout the country after anti-American demonstrations in Tripoli and Benghazi called upon by the regime turned against it. The military continued to be the ultimate source of power in Libya.66 Symptomatically, military officers remained above the day-to-day controls exerted by Revolutionary Committees, especially concerning the building of houses and restrictive laws on private property.67 Nevertheless, in the Jamahariyya, the army had to follow the whimsical phases of the people’s power that disorganized it. For instance, after the April 1986 American raid on Tripoli, the chief of staff was transferred from Tripoli (whose status as capital was canceled on January 1, 1987) to the al-Jofra oasis (650 km southwest of the capital), to be followed by the defense ministry. In fact, Qaddafi announced numerous times the dissolution of the military, most memorably in 1995. Although these declarations created – and, in many respects, reinforced – an atmosphere

66 67

Vandewalle, Libya since Independence, 102. John Davis, Libyan Politics (London: Tauris, 1993).

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of unpredictability and “deinstitutionalization,” they were not followed up by changes on the ground. On the other hand, the military kept a key role, especially during the times when Libya waged war against Chad, with whom the country was engaged in recurring wars from 1978 to 1987 (for the Aouzou Strip). Libya’s logistical capabilities – projecting large contingents with hundreds of tanks to the far south – proved to be impressive. The Libyan army’s fortune fell in dramatic fashion, though, resulting in more than 7,500 deaths (in the 1987 campaigns alone) against Chad’s lightly armed, ragtag combatants outfitted with Toyota pickup trucks and supported by the French army. The Chadian forces took 1,200 Libyan prisoners, who were later enlisted in the Libyan opposition, among them the commander of the “Eastern military group” in Chad, Colonel Khalifa Haftar.68 The army was demoralized by the humiliating defeat and by the regime’s doubts about it and lack of confidence. The army was shrunk in 1987 from 86,000 to 61,000 uniformed personnel. Many officers went into retirement or were demobilized – some of them would come back in 2011 as organizers of networks of support for the uprising in various cities (Chapter 5). In the 1980s, things went farther sour between the regime and its army. The unstable equilibrium of control in the Jamahiriyya proved elusive with challenges mounting from within the Libyan military at an increased pace. The long list of serious incidents and nascent rebellions (in 1983, 1984, March 1985, April 1985, August 1985, September 1985, April 1986, etc.) suppressed by harsh internal repression signaled the sad state of the Libyan military and the atmosphere of unease within it.69 Most incidents were not reported in the media as the custom was not to publicly acknowledge any regime weaknesses. However, they were admitted more openly when Qaddafi denounced the army in derogatory terms, as a locus of “corruption and fascists,” addicted to “hashish, alcohol and pornography,” in an article published in the official organ of the Revolutionary Committees in March 1983. In particular, the attack by the oppositional National Front for the Salvation of Libya on Qaddafi’s residence in high-security Tripoli in May 1984 shocked the leader and altered his perception of security. Another crucial alarm bell 68

69

Kenneth Pollack, Arabs at War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); René Otayek, La politique africaine de la Libye (Paris: Kathala, 1986); Bertrand Lanne, Tchad-Libye, La querelle des frontières (Paris: Karthala, 1986); Robert Buijenthuis, Le Frolinat et les guerres civiles du Tchad (Paris: Kathala, 1987); René Lemarchand, ed., The Green and the Black (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). In 1987, defections were so numerous and draft-dodging so important that the security services even carried out large-scale search operations to hunt down defected soldiers in Libyan cities – others fled to Egypt with their plane or helicopter.

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that rang was a coup attempt in November 1993, led by a group of officers from the Warfalla tribe and allegedly involving forty-two senior officers at a strategic base near Bani Walid. This was a highly symbolic move because this tribe was said to be the historic protector of the Qaddafa tribe and because it was heavily incorporated in the military – with some Libyan sources saying that it even held a majority within the army.70 The main reason for the coup attempt was that Warfalla officers allegedly believed themselves to be poorly rewarded for their services for the regime. And symptomatically, the officer corps was the sector of Libyan society most affected by regular waves of summary executions. Many defecting high-ranking officers were active in the external opposition, such as Commandant Abd al-Munʿim al-Huni, a former RCC member, and Colonel Haftar.71 The regime frequently reshuffled the higher echelons of the officer corps and raised salaries repeatedly. The regime became increasingly obsessed with coups. Yet, deinstitutionalization and “people’s power” were no solution to the problem of political control. Eventually in the second half of the 1980s, a new policy emerged from this sense of insecurity at the top of the regime. Qaddafi set up a new grid of control. Changes in the military sector were progressive, often unseen in Libya’s institutional mess but, nevertheless, indicative of radical shifts. The step-by-step end result was a complete disorganization of the military mirroring that of the state, to prevent from emerging any group that could become an independent basis of support away from Qaddafi’s network, with an emphasis on overlapping security structures and tribal manipulations/coup-proofing. Strict and quasi-obsessive control on the army by Qaddafi now trumped all other considerations, including military efficiency. After the experiment of the Revolutionary Committees, Qaddafi created the so-called Deterrence Battalions, as specific praetorian units recruited to prevent a coup, reinforced his “presidential” guard (“Jamahiriyya Guards”) – both predominantly staffed by fellow Qaddafa tribesmen – and set up specific security cells in Tripoli, Syrt, Ajdabiya, Tobruk and Sabha.72 That system of praetorian forces was rationalized thereafter with six to seven brigades that were crucial for the regime and put under the command of Qaddafi’s close relatives. These “Security Brigades” (al-Kataʾib al-Amniyya), first organized on a small scale and ad hoc basis (with former Revolutionary Guards and security cells), were professionalized after 1993 on a large scale and 70 71 72

“Chronique politique Libye,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (Marseille: CNRS, 1993). Lisa Anderson, “Qadhdhafi and His Opposition,” The Middle East Journal, 40(2) (1986): 225–237. “Chronique politique Libye,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (Marseille: CNRS, 1992).

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buttressed by using resources from the military outside the purview of the regular army. The most prominent was the Thirty-Second Reinforced Brigade (al-Liwa 32 al-Muʾazzaza) in Tripolitania under the command of Qaddafi’s son Khamis, much more than a simple brigade in the strict meaning of the term as it was estimated to have at least 10,000 Libyan and foreign soldiers, with ground forces, artillery, as well as missile and intelligence units. Other important brigades included the Imhammad Imghayif Brigade, in charge of Qaddafi’s security in Tripoli; the Fadhil Abu Umar Brigade in Benghazi, recruited among the Warfalla tribe; the Faris (or Ninth) Brigade in Sabha, recruiting Tebus, Qaddafa and Awlad Suleiman tribesmen; and others. Security Brigades were deployed in major towns and tasked with the defense of regime infrastructures as well as ports, airports, frontiers and weapons storage facilities with immense stockpiles (see Chapter 3 on profligate weapons imports). These units were relatively well equipped and received preferential treatment in benefits, equipment, pay, and subsidies for home, car, fuel and food. On the other hand, the (rest of the) regular military was restrained.73 It was organized around comparatively small units, the battalion (armored, mechanized, artillery, commando, missile, air defense, etc.) rather than the brigade or the division, hence a smaller level of organization, even though units were often called “brigade” (katiba) in local parlance. This was a way to exert control by limiting the size of deployments and activities. The regular part of the military was not often allowed to train with live ammunition nor permitted to conduct military exercises at higher than battalion levels. It had no experience in coordinating between infantry, armor and artillery, and competent leadership was lacking. There was a frequent rotation of leadership to avoid the creation of enduring networks among officers, a tight control on promotions by Qaddafi and his close associates, and often blurred hierarchies.74 Actual rank said little about the influence enjoyed by the person concerned. The problem for Qaddafi was to ensure that every unit commander and senior officer would be afraid, uncertain and stay loyal or, at the very least, remain “quietist” and careerist. Military police was closely related to other security organs and to the Security Brigades, and kept a watchful eye on officers and the movements of units. Military intelligence was directly connected to the high command of the armed forces and was tasked with preventing coups. Chains of command were duplicated with a General Committee on Defense (the ministry) for the military as 73 74

Anthony Cordesman and Aram Nerguizian, The North African Military Balance (Washington: CSIS, 2009). Interview with a Libyan major, Geneva, September 2013, and with a Libyan captain, Paris, March 2014.

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a whole and the Permanent Security Committee (based in the Bab alAziziyya casern) where heads of the Security Brigades sat. The regime also built numerous parallel units/militias or let specific individuals close to Qaddafi create security structures without horizontal coordination by taking resources from the army. The Revolutionary Guards, built by the Revolutionary Committees in the armed forces (1,000 to 2,000 men), were tasked with the surveillance and control of the numerous weapons depots. Some figures put their numbers to 6 brigades or even 40,000 men, but most of those counted in such a way were not full-time employees but volunteers accepted on the recommendation of other members of the Revolutionary Guards and who could be called on demand as stated in their oath of allegiance to the Jamahiriyya.75 The Jamahariyya Guards were entrusted with the personal security of Qaddafi (3,000 men). Both units were recruited heavily from the Qaddafa tribe and were referred to by Qaddafi as ansar – the same word is used to name the companions of the Prophet Muhammad. The regime also recruited numerous ad hoc militias more or less integrated within the military and benefiting from its equipment and training when necessary. During the heyday of Islamist activism (1995–1998), there were rumors of connivance between the regular military and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG, al-Jamaʿa al-Islamiyya al-Muqatila fi l-Libya) in Cyrenaica. Qaddafi resorted to specific paramilitaries – the so-called People’s Guard (al-Haras al-Shaʿabi) created to monitor mosques and to get “loyal” fighters against Islamists. In 1997, at the height of the offensive, these militiamen and the army – in particular eastern units recruited from the Obeida tribe – the Revolutionary Guards and the police (in total perhaps 10,000 men)76 would collectively man checkpoints and conduct hunting operations sustained with aerial bombardments – Serb mercenaries were allegedly also used in military operations. All power relationships pointed vertically toward the Guide, with his intelligence office (maktab maʿalumat al-qaʾid) and his appointees to key posts such as heads of military regions, commanders of armaments and ammunitions or military security, who could reorganize existing forces or create new ones around themselves in important municipalities (shaʿabiyyat) with their own networks, until they were sidelined for getting too much leeway and power. Qaddafi’s sons played a key role: Khamis was the commander of the elite Thirty-Second Brigade; Muʿtassim was 75 76

Hanspeter Mattes, “Formal and Informal Authority in Libya since 1969,” in Libya since 1969, ed. Diederick Vandewalle (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 55–81. Hanspeter Mattes, “Challenges to Security Sector Governance in the Middle East, the Libya Case” (Geneva: DCAF, July 2004); Hanspeter Mattes, “Chronique LIbye,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (Marseille: CNRS, 1998).

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a lieutenant colonel in the Special Forces (al-Saʿiqa) until 2007 and then was sidelined in favor of another son, Saʿdi, who was in charge of units near the strategic town of Bregha (for its petrochemical terminal). Qaddafi’s blood relatives were also included in important positions, among many others, his nephews and cousins, trusted relatives (relations of his second wife), members of the Qaddafa tribe and prominent members from allied tribes such as the Warfalla, Awlad Suleiman or Magharba. Beneath the level of rising Qaddafi relatives or allies at key posts as colonels, a large number of Qaddafa junior officers were instilled in the armed forces and received rapid promotions in the Cyrenaica and Benghazi military regions, in military security and in the command of armaments and ammunition. The air force, a crucial service in a vast country like Libya, was also staffed mainly by members of Qaddafi’s tribe and mercenaries/foreigners. And, more generally, the tribal representation in the armed forces was carefully balanced to assure that potential dissension in one unit didn’t spread to the entire military establishment. At the rank-and-file level, young people from the same town, tribe or community (such as the Washafana, south of Tripoli, or the Tawerghas, a dark-skinned, marginalized group near Misrata) were induced to join in blocks to vouch for each other’s loyalty, thereby creating numerous and opposite perceptions of solidarity among individuals along the qabila (tribe).77 As a result, the Libyan military was no longer the most cohesive group endowed with a sense of Libyan nationalism as in 1969, and it was severely “tamed” by Qaddafi in a huge institutional mess. Symptomatically, from the initial RCC members, the “survivors” were only few and increasingly sidelined by the end of the 1980s. Authoritarianism without the Military: Tunisia from Bourguiba to Ben Ali In parallel, Tunisia tells another story, even in a context of authoritarianism rebooted. The famous sentence ushered by Bourguiba when questioned about the “Tunisian system” and angrily answering, “The system? What system? I am the system!”78 draw us into the key political 77

78

The politics of “re-tribalization” was also applied more generally in the Libyan system: the Revolutionary Committees, de facto abolished in 1996–1998, were replaced by the Social and Popular Commands (al-qiyadat al-shaʿbiyya al-ijtimaʿiyya) filled in with local leaders (often recreated tribal links); for instance, military officers or close confidents of Qaddafi with technocratic positions – and tribal clubs (nawadi qabaliyya) were created in Benghazi, Misrata, Derna, etc. Amal Obeidi, Political Culture in Libya (London: Routledge, 2001). The sentence was Bourguiba’s answer to a question by Clement Henry Moore, Tunisia since Independence: The Dynamics of One-Party Government (Berkeley: University of

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underpinnings of the Tunisian state: Bourguiba was the center. He also built a strong and increasingly authoritarian regime around his own person, close associates (all civilians) and the Neo Destour, renamed Socialist Destourian Party (PSD) after 1964.79 The military was a symbol of national unity (Chapter 1) and was the means of connecting the citizen to the state through military service. Nevertheless, under the guidance of the Bourguibist party and state, the military was certainly not the kind of guardian of Bourguibist ideology that the Turkish military was of Kemalism.80 Bourguiba’s authoritarianism had no relation of proximity with the army. As recalled by Ben Ali himself, “it was no secret to anybody that I was a member of the military and that Bourguiba was always highly suspicious of the military.”81 Indeed, there was a tradition of low-key military involvement to buttress the police and the paramilitary National Guard: in February 1961, with rioting as a consequence of Bourguiba’s Ramadan policy; in June 1967, as a consequence of the Six-Day War; in October 1977, in Ksar Hellal, a symbolic city at the very heart of the Sahel region where the first congress of the Neo Destour was held.82 Yet, military involvement to restore public order accelerated when challenges to the Bourguibist model mounted, especially with a pervasive economic crisis, the rise of the Islamist Mouvement de la Tendance Islamique and the decay of the political system into authoritarianism and competing political networks without any capability of inclusion.83 In 1978, with a nationwide strike called upon by the national trade union, Union Générale des Travailleurs Tunisiens (UGTT), again in 1980–1981, after Qaddafi’s attempt to provoke a popular revolt in the industrial city of Gafsa and in 1984, with bread riots after reforms in the Caisse de compensation in charge of subsidies, a series of January crises brought the Tunisian military into new visibility to assist the beleaguered interior ministry’s security forces to

79 80

81 82

83

California Press, 1965), 104; also quoted by Jean Lacouture, “Un entretien avec le président Bourguiba,” Le Monde Diplomatique, May 1969. Samuel Huntington and Clement Moore, eds., Authoritarian Politics in Modern Society (New York: Basic Books, 1970). Bourguiba had an ideology of rational engineering to promote social changes but he also harbored an explicit rejection of doctrinaire ideologies, placing him in contrast to Ataturk, whatever the parallels between both modernizing regimes. Leon C. Brown, “Bourguiba and Bourguibism Revisited,” Middle East Journal, 55(1) (2001): 43–57. “Un entretien avec le président tunisien Ben Ali,” Le Monde, September 10, 1988. See the interviews of Béji Caid Essebsi and the founder of the BOP (Brigades de l’ordre public), Tahar Belkhodja, in M. Camau and V. Geisser, eds., Bourguiba, La trace et l’héritage (Paris: Karthala, 2004). Douglas Ashford, “Succession and Social Change in Tunisia,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 4(1) (1973): 23–39; Abdelkader Zghal, “The Reactivation of Tradition in a Post-traditional Society,” Daedalus (Winter 1973): 225–237; Christiane Souriau, Le Maghreb Musulman en 1979 (Paris: CNRS éditions, 1983).

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restore order. Moreover, the fact that the army was stationed near towns, centers of power or communication lines allowed it to be relatively efficient in times of social unrest.84 Symptomatically, the military was heavily deployed around the Kasbah palace where a meeting of the council of ministers was taking place on January 5, 1984, a choreography not seen before in Tunisia. The Tunisian political leadership was loath to use the army in politics whose small size and weak operational capabilities were nevertheless strong inhibiting factors to any political ambition.85 Most importantly, military involvement was channeled through one key security actor of Bourguiba’s system. Ben Ali, the director of military intelligence for ten years (1964–1974), and subsequently named director of national security (Sûreté Nationale) in the interior ministry, coordinated the repression by the military and the police in 1978. Ben Ali was reassigned to the post of director of the Sûreté Nationale in the aftermath of the 1984 riots – with some officers such as Ben Ali’s close comrade at Saint-Cyr (in 1956), Colonel Habib Ammar, at the helm of the National Guard.86 In each case, military intervention was never the ultimate solution, just a tool used punctually by the Bourguiba regime that returned to its politics of patrimonialism and consensus-building within the realm of the PSD.87 Furthermore, the small army (42,000 men in 1987) was counterbalanced with the National Guard (al-Haras al-Watani), a paramilitary force (of about 600 men in the 1960s, grown to 7,000 in 1987) and kind of gendarmerie after the French model but under the command of the interior ministry. The National Guard was at the forefront of repression. It was as strong as the military with its own transportation and communication systems, capacity, armed carriers and even its own modest fleet of helicopters. And in terms of training, ranks and equipment, it was practically identical to the military. Conversely, the army resented having had to assume such police functions and having sometimes to open fire on civilians. Officers prudently voiced “concern” (not much more) against the government about using military resources to solve social conflicts and not being able to manage the social crisis – in fact, 84 85

86 87

Abdelkader Zghal, “La Tunisie, dernière république civile,” Jeune Afrique, no. 1205, February 8, 1984. See the report of the inquiry commission of February1984 in Dialogue no. 498, April 3, 1984, and the letter by the former (and dismissed) interior minister, “Dans une lettre au Président Bourguiba M. Driss Guiga se défend de l’accusation de haute trahison portée contre lui,” Le Monde, May 16, 1984. “Chronique Tunisie,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (Marseille: IREMAM-CNRS, 1984). Michel Camau, Fadila Amrani and Rafaa Ben Achour, Contrôle Politique et Régulations Electorales en Tunisie (Aix-en-Provence/Tunis: CRESM, Edisud, 1981).

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anger was directed to the repressive interior ministry whose large bureaucracy was incompetent to cope with civilian disorders. This remained largely an untold story until 2011 when retired military officers became increasingly eager to tell it. The overall, trumping importance of civilian control in Tunisia, which resulted in a specific exception in the Arab World, was even preserved after Ben Ali toppled the infirm and unstable Bourguiba in a bloodless (medical) coup d’état on November 7, 1987.88 The army’s top leadership (chief of staff, chief of military intelligence, inspector general) was indeed instrumental in the coup – they were quickly promoted afterward.89 Many officers hoped for some rebalancing with appointments in the bureaucracy, promotions, better equipment after decades of marginalization under Bourguiba, short of any appetite for politics or militarism for too small an army – size is a key factor along with a specific history of civilmilitary relations. Superficially, at least, during the first year of Ben Ali’s reign, the army assumed a somewhat more prominent role, with several officers promoted to high-level positions (General Habib Ammar as interior minister but who was sacked already in 1988; General Abdelhamid Essheikh, another comrade of Ben Ali in 1956 in Saint-Cyr as foreign and later interior minister) and a few other officers appointed to security positions especially in the interior ministry, more because they were close associates of Ben Ali than being military officers – others were rewarded with ambassadorships and one was named a governor. But this reliance on the military did not signal the entry of the army into the Tunisian state. On the contrary, purges were the flip side of the rise of Ben Ali. Ben Ali struck a significant blow to the military in January 1991 with the Barakat al-Sahel affair, named after a small village near Hamammet where a plot was allegedly devised: 244 military personnel (113 officers, among them 3 of the 5 aides to the chief of staff and 82 NCOs) were put to a humiliating trial – they were accused of their alleged links with the former Islamist MTI (renamed al-Nahda after 1989) to stage a coup. Abdallah Kallel, the secretary of state for the interior under Ben Ali’s interior ministry (defense minister in April 1988, then interior minister in February 1991) took an active role in repression, hence signaling, in the interpretation of many 88

89

Derek Hopwood, Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia: The Tragedy of Longevity (Oxford: Macmillan, 1992); Lisa Anderson, “Political Pacts, Liberalism and Democracy,” Government and Opposition, 26(2) (1991): 244–260. Ben Ali used for his coup the National Guard (and its special intervention unit); according to other sources, the military was more passive than an active actor; and the air force chief (and a relative of Bourguiba) was put under house arrest. Noureddine Jebnoun, “In the Shadow of Power,” Journal of North African Studies, 19(3) (2014): 296–316.

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officers, the humiliation of the military under the guidance of the interior ministry.90 Differently from many leaders in the Arab World and despite his military background,91 Ben Ali did not build an authoritarian regime with the army as a behind-the-scenes pillar, but a police state that marginalized the military.92 Ben Ali ruled through numerous and rival security services, along with the intelligence organs of the RCD and of the Presidential Guard. Estimates of police officers were put between 130,000 and 150,000 (even 200,000): after 2011, it was revealed that the number of police officers was much lower, around 50,00093 – but we should add thugs and various, unofficial “implementers” to this figure, hence returning to the original estimate. Beginning in the mid-1980s, the interior ministry reinforced the 12,000-strong National Guard and created “militarized” units such as the anti-terrorist brigade (BAT). The Presidential Guard was a 3–5,000-strong force with numerous privileges (high salaries and social advantages), which was reinforced and deeply resented by their counterparts in the (regular) military. In fact, the Ben Ali regime was based on the political use/abuse of the (civilian) state apparatus through repression, intimidation and manipulation by a coercive apparatus diluted inside the state, in a kind of “abduction” or “hijacking” of the state apparatus by the regime, namely, a small clique surrounding Ben Ali.94 When the army happened to enter into repression in society it was in a secondary role. In June 2008, after a five-month dormant uprising in the region of Gafsa-Redeyef denouncing corruption and lack of employment opportunities for diplômés (college graduates) at the Compagnie des Phosphates de Gafsa, the police and the National Guard (under the purview of the interior ministry) lost control before

90

91

92

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See the association “INSAF pour les anciens militaires,” http://jamaity.org/association/ association-insaf-justice-pour-les-anciens-militaires/. President Moncef Marzouki held a ceremony in homage of the victims of trials in August 2014. Ben Ali though trained as an artillery officer never had the operational command of an artillery unit during his strictly military career from 1956 to 1977. Jebnoun, “In the Shadow of Power.” Steffen Erdle, Ben Ali’s “New Tunisia” (1987–2009) (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2010); Clement Henry, “Tunisia’s Sweet Little Regime,” in Worst of the Worst, ed. Robert Rotberg (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2007), 303–323. Interview of Interior Minister Farhat Raji, Nessma TV, February 4, 2011; Ministère de l’Intérieur, Budget du Ministère de l’Intérieur pour 2015 (Tunis: Opendata, 2015), http:// opendata.interieur.gov.tn/content/pdf/2015/budget_mi_2015.pdf. The police dwarfed the 35,000-man army, with the latter poorly equipped (12 helicopters belonged to the military and 8 to the security services) and under-supplied (only 18,000 were in combat units, the rest being administrators). Bob Rijkers, Caroline Freund and Antonio Nucifora, “All in the Family: State Capture in Tunisia,” Policy Research Working Paper (The World Bank, March 2014).

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the determined protesters and the army took control of Redeyef.95 The military pursued and arrested fugitives in the surrounding mountains but its role was mainly supportive.96 In the 1990s, as the civil war raged in Algeria, the regime would use military units in the South against Islamist infiltrations, but only under close supervision by military intelligence and the interior ministry’s general intelligence directorate (political police). The army was definitely the third-tier force before 2011, but as a consequence, it was not readily and openly associated with repression of the Ben Ali era. Furthermore, Ben Ali never relied on the military to legitimize his rule.97 He never visited the military even though he was an officer. No wonder that officers quickly came to see Ben Ali as “anti-military.” Ben Ali was as fearful of the military as Bourguiba. Tellingly under Ben Ali, checkpoints of the military police were numerous on roads across the country, aimed at controlling the soldiers’ movements in case some of the troops moved out of their barracks – after 2011 they disappeared almost entirely. Under Ben Ali, promotions were double-checked by military intelligence, whose founder was Ben Ali himself in 1964 and whose members were often the future high officers in the military hierarchy. The military personnel’s professional activities and contacts with external counterparts were monitored by intelligence services – email messages and phone conversations were tapped. Conversely, there was some resentment in the officer corps against the Ben Ali regime, but this was not voiced openly, in a setting of strong enfeeblement of the military and of strict supervision by military intelligence. Furthermore and quite differently from Egypt, it was a military not well versed in politics or associated with past experiments in state-building (Chapter 1). The Ben Ali regime was at a distance and even far removed from the army: authoritarianism can prosper without a strong military pillar. The Tunisian military was not in the regime – police or intelligence agencies did not emanate from the military – and was in large part sidelined by it. Conclusion The remarkable longevity of political regimes appeared to have put the armed forces back to the barracks in the early 1970s. But the political 95 96 97

Wikileaks cable/09TUNIS506, July 22, 2009. “Behind Tunisia’s Economic Miracle, Inequality and Criminalization of Protests,” Amnesty International, June 8, 2009. Very symptomatically, it was not until 2014 that the government took the decision to write an official history of the Tunisian military with the help of a commission of military history, to help the training of officers. “Tunisie,” L’année du Maghreb (Marseille: CNRSIREMAM, no. 10, 2014), 52.

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quietism of armies and the apparent durability of regimes did not reflect the military’s estrangement or separation from (civilian) politics (to the contrary). The military was rather embedded in these spheres and in regimes, with variations across cases. The imperative of control was hence crucial. It was pursued more intrusively in insecure and fragmented states, in a model called by Clement Henry and Robert Springborg “bunker states,” “in a potential state of war with the societies they rule,”98 also specifically called “Etat de barbarie” by Michel Seurat for Syria in the 1980s.99 In general, the seeming quietism of the military and durability of regimes concealed blurred behind-the-scenes institutional boundaries with senior echelons of the military becoming part of the cliques that govern these countries, or at least part of informal networks at the top of power echelons – though the army should not be conflated with the regime. And the army’s roles in Arab politics could not be understood through a conventional focus on civil-military relations, because those called “civilians” at the helm of a given state in such a set of relations often originated from military careers or used military networks. This chapter, therefore, introduced the specificities of armies’ roles in Arab political systems.

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Henry and Springborg, Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East. Seurat, L’Etat de barbarie.

3

Armies Living under Enduring Authoritarian Regimes The Officer as an (Influential) Bureaucrat

In parallel to Chapter 2, viewing the second cycle (Introduction) from the point of view of regimes, I will concentrate here on the armies’ ability to install themselves into regimes, navigate inside them and create specific links to them. Terms like “civilianization,” “demilitarization” or even the concept of “civil-military relations” should be strongly qualified in the Arab World. The problem was not just that of “soldiers in politics” as in a previous stage (Chapter 1)1 – relating military behaviors to both institutional features of the armed forces and to activated social forces, whether classes or confessional groups – nor was it only to assess the army’s impact on politics and the economy. Rather, the crux of the matter was about “soldiers living with politics,” defined by the enduring rule of authoritarian regimes, whether monarchies or republics. There was an “authoritarian control on the armed forces” (something akin to the more well-known “democratic control on the armed forces”) also related to their transformation from power brokers to compliant instruments or bureaucracies at least. Arab militaries were embedded in regimes and adapted to their enduring rule. Arab officers in the end of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries were considered a stability-oriented element in these regimes. One might argue that this was indicative of diminished praetorianism and of the loss of the army’s unquestioned political dominance. One might also argue, however, that this notion was strongly dependent on the context and that the military revealed its true face after 2011 when confronted with the prospects of radical changes. But for sure, officers lived in and navigated within regimes. That pattern was based on a show of appearances, that of regimes entrenching themselves in power for decades – who revealed their surprising fragility in 2011 – and something related to the “performative effect” of authoritarianism, how it created a reality out of weak foundations, with the military as a crucial behind-the -scenes pillar. And armies were institutionalized within authoritarian 1

Eric Nordlinger, Soldiers in Politics (Englewood-Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1977).

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regimes; in other words, positioned according to the institutional dimensions of their embeddedness in regimes. Expanded Military Bureaucracies and the Close World of Arab Officers Armies across the Arab World in the past thirty years have behaved more like big bureaucracies rather than political springboards as they did in the 1950s–1960s. I follow Max Weber in defining bureaucracy as the exercise of authority according to abstract rules and regulations that apply universally. In the case of military institutions, these rules pertain to paths of career advancement and recruitment, promotions based on performance, discipline, service ethic and so on. In the past thirty years, and especially after the Gulf War of 1991, Arab officers have become more proficient as the professional requirements for officers in the lower and medium ranks rose and advancement was increasingly tied to training and education and, more broadly, merit. Authoritarian regimes presided over the depoliticization and consequent re-professionalization of their respective armed forces (transforming them into professionals looking for a salary), while constraining them within a strict structure of control and obedience and thereby transforming them into an instrument in their hands. In Egypt, after his difficult encounter with the army when he acceded to power, Sadat was especially careful to promote professional officers and insisted on recruiting university graduates as junior officers to rejuvenate the officer corps. By the 1980s, Egyptian officers became increasingly focused on their profession and imbued with ideals of patriotism and service to the nation. Under Mubarak, the military was no longer an institution charged with ideology in the sense of the 1950s. What officers proudly called the military doctrine (ʿaqida) highlighted military training as a process of moral regulation instilling indibat (discipline), gediya (seriousness), hasm (determination), wagib (dutifulness) and taʿa (obedience), especially when compared with what they saw as incompetent and ineffective civilians.2 In recruitment processes, demands for higher educational standards did favor the middle- or upper-middle-class strata and sons of officers, who enjoyed privileged access. And it would be more difficult in the 2010s for Nasser, Amer, Sadat or Tantawi to display an image of humble cadets devoted to social justice for their people, similar to when they entered the military academy. Many officers were first and 2

Interview with an additional teacher in the military academy, location withheld, December 2015.

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foremost careerists, who looked for the prospects of climbing the military hierarchy as a social ladder. Within the officer corps, connections based on school and family ties, peer group networks or kinship ties (called shilla in Egyptian colloquial) supported advancement in a very competitive world of officers where many held university degrees. The average officer attained the rank of colonel (ʿaqid) in twenty-five years after a hard life in the army and low pay when compared with the booming private sector. The Egyptian defense ministry was an entirely military bureaucracy with no civilian having power in it or over it. It was headed by a few aging generals trusted by Mubarak who controlled the whole military machine, from regional commands to the military economy. High-ranking officers promoted other officers whom they regarded as politically loyal and sharing the professional values of their commanders. In this way, they created greater cohesion in wide circles of officers, constantly testing the brightest officers for allegiance to the regime in a multifaceted system aimed at creating strict obedience. In particular, the relation of the Egyptian military institution with the US was very close and even intimate, but it has always been managed in Egypt by keeping the Egyptian military autonomous, closed onto itself and out of influence from external ideas of reform or foreign models. US-trained officers, owing to their exposure to non-regime socialization, were said to be held back for some time before reaching high-ranking positions or even sidelined.3 The Egyptian military has become a bloated bureaucracy that concealed itself behind fighting undefined threats with no clear national security strategy and behind the necessity of preparing for an all-out battle with an undetermined adversary (Israel?). There was no desire among the army leadership to adapt or transform the military (e.g., to serve in new missions such as border control, search-and-rescue or disaster relief operations, peacekeeping under the UN flag, humanitarian interventions, anti-terrorism operations, regional coalitions, etc.) that would have implied operational reforms, enhanced interoperability and more autonomous forces. The military, with poor communication, lack of interoperability between the services, poor training, uncooperative regional commands, no lateral communications (air force and air defense commands were separated) and everything integrated in the command structure from above with the defense minister representing the president, was much more of a weighty bureaucracy with an indulged officer corps than an operational sector.4

3 4

Interview with a US-trained officer, location withheld, June 2016. Thanassis Cambanis, Once Upon a Revolution (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2015).

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Similarly, in Syria and in parallel to the regime’s social engineering and security grid in the officer corps (Chapter 2), the secret of Hafez alAssad’s longevity also lay in his ability to transform the military from a largely uncontrolled and destabilizing locus of politicization to an element of stability and a supporting pillar of his regime in the form of a big bureaucracy. This only hints at the complexity of the Syrian military. Depoliticization and professionalization entailed a thorough rebuilding of the Syrian army that came out of the 1960s in a state of complete dereliction (Chapter 1). The term depoliticization might sound paradoxical, as ideology still played an essential role in it. Under Hafez, the army was indeed supposed to play a dual role: to defend the homeland’s borders as well as “the Corrective Movement” (al-Harakat al-Tashihiyya) of November 1970; in other words, the Assad regime, also called “the Assad state” (dawlat al-Assad). Still, depoliticization should be understood with retrospective insight, by contrasting the army’s new role with the role it played in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was a locus of intense politicization with officers acting as rulers and with barracks full of political debates, rival political cliques and would-be juntas in preparation. For the first time after 1970, the military was distanced from involvement in the country’s day-to-day political life and subordinated to a political power, that of a particular clan or networks controlled by Hafez. Tellingly, the Syrian military enjoyed some impressive (though temporary) achievements in combat – the 1973 war was not a humiliating defeat for it. Hafez reestablished professional discipline, promoting officers (and also NCOs) based on performance criteria, and reintegrating into the services the nonpolitical officers purged earlier on spurious grounds during what was called by “neo-Baathists” the building of “the ideological army” (Chapter 1). The Syrian officer corps became a huge bureaucracy where everybody was not part of the Alawi networks governing it – and not all Alawi junior officers could dream of a bright career. Yet, numerous Syrian officers regarded the Assad regime as their own (at least until 2011). The corporate spirit within the armed forces as transformed by the regime became strong. Conversely, the latter would benefit from the bureaucratization of the military and from the army’s identity based on the protection of the state (equated with the Assad regime) and strict obedience to it. Hence, professionalization also served as a way to advance control. To paraphrase French researcher Michel Seurat, the trick was to reinforce the regime’s network (ʿasabiyya, sense of group solidarity), the real channels of power based on subnational and subterranean Alawi networks, while depriving all other groups of the means to

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play on their own ʿasabiyya in the name of the Syrian nation-state and Arab nationalism.5 Professionalization also meant modernization and the acquisition of increasingly sophisticated equipment by the Syrian military. After the 1973 war, Syria accelerated its rearmament efforts and, in the wake of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979, announced itself as “the state of confrontation” (dawla al-muwajaha), one of the last Arab states still in a state of war with Israel. Thereafter, the regime introduced the search for “strategic parity” (al-tawazun al-istratiji) with Israel, no longer through inter-Arab military cooperation, but by building upon national strength, “standing firm and meeting the challenge” (al-sumud wa-l-taʾaddi), namely, achieving a defensive capability to repulse any Israeli attack – the other strategic components were Hezbollah in Lebanon and the alliance with Iran.6 Preparation for war or the objective of strategic parity was not to win wars against Israel (after 1973) or invade neighbors (except Lebanon from 1976 to 2005), but to remain defensive, defiant, endowed with a credible deterrent potential and a difficult opponent for Israel. In all cases, Arab officers have learned to be politically cautious and to turn back to their professional tasks and ethos. Even in Libya, an eclectic case, in what remained from the regular military as distinguished from the praetorian “Security Brigades” (Chapter 2), most officers were passive loyalists and careerists. They were often sidelined by other individuals promoted faster, many without even attending the military academy, based on their “revolutionary” zeal and/or more frequently their closeness to Qaddafi. Yet, professional officers existed and numerous officers were trained abroad as part of the huge arms deals signed by Qaddafi, though most of them did not have great interest in their training and studies; many considered service in the military as a job. The whole structure was disorganized. In 2011, those trying to get a global view of the military in order to reorganize it discovered that there was a distorted pyramid in high positions (without much power) with 50 major generals, 500 brigadiers and 1,300 colonels7 and that, owing to the lacking proper system of retirement, many old officers were still working after retirement in the military – this was their only source of revenue. 5 6

7

Michel Seurat, L’Etat de barbarie (Paris: Seuil, 1989). Yael Evron, War and Intervention in Lebanon (London: Croom Helm, 1987); Adeeb Dawisha, Syria and the Lebanese Crisis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980); Moshe Ma’oz, Syria and Israel (London: Oxford University Press, 1995); Fred Lawson, Why Syria Goes to War (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); Alasdair Drysdale and Raymond Hinnebush, Syria and the Middle East Peace Process (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1991). International Crisis Group, “Holding Libya Together” (Brussels, report no. 115, December 14, 2011).

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To be sure, relative institutionalization has varied greatly from case to case: low in Libya (and Yemen), high in Egypt, Tunisia (and Jordan), with Syria and Iraq (under Saddam Hussein) occupying in-between places. In Tunisia, an exceptional case in our batch, this dimension was prevalent. Institutionalization took the form of a complete closure of the small military to politics and society rather than just the definition of institutionally regulated roles. So much so that Tunisian officers after 2011 were utterly disappointed by political change, a topic they never dealt with explicitly until they were suddenly confronted with politics. The army was indeed a closed sector pervaded by a secretive culture. It built itself as a coherent sector under the guidance of a small elite (high officers) that managed to modernize and reproduce itself socially – a kind of mirror of the Bourguiba system where the Neo Destour led the country’s modernization – while keeping politically quiet. The high command was made up of well-trained professionals who passed through the Foundouk Jedid military university, the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre and the Institut de Défense Nationale and then gained additional experience as military attachés abroad or in a few detachments in foreign armies.8 Officers, mainly from the coastal Sahel (Sousse, Monastir, Tunis, Bizerte and Cap Bon) managed to find ways to professionally improve themselves, in Europe and in particular in France in the 1960s, then in the US after the 1970s. They strove to offer commissions to train competent cadres even from deprived regions – General Salah Hamdin who served as chief of staff in 2013–2014 hailed from Sidi Bouzid, the cradle of the 2011 uprising. Officers spent fifteen to twenty years in service before reaching command levels and languished in rank for long periods: this was a way for the regime to diminish the importance of the army and not to build it as a vehicle for rapid social mobility. Beyond a proclaimed ethics of professionalism within the Tunisian military, there was little cooperation between the three branch services, with each conducting its own missions without coordination or much contact with the others. Even medium-scale military exercises were seldom held and were always of a limited scope. The chiefs of staff commanded each of their respective services but did not serve on a unified chief of staff. There was no joint chief of staff in general. Instead, they acted as those responsible before the regime, as exemplified by the long tenure of General Mohammed Hedi Ben Hassin appointed in June 1990 and chief of staff until November 2001, along with a few uncharismatic officers behaving as bureaucrats and a few security-related others 8

“The Tunisian Army, Special File,” Jeune Afrique, December 10, 2013.

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(military intelligence). The Ben Ali regime kept the number of highranking generals at two (one in the army, one in the air force). Since the 1990s, the military has also been involved in peacekeeping operations on behalf of the UN (sixteen missions), and the African Unity Organization (four missions). These activities signified a formative experience of “civilianization” for the army personnel – for the Ben Ali regime it was a way to bolster Tunisia’s reputation abroad. The relegation of the military to the periphery of Ben Ali’s system and its dissociation from regime maintenance and day-to-day repression helped square the circle for the army’s hierarchy with a professed ethos of professionalism whereby the officers identified with the military institution. The military shared the ethics of professionalism and technical proficiency characteristic of other occupational groups in Tunisian society, such as bureaucrats, middle entrepreneurs (not the “rentier families” close to Ben Ali) who were implicitly “colluding by silence” with the regime. There were differences of opinion inside the military but nothing surfaced and the army remained invisible to society in the closed world of barracks – officers’ mood could change only in exceptional circumstances, such as January 2011. Armies Cultivating Their Social Embeddedness through Conscription and Links to Societies In most Arab states, armies have kept a link to their respective societies through conscription and had the opportunity to shape the perceptions of millions of conscripted citizen, although the latter were more than often reluctant to submit.9 Even in states where regimes invested in elite units stacked with members of the Alawi community in Syria or northern officers in Yemen, and with the exception of Libya where the system was messier, regimes kept a large conscript-based army to legitimize themselves and as a form of social control, hence differing from pure “military ethnocracies” described for Africa.10 The Egyptian armed forces are composed of 60–70 percent conscripts (320,000 out of a total of 460,000 men), based on the compulsory military service. There are different types of service ranging from twelve to thirty-six months: a young man holding a university degree will either serve three years as an officer or one year as a conscript; another with a high school degree will serve for two years as a conscript; and another with a lower degree will 9 10

The documentary from Al Jazeera, “Hikaya ʿan al-Tajnid al-Ijbari fi Masr,” Doha, November 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZHlvHqwcIY. Ali Mazrui, Soldiers and Kinsmen in Uganda (Beverly Hills: Sage Publishers, 1975).

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serve for three years as a conscript. Potential army recruits with the lowest levels of education are shifted into the paramilitary Central Security Forces (CSF). The high force level maintained by the military and its reliance on conscription mean that the army’s socialization influence reaches a large number of Egyptians. Egypt’s relatively young population is a strong asset as a reservoir of young men, but the high rate of illiteracy among conscripts is also a problem for training in an army under modernization that wants soldiers with university degrees. In the 1980s the Egyptian military served as a channel of vocational upward mobility for hundreds of thousands of conscripts who enhanced their skills in vocational schools managed by the military – it was the most important provider of technical education and training. However, the army is no longer the same modernizing factor; nor is military service particularly attractive for young Egyptians, which is often a harsh experience in life – in the 2000s, efforts by army recruiters to attract Egyptians with university degrees in particular from expatriate communities were not very successful because salaries were relatively low in the public service. It is difficult for young Egyptians to avoid serving in the military by getting an exemption – money and connection can only avoid being placed in a faraway place or in a dangerous war zone like Sinai since 2013. Conscripts feel exploited – the revolt of the CSF in 1986 was sparked by a false rumor that the conscripts’ tours of duty would be extended from three to four years. Conscripts identified as lacking basic skills even work in gas stations, supermarkets, snacks, sports clubs owned by the military or as domestics for high-ranking officers – the army denies that conscripts work in sectors far from defense functions. Military factories or enterprises either hire civilians with skills or pick them out of army conscripts – the army even publishes job advertisements for specialized skills in newspapers or on the Web. In total, the military is presumably the largest employer in Egypt, annually absorbing 10–12 percent of the Egyptian male workforce, but increasingly to its own benefit (as an economic actor) rather than at the service of the country (to improve the skills of conscripts as in the past). The Syrian military is a two-dimensional entity: first, it is strongly integrated in and transformed by the Assad system of power (Chapter 2); and second, it keeps from its first years after independence a connection with society through conscription, also a key legitimization for the regime. The Syrian military has been a conscripted force and youth have served for thirty months upon reaching the age of eighteen – military service was reduced to twenty-four months in 2005, twenty-one months in 2009 and eighteen months in March 2011. There was usually a great deal of discrepancy between laws and realities. University students could

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postpone their military service until after graduation; expatriates could avoid military service if they paid a certain amount of money in bribery (al-badal, for a few thousand dollars), so most of the conscripts were those who could not pay their way out of the military service. Draftees were thus mainly of rural and poor origin. As a result of demographic realities combined with conscription, the entire Syrian army was not sectarian and Sunnis were a plurality,11 especially Sunnis of rural origin. The daily life of an ordinary Syrian conscript was not easy, plagued with routines and hardships and under severe discipline, with a system of harsh punishments and military courts. Those who could bribe their officers benefited from easier service conditions, such as working as personal servants and drivers for officers. Yet, military service often gave poor rural draftees the opportunity to acquire some technical skills, sometimes even a marketable skill that they could use when they left service. Conscripts in general lacked education; though, increasingly after 1970, the number of secondary and vocational school graduates increased. After the completion of his military service, a man could enlist for five years in the regular armed forces and become an NCO, a channel of social mobility that kept some luster in rural areas in the 2000s. Professional training, food, medical care, housing, a regular pay and retirement benefits kept military service relatively attractive – soldiers could get more than the basic rate of pay in Syria as enlisted officers and even men. Specialists (doctors, engineers, technicians) received a substantial amount of additional pay. Few university-educated, middle-class city dwellers opted for military careers, but officerships remained lucrative to rural and lower-income social groups. In sum, the military remained a channel of social mobility for the nation’s lower classes, mainly Sunni rurals or those who combined social “stigma” with confessional specificity, Alawis: hundreds of Alawis have risen in one generation from an impoverished childhood in the mountains around Lattakia to much enhanced social positions as military officers. Many rural families considered the military career as an opportunity for one of their sons to be able to deliver support/ help (wasta) in later years. Especially in the 2000s, which was a time of frequent drought and agricultural stagnation in rural areas and of harsh economic conditions engendered by liberal reforms, volunteers more often joined the armed forces, both educated (but unemployed) and uneducated youth. Hence, a large part of the Syrian society has been incorporated via the military, as the army has kept some links to society as a channel of

11

A common figure is 70 percent; see Drysdale and Hinnebusch, Syria and the Middle East Peace Process.

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mobility and has shifted less toward the model of a closed entity with an endeavor to develop economic activities as in Egypt. A few other scattered examples will display the importance of conscription for Arab armies. The very different (and small) Tunisian military has also relied on conscription. A source of maintained proximity of the army with society (whatever its closure on itself) has been mandatory military service (twelve months), although there have been many exemptions or alternative ways to perform it. The rank and file are mainly staffed by young men from the more depressed areas of the country – the unemployed, those who don’t study in universities and who cannot prove that they are essential breadwinners. Ordinary soldiers are sociologically different from the officer corps. Conscripts number two-thirds of the army (22,000 out of 27,000), somewhat less in the navy and air force.12 Conscription has created a kind of integration effect for the military – but avoiding conscription became a national sport of sorts in the 1990s, so much so that the police organized raids against those unemployed (“keeping the walls”) in villages. The neighboring Algerian military has particularly put emphasis on conscription to ascertain its links to the people following “the war of liberation.” It developed an expansive network of military schools (Kolean, Oran, Tlemcen) and academies (Cherchell, Tamentefoust, Ecole militaire polytechnique) that have offered still attractive careers for ambitious young. Increased “professionalization” of the military, meaning a professional elite force and additional supplementing militias – the savage war of the 1990s was also waged by the so-called patriot militias or Groupes de légitime défense (GLD) that proliferated after 1994 to number some 100–200,000 men – with a possible scrapping of the national service (al-khedma al-wataniyya) were discussed in the 2000s; but the latter was maintained as it was the guarantee of the army’s “popular character” in an army said to come out of a national revolutionary movement and an important legitimacy resource. The mixture of unwilling social filtration (undesired social effects) as exemplified by Tunisia and targeted constituencies as in Syria, both in a national conscripted army, was at the core of (biased) conscription in Yemen that favored northern (Zaydi) tribes’ recruitment (for two years) and denied southerners’ enlistment – conscription was ended in 2001, then reinstated in 2007 because of the threat of al-Qaeda. Tribal volunteers or “militarized irregulars” (junud mustajanidin) were also integrated in the military during and after the 1994 civil war – who benefited from the discredit of southern soldiers and got much of the latter’s military hardware – then during the Saʿda wars against the Houthi rebels in the 2000s. 12

Anthony Cordesman and Aram Nerguizian, The North African Military Balance (Washington: CSIS, 2009).

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Finally, Libya, an eclectic case of deconstruction of the army (Chapter 2), invented generalized conscription without a real army, also as a way for Qaddafi to sideline it. The people would defend itself through the concept of “the people in arms” (al-shaʿab al-musallah) that gained currency (Article 9 of the proclamation of “people’s power”). General military training was established in 1978 along with the militarization (taʿaskur) of society at large, from basic military instruction in middle schools to military service in the army or in the “People’s Militia” (or People’s Resistance Forces, Quwwat al-Muqawama al-Shaʿabiyya; 45,000 Libyans and also non-Libyans), and then service in a kind of active reserve – conscription into the People’s Militia or in the regular military was largely arbitrary. In 1984, the General People’s Congress proclaimed that women aged seventeen to fifty-six would be conscripted as well as men. There was a general “militarization” of the country, but the system to carry it out was messy and unpredictable: most measures proclaimed with great fanfare tended not to be implemented.13 In January 1979, units of the People’s Militia were the main elements of the Libyan troops (a force of 4,500 men) that Qaddafi sent to Uganda to shore up Idi Amin Dada’s regime, with no great efficiency. Officers remained at the helm of the Libyan system of military conscription, entrusted with the task of “educating Libyans” through military service to the regime’s ideological values “in the service of the revolution.” They were often less than enthusiastic and thus evoked Qaddafi’s ire. Beyond conscription and whatever their closure on themselves (and their privileges), Arab armies have cultivated their cultural and social “embeddedness” and their untouchable image, also an ideational power and often a source of propaganda. In all cases, the army has been framed as a useful and important social actor, an institution positively embedded in society. Conversely, the military valued the high esteem it held by society. And, in some cases, the military could gain a measure of prestige from the same posture that dissociated it to some extent from negative effects of incumbent regimes, such as repression, more commonly associated with interior ministries. That also represented a kind of autonomous ideational power of the military in the Egyptian system. In most cases, the picture was that of a closed military institution with a strong corporatist identity and de facto separate from society (much more so in Egypt than the Syrian or Iraqi armies, for instance), unaccustomed to intermeshing with other interlocutors, business classes, politicians, 13

The first decisions of the chief of staff (February 4, 1975) about military service were met with student riots when known in March 1975 and the military was deployed in the Benghazi university compound (“Chronique politique Libye,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (Marseille: CNRS, 1975, 1978 and 1981)).

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civilian state bureaucracy (as in Turkey or Pakistan by comparison or even Latin America), but rather to impose its views and interests. Arab armies were not sensitized to the societies that surrounded them but rather self-defined as protectors or actors solving problems (with the exception of Tunisia). Armies have positioned themselves aside from society, protected from behind closed doors and have been very reluctant about any civilian oversight. That self-closure was also a surrender to the “regime logic.” For instance, in Egypt, the army’s role in national development (food security, education, etc.), its protection of sovereignty and its relief work in natural disasters has especially been magnified. Such a favorable image has seeped into the culture through numerous vehicles like television, movies, popular songs, museums, national holidays, artworks (for instance, huge paintings on the external walls of barracks in cities). Notwithstanding the “class gap” at its summit between high officers and soldiers and the remaining gap between officers’ and lay civilians’ life,14 the Egyptian army has always striven to remain connected to society – also with huge communication effects. It has presented itself as an expression of the people, cultivating the image of “a big family” that helped and served Egypt by distributing food packages (shantat ghazaʾiyya) or benevolent aid, donating land to construct low-income housing and performing crucial tasks such as building infrastructures, selling cheap consumer goods from its economic enterprises, providing education and absorbing labor demand with conscription and so on, to the point of even to some extent monopolizing the cultural life of the nation (under the regime’s strict guidance). The military has been very careful to ensure its status and image were respected. A culture of militarism has pervaded Egyptian society, attaching great value to the role of the army and identifying it as an establishment of national strength and masculinity (“the factory that manufactures real men,” masnaʿa rigala, as the Egyptian expression puts it). The military has helped cultivate the myth that “the Egyptian military is the people,” with a celebration of the “Egyptian soldier” from the Pharaonic times to the Islamic conquest – an unreliable hadith (saying of the Prophet Muhammad) holds that “the finest soldiers on earth (khayr ajnad alard) are the Egyptians” – displayed in murals and other artwork outside military installations. The (civilian) educational system has promoted 14

Officers are all sons of middle-class and well-to-do, mostly urban and small families, while soldiers are mostly from villages and large families – and NCOs are also of modest origins, with lives closely connected to those of working people and though bettered because of the military.

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a view of history that considered the army nearly legendary for the public imagination. As an extreme form of “barrack-ization” of the country, in Syria, young children were dressed in khaki military-style school uniforms (until the 2000s).15 Education was militarized and students were taught military training as part of their curriculum from secondary school to university – it became a discipline (futuwwa) like sport after 1956.16 Members (udw ʿamil) of the Baath Party and those in the youth movement (taliʿa = pioneers) could participate in military training (dawrat al-saʿiqa). Baath Party local organizations held military preparatory sessions for university students, both men and women each summer – for men the time spent was subtracted from mandatory military service. In its function of socialization, the army was a symbolic but essential provider of militaristic values that were taught to every young Syrian. The overall atmosphere of preparation for war (1970–2011) displayed with the help of the military was functional for the regime to govern/“discipline” Syrian society and to justify the existence of a strong authoritarian system. The regime was benefiting from the atmosphere of militarization much more than the army as a separate entity (from the Assad regime). By comparison with the above cases, in Tunisia, the societal link was related much more to a case of good image preserved by the military institution than a pervasive strategy systematically cultivated by military propaganda and by the regime. The Tunisian army remained to some extent close to society since officers were not prevented to command units near their hometowns. Furthermore, their lifestyle was not different from their counterparts in the middle classes and they did not enjoy privileges that set them apart from society, as in Egypt. The army did public works and participated in highly publicized civilian missions, to help civilians in cases of floods or natural disasters, secure the olive harvest against theft or even do the picking on state-owned properties. The services of military hospitals were appreciated by citizens in Tunis, Gabès, Bizerte, Kairouan, with their relative lack of dysfunction when compared with their civilian counterparts. Hence the army kept a favorable image in society. The cultural ideational power of the Tunisian military did not flourish to the same degree as in Egypt and with the same conceit – the civilian tradition of control from Bourguiba to Ben Ali would not have allowed such manifestations. 15

16

Volker Perthes, “Si Vis Stabilitatem, Para Bellum: State Building, National Security, and War Preparation in Syria,” in War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East, ed. Steven Heydemann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 149–173. “Al-Tarbiyya wa-l-Taghayyirat al-Ijtimaʿiyya fi l-Qutr al-ʿArabi al-Suri,” Iqtisad (Damascus), no. 319, August 1990.

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As a corollary of such “calculated” and preserved links to society, the military could also be influenced politically by spillover effects of some deep societal currents. For instance, in Egypt under Sadat, a dangerous development was the growing attraction of middle-ranking and lower officers to Islamist ideas. Scattered cells from the so-called Islamic Jihad group were eager to infiltrate the army and stage a military coup – a testimony of the still important role of the army in Egypt. They reached some prominence when a cell (most of them officer cadets) led by Salih Sariyya attempted to storm the military academy in April 1974. The most serious and still poorly understood incident took place on October 6, 1981, the eighth anniversary of the 1973 war, when Sadat was assassinated in the middle of a military parade by four gunmen (an artillery lieutenant, a sergeant, a former army officer turned national guard sergeant and a reserve engineer officer in the air defense corps), a cell related to the jihadist group al-Gamaʿat al-Islamiyya. The attack occurred in a military-secured area where everyone had to pass through three separate points of security inspections, in a place where sharpshooters from the Presidential Guard were due to be posted to protect the presidential tribune although, as it turned out, they were absent.17 The plot was mainly devised by a young lieutenant, Khaled Islamboli, who managed to replace his soldiers in the parade by the plotters, and a lieutenant colonel in the air force’s military intelligence, Abbud alZumur, who was released from prison in 2011.18 The assassination was explained through an Islamist prism – a radical jihadist group willing to follow the Iranian revolutionary path to seize power; during interrogation, al-Zumur confessed the difficulty of recruiting from within the military and did this only by chance, after meeting potential recruits in mosques. There was no major cabal within the army to get rid of Sadat, though several military officers were court-martialed or retired after the event. Under Mubarak, there is every reason to believe that the military (and the officer corps) contained all the cleavages and splits found within the larger society, especially a re-Islamized Egyptian society after the 1970s. The setting changed with a generalized re-Islamization: religious practice was not common in the army in the 1960s–1970s, when under Mubarak all military units (and many noticeboards or slogans used by military spokesmen or rhetoric used by the Department of Morale Affairs of the armed forces in charge of propaganda) were full of religious discourses and Quranic or hadith quotations. And extremists could seep in. At least 17 18

Robert Springborg, Mubarak’s Egypt (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989); Hazem Kandil, Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen (London: Verso, 2012). “Abbud al-Zumur Reveals New Secrets,” al-Shuruq, March 13, 2011.

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two assassination attempts against Mubarak in the 1980s originated from the army. In the 1990s, fears about jihadist gains in the enlistees and junior officers (along with the large number of sullen conscripts) led to careful surveillance to prevent the army’s infiltration by “mutaʿassibin” (fanatics). The family backgrounds of individuals seeking commissions in sensitive positions were thoroughly investigated. The examination of candidates (kashf hayat) in the military academies was very strict and included a close study of family history, links and religious backgrounds.19 Though not at all embedded in the regime in the same way, the Tunisian military has not been immune to social trends. In August 1983, the Islamic Liberation Party (a Jordanian Islamist organization distinct from the Muslim Brotherhood) was said to have infiltrated the air force.20 In early 1984, a number of officers and enlisted men were arrested and put to trial.21 Following the November 1987 coup against Bourguiba by Ben Ali, a plot was unveiled that was said to be related to the “security group” of the Islamist Mouvement de la Tendance Islamique (MTI): the coup was allegedly planned by Islamists against Bourguiba’s decision to retrial MTI leader Ghannouchi (this time demanding execution) and was foiled by Ben Ali, who also feared being dismissed – it was planned one day before his own coup against Bourguiba. Two hundred and sixty-nine individuals (among them sixty-six from the military, sixty-two from the security forces) were put to trial and there were rumors of high-ranking officers forced into retirement due to their religiosity.22 In general, religiosity inside the military received a lot of attention under Ben Ali. In the 1990s–2000s, an unwritten rule was to reject applicants in the military who attended mosques regularly. Suspicions reigned as a number of wives of young officers were wearing veils. Numerous NCOs were expelled from the military for allegedly being too pious or asking to do their religious duties in the military as Ben Ali feared the rise of al-Nahda, after the alleged attack of a RCD branch in Bab Souika/Tunis – many have asked to be rehabilitated before the Instance Vérité et Dignité after 2014. 19 20 21

22

Interview with an Egyptian student who was blacklisted from the military academy, location withheld, January 2015. Le Monde, August 24 and 27, 1983. Leon B. Ware, “The Role of the Military in the Post-Bourghuiba Era,” The Middle East Journal, 39(1) (Winter 1985): 27–47; Leon B. Ware, “Ben Ali’s Constitutional Coup in Tunisia,” The Middle East Journal, 42(4) (Autumn 1988): 587–601. “Chronique tunisienne,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (Marseille: IREMAM-CNRS, 1987); François Burgat, L’islamisme au Maghreb (Paris: Karthala, 1988), 253–255; Rémy Leveau, Le sabre et le turban (Paris: F. Bourin, 1993); see the interviews of Salah Karker (president of the MTI) and Habib Mokni (MTI representative for France) in M. Camau and V. Geisser, Le syndrome autoritaire (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2003).

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Armies as Big, Budget-Hungry Institutions Keeping Their Hold on Resources, Also with Foreign Financing In general, Arab armies have been budget-hungry institutions with a constant claim on resources and a deep corporate identity weighting on their respective polities. And regimes gave them or let them gain a stranglehold on a substantial share of national resources (for tentative figures, see Figure 2 and 3). In the 1960s–1970s at times of Arab-Israeli wars, the military ranked as a top priority in terms of money allocations: during this golden period of “war economies,”23 a good part of the national budget was allocated to the armed forces – between 60 and 70 percent of the total budget in Egypt and Syria in the first half of the 1970s – without much accountability. Even after Egypt removed itself from the Arab-Israeli conflict and sealed off the end of the great Arab-Israeli wars, the drain on resources by military establishments was not halted. Egyptian defense expenditures in real terms fell to US$4 billion between 1979 and 1981 in the wake of the peace accord, then rose sharply in 1982 to US$7.5 billion (23 percent of total government expenditure), to stabilize in the subsequent five years (US$6.5 billion) – with US military aid and money received from Saudi Arabia.24 The size of the Egyptian armed forces actually increased after 1981, even though one might have assumed that the peace treaty with Israel would stimulate troop reductions. As the 1990s introduced hopes of regional peace with the Oslo peace process and prospective regional demilitarization, the Egyptian army’s thirst for weapon imports did not diminish. In the beginning of the 2000s, Egypt even supplanted Saudi Arabia as the primary recipient of US weapons in the Middle East. In Syria, the regime lavishly spent on the army and as much as 30–35 percent of the government’s budget may have been devoted to the military, though, admittedly, all figures were tentative.25 The Syrian armed forces’ manpower was 80,000 in 1970, 170,000 in 1973, 225,000 in 1982, 400,000 in 1986, 410,000 in the early 1990s and jumped with the creation of new divisions to more than 500,000 to stabilize around 400–420,000.26 Syrian defense expenditures soared from perhaps 10 percent of the GDP in the years 1970–1974 (much more in 1973) to 15–20 percent in the second half of the 1970s – they did not include 23

24 25 26

Jacob Hurewitz, Middle East Politics: The Military Dimension (New York: Praeger, 1969); Michael Barnett, Confronting the Costs of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). The Military Balance (London: IISS), various years; for SIPRI’s figures, see Figure 2. Volker Perthes, The Political Economy of Syria under Asad (London: Tauris, 1995). Figures are secretive and incomplete, various issues of The Military Balance (London: IISS) checked to make approximations, with various interviews with officers.

Egypt, Arab Rep. Jordan Syrian Arab Republic Tunisia Yemen, Rep.

Military expenditure (current USD)

Figure 2 Military expenditure (current US dollars)

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Yearbook: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security. License: Use and distribution of these data are subject to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) terms and conditions.

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Figure 3 Military expenditure (% of GDP)

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute ( SIPRI ), Yearbook: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security. License: Use and distribution of these data are subject to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) terms and conditions.

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“supplemental” military appropriations. The 1978 Camp David Accords coincided with a massive buildup of the Syrian armed forces with an increase in troops by 50 percent, the doubling of the number of tanks and the tripling of that of combat helicopters.27 After 1984, the Syrian armed forces were curtailed (with the demobilization of two divisions) and their budget dropped as a consequence of state budget fiscal constraints.28 In 1986, military expenditures reached 14 percent, then dropped to 10 percent in the early 1990s. The reasons for the reduction in defense outlays were misguided economic policies that led Syria close to financial bankruptcy in 1986, with little more than one week’s worth of imports in currency reserves; in 1987–1988 the GDP actually contracted.29 In a similar way and surprisingly for a poorly resourced and bankrupted state, Yemeni defense expenditures were high, between 20 and 40 percent of the government’s budget (also secretive and controversial figures) without much transparency on how the military budget was spent – furthermore, the budget of the military’s economic wing (YECO) went undeclared.30 Some estimations put the Yemeni military budget in the 2000s as the eighth-highest percentage of GDP spent on the military in the world for one of the most aided countries (along with Jordan). The size of the army was increased markedly, from a small volunteer force of some 3,000 to 5,000 men in the mid-1970s to 37,000 at the time of unification (counting only northern contingents) – Yemen even sent “volunteer” contingents to fight on the Iraqi side in the last years of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). Following the 1994 civil war, the Yemeni army’s manning level jumped to 58,000 men (with the maintenance of a two-year conscription system). In the 2000s, the Yemeni air force (and a key branch with its combat helicopters) was also expanded from 2,000 to 5,000 men with US financial help. In total, in the 2000s, some sources estimated the total army’s manpower at 176,000 strong – less conservative figures put it at 200,000. Figures in general in Yemen (from the military to development issues) were sources of controversy and most 27 28 29

30

Patrick Clawson, Unaffordable Ambitions: Syria’s Military Buildup and Economic Crisis (Washington: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1989). Ibid. Yahya Sadowski, “Cadres, Guns and Money,” Middle East Report, July–August 1985; Nabil Sukkar, “The Crisis of 1986 and Syria’s Plan for Reform,” in Contemporary Syria, ed. Eberhardt Kienle (London: Tauris, 1996), 26–43; Stanley Fisher, Dani Rodrik and Elias Tuma, eds., The Economics of Middle East Peace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Steven Heydemann, ed., War, Institutions and Social Change in the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). “Parliament and Cabinet: Tensions Accumulated,” Yemen Times, September 19, 2005; “Yemen’s Increase in Spending on Weapons over the Last Ten Years,” Yemen Post, April 10, 2010.

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brigades have historically been understaffed at one-third to one-half of their official strength, with the generalized problem of “ghost soldiers” (those on the payroll but not attending and whose salaries were pocketed by commanders) throughout the entire army – some put the total figure of ghost soldiers at 100,000.31 In Arab armies, quantitative considerations trumped everything, especially qualitative issues of military capabilities. In general, Arab militaries have been eager to get technologically sophisticated weapons even if they lacked the personnel with the requisite skills to operate them at their fullest capacity and potential and, in many cases, the infrastructure necessary for their proper maintenance. The Egyptian armed forces fielded more tanks (4,000) than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa combined and the fourth largest fleet of US F16 fighters (240 or so) in the world. Large numbers were achieved at the price of low-grade big units in Egypt, not well geared for modern warfare when compared with other professional and technological armies. Syrian militarization remained limited to the quantitative expansion of conventional warfare capabilities with huge numbers of Russian tanks, medium-range missiles and anti-tank missiles. At the same time, the high command displayed no willingness to address the weaknesses of the Syrian army, in particular the technological gap with Israel, or to upgrade military capabilities: tanks were dug in fixed posts and big bases; the army and the air force had a reputation for poor maintenance; and all services, other than air defense, were fundamentally obsolete in both equipment and tactical preparedness. Inspection officers on regular visits (something that allegedly began in the mid-1980s) to assess the preparedness of units on behalf of the central command were systematically bribed to write positive evaluations.32 And, similarly, the huge Yemeni military, at least ten brigades in 2009, half of the regular forces, was unsuccessfully involved in six counterinsurgency campaigns in 2004–2009 against the ragtag Houthi rebellion in Saʿda. In the 1990s, as a result of the mounting need for social spending with acute social demands and neoliberal reforms, a shift in state policies was observable in several countries. Regimes were motivated by fears that the equilibrium that kept them in power could crumble when faced with increasing social demands after hunger revolts occurred. Therefore, efforts trying to target at least the partial reversal of the army’s stranglehold on state budgets began to emerge.33 Egyptian defense budgets steadily declined in proportion to the GDP (19.5 percent of GDP in 31 32 33

“Yemen Army: The Regime’s Cash Cow,” al-Akhbar (Sanaa), July 13, 2012. Kheder Khadour, Asad’s Officer Ghetto (Beirut: Carnegie Middle East Center, November 2015). Yahya Sadowski, Scuds or Butter? (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1993).

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1980, 9.6 percent in 1987, 3.6 percent in 1990, 2.6 percent in 2000, 3.3 percent in 2007, 2.9 percent in 2008, 2.2 percent in 2010):34 when they remained the same or increased in absolute terms, they did not match the growth of Egypt’s GNP (see Figures 2 and 3).35 The military received proportionally less compared to the rapid increase in the interior’s budget (as a consequence of the Islamist challenge), but it got much of what it wanted. New budget constraints gradually emerged whereby the army would have to bargain and pressure for its budget share inside the Egyptian system, differing from earlier periods when it was able to automatically obtain resources in the name of national security. The grim state of the economy even fueled an unprecedented yet self-limiting debate among intellectuals regarding the army’s contribution to development or conversely its somewhat detrimental role.36 In Syria in the early 1990s, budget battles were fought even between the military and reformers (civilian technocrats) who became bolder and were allowed by Hafez to make some priority claims for social expenditures on scarce economic resources. In the 1990s, the Syrian economy structurally encountered difficulties in combining allocations for defense purposes, to prepare for “strategic parity” with Israel, with a comparatively high level of civilian public expenditure to wage “war against poverty.”37 Still, the military learned to tap other resources: smuggling from or pillaging in Lebanon (until 2005), using revenues from oil in the Deir ez-Zor area to finance the expansion of the praetorian Republican Guard or getting taxes leveled on the private sector in the name of “the war effort” (al-majhud al-harbi). To be sure, the armed forces of the region have remained dominant stakeholders and retained much of their clout, but they increasingly found themselves in the position that actually compelled them to some extent to negotiate and fight for their share of the economic pie, something that was taken for granted in the 1960s–1970s. Yet, Arab militaries have struggled to adapt themselves to this new setting. As a consequence, all talks of the 1990s about a prospective reduction of military expenses as economically unsustainable have proved idle in view of armies’ abilities to keep a grip on 34 35

36 37

Figures from the World Bank Military Expenditures % GNP (reprinted from SIPRI Yearbook). The figures of the military budget are unsafe (some data give a budget five times the published figure); the Egyptian defense ministry seems to take it from the SIPRI Yearbook, whose data are based on questionnaires sent to Egypt (hence the defense ministry!); see other estimates by the American-Israeli colonel Shawn Pine, “Egypt’s Defense Expenditures: $2.7 Billion or $14 Billion?” NATIV Online, 2003. Ahmed ʿAbdallah, ed., al-Jaysh wa-l-Dimuqratiyya fi Masr (Cairo: Dar al-Sina li-l-Nashr, 1990). ʿAref Dalila, “ʿAjz al-Muwaʾazana al-ʿAmma wa-Sabil Muʾalajathu,” Damascus, Economic Sciences Association, Paper no. 9, April 1999, 35.

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resources: money has been less profligate for armies, but their stranglehold on resources has not been seriously loosened. In parallel to the “authoritarian bargain” between societies and regimes (e.g., the symbolic trading of the absence of “voice”/political representation for theoretically ensuring economic development, social equity, the fight against Israel, Arab unity, stability), regimes had a similar bargain with their armies (to secure them with enough resources for loyalty and support). A significant proportion of the oversized defense outlays were actually payoffs to the military, without external (civilian) control. The Egyptian defense minister appeared annually before parliamentarians to present an aggregated figure of military expenditure until the constitutional amendments of 2007 – at that point the prime minister assumed that task. There was little discussion since the Defense and National Security Committee in the parliament was chaired by a former general and staffed more or less exclusively with parliamentarians who were former military or police officers.38 The armed forces were staying outside politics and budget was an untouchable “red line” in Egypt. In Yemen, the debate about the military budget was shelved off with a constitutional article that banned defense and security budget monitoring by the parliament or the Central Auditing and Control Organization. Growth in equipment and manpower devoted to the armed forces increased also markedly in close correlation with the growth of oil revenues (for oil producers) and the trickle-down effect of aid (for nonproducing countries). Cash flow irrigated the whole region not just oil producers with a complex system of bilateral or regional aid between Arab countries/“brothers,” specific disbursements for budget balancing in other countries, purchases on behalf of other poorer states and so on, hence signaling the crucial importance of oil prices to the budget of nonoil states. As a corollary, the financing of military expenses also followed the vagaries of oil prices and inter-Arab diplomatic relations. Cash flow in the Arab World was enormous after the 1970s and helped sustain big armies. No other Third World region witnessed such a flow of money, especially in one decade, between 1973 and 1982. Oil flows allowed the generous funding of military establishments, also creating a vital market for external arms suppliers. The region had the dubious distinction of hosting the world’s largest weapons markets in the 1970s and 1980s with the largest purveyors of arms being the Permanent Five (P5) of the UN

38

Mohammed Hassanein Heikal, Mubarak wa-Zamanhu (Cairo: al-Shuruq, 2012); Muhammad al-Baz, al-Muchir, Qissat Suʿud wa-Inhiyar Abu Ghazala (Cairo: Kenouz li-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawziʿ, 2007).

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Security Council and in the first place the USSR and the US weapons industry that won showy arms deals. A regional political economy of militarization was highly prevalent. In 1975, Sadat established the Arab Organization for Industrialization to build an Arab arms industry capitalizing on Egyptian capabilities and financed to a large extent by the oil-rich Gulf Arab states – before the Arab boycott of Egypt after the signing of the Camp David Accords. Syria exploited its strategic location, the political value of its hard-line diplomatic positioning as the alleged defender of the Arab heartlands and its confrontational posture toward Israel, to get substantial resources from Saudi Arabia, other Gulf states and Libya. Gulf aid declined in the 1980s after Syria aligned with Iran and was partially made up for by Soviet loans at favorable terms for arms procurements. Some attention should be paid to Libya (see Chapter 4 for Gulf oil producers). Qaddafi needed a powerful military, at least on paper, in accordance with his dreams of power projection in the Arab World and Africa. Yet, the army remained modest in size, as a consequence of Libyan state-building constraints and inherent (human resources) limits and, above all, out of Qaddafi’s defiant stance toward the military as an institution and its thorough deconstruction (Chapter 2). Rather, the regime devoted substantial resources for defense-related purchases but with no real army, as a consequence of its institutional messy character. The square was circled by the fact that this forceful quantitative militarization was in line, theoretically, with the official aim of creating “the people in arms.” The paradox, one of many in Qaddafi’s Libya, was that his regime did not have the size of armed forces commensurate with its regional ambitions, save for the large defense budget and the accumulated arsenal. No reliable figures were disclosed but in the first half of the 1980s, arms imports represented one-quarter of all Libyan exports, transforming the country into a veritable arsenal, with more than two-thirds of the purchases originating in the Soviet Union and its allies. The increase in spending was closely related to rising oil revenues; thereafter defense expenditure decreased.39 Only Qaddafi and his confidantes in the army leadership were aware of the true magnitude of such expenditure. The equipment purchased was generally substandard – arms procurements were poorly conceived shopping sprees – and the levels of both maintenance and training were low. The air force was endowed with the largest stock of equipment relative to its small personnel (including as many as 39

Anthony Cordesman and Aram Nerguizian, The North African Military Balance (Washington: CSIS, 2009).

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500 Soviet fighter jets), which was complemented with a high proportion of foreign personnel. Libya had access to ultra-modern jet fighters and training sessions abroad, especially in France. On paper, Libya’s tank force was the world’s tenth largest and it also fielded a massive artillery and missile force. In order to maintain its military capability, Libya relied heavily on advisers from East Germany, Syria (in particular pilots), Cuba, along with various mercenaries recruited among African workers (who went to Libya to benefit from the petroleum bonanza) to staff Libyan units or the so-called Islamic Legion. The circle of incoherent objectives – a big army meant having to depend on a politically unreliable military that the regime did not wish and that was not compensated by “the people’s power” – was also squared with the systematic acquisition of weapons of mass destruction – nuclear weapons especially from black-market entrepreneurs or proliferators in Russia and Pakistan, chemical weapons (allegedly used against Chadian troops in 1987) and a small biological program.40 Very symptomatically, Qaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, lamented at a time of the 2011 uprising that the regime should have spent more on the military!41 In fact, spending was huge with oil money but widely used for weapons acquisition rather than training and capacity building. In parallel, foreign alliances, during the Cold War and differently in the post–Cold War era, were also an essential resource to sustain military expenses, in a model of search for strategic rents by Arab states to build military apparatuses.42 Mass Cold War arms purchases have influenced the nature of Arab armies, especially their equipment with Soviet arms, the use of Soviet warfare tactics (massive tank attacks, heavy artillery barrages, missiles umbrellas) – until now, the Egyptians have kept by their own old (and majoritarian) Soviet equipment in operation. After 1955, Egypt received huge amounts of military aid from the Soviet Union. After the 1967 disaster, the Soviet Union swiftly airlifted new equipment along with its own pilots and technicians to rebuild the Egyptian army – Moscow sent 3,000 instructors in 1967, with 15,000 field unit personnel in 1970 and perhaps as many as 20,000 in 1972. The Soviet connection introduced an uneasy dependency. The treaty of friendship between the two countries never concealed the view that the Soviets were dragging their feet with respect to arms supplies – to supply 40

41 42

Ronald Bruce St John, “Libya Is Not Iraq, Preemptive Strikes, WMD and Diplomacy,” The Middle East Journal, 58(3) (Summer 2004): 386–402; Bruce Jentleson, “Who ‘Won’ Libya?” International Security, 30(3) (Winter 2005/06): 47–86. “Interview with Saif al-Islam Qaddafi,” Russian TV, July 1, 2011. Barry Buzan and Ole Waever, Regions and Power (London: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Emmanuel Adler and Michael Barnett, eds., Security Communities (London: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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Egypt with an integrated air defense system (SAM missiles) and to boost supplies (of advanced MIG fighters, anti-tanks weapons, SCUD missiles). The other side of dependency was the financial burden (and regular debts rescheduling) that military debt toward the USSR signified for Egypt’s shaky finances. Using Soviet procrastination of new arms deliveries as a pretext, Sadat, who was more than willing to explore new relations with the United States, expelled Soviet advisers in July 1972. Diplomatic realignments had a crucial military (and economic) component. After the signing of the Camp David Accords, the United States picked up the slack of supplying Egypt with weapons. Abu Ghazala, who was military attaché in Washington, DC (1976–1979), worked closely with then vice president Mubarak in devising the new US military aid programs.43 Cairo repositioned itself in a triangular diplomatic relationship (between Egypt, Israel and the US) as a peace partner for Israel. Security assistance began in 1979 in the form of Foreign Military Financing (FMF) loans for the purchase of US arms and funding for International Military Education Training (IMET) programs to train officers in the US. After an initial US$1.5 billion in 1979, military aid was reduced to US$550 million in 1981. Then, with the deepening of the relationship, the US aid turned into a stable US$1.3 billion annual military aid package in FMF after 1986.44 Incidentally, for a loyalist group (to Sadat) of high officers (Mubarak, Abu Ghazala) who bet on American aid, the purchase of new advanced Western weaponry, massive American military aid and participation in joint annual exercises (the annual Bright Star maneuvers) beginning in November 1980 was a way to address concerns among Egyptian junior and mid-ranking officers, alarmed by Sadat’s turn away from Egypt’s main supplier and the ensuing decline in operational readiness (with the lack of Soviet spare parts). Egypt’s close military relations with the US were used by the Egyptian army as a way to fund and sustain the high level of Egyptian military expenditure.45 A complex system was built between the Egyptian Armament Authority, the Pentagon, the US Office of Military Cooperation in Cairo and the Egyptian Procurement Office in Washington – with links to Congress, as congressional notifications were necessary depending on the size and nature of Egyptian requests, in particular concerning the delivery of sophisticated arms. The first three-year arms package 43 44

45

Springborg, Mubarak’s Egypt. William B. Quandt, The United States and Egypt (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1990); Zeinab Abul-Magd, Militarizing the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). al-Baz, al-Muchir.

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(US$1.5 billion), paid by Saudi Arabia, was modest in technology and began with transport planes, then medium-tech fighters. In 1987, the US agreed for the assembly and coproduction of the most advanced US M1A1 Abrams tank in Egypt (Abu Za’abal military factory 200) with FMF loans – with hopes among Egyptian generals that they could export such locally produced tanks across the region, an idea resented by the US, willing to keep control on exports. Furthermore, Egypt enjoyed financing privileges. US arms sales (FMF) were converted from loans to full grants after 1985 and Egypt benefited from favorable conditions (“early disbursement” of the FMF assistance and “cash flow financing” arrangements). In 1991 as a result of Egypt taking part in the coalition against Saddam, the US waived US$7.1 billion of Egypt’s military debt – and EU countries in the Paris Club did cut Egyptian civilian debt by a half. Hence, the flow of US military aid decisively helped the Egyptian army to sustain its high level of forces. With US help, the Egyptian military got the prestige of having access to sophisticated technology with yearly FMF on a grant basis to cover costs of American equipment and the IMET annual package providing opportunities for training. True, the Egyptian officer corps resented receiving less sophisticated weapons (with strings attached) when compared with Israel or even Saudi Arabia, with a constant search of parity with Israel for advanced weapons (such as the number of F16s, access to missile technology, the pace of weapons deliveries). Though fraught with misunderstandings and hence vindicating a disconnection between alliances and foreign influence,46 the US-Egypt alliance has been a solid convergence on mutual interests that benefited the Egyptian military. Yet, the Egyptian army resisted all efforts by the US to restructure/modernize its forces to improve their combat effectiveness, which Washington offered after the Egyptians’ at best mediocre performance in Operation Desert Storm in Kuwait in 1991. Egyptian air defense remained dominated by Soviet and increasingly French systems; the ground forces were still mainly equipped with Soviet gear; only the air force and the navy were truly modernized. Defense Minister Tantawi refused to sign “memorandums of understanding” with the US regulating technology use and transfers to third parties (unlike Gulf monarchies) and as a consequence was deprived of advanced technology upgrades (communications) in the 46

Stephen Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Abdelfattah Said ElSisi, “Democracy in the Middle East” (Pennsylvania: US Army War College, March 15, 2006); Sedky Sobhy, “The US Military Presence in the Middle East” (Pennsylvania: US Army War College, March 18, 2005); Sherifa Zuhur, “General Sisi at the U.S. Army War College,” https://sherifazuhur.wordpress.com/2013/ 08/01.

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most advanced systems (F16 jets, M1A1 tanks).47 Procurements have prevailed on other aspects of cooperation (doctrine, formation). US assistance has been seen in Egyptian decision-making circles as a payoff for maintaining peace with Israel and keeping the Egyptian army in shape, but without significant reforms. Conversely, Egypt represented a high strategic prize for the US giving Egypt a tremendous value, sufficient to support any regime in Cairo: it granted unlimited over-flight rights, expedited passage for US military vessels including nuclear vessels through the Suez Canal (the only country in the world that offered this perk), shared intelligence, selective access to military facilities (though Egypt did not grant permanent basing rights), extended logistical support for US ventures in the area (beginning with the providing of arms to the Afghan rebels/mujahidin until the invasion of Iraq, then confrontation with Iran). As a corollary, the Egyptian army’s main basis of support in Washington, DC, has not been in political circles, think tanks or lobbies but in the US military – even at the highest point of crisis when Egypt went after NGOs working with US democracy promotion institutions in 2012. Similarly, the Soviet Union was a massive purveyor of weapons for Syria until the end of the Cold War. Arms deliveries were largely financed from abroad (quite differently from Syria’s military expenditures for salaries and maintenance) and Damascus managed to pay only a fraction of its armament bill. For the period 1979–1984, Syria was the number one weapons importer in the Third World.48 Syria fielded a formidable conventional military machine that proved a match (for some time) for the Israelis in the Golan in 1973 and during their 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The Soviets rebuilt Syria’s defenses, an impressive array of SCUD missiles and the most sophisticated air defense network outside the Soviet Union, after 1983 with large credits that resulted in a huge military debt in 1988. The collapse of the Soviet Union eroded one of the main sources of Syrian militarization. And Moscow urged Damascus to reimburse its military debt, creating further pressures on Syria’s modest currency revenues. Alliances in the Gulf War in 1990–1991 provided the Syrian regime with some breathing space (and funding). In 1991, Syria participated in the US-led coalition against Baathist yet rival Iraq and received some additional strategic rents from the Gulf states. Gulf aid thereafter declined or was stopped and was complemented with Iranian grants in the form of oil deliveries or financial assistance. External rents allowed Syria 47 48

Robert Springborg, “Learning from Failure,” in The Routledge Handbook of Civil-Military Relations, ed. Thomas Bruneau and Florina Matei (London: Routledge, 2013), 102. SIPRI Yearbook, Stockholm, 1985.

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to maintain a relatively large defense budget whose level was very sensitive to changes in financing linked to those of geopolitics (the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 1991 Gulf War). Buying sophisticated military equipment was also a chip given to the officer corps. Since the 1990s, modernization has been a high priority for the generation of officers in command. During the Gulf War of 1991, they witnessed the demolition of the Iraqi military machine and saw that the huge armies they had spent a generation building up were technologically obsolescent. This realization motivated Damascus’s search for sophisticated military equipment (missiles, jet fighters, radar systems, etc.) in Russia, China, Iran or North Korea, along with biological, chemical and, according to some sources (and the Israeli strike on an alleged nuclear facility near Deir-ez-Zor in September 2007), nuclear warfare capabilities, along with the development of more conventional assembly lines for weapons and equipment with China, North Korea and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) – but this was nothing compared with the systematic Egyptian endeavor through US imports or ambitious military industry programs.49 More than any other Arab country, Yemen played adroitly on outside financing, as highlighted by the numerous ways by which Yemen got external aid to buy arms by playing on Cold War equilibriums, regional influences or post–Cold War priorities. Increased militarization since the 1970s could not have been sustained without foreign help. Following the Egyptian departure, North Yemen got military shipments (artillery, tanks and vehicles) from the Soviets who had invested a lot in the republic (a new airport in Sanaa, a new port in Hodeida) – to the point that the US feared that the Soviet Union might obtain permission to set up air and submarine bases in the country – and, after the signing of a military agreement (in March 1963), an aid program larger than the parallel (and maintained) US aid. Soviet shipments diminished in the early 1970s when the USSR chose to support the more leftist PRSY/PDRY. North Yemen thereafter relied more extensively on the US. Under Saleh, the military was overequipped in material imported from foreign countries, in the context of what was described by foreign diplomats and Yemeni (civilian) high technocrats as a shopping spree of equipment and relentless pressures for arms purchases by the army50 – furthermore in a country awash of light weapons mostly obtained through regional 49 50

Murhaf Jouejati, “Syrian Motives for Its WMD Programs and What to Do about Them,” The Middle East Journal, 59(1) (Winter 2005): 52–61. US State Department, “Billion Dollar Arms Deal Denied,” March 7, 2009, and “Sa’da Solution Requires More Thought, Less Weapons,” November 10, 2009, leaked by Wikileaks. For pleas to the US, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar, see US State

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smuggling in the Red Sea. Differently from Egypt, Yemen had access most often not to technologically advanced weapons but to old Iraqi, Moldavian (Russian) or Chinese equipment available on the international arms markets after the 1990s. The armed forces had privileged access to a wealth of funding for arms imports, but often in a biased way according to the Saleh regime’s logic, which favored praetorian, familial-led forces. For fear of his rising influence in the 2000s, Saleh forced upon Ali Mohsen’s First Division some curtailments in the number of men enlisted (for alleged budgetary constraints) and restricted its access to new military hardware despite its deep involvement in the Sa’da wars, when the newly created units such as the Republican Guard continued to procure weapons. Weapons imports were relaunched under the pretext of the Huthi rebellion or the fight against al-Qaeda in the 2000s. Ali Abdallah Saleh developed a rare ability to manipulate the US for aid and counterterrorism, along with Saudi Arabia. The US funneled millions of dollars to Yemen to purchase military equipment and pay military training, a very controversial issue as funds were diverted or looted.51 And foreign advisers played a key role. In the 1990s, Iraqi, Sudanese, Eritrean or Jordanian advisers replaced the Soviet military trainers of the 1980s. Foreign advisers were crucial in a Yemeni army where numbers were one thing but were often distinct from capabilities and abilities to man modern weapons. And Yemen lacked professional military education with the exception of a command staff college and some of its officers who were sent to foreign countries, in particular Jordan. After 2001, Western and in particular American advisers took the lead, especially in the praetorian forces developed by Saleh and his relatives. Lastly, the above cases of big budget-hungry military institutions with access to rents or external resources should be put in parallel with the exceptional case of Tunisia, which will display the exact opposite features. Tunisia has had the lowest rate of defense expenditure in the Arab World. The Tunisian army was not very well resourced for structural Tunisian constraints and also a choice of the regime from Bourguiba to Ben Ali to sustain civil-military relations unbalanced toward the civilian side. And officers had little say in the formulation of the army’s annual budget. The Tunisian military was kept small and endowed with limited means – 9,500 men in 1956, 20,000 in 1961, 42,000 in 1987. From independence

51

Department, “Supporting Yemen’s Request for More Armored Vehicles,” March 27, 2007. US Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Following the Money in Yemen and Lebanon (Washington: GAO, 2010); and later (after the US special forces withdrew from Yemen), “Pentagon Loses Track of $500 Million in Weapons, Equipment Given to Yemen,” The Washington Post, March 17, 2015.

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until 1975, the defense budget never reached 2 percent of GDP and was always lower than resources devoted for health or education in the state budget, indicating clear priorities and civilian preeminence. Tellingly, the defense ministry’s budget was lower than the interior’s, with some increases after 1966. As regional or internal security threats were mounting in the 1970s, Bourguiba accepted, under pressure from the (civilian) defense minister, that a modernization program (tanks, airplanes, anti-aircraft defense) was necessary. The resulting increases in military expenditure (60 percent in 1975–1976 and 71 percent in 1976–1977) were radically new for Tunisia. Between 1975 and 1980, the defense budget (tripled between 1975 and 1977) reached 4 to 6 percent of GDP, creating huge financial problems and a large debt for the country. The Gafsa attack in 1980 served as a serious reminder of the Tunisian army’s weakness and spurred a second modernization program in 1982–1986, with US military credits increasing sixfold during that period – this rebalancing on behalf of defense was reversed in 1984. Yet, these ebbs and flows never meant an empowerment of the army. Tunisia had few resources to finance a defense modernization program. Washington became Tunisia’s top military sponsor, especially as tensions were mounting between the US and Libya in 1981.52 Officers’ desire for new armaments and technology increased as well as their frustration that they didn’t receive the equipment commensurate with their involvement in safeguarding the regime after they restored public order in 1984, bailing out the incompetent police and National Guard. For instance, in 1985, the army pressured Prime Minister M’Zali to get new and expensive fighter jets at a time of economic recession, what was called “a catastrophic whim,”53 but it failed to persuade him. The “economy of defense” and preparation for war so typical of other Arab countries never materialized in Tunisia. Tunisia never took part in regional arms races to equip armies with modern huge military hardware, such as one witnessed in the Mashreq in the 1950s or in the Maghreb with Soviet deliveries to Algeria (US$200 million in the five years after independence) and the dozens of modern fighters and tanks bought by Qaddafi’s Libya.54 Financial problems were recurrent for Tunisian military procurements that were never left under the control of or made under 52 53 54

Leon B. Ware, Tunisia in the Post-Bourguiba Era (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air Force University Press, 1986). Mohammed M’Zali, Lettre ouverte à Habib Bourguiba (Paris: Alain Moreau, 1987), 113–114. Stuart H. Schaar, “The Arms Race and Defense Strategy in North Africa,” American University Field Staff Reports, Vol. XIII, no. 9, December 1967.

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pressures from the army. Most arms purchases were driven and determined not just by security threats but by financial constraints. Even as tensions were mounting in the region, Tunisia had to buy used equipment, often outmoded ones, or wait for small donations from foreign allies, and in numerous cases refused to buy modern weaponry. As a corollary of this cultivated and also constrained military weakness, security threats for a small country like Tunisia with turbulent neighbors – Algeria after 1962 and Libya after 1969 – were primarily met with security guarantees from external alliances (France, the US) and diplomatic balancing in the complex Arab World (with Algeria, Egypt), while avoiding being brought into the intricacies of Arab politics. After the Ben Ali coup in 1987, military budgets increased but only by a little when compared with the growth in the interior ministry’s expenditure. Revealingly, before his fall in 2011, Ben Ali allocated 50 percent more funds to the 12,000-strong National Guard than to the army, navy and air force combined. The army’s budget was lower in the 2000s than in the mid-1980s. Still, the weapon transfers were modest when compared with regional standards. And arms purchases increased Tunisia’s foreign debt. Ben Ali had to renegotiate Tunisian military debt in 1987.55 At that point, US aid radically diminished (with grants disappearing entirely), after Tunisia’s reluctance to oppose Iraq in the Gulf War of 1990–1991 and it resumed only in 1994. Since 1994, the US has been Tunisia’s primary weapons supplier, mainly purchased through Foreign Military Sales (FMS) agreements, along with the Pentagon’s “Section 1206” security assistance funds.56 Tunisia has been one of the top recipients (though in modest amounts) of International Military Education and Training (IEMT), along with the Counterterrorism Fellowship Program (CTFP), complemented with opportunities to train in French military schools or instruction centers. External assistance has been small in comparison, but essential for Tunisia’s weakly resourced armed forces to maintain its aging 1980s- and early 1990s-era inventory of US-origin equipment, which comprises nearly 70 percent of Tunisia’s total inventory.57 In April 2002, thirteen high-ranking officers of the Tunisian armed forces, including the chief of staff, were killed in a helicopter crash decimating the command staff of the military. Widespread suspicions in Tunisia claimed that the accident was the elimination of officers considered insufficiently loyal – the file was reopened after the 2011 uprising but no conclusive information surfaced 55 56 57

Nicole Grimaud, La Tunisie à la recherche de sa sécurité (Paris: PUF, 1995). State Department Congressional Budget Justifications (Washington, DC, State Department and Congress, various fiscal years). Defense Security Cooperation Agency, “Tunisia Summary,” Washington, January 13, 2011.

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against the accident hypothesis.58 The mishap would probably be a result of the largely obsolete equipment. Deep Military Encroachments into Civilian Economies: The Flip Side of Embeddedness in Regimes Competition for economic resources combined with a much more professionalized hence corporatist military, along with the army’s status as a vital pillar for regimes, led to broad military encroachments into the (civilian) economy. An important rationale for such economic activities is the inevitable corporatism associated with big armies and kept big, a preferred choice for authoritarian regimes. But encroachments went much farther. Armies went into business ventures first in connection with the acquisition of military equipment and then continued to venture into civilian activities as well. In Egypt, the army’s economic role greatly expanded under Mubarak’s three-decade reign, operating a business empire that went far beyond weapons manufacturing – Nasser first developed the Egyptian defense industry in the 1950s. Although the Egyptian army was admittedly the most commercially active Arab army, a number of other defense establishments in the region, such as Syria, Iraq under Saddam, Algeria and Yemen, were also heavily invested in their respective economies – such economic involvement did not exist at all in Tunisia. Aside from their economic significance, the army’s business activities revealed much about officers’ relationships with politics in their respective states. In Egypt, the range of the generals’ economic involvement aptly mirrored the army’s status as foundational pillar of the polity. Incidentally, it diverted the military from politics toward business and highlighted the growing collusion between the army’s high hierarchy, businessmen linked to the regime (crony capitalists) and political elites. The military’s economic endeavors and powerful networks in politics and business set the army apart from other institutions and social groups and, as a consequence, were also an indicator of the degree to which the army saw itself as an institution with its own interests in the survival of authoritarian regimes and, conversely, how regimes relied on such a military pillar. In this sense, the term “military economy” was to some extent a misnomer. The (large) portion of the national economy that the armed forces dominated was not a structured economic sector per se. Rather, the military as a crucial pillar of the regime benefited from its position in state and society and took advantage of that position within the country’s 58

Tunisia First Channel’s program “Chute d’un régime corrompu,” April 19, 2011, followed by a communiqué of the defense ministry on April 29, 2011.

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economy. In Egypt, military business became more elaborate than any of its counterparts in the region, even with joint ventures with multinational companies and complex financing schemes. But it was not built only upon an economic rationality (profitability, investments), as it benefited mainly from subventions, the circumventing of laws and regulations and advanced information on auctions. Similarly, and yet less well known, the Algerian military secured access to the oil and gas rent. It further developed huge economic interests – economic holdings, stakes in import markets in wheat, raw materials, pharmaceuticals, sugar and cars, construction and infrastructure projects, a huge logistical base near Blida, joint Algerian-Libyan or Algerian-Emirati banks to invest in real estate in Paris – and expansive patronage, as a consequence of the necessary approval of the Bureau de sécurité et de prévention (BS) related to the Sécurité Militaire/DRS for employment in all public enterprises, central administrations and wilayat (territorial collectivities). This was called in Algeria the “khubz-ist” part of the army (khubz meaning bread in Arabic). And, in particular, among Algerian officers, the chance to work in or in liaison with military intelligence structures offered opportunities for selfenrichment. In Syria or Iraq (under Saddam), the army’s economic involvement was even less institutionalized and more rudimentary (cement production, road building, housing projects), using low-wage conscripts and depending on ad hoc economic opportunities. In those countries, high-ranking officers served as facilitators between state and society in a sort of “military-munfatihun (economic liberalizers) complex” based on “parasitical” (tufaʾiliyya) deals (the sharing of high returns and even under the form of protection rackets) between generals and private entrepreneurs.59 In general, economic activities were presented as beneficial to the economic welfare of the state in a militaristic view of society. Officers were indeed highly nationalistic, sensitive to factors undermining national security, including foreign interventions in Arab lands, and saw economic developmental issues – raising literacy levels, improving technical skills, advancing industrial capacities – as central to their mission and with a direct impact on their battlefield capability. Beyond propaganda discourses about the military catering for the nation’s developmental capabilities and reaching self-sufficiency, commercial activities fundamentally exposed the discretionary power of the army in authoritarian systems. In the Arab World, links between regimes and armies were often summarized 59

Philippe Droz-Vincent, “The Military amidst Uprisings and Transitions in the Arab World,” in Constitutionalism in the Arab World, ed. T. Roeder and R. Grote (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 323–354.

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by the general notion of “interests” (budget, privileges, business involvement, societal prestige) defended by the military in exchange for its enduring support to the regime as if these interests were intrinsic to the military. These interests were also a product of their access to the political system, their control of formal or informal institutions, a source of authority that the senior command guarded with a pervading sense of superiority on civilians, hence perpetuating the intimate link between the army and the regime at another level: no longer that of the military as the direct founder of the regime, but the army as “embedded” in the regime and its dirty tricks. Corruption and nepotism were the flip side. Opportunities for mischief increased with the large-scale economic involvement of the Egyptian armed forces after the 1980s. Widespread and massive corruption and patronage networks defined the Syrian military far more accurately than its preparation for war (with Israel). Professional shortcomings and defaults of Arab armies directly reflected the sensitive role of the military in their respective political systems. And corruption was also a way for regimes, by letting corrupted officers prosper, to keep tabs on them. When acquisitive motives and search for privileges among military officers trumped everything else (with the control of smuggling in particular), to speak about military economy was then far-fetched and looting was more appropriate in Libya or economic “parasitical” activities in Yemen. For instance, after the period of oil bonanza in Libya, in the 1980s, the armed forces, like the rest of the Libyan population, experienced the difficulties of an ailing economy with shortages even in military shops and delays of two to three months in salary disbursements. And Libya submitted to one of the most comprehensive embargoes imposed on a Middle Eastern country. The poor capabilities of the armed forces were exacerbated by international sanctions, in particular covering arms sales to Libya. The liberalization of trade and the end of import regulations in Libya’s tentative economic opening (infitah) in 1987–1988 allowed well-connected military officers and those exploiting the prestige of their profession, their networks of friends, supporters and family/tribal members among entrepreneurs to benefit from their positions. The failure of the infitah left them with privileged access to some business and commercial opportunities in the 1990s. Much more important was corruption and trafficking surrounding officers involved in the control of passengers going to Malta or Djerba (Tunisia) from Libyan ports or border crossings – these trips became lucrative, feeding huge black markets – or military governors and their subordinates in the South, who were granted special powers as this area was a “military zone” as well as, conveniently, a traffic hub from Africa to Libya. And

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to frighten officers and to let them feel the upper hand of Qaddafi and his networks, after 1996–1997, the army was involved in “purge committees” (lijan al-taʾthir) aimed at fighting corruption and trafficking, at the time of growing liberalization of commerce. All that reflected the sad state of the Libyan military or what was named as such in the big Libyan institutional mess. Taking another example, much of the capability of the Yemeni military was diverted toward economic and profit considerations fueling an unleashed and generalized corruption under Saleh, and with destructive institutional consequences.60 It was not uncommon in the past and, for instance, Saleh as the commander of the Taiz military district in 1978, with access to the Bab al-Mandeb Detroit in the Red Sea, benefited from lucrative smuggling opportunities. But that trend developed more extensively under Saleh’s long rule. In the mid-1980s, the army’s Yemen Economic Corporation (YECO, al-Muʾassassat al-Iqtisadiyya alYamaniyya), initially owned by military servicemen, became a commercial company with a wide range of activities, in basic commodities and military supplies, also in pharmaceuticals, agribusiness, commercial fishing, real estate, tourism61 – and YECO’s head was one of the uncles of Saleh. Numerous state or parastatal institutions were run through military officers. The military even had its own publishing house (Tawjih al-Maʿanawi, morale orientation) to publicize its role under the command of a member of Saleh’s close inner circle. After unification, the YECO expanded its activities in the South, a region less densely populated than the North but nearly twice as large and richer in mineral wealth and land. Military-controlled companies sidelined many of the traditional (Shafii, especially Taizi) merchant families. Many tribal or military high commanders benefited from the regime’s opaque ways to award contract and procurement opportunities. What was called a “tribal-military complex” at the helm of Yemen became a “tribalmilitary-commercial complex.”62 The YECO became a key partner for prospective international investors, in particular from the Gulf in the 2000s, as it was granted large swaths of public land in Sanaa and Aden and thousands of hectares in agricultural areas across the country – foreign investment became a key component of the Yemeni economy in 60 61 62

USAID, Yemen Corruption Assessment 2006 (Washington: 2006). Kiren Chaudhry, The Price of Wealth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). For the first expression, see Robert Burrowes, “State-Building and Political Construction in the Yemen Arab Republic,” in Ideology and Power in the Middle East, ed. Peter Chelkowski and Robert Pranger (Duke: Duke University Press, 1988), 210–238; and for the second, see Robert Burrowes, “The Saleh Regime and the Need for Reforms,” Yemen Times, January 28, 2008.

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the 2000s. The army was also involved in large-scale trafficking of “enduser certificates” – the papers that prove that an importer won’t reexport a given material after getting it – with arms dealers, most famously the diversion of Polish/Russian tanks to embargoed Sudan in 1999.63 The new Coast Guards Authority, established by US military advisers under the interior ministry’s purview because the navy was too corrupted, rented its services to commercial firms seeking piracy protection instead of intervening. At the lower level, beginning in the 1980s, officers as individuals became much more involved in economic deals or smuggling, and used their positions for economic enrichment – unit commanders routinely pocketed the salaries of “ghost soldiers,” as the number of personnel on the payroll was far higher than the number of actual soldiers. Officers derived considerable profits from diesel and food smuggling – diesel was heavily subsidized in Yemen and a crucial resource for diesel-generated pumps widely used to extract groundwater in one of the most water-scarce countries in the world; diesel was then reexported outside – their privileged access to import licenses, their patronage of land deals or the resale of stuff imported tax-free by the army. All this bunch of privileges was also doled out by the Saleh regime to enhance the officers’ personal wealth. In all cases except Tunisia, officers were seen by regimes as a constituency to be “cocooned” to the greatest extent possible. In general in the Arab World, officers did not live with their men in barracks, hence the need for them to get access to a sufficient purchasing power and means of living. Taking care of military personnel’s material wants was also an important way for authoritarian regimes to ensure their undisputed allegiance. Virtually all Arab states did their best to provide for their officers – active duty and retired – and their families. In the 1960s–1970s, officers benefited from employment security, guaranteed pensions and preferential access to health care and education for them and their families, which set them apart from other occupational groups with promises of social advancement. Things changed in the 1980s. High officers, part of the elite, had access to numerous additional incomes to pay for family expenses. Officers – low to mid-rank – were stuck among middle classes struggling to live, to get health care and educate their children in more difficult conditions and with rising inflation rates; in the main they were clearly worse off than members of the emerging upper middle class composed of entrepreneurs, doctors, professionals and engineers.64 Structural adjustment programs and the waning of 63 64

US State Department, “Combating Yemen’s Grey Market in Small Arms and Light Weapons,” February 15, 2005, leaked by Wikileaks. Matrimonial strategies are always indicative of broad trends: in the 1990s–2000s, notwithstanding the factor of love, it is no longer as “attractive” for a family to have its daughter married to an officer when it was the best choice in the 1960s.

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state resources in the 1990s had direct consequences for the military (for tentative trends, see Figure 3). The army provided officers with sources of welfare and social services but the relative benefits gained did not compensate for their declining purchasing power. Officers lived off a little more than other citizens, but not by much. They did, however, comprise a distinct social stratum endowed with some privileges and at least status symbols. And economic activities (along with profligate foreign aid), although also diverted toward pure business benefiting to some key military stakeholders or corruption, signaled for them the symbolic importance attached by regimes to the army. The Expanded Economic “Empire” of the Egyptian Military Sadat initiated a new trend that was pursued forcefully under Mubarak as well. Sadat presided over the conversion of the military from war (and war preparation) to peacetime following the signing of peace with Israel – its size was reduced by a half after the 1973 war and the Camp David Accords. He initiated the repositioning of the army toward economic activities with the creation of the National Services Organization (NSO, Gihaz al-Khedmat al-Wataniyya) (Presidential Decree no. 32, January 15, 1979), under the pretext of assigning a developmental goal to the armed forces. The NSO undertook ambitious projects in the production of eggs, vegetables, chicken and meat, then the construction of roads and communication facilities. It also began to train skilled manpower for the civilian sector and to provide health services with military hospitals. These were the first stirrings of the military business in an economy of peace. That trend was reinforced by Defense Minister Abu Ghazala (Chapter 2) under Mubarak and followed up by his successor Tantawi, who transformed the military into a powerful economic actor in the state. Abu Ghazala began with projects for building military cities (e.g., Nasr City) and producing military gear. Next, he embarked on the development of an entire “military economy” with defense companies shifting a significant part of their production toward nondefense civilian sectors for commercial purposes to benefit from the liberalizing policies of economic opening (infitah). The Arab Organization for Industrialization (AOI), renamed Egyptian Organization for Industrialization after the boycott of Egypt by Arab Gulf monarchies, and the Ministry of Military Production manufactured military equipment in various joint ventures, for internal use and also for exports – but Egypt could not meet the standards of high technology in the very competitive global markets for weapons and in

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the new geopolitical landscape, in particular Iraq under strict embargo after the Gulf War.65 As a consequence, the army shifted a significant part of its manufacturing base (40 to 70 percent in some factories?) toward civilian production and ventured into joint ventures with foreign enterprises (the AOI and Peugeot, Suzuki or DaimlerChrysler, etc.).66 The NSO opened more dairy farms, poultry complexes, fish farms, milk processing facilities and then reclaimed thousands of acres of desert land with personnel drawn from the ranks of conscripts. The army also moved up the value chain and invested in food- and drinkrelated industries (Queen pasta, Sinai olive oil, mineral water), the supply of gas and fuel (Wataniyya gas stations) and retail outlets. More structurally in the early 1980s, the NSO expanded its ability to implement projects in sectors that had previously been run entirely by civilians (“in the field of development of human resources and infrastructures”), for instance hotels and tourist resorts, and created ventures with its own bank accounts and handling of foreign currencies, either alone or in partnership with private national or foreign firms. The Army Corps of Engineers undertook the building of roads, buildings, stadiums, airport infrastructure, cultural infrastructure and so forth on a large scale, and the Signal Corps entered the lucrative business of building telecommunication centers. After the 1990s, the military displayed a clear capacity to adapt to new conditions of economic liberalization.67 One way for the Mubarak regime to compensate the military was to allow its entrepreneurial activities and permit it to claim autonomous sources of funds. Tantawi further expanded the army’s production potential and ventured into new fields, reclaiming land for commercial use – an essential asset in Egypt where, for national security reasons, the military has some say on how land is used, acquiring various subsidiaries of state-owned companies, getting ownership of shares of public-private ventures with local or international capital and taking control of privatized enterprises. Tantawi, who was a member of the national privatization committee, diversified the army’s business 65

66 67

Philippe Droz-Vincent, “Le militaire et le politique en Egypte,” Maghreb-Machreq, no. 165 (Paris: La Documentation française, July–September 1999); Philippe Droz-Vincent, “From Political to Economic Actors: The Changing Role of Middle Eastern Armies,” in Debating Arab Authoritarianism, ed. Oliver Schlumberger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 195–211. Abul-Magd, Militarizing the Nation; Yezid Sayigh, “Owners of the State” (Beirut: Carnegie Middle East Center, December 2019). Shana Marshall, “The Egyptian Armed Forces and the Remaking of an Economic Empire” (Beirut: Carnegie Middle East Center, 2015); Shana Marshall and Joshua Stacher, “Egypt’s Generals and Transnational Capital,” Middle East Report, no. 262, Spring 2012.

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portfolio accordingly (e.g., Egyptian Company for Ship Repairs and Building in 2003, Alexandria Shipyards in 2007, Nile Company for River Transport in 2008, the General Egyptian Company for Railway Wagons and Coaches in 2002–2004 to the AOI, etc.). And, as Egypt’s new economic landscape was taking shape due to privatization, he favored subcontracts with foreign companies and investment from the Gulf states.68 The military got shares of state companies (oil and gas, petrochemicals) and in public-private ventures (computers, oil and gas piping, cars, solar energy) with preferential treatment in bidding and advance notice of projects. The military entered into two highly lucrative sectors, the steel industry (Factory 100 of the Ministry of Military Production in 2005–2008) and cement production (the Arish Cement Factory of the NSO in 2010–2012). Some sectors of the military, such as the Army Corps of Engineers, the military water department, the navy, the air force or certain segments of these entities (especially their retired cadres), were intensively involved in projects at some stage (e.g., as domestic suppliers or subcontractors in infrastructure projects) and entered into joint ventures with local and foreign companies in wastewater treatment, renewable energy, fertilizer production, maritime and air transport. Many retired officers were appointed to the boards of companies or joint ventures in the above-mentioned sectors. An extension of the military economy was represented by retired senior officers. They built up connections during their years of service and then benefited from the demand for senior officers in the bureaucracy and the availability of plum jobs in state-owned or private enterprises. Many individuals working in the military-owned businesses were either active officers or often former officers or their family members and were ordinarily extremely well compensated. Others benefited from istidaʾ, or callup, which were renewable contracts upon retirement allowing them to remain in uniform (away from active commands) while holding economic or administrative positions.69 Those few at the very top would benefit from positions of military attaché in some Western capital or from assignments paid by US weapons companies. Other retired military generals would operate major businesses in the military economy where the large amount of funds around virtually guaranteed leakages into private 68 69

Abul-Magd, Militarizing the Nation; Sayigh, “Owners of the State.” For a geographical display of the military encroachment in the state, see http://el3askar map.kazeboon.com/; Zeinab Abul-Magd, “The Egyptian Republic of Retired Generals,” Foreign Policy, May 8, 2012; Yezid Sayigh, Above the State: The Officers’ Republic (Beirut: Carnegie Middle East Center, August 2012); complemented by Hicham Bou Nassif, “Wedded to Mubarak,” The Middle East Journal, 67(4) (Autumn 2013): 509–530; Marshall and Stacher, “Egypt’s Generals and Transnational Capital”; Marshall, “The Egyptian Armed Forces.”

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pockets. Furthermore, the army controlled access to numerous positions in the state apparatus – following Presidential Decree no. 32 of 1979 – circulating lists (with names and qualifications) of officers approaching retirement and seeking new placements. These jobs that led to the hiring of hundreds of retired officers ran the gamut of the entire employment spectrum from undersecretaries or directors of the cabinet (in selected departments, such as transport, communication, environment, social affairs), but not just in commanding positions, also in management at all levels, in administrative auditing organs (Hayʾat al-Riqaba al-Idariyya), in the antiquities authority (Hayʾat al-Athar alMasriyya) and in the entire chain of local government (governors, districts, cities, urban neighborhoods, village levels, perhaps an estimated batch of 2,000 posts) and all the subordinated departments. In parallel to the military economy, military education has progressed (Military Technical College, Military Academy for Administrative Science, Military Academy for Medicine, etc.) giving officers options after retirement. Furthermore, in Egypt, officers were in relatively important numbers, as there was a significant inflation in the top ranks, from colonel (ʿaqid) to general (fariq awwal). And, with the end of Arab-Israeli great wars, most officers were required to retire after twenty years of service, thus were in search for a second career. The so-called military economy was not just important by its absolute (and controversial) figures lumping together very different configurations. According to figures “revealed” in March 2012 by the assistant defense minister for financial affairs, the size of the military economy was about US$198 million (EP 1 billion) a year; in 2009, the state minister for military production quoted a figure around US$600 million (EP 3.6 billion).70 Other, less conservative estimates put the figure far higher, to billions of dollars71 – in December 2011, to help the government out of a financial crisis by propping up the Egyptian Pound, the army lent US$1 billion,72 a testimony of the true extent of its assets. These figures may be misleading because the army did not control or own everything in a hierarchic organization mirroring that of an integrated economic sector. Officers who managed or were responsible for the army’s business ventures were not conventional businessmen driven by profit motives and 70

71

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“The Military: Our Projects Are the Sweat of the Defense Ministry and We Will Not Allow the State to Enter into It,” al-Shuruq, March 21, 2012; “Army Gets 4.2% of State Budget, Says SCAF Member,” al-Masry al-Youm, March 3, 2012; “Meshʾal: Sales of the Military Production Sector Reached 3.6 Billion Pounds,” al Ahram, October 24, 2009. Ambassador Margaret Scobey, “Academics See the Military in Decline, But Retaining Strong Influence,” US Embassy in Cairo, September 23, 2008, published by Wikileaks, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08CAIRO2091_a.html. “Amy Loans $1 Billion to Central Bank,” Daily News Egypt, December 2, 2011.

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a capitalist ethos following the Weberian entrepreneurial model. The most important point, however, was how the military moved adroitly, or imposed itself by its institutional weight and political influence, and implanted itself into the (civilian) economy.73 Military enterprises did not pay taxes, were able to deal with bureaucratic red tape because they knew the “rules of the game” and benefited from “accelerating networks” of former officers (“to make things happen” in the Egyptian bureaucratic maze), as well as from state subsidies (e.g., on electricity, cement, etc.), let alone military land and the quasi free workforce of conscripts. Nevertheless, they were not particularly profitable and/or efficient, nor well managed. The rationale for such an economic empire was lavishly justified, with an acute sense of public relations by the military referring to three major benefits for the nation: the armed forces’ self-sufficiency (al-iktifaʾ aldhati); contributions to Egypt’s development (mostly by building infrastructure, roads, railways, overpasses, telephone infrastructures, as well as schools, hospitals, museums, etc.); and offering cheaper foodstuffs or products purchased by lower middle-class families and meeting unfulfilled demand. In fact, the army’s economic contribution was modest and often more symbolic. In the 1980s it was a good way for an Egyptian army that no longer had an obvious enemy to wage a public relations campaign stressing that its special expertise and knowledge were needed. Of crucial importance was the political meaning of such a relationship, in a two-way exchange of power and legitimacy versus benefits. Under Sadat, officers, mainly from middle-class background, underwent an embourgeoisement, increased their income and changed their lifestyle with access to apartments in housing units built by the NSO in Cairo (near al-Abbassiyya and Heliopolis or in Nasser City) and Alexandria – the program was said to exclude armed forces personnel from the strained housing market and indirectly to provide more housing opportunities for the civilians. Defense Minister Abu Ghazala upgraded facilities and equipment, and cared about the army’s welfare, by raising wages, which was all the more necessary given the high inflation of the 1980s – there were reported strikes in some military facilities. He adapted the armed forces to the newly liberalized Egyptian economy where a young graduate from the American University in Cairo (AUC) working for a foreign company might earn three times as much as an army general. A low- or mid-grade officer received (without bonuses) about the same wages as 73

But there was no economic rationality thought as such; no reflection about how one military economic sector should be structured; how it could evolve under further liberalization; what the policy issues were.

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a Cairo cab driver. Revealingly, officers’ wives were forced to work to sustain the standards of living of their households.74 This was no longer the period of “war economy” where “everything was for the battle” (i.e., unlimited resources for the military). Indeed, the post–Camp David paradigm of peace for military aid helped the military get access to resources. In the 1990s, the Egyptian army lived with serious budget constraints and felt that it had to bolster its coffers. Very tellingly, production in military-owned factories changed from cheap stuff for military internal consumption in the 1980s (reflecting the desires of a “petite bourgeoisie” of officers) to more luxury items commercialized on markets and targeting consumers with high purchase power in the 1990s–2000s. The large Egyptian military was under financial constraints, keeping costs low (limiting training and operation expenses in comparison to expenses to pay the costs of salaries) and storing, rather than operating, a great deal of equipment (jet fighters, tanks) to reduce costs, while trying to maximize returns from its far-flung economic empire. As a consequence, off-budget profits have compensated for the shortfall. A network of dependence with consumer cooperatives, shopping malls, nurseries, schools, sporting clubs, socializing venues financed and run by the military served officers and their families. The army’s economic empire would generate corporate economic benefits for the armed forces and fund private benefits for officers, such as discounted apartments, subsidized cooperatives for food and services, special military hospitals, vacation accommodations and army hotels, army-specific bank branches, pharmacies, sports clubs, membership in exclusive social clubs, subsidized wedding ceremonies, Ramadan boxes and so on. Each armed forces branch built its own residential compounds, resort facilities, mostly without coordination and in a competitive fashion. This helped bear the rising costs of life for officers though not always decisive in the difficult Egyptian economic position of the 1990s and 2000s. That free hand in a sprawling military economy with money pocketed directly by the military without any oversight also meant the army was indirectly empowered in the Egyptian political system. This kind of reciprocal system subtly played into the hands of the regime, because the military as a corps supported the status quo and officers were potentially co-opted with selective individual benefits. Economic activities fragmented the military and created a two-tiered army, also as a way to defang the army’s overall power in the political system. The growing and increasingly obvious prosperity of the armed forces created divides not just between military personnel and civilians but also within the army. 74

Observations through a law professor with connections to the military, Paris, June 2014.

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The increasing wealth of some high-ranking generals (those connected with economic ventures who pocketed most of the fringe benefits) did not go hand in hand with an improvement to the same degree of the living conditions of junior- or mid-career officers who were toiling for years (and respected the mandatory requirement of political quietness) to make a colonel at a relative low pay, let alone NCOs. And more professional high officers also resented this as corruption. This was complexified by a system of bonuses and premiums granted by the minister that could reach as much as ten or fifteen times the base salary – with cash doled out by the president at the top leadership (“loyalty allowances”). Indeed, this crony system (beyond a certain level) created resentment, because only those with privileged ties (wasta) could get a lucrative job in the military economy. This pyramid of vested interests and the resulting “class gap” inside the officer corps were, however, alleviated by a “waiting game” based on the assumption that junior officers would wait for their turn to come and hope for their rewards. Young and mid-ranking Egyptian officers accepted poor conditions and abstention from political engagement in return for expectations of future payoffs: high-level appointments, lucrative positions in the bureaucracy and the economy. And these appointments were left to the discretion of the high command, hence conditioned by strict loyalty and political quietism. All in all, the whole bundle of interests, patronage and corruption created a sense of corporatism and conservatism, and incentives to preserve the status quo in the officer corps in general, with the hope of benefiting from these “institutional” benefits or at least getting some spoils that compensated this factory for internal grievances and resentment. Professional officers were unable and to some extent unwilling to challenge the status quo. Most officers were content to know that their material interests were potentially catered for in return for loyalty. The military economy was not just a separate economic sector or a new venture of the military into the economy, but much more an incubator to help finance and stabilize a whole system.75 From “Parasitical” (Tufaʾiliyya) Activities to Bashar’s Reforms and the Relative Marginalization of the Syrian Military In Syria, unlike in Egypt, the most important economic involvement (and related corruption) of the armed forces in the civilian economy transpired through individuals at the pinnacle of power in the military rather than through the entire institution and its related companies. And then it 75

Droz-Vincent, “From Political to Economic Actors.”

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trickled down to other officers below. This has been a recurrent feature in the Syrian military from the 1970s as epitomized by Rifaat al-Assad, the commander of one praetorian force (the Defense Companies, Sirayat alDefaʿ) and who commanded the cliques of businessmen in Damascus and Aleppo, owned extensive holdings in Lebanon, among them cement factories in east Beirut, and sponsored hashish trade in the Beqaa Valley – after the 1983 succession crisis he was stripped of all his possessions and exiled. The rival praetorian Third Armored Division, which saved the Assad regime in 1983, was stationed partly in Lebanon, partly around Damascus and similarly controlled trade and smuggling between both countries, which hugely benefited high officers (such as its commander, Shafiq Fayyad, who was eventually dismissed and sent into a golden exile in Moscow and Geneva), along with junior officers controlling contraband in border areas. In fact, contraband through Lebanon represented a huge part (50 to 70 percent?)76 of Syrian total imports in the 1980s– 1990s.77 And some of the fiercest administrative battles within the Syrian army actually concerned the occupation of positions in charge of traffic and customs across the Lebanese or the Turkish borders at the end of the incumbent’s term. Army officers who occupied senior administrative positions in Homs, Hama, Idlib were also very corrupt and involved in cross-border smuggling.78 Other officers were allowed to keep the privileges of an active officer even if they reached retirement age, a way for Hafez to “anesthetize” the high officer corps and keep them dependent – he could sideline them at will by sudden retirement. The armed forces also engaged in more sophisticated economic ventures, most prominently with two construction companies: Mutaʿ (Muʾassassat Tanfidh al-Inshaʾat al-ʿAskariyya) for engineering and construction work, and the Military Housing Company (Muʾassassat alIskan al-ʿAskari) to build housing for officers. Milihouse, under the command of the Alawi colonel Khalil Bahlul in the 1980s, was said to employ between 70,000 (Perthes) and 150,000 (Bahout).79 It eclipsed all other state construction companies and began to branch out into livestock 76 77

78

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No source available, but interview with a high customs Lebanese officer, location withheld, April 2015. Smuggled goods from Lebanon’s ports, ranging from luxury cars to drugs, were transported in convoys of military vehicles on a “military-only” route parallel to the international highway linking Lebanon and Syria, where everything could be found at the so-called military market in Damascus. See the interview with FSA commander Lieutenant ʿAbd al-Razzaq al-Tlass (al-Hayat, June 1, 2012): a seller was surprised to be paid for his bags of cement by an army officer. The very first slogans of protesters in 2011 on Facebook called for the removal of military governors or administrators in the local administration. Respectively, Perthes, The Political Economy of Syria under Asad; Joseph Bahout, Les entrepreneurs syriens (Beirut: Presses de l’IFPO, 1994).

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agriculture and manufacture of construction materials and furniture in the Aleppo industrial zone and in Damascus. It went bankrupt in 1988 and was streamlined. Military companies in general faced no restriction of imports – they merely needed to declare a product of “strategic importance” to get it – or restrictions in the use of foreign currencies. They recruited the best personnel either by attracting them with high salaries or, for instance, in the case of engineers, conscripting them for five years of military service after they completed their degrees. Since the 1980s, the Syrian military also gained a foothold in the National Center for Scientific Research, prioritizing military research, but also investing in telecommunication, pharmaceuticals and satellite dishes – usually with financial interests complementing strategic priorities. But for high officers who chose this path for their career, it was also a self-accepted dead-end, as those who chose at one moment to enter such activities could make a lot of money but could never return to command units.80 The phased liberalization of the Syrian economy beginning slowly in the 1990s offered yet other opportunities. The private sector developed close ties with high-ranking members of the military (and security services, state and/or Baathist officials numbering in the several hundreds). Generals or colonels didn’t operate directly in private business but acted as partners or associates in sharing the benefits, often as “protectors” of businessmen, with preferential access to foreign currencies, favorable custom rates, opportunities to skim off taxes, access to state subsidies, politically inspired loans and interest rates, preferential treatment from the bureaucracy and so on, in the huge and contradictory web of Syrian economic regulations. Many top officers were partners in corruption with new private entrepreneurs. Also symbolic as a kind of completion of their climbing up the social ladder, some officers married into the old aristocracy – a trend also confirmed by the choice by Bashar of a Sunni bride in the Homsi alAkhras family. Symptomatically, the offspring of many generals called “sons of power” (awlad al-sulta) went preferably into business in the end of the 1990s and 2000s with their career greatly facilitated by their fathers’ prominent positions – with examples such as Firas Tlass or Bilal al-Turkmani, the son of Defense Minister Hassan alTurkmani, who replaced old stalwart Mustafa Tlass. This model was reproduced at other less senior levels by the deputies of generals or various officers with some veto power or access to resources or bureaucratic power somewhere in the Syrian state – often a phone call would decisively help (wasta) in the intricacies of the Syrian 80

Interview with a former officer of the air force, location withheld, June 2014.

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bureaucracy, with central bank officials, other governmental officials or customs officers.81 Corruption was also a deliberate strategy of control by the regime, which centered on top generals, heads of major security services, former heads of security, numbering several hundred: it tied key individuals to the regime. High officers were rewarded for their loyalty by allowing them to turn their units into economic fiefdoms within limits, namely, those of the exclusive political grip of the Assad family. These officers owned lavish and immense villas often built with looted funds and visible on some hills in the Jabal Alawi or on the Syrian coast that signaled “a man in authority” as the Syrian expression put it. And that was a very “competitive” world: Alawi high officers were laid off during the 1990s for the simple reason that prominent senior officers didn’t want other prominent officers from their region in addition to them. But high corrupted stalwarts could also lose their position suddenly in an anti-corruption campaign if they grabbed too much power. Tellingly, at the end of the 1990s, when Hafez endeavored to install his son Bashar firmly in power (beginning in the military), the anointed heir waged an anti-corruption campaign in the army as a way to displace military stalwarts who could oppose his rise. The entire officer corps did not benefit from such largesse and the closed eyes of the Assad regime to the same degree, but the interests associated with the military nevertheless represented a very extensive network. Senior generals often moved, and younger officers under their command moved around with them. Junior officers accepted poor conditions, hard work and strict political allegiance in return for expectations of future appointments in high and lucrative positions. Those who could not hope to reach top ranks could benefit from army connections to reposition themselves, for instance as contractors in business after retirement. Many middle-ranking officers were waiting for new appointments at the doors of high-level military insiders in this highly “competitive” world of patronage where, when someone fell, many others competed for his position. In sum, the officer corps as a whole enjoyed extensive privileges transforming it into a specific social stratum in Syrian society. Hafez was a military man and not a single civilian leader, however high his position might be, had a say over the army. Hafez viewed favorable conditions of service and living standards for officers as a way to maintain their loyalty. In the 1970s–1980s, officers received higher salaries than individuals of comparable civilian status and enjoyed free medical care, generous traveling allowances and interest-free or low-interest loans that allowed them to 81

Interview with an active officer, location withheld, April 2014.

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buy apartments and cars, symbols of middle-class status highly valued in Syrian society. Those related to the military or with an officer in their family – the military and the security apparatus accounted for half of the people employed by the state and 15 percent of the total workforce in the country – got access to army cooperatives that provided them with domestic and foreign goods at discounted prices not available to the rest of the population.82 Military hospitals and clinics had the most sophisticated equipment in the country and as many as 20 percent of the country’s doctors were said to work in medical facilities reserved for military personnel and their families.83 Retired officers received high pensions – the custom was to be promoted to the immediate above grade upon retirement – and had numerous opportunities to attend university, enter new professions and to start new businesses. Many officers purchased small- or medium-sized plots of land, including state land, and established prosperous ventures with tree plantations, greenhouse cultivation and poultry farms, something called “officers’ farms” (mazariʿ al-dubbat), and numbering allegedly thousands – some of these medium-sized owners became more ambitious, launching agribusiness companies after 1986. This story was not just about material interests, but also entailed very symbolic elements that contributed to the linking of the officer corps to the regime, in the first place Alawis. After 1970, Hafez and the ruling group of officers and Baathist bureaucrats, hailing from rural parts, were building a new Syria and made their entry into rapidly growing big cities, formerly a preserve of old elites. Urban housing played a symbolic role especially for officers of rural origins who would have never managed to buy a house or an apartment, live in a big city and have their children study in Damascene universities. After the 1970s, they could buy a house in “the Assad suburb” (dahiye Assad) in Damascus and that house could become the source of speculation at a time of real estate inflation in the 2000s. More generally, the “ruralization” (tariyif) of big cities (with the arrival of rural officers or bureaucrats) changed their equilibriums: the numerous complexes with housing compounds and various commercial ventures that developed around military bases – especially around Homs, Hama, Deraa, Suweida and above all Damascus; Aleppo was more “resistant” to the penetration of Alawi rural migrants – have acted as enclaves of the regime encroaching on cities. Many rural residents (often Alawis) clustered in the same neighborhood and their presence in cities stretched back only thirty to forty years. 82 83

Perthes, The Political Economy of Syria under Asad. Figures are again tentative, source from interview with a member of the Doctors’ Syndicate, Paris, June 2013.

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Bashar inherited and benefited from his father’s complex system of power while gradually introducing a change in paradigm and deconstructing some of its essential pillars. Contrary to his father, he was not a military man and did not have the same level of involvement in military affairs. Instead, Bashar was a representative of “the new generation” (al-jil al-jadid) closer to Damascus and its urban elites than to rural areas (from where many other officers hailed), a youth who grew up in Damascus and inherited power rather than fought for it. Though anxious to keep the semblance of statism and some of the socialist features, what was called in Syria “the fundamentals” (al-thawabit), Bashar introduced a politics of reform, or “development and modernization” (tatwir wa-tahdith), in the first place in the economy, with consequences for the whole system. Beyond reshuffles in top positions at the moment of succession in June 2000, reforms under Bashar were not targeting the military specifically, but in general seriously weakened and marginalized the army. Generally speaking, the Syrian authoritarian system under Bashar became more fragmented, built as a more “competitive” coalition among different groups (security cadres, military elites, top bureaucrats, new businessmen) than under Hafez, and with a more rapid turnover among top elites with appointees holding their jobs for shorter periods (and hence seeking quick personal enrichment).84 Under Bashar, the presidency used its enormous constitutional powers of appointment/promotion and retirement to position new elites, first in sixty-odd top political, security and administrative posts (2001–2002), and then, especially after the Baath Congress in June 2005, in a battle with Baathist apparatchiks, over appointments in government offices and the public economy sector. The regime as a glue around the state apparatus led by specific power networks pointing to the presidency no longer displayed the same sense of cohesiveness as it did under Hafez and gradually appeared shaken and even destabilized. Bashar’s regime seemed to forget its social roots, distancing itself from the peripheral rural areas from which many of its cadres came – as exemplified by the al-Hawran plain, whose administrative center, Deraa, was the birthplace of numerous prominent regime officials. Even in its alleged Alawi base, numerous poor Alawi villagers around Latakia no longer found jobs in the state and the military 84

Elizabeth Picard, “Syrie: la coalition autoritaire fait de la résistance,” Politique Etrangere, no. 4 (2005): 755–768; Volker Perthes, “Syria under Bashar al-Asad” (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, Adelphi Paper no. 136, 2004); Bassam Haddad, Business Networks in Syria (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Raymond Hinnebusch, “The Ba’th Party in Post-Ba’thist Syria,” Middle East Critique, 20(2) (Summer 2011): 109–125; and see many articles by Ibrahim Hamidi in alHayat; for instance, “The Exit of the Old Guard from the Regional Command and the Central Committee,” al-Hayat, June 19, 2005 (in Arabic).

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and worked in the informal sector (e.g., as taxi drivers). Economic openness in particular had regressive consequences on the Syrian society with a decline of public expenditure on welfare and social provision by the state, the decline of the purchasing power of the remaining state subsidies and reduction in the level of subsidies provided under the so-called social market economy (a term introduced around 2005–2006). Structurally, the military was thus weakened in Bashar’s Syria with the rise of private banks and private entrepreneurs dealing with hard currencies and the new economic bureaucracy now the bailiwick of economic experts and not just political Baathist figures. Even generals lost some of their influence on civilians as the latter rose in Syrian politics. At the very top echelons (about half a dozen senior generals), the traditional role of the military competing for and alternating in key posts (defense, security services, Regional Command) was enfeebled after the 10th Regional Conference of the Baath Party held in June 2005 – the Regional Command and the presidency share the power to appoint government officials. The military was no longer a kingmaker in Syria’s complex system, as it was challenged by security barons and a minority of technocratic or private-sector reformers close to Bashar and in particular the Syrian Computer Society. Nevertheless, some senior officers close to the regime individually continued to benefit from reforms, gaining market “access” in the booming real estate, transportation and tourism industries. More specifically, the military directly felt the brunt of these changes at various levels. Change was not a one-time shock but a gradual decline. After coming to power, Bashar launched a major anti-corruption campaign in the military. In 2004, he issued an order regulating the duration of service of senior officers – although many decisions were not implemented. Still, the grid of control was maintained, especially in key military units, where the retired old cadres were replaced by younger second-rank Alawi officers beholden to Bashar. The 2005 withdrawal from Lebanon was another blow to the army that weakened its institutional clout. How much the climate had changed in Damascus was indicated by the fact that armed forces’ personnel returning from Lebanon were received by private press executives not Baathist officials. Mid-level officers were no longer the most privileged stratum in Syrian society as they also felt the economic difficulties of daily life. The average salary of senior officers was modest compared to the income of new entrepreneurs with ties to regime insiders. Officers who supported large families lived more modestly even when their privileges were factored into their earnings. Indeed, the material privileges and amenities they got were essential additional sources of income when compared with the rest of Syrian society – even though the privileges they got were nothing when compared with that of a few

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high officers in high positions. In the 2000s the army became a largely demoralized and poorly equipped force that any visitor to Syria could witness. To the point that in 2010 Bashar raised salaries and upgraded cars and housing for the army in an attempt to bolster its loyalty to the regime. This account tells a lot about the military in Syria. The Syrian military did not assert itself more effectively than other institutional, bureaucratic or social groups in the Syrian system: it was a powerful corporate corps that was integrated and “securitized” as a loyal pillar and obedient watchdog of the Assad regime in the Syrian system of power. The military was a powerful stakeholder in the Syrian system, but it couldn’t become by itself the predominant force in the system. And it was to some extent marginalized in the 2000s by systemic changes associated with Bashar’s reforms. Conclusion The second cycle installed a pattern whereby the military became a resourceful bureaucratic/institutional sector in most cases – with the qualified exception of Tunisia. The army was no longer shining in open politics or playing the role of a vanguard for the state but became a closed sector and a black box. Officers in Arab armies understood their role in a very shy and careful manner behind bureaucratic procedures – those at the top could take more risks, accumulate more corruption, also as a way for the regime to keep tabs on them. Officers acted with a closed (heavily military-turned) mindset based on a military esprit de corps that few (or no) civilians would dare to challenge. Yet the military was a powerful actor with some degree of autonomy or decision-making latitude. This was concealed behind a pervasive yet vague discourse of a national army defending the state (hence the importance of conscription, tajnid, in all cases) or more vague arguments about how it contributed to development, social policies (for young generations) or even economic growth. Armies were oversized when compared with real threats, with quantitative considerations trumping all questions of training, adaptation of resources to objectives or readiness to conduct roles and missions and with lavish spending squaring the circle without any debate. “Cocooned” armies with privileged access to resources were the price paid by states and societies, with huge budgets slices or at least a whole political economy of defense that allowed the financing of such resource drains. And economic encroachments into civilian economies were the natural complement.

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As a corollary, that resourceful institutional actor could play a role in an otherwise weak institutional setting (in the sense of O’Donnell; see Introduction), in particular with an absent legal framework (to regulate the army’s activities), and that allowed armies to wield power (within the regime’s grid of control) at least with influence, veto powers and bureaucratic infighting. That kind of institutional power was the one analyzed by Huntington in a different context (when he argued it needed to be neutralized by the maximization of professionalism or “objective control”), and it would deploy fully, furthermore, after other weak institutions happened to fall suddenly in 2011 (Chapter 5).

4

Are Arab Monarchical Militaries Different?

A specific chapter should be devoted to armies in monarchies, though it will not offer a systematic and extensive treatment of all monarchical militaries for editorial constraints, and should be read in close parallel with Chapters 2 and 3. The ready-made (and pervasive) narrative about civil-military relations in the Arab World will usually contrast monarchies and military-based republics that were revolutionary and often born out of the death of monarchies via coups d’état. The latter cases are those in which the army is seen as pivotal, whereas in the former it is considered of secondary importance, at least implicitly, when compared to royal courts and more or less specified monarchical mechanisms. Tellingly, the rare studies of the military in the Arab World do not devote many pages to monarchies. There is an element of truth in this story, but it is incomplete, especially when it conveys the idea that monarchies have few affinities with the military. And the whole story of civil-military relations in monarchies should be better analyzed diachronically, distinguishing between different phases. For sure, in the 1950s–1960s, the political surge of armies was antagonistic to monarchies and the politicization of the officer corps spelled the fall of some monarchies (Egypt, Iraq, Yemen and Libya) – a trend that gave the impression that monarchies were a legacy of the past when revolutionary (military-originating) republics would become dominant.1 As a corollary, monarchies seemed to diverge from the first cycle of my framework and “surviving” monarchies managed to handle the potential surge of armies differently with the role of familial royal ties.2 But after the 1970s, numerous features of civil-military relations developed for republics also applied to monarchies, though with some qualifications. As stressed in this book, the importance of the coercive apparatus, and in the first place of the armed forces, was strongly related 1 2

Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968) on “the king’s dilemma.” Michael Herb, All in the Family (New York: SUNY Press, 1999).

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to the authoritarian nature of regimes, whatever their modes of organization, whether republics or monarchies. This chapter concentrates on monarchies and provides a comparative view of them (also when compared with republics). And it will also delve into differences within the monarchies, with Jordan, Morocco (and perhaps Oman) closer to the model of professional/institutionalized Arab armies (with these terms strongly qualified in Chapter 2), in contrast to the specific militaries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, also with differences among them between Saudi Arabia or Kuwait and other emirates. Arab Monarchies Are Not So “Alien” to the Military The political surge of armies in the 1950s with coups, attempts at coups d’état or threats of them was also felt in monarchies, especially in Jordan, also in the Gulf. As argued in Chapter 2, the politicization of the officer corps was an essential factor creating a momentum for change in various polities. The resulting ready-made narrative was that old-fashioned and “traditional” (“sultanistic” to borrow Max Weber’s term) Arab monarchies were contested by officers. This was only one part of the story, indeed a prevalent one in Egypt, Iraq, to some extent Yemen and Libya, and this perspective should be qualified in other cases. In reality, rather than inherently revolutionary and antimonarchic, the role of the military should be better understood in relation to the nature of conflicts around the state, in particular the early stages of state formation at a time when the Arab World was making a late transition from empire to newly created (nation-)states after World War I. In some cases, the army came to take power and proclaimed new (republican) regimes. In other (not so few) cases, struggles inside the officer corps between officers endowed with various revolutionary/nationalist ideologies and those loyal to incumbent monarchies led to the consolidation of regimes. Tellingly, Jordan in the 1950s under King Hussein was dubbed by a comparative student of military politics a “royal military dictatorship.”3 Arab monarchies were of recent origin (with the exception of Morocco) – with the Hashemites as the first Arab rulers in the twentieth century to proclaim themselves king (malik).4 Monarchies made the transition between the falling Ottoman Empire and the new order that came out of its death with provinces turned into nation-states under the French or British mandates – as a shortcut, the British would favor 3 4

Samuel Finer, The Man on Horseback (London: Pall Mall, 1962), 2. Amin Ayalon, “Post-Ottoman Arab Monarchies: Old Bottles, New Labels?” in Middle East Monarchies, ed. Joseph Kostiner (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 23–36.

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monarchies and the French would build republics. As a consequence, monarchies were new political models in the Arab World, indeed with few historical roots (whatever the subsequent “invented traditions”5 posing the kings of Jordan and Morocco as descendants of Prophet Muhammad) and without much traditional legitimacy. Some of these new monarchies furthermore tried to assimilate the Western model of kings with constitutional and parliamentary dimensions (elected parliament, accountable cabinets, systems of political parties, constitutions), as exemplified by Egypt and Iraq. The latter’s pretense to political modernity with these new institutions in the context of rapidly changing societies (Chapter 1) and the vagaries of historical accidents – Faysal’s early death and difficulties in the Hashemite family to find a competent successor in Iraq – enfeebled them when confronted with officers and their new bid for legitimacy. Quite differently, other monarchies such as Transjordan or Morocco were old-style monarchies, much more traditional or patrimonial polities – Emir Abdallah (I) became king in 1946 and Sultan Mohammed V in Morocco in 1957.6 Kingship was for them a claim of revived sovereignty in a changing international world after World War I, perhaps a prestigious international status and a title adopted out of expediency in the most part. Such Arab monarchies, of course, also needed to develop their own armed forces as a defining symbol of the monarchical nation-state, furthermore in a dangerous region. This was done in Jordan and Morocco under the colonial grip respectively of Great Britain and France and with extended consequences for the future, creating privileged (or subsequently dubbed “traditional”) relations between the monarchy and rural or Bedouin communities in Jordan7 and rural elites in Morocco.8 In Jordan, tribes went from attacking the new Hashemite state in the 1920s to become its backbone and “owners.” They were incorporated in the so-called Arab Legion (al-Jaysh al-ʿArabi) under the leadership of John Bagot Glubb (Glubb Pasha) after he came from British Iraq (1930) – he was chief of the Arab Legion from 1939 to 1956.9 Glubb favored the recruitment of Bedouins as opposed to the settled (hadari) Transjordanian (or Palestinian) population, 5 6 7

8 9

Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Mary Wilson, King Abdallah, Britain and the Making of Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Riccardo Bocco, “Etat et tribus en Jordanie” (PhD diss., Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, 1996); Tareq Tell, The Social and Economic Origins of Monarchy in Jordan (New York: Palgrave, 2013). Rémy Leveau, Le fellah marocain, défenseur du Trône (Paris: Presses de la FNSP, 1985). Panayotis Vatikiotis, Politics and the Military in Jordan, (Boulder: Praeger, 1967); Joseph Massad, Colonial Effects (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

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hence subjugating the recalcitrant Bedouins in the monarchy – most officers were British because of questions of literacy and formation. In Morocco, the Forces Armées Royales (FAR) were created in 1956 and made up of soldiers from the French and Spanish armies with war experience in the Spanish Civil War, World War II and French war of Indochina, along with former rebels from the Armée de Libération Marocaine. Its officer corps was dominated by Berber (Imazight) officers. The FAR were organized by Prince Moulay Hassan (later Hassan II) acting as chief of general staff, reminiscent of a model where a sultan of the past placed his heir in control of the army10 – along with General (future marshal) Meziane, who held posts in Spain at high ranks bestowed on him by Franco before 1956. A further modernization of these traditional polities occurred in the 1950s when they turned into entities endowed with full independence. Little wonder, then, that they were submitted to the threats of “revolutionary” officers that tried to mimic the model of Free Officers, especially in Transjordan/Jordan. But a more stabilizing trend mounted under the aegis of new generations in these monarchical families. This was exemplified by the role of King Hussein in the expulsion of British officers in 1956 and the so-called (and much-celebrated until nowadays) “Arabization of the army” – the Arab Legion was thereafter called the Jordanian Arab Army. And this trend of monarchical state- and nationbuilding had a strong military component. In particular, military valor among royals and princes was prized. King Hussein (and later his son Abdallah II) in Jordan had extensive military experience that did not differentiate him from revolutionary officers who took power in the 1950s. The Jordanian army played an essential role in building a balance between tribes, peasants and urban dwellers. And the socalled Bedouins in Jordan in the 1950s or those with tribal background (Bani Sakhr, Huweitat, Sirhan, Shammar, etc.) were no longer the same as their counterparts of the 1920s recruited by British officers. The enrollment of settled (East Bank) Jordanians and (Jordanian) Palestinians increased the infiltration of the army by politics but also “nationalized” the military.11 The army became a nationalist crucible for Jordan and a backbone for the monarchy. The army occupied a central position, yet, differently from republican militaries described in Chapter 1, did not determine policy. The military was “tamed” under monarchic state- and nation-building rather than becoming an “avant-garde” (taliʿa) of the state 10 11

Léo Hamon, Le role extra-militaire de l’armée dans le tiers – monde (Paris: PUF, 1966). Saʿad Abu Diyé, al-Jaysh al-ʿArabi (Amman: al-Quwwat al-Musallaha al-Urduniyya, 1987).

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with a political role, quite differently from the foregone conclusion that the military was ipso facto an autonomized revolutionary agent in the state; Morocco followed a similar path, with a comparatively small army when put in regional context, in particular its rivalry with Algeria. Gulf armies, especially in the small shaykhdoms/emirates, undertook another trajectory of political development. “Southern Arabs,” as contrasted to “Northern Arabs,” namely, Iraqis, Palestinians, Egyptians, Syrians who came to interact with and help the former in their statebuilding ventures, had a specific sociopolitical lifestyle in these states whose national bonds came from tribal background and a specific social fabric.12 And they enjoyed a specific autonomy, though paternalistically protected by British political officers (the Gulf as “the Trucial Coast”) – Saudi Arabia was not part of the Ottoman Empire, except in the Hijaz, nor submitted to Western mandates or protections. After they turned into states and after Saudi Arabia became a unified country (1932), the army was not their prime concern and was maintained small. More than often military and police functions were mixed: tellingly, in Kuwait, for instance, the police and the army were not well differentiated in the 1930s13 (as was also the case in Transjordan before 1946). Then few Kuwaitis were interested in having a career in the army, especially in the rank and file, and the Sabah regime in need of a military force after the crisis of independence in 1961 (Iraq’s threats of annexing) recruited among the bidun (jinsiyya, “without nationality”) Arabs and paid tribal Bedouins shaykhs to enlist their followers – bidun and Bedouins are two different categories that can overlap if the regime grants citizenship to the latter, a controversial issue in Kuwait and a source of electoral manipulations.14 They might represent half of the military force. The composite army also included Pakistanis, Palestinians (until 1990) and more generally Arabs who did not hold Kuwaiti citizenship. Saudi Arabia, a more substantial state (in terms of population and territory), relied on the tribal forces of the paramilitary White Army (from the name of their white thawb, robe) and the Royal Guard of the eponymous founder Abdelaziz Ibn Saud that came to be organized into a parallel army tasked with a function of protecting the regime and called the Saudi National Guard (SANG).15 A regular Saudi army was built with American 12 13 14 15

Levon Melikian, “Arab Socio-political Impact on Gulf Life-styles,” in The Arab Gulf and the Arab World, ed. B. R. Pridham (London: Croom Helm, 1988), 112–128. Jill Crystall, “Public Order and Authority,” in Monarchies and Nations, ed. Paul Dresch and James Piscatori (London: Tauris, 2013), 158–181. Anh Nga Longwa, Walls Built on Sand (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997). Ghassan Salamé, al-Siyasa al Kharijiyya al Saʿudiyya mundhu ʿAm 1945 (Beirut: Maʿhad al-Inmaʾ al-ʿArabi, 1980); William B. Quandt, Saudi Arabia in the 1980s (Washington:

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assistance but troops did not grow beyond the small 7,500–10,000 men – and acquisitions for them draw to a halt in the 1950s and 1960s with manpower and financial resources diverted to the SANG that was recruited according to tribal links and alliances. The Saudi monarchy, endowed with its own endogenous social fabric based on religious reformism (Wahhabism), with its own strike forces (in the line of the former Ikhwan, the shock troops of the Wahhabis) feared coups from “modern” or ideology-inspired officers, if it built too great and expanded an army. Although they did not lead to the overthrow of the Saudi regime, several serious coup attempts originated from the regular military: among Hijazi officers in May 1955, from within the most modern branch; the air force, in November 1962; another plot involving several hundred officers from the air force in July 1969; and others. Interestingly and as in Jordan, Saudi Arabia developed a complex combination of a tribally based army formed of family loyalties especially for ground and combat troops recruited respectively from among families of the central Nejd area, the birthplace of the Saud family, and a more meritocratic and competence-based recruitment strategy targeting educated urban communities for the positions in the armed forces requiring sophisticated skills and technological know-how from the Hijaz or the Hassa provinces. Yet the real military buildup only followed the oil boom in the 1970s. If armies were maintained small, major security requirements and in particular crucial military functions were met in the Gulf with external help by relying on the British umbrella until its withdrawal in the end of the 1960s16 and the US special alliance – for Saudi Arabia, the latter was sealed (symbolically) after the meeting between Roosevelt and Ibn Saud in February 1945, also in relation with the granting of oil concession to the Standard Oil of California (1933) and the establishment of a secret US military base in Dhahran (1943). In most Gulf cases, these strategic choices allowed the slow building of an army of very limited size (also for real constraints of manpower resources) in a however dangerous and threat-generating region. And these armies, in the first place in Saudi Arabia, amounted to a replica of many US installations with US equipment. Since then, an enduring feature of Gulf states was in place whereby the ultimate security provider was external, namely, the US. This “outsourced” dimension of security was manifested through the leasing of bases. Gulf states have been reluctant to openly admit the numerous facilities they have leased to the US, UK, France and other

16

Brookings Institution Press, 1981); Nadav Safran, Saudi Arabia: The Ceaseless Quest for Security (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1985). Rosemarie Zahlan, The Making of the Modern Gulf States (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Fred Halliday, Arabia without Sultans (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974).

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foreign powers for reasons of domestic public opinion and owing to fears of being delegitimized.17 Yet (and just to mention the most important US facilities), this feature has been widespread, such as to the forward headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, the al-Udeid Air Base, which hosts the forward headquarters of the US CENTCOM and the alSayliyah camp, the biggest storage area for US military equipment in the region in Qatar, the Jebel Ali Port in Dubai and the Al-Dhafrah Air Base in Abu Dhabi, the huge US transportation hub in Kuwait as a consequence of the first ten-year Defense Security Cooperation Agreement (with the permanent stationing of a US Army Battalion and the prepositioning of equipment at Kuwaiti expenses) with the US after the liberation from Iraq in the fall of 1991 – not to mention Oman, where, from 1970 until 1987, the commanders of the armed forces, heads of navy and air force were British generals and admirals on loan. As mentioned in Chapter 3, all Arab armies benefited from foreign assistance and cooperation agreements. The very specific feature in the Gulf lies in the degree to which these armies have interacted with and relied on foreign patrons/ umbrellas to the point of quasi-interoperability with US forces – as demonstrated during the 1990–1991 Gulf War. The Military and Monarchical Regimes, or When Monarchies Meet Republics within Authoritarian Regimes Starting from this distinctive history, monarchies have changed a lot in relation to their respective armies especially in the 1970s. On the score of military embeddedness in regimes, the monarchies have become in large part less distinguishable from their republican counterparts. And within this enduring political trend in the Arab World, monarchies met republics: whatever the differences (and violent encounters) in their political trajectory in the two postindependence decades, both types of regimes converged in an identical format of authoritarian control after the 1970s. Republics came to pass through a phase of “militarization” (military regimes after coups), then “demilitarization” (with the strong qualification made in Chapter 2 to this term) with enduring authoritarian (and in appearance) “civilianized” regimes after the 1970s. The army as the backbone of regimes and the imperative of control on the armed forces for regimes have also been crucial features in monarchies. In some monarchies like Jordan or Morocco, strong similarities existed with the relations that republics had with their armies. When in “Black” 17

Alexander Cooley, Base Politics: Democratic Change and the U.S. Military Overseas (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).

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September 1970 Hashemite forces struggled against guerrilla (PLO) fedayyins in northern Jordan, a huge moment of truth occurred for the Jordanian Arab Army where Palestinians numbered perhaps 40 percent of the corps – their number increased in the 1950s, but they were not in leadership commands, nor preponderant more generally in strike units (armored, infantry) and much more posted in logistic, technical and support positions. The army was reshuffled by King Hussein in the aftermath of this fratricidal and regional conflict.18 The Jordanian military has since been based on subtle and untold equilibriums, mostly Transjordan in composition (and leadership) but incorporating Palestinians – they identify themselves as Palestinian Jordanians but they implicitly would not climb ranks above a certain rank (major or lieutenant colonel) in combat units – while keeping the army’s character as a nationalist crucible for the state (al-jaysh is identified with Jordan). The supervision of the military was handled by the king himself in relation with the officer corps and the chief of staff – King Abdallah II directed the prime minister to establish a defense ministry only in August 2014. And the Hashemite family has invested itself heavily in the army. In Jordan in the 1960s– 1970s only distant relatives of King Hussein served in the army; after the 1980s, the number of Hashemite family relatives (among them princes Hamza, Faysal, Ali, Hashim and more recently Crown Prince Hussein) increased markedly in it. Tellingly, former high officers also filled key posts, including prime ministerships or in the royal court – the number of prime ministers with a military background may be more than in countries like Egypt or Syria, though there were not so many military prime ministers in Jordan. The Jordanian army has been an essential pillar of the Hashemite regime, organized for regime-shielding functions, with most of its armored and strike brigades stationed in the Amman/al-Zarqa area and with a Royal Guards Brigade in Amman. The Jordanian regime also used its army to suppress riots in Karak in 1996 and in Maan in 1998 when the police was overwhelmed. The Jordanian armed forces’ format also bore resemblance to some extent, comparatively to the size, population and GDP of the country, to the model of big armies in Egypt, Iraq or Syria – one of the top highest countries for defense spending as a percentage of GDP; also at the top in terms of military (and security) employment as a percentage of the labor force (even ahead of Syria). Spending on the army (plus security) trumped all development investments, perhaps 30 to 40 percent (sometimes 18

Paul Jureidini and R. McLaurin, Jordan: The Impact of Social Change on the Role of the Tribes (New York: Praeger, 1984); and the special issue of the journal Civil Wars, 10(3) (2008).

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60 percent) of public expenditure. The comparison extended with the military as a crucial source of employment in the country (with 88,000 to 100,000 active personnel), the role of ex-servicemen in the regime (including former generals appointed prime ministers or in the royal court), a military-bureaucratic (Transjordanian) elite employed in the state,19 the military benefiting from special shops, advanced medical treatment and university placement, army institutions such as Muʾassasat alMutaqaʿidin al-ʿAskariyyin (the organization for retired servicemen) charged with aiding military pensioners and their families20 – and Jordan reintroduced military service in 2007. In Morocco, manpower in the FAR increased in the 1960s and Hassan II, after he became king in 1961, developed a relation of clientelism with the officer corps, systematically handpicking and following officers he knew personally (even to the ranks of under-lieutenant).21 He made use of the FAR to suppress urban riots in Casablanca in 1965 that led to the dissolution of the parliament and the proclamation of the state of emergency – the army crushed the 1958–1959 revolt in the Rif area, a rebellious region. At the time of the border war with Algeria (1963– 1964), officers became an influential part of the factional components of the Alaoui monarchy and played roles in ministries, in the administration, while getting individual economic benefits (farms, enterprises) – this was completely different from the model of civilian-led state-building in Bourguiba’s Tunisia. The price of such an organic relation of the monarchy with the army was the occurrence of dangerous coups d’état. Two very serious coups in Skirat in July 1971 (involving the head of the royal cabinet General Madbouh) and in Rabat in August 1972 (allegedly with Defense Minister General Oufkir) signaled clouds on the horizon and led to a change and to some extent the dissolution of the organic relation between the army and the monarchy.22 After huge reshuffles in the high officer corps and the promotion of a new generation of officers, Hassan II retook control of the military, by shifting the organic relation with the army toward more control and political “quietism” and counterbalancing the army with the parallel Garde Royale, the monitoring by the 19

20 21 22

A caveat should be added: King Abdallah II cultivated relations with the upper echelons of the officer corps (especially the Special Operations Command), but some of his closest advisers have been civilian technocrats and entrepreneurs. Anne-Marie Baylouny, “Militarizing Welfare: Neo-liberalism and Jordanian Policy,” The Middle East Journal, 62(2) (Spring 2008): 277–303. Quoted in the “anonymous” chapter on Morocco in Léo Hamon, ed., Le rôle extramilitaire de l’armée dans le Tiers-Monde (Paris: PUF, 1966). John Waterbury, “The coup manqué,” in Arabs and Berbers, ed. Ernest Gellner and Charles Micaud (London: Duckworth, 1973), 425–430; Rémy Leveau, Le sabre et le turban (Paris: F. Bourin, 1993).

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Gendarmerie Royale and numerous other intelligence services. The army thereafter did not retain the same scope of influence and power in the regime that distanced itself from it – tellingly, the army was now called by Moroccans la grande muette (the big silent one).23 Furthermore, Hassan II focused the military’s attention on a nationalist task of external defense with the war in Sahara against the Algerian-backed Sahraoui Polisario Front after 1975. The oil boom of the 1970s allowed Gulf bureaucracies (among them the army) to acquire their definite shape. After they regained an autonomous hand back on oil rents and after the gradual nationalization of their oil companies, Gulf monarchies endowed their armies with massive budgets. Everything concerning the military was developed at full speed with the help of the financial means of oil rents after the 1970s. As a corollary, defense (and security) budgets followed oil prices but with a tendency to remain more immune to budgeting cuts than other expenses – yet, even in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s, financial constraints were felt by the military during times of economic contraction and debt strangling. The first specificity lied in rent-driven military building. Gulf armies have been built by dint of huge military expenses and arms imports, and more recently technology transfers.24 One of its most important components has been the “military-industrial complex or bazaar” linking Gulf rulers and close associates (among them local private brokers and entrepreneurs), their armed forces, manufacturers of sophisticated weapons like the US, France and Great Britain and the latter’s defense companies, with arms exports and contracts for maintenance of equipment on a very large scale, overexpanded in comparison with the needs and capabilities of these armies. Little Gulf emirates’ state-building had traditionally an external component with the intensive use (with variations across the area) of migrant workers and not just in menial jobs. But their security sector was also more internationalized in scope than other areas of statebuilding, with widespread outsourcing to networks of US, French, Russian, British and Korean defense manufacturers. Military buildups were also a form of prestige race between small Gulf states to amass parallel security sectors from the same source, the US, a feature cultivated by the US, in particular the CENTCOM, and weapon firms in search of huge markets to complement the traditional Saudi market. And they were for Gulf states a way to reinforce the above-mentioned links of alliance and get access to Washington – defense firms and the Pentagon were 23 24

General Tobji, Les officiers de sa majesté (Paris: Fayard, 2006). David Sorenson, “Why the Saudi Defence Binge,” Contemporary Security Policy, 35(1) (2014): 116–137.

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a good way to foster their interests and lobbying capabilities in the US. As a corollary, Gulf armies did not develop huge encroachments into civilian economies similar to what was described in Chapter 3. The flip side of rent-driven and outsourced militarization was the lack of transparency. For instance, in Kuwait, endowed with a vocal and active parliament, defense expenditure has provoked regular uproars in parliament among the opposition (and the ensuing disbanding of it by the Sabah dynasty) concerning how defense contracts were awarded and managed, with allegations of corruption.25 This was a story unheard of in my other cases. Yet, second and contrary to common views, Gulf armies were not just an artifact and a largely outsourced appendix. The military sector was included in the regime’s equilibriums. Extended families mirrored the pyramidal state apparatus with family members infused according to the hierarchy of familial branches in commands of military regions, army bases, specific units or paramilitary forces. Genealogy was a complex pyramid of power with hierarchies among families, tribes, branches in these collegial Gulf monarchies. Power was widely distributed along family lines, in particular in armies that were a significant tool to maintain the balance of power among branches within the core ruling families.26 Though with a different genealogy, monarchical regimes were thus in close affinity (in the Weberian sense of the term) with armies and paramilitary forces. For instance, in Kuwait, officers have traditionally been in close connection with the ruling Sabah family and associate allies. And, since the 1980s and in a context of reassertive authoritarianism in a formerly more opened (parliamentary) political landscape, the Sabah dynasty has controversially relied on the military for internal repression or at least to support the extended police apparatus27 – this was the model of Bahrain in 2011. In Saudi Arabia until the rise of Muhammad Ibn Salman after 2015–2017, the defense and civil aviation ministry and the National Guard ministry, both separate entities, became expanded fiefdoms distributed to family members and their cliques or even quasi-states within the Saudi state,28 providing patronage networks with contracts, employment and privileged services to both officers and their relatives – and the 25 26

27 28

Mary Ann Tetreault, Stories of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). For instance, in the 1996 Omani Constitution, the crucial succession question (Article 6) is organized with a system of letters disseminated in the country in specific locations and written by the former sultan to channel the designation by the Royal Family Council (the Al-Said, Al-Bou Said, etc.) with an order of preference; if the latter does not agree on a name, the Defense Council (with no family member) will be in charge of applying them. In January 2020, the military high council watched over the succession after the death of Sultan Qaboos. Jill Crystall, Oil and Politics in the Gulf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Steffen Hertog, Princes, Brokers and Bureaucrats (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).

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same held true for the interior. The defense ministry was organized around prince Sultan Ibn Abdelaziz who remained at its helm (with his full brothers Turki and Abdelrahman as deputies) for forty-eight years, from 1962 until his death in 2011. The SANG ministry was the preserve of (future king) Abdallah, then his son Mutaʿib Ibn Abdallah, along with other sons – it had its own ministerial status in parallel to interior and defense until Muhammad Ibn Salman’s grab on power. The SANG was modernized in the 1980s–1990s to become virtually a parallel army coopting key tribes and offsetting the regular military – with the caveat that the SANG did not have heavy armor and air defense. It was tasked with securing oil fields and the regime. And Saudi Arabia deployed its military on numerous occasions to support the police and the paramilitary SANG to reestablish order in its often-unstable, oil-rich Shia majority eastern province. Each of these fiefdoms controlled huge infrastructures, their own cities and their own share of the budget. In the 1980s, the number of officers increased independently of capabilities. The SANG in particular served as a mechanism to redistribute wealth to those with a tribal background – initially, it was a Nejdi force, then, it recruited beyond this core region for the Saudi family – and supported a large number of Saudis with its networks of schools and hospitals. The army/paramilitary was a highly personal topic with senior commanders hailing from families with historical ties to the Saud and building clientelistic networks with other people. This specificity of Saudi state-building process could also serve as a coupproofing device with the extreme segmentation that resulted – and the Saudi regime had no desire to see the armed forces united in a functional sector. The way the armed forces (the regular army and the SANG) featured in the political landscape of Saudi Arabia implied that they were not much involved in decision-making with a political unified stance (that of a unified military sector) and much more pulled by their very constitutive shape (and familial/tribal ties) into the Saud family’s business and bargaining, hence specifically “embedded” bureaucratically and financially into the Saudi regime. Other Gulf states have been latecomers but strong-minded investors in defense matters, with a military buildup focused on hardware and technology. For instance, the UAE was created in 1971 as a federation (Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al-Qawain, Fujairah and later Ras al-Khaima) at a time of British withdrawal from the Gulf and acute security threats for these tiny city-states. But the UAE lacked a unified army despite exhortations by advisers from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan. Attempts to build a unified army failed amidst rivalries between the al-Nahyan dynasty (of Abu Dhabi) and al-Maktoum (of Dubai) and

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despite the impetus of the charismatic ruler (Shaykh Zayed Ibn Sultan alNahyan) and the huge military expenses made by various emirates, yet in competition. Leadership of the armed forces has been a crucible and a symbol of political power for rising shuyukh of the al-Nahyan and alMaktoum families in rivalry, hence with separate armies in this federal government. Monarchical networks and family connections around the emir of Dubai and federal Defense Minister Shaykh Muhammad Ibn Rashid al-Maktoum, the president of the federation and commander of the armed forces, Shaykh Khalifa Ibn Zayed al-Nahyan, and his halfbrother, Abu Dhabi crown prince and vice commander of the army, Mohammed Ibn Zayed al-Nahyan (MBZ), were key pillars to build military structures and sign related arms contracts after the end of the Gulf War. Only in the late 1990s and with the rise to power heights of a new generation of princes did a UAE unified army began to emerge and the armed forces become a vector of federation building. After 9/11 in particular, MBZ, a graduate from the UK military academy at Sandhurst in 1979, chief of staff in 1993 and involved in the development of the UAE’s increasingly expeditionary approach with a participation in international interventions in Somalia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, emerged as a key leader in Emirati politics with his assertive policies. He oversaw an unprecedented increase in military spending with major purchases in aircraft and aid defense since the mid-2000s. In sum, reflecting their abundant resources, Gulf monarchies have also built their well-remunerated and carefully selected military personnel as a closed and “cocooned” bureaucratic apparatus populated by careerists often detached from combat: most defense expenditures in the Gulf, in particular in Saudi Arabia, have gone to building huge bases and to salaries rather than improving training, combat readiness and actual fighting capabilities. And in rich Gulf countries, military officers and even native-born NCOs have benefited from numerous fringe benefits, handouts of cash (a generalized practice in regime-society relations in the Gulf) and land grants for retired officers – this was a common practice also in the civilian bureaucracy. The military buildup in the Gulf was impressive in terms of quantity and quality of available weapons for the well-indulged officers.29 But Gulf monarchies did not welcome the idea of having large and dynamic armed forces for fear that they might overthrow them. 29

The best few pages on Gulf armies remain Nazih Ayubi, Overstating the Arab State (London: Tauris, 1996). See also Anthony Cordesman, Saudi Arabia Enters the TwentyFirst Century (Westport: Praeger-CSIS, 2003); Mark Heller and Nadav Safran, The New Middle Class and Regime Stability in Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1985).

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Some, such as Saudi Arabia, could have developed much larger ones, of course, but internal security reasons largely prevailed. The Gulf monarchies in general resisted pressures from the US, especially after the First Gulf War of 1990–1991, to buttress the capabilities of their armed forces by expanding them and introducing conscription – twenty years later the needs were different and military buildups started. Large bases and the so-called military cities were also kept far away from the power and population centers – for instance, in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, only units from the Special Forces of the police and the Royal Guard have been stationed. The SANG did not coordinate with the regular forces. In addition, the SANG was counterbalanced by other tribal forces called al-Fawj (regiment). The rent-driven and family-dominated character of military buildups explained a specificity of most Gulf armed forces, their truncated character in operational terms. For instance, the Saudi armed forces lacked a mobile artillery force and even supporting fighting vehicles. Saudi pilots were said to be highly trained but a shortage in qualified ground crew and technicians has compelled the Saudi air force to hire foreign contractors to do these jobs. Tellingly, the Abu Dhabi and Omani pilots were the only ones in the Gulf able to strike moving targets and operate air refueling in the anti-Daesh coalition in 2015–2018 – but the Emirati air force has had some of the fewest troops and nationals in service. Oman stands as an exception with the early “Omanization” of the officer corps and the intensive modernization of the army under Qaboos focusing more on training than on arms procurements, yet in a small country. In general, showy, expensive and huge arms purchases were signed without dealing with the manpower and maintenance issues involved. Gulf armies were quite different from other regular armies maintaining technical services and infrastructures – “postmodern [Western] armies” also developed with some degree of “outsourcing,” while keeping the knowledge of these functions – to the extent that a lot of these dimensions have been completely outsourced to foreigners or contractors in the Gulf. This represented a kind of outsourced buildup that left these armies less operational and more dependent on battalions of nonnational (civilian) contractors employed to do the cleaning, cooking and service tasks and carry out the bulk of the manual labor involved. For instance, the Kuwaiti military displayed little coordination for eventual battle, as happened with its debacle in 1990 – with a few exceptions and the only bright spot, the air force, that attracted capable officers (but who were dependent on foreigners for ground crews) and that took part in the 1991 coalition against Iraq. When deployed

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on the field, a brigade of Bangladeshi soldiers would conduct the bulk of the menial tasks and services for the Kuwait Armed Forces.30 As a consequence of these structural gaps in the capabilities of their armies, Gulf monarchies have relied instead on foreign actors’ protective umbrella – chiefly the US – and on contractors/mercenaries to protect them and to deter serious external threats for these countries surrounded by dangers (the Iran-Iraq War, the turbulent 1990s and Iraq under embargoes, the post-9/11 era and regime change in Iraq, an assertive Iran, etc.). The Kuwaiti army, however, that included Palestinians and Arabs who did not hold citizenship was largely depleted and short of manpower after the Iraqi invasion in 1990, after the Sabah considered Arabs as less reliable politically. This was also a determined choice of Gulf rulers in order to prevent their (national) armies to become too large and risk interfering in politics. The vast majority of the contractors in Gulf armies came from (Sunni) Muslim countries, especially Pakistan and Jordan, though they have also employed non-Arabs (Australian, British, Colombian, Nepali and South African) officers and NCOs. Cases varied from the hiring of entire units with cooperation agreements signed between states – Jordan or Pakistan have been especially apt at playing such a strategy – to individuals recruited based on their sought-after skills. In 1999, Jordan even established the KADDB (King Abdallah II Design and Development Bureau) within the Jordanian armed forces, reporting to the private office of the king through the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, to create a defense industrial base and in reality to meet the needs of potential Middle Eastern clients, that is, Gulf states in need of manpower and military knowledge. And the category of mercenary was especially blurred in the Gulf; for instance, in Kuwait where even Arabs are listed as “stateless” (with the bidun) by the defense ministry. One last point should be underlined. Gigantism and the speedy way to build armies and catch up with modern military requirements with foreign contractors or mercenaries that were characteristic of Gulf countries were not contradictory with parallel and gradual policies of endogenous development. All across the Gulf, especially in the 1990s and 2000s, a new generation of rulers has initiated policies related to conscription with a special meaning in terms of nation-building or revamped social contracts offered to societies under monarchical authoritarian rule. Monarchy should be better understood as an alternative conception of society and rule (when compared to more familiar republican systems or Western monarchies), also in need of national myths as an imagined 30

Sean Riordan, Culture and the Military in the Middle East: The Case of Kuwait (Quantico: US Marines Corps, 2005).

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community. In Arab monarchies, the latter has been based on kinship and family, tribal values and sometimes religious roles (commander of the faithful, amir al-muʾminin, in Morocco; custodian of the two holy sites, khaddim al-haramayn, in Saudi Arabia). Gulf countries have also devoted considerable resources to the creation of national symbols under the term turath (heritage). The adaptation of these societies to the cosmopolitan and global world witnessed a transformation from Bedouins into consumers/bourgeois with a specific relation to their own societies and states.31 A related step concerned conscription as a way to enhance national identities (Emirati-zation, Omani-zation, Saudi-zation, Qatarization, etc.), in a competing process among states. This trend toward conscription was very much a question of appearances and symbols: the matter was not to use conscription to build strong armies (or replace contractors and mercenaries), but to help reinforce a budding national identity that saw itself as equal to other military powers, specifically Iran – this was accompanied with US preferential treatment and support for Gulf states, in particular a willingness to share advance technology (fighters, drones, etc.) that served to square the circle of limited human capabilities by technology. Qatar introduced three-month conscription in 2013, extended to one year in 2018. In 2014 the UAE followed suit by introducing compulsory military service for nationals – perhaps only 20 percent of the UAE’s total inhabitants. Kuwait reintroduced mandatory service in 2017 after its abolishment in 2001. And tellingly, in August 2018 Morocco joined the trend. All in all, the military in monarchies has been specifically “embedded” in regimes, but with less ability for it to distance itself from regimes (Chapter 2). Kingdoms enjoyed the advantage of a different concept of state- and nationbuilding when compared with republics and the latter’s patronage related to dominant parties, mobilizational structures or associations: with more intimate relations between rulers and society, a reliance on personal relationships, a role of extended families and family alliances in the case of monarchies.32 And such relations flourished within the officer corps. Networks based on families, tribes, clans, subgroups have been positioned into armies. The Gulf armed forces have been very much penetrated by “monarchical dynamics,” in particular with the role of officer-princes in the officer corps: those called, for instance, the Sandhurst shuyukh, namely, members of royal families, trained in this famous British military

31 32

Calvert Jones, Bedouins into Bourgeois (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Lisa Anderson, “Absolutism and the Resilience of Monarchy in the Middle East,” Political Science Quarterly, 1 (1991): 1–15; Lisa Anderson, “Dynasts and Nationalists,” in Middle East Monarchies, ed. Joseph Kostiner (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 53–69.

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academy.33 Most command positions in the Gulf armies were in the hands of “officer-princes,” family members with a military background who were often the commanders or deputy commanders of important units. The way repression was waged in 2011 in Bahrain illustrated such proximities. A Monarchical Army in Repression: Bahrain, 2011 The Bahraini Defense Forces (BDF) were a small army (between 8,000 and 13,000 men), with a well-trained, well-serviced and well-cocooned officer corps – most have received their professional education in the UK or in the US. Hamad ibn Issa al-Khalifa, the current ruler (since 1999), graduated from the US Command and General Staff College and was in charge of creating the army after independence as its first commander in chief – then he was succeeded by the current Crown Prince Salman until 2008, thereafter by a member of another branch of the al-Khalifa family with numerous members in the security sector, the so-called Khawalids in reference to their ancestors, Field Marshal Khalifa Ibn Ahmad al-Khalifa. All consequential and sensitive positions (chief of staff, chief of the Royal Guard, chief of the special forces of the Royal Guard, etc.) were held by al-Khalifa members – a family whose membership is estimated between 3,000 and 6,000. Very controversially, after the 1981 coup, the BDF was ridden of most of Shia officers in sensitive positions – the regime recruited officers from Sunni families allied with the monarchy giving them a favorable status, hence favoring social mobility and wedding them to the dynasty. Furthermore, after a mass uprising (the intifada of 1994–1995), the representation of Shias in the military diminished: they were systematically discriminated in the officer corps. And even the rank and file (and NCOs) were increasingly filled with foreigners and mercenaries from Pakistan, Jordan and other countries (Syria) who were often given Bahraini nationality – their proportion was much more important in the police and the intelligence.34 Shias represented perhaps 53 to 62 percent of the island’s citizen population (53.9 percent of the total population is foreigner according to the 2010 official census’s published figures) governed by the Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty; the British since the beginning of 33

34

Kings Abdallah of Jordan and Hamad of Bahrain, Shaykh Tamim, emir of Qatar, Sultan Qaboos of Oman are graduates from Sandhurst. More than twenty of King Hamad’s immediate family studied there. In the 2010s, if we except British citizens, Sandhurst had more officer-cadets from the UAE than from any other country. On this controversial topic, see Abdulhadi Khalaf, “Contentious Politics in Bahrain,” Oslo, Fourth Nordic Conference on Middle Eastern Studies, August 13, 1998; Amy Austin Holmes, “On the Undoing of Bahrain’s Arab Spring,” Mediterranean Research Meeting (draft paper, 2012); and the so-called Bandargate Report by a British Sudanese adviser leaked to Bahrain Mirror.

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the twentieth century discriminated against Shias in general in a country with a long history of popular opposition to the al-Khalifa going back to the 1920s and democratic (not just Shia) movements seen every decade since the 1950s. The BDF was the army of the al-Khalifa monarchy whose ultimate mission was its protection35 – the highest level of defense authority, the Supreme Defense Council, was composed entirely of alKhalifa members. The enormous increase in defense expenditure, especially in the 2000s,36 for a small army with no offensive capabilities meant that its primary purpose was to provide regime security. In 2011 and in the wake of the uprisings that swept away Ben Ali and Mubarak, demonstrations initially confined to Shia villages outside Manama gathered momentum and migrated to the capital, on the Pearl Roundabout (midan al-luʾluʾ) close to the flagship Bahrain Financial Harbour and taking a national (and trans-confessional) character – this was a huge source of legitimacy controversies between the dynasty and the fragmented opposition. On February 14, 2011, a day of protest planned on the tenth anniversary of the referendum that approved the national action charter (namely, constitutional changes in 2001 coming after the scrapping of the state security law of 1974) initiated a movement that at some dates featured an astounding participation rate that even revolutionaries in Egypt could only dream of.37 The uprising in Manama gathered perhaps one-fifth of the entire country into the streets (a unique feature) to protest the ruling al-Khalifa family’s enduring rule. At least and despite controversies about figures in demonstrations and counterdemonstrations, the challenge was acute for the al-Khalifa who were submitted to the one case of sustained popular (and not just Shia) pressure on a monarchy in 2011. On March 13, about 1,000(?) men from the Saudi SANG (with columns of tanks) – the eastern Saudi Shiapopulated and unstable province of Hassa and where the kingdom’s largest oil deposits are close to Bahrain – and a contingent (500?) from the Emirati military police came to rescue the small BDF, one day after 35

36

37

It was even stated in the BICI, p. 51. The BICI, or Bahrain Independent Commission on Inquiry, is the report of the commission established by King Hamad and headed by Egyptian professor of law Bassiouni (who led the UNSC commission on war crimes in former Yugoslavia). The BICI ran into troubles when it appeared to exonerate officials from any responsibility for human rights violations, then surprised everyone with the hard-hitting content of its report – Bassiouni even stated before the king in a televised speech that most of the protests did not fall outside of the participatory rights of citizens. According to Jane’s World Armies, or the SIPRI (Stockholm), Bahrain ranked number eleven on the list of top military spenders as a proportion of GDP from 2000 to 2009 in the world. 80 to 85 percent of all employees in Bahrain went on general strike according to the “official” BICI (p. 83); perhaps half of the country’s (national) population joined protests at their peak.

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a visit by US defense secretary Gates.38 They played a role to reinforce the small BDF in second-line positions. The popular pressure did not result in conflict inside the dynasty, between the soft-line crown prince (and oldest son of the king) Prince Salman and the hard-line prime minister (and uncle of the king) Khalifa Ibn Salman al-Khalifa – the armed forces were more identified with a third group (the Khawalids). Incidentally, any possibility of internal dissent was preempted by Saudi and Emirati intervention. The BDF was a crucial organ involved in implementing the emergency law declared by royal decree – as stated by the BICI report recalling its role in field operations (curfews, checkpoints, the clearing of the Pearl Roundabout) and its participation in the legal and judicial aspects of the emergency law and as highlighted by the much more prominent role of the BDF commander Khalifa Ibn Ahmad al-Khalifa in the media with a fiery language linking demonstrations with Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah. Yet, the BICI report largely exonerated the BDF when it pinpointed the culture of unaccountability of the security forces as distinguished from the BDF. The BDF’s role was, however, less autonomous (according to the model developed in Chapter 2) from the regime than its Egyptian and Tunisian counterparts. The BDF was included into a larger repressive system made up of the interior, the National Guard, the National Security Agency, the Special Security Forces – established with the help of British advisers – and buttressed by Saudi and Emirati intervention. The Bahraini officer corps’ firm belief in the legitimacy of the monarchy, the small “cocooned” military being more of an “elite” (a Sunni elite) rather than a “representative” military in affinity with demonstrators, and the rank and file coming hegemonically from this minority stratum (along with Sunni foreign mercenaries) were key reasons behind the successful suppression of the demonstrations. Bahrain was a source of successful (and harsh) regime reassertion despite serious contestations.

38

Bahrain has hosted a US naval presence since 1948, then the siege of the naval component (NAVCENT) of the US Central Command as well as the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet – a Cooperative Defense Agreement was first signed in 1991. It was put by G. W. Bush in the category of “major non-NATO ally” (as Japan or Australia) in 2002. That does not mean that the US has got much leverage on internal Bahraini matters (see CRS, “Bahrain, Reform, Security and US Policy,” Washington, US Congress Report, June 29, 2012), even when some US high generals talking to Bahraini officials contrasted the integration of African Americans in the US army with the policy toward Shias in Bahrain.

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The Great Reversal after 2011: Gulf “Little Spartas” on the Rise and the New Trend in Military Monarchical Assertiveness? The less-mentioned Gulf militaries made a comeback to the fore in the 2010s. In 2020, a few Gulf monarchies or Jordan39 are considered firstrank military powers or at least the region’s most capable armed forces, quite a reversal when compared with previous “rankings” in the Arab World in the 1950s–2000s where monarchies lay well behind republics in military terms. The traditional model of Gulf armies has remained prevalent, with overspending in some dimensions of the military (infrastructure and equipment), the maintenance of an understaffed army (and a well-paid and “cocooned” military complemented by mercenaries or contractors) and the overreliance on the American security alliance (or in some cases more diversified Western umbrellas with Great Britain or France). What is new is the assertiveness of Gulf armies in a context of regional turmoil and a weakened (retreating) American umbrella. What is also new is a willingness to use force when confronted with a problem related to regional security and not just wait for foreign patrons to intervene. Monarchies are no longer shy military actors and are not just endowing their armed forces with modest objectives. Since the mid-2000s, the classic regime-shielding activities of Gulf armies have also entailed a new dimension of military self-reliance and assertiveness with a new endeavor to project power. Rulers in the Gulf in general and the new rising heirs in particular (Muhammad Ibn Zayed in the UAE or Muhammad Ibn Salman in Saudi Arabia) have understood their regime security as not just entailing the thwarting of internal threats but also encompassing the fight against new regional threats with some sense of self-reliance based on wealth, access to advanced weaponry and the enhancement of military capabilities. Very tellingly, the area has been sprouting with new defense colleges in Qatar, UAE, Oman (2013), Bahrain (2014), Kuwait (in connection with NATO, 2017). Gulf states have been especially mindful of American foreign policy intentions, understood as a relative withdrawal of American power (hence protective umbrella) from the region: after 2006 with the G. W. Bush administration’s desperate search for an “exit strategy” from Iraq that left this country more open to Iranian influences and submitted to Iraqi Shia parties’ assertiveness with new sectarian overtones (and related militias); then under the Obama administration, from the pivot to Asia, the less activist role of the US in the Middle East in particular in Syria (the “red 39

There are few sources on the Moroccan military, except historical works on the Moroccan Liberation Army (Jaysh al-Tahrir) and that a museum opened in 2001!

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line” on chemical weapons in August 2013) to the nuclear deal with Iran (JCPOA) in July 2015; a policy of retreat pursued paradoxically by the reckless Trump administration. Gulf monarchies have, then, developed a new sense of self-reliance in security matters and an ensuing activism with a military taint. The rise of the “Shia Arc” rhetoric among Gulf ruling dynasties has been based on perceptions of acute threats to Gulf (Arab) polities, from alleged pan-Shia transnational links to Iran’s political advances in the Arab World. And they have represented a stronger fear than the old counter-discourse generated by the Iranian revolution in 1979 and that had helped gather the GCC in 1981.40 Gulf monarchies have felt surrounded by the Iranian influence in Shia communities in the Gulf (including the Bahraini uprising of 2011), in Iraq (after 2006–2007), in Lebanon (with Hezbollah), in Syria (after 2012–2013), in Yemen (after 2014) – with Zaydis conflated with Iranian Twelvers and the Houthis with direct Iranian proxies, when concrete evidence has remained faint. A language of confrontation with Iran has been aired in parallel with military buildups and huge purchases of aircrafts and missiles – the US made its largest sales in the 2010s to the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Israel, all in strong opposition to Iran. The alleged disengagement of the US, the waning of US hegemony and the perception of rising threats by Gulf states has been emboldening entrepreneurship on the part of new regional powers like the UAE and Saudi Arabia. There has been an eagerness among Gulf monarchies to “securitize” new alleged threats by using military capabilities and projecting power to counter them, as exemplified by some Gulf states’ action in Libya (with the support of French and British special forces) in 2011, then after 2014, presumably in Syria (at least under the form of massive aid for the armed opposition), and direct intervention in Yemen after 2015. Furthermore since 2011, there has been a new regionalism in security in the Gulf with a Joint Security Agreement of the GCC signed in 2012 (and even ratified by the most democratic, or at least vocal, parliament in Kuwait in 2015) and a large number of new anti-terrorism laws that have extended the criminalization of numerous acts, surveillance and extraterritorial powers to the targeting of suspects in any other member states on the basis of a mere accusation – it was initially offered by the Saudis in 1982 after the Iranian revolution, but it was adopted only in 2012.41 To fulfill these “securitization” moves and besides the dramatic expansion of defense supply chains and weapons procurements (a classic 40 41

Gregory Gause, The International Relations of the Persian Gulf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Human Rights Watch, “GCC: Joint Security Agreement Imperils Rights” (Beirut: April 26, 2014).

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feature), there has been a new regional search (and competition race between monarchies) for air power and elite units or special forces. They have followed suit of global (Western) models of militarization, from the 1991 Gulf War and the role of the US Air Force to demolish Saddam Hussein’s huge military apparatus, to subsequent wars waged by Western powers in the region or its immediate vicinity (from Afghanistan to Libya) with air power and special forces on the ground – after 2015, Russia has posited itself as an efficient intervener in Syria and a provider of advanced weapons. The Saudis have endeavored to develop huge special forces with the help of France. Other small Gulf monarchies have established smaller special forces said to be the most effective regional armed forces, along with their Jordanian counterparts with whom they have cultivated close relationships and exchanges. The new military assertiveness has gone hand in hand with the reaffirmation of the national character of the army (and conscription). Gulf states have also been eager to develop their own ability to maintain and repair sophisticated military equipment and even to manufacture it. The UAE (the Emirates Defense Industries Company) and Saudi Arabia (the Saudi Military Industries Corporation) have been looking not just for weapons acquisitions but they have been asking their traditional Western business partners for transfers of technology (including drones) and new production lines to local companies in a rising industrial defense base – “offset contracts” are designed to offset costs of foreign imports with local factories to produce components and maintain systems. And, in 2016, when the US forbade Gulf buyers to get some sophisticated items (e.g., the fifth-generation F35, Predator UAS) the Emirates turned to Russia to develop a light combat fighter or to China to manufacture drones.42 In the UAE, Crown Prince (of Abu Dhabi) Muhammad Ibn Zayed (MBZ) has prioritized the development of a military-industrial complex of private and state companies specialized in the defense sector and developed infrastructure for manpower formation and arms maintenance in Abu Dhabi. The Gulf has no longer just been a weapons customer, but an industry partner with complex financing schemes devised with global defense firms. And the display of military capabilities has also been a source of national prestige – GCC maneuvers have been showcased on big advertisement panels on the main roads of capitals, as seen, for instance, in Bahrain in November 2016. A caveat should be added: whatever the new degree of self-assertiveness, Gulf monarchies have 42

“Arab Nations Rush to Develop Their Defense Industries,” The Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2017; “Saudi Arabia Strives to Create Saudi-based Defense Industries,” Financial Times, March 15, 2018; Florence Gaub and Zoe Stanley-Lockman, “Defense Industries in Arab States,” Paris, Chaillot Paper 141, March 2017.

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still relied on American strategic protection, despite the doubts they have expressed in private and that were publicly revealed in the so-called Saudileaks (by Wikileaks).43 One of the foremost examples of a new military interventionism in the Gulf is the UAE, allegedly dubbed “little Sparta” by US high officers.44 The UAE has remained a small-sized military endowed with huge and sophisticated equipment and a country whose ultimate security has been based on foreign alliances. The latter were sealed with the aircraft refueling station in al-Dhafrah used by the US to carry out bombing raids in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq (against Daesh) and with infrastructure for drones monitoring, along with a French naval and air base (called “Camp de la paix”) opened in May 2009. Since the mid-2000s, the UAE has developed its military capabilities and a new ability to use them. The UAE doubled its military budget from 2005 to 2014 (according to the SIPRI military expenditure database) with huge defense imports (more than 60 percent from the US, 9 percent from Russia).45 The UAE sent small contingents, previously in Somalia, in the Gulf War of 1990–1991 and Kosovo, then in Afghanistan and more recently Libya, Yemen and presumably Syria. A new National Defense Staff College created by federal decree in Abu Dhabi was opened in December 2013 – it was allegedly staffed by former US officers. Mandatory conscription was introduced for adult males in 2014; the aim was more to create a military socialization effect than build the UAE’s military might upon conscription. In parallel the UAE has relied on the extensive recruitment of Columbian soldiers hired directly in the armed forces and paid salaries up to ten times what Columbia paid them (800 men in 2012, with a stated objective of 3,000), at a time of peace agreements between the government and the Marxist FARC guerrilla in Columbia. The new Emirati assertiveness has also had an internationalized component with private military activities. In the 2010s, Dubai became a key hub for private security companies (PSCs, or mercenaries) offering services on anti-terrorism, surveillance, cyber-surveillance (also for carrying out military air operations in Libya on behalf of the UAE)46 – and Jordan has also developed its own PSCs or networked relations with the UAE. And the 43 44 45 46

The new military assertiveness has also been a good way to keep close relations with the US: overbuying equipment is also to some extent buying alliances. “In the UAE, the US Has a Quiet, Potent Ally Nicknamed Little Sparta,” The Wall Street Journal, November 9, 2014. “Military Spending and Arms Imports by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE,” SIPRI Fact Sheet, May 2019. On the recruitment of Columbian mercenaries by Blackwater (renamed Academi), see “Secret Desert Force Set Up by Blackwater’s Founder,” The New York Times, May 14, 2011; “Erik Prince in the Hot Seat,” The Intercept, March 24, 2016.

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UAE has been bustling with military projects of naval bases, in Somaliland (Berbera) in January 2017, in Somalia (Bosaso) and Eritrea and with similar projects in South Yemen. MBZ has steered the transition of the UAE military from a force of marginal importance to one of distinct power projection capabilities. The UAE was instrumental along with Saudi Arabia to project its forces in Bahrain in March 2011. The UAE has taken a key role in the Saudi-led war in Yemen after 2015 with as many as 4,000 troops, with 1,500 UAE special forces on ground deployments and French-built ships to empower the naval blockade of Houthi-controlled Yemen.47 UAE special forces played a key role in reorganizing President Hadi’s scattered forces in the South, in recapturing Aden in 2016 and in the fight against al-Qaeda in al-Mukallah in the spring of 2016.48 The UAE has had actual soldiers on the ground, a very new feature for Gulf armies; yet, after some were killed (and were heralded as heroes in the country, allegedly 107 Emiratis in 2018), it has increasingly been reluctant to participate with ground troops that often stuck in their bases – the UAE announced a drawdown/withdrawal of its deployment in July 2019. The UAE, then, had a key logistical role to bring in mercenaries from Latin America (Chile and Columbia)49 and to support the incoming Sudanese forces (from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, Quwwat al-Daʿam al-Sariʿa) in Yemen as foot soldiers. At least 300(?) soldiers of the Bahraini Royal Guard and elements from the air force were deployed in Yemen with Emirati forces at one moment. The UAE army has become a very modern and well-trained military (with brand-new equipment), but of course it remains a “catalog military” with limited capabilities (also due to structural demographic reasons). Saudi Arabia followed the UAE’s steps. Muhammad Ibn Salman (MBS)-induced military reforms in Saudi Arabia have been part of his whole program of reform, also aimed at maintaining the exclusive grip of the Saud family and in particular reinforcing the power of his own subfamily clan. They entailed the retaking of exclusive control by MBS and his familial network over fiefdoms, in particular in the defense ministry and the parallel SANG with anti-corruption campaigns and new 47

48 49

The Saudis even set up (presumably with British help) a Joint Incident Assessments Team to investigate (or whitewash) alleged violations of international humanitarian law led by a Bahraini military judge (involved in military trials against protesters after 2011 in his country) – this is copied from Western armies waging war among civilians with the risks of civilian deaths or (for the worst) war crimes and that operate under strict legal rules of engagement. Alex Mello and Michael Knights, “West of Suez for the United Arab Emirates,” War on the Rocks, September 2, 2016. “Emirates Secretly Sends Colombian Mercenaries to Yemen Fight,” The New York Times, November 25, 2015.

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nominations. But they have also been part of a new military assertiveness with a strong endeavor to have an effective fighting force in the regional rivalry with Iran. This nationalist endeavor was a core rationale behind the war/intervention in Yemen launched under the direction of MBS in March 2015. In 2016, the then-deputy crown prince said that “it is unacceptable that we are the world’s third or fourth biggest country in military spending but our army is ranked in the twenties.” In November 2017, the SANG minister was fired. In March 2018 in a series of royal decrees, several top military commanders (including the chief of staff, the heads of the ground forces, the air defense forces and the air force) were fired with a larger plan to overhaul the country’s army with what MBS called “highenergy people” in top military jobs in the ministry.50 In May 2018, he announced a planned recruitment of 800 new officers – with an ambitious program to launch a defense university. MBS also aimed at developing the defense ministry. “Vision 2030,” the flagship program of MBS, envisioned a crucial increase in local defense manufacturing – though weakened by problems of capabilities. A royal decree named as assistant to the defense minister for executive affairs someone whose background signaled the new involvement of the private sector. In short, Saudi Arabia has striven to mimic the UAE’s military assertiveness initiated. And in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, a new assertive atmosphere praising militarism (previously a threat to monarchies, Chapter 1), intervention, the use of force has been prevalent among ruling elites, along with friendships or patronage relations in accordance with their counterrevolutionary moves in the post-2011 Arab World, in the first place in Yemen and Libya (Chapter 6). And it expanded. In February 2019, the Algerian Chief of Staff Gaid Salah paid a discrete but high-level visit to Abu Dhabi (officially to the IDEX-2019 military salon), five days before he forced President Boutefliqa to step down with a military ultimatum – and civic mobilizations in the streets would claim “Gaid Salah chiyate alImarat” (Gaid Salah, servant of the UAE) in Friday protests. In March 2019, before his April offensive against Tripoli, General Haftar with his whole military staff was welcomed in Riyadh by King Salman, MBS and intelligence and foreign ministry officials – in April 2019 during his visit to the White House, President al-Sisi also broached the subject with President Trump. Haftar has also had close relations with the UAE for funding and most importantly military support with air power and armed drones. Finally, a key player in the transitional military council that 50

“Military Shake-up Aims at Installing ‘High Energy’ People to Achieve Modernizations Targets: MBS,” Dawn (Pakistan), February 28, 2018.

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overthrew President al-Beshir in the midst of huge civic mobilizations in Sudan in April 2019, (Lieutenant General) Mohammed Hamdan Dagolo (nicknamed “Hemedti”) and the head of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has cultivated close relations with Saudi Arabia and the UAE: he was involved in the deployment of the RSF in Yemen, along with the head of the junta, General Burhan; the transitional military council got US$3 billion from Saudi Arabia and the UAE to shore up the country’s shaky finances after the coup. Elites in the Gulf are not alien to the military and its manifold manifestations as analyzed in this book. Similarly, Jordan fits into this model of new military assertiveness of monarchical armies, while also benefiting from it by branching out. In 2020, it is considered one of the most professional and well-organized armies in the world, in one of the most militarized nations in the world, in terms of the ratio of force number to the total population or military expenditure to GDP, even during periods of economic crises. It has been a flourishing importer of most modern US tanks and jet fighters, funded by a large (though fluctuating) US military assistance that increased since the mid-1990s, even after the signing of the peace treaty with Israel (1994), along with additional British help. The Jordanian army also took the turn of modernization and reorganization according to international standards, especially under King Abdallah II, who previously spent eighteen years in active duty. There was a streamlining of the military toward a more specialized apparatus (fit for peacekeeping, special forces and as a provider of military services for the Gulf) and a twotier military (the elite forces vs. the rest and the Gendarmerie).51 The army was restructured around the brainchild of (future King) Abdallah II, the Special Operations Center created in 1996,52 which has become the backbone of the Jordanian military, also closely related to the Royal Guard units in charge of securing Amman. In parallel, the Jordanian armed forces, already in long-standing cooperation with Gulf countries, have reinforced their links with the Gulf with rotating units, detached advisers or Jordanian military retirees contracted in Gulf police or armies. The KADDB has symbolized the new positioning of the Jordanian defense establishment in trying to get contracts in Gulf markets. Furthermore, the Jordanian military has taken part in numerous UN peacekeeping operations (also a source of funding) and 51

52

The transformation fueled discontent among veterans. In 2010, the National Committee for Retired Servicemen (though strictly loyal to the Hashemites) came out and converged with other social protests (al-Hirak movement). Tariq Tell, “Early Spring in Jordan: The Revolt of the Military Veterans” (Beirut: Carnegie Middle East Center, November 2015). “Jordan,” al-Wasat, December 16, 2016.

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was involved in Afghanistan after 2001, in the training of Iraqi troops and policemen when the US was rebuilding the Iraqi security forces (2007– 2009), or with special forces against insurgent groups in Iraq in 2006–2009. It participated in NATO operations to impose a no-fly zone in Libya in 2011, then in the training of militiamen for the rebuilt Libyan security sector in 2012–2013.53 A Jordanian military committee was deeply involved in the restructuring of the Yemeni defense and security sectors in 2013, in accordance with the longtime Jordanian military experience in Yemen. A classic realist-oriented analyst of military power will understand this new military assertiveness in the Gulf or Jordan as a way “to punch above their weight,” but, as other IR theories will argue, sometimes images and announcements have a “performative” effect. This is a reversal of an Arab pattern settled in the 1960s whereby big (republican) armies had the most important influence in internal politics as well as regional relations with their ability to project power; they seem no longer able as explained in Chapters 5 and 6. Conclusion This chapter offered two arguments. First, it explained why the military was also pivotal in monarchies. The army in monarchies did not come to the fore as a result of its political surge in the state as in many republics and according to the Egyptian trendsetting model, nor was it “subsumed” by the specific civilian-led state-building according to the model of Bourguiba in Tunisia. Yet, my hypothesis is that despite divergent trajectories of political development in the 1950s and 1960s, both monarchies and republics have met in a similar (though in distinctive ways and trajectories) embeddedness of the military in authoritarian regimes after the 1970s. Second, quite differently from the usual view that monarchies were far from or alien to the military when compared with armyoriginating republican regimes, this chapter explained that the role of militaries in monarchies has changed a lot and grown in some since 2011: it began with the help to suppress the Bahraini Spring then expanded with a renewed military interventionism in Yemen, Libya (and Syria for some time).

53

In 2011, there were reports (denied officially) that Jordan sent a battalion from the Gendarmerie (al-Darak) with Saudi and Emirati forces in Bahrain in 2011; whether true or not, a lot of Jordanian personnel were contracted into Bahraini armed forces or police.

5

Agency Restored? Uprisings, Surprise and Army Interventions

In 2011, in some cases which are the specific focus of this book, unpredicted uprisings took off the military from their torpor within authoritarian rule.1 Transitions pitted together two very different kinds of actors: an institutional one (with all the above chapters’ qualifications), the military; and a more elusive social actor based on the extreme degree of resilient pressures that mass social mobilizations in public spaces exerted on authoritarian equilibriums and the flip side of my inquiry in this book.2 In line with the third cycle of the framework (Introduction), I argue that these uprisings were rare moments during which the agency of military actors, formerly status quo agents under enduring authoritarian regimes, was put back into motion. In these rare moments of radical and sudden change, militaries became “naked” in configurations of mass civic uprisings and no longer concealed behind the protective veil of enduring regimes and their trappings. In the 1990s, officers had stuck with embattled regimes against Islamist insurgencies in Egypt, Algeria and Syria. Only in Sudan did they follow Islamists, for some time, thereafter putting them under strict control and house arrest. They had also coalesced with incumbent regimes in Iraq during the 1991 civil war and in Saudi Arabia during times of Islamist contestation. In general, in the 1990s, they had played status quo roles. In the 2010s, the setting was more complex and stakes more open-ended. In some cases, such as Egypt, officers capitalized on the above dimensions of embeddedness to reposition themselves in a transitional setting, also finding “lifelines” or assurances to handle complex situations, often without a clear road map on how to proceed, contrary to “decisionist” views of high officers. And the army was in search of new or tentative institutional equilibriums, 1 2

Roger Owen, The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2014); James Gelvin, The Arab Uprisings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Jason Brownlee, Tarek Masoud and Andrew Reynolds, eds., The Arab Spring (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Joel Beinin and Frédéric Vairel, eds., Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).

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a difficult setting since it had not been a political actor for years, but rather remained out of the “dirty” business of day-to-day politics. In other cases, armies were engulfed into complex processes of transition, then civil wars in Libya and Yemen (after 2014) or Syria. To borrow Max Weber’s vocabulary, I argue that the military was an “adequate cause” present with varying degrees of probability at the time of significant political events in 2011 but whose historical outcomes were open-ended. Armies in More Direct Interaction with Mobilized Societies: The “Stress Test” A starting point should be stressed: the military did not come out of its barracks in 2011 as a result of armies plotting against regimes with oppositional actors – on the contrary. The armed forces were pulled out of their torpor as status quo actors or satisfied stakeholders in most cases, either self-chosen and/or cultivated by regimes, only as a result of mass civic mobilizations, a different and completely independent variable. The linkage or trigger was of course the potential role of armies in the regime’s coercive arm, the linchpin of authoritarianism, and a nebulous continuum with riot police, paramilitary forces, intelligence and repressive apparatuses and the military. Mass demonstrations in which tens of thousands of people participated could not be handled by the police, security agencies, anti-riot units or paramilitary forces and led regimes to deploy the armed forces. And as a corollary, more than any other factor, the reaction of the army was directly tied to the regime’s fate (survival or fall). Two changes were instrumental: the military entering into direct contact with the new political assertiveness of societies and the army gradually pulled by regimes into prospective repression. First, in normal times of authoritarianism (routine authoritarianism), armies had not been in open contact with societies, especially in the closed world of Arab officers who were secluded and socially cut off from Arab societies in segregated suburbs, often not close to urban centers, or at least as a specific social stratum. Times of uprisings in 2011 changed the equation. In times of huge mobilizations, armies came in direct contact with societies. The strength of the 2011 Arab uprisings was their ability to shift social mobilization from rural or deprived areas to the center of power, the capital and its symbolic (for the regime) public spaces (squares), as a way to increase its visibility and to gain wider acceptance and participation in it among different sectors of society. The emergence of sustained, broad-based, cross-social or cross-category, peaceful – though insurrectionist – and geographically widespread mass civic protest, whereby

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civilians refused to stand with and for the status quo of the regime and contested it in symbolic (for the regime) public spaces (squares), made this movement irresistible. The resilience of the movement was a real challenge that enfeebled the security response, even when regimes rapidly unleashed heavy-handed violence as in Libya or in Syria. Regimes discovered the impossibility of the quick reinstatement of the vicious “wall of fear” (hajez al-khawf) based on the patrolling of society by the dreaded mukhabarat, namely, the dissuasive effect of prospective repression along its occurrence with selective arrests and torture allegedly acting as a deterrent. Taking part in repression of massive protests meant that the military would tarnish its prestige and associate itself in the eyes of the public with mass murders committed by the regime, furthermore in times of circulating images from widespread personal cell phones with cameras. And with generalized resentment and rage, the problem was no longer just protests in deprived hinterlands. Hence this would act as a deterrent to major violence in the officer corps by its sheer potential visibility and mass character. Another great strength of the 2011 movements, at least in the beginning, was their peaceful nature, as highlighted by the famous slogan shouted by demonstrators, “selmiyye, selmiyye” (peaceful, peaceful). The uprisings were indeed insurrectionists as they tried to forcefully take control of symbolic public spaces and keep them away from the regime’s ambit. Yet, there was an asymmetry between the low-level insurrectionist violence used by demonstrators against the hated police and the harsh response of police forces with automatic war weapons, live ammunitions, direct targeting with anti-riot arms, snipers and so forth. That asymmetry had a huge trigger effect. The army’s reaction was heavily influenced by the characteristics of these demonstrations and the ensuing prospect of high-intensity repression that bore no resemblance with the internal functions of policing, inter-elite strife or coup d’état it had carried out earlier. And as everywhere, soldiers in general held the participation in such policing functions below their threshold of dignity. Authoritarian regimes had been very apt at forcefully encircling and stifling specific areas of contention in the past. In 2011, the bar was set higher by regimes when they ordered the deployment of military units. Authoritarian regimes were entering the dangerous slope of mass violence as a reaction to mass mobilizations. For instance, from December 17, 2010, to January 10, 2011, the Tunisian army sat on the fence while the regime was trying to repress protests. Commanders began to fear a rift among the troops if they ordered them to shoot at demonstrators and

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were alarmed by the fact that soldiers and officers on the ground resented the excessive use of force by the police and the National Guard3 – this was not repression behind closed walls as in Gafsa in 2008. In Egypt in January 2011, at the request of President Mubarak, the Egyptian army deployed onto the streets following three days of protests and fighting between insurrectionist demonstrators and the Central Security Forces (CSF) that resulted in the withdrawal of the CSF and the breakdown of the police. The military was seen by protesters as a relief after violence by the interior ministry’s anti-riot units, because it was not associated with day-to-day repression under Mubarak. The Egyptian uprising was directed against the police; it was actually timed to begin on January 25, the so-called police day in Egypt.4 In all cases, the military was confronted on the ground with massive protests and was in direct contact with “the people,” furthermore with relatively “representative” demonstrations due to their massive character, whatever exaggeration in figures. Second, the army became the direct arm of the regime on the ground, a changing pattern when compared with previous situations when it was the police that acted as the direct bulwark of the regime and when the military could shy away in oblivion behind its professionalism in a kind of closed black box. The army had contingency plans to secure government buildings in the events of rioting. In 2011 in Tunisia and Egypt, the regime left the military after its deployment in imprecise situations and without clear instructions, with unclear or implicit orders, faced with facts on the ground, with shock and awe strategies by rogue elements of the regime violently crushing some demonstrations. Repression would lead the military to be involved in a new complex set of relations, having to coordinate more directly in operational rooms with the interior ministry under the looming presence of the regime’s strongmen. Officers valued their monopoly of force and resented the intensive use in repression of paramilitary forces, Presidential Guards – in Egypt, the latter was more part of the regular military than its counterpart in Syria – and thugs linked to the RCD in Tunisia or to the NDP in Egypt. For instance, Ben Ali and his close advisers were reluctant to openly use the military and whenever they deployed military units, they would try to create some confusion with the militarized police – the National Guard whose units wore the same uniforms – so that the blame for the use of force would be shared. And whenever the regime deployed military units in the capital, it also deployed National Guard’s heavily armored units in the vicinity. The 3

4

Four field commanders (interviewed in Tunis, January 2014) recall that in January 2011 they faced huge and socially mixed crowds advancing toward their vehicles. They reported to the high command. Various articles in Social Research, 79(2) (Summer 2002).

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Tunisian army’s command was alarmed by harsh repression and killings in the provinces (Kasserine, Thala)5 and the chief of staff, General Rachid Ammar, seemed to have issued an internal order “no use of firearms without explicit order” with a copy to the presidency.6 Yet, there seems to have been no explicit order to fire in the crowds from Ben Ali. Similarly, in Egypt, the army’s behavior on the ground was ambivalent, focused on securing public buildings, in particular the Stalinist Mugammaʿ building (a huge administrative center related to the interior ministry) in central Tahrir Square, rather than acting against demonstrators. From the beginning, it was noted by some Egyptian witnesses (who were military veterans)7 that the army did not deploy on Tahrir and in Alexandria or Suez its brand-new American military equipment, but old tanks and armored vehicles: the army did not want to be seen using Americanmade weapons against peaceful protesters because it was aware that would trigger US law banning exports of them for that purpose. But more fear-inspiring and well-armed units, such as the Republican Guard (RG), were deployed at some distance. Some RG units – clearly identifiable with their green berets – were suspected by protesters of facilitating pro-Mubarak rallies. There were rumors that the military was reinforcing the CSF or resupplying the police with tear gas and ammunitions – a revolutionary situation is rife with rumors, true or false but with an essential “performative” effect. On February 2, in the last serious (yet ridiculous) attempt by the Mubarak regime to displace the occupation of Tahrir, the so-called battle of camels when a few hundred Mubarak supporters or hired thugs (baltagiyya) came with horses and camels to clear the square,8 the army participated in the detention and abduction of some protesters, while also cracking down on hired thugs. The highly controversial question whether or not, at some moment, Mubarak (or members of his close entourage) gave the army orders (that were not followed) to fire has remained unanswered. After the fall of the regime, the SCAF issued contradictory statements and during the trial of Mubarak, Defense Minister Tantawi and Chief of Staff Anan denied receiving an order to fire.9 5

6 7

8 9

“Report of the National Commission to Investigate Violence during the Riots” headed by Tewfik Bouderbala (Tunis, May 4, 2012), in Arabic (hereafter “Bouderbala report”), 84, 107. Jeune Afrique, January 15, 2012. Michael Nabil Sanad, “The Army and the People Wasn’t One Hand,” blog post, www .maikelnabil.com, March 8, 2011 (accessed and copied April 11, 2011, and later deleted). He was imprisoned. “What Is the Love Story with the Tanks,” al-Masry al-Youm, February 2, 2011. ʿAbdelatif Minawi, al-Ayyam al-Akhira li-Mubarak (Cairo: Dar al-Masriyya alLubnaniyya, 2013).

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In terms of armies playing a role as the regime’s arm, Syria had a past history of the army taking part in internal repression. In Yemen and Libya, the straddling of military and security roles was the preserve of specific or parallel military units, with the rest of the regular military being left aside. Yet, the way state violence and the army’s intervention were “framed”10 by regimes had a potentially strong impact both on the military and the protesters. In this sense Bahrain’s careful and calibrated use of “legal” violence (Chapter 4) – the proclamation of the state of emergency for a limited period, a legal framing for repression, buttressed by heavy propaganda in the official media – was in clear contrast to Syria. And the Bahraini regime strove to portray protesters as members of the marginalized Shia Muslim majority (and readily as agents of Iran) demonstrating against the ruling Sunni elite and more generally Sunni Muslims. At the opposite end of the spectrum, taken by surprise but self-blinded by what it thought were its “specific characteristics,”11 the Assad regime answered by using extreme language. In April 2011, one month after the beginning of the uprising, internal documents circulating in administrations and leaked to the opposition asked for the drawing up of plans for “the war effort” (almajhud al-harbi), as exemplified by the siege of Deraa by troops and tanks. The Assad regime decided early on that brute force would be its main survival strategy and cracked down on the popular uprising by using machine guns, tanks, snipers and exacting a high death toll.12 It tried to paint demonstrations as instigated by “foreign agents” and manipulated by Islamist jihadist groups, but without convincing anybody, at a time of social media that debased official discourses. Similarly, the process of descent into repressive violence was messy in Libya with astonished Qaddafi threatening to chase protesters “house by house (dar dar, bayt bayt), street by street (zenga zenga)” in the harshest manner. Conversely, demonstrators tried to circumvent the strategies used by regimes to surreptitiously pull armies into repression with appeals to fraternization directed at the military. Fraternization as theorized by Trotsky in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 aims at fracturing the military and having soldiers and whole units join the protesters. The first stirrings of these effects were carefully counterbalanced by the control 10 11

12

Robert Benford and David Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment,” Annual Review of Sociology, 26 (2000): 611–639. The Syrian regime believed that cosmetic reforms in the 2000s associated with the “new generation” (al-jil al-jadid) of Bashar and its foreign policy of “resistance” (al-muqawama) would legitimize it. See Bashar’s interview in The Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405274870383320457611471244 1122894. For an insider view, see ʿAzmi Bichara, Darb al-Alam nahwa Huriyya (Doha: Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, 2014).

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exerted by the military police in Egypt in January 2011.13 At the first sign of some minor breakdown in military discipline on Tahrir, red-beret military police officers were quickly sent in to bolster discipline. In Bahrain, the use of foreign mercenaries and the physical distance kept between the troops and the demonstrators, with the police in close contact, allowed the Bahraini regime to “manage” the problem to its own advantage. In March 2011 in Syria, demonstrators pinned their hopes on what they wished to see as a national army.14 This proved to be wishful thinking when considering the army as an institution (individual defections are discussed below). When the armed forces staged a series of operations in Zabadani and Duma (January 2012) and Homs (February 2012), they tended to shell neighborhoods without undertaking a ground operation, and troops carried out looting reminiscent of the Syrian army’s behavior in Lebanon (1976–2005), with army trucks ferrying out “booty.” The military thereafter came to be seen by Syrians as an extension of the security forces and of the regime, “the army of the regime” (jaysh al-nizam) whose methods were not different from those of the security services. I hypothesize that the 2011 events in all cases, however, signified a crucial “stress test” for the armed forces living under authoritarian regimes as the entire set of social relations that constituted the military – e.g., its hierarchical institutional relations, its horizontal links to other functional sectors, in the first place the interior, and in general other societal strata, its sense of duty and obedience, etc. – were becoming strained beyond the limits of normal operation in times of prospective bloody repression. Protracted uprisings were contexts of unraveling of regimes, so that the military became “naked,” that is, it was no longer in the protective cocoon of the regimes’ stasis. The fluid context that characterized the 2011 uprisings trumped all formal directives or rules, “path dependence” or authoritarian torpor.15 13

14

15

Neil Ketchley, “‘The Army and the People Are One Hand!’ Fraternization and the 25th January Egyptian Revolution,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 56(1) (January 2014): 155–186. Women and children were greeting soldiers with olive branches; people were shouting the slogan heard in Tunisia and Egypt (via Al Jazeera): “the army and the people are one hand”; in April 2011, the National Initiative for Change, a follow-up to intellectual petitions of the short and aborted 2000 Damascus Spring, called for the army to facilitate a transition and singled out, as “representing a background that Syrians can positively relate to,” the Defense Minister Ali Habib – a respected career officer with no known connections to the security; in September 2013 he was said to have defected to Turkey – and Chief of Staff Daoud Rajiha, who was killed in an alleged bombing in the building of the security directorate in July 2012; a “Friday of protest” (on May 27, 2011) was named after “the protectors of the nation,” another way to name the army and a reference to the national anthem. Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); John Higley and Richard Gunther, Elites and Democratic Consolidation in Latin America and Southern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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Armies Pulled toward Repression: Keeping Cohesive . . . or Not In these protracted times of unrest, uprisings and even revolutionary contexts, the military increasingly came to understand that its role was pivotal, while at the same time expressing a sense of danger or deep uneasiness. That latter factor was often neglected by foreign observers obsessed with “decisionist views” of the military and trying to decipher why the military did repress or opt out or remain neutral (to some extent). That was a complex process weighting on the military, with implications for its loyalty to the incumbent regime. This was especially the case in armies left in a relative autonomy, whether a scrutinized autonomy in weakness (small size and weak capacities) as in Tunisia or an autonomy sealed with bonds of loyalty and confidence between Mubarak and high officers for a pillar of the regime in Egypt. With these degrees of autonomy, it became easier for high officers to coordinate among themselves beyond the direct scrutiny of the incumbent regime. And in general, mutinies are less common than officer coups.16 Comparatively, there was not a modicum of autonomy for the Syrian army mirroring the Egyptian or Tunisian cases, quite differently from the 1960s in Syria when politics reverberated through the officer corps. And conversely, contested authoritarian rulers tried to play on the “path dependence” factor that could be summarized with a simple reasoning: all things being equal, if the regime treated the armed forces well, high officers were likely to stand by it and keep the military loyal behind the regime. In general, all regimes in disarray were also playing on their coup-proofing and loyalty-maintenance mechanisms in the army in a free-for-all atmosphere of panic best exemplified in Libya, Yemen and Syria in 2011. But at times of mass demonstrations, that might not be sufficient. Mass uprisings put the stakes higher still than just interests and status quo as exemplified by the Egyptian case in 2011. (Military) institutions “do think”17 through a mixture of institutional effects (in particular interests) and individual thinking within and on behalf of institutions. Officers, who might be viewed as “representatives” of a highly hierarchical organization based on obedience, discipline and the carrying out of orders issued by superiors, valued the sense of belonging and unity of the military seen as an essential feature of battlefield capability – this is the way armies in general are working with the execution of preprogrammed plans.18 Issues of generation could enter the 16 17 18

Naunihal Singh, Seizing Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986). Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).

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equation. In the Egyptian and Tunisian cases in 2011, junior officers were not insensitive to some of the slogans of the uprisings but did not dare to challenge the status quo. Senior officers tended to be very anxious about the cohesion of the military institution, one of the high values in the army. Indeed, in Egypt there was a gap between high officers (especially those who consumed the rents of “the economic empire”) and junior or medium officers. High officers were benefiting from the regime but were not the regime (Chapter 2) and were in a contract of strict political quietism and submission to Mubarak. And junior officers could express grievances, but, as the social movement theory or previously Alexis de Tocqueville put it, grievances do not create mobilizations and coordination. Both trends (“from below” and “from above”) in the officer corps converged in Tunisia and Egypt to preserve the unity of the armed forces and make them ease the end of the incumbent regimes. Although military cohesion was often taken to mean cohesion just in the officer corps, it ought to denote the unity of the entire armed forces. NCOs tended to come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, had lower educational level and received lower salaries and fewer benefits than officers. This was an essential factor that high officers in Tunisia and Egypt took into consideration in 2011, especially when troops were in direct contact with demonstrators. And, in the Arab World in 2011, the military, when it fractured, did not fissure along social or class lines with junior officers or NCOs in the lead as in Nigeria in the 1960s or in West African coups in the 1990s–2000s (Conclusion). The role of officers to “embody” the military organization and its cohesiveness was indexed with another key attribute, whether a given army was a conscripted or volunteer force, or some mixture of the two. Draftees represented a wide cross-section of society – assuming conscription was imposed fairly – hence a crucial factor when the army faced a broad-based uprising. In Egypt, Yemen and Syria, soldiers were treated very poorly; consequently, their loyalty to the regime in revolutionary environments and, more broadly, at any time when they might be ordered to use their weapons against civilians, was likely to be questionable. There were no mass defections (from below) in Egypt and Tunisia but the high command took this potential factor into close consideration. In Libya and Yemen conscription was not systematically enforced. And a conscripted army reluctant to repress and specific units recruited either from conscripts with a specific confessional background (Alawis) or from Alawi enlistees explained the specific Syrian trajectory of civil war after 2012. Moreover, in Syria, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain, biased recruitment either in the officer corps or in the military in general and then phased engagement was a way for regimes to circumvent the above risks of

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military cohesion against them. Regimes mobilized, preferably in repression, Republican Guards, Presidential Guards and other praetorian forces more or less distinct from the regular army and supposedly more reliable forces. These were specifically recruited for domestic suppression functions and their regional, ethnic or sectarian identity distanced them from protesters. Though not based on the same social divisions in a more cohesive Egypt, the Republican Guard (al-Haras al-Jumhuri) was even recruited from particular backgrounds and its officers severely vetted, a feature that caused some concerns about its potential reactions in support of Mubarak in 2011 inside the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). Yet, such a biased recourse to the army should not be taken for granted and had waves of consequences inside the military as highlighted by a detailed examination of Syria. The Assad regime’s violent military response to the demonstrations relied mainly on the use of its main praetorian or special units in a “dualized” army. In the first months of 2011, only the Fourth Division (al-Firqa al-Rabiʿa), an expanded elite unit led by Bashar’s brother Maher, and Special Forces (al-Wahdat al-Khassa) units were regularly deployed to quell protests and opened fire on demonstrators. Military intelligence (mukhabarat ʿaskariyya) units were also at work taking the lead in directing repressive operations. The Assad regime made extensive use of the much more developed (than in other Arab regimes) “straddling” between military and security functions. This was exemplified by those colonels (and heads of military intelligence) involved in heavy repression who were promoted to the rank of general, for instance by “unpublishable” (Article 7) Presidential Decree no. 95 (July 27, 2011) leaked by the opposition. The regime called on the regular military, while strictly monitoring it when on the field, only for secondary missions (manning checkpoints, supporting security forces logistically or with armed vehicles, carrying out blockades) or when armed resistance was well organized. To complement unreliable soldiers, the Syrian regime also used civilian proxies, called shabihha – a slang word seemingly meaning “ghosts” from the nickname of the black Mercedes of “official” smugglers in the 1980s19 – recruited on a confessional basis to repress or to play a role as provocative agents in demonstrations. And the regime used the regular army in 19

Some were criminal gangs from the Syrian coast linked to ruling family members. Others were recruited by private security companies (Lions of Ebla, White Wolfs, Group Four, Pelican, ICPP, CBS, Al Shuruq for Services and Professional Security) founded by former high police officers linked to Hafez Makhluf (the head of State Security, a cousin of Bashar and brother of the capitalist tycoon Rami Makhluf) or Mujahed Ismael, the son of a general (who led with his mechanized brigade the assault on Hama in 1982).

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support operations for the shabihha. In sum, the regime deployed only a fraction of its military forces out of fear of mass defections; clearly, it did not trust its armed forces in general. This notion also explained why the regime, in order not to overstretch its most loyal security and military forces, withdrew from some cities, which were left as “liberated territories” to protesters whose demonstrations grew larger in June 2011 (e.g., the Bab Amr(o) neighborhood in Homs) and were retaken militarily in July 2011. In other areas such as Jisr al-Shughur and in the Idlib province, the harsh tactics used provoked an armed reaction that the security forces were unable to address, hence the need for additional combat troops.20 Internal security efforts, then, placed serious strains on the loyal military and praetorian forces and the spread of unrest forced the regime to conduct a “360 degree” defense. The regime was careful at the beginning to move or deploy troops in such a way as to make sure they did not fire on their own relatives. As disturbances spread, additional military units were drawn into the struggle, increasing the potential for a stress test in the Syrian military.21 Even though the Syrian military had a strong reputation not to hesitate when ordered to fire on crowds,22 it found itself in a difficult stress test, far more difficult than in the 1980s when the regime fought against the armed wing of the Muslim Brotherhood and other mobilized components of urban society – the model of “the state against society” described by Michel Seurat.23 Tellingly, the Syrian military in general was far more submitted to the stress test than commonly thought, due to the large array of activities it was involved in (and the high number of personnel implicated). For instance, the direction of communications in the defense ministry was engaged in cutting the Internet, reducing access to the flood of data24 and spotting dissent on the Web. Another telling example was the use of military hospitals to kill injured demonstrators: private and public civilian hospitals were forbidden to accept injured who were transferred there.25 As a consequence, the shockwaves of the stress test 20 21

22 23 24 25

“UN Says Death Toll in Syrian Uprising Tops 3,000,” Associated Press, October 14, 2011. Philippe Droz-Vincent, “The Syrian Military and the 2011 Uprising,” in Military Engagement in Mobilizing Societies, ed. Holger Albrecht, Aurel Croissant and Fred Lawson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 168–184. Interviews with two Lebanese officers, location withheld, April 2015. Michel Seurat, L’Etat de barbarie (Paris: Seuil, 1989). According to an internal letter leaked to www.all4syria.info, November 22, 2011. This is also highlighted by the case of the military defector and forensic photographer (captain), code-named Caesar in the US, who defected in August 2013 and smuggled out of Syria between 28,000 and 53,275 photos of killed detainees under torture; he gave his name to the US bill of sanctions, the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of December 2019.

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reverberated deeply inside the military. Many soldiers and officers were directly exposed to the atrocities of repression. This occurred despite the alleged more “patrimonial,” less “institutionalized” or more “dualized” character of the Syrian army. The regime’s manipulations in the military and “social engineering” in the officer corps were trumped by the magnitude of the stress test in 2011. To keep some cohesive yet diminished (in terms of manpower) military, the Assad regime “brutalized” the Syrian military as much as it reacted with brutal methods against its society: it was a calculated policy, presumably not in the hope of pulling the army fully into confrontation with demonstrators, but at least to keep it obedient inside barracks and as a logistical provider for praetorian military units or paramilitary groups (shabihha) that carried out directly repression. During the first months of the uprising, many military deaths were reported by official sources, the international press and even Human Rights Watch. These soldiers and officers were, in fact, killed by security forces, in particular military intelligence (al-amn al-ʿaskari), for refusing to shoot at protesters or allegedly sympathizing with demonstrators, an assertion buttressed by numerous leaks of documents from military intelligence.26 The executed soldiers were numbered among “martyrs” (shuhadaʾ) by the regime and their deaths were blamed on “armed gangs.” Security elements took prominent positions over the common military command structures. After 2011, military intelligence oversaw the promotion of officers and the movements of all army units: the staff command followed the orders not of the defense ministry but of the intelligence. At least 3,000 officers, most of them of junior- and midlevel ranks, especially from non-Alawi confession, were detained in prisons in 2011–2013. “Security committees” (lijan amniyya) within military units were watching soldiers, reporting to al-amn al-ʿaskari about what was going on inside the army, what soldiers were telling or writing to their families. In a given unit, the security officer’s (dabbet li-l-amn) role was more important than that of the commander. And, after 2011, security officers have increasingly dealt with individuals according to their sectarian or geographic affiliation. Their way to deal with members of the Sunni majority, even if they did not openly display sectarian affiliation, or with people hailing from Deraa and Idlib, the initial hot spots of the uprising, was different from the way members of minorities were handled. Soldiers 26

Documents leaked by the Damascus Centre for Human Rights (2011), allegedly from Air Force Intelligence, stated that “it is acceptable to shoot some of the security agents or army officers in order to further deceive the enemy, which will further help the situation by provoking the animosity of the army against the protesters.”

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from regions that were considered to be “disloyal” were placed under strict control; sometimes they were not permitted to carry weapons.27 Brutal repression was complemented with heightened propaganda. The Assad regime was obsessed with its desire to disparage and slander peaceful demonstrations, denouncing “armed gangs,” “extremists and jihadists” (takfiris) and “criminals and terrorists” manipulated by regional or international powers, also as a way to picture itself as deploying its army to fight armed groups and not to repress unarmed protesters, and a less delegitimizing narrative. State media released pictures of the mutilated corpses of alleged Alawi officers in Homs in April 2011.28 The regime was also eager to warn Syrians about the risks of fragmentation: it kept repeating that demonstrators were shouting slogans such as “Christians in Beirut and Alawis to the grave” and launched in the summer of 2011 a massive nationwide propaganda campaign with huge billboards implicitly warning of sectarian/confessional fragmentation to create anxiety. All these multifaceted efforts were a way for the regime to play on the heterogeneous character of Syrian society in order to fragment the broad oppositional mobilization and to draw groups or individuals to itself even if only out of fear of an uncertain future. These moves targeted Syrian society, but, specifically, the Assad regime imposed silence on military personnel and unleashed a massive propaganda effort on the army.29 Similar remarks hold true for other cases where pulling the army under the stress test of social mobilizations into repression had destabilizing and even destructive institutional consequences. On March 18, 2011, in Sanaa, Yemen, snipers in buildings overlooking Taghayir Square opened fire on pacific protesters killing at least fifty-two demonstrators – and ambulances were prevented from intervening. That massacre brought the (previously violent) military-security apparatus to a breaking point with the stress test of heavy repression approaching. Three days later (on March, 21, 2011), a key insider, General Ali Mohsen (Chapter 2), defected with his First Division vowing to protect protesters and brought with him a dozen senior military commanders, along with whole brigades and thousands of troops of the Political Security Organization (from the interior ministry) – some brigades, such as a big brigade in Taiz, defected to protect the protesters but hang on to fall with Mohsen and kept out of the fight.30 The transition turned into a showdown between competing (military) stakeholders in the 27 28 29 30

Interview with a Syrian NCO who defected, location withheld, September 2014. Sana News Agency, dispatch, April 20, 2011. Interviews with three Syrian civic activists, location withheld, November 2014. Michael Knights, “The Military Role in Yemen’s Protests,” Journal of Strategic Studies, 36(2) (2013): 261–288.

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Saleh system. The political equilibrium devised by Saleh in the 1980s– 1990s had collapsed in the mid-2000s with the rise of Saleh’s direct relatives in the military and security. In particular, core insiders of the regime – such as Mohsen (with no apparent bid for the presidency) or Hamid al-Ahmar, one of the sons of the late Shaykh Abdallah al-Ahmar (having himself aspirations for power) – frontally opposed the succession of Saleh by his son Ahmed Ali, the commander of the Republican Guard. That question split the core elite well before the 2011 demonstrations. But the uprising gave opponent stakeholders the catalyst to act decisively. And incidentally, rather than just following as they claimed the moral high ground (“not to shoot” on pacific demonstrators), key insiders of the Saleh regime yet opposed to him exploited the unrest to pursue with other means their campaign against Saleh’s personal strategy. They also to some extent lost control of the situation.31 The collapse of the Libyan army and the specific process of unraveling largely reflected its having been hollowed out institutionally over the preceding decades. The weakened and fractured Libyan military imploded in February 2011, but in a way that left the Qaddafi regime resilient, with substantial means of repression remaining in its hands, hence opening the way to open civil war. On the one hand, Libya’s segmented armed forces were severely “stressed” by demonstrations. The military had rarely been used to suppress huge riots and some “Security Brigades” (e.g., the al-Jarah Brigade in al-Bayda) even refused to do so. Perhaps one-third of the army defected immediately (8,000 soldiers allegedly in the East)32 and many returned home without joining the rebel forces. Desertions in the East were numerous because defectors could assume safety for themselves and their families. Many officers in the West feared for their families, hence defections took place mostly in the East. A large number (more than 50 percent?) stayed quartered in their barracks and provided logistical support or information to revolutionaries or deliberately disarmed projectiles when firing artillery shots. Before victorious rebel brigades took control of whole arsenals, officers remaining in the army played a crucial role in providing access to weapons for the opposition.33 On the other hand, Qaddafi proved resilient. In February 2011, the regime kept the upper hand in Tripoli and crushed the nascent uprising with the security brigades stationed there (the Imhammad Imghayif Brigade in the Bab al-Aziziyya casern and units from the Thirty-Second Reinforced Brigade) and in the nearby region 31 32 33

Interviews with a civic activist from a sadaʾ family and the son of a military unit commander, Geneva, February 2014. Interview with a British diplomat formerly posted in Benghazi, Paris, January 2014. Interview with a Libyan colonel trained in France, Paris, March 2014.

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(with large Security Brigades’ bases in Tarhuna and Ghariyan). It was able to suppress nascent revolts in Zawiya and Misrata in March 2011, then was forced to organize the defense of Tripoli.34 Most regular army units in the South remained loyal and intact until the end of the regime. Symptomatically, for a long time, the front lines remained stable with rebels unable to move in the battle for the coastal road from Syrt to Ajdabiya, Bregha and Raʾs Lanuf oil terminals and NATO’s no-fly zone thwarted Qaddafi’s attempts to retake eastern Libya. Indeed, with the plunge into civil war, the regime increasingly became short of reliable troops as the military was culled by defections and shrank from 51,000 to 10,000 or 20,000 men.35 The regime resorted to its old tricks in a kind of “militia-nization” to enlist fresh troops, using national conferences of Libyan tribes as a way to request recruits from certain groups. Qaddafi also threatened the introduction of conscription among male employees among civil servants.36 And most controversially, his henchmen recruited mercenaries from among sub-Saharan African workers.37 But contrary, for instance, to the Syrian case, this sort of “tinkering” with potential sources of manpower remained tentative and unorganized in Libya and did not provide the regime with the necessary repressive means. Symptomatically, most loyalist columns were piecemeal and made up of parts of elite units (e.g., the Thirty-Second Brigade), along with pickups filled in with various militias, ad hoc recruited men and men from the security forces. In general, fragmentation (and its political use) is a much more intricate problem than an automatic fracturing of the military along sectarian or ethnic lines, because fissures come out as a result of a general process of social decay – the weakening of national citizenship and the rise of sectarian/confessional identities in a context of state collapse – in which a given regime keeps cards to manipulate identity allegiances to its own benefit. In multiethnic and multi-confessional states and in specific circumstances of heightened conflict, the armed forces are affected by the confessional and ethnic rifts that exist in society at large.38 It is a crucial underlying cause of fracture along communal/confessional/ethnic lines underpinning the scale of defections,39 whether as wholesale units or only 34 35 36 37 38 39

International Crisis Group, “Divided We Stand” (Brussels, report no. 130, September 14, 2012). Interview with a member of the NTC, Paris, January 2014. “Tripoli Witness,” BBC World Service, May 13, 2011. Interview with an NGO’s Libyan local coordinator (from Tripoli), Paris, March 2014. Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Theodore McLauchlin, “Loyalty Strategies and Military Defection in Rebellion,” Comparative Politics, 42(3) (April 2010): 333–350; Michael Makara, “Coup-proofing,

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as individuals (however numerous they might be). The agency of potentially “divisive factors” (officers vs. NCOs and conscripts, praetorian units or security vs. regular brigades, ethnic or confessional bias) can also play into the hands of the incumbent regime during stressful events. Tellingly, the effect of this factor was more double-sided in Syria, allowing the survival of the regime while at the same time weakening it. Syria in 2011–2012 witnessed individual defections of numerous rural Sunni conscript soldiers and low officers (also a few high officers but not in direct command posts), hence weakening the army. Yet, Alawi (and minority) officers, either in high or junior (command) positions, stuck with the regime and filled the gaps, hence the regime kept some basic structures of forces alive. All in all, factionalism, fragmentation (absence of cohesion) or “dualism” in the armed forces in the Arab World was of a specific kind. It was different from the kind of internal military factionalism (moderates vs. hard-liners) outlined more usually by observers and that would lead to democratic transitions/bargains between military “reformers” (as opposed to military “hard-liners” or “securocrats”) and “moderate” civil society/opposition – a classic feature for armies engaged in power, for instance, in Latin America. Factionalism in Arab armies when it was topical (Libya, Syria, Yemen) was often based on the imbalance between special units with a specific social trait (confession, tribe, family, etc.) and the rest of the military. The former were more eager to fight to death for the regime and had deeper links to the regime than the regular army. How an Army Fractures, the Case of Syria: From the Regime’s “Containment” of Unraveling to Defections “within Limits” Defections played an important role, especially in the first year-and-a-half of the uprising. The number of defectors was estimated from 50,000 to up to 100,000 (between 2011 and 2014), not including those who skipped military service.40 Although specific figures may be in doubt, the Syrian army was reduced by at least two-thirds with real manpower shortages explaining many setbacks on the ground. Some military units were kept in their bases for reasons of questionable reliability. Hundreds of mostly low- and middle-ranking officers – but also some senior officers among them, about thirty-five above the rank of colonel including some well-

40

Military Defection, and the Arab Spring,” Democracy & Security, 9(4) (2013): 334–359; Sharon Erickson Nepstad, “Mutiny and Nonviolence in the Arab Spring,” Journal of Peace Research, 50(3) (May 2013): 337–349. Reliable sources are unavailable as figures are also a weapon in the war between the regime and the opposition.

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known figures, such as Manaf Tlass (a symbolic character as the son of the former long-serving defense minister and close ally of Hafez al-Assad, Mustafa Tlass), a MIG fighter pilot, the first Syrian in space and a female Alawi colonel – announced their defection (inshiqaq), especially between 2011 and the beginning of 2013. Defections also hit symbolic cities, as all the hot spots of the uprising in 2011 were in fact the traditional locus of recruitment of officers in rural Syria (Deraa, Idlib, Deir ez-Zor, Rastan). On September 25, 2011, for instance, in Rastan (and hometown of the Tlass family), 100 to 300 officers, all originating from this city or its immediate vicinity, announced their defection, thereafter a battle took place there (celebrated on October 14, 2011, with a “Friday of the free military” event). Such instances were reproduced all over Syria, signaling the malaise inside the officer corps. A caveat should be immediately added: this whole story, especially regarding numbers, is a very controversial and politically charged topic. The opposition was drawing a picture of the Syrian military as overwhelmed by actual or prospective defections. A “Friday of the protectors of the motherland” (jumuʿat humat al-diyar) demonstration was organized by the opposition’s coordination committees on May 27, 2011, to rally military defectors, suggesting a regime on the verge of collapse. In late 2011, another hypothesis gained ground in oppositional circles, stating that many prospective defectors stayed inside the army as covert agents for the opposition and were considered more useful inside the military. An alternative army, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), was created on July 29, 2011. Yet, as a result of the Assad regime’s management of the military (Chapter 3), and despite a real stress test, the Syrian army preserved some organizational coherence, though it was severely weakened by desertions. Importantly, the Syrian army did not implode as Libya’s or fractured in two halves as Yemen’s. But, since 2011, the number of defections has certainly had an essential effect on the course of the conflict, delaying deployments, forcing shifts in tactics (with more artillery or aviation shelling than infantry counterinsurgency operations) and necessitating resources reallocations. Russian and, above all, Iranian and Hezbollah advisers have been very active to counter operational disorganization and in particular, to compensate such a mounting unraveling of the Syrian military through manpower shortages (Chapter 6).41 Disobedience in strongly hierarchical organizations such as the military is a multifaceted phenomenon with defections, desertions, insubordinations, 41

Joseph Holliday, “The Assad Regime,” Institute for the Study of War, Report no. 8, March 2013; Christopher Kozak, “An Army in All Corners,” Institute for the Study of War, Report no. 26, April 2015.

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mutinies.42 Explanations generally point to insufficient training, leadership failures, problematic social conditions, the importance of identity (regional, sectarian/confessional, kinship, tribal, class or urban/rural ties that may overlap) in a military organization governed by discipline, socialization, codes of conduct and law. These factors gain particular weight in civil war conditions. Armed forces personnel have families, hometowns and friends both inside and outside the military organization, hence are connected to their society and their behavior is necessarily determined by preexisting identity factors. Nor is it true that socialization into the military organization completely absorbs the individual. The reality actually falls somewhere in between and times of crisis (the stress test of massive peaceful demonstrations) act as a destabilizing setting. Officers represent a specific category within the military – and decisions by officers in good standing could carry collective ramifications for the whole organization. Syrian officers were more capable of endowing their defections (inshiqaqat) with political significance. Many videos aired on the Internet denounced the extreme violence (torture, summary executions, sniper shots, thefts) witnessed or committed against unarmed civilians after 2011, and emphasized moral and ethical reasons for officers’ decisions to leave the military. As a kind of tacit acknowledgment from the regime’s side, in June 2011, even “official” Shaykh Said al-Buti from the Omayyad Mosque in Damascus issued a fatwa (on the website Nasim al-Sham) stating that the military should not kill civilians – however, he did not openly favor disobedience. Defecting officers and soldiers were also moved by economic incentives, either from rebel groups or from their Western and Gulf sponsors who explicitly encouraged them to defect. Defections and the potential for defections were also strongly correlated with external (potential) help even in the absence of an actual (multilateral humanitarian) international intervention to protect civilians. A “Western” intervention according to the 2011 Libyan model became an important horizon of expectation for many, a component of their political strategy and motivations, triggering more numerous defections when it seemed possible – at a time when Alawi officers, though not defecting, were said to move their families from around Damascus to their hometowns in the Alawi mountains. Tellingly, al-Jazeera.net installed a specific page “Tracking Syrian Defections,” featuring important defectors, an essential dimension of propaganda on behalf of the opposition. Every significant defection was hailed as a sign that the military, and hence the regime, was about to collapse. 42

Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 12(2) (1948): 280–315.

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The regime’s security-military nexus (Chapter 2) was instrumental to maintain an atmosphere of fear to prevent expanded disobedience in the army. Many soldiers and officers from regular units were executed for insubordination and their corpses were returned to their families without the presence of an officer as customary. Security forces with their pervasive grid of control systematically hunted defectors and exerted reprisals on their families: many soldiers remained in the army terrified by the consequences of betraying it. Defectors needed to carefully plan their action and find ways to protect their families beforehand43 – hence defections were easier in areas where families lived under the control of opposition armed groups such as in the rural northwest after 2011 and the South after 2012. Consequently, defections took place as a result of individual or small-group (of friends or relatives) decisions, not with entire units siding with the growing and militarized opposition. Most of the defecting soldiers and officers left the army to return home and become civilians, then refugees in neighboring countries or in Europe. They could reengage as opposition fighters to protect their villages according to the ebbs and flows of conflict.44 Draft dodging has also multiplied since 2011 sparking increased scrutiny at checkpoints by military intelligence.45 Significantly, though, there were no mutinies of whole units, something that would have required the full participation of officers on a large scale. As a consequence, the operational structure of the Syrian military was preserved: most top officers who defected were from the teaching staff, signal corps and air defense – the least attractive branches of the Syrian military – or held positions in the infrastructure and logistics branches. The aforementioned social “engineering” of the regime in the officer corps with trusted officers, mainly Alawis, in combat units (Chapter 2) allowed the regime to keep its command structure more or less intact and operational (till the bottom units) despite a huge number of individual defections in the ranks and among low officers. With Alawi officers occupying most of the senior positions and also available in mid-ranking 43 44

45

Interview with a Syrian captain who defected, location withheld, January 2015. Dorothy Ohl, Holger Albrecht and Kevin Koehler, “For Money or Liberty? The Political Economy of Military Desertion and Rebel Recruitment in the Syrian Civil War” (Beirut: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 24, 2015); Hicham Bou Nassif, “‘Second-class’: The Grievances of Sunni Officers in the Syrian Armed Forces,” The Journal of Strategic Studies, 38(5) (2015): 626–649; Romain Huët, “Quand les ‘malheureux’ deviennent des ‘enragés’,” Cultures et Conflits, 97 (Spring 2015): 31–75; Adam Bazcki, Gilles Dorronsoro and Arthur Quesnay, Civil War in Syria, Mobilization and Competing Social Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). When they begin their military period, conscripts are bereft of their civilian identity card and instead carry a military card; they get back the former at the end of their service.

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and junior positions, the army kept a crucial institutional skeleton though culled from many of its (conscripted) foot soldiers. Overall, the strategy of “containment” of defections by the regime worked. In 2011–2012, the regime and the opposition were in a race against time to unravel the officer corps and the military in general. The regime tracked down deserters and their families and redoubled before each military barrack and institution the presence of security personnel (mukhabarat) monitoring the coming and going of personnel and material.46 The regime also increased salaries (Presidential Decree no. 40 of March 2011, Presidential Decree no. 38 of June 2013, etc.) and material incentives (cars, land, money allowances, etc.) for officers. Corruption increased after 2011 with soldiers bribing officers not to be deployed in some places or to end their service. The armed opposition was even said to get a large proportion of weapons, ammunitions and fuel from deals with officers in the regime.47 The race was in reality “arbitrated”/“deciphered” through long-term social trends. Defections came mostly from specific regions – all of the soldiers from the Hawran, for instance, were said to have left service – and reflected the polarization in the Syrian socioeconomic setting created by economic change and reform processes since 1991 (law no. 10) and its acceleration with Bashar’s economic openings. Most investments during the 2000s took place in big cities and urban areas, in the first place Damascus and Aleppo, at the expense of the countryside, whose small cities (Deraa, Idlib, Deir ez-Zor, Rastan) furthermore absorbed Syrian rural migrations (as a result of prolonged droughts), Iraqi migrations after 2003 and those no longer able to live in big cities with the gentrification of low-income quarters. Douma, the largest town in the Damascus countryside (Rif Dimashq), saw its population quadrupled from 2004 to 2009. Economic openings, crony capitalism and the retreat of the state (and its welfare minimums) with the “social market economic policy” provoked huge social divides and lost the support of all of who relied on state support to survive. And these rural areas were historically, and especially under Hafez, in parallel to the Alawi mountains, the largest basis of recruitment for the armed forces and security services. Put simply, as a result of changing socioeconomic trends, Sunni rural officers were led to order firing on unarmed people who they connected with by social and familial ties. No wonder that defections took place along specific and predictable lines: rural Sunni officers, hailing from 46 47

Discussion with an active Syrian officer during his trip abroad, location withheld, June 2015. Information corroborated by numerous interviews, Paris, Beirut, Geneva and Brussels.

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traditional strongholds of the (Hafez) al-Assad regime from where the (welfare) state withdrew under Bashar, defected. Not surprisingly, then, the FSA had no Alawi officers and very few from other minorities. Very tellingly and as a proof of a large social trend, a few months later in July 2012, when those rural Sunni officers along with rural fighters reached eastern Aleppo in the rebel incursion of this important northern city, they were resented as “foreigners,” that is, nonurbanites by Aleppine urbanites.48 Hence, the process of unraveling could not go beyond certain strata (however important) and could not reach the whole Syrian operational military structure, furthermore with the infusion of new Alawi officers by the regime. Very symptomatically, the string of military defections tapered off in the end of 2012, beginning of 2013. This end point could be sensed very simply because less and less official documents on what took place inside the army and security forces and carried by defectors were published on opposition websites. This could be interpreted that the regime had got rid of all those it did not trust. Paradoxically, desertions left the military with the most committed forces, even if that commitment was forced by events, the pace of civil war, passivity, interests or the regime’s manipulations cementing the bond of minorities and Alawis around itself (Chapter 6). Agency Restored and the Military as a Switchman . . . or Not The army’s potential agency – or the possibility for it “to think” (to borrow Mary Douglas’s expression) outside the confines (“the logic”) of the regime – allowed it, in some cases, to act cohesively with its institutional full weight. Here entered the capacity for the military, if cohesive, to regain some agency after decades of political quietism under authoritarianism. What the 2011 uprisings showed was that preserving cohesion and acting were complex outcomes, more than often the product of a process, rather than a static state of play to be assessed through a list of factors. Such a process was analyzed by Weber in his inquiry into why an institution should not be “reified” and in what conditions it exists or has ceased to exist. What Weber describes for a state, church, association or marriage is relevant for armies: “the social relationship [that constitutes an army] consists exclusively in the fact that there has existed, exists and will exist a probability of action in some definite way appropriate to this meaning”; and I will say of the military what Weber says about the state: it “ceases to exist in a sociologically 48

Interview, FSA Captain, Paris, February 2014.

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relevant sense whenever there is no longer a probability that certain kinds of meaningfully oriented social action will take place. This probability may be very high or it may be negligibly low.”49 Following Weber, the cases of Arab uprisings in 2011 highlight three orientations of social action in the changing conditions of uprisings: one preserving the military as an institution in most cases by turning it against the regime, one where the military ceases to exist as a whole and is hijacked by commanders turned stakeholders or other actors and one where it is recaptured and reconfigured in a diminished format by the incumbent regime. First, in some cases, this process advanced through a kind of collective “assessment” or tacit coordination, when officers began to develop ideas about how a given regime should react. The collective assessment of the regime and its ruler by senior echelons of the military had been informal and inchoate in “normal times” of enduring authoritarian regimes. This might be so even though the regime had cultivated and cherished the army. In more stressful times such as during the 2011 upheavals, that collective assessment became more pressing and the top brass’s views of regime legitimacy became more directly a factor in determining the army’s behavior. The regime had cultivated a kind of “natural and unquestioned right” to rule, a feeling shared, implicitly at least, in normal times by the very conservative high military officers. Yet, with uprisings in motion, high officers might conclude that the regime was becoming a lame duck, doomed to fail or even unable to rule.50 The officer corps might actually coordinate horizontally and conclude that it would be better off if it left the regime to its own fate, with some parallels with what conscripts or NCOs were feeling. For instance, Tunisian officers and, even more so, their Egyptian counterparts, were quite ambivalent toward mounting massive civic demonstrations. But the generals’ unfavorable appraisal of Ben Ali or Mubarak’s ability to handle crises was certainly an important reason for their shift away from political quietism in Tunisia and Egypt. In Tunisia, beyond the army’s preserved cohesion by dint of its dissociation from other security forces, an essential factor in its decision to opt out or facilitate the end of Ben Ali was the general disgrace of the regime. The generalized disenchantment with the intensification of the dictatorship and about the Ben Ali family’s grip on power in large sectors of Tunisian society – secularists, Islamists from al-Nahda, women, middle classes, unemployed educated people, the UGTT, mid-level 49 50

Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), 27. Henry Hale, “Regime Cycles: Democracy, Autocracy and Revolution in Post-Soviet Eurasia,” World Politics, 58(1) (2005): 133–165.

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businessmen, the judiciary, the journalists, along with local activist and citizens51 – facilitated the military shirking away from reestablishing order on Ben Ali’s behalf. Furthermore, what was known and said in Tunisian private circles was also “publicly” vindicated with revelations, through Wikileaks (thereafter Tunisleaks), of cables by successive US ambassadors to Tunisia Robert F. Godec and Gordon Gray III detailing the corruption of the Ben Ali regime.52 Inevitably, such general societal questioning of the regime was reverberating inside the military. The marginal position occupied by the Tunisian army within the regime and its lack of resources (compared to the immediate repressive arm, the interior), its lack of integration in the regime’s networks and its absence of stakes in the survival of the regime united the top brass with other officers in a common resentment of the regime and aversion toward Ben Ali’s generalized corruption. Still, the military did not act through a putsch nor a coup d’état, which were considered dishonorable acts in the Tunisian officer corps. On January 10, the military began to dissociate itself from the police, or at least tensions surfaced in their relationship, as a result of widening protests causing growing confusion. The army’s posture shifted from passivity to support for demonstrators on January 12–13, as the balance of power had already changed on the ground between the regime and protesters.53 This detachment contributed to the army’s popularity and to a deeply entrenched belief among Tunisians that it was the best bulwark against the reviled and repressive police force. On January 14, the military, acting in unison, also played a decisive role in elite power games that forced Ben Ali out of power. The “narrowing” of the regime left some room of maneuver to the military command, with an essential role for General Ammar.54 The events in the El-Aouina base near Tunis Airport from where Ben Ali left the country on January 14 remain unclear. A narrative built itself in 2011, with an image of the small, apolitical and strictly legalist Tunisian military, dubbed by Tunisians “la grande muette” (the big silent one), having eased the “revolution” (thawra) and facilitated 51

52

53 54

Michele Penner Angrist, “Understanding the Success of Mass Civic Protest in Tunisia,” The Middle East Journal, 67(4) (Autumn 2013): 547–567. For the Islamist vision, see secretary-general of Al-Nahda, then prime minister (2011–2013) Hamadi Jebali’s memoirs, al-Charq al-Awsat, published daily, July 7–14, 2014. These cables were translated into Arabic and French by the collective Tunisian blogging site www.Nawaat.org. Also important was the role of the Internet group Takriz (“cassecouilles” in French). Contacts between the US and Tunisian military through aid and training programs existed but were not determinant to shift the army’s view of Ben Ali. “Bouderbala report,” 305. Jeune Afrique, January 15, 2012; see also Samir Tarhouni’s (head of the SAWT team of the National Guard) undisclosed testimony to the Fondation Temimi, December 4, 2013.

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the transitional process.55 The sequence of events is not fully documented, the precise details remain murky and, as usual, the devil lies in the details.56 The attitude of the Egyptian military during the eighteen-day uprising has been a very sensitive subject. As highlighted by numerous posters and commercial billboards with the slogan “The 25 January revolution, the army protected it” in Egypt’s main avenues throughout 2011, the official (military) version claimed that the armed forces supported the revolution from the start and that “the people and the army are one hand” (al-shaʿab wa-l-jaysh ayad wahida). The official ex post version publicized in numerous statements of the SCAF claimed that the military leadership took a position against hereditary succession (tawrith al-sulta) – with programmed inheritance by Gamal Mubarak – the prospect of presidential elections after the sham of parliamentary elections in 2010, and denounced Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif’s politics of economic liberalization and privatization.57 The army, then, allegedly complied with “the will of the people.” The Egyptian military has summoned all those Egyptians who dared to derail from this official line in the media, and even imprisoned some dissident voices, especially bloggers.58 In reality, the army was much more ambivalent than stated in the above narrative. Indeed, the Egyptian military chose not to shoot at mobilized crowds and thereby accelerated the unraveling of the Mubarak regime. But this was the end result and the process that led to it was of prime importance, with its precise details being an essential feature, beyond very general characterizations of the military’s stance. After its deployment on Tahrir Square on January 28,59 the military was giving the impression to leave a few days for Mubarak and his confidantes (and former officers), newly appointed Vice President (and former chief of the General Intelligence Services) Omar Suleiman and 55

56 57 58

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Risa Brooks, “Abandoned at the Palace: Why the Tunisian Military Defected from the Ben Ali Regime in January 2011,” The Journal of Strategic Studies, 36(2) (2012): 205–220 (who criticizes the commonly held view of the apolitical character of the army); Hicham Bou Nassif, “A Military Besieged: The Armed Forces, the Police, and the Party in Bin ʿAli’s Tunisia, 1987–2011,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 47 (2015): 65–87. For a linear (not interpretative) reading of events, see “Bouderbala report.” For an informed account close to the army, see Mustapha Bakri, al-Jaysh wa-l-Thawra (Cairo: Dar al-Masri al-Lubnaniyya, 2011). ʿAbd al-Hamid Hamad, in al-Thawra al-Taʾiha (Cairo: Markaz al-Marosa, 2012), recounts how he was threatened by military officials in his position as editor in chief of alAhram along with other journalists for the appearance of a column dealing with the deployment of troops on January 28. David Kickpatrick, “Mubarak’s Grip on Power Is Shaken,” The New York Times, January 31, 2011.

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Prime Minister (and former air force commander) Ahmad Shafiq, to offer ways out of their predicament – such officers were not active but officers who went into intelligence or politics for a long time.60 The shift of allegiances away from Mubarak among high officers was gradual and mediated through the SCAF where some consensus emerged that Mubarak could not manage the situation. In the SCAF itself, generals close to Mubarak were seated with others who were loath to support what they saw as an ailing and corrupt regime. Backing for the regime broke down mostly along generational lines. Most high-ranking officers did not dare speak – unit commanders and high officers were too accustomed to political quietism though wary about the situation.61 Lower-ranking officers were willing to defect but were also waiting to see what would happen – opened defections were, in fact, rare and perceived as treacherous. Younger officers were dissatisfied and more vocal especially in military clubs. The dissemination of alleged deployment plans to counter demonstrations were met with hostile reactions by officers. Another view is that the top brass disclosed such leaks in order to assess the mood of the officer corps.62 The military elite balked at issuing orders to repress, knowing that cascade defections could ensue among junior officers, and they changed their mind when it became clear that the army would be dragged into repression by Mubarak’s inabilities. At the helm of the SCAF, Field Marshal Tantawi moved away from the deadly status quo with the essential imperative to preserve the unity of the military. He chose not to take power or allow himself to be nominated as provisional president, in order not to give a sense of coup d’état against Mubarak. Such a move, as he knew well, could have elicited a wave of politicization in the officer corps for or against him. Rather, he acted according to the 1971 constitution by nominating an interim president and prime minister and making the SCAF act as a collegial body under his direction.63 On February 10, the military made its first statement (Communiqué no. 1) endorsing “the legitimate demands of the people” only a few hours after high-ranking generals met with Mubarak, the supreme commander, in what was interpreted as “a soft coup.” Mubarak then stepped down. 60 61 62 63

Sanad, “The Army and the People Wasn’t One Hand.” Much of the material in this paragraph is based on interviews with one professor of law and one journalist close to the SCAF, location withheld, January 2014. According to an interview by a retired colonel published by Al-Shourouq website (April 1, 2013), then deleted. Hamad, al-Thawra al-Taʾiha. On possible divisions within the SCAF, see Muhammad alBaz, al-Muchir wa-l-Fariq (Cairo: Kenouz li-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawziʿ, 2014); Muhammad alBaz, Harb al-Generalat (Cairo: Dar al-Masri al-Lubnaniyya, 2014).

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Second, the military could lose cohesion along the numerous divisive dimensions listed above and no longer exist as an institution in the Weberian sense above, resulting in other kinds of political trajectories that lent it some levers of pressure (Yemen) or overwhelmed it (Libya). In Yemen, Saleh’s repressive power was cut by a half as he could only rely on the part of the military or security under the control of his direct relatives (the Republican Guard, the air force, the Special Forces, the Central Security, the National Security Bureau, the Presidential Guard), a substantial slice of forces but not enabling him to reassert his power as in past crises. Both sides (Saleh and his relatives vs. Ali Mohsen and the alAhmars) avoided battling one another in outright combat through their respective forces. And during the crisis, both opposing sides, the Republican Guard and the First Division, received their monthly budget. Crucially, that sense of restraint was not a product of military professionalism and much more that of key stakeholders who knew that they would have to bargain in the future and had no interest in destroying each other.64 As a corollary, the roots of the revolt, peaceful protests and encampments by young protesters did not disappear, but were overshadowed by the defection of these key insiders (and in particular in international and Arab media coverage), giving the impression of a protracted transition in Yemen. Incidentally, in June 2011, Saleh was badly wounded in an assassination attempt in his palace’s mosque that left him as a kind of “survivor” coming back from near death and forced to go to Saudi Arabia for intensive medical treatment – senior officials (the prime minister, two of his deputies, the head of the Consultative Council and one of the original founders of the republic in 1962, the speaker of parliament, etc.) were killed adding to the sense of disorder in the Saleh system. In November 2011, though reluctantly and after a good deal of procrastination, Saleh signed the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) initiative for regime transition in Riyadh. The UNsponsored GCC agreement established a road map for regime change whereby Saleh authorized the transfer of executive power to acting Vice President Abdurabbo Mansour Hadi in return for immunity from prosecutions for himself and his family – he returned to the country from Saudi Arabia after recovering from his injuries. In Libya, the (exploded) army never regained agency and the melting down of the military was subsumed by rising social actors. Contrary to Syria where it took months and months for the uprising to militarize and for armed groups (kataʾib) to take the upper hand in face of the regime’s violent repression, Libya’s uprising turned violent in a matter of days. As 64

Interview with a UN official, location and date withheld.

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everywhere else, war has a transformative effect with the rise of new actors and new social hierarchies such as warlords and militias.65 But that feature was especially crucial in Libya with the rise of multiple self-proclaimed “revolutionary brigades” (kataʾib al-thuwwar), mainly staffed by young civilians. The paradox was that the external political wing of the rebels (the National Transitional Council, NTC) seemed to be and presented itself in Paris or London as the civilian umbrella of the uprising, but had no inch of authority on them.66 The emergence of revolutionary brigades as a new militarized, or more precisely “militia-nized,” actor was the product of two Libyan specificities. First, the Libyan uprising acted as a kind of revenge of society against the state/regime: those who were not part of Qaddafi’s power networks were marginalized and transformed into a social periphery by the regime, in the general context of a Libyan society “brutalized” for years by drastic and unpredictable changes, shortages, lacking opportunities, hence harboring a specific recrimination against the central power. With the beginning of the uprising, these resentful social actors began to search for an alternative, endowed with a “revolutionary legitimacy” (shariʿa thawriyya), that of revolutionaries (thuwwar), furthermore, for a weaponized society that had the means to make its voice heard. And this societal revenge was playing on an acute and disorganized localism. Localism prevailed everywhere: numerous local councils and their military wings arose throughout Libya, contesting the Qaddafi regime on a city-to-city basis, in neighborhoods, villages, communities, municipalities (shaʿabiyyat), tribes. The way the nofly zone was implemented and the nature of the territory, with 1,000 km separating Benghazi from Tripoli, allowed rebels to exist inside Qaddaficontrolled territory in multiple local components with the help of NATO airstrikes – Misratans were resupplied by sea, Zintanis via the Tunisian border or by Qatari and French helicopters. Second, this was a revengeful society awash of weapons in a country full of huge arsenals accumulated by the Qaddafi regime (Chapter 3) and that were looted by locals in a kind of “socialization of weapons” by civilians. The additional arms (automatic rifles, anti-tank missiles, etc.) poured in by foreign suppliers (France, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Sudan) in 2011 created a virtually limitless supply of arms.67 In particular, Qatar, the star of the moment at this time of Arab uprisings, supplied more than 20,000 tons of weapons and hundreds 65 66

67

Elizabeth Wood, “The Social Processes of Civil War: The Wartime Transformation of Social Networks,” Annual Review of Political Science, 11 (2008): 539–561. Peter Cole and Brian McQuinn, eds., The Libyan Revolution and Its Aftermath (London: Hurst, 2015); Wolfram Lacher, Libya’s Fragmentation: Structure and Process in Violent Conflict (London: I.B. Tauris, 2020). Interview with a French high officer, Paris, January 2014.

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of Libyan civilian fighters were taken to Doha for short training sessions.68 Furthermore, embedded Qatari or French special forces supervised the battle plans of numerous brigades made up of civilians, in particular for the battle for Tripoli. Militias/brigades could be relatively small organizations (a few dozen) or could field more impressive numbers (a few thousand). Some possessed specialists fulfilling specific functions such as repair services or maintenance of tanks and artillery.69 The disconnection between the rebel NTC and the civilian-led uprising was greatest in the West, especially in Zintan, Misrata, Gharian, Zawiya and Nalut in the Nafusa mountains. Misrata’s bloody battle lasted from February to May 2011, with violent attacks by loyalist columns coming from Tripoli or Syrt. It witnessed the emergence of a more or less loose alliance of rebel brigades that managed to resist – there were few Misratan officers in the army before the 2011 uprising though defecting officers from the Misrata Air Force Academy played a role as coordinators with NATO.70 That process fueled an essential feeling and a distinctive identity among Misratans who often stated that they could only count on themselves and that they received only scant practical support from Benghazi rebels and the NTC – Misrata had not been favored by Qaddafi in general but survived as a port during his long tenure. Misrata with 20,000 to 40,000 fighters emerged as a leading player in post-2011 Libya, and its revolutionary leaders pushed for the revolutionary brigades to act as substitutes for the national army. In the West in general, the former (regular) military was not a powerful stakeholder as an organized (interest) group, but individuals or groups who had been in military careers were active (with lots of rivalries) in rising civilian-generated militias. In Zintan, the uprising was led by experienced military defectors, many of them long-serving army officers. Networks of former or active officers were instrumental to negotiate regarding the allegiance of various units stationed in the area during the eight-month civil war. But officers did not act in unison (based on a military “ethos”) and were divided,71 becoming part of various Zintani brigades (al-Sawaʾiq Brigade or the Qaʾqaʾ Brigade) that acquired much prestige for their participation in the battle for Tripoli and for the arrest of Saif al-Islam Qaddafi. Zintani brigades thereafter focused on the defense of their new “interests”: the seizing of machinery from construction sites they took over and the looting of private homes of 68 69 70 71

Cole and McQuinn, eds., The Libyan Revolution. Interview with a (Jebel Nafusa) civic activist, Geneva, September 2015. Interviews with a French military planner, Paris, March 2014, and a NATO official, Brussels, November 2014. Interview with a Zintani civic activist, Paris, June 2014.

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senior officials from the Qaddafi era, their access to weapon depots in the greater Tripoli area, their influence (and control on smuggling) in the Tripoli Airport area (August 2011–August 2014) – many Zintanis were born in Tripoli – and their control of the Ghadames area, the Algerian border and various oil fields (including the Elephant oil field near Murzuq in alliance with Tuareg forces). In the East, defections from Qaddafi’s army occurred among whole units not just individuals. Already on February 18, 2011, in the Tobruk military region, Colonel Mansur al-Obeidi brought the army with him to the rebel camp. Interior Minister Major General Abd al-Fattah Younes, after some procrastination, defected with other regular military units – al-Obeidi and Younes were both members of the influential Obeida tribe in the East – specifically the “Special Forces” (Quwwat al-Saʿiqa) stationed in Benghazi and led by Colonel Salim al-Hassi (Saʿdi Qaddafi was technically the commander of this brigade, but in reality al-Hassi was in charge). The wide range of defections with intact units allowed rebels to win the initial space to organize in Benghazi. Qaddafi’s former interior minister Younes became the commander of the rebel Libyan National Army. The component of the military that defected en masse in the East (e.g., the Saʿiqa special forces, the Benina air base) was sidelined by groupings of civilian fighters. Tellingly, General Younes, eyed with suspicion and as a latecomer by (civilian) armed rebels, was assassinated in July 2011 by unknown killers, presumably from Islamist brigades. Furthermore, in this eastern region, former military officers were weakened by rivalries between them for the control of the army’s large stockpiles, for instance, after the return of General Khalifa Haftar in Libya following more than twenty years in exile.72 In August 2011, the final battle for Tripoli was symptomatic of such rebalancing of power between (civilian) brigades and the (former) military.73 Civilian fighters desired to limit the resurgence of the armed forces, a feeling shared with the powerful Misratan brigades – and thousands of Misratans and Nafusa mountain fighters were infiltrated into the battle. In the end, the battle of Tripoli magnified the role of the revolutionaries (thuwwar), with Qatar’s Al Jazeera channel presenting (erroneously) former Libyan Islamic Fighting Group member Abd al-Hakim Belhaj as the head of the Tripoli Military Council. Third, the regime and its networks could benefit from the unraveling of the military (limited in scope by its brutalization) to reconfigure it. Here stands Syria, with the reemergence or the survival of a cohesive yet diminished military loyal to the Assad regime. And the “disloyal” rest disappeared 72 73

Interview with an Italian diplomat, Rome, June 2015. Cole and McQuinn, eds., The Libyan Revolution.

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in prisons or individual defections. The regime transformed the former part of the army in a dreadful counterinsurgency/killing force, as clearly heralded by slogans painted by loyal soldiers in black on walls: “if you try again, we’ll come back and eradicate you,” “al-Assad or we burn the country” or the much more provocative, especially in Sunni re-Islamized milieus, “there is no god but Bashar and Bashar for eternity” (la ilaha illa Bashar wa-Bashar ila abad).74 In this process, the diminished military would play in the hands of the vivid manipulations by the Assad regime or faithfully participate in them. This story is recounted in Chapter 6. Conclusion: The Crucial Internal Dynamics of Agency through the Military This chapter was devoted to the 2011 uprisings, especially in cases where they grew mature and became challengers for incumbent regimes. Incidentally, the army’s behavior shifted from (political) quietism to renewed agency. In the chronologically brief but critical uprisings, some of these armies decided to support the regimes they were supposed to serve, while others switched sides and backed protesters. In these highly uncertain settings, armies differed with their institutional capacities, as some were unable to remain united and fragmented, with some segments of the military supporting the regime while others sided with demonstrators. Internal dynamics rather than external actors and patrons determined outcomes. The army was not the overarching determinate factor but was a pivotal crucible where internal dynamics crystallized. This goes against conventional analysis with the qualified importance of the external factor, an often-overused variable to interpret Arab politics, and this further vindicates the importance attached in this book to internal dynamics in the military. The external factor was, at first, not so crucial. As argued above, most instrumental processes of change took place inside regimes and armies. Armies, though intimately connected to the external factor (through aid, training, technology, etc.), were more strongly embedded in internal political dynamics than usually thought. In the eighteen days that led to Mubarak’s departure, internal factors, in the first place military factors, were preeminent. The Obama administration (National Security Council, State Department) advised Mubarak not to allow the army to open fire on civilians in Tahrir Square and to leave matters to the police. The Pentagon did the same through Egyptian officers, along with declarations from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mullen and more insider conversations – Egyptian chief of staff General 74

Various videos posted on the Internet.

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Anan happened to be in Washington on January 25, 2011. But the external factor did not have a significant impact on military leaders in Cairo.75 The Egyptian military, though concerned regarding the continuation of US military aid, was not very responsive to admonitions from the Obama administration. The external environment might be considered more influential in other cases, but it came – in 2011 at least and the conclusion will be completely different for the aftermath of the uprisings (Chapter 6) – in a secondary position to complex and concatenated internal processes of change. Although not at ease with the democratic slogans of the demonstrators, Saudi Arabia and Gulf countries understood that the revolutionary process had reached a point of no return in Yemen and engaged in mediation in April 2011, perhaps with afterthoughts of channeling it toward acceptable terms or some form of a dead-end. Mediation ended with the November 2011 transition brokered by the GCC – it was completed by a series of UN-backed implementation mechanisms (UN Security Council Resolution 2014 of 2011, then 2051 of 2012).76 But regional influences (in 2011) were secondary to internal Yemeni dynamics in particular involving key stakeholders in the army and security. And most importantly, in the uprising and then eight-month civil war in Libya, the NATO operation in 2011 was crucial in shifting the balance between the Qaddafi regime and “the revolutionaries.” The March 17, 2011, UN Security Council Resolution 1973 was a landmark event: an international coalition which included both NATO and the Arab League – with the active participation of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which gave an Arab face to “Operation Unified Protector” – engaged in combat missions and shifted, beyond the mandate of the UN resolution, from protecting civilians to actually overthrowing Qaddafi. Yet the external NATO could not channel and transform internal dynamics (many of them related to the army) as external “lite nationbuilding” proposals (about reconstructing Libya with the NTC) would dream of it: external intervention was a game changer but it was not the driver (or only one among others) behind the crucial Libyan dynamics of “militia-nization” described above.

75 76

William C. Taylor, Military Responses to the Arab Uprisings and the Future of Civil-Military Relations in the Middle East (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Tellingly, the agreement was signed by Saleh in the presence of members of the ruling families of Saudi Arabia and Gulf countries and there were few Yemenis attending this ceremony.

6

Post-uprising Eras and (Tentative) Regime Re-formations

The 2011 Arab uprisings ushered in a period of changes: talks about revolutions or transitions to democracy revealed themselves as farfetched. And the analytical problem is not just to inquire into the causes of the uprisings and the role the military played in 2011, but also into the divergent political outcomes (2011–2020), especially after regime breakdowns. Here enters the tumultuous and protracted post-uprising phase, whose core rationale is the tentative rebuilding of political systems, either the founding of new political regimes (Tunisia, Egypt 2011–2013), the derailment of transition (Egypt, 2013), the rebuilding of collapsed regimes and their failings (Yemen, Libya, 2014), the re-equilibration of enduring ones (Bahrain) or the plunge into civil war (Syria, 2012). Whatever its complexity and the multiple factors involved, the postuprisings period witnessed the pivotal role of armies or other “militianized” actors as stakeholders or spoilers in the post-2011 political systems, with one exception, Tunisia; in this latter case, the huge and unreformed interior ministry has been the equivalent of overexpanded militaries in Egypt or Yemen. The complex post-2011 era included a more politicized role for armies, although they were not political actors similar to the 1950s–1960s. Yet, whatever their pivotal role therein, this period of regime re-formations has had huge consequences for armies displaying their weaknesses or encountering increased fracturing, informalization, blurring of distinctions (state/non-state actors = militias) or increased straddling between (military and security) sectors/ functions. The Deployment of the Army’s Institutional Power: From Egypt to Others The military, in some cases, could deploy its institutional assets, often in an otherwise void or shattered institutional context and in protracted transitional settings. The resulting process was bumpy and chaotic in Egypt and, by comparison, messier in Yemen and Libya. 216

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Egypt stands out among the cases examined here. Many one-sided explanations have been at a loss to explain what happened after the fall of Mubarak. Those arguing that military rule (or at least “ruling without governing”) has been an enduring feature in Egypt do not account for the fact that the military elite in Egypt has changed a lot since 1952. The officers of 2011 who belonged to the ruling class and lived under the status quo of the Mubarak regime for thirty years were very different from the young middle-class officers who worked for change in 1952. Similarly, the SCAF’s behavior could not be simply explained by the officers’ concerns about protecting their economic empire. They indeed managed to protect their economic interests even under newcomers, the Muslim Brothers. Yet, the explanation lies not just in a “path dependence” from patterns highlighted in the above chapters, but also in the interaction, after February 2011, between the new dynamics of the Egyptian society, a new level of street politics that crystallized into the revolution in January 2011 (and remained active from 2011 to 2013) and the only state institution that remained standing after Mubarak’s departure, the military. The army remained the only state institution that kept functioning or at least that could temporarily bet on its strong legitimacy (“the people and the army are one hand”), while other state institutions (the police, the judiciary, the media, the bureaucracy in general) were “floating” in a void, in disarray, ceasing to function entirely or stunned by the shock of January 2011 and the disappearance of the executive’s authoritarian grip/”direction” of the Mubarak regime. After Mubarak’s ouster, high-level military leaders, slightly intoxicated by their initial popularity, threw themselves collegially into the transitional process; hence they operated in a new and fluid arena without clear “rules of the game” for an institution that walled itself off from politics under Mubarak. The SCAF’s members were almost all over fifty years old, managing a transition initially propelled by a very young generation of civilian activists. They had coexisted in political quietism with the Mubarak regime for decades, were averse to change and dissent and favored hierarchy. They were frightened by what they witnessed after 2011, a case of chaotic and unpredictable transition, but they acted forcefully through their opaque coordination body.1 Secrecy was a hallmark of the SCAF. Though it established a Facebook page to issue its proclamations and some SCAF members spoke publicly to justify their decisions, it was confined to the defense ministry, handing out “orders” to the provisional government. It did not empower civilian ministries and none of the three successive interim cabinets was really 1

Interview with a participant to meetings with the army, location withheld, June 2015.

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able to work and undertake policy initiatives without military direct approval.2 The disparagement of civilians and politicians was deeply ingrained in officers’ ideational culture. As summarized by Tantawi’s remark to one parliamentarian, “the military is not accountable before anyone.”3 The SCAF moved with scant consultation with political groupings, assuming full executive and legislative powers, and without a clear road map for transition, constantly changing the timetable for transferring power to civilians. The SCAF stated that it was eager to remove itself from politics or at least from political limelight, while at the same time aspiring to remain an arbitrator or a guardian behind the scenes: by playing on the sequencing between parliamentary and presidential elections, trying to influence the constitution-drafting process, trying to weight on parliamentary elections, attempting to shape the acceptable spectrum of presidential candidates. In any event, all the SCAF’s attempts failed. The strength of the military lay in its ability to remain cohesive and keep deliberations behind closed doors and out of public view. Insiders noticed that generals had a penchant for endless deliberation that put them often at odds with the quickly moving pace of events.4 This was also a way to preserve the unity of the military institution. The problem of the army’s cohesion was not only at stake at one brief moment (the uprising, Chapter 5) but during a relatively long and protracted transitional process. That entailed a careful and calibrated management of the military by the officer corps. The army’s institutional unity should not be taken for granted. The SCAF itself was not an homogeneous body: some of its members were more engaged in the military economy and more vocal in politics (for fear of civilian oversight); the older generation (emblematized by Tantawi) was scared by events getting out of control; while the younger generation (Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the chief of the military intelligence, or others who would rule with him after 2013) was more confident in its ability to govern.5 In the end, Tantawi enjoyed preeminence and played on a rigid notion of hierarchy. At the same time, the atmosphere of general politicization in Egypt was reverting back on the army. In October 2011 at the air defense academy in the outskirts of Alexandria, around 500 officers demonstrated for better treatment (denouncing poor food, harsh training, pointless assemblies, hard punishments), salaries and improved training.6 Tantawi was very careful to preserve cohesion inside 2 3 4 6

Hazem Beblawi, Arbaʿa Shuhur fi Qafas al-Hukuma (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2012). ʿAbd al-ʿAzim Hamad, al-Thawra al-Taʾiha (Cairo: Markaz al-Marosa, 2012), 29. Ibid. 5 Interview with an officer, location withheld, May 2015. “Egyptian Army Officer’s Diary of Military Life in a Revolution,” The Guardian, December 28, 2011; Patrick Galey, “Why the Egyptian Military Fears a Captain’s

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the ranks, holding regular meetings with officers, spending a lot of time and propaganda trying to keep the military cohesive behind its high officer corps, raising salaries and reassuring mid-ranking officers that their concerns would be addressed.7 The middle ranks in the officers’ corps (captains to lieutenant colonels) were increasingly restive before orders to repress; and when deployed to secure demonstrations, field officers would receive substantial increases leaving them politically indifferent and bought with bonuses. Playing on its preserved cohesiveness, the military cultivated its image as the last unified force in a very chaotic situation and gained some respect in Egyptian society, although not among the young revolutionaries. Informally throughout 2011, the military prosecutor and some generals repeatedly summoned journalists and media figures, in a country where the print media enjoyed a strong following even in the era of the Internet. Generals closely monitored media discussions and displayed acute sensitivity to public criticism targeting them. The army’s Department of Morale Affairs also played an essential role to offer counterpropaganda – the information minister at the time was a former military general. The SCAF ordered pro-military posters to be stuck on public buses and sent retired generals to university campuses to improve the army’s image. Military vehicles displayed stickers that read “the people and the army are one hand” or “protecting the revolution.” The generals actually did accept some form of transition, albeit within limits. One of the first decisions of the SCAF after the ouster of Mubarak was about the arrest of symbolic figures such as Interior Minister Habib al-Adli and the steel tycoon Ahmed Ezz on corruption charges. The SCAF was eager to organize elections to open up the Egyptian political system and to address the constitutional limits that precluded political life, in particular the permanent state of emergency and an electoral system designed to allow those in executive position to select the winners. But the SCAF never intended a revolutionary transformation of Egypt. The generals stuck to their faith in legal rules and fidelity to institutional frameworks that put them at odds with young revolutionaries. They also resisted deeper changes such as ending the 50 percent quota reserved for peasants and workers in elections (over which they often controlled seats with the candidacy of former military personnel) or the setting up of revolutionary courts to try the “remnants” (al-fulul = politicians of the Mubarak era). The trial of Mubarak as a “red line” was not to be crossed

7

Revolt,” Foreign Policy, February 16, 2012; “In Egypt’s Military: A March for Change,” Reuters, April 10, 2012. Interview with a journalist connected with the army, Paris, June 2014.

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(and talked about in the media) for a long time, reflecting the sense of cohesiveness in the officer corps. Yet officers bowed to public outcry and large demonstrations (million marches or “al-millionnat”) as when they conceded to put Mubarak in jail and to trial, a big concession signaling a disarrayed and decredibilized SCAF.8 The transitional setting in Egypt was very different from earlier cases in southern Europe, Latin America or eastern Europe in the 1980s–1990s or even in Tunisia (with the Instance pour la réalisation des objectifs de la révolution). There was no rebuilding of a functioning political system as the SCAF, with all power in its own hands, did not choose to build a partnership with some civilian political actors. The SCAF was only eager to draw tactical agreements (tafahumat, understandings) with political groups rather than pursue serious negotiations and it offered no new political horizons. The Three-Step Protracted Transition in Egypt: The Military Thrown into Direct Politics, the Implicit “Deal” with the Muslim Brotherhood and a “Coup” Once Again? In a first step (February 2011–June 2012), the army jumped into politics. In a rushed constitutional move, the SCAF appointed a legal committee to reform the constitution, but with no consultation, no public accountability, no representation of political parties (except a lone member of the Muslim Brotherhood) and, as confirmed by its head (and an Islamistleaning intellectual), Tareq al-Bishri, within strict limits.9 On March 19, 2011, voters approved these eight amendments to the suspended 1971 constitution in a referendum. But on March 30, the SCAF announced on its Facebook page a “provisional constitutional declaration” including, in addition to the referendum-approved amendments, fifty-five other articles never put to vote and taken from the 1971 constitution. The SCAF saw the Muslim Brotherhood as the true real party in Egypt able to discipline the streets, though it was wary of the Brotherhood’s strong desire to quickly go to elections. At the same time, the SCAF viewed other political parties with suspicion as too fragmented. Furthermore, the SCAF resented the revolutionary youth, referring derisively to “the kids of Tahrir” (awlad Tahrir) and discounted them as those who hindered the restoration of normal life and stability. The SCAF worked with the assumption that the military under the SCAF’s guidance was the only actor truly caring about Egypt’s interests,10 which meant 8 9 10

Interview with a young activist, Paris, June 2015. Interview with a law professor, Paris, June 2014. “This Is How SCAF Talked,” al-Masry al-Youm, February 14, 2012.

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pursuing a “disciplined” transition. The generals believed, or at least publicly claimed, that they acted on behalf of what they called the “silent majority” of Egyptians and saw the demonstrators in Tahrir Square as not representative of Egypt at large. Confronted with fast-moving events, for which they were unprepared, generals were at a loss in a new political scene populated with youth activists, party blocs, intellectuals and rising Muslim Brothers. No wonder that their mindset was distinctly paternalistic when they regarded civilians. And the army regularly denounced protests as an instrument of foreign plots to weaken the country, even accusing the United States – in December 2011, for instance, Egyptian authorities conducted unprecedented raids against US, European and domestic NGOs. The SCAF struggled to institutionalize the military’s prerogatives and role, which was a very new feature in Egypt in 2011, in a country whose four presidents since 1952 had a military background and had cared about the army’s unique status and corporatist interests. Furthermore, for highranking officers, constitutional appearances mattered, as they were keenly interested in retaining an iron-clad position for the military in the constitution. In 2011 the army developed a very extensive list of its own requirements. The army tried to sell them to the public as a national security issue. Talks about the “Turkish model” were also aired by the SCAF’s spokesmen and the military allegedly translated Turkey’s military-influenced 1980 constitution.11 In November 2011, Deputy Prime Minister (“for political development and democratic transition”) Ali El-Selmi circulated the prospects for “the basic principles of the constitution” (also called the “El-Selmi document”).12 The push for such supra-constitutional principles faltered, however, with the emergent popular uproar and mobilization in public spaces. In December 2011, the army attempted to set up an extraconstitutional advisory council to issue guidelines on the constitutiondrafting process. After the Freedom and Justice Party (the Muslim Brotherhood) won parliamentary elections, the military tried to control the selection of the future constitution-drafting committee. In sum, the SCAF kept insisting that it was not interested in power; in reality, however, it was midwifing a democratic transition and ensuring that real democracy was stillborn. At the same time, the SCAF strove to restart the workings of the state apparatus. Generals had no clear ideas on public policies or broad policy goals, let alone any articulated program, and had little stomach for the 11 12

Steven Cook, “In Egypt, the Military Adopts Turkish Model to Check Morsi,” alMonitor, June 24, 2012. “The Text of Dr. Ali El-Selmi’s Document,” al-Masrawy, November 2, 2011.

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nitty-gritty of day-to-day governance they were isolated from for years.13 Yet, the conservative and risk-adverse military institution was endowed with a strong sense of the state and a sense of itself as a protector of national interests. The army embraced a very specific concept of the state that was a secular entity; not dissociated from religion but above religious politics – most generals thought of the Muslim Brothers as internationalists who possessed no notion of the state – tasked with providing a basic measure of social welfare or committed, at least rhetorically, to a broad Nasserist legacy; and furthering the army’s broad corporate and economic interests in a highly liberalized economic environment.14 And, to legitimate its actions, the SCAF proceeded on the assumption that a plurality of Egyptians wanted a restoration of stability (istiqrar) and a functioning economy, with a view that “Tahrir was not Egypt.” On the one hand, the SCAF concluded that the purging or reform of institutions like the interior ministry, the judiciary or the media would sow chaos and undermine the state. In fact, the SCAF conducted a phony security sector reform,15 refusing all calls for purges in key posts. It retook control over the interior ministry and preserved the security apparatus, in particular its intelligence wing as a governance tool. The former State Security Investigations (Mabahith Amn al-Dawla) was renamed the National Security Sector (NSS) (Qitaʿa al-Amn al-Watani), reorganized by the SCAF and endowed with the same missions. The General Intelligence Services (Mukhabarat ʿAmma) – that gleaned its senior officers from the military – was refocused on Egyptian internal topics (and new political groups) under General Murad Muwafi, the erstwhile governor of the North Sinai. The military intelligence (idarat almukhabarat al-ʿaskariyya) was not only tasked with army-related topics (as under Mubarak) but was increasingly engaged in surveying major civilian political activities. The Central Security Forces that ground to a halt in January 2011 returned to the streets under a preserved interior ministry – the SCAF promoted a veteran of al-Adli’s ministry – under the army’s control. The SCAF continued to nominate people from military and security backgrounds as governors. On the other hand, restarting the state was understood by the SCAF as synonymous with putting an end to the continuing street politics in the country – both the politicized demonstrations in Tahrir and the sort of uncoordinated direct actions of citizens that became a recurring feature after January 2011. The military acted roughly, using force: with the 13 14 15

Interview with a professor of political science, Paris, January 2014. Interview with a journalist connected with the military, Paris, June 2014. Yezid Sayigh, “Missed Opportunity” (Beirut: Carnegie Middle East Center, 2015).

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massacre of Coptic Christians marching on Maspero, the Egyptian radio and television, some of them crushed by tanks in October 2011;16 the brutal clearing of Muhammad Mahmud Street by the military police in November 2011, the infamous “blue bra” attack where army personnel were involved in December 2011;17 the humiliating tactic of administering virginity tests for arrested female demonstrators. Under the SCAF’s rule, the aggressive transfer of civilians to military trials increased: average estimates put the number of civilians prosecuted before military tribunals from 12,000 to 15,000 – in thirty years under Mubarak, it was 3,000. And the transitional period has seen many more killing of protesters than during the eighteen days of revolution.18 In a second phase (June 2012–July 2013), the army entered in an “implicit deal” with the Muslim Brotherhood. There was some general consensus within the SCAF for restarting a slightly more opened Egyptian system, with elections – what Egyptians called strategies of “election-izing” – yet without structural changes in state-society relations. The military had exhausted itself in one year of direct and catastrophic rule without addressing Egypt’s pressing socioeconomic challenges, as indicated by the surge of social mobilization in Tahrir on January 25, 2012, with slogans such as “isqat al-mushir” (the fall of the field marshal), referring to SCAF’s head Tantawi, and “yasqut hukm al-ʿaskariyya” (down with military rule). On the other hand, the Muslim Brotherhood was very eager to gain a piece of the political pie it never had access to since its creation. It saw elections as an historic opportunity. The military struck numerous blows to the Muslim Brotherhood and often won it out in a tug-of-war battle over “a consensus presidential candidate” (who could have the support of both the SCAF and the Muslim Brotherhood), then with the invalidation of some key Muslim Brotherhood candidates (among them the favorite and influential Khairat al-Shater) and the certification of the candidacy of an old regime figure, Ahmad Shafiq. And the Supreme Constitutional Court ruled that parliament was elected based on an unconstitutional law and would be dissolved, two days before the second round of presidential elections. The SCAF’s “additional constitutional declaration,” minutes after the polls closed in the runoff to the presidential elections, limited the power of 16 17 18

Mariz Tadros, “Egypt’s Bloody Sunday,” Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), October 13, 2011, www.merip.org/mero/mero101311. A female protester knocked to the ground had her skirt pulled up, exposing her blue bra and became a symbol of repression. Amnesty International, “Egypt’s Military Rulers ‘Even Worse’ than Mubarak” (New York: November 22, 2011).

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the presidency.19 On June 19, 2012, the headline of the independent newspaper, Al-Masry al-Youm, read “the military transfers power to the military.” Talks about Algeria in 1992 were heard in Egypt as the military stationed its armored vehicles on the streets, but the SCAF’s game plan was more sophisticated and the military did not want to be seen as an oldstyle military junta and had neither the desire nor the resources to enter an all-out civil war.20 But the SCAF could not stuff the ballot boxes in favor of a candidate as the Mubarak regime did. The end result was an exhausting outcome (illustrating the difficulties of noncooperative games between rational actors) whereby, without trust, each actor would aim for his personal best outcome and leave the worst possible outcome for all. The resolution of the dilemma came when (first civilian-elected) President Morsi reached out to some officers whom he thought sympathetic to Islamism – key among them was the chief of military intelligence General al-Sisi. Other interviews put it vice versa: some SCAF members came to Morsi to make an offer.21 Al-Sisi was younger yet sufficiently senior and allegedly pious, his wife veiled – a member of his family was a Muslim Brotherhood cadre. In all hypotheses, the SCAF’s leadership under Tantawi came to be perceived within the military as threatening the status quo the army benefited from and acting so ineptly that it could jeopardize its maintenance and the institutional interests of the armed forces (as Mubarak in 2011). Morsi used the pretext of Tantawi’s mishandling of an Islamist raid on a military checkpoint in the Sinai in August 2012 to push Tantawi and his heir apparent, Chief of Staff Anan, into retirement. He nominated al-Sisi as defense minister, along with Sedqi Sobhi as chief of staff and a new deputy defense minister, General ʿAsar, who had held the US portfolio during the SCAF’s rule in 2011–2012. Morsi also issued a new constitutional declaration abrogating the SCAF’s “supplementary constitutional declaration” of June 2012. Morsi then ordered changes in key positions such as the heads of the Presidential Guard and military intelligence, the chief of staff, commanders of the navy, air force and air defense, the Central Security Forces and the Cairo Security Directorate. This move was first interpreted as the 19

20 21

The document stated that the president could not declare war without seeking permission from the SCAF, he could not appoint a defense minister without consulting the army, the military would have a huge say in the writing of the constitution and, in the constitutional writing process, the arbiter for a dispute between the army and the constitutional assembly would be the Supreme Constitutional Court. Interview with an active officer, location withheld, January 2014. “President Consulted Army Over Changes,” Reuters, August 12, 2012; “Egypt’s Morsi May Have Consulted Military on Sunday Surprise,” al-Ahram Online, August 12, 2012. This was strongly denied by the former commander of the navy (purged by Morsi) Mehab Mumish in an interview (al-Masry-al-Youm, August 11, 2013, deleted).

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proof of his understanding of key positions within the military. Defense Minister al-Sisi ordered the retirement of some hundred older officers, a signal of a quite different hypothesis that underscores that changes were made by the military itself. As if to buttress the latter interpretation, Morsi did not attempt to subordinate the armed forces and was extremely solicitous of them: there was no investigation of the army’s misbehavior and involvement in killing and torturing civilians (e.g., Maspero, Muhammad Mahmud Street battles and many other cases) – even though many allegations were documented in a presidential fact-finding report leaked to the media. And the 2012 “Morsi constitution” entrenched the military higher than any elected authority in the constitutional order and gave to it more privileges than that of 1971 – the Muslim Brotherhood had previously appointed a former general as head of the parliamentary national security and defense committee. According to the constitution, the military budget would only be discussed in the National Defense Council (NDC; alMajlis al-Defaʿa al-Watani) created by Sadat but lapsed into inaction before 2012 and not by the parliament. The NDC tasked with issues related to “the safety and security of the country” would be dominated by commanders of the different branches (Article 198) – eight officers out of fifteen members and a minority of civilians, among whom only three were elected – and would have authority on critical areas of policy-making. Other articles of the constitution signaled the importance of the military institution. It placed mandatory conscription up front (Article 7) in the text of the constitution – by contrast, it appeared at the end of the 1971 basic law; Article 196 stipulated the appointment of the defense minister from among officers, a point that was not even included in the 1971 constitution. The military got what it wanted, namely, a safe exit away from the limelight of politics and from public scrutiny and back to the barracks and a return to its economic ventures, while at the same time cordoning off major policy areas (foreign policy, domestic security issues, major orientations in economic policy) from elected institutions and preventing any policy changes or shifts that would threaten the army’s position. In the meantime, Defense Minister al-Sisi made the restoration of the army’s prestige one of his priorities. The most surprising element was the quick recovery of the military in the media in 2013. The “implicit deal” between the military returning to the barracks and a civilian president ruling Egypt would only be viable if the Muslim Brotherhood ruled Egypt – one of the key aims of generals was to restart the state. These hopes were dashed as the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi, in large part dazzled by their electoral victory and newly acquired legitimacy (what they called “al-shariʿa al-barlamaniyya,” parliamentary legitimacy),

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were unable to reengineer politics in Egypt and produced only increased polarization in the country enraging the secular opposition and leading to generalized un-governability – and, conversely, the latter also played polarization rather than political bargaining. The Muslim Brotherhood’s exclusive grab on power, the fact that it did not enter into coalitions when Morsi formed his government or during the 2012 constitution-drafting process, its desire to entrench itself at the expense of all other political actors,22 threatened national unity, a factor that the military saw its primary role defending. The Muslim Brotherhood was increasingly seen as a threat to public order as social mobilizations resumed, in the midst of the political crisis over the rushed constitution or in the badly sequenced trial of the Port Said football stadium tragedy in February 2013, with the result that the army risked being called upon once again to restore order if disturbances could not be contained. Leading generals, after their failures during the SCAF’s direct rule, banked on the assumption that elected civilians in power could manage street protests, but demonstrations did not stop. Morsi requested the military to restore order locally but the military did not enforce the curfew and the National Defense Council’s statement stressed that “the army belongs to the people.” Furthermore, the attacks on demonstrators in Tahrir in October 2012, in front of the presidential palace in December 2012, and growing violence against political opponents and religious and sectarian minorities by alleged militias or parallel security structures of the Muslim Brotherhood and demands by the political wing of the Islamist al-Gamaʿat al-Islamiyya in order to legalize unarmed “popular committees” to supplement the police aroused concern in the army. In January 2013, General al-Sisi issued a stiff warning on this topic, calling the Muslim Brotherhood’s attention to the state’s monopoly over violence. The Brotherhood put its new relationship with the military to a stiff test and introduced topics that troubled the military corps, even officers who were favorably disposed to cooperating with the confraternity to stabilize the country. A more structurally relevant point is that the Muslim Brotherhood’s presidency was also squandered, in military eyes, by its inability “to restart the state.” The first steps were seen as constructive in the army,23 when President Morsi left the interior ministry unreformed and appointed as its head a Mubarak-era holdover. Nevertheless, what increasingly dominated public discussions in Egypt and in particular in the officer corps was the specter of infiltration of the state by the Muslim 22

23

The Muslim Brothers displayed an inability to transcend their in-group trust network and work with other political groups particularly after the November 22, 2012, decrees granting sovereign powers and immunity to President Morsi. They bunkered themselves, never reaching out to the oppositions. Interview with an officer, location withheld, June 2016.

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Brothers (ikhwanat al-dawla). Convergences were then possible with large sectors from the Egyptian bureaucracy that fought fierce bureaucratic battles with the incoming Brotherhood, who controlled the executive endowed with extensive powers of nomination and patronage, in the few places where the Muslim Brotherhood tried to advance its agenda (culture, education, ministry of supply, social security organs). Officers (and the military intelligence from where General al-Sisi came) were also very alarmed by evidence of the Muslim Brotherhood’s attempts to place its members as junior officers24 – between 2012 and 2013, the military was pushed by the Muslim Brotherhood’s electoral rise, hence its new “normalization” in the Egyptian political landscape, to open to some extent the gates of the military academy. One of the greatest assets of the army was its institutional cohesion: mid-level officers or lay soldiers didn’t share much with the generals of the SCAF but the latter built and maintained a strong and complex network of interests and allegiance within the military that survived rather smoothly the tumults of the January revolution and its aftermath. And the whole military corps gathered before the fear of instability that caused the army to issue warnings.25 The latter was once again positioning itself as the sole remaining supportive column of the edifice of the Egyptian state, and was increasingly reentering politics. A series of badly calibrated decisions (or rumors about them) and declarations came to alarm and antagonize the military and started the final countdown of military intervention.26 Uncorrected and therefore all the more dangerous misperceptions and misunderstandings ranged from key issues to more symbolic skirmishes. Conflicts with the military multiplied, signaling the mounting level of distrust with incidents perceived by the army as encroaching on its areas of core concern. In October 2012, President Morsi’s political adviser Saif Eddin Abd alFattah offered to send Egyptian troops with an Arab force in Syria without prior consultation with the military, a casus belli for high officers.27 President Morsi’s posturing on the territorial conflict with Sudan or water conflict with Ethiopia was perceived as irresponsible in 24 25

26 27

Thanks to the late professor Roger Owen for providing this information from his own network. Chief of Staff Sedqi Sobhi (http://elbadil.com/2013/02/18/110297/) or, similarly, Defense Minister al-Sisi (www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiOpL51FBJY&feature=player_embedded). In a speech before the military academy, General al-Sisi warned about “the collapse of the s t a t e” ( ww w . f a c e b o o k . c o m / p h o t o . p h p ? p i d = 6 0 1 3 0 7 &l = b 1 0 7 f a8 b 1 7 & i d = 217455035052153). Mustapha Bakri, al-Sisi (Cairo: Dar al-Masri al-Lubnaniyya, 2015). In a declaration to the Turkish agency Anatolya, www.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/09/30/ 240980.html.

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the army high command.28 Continued unrest in the Sinai with the rise of jihadists29 was seen as a major threat with wide appeal for the sense of nationalism and pride in the officer corps and in a key area for the military. The army regarded with suspicion the proposed common economic projects of the Muslim Brotherhood with Qatar in the Sinai or Suez Canal, where the military controlled most of the land, a topic seen as “a red line.” In December 2012, General al-Sisi issued a decree restricting the right to buy property in the Sinai to secondgeneration Egyptian citizens after rumors of Palestinian-Qatari schemes for tourism-related projects.30 A Muslim Brother parliamentarian, Hassan al-Brins, disclosed the level of corruption inside the Arab Organization for Industrialization interfering in one of the specific preserves of the military, its economic empire.31 Tensions soared with talks about a possible trial for Tantawi and Anan by a journal close to the Muslim Brotherhood – the information was denied and the editor in chief ousted – which was another “red line” for the army, followed by rumors about the dismissal of al-Sisi.32 In October 2012, the symbolic armed forces’ celebration of the 1973 war organized by President Morsi was far surpassed, as in a partisan meeting, by the large display of flags and posters from the Muslim Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party. Moreover, the military was upset with the attendance among presidential guests of Abbud al-Zumur, convicted for the assassination of Sadat in 1981. In June 2013, President Morsi appointed several Muslim Brothers as governors in sensitive sites despite the importance of these positions for the military. In a third step, General al-Sisi overthrew President Morsi on July 3, 2013. Beyond the semantic debate, whether it is called a coup d’état or a postmodern coup (according to the 1997 Turkish role model) or an uprising that was stopped short and followed by a coup picking up against the original popular uprising, the army transferred power from the democratically elected president to the interim president and head of the Supreme Constitutional Court. The army played on the context of the Tamarrod (rebellion) movement collecting signatures against Morsi and initiated by two young activists from the Nasserist current – allegedly fifteen million, that is, more than the thirteen million ballots Morsi got.33 28 29 30 31 32 33

When he promised to give Sudan the contested area of Halayeb, Chief of Staff Sedqi Sobhi rushed to Khartoum to deny this. Hossam Bahgat, “Who Let the Jihadis Out?” Mada Masr, February 16, 2014. al-Ahram, December 27, 2012. https://ar-ar.facebook.com/HassanElPrince; al-Youm al-Sabaa, September 8, 2012. www.facebook.com/Egy.Army.Spox/posts/273426832788306. Ibrahim Gad, Tamarrod wa-Tariq ila 30 Junio (Cairo: Mahrousa, 2013).

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There were allegations of manipulation. At least the military exploited the mandate of the protest, even posted footages of the demonstration34 and might have given logistical and financial support to Tamarrod in addition to the help from the interior ministry, the General Intelligence Services and businessmen close to the army – the military intelligence would certainly be aware of this.35 The military cynically exploited what was a convenient opportunity to dispose of the president under the guise of political support from the demonstrators. The coup could not have succeeded without the use (and manipulation) of mass mobilizations (Tamarrod) against Morsi.36 The July 3, 2013, press conference convened around General al-Sisi after his coup showed the outlines of an heterogeneous alliance of state institutions, religious institutions (AlAzhar, the Coptic Church), some Salafi parties and some secular parties – very strange bedfellows indeed – and showed how many interests linked to the state had been antagonized by the Muslim Brotherhood. Losing Track: Arrested Reinstitutionalization in Yemen and the Chimera of the Impossible State Monopoly on Force in Libya By comparison, Yemen exemplifies a case of corporate reaction of the military, yet an army fractured and further weakened by lingering power plays in a general context of tentative reinstitutionalization. In February 2012, Abdurabbo Mansour Hadi, a former South Yemen politician who fled to North Yemen,37 an army officer (holding the rank of field marshal) but with no operational command, formerly Saleh’s vice president and the only candidate, was elected president in a one-man referendum following the first steps of the UN-sponsored GCC-UN transitional plan.38 He tried to implement the second phase of the agreement (paragraphs 16 and 17) about security sector reform (SSR).39

34 35 36 37

38 39

Associated Press, “Egypt’s Military Releases New Protest Video,” July 2, 2013, www .youtube.com/watch?y=1VrWRkhtjTk. “Recordings Suggest Emirates and Egyptian Military Pushed Ousting of Morsi,” The New York Times, March 1, 2015. Kira Jumet, Contesting the Repressive State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Hadi was from the Ali Nasser Mohammed group in the southern Yemen Socialist Party who fled (perhaps 30,000 persons mainly originating from Abyan and Shebwa governorates) after the bloody civil war in January 1986 in Aden. He was among southerners who got high (symbolic) posts under Saleh. Helen Lackner, “Yemen’s ‘Peaceful’ Transition from Autocracy: Could It Have Succeeded?” (Stockholm: International IDEA, March 2016). Marwan Noman and David Sorrensen, “Reforming the Yemen Security Sector” (Stanford: CDDRL Working Papers no. 137, June 2013); International Crisis Group,

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Hadi choose a “salami-slice” approach to handle the hot topic of reforms, purging twenty of Saleh’s relatives from high positions in April 2012, among them, the air force commander and the commander of the “Special Republican Guard” brigade within the Republican Guard division – both of whom defied Hadi for two weeks until the UN Security Council threatened sanctions against them. He also removed the deputy director of the National Security Bureau and the commander of the Central Security in May 2012 (nominally under the purview of the interior ministry), reduced the size of the Republican Guard and formed a new military unit in August 2012, the Presidential Protection Forces (made up of three brigades from the Republican Guard and five others associated with Ali Mohsen) reporting directly to him, which was believed to be under the command of Hadi’s brother. In September 2012, Hadi issued another list of rotations (National Security Bureau, military intelligence, defense ministry’s financial department). Then, in December 2012, he disbanded the Republican Guard and the First Division blending their brigades into other forces. Hadi also announced a new organizational structure of the Yemeni military in seven regions to be drawn more precisely later – Ali Mohsen’s northwestern region was split in two – with new commanders and the deployment of units outside cities. And he offered a streamlining of the military into four services – respectively, army, air force, navy and border guards; then two were added, missiles and special operations command. In February 2013, Hadi announced a major overhaul of the interior ministry (the Central Security was rebranded Special Security Forces, Quwwat al-Amn al-Khassa). And he named a new director for the military’s economic branch, YECO. In April 2013, Hadi removed Ahmed Ali Saleh from his command in the Republican Guard and the Special Forces (and thereafter appointed him ambassador to the UAE) and named Ali Mohsen adviser to the president for security and military affairs, another way to sideline him. Hadi was accused by both “sides” (Saleh and Ali Mohsen/al-Ahmar) of acting out of political bias or conversely of not going far enough. And he was accused of favoring his regional allies from Abyan (his home governorate) or from adjoining Shebwa to fill emptied posts. With this ambitious SSR reform program, President Hadi drew new lines of command in a largely self-autonomized Yemeni military during the past thirty-five years and furthermore after March 2011. He also took decisions following advice from two technical committees staffed by military technocrats with the crucial help of the US (on defense matters), “Yemen’s Military-Security Reforms: Seeds of New Conflict?” (Brussels: Middle East Report no. 139, April 4, 2013).

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the EU (interior), the UK and Jordan – and frequent visits by US high military officials to Hadi. But the reform process in the military never reached its end point for larger reasons – the president was too weak politically, too dependent on foreign backing – but also for more immediate causes, because stakeholders refused, ignored or only partially implemented, then overturned presidential decrees, and their units went on strike or stormed official buildings in protest. Hadi’s approach to military reorganization was not able to replace the old Yemeni organization with fewer ones endowed with better defined roles – the Jordanian model was envisioned, where the army is considered as one of the more professional in the Arab World (Chapter 4). All this amounted only to SSR on paper or PowerPoints. Networks (ʿasabiyyat) of influence (the General People’s Congress in the defense ministry, al-Islah in the interior) proved more important than reforms and administrative decrees. A legacy of ruling with networks by Saleh could not be erased by new organizational charts of SSR and networks remained active as evidenced by innumerable mutinies or at least insubordinations by Ali Mohsen’s troops or Saleh’s loyalists in 2013. In general, among soldiers (whether officers or not), Hadi was seen as not protecting them, at a time when al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) became more brazen and attacked important military installations.40 Most new commanders nominated by Hadi were unable to overcome the entrenched loyalty of elite military units in a Yemeni pattern where unit commanders had acted like patrons in a fiefdom or a constituency41 – and most new commanders were from Abyan and unable to secure regional or tribal loyalties in their new units. In the 2000s, Ahmed Ali Saleh took care of the Republican Guards and endowed them with benefits (housing, sports clubs, hospitals, etc.) additional to their salaries, hence numerous units in the Republican Guard supported the Saleh regime and above all their commanders. President Hadi could install loyalists at the top but he could not dismiss the many hundreds of mid-level Sanhani officers who were injected in the military since the 1980s (Chapter 2) and were active members of these networks. The same held true in the First Division with Ali Mohsen. To complicate matters, soldiers recruited en masse by the Republican Guard and the First Division during the 2011 uprising – those elite units were valued professions for Yemenis in dire economic conditions – wanted to benefit from favorable conditions and not being transferred into more regular 40

41

In late 2011, AQAP was sufficiently militarily prominent as to besiege a Yemeni army brigade in the provincial capital of Abyan, Zinjibar, necessitating a major US-backed relief offensive by the Yemeni armed forces. Interview with a UN official, Paris, February 2015.

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units by Hadi’s reforms. After 2011, not just Yemeni society but also soldiers became increasingly protesting actors: soldiers would walk out in protest over delays in salary payments and unit commanders would have to calm down their fighters and preserve their own image acting as benefactors, a new setting that was exploited by “regime-hardened” Saleh loyalist commanders.42 And the final conundrum was that the army was in crucial need of trained forces to counter restive tribes in the highlands (Marib, al-Jawf), various rebellions (the Houthis in the North, al-Hirak in the South), territorial advances by AQAP and to protect key infrastructures. Because of the level of disorganization in the regular military and as a lot of mid-level officers were fired (for incompetence) or rotated with reforms, the most professional and the more qualified forces, namely, those with less “ghost soldiers,” more trained officers and officers working (and not absent from work) were those forces built by Saleh’s sons, nephews and various relatives, but they were also the more praetorian ones with Sanhani officers – as a joke, Yemenis used to say that “Yemen had only one army,” the Republican Guard. The resulting context made up of the dysfunction of the Hadi government, its weak legitimacy and more generally the inability of political processes to “subsume” SSR under a rebuilt and functioning political system played an additional critical role, despite the promising National Dialogue (al-Hiwar al-Watani) and the backing of the UN’s Department of Political Affairs – and the chairmanship of the very interventionist UN special envoy Jamal Benomar – and of the Group of Ten Ambassadors (from the Security Council, the GCC and the EU).43 And conversely the truncated SSR reform on paper and inaction in practice blocked real political transitional moves creating a political conundrum, until one actor stepped in, the Houthis. Tellingly and as a symptom of his failure to reform, President Hadi did not deploy the armed forces against the Houthis by late 2014 and he had not enough troops to face the SalehHouthi forces in spite of the efforts of his allies (in the first place the defense minister) and the only unit that fought for him was the small Presidential Guard. The revolt movement in Libya was brought together by an eclectic mix of weaponized social activism from below based on localism 42

43

“Students Walk Out of Sana’a War Academy,” Yemen Times, January 28, 2015; “It’s Not the Bullets Forcing Yemeni Troops Off the Battlefield,” The New York Times, September 12, 2016. Sheila Carapico, “Demonstrators, Dialogues, Drones and Dialectics,” Middle East Report, no. 259 (Winter 2013); Sheila Carapico, “Yemen between Revolution and Counter-terrorism,” in Why Yemen Matters: A Society in Transition, ed. Helen Lackner (London: Saqi Books, 2014), 29–49; Human Rights Watch, “Between a Drone and alQaeda” (New York: HRW, October 2013).

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(Chapter 5). The problem was who would take back control and guarantee order. The National Transitional Council (NTC) served as the external political face of the multiple uprisings, in connection with the unprecedented regional and international support. But the NTC was in large part a bystander, without a leadership role. It displayed its inability to restore any state monopoly on force. In November 2011, the NTC’s transitional administration tried to marshal the multiple armed groups under the heading of the defense or interior ministries. A defense ministry was created from scratch in May 2011, with a Misratan commander (later accused of involvement in the assassination of Qaddafi’s former interior minister and rebel military chief, Abd al-Fattah Younes, Chapter 4) as its head. The lines of authority between the second defense minister (a former military trainer and educator from Zintan, the commander of a militia responsible for the capture of Saif al-Islam Qaddafi and also a former head of Zintan Military Council) and the newly appointed chief of staff (a Misratan who had retired from the armed forces just before the uprising and fought with the revolutionaries) were not clear. The appointment of career officers in the ministry was counterweighted with political appointments of deputy ministers among “revolutionaries,” often Islamists, Salafis or former Libyan Islamic Fighting Group members, with their own parallel chains of command. Reinstitutionalization was very tentative, because of the path dependence from decades of disorganization inherited from Qaddafi (the weighty structural factor) and because those who led transition in the NTC were especially cautious or unable to play a leading role (the missing agency factor). And agency came from revolutionary brigades instead of from “central” authorities, namely, the NTC (from October 2011 to August 2012), then the General National Congress (GNC, until August 2014). After a failed attempt to dissolve armed groups and as they were in charge of day-to-day affairs and endowed with huge (local and revolutionary) legitimacy, the NTC set up the Warriors’ Affairs Commission for Rehabilitation and Development (WAC) in December 2011, with US$8 billion of funds – not all were disbursed – to register fighters under the interior or defense ministries. The director and deputy director of the WAC were two former leaders of a Benghazi-based Islamist brigade. In June 2012, the commission registered 250,000 people after it was overwhelmed by a deluge of forms distributed by brigades and councils – “revolutionaries” who really fought against Qaddafi were much less, presumably 25,000. As an incentive for registration, revolutionary brigades came to get payments, then regular salaries from the state through their brigade commanders, who could do what they wished with the

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money received for the unit they registered – some brigades received millions of dollars.44 Paradoxically, militias/“revolutionary brigades” had an incentive to institutionalize themselves as they were in rivalry with the remnants of the “old army,” called by revolutionaries the “dregs of the old regime” (izlam ʿan al-nizam al-sabiq), especially those units that defected early (the Benghazi-based army units). Coalitions of militias needed a parallel system that enabled their long-term mobilization. In parallel and out of distrust for the WAC, the interior and defense ministries were also carrying out their own (and rival) programs of registration. Later, in mid-2012–2013, the chains of command remained blurred with a great deal of contestation, as the law allocated shared responsibilities between the head of GNC, the defense minister and the chief of staff, with all three allowing the creation of new units. Militias were integrated as entire brigades (and not as soldiers/policemen vetted on an individual basis) while retaining their own chains of command intact and commanders in charge, hence laying the ground for future loss of loyalties and conflicting agendas.45 As a consequence, they got a legal mandate and payments from the state and were even allowed to sign arms deals, to receive training (as part of the defense and security sector) and to officially import weapons. Affiliation was often based on personal connections with one minister or deputy minister. Those that felt sidelined or forgotten in this great redistribution/“institutionalization” began blockading roads or ministries until their demands were met. As a result, militias turned security forces quickly mimicked the organization of a regular military (or police), each in their own domain, issuing their own identification cards and registration of weapons or vehicles for their militiamen – at the same time, they transported the weapons they had seized in their respective caches or strongholds46 – and centralizing their activities and developing processes for quick deployment, while at the same time keeping their autonomy and their links to their respective cities or military councils (Misrata, Zintan, Ghariyan, etc.). And these localized forces seized/“protected” border posts, government facilities, oil fields and refineries for economic gain, but also to pressure the central government for help, with increasing demands throughout 2013 culminating in the virtual collapse of Libyan oil exports in early 2014. 44 45 46

International Crisis Group, “Divided We Stand” (Brussels: September 14, 2012); interview with a Zintani civic activist, Paris, June 2014. Interview with a Zintani civic activist, Paris, June 2014; Skype interview with a Misratan entrepreneur, Bordeaux-Misrata, July 2014. What was surprising was how well commanders knew their fighters – they even noted fighters; in general, militias are associated with huge anarchy.

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Consequently, the defense (or interior) ministry’s control on the emerging security sector edifice was precarious. Behind such tentative moves, there was also the critical need for would-be state authorities (NTC/ GNC) to get security providers on the ground in multiple areas because numerous local conflicts broke out – these areas were then declared “military areas” with several heavily armed “official” militias intervening on behalf of various ministries while remaining autonomous – to secure key infrastructures and, more generally, with the pressing need to face rising crime and lawlessness across the country in the absence of a monopoly on force. In the history of civil wars, the NTC/GNC has been the government funding the forces fighting it. The process led to the birth of parallel armies (or as it was officially defined, a temporary reserve army), called the Libyan Shield Forces (Quwwat al-Deraʿa al-Libya) officially sanctioned in April 2012 (law no. 47), under the command of the army chief of staff, at least nominally, and in reality heavily fragmented in revolutionary brigades functioning autonomously. The interior ministry acted as a rival, registering armed groups and creating parallel security providers, in particular the “temporary” Supreme Security Committees (al-Lajnat al-Amniyya al-ʿUliyya al-Muqataʿa, SSC) – the parallel Preventive Security Apparatus was created under the authorization of the interior ministry, but, later, its affiliation shifted to the army’s chief of staff. And forces created by the deputy defense minister in charge of border security and critical national infrastructure with a separate chain of command merged into the autonomous Border, Petroleum and Vital Installations Force in 2012. Tellingly, Libyans used the word “army” (aljaysh) for those elements of the Qaddafi regime that shifted very early in support of the uprising (Chapter 5), and continued to use the term “revolutionaries” (al-thuwwar) to refer to the various forces that were integrated in the military after the end of the civil war; and those revolutionaries called themselves the National Army (al-Jaysh al-Watani). War in Syria: The “Securitization” of the Army, Civil War and the Rebuilding of an Efficient Yet Exhausted Killing Machine In the beginning of 2012, there was a clear shift from a violent answer of the Assad regime to systematic military offensives against lost areas. The regime’s strategy was inadvertently bolstered by the rebels’ controversial shift toward armed insurrection, as initiated by their offensives against Damascus and Aleppo in mid-2012. It took months and months of disruption and despair for Syrians to pick up arms on a large scale – unlike in Libya where in a matter of hours many citizens used weapons – but the

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clear stage of militarization was reached in mid-2012. The fragmented oppositions invested much hope with the additional bet that an international and regional intervention would overthrow the Assad regime according to the Libyan role model. The year 2012 signaled that peaceful demonstrations did not disappear but became overshadowed by a mounting civil war with new features dangerously adding themselves to militarization: confessionalization, militia-nization, jihad-ization, regionalization and even internationalization – the logic of war attracted new actors to the Syrian quicksand, while also sucking the rest of the region into it. This emerging, then entrenched, setting of war had essential consequences for the Syrian military and its ability to fight. The regime was able to fully endow its armed forces and, more generally, its entire remaining social support base, with a war mission: the military was no longer merely “taking part” in repression against unarmed citizens but was waging a full-scale war, a less delegitimizing narrative. The regime could with some reality dismiss the broad-based protest movement as an armed insurrection by distorting what was the greatest threat to its weak legitimacy (peaceful protests by mass numbers) and creating an adversary against whom it could wage a war. The war narrative was a vicious way for an exhausted regime to create a reality – what is called a performative effect in the sociological meaning of the term, namely, “a discursive practice that enacts and produces that which it names” to quote Judith Butler – out of the regime’s obvious lies at the very beginning (i.e., demonstrators presented as armed groups). The issue shifted to a full-scale war against increasingly jihadist-leaning (the rise of al-Qaeda’s offshoot, Jabhat alNosra, then Daesh/“the Islamic State”), then jihadist-led alliances with regional connections. The regime could present its soldiers and officers with a real enemy to fight and to destroy at any cost. And the frazzled army shelled towns or residential neighborhoods that were lost with artillery and tanks, thereafter upgraded violence with surface-to-surface missiles, helicopters, bomber aircrafts, helicopters and chemical weaponry. Obviously, this came as a complement to the politics of “securitization” of the military by brutalization that continued unabated (Chapter 5). The frame of war came to trump everything else and played in the hands of the Assad regime, which pushed a new kind of patriotism, presenting itself as the defender of the Syrian state at war, with some purchase on the military’s will to fight. Many officers, even Sunnis, disillusioned by Bashar’s policies in the 2000s, came to coalesce around it in the defense of Syria – a kind of “imaginary” or idealized state that in reality never existed, but whose existence came as an exact counterpart to the atmosphere of slippery descent into full-scale war. Within units, officers could refer to the protection of the Syrian state as a national

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duty, as homage to the fallen martyrs (shuhadaʾ) and as a necessity to fend-off foreign plots.47 Furthermore, in 2013, a new propaganda campaign on state television kept rehearsing the argument that the country would break apart (cynically reviving the short and traumatic history of Syria as an independent nation-state) and be under foreign occupation without Bashar, reproducing the personality of the savior, even a kind of projection of deity. While Bashar had toned down the cult of personality after becoming president, this policy was reversed after 2012–2013. Many army recruits, especially in the villages around Latakia, were successfully indoctrinated to revere the leader and became willing to sacrifice themselves for him.48 Everything in war should not be perceived through the lenses of ideas and propaganda creating an endeavor or even enthusiasm to fight. Studies of war experience among combatants show that soldiers and officers fight not just out of love or allegiance for those who command them. They also fight out of fear of being killed by their own and also, not incidentally, for fear of their adversary, who would leave them no chance of survival.49 The nature of the fight in Syria with a generalized civil war changed a lot of actual behaviors. The savage war of Syria – with atrocities displayed on videos aired on the Internet, with officers in lost checkpoints who were decapitated or whose bodies had been dismembered – had a chilling effect inside the Syrian army. Furthermore, military units had been distributed in the Syrian territory according to a principle of local entrenchment. Families of officers most of the time lived in the vicinity of bases, called military sectors (qutaʿat) – and dubbed “colonies” (mustawtanat) by Syrians, also as a subtle reference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This created a sense of military entrenchment in society/territory, with officers and soldiers fighting, close to their homes, for their own and their families’ survival – since 2011, most units have been deployed no more than ten or fifteen kilometers from their base. These locally “entrenched” units bulldozed entire neighborhoods in the vicinity and created huge impregnable bases (with strong artillery or aviation). Symptomatically, garrisons under siege for many months held on in the North – where there were less locally “entrenched” bases as compared with the South – and the East (Deir ezZor, Hassake) or in the al-Hawran, a region chock-full of military bases designed to defend against Israel.50 In particular, Damascus was ringed 47 48 49 50

Interview with a defected captain, location withheld, January 2015. Interview with a conscript, location withheld, January 2015. Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II,” The Public Opinion Quarterly, 12(2) (Summer 1948): 280–315. On the Al-Meshat military academy in Aleppo, see Florence Aubenas, “Syrie, La chute d’Al-Mouchat,” Le Monde, January 4, 2013.

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by such military bases – four large military complexes in Qassiun, Mezzeh, al-Dreij and Qatana. Ahead of militarization, the “confessionalization” and thereafter “jihad-ization” of the conflict played an essential role to foster regime cohesion, with essential overtones in the military, and especially in the Alawi community (if it exists?). Many an Alawi – first of all intellectuals and simple villagers, unemployed youths in the suburbs of Damascus, but also members of the army and the security services – resented the policies and abuses of the regime for reasons not very different from Sunni rural residents. Many Alawis joined the military and security forces not because the regime was Alawi but because the Alawi countryside remained underdeveloped, even under the Assad regime – low-ranking officers could even work as cab drivers at night and lived in poor neighborhoods. All these factors resonated in the Alawi-dominated officer corps in 2011.51 As a way to change perceptions through a sectarian/confessional prism, the regime propaganda systematically reported isolated confessional incidents: in Hama, Deir ez-Zor (both traditional bastions of Sunni piety and the former especially resentful of the Assad regime after 1982), Homs (a religiously mixed city), Latakia (pitting the most ancient Sunni population in the central neighborhoods against new Alawi urbanized neighborhoods, called mashruʿat projects, around the center) and Banyas (another religiously mixed city renowned for its Sunni conservatism). The regime presumably staged – or at least closed its eyes to and cynically exploited – sectarian incidents (or bombings) in confessionally mixed areas as a means to bring to the surface deeply ingrained feelings of insecurity among minorities. And the situation darkened when antiAlawi and anti-Shia rhetoric, with Alawis and Shias likened to unbelievers, “renegades” (rawafid),52 reached high levels in opposition rhetoric and, more importantly, with reported sectarian killings beginning in confessionally mixed central Syria in April–May 2012, brutal fighting in Damascus and Aleppo, and reprisal massacres of entire families by loyalists in the wake of military operations in the Banyas area in May 2013. Alawis closed ranks behind the regime as the uprising turned increasingly sectarian with militant armed groups having increasingly an extremist Sunni, foreign-backed and radical jihadist identity.53 51 52

53

Interview with a defected major, location withheld, March 2015. Anthony Shadid, “Sectarian Strife in City Bodes Ill for All of Syria,” The New York Times, November 20, 2011; “. . . But There’s a Slim Hope in History,” The New York Times, November 19, 2011. Salafi Shaykh ʿArur, who lived in Saudi Arabia, warned especially Alawis to “mince them in meat grinders and feed dogs with their flesh” in June 2011. Many Alawis lived in neighborhoods such as Mezze 86 or ʿIsh al-Warwaʾ built on lands that belonged to Sunni urban landlords and were expropriated by Rifaat al Assad after

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This was a kind of “rational” confessionalism different from the supposedly irrational and primordialist sectarian sentiments. All doubts among Alawis were subsumed under the Alawi dilemma: they worked for the state and the military in particular and thus were associated with the Assad regime. Furthermore, Alawis had no way out: the prospect of Alawis fleeing Damascus and other big cities sounded simpler than it was because Alawis have lived there for several generations. Even Bashar should be considered a Damascene, though local urbanites do consider him as an Alawi, in a kind of social “poetics of accusation.”54 As a result, Alawi neighborhoods around Damascus with many military bases and residential areas – in Sumariya, which borders an opposition stronghold (Muʿadhamiyya), Wahid Tishrin, Ish al-Warwar, Mezze 86, Hayy alWarda, namely, the suburbs where the regime encouraged Alawis to settle in the 1980s – turned into loyalist militia-run strongholds.55 Their inhabitants have had no other choice with mounting confessional resentment than to cling to the Assad regime that had only superficially promoted their interests (when compared with those of its close clique and associates). In such a setting, the most cohesive mechanism of association proved to be communal/confessional, a quite rational feeling for protecting a minority regime or precisely those at the top with the risk of facing a fate similar to them in case of regime collapse. The regime could likewise tie other minorities to its fate by undermining and discrediting the opposition with a renewed credibility when, after 2013, it equated the oppositional insurrection with a wholesale and predominantly Sunni radical (takfiri) uprising, an argument with great purchase among Alawis, Christians, Ismaelis or even Druzes. The story of sectarianism was false at the beginning, but the “performative effect” of such discourses was successful as repression escalated. For instance, many rebels in general came to blame not just the Assad regime or the Alawi figures in power, but the Alawi community as a whole, not just some minority figures (hostage to the regime) but minorities in general who supposedly coalesced around the regime. Confessionalism is a social language that can exist and coexist with other narratives such as citizenship in “normal” times, but it becomes a protective and exclusionary shelter that trumps all other identity manifestations in times of acute

54 55

1982. See also Hassan Abbas, Governance of Diversity in Syria (Paris: Arab Reform Initiative, June 2012). Christa Salamandra, A New Old Damascus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). Provocative slogans painted on the walls in these neighborhoods left no doubt about where they stood, such as the one reading al-Jumhuriyya al-Assadiyya al-Suriya (“the Syrian Republic of Assad”) in Mezze 86 neighborhood in Damascus in May 2012.

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violence and danger. Syrian society is not sectarian/confessional per se, but can turn itself to confessional discourses in periods of disruption. After 2012–2013, the confessional paradigm gained substantial purchase in Syria in general and in the army in particular. And the regime was eager to manipulate symbols. Tellingly, the nomination of Dawud Rajiha as defense minister in the summer of 2011 – after the retirement for “medical reasons” of (Alawi) General Ali Habib, who later defected – was the rise of a senior officer very close to the president, but was also the display of a Christian “face” by the regime and a way to implicate Christians on its side with the crucial importance of confessionalism to wage war – and it was interpreted as such in Syrian society. Similarly, the chief of staff from July 2012 to January 2018, Fahd Jassem al-Farij, who was not the most senior officer in the ranks to become chief of staff (as was the custom in earlier years), was a Sunni from the rural area around Hama (rif Hama) – his deputy was an Alawi.56 And, from that setting, the Assad regime was provided with the potential to leverage resources and to build forces to fight. For four decades the Assad regime manipulated regional, class, group, communal or confessional interests with an extremely centralized system creating strongmen (who could be replaced quickly) enjoying the endorsement of the top leadership and replicating it all over the country. Since 2012–2013, the Assad regime has “militia-nized” that setting (as it did in the 1980s): the military intelligence, the Air Force Intelligence or the Republican Guard in the lead in this process have created militias, with Iran’s forceful help for training, organization and funding. The story in Syria was not just about sectarianism/confessionalism but the vicious manipulation by the Assad regime of the whole Syrian mosaic in a context of intense violence from all sides. In Syria, majority and minority are not stable categories as the minority complex can be replayed at various levels. There is not even a “Sunni majority” as there are many kinds of Sunnis, rural vs. urban residents, Damascene vs. Aleppans, Kurds vs. Arabs, and these categorizations should be crossed with other categories such as loyalists/moderates/ Salafis/takfiris (jihadists). The trend toward the militia-nization of Syrian society, especially among minority groups, was a way to draw them to the regime. These, to mention but a few, have included Christian groups in Homs, Hama, Damascus, Assyrian militias in Hassake, tribal Sunni Arab militias in the Qamishli and Hassake 56

Dawud Rajiha, who served in a sophisticated unit stationed in the Ghuta of Damascus, was spotted when Bashar visited in 1997 on his tour of most army units. Though higher in rank than Bashar, who was just being groomed in the military by his father, Rajiha famously gave him a strong military salute and thereafter has been regularly promoted (http://all4syria.info/web/archives/35274). Numerous others followed such a path.

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areas,57 Druze groups in the Suweida province, plus numerous Palestinian groups notwithstanding the traditional Palestinian allies of the Syrian regime (Fath al-Intifada, PFLP-GC, PLA). Furthermore, the Baathist tradition of militia-nization has been revitalized with the “Baath Battalions” first organized in Aleppo by the former party chief in 2012, then created in Damascus, Latakia, Tartous and Hassake. Local selfdefense militias (or popular committees, lijan shaʿabiyya) emerged from generalized fears in a complex country, organized with Iranian help. There has been a generalized manipulation of localism by the regime to build additional forces. Militias have also been an alternative to controversial and often forced conscription: their attractiveness was based on their local identity, the possibility of hometown service, as opposed to deployment on a far-away front, and of course pay. Localism was also a way to encourage the will to fight – fighters also played a role in the local war economy with racketeering, looting and even organized crime. And the Air Force Intelligence (Amn Jawi) fused some militias with some army special units into the Tiger Forces (Quwwat al-Nimr) with more offensive capabilities, headed by the Air Force Intelligence special operations’ chief Colonel (then general) Suheil al-Hassan and developed with strong Russian help. The infantry of militiamen has been, since 2013, the ground force used in military operations on a local basis and in a very organized way, also as a compensation for huge defections in the army (Chapter 5). And the Syrian army served as the training base, the provider of equipment for these militias and the ultimate coordinator for their engagement, hence saving its human resources in ground infantry combat and acting as a supportive instrument.58 The Syrian military, in fact, remained the backbone of militia-nization as the actor deploying the most sophisticated and heavy weapons. Aside from large operations, regular military units were rarely seen and most of the checkpoints were manned by locally recruited militias after 2013. Some regional enablers of the regime were pivotal in the militianization. Hezbollah’s initial involvement was, in mid-2012, to ward off assaults by sectarian armed groups on Shia-populated villages along the Lebanese border or Shia shrines, in the first place the Sayyida Zeinab shrine in Damascus. Iranian advisers (Sepah-e-Pasdaran and their Quds Forces, Niru-e-Quds) formed specialists in electronic warfare and trained loyalist soldiers (and hundreds of officers) in urban warfare. Yet after 2013, their more important role was to help organize (and fund) the 57 58

Dawn Chatty, “The Bedouin in Contemporary Syria,” The Middle East Journal, 64(1) (Winter 2010): 29–49. Interview with an active officer, location withheld, September 2014.

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initially ragtag militias (shabihha) or local vigilantes (lijan shaʿabiyya) into a “militia-nized” infantry in the so-called National Defense Forces (alQuwwat al-Defaʿa al-Watani), believed to be 100,000 up to 150,000 strong across the country. These forces were modeled after the Iranian Basij, quite differently from the initial ragtag bands of shabihha (Chapter 5). From there and using its preserved control on the officer corps, the Assad regime could rebuild an offensive killing machine. The regime disbanded some weakened (or less loyal) “dead” units and reorganized the military around its loyal core. Subunits from the Fourth Armored Division, Republican Guard and Special Forces regiments have been combined with other regular units to form battle groups for offensives.59 Officers got more autonomy on the ground to move troops than under the previous rigid command and control structure characteristic of the Syrian army. This increasing operational freedom has explained the feats and rising fortunes of individual commanders such as Air Force Intelligence’s General Suhail al-Hassan, dubbed “the Tiger” (al-Nimr) with his Tiger Forces (Quwwat al-Nimr), the Republican Guard’s Druze Brigadier General Issam Zahreddin (killed in October 2017 in Deir-ez-Zor) and one of the commanders of the NDF Major General Mohammed Khaddur, and others. And, revealingly, the unusual deaths of numerous middle officers in frontline combat positions – that is, the latter no longer stayed in rear headquarters but took a leading role in fighting. These opportunities have been offered to hundreds of new officers (mainly Alawis) coming out of the military academies since 2011 at an accelerated pace (training was shortened from three to two years) and forming a young generation of officers keen to earn promotions by assuming command in combat units.60 The pyramid of regressive and successive allegiances upon which the army was revamped after 2012–2013 allowed the command structure to stay afloat and the killing machine to remain effective: with kin, patrimonial and sectarian ties, the loyalty of the top military hierarchy was secured – no one could seriously think about sacrificing the president to save the whole system as all were embedded in the regime’s inner workings. Loyalty was diffused in the officer corps as the majority of key 59

60

Christopher Kozac, “An Army in All Corners” (Institute for the Study of War report no. 26, April 2015); Gregory Waters, “Tiger Forces” (Washington: Middle East Institute in Washington, October 2018); Gregory Waters, “Syria’s Republican Guard” (Washington: Middle East Institute in Washington, December 2018); Gregory Waters, “The Lion and the Eagle” (Washington: Middle East Institute in Washington, August 2019). Interview with an active lieutenant, location withheld, March 2015.

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officers were Alawis. Other officers and Sunni soldiers fought – when they were not locked up in their barracks – out of fear, especially after jihadists/ takfiris took over a large part of the opposition and accounted for a disproportionate number therein after 2013. Consequently, the regime rebuilt a leaner yet more efficient fighting force. Another key aspect of the Syrian military should be immediately stressed to complement the above elements of regained military offensive capability: it was an exhausted force faced with difficulties to mobilize additional manpower resources. The ebbs and flows of front lines were indicative. In the second half of 2012, the regime let the northern countryside of Idlib and Aleppo provinces slip into the hands of rebels while maintaining some strongholds and using its air power to bomb lost areas in retaliation. The Syrian army regained the initiative in the first half of 2013 – after the symbolic victory of al-Qusseir, southwest of Homs and near Lebanon with Hezbollah’s crucial help – but it was unable to retain the territory it had retaken and to push toward Aleppo and its northern countryside. Instead, the regime began dropping barrel bombs on infrastructure in lost areas. The regime was then weakened in the first half of 2015 by its own shortcomings in manpower and morale, an offensive from the northwest (Idlib) by a coalition of fighters assembled by alQaeda offshoot Jabhat al-Nosra and a push further south by the rising Daesh with the symbolic capture of Palmyra and an offensive in Quneitra and toward Deraa by other rebels. One explanation was widespread defections (Chapter 5). A complementary one was heavy losses.61 Casualty rates among loyal troops have been considerable, as exemplified by portraits of martyrs papered everywhere on walls in villages in the Alawi mountains and in Alawi villages in central and western Syria.62 In March 2013, the pro-regime (Sunni) Higher Council for Fatwas issued a religious edict (fatwa) broadcast on television urging Syrian citizens to join the military for mandatory enrollment, calling it “a spiritual and national obligation” (masʾuliyya imaniyya wa-wataniyya), and adding that “fighting to defend our people (shaʿab) and our nation (umma) under the command of God in our fight (jihad) and your defense of Syria follows God’s Word and the right (haqq) in our homeland (watan).”63 A presidential decree in May 2013 tripled the price of the exemption fee (badal) for military service for Syrians living abroad, thereafter reduced in August 2014 if the concerned families committed, “in exchange,” to enlist their other children in military service. Further 61 62 63

“Asad in Rare Admission Says Syria’s Army Lacks Manpower,” The New York Times, July 26, 2015. Interview with a military doctor, location withheld, January 2015. Reuters Arabic, March 12, 2013.

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decrees in June, August, October and November 2014 restricted the ability of military-aged youths to travel abroad. In 2014–2015, checkpoints manned by the military intelligence increasingly targeted young Syrians trying to avoid military service. Many reservists were also mobilized across the country still under the government’s control – even to the point of using exams for lucrative positions in the administration as a trick to enlist candidates in the Republican Guard.64 Many fighting-age males have shirked or even refused military service – this was, for instance in 2014–2015, an essential source of resentment in the majority-Druze province of Suweida or the al-Hawran region. The pool to recruit motivated soldiers and officers has become small and shallow as a result of the high attrition forces suffered. Losses have also been correlated with the army’s declining combat abilities due to the lack of effective NCOs in infantry and even Special Forces units.65 The erosion of the army’s manpower was somewhat compensated by the above-mentioned rise of militias, but on a local basis, hence stalling offensive capabilities. After 2017–2018, with the tide turned and the retaking (called “reconciliation”) of many opposition strongholds, the army regained some of its manpower losses through forced conscription of former rebels and draft dodgers.66 Manpower shortages and high combat attrition have been compensated by the increasing participation of Hezbollah fighters, Iranian Revolutionary Guards (Sepah-e-Pasdaran) and Iraqi or Afghan Shia militias. Contrary, for instance, to Libya that was an isolated state even in 2011 after a relative return to “normalcy” with the end of embargoes, Syria was a key strategic state with plenty of alliances or external cards to bet on. After an initial advisory role, Hezbollah came to play a bigger part in the war, with a combat role in strategic areas in 2013–2014 – this was highlighted by mounting numbers of “martyrs” (shuhadaʾ) buried in Shia villages and suburbs in Lebanon, initially under mysterious circumstances, then officially recognized. The same held true for the Sepahe-Pasdaran – deployments of Iranian regular forces (Artesh) (special forces) were even signaled in 2016.67 In parallel, Hezbollah and Iranian Sepah-e-Pasdaran68 (Quds Force) recruited and trained various Shia militias in Iraq (Liwaʾ Abu Fadl al-Abbas, Jaysh al-Imam al-Mahdi, 64 65 66 67 68

The maritime shuttle between Tartus and Mersin in Turkey was flooded by young Alawis fleeing military service. Interview with an entrepreneur working mainly for the military, location withheld, January 2015. “Israel Sees Syrian Army Growing beyond Pre-civil War Size,” Reuters, August 7, 2018. “Iran’s Army Denies Direct Involvement in Syria,” Financial Times, April 16, 2016. “Shiite Combat Casualties Show the Depth of Iran’s Involvement in Syria,” Policy Watch 2458 (Washington: WINEP, August 3, 2015).

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Katiba Hezbollah, Nujaba Hezbollah, Asaʾib Ahl al-Haqq, Katiba alImam al-Hussein, etc.), Pakistan (Katiba Zeynab) and Afghanistan (Liwaʾ Fatimiyyun). These legions were said to total up to 70,000 fighters at their acme (2015–2017).69 Shia militias expanded in 2015 to help the Syrian army regain the countryside of Damascus or the Quneitra region of enormous importance with its proximity to the Golan Heights and thereafter in all major offensives of the Assad regime. Although in contact with Syrian units for training them for advanced weapons delivered by Iran, Iranian advisers had no specific influence inside the Syrian military and kept some distance from its internal matters. And conversely, Syrian officers – except in the Republican Guard, the military intelligence and the Fourth Division, which were closer to Iran especially in Deir-ez-Zor or Aleppo – seemed to operate at a distance from Iranian influence, though coordinating under direct orders coming from high levels, seemingly the Iranian-Syrian coordination cell at the presidency. And they harbored some reluctance about the growing role of this ally and, in particular seeing Iranian-sponsored militias as confessional (taʾifiyya) instruments (openly proffering a sectarian ideological discourse), in opposition to their self-proclaimed image of a national Syrian military70 – at least on paper and notwithstanding the increased influence of Alawi high officers in it. Another pivotal source of support was Russia. Russia has supplied the Syrian army with weapons and ammunition in large quantities and trained Syrian officers, presumably in urban warfare and in particular sieges along with the model of Grozny (Chechnya) – and Russia vetoed all UN Security Council resolutions threatening the Assad regime. Russian aid was channeled through the regular Syrian military and not directly to militias (except the Tiger Forces). Russian experts were critical of the lack of capabilities of the Syrian military that did not fight and stayed dug in fortified bases and checkpoints.71 Then, in September 2015, Russia intervened with direct military force, especially bombers and helicopters, along with advisers, special forces and private contractors (Wagner, Evro Polis)72 to avoid the costs of deaths for ground forces. Russian destructive air strikes were crucial to buttress the Syrian army’s offensives (in particular in Aleppo in September–October 2016), in close coordination with 69 70 71 72

Interview with a professor of law close to the Iranian foreign ministry, location withheld, January 2015. Interview with a colonel who defected, location withheld, January 2016. For rare insights into the Syrian army in a pro-Putin outlet, see “Here Is Why Assad’s Army Can’t Win the War in Syria,” Gazeta.ru, September 9, 2016. Kimberly Marten, “Russia’s Use of Semi-state Security Forces,” Post-Soviet Affairs, 35(3) (2019): 181–204.

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Iranian forces or Iranian-sponsored militias. And that has not failed to influence Assad’s officers sticking with the regime. The Russian intervention was coordinated with Syrian commanders on the ground at a tactical level and Syrian staff and command officers seemed to believe they could not win the war without external (Russian) military aid.73 After 2016–2017, in close contact with the defense ministry and general staff, Russian officers were also instrumental to revive some “dead” (meaning nonoperational) units by filling them with new graduates from military academies, who had a chance to prove themselves and were given new equipment. Russia endeavored to rebuild the army as a pillar of stability (of the victorious Assad regime) and seemed to have given the advice to rely more on regular armed forces rather than on militias.74 Russian officers very intrusively intervened inside the Syrian military to transfer officers, dismiss inept and corrupt incumbents and reorganize the enfeebled army with officers trained in Russian academies. And they were instrumental to reintegrate loyalist militiamen into the Fourth Assault Corps created in October 2015 (not a successful experiment), thereafter the Fifth Assault Corps created in November 2016 and made up of regular Syrian officers, various groups of militiamen and “reconciled” rebels commanded directly by Russian officers. Russia’s bet was to rebuild the Syrian army as a key pillar of the state. Interventions by Iran, Hezbollah and Russia have been crucial to buttress the Syrian army’s enfeebled combat ability and compensate for its inherent weaknesses. Regime De-structuration: Army Decays in Protracted Transitions, from Yemen to Libya Contrary to the Egyptian model of enhanced military roles in the polity, other transitional trajectories displayed the inabilities of some armies to reemerge institutionally after the collapse of incumbent regimes. In Yemen, the army gradually unraveled in 2012–2014, even if it “reunified” rapidly after its fracturing in 2011. Then, it collapsed in the hands of multiple other actors, in the first place a northern rebellion, the Houthis. Libyan former or active officers, especially in Cyrenaica and their rivals, and revolutionary brigades’ commanders filling key positions inside the rebuilt security institutions (interior and defense ministries, petroleum facilities protection forces) engaged in a fateful drift toward renewed civil war. These cases of armies degenerating and involved in conflicts bore 73 74

Interview with a major who defected, location withheld, February 2016. Ibrahim Hamidi, “Russia Intervention Urges to Dismantle ‘Defense Forces’ Close to Iran,” al-Hayat, October 11, 2015.

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some resemblance with the model introduced by the literature on “new wars.” The resulting process of fragmentation revolved around the emergence of new armed actors, no longer regular armies but networks of state and non-state actors coming out of the degeneration of the regular armed forces in cases of state weakening or collapse: with new objectives (no longer winning battles but waging wars fought in the name of identity politics and other fragmented identities), new methods (no longer big battles against adversary forces but population displacements, the “poisoning” of some areas to render civilian life impossible, etc.) and a new economy (no longer war economies to sustain a statist war effort with taxation or patronage aid but new economies of looting and smuggling to sustain delocalized armed groups).75 Both cases do not highlight just the privatization of security/war or the creation of state-induced paramilitaries of importance but the degeneration of the army institution into new forms blurring classic distinctions between armies and militias in fluid, unstable, reversible and intricate alliances. And the general political stalemate played a key role, leaving room for armed actors, with the involvement of external powers. In Yemen, rather than just determined by power games played at the center (Sanaa) among big stakeholders, the transitional process was disrupted by a peripheral actor that came to prominence and overturned it, the Houthis. The Houthi rebellion started as a Zaydi revivalist movement led by the al-Houthi sadaʾ family – that movement was religious or sectarian, but also about regional identity on the borders with Saudi Arabia and held a tribal advantage in the northern Zaydi highlands76 – then morphed into a neo-Zaydi rebel movement.77 The Houthis joined protests against Saleh but at the same time capitalized on the power vacuum to expand their territorial control in the northern Saʾda governorate and they played both political (the UN-backed National Dialogue) and military cards (they fought Salafi fighters aligned with al-Islah and Ali Mohsen).

75

76

77

Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars (Cambridge: Polity, 1999); Hebert Munckler, The New Wars (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005); Mary Kaldor, “In Defense of New Wars,” Stability, 2(1) (2013), http://doi.org/10.5334/sta.at. In the 1990s, the Middle East was understudied by this literature that rather focused on ex-Yugoslavia, Afghanistan or Africa. Shelagh Weir, “The Clash of Fundamentalisms,” Middle East Report, no. 204 (1997): 22–26; and more generally Shelagh Weir, A Tribal Order (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); Bernard Haykel, “A Zaydi Revival?” Yemen Update, no. 36 (1995). The Houthis as sadaʾ are not members of tribes. They seem to have played adroitly the tribal factor, in particular the loss of touch of tribal shaykhs (who lived in cities) with their roots in the countryside allowing them to recruit numerous middle tribesmen.

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The Houthis had their fighters organized in local Revolutionary Popular Committees, battle-hardened during their various wars and numbering 20,000 to 30,000 men (with the usual caveats as field research remains impossible), along with the support from tribes that were not necessarily close ideologically to the Houthi project but armed by them.78 After Hadi’s military reforms and during 2013, large parts of the military still on Saleh’s payroll or influence and feeling that they were losing too much influence made a tacit alliance with the Houthis in what they seemingly understood as a move to survive. This was a Faustian bargain or a strange reshuffling of alliances since the Houthis fought six wars against the Saleh regime (2004–2009), during which Saleh unleashed the firepower of the military, especially during the notorious “scorched earth operation” (ʿamaliyya al-ard al-mahruqa) by Ali Mohsen’s First Division in August 2009 – and Saleh was partially or indirectly responsible for the death of the eponymous leader Hussein al-Houthi. With the help of elite military units loyal to Saleh, the Houthis surrounded all government buildings in Sanaa in September 2014 and finalized control in February 2015. The march toward complete collapse in war began. In 2014–2015, forces loyal to Saleh (the Republican Guard, the Special Forces, the CS) played a pivotal role in allowing the Houthis to take control of much of the country southwards. The units capable of firing missiles and using tanks were mostly those following Saleh rather than the small guerrilla bands of Houthi fighters. In March 2015 (pro-Saleh) GPC’s networks were also critical in areas such as Taiz where opposition to the Houthis was strong and furthermore in Shafii areas socially different from Zaydi highlands – barracks of the newly rebranded but Saleh-loyal Special Security Forces (formerly Central Security) and Reserve Forces, in fact made up of former Republican Guard units, a police camp and a “reception camp” where soldiers were trained after they enlisted were located in this area and served as crucial springboards to project Houthi forces.79 In April 2015, the Houthis marched southward to take Aden and the nearby al-Anad air base (the former headquarters of American special operations against AQAP). Incidentally, in March 2015, on the heels of a transition from Saudi King Abdallah to King Salman, with concentration of power in King Salman’s son Muhammad Bin Salman – new 78

79

Barak Salmoni, Bryce Loidolt and Madeleine Wells, Regime and Periphery in Northern Yemen: The Huthi Phenomenon (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2010); on tribal militias (or jaysh shaʿabiyya), see Mariecke Brandt, “The Irregulars of the Saada War,” in Why Yemen Matters: A Society in Transition, ed. Helen Lackner (London: Saqi Books, 2014), 105–122. “Rebels Seize Key Parts of Yemen’s Third-Largest City, Taiz,” The New York Times, March 22, 2015.

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defense minister then deputy crown prince (and crown prince since 2017) – Saudi Arabia and the UAE – not always on the same line – intervened at the helm of a coalition with the stated goal of rolling back the Houthis and reinstating the Hadi government. The army, rather than leading events, was pulled into these cataclysmic changes and started a cycle of degeneration into implosion and was submitted to “cannibalization” by non-state actors. With the takeover of Sanaa in September 2014, the Houthis took control of what remained of state institutions, in particular the military apparatus and the Sanaa Security Committee where Houthi commanders, the chief of staff, the defense and interior ministers and numerous Saleh loyalists sat. Key parts of the military-security apparatus were then controlled by the Houthi Revolutionary Popular Committees, in particular the National Security Bureau and the Political Security Organization.80 And in December 2014, under heavy Houthi pressure, President Hadi issued a military decision to appoint several Houthi military commanders in the armed forces, including Zakaria al-Shami, a guerrilla commander, as deputy commander in chief. Army bases were overrun by the Houthis (or later bombed by the Saudi coalition). The Houthis managed to acquire masses of heavy equipment from the army’s profligate arsenals. They cultivated or co-opted key units and indispensable specialists in charge of missiles. Battle-hardened Houthi military commanders reinvented themselves as the new Yemeni army after they controlled the armed forces’ general command, the defense ministry and the headquarters of the Central Military region in Sanaa. The exact degree of Iranian support to the Houthis has been debated since then, also a huge source of propaganda for the Saudi-led coalition after March 2015; the Houthis did not experience a religious or confessional affinity with Iran as Zaydis, they were not Twelver Shias, but they got logistical support, training and advice on how to present themselves and what strategies to adopt by mirroring the Lebanese Hezbollah. According to some views, the Houthis have been gaining the army’s loyalty over time by teaching soldiers and low-level officers about their ideology (to make them Houthi-cized, mutahawith) – they also used numerous pressures and carrot-and-stick approaches to win loyalties.81 And the sectarian language has started to seep in Yemen (among northern Zaydis traditionally enlisted in the army) with a growing polarization in the country. Nobody in Yemen until 2014–2015 talked about Shias vs. 80 81

“The Fall of the State” and “The Collapse of the National Army” (Sanaa: Abaad Studies and Research Center, 2014). On the Houthi takeover in the air force, one of the oldest army units in Yemen where the US invested millions of dollars, see al-Monitor, April 29, 2015.

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Sunnis, a dichotomy that did not translate well in Yemeni reality – the term Sunni was reserved for specific groups, the strains of the Muslim Brotherhood in al-Islah, Salafi or Wahhabi jihadists who called themselves as such. But this changed as a result of the performative effect of the sectarian/confessional discourse, in particular in heavily biased Arab media coverage with the demonizing of one camp. And even Saleh and his close Sanhan associates rediscovered their Zaydi origins for some time.82 The new discourse in terms of Shias vs. Sunnis offered a kind of ready-made new war narrative. Other opposite views hold that Saleh’s best equipped and trained units supported the Houthis, tacitly fighting alongside them during the takeover, then cooperating after the Saudi intervention under a common narrative of resistance against foreign invaders; Saleh-affiliated forces and infrastructure (caserns, homes and properties of GPC members)83 have been targeted disproportionately by the Saudis as they were prominent in the North and visible when compared with the guerrilla nature of the Houthis. This alliance of convenience lasted until the assassination of Saleh by the Houthis in Sanaa in December 2017, and the fragmentation of Saleh loyalists increased with some returning toward Hadi’s side. On the other side of the conflict, and although it is preposterous to speak of two clear-cut sides, a similar degeneration has taken place. Hadi’s most important (and weak) asset has been to function as the internationally recognized government, though his term expired in February 2014, and a government without a real army. Most of the brigades stationed along Yemen’s eastern Arabian Sea coast were in theory loyal to Hadi but they were weakened by reforms (SSR), less able than northern brigades and often handed over security, and even their bases, to local tribes in 2015. In his first decree after retracting his resignation, Hadi appointed a new commander to the Special Security Forces (the new name of the Central Security), a man whose military brigade was accused in 2004 to have assassinated Hussein al-Houthi, the brother of Abd al-Malik and the current leader of the Houthis. A largescale recruitment policy was launched by Hadi and his allies with the ad hoc recruitment of numerous unemployed youth, along with former soldiers (or “ghost soldiers”), to fill up depleted scattered units and to meet hasty demands for fighters: many have joined to make a living in dire economic conditions and were recruited at the prewar salary of a university professor with a master’s degree – tracts distributed in the South in December 2016 82 83

Farea al-Muslimi, “How Sunni-Shia Sectarianism Is Poisoning Yemen,” Sada Blog (Beirut: Carnegie Middle East Center, December 29, 2015). “Coalition Strikes Demolish Military Infrastructures,” Yemen Times, April 1, 2015.

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and issued by AQAP denounced “munkara al-ʿaskara” (the abomination to enlist). The control of units has been heavily fragmented. In late 2014, Ali Mohsen emerged from the shadows of retirement (in contravention of presidential decrees) to command the remnants of his First Division (dissolved by Hadi) against the Houthis in the province of Sanaa. Ali Mohsen and his close ally, the chairman of the chiefs of staff (under Hadi), Muhammad al-Maqdashi, were able to rally some army brigades. Ali Mohsen also headed a National Army Coordination Centre with his affiliated forces in Maarib. Ali Mohsen was named deputy commander of Yemen’s armed forces in February 2016 and appointed vice president in April 2016. And among Hadi’s “allies,” al-Islah has had extensive networks of tribal forces and has been influential in the interior ministry – the al-Ahmar family has had a prominent role in the Saudi coalition. Tribal militias in Taiz, Ibb, al-Baydha, Marib and al-Jawf governorates overran numerous military bases – or their soldiers left – and looted arsenals – tribes in the Marib area that considered the Houthis as northern invaders even held military parades with dozens of military vehicles they got or stole in 2015. And AQAP even benefited from the great “selling out” of military hardware in eastern Yemen. Tellingly, in July 2015, the battle to oust the Houthis and Saleh loyalists from Aden signaled the difficulty of Hadi to gather forces that could only hold the regained city with difficulties. The battle was waged by a composite coalition united by nothing except their enmity of the Houthis, with the essential help of the Saudi and Emirati Special Forces: Ali Mohsen, whose close associate was the leader of the military in the eastern part; the al-Islah party; various Salafis (some loosely affiliated with AQAP); and local southerners distrusting al-Islah (because of its role in the 1994 war in the South). The southerners, or the so-called Southern Popular Resistance, were made up mainly of civilians from across Aden’s social and political spectrum, including the al-Hirak and in particular former South Yemeni officers (Chapter 2), in self-organized local groups or popular committees (lijan shaʿabiyye),84 thereafter gathered under the Higher Resistance Council. Hadi, though born in the southern Abyan governorate, was considered in Aden a creature of the North: the Houthi takeover in Sanaa set Hadi and the southern al-Hirak nearer in the fight against a common enemy, but not much more. And the UAE developed militias emphatically called “counterterrorism forces” in Aden (also Abyan and Lahij) to secure Hadi’s power: the most 84

Farea al-Muslimi, “The Popular Committee Phenomenon in Yemen,” Sada Blog (Beirut: Carnegie Middle East Center, April 1, 2015).

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powerful unit was the so-called al-Hazm al-Amni (Security Belt Forces), under the interior ministry; other autonomous regional militias were the Hadrami Elite Forces and the Shabwani Elite Forces, both under the defense ministry – all answered to the UAE not to Hadi. And Emirati soldiers manned checkpoints in 2015; thereafter, at the end of 2015, hundreds of Sudanese (former janjaweeds from the Rapid Support Forces in Darfur, Chapter 4), then Columbian soldiers/paramilitaries (after the ceasefire with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Columbia, FARC, in June–August 2016) were brought in by the UAE.85 In a similar way, in the battle around Taiz, more than ten groups, known as the Popular Resistance (al-Muqawama al-Shaʿabiyye), along with some army brigades (such as the “Giants’ Brigade”), were leading the renewed fight against the Houthis. In 2017–2018, the battle for Hodeida was waged by local militias from the Tihama Resistance, the Giants’ Brigade and the remnants of (assassinated former president) Saleh, headed by his nephew Tareq Saleh. Hadi was unable to reinstate a form of Yemeni army. There has been an advancing “militia-nization” in Yemen, though it has not been as thorough and complete as in Libya, where society or at least civilian-led local military councils took over whole arsenals.86 The crucial new point is a change in the Yemeni military from factionalism to militia-nization. Before 2011, there was an army, although fragmented and factionalized between unit commanders, also a point of entry for tribes, but it could serve as a reference point (with a defense ministry, a chief of staff), whatever the critics aired via foreign advisers and promoters of SSR reforms in 2012–2014. By comparison, in Libya, these institutional dimensions of the military were absent, dissolved by Qaddafi for years. The critical change after 2015 was the implosion of the whole Yemeni military-security system and all its (indeed weak) institutional underpinnings as a consequence of the weakening of the Yemeni (mainly northern) state and idea of the state. Military institutions have remained only in name. And the remaining brigades of the Yemeni army have served as quasi-“mercenaries” in one camp or another. As a corollary, war fighting on the front lines in 2017–2020 has been intermittent, except when decided and pushed forward by the UAE or the Saudis: what has been at stake for both “camps” was less gaining additional ground in military terms (gaining battles) but rather keeping influence on the varied forces that were said to make up “one side” (the Houthis vs. Hadi) in a given specific area. The key feature has been the rise of decentralized and 85 86

“Sudan Sends Ground Forces to Yemen,” Reuters, October 18, 2015. The militia-nization (the emergence of armed groups with a local parochial agenda) and the generalized possession of weapons by individuals (a classic feature in Yemen) should be distinguished as indicating different degrees of political and social collapse.

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localized militias of various kinds. Very symptomatically, Hadi’s own brother, General Nasser Mansour Hadi, head of the Political Security Organization in Aden, Abyan and Lahij, helped form popular committees to oust the Houthis out of Aden and put them on the state payroll, hence institutionalizing their role.87 Similarly, the influent UAE Special Forces, with close relations with the governor and the director of security in Aden, have developed a large engagement with regional army commanders and local leaders in the tribal councils that emerged in Hadramawt or al-Mukalla – the UAE had prior strong connections to Yemen and in particular to the South (Aden) with the recruitment of Yemeni-born personnel in the UAE police and military police over decades (Chapter 4); these contacts were reactivated in 2015.88 Autonomized militia-nization was reinforced after the withdrawal of UAE forces in June–October 2019 (though their influence on the ground has remained strong). Rather than in a leading role, the Yemeni military has been overwhelmed by the above dynamics and even “cannibalized” to some extent by various forces. The army has been navigating in a new setting made up of disintegration of the armed forces, fragmented armed groups based on local self-governance and mounting identity politics far from a Yemeni state project and no longer over-extensive with the monopolization of control at the level of a central state (state-building). In Libya, the implosion of the armed forces was worse after transition went awry.89 There was some hope that national institutions might emerge despite the rise of major interests linked to militias now integrated in the state apparatus (as “temporary solutions”) and their continuing behavior less as parts of the state but rather as units loyal to their commanders and local interests. The central government did not position itself as a neutral entity above the fray with the monopoly on force, but rather as a bargaining center whose existence was necessary to all heavily militarized or militia-nized actors, in the first place because it had the exclusive control on funding – the central bank, the oil company and the Libyan investment fund were “protected” by the international backers of the government in the UN Security Council. Such militia-nized social dynamics obstructed the rebuilding of a central authority, but at the same time they yearned for contact with some central authority that could potentially expand their influence as go-betweens and provide them 87 88

89

“Integration of the Popular Resistance into the Army,” Yemen Times, July 29, 2015. Skype interview with an officer in the UAE special forces, Bordeaux-Abu Dhabi, December 2015, and various informal interviews with two French officers involved in the UAE. See the special issue “From Aden to Abu Dhabi,” Middle Eastern Studies, 53(1) (2017). Frederic Wehrey, The Burning Shores: Inside the Battle for the New Libya (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).

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with crucial resources, hence trends were fully contradictory and open to changes in the direction of rebuilding a monopoly on force or the opposite. The new catchword in foreign circles interested in Libyan affairs was “hybridity,” the rise of hybrid forces, also a catchword in the post-conflict literature.90 These forces were not so much hybrid rather than based on a balance of power between weak central authorities stripped of coercive capacity and revolutionaries buttressed by militias. And to forecast a transition from “hybrid” to regular armed forces or with hybrid forces was preposterous because there was no parallel state-(re)building process. The problem in Libya when compared with Tunisia and Egypt was not to pass power from the military to the civilians or foil the reverse trend – it was in the hands of civilians, yet “militia-nized” or “militarized” civilians, furthermore “official” militias – but how to rebuild a functioning state from scratch, perhaps not a brand-new centralized Weberian state as international state-builders would have dreamt of it but a functioning state nonetheless. The paradox of Libya from 2011 to 2013 was the vitality of the political system, its ability to conduct elections for the General National Congress (GNC) in June 2012 with a high turnout, rare incidents and a fairly pluralistic and balanced outcome, to restore oil production to the prewar level in the summer of 2012 and get resources for the government budget, though most were diverted by militiamen installed in institutional positions. But that initial vitality gradually exhausted itself in permanent political bargaining. And Libya remained far too long without defining the rules of the game (writing a constitution) beyond transitional bargaining and negotiating under the NTC, then the GNC, leaving this crucial phase in the hands of militias and dependent on their balance of power that wrote and rewrote the rules of the political game according to their changing interests.91 And the atmosphere increasingly changed from the NTC-brokered political arrangements and the GNC elections in July 2012 (with a pragmatic chairman of the GNC) to the increased weight of the Muslim Brotherhood (and the more ideological Wafaʾ Block or Block of Loyalty to the Martyrs) in the GNC after June 2013. Furthermore, militias parts of the Libyan Shield Forces (and the Supreme Security Committees), often not in their official capacity (but with their registered 90 91

Frederic Wherey, “Ending Libya’s Civil War” (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Paper, September 24, 2014). From August 2013 to January 2014, the GNC was trying to unseat Prime Minister Ali Zeidan, known for his strong commitment to dismantle armed groups outside the state apparatus. Zeidan was even abducted in October 2013 by a militia close to the new speaker of the GNC (Nuri Abu Sahmain), the Libyan Revolutionary Operation Room, and liberated thanks to the intervention of another.

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vehicles), acting for the controversial Coordination for Political Isolation, were increasingly pushing for the “political isolation law” (qanun al-ʿazl al-siyasi) that was finally forced upon the GNC (at gunpoint) in May 2013. That law would exclude former regime officials from holding any public office, not just those who sided with the regime until the end, but also all those associated in one manner or another with it, in particular the large number of technocrats who had found some kind of accommodation under Qaddafi; for instance, ordinary people who wanted to practice their professions. Among those targeted, former military officers stood also in prominence. One of the first actions of the new chairman (June 2013–August 2014) of the GNC – and self-promoted as “the supreme military commander of the armed forces” on a fuzzy legal basis – was to establish an Integrity and Reform Commission in June 2013 and in particular to favor its implementation in the armed forces, in order to exclude former officers of the Qaddafi regime and, controversially, to integrate revolutionaries with military ranks; the defense minister tried to reconcile the various camps with an “integrity commission” headed by officers who defected early in the uprising. Furthermore, in 2013 in the GNC, Islamists were haunted by the difficulties of al-Nahda in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and doubted the (remnants of the) army’s loyalty, hence relying on militias for fear of an Egyptian-style military coup. Political games polarized in the center at a moment when divisions between the new “hybrid” forces (such as the Libyan Shield Forces) and other more “regular” military units in the East, whose career officers were claiming to be the true Libyan National Army (more precisely, they called themselves al-Quwwat al-Musallah al-ʿArabiyya al-Libya), turned to conflict. In the East, the structures of Qaddafi’s former army survived intact given that they defected very early (Chapter 5). In late 2012 and 2013, various groups of officers met in a series of “extraordinary conferences of the Libyan army” to denounce the influence of militias turned security forces, in particular the faction led by General Haftar – with Colonel al-Hassi, the spokesman of the federalist al-Barqa (Cyrenaica) Military Council. Haftar presented himself as a defender of the army against messy revolutionaries impeding the rebuilding of the armed forces, with some purchase among officers who felt marginalized by the role of the revolutionary forces badly integrated in the military and with the support of increasingly vocal federalists feeling some sense of unease about their alleged marginalization in the new Libya by Tripoli and the domination of various Western militias. Furthermore, throughout 2013 and with increasing rate in 2014 (several per day) in Benghazi and Derna, army officers (and members of the police and intelligence) were the

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targets of quasi-systematic yet mysterious assassination campaigns, leading Benghazi-based military units to take matters into their own hands in the name of “law and order” and “stability,” a kind of praetorianism on the cheap. Politics was lost to renewed civil war. After a false start in February 2014, in Benghazi in May 2014, a coalition of army officers under the command of General Haftar, along with the former chief of the air force, Saqr al-Jarushi, a spokesman of the federalist al-Barqa Military Council, Colonel al-Hassi, and former cadres of the Qaddafi regime, launched “Operation Dignity” (ʿAmaliyya Karama) against a Salafijihadist group (Ansar al-Shariʿa), prompting the majority of Benghazi Islamist-leaning revolutionary brigades to align with Ansar al-Shariʿa. Operation Dignity was joined by Zintani brigades. Haftar also struck important alliances with crucial tribes in the East (the Obeidat, Maqarha, Braʾsa, Awaqir) and with federalists. General Haftar launched his campaign against Islamist militias in Benghazi in explicit rebellion to the army leadership, at least that of the government elected by the GNC (until its term in June 2014). On the other hand, in August 2014, a coalition of Misratan revolutionary brigades, along with forces from Gharayan, Zawiya, some neighborhoods of Tripoli and some southern tribes, calling itself “Operation Libya Dawn” (ʿAmaliyya Fajr Libya), launched an offensive for the control of Tripoli, especially to rid the city’s international airport from Zintani brigades. Revolutionaries (and the Muslim Brotherhood) were also faced with the prospect of a diminishing influence in Tripoli after their meager results (save Misratan politicians) in the elections in the newly elected parliament (renamed House of Representatives, HoR, elected in June 2014). The turn to heavy and generalized violence took place at a moment when the newly elected parliament (HoR), amidst boycotts and insecurity, established itself in Tobruk and adopted an increasingly partisan stance with attendance diminishing as a result of boycotts. The HoR labeled Libya Dawn “terrorists” (and threatened them with the voting of “anti-terrorist” laws) and appointed a close ally of General Haftar (Abd al-Razzaq Nadhuri) as chief of staff – his predecessor, Abd al-Salam al-Obeidi, refused to step down and supported Libya Dawn. The HoR appointed a government in Tobruk led by Colonel Abdallah al-Thinni, a former defense minister. In mid-2014, the HoR planned to dissolve “irregular armed entities” – but, conversely, the Libyan regular military ceased to exist. Politics and military confrontation overlapped when two rival camps emerged. State institutions split in two, with one government in the city of al-Bayda (recognized internationally) nominated by the Tobruk-based HoR elected in June 2014 – the HoR backed General Haftar but did not

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control the chains of command of his Operation Dignity – when the HoR’s predecessor, the GNC (elected in June 2012) or its remnants, installed a rival government in Tripoli in August 2014, backed by Libya Dawn that took control of Tripoli and was only nominally loyal to the remaining GNC. Various divides between Islamist-leaning forces (Islamists, Salafis or jihadists) vs. more “liberal” (for external eyes at least) politicians, urbans (Benghazi) vs. rurals (Jabal Akhdar), official army (or former) officers vs. parallel (“hybrid”) armies created by revolutionaries, centralist vs. federalists increasingly came to be subsumed under two seemingly clear-cut camps. In the last months of 2014, regional relations added a proxy dimension to the Libyan conflict, with Qatar and Turkey backing the old GNC and Libya Dawn, when the UAE, Egypt and Saudi Arabia supported Operation Dignity and the Tobruk government, with regional involvement leading to Egyptian and Emirati air strikes on the positions of Libya Dawn and huge arms deliveries (despite an international embargo since 2011 and reiterated in 2013 and 2014). The end result was a polarization with a dangerous divide in two camps supported by regional powers – General Haftar targeted all Islamists with the harsh language of Egypt’s new president, al-Sisi – and a receding backward into civil war. An important difference with Syria engulfed in a similar trap of civil war and a crucial feature of Libya was that political dialog between both camps, at least substantial parts of them, was always a reality. In 2015–2016, polarization receded to the point that both coalitions (Dignity and Libya Dawn) no longer existed – and support by regional powers did not prove a decisive advantage to either camp. Cities previously backing one side and under local pressures from local elders and notables to mitigate conflict negotiated ceasefires. But the resulting fragmentation of the armed forces and militias has remained in place, fueling a restarting of civil war in April 2019 with Haftar’s offensive to seize Tripoli (Operation Flood of Dignity). Regime Re-formations: Reinforced Militarism and the Looming War and Threat-Generating Regional Context The role of the army in polities in re-formation is a core question, with military apparatuses more “naked” or unsettled in new transitional settings or with slow regime re-formations when compared with the long “stasis” of former authoritarian regimes that fell. As analyzed in Chapters 2 and 3, the military was specifically “embedded” in a given polity. These dimensions have been further transformed and even reinforced after 2011 and have not been subsumed under the workings of new functioning political systems contrary to the transition (to democracy) model – with

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the only qualified exception of Tunisia; furthermore, where such encroachments did not exist. The difficulties of political rebuilding left these dimensions unfettered. They burgeoned in new transitional settings: with the army as a guardian or savior of the state (Egypt, coalitions of officers in eastern Libya), as the founder of a new regime (Egypt after 2013), reinforcing its economic interests and its weight on society (Egypt) or attempting to reinforce its role in the polity at times of civil war (Libya and Yemen). That explains why an entrenched militarism came anew to the surface after 2011 and has remained influential since then. As a corollary, all talks about Security Sector Reform (SSR) and “democratic control of the armed forces,” namely, topics that are generally associated with periods of transitions,92 have remained largely baseless. Furthermore, this military (sometimes tentative) assertiveness has taken place in a context of unprecedented regional turmoil that has lent legitimacy and support to newly rebuilt exclusionary systems based on the strengthening of the security apparatus and specifically the army, in countries such as Egypt under al-Sisi or in a weakened manner by Haftar in the eastern part of Libya, then with his bid for power in the South thereafter for the (failed) conquest of Tripoli in April 2019. By comparison, Algeria in the 2000s acted as a trendsetter. The Algerian regime that was in a virtual international quarantine, with the controversial role of the army in the civil war (1992–1999) resulting in at least 100,000 to 150,000 dead (at least), has reinvented itself with the priority given to the threat of terrorism in the 2000s (the G5 Sahel, the regional counterterrorism cooperation mechanism or CEMOC) and has repositioned itself as a key US ally after 9/11 against al-Qaeda-linked groups in North Africa (the African Center for Studies and Research on Terrorism, Operation Active Endeavor under NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue Initiative, Trans-Saharan Counter-terrorism Initiative). Furthermore, Algeria was Russia’s largest African client for weapons in the 2010s. The instrumental role of regional turmoil (in North Africa) is evident with more than 70 percent of the Algerian army stationed in the South since the collapse of Mali in 2012, the reinforcement of the military (professional) institution as its mainstay and the retreat of the army’s former interventionist instrument (the DRS/DSS) from open politics and its redirection toward new security functions and the general staff keeping a deep involvement in internal politics (in rivalry with Boutefliqa's networks) After 2011–2013 in the Arab World, the importance of the external factor mediated through the regional context of turmoil has been 92

Philippe Droz-Vincent, “Prospects for Democratic Control of the Armed Forces? Comparative Insights and Lessons for the Arab World in Transition,” Armed Forces and Society, 40(4) (October 2014): 696–723.

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reinforced as contexts of upheavals, protracted transitions and breakdowns endured. The regional context has heavily weighted upon internal processes with four collapsed or conflict-affected states (Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen), the new regional Cold War/sectarian hatred (Shias vs. Sunnis) between Saudi Arabia and Iran, “counterrevolutionary” discourses and practices (i.e., interventions in Bahrain then Yemen, proxy wars in Libya and Syria) by regional would-be authoritarian patrons (Saudi Arabia, the UAE), the rise of Iran and the rise of extremism in the name of al-Qaeda or the Islamic State (Daesh) in an unprecedented manner across the region. The level of regional turmoil and threats has played into the hands of renewed authoritarianisms that have been built around “law and order” strategies. Or, in other words, militarism, that is, the use of military power in politics, has a pervasive nature and can get reinforced significance with national security and policy functions. In classic studies,93 militarism was understood in ideological terms to include the glorification of military values, a propensity toward the use of force to solve problems, further refined to include the impact of the army on society as a whole. My understanding will relate militarism with political regimes or the struggles to reformulate them after 2011, especially with the formulation of terrorism, an encompassing and vague label, as the prominent security threat due to be met with military responses and the dominant prism through which problems were identified. This new context and its related appendices (arms sales, technology transfers, expertise, capacity building, etc.) have helped bolster authoritarianism in a decisive way: the connection to global and regional security trends (and not just their pulverizing oppositions in internal government-opposition relations) has contributed to buttress (some of) these regimes in re-formation. Egypt Back to Military Rule? The al-Sisi Regime After the July 2013 coup, al-Sisi, lieutenant general (fariq awwal), then field marshal (mushir), thereafter president, strove to build a new regime around himself whose main characteristics have been a militarization of power to an unprecedented level, an extremely manipulative move to draw alliances to govern Egypt and heavy repression. First, there has been a “remilitarization” of power unknown before in Egypt, or at least after 1956. After July 2013, the army has been at center stage and in a conspicuous position. It has been the proactive pillar of the new regime and a key assert for regime re-formation. During 2011–2013, only the military kept some institutional ambit with its preserved 93

Alfred Vagt, A History of Militarism (New York: Meridian, 1959).

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cohesiveness behind its officer corps and its regained relative popularity (after June 2012). Thereafter, President al-Sisi has not autonomized himself from the military institution and remained in the bosom of the military, implicating the army, its networks of governance, its huge economic resources, its conscripts (as a labor force), to govern the country and support populist developmental ventures and huge infrastructural projects. The military has directly designed and supervised (with the Army Corps of Engineers)94 or extensively participated (with its enterprises) in the new regime’s flagship programs such as the Suez Canal regional development project (the digging of the parallel Suez Canal, the expansion of ports, the construction of tunnels underneath the canal, etc.), a new administrative capital east of Cairo, the building of one million units of housing, the expansion of the Toshka project in the western desert (forty-eight new cities, eight airports, a railroad, a highway) and so on. The most visible part (and which attracted most attention among observers) of such a military-originated regime has been the growth in military economic activities in the civilian economy – and the flip side was an increase of budget resources devoted to the armed forces in general.95 Militaryowned or -associated companies have flourished since al-Sisi became president and numerous new ones have been created in manufacturing (National Co. for Batteries, Abu Zaabal Co. for Specialized Industries), construction (Military Production Co. for Projects, Engineering, Investment and General Supplies), services (Tolip, National Co. for Refrigeration and Supplies), food processing (National Co. for Fishery and Aquaculture), energy (Arab Renewal Energy Co., Egyptian Black Sand Co.), pharmaceuticals (Egyptian National Co. for Pharmaceuticals) and so on. The military took control of the National Company for Roads and Bridges collecting fees on parking and main roads. The army has gained new wider prerogatives; for instance, with the Armed Forces Land Projects Agency allowed to enter in joint ventures with private investors by contributing with the land it controls (2015); and exemptions, for instance, from the new value-added tax enacted as part of the IMF-inspired reforms (2016). The Army Corps of Engineers was awarded authority to manage agricultural land reclamation projects above the authority of the agriculture ministry. Retired officers have been infused in the Egyptian state in thousands of jobs and in an accelerated manner under al-Sisi. The “law on the treatment of some senior commanders” (qanun muʿamala baʿd qada al94 95

“By the Numbers: What Are Armed Forces Engineering Authority Contributions?” Youm 7, January 2, 2018. See the exhaustive summary by Yezid Sayigh, “Owners of the Republic: An Anatomy of Egypt’s Military Economy” (Beirut: Carnegie Middle East Center, 2019).

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quwwat al-mussallaha), to honor/reassure the armed forces and service their commanders, was approved in July 2018 and pensions increased (when they used to be low under Mubarak). Yet a closer examination will reveal that the model of revamped authoritarianism, rather than relying on an extended control of the military over the polity, has been based on some segments of the army, in particular the military intelligence (Idarat al-Mukhabarat al-ʿAskariyya) – al-Sisi was its former head. The crux of the matter for President al-Sisi has not just been to bolster the military intelligence as a watchdog in the army and its classic role in Arab armies, but to position it, along with his own military networks of family relations, friends and close associates built for years – his eldest son is married to the daughter of the director of military intelligence; his former boss in the military intelligence was transferred to the interior’s General Intelligence Services96 – in a domineering and governing posture.97 The military played a key role to monitor and steer state institutions, taking the role Mubarak’s networks (officers, party apparatchiks, businessmen) had played. And al-Sisi has also turned the military toward a darker and more repressive and exclusionary regime with an expanded army-security nexus under the control of military structures, rather than the relative separation between both and the preeminence of the interior ministry in day-to-day repression and governance under Mubarak. Furthermore, the military intelligence has extended its grip of control though private security groups such as Falcon Security on university campuses and sensitive locations. Talks about the “deep state” (aldawla al-ʿamiqa) in ambush, a reference to the Turkish word (derin devlet or parallel devlet), namely, a shadowy, organized and long ingrained machinery parallel to state institutions and manipulating state institutions for decades,98 were numerous between 2011 and 2013. Yet, the term was overstated or far-fetched in 2011–2013 when applied to Egypt. In fact, the deep state’s nexus of power networks did not exist prior to 2013 in its Turkish meaning, but it has been the basis of al-Sisi’s endeavor to build his power after July 2013. That new setting would also bear some resemblance with the role of the DRS/DSS in Algeria (Chapter 2). The army’s propaganda machine has also been pivotal for the regime, more precisely its Department of Morale Affairs (Idarat al-Tawjih al-Maʿanawi), 96

97 98

Robert Springborg, “Military Intelligence Trumps Political Intelligence in Egypt,” The New Arab, May 24, 2016, www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment; Robert Springborg, Egypt (New York: Polity Press, 2017). Jessica Noll, Fighting Corruption or Protecting the Regime (Washington: POMEP, February 2019). The Turkish expression describes a tightly knit network of high officers in the armed forces, the secret services and the police, mafia dons, high members in the judiciary and far-right extremists that ultimately exert power from behind the scenes.

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whose role has been to display a legitimizing image of al-Sisi and to portray a cohesive ruling apparatus with an image of efficiency, with shows of propaganda verging toward quasi-magical thinking – “follow me” has been the mantra of President al-Sisi, in default of real program or ideology. The power of propaganda was exemplified by the constitutional referendum campaign in January 2014, the renewed era of military populism in favor of General (then marshal) al-Sisi, his election as president in June 2014,99 his reelection in March 2018 in elections where participation was a crucial stake after the sidelining of real challengers; al-Sisi relied on the backing of the military intelligence to organize mobilizational ad hoc vehicles (For the Love of Egypt, the Nation’s Future Party, Support Egypt) in parliamentary or presidential elections. The army’s propaganda offensive has also been buttressed by the acquisition of media by companies linked to the intelligence apparatus – a new company, Tawasul Co. for Public Relations, related to Falcon Security, took control of some of the most important privately owned media outlets; the Egyptian Media Group owned by the intelligence signed contracts with the Egyptian State and TV Union (Maspero) allegedly “in direct orders from the presidency.” And the Department of Morale Affairs organized “educational seminars” for the army cadres, often attended by the president. Rather than the military as a whole – and though the armed forces as a whole have largely benefited from such a new relation – the governing “nerves” of the al-Sisi regime have also preferably relied on a few individuals close to the president. Tellingly, the men surrounding al-Sisi in the presidential palace have been a reflection of such features, with military high officers close to him, even relatives, and often from the military intelligence – his two sons have served in the intelligence apparatus – complemented by consultants selected for their management and technical skills and a strategic planning team recruited among Egyptians who graduated from prominent foreign universities; they drew a road map for him after the July 3, 2013, coup d’état and worked for his presidential campaigns afterward. The obsession of President al-Sisi has been to find men “who can deliver” as the Egyptian expression puts it, in a kind of military way to understand governance in a context of drumbeat announcements of major policy initiatives.100 He has understood politics 99 100

“Selling a Constitution,” Mada Masr, January 5, 2014; Hossam Bahgat, “Anatomy of an Election,” Mada Masr, March 14, 2016. “The Sisi Men,” al-Quds al-ʿArabi, June 4, 2014. For leaked conversations (presumably true) in which General al-Sisi describes Egyptian citizens as “sons” who need strong military guidance, see “Egypt’s New Strongman, Sisi Knows Best,” The New York Times, May 24, 2014.

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as a way for a country to stand united behind the commander in chief as the army does in war. And the constitutional amendments ratified in April 2019 gave the army a role of protection of the state with a constitutional cover (Article 200, §1), also making permanent the temporary role of the SCAF to appoint the defense minister (Article 234) and expanding the power of military courts (Article 204). In this complex power-building play, al-Sisi has striven to keep the cohesion of the officer corps behind his new regime and his person, watching it closely and keeping the army closed onto itself. And everything did not work smoothly, as in all cases of military interventions in politics. Key insiders such as former defense minister Tantawi have all been sidelined or put under surveillance. Rumors of a coup d’état were even aired in 2015 signaling that such a military posture should not be taken for granted.101 The turnover in military sensitive posts has been high: the firing of the chief of staff (Mahmud Hegazy) in October 2017 and his detention under house arrest – Hegazy’s daughter was married to one of al-Sisi’s sons; then again in March 2018 in the aftermath of the presidential elections (Mohammed Hegazy); the appointment of a new defense minister (Mohammed Zaki, former chief of the elite paratroopers involved in repression, then chief of the Republican Guard when Morsi was arrested) in June 2018; and a new director of military intelligence in December 2018; moreover, more than 200 senior intelligence officers were allegedly fired. Rotations in the ranks for senior positions have accelerated when compared with the Mubarak era. At a lower level, more than thirty captains and lieutenants in the army and security forces allegedly joined the jihadist group Ansar al-Islam headed by a former special forces officer (Hisham al-Ashmawi) – he was captured by Haftar’s forces in Derna (Libya) in October 2018. Very tellingly, in the March 2018 presidential campaign, high-profile challengers to al-Sisi had a military background such as Ahmad Shafiq, former air force general and prime minister, who narrowly lost the 2012 election against Morsi, and Sami Anan, former chief of staff from 2005 to 2012 and al-Sisi’s army superior (when in office). This was an indicator of where real power lay in Egypt and also that support declined for al-Sisi in this institution. Such high-ranking military figures that might inject divisions in the military institution regardless of electoral potential were a top concern for al-Sisi: Shafiq was submitted to heavy pressures; Anan was arrested; another candidate, a military colonel, was tried; and rumors of military purges were heard – corruption probes were opened against the former head of Egypt’s second army and the assistant defense minister in May 2018. The 101

Hossam Bahgat, “A Coup Busted?” Mada Masr, October 14, 2015.

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SCAF of 2013 was completely reshuffled in membership under al-Sisi, except two remaining generals in 2020. A second feature of the regime in re-formation is that al-Sisi and his close associates have striven to make relevant groups in a fragmented state coalesce around them by enticing many sectors behind a project of restarting Egypt and with a lot of intimidation. They positioned military networks as the key holders of the balance, that is, with the ability to make power resources flow in one direction. In 2013, al-Sisi convinced the officer corps that direct intervention was necessary. And much more than just the army only clearing the way for economic or bureaucratic interests, the Egyptian military after 2013 has devoted considerable resources to national economic recovery plans, as exemplified by the above-mentioned, numerous economic projects undertaken under military guidance and mobilizing substantial military resources to legitimize the al-Sisi regime and stabilize Egypt. The army earned huge fringe benefits from these projects for the “military economy,” but it has also endangered or at least exposed itself in direct governance. With such a commitment of the army, al-Sisi has managed to coalesce behind him a very heterogeneous coalition with state institutions (the bureaucracy, most importantly the judiciary, the police and the media apparatus) at center stage, along with their dependencies (private entrepreneurs, media moguls and stars, religious elites, local notables who are often former Mubarak-era NDP officials, and wellknown figures). Political polarization (against the Muslim Brotherhood) created a setting whereby the military could find potential allies, in particular in the state apparatus, and fracture any consensus opposing its intervention and rule. Tellingly, in his address to a promotion of the military, al-Sisi explained that he gave up betting on Morsi who, as an Islamist, did not understand the idea of the state and decided “to emphasize the idea of the state” on the judiciary, AlAzhar, the Coptic Church, the media and public opinion.102 The workings of the hurried constitutional process to revamp the 2012 Morsi constitution – led by a constitutional committee of fifty after an earlier committee of ten appointed by the military, who wrote an extensive list of amendments – was constantly driven by the necessity not to hamstring critical state actors, in the first place the military, and to placate the particular demands of various bodies within the state apparatus, with the judiciary in a prominent position – every component had its particular demand, hence the ensuing process of 102

www.shorouknews.com/news/view.aspx?cdate=24072013&id=b94ce861-eefe-4d34aa02-66dde3ee63c1.

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logrolling among them.103 During 2011–2013, under the assaults of enduring civic mobilizations from below, state institutions were in disarray, stunned by the shock of the 2011 uprising and floating in a void. After they experienced what it is to have the people in the streets demanding justice and redistribution and to see the Muslim Brotherhood threatening their power, state agencies have returned to work under military guidance giving a sense of normalcy to Egypt under al-Sisi.104 As for economic elites, the crux of the problem has not just been a recapitulation of the model of bureaucratic authoritarianism introduced by O’Donnell to account for the alliance between the military and established interests – between military rulers, bureaucrats and industrialists in Brazil, the army and neoliberal (Chicago) economists in Chile. Private investment opportunities have been crowded out by military-owned companies whose privileges and better ability to navigate the complex economic landscape have been an obstacle to Egyptian and even foreign investors.105 But new economic partnerships have been sealed. Government-owned media under the guidance of the army have acted as propaganda media and have gone to extremes to support the al-Sisi regime. Newspapers and talk shows have extolled the military for “saving” the revolution and combating “traitors,” depicting it as “heroes” and “saviors of the country.” And private satellite channels have served the interests of the businessmen who owned them and lined behind the al-Sisi regime – the Muslim Brotherhood’s channels were closed down and independent or foreign journalists intimidated with the so-called Al Jazeera trial (2013– 2015). The new power has engineered a systematic depoliticization of Egypt, trying to impress on citizens less a full allegiance or acquiescence to the military-backed regime – it has had no real ideology – but rather a sense of apathy. Media outlets, in particular in popular talk shows, have cultivated an atmosphere of polarization whereby “either you are with alSisi or against” and have offered conspiracy narratives encouraged by the security establishment. The military-influenced governance of Egypt under al-Sisi has relied on a pervading national security discourse and the state’s self-assertion of its interests often based on the notion of (internal and 103

104 105

The constitution rewards primarily the military, whose autonomy is enshrined in the text in much more precise terms than in the now-suspended 2012 constitution, and the judiciary. Very symptomatically, the president of the Supreme Constitutional Court was made interim head of state immediately after the military coup. Nathan Brown and Michele Dunne, “Egypt’s Draft Constitution Rewards the Military and the Judiciary” (Washington: Carnegie Paper, December 4, 2013). “Sudden Improvements in Egypt Suggest a Campaign to Undermine Morsi,” The New York Times, July 10, 2013. “From War Room to Boardrooms,” Reuters, May 16, 2018.

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foreign) conspiracies against Egypt. Furthermore, that discourse had an external component, after President Obama expressed his “deep concern” about the coup – stopping short of labeling it a coup, a wording that would have led to an aid suspension – and ordered a review of aid to Egypt. Egypt waged a public campaign in Washington (especially in Congress), hiring one of the top lobbyists (Glover Park Group) – military aid was cut partially after the Rabaʿa massacre from October 2013 to early 2015. As analyzed for other areas but with an argument resonating for Egypt, contentious politics and threatening internal conflicts explain why a wide range of elites coalesce in “protection pacts.”106 This occurred in a very specific manner in Egypt. The military has proffered a powerful discourse about the state, with constant references to the state apparatus (ajizat aldawla), the state as a unifying force and the redefinition of its role under the heading of what was called “respect for the state” (hayba al-dawla). This discourse has served to give coherence to an otherwise non-cohesive regime that lacked ideological glue. In 2014–2015, heightened propaganda portrayed al-Sisi as the political continuation of Nasser, but without any concrete recapitulation of Nasser’s social policies except some vague rhetoric of social justice. The resulting picture in Egypt has been very far from the building of a strong, enduring (“protective”) Leviathan with its coercive, remunerative and symbolic power, as witnessed in East Asia in the 1960s (Singapore, Malaysia). A third feature of the al-Sisi regime is the pervasive stress on security, which has been a key characteristic, made up of symbolic measures giving a sense of return to the past, heightened propaganda about alleged threats everywhere and violence unleashed in the hands of the interior ministry. And the security apparatus has been restructured with close associates of the military (and former Mubarak holdovers). The al-Sisi regime expanded the role and influence of the security services, an institution bent on quashing any form of dissent. Since 2013, the interior ministry has returned back to work with old methods (violence, torture) and in a model of repressive and exclusionary authoritarianism that has signaled a significant shift even from prior, more “regulated” repressive strategies under Mubarak.107 Although the Mubarak regime fought a bitter campaign against Islamist insurgents, it had also employed a combination of strategies to induce a change in extremist Islamist ideology, contrasting with the “hammer-and-tongs” strategy of militarized power under al-Sisi after 2013. Also after 2013, the interior ministry has been forcefully 106 107

Dan Slater, Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Joshua Stacher, “Fragmenting States, New Regimes,” Democratization, 22(2) (2015): 259–275.

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engaged in what has been interpreted in Egypt as a “revenge of the state” against the Muslim Brotherhood, with the Rabaʿa al-ʿAdawiyya massacre of the pro-Morsi sit-in on August 14, 2013, being an essential milestone.108 The acquittals of senior interior ministry officials accused of killing protesters in 2011 were also symbolic measures that resonated in parallel with the unleashed use of violence by the police. There has been an unprecedented swell in political detentions (40 to 100,000?) and increasing disappearances109 – even foreigners could be targeted as (seemingly) exemplified by the assassination of the Italian PhD student Regeni in 2016. The judiciary has also taken an active part in harsh repression as exemplified by the practice of collective death penalties, in particular against Muslim Brothers. Yet, judges have also been submitted to intimidation, purges and pressures and judges close to the army promoted. Repression has been a way to instill fear and seek a depoliticization of Egyptian masses, a characteristic feature of military regimes. The aim of repression was not simply to “eradicate” (to borrow the expression used by some Algerian generals in the aftermath of the 1992 coup) an Islamist political organization from the political scene or revolutionary young activists, but to end the unprecedented nature of street mobilization and political activism in Egypt (2011–2013) and to completely reverse the trend by clamping down on activism of all kind. The regime designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group and has considered anyone who took part in its activities a terrorist. Every organized protest has systematically been met with violence. The police went after many protests undertaken by young activists. Several revolutionary young activists have been approached by the military or security services, offered positions and those who have turned the offer down were harassed or imprisoned. And the only politics remaining afloat has been parliamentary or presidential elections without much luster. The al-Sisi regime also introduced numerous repressive laws: the law on the right to public meetings, processions and peaceful demonstrations; the university law; a decree bringing mosques and preachers under government control; the association law on NGOs; the penal code amendment; the anti-terrorism law; and so on. 108

109

On the Rabaʿ al-ʿAdawiyya massacre, see “Hundreds Die as Egyptian Forces Attack Islamists Protesters,” The New York Times, August 14, 2013; and Human Rights Watch, “All According to Plan” (New York: August 12, 2014). It was called a massacre in the world press, not in Egypt, where the media called the police “heroes” and “victims of the Muslim Brotherhood.” POMEPS, “Egypt under President Sisi: Even Worse than under Mubarak or Morsi,” June 2016.

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The army has been directly involved in counterinsurgency operations in the Sinai where violence spiked in 2015 (even with the use of air attacks) and in general with a blank check given to the military (and security) to round up everyone they wanted in a counterterrorism policy.110 In February 2018, the al-Sisi regime launched, with huge propaganda, the comprehensive “Operation Sinai 2018” headed by the military intelligence, “to purge the country of terrorists.” This was the first time the military (Special Forces, army conscripts, the air force, the navy) were involved in counterterrorism in Egypt, and not just in support of the interior. The atmosphere of violence, with a war in the Sinai between the army and the jihadist group Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis (rebranded “Islamic State/Daesh-Sinai province”), has played into the hands of the al-Sisi regime. And more generally, an extraordinary and unprecedented level of regional turmoil has left room for “law and order” strategies like the alSisi regime. The “war against terrorism” has been a way to offer the image of an endemic and unmanageable conflict, to instill among Egyptian citizens the idea that they have more to fear from fuzzy threats – from Muslim Brothers (equated with terrorists) to jihadists, either national or international – than from the state. Furthermore, the recombination of regional and international relations, with Russia balancing the essential American partnership or counterrevolutionary regional policies and interventions by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have offered diplomatic support and sources of funding for renewed military-originated authoritarianism in Egypt – furthermore with major Egyptian weapons orders from the US, France, Russia and Germany, in a context of regional threats. Praetorianism “On the Cheap” in Eastern Libya with General Haftar In the Libyan exploded transition, the seemingly strengthening of the Libyan National Army’s (LNA) role in the end of 2014 with the bringing back into service of General Haftar together with 108 officers (January 2015) and the appointment of Haftar as “general commander in chief of the armed forces” (March 2015) – a post lower than “commander in chief” (a title attributed to the speaker of parliament, HoR) but higher than chief of staff – was not a symbol of the coming back of the armed forces to the fore; their varying adversaries in Tripoli or Misrata who coalesced against the LNA denounced the establishment of 110

Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, “Egypt Security Watch” (Washington: May– June 2016).

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a military dictatorship. The LNA has been a “national army” only in name, with a regular army nucleus of about 7,000(?) men with Soviet and Eastern Europe vintage equipment; its depleted manpower was completed after 2014–2015 with the recruitment of groups of 12,000(?) civilians from the eastern tribal landscape, Sudanese and Chadians fighters or Salafi (Madkhali)111 combatants before its offensive against Islamists in Benghazi in 2015–2016, its razzou/blitz in the oil-rich southwest (Sebha) in January 2019 and various alliances that allowed its offensive against Tripoli in April 2019. Haftar relied also on family members, famously his sons Khaled and Saddam were elevated to command positions as were members of his tribe. However, key units/militias in allied cities or in the South (the Tubus) or even in Benghazi, nominally related to the LNA, escaped Hafar’s sway. The military offensives described as those of a regular army prevailing via military discipline and might were in reality done, as for local militias, through negotiations and distribution of money. Haftar boasted about building state institutions, while relying on militias beholden to tribes, regions, towns, neighborhoods or various localized places. The economic activities of the LNA taking over chinks of the civilian economy in Cyrenaica bore more resemblance to the generalized predation by militias integrated in the state described above, rather than to encroachments by the Egyptian military institution. The LNA was funded by the al-Bayda Eastern government (the Eastern Central Bank of Libya), a channel complexified after the establishment of the UN-supported Government of General Accord (GNA) in 2015 with the support of the international community (at least for some time). After its complete takeover of Benghazi in July 2017, the LNA expanded its control on licit and illicit economies, a move further accelerated after its blitz in the oil-rich South, then in the West (toward Tripoli). A pompously dubbed Organism for Military Investment (Haʾiat al-Istithmar al-ʿAskari) created in 2017 took control of economic assets with exemptions guaranteed by law (voted by the HoR) or the appointment of officers to manage some economic projects. It was also at the center of various illegal activities: bullying big businessmen, using letters of credit (for importers) to get access to hard currencies, smuggling scrap metal in an organized way, smuggling refined oil – the LNA took control of the Oil Crescent in September 2016, thereafter the Sharara and al-Fil giant fields in March 2019, but only the Western-based National Oil 111

International Crisis Group, “Addressing the Rise of Libyan Madkhali-Salafis” (Brussels: April, 25, 2019).

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Company (NOC) could export oil officially under the protection of international backers of the GNA at the UN Security Council.112 Haftar and some officers around him have rather been dreaming about rebuilding some central power in Libya based on the military or more accurately the al-Sisi model in neighboring Egypt – tellingly, they tried to expand their control by replacing local self-designed authorities with military governors. The LNA and its Military Media Division developed an ability to wage public relation campaigns. Haftar could legitimize his bid for power in the ears of external supporters, in the first place al-Sisi’s Egypt – he used the same discourse as al-Sisi against Islamists – and to some extent France in 2017–2020. Regional backers such as the UAE and Egypt have supported his bid for power with ammunitions, old aircrafts, helicopters, boats, drones and military vehicles (also training pilots in Egypt), in contravention of a UN embargo, with assistance from France and Russia, whose help increased in 2017 after the meeting between Haftar and Russia’s defense minister – conversely Turkey has supported Haftar’s opponents.113 The weaknesses of Haftar’s endeavors were illustrated on the ground (as opposed to propaganda or Twitter accounts) by the LNA’s severe failure to wrest control of the western part of the country (strategic locations such as al-Watiyya air base, Tarhuna, etc.), and in particular take over Tripoli (with UAE and Egyptian help and hundreds of Russian and Syrian mercenaries), in front of the counteroffensives of GNA-aligned (but not fully loyal) militias critically backed by Turkey’s drones and military advisers (along with thousands of Syrian-recruited mercenaries/rebels) in May 2020. Militarism in Libya was also a reflection of foreign dreams of rebuilding a state. At a time of faltering Libyan institutions, the threat of Daesh after 2014,114 the return of Libyan fighters from Syria, one of the strongest contingent of foreign fighters in relation to the size of the Libyan population, and the absence of a central authority controlling frontiers (hence flows of refugees coming from sub-Saharan Africa to reach the shores of 112

113 114

International Crisis Group, “Of Tanks and Banks” (Brussels: May 20, 2019); Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, “Predatory Economies in Eastern Libya” (Geneva: June 2019); “Prime Seaside, Real Estate, Oil and Scrap Metal,” The Independent, September 7, 2019. United Nations, “Final Report of the UN Panel of Experts on Libya” (New York: September 5, 2018). Extremists existed but up until the end of 2014 they operated without displaying transnational characteristics. That setting changed in October 2014 when a jihadist splintering group in Derna vowed loyalty to the Islamic State (Daesh), then in other areas. In most cases, a coalition of local forces forced militants out of “their” towns. In 2015–2016, Daesh made advances in Syrt, a Qaddafi stronghold destroyed by revengeful revolutionary brigades, and was repelled after a six-month siege by a coalition of revolutionaries supported by US air power.

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Italy) have bred desires for intervention among foreign powers desperately looking for a central government. Foreign powers have supported the tentative return of a monopoly over force by some centralized authorities. After numerous previous failures, the last international attempt occurred in December 2015, when a UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL)-brokered Libyan Political Agreement was reached. Yet, the implementation of signed agreements has remained problematic after a new prime minister (Faʾiz al-Sarraj), in March 2016, settled (in a naval base) in Tripoli – four to five big militias have been the “protectors” of the UN-supported GNA.115 The so-called and selfdesignated LNA under General (thereafter marshal) Haftar was not loyal to the GNA. As a shortcut to real state-rebuilding, some external actors (Italy, France, with contradictory agendas, converging at some moments) have bet on the (tacit) support to some militias or the selfproclaimed LNA . . . with a dangerous tendency among foreign powers to disconnect counterterrorism and border control from other forms of engagement to support political dialog and state re-formation in Libya. The Tunisian (Military) “Exception” Still Continues . . . Structurally, constitutional changes away from authoritarianism were conducted by civilian elites with the help and protection of the military, a new feature in Tunisia. On the one hand, in allowing the civilian uprising to unfold in 2011, the army acted politically. It immediately authorized a real civilian interim authority to emerge and formed a joint committee in which civilians had full partnership to discuss the way forward (in particular what elections to have first). As the police largely disappeared from streets after Ben Ali’s fall and remained disorganized, the army was in charge of ensuring public security, even in Tunis. The military handled the mounting violence in the country: bank and supermarket robberies, aggressions at night, attacks against hospitals to steal drugs, prison breaks, attacks against political meetings, localized riots, Salafi groups smuggling weapons and all types of local conflicts, especially in the South. It secured the pivotal October 2011 parliamentary elections. It was also called upon to deal with the refugee crisis from neighboring Libya, plus sub-Saharan Africans crossing en masse into Tunisia to reach Italy. After the uprising, the army became active in “security operations rooms,” in particular in cases of riots in cities in the southern and central 115

Wolfram Lacher and Alaa al-Idrissi, “Capital of Militias” (Geneva: Small Arms Survey, June 2018).

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parts of the country, as the hated police would immediately withdraw, not to be embroiled in controversies. A year after the revolution, Humvees and tanks were seen everywhere in Tunisia, something uncommon before 2011. And the army came out of these events endowed with a huge aura. The view of the small army saving the revolution was publicized widely, as exemplified by the cover of Jeune Afrique (January 7, 2011) with a photo of Chief of Staff Ammar in the square and with the headline “Tunisie: L’homme qui a dit non” (Tunisia: the man who said no); Facebook pages “We want Rachid Ammar as president” or “The man who dared to say no” were created. Ammar, previously an unknown figure, became a national hero for allegedly refusing to fire on protesters.116 This happened to be largely a “myth.”117 New Facebook pages on the 2002 Medjez El Bab accident (Chapter 2) cultivated the image of a military brutalized by Ben Ali. For the first time since independence, the military gained immense public prestige. And tellingly, the “Report of the National Commission to Investigate Violence during the Riots” (Bouderbala report) only mentioned the military to herald its heroism.118 On the other hand, and crucially, key advances at critical junctures in the transitional process were made by civilians. In 2013, before retiring, General Ammar sat for a three-hour interview on one of the most popular television stations in Tunisia and revealed that he categorically refused to succeed to Ben Ali on January 14, 2011, against the strong insistence of the prime minister and defense and interior ministers, and insisted on constitutional legality to be followed.119 Tellingly in 2011, when President Mbazza selected Beji Caid Sebsi to take over from embattled Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi in the Casbah II crisis on his own initiative – they had worked together in the 1960s when Sebsi as interior minister had appointed Mbazza to his first big job to head the police – he did not consult with General Ammar. Later, in 2013–2014 and very differently from Egypt where the polarization between two camps led to a coup, it was the (later Nobel Peace Prize-awarded) 116 117

118

119

Michael Béchir Ayari, Vincent Geisser and Abir Krefa, “Chronique d’une révolution [presque] annoncée,” L’Année du Maghreb (Marseille: CNRS-IREMAM, 2011). The blogger Yasin Ayari (and the son of a colonel) explained (on his Facebook page, July 17, 2011, then relayed by Mosaique FM, July 19, 2011) that he forged the news that Ammar said no to Ben Ali when asked to open fire on demonstrations, that Ben Ali never asked for this and that Ammar, as a military leader, does not say yes or no but applies orders (taʿalimat) or waits for orders to act. The detailed report can be found at http://archive.mosaiquefm.net/index/a/ActuDetail/ Element/19900-Le-texte-int%C3%A9gral–du-rapport-de-la-commission-nationale-dinvestigations-sur-les-abus-et-les-violations.html. Ettounisia TV, June 24, 2013.

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“Quartet” – the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT), the Tunisian Union for Industry and Commerce (UTICA), the Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH) and the Tunisian Bar Association – that initiated Tunisia’s national dialog to smooth political processes by transcending the debate between secularists and Islamists and to help find a solution to the political crisis in 2014. The army would only secure official buildings in August 2013 when protesters attempted to storm the National Constituent Assembly. The Tunisian military did not tread out of the path of a republican body respectful of civilian state institutions. For sure, the armed forces gained more bureaucratic leeway and to some extent some political muscle after 2011. A new position of joint chief of staff was named in the person of General Ammar in April 2011. The military (and Ammar) acquired full autonomy on decisions pertaining to the armed forces. The army’s power was recalibrated vis-à-vis the interior ministry. The army assumed greater control over the Presidential Guard, the National Guard (whose new commander was an army colonel) and the direction of prisons. A military brigadier general was appointed at the Sureté générale in the interior ministry. But the too-close-to-politics Tunisian army felt the heat, in controversies in 2012 about the lifting of the state of emergency (regularly extended since January 15, 2011) between President Marzouki and the military (Chief of Staff Ammar) led by Defense Minister Zbidi (who resigned in March 2013), or about military losses in the hands of jihadists in Mount Chambi. In a surprise move, on June 24, 2013, the fifty-seventh anniversary of the Tunisian military, Ammar voluntarily retired: what he announced as normal retirement was also interpreted in Tunisia as a resignation.120 Similarly, following controversies after a massacre of soldiers by jihadists in August 2014 – the highest losses of life for the military since Bizerte in 1961 – Chief of Staff Hamdi, appointed one year earlier, resigned (officially for personal reasons). Most importantly, the army resented being caught in politics and stuck to its legalist stance when thrown into political controversies in 2012–2014. Indeed, the military became much more visible, but confined to some functions. The army was called upon to help fight terrorism and secure border areas, which were an important point of access for Libyan military equipment on its way to Mali and Algeria – eleven among the thirty-two militants who stormed the strategic Tinguentourine/In Amenas gas station in Algeria in January 2013 were Tunisians – not to mention Tunisian 120

Some (controversial) opinion polls such as the one by C3Etudes (July 5, 2013) put him in third place in terms of popularity for presidential elections.

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jihadists trained abroad, with hundreds in Syria. Since 2013, Tunisia has been increasingly drawn into acute security problems with jihadist attacks in the northern part of the Algerian-Tunisian border (an area of intense smuggling) and in mounts Chaambi, Dernaya or Sennama. The instances of violence were also timed to coincide with important political benchmarks in the Tunisian democratic transition with the assassinations of Chokri Belaid, a lawyer and a figure of the secular left in February 2013, and Mohammed Brahmi, a parliamentarian and a member of a coalition of the extreme leftists and Arab nationalists in July 2013. After jihadist attacks in the Mount Chaambi area in October 2013, President Marzouki issued a decree giving the military the upper hand in the southwest defined as a “zone of military operations.” The army, the National Guard and the police were unified under military authority – but the latter has been forced to cooperate with police officers to control individuals (and exert judicial powers) while the exchange of information with the National Guard has remained deficient. Tellingly and quite contrary to all other Arab cases, the main topic in Tunisia since 2011 has not been the downsizing of the army, but its reinforcement – and international experts on Security Sector Reform (SSR) have advocated along this line. Defense budgets have increased in 2013 and 2014, and for the first time the defense ministry’s increase was more than two times that of the interior ministry, to buy new equipment (in particular combat and transport helicopters), offer higher wages and attract more recruits. There were talks about the reinforcement of conscription in 2015, owing to extensive draft dodging. Yet, an indicator of civilian supremacy was the relative decrease in military expenditures in the 2018 budget, reflecting a shift in priorities from security (and military) to social issues, a crucial topic for the Tunisian democratization experiment. The new political and security setting forced the closed and secretive military to reposition itself and open up to a limited degree. In October 2011, a meeting organized by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, the Geneva-based DCAF and the Centre des études méditerranéennes et internationales – which convened external experts with the whole staff of second-tier Tunisian military commanders in Tunis – conveyed a latent atmosphere of anguish before change within the armed forces. Officers thereafter willingly adjusted to a democratic system of governance and legislative oversight. All in all, the military has made its voice heard, a kind of a pressure group catching up from a position of past marginalization, yet short of any military direct and domineering intervention in politics. Retired officers have been more inclined to speak openly, possibly acting as unofficial spokesmen for the active military – since they know each other well. They asked for enshrining the role of the

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armed forces in the constitution as a way to prevent its instrumental use by the political leadership. They also argued for more consultation of the army on national defense and other security issues with the political leadership, in contrast with the past when they were completely sidelined. Former high-ranking military officers advised the National Constituent Assembly on defense-related articles or helped presidential candidates in 2014 on defense policy. Another new phenomenon was the creation of associations, such as the Association of Former Officers of the National Army (March 2011), the Association of Justice for Military Veterans (by former officers condemned unjustly in the 1991 Barakat al-Sahel trial) and the Tunisian Center for Global Security Studies (November 2013) – its president was appointed head of Tunisia’s National Counterterrorism Commission in June 2018. This was indicative of the smooth civilmilitary relations in Tunisia (rather than a looming military threat) and the army remained under civilian control, under the command of civilian defense ministers and bureaucrats. And the trustful relationship between the military and political elite was highlighted by the permission given to the military (and security forces) to vote in municipal elections in April 2018, for the first time in Tunisia. There have been recurring talks, newspaper articles and public and political debates about an increased involvement of the military seen as one of the legalist institutions able to help stabilize the country – according to some polls, 96.6 percent of Tunisians were said to trust the military.121 In May 2013, the presidency even published a communiqué threatening to put to trial those calling for the army to overthrow civilian rule in Tunisia, in a time rife with controversies after the assassination of Chokri Belaid.122 And after the savage killing of soldiers in Mount Chaambi in July 2013 and the murder of Mohammed Brahmi, at a time of the coup d’état by General al-Sisi in Egypt, an officer close to President Marzouki was named at the helm of military intelligence (DGSM), hence signaling defiance.123 Yet, there was no military walk away from the norm of strict professionalism. These were only rhetorical controversies (about a potential army role) with no reality of or path dependence from past occurrences (as in Egypt). The army indeed gained some input into security policies under the new democratic era. A decree favoring military retirees to come back to service was issued124 and all kind of discourses heralded the military as an institution apt to offer decisive help for the Tunisian polity facing difficult times. Controversies raged about the 121 123 124

al-Shourouq, June 6, 2015. 122 Nawaat.org, July 19, 2013. “Armée tunisienne, la grande désillusion,” Jeune Afrique, September 2, 2014. Journal Officiel de la République Tunisienne, July 3, 2015.

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potential nominations of governors (wali) with military backgrounds in August–September 2015 – in reality, few were nominated after rumors that “figures with experience in the military and development fields” would be appointed in half of the new posts.125 Calls were issued to nominate officers to direct state institutions to counter dysfunctions – a colonel was appointed as director of a hospital in Sfax, creating uproar among professional syndicates about “militarization” (ʿaskara) in the making.126 But, most importantly, Tunisian debates about the army’s potential roles should not be compared with and put to the same level as talks about the controversial role of the Egyptian military or that of former Libyan officers around General Haftar. Indeed, and reminding other Arab states, the military has become a sensitive topic in Tunisia. This was exemplified by charges of “army defamation” against a blogger (in January 2014, for an article on dysfunctions in a military hospital), a politician (in January 2013, for protesting against the extradition to Libya of a former Libyan prime minister using military means in El-Aouina Airport), a leader of a police syndicate (UNSFO) (in November 2014, for disclosing documents about military operations against jihadists), another blogger (in December 2014, for some posts on his Facebook page), furthermore in the context of the law project “Loi de répression des agressions sur les forces de l’ordre” (law of repression against aggressions on security forces) in April 2015. All this did not mean that Tunisia was verging on any kind of military-influenced government.127 Public criticism or debate has acted as a strong impediment against the military further treading into political subjects, and thereby reinforcing a-politicization among officers. Any change in that equilibrium of renewed political processes led by civilians would imply a radical shift in the core identity of the Tunisian military and its officer corps,128 which was not prevalent in 2020. In reality, the “meager” Tunisian army did not have the required capabilities nor the size (with a legacy of neglect that left it weak) and, most importantly, has had no historical background to play any political or 125 126 127

128

This is a recurring question dating back from Bourguiba, the idea that the military is better suited to head peripheral and deprived governorates. Chams FM, September 17, 2015. Rumors of coup plots could not seriously come from the military; and if any, they were much more substantiated in the interior, for instance by the movement against the retirement of Colonel Moncef Ladjimi, former commander of the notorious Bouchoucha prison near Tunis and a commander of the BOP (Brigades de l’ordre public), whose members were involved in killings in Thala, Kasserine, then commander of the Brigades d’Intervention (the new name of the BOP after 2011) (Al-Akhbar, January 12, 2012). For this factor, see Samuel Fitch, The Armed Forces and Democracy in Latin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

The Tunisian (Military) “Exception” Still Continues …

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domineering role. Crucially, officers have been kept far from power – incidentally, the army remained counterbalanced by the paramilitary National Guard. Change pulling the military closer to politics might come from two medium-term dimensions. The first is the risk of the army moving more thoroughly into internal policing against terrorism. After the July 2014 attack, a new Crisis Cell – made up of the president, interior, foreign and defense ministers, along with some high-ranking officers – has held weekly meetings. In November 2014, an “Agency for Intelligence and Security” was created under the guidance of the defense ministry and with the military at its helm (Presidential Decree no. 2208 of 2014), but was not operational before January 2015. Some army officers have lobbied to create more counterterrorism units as part of the Tunisian Groupe des Forces Spéciales. The military might move into areas reserved for the civilian security organs, with the threat of the possible acquisition of judicial powers and develop internal intelligence capabilities, especially on jihadism129 – and the latter issue will border on the political question of Islamism. The second is the internal consequences of foreign pressures to give the military a new importance and socialize officers into internal missions (counterinsurgency, counterterrorism). The Tunisian military has been the object of a lot of attention to help upgrade its capabilities, with the tripling of US military aid (April 2015) and the quadrupling of French military aid (October 2015). In December 2014, Tunisian officers were said to participate in programs organized by a consultant firm (Booz Allen Hamilton) with the US Special Operation Command (SOCOM).130 There are unconfirmed rumors about US military (drone) facilities in the South – the question goes back to the 1980s – and US soldiers allegedly combated with (or advised) Tunisian troops in counterinsurgent operations.131 There is no doubt, however, that Tunisia has been at the center of a US surveillance network active in Africa.132 Such offers of new technologies or support in return for its participation in international counterterrorism efforts could 129

130 131 132

There have been serious attacks, from the US embassy (September 2012) to the failed suicide bombing on a beach in the tourist resort of Sousse (October 2014) – in May 2014, AQMI even attacked the interior minister’s house in Kasserine; terror massacres in the Bardo Museum (March 2015) and in a Sousse hotel (June 2015); bombing against the Presidential Guard (November 2015); tentative assault of the southern city of Ben Guardane by dozens of Islamic State-affiliated fighters in March 2016; an ambush against security forces by AQMI near the Algerian border in July 2018; suicide bombings in Tunis in June 2019 and March 2020; and others. Maghreb Confidential, no. 1139, January 15, 2015. “U.S. and Tunisia Are Fighting Militants Together: Just Don’t Ask Them About It,” The New York Times, March 2, 2019. The Intercept, October 15, 2015.

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shift the Tunisian military from a political pressure group to a more politicized actor. Conclusion The new roles of armies were especially relevant in stirred-up political systems, as exemplified by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces’ (SCAF) role in Egypt, retired and active-duty eastern (Cyrenaican) army officers in Libya or unit commanders in Yemen. While they abstained from direct politics in the past or played it only within the ambit of the authoritarian systems in power, the new circumstances forced them to become more activist or at least gave them more leeway, with the rationale that civilian politicians as well as new civic activists were weak and unable to cope with challenges, or even that some of them (the Muslim Brothers) were dangerous (to Egypt or Libya). Just as in the 1960s, these rationalizations have reemerged to justify the army’s return to political life after 2013 in Egypt or after 2014 in eastern Libya. In Egypt, chaotic transition and the short rule of the Muslim Brotherhood were abrogated by harsh military-led rule. Furthermore, in Syria, the military was a key stake after 2012 for the simple reason that it was in a setting of full-scale civil war, but with huge consequences for it. Regime re-formations were especially difficult and bumpy in Yemen and Libya and they led, after mid-2014, to renewed civil wars amidst heightened regional interventions channeling proxy games. And this took place in a fundamental and transformed regional order where stakes became heightened to an unprecedented degree and related to internal dynamics, and, contrary to the previous assessment made about the 2011 uprisings in the conclusion of Chapter 5, regional and international factors took on clear roles as agents.

Conclusion Arab Armies Once Again at the Forefront

Military interventions in politics and more generally military roles in the Arab World are a multifaceted rather than mono-causal phenomenon. The historical journey of this book through my sample of countries aims at promoting a more grounded view of Arab armies. Contrary to the literature that has flourished after 2011, my view of the military is not that of a mere state institution being determined by its internal dynamics (rules, doctrine, culture, etc.) and its political, social, cultural and economic environment, along with some regional and international factors; and then, prompted by an event it did not desire, it suddenly jumped into politics in 2011 with various consequences.1 And, before 2011, I not merely assess the behavior of the army by considering military interventions and subsequent potential extrications from politics or, conversely, new entrenchments, but I provide a far more holistic view of the armed forces’ roles in their respective polities. Rather, I consider the army as a complex actor, in particular specifically embedded in political regimes for decades. Most of the literature on civil-military relations focuses on (civilian) control.2 But control is not the only relevant issue in these relations – as mentioned by Huntington, objective control with noninterference by political leadership is for maximum effectiveness; others will argue for the opposite without civilian involvement. Control is closely related to military effectiveness, which is its flip side, namely, the major roles and missions that the armed forces should be effective in implementing and the effectiveness in using allocated resources they get.3 Taking into consideration both control and effectiveness, my above chapters highlighted their very specific overtones, namely, embeddedness in regimes rather than clear-cut civil-military relations and their dubious effectiveness on 1

2 3

Barbara Geddes, Erica Frantz and Joseph G. Wright, “Military Rule,” Annual Review of Political Science, 14 (2014): 147–162; see also Barbara Geddes, Joseph G. Wright and Erica Frantz, How Dictatorships Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1957). Aurel Croissant and Thomas Bruneau, eds., Civil-Military Relations (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2019).

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many counts. This leads me to refocus the attention toward the more essential political role of Arab armies. Armies in the Arab World . . . “Living with Politics” Arab armies have changed a lot since the 1970s – most (of the few) books on the topic predate this period. Arab militaries in authoritarian contexts have reinforced their degree of institutionalization since the 1970s, along with their professionalization, but those very elements should be examined closely. This characterization was vindicated in the context of the new “quietist” relations that Arab armies have delineated toward politics since the 1970s. That would not have been the case in the 1950s–1960s when the armed forces were channels of social mobility and agents of political change, in some cases state-makers, and more often than not institution-breakers (with coups d’état) or -circumventers. Classic institutional studies tend to focus on institutions as structures of cooperation, less on power or the relations between power and institutions; furthermore, most studies are located in strong institutional contexts in democratic settings.4 Consequently, they are unable to account for the great variety of relations between armies and regimes and do not render justice analytically to the specific roles of armies under authoritarian regimes in the Arab World. As stressed in the above chapters, the Arab militaries’ roles in their respective polities encompassed many more dimensions than institutional effects would account for. In a similar way and signaling other difficulties, this trend toward the institutionalization of Arab armies has gone hand in hand with an increased professionalism (though a different concept): their reliance on more educated personnel; their modernization under the influence of Western military doctrines, while also keeping many old Soviet military tactics; the acquisition of modern material advanced in technology degree; the adaptation to modern standards of warfare; the development of military education, academies and staff colleges; and so on. Professionalization has meant an increase in the number of well-trained officers, yet, those handpicked for training in these extremely hierarchic military institutions have been selected by senior officers according to criteria of loyalty and hence recreating a renewed basis for patronage and networks – education in Arab military schools has not favored critical thinking and the development of independent minds. And more 4

Ian Shapiro, Stephen Skowronek and Daniel Galvin, Rethinking Political Institutions (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Robert Bates, Prosperity and Violence (New York: Norton, 2010); Margaret Levi, Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

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professional officers have been rotated in their later assignments, hence allowing the dissemination of professionalism while preserving control mechanisms by power networks. The armed forces’ political role in most Arab countries should not be assessed by taking into consideration only their professional role which, by definition, should be related to national security/defense priorities, or even roles in terms of commitment to constitutional principles. For the most part, the real mission of Arab armies was also taking part in a distinctly political role, that is, the regime’s preservation, support and its protection from domestic challenges. That role could materialize in just a passive assent to a given regime’s enduring stay in power or could be sealed in more organic relations, with huge differences from Egypt to Syria. This is not to deny that Arab armies have expanded in relation to acute and real external security concerns, in the first place for states with borders with Israel. But security requirements have also inflated to include other, more internal (regime-maintenance) considerations.5 Tellingly, that huge Arab armies have been unsuccessful at winning external wars did not make much of a difference: war, or more precisely preparation for war,6 was a context for rulers rather than a reality or an objective of their policies. There are few bright spots in the battle history of the Egyptian army, with the exception of the more qualified Yom Kippur/Ramadan War (1973); and its inconclusive participation in Operation Desert Storm in Kuwait (1991) nuanced the effects of the huge modernization programs undertaken with American military aid. Nearly every deployment of Libya’s army under Qaddafi ended in disaster, perhaps most memorably its incompetent performance against the ragtag Chadian forces supported by the French in the 1980s. In 1991, in another traumatic moment for Arab officers, the US-led coalition demolished in a few days of air campaign the Iraqi military, said to be the best equipped and most expensive in the Arab World. The Syrian army was far more effective in invading Lebanon (1976–2005), or repressing domestic revolts, than in combating Israel. Despite its extraordinary budget, the Yemeni military was not able to put down the Houthi rebellion in the northern governorate of Saʿda in a succession of wars in 2004–2009. Despite the huge military buildup, Saudi Arabia displayed its lackluster

5 6

Sheena Chestnut Greitens, Dictators and Their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Yezid Sayigh, “War as Leveler, War as Midwife,” in War, Institutions and Social Change in the Middle East, ed. Steven Heydemann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 200–239; Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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performance against Houthi insurgents in border confrontations in 2009, then after its intervention in Yemen after 2015. The flip side of this generalized inadequacy in effectiveness lay in the fact that the military’s primary objective was not to be a combat-effective institution. Regimes never tasked their militaries with such objectives beyond propaganda discourses. Very tellingly, whatever the courage and fortitude of Arab soldiers of all ranks, the whole structure of the Syrian or Egyptian military was in large part responsible for alleged defaults in efficiency. Armies were not organized to wage modern wars, as institutions built for analyzing information coming from the field, making decisions, taking initiatives and so on, but were much more organized as watchful guardians of their respective regimes or at least positioned in regime-maintenance functions.7 The armies’ importance laid elsewhere, in their standing behind regimes, at least in the specific relations linking regimes and high military commanders, with a sense of satisfaction among high officers, expectations among younger officers to be included in such a system and a sense of the necessary status quo prevalent among all officers. This book goes farther than and qualifies the classic argument stressing that authoritarianisms are not just based on a winning coalition, but that the more stable among them came into power through violent and ideologically driven struggles. These foundational periods left an enduring legacy regarding internal discipline and the coherence of the regime in question, by creating partisan identity, hardening boundaries with “others,” introducing a military ethos and discipline, producing leaders with authority and an ability to repress.8 I argue that this “stabilizing” effect was not just a legacy or a path dependence from periods of struggle, but it was also a result of the embeddedness of the military in the regime with its positional/institutional and ideational effects – even in Algeria, the rebuilding of the army by Boumedienne after 1963 was as important as the struggle for national liberation (1954–1962) because the “army” that came out of it was mainly made up of “civilians who took arms” (to borrow the expression from actor and historian Mohammed Harbi). The embeddedness of armies in Arab regimes was an essential element of authoritarian durability. 7

8

Kenneth M. Pollack, Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948–1991 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Kenneth M. Pollack, Armies of Sand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, “Beyond Patronage: Violent Struggle, Ruling Party Cohesion, and Authoritarian Durability,” Perspectives on Politics, 10(4) (December 2012): 869–889. The argument was formulated by Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 424–425.

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That political centrality was again vindicated in 2011. The new and noted role of armies in the Arab World after 2011 that resulted in a surge of academic interest about the military had huge consequences for armies, quite different from the mere restoration of (pre-uprising) settings. Armies have also been engulfed into new and pressing settings rather than (or while) just becoming domineering actors, and with high risks for military institutions (see Table 2 for a graphic summary). After 2011 in some cases, militaries have come closer to politics and left the previous and more comfortable role of the quietist army under authoritarianism to put their hands on direct governance. Egypt went from an enduring regime that basically structured all power from the executive to a new setting where the “revolution” did not take power (as in textbook revolutions) but broke that unipolar system and distributed power between major actors, with none of them able to cancel the other. The army was pulled by the high officer corps into direct political and governing tasks. The model of extended and repressive control of the military over the polity that emerged after the July 2013 coup d’état by General al-Sisi has tried to square the circle of combining the demands of political popularity (with one officer in power) and the demands of military awe (on which the soldier’s rule is based in terms of “ideal type”), in a kind of Machiavelli motto for whom “to be feared and not hated are compatible enough.” The Syrian army was severely shaken by civil war and its overuse by the regime in repression. Russia has been particularly active in order to reinstate its battle order and to strengthen it as a pillar of the postwar state and the regained sovereignty on most parts of “useful Syria” (al-Suriya al-mufida), then on rebel-remaining peripheries (northwest, northeast) in 2019–2020. In particular, the process of multiplied militia-nization developed by the Syrian regime during (civil) war thrived on opposing views between a Russian approach favoring state institutions and an Iranian preference for a decentralized/militia-nized vision of the security sector, based on converging (yet different) views/interests of Syria, respectively, as a Russian way to project power on a world stage and as an essential pillar of Iranian foreign policy in the Arab World. Yet, militia-nization – I’m dealing here with Syrian militias not foreign (Iraqi, Afghan, etc.) Shia legions – carried out with Iranian help and progressively reincorporated into the army by Russia, has long roots in Assad’s Syria: the Hafez regime already used such tools, then reincorporated them in its security apparatus in the 1980s. Indeed, the difference in 2020 is the extreme weakness, exhaustion and disorganization of the Assad regime. In other cases whose numbers rank high among the cases of Arab uprisings in 2011, the enfeeblement of the state ultimately disempowered the military while hollowing it out. The stress test of massive social mobilizations had much more thorough consequences in states that were more insecure, more

Social embeddedness

Economic embeddedness

A new role of the military?

Reinforced

Slightly reinforced, especially in times of terrorism

External guardian within civilian constitutional rule The regime and who No role rules

Relation to the new state

The military’s reaction as . . . Tunisia Haftar vs. GNA

Libya

Reinforced economic empire Cultivated by the army

New pivotal role as the pillar of the al-Sisi regime

Fragmentation

Control of key oil infrastructure

Battles between former officers and revolutionaries

Activist role, then Haftar playing on took power the return of law and order

Playing as the savior of the country

Egypt

Bahrain

The military as Back to routine a key pillar of the authoritarianism Syrian state

Syria

Fragmentation

Local warlordism

Economy of war, checkpoints, smuggling More Alawi and militia-nization

Instrumentalization The state = the royal Brigade of the military by family commanders as stakeholders the regime and security services Role of brigade Civil war commanders on the local level

Houthis vs. Hadi vs. southerners

Yemen

Table 2 The many faces of the military and developments in six cases after 2011

Terrorism + regional turmoil

Foreign influences

US, Russia, Saudi The UAE, Egypt, Saudi-Emirati intervention Arabia, Turkey, Qatar the UAE + French, and the SaudiBritish and Iranian Italian special “Cold War” forces Internal jihadism Sinai, the Islamic Regional proxy Sunnis vs. Shias State, terrorism interventions and shockwaves of Libya

Sunnis vs. Shias

Sunnis vs. Shias

Russia + Iran + Saudi influence Hezbollah + Shia militias + Turkey + Saudi Arabia + Jordan (+ Israel)

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fragmented, more opened to societal influences than in states that had a long and endogenous tradition of state-building like Egypt or Tunisia. And it led to state weakening/collapses and even societal collapses in Libya and Yemen, with huge consequences for armies. In Libya in 2020, the state is fragmented with multiple warring sides (mostly thanks to the lineup of foreign support they got) and (three then) two governments. Most dauntingly, the state is fragmented by the rise of identity politics after Qaddafi had so weakened a genuine national sentiment in the country. Tellingly, understanding the Libyan armed forces would better be done by offering a list of multiple warring groups, rather than a chart of the army, navy and air force! Similarly in Yemen in 2020, with the state weakened, then collapsing under Houthi assaults and the Saudi-led intervention, multiple political movements and social dynamics (tribes in some areas, al-Hirak in the South) have made claims on the military, first of all on its huge (not necessarily sophisticated but deadly) equipment. And state collapse was accompanied by societal collapse. Sectarian tensions that were inexistent before in Yemen have been flaring up with hardened confessional discourses – Salafis and Zaydis have spoken in denominational terms of Sunni vs. Shia animosities and these discourses have seeped into society – or secessionist movements in the South. The army was a key factor in Yemeni history (at least since 1962 or 1970) and it was related to a state or at least a state project with various overtones from military modernizers to republican tribalists; all talks about bad governance, collapsed or failed state were in fact idle originating from outsiders and cynically used by Saleh as a bargaining chip and the seemingly weak Yemeni state endured and negotiated in hard terms with external donors or powers. After 2014–2015, the Yemeni army has been submitted to processes of decentralization, dismantlement and fragmentation parallel to that of the state and society, and to an extent and depth unseen before. The Future of Military Politics in the Arab World in Comparative Perspective This book offers a sophisticated analysis of Arab authoritarianisms, especially their organizational features, and in my case, how a regime structures its coercive apparatus and mechanisms for controlling a given polity with the army,9 beyond the classic question of civil-military relations, which is too closely related to democratization (as a “partial regime” for it).10 As 9

10

Lucan Way, Pluralism by Default (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015); Eva Bellin, “Reconsidering the Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Lessons from the Arab Spring,” Comparative Politics, 44(2) (January 2012): 127–149. David Pion-Berlin and Raphael Martinez, Soldiers, Civilians and Politicians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

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argued in this book, military embeddedness is a way to buttress and sustain Arab authoritarian regimes. Most studies of the military in politics recall that after the 1990s, for instance in Latin America, Africa or Asia, military regimes became a dying breed and some even asserted that the same held true for the Arab World,11 based on the visible observation that Arab armies were no longer openly in power. The latter assumption was false if one goes beyond appearances. As explained in Chapters 2 and 3, the big difference in the Arab World was that armies were deeply embedded in regimes that relied on them, though this relation became no longer visible at first sight. In 2011, when they answered negatively, regimes crumbled; when they answered positively, regimes could engage in repression. The key feature is the organizational capacity of a regime, in particular in this book in relation with the crucial military pillar, along with other organizational tools (parties, alliances, etc.) not addressed here. Crucial comparative differences should be underlined with other cases where the military played key roles. For instance, in Latin America and the heartland of military politics in the 1970s–1980s (no longer after the 1990s), so-called political armies took power and became de facto political parties.12 Armies went into direct politics with juntas and military presidents, waged internal warfare derived from the tenets of a “new professionalism” of internal security and counterinsurgency or a stringent doctrine of national security. And they transformed law enforcement and public order (the police, the judiciary) into repressive tools. Military rule was understood as “an expansion of military-mission definition, organizational reach and comparative power” of the army or a “tarnished professionalism” that served a political end and was also a form of domination of the military.13 Armies entered into politics across the continent with the most brutal ways (coups d’état), but thereafter “exited”/retreated from politics while securing some reserve domains and immunities. As stressed by Rouquié,14 periods of military rule (the seizure of power and the subsequent years) never really subsumed/superseded the superior legitimacy of constitutional and civilian rule, even after 11

12 13

14

Gavin Cawthra and Robin Luckham, eds., Governing Insecurity: Democratic Control of Military and Security Establishments in Transitional Democracies (London: Zed Books, 2003). Alain Rouquié, La politique de Mars (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1981). Respectively, Alfred Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), xii; Genaro Arrigada, Pinochet: The Politics of Power (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988). Alain Rouquié, The Military and the State in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); see also Karen Remmer, Military Rule in Latin America (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

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military attempts to keep the reins with a former officer turned prospective ruler or an army-supported party competing in semi-competitive elections. Hence, the Latin American pattern allowed easier returns back to civilian rule. The deeper embeddedness of Arab armies explains why classic views or recipes (transitional bargains, consolidation processes) are not relevant: the organizational features of enduring Arab authoritarian regimes positioned the military as a specific component of political order in a given country over the long term. Extrication (from politics) indeed left huge problems in abeyance in Latin America, with the question of subtle manifestations of military roles and their expansion,15 the unaccountability of the army and the absence of pursuits against human rights abuses. These manifold difficulties continued behind the formalities of civilian and democratic rule (after democratic transitions), hence fueling voluminous literature on the transformations of civil-military relations and Security Sector Reform (SSR). But transitions away from military rule proceeded relatively smoothly. Tellingly, the most difficult problems of transitions were not those in polities coming out of a military dictatorship but countries that did not live under military rule, such as Mexico coming out of the authoritarian grip of the (civilian) Revolutionary Institutionalized Party. And, symptomatic of a change of paradigm, Latin American soldiers remained in their barracks in the 2000s even when politicians and contentious social movements called them to intervene in politics. In the meantime, they had become immunized from direct intervention and focused instead on safeguarding and expanding their privileges.16 Military role beliefs (or conceptions of their role in politics) dramatically shifted in the last quarter of the twentieth century.17 They could return indirectly in Brazil through internal security tasks (called “Operaçoes de GLO” = guaranteeing law and order) under President Temer and most importantly after the election of Jair Bolsonaro in October 2018 with retired officers in important positions, but that does not invalidate the above downward trend or could be interpreted as a very different form of militarism related to populist extreme right currents. That Latin American pattern had no general applicability in the Arab World. Arab armies continued to be involved in their respective polities 15 16

17

Alfred Stepan, Military Politics in the Southern Cone (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). David Pion-Berlin, Diego Esparza and Kevin Grisham, “Staying Quartered: Civilian Uprisings and Military Disobedience in the Twenty-first Century,” Comparative Political Studies, 47(2) (February 2014): 230–259. Samuel Fitch, The Armed Forces and Democracy in Latin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

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deeper, though usually silently and invisibly, and differently from their Latin American counterparts. The Arab World was characterized by enduring authoritarian rule (for decades)18 by rulers who came from the army or used it as an essential pillar but who were not military rulers in the Latin American sense of the term. The Arab World did not witness the enfeeblement and weaknesses of military power as analyzed in Latin America, but rather its embeddedness in (“civilianized”) regimes where the army played important roles. Arab armies were not forced to exit (from politics) as a consequence of their exhaustion in rule or of the erosion of their legitimacy, just because they were not in direct power, though embedded in regimes, and to some extent they could preserve their own “legitimacy” or at least positive self-image. They were not threatened by a return of civilian politics because authoritarian regimes erased its underpinnings. And the context of threat and securitization prevalent in the Arab World in the 2010s vindicated their enduring roles. All their encroachments, whether economic, social or cultural, were illustrative of the close “affinity” (to borrow Max Weber’s vocabulary) of armies with authoritarian regimes. To put it plainly, it was not so much military power that was “institutionalized” (as attempts were made in Latin America) in various Arab polities but rather Arab authoritarianisms that subsumed military power or tentatively “institutionalized” it in a specific way within their ambit. Latin American armies, also interventionist actors, were different in their relation to politics. The key problem in the Arab World was not armies in political processes as analyzed by Rouquié for Latin America, but armies embedded in authoritarian settings where they were one (key) element of political equilibriums. And in the Arab World after the 1990s, armies “bunkerized” themselves in a specific posture in changing authoritarian regimes (Chapter 3). For most of the 1990s, the Arab World experienced (relative) economic reforms or openings (infitah), necessary dimensions for the funding of bankrupted authoritarian systems – even rent-driven authoritarian systems were marred by debts and huge corruption. In reality, economic reforms did not transform structurally these economies19 and, incidentally, did not diminish the role of the armed forces in national economies. On the contrary, they led to more important military investments in the economy, as best exemplified by Egypt. In other cases, that investment witnessed the development of deep patronage networks between some officers and businessmen. In another instance of closeness of armies with changing authoritarian regimes, the 18 19

Roger Owen, The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Melani Cammett, Ishac Diwan, Alan Richards and John Waterbury, A Political Economy of the Middle East (London: Routledge, 2019); Robert Springborg, Political Economies of the Middle East and North Africa (London: Polity, 2020).

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fight against Islamist insurgencies in the 1990s, then the new US-led security agenda around the “global war on terror” after 9/11 (2001), were used by regimes to legitimize themselves and gave a new push to “securitization” moves (discourses and related practices)20 in state-society relations. Beyond the classic regime-shielding function of armies, there was a gradual shift of missions from the military’s official mission (external defense) to increasingly covert police, surveillance, anti-insurrection or counterterrorism functions blurring the differentiation between the internal and the external realms. The army was pulled into the fight against (transnational) terrorism or various fuzzy threats with the creation of elite or counterterrorism units, intelligence or specialized agencies. In most cases, the army was reluctant to go out of the quiet and benefiting stasis of authoritarian enduring regimes and more eager to let the overexpanded interior ministries jump in, while at the same time eager to benefit from modernization programs associated with these new functions, institutional leverage to be gained from such participation and associated available international cooperation and training opportunities. The military was increasingly pushed (by regimes) to intervene in intercommunal tensions, intrastate conflicts under the guise of the fight against terrorism with counterinsurgency support – or by creating state-generated militias, auxiliary forces and adjunct forces, such as “patriot militias” in Algeria (1992–1999) or the so-called janjaweed groups (renamed Rapid Support Forces) in Darfur/Sudan – martial laws, military courts, censorship in the name of national unity, states of exceptions or emergency, complex systems of surveillance and so on. And the military treaded into this new path with its social conservatism (what philosopher Michel Foucault would call “the military dream of society”)21 and its specific approach of public life and politics summarized by the notion of law and order or the search for stability (istiqrar). In this context of new threats, SSR programs were hijacked by regimes to favor special units that were built in theory for counterterrorism and that could be stacked with loyalists, far from their stated goal of building more effective and accountable security sectors.22 Hence, Arab armies came out of the 2000s as resourceful and institutionally powerful (yet politically quietist) actors. The comparison with Africa displays the opposite view. A lot of African regimes took the form of military oligarchies led by those who had emerged out of the army.23 In 20 21 22

23

Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde, Security (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1998). Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 169. Among a plethora of literature, more than often prescriptive, see the perceptive Yezid Sayigh, Security Sector Reform in the Arab World: Challenges in Developing and Indegenous Agenda (Paris: Arab Reform Initiative, 2007); and his specific works on Palestinian SSR. Robin Luckham, “Dilemmas of Military Disengagement and Democratization in Africa,” IDS Bulletin, 26(2) (April 1995): 49–61.

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the 1990s, the latter was reluctant, as compared with Latin America a decade earlier, to hand over power back to civilians (in transitional national roundtables pushed forward by civic mobilizations) and preferred managed transitions.24 But well before these processes of democratization, African armies’ bases of power were severely weakened by the large-scale withdrawal of foreign military support with the end of the Cold War, along with programs of economic reforms (of the state in general, the so-called Washington Consensus), the ensuing fiscal crises of states and their inabilities to sustain their previous outlays on weapon purchases and military wages.25 As a consequence, regimes were not able to buy off military loyalty and to keep their armies as cohesive entities. Tellingly, in the 2000s–2010s, the renewed military interventions in politics in Africa were mostly mutinies coming from below from disenfranchised soldiers or NCOs (a lumpen militariat) endowed with a strong professional pride in Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, Nigeria, Sao Tomé and Principe, Mali, Guinea Bissau, Burkina Fasso, Guinea, Niger, CAR, Benin.26 The picture was completely different in the Arab World. Is there a way out from such protracted Arab settings? Whatever the huge difficulties they encountered, civilians in Latin America succeeded in reducing some of the military prerogatives over time – they challenged their armed forces – hence the popularity of a “rationalist” perspective to understand civil-military dynamics in this region with a focus on the actual decisions and calculations of political actors. And conversely, officers displayed relatively level-headed reactions and judicious restraint, keeping troops in the barracks and rationally adapting to new rules of the game. Comparatively, “cultural” factors (in the sense of the conception of armies’ roles, norms and values that sustained military rule) and “structural” factors (authoritarianism) were much more prevalent in the Arab World, especially within the long “stasis” of authoritarianism. And that explains why after 2011, the starting point of a downward trend (in military roles) does not influence the end point in 2020. Reversing the embeddedness of armies in Arab regimes was especially difficult. A radical (but externally generated) uprooting of the organizational roots of the regime and its associated army was attempted in Iraq. The “big” Iraqi army (unexamined in detail in this book) was in perfect line with the above chapters, with its historical role in state-building thereafter 24 25 26

Michael Bratton and Nicolas Van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Jeffrey Herbst, “African Militaries and Rebellions: The Political Economy of Threat and Combat Effectiveness,” Journal of Peace Research, 41(3) (May 2004): 357–369. Maggie Dwyer, Soldiers in Revolt (London: Hurst, 2017); Jimmy Kandeh, Coups from Below (London: Palgrave, 2004).

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living under enduring Baathi (then Saddam Hussein)27 authoritarianism. The Iraqi Baath Party played a role as a network penetrating and controlling the military with kinds of political commissars.28 The occupying American power in 2003 considered it as a Baath- or Saddam-tainted “entity” and decided its radical dissolution (Coalition Provisional Orders nos. 2 and 3). The most immediate consequence was that, after some procrastination and tentative contact with the new American powerholders in Baghdad’s Green Zone, a significant proportion of former Iraqi officers went to the Iraqi insurgency (with all their military skills) and some shifted even to al-Qaeda networks with the first stirrings of Daesh (reorganized by Abu Musab al-Zarkawi) – Saddam had recruited his praetorian forces in small and medium-sized Sunni tribes in the rural areas of Salaheddin, Anbar, Diyala and Niniveh where these groups took root. The American-sponsored planning for SSR and securing a “democratic control of the armed forces” after the return of Iraqi sovereignty (2004) was limited to the rebuilding of a small-sized, nonoffensive army, including the so-called Golden Division or Counterterrorism Forces – in 2017–2018, the latter were the only effective force and at the forefront of the fight against Daesh. In 2006, when the US got sufficiently bogged down in Iraq and searched for a way out (an “exit strategy”) from the Iraqi quagmire, the G. W. Bush administration launched an accelerated program for rebuilding Iraqi security forces in parallel to the so-called temporary surge of American troops (2007–2010) led by General Petraeus. That accelerated path led to the rebuilding of a substantial Iraqi army at least on paper (or PowerPoint) according to a model of quantitative quick rebuilding. Furthermore, in the context of the weakening of the departing American influence (under the G. W. Bush, then Obama administrations) and in particular during the second mandate of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, internal political games accelerated the patrimonial and confessional engineering in the officer corps done by various rival Shia networks (al-Daʿwa, al-Badr, al-Majlis = Islamic Supreme Council in Iraq, the Sadrists), along with the Kurds (PDK, UPK) and their autonomous Peshmerga forces, namely, all the actors who were the benefactors of the 2003 US de-Baathification. The unintended consequence was that the officer corps that was a preserve of (rural) Arab Sunnis (in its height) 27

28

Saddam Hussein, a civilian Baathist activist, was part of the core power group that took power in July 1968 with General Hassan al-Bakr as president (who was a kinsman of his). He grabbed more power after a failed coup attempt in 1973 and was catapulted to general in 1976 – and finally replaced al-Bakr, who resigned and retired in July 1979. Ibrahim Al-Marashi and Sammy Salama, Iraq’s Armed Forces (London: Routledge, 2008).

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under Saddam came to be dominated by Shias and Kurds and their political rivalries, far from the model of a rebuilt national army around a new Iraqi state. No wonder that this huge (in theory) and quickly built Iraqi military collapsed before a few hundred jihadists of Daesh in June 2014 in Mosul – it was dubbed the “city of millions of officers,” at least where Saddam had recruited a lot of them. The rebuilding of an offensive capability for the army after 2015, amidst national (also Shia) popular mobilization and the setting up of Shia militias in a complex galaxy (al-Hashd al-Shaʿabi), bore resemblance to the new “hybridized” security sectors described above.29 Another very different opportunity for endogenous change emerged in 2011 with the stress test of the Arab uprisings and their democratization impetus. And the SSR literature recalls that the vital spark of fundamental political change can generate interests in demilitarizing the state – it is rarely conceivable without democratization – with the necessary complement of an external environment of relative security. This was not the case in the Arab World in 2011–2020. Indeed, the real impact of the social mobilizations/uprisings of 2011 should not be assessed in terms of state power vs. social resistance and is difficult just to capture with the notion of a unified outcome (success or failure) at the macro-political level in 2020. Change is more subterranean and constrained, in particular by counterrevolutionary regime re-formations (Chapter 6), where the military or some parts of it play a role. Yet, the stress test of the 2011 Arab uprisings did not have the essential trigger effect for a process of radical reforms of civil-military relations. By comparison, the Turkish military was sidelined between 2007 and 2011 by high-profile trials (Ergenekon and Balyoz) and campaigns of public relations that galvanized support behind then prime minister Erdogan. The army was institutionally uprooted from its role as the guardian of the state with its overbearing shadow. And the general staff agreed that civilians should have the last say in political matters and acquiesced to changes in civil-military relations. The limits to the military endeavor to control the polity were well exemplified by the Turkish coup of July 2016. The tentative coup was carried out as a last-ditch and badly organized attempt by some officers (chief among them Gulenists) along with allies of convenience in the army. Tellingly, in July 2016, the commander of the First Army in Istanbul declared on television the coup illegitimate and the commanders of land, air, naval and gendarmerie

29

Faleh Jabbar and Renad Mansour, “The Popular Mobilization Forces and Iraq’s Future” (Beirut: Carnegie Middle East Center, April 2017).

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forces refused to sign on the coup. This was the exact opposite of Egypt in July 2013. Nowhere, except in Tunisia, did the 2011 uprisings – or their reverberations in 2019 in Sudan and Algeria – seriously shake the many roles of armies in Arab regimes. And in the bleak picture painted in this book, Tunisia has remained an enduring exception signaling that praetorianism, militarism and military interventions should not be considered as foreordained in the Arab World. Indeed, the Tunisian army differed markedly from other armies, with its small size, limited operational capabilities, low budget and enduring marginalization by two regimes that kept it away from any interference in politics and even political influence into security policies, and counterbalanced it with the National Guard. Hence the army was wedded to the Tunisian political trajectory that had no military component.

Index

Algeria ALN/ANP, 21, 57, 83 Boumedienne, 82 Boutefliqa, 83 Chadli, 82 civil war (1992–1999), 67, 83, 116, 258, 290 DRS/DSS, 82, 83, 139, 258, 261 Gaid Salah, Ahmed, 83, 182 general staff, 82, 83 Arabism (and officers), 35, 44–45, 46 ʿasabiyyat (solidarity groups), 62, 77, 110 ʿaskar (soldier), 25 authoritarianism, 2–3, 6–8, 13, 16, 62–63, 65, 68, 78–79, 104, 128, 138, 186, 187, 206

Syria, 194, 195, 200–205, 242–243 cohesion and fracturation Libya, 198–199 Yemen, 198 colonial armies, 11–12, 42, 50 conscription Algeria, 116 Egypt, 39, 114, 121, 193 Gulf, 171, 172–173, 180 Jordan, 166 Libya, 117, 193 Syria, 114–116, 193 Tunisia, 60, 116, 193 Yemen, 116, 193 coup-proofing strategies, 78–79 coups d’état and state-building, 2, 26–27

Bahrain, 164, 168 BDF, 174, 175, 176 BICI report, 175, 176 Khalifa, 174, 175 relations with the US, 174, 176 Saudi and Emirati intervention, 175, 176, 181 Shias, 174–175, 176 uprising of 2011, 175–176, 190, 191 budgets (military) Egypt, 45, 122, 128 Gulf, 167, 180 Jordan, 166, 183 Syria, 47, 122–125 Tunisia, 135–138 Yemen, 125, 128

decisionist views (of armies), 4–5, 19, 185 dualization (of armies)/praetorian units, 67, 68, 72, 78, 88, 127

civilianization (of regimes)/demilitarization, 7, 13, 43, 62, 63, 69–70, 74, 77, 107 cohesion (military), 109, 148–149, 190, 192–194, 199–200, 206, 218–219, 227, 263–264 African armies, 291 cohesion and defections Egypt, 191, 209

economic activities (of the army) Algeria, 139 Egypt, 114, 132, 138–139, 143–149, 261, 264 Gulf, 179, 182 Syria, 139, 149–153 Yemen, 47, 141 economic activities and corruption Egypt, 140 Libya, 140–141 Syria, 140, 150, 151, 152 Yemen, 141–142 economic liberalizations (and the army) Egypt, 81, 126–127, 144–145, 208 Libya, 140 Syria, 127, 155–156 effectiveness (military), 108, 126, 132, 171, 177, 181, 245, 282 Egypt Abu Ghazala, 80, 131, 143, 147 Amer, 30, 39, 44, 48, 49

295

296

Index

Egypt (cont.) Arab Organization for Industrialization, 129, 143, 145 Army Corps of Engineers, 144, 145, 260 constitution of 2012, 225 constitution of 2014, 264–265 constitutional amendments of 2011, 220 coup of 1952, 36 coup of 2013, 227–229 CSF, 72, 114, 188, 189, 222 Department of Morale Affairs, 120, 219, 261, 262 Free Officers, 30, 36, 38 Islamist challenge (and the military), 66–67, 73, 120–121 judges (and the army), 220, 221, 223, 228, 264, 267 Ministry of Military Production, 143, 145 Mubarak, Gamal, 71, 79, 80, 121, 131, 209, 219 Mubarak, Husni, 81, 208 Mubarak’s ousting, 208–209 Muslim Brotherhood (and Nasser), 30, 36, 48 Muslim Brotherhood (and al-Sisi), 225–227, 265, 267, 268 Muslim Brotherhood (and the SCAF), 220–221, 223–225 Nasser, 30, 34, 36, 38, 45, 48, 49, 69 National Services Organization, 143, 144, 147 Neguib, 48 relations with the Soviet Union, 34, 39, 45, 46, 130–131 relations with the US, 45, 109, 122, 131–132, 189, 214–215, 221, 266 retirees (military), 145–146, 261 riots of 1977, 66 riots of 1986, 66 Sadat, 30, 65, 66, 70, 71, 80, 120, 143 SCAF, 69, 78, 189, 208, 209, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 264 Shafiq, Ahmad, 209, 223, 263 al-Sisi, 182, 218, 224, 225, 226, 228, 229, 259, 260, 261, 262, 264, 266 social background (of officers), 29–30 Suleiman, Omar, 81, 208 Tamarrod, 229 Tantawi, 80, 81, 143, 144, 209, 218, 223, 224, 228, 263 uprising of 2011, 188 embeddedness (of armies), 15, 16–17, 107, 140, 164, 281, 282 European (armies), 8–10, 26, 35

Gulf monarchical state-building, 13, 158, 162–163, 168–169, 173 relations with foreign powers, 164, 167, 171, 172, 173, 177–178, 180 rent-driven military budgets, 128, 129, 167 hybrid/hybridization (of armies), 20, 180, 254 institutions (armies as), 5, 15–16, 63, 79, 108, 109, 112, 192, 205, 216, 280 interior/police forces, 73, 75, 222, 267 Iraqi (army), 52, 84, 291–293 jaysh (army), 25 Jordan, 159, 160, 161, 183 Arab Legion, 21, 160, 161 Black September, 165 KADDB, 172, 183 relations with the Gulf, 172, 174, 180, 183 Transjordanians and Palestinians, 160–161, 165 jund (soldier), 25 Kuwait, 162, 164, 168, 171, 172, 173, 178 Latin American (armies), 8, 12, 17, 200, 287–289, 291 Lebanese (army), 20, 65 Libya civil war of 2014, 256–257 coup of 1969, 36 Free Unionist Officers, 31, 36, 76 Gulf interventions, 178, 211, 213, 215, 257, 270 Haftar, Khalifa, 96, 97, 182, 213, 255, 256, 257, 258, 268, 269, 270 Libya National Army, 255–256, 268–269, 270 LIFG, 99, 213, 233 militias, 99, 198, 211, 211–212, 234, 235 NATO intervention, 199, 211, 212, 215 NTC, 211, 212, 233 people’s power, 76, 96, 97, 117, 129 political isolation law of 2013, 254–255 Qaddafi, 31, 49, 76, 77, 79, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 190 Qaddafi’s fall, 210–213 regular military, 97, 98, 111, 212, 213 relations with France, 47 relations with the US, 34 Revolutionary Committees, 76, 95

Index Sanousiyya, 30–31 Security Brigades, 97–98, 198 social background (of officers), 31 tribes, 37, 97, 99, 100, 199, 211, 213 uprising of 2011, 211

297

regime re-formation, 216, 257–258, 286 Egypt, 217–220, 257–258, 264–266, 268–271 Libya, 257–258 Tunisia, 272–273 repression (armies and), 187–190, 191, 202, 222–223, 261, 266–268

Syria Air Force Intelligence, 85, 90, 240, 241, 242 Alawi (officers), 41, 51, 73, 86–87, 115, 153, 154, 204, 240, 242 al-Assad, Bashar, 68, 86, 151, 154–156, 237 al-Assad, Hafez, 28, 40, 51, 52, 53, 73, 74, 79, 85, 86, 87, 89, 152 al-Assad, Maher, 194 al-Assad, Rifaat, 67, 88, 150 Baath Party, 32, 44, 49, 52, 73, 88, 89, 154 brutalization (of the army), 237 casualties (after 2012), 243–244 confessionalism (in the army), 41–42, 50–51, 89, 202, 204–205, 237, 238–240 Corrective Movement, 53, 110 coups of 1949, 37 FSA, 201, 205 Gulf interventions, 178, 202 Hama (1982), 67 Hezbollah (role), 241–242, 244 al-Hourani, Akram, 37, 42 Military Committee, 51–52 military retirees, 153 militias (pro-regime), 89, 194, 240–241, 245 opposition armed groups, 236, 238, 239 relations with Iran, 111, 133, 134, 201, 241, 245 relations with Russia, 201, 241, 245 Russian-Iranian intervention, 245–246 security-military nexus, 90, 196, 203, 204 al-Shishakli, Adib, 37, 42 social background (of officers), 32, 40–41 social engineering (officer corps), 68, 86, 87 Tlass, Mustafa, 86, 151, 201 United Arab Republic, 45, 49 uprising of 2011, 190–191, 194–196 al-Zaʾim, Husni, 32, 50

Sandhurst, 170, 173 Saudi Arabia, 179 MBS reforms, 177, 182 relations with the US, 163 SANG, 162, 163, 169, 171, 175, 181, 182 tribes, 162, 163, 169, 171 Security Sector Reform (SSR) Libya, 233–235 Tunisia, 274–275 Yemen, 229–232, 252–253 Sudan, 142, 181, 183, 185, 290

threat marketing/terrorism/counterinsurgency, 258–259, 268 Egypt, 265–266 Gulf, 178 Libya, 190, 270–271 Syria, 197, 213–214, 236–237 Tunisia, 277–278 Tunisia Ammar, Rachid, 59, 189, 207, 272, 273 Ben Ali, 57, 58, 102, 103, 104, 105, 113, 206, 207 Ben Youssef, Salah, 56, 57

militarism, 17–18, 118, 119 militarism (renewed), 177, 178–179, 180, 182–183, 259–260, 270 military academies, 29, 32, 39, 40, 59, 108, 112, 116, 121, 146, 177, 180, 227 modernization theory, 2, 26, 27–28, 31, 56 Morocco, 160, 161, 162, 164, 166–167, 173 mukhabarat (political police), 62, 69, 78, 84–85, 89–90 officers (and the state), 12–13, 28–33, 38, 39, 43–44, 63, 222, 227 officers (in the state), 46, 142–143, 147–148, 152–153 officers and political agency, 18–19, 185–186, 210, 217 officers (in society), 39, 117–119, 140, 219 Oman, 164, 171 Ottoman reforms, 10–11 Pakistan, 130, 162, 172, 174 patrimonialism (in armies), 6, 32, 39, 78, 85, 86, 168, 170 professionalization, 108–109, 110–111, 112, 113, 280–281

298

Index

Tunisia (cont.) Bourguiba, 56, 60, 100, 101 coup attempt of 1962, 58 coup of Ben Ali, 103, 121 interior ministry, 104, 104, 105 National Guard, 101, 102, 104, 137, 188, 273, 274, 277 political quietism (officers), 57, 58, 59, 60, 103 political quietism (officers) under stress, 206–208, 274–276 relations with France, 57, 59, 112, 137, 277 relations with the US, 59, 112, 136, 137, 207, 277 social background (of officers), 58 uprising of 2011, 187–188 Turkish (model), 83, 101, 221, 261, 294 UAE, 169, 170, 173, 179, 180 MBZ, 170, 177, 179, 181 undersized armies, 58, 79, 163 war (and the military), 33, 49, 53, 66, 70, 71, 96, 109, 110, 111, 281–282 weaknesses (of armies in power), 47–49 weapons procurement Algeria, 136, 258 Egypt, 130–133 Gulf, 167–168, 178, 179 Jordan, 183 Libya, 129–130

Syria, 129, 133–134 Yemen, 135 Yemen Ali Mohsen, 47, 93, 94, 197, 230, 231, 248, 251 civil war (1962–1967), 38, 42–43, 48, 53 coup of 1962, 37 Hadi, Abdurabbo Mansour, 210, 229, 230, 249, 250 Houthis, 94, 126, 232, 247–248, 250 Jordanian (role), 55, 76, 94, 135, 184, 231 relations with the Soviet Union, 33, 43, 134 relations with the US, 85, 93, 94, 125, 135, 142, 230 Saleh, Ali Abdallah, 47, 74, 79, 91, 92, 93, 95, 141, 198, 210, 230, 231, 248, 250 Saleh’s ousting, 210 Sanhan officers, 74, 75, 91, 93, 94, 231, 232, 250 Saudi Arabia (role), 56, 178, 210, 215, 249 social background (of officers), 33 southern army retirees, 91–92, 251 tribes, 42, 43, 54–55, 75, 91, 116, 251 UAE (role), 178, 181, 251–252, 253 unification of Yemens, 76, 93, 94 Zaydi Imams, 32–33, 37–38, 53