The Contemporary Middle East: A Westview Reader [3 ed.] 9780813348391, 9780813348407, 2012033625

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T H E C O N T E M P O R A RY

MIDDLE EAST

T H E C O N T E M P O R A RY

MIDDLE EAST A WESTVIEW READER

QR T H I R D

E D I T I O N

WITH A SPECIAL CONTRIBUTION BY

Shibley Telhami EDITED BY

Karl Yambert

New York London

For Hallie

First published 2013 by Westview Press Published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2013 by Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Every effort has been made to secure required permissions for all text, images, maps, and other art reprinted in this volume. Designed by Jeff Williams Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The contemporary Middle East : a Westview reader / edited by Karl Yambert ; with a special contribution by Shibley Telhami.—3rd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8133-4839-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8133-4840-7 (e-book) 1. Middle East. I. Yambert, Karl. DS44.C575 2012 956.05—dc23 2012033625 ISBN 13: 978-0-8133-4839-1 (pbk)

C ONTENTS QR

Preface to the Third Edition xi Acknowledgments xiv A Note on Editorial Matters xvi Summary of Recent Events, 2011–2012 xviii

I. H ISTORY AND P ERSPECTIVES 1

The Peoples and Cultures of the Middle East

6

Colbert C. Held and John Thomas Cummings Within its regional unity, the Middle East possesses great cultural diversity. Differences of language, religion, and ethnicity create a complex mosaic of peoples.

2

The Roots of Arab Bitterness

24

Arthur Goldschmidt Jr. and Lawrence Davidson Varieties of Arab nationalism all share a consistent distrust of the West, based on bitter historical experience.

3

Islamist Perceptions of US Policy in the Middle East

37

Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad Islamism is a worldview in which the US support for Israel in particular is understood to be part of a larger Western effort to keep Muslim states weak and subservient.

4

Global Energy and the Middle East

47

Steve Yetiv Access to Middle East oil will become even more critical as oil supplies dwindle, even as the region’s flow of oil is vulnerable to several sources of major disruption.

v

vi

Contents

5

New US Policies for a New Middle East?

55

William B. Quandt The Bush administration’s ambitious plan to remake the Middle East fell short and left the United States facing many obstacles in pursuit of its goals in the region.

6

Cairo Speech

67

Barack Obama President Obama seeks a “new beginning” by addressing sources of tension between the United States and the Muslims of the world.

II. I SRAEL AND THE PAL E ST I N I A N S 7

Israel and the Arabs, and Beyond

91

Robert O. Freedman Israel has battled Arab states since its founding and now faces a threat beyond the Arab world in Iran, which backs Hezbollah and Hamas, two militant enemies of Israel.

8

The United States and Israel

99

Bernard Reich and Shannon Powers Broad support of Israel by the United States is accompanied by disagreements on many specifics of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

9

The Palestinians

120

Glenn E. Robinson Contradictory promises to Jews and Palestinian Arabs set the stage for inevitable conflict following the 1948 establishment of Israel.

10 Sharon’s Fence

132

Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar Ariel Sharon’s “security fence,” new settlements, and unilateral withdrawal from Gaza were designed to deepen Israel’s hold on the West Bank.

11 Whither the Palestinians? Samih K. Farsoun and Naseer H. Aruri The millions of Palestinian refugees and their right to return are not always represented by those Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories.

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12 Ethnicity and Nation-Building in the State of Israel

vii

150

Calvin Goldscheider Israel’s pluralistic society is shaped by Jewish communities outside the State of Israel as well as by Palestinians within territories administered by Israel.

13 Syria’s Threat to Israel

162

Hirsch Goodman Syria’s threat to Israel consists chiefly in its serving as a conduit for Iranian aid to Hamas and Hezbollah.

14 The Iranian Nuclear Threat Against Israel

167

Steven R. David Even given scenarios in which Iran might launch a nuclear attack against Israel, or Israel might preemptively strike Iranian facilities, Israel will likely allow Iran to become a nuclear state.

III. I RAQ AND I RAN 15 Pashtunistan: Afghanistan, Pakistan—and Iraq

189

Stephen Tanner America’s battle against the perpetrators of 9/11, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, was derailed by turning attention to Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

16 The Land and People of Modern Iraq

199

Phebe Marr Iraq must contend with the separatist tendencies of Shiite Arabs and Sunni Kurds, who were ruled until recently by a Sunni Arab minority.

17 Impacts of the Iraq War

209

James DeFronzo The Iraq War damaged US moral standing internationally, strengthened Hamas and Hezbollah, and established a Shiite-dominated Iraqi government friendly to Iran.

18 America’s Troubled Moment in the Middle East William L. Cleveland and Martin Bunton In the aftermath of the Iraq War, the policies of Barack Obama toward Iraq and Iran have been surprisingly similar to the policies of George W. Bush.

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19 Maliki Consolidates Power in Post-Saddam Iraq

234

Phebe Marr Shiite prime minister Nouri al-Maliki shored up his position by steering a secular, nationalist course rather than a sectarian one, and by negotiating America’s exit from Iraq.

20 The Iranian Revolution and Its Consequences

247

David W. Lesch The Iranian Revolution of 1979 established a Shiite theocracy next door to Saddam Hussein, prompting him to invade Iran and begin the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War.

21 Islamic Republic of Iran: Political Dynamics and Foreign Policy

259

Mark Gasiorowski Iran’s political culture contains an undercurrent of distrust of foreigners even as Iranian moderates in particular occasionally reach out to the West.

22 Iran’s Regional Foreign Policy

270

Manochehr Dorraj The US rebuff of Iran as a member of the “axis of evil” contributed to Iran’s strengthened ties with Russia, China, Syria, Hamas, and Hezbollah.

23 Iran, Israel, and the United States

279

Scott Ritter The Israeli lobby influences US foreign policy to regard Iran as a regional threat, but the United States would do better to normalize relations with Iran.

24 The Iranian Predicament

284

Michael Axworthy The United States rejected Iran’s 2003 “Grand Bargain” that would have committed Iran to a two-state solution with Israel and to a peaceful nuclear program.

IV. T HE I SL AMISTS 25 Islamists and Democracy: The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Marwan Bishara The Muslim Brotherhood’s history of charitable work translates into strong party organization in post-Mubarak Egypt, even as traditionalists and radicals disagree over the Brotherhood’s course.

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26 Talking to Terrorists: Hamas and Hezbollah

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307

Mark Perry Terrorist groups that participate in elections and governments and that have constituencies to answer to, such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, can be negotiated with.

V. T HE A RAB S PRI N G 27 The Arab Spring, 2011

330

Eugene Rogan The trajectories of the Arab Spring are followed in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, where longtime rulers were ousted, and in Bahrain and Syria, whose regimes remain in power.

28 Egypt: Mubarak and After

342

Arthur Goldschmidt Jr. After the end of Hosni Mubarak’s three-decade rule, Egypt’s first-ever free national elections resulted in some major surprises.

29 Bashar al-Asad, Syria, and the Arab Spring

353

David W. Lesch Despite warning signs, Bashar al-Asad of Syria did not expect the Arab Spring to wash over his country, and he still brutally puts down what he considers to be foreign-inspired uprisings.

30 The Arab World at the Intersection of the National and the Transnational

360

James L. Gelvin While certain transnational factors in common made Arab states vulnerable to protest, national variations ensured that the Arab Spring would follow divergent courses.

VI. L O OK I N G F ORWARD 31 The Contemporary Middle East: Some Questions, Some Answers Shibley Telhami A noted authority addresses questions about Iraq, Iran, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Syria, and Egypt.

372

Contents

x

Select Bibliography William L. Cleveland and Martin Bunton

386

Glossary Notable Persons Chronology Since World War I Index

394 405 408 412

M APS Map I.1

The Middle East

1

Map 1.1

Middle East languages

8

Map 1.2

Middle East religions

12

Map 1.3

Present extent of Islam

14

Map 2.1

The Sykes-Picot Agreement, 1916

32

Map 2.2

The Middle Eastern mandates, 1924

35

Map II.1 Israel

81

Map II.2 Palestine

82

Map II.3 United Nations plan for partitioning Palestine, 1947

83

Map III.1 Iraq

179

Map III.2 Iran

179

Map 16.1 Ethnoreligious groups in Iraq

203

P REFACE TO THE T HIRD E DITION QR

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hen vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself afire in a small Tunisian town, he touched off a conflagration that swept across the Arab world and burned even brighter than other momentous news stories of 2011, including the assassination of Osama bin Laden by US Navy SEALs in Pakistan and the withdrawal of all American combat troops from Iraq almost nine years after the United States invaded that country. The third edition of The Contemporary Middle East, then, provides fresh material on the Arab Spring and on a number of other current developments in the region as well. As did the two previous editions, the third edition brings together sometimes provocative but always authoritative voices of prominent Middle East observers— scholars, journalists, and policy advisers—whose assessments of current affairs have appeared in books recently published by imprints of the Perseus Books Group, including Basic Books, Nation Books, PublicAffairs, and Westview Press. The combination of incisive essays and their intersecting coverage of topics has made the book readable and informative for students in courses on the Middle East as well as for general readers with an interest in current world events. The new edition retains a format that will be familiar to those acquainted with its precursor editions. Its first section of readings provides a basic introduction to the peoples, cultures, and history of the Middle East; background on the perspectives by which Middle Easterners view the United States; assessments of US foreign policy in the region; and President Barack Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world in his speech in Cairo. New to this section is Steve Yetiv’s essay on global energy—particularly oil—and the Middle East. The question of Israel and the Palestinians frames so much of what transpires in the political realm of the Middle East that it has seemed advantageous to turn next to coverage of that issue. As in previous editions, then, Part II comprises chapters that consider the Israeli-Palestinian issue from a number of interconnecting and sometimes strongly opposing viewpoints. Two new readings are Hirsch Goodman’s and Steven R. David’s respective assessments of the threats posed to Israel by Syria and a nuclear Iran. xi

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Preface to the Third Edition

The attention of most Americans was perhaps first forcefully drawn to the Middle East by the events of 9/11. But the American route from 9/11 to the Middle East, which is to say, to Iraq, passed initially through Afghanistani—and drew on an uneasy alliance with Pakistan. Part III on Iraq and Iran, then, begins with a new contribution by Stephen Tanner on the American foray into “Pashtunistan,” the wild tribal region that makes up the Afghan-Pakistani border, and the subsequent diversion of American attention from Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Complementing the chapters that introduce the land and people of Iraq and that provide perspectives on the Iraq War, Phebe Marr contributes a new analysis of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s consolidation of power in post-Saddam and post-America Iraq. Iraq is paired with its longtime nemesis, Iran, in this section, which examines the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath; Iranian foreign policy, particularly with regard to Israel and the United States; and the international repercussions of Iran’s nuclear program. Part IV consists of two entirely new readings on Islamists and their potential effect on democracy in the Middle East. Al Jazeera’s Marwan Bishara looks at the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, all the more worthy of renewed consideration in light of that group’s performance in the parliamentary and presidential elections of post-Mubarak Egypt. And foreign affairs analyst Mark Perry makes a case for “talking with terrorists,” specifically Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. An entirely new section is devoted expressly to the Arab Spring (Part V). Eugene Rogan traces the different trajectories of the protest movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria. Arthur Goldschmidt Jr. then provides greater depth on the Egyptian case, examining that nation’s political life under Mubarak and after his fall, with special attention to the 2012 presidential elections. Likewise, David W. Lesch analyzes Bashar Asad’s reactions to the Arab Spring as manifested in Syria. Then James L. Gelvin steps back once again to share a broad perspective on the shared preconditions underlying the Arab protest movements, and he considers as well the national factors that nonetheless led different regimes to follow different courses. The concluding chapter addressing current conditions and events is once again by veteran Middle East observer and commentator Shibley Telhami. Though the essay’s question-and-answer format is carried over from previous editions, the questions and the answers themselves are entirely new to this edition. The readings are again supplemented by a number of reader-friendly features, including a select bibliography by the late William L. Cleveland and Martin Bunton, which offers a well-considered guide to further reading on the topics of the book. The brief introductory summaries for each of the essays are supplemented by a feature new to this edition: introductions to five of the book’s six parts. The part introductions provide pertinent historical and political contexts for approaching the readings in that section. In addition, numerous maps throughout

Preface to the Third Edition

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the volume provide an essential sense of place. In the back matter, a glossary, a brief register of notable persons, and a chronology of events since World War I provide readers with handy quick-reference sections, complemented by the summary of recent events that appears in the volume’s front matter. —K ARL Y AMBERT

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS QR

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everal contributors to this volume graciously consented to update their previously published works expressly for the third edition of The Contemporary Middle East. My profound thanks go out to Arthur Goldschmidt Jr. for revising his chapter on Egypt to interpret that country’s first presidential elections of the post-Mubarak era, even amid other pressing demands on his time; to Phebe Marr for extending her analysis of Nouri al-Maliki’s consolidation of power in Iraq both before and following the US withdrawal of forces; to Shibley Telhami for again writing a wholly new question-and-answer essay as the volume’s concluding chapter; and to Bernard Reich and Shannon Powers for assessing the state of Israeli-US relations into the fourth year of the Obama administration. I am indebted to Bernie for his many kind attentions over the years, and I hope that he finds his new emeritus status nothing but fulfilling. David Lesch and James Gelvin generously allowed me to adapt prepublication drafts of their chapters in The Arab Spring: Change and Resistance in the Middle East, edited by Lesch and Mark L. Haas. Again, thank you all. I thank the following for their assessments of the second edition, which helped us prepare the third edition: Dale Thomas, University of Memphis, Department of Political Science; Ali Abootalebi, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, Department of Political Science; James M. Lutz, Indiana University–Purdue University, professor and chair of the Political Science Department; Gigi Gokcek, Dominican College, assistant professor of political science; and Peter Heller, Manhattan College, professor of government. The staff at Westview Press, many of them my longtime but now former colleagues, merit my particular thanks. It was publisher Cathleen Tetro who first conceived the idea of a Westview reader that would draw upon the press’s long shelf of distinguished textbooks on the Middle East and who gave me rein to determine as best I could how such a volume might be assembled. Cathleen’s initial idea has since grown to incorporate titles and authors not just from Westview but from other imprints of the Perseus Books Group as well. I am grateful to editorial director Priscilla McGeehon for inviting me to return as editor for the third edition of The Contemporary Middle East, a task that I’ve found stimulating and enjoyable. I hope Priscilla finds that her trust was well placed. Associate editor xiv

Acknowledgments

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Kelsey Mitchell has been my primary in-house contact during the process of putting the new edition together. Indeed, Kelsey proposed several cogent readings that made their way into the book. Kelsey is moving on to new challenges and opportunities, and I wish her well in her every endeavor. I am indebted, yet again, to associate marketing director Erica Lawrence for her consummate promotion of the new edition. Had she not also performed similarly fine services for the first and second editions, there might have been no defensible justification for a third edition. Erica is adding a new chapter or two to her life’s story, and I wish for her “all happinesse.” Thanks, too, to production editor Sandra Beris for adroitly guiding the manuscript through the production maze. I’ve enjoyed working with Sandra again. I am grateful to copyeditor Jennifer Kelland for her sharp-eyed attention to any number of issues that had escaped previous attention. Against my better judgment in several instances, I have not acceded to all of Jennifer’s suggestions, but the book is much the better for those we did include. I also thank Kay Mariea for her careful proofreading.

—Karl Yambert

A N OTE ON E DITORIAL M ATTERS QR

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hapter 31, by Shibley Telhami, was specially commissioned for this volume. Chapter 6 is an address by President Barack Obama and is reprinted in its entirety. Chapters 29 and 30, by David W. Lesch and James L. Gelvin, respectively, derive from prepublication manuscript drafts for the forthcoming volume The Arab Spring: Change and Resistance in the Middle East, edited by Lesch and Mark L. Haas. Special updates to their chapters were supplied by Bernard Reich and Shannon Powers (chapter 8) and Arthur Goldschmidt Jr. (chapter 28). All the remaining readings, including the select bibliography by William L. Cleveland and Martin Bunton, consist of condensed versions of materials appearing in books recently published by various imprints of the Perseus Books Group—Basic Books, Nation Books, PublicAffairs, and Westview Press. The act of shortening the materials for inclusion in the present volume required surprisingly few and minor editorial revisions to preserve continuity. For the most part, then, these changes have been made silently, though I’ve indicated some other, possibly more significant editorial interventions within square brackets. In several instances, to assist the reader through a given chapter, I have inserted headings of my own devising, though not within brackets. Of particular note, perhaps, is my decision not to indicate omissions by means of ellipses. Rather, I here openly acknowledge that the act of condensing previously published materials is pervasive and silent throughout this volume (except in chapter 6). Anyone troubled by this, or (happy alternative!) anyone inspired by the chapters of this book to read further, is strongly encouraged to read the materials in their full and original form, within the context of the volumes in which they originally appeared. The attentive reader will quickly discern that commentators on the Middle East do not adhere to a single, agreed-upon system for transliterating Arabic. I have respected and retained the original spellings in each chapter, though this necessarily results in a great deal of inconsistency across chapters. Thus, al-Qa’ida, in one chapter conceivably appears as al-Qaida, al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda, or Al Qaeda in other chapters. Likewise, Hezbollah, Hizbollah, and Hizbullah are used in different chapters to denote the same referent, as are Assad and Asad. xvi

A Note on Editorial Matters

xvii

In contrast, the editorial apparatus—including especially the part-opening essays and the short introductions to each chapter—uses a consistent, if ad hoc, system of transliteration, which perhaps derives more from journalistic than scholarly usages, particularly in the use of Shiite (as both noun and adjective) instead of Shia, Shi’a, Shi’i, Shi’ite, or the related variants of Shi’i. I have also resorted to variants that omit Arabic diacritics (Baath rather than Ba’ath, for example). An unavoidable correlate of this editorial decision is that, for example, the introduction to a given reading may well rely on different spellings than the reading itself.

S UMMARY OF R ECENT E VENTS , 2011–2012 QR

January 2011 • Tunisia: Mohamed Bouazizi, who had set himself afire the previous month, dies. Widespread protests force President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from office. • Egypt: Protests erupt calling for the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptian army declares it will not use force against the people.

February 2011 • Egypt: Mubarak stands down, handing power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. • Yemen: Tens of thousands of protestors seek regime change. President Ali Abdullah Saleh offers to step down in 2013. • Bahrain: The main opposition party withdraws from the parliament after government forces fire on protestors. • Libya: The city of Benghazi falls to rebels. The UN Security Council unanimously refers Muammar Gadhafi to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

March 2011 • Libya: US President Barack Obama urges Gadhafi to step down. The UN Security Council backs imposing a no-fly zone and air strikes against Libya. • Bahrain: Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) forces, primarily from Saudi Arabia, deploy troops in Bahrain on the government’s request. • Yemen: President Ali Abdullah Saleh fires his cabinet but fails to deliver other reforms. Leading military commanders defect from the regime.

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Summary of Recent Events, 2011–2012

xix

April 2011 • Yemen: President Saleh signals his approval of a GCC deal by which he would step down but insists he will do so only at the end of his term in 2013. • Libya: Arab and Western leaders declare Gadhafi has lost all legitimacy and unanimously call on him to step down. • Bahrain: Authorities systematically attack and arrest medical workers who assisted injured protestors. • Syria: Hundreds of members of President Assad’s Baath Party resign in protest of Syria’s increasingly bloody crackdown on demonstrators. A divided UN Security Council fails to condemn the government’s use of violence.

May 2011 • Pakistan: Osama bin Laden is killed in a raid by US Navy SEALs. • Syria: The United Nations imposes an arms embargo and other sanctions on Syria. The European Union also imposes sanctions. • Egypt: Tens of thousands of protestors in Cairo demonstrate in favor of the Palestinians. Egypt opens border to Gaza, displaying stronger sympathy for Hamas. Ex-president Mubarak is bound over for trial for the deaths of protestors against his government. • Yemen: President Saleh refuses three times to sign the GCC-brokered transition deal. • Libya: NATO air forces levy heavy strikes on Tripoli.

June 2011 • Yemen: President Saleh is badly wounded in an assassination attempt. He flies to Saudi Arabia for treatment. • Tunisia: Former president Ben Ali and his wife are sentenced in absentia to thirty-five years for theft. • Bahrain: King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa orders an investigation into the regime’s crackdown on antigovernment protestors.

July 2011 • Libya: The International Criminal Court issues an arrest warrant for Gadhafi for crimes against humanity committed against antiregime protestors. The

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Summary of Recent Events, 2011–2012

National Transition Council (NTC) of the rebels wins international recognition as the country’s legitimate authority.

August 2011 • Egypt: Mubarak is brought into court on a stretcher to face charges of corruption and killing protestors. Egypt brokers a cease-fire to halt missiles fired into Israel from Gaza and retaliatory air strikes by Israel. • Libya: Rebel forces capture Tripoli; Gadhafi flees into hiding. The NTC prepares to move from Benghazi to Tripoli. • Syria: Rebels reject praise from al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, who attempts to characterize the uprising as an Islamist battle against US and Israeli interests. Saudi Arabia recalls its ambassador in Damascus. President Barack Obama’s demand that Assad resign is backed by England, France, Germany, and the European Union.

September 2011 • Iran: EU bans imports of Iranian oil. • Egypt: Crowds storm the Israeli embassy in Cairo. Most of the embassy staff is evacuated. Egypt’s ruling council reimposes Mubarak-era emergency laws, sparking protests.

October 2011 • Yemen: Tawakkul Karman, a journalist and peace activist, is one of three women sharing the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. • Saudi Arabia: King Abdullah announces women will be allowed to vote in 2015. • Syria: Russia and China veto a UN Security Council resolution threatening sanctions against the Syrian regime. However, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev urges Bashar Assad to reform or leave office, as does China. Turkey says it will consider all options, including military measures, in dealing with the Syrian crisis. Libya’s interim government recognizes Syria’s opposition as that country’s legitimate authority. • Tunisia: In elections to the constitutional assembly, the moderate Islamist Ennahda Party captures twenty-four of fifty-seven seats. • Libya: Gadhafi is captured and killed by forces of what is now the new Libyan government.

Summary of Recent Events, 2011–2012

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• Israel: Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held captive by Hamas militants since 2006, is released in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners.

November 2011 • Yemen: As President Saleh battles renegade soldiers and tribal militias, leaders of a southern secessionist movement threaten to split the country into two countries again. • Syria: The United States pulls its ambassador from Damascus. Syria agrees to an Arab League peace plan calling for government talks with the opposition, but, soon after, the Arab League expels Syria for failing to end crackdowns, and it imposes economic and political sanctions. Jordan’s King Abdullah says Assad should quit. Turkey’s president says Assad can no longer be trusted, and “change is inevitable.” • Palestine: UNESCO accepts the Palestinian Authority as a full member over opposition from the United States and Israel. The United States withholds its contributions to UNESCO.

December 2011 • Syria: Turkey imposes fresh sanctions on Syria. • Iran: The British embassy in Tehran is stormed by protestors against Britain’s support for sanctions targeting Iran’s nuclear program. Britain closes its embassy and expels Iranian diplomats. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports Iran’s research is used to develop nuclear weapons. • Egypt: The latest of massive protests against the military junta numbers perhaps 100,000. Parliamentary elections begin. • Egypt: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party is the leading vote getter in parliamentary elections. • Iran: Iran threatens to block the Strait of Hormuz. • Iraq: Last US troops leave Iraq.

January 2012 • Yemen: Yemenis rally and demand that President Ali Abdullah stand trial. • Iran: The United States imposes sanctions on Iran’s central bank. The European Union embargoes Iranian oil. Iran declares it is ready for nuclear talks with the West but also threatens to ban oil exports to the West. An IAEA team seeks Iranian cooperation in inspecting its nuclear facilities.

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Summary of Recent Events, 2011–2012

• Syria: The Arab League monitors Syrian war zones near Damascus. The Arab Gulf states and Turkey urge Syria to accept the Arab League plan. The Syrian opposition seeks UN protection.

February 2012 • Iran: IAEA inspectors are denied access to Iranian facilities. • Yemen: Saleh steps down, ceding power to his vice president.

March 2012 • Iran: President Obama warns that all elements of American power remain an option to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Iran offers to allow inspections.

May 2012 • Iran: IAEA inspectors find traces of uranium enriched to a level beyond the maximum for civilian use and report Iran is building hundreds of new centrifuges. In negotiations on curbing Iran’s nuclear program, Iran seeks an end to economic sanctions before making concessions, and the West adheres to strict sanctions until it sees concessions by Iran. • Syria: More than one hundred civilians, mostly women and children, are killed near Homs. The UN Security Council unanimously condemns the Syrian government for its role in the massacre. The United States, Germany, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, and Australia expel senior Syrian diplomats in protest. • Egypt: The top two spots in Egypt’s presidential elections go to Mohamed Morsi, a candidate with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and Ahmed Shafiq, a former prime minister under Mubarak, who will meet in a runoff election. The choice between an Islamist and a hard-line member of the old regime dismays many Egyptians. • Afghanistan: President Obama says US troops will withdraw completely by 2014.

June 2012 • Egypt: Mubarak is sentenced to life in prison. The Egyptian Supreme Court rules the recently elected parliament invalid. On the eve of the presidential runoff election, the SCAF announces a curtailing of presidential powers. Morsi wins the presidency.

Summary of Recent Events, 2011–2012

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July 2012 • Egypt: President Morsi defies the SCAF by calling the dismissed parliament to reconvene. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits Morsi in Cairo and receives assurances that Egypt will respect its international treaties, including, presumably, its treaty with Israel. • Syria: Syria shoots down a Turkish plane that had strayed into its territory. Two high-ranking defections from the Syrian regime, by a brigadier general and an ambassador, fuel speculation that other defections might follow. Four key military figures, including President Assad’s brother-in-law, are killed by a bomb. Rebel troops flood into Damascus. Russia and China veto a UN Security Council resolution to sanction Syria for using heavy weapons against the uprising. • Iran: The European Union begins its boycott of Iranian oil. Iran announces it will build a nuclear-powered submarine. Israel blames Iran for the bombing of a bus of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria. • Israel: Presidential nominee Mitt Romney visits Israel and offends Palestinian leaders by declaring Jerusalem’s Israel’s capital and attributing Israeli economic success to the “hands of Providence.” His campaign says Romney would accept an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.

August 2012 • Syria: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declares the need for a transition plan for Syria after Bashar Assad, warning outsiders (presumably Iran) not to take advantage of any power vacuum. Turkish and US officials coordinate military, intelligence, and political responses to the crisis. President Barack Obama warns that any use of the government’s chemical weapons would change the American “calculus” in the region. • Egypt: President Mohamed Morsi forces two top generals into retirement and annuls the military’s June assumption of constitutional powers that had previously belonged to the presidency. • Israel: Israel’s foreign minister calls on Western powers to declare that international talks with Iran on its nuclear program have failed, and demands that Iran be given an ultimatum of “a few weeks” to cease the program. • Iran: Iran warns that it will not allow Syria to be removed from an “axis of resistance” to terrorism. The country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, orders intensification of terror attacks against the West for supporting the opposition to Syrian President Bashar Assad. The United States accusing Iran of training a Syrian militia to bolster the Assad regime.Israel: August 2012

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Summary of Recent Events, 2011–2012

September 2012 • The Muslim World: An Internet video mocking the Prophet Mohammed sparks anti-American protests in some twenty countries across the Muslim world, including Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen in North Africa and the Middle East as well as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia elsewhere throughout Asia. Palestinians also protest in Gaza and Jerusalem. • Libya: On 9/11 the US ambassador to Libya and three other Americans are killed in an assault on a US consulate apparently by al-Qaeda-affiliated militia members. The murder of the well-liked ambassador sparks popular protests against militias, followed by a government crackdown on militias. • Egypt: Protesters breach the walls of the American embassy in Cairo, hoisting a black banner in place of the US flag. Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi apologizes for the attack after a tense phone call with US President Obama, but declares that if Egypt is to honor its treaty with Israel, the US must honor its Camp David commitment to Palestinian self-rule. Government troops clash with Islamist militants in Sinai over assaults on government forces and smuggling of arms and other goods through hundreds of tunnels into Gaza. • Israel: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asserts that those countries that fail to set clear limits to Iran’s nuclear program, and then to impose strict consequences on Iran for exceeding those limits, have no moral right to prevent Israel from striking Iran. He claims Iran is six or seven months from being on the brink of building a nuclear bomb. • Iran: The commander of the Revolutionary Guard warns that nothing will remain of Israel if it attacks Iran over Iran’s nuclear program. The commander warned that, in the event of war, oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz could be restricted and US bases in the Gulf could be subjected to massive missile strikes. The commander also says the Revolutionary Guard has advisers in Lebanon and Syria but has not yet decided whether to send military reinforcements to save the Assad regime. • Syria: Syria accuses Turkey of allowing terrorists including al-Qaeda to enter Syria to spread chaos and destruction. The new international envoy charged with formulating a plan to stop the bloodshed admits that the task is nearly impossible. Rebel leaders announce they will move their headquarters from Turkey to Syria to speed the fall of the Assad regime. • Afghanistan: 33,000 American “surge” troops leave Afghanistan. The remaining 68,000 US troops are due to leave in 2014, ending the longest war in US history.

PART I

History and Perspectives QR

Map I.1. The Middle East

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hat is the Middle East? The term Middle East first came into use in the early twentieth century to refer to the vast areas of Asia between what were then called the Near East (the lands at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, from Turkey south to Egypt) and the Far East (comprising notably China, Japan, and Korea). All three terms—Near, Middle, and Far East—are unabashedly Eurocentric, defining as they do great regions and numerous peoples of the world according to their distance from Europe and Europeans. By a more value-neutral terminology, the Far East, for example, is now more commonly called East Asia. In its first usages, the Middle East was considered to include the Arabian Peninsula and the former lands of ancient Mesopotamia and Persia (modern Iraq and Iran, respectively). It also extended beyond Iran deep into Central Asia and to Afghanistan, which bordered that part of British India that would eventually become independent as Pakistan. Over time, however, the term’s more usual applications came to focus on the westernmost of those regions, such that Middle East referred most specifically to the countries and regions centered on the Persian Gulf (sometimes called the Arabian Gulf ). It therefore included most prominently Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, and Iran.

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However, in another semantic shift, the term Near East largely fell into disuse (except in the fields of ancient history and archaeology) as it was supplanted by the newer term, Middle East. Thus, although no one definition of the Middle East can claim universal adherence, in rule-of-thumb contemporary usage, the Middle East generally includes those countries rimming the eastern Mediterranean as well as those surrounding the Persian Gulf. The less-Eurocentric term West Asia is sometimes encountered as a synonym. Further complicating the denotation of the term, however, are the northernmost countries of the African continent, which line the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea—including Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya—and which are often considered culturally akin to the Middle East. They thus make up the western portion of a larger cultural entity descriptively, if inelegantly, referred to as the Middle East and North Africa. (Geographically, Egypt is part of North Africa, but for historical and political purposes, it is usually considered part of the Middle East rather than North Africa.) By whatever label one might apply to the two regions, it makes sense, in certain contexts at least, to consider North Africa together with the Middle East proper, because they share a history of both Arab and Islamic dominance. In the seventh and eighth centuries, followers of the Islamic prophet Muhammad swept out of the Arabian Peninsula and overran first neighboring and then ever-more-distant lands. Arabic language and culture, and especially the Islamic religion, characterized a number of Muslim dynasties that ranged to India in the east and extended along North Africa to the Atlantic Ocean in the west. In the west, in fact, Muslim armies did not remain confined to Africa but crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to conquer most of the Iberian Peninsula, home of modern Spain and Portugal, and even traversed the Pyrenees to occupy briefly what is now southern France. Almost immediately following the death of Muhammad, Islam experienced a schism that still divides the Muslim world today. Sunni and Shiite Muslims disagree about who the legitimate successors to Muhammad were, and that disagreement has often taken violent forms—no different, sadly, than the often brutal history between Protestant and Catholic Christians. Sunnis make up by far the majority of the world’s Muslim population, and they predominate in most Middle East countries. However, Shiites constitute the majority in both Iraq and Iran. In Yemen, Shiites rule a Sunni majority, and the regime in Syria adheres to an offshoot of Shiite Islam in a country that is otherwise chiefly Sunni, albeit with significant Christian and Druze minorities as well. Eventually, most Arab lands were absorbed into the Ottoman Empire. In 1453, after several centuries of previous expansion, the Ottoman Turks effectively ended the tottering Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire by capturing its capital, Constantinople (now known as Istanbul, the capital of Turkey). Under Suleiman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century, the Ottomans ruled over southeast Europe to the gates of Vienna in Austria, over Western Asia from the Tigris and Euphrates to the Nile, and over North Africa to Algeria.

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The Ottomans themselves were Turks, though their empire was, as empires generally are, a multiethnic and multilingual conglomeration of peoples, which included most of the world’s Arabs. The Ottoman Empire was a Muslim state, and Ottoman sultans were recognized as caliphs, or the de facto leaders of the world community of Islam. But the empire accorded a great deal of freedom to religious minorities, including Christians and Jews, so long as they acknowledged Ottoman authority by paying their proper taxes. The Ottoman Empire was in pronounced decline by the nineteenth century, reputedly being called “the sick man of Europe” by Russia’s Tsar Nicholas I. Among the empire’s many difficulties, Arab nationalists agitated for independence from their Ottoman overlords, by armed revolt if necessary. The British officer T. E. Lawrence, better known to the world as Lawrence of Arabia, helped lead Arab insurgencies against the Turks during World War I, in which the Ottoman Empire had sided with Germany and against Britain. The Ottomans surrendered to the Allies in 1918, and the victors set about partitioning the empire. The League of Nations granted mandates over Palestine and Mesopotamia to the United Kingdom and over Syria to France. By terms of the mandates, the European powers were to render to the former Ottoman territories advice and assistance till such time as the dependencies could stand on their own as new nations. Eventually, the nation of Iraq was formed from the Mesopotamian mandate, followed by Israel and Jordan from the Palestinian mandate and Syria and Lebanon from the Syrian mandate. Another decisive blow against the old empire was the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate by Turkish nationalists in 1924 as part of their creation of the modern and comparatively secular republic of Turkey.

H Colbert C. Held and John Thomas Cummings provide an incisive overview of the Middle East’s languages, religions, and ethnic groups in chapter 1 of this book. Their chapter makes clear the great diversity of the Middle East. While Arabic is indeed the predominant language throughout the core Middle East as well as North Africa, other major languages spoken in the region include (in descending order of number of speakers) Turkish in Turkey, Farsi in Iran, Kurdish by the stateless Kurds in so-called Kurdistan (straddling parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran), and Hebrew in Israel. The Middle East is more Muslim than Arab, however, since approximately 90 percent of the region’s people practice some form of Islam. Nonetheless, the Middle East is the birthplace of three of the world’s great religions—Judaism and Christianity as well as Islam—and both Jews and Christians constitute significant minority populations in several countries. Jews, of course, are the majority in Israel, the Jewish national state. In chapter 2, “The Roots of Arab Bitterness,” Arthur Goldschmidt Jr. and Lawrence Davidson summarize the interplay of European powers with Arab nationalists in the context of World War I and the subsequent partitioning of the Ottoman Empire. Working in tandem with British forces and encouraged by

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British and French promises of self-determination, if not outright independence, Arab forces pushed north from Arabia, helping to drive the Ottoman army from Palestine and then Syria. With the signing of an armistice between the Ottoman Empire and the Allies in 1918, Arab independence looked to be at hand. However, a secret pact among Britain, France, and Russia had provided for carving up former Ottoman domains into European spheres of influence rather than handing them over to their Arab inhabitants. Arab expectations of independent states were dashed by the establishment of British and French mandates in Iraq, Palestine, and Syria. Making matters even more contentious, Britain had committed itself to establishing a national home for the world’s Jews in Palestine, despite the fact that Palestinian Arabs made up by far the majority of the existing population of Palestine. The Arab sense of betrayal by Western interests has persisted since. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad continues the story of Muslim resentment against the West in chapter 3. She cites the division of the Middle East into European spheres of influence following World War I, the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate, and even outrages committed during the Crusades nearly a thousand years ago as factors that continue to fan the flames of Islamic antipathy against mistreatment by the West. Perhaps the most volatile issue, according to Haddad, is the consistent skewing of US foreign policy in the Middle East in favor of Israel since its founding in 1948 and through the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 to the present day. By a double standard, the Palestinians are expected to tolerate Israeli encroachment upon Palestinian territories, whereas Israel flouts with impunity any of a number of United Nations resolutions that have called on it to return such confiscated land to the Palestinians. (Israel has since withdrawn from the Gaza Strip, however.) Where the West often sees Islamic fundamentalists as extremists and terrorist aggressors, Haddad contends that Islamism is a defensive ideology against a perceived “crusader-Zionist conspiracy.” The Middle East produces the world’s greatest supply of oil, a critical resource for the operation of modern industrial societies. American politicians often openly proclaim that maintaining access to Middle East oil is a US nationalsecurity priority. As Steve Yetiv points out in chapter 4, Middle East oil reserves will become only more crucial as oil inevitably becomes harder to find. In fact it is possible that the world has already achieved peak oil production, or very soon will, and that oil supplies are being depleted faster than many currently believe. This is a sobering realization in itself, but it is even more a cause for concern given the several threats to the free flow of global oil that arise from conditions in the Middle East. Yetiv discusses, for example, Iran’s potential to disrupt tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, through which some 40 percent of the world’s oil exports pass daily. Development of weapons of mass destruction, including a weaponized nuclear capability, would ratchet up the Iranian threat. Likewise, terrorism by such organizations as al-Qaeda could target ships, ports, pipelines, or other oil facilities to cut the West’s economic lifeline to Middle East oil. Yetiv’s chapter con-

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cludes, however, with a survey of factors that help mitigate the threats to Middle East oil supplies. The foreign policy of the Middle East had long been “remarkably successful” in achieving its principal aims of preserving access to Middle East oil, countering the Soviet Union’s influence in the region, and maintaining Israel’s security. Or at least it had been successful until the US intervention in Iraq under President George W. Bush, contends William B. Quandt in chapter 5. The United States responded initially to the 9/11 attacks on America by attempting to uproot al-Qaeda from its base in Afghanistan. But it soon turned its attention to invading Iraq, ostensibly to halt that country’s production of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, under dictator Saddam Hussein. The Iraq War cost more than the previous fifty years of American Middle East policy expenditures and caused thousands of American casualties. Another result of the war was to spur neighboring Iran to accelerate its nuclear-weapons program to protect itself from similar American intervention—an intervention that seemed plausible to the Iranians, considering that America had already stationed armies on two of Iran’s borders, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Promising discussions for an accord between Syria and Israel fell through because of Syria’s ties to Iran, which Bush characterized as a member of an “axis of evil.” And Bush’s disengagement with Israeli-Palestinian issues left Israel free to unilaterally redraw boundaries and establish new settlements on Palestinian territories. The result of the recent US policies, says Quandt, has been to raise new obstacles to accomplishing American goals in the region. Responding to dismal perceptions of the United States in much of the Middle East, newly inaugurated American president Barack Obama sought to mend fences with Muslims and Middle Easterners in a speech delivered in Cairo, Egypt, in 2009. In his address (reprinted as chapter 6), Obama draws upon his personal story—the son of an African Muslim, he lived for part of his childhood in Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Muslim population—to illustrate his openness to a “new beginning” between America and the Muslim world. He reaches out to moderate Muslims by emphasizing a shared commitment to advancing human rights by combating violent extremism. He endorses a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue: one nation for Jews and another for Palestinians. With an eye toward Iran, Obama reiterates every nation’s right to peaceful nuclear power, so long as it adheres to international protocols for limiting the spread of nuclear weapons. And despite America’s checkered history of supporting despots in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world, the president reaffirms America’s commitment to democratically elected, peaceful governments that are responsive to their people.

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The Peoples and Cultures of the Middle East Colbert C. Held and John Thomas Cummings

It may be tempting to think of the Middle East as uniformly Arab and Muslim, but as the following essay makes clear, the Middle East comprises a great cultural diversity of ethnic groups, which are further fragmented by differences of language and religion. About half the population of the Middle East is not Arab, including notably the Turks of Turkey, the Jews of Israel, the Persians of Iran, and the Kurds, who have no nation of their own but who live in so-called Kurdistan, at the mountainous intersections of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Likewise, though over half the population of the Middle East speaks Arabic, and though Arabic is the national language of most countries in the region, large numbers of Middle Easterners speak Turkish, Farsi, or Kurdish instead of Arabic. The Middle East is more Muslim than Arab: over 90 percent of Middle Easterners practice Islam. However, a fundamental and often rancorous division between Sunni and Shiite Muslims complicates any apparent regional unity on the basis of religion. Furthermore, it should not be overlooked that a great many followers of Islam do not reside in the Middle East at all. In fact, the four nations of the world with the largest Muslim populations are (in descending order) Indonesia in Southeast Asia and Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh in South Asia. Colbert C. Held is a former Foreign Service officer in the Middle East and a retired diplomatin-residence at Baylor University. With John Thomas Cummings, he is the coauthor of Middle East Patterns: Places, Peoples, and Politics, now in its fifth edition. John Thomas Cummings has spent nearly thirty years in the Middle East with the US Department of the Treasury, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and the World Bank. He has taught economic development and international economics at Al-Hikma University (Baghdad), Suffolk University, Tufts University, and the University of Texas at Austin.

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t is the cultural differentiation among peoples—variations in language, religion, customs and dress, values, and historical experiences—that creates separate group identities and nations. Thus, examination of the mosaic of peoples, or ethnic groups, is a major component of this analysis of the region. Cultural patterns are, in effect, shuffled three times. The two dominant cultural ones, language and religion, deserve individual attention; sections on those are followed by a survey of ethnic groups. Two salient points about the patterns of peoples are worth noting at the outset: about half the population of the region is non-Arab, and within its essential theological unity, Islam carries ethnic and political imprints and has several sectarian variations. Thus, the region has great cultural diversity.

Languages Language is the principal criterion for defining ethnic groups. The principal languages of the region are, in order of speaker populations: Arabic, Turkish, Farsi, Kurdish, Azeri, and Hebrew. (See Map 1.1.)

Arabic Arabic is the national language of twelve of the core countries of the region and is spoken by more than half the total population of the core countries, about 165 million people. It is spoken by an additional 85 million North Africans. Three levels of usage prevail: (1) colloquial, informal spoken Arabic; (2) modern standard Arabic, or “newspaper Arabic,” the more formal version used in the media; and (3) classical Arabic, the formal and highly conventionalized style based on the language of pre-Islamic poetry, the Quran, and writings from the first few Islamic centuries. Educated Arabs understand all three, but the uneducated have difficulty with the two more formal levels. In addition, there are four major dialects in the twelve Arab countries herein (the Mashriq): those of Egypt, Syria (western Arabic), Iraq (eastern Arabic), and the Arabian Peninsula. Significant differences of vocabulary and pronunciation exist among, and even within, these four. One major example is the pronunciation in Egypt of the Arabic “j” (jiim) as a hard “g.” Thus, jabal (mountain) is pronounced gabal in Egypt; this creates problems transliterating place-names. Variants in North Africa (the Maghrib) are even further removed. Speaking Arabic as a mother tongue is the hallmark of being an Arab. Since it is the language of the Quran, the holy book of Islam, it has a mystical quality for many Arabs. It has additional emotional overtones as the language in which speeches and documents on Arab nationalism are prepared. In written form, it even plays a central role in art, since calligraphy is widely used in traditional decorative motifs in lieu of the sometimes-proscribed human and animal forms; it is one of the highest Islamic fine arts.

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Map 1.1. Middle East languages, indicating ethnolinguistic groups. This pattern has been the basis for numerous political developments and regional conflicts. Note that the complexity of the pattern of languages is greatest in mountain areas, especially in Iran.

Turkish The best-known of the Turkic languages, Turkish is spoken by the largest number of people. The national language of the Republic of Turkey, it was brought into the region by tribes migrating from Central Asia in the tenth to thirteenth centuries. As they adopted Islam and settled in Asia Minor, the language absorbed loanwords from Arabic and literary Persian. Lacking a standard alphabet of its own, for 800–900 years Turkish was rather inadequately written in Arabic script. In 1928, the Latin alphabet, with some borrowed diacritical marks, was officially adopted, and the language was “purified” of

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Arabic and Persian terms. In the region, it is spoken throughout the Republic of Turkey and by Turkish Cypriots in northern Cyprus; elsewhere, it is spoken by small scattered groups in the Fertile Crescent.

Farsi (Persian) The primary Indo-Iranian language is Farsi, a name taken from the ancient Iranian province of Fars. After Arabic and Turkish, it is spoken by the third-largest language group in the region. The Persian languages were brought to the Iranian Plateau more than 1,500 years before Turkic languages were heard in the area. After the Muslim conquest of Iran in the seventh century, Persian, like Turkish, incorporated hundreds of Arabic loanwords, adopting a modified Arabic script. It is the primary language of Iran, although nearly half of Iranians speak another mother tongue—Azeri, Kurdish, Gilaki, Luri, Baluchi, Arabic, and others. However, as the official language and that [of ] the mass media, government, and educational institutions, Farsi is a second language for most minority groups. Persian literature has a rich history dating from the Zoroastrian scriptures, the Avesta, written before 500 BCE.

Kurdish The second-most-common Indo-Iranian language in the region, Kurdish is found across a geographical range extending from the streets of Beirut eastward to remote valleys in Afghanistan—though its main concentration of more than 20 million speakers is in the mountains of Kurdistan [comprising parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria]. It is grammatically and lexically distinct from Persian, and two major dialects may be distinguished. Reflecting the extension of Kurdistan into several hegemonies, Kurdish is written with the Arabic alphabet in Iraq, the adapted Arabic alphabet in Iran, and the Latin alphabet in Turkey.

Azeri Azeri (or Azerbaijani) is the second major Turkic language in the region, centered in northwestern Iran, adjacent areas in Iraq, and the Republic of Azerbaijan. Variations appear in the western Elburz and the southern Caspian littoral among the Afshar, Shahsavan (now called Ilsavan), and Qajar groups. Like Turkish, Azeri entered with migrating tribes during the Abbasid era. Other Turkic languages, spoken by several hundred thousand people each in Iran, Turkey, and Iraq, include Qashqai (spoken by tribes in the southern Zagros Mountains of Iran) and various Turkmen dialects spoken by scattered peoples in the Anatolian-Iranian mountains and basins and in small areas in northeastern Iraq. Still others are the national tongues of peripheral states: Turkmen in Turkmenistan

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and northern Afghanistan, Uzbek in Uzbekistan and northern Afghanistan, Kazakh in Kazakhstan, and Kirghiz in Kyrgyzstan.

Hebrew Compared with Arabic, Hebrew is the mother tongue in a relatively limited area for a comparatively small number of people, a little more than five million—not of all the Jews in the region or even all Israeli Jews. An ancient language, it was the vernacular for more than 1,000 years in the traditional Old Testament area of Israel. It ceased to be a working language centuries ago, but for Jewish communities, it remained the language of religion, much as Latin, Greek, and Syriac are used in Christian liturgies. As a scriptural language like Arabic for Muslims, it has a mystical quality for religious Jews. For the ultrareligious, it is so sacred that it is reserved only for rituals; some regard as near blasphemy its vernacular use and employ instead Yiddish or other languages. Hebrew was revived in the late nineteenth century under the stimulus of the Zionist movement—because a unifying language was needed for Jewish immigrants to Palestine. Contemporary usage has required adaptation of old terms and the coinage of new ones. Because Israeli scholarly and scientific writings would have only limited readership in Hebrew, English is commonly used in publications.

Religions At first glance, the pattern of religions appears simple: Islam embraces more than 90 percent of the people of the core Middle East. This pattern, however, is complicated by the interwoven and disparate segments of Islam, by the basic divisions within Islam between Sunni and Shii, and by the splintering of Shii sects. Divisions within Christianity that developed in the region are even more numerous. Differing theological interpretations resulted in major schisms, which were later only partly mended by the church in Rome, until more than a dozen sects claimed sole possession of Christian truth. Several million Jews are now concentrated in Israel, where ethnic and sectarian subdivisions periodically dispute such issues as conversion and observation of the Sabbath. Ancient or syncretic religions—Zoroastrian, Yazidi, Mandaean, Bahai— constitute small Middle Eastern minorities. Religious divisions have long played, and now increasingly play, significant cultural-political-geographical roles in the Middle East. In recent decades, political instability and social violence have increasingly devolved from intensification of religious and ethnic consciousness. In turn, political polarization resulting from religious fervor has inflamed communal feelings and weakened national bonds. The increasing linkages between politics and religion have been a cause of growing apprehension since the 1970s, and especially after 9/11.

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The pattern of religions has been strongly influenced by two historical factors in modern times. First, when Muslims conquered the area from the Nile River to the Iranian Plateau in the seventh century, there were millions of Christians and Zoroastrians, scores of thousands of Jews, thousands of Mandaeans, and other smaller groups. In general, the Muslim invaders proselytized these conquered peoples. However, the Quran taught that Jews and Christians were ahl al-kitab (people of the book), [and] permitted to keep their religions and communities under certain conditions. Later, Mandaeans, Zoroastrians, and even Berbers were accepted as people of the book. Therefore, religious groups had a strong group identity linked with their courts, areas of residence, occupations, and usually language, as well as religion. This group identity persists, and it continues to affect regional relationships and the internal politics of Middle East states. In a second historical development, the concept of people of the book was codified in the Ottoman Empire into the millet system (from millah, “religion” or “religious community”), and millets further imprinted group consciousness on the non-Muslims of the Middle East. Religious affiliation assumed great culturalpolitical significance, and identity cards in Lebanon and Israel, for example, still indicate in some way the individual’s religion. The Middle East is familiarly and significantly known as the birthplace of the world’s three major monotheistic religions, all of which worship the same God: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Map 1.2). Judaism and Christianity both began in the hills between the Mediterranean coastal plain and the Jordan Valley, and Islam originated 700 mi/1,125 km to the southeast in the heights inland from the Red Sea. As Judaism borrowed from Mesopotamian and Canaanite traditions, so Christianity evolved from Judaic and other practices of the region, and Islam borrowed heavily from Judaism, Christianity, and local Hijazi customs. Late in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Muslims number about 320 million, about 92 percent of the population of the region. Christianity is the second-largest religion, with approximately 15 million adherents, and Judaism [is] third with approximately 6 million.

Islam The word Islam is Arabic for “submission,” that is, submission to God’s will, and a Muslim is “one who submits.” The term “Muhammadan” is a misnomer, since it suggests a parallel with “Christian”—a worshiper of Christ—whereas Muslims do not worship Muhammad. Rather, they revere his teachings and consider him the Seal of the Prophets, that is, the last and greatest of the prophets, a line that had stretched from Adam and Noah to John the Baptist and Jesus. The origins of Islam are regional in character. Mecca, the Arabian town in which Islam evolved, was an important caravan post between Yemen and Syria. Its importance was enhanced by the Well of Zamzam, since water was scarce along Tihamah, the barren Red Sea coastal plain followed by the caravans. It was also

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Map 1.2. Middle East religions. Note the overwhelming dominance of Islam and the extension of Shiism into southern Iraq.

the site of an ancient shrine, the Kaabah, which contained an array of idols and housed the revered Black Stone (a meteorite). Rapid development in the sixth century stimulated intellectual exchange, as townspeople and Bedouin from the Hijaz mingled with the caravan travelers from Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere. One Mecca merchant who was inspired by the ideas being discussed was Muhammad ibn Abdullah, a member of the Hashim clan of the Quraysh tribe. While meditating in a nearby cave, he received what he later explained were dictations from the Angel Gabriel of the Holy Word of the one God (Arabic Allah = The God). Preaching his revelations, he denounced the Kaabah idols and thereby endangered Mecca’s pilgrim trade. Harassed by local merchants, Muhammad and

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his followers—the original Muslims—emigrated to Yathrib, 210 mi/340 km north of Mecca. Yathrib later became known as al-Madinat al-Nabi (the City of the Prophet), or simply al-Madina (the City). The migration was in 622 CE, which became the first year of the Islamic calendar. Muslim years, comprising twelve lunar months (eleven days shorter than Gregorian or solar years), are designated as anno Hegirae (AH), year of the Hegira (Arabic hijrah = flight). In Medina, the Prophet recited dictations from the Angel to his followers until his death in 632. These were assembled in 651 into the Muslim scriptures, the Quran (Koran), meaning “recitation,” and the essential core of Islam. Accepted by Muslims as the exact Word of God linking God and believers, the Quran uses poetic language reflecting the Hijaz and village and Bedouin traditions, just as the Old and New Testaments refer to the desert traditions of Sinai and the Syro-Palestinian area. Translation of the Quran from Arabic was long forbidden, since that would mean altering the direct Word of God, and converts perforce had to learn the language in order to understand the scriptures. As Islam spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa to Spain and into Central Asia (Map 1.3), the Arabic language also spread, with crucial historical and political-geographical consequences. The Muslim place of worship is the mosque (from Arabic masjid, “place of worship”). Each mosque has an exterior minaret and interior mihrab, which indicates where worshippers should direct their prayers—toward Mecca. Over the centuries, thousands of shrines have been built all over the Islamic world; they are interesting and moving features in many otherwise barren landscapes. Although, like all religions, Islam has elaborated a complex and subtle body of theology, both its essential message and practice are simple and straightforward, and that is one of the reasons for its rapidly growing numbers. Its one fundamental essential is that a convert express and believe the shahadah, or profession of faith: “There is no god but God; Muhammad is the messenger of God,” a translation of the euphonious Arabic La ilaha illa Allah; Muhammadun rasulu Allah. The shahadah and four additional primary obligations constitute the five pillars of Islam, which have profoundly affected regional character in the Islamic world: salah, devotional worship or prayer five times a day facing toward the Kaabah, the House of God, in Mecca; zakah, religious tax (and sadaqah, voluntary almsgiving, additionally meritorious); sawm, fasting during the holy month of Ramadan, ninth in the year; and, for those who have the means, the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Quran underlies the Sharia, the sacred law of Islam, which covers all aspects of the lives of Muslims—not only religious and private but also political and public, social and economic. Sharia still plays an important role in the legal systems of several Middle East countries—notably Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Iran— and complements the more Westernized legal codes of countries such as Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. Resurgent Islamic fundamentalism, which has received so much attention since 9/11, has brought a renewed interest in Sharia, especially since it is at times in conflict with modern secular trends in the region.

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Map 1.3. Present extent of Islam, with major medieval caravan and sea routes that contributed to the spread and persistence of Islam.

Islam was for many centuries both religion and government, and when the Sharia was compiled, it combined religious and civil matters. The caliph (Arabic khalifah = successor) thus led both the community of believers (the ummah) and the Islamic state. Although subsequent schisms placed severe strains on the unity of religion and state, resurgent fundamentalism—Islamism—has revived ferment for Islamized control in several states, from Morocco to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The most momentous dispute within Islam occurred with the seventh-century division between Sunni and Shii. It has led to wars, assassinations, civil conflict, and rancor throughout the Muslim world for more than 1,300 years and has major repercussions in the Middle East today. The Sunni (or Sunnites) consider themselves the original orthodox Muslims and have always been in the overwhelming majority. They believe that caliphs should be chosen by leaders of the ummah and were primarily secular leaders. The Shii (or Shiites or Shiah) separated beginning in 657, holding that only descendants of Muhammad, through his daughter Fatima and son-in-law Ali, were legitimate successors to the Prophet. To Shii, these successors are divinely guided, sinless, infallible religious leaders (imams) with authority to interpret the Prophet’s spiritual knowledge. The schism has accentuated political, social, and cultural divisions both historically and

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currently—perhaps as bitterly today as at any time in the past—in Iraq particularly, but also in Lebanon, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain as well as in peripheral Pakistan.

Christianity Middle East Christianity embraces more than a dozen sects centered on the spiritual and ethical teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, who is believed to have lived and taught in Palestine 2,000 years ago. In the Occidental world, calendar years are designated (with an inadvertent error of about four years) as anno Domini (AD), indicating years that have elapsed since the birth of Jesus. A religiously neutral term is CE, Common Era. Although other religions share the messianic concept, Christianity preaches, as a central belief, that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah (Greek Christos = “the anointed”). The early apostles compiled his teachings in the Gospels (good tidings) and added their own preachings and letters. Assembled, these writings form the New Testament (New Covenant), the main Christian scriptures—coupled with the Old Testament to constitute the Christian Bible. From its earliest years, Christianity incorporated influences from the region’s several cultures—Jewish, Greek, Roman, and Aramaic. By New Testament accounts, Jesus was acclaimed during his three-year ministry in Judea, Galilee, and nearby places. However, only a few of his followers, mainly converted Jews, remained faithful after his crucifixion by the Roman authorities. When in 66 CE these early Christians refused to support the Jewish revolt, they were effectively cut off from their former compatriots. Even before this breach, the apostle-missionaries preached to the Gentiles (Greeks) in Asia Minor and Syria. Antioch was the first Christian center, soon followed by Edessa farther east. Suppressed for more than 200 years by Roman authorities as inimical to the imperial religion, it was officially permitted by the Edict of Milan (313), then accepted by Emperor Constantine after the imperial capital was moved from Rome to Constantinople in 330, and became the state religion of the empire in 380. A series of ecumenical councils, convened in or near the new capital, debated heresies and sought unity but often actually engendered fragmentation. Christianity was the dominant religion of the Middle East outside Iran and the Arabian Peninsula from the fourth to seventh centuries, but today it is a minority faith in an overwhelmingly Muslim area. The approximately 15 million Christians in the Middle East are divided among more than a dozen Orthodox and Catholic sects: a small number are Protestants. Although exact figures are unknown, it is possible to estimate the number of Christians in the main groups. Copts, about ten percent of Egypt’s population, are the largest. Maronites, concentrated in Lebanon, are second-largest; they and other sects constitute about 38 percent of the country’s population. Christians in Syria,

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with about six percent, are the third-largest Christian group in the region. Fourth are the adherents of several sects in northern Iraq, where mountains have sheltered numerous relict groups—non-Christian as well as Christian. Fifth-largest and the greatest concentration of Greek Orthodox in the region is in Cyprus—about threefourths of the island’s population and nearly 100 percent in south Cyprus. Finally, Turkey, Iran, and Jordan each have sizable Christian minorities (more than 400,000 in Turkey and Iran, and 210,000 in Jordan).

Judaism The oldest of the three great monotheistic religions, Judaism evolved over a period of more than 1,500 years, a development that is the theme of the Old Testament. It takes its name from Judah, the tribe of King David, from which the term “Jew” is also derived. The patriarch Jacob, whose religious name was Israel, is the eponymous ancestor of the Bnai Yisrael, or Children (literally, “Sons”) of Israel. Judaism’s roots lie in the traditions of a seminomadic Aramaean tribe personified in the patriarch Abraham. In the Old Testament narrative, the original group migrated from southern Mesopotamia, Ur of the Chaldees, up the Euphrates Valley to the Harran and then, traditionally around 1700 BCE, southwestward to the southern hills of Canaan. Abraham’s grandson Jacob (Israel) migrated to Egypt, where his descendants multiplied; later, perhaps in the thirteenth century BCE, they made their “Exodus” from Egypt to claim Canaan. In the biblical account, it was out of the tribal growth and development of the Bnai Yisrael during the Exodus that evolved the monotheistic religion that came to be known as Judaism. It revolved around the one God (Yahweh), the covenant between God and the people of Israel, the comprehensive law, and for many Jews, the land. Missionary activity among the Hebrews (referred to as Jews after the 50 year Babylonian Exile) following the return of many exiles in 538 BCE reflected the belief in Israel’s election by God to mediate divine blessings to all nations. By the time of Jesus, Judaism was winning many converts throughout the Roman Empire. However, after the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE and dispersed many Palestinian Jews, proselytizing almost ceased. Particularism and separatism, as opposed to universalism, increasingly characterized Judaism, which then had a mostly token presence in its original territory for more than eighteen centuries. Different interpretations of the Torah (the Law, the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament) and the Talmud (a body of commentary and guidance) have led to various groupings within Judaism. In modern times, it embraces such groups as the ultra-Orthodox Hasidim (“those who are pious”), as well as Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist Judaism. Neither Reform Judaism, which seeks to bring the faith into modern Western life, nor Conservative Judaism, seeking a middle position, achieved recognition in Israel until

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the 1970s; in the new century, non-Orthodox Judaism still has a second-class status because of the overwhelming pre-eminence of the Orthodox establishment. This is the cause of much bitterness on the part of the many American and other Jews in the diaspora who are not Orthodox. The debate is especially relevant to individuals converted to Judaism by liberal rabbis and who emigrate to Israel where their conversions are not recognized. Nevertheless, Judaism has not experienced the degree of institutionalized sectarian fragmentation suffered by Christianity and Islam. Reimplanted in its native locale in the mid-twentieth century, Judaism has become for many of its adherents a belief system that is quite different from its original theology. Surveys have shown that only a minority of Israeli Jews actually practice the religion, and distinctions must be drawn among Jews, practitioners of Judaism, Zionists, and Israelis.

Ethnic Groups Aspects of language and religion patterns may now be merged in a survey of ethnic groups, examining four major aggregates—Arabs, Turks, Persians, and Jews— and briefly discussing related smaller groups associated with each.

Arabs Even with diverse traits and distribution over vast distances, the ethnic identity of the Arabs is one of the basic realities of the pattern of peoples in the region. Numbering about 172 million, not only are Arabs the overwhelmingly dominant ethnolinguistic group in the twelve Arab countries of our sixteen core states, they also include at least one million nationals in three other countries—Israel, Turkey, and Iran—and are numerically negligible only in Cyprus. In the five Arab countries in North Africa plus Sudan, they number another 97.2 million. All Arabs share two cultural elements, and most share a third. First, the Arabic language provides an element common to all, despite dialect variations. As the language of the Quran, it has deep religious and cultural significance for most Arabs. Second, the Islamic cultural heritage embodied in architecture, design, calligraphy, and art provides a common Arab history—Muslim and Christian, orthodox and heterodox, Bedouin and city-dweller, Syrian and Qatari, Moroccan and Egyptian. It underlies modern Arab political identity, relevant in many modern problems and conflicts. Third, since more than 92 percent of Middle East Arabs are Muslim, Islam links the majority.

Copts Coptic ethnic identity derives primarily from religion. About 10 percent of the population of Egypt, Copts are the largest non-Muslim ethnic group in the region,

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a remnant of the ancient Hamitic Egyptians who became Christians. Practicing endogamy and segregation from other Egyptians and from invaders, they preserved their Monophysite Christianity as well as a sometimes-disputed genetic physical kinship with early Egyptians. Their language survived as the vernacular until supplanted by Arabic 1,000 years after the Islamic conquest. Outside the urban centers of Cairo and Alexandria, they are concentrated in Upper Egypt.

Maronites Like the Copts, Maronites are differentiated primarily on the basis of religion. However, geographical isolation in the Lebanon Mountains encouraged independence and endogamy, producing cultural differentiation and substantial political autonomy. Arabic supplanted Syriac during the eighteenth century as a working language, and historic ties with the French culminating in the mandate years (1920–1943) promoted French as a second language. The determined separatism of the Maronites has been a compelling dynamic in Lebanese politicalgeographical events. Oppressed for adherence to a Christian heresy, they left Syria in the tenth century and settled in the mountains around Qadisha Gorge. Their cooperation with the Crusader invaders alienated them from the Muslim population, and a small group of Maronites left with the retreating Crusaders to settle in Cyprus, where a community remains. The exact origins of their long adherence to the Church of Rome are in dispute. Many thousands began to emigrate in the late nineteenth century, and the civil conflicts of the last half of the twentieth century accelerated emigration again. Some 700,000 Maronites remain in the Levant, most in Lebanon but a few in Cyprus, Syria, and Israel.

Druze Druze identity also originated in religion, with cultural and physical differentiations developing over the centuries. Originating in Egypt, the Druze won adherents in the Mount Hermon area, where they are still centered. Additional contemporary concentrations are in the Shuf area in central Mount Lebanon and in the Jabal al-Druze (officially now Jabal al-Arab) of southern Syria. As heretics, the Druze were alienated from other Shii and even more from Sunnis; they clashed with Maronites as both groups migrated into central Mount Lebanon 1,000 years ago. Rejected by their neighbors, they separated themselves through endogamy. Their fierce sense of independence and separatism contributed to a military orientation, which they exhibited against the Crusaders, against Maronites in the 1840s–1850s and 1958, and in the 1975–1991 civil conflict in Lebanon. But Druze in Israel generally accepted the Jewish government in 1948–1949; they are the only Arabs permitted to serve in the Israeli army. Even

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so, Druze-Israeli relations deteriorated after Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights in 1981 and the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon in 1978–2000.

Alawi The Alawi are also primarily distinguished by religion, and they too have developed distinct cultural attributes through segregation and endogamy. They are concentrated in and around the Jabal al-Sahiliyah in northwestern Syria and constitute about 11 percent of the population. The Alawi have preserved no ancient language and use Arabic. Although criticized by other Syrians for cooperating with French-mandate authorities, after World War II they were trusted in the army and in government because of their minority status. A climax of the group’s role came in 1969, when Syrian Air Force General Hafiz al-Asad, an Alawi, seized power in Damascus. He held the presidency from 1971 until his death in June 2000, when he was succeeded by his Alawi son.

Assyrians Distinguished principally by their religion and, for many, their language, Assyrians consider themselves to be ethnic descendants of ancient Mesopotamians. A considerable group retained their identity in Mesopotamia and remain there and in adjacent areas today; those in Iraq constitute the country’s largest Christian sect. With the sects well intermixed in much of their common area, Assyrians number 700,000 by some estimates. Many live in Baghdad, but others continue to live in northern Iraq (especially in Kirkuk, Irbil, Mosul, and adjacent areas), eastern Syria, and northwestern Iran. Assyrians have periodically suffered persecution and massacres, and thousands have fled Iraq to escape persecution, notably the 1933 massacre in northern Iraq. Many have fled Islamist and Kurdish oppression since 2003. Assyrians in the West may outnumber the core population by as much as four or five times.

Turks The second-largest ethnolinguistic group in the core Middle East (after the Arabs), ethnic Turks number about 60 million, somewhat more than one-third of the total number of Turkic-speaking peoples of the world. Generally, they speak Turkish as a primary language, are Muslims (90 percent are Sunni), claim a Turkish heritage, and are patriotic about the Republic of Turkey. Culturally, they combined Persian, Arab, Byzantine, and Anatolian cultural elements with their former nomadic Central Asian culture. Turks, Tatars, and Turkmen are difficult to differentiate, despite distinctive characteristics, partly because of intermarriage and cultural assimilation.

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Four groups of Turks can be identified through cultural and geographical differences. First, the Anatolian Turks in Asia Minor are a thorough biological mixture of earlier Anatolian peoples. Second, the Rumelian Turks (from Rum, meaning “Roman,” or European) are European Turks who remained in Europe after Ottoman days but later returned to Turkey. More than 400,000 were expelled from Greece in the 1920s with a similar number of Greeks forced from Turkey; many thousands more arrived later in Turkey from Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Also from Bulgaria came about 150,000 Pomaks—Bulgar converts to Islam when the Ottomans controlled the Balkans. Now highly Turkified, they live in western Anatolia. Third are descendants of Turks who stayed in various parts of the Middle East separated from the Ottoman Empire after World War I. They are steadily becoming Arabized. Fourth are some 200,000 Turkish Cypriots, descendants of Turks who moved to the island after the Ottoman conquest in the sixteenth century or of converts to Islam. They have been joined by more than 50,000 Turks from the mainland since 1974, along with 35,000–40,000 Turkish troops.

Persians Persians are the third-largest ethnolinguistic group after Arabs and Turks. IndoIranians entered the mountains and basins south and southwest of the Caspian during the second millennium BCE. One branch went southeastward into the Indus Valley and eventually dominated the sub-continent; others halted in the rugged folds of the Zagros Mountains and settled in western Iran. Those south of the Caspian became the Medes (or Medians); those in the southern Zagros became Persians. They called themselves Aryans (nobles) and named their new homeland after themselves—Iran. After a thousand years in the folds of the Zagros, the Persians emerged as a unified sedentary people in the sixth century BCE and built an unprecedented empire. Although later defeated by Alexander the Great and then overwhelmed by Arab Muslims in the seventh century, they repeatedly restored a power base on the intermontane Iranian Plateau. Since World War I, the Persians have become the leading ethnic group in Iran, filling most government, industrial, professional, and cultural positions. By the 1970s, most educated Persians spoke French or English in addition to Farsi, and many were educated in the US or Europe; however, after the Islamic Revolution, the authorities discouraged Westernization, forcing a return to Islamic fundamentalism. More than 95 percent of Persians adhere to Shii Islam, for nationalistic as much as for theological reasons. A small but significant number are Zoroastrians and Baha’i. Living throughout Iran, they are the majority of the population in many of the foothills, valleys, basins, and plateaus and predominate in the cities of Hamadan, Qom, Tehran, Shiraz, and Kerman.

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In addition to the approximately 34 million Persians in Iran (about half the population), another million live on the west side of the Gulf, in the Qatif and alHasa oases in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia (where they are Arabized), and near the Shii shrines in Iraq. Wherever they live, they proudly differentiate themselves by their language, Shii religion, history, 2,000 years of literature, and distinctive arts. The cleavage between Persians and Arabs along the Zagros piedmont has periodically erupted over the centuries, most recently in the bloody 1980– 1988 Iran-Iraq War.

Kurds The fourth-largest ethnolinguistic group, the Kurds occupy a historic mountain homeland—politically fragmented Kurdistan—at the junction of and comprising parts of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria (see Map 1.1). They not only predominate there but also mix with neighboring Azeris and Armenians, as well as with Turks, Turkmen, Arabs, Assyrians, and others. Both their total population and its distribution among the countries that share Kurdistan can only be estimated subject to controversy. Kurdish leaders claim much higher numbers than officials and scholars accept. Reasonable figures in the first decade of the twenty-first century suggest about 24 million in “Kurdistan”—11.5 million in Turkey, 6 million in Iran, 5 million in Iraq, and perhaps 1 million in Syria—plus others in Armenia, Lebanon, central Anatolia, the central Zagros Mountains, and the Elburz and Kopet mountains. Language, heritage, culture, and a fierce sense of independence combine to define Kurdishness, along with physical attributes; many consider themselves descendants of the Medes, while others believe they were formerly part of the Lur. Most are Sunni Muslims, separating them from the Shii Persians, although some in Iran and Iraq are Shii. Retaining a tribal structure, they are settled farmers, herdsmen, and townsmen. Especially in their core mountain home area, they have historically resisted outside authority. Those in Iraq have notably battled for selfgovernment, especially in 1974–1975, during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, during and after the 1991 Gulf War, and after 2003. Similarly, Kurds in Turkey engaged in a decade-long fight for recognition in which 30,000 died during the 1980s and 1990s.

Jews After a series of unsuccessful revolts against the Romans and the destruction of the Temple built by Herod, many Jews were deported from Palestine. In this second dispersion of the Jews (the first was to Babylon), the exiles joined the many sizable Jewish communities already established around the Mediterranean. For example,

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the community in Alexandria in Egypt thrived for more than 2,200 years until after World War II; it was here that the Old Testament was translated into Greek— the famous Septuagint—in the third century BCE, for the use of non-Palestinian Jews and Gentiles attracted to Judaism but unfamiliar with Hebrew. For Muslims, Jews (like Christians) were ahl al-kitab (“people of the book”); under the Ottomans, they constituted a millet, and their minority rights were sufficiently protected that tens of thousands of Sephardic (Spanish) Jews fleeing the Inquisition in the sixteenth century settled in the Ottoman Empire. They thus became citizens of successor Arab states after 1918. Ashkenazi (German) Jews from Europe migrated to the Middle East rather recently, from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth, especially in waves of immigration (aliyah) after World War II. After the establishment of Israel in 1948, most of the Jews in Middle East Arab countries emigrated, largely to Israel—an estimated 300,000 from Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen by the early 1990s. Smaller proportions of the Turkish and Iranian Jewish communities also have emigrated. Despite generally endogamous traditions, Jewish immigrants in Israel exhibited physical differences related to their countries of origin, plus a variety of linguistic, political-geographical (or national), and ideological backgrounds. Subethnic divisions emerged between Ashkenazis and Mizrahim (Oriental or Eastern Jews, including Sephardim). Sabras—native-born Israelis—form another subgroup. The continuing question, “Who is a Jew?” and the distinctions among observant Jews, nonobservant (or nonpracticing) Jews, Halakhic Jews (strict adherents to religious law), assimilated Jews, and even Christian Jews complicate citizenship problems regarding the Law of Return. Of a world total of about 14.5 million Jews, about 6.0 million lived in Israel in 2008. About 35,000 more lived in the rest of the Middle East (out of about one million, pre–World War II), mainly in Iran and Turkey.

Armenians Armenians date back more than 3,000 years, to about the time the Hittites disappeared from Anatolia. Prior to World War I, they were centered in the Lake Van area and surrounding eastern Anatolian mountains, long referred to as Armenia. The ancient kingdom of Armenia, located in the same area, was the first state to adopt Christianity as its official religion. Although Armenians were once an influential millet in the Ottoman Empire, relations between Armenians and Turks became hostile after 1878, and there were battles in 1895–1896, 1909, 1915–1917, and 1920–1921. In a confused, complex, and disputed series of circumstances (including Kurdish-Armenian-TurkishRussian relations), hundreds of thousands of Armenians in central and eastern Asia Minor were persecuted, massacred, and deported; thousands more fled into

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adjacent lands for safety. A post–World War I Armenian republic was proposed by the Allies at the Paris Peace Conference, but a sustained independent Armenia materialized only in 1991. Although the Armenians survived in their traditional homeland only under Ottoman and Russian overlords, they have maintained a strong separate ethnic identity, language, and religion, partly through a tradition of endogamy. They center on the church (usually Orthodox, some Catholic), school, newspaper, and businesses and have a cultural emphasis on education and achievement. In the core Middle East they total about 900,000—in Syria (more than two percent of the population, and found especially in Aleppo and Damascus), Lebanon, Jordan, Iran, Turkey, and Iraq. The Armenian Republic, independent since 1991 from the Soviet Union, has more than three million people, and thousands of Middle East Armenians have emigrated there as well as to the West since World War II. Adapted from Chapter 4 of Colbert C. Held and John H. Thomas Cummings, Middle East Patterns: People, Places, and Politics, Fifth Edition (2010, Westview Press).

CHAPTER 2 QR

The Roots of Arab Bitterness Arthur Goldschmidt Jr. and Lawrence Davidson

Arab nationalism—the belief that Arab states should unite under a common government, particularly to resist non-Arab control—is a strong sentiment in the Middle East. Until the aftermath of World War I, many Arabs were under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, a situation of some ambivalence for the Arabs, since their overlords in most cases were Turks or other nonArabs, though the rulers were also the Islamic coreligionists of their Arab subjects. Even though Arab nationalists strove to liberate themselves from Ottoman rule, there is detectable even today in Arab nationalist thought a strain of nostalgia for the lost days of a united and powerful Islamic empire that subsumed what are now separate, weak, and often bickering Arab nation-states. There is also some uncertainty about whether Arabs who seek a greater unity ought to consider themselves Arabs first or Muslims first. The Arab experience with the West has, unfortunately, been less ambiguous. As summarized in the following essay, Arabs repeatedly dealt with Western powers that promised them independence from the Ottomans but then established for themselves spheres of influence in the Middle East, formalized soon after World War I as mandates, which were little more than colonies in disguise. Even after the Arab states’ eventual independence, they still remain sensitive to perceived instances of Western meddling and power mongering in the Middle East. To many Arabs, the establishment of the State of Israel in Palestine in 1948 is a highly charged emblem of Western intrusion and duplicity, in that it violated previous Western assurances and displaced a great many Arab Palestinians, leaving them without homes, property, or a country of their own. Arthur Goldschmidt Jr. is professor emeritus of Middle East history at Pennsylvania State University and author of Modern Egypt, Second Edition. Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University and the author of America’s Palestine and Islamic Fundamentalism. Goldschmidt and Davidson are coauthors of A Concise History of the Middle East, Ninth Edition, from which this chapter is taken.

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ew topics in Middle East history have generated as much heat—and as little light—as Arab nationalism. Few people are as poorly understood as today’s Arabs. Even deciding who is an Arab or defining what is meant by Arab nationalism can easily get scholars and students into trouble, with both the Arabs and their detractors. Nevertheless, Arabs are becoming more politically active in the twenty-first century. In our analysis we may find that what is called Arab nationalism is now dissolving into many different movements, whose common feature is that they pertain to various Arabic-speaking peoples who seek to control their own political destinies. We must study these various manifestations of Arab feeling. And let us not fool ourselves: Arab feeling is strong and is likely to get stronger. It is also sometimes bitter, owing to some of the Arabs’ unhappy experiences in the early twentieth century. Let us see what happened, and why.

Arab Nationalism What is Arab nationalism? Simply put, it is the belief that the Arabs constitute a single political community (or nation) and should have a common government. Right away we can see problems. There is no general agreement on who is an Arab. The current definition is that an Arab is anyone who speaks Arabic as his or her native language. This is not enough. Many speakers of Arabic do not think of themselves as Arabs, nor do other Arabs so regard them: Take, for example, the Lebanese Maronites, the Egyptian Copts, and of course the Jews born in Arab countries who went to live in Israel. A more eloquent definition is one adopted by a conference of Arab leaders years ago: “Whoever lives in our country, speaks our language, is reared in our culture, and takes pride in our glory is one of us.”

Historical Background As we review the history of the Arabic-speaking peoples, we must remember that they have not been united since the era of the High Caliphate, if indeed then. Moreover, except for the Bedouin, they did not rule themselves from the time the Turks came in until quite recently. The very idea of people ruling themselves would not have made sense to Middle Easterners before the rise of nationalism. Settled peoples cared that a Muslim government rule over them, defend them from nomads and other invaders, preserve order, and promote peace in accordance with the Shari’a. It did not matter whether the head of that Muslim government was an Arab like the Umayyad caliphs, a Persian like the Buyid amirs, a Turk like the Seljuk and Ottoman sultans, or a Kurd like Salah al-Din and his Ayyubid heirs. Almost all rulers succeeded by either heredity or nomination; no one thought of letting the people elect them.

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The Arabs Under Ottoman Rule From the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, most Arabs—all of them, really, except in parts of Arabia and Morocco—belonged to the Ottoman Empire. Even in periods of Ottoman weakness, the local officials and landlords were apt to be Turks, Circassians, or other non-Arabs. Since World War I, the Arab nationalists and their sympathizers have denounced the horrors of Ottoman rule, blaming the Turks for the Arabs’ backwardness, political ineptitude, disunity, or whatever else was amiss in their society. What went wrong? Were the Arabs under Ottoman rule better or worse off than they had been earlier? In fact, the Arabs’ decline cannot be blamed on Istanbul. You can even argue that early Ottoman rule had benefited the Arabs by promoting local security and trade between their merchants and those of Anatolia and the Balkans. If the eighteenth-century Ottoman decline and overly zealous nineteenth-century reforms hurt the Arabs, the Turks within the empire suffered too. In weighing these facts, historians have concluded that Arab identity played no great part in Middle East politics up to the twentieth century. Muslim Arabs felt that any attempt to weaken the Ottoman Empire was apt to harm Islam. Even under Sultan Abdulhamid, despite his faults, most Arabs went on upholding the status quo. Many served in the army or civil administration. A few were prominent advisers. They might have been proud of belonging to the same “race” as Muhammad, but this did not inspire them to rebel against the Turks, who were Muslims too.

Christian Arab Nationalists Not all Arabs are Muslim. In the nineteenth century, as many as one-fourth of the Arabs under Ottoman rule belonged to protected minorities. Most of these were Christians, who were less likely than the Muslims to feel a strong loyalty to the empire. But we must pin down the time, the place, and the sect before we can discuss the politics of the Arabic-speaking Christians. The ones whose role mattered most in the birth of Arab nationalism lived in Syria, which then included most of what we now call Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, the Republic of Syria, and even parts of southern Turkey. From the 1820s on, American and French missionaries founded schools in Syria, as did the British, Russians, and other Westerners, though to a lesser extent. Inasmuch as Syrian Christians naturally sent their children to mission schools closest to their own religious affiliation, Maronites and Uniate Catholics tended to go to French Catholic schools and to identify with France. How could the Orthodox Christians compete? Distressed by the low educational level of their own clergy, some were converting to Catholicism or Protestantism and sending their children to the relevant mission schools. The Americans helped solve their problem, but quite by accident they aided the rise of Arab nationalism. US mission schools, especially their crowning insti-

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tution, the Syrian Protestant College (now the American University of Beirut), tried to serve students of every religion. But most of them hoped also to convert young people to Protestant Christianity. Because Protestantism has traditionally stressed the reading and understanding of its sacred scriptures, the Bible was soon translated into Arabic for local converts. Many of the early American missionaries learned the language well enough to teach in it and even to translate English-language textbooks into Arabic. Given this relative acceptance of their culture, many Arabs sent their children to American schools despite their Protestant orientation. The Orthodox Christians were especially apt to do so. This led to a higher standard of Arabic reading and writing among Syrian Orthodox youth, many of whom went into journalism, law, or teaching. Some became scholars and writers. Before long they were leading the Arabic literary revival, which turned into a nationalist movement, just as happened to literary movements in some European nations. The growth of nationalism was also fostered by such American ideas as using the schools to develop moral character, promoting benevolent activities, and teaching students to create new institutions to fit changing conditions. The commitment of students and alumni of the American University of Beirut, in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, has nurtured the ideas of Arab nationalism and spread them among both Muslim and Christian speakers of Arabic.

Muslim Arab Nationalists But Arab nationalism could not have won Muslim acceptance if all its advocates had been westernized Christians. The first breakthrough for Arab nationalism was the 1908 Young Turk revolution, which restored the long-suspended Ottoman constitution. Suddenly, men living in Beirut and Damascus, Baghdad and Aleppo, Jaffa and Jerusalem, were choosing representatives to an assembly in Istanbul. Hopes were raised for Arab-Turkish friendship and for progress toward liberal democracy in the Ottoman state. Arab hopes soon faded, though. Representation in Parliament favored Turks against the empire’s many ethnic, linguistic, and religious minorities. The Young Turk regime resumed the centralizing policies of earlier Ottoman reformers. Consequently, the Arabs began to fear that their liberties, preserved by the weakness or indifference of earlier governments, would now be in danger. The imposition of Turkish as the language of administration and education especially angered the Arabs. But how could they react? Not since Muhammad’s day had large numbers of Arabic-speaking peoples mobilized politically to gain unity and freedom. What good would it do Syria’s Arabs to overthrow Turkish rule, only to become, like Egypt, a dependency of a Christian power? Few Syrians (other than some Maronites) sought French rule. Nor did Iraqi Arabs want Basra [an Iraqi port city] to become (like Suez) a link in Britain’s imperial transport and communications.

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The result of these deliberations was a low-profile movement of a few educated Arabs aimed not at separation but at greater local autonomy. It included three different groups: (1) the Ottoman Decentralization Party, founded in 1912 by Syrians living in Cairo and seeking Arab support for more local autonomy instead of strong central control by the Ottoman government; (2) al-Fatat (Youth), a secret society of young Arabs who were students in European universities and who convoked an Arab Congress, held in Paris in 1913, to demand equal rights and cultural autonomy for Arabs within the Ottoman Empire; and (3) al-Ahd (Covenant), a secret society of Arab officers in the Ottoman army, who proposed turning the Ottoman Empire into a Turco-Arab dual monarchy on the pattern of Austria-Hungary. Each of these groups found backers among educated Arabs living in Istanbul, other Ottoman cities (notably Damascus), and abroad. But do not overestimate the strength of Arab nationalism before World War I. Most Arabs were not yet Arab nationalists; they remained loyal to the Ottoman constitution that gave them parliamentary representation, and a government in which some Arabs served as ministers, ambassadors, officials, or army officers.

World War I The next turning point in the rise of Arab nationalism occurred when the Ottoman Empire decided in August 1914 to enter World War I on the German side. The CUP [Committee of Union and Progress, a Turkish nationalist party] may have been influenced by their exposure to German military advisers, but their main motives were to regain Egypt from the British and the Caucasus Mountains from Russia. So strongly did the Ottoman government and people support the German cause that the sultan officially proclaimed a jihad against Britain, France, and Russia. All three had millions of Muslim subjects who, if they had heeded the message, would have had to rebel on behalf of their Ottoman sultan-caliph.

Britain and the Arabs The British, especially those serving in Egypt and the Sudan, wanted to counter this pan-Islamic proclamation. Britain declared its official protectorate over Egypt. Some Ottoman army units reached the Suez Canal in February 1915, and one even crossed to the western side under cover of darkness. For three years, Britain had to station more than 100,000 imperial troops in Egypt—partly to intimidate the Egyptian nationalists, but mainly to stop any new Ottoman effort to take the canal, which the British now viewed as their imperial lifeline. Britain responded by contacting an Arab leader in the Hijaz—namely, Husayn, the sharif and amir of Mecca. Let us explain these titles. A sharif is a descendant of Muhammad, of which there were many in the Hijaz, especially in the Muslim holy cities. Being protectors of Mecca and Medina conferred prestige on the Otto-

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man sultans; they lavished honors on the sharifs but also exploited their rivalries to control them. The various clans of sharifs competed for the position of amir (prince), which carried some temporal authority. During the nineteenth century, however, the Ottoman government had tried to strengthen its direct rule over the Hijaz, using an appointed local governor. Sharif Husayn, the leader of one of the contending clans (which he called the Hashimites, the clan of the Prophet himself ), had long struggled with the Ottoman sultan and his governors.

The Husayn-McMahon Correspondence In Cairo, Britain’s new high commissioner, Sir Henry McMahon, wrote to the sharif of Mecca. Britain wanted him to rebel against Ottoman rule in the Hijaz. Husayn in turn asked for a pledge that the British would support the rebellion financially and politically against his Arab rivals as well as against the Ottoman Empire. If he called for an Arab revolt, it was not for the sake of changing masters. The British in Egypt and the Sudan knew from talking with Arab nationalists living there that the Hashimites could not rally other Arabs to their cause—given the power and prestige of rival families living elsewhere in Arabia—unless the Arabs were assured that they would gain their independence in the lands in which they predominated: Arabia, Iraq, and Syria, including Palestine and Lebanon. Keeping these considerations in mind, the amir of Mecca and the British high commissioner for Egypt and the Sudan exchanged some letters in 1915–1916 that have since become famous and highly controversial. In the course of what we now call the Husayn-McMahon Correspondence, Britain pledged that, if Husayn proclaimed an Arab revolt against Ottoman rule, it would provide military and financial aid during the war and would then help to create independent Arab governments in the Arabian Peninsula and most parts of the Fertile Crescent. Britain did, however, exclude some parts, such as the port areas of Mersin and Alexandretta (which now belong to Turkey), Basra (now in Iraq), and “portions of Syria lying to the west of the areas [districts] of Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo.” One of the toughest issues in modern Middle East history is to figure out whether McMahon meant to exclude only what is now Lebanon, a partly Christian region coveted by France, or also Palestine, in which some Jews hoped to rebuild their ancient homeland. Lebanon was clearly west of Damascus and those other Syrian cities, whereas the area that we now call Israel was significantly less so. The Arabs argue, therefore, that Britain promised Palestine to them. But if the letter referred to the province of Syria (of which Damascus was the capital), what is now Israel and was then partly under a governor in Jerusalem may have been what McMahon meant to exclude from Arab rule. Not only the Zionists but also the British government after 1918, even McMahon himself, believed that he had never promised Palestine to the Arabs. However, since Britain cared more in 1915 about its French alliance than about reserving Palestine for the Jews, we

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think that Lebanon was the area excluded from Arab rule in the negotiations. Only later would Jewish claims to Palestine become the main issue. The exclusion of these ambiguously described lands angered Husayn; he refused to accept the deal, and his correspondence with the British in Cairo ended inconclusively in early 1916. The Ottomans could have prevented any major Arab revolt, but for its authoritarian governor in Syria, [Ahmed] Jemal, who needlessly antagonized the Arabs there. As a former naval minister and one of the three Young Turks who ruled the Ottoman Empire when it entered World War I, Jemal had led the Turkish expedition to seize the Suez Canal and free Egypt from British rule. Although his first attempt failed, Jemal planned to try again. He settled down as governor of Syria while he rebuilt his forces, but he did little for the province. Many areas were struck by famine, locusts, or labor shortages caused by the conscription of local peasant youths into the Ottoman army. Fuel shortages led to the cutting down of olive trees and also hindered the transport of food to the stricken areas. Meanwhile, the Arab nationalist societies met and pondered which side to take in the war. One of Husayn’s sons, Faysal, came to Syria to parley with both the Arab nationalists and Jemal in 1915, but he accomplished nothing. Then in April and May 1916, Jemal’s police seized some Arabs, including scholars who were not nationalists, arrested them for treason, and had twenty-two of them publicly hanged in Beirut and Damascus. The executions aroused so much anger in Syria—and among Arabs in general—that Faysal returned to Mecca, a convert to Arab nationalism, and convinced his father that the time for revolt had come.

The Arab Revolt On 5 June 1916 Husayn declared the Arabs independent and unfurled the standard of their revolt against Turkish rule. The Ottoman Empire did not fall at once, but large numbers of Arabs in the Hijaz, plus some in Palestine and Syria, began to fight the Turks. But were the Arabs in these areas truly nationalists? Most probably did not care whether they were ruled from Istanbul or Mecca, so long as the outcome of the war was in doubt. The Arab Revolt raged for the next two years. Guided by European advisers, notably T. E. Lawrence [perhaps better known as Lawrence of Arabia], the Arab supporters of Amir Husayn fought on the Allied side against the Ottoman Empire. Working in tandem with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (the British Empire troops advancing from the Suez Canal), they moved north into Palestine. While the British took Jaffa and Jerusalem, the Arabs were blowing up railways and capturing Aqaba and Amman. When Britain’s forces drew near Damascus in late September 1918, they waited to let Lawrence and the Arabs occupy the city, which then became the seat of a provisional Arab government headed by Faysal. Meanwhile, the Ottoman army, now led by Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk), withdrew from Syria.

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The Turks were also retreating in Iraq before an Anglo-Indian army. Late in October the Ottoman Empire signed an armistice with the Allies at Mudros. The Arabs, promised the right of self-determination by the British and the French, were jubilant. Surely their independence was at hand.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement But this was not to be. The British government during the war had promised Ottoman-ruled Arab lands to other interested parties. Britain, France, and Russia drew up a secret pact called the Sykes-Picot Agreement (see Map 2.1). Signed in May 1916, it provided for direct French rule in much of northern and western Syria, plus a sphere of influence in the Syrian hinterland, including Damascus, Aleppo, and Mosul. Britain would rule lower Iraq directly. It would also advise an Arab government to be given lands between the Egyptian border and eastern Arabia, thus ensuring indirect British control from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. An enclave around Jaffa and Jerusalem would be under international rule because Russia wanted a part in administering the Christian holy places. The only area left for the Arabs to govern without foreign rulers or advisers was the Arabian desert. Arab apologists claim that Amir Husayn knew nothing about the Sykes-Picot Agreement until after World War I. T. E. Lawrence was wracked by guilt because he had encouraged the Arabs on Britain’s behalf, thinking that they would get their independence after the war, when in fact they were being manipulated by British diplomacy, if not duplicity. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a readable book, and Lawrence of Arabia is a great film, but neither one is history. Amir Husayn did know about the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Not only had the Allied secret treaties been published by the communists after they had seized control of Russia in 1917, but Husayn learned about the agreement from Turkish agents trying to draw him out of the war and, indeed, from the British and French themselves. To Husayn, the advantages of directing an Arab revolt against the Turks, who had interned him for so long, outweighed the perils of Sykes-Picot, which the British claimed would not involve the lands he hoped to rule. To other Arab nationalists, this Anglo-French agreement betrayed their cause; worse, it was kept secret until after the war.

The Balfour Declaration More public was a decision by the British cabinet to help establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, formally announced on 2 November 1917. This was the famous Balfour Declaration, so called because it appeared as a letter from the foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, to Lord Rothschild, titular president of Britain’s Zionist Federation. We note here its salient points: (1) The British government

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Map 2.1. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, 1916 would help set up a national home in Palestine for the Jews; (2) it would not undermine the rights or status of Jews choosing not to live there; and (3) it would not harm the civil or religious rights of Palestine’s “existing non-Jewish communities.” The Arabs’ main objection to the Balfour Declaration was that they made up over nine-tenths of the population of what would later become Palestine. How could anyone create a home for one group of people in a land inhabited by another? Worse still, the inhabitants had never been asked if they wanted their land to become the national home for a people who would be coming from far away. Moreover, the Balfour Declaration never mentioned the political rights of non-Jewish Palestinians, a point that still stirs deep Arab resentment. If Britain tried to realize the Zionist dream of a Jewish state, what would be the political status of Palestine’s Arabic-speaking Christians and Muslims? Did this document not contradict the Husayn-McMahon Correspondence and other statements meant to reassure Arabs who had thrown themselves into the revolt against the Turks?

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The Postwar Peace Settlement How would these conflicting commitments be reconciled once the war was over? In November 1918 the guns in Europe fell silent. Everyone hoped the diplomats would make a lasting peace. During the war, President Woodrow Wilson, the greatest statesman of the day, had proposed a set of principles called the Fourteen Points, upon which he wanted the Allies to build the peace once the war was won. He denounced secret treaties, urged self-determination for all peoples (specifically including those who had been under Ottoman rule), and proposed creating a League of Nations to avert future wars. When he came to Europe to represent the United States at the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson was hailed everywhere as a hero and savior. But Britain and France, the Allies that had borne the brunt of the fighting and the casualties, were determined to dictate the peace. The defeated powers, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire, could not attend the peace conference until it was time to sign the treaties. Russia (now a communist state that had signed a separate peace with Germany) was also excluded. Georges Clemenceau, who headed France’s delegation, expressed a popular mood when he demanded that Germany be punished and that France receive control over all of geographical Syria. David Lloyd George, heading the British delegation, agreed that Germany should be punished, but he also sought a formula to bring peace to the Middle East without harming the British Empire. The Zionist (or Jewish nationalist) movement was ably represented by Chaim Weizmann. The Arabs had Faysal, assisted by Lawrence.

The King-Crane Commission No one could reconcile the Middle Eastern claims of the Arabs, the Zionists, the British, and the French, but the conferees did try. Wilson wanted to send a commission of inquiry to Syria and Palestine to find out what their people wanted. Lloyd George accepted Wilson’s idea, until the French said that unless the commission also went to Iraq (where Britain’s military occupation was unpopular), they would boycott it. The British then lost interest, so the US team, called the King-Crane Commission, went alone. It found that the local people wanted complete independence under Faysal, who had already set up a provisional Arab government in Damascus. If they had to accept foreign tutelage, they would choose the Americans, who had no history of imperialism in the Middle East, or at least the British, whose army was already there, but never the French. The King-Crane Commission also examined the Zionist claims, which its members had initially favored, and concluded that their realization would provoke serious Jewish-Arab conflict. Its report proposed to scale back the Zionist program, limit Jewish immigration into Palestine, and end any plan to turn the

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country into a Jewish national home. Faysal and his backers hoped that the KingCrane Commission would persuade Wilson to favor the Arabs. Instead, Wilson suffered a paralytic stroke before he could read the commissioners’ report, which was not even published for several years.

Allied Arrangements: San Remo and Sèvres Contrary to Arab hopes, Britain and France agreed to settle their differences. France gave up its claims to Mosul and Palestine in exchange for a free hand in the rest of Syria. As a sop to Wilson’s idealism, the Allies set up a mandate system, under which Asian and African lands taken from Turkey and Germany were put in a tutelary relationship to a Great Power (called the mandatory), which would teach the people how to govern themselves. Each mandatory power had to report periodically to a League of Nations body called the Permanent Mandates Commission, to prevent any exploitation. Meeting in San Remo in 1920, British and French representatives agreed to divide the Middle Eastern mandates: Syria (and Lebanon) to France, and Iraq and Palestine (including what is now Jordan) to Britain. The Hijaz would be independent. The Ottoman government had to accept these arrangements when it signed the Treaty of Sèvres in August 1920. By then the French army had already marched eastward from Beirut, crushed the Arabs, and driven Faysal’s provisional government out of Damascus. The Arab dream had been shattered.

The Result: Four Mandates and an Emirate What happened then to the Arabs of the Fertile Crescent? The French had absolutely no sympathy for Arab nationalism and ruled their Syrian mandate as if it were a colony. Hoping to weaken the nationalists, the French split Syria into smaller units, including what would eventually become Lebanon, plus Alexandretta (which would be given to Turkey in 1939), states for the Alawis in the north and the Druze in the south, and even Aleppo and Damascus as city-states. Lebanon’s separation from Syria lasted because it had a Christian majority (as of 1921) that was determined to keep its dominant position. The other divisions of Syria soon ended, but the Syrians rebelled often against French rule, which in the 1920s and 1930s seemed likely to last (see Map 2.2). The British were inconsistent backers of Arab nationalism, working with the Hashimite family. Husayn still ruled in the Hijaz, but the prestige he had gained from the Arab Revolt made him a troublesome ally for the British. He refused to sign the Versailles and Sèvres treaties, proclaimed himself “king of the Arabs,” and later claimed to be the caliph of Islam. These actions so offended the British that, as the Saud family rose to power in eastern Arabia, they did nothing to stop the Saudis from marching into the Hijaz and toppling his regime in 1924. As for Iraq, British control led to a general Arab insurrection in 1920. Needing a strong man

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Map 2.2. The Middle Eastern Mandates, 1924

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to pacify the Iraqis, the British brought in Faysal, who was approved in a rigged plebiscite as their king. Soon peace was restored. The British cooperated with Faysal’s government and the local tribal shaykhs to speed Iraq toward independence. Ironically, Iraq, once among the poorest areas of the Ottoman Empire, became in 1932 the first state to graduate from its mandate status. After Faysal was ousted from Damascus in 1920, Abdallah (another son of Sharif Husayn) gathered about 500 tribal Arabs, occupied Amman, and threatened to raid the French in Syria. Although he could not have expelled them, the British wanted to keep him quiet. Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill met Abdallah in Jerusalem and persuaded him to accept—temporarily—the part of Palestine that lay east of the Jordan River, until the French should leave Syria. This provisional deal was opposed by the Zionists, who wanted all of Palestine as defined by the 1920 peace treaties to be open to Jewish settlement and eventual statehood. France feared that Abdallah’s new principality would become a staging area for Hashimite raids on Syria. No one expected this Emirate of Transjordan to last long, but it did. While the western part of the Palestine mandate seethed with Jewish-Arab strife, Transjordan became an oasis of tranquil politics and economic development.

Conclusion and Summary The Arabs had been roused from centuries of political lethargy, first by American teachers and missionaries, then by the revolution of the Young Turks, and finally by the blandishments of Britain and France during World War I. They recalled their ancient greatness and longed to recover it. From the West they learned about rights and freedoms, democratic governments, and national self-determination. Led by descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, a few Arabs had dared to rebel against the greatest Muslim state left in the world, the Ottoman Empire. In its place they hoped to set up one or more states that would have the same sovereign rights as all other independent countries. They helped the British and French defeat the Ottoman Turks in World War I, but later on the Allies failed to keep the pledges they had made to the Arabs. In the lands of the Fertile Crescent, where Arabs were clearly in the majority, where they hoped to form independent states, where some day the Arab nation might revive its former power and glory, the victorious Allies set up mandates that were mere colonies in disguise. Even if Britain and France governed their mandates well, promoting education and economic development, the Arabs wanted to rule themselves. Instead of coming together, the Arabs found themselves being pulled farther apart. One area, Palestine, was even declared to be the Jewish national home, leaving in doubt the future of its Arab inhabitants. These were the roots of Arab bitterness, put down almost a century ago. Adapted from Chapter 13 of Arthur Goldschmidt Jr. and Lawrence Davidson, A Concise History of the Middle East, Ninth Edition (2009, Westview Press).

CHAPTER 3 QR

Islamist Perceptions of US Policy in the Middle East Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad

Just as Americans have created a stereotype of Islamic fundamentalism, so too have Islamists created a parallel stereotype of a “crusader-Zionist conspiracy” bent on subjugating Muslims and eradicating Islam. Islamists and secular Muslims alike generally agree that US foreign policy has been skewed in favor of Israel at least since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when Israel gained control over the West Bank and Gaza Strip. As Yvonne Haddad cogently conveys in the following essay, Islamism is a reaction to Zionism, which is perceived as Israeli aggression aimed at enthralling Palestinians and defying United Nations resolutions, with the aid of US intervention at the United Nations. Islamists see that the West maintains a clear double standard that supports Jews’ having a Jewish state but demonizes Muslims who want an Islamic state and that immediately and forcefully punishes Iraq for its trespasses while silently ignoring Israel’s transgressions over the more than forty years since the 1967 war. More than fifteen Arab nations for a time established some sort of relationship with Israel after the 1993 Oslo agreement, Haddad points out, but this only led to increased arrogance on the part of the Israeli government, which continues to flout the many UN resolutions on the Palestinian-Israeli issue, including especially the one that stipulates the existence of a Palestinian state. Islamists conclude that Israel doesn’t truly want peace but only wants the pacification of Palestinians and the legalization of its territorial acquisitions. So convinced are Islamists that US policy is shaped by those with Jewish interests at heart that even President George W. Bush’s war on terror in response to the 9/11 attacks on US soil is perceived, despite assurances to the contrary, as a war on Islam—in effect continuing a “thousandyear” crusade of Christian fanaticism and Western imperialism against Muslims. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad is professor of the history of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University. She is author of A Vanishing Minority: Christians in the Middle East and coeditor of numerous volumes, including Islam and the West Post 9/11. 37

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or more than five decades, the umbrella ideology of Islamism has cast an increasingly large shadow as Islamist groups strive to create a unified ethos in order to enhance their own sense of empowerment in facing repressive regimes and what they view as Western and Zionist hegemonic policies in the Muslim world. Designed as an alternative to liberal humanism and socialism, as well as to fundamentalist secularism and Marxism, Islamism has left itself vulnerable to attacks from various quarters, including the regimes of some Arab countries, secularists, Zionists, humanists, socialists, feminists, and most recently the government of the United States that has since 9/11 dubbed Islamists as evil. During the past twenty years, the US press and some people in the US academy and government have created a consummate stereotype, commonly identified as “Islamic fundamentalism” or “Islamic extremism.” Currently, a profound sense of victimization on the part of Islamists has led to the development of a parallel stereotype: the alliance between Israel and the United States, which is generally depicted as “the crusader-Zionist conspiracy,” the Western demon bent on the eradication of Islam. This perception has its roots in the worldview of the Muslim Brotherhood, “the mother of all Islamist movements” in Egypt. Hasan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, perceived the Muslim nation to be in mortal danger as a consequence of the abolition of the office of the caliphate (the generally acknowledged leader of the Islamist community dating to the initial successor of the Prophet Muhammad) in 1924 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in Turkey. The caliph had provided a sense of Islamic unity maintained by commitment to Islamic values in societies governed by Islamic law. From his vantage point, foreign interests, at the time mainly British, appeared to work diligently to divide the Muslim world into nation-states to facilitate their subjugation and to insist on implementing the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which had promised a national homeland for European Jews in Palestine. For al-Banna, the Balfour Declaration was not only a means of maintaining colonial interests in the area but was a continuation of European crusader designs on the holy lands. Although all Islamists appear to agree on an agenda of bringing about the kinds of changes that provide empowerment and well-being for Muslim society, they differ on the means of actualizing change and on issues of political and religious pluralism in an Islamic state. Meanwhile, there is general agreement among Islamists and secularists that US foreign policy in the Middle East has been skewed in favor of Israel since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war (also known as the Six Day War, or June War). This perception has left an indelible mark on Islamist identity and its worldview.

Islamism: A Reaction to Disempowerment Islamism is not a reactionary movement; it does not want to replicate the Islamic community of the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century. Rather, it seeks control of the present and future of Muslim destiny. From its inception it has been reactive, responding to direct and imagined challenges posed by internal

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conditions as well as its violent encounter, during the past two centuries, with a dominant West. Its ideologues operate with a heightened awareness of the importance of monitoring events in the world, particularly those that affect their lives, and responding to them. They see themselves as manning a defensive operation, the responsibility of which is to safeguard society from total disintegration. Islamism was initially a reaction to the internal sense of decay in Muslim society. A central theme in most Islamist literature is a response to the deep awareness of the backwardness of Muslims, a critical assessment of what went wrong historically, and an effort to rectify the situation in order to bring about a vibrant future. Revival is seen by its advocates as a crucial means of infusing life into a community that is bogged down in centuries-old ideas and traditions that have led to the ossification of Islamic society, restricting its ability to adapt to the fast-changing reality of the modern world. Islamism is a reaction against disempowerment and what is seen as the irrelevance of the nation-states created in the region as a result of the Sykes-Picot Agreement constructed during World War I, through which the British and the French artificially divided much of the Middle East into spheres of influence that were later sanctioned through postwar agreements into the mandate system consisting of state units that had hitherto not existed. There is general consensus in Islamist literature that the dominant world order that has prevailed since the nation-states in the area were carved out has not allowed for the inclusion of Arabs as full citizens of the world. Arab nations and peoples have continued to be subservient to foreign domination, which Islamists describe as a continuing predatory relationship. Islamism is also a reaction to a profound feeling on the part of Muslims that they have been victimized over the centuries at the hands of Western Christians. The litany of perceived outrages includes European treatment of Muslims during the Crusades. They cite the fact that Eastern Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Jerusalem were massacred by the Western invaders during the First Crusade whereas Salah alDin (Saladin) treated the crusaders magnanimously by giving them assurance of safe passage after he led the Muslim recapture of the city eighty-eight years later in 1187. It includes the reconquista in Spain during which a ruthless de-Islamization policy gave Muslims the options of conversion, expulsion, or execution. It includes the colonialist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, along with the activities of Christian missionaries. It also includes the reality that in the Soviet Union, Muslims living under Communist hegemony were not allowed to practice their faith or study the tenets of their religion. And it includes the perception that for a century, Zionism has been one more element of the long and continuous effort supported by Christians to eradicate Islam and Muslims from the holy places. [Ethnic conflicts in] Bosnia and Kosovo are seen as further manifestations of European efforts to eradicate the indigenous European Muslim population. Islamism is a reaction to the demonization of Islam. Muslims are offended and angered at the way in which Islam has been defamed in inflammatory political statements, such as former US Vice President Dan Quayle’s comparison of Islamic

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fundamentalism to Nazism and communism.1 Islamists are very aware that since the late 1970s there has been a dramatic increase in the number of articles in the US press dedicated to Muslim-bashing. These tend to depict Muslims as irrational and vengeful and motivated by religious zeal and fanaticism that arise out of an innate hatred of the West, its Judeo-Christian heritage, and its secularist values. Such distorted presentations of Islam are seen by Muslims as conscious efforts at revisionist history, inspired by contempt for Islam or motivated by political considerations in an attempt to maintain unwavering US support for the state of Israel. They tend to validate for Islamists their perceptions that the West has a double standard by which it measures events in the area. Islamism is a reaction to Zionism. Israel’s 1967 preemptive strike, which resulted in a devastating defeat of Jordan, Egypt, and Syria, is generally referred to as ‘udwan, or aggression. Zionism’s policies are perceived as Judaizing and aimed at disempowering, dispossessing, and displacing the Palestinians in an effort to destroy their identity. What is perceived as [Israel’s] persistent rejection of United Nations (UN) resolutions and violation of the Geneva Convention has fostered, nursed, and inflamed the Islamic response. It is enhanced by what is seen to be US intervention at the United Nations in support of these policies, which has made the international community ineffective in implementing resolutions that would uphold justice. On another level Islamism can be said to be a kind of mirror image of Zionism. It may be seen as an attempt to emulate what is perceived as a winning Israeli formula in which religious zeal, divine justification, scriptural proof-texting, and victimization are employed to mobilize Jewish as well as Euro-American Christian support for the state. The question thus remains: Why is it acceptable for Jews to have a Jewish state and not for Muslims to form an Islamic state?

Islamism and the “Double Standard” Islamism is a reaction to what is perceived as the double standard (al-izdiwajiyya) that is used by the West in its foreign policy in the Middle East. For example, in demonizing the Islamists, Westerners claim that there is no room for religion in the modern nation-state. Islamists consider this not only to be hypocritical in light of Western support for Israel and enduring and prominent symbols of religiosity in the West but, in a very profound way, to be the proof of the double standard. Hence they believe that the West is not against religion per se but against Islam. “Pakistan and Israel,” says one writer, “are two countries created solely on the basis of religion and faith. But you may read in the Western press that Pakistan is backward and reactionary because it has emerged in the name of religion. Nothing whatsoever of this nature is said about Israel.”2 1. Graduation speech at the US Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, May 30, 1990. 2. Muhammad M. al-Fahham, “The Restoration of Jerusalem,” in The Fifth Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research (Cairo: Government Printing Office, 1971), 53.

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There is a growing perception among Islamists that Jews and Christians, driven by religious fanaticism, triumphalism, and imperialism, have been engaged in a “thousand-year war” with Muslims. Major events in the area have contributed to this perception, such as the success of the Iranian revolution, which validated for the faithful the Qur’anic teaching that God will give victory to those who believe, and Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, which were widely seen as a continuation of the crusader-Zionist efforts to destroy Islam. Muslims have been intrigued by the fact that Israel and its supporters boast that it is the only democracy in the area. They note that it functions as a democracy “for Jews” while denying religious minorities—both Christian and Muslim— equal access to resources such as water, housing, health, education, jobs, and the ability to purchase land.

Islamists and the Zionist Lobby The Islamist literature depicts the West as dominated by the Zionist lobby. This image has had several mutations as Zionist influence is perceived to have gained control of the inner circles of policymakers who determine the destiny of the region. Interviews I conducted with Islamists in Egypt in 1985 made clear that they resented the double standard with which they were treated. One leader talked about the “evenhanded” policy, which was then the buzzword used by the [Reagan] administration to describe the habit of the West “to stroke Israel with the palm of their hand and whack us with the back.” That same year, the joke in Jordan was, Why doesn’t Israel want to become the fifty-first state of the United States? The answer: It would then have to be satisfied with being represented by two senators whereas now it has 100. In interviews I conducted in 1989, the image of Zionist control of the US government became even more dominant. One Islamist depicted the United States as a colony of Israel (a view that is shared by Arab secularists). He compared the state of affairs in the United States with the former British rule over Egypt, noting that there were three specific areas in which British power manifested itself. First, Egyptians were not allowed to have an independent foreign policy but had to defer to Britain for direction. Second, there were foreign British residents in Cairo who made sure that Egyptian policy was in accord with the interests of Britain. Third, Egyptian tax revenues were sent to Britain to sustain its power. He drew the parallels by concluding, “What you have in the United States is a government that is unable to formulate an independent foreign policy without first asking how will Israel react. Secondly, the Congress is accountable to the Israeli lobby, which functions as a foreign agent placing the welfare of Israel above that of the United States. In the third place, the lobby assures the flow of billions of US tax dollars to Israel.”

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US Foreign Policy and the Clinton Administration For Islamists, the [Bill] Clinton administration assumed authority at a critical time in history. Due to the collapse of the Soviet empire, the US administration was not only able to implement its policies unimpeded by considerations of balance of power, but it also chose to shed its cooperative arrangements with old “allies,” such as Pakistan and the Afghan Resistance Movement, and to rearrange its priorities. Clinton began what was perceived as a tilt toward India at the expense of Pakistan, the latter an ally during the cold war who had for years supported the policies of the United States and had allowed operations against the Soviet Union to be launched through its territory into Afghanistan. The dumping of Pakistan and the abandonment of Afghanistan were perceived as part of US duplicity and a sign of its increasing control by Zionist interests. The United States would feign friendship only when it needed to use nations for its own interests. Despite their struggle for empowerment during the twentieth century, Islamists feel, it has been determined that Arabs should be maintained in weakness, mediocrity, and subservience. For many in the Islamist movement, the actions of the Clinton administration and its pronouncements confirmed the perception of many Muslims that it is Tel Aviv that dictates policy in the area. An address by Martin Indyk (former assistant secretary of state for the Near East and North Africa) on May 18, 1993, raised further concern about the future of the region. Indyk outlined a Manichaean vision, one where the world was portrayed as a potential nightmare should the nationalists or Islamists realize their dream and form a united front. The alternative vision that he promoted was one of harmony and bliss in which Israel would attain its “normalization” in the region. Indyk stated that the United States is not an impartial arbiter of the peace process; rather he affirmed that “the President and the Secretary of State made it clear that our approach in the negotiations will involve working with Israel, not against it. We are committed to deepening our strategic partnership with Israel in the pursuit of peace and security.”3 This affirmation did not bode well for permanent peace in the area and in fact probably assured further growth of the Islamist movement. Furthermore, it served to undermine the very regimes (Egypt and the Gulf nations) the United States wishes to support. Those regimes were put in the position of seeming to collude in the empowerment of Israel at the expense of the Arab population. In his speech to the Jordanian parliament in 1994, President Clinton appeared to be reiterating Indyk’s vision of a Manichaean worldview. He portrayed the Middle East as “an arena of struggle between the forces of tyranny and freedom, terror and security, bigotry and tolerance, isolation and openness.” In the process, he spelled out for Islamists the choices between good and evil in the area, with the 3. Martin Indyk, “Address to the Soref Symposium, Washington Institute, May 18, 1993,” 17.

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good being assured when they associated with Israel. Meanwhile, administration policy appeared to depict Islam in a similar fashion: At one end of the spectrum is Islam, represented by the faith that is confined to personal belief and ritual practices, and on the other are extremist groups that insist on the political dimension of Islam and therefore are dubbed violent and terrorist. Although this policy affirms a respect for the religion of Islam, it is a disemboweled Islam that has no input into human, social, economic, or political values, which some Islamists have dubbed “American Islam.” Since 1967, the issue of Palestine has been adopted increasingly as part of the Islamic agenda. It seems all too clear that an unjust peace that thwarts all hopes will only intensify the anger at what is seen as long-standing injustice and will fuel the flames of Islamist reaction. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, one American administration after another invited the Arabs to trust American evenhandedness and come to the peace table and reap the benefits. And they have come. Over fifteen Arab nations for a time established some sort of relationship with Israel after the signing of the Oslo agreement and the Madrid peace conference of 1991. The consequences were perceived to be the increased arrogance on the part of the Israeli government. Many in the area feel that the Islamists were vindicated, that Israel does not want peace but pacification and the legalization of its acquisition of the rest of the land of the Palestinians with the indigenous population relegated to isolated Bantustans, while the presidents of the Palestinian Authority are to become the enforcers for Israeli security interests. As one Islamist put it, “the peace process turned out to be the process by which Israel acquires Palestinian land piece by piece by piece.” The peace process engaged in by the Clinton administration was suspect from the beginning because the diplomats charged with shepherding it through were from the Israeli lobby and were working in support of Israel’s interest. Not one had an Arab background; hence there was an underestimation of what the Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims would find acceptable. At issue was the fact that the Arabs believed that they had given up all they could at Madrid. They had accepted Israel within its 1967 borders, relinquishing 78 percent of original Palestine for the Jewish state. But Israel wanted more land. It wanted to maintain settlements established on confiscated land in the West Bank and Jerusalem, a policy that is in violation of international law as set by the Geneva Convention and reiterated by a variety of UN resolutions. This was justified as necessary because of its security needs—that it was the dream of generations of Jews who had suffered during the Holocaust, and that Israel had won the war. To the Islamists, such demands were seen not only as excessive greed but in a very profound way as an unjust solution to the problem. Arabs argue that it is unjust to expect the Palestinian Christians and Muslims to relinquish their rights to their lands and homes in order to satisfy Israel’s expansionist security needs. That would reward Israel for what the Arabs call its War of Aggression (of 1967). If the argument is that Israel had won [land] by

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war, that in the final analysis might makes right, then, they say, the Arabs should wait until a new generation is able to rise and become strong enough to take it back. If Israel’s acquisition of land is based on religious justification that 16 million Jews consider Jerusalem as the religious center of their life, they question why the sentiments of 1.3 billion Muslims about Jerusalem are not being taken into consideration. They question why Judaism is being privileged. If the argument is that God had promised the land in the Hebrew scriptures, they question why the Qur’an, the final revelation of God, which sees that the Jews will be dispersed throughout the world, is not taken into consideration.

US Foreign Policy and the George W. Bush Administration Muslims expected a more equitable policy from the George W. Bush administration. During the presidential debates, he had questioned the use of racial profiling legislated by the Clinton administration, which had targeted Arab Americans. Furthermore, in the estimation of Arab and Muslim Americans, a change in administration would remove the Israeli lobby from the center of policymaking. They had noted that the lobby was instrumental in defeating the reelection bid of George W. Bush’s father (because it did not forgive his policy of demanding a halt to the construction and expansion of settlements on the West Bank). Consequently, George W. received the endorsement of the major Muslim and Arab organizations, and a large number of Arabs and Muslims in the United States registered and voted for the first time, accounting for 2 percent of the votes received by the [George W.] Bush–[Dick] Cheney ticket. From the beginning, President Bush wanted to keep his hands off the ArabIsraeli conflict. In the process, he allowed the Israeli authorities to continue to grind down the Palestinian resistance to the occupation. His public and highly publicized refusal to meet with Yasser Arafat, while repeatedly welcoming Prime Minister [Ariel] Sharon to the White House, sent an important message to Islamists that he was in total support of Israel and its policies. Whenever the Palestinians reacted to Israeli aggression, Bush blamed Arafat and the Palestinians. Such open support of Sharon infuriated Muslims and Arabs overseas; Sharon was particularly reviled because he was implicated in four massacres perpetrated against the Palestinians. Then there was the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Virginia, and Americans asked, “Why do they hate us?” Osama bin Laden’s statement provided an answer that few US policymakers wanted to hear. He identified US foreign policy vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict, US containment of Iraq, which had degraded the lives of the Iraqi people and led to their suffering, and US troops stationed in the Gulf, who maintained American hegemony in the area and supported autocratic regimes. His message was blunted by a parade of former US policymakers, diplomats, and army brass who appeared on

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American television stations around the clock to assure the American public that they hate us because of our “democracy,” our “culture,” and our “values.” And as Raghida Dergham of the Lebanese daily al-Hayat has said, not one dared to tell the American people that “it is the policy, stupid.” After the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration declared a “global war on terrorism.” The attack on American soil was so momentous that it was deemed to have “changed America forever.” To his credit, President Bush reached out to the Arab and Muslim American communities and assured them that the United States was waging war not against Islam but against terrorism. He called on the American people not to take out their anger and frustration on American Muslims. At the same time, his administration incarcerated more than 5,000 Arabs and Muslims using the hastily legislated Patriot Act. Racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims continues to be a common practice. Meanwhile, there was very little movement in adjusting US foreign policy to demonstrate more evenhandedness and justice. The Bush administration was caught in a double bind: If it altered its policies, it could be perceived as caving in to the terrorists; at the same time, the constant blaming of Palestinians for the bloodshed in Israel/Palestine and the daily saberrattling for regime change in Iraq raised questions about US sincerity. The majority of Muslims overseas believed that the United States had declared war on Islam. Many continue to question whether current policies are raising a new generation of Islamists who will seek to avenge what they perceive to be a war on Islam, despite the assurances by the Bush administration to the contrary, and they await justice for the Palestinians. Western commentators point to the fact that various Arab governments appear to have wearied of the Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian cause. For Islamists, the danger facing the Muslims is not “the Palestine problem” as much as the “problem of Israel.” For Muslims, Palestine is a cause. It represents the demand for the right of a people to self-determination, democracy, and freedom. It is also the demand that the West recognize that an Arab person is equal to a European person or, as some Palestinians put it, that a European Jew is not better than a Palestinian Christian or Muslim and has no superior right to rob, destroy, expel, kidnap, or kill without consequences. Palestine is a demand for the end of the colonial era, an end to the era of “Christian arrogance” and “Jewish insolence,” a demand that the superior international Islamic law prevail, which would guarantee justice and freedom to Muslims and to religious minorities who dwell among them.

Operation Iraqi Freedom and Its Consequences One of the transformations that took place post-9/11 was in President George W. Bush himself, who referred to himself as the “war president.” After September 11, 2001, the president proceeded to plan for the invasion of Iraq, a plan promoted by the neoconservative advisors in his administration. In seeking the support of

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the American people for the global war on terrorism, the Bush administration utilized a variety of themes, including creating a climate of fear about the alleged imminent danger from a nuclear attack by Saddam Hussein. Furthermore, despite the fact that Saddam was a secularist, he was initially depicted as an accomplice of al-Qa’ida. At the same time, the propaganda for war provided the public with a moral justification for attacking Afghanistan and Iraq, bathing the war in the virtues of, among other things, liberating the oppressed women of Islam from fanatical oppressive Islamists. The goal became the modernization and democratization of Islamic society. Washington eventually promised the refashioning of Iraq as a beacon of democracy that would serve as a model for the entire Middle East. Muslims took note of the fact that Operation Iraqi Freedom was a preemptive war. From their perspective, there was no virtue in the attack. Although they despised Saddam Hussein, they perceived the goal of the US-led invasion in more sinister terms, as one that was driven by the motive of weakening the Arabs and Muslims and empowering Israel. They accused the Bush administration of dealing with the consequences of terrorism while turning a blind eye toward its causes. Arabs and Muslims are aware that terrorism is a response to American policies that empower autocratic regimes and implement Israeli and Zionist policies that are harmful to Arabs and Muslims and therefore breed hatred. They noted that the US government could not acknowledge this truth since it would indict itself, and therefore it projects the blame on others. Hence the Bush administration declared a global war on terrorism, in which it assumed a total monopoly in deciding the nature of the war, its timing, its targets, the means to be utilized, and the manner in which it would be conducted. Islamists continue to be suspicious of the Bush administration’s goals in Iraq. They maintain that under the rubric of pluralism and democracy, the American government appears to be in the process of dividing the country according to ethnic and sectarian identities. They note that the record of the US occupation does not inspire hope. It is accused of insisting on giving US companies the right to develop the oil industry, robbing the Iraqis of their wealth. It is also accused of initially placing shady characters in charge of the Iraqi government, of allowing the theft of archeological treasures, and of subverting the intellectual and religious culture of Iraq by replacing the school curricula with materials conceived and written in the United States. Suspicion of America’s motives is pervasive in the Muslim world, and the US desire to unilaterally dictate norms and culture is a serious concern in the Middle East. The fear is that the globalization promoted by the United States will result in the Americanization of Arab and Muslim culture. The hope in the Arab and Muslim worlds is that Americans will recognize that the international order that was unilaterally abrogated by the United States must be restored. The hope is that the American people will initiate that change. Adapted from Chapter 27, by YvonneYazbeck Haddad, in David W. Lesch, ed., The Middle East and the United States: A Historical and Political Reassessment, Fourth Edition (2007, Westview Press).

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Global Energy and the Middle East Steve Yetiv

Access to the Middle East’s oil is essential to the industrialized societies of the world; therefore, in one way or another, petroleum lies at the heart of the Middle East foreign policy calculations of the United States and other oil-producing and oil-consuming nations. Global-energy analyst Steve Yetiv explains why Middle East oil will necessarily become an even more central concern. Demand for it continues to grow; yet oil is a limited resource, and oil production will eventually peak and then tail off as oil becomes harder to find. As that happens, and as other petroleum reserves dry up, Middle East oil—the largest reserves in the world—will experience increasing demand. Factors that pertain especially or uniquely to the sociopolitical conditions of the Middle East also threaten the region’s flow of oil to the world. For example, at times Iran has resisted international pressure on its nuclear program by threatening to cut off oil to the West. Iran has the military strength to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz at the bottom of the Persian Gulf, through which about 40 percent of the world’s oil exports flow each day. Oil drilling, refining, and shipping are all activities vulnerable to attacks by terrorists as well. Yetiv concludes, however, by outlining a number of factors that help to mitigate such threats to the disruption of the oil supply. Steve Yetiv is university professor of political science and international studies at Old Dominion University. His books include Crude Awakenings: Global Oil Security and American Foreign Policy and The Petroleum Triangle: Global Oil, Globalization, and Transnational Terrorism. The present reading is adapted from his chapter in Interpreting the Middle East: Essential Themes, edited by David Sorenson.

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ive factors are making oil more important for the global economy and will increasingly place the Middle East even more at the center of global oil security. These factors are (1) the rising demand for global oil; (2) peak oil and its potential effects; (3) that the Middle East, due to its reserves, will become even more important as a supplier of global oil; (4) that the Middle East now has and will increasingly have the lion’s share of excess global oil capacity; and (5) the likelihood that the highest potential for serious oil disruptions is in, or emanates from, the Middle East. The chapter puts these threats into a balanced perspective, arguing that while they are very serious, a number of developments over the past thirty years can help mitigate them, to some extent at least.

Projected Demand for Global Oil The first trend of importance in gaining some traction on the more specific issue of Middle East oil is the rising demand for global oil. The US Department of Energy projects that the use of all energy sources, including oil, will increase through 2030. This notion is fairly intuitive to most energy watchers and perhaps even to intelligent laypeople. Indeed, we are increasingly aware that industrializing countries such as India and China will need more and more energy. Even though oil demand is projected to increase, it is not expected to grow faster than that for other energy sources. Renewable energy and coal are expected to be the fastest-growing energy sources. Prospects for renewable energy are expected to improve due to projected high prices for oil and natural gas and increasing concern about the environmental impacts of fossil fuel use.

The Peak Oil Problematique Although oil demand will increase over time, the opposite is likely to be true for oil production. Different estimates exist on when oil will peak. The oil peak refers to a turning point in which ever-growing production volumes will be followed by a period of shrinking volumes, until oil runs out altogether and we’re left holding the global gas can. Some analysts believe that since 1980 the world has consumed far more oil than has been discovered and that we are now at a place where one barrel of new oil is found for every four consumed; that we are well past peak oil. That is a rather grim assessment. Pessimists believe, in part, that oil reserves are exaggerated, partly because countries in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) want higher output quotas. These quotas are pegged to the size of the oil reserves that they claim. Thus, they exaggerate the size of their reserves. Others point to an oilproduction drop in the past few years in major oil-producing countries and by the major oil companies as an indicator that we are depleting global oil resources

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faster than believed. The pessimists also put less stock in technological fixes and in the human leadership needed to cause a major change in consumption habits. They believe that these pitfalls, combined with rising population and limited sources, spell trouble ahead. Optimists criticize the pessimists for ignoring or not sufficiently considering changes in technology, costs, prices, or politics, all of which could significantly affect the oil peak. Optimists also include many economists who have a sanguine view of market power. They believe that price incentives will drive discovery and that innovative technological fixes can yield alternatives to oil. Even as oil becomes more scarce and prices rise, other forms of energy will come on the market, preempting the difficult scenarios the pessimists paint. No one can predict an oil peak definitely or surmise its specific effects. However, there is good reason to believe that the oil peak will be important for a number of reasons. First, no matter what one thinks of peak oil prognostications, common sense tells us that oil is a finite resource. We cannot continue to discover, produce, and deliver oil forever. Even if we have twenty or thirty years from peak time to exhaustion, we are running far behind in preparing for the future. Indeed, the global economy runs on oil. It cannot switch from oil to other alternatives overnight, even if they are available at a reasonable cost. The oil crisis won’t hit suddenly, but oil prices will rise ahead of it. We won’t wake up to the stunning headline “We’re Down to the Last Drop of Oil.” Oil will peak well before this news ever becomes a big surprise. In the absence of a serious alternative energy source, the price of oil will begin to rise significantly as perceptions that it is stretching supply gain ground. The price will likely increase even more after some consensus is reached that we have peaked, especially if oil production is also viewed as likely to decline at a faster rather than slower pace, and if such realizations overlap with political and security trouble in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. The oil peak is important because it will signal, for a variety of reasons, an era in which the Middle East becomes even more critical for global oil. We now can turn to that issue.

Increasing Dependence on Middle East Oil Irrespective of when oil peaks, the Middle East will become increasingly important as a supplier of oil. As is well known, the world’s oil reserves are concentrated in the Middle East. After we draw down oil reserves all over the world, Middle East oil will remain the crucial resource base. In fact, even if we make major changes in oil consumption, the Middle East will still become more important as an oil supplier. In the past two decades, the share of oil as a percentage of total energy consumption by the major industrialized countries actually declined from 55 percent in 1980 to 40 percent in 2000. Arab Gulf states, in particular, have lost and not regained market share, partly as a result of the long-run impact of the 1973 oil

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embargo, which motivated conservation and exploration into oil alternatives and into non-OPEC oil. By 1982, oil production from areas outside the Middle East overtook oil production from the region for the first time. Although the demand for OPEC oil has decreased since 1973, world dependence is projected to increase in the future, with the Persian Gulf serving as the principal source of supply to meet rising demand over the next two decades. This will make the Gulf increasingly important to the global economy and the question of oil security even more germane. According to the US Department of Energy, the region holds about two-thirds of global oil reserves, whereas the United States by contrast holds about 4 percent.

Global Spare Capacity It is not just that most of the world’s global reserves are in the Middle East but also that 80 percent of the world’s spare oil capacity is there—a percentage that may well increase over time. Spare capacity, or idle capacity, is the amount of oil that can be brought onto the market in a short period in case of a major oil disruption. Spare capacity is not just a function of how much oil a country has but to what extent it has the production capability to bring oil onto the market quickly. Saudi Arabia holds most of the world’s spare capacity, and the country is carrying out plans to increase this capacity significantly. Such concentrated spare capacity—in addition to increasingly concentrated oil reserves—will make the region’s security and political developments more important to the functioning of the world economy. These threats are discussed in the following sections.

Oil Supply Disruptions Threats to the free flow of oil certainly exist and could arise at any time. Such threats can develop anywhere in the world. However, historically, the most serious threats have arisen in the Middle East. While that is unlikely to change, what will change is that such threats will be weightier and produce more serious consequences for oil prices and the global economy. This is because the Middle East will become increasingly critical as a provider of oil to the world economy. The sections below discuss in brief the key threats to the free flow of global oil, all of which exist in, or emerge from, the Middle East. Some of these threats may never materialize, and others may materialize very soon or many years down the road.

Military Threats to Oil Security Various regional military threats to oil security are germane, but three are most prominent: efforts to shut down the Strait of Hormuz; to engage in interstate aggression; and to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

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Much of the world’s oil travels through the thirty-four-mile-wide Strait of Hormuz. Around 40 percent of the world’s oil exports pass through the strait daily, a number the US Department of Energy projects will climb to 60 percent by 2030. Iran poses the key threat to the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s ability to interdict or shut down oil traffic is enhanced by anti-ship missiles, mine warfare, amphibious assets, and submarines. Such assets are not enough to challenge American military forces in a sustained, conventional engagement but certainly offer the ability to conduct forms of unconventional warfare. Such capabilities are enhanced by Iran’s long coastline dominating the strait. To be sure, Tehran must recognize that disrupting Gulf shipping would produce countermeasures and diminish its own oil exports. Yet, a UN economic embargo of Iran might trigger Tehran to try to close the strait, as could the use of force against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Iranian officials have suggested repeatedly that while Iran, the world’s fourth largest exporter, supports the stable flow of oil, it reserves the option to shut down the strait if threatened. If Iraq splinters into its three historic parts [Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd], Iran’s influence over Iraq’s Shia will likely increase, perhaps allowing it to influence Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. If Iran’s influence increases in the future, and if it appears that its power cannot be checked at the regional or global level, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait could be more likely to accommodate Iran on various issues, including oil pricing in OPEC. This is because they would be more reluctant to challenge a powerful Iran in a region where perceptions of power count heavily. Moreover, a serious Iranian bid for regional hegemony, especially in the relative absence of influence by moderates at the domestic level, could also generate the types of broader instabilities in the region, which usually spook oil markets. As a result, it appears that even after the United States withdraws from Iraq, a strong American deterrent against increased Iranian power in Iraq will be important, even if it is over the horizon or at some distance from the actual points of potential conflict. The United States will want to pursue a well-planned role as an outside balancer in the region. In addition to threats against the Strait of Hormuz and to threats regarding Iraq, WMD represent an indirect threat to oil security. Iraq nearly developed nuclear capability prior to the 1991 Gulf War, and Iran may be able to produce nuclear weapons in the coming years. Even a small nuclear weapon could destroy major oil facilities, and threats of radiological, chemical, and biological weapon attacks cannot be discounted. Even if Iran or other states in the region never use WMD, they could enable brinkmanship or coercion because others would be aware of their existence. This could facilitate efforts by Iran to coerce other OPEC states, such as Saudi Arabia, into lowering oil production to raise the price of oil or into launching an embargo for various political ends. Nuclear weapons could also make it harder for the United States to deploy regional forces, for the obvious reason that leaders would be less willing to take the risk of massive casualties.

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Terrorism In addition to more conventional threats, terrorists can also threaten oil security. Terrorists could do damage in various ways. They could hit sensitive points in Saudi Arabia’s eight most significant oil fields, both onshore and offshore, and cause major problems in supply that could last months. Loading terminals and oil pipelines could also be hit along the broader Saudi oil system. Terrorists could also hijack ships and use them to attack ports and facilities or hit large oil reservoirs. In fact, it is very likely that al-Qaeda has targeted such facilities. The bombing of the French-flagged supertanker Limburg in the Arabian Sea off Yemen’s southeastern Hadramaut coast on October 6, 2002, underscored such intentions. On the same day the Limburg was attacked, the Al Jazeera network in Qatar broadcast an audiotape in which Osama bin Laden warned that Islamic forces were preparing to attack the crusaders’ “economic lifeline,” referring to the supply of oil to the American and Western world. Terrorism aimed at regional monarchs, if successful, could also hurt oil security by weakening their position and slowly creating an atmosphere conducive to their overthrow. Increased domestic terrorism could dispose them to appease their antiAmerican domestic critics and to decrease cooperation with Washington in the hope that they can placate at least part of the political spectrum that might sympathize with the terrorists.

The Rise of Extremists in Saudi Arabia While terrorism could seriously affect oil security, an even bigger threat is the fall of the Saudi regime to Islamic radicals. It is impossible to know exactly what such a radicalized regime would do, but based on the views of such radicals, it is likely that they would limit or cut US relations; deny the United States worst-casescenario access to Saudi strategic facilities; oppose Mideast peace efforts; possibly align more closely with Iran; eschew antiterrorism measures at the domestic and international levels; and decrease oil production to increase oil prices and oil revenues and to defy Washington. The combined effect of these actions would be to hurt oil security and raise prices, even if the new regime did not resort to oil embargoes and sought to provide a stable flow of oil to the global economy.

Saudi Regional Orientation Short of falling to extremists, a threat also exists that the Saudi regime will genuflect more toward Iran than toward the United States. Riyadh has shown a sporadic proclivity to seek security more by accommodating than by opposing potentially threatening actors, which was true even when the Saudis faced the serious threat of Iraq’s forces on their border after the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

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They considered accommodating Saddam Hussein and exhibited much concern about letting American forces into the kingdom. To be sure, accommodating threatening actors can make sense. Even Washington blessed the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement that began in late 1997 and early 1998. But the real question is under what conditions such a rapprochement benefits oil security. Security can be threatened if a resurgent Iran slowly lures Riyadh toward its foreign policy orientation. This is because Iran, as an OPEC hawk, has sought higher oil prices than the Saudis have wanted; has at least threatened an oil embargo; seems to seek WMD capability; explicitly wants to eject US regional forces; and has been far less supportive of Mideast peace efforts than Saudi Arabia. Indeed, Iran’s support of Hamas and Hizbullah has hurt peace efforts, as suggested by Hizbullah’s war with Israel in Lebanon and by the rejection of peace efforts by both groups. Absent Iran’s strategic and political support, both actors would be less able to disrupt the peace process.

Developments that Mitigate Threats to Oil Supplies While threats to oil supplies are serious and can arise at any time, it is important not to exaggerate threats to oil supply. The Middle East is likely to become even more important due to these threats, but several developments over the past thirty years could also help mitigate such serious disruptions. It is useful to consider these developments to obtain a balanced view of the threats we are likely to face in the coming years and even decades. In 1979, Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, seized power and sought to export Iran’s revolution across the oil-rich Gulf. The Saudi regime appeared on the verge of falling, with massive uprisings by Iranian-inspired Shia Muslims in the eastern Hasa oil province and the seizure of the Grand Mosque at Mecca by Islamic zealots. Today’s Iran, by comparison, is far less aggressive toward the oil-rich Arab states. It is true that it appears to be pursuing nuclear weapons as well as the ability to weaponize and to deliver them, and that its position as a leader of Shiites in the Middle East has probably increased. Those are serious issues, but Iran does not threaten regional oil supplies as it did in the period following the revolution. In addition, Saddam [Hussein]’s Iraq was a veritable powerhouse in 1979, bent on regional domination. The oil-rich Arab monarchs were scrambling to mollify Iraq, even while they feared it. Saddam is gone. His military is disbanded. Iraq is attempting to become a democracy. It could try to threaten the region again in the future. However, it is far less aggressive now than it was under Saddam. And its ability to produce oil has gone up dramatically with the end of Saddam’s regime, the lifting of UN sanctions, and the increasing international investment in its oil industry. Egypt and Israel made peace in 1979, but the chance of an Arab-Israeli war, which could trigger use of the Arab oil weapon, was still far higher than it is today.

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Back then, Egypt was ostracized for making peace; the Soviet Union was supporting Syria, Iraq, and Libya, thus emboldening them; Israel’s military advantage was far less clear to Arab states than it is today; US credibility was in tatters because of its perceived inability to save the shah, and extreme pan-Arabism was much stronger. Today, no combination of Arab states can expect to defeat Israel militarily. The world suffered two recession-causing oil shocks in the 1970s—the 1973 embargo and the 1979 Iranian revolution. Today, OPEC and Saudi Arabia often try to, albeit clumsily, increase oil supply when needed. While OPEC’s abilities have been tested recently by growing global demand, its members know that the high oil prices of the 1970s provoked alternative energy and oil exploration, which cost them market share. By enabling and motivating alternatives to OPEC oil, the rise of high technology and environmental concerns only placed added pressure on OPEC to moderate prices. In 1973, industrialized countries lacked petroleum reserves and the know-how to use them in crises. Today, these reserves, both commercial and strategic, offer at least 90 days of import protection for most industrialized states and 141 days for the United States, and they have been used effectively in crisis and noncrisis situations. In 1979, the superpowers were locked in a dangerous global rivalry. The end of the Cold War and the events of September 11 caused a major shift in the oil sector. US-Russian business and national cooperation, despite Vladimir Putin’s autocratic turn and Russia’s occasional efforts to use energy for political ends, has in some ways increased in the effort to bring Russian energy to the world. During the Cold War, Soviet energy went mainly to the Soviet bloc. Serious threats to oil supplies do exist and new ones may arise, but these broader developments are also important to understand. They put oil security into perspective. Even so, it is hard not to conclude that the tectonic plates of global oil will lie increasingly in the Middle East and be subject to its political, economic, and security earthquakes, both big and small. Adapted from Chapter 14, by Steve Yetiv, of David Sorensen, ed., Interpreting the Middle East (2010, Westview Press).

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New US Policies for a New Middle East? William B. Quandt

In this chapter, William Quandt considers developments in Middle East foreign policy through early 2006, or approximately midway through George W. Bush’s second term. Even considering the flaws in US policy in the Middle East that he himself acknowledges, Quandt rates US policy before the Iraq War as “remarkably successful” in achieving the primary American objectives of containing the Soviet Union’s influence, preserving access to Middle East oil, and maintaining Israel’s security—all at a comparatively low cost in American lives and dollars. That changed with the Iraq War, which alone cost as much as the previous fifty years of Middle East policy expenditures, as well as the lives of thousands of Americans. The war was part of an ambitious strategy to transform the Middle East by toppling Saddam Hussein, aggressively pursuing a war on terror, pressuring Iran and Syria to change their hostile policies, and allowing Israel a freer hand in developing its own approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, once the short military phase of the Iraq War had concluded, Iraq’s envisioned transition to democracy faltered as Iraqi politics polarized along sectarian lines, often quite violently. The Bush administration eventually sought to lower expectations by signaling that US troops would be withdrawn and Iraqis would be left to create their own state. For Iran, the lesson of the war seemed to be that it should accelerate its nuclear-weapons capability, given that the United States was evidently less likely to challenge a country that had nuclear weapons (such as North Korea) than one that didn’t (such as Iraq). President Bill Clinton’s promising discussions toward an accord between Israel and Syria came to naught following 9/11, as Syria’s support for radical Palestinian and Lebanese groups and its alignment with Iran were problematic for Bush. And while Bush did outline a so-called road map for IsraeliPalestinian peace negotiations, his attitude was typically one of disengagement, leaving prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert free to unilaterally define a new reality on the ground by erecting a barrier/wall that redrew boundaries between Israelis and Palestinians and by evacuating Israeli settlers from Gaza, leaving the area in Palestinian hands but tightly surrounded by Israel. Even Bush’s broad theme of promoting democratization of the Middle East may have been tempered by 2005–2006 elections in Egypt, Iraq, and Palestine that showed the strength of Islamic parties.

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W ILLIAM B. Q UANDT

William B. Quandt is professor of international relations at the University of Virginia. Previously, he served as a staff member on the National Security Council in the Nixon and Carter administrations and was actively involved in the negotiations that led to the Camp David Accords and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. His several books include Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967, third edition, and Between Ballots and Bullets: Algeria’s Transition from Authoritarianism.

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eptember 11, 2001, is one of those dates that Americans will remember and reflect on for a very long time. Did this unprecedented terrorist attack on the United States show the bankruptcy of years of US involvement in the Middle East? Many Americans seemed puzzled. “Why do they hate us so much?” became a common question. After all, don’t we support peace and stability in the Middle East? Don’t we promote economic development and democracy? Paradoxically, the answer to why September 11 happened can be found not just in some of the obvious flaws in US policy in the Middle East—its support for repressive regimes, its failure to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, its sanctions against Iraq—but also must be understood, in part, as a result of the remarkable success of US policy over the preceding fifty years. Because the United States was the most powerful player in the Middle East, because so many regimes were beholden to it, Washington became the target of the grievances of all those who were unhappy with the existing order in the region. If a Saudi or an Egyptian wanted to overthrow the regimes in Riyadh or Cairo, he might try direct action against those targets. But such efforts have been thwarted quite successfully in recent years, in part because of support given to those regimes by the United States. Ironically, striking at the United States became the least dangerous means, or so it must have seemed to Osama bin Laden and his followers, to bring down the hated regimes that had done so much to weaken and corrupt Islamic political movements in the previous decade. Had all gone as planned, the United States would have reacted harshly and indiscriminately to the September 11 attacks, outraging Arab public opinion, delegitimizing pro-American regimes, and setting the stage for the eventual overthrow of the existing order. But it seems unlikely to turn out that way. Just as Saddam Hussein in 1990 had calculated that Arab public opinion might shield him from the power of US retaliation, so must have Osama bin Laden counted on widespread support from angry Muslims throughout the region. And there was a great deal of anti-American sentiment around, both in 1990 and in 2001. But US power was not deterred, nor was it indiscriminate, and a surprisingly large number of Middle Eastern and Central Asian states ended up cooperating in the initial phase of the “war on terror.” President George W. Bush had come to office just nine months before the attacks of September 11, 2001, without a fully developed plan for the Middle East. But he did come to office with a team of policy advisers who had sharply defined

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views on the region. Some, like Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell, were veterans of the George H. W. Bush administration, while others, like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, had served in various capacities with presidents [Gerald] Ford and [Ronald] Reagan. In addition, a flock of socalled neoconservatives occupied secondary positions at the Department of Defense and in the White House. Many of them were identified with views calling for the transformation of the Middle East—overthrowing Saddam Hussein, fully backing Israel, and promoting the spread of democracy. It took some time after 9/11 for President Bush to embark on an entirely new approach to dealing with the Middle East. His initial inclination seemed to be to strike back at al-Qa’ida and to topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden had found refuge. That was accomplished fairly quickly and without great loss of life. But some in the Bush administration argued for a more ambitious policy of remaking the Middle East, starting with the removal of Saddam’s regime. Sometime during 2002, President Bush made the fateful decision to embark on this strategy, arguing in public that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had ties to al-Qa’ida. Powell managed to slow down the rush to war, but only for a few months. In March 2003, the US-led invasion of Iraq began, and with it a new era for American policy in the Middle East. To appreciate how great a departure this policy was from traditional approaches, we need to look back a bit, and then to reflect on the likely consequences of this radical approach to remaking the Middle East.

US Interests in the Middle East Despite 9/11, one could argue that US policy in the Middle East since World War II had been remarkably successful in terms of the standard definition of US national interests. Although this is a contested view, I think it is reasonably accurate within the framework of stated US objectives in the Middle East. The normal definition of US interests in the Middle East throughout the cold war era had consisted of essentially three points. One was to ensure that the Soviet Union, our global rival and adversary, did not succeed in extending hegemony into the Middle East. Given what we now know, that may never have been a likely prospect, but after World War II, with US-Soviet competition for influence in Iran and Turkey and the establishment of the Kremlin’s domination in Eastern Europe, there was a real concern that Soviet power would extend quickly into the Middle East and perhaps be very difficult to contain. For the entire post–World War II period up to 1990, the problem of how to deal with the Soviet Union was number one on the list of Middle East policymakers in Washington. The second issue was oil. There were times when access to oil was taken for granted, but everyone understood that the Persian Gulf region was the single largest source of oil in the world; indeed it comprises two-thirds of the globe’s proven oil reserves. We simply could not ignore the strategic significance of that fact.

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Third was the special relationship between the United States and Israel. The relationship has not always been a comfortable one, but every president since Harry S Truman has felt a special commitment to Israel’s security and well-being that has not been matched by a comparable commitment to any other single state in the region. If one takes these three points as the definition of Washington’s major interests in the region—containing the Soviet Union, oil, and Israel’s security—we can then determine how successful US policy had been up until 9/11. Compared to our policy in Southeast Asia, for example, US policy in the Middle East had been a relative success, certainly in terms of costs, both human and economic. Calculating the human costs to the United States of pursuing our policies, with all the mistakes made over this entire fifty-five-year period, it is estimated that at most some 500 Americans had lost their lives in Middle East–related violence up to 2001 (plus almost 3,000 more in the September 11 attacks). In Southeast Asia, the comparable number exceeded 50,000. This is not meant to minimize the importance of those losses in the Middle East, only to put them in perspective. In economic terms, the cost of pursuing US policies in the Middle East is not so easy to calculate. For implementing Middle East policy between 1945 and 2000, Congress authorized, just in terms of budget outlays, expenditures of about $200–250 billion (in current dollars), which, of course, seems like a huge amount of money. This works out to somewhat more than $4 billion per year over this entire period. These numbers are inexact at best, but compared to the costs of supporting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or financing the war in Vietnam, the expense for US policy in the Middle East had been quite low until the Bush administration decided to intervene in Iraq. With respect to the US interest in Middle East oil, it is probably no exaggeration to say that if the United States and its allies had not had access to that resource at low prices in the 1950s and early 1960s, the rebuilding of Europe and Japan along democratic lines as a bulwark against Soviet expansion would have been exponentially more costly. In a way, then, the Middle East did fit into the grand strategy of the United States during this era. To appreciate how much changed with the invasion of Iraq, consider the costs to America of the first three years of the war, from spring 2003 to spring 2006. In human terms, more than 2,300 Americans were killed and more than 15,000 wounded, many very seriously. The cost of the war was staggering when compared with costs up to that time, probably equaling all the expenditures for Middle East policy in the previous fifty years—well over $300 billion in direct costs. And the price of a barrel of oil, which had been relatively level in the mid-twenty dollar range before the Iraq war, was up to seventy dollars per barrel by mid-2006. Prior to 9/11 and the Iraq adventure, the United States had relied on a series of policy instruments to pursue its goals in the Middle East: economic and military assistance, arms sales, covert interventions, military presence, diplomacy—

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particularly in the Arab-Israeli peace process beginning in 1967—but only rarely the direct use of US military forces, as in Lebanon in 1958 and 1982 and the war against Iraq in 1990–1991. During the cold war era, the US public seemed willing to support these policies, by and large. There were occasional debates and protests but never anything like the massive alienation from official policy that occurred as the costs of our involvement in Southeast Asia grew in the 1960s and 1970s. For the most part, Democrats and Republicans, year after year, were prepared to support the main thrust of US policy in pursuit of widely supported American national interests. Both President George H. W. Bush and President George W. Bush, the first in 1990–1991 and the second in 2001–2002, were able to count on extremely high levels of public support for their military responses to what seemed to be direct threats to US interests in the Middle East. It was only as the costs of the Iraq war—both economic and human—continued to grow in 2005 and the perception set in that American objectives could not be easily achieved that public opinion began to turn decisively against the war. The Gulf crisis and war of 1990–1991 looks very much like the end of one phase in US foreign policy—a kind of watershed between the cold war and the post–cold war eras. It occurred just as the Soviet Union was disintegrating, but when the United States was still fully mobilized following the intense military buildup under the Ronald Reagan administration in the 1980s. Oil was seen to be at risk. Washington’s military strategy promised success with relatively few US casualties. The United States had Arab allies on its side to fight against another Arab regime, and it had other countries willing to help foot the bill. That is what made it possible to mobilize the 500,000 US troops, to fight the war efficiently and successfully, and to sustain public support. But note, this was not the beginning of a new burst of enthusiasm for redrawing the map of the Middle East. Pax Americana was not on the minds of official Washington after settling accounts with Saddam Hussein in Kuwait. Instead, Saddam Hussein was allowed to remain in power, and the United States relied on sanctions, containment, and deterrence—tried and true policies from the cold war arsenal—to deal with the remaining threat from Iraq. The apparent inertia in US Middle East policy after the cold war came to an end on September 11, 2001. The initial reaction of striking at al-Qa’ida and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was a standard “realist” response to a direct attack on the United States. It was only after the fall of the Taliban in late 2001 that the real debate got under way in the Bush administration about whether and how to refashion American policy in the Middle East. As it turned out, this supposedly conservative president opted for a remarkably ambitious policy consisting of several main themes: first, the war on terror would be pursued aggressively; second, the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq would be overthrown and disarmed; third, pressure would be exerted on Iran and Syria to change their hostile foreign policies; fourth, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be placed on the back burner, and Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon would be supported as he developed his own new

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approach to dealing with the Palestinians. In all of these initiatives, the United States would act according to its own definition of its interests. If others chose to participate in these initiatives, they would be welcome. But Bush would not waste much time or energy on multilateral diplomacy. As time went on and the ostensible reason for invading Iraq became questionable—there were no weapons of mass destruction, and ties to al-Qa’ida were flimsy at best—the Bush administration developed a new rationale for its Middle East policy. Arguing that terrorism had its roots in the undemocratic nature of Middle East regimes—an intriguing and controversial proposition—the Bush administration declared that its goal was to fight terror by bringing democracy to the Middle East, starting with Afghanistan and Iraq. No longer would friendly dictators be coddled—or so the rhetoric implied. To say the least, this was a dramatic departure from anything that had come before. Could the United States really deliver on this ambitious new program for the Middle East? Let us look at the issues one by one, though they are all interconnected.

Iraq The decision to invade Iraq stemmed from the reaction to 9/11, the transformational views on the Middle East of the neoconservatives, and Rumsfeld’s desire to disprove the Powell Doctrine, which held that the United States should use force only when it had a massive military advantage and a clear exit strategy. The decision to go to war in Iraq in March 2003 with about 150,000 US troops was also anchored in a remarkably optimistic view of what would likely occur. The military correctly understood that Iraq’s army would not put up much of a fight, but the planners of the war also had a naïve notion that they would be met by grateful Iraqis who would quickly transition to a pro-American democracy. Within months, in this view, most American troops would be on their way home. All that needed to be done was to remove Saddam and his top henchmen, install a government of pro-US Iraqi exiles, and Iraq could then rely on its oil wealth to develop its economy and to buttress its democratic leanings. The war planning was faultless, as far as it went—which was to Baghdad and the fall of the regime. But it made little provision for what would happen after the war, and the political planning was even more incompetent. From the outset of the post-Saddam era, there were too few American troops to guarantee security, a problem compounded by the decision to disband the Iraqi army and to purge the government of most Ba’th party cadres. Instead of a functioning Iraqi state without Saddam, the Americans all of a sudden confronted chaos. Over the ensuing months, as a robust insurgency began to take hold in the Sunni areas of Iraq, Iraqi politics began to polarize along sectarian lines. By mid-2004, Americans realized that they needed to put more of an Iraqi face on the day-to-day governing of Iraq. A provisional authority was created and

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elections were called for January 2005. Those elections resulted in large-scale participation on the part of Kurds and Shi’as—the two groups that had suffered most under Saddam—but an almost total boycott by the Sunni Arab minority. The next months were spent fighting the insurgency, including a small but virulent element of foreign fighters aligned with al-Qa’ida who seemed intent on fomenting sectarian violence. In addition, work began on a constitution, which was ratified in the fall of 2005, again with Shi’a and Kurdish support but Sunni opposition (especially to its federal provisions, which could leave the Sunni areas without access to a fair share of central government oil revenues). With considerable effort, Sunnis were persuaded not to boycott the elections held in December 2005, elections that were supposed to set in place the first “permanent” democratic government of the country. By the time these elections were held, American opinion was turning against the war, and many were losing faith that a US-imposed democracy could be established there. Instead, the new Iraq was beginning to look ungovernable, fragmented, sectarian, not very democratic, filled with religious zealots, and tilting ominously toward Iran. This was not exactly what the Americans had had in mind when they sent troops into battle three years earlier. Into 2006, it is difficult to see success in Iraq. If, by chance, a loosely federated Iraq, semi-democratic in nature, relatively peaceful, and intent on rebuilding its shattered economy were to emerge in coming years, many Americans might still conclude that the whole costly enterprise was worth the lives and money. A few might still believe in a more robust democratic, pro-American outcome, and if that were to happen it would vindicate the Bush policy. But it seemed just as likely that Iraq would remain a deeply fractured society and troubled polity, riven by sectarian and ethnic disputes, prone to violence, and allying on many regional issues with neighboring Iran. This would be a clear setback for the Bush administration and for US policy in the Middle East. Regardless of which of these scenarios comes to pass, the Bush team seemed to have concluded as of early 2006 that the time had come to lower expectations, to signal that troops would be withdrawn, and to prepare public opinion for a realistic definition of “victory”—Saddam was gone from power, Iraqis had a chance to create their own state, the prospect that Iraq would build weapons of mass destruction was remote, and the germ of democracy may have been planted in the heart of the Middle East, even if it would take years to come to fruition.

Iran and Syria Toward the end of the [Bill] Clinton administration, both Syria and Iran were countries with whom the United States seemed to be trying to improve relations. Syria’s legendary leader, Hafiz al-Asad, had died in May 2000, and many expected that his son and heir, Bashar, would prove to be something of a reformer. Iran,

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which had been at odds with the United States ever since the 1979 revolution, had received a number of signals from the Clinton administration that better relations might soon be a possibility. The fact that the elected president of Iran, Muhammad Khatami, was an outspoken reformer also seemed to indicate that a thaw between Tehran and Washington might be imminent. But in neither case was that to happen. As early as January 2002, President Bush had gone on record labeling Iran as a charter member of the “axis of evil,” along with Iraq and North Korea. The main complaints were that Iran supported terrorism, was hostile to Israel, and was pursuing a nuclear program that might have the potential to produce highly enriched uranium. Among neoconservatives, there were some who felt that Iran was even more of a threat than Saddam’s Iraq. But Bush’s decision in early 2003 to invade Iraq put the Iran issue on hold, at least for the time being. No one in Washington wanted to face two simultaneous military confrontations in the Middle East, especially since Iran was a very large country, and there was no obvious casus belli [cause for war]. The irony of the Iraq operation was that it managed to accomplish in a few weeks what Iran had been unable to do in eight years of war—namely, to overthrow Saddam Hussein. In addition, if Iraq was to be a democracy, as the Americans insisted, it seemed likely that the Shi’as would eventually come to power, and Iran had close ties with the two major Iraqi Shi’a groups. From Iran’s perspective, the changes in Iraq were a big strategic plus, provided that American troops eventually withdrew. One lesson from the crisis of 2003 was that the United States was much less likely to challenge militarily a country that had nuclear weapons, such as North Korea, than one that simply had a nuclear research program, like Iraq. Iran seemed to act on this lesson by accelerating its moves in the direction of an actual weapons capability, while constantly denying any such intent. The American response was harsh, but short of direct threats to use force. Indeed, apart from maintaining unilateral—and not very effective—sanctions on Iran, the United States reluctantly agreed to let a number of European states explore the possibility of working out a compromise with Iran that would allow Tehran to pursue its nuclear research without developing its own ability to enrich uranium. The talks dragged on throughout 2005 and into 2006 without reaching a conclusion. Meanwhile, Iran elected a new hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, making any near-term reconciliation between the United States and Iran quite unlikely. Syria was a different matter altogether. The United States had maintained diplomatic relations with Damascus since the 1970s and frequently held highlevel talks, primarily about the Arab-Israeli peace process. Clinton had come close to reaching an agreement between Israel and Syria in early 2000. However, in the new atmosphere that prevailed after 9/11, Syria’s support for radical Palestinian

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and Lebanese groups, its alignment with Iran, and its generally thuggish behavior in Lebanon were all problematic for the Bush team. During 2004, in a rare moment of cooperation with France, the United States supported UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which called for Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and the disarming of the Hizbollah militia, Syria’s firmest ally in the country. In February 2005, an immense bomb blast in Beirut killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, and most observers suspected that Syria was behind this act of terrorism. Pressure mounted on Syria to comply with Resolution 1559, and by summer 2005 Syrian troops did finally withdraw, ending a thirty-year presence in Lebanon. This did little to ease the tensions between Damascus and Washington, however, and by early 2006 there was no sign that US-Syrian relations would improve any time soon. At the same time, with the war in Iraq still demanding a major US military commitment, there was little chance of direct US military action against Syria.

Israel-Palestine One might have thought that 9/11 would have convinced Americans to make an all-out effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After all, one of the major sources of anti-Americanism in the region was the ongoing violence in IsraelPalestine and the perception in much of the Arab and Muslim world that the United States was unreservedly supporting Israel. But the Bush team was worried that pressure on Israel would be seen as bending to the demands of terrorists, and this was ruled out from the beginning. In addition, Bush seemed to have a good opinion of Israeli Prime Minister Sharon and a very dim one of PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Thus, in early 2002, when Arafat was believed to have lied to Bush about an apparent arms smuggling operation, Bush essentially ordered that official contact with Arafat be ended. During the summer, the president gave an important speech in which he called for creation of a Palestinian state, existing side by side with Israel, but the call was coupled with a demand that Palestinians carry out farreaching political reforms. In short, as long as Arafat was in charge, the United States would do little on the peace front. In response to pressure from British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush did agree, shortly after the invasion of Iraq in spring 2003, to put forward a so-called Road Map for Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Part of the goal was to hold out some hope to Arabs that the United States would use its influence to moderate Sharon’s harsh policies at a time when Arab opinion was being agitated by the war in Iraq. The Road Map demanded that the Palestinians end their use of violence against Israel, called on Israel to stop building settlements, and laid out a series of steps that might result in a Palestinian state with provisional borders within a matter of years. Since there was no agreed mechanism for making any of the provisions of the Road Map actually occur, it quickly bogged down, with Palestinians

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saying they could not improve the security situation until Israel stopped erecting settlements and pulled back troops, and Israelis arguing that they would do no such thing until the attacks ceased. Meanwhile, Arafat was becoming increasingly isolated—physically and politically. Sharon would have no dealings with him, and soon the Americans joined in shunning him. In fall 2004, Arafat’s health took a sudden turn for the worse, and on November 11, he died in a Paris hospital. His successor, much to the satisfaction of American officials, was the relatively moderate Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), who was elected president in a relatively free election in January 2005. Meanwhile, Sharon had begun to develop a strategy that would effectively bypass the Road Map. He proposed not negotiations but unilateral Israeli steps that would change realities on the ground. One part of the plan was the construction of a barrier/wall between Israelis and Palestinians. The barrier would follow the 1967 lines in some areas, while in others it would intrude into the West Bank in very disruptive ways for Palestinians. Many thought they could see the outline of Israel’s de facto future borders in the route of the barrier/wall. The second part of the strategy was to evacuate Israeli settlers—about 8,000 of them—from Gaza, leaving this area entirely in Palestinian hands but tightly surrounded by Israel. Optimists thought that Sharon’s initiative, carried out successfully in mid-2005, might be followed by further unilateral moves that would bring about a reduction in the violence and a period of de facto peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. Pessimists were more inclined to see the Gaza disengagement as a way of gaining time for consolidating Israel’s position in crucial parts of the West Bank, while completing the construction of the barrier. Bush’s attitude toward all of this was a typical mixture of disengagement, support for Sharon, and occasional pronouncements about what the future shape of a peace agreement would look like. At his most expansive, Bush put forward a view that called for two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side. Israel would not be expected to withdraw all the way to the 1967 lines, but those lines should serve as the main point of reference when final borders would be drawn up. In addition, Bush said explicitly that a Palestinian state should be democratic, contiguous, and economically viable. In a nod to Israeli sensitivities, he said that Palestinian refugees could not expect to return to homes in Israel proper. For some reason, he did not go on to say that they should receive generous compensation for their losses, although that would certainly be part of any full statement of the American position. Only on Jerusalem and its future was Bush notably silent. But even more important, beyond his words, he seemed to have no strategy to make any of this happen. Indeed, up until the moment in early 2006 when Ariel Sharon suffered a massive stroke, Bush seemed to believe that the best stance for the United States was to hold back and let the parties work their way through their respective elections, scheduled for early in 2006, and then assess the new political realities that would face him. Such a restrained approach was called into question with the de-

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parture of Sharon from the political stage and the subsequent victory by Hamas in Palestinian parliamentary elections in late January 2006. In short, Bush began 2006 without a credible strategy for Israeli-Palestinian peace, just as events on the ground were casting a dark cloud over the future. Israeli elections were held in March 2006. The party formed by Sharon before his stroke, Kadima, won, but with only 29 of the 120 seats in the Knesset [Israeli legislature]. The new prime minister, Ehud Olmert, would preside over a multiparty coalition of the center. In theory, this gave him room to engage in negotiations, but the harsh reality was that the Hamas victory and dominance of the Palestinian side made such negotiations unlikely. Instead, Olmert spoke of unilateral steps that would set Israel’s border over the next four years. While this was unlikely to bring peace, it might be the best that could be hoped for, given the president’s other preoccupations in the region and his flagging support on the home front.

Democracy The last of the major themes of the Bush administration’s Middle East policy was democratization. The policy has not been fully elaborated by any means, but the main idea is that the time has come for the United States to place more emphasis on political and economic reform in the region. There is an audience for such views. Middle Easterners do want to see economic change, they do want to see more responsible and accountable governments, and they are fed up with the corruption of their own leaders. But there is always the dilemma for the United States of trying to impose its own views, which may ultimately produce a negative nationalistic backlash. The issue of how best to support reformist regimes may not be so easy to avoid in the future. Many of the leaders with whom the United States has had cordial relations—the Saudi royal family, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak—are getting on in years, and succession will soon take place to a new generation of leaders, as it has already in Jordan, Syria, Morocco, and several of the small Gulf states. This will be the moment when we will see if the United States is inclined to go beyond rhetoric and provide actual support and encouragement for democratization. It is simply not a viable stance to argue that the Middle East is an exception to the trend toward democracy because of some alleged incompatibility of Islam and democracy, and the Bush administration has now stated that forcefully. Indonesia, the largest Muslim state, has shown that opposition to a dictator who had clung to power too long can take the form of demands for more democracy. The same may be expected in many parts of the Middle East in the years ahead. In Indonesia, the United States finally encouraged Suharto to step down. Similar moments will doubtless confront future American presidents in the Middle East. Clinging to the old order while professing a belief in democracy will not serve American interests.

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At the same time, if democracy is simplistically equated to the holding of elections, and if those elections are held in conditions of turmoil, occupation, or economic distress, then the results may be quite unfortunate for those who hope for liberal, tolerant, pluralistic outcomes from elections. Indeed, elections in 2005–2006 in Egypt, Iraq, and Palestine showed the strength of Islamic parties in mobilizing voters against incumbents. Even in Iran, hardly a showcase for democracy, contested presidential elections in 2005 brought a hard-line figure to the fore to replace the relatively moderate Khatami. In short, the result of recent elections may temper the enthusiasm of some in the Bush administration for rapid democratization as the panacea for the region’s ills. Other goals, such as creating conditions of security, spurring economic growth, ending foreign occupations, establishing competent political institutions, fostering a free press, and bolstering civil society, may all be recognized as essential components in a serious strategy for encouraging democracy.

Conclusion Although the United States has protected its basic interests during the past fiftyplus years, it has often done so by dealing with illegitimate regimes, a situation that still exists today and that is increasingly worrisome. As of 2006, the United States actually has quite good relations with many governments in the region, with the exception of Iran, Syria, and Sudan. But at the more popular level— among both Islamists and nationalists—there is a deep antipathy for US policies. In the future, threats to US influence will be difficult to deal with because they will be less clear-cut, as the al-Qa’ida phenomenon demonstrates. The fragility of the regimes in the region is a reality over which the United States has very little influence. It is tremendously difficult to resuscitate a regime that has lost its fundamental legitimacy. The United States, for example, probably could not have done a great deal to prevent the Iranian revolution by the time it reached a critical mass. In the future, the United States, despite the perception that it is the only remaining global power, cannot hope to impose a design of its own on the Middle East. There is a certain inevitability that Middle Easterners will view the United States with suspicion simply because it is the most powerful country in the world—quite apart from its policies. No country that feels weak and vulnerable will feel comfortable dealing with a much more powerful country, so there is now built into the structure of diplomacy one strike against the United States. On the one hand, everyone is awed by US power, but on the other, they distrust it. This suggests that the Middle East will remain a troubled area and that the United States will face many obstacles in its efforts to pursue its multiple goals in the region and to combat terrorism, challenges made more serious by the erosion of serious interest in foreign policy in many circles in the United States. Adapted from Chapter 26, by William B. Quandt, in David W. Lesch, ed., The Middle East and the United States: A Historical and Political Reassessment, Fourth Edition (2007, Westview Press.).

CHAPTER 6 QR

Cairo Speech Barack Obama

In the Egyptian capital on June 4, 2009, President Barack Obama made a widely anticipated speech in which he attempted to begin rebuilding the bridges to the Muslim world that had, in the opinion of many, been badly damaged under the George W. Bush administration. Indeed, the official title of the speech is “A New Beginning.” In the speech, Obama strikes a conciliatory note by outlining the historic contributions of Muslim civilization to Western culture and the contemporary contributions of American Muslims to the United States. He cites his personal experiences as the son of an African Muslim and as one who lived his early years in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation. He then addresses seven primary sources of tension that must be addressed with mutual respect and cooperation. (1) He declares that America shares with Muslims and the rest of the world an imperative to combat violent extremism, which is irreconcilable with human rights and, in fact, with Islam. (2) He reiterates the US endorsement of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue, calls on Hamas to end violence and recognize Israel, and pronounces continued Israeli settlements in occupied territories to be illegitimate. (3) He asserts that Iran should have the right to peaceful nuclear power so long as it abides by the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty. (4) He recognizes that there is no one path to democracy but affirms America’s support for elected, peaceful governments that govern with respect for all their people. (5) He urges religious tolerance, not just between Muslims and non-Muslims but between Sunni and Shiite Muslims as well. (6) While noting that the Muslim countries of Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia have already elected women as leaders, he pledges that the United States will partner with any Muslim-majority country to further support women’s education, which he considers a key to women’s equality. (7) He also promises partnerships with Muslim countries to promote education and economic and technological development. The speech met with mixed reactions. While many felt that it was positive and constructive, others felt that it was lacking in the specifics that would truly define a new era in US–Middle East relations. Others were even more harsh. Some Palestinian spokesmen, for example, decried the president’s failure to criticize Israeli violence and asserted that the speech outlined nothing different from Bush’s policies. Some Israelis objected to Obama’s juxtaposing of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust with Palestinian affliction as justification for a Palestinian state. Ten days later, 67

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel delivered a speech at Bar Ilan University in which he countered Obama’s mention of Palestinian suffering but also, for the first time, proclaimed his support for a two-state solution. Barack Hussein Obama, the forty-fourth president of the United States, was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

I

am honored to be in the timeless city of Cairo and to be hosted by two remarkable institutions. For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar [University] has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning, and for over a century, Cairo University has been a source of Egypt’s advancement. And together, you represent the harmony between tradition and progress. I’m grateful for your hospitality, and the hospitality of the people of Egypt. And I’m also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: Assalaamu alaykum [Peace be upon you]. We meet at a time of great tension between the United States and Muslims around the world—tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate. The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of coexistence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam. Violent extremists have exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims. The attacks of September 11, 2001, and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights. All this has bred more fear and more mistrust. So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, those who promote conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity. And this cycle of suspicion and discord must end.

A New Beginning I’ve come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not

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be in competition. Instead, they overlap and share common principles— principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings. I do so recognizing that change cannot happen overnight. I know there’s been a lot of publicity about this speech, but no single speech can eradicate years of mistrust, nor can I answer in the time that I have this afternoon all the complex questions that brought us to this point. But I am convinced that in order to move forward, we must say openly to each other the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground. As the Holy Koran tells us, “Be conscious of God and speak always the truth.” That is what I will try to do today—to speak the truth as best I can, humbled by the task before us, and firm in my belief that the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart. Now part of this conviction is rooted in my own experience. I’m a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan [call to prayer] at the break of dawn and at the fall of dusk. As a young man, I worked in Chicago communities where many found dignity and peace in their Muslim faith. As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam—at places like Al-Azhar—that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra, our magnetic compass and tools of navigation, our mastery of pens and printing, our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires, timeless poetry and cherished music, elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation. And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality. I also know that Islam has always been a part of America’s story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second president, John Adams, wrote, “The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.” And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States. They have fought in our wars; they have served in our government; they have stood for civil rights; they have started businesses; they have taught at our universities; they’ve excelled in our sports arenas; they’ve won Nobel Prizes, built our tallest building, and lit the Olympic Torch. And when the first Muslim American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers—Thomas Jefferson—kept in his personal library. So I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed. That experience guides my conviction that partnership between

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America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn’t. And I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear. But that same principle must apply to Muslim perceptions of America. Just as Muslims do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire. The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known. We were born out of revolution against an empire. We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal, and we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words within our borders, and around the world. We are shaped by every culture, drawn from every end of the Earth, and dedicated to a simple concept: E pluribus unum—“Out of many, one.” Now, much has been made of the fact that an African American with the name Barack Hussein Obama could be elected president. But my personal story is not so unique. The dream of opportunity for all people has not come true for everyone in America, but its promise exists for all who come to our shores—and that includes nearly 7 million American Muslims in our country today who, by the way, enjoy incomes and educational levels that are higher than the American average. Moreover, freedom in America is indivisible from the freedom to practice one’s religion. That is why there is a mosque in every state in our union, and over 1,200 mosques within our borders. That’s why the United States government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab [head scarf ] and to punish those who would deny it. So let there be no doubt: Islam is a part of America. And I believe that America holds within her the truth that regardless of race, religion, or station in life, all of us share common aspirations—to live in peace and security; to get an education and to work with dignity; to love our families, our communities, and our God. These things we share. This is the hope of all humanity. Of course, recognizing our common humanity is only the beginning of our task. Words alone cannot meet the needs of our people. These needs will be met only if we act boldly in the years ahead; and if we understand that the challenges we face are shared, and our failure to meet them will hurt us all. For we have learned from recent experience that when a financial system weakens in one country, prosperity is hurt everywhere. When a new flu infects one human being, all are at risk. When one nation pursues a nuclear weapon, the risk of nuclear attack rises for all nations. When violent extremists operate in one stretch of mountains, people are endangered across an ocean. When innocents in Bosnia and Darfur are slaughtered, that is a stain on our collective conscience. That is what it means to share this world in the twenty-first century. That is the responsibility we have to one another as human beings. And this is a difficult responsibility to embrace. For human history has often been a record of nations and tribes—and, yes, religions—subjugating one an-

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other in pursuit of their own interests. Yet in this new age, such attitudes are selfdefeating. Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. So whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners to it. Our problems must be dealt with through partnership; our progress must be shared. Now, that does not mean we should ignore sources of tension. Indeed, it suggests the opposite: We must face these tensions squarely. And so in that spirit, let me speak as clearly and as plainly as I can about some specific issues that I believe we must finally confront together.

Violent Extremism The first issue that we have to confront is violent extremism in all of its forms. In Ankara [capital of Turkey, where Obama had addressed the Turkish parliament in April 2009], I made clear that America is not—and never will be—at war with Islam. We will, however, relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security—because we reject the same thing that people of all faiths reject: the killing of innocent men, women, and children. And it is my first duty as president to protect the American people. The situation in Afghanistan demonstrates America’s goals and our need to work together. Over seven years ago, the United States pursued al-Qaeda and the Taliban with broad international support. We did not go by choice; we went because of necessity. I’m aware that there’s still some who would question or even justify the events of 9/11. But let us be clear: Al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people on that day. The victims were innocent men, women, and children from America and many other nations who had done nothing to harm anybody. And yet alQaeda chose to ruthlessly murder these people, claimed credit for the attack, and even now states their determination to kill on a massive scale. They have affiliates in many countries and are trying to expand their reach. These are not opinions to be debated; these are facts to be dealt with. Now, make no mistake: We do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We seek no military bases there. It is agonizing for America to lose our young men and women. It is costly and politically difficult to continue this conflict. We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and now Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can. But that is not yet the case. And that’s why we’re partnering with a coalition of forty-six countries. And despite the costs involved, America’s commitment will not weaken. Indeed, none of us should tolerate these extremists. They have killed in many countries. They have killed people of different faiths—but more than any other, they have killed Muslims. Their actions are irreconcilable with the rights of human beings, the progress of nations, and with Islam. The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as

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if he has killed all mankind. And the Holy Koran also says whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind. The enduring faith of over a billion people is so much bigger than the narrow hatred of a few. Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism—it is an important part of promoting peace. Now, we also know that military power alone is not going to solve the problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That’s why we plan to invest $1.5 billion each year over the next five years to partner with Pakistanis to build schools and hospitals, roads and businesses, and hundreds of millions to help those who’ve been displaced. That’s why we are providing more than $2.8 billion to help Afghans develop their economy and deliver services that people depend on. Let me also address the issue of Iraq. Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq was a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world. Although I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible. Indeed, we can recall the words of Thomas Jefferson, who said: “I hope that our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power the greater it will be.” Today, America has a dual responsibility: to help Iraq forge a better future—and to leave Iraq to Iraqis. And I have made it clear to the Iraqi people that we pursue no bases and no claim on their territory or resources. Iraq’s sovereignty is its own. And that’s why I ordered the removal of our combat brigades by next August. That is why we will honor our agreement with Iraq’s democratically elected government to remove combat troops from Iraqi cities by July and to remove all of our troops from Iraq by 2012. We will help Iraq train its security forces and develop its economy. But we will support a secure and united Iraq as a partner, and never as a patron. And finally, just as America can never tolerate violence by extremists, we must never alter or forget our principles. Nine-eleven was an enormous trauma to our country. The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals. We are taking concrete actions to change course. I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States, and I have ordered the prison at Guantánamo Bay closed by early next year. So America will defend itself, respectful of the sovereignty of nations and the rule of law. And we will do so in partnership with Muslim communities which are also threatened. The sooner the extremists are isolated and unwelcome in Muslim communities, the sooner we will all be safer.

Israelis and Palestinians The second major source of tension that we need to discuss is the situation between Israelis, Palestinians, and the Arab world.

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America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied. Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and antiSemitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot, and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed—more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, it is ignorant, and it is hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction—or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews—is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve. On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people—Muslims and Christians—have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they’ve endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations—large and small— that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: The situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. And America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own. For decades then, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive. It’s easy to point fingers—for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought about by Israel’s founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond. But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: The only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security. That is in Israel’s interest, Palestine’s interest, America’s interest, and the world’s interest. And that is why I intend to personally pursue this outcome with all the patience and dedication that the task requires. The obligations that the parties have agreed to under the road map are clear. For peace to come, it is time for them—and all of us—to live up to our responsibilities. Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong, and it does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That’s not how moral authority is claimed; that’s how it is surrendered.

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Now is the time for Palestinians to focus on what they can build. The Palestinian Authority must develop its capacity to govern, with institutions that serve the needs of its people. Hamas does have support among some Palestinians, but they also have to recognize they have responsibilities. To play a role in fulfilling Palestinian aspirations, to unify the Palestinian people, Hamas must put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, recognize Israel’s right to exist. At the same time, Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop. And Israel must also live up to its obligation to ensure that Palestinians can live and work and develop their society. Just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel’s security; neither does the continuing lack of opportunity in the West Bank. Progress in the daily lives of the Palestinian people must be a critical part of a road to peace, and Israel must take concrete steps to enable such progress. And finally, the Arab states must recognize that the Arab Peace Initiative [proposed in 2002 by then crown prince, now King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia] was an important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities. The Arab-Israeli conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations from other problems. Instead, it must be a cause for action to help the Palestinian people develop the institutions that will sustain their state, to recognize Israel’s legitimacy, and to choose progress over a self-defeating focus on the past. America will align our policies with those who pursue peace, and we will say in public what we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs. We cannot impose peace. But privately, many Muslims recognize that Israel will not go away. Likewise, many Israelis recognize the need for a Palestinian state. It is time for us to act on what everyone knows to be true. Too many tears have been shed. Too much blood has been shed. All of us have a responsibility to work for the day when the mothers of Israelis and Palestinians can see their children grow up without fear; when the Holy Land of the three great faiths is the place of peace that God intended it to be; when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, peace be upon them, joined in prayer.

Nuclear Weapons The third source of tension is our shared interest in the rights and responsibilities of nations on nuclear weapons.

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This issue has been a source of tension between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. For many years, Iran has defined itself in part by its opposition to my country, and there is in fact a tumultuous history between us. In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against US troops and civilians. This history is well known. Rather than remain trapped in the past, I’ve made it clear to Iran’s leaders and people that my country is prepared to move forward. The question now is not what Iran is against, but rather what future it wants to build. I recognize it will be hard to overcome decades of mistrust, but we will proceed with courage, rectitude, and resolve. There will be many issues to discuss between our two countries, and we are willing to move forward without preconditions on the basis of mutual respect. But it is clear to all concerned that when it comes to nuclear weapons, we have reached a decisive point. This is not simply about America’s interests. It’s about preventing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East that could lead this region and the world down a hugely dangerous path. I understand those who protest that some countries have weapons that others do not. No single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons. And that’s why I strongly reaffirmed America’s commitment to seek a world in which no nations hold nuclear weapons. And any nation—including Iran—should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That commitment is at the core of the treaty, and it must be kept for all who fully abide by it. And I’m hopeful that all countries in the region can share in this goal.

Democracy The fourth issue that I will address is democracy. I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq. So let me be clear: No system of government can or should be imposed by one nation [on] any other. That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the will of the people. Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election. But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed, confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice, government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people, the freedom to

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live as you choose. These are not just American ideas; they are human rights. And that is why we will support them everywhere. Now, there is no straight line to realize this promise. But this much is clear: Governments that protect these rights are ultimately more stable, successful, and secure. Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them. And we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments—provided they govern with respect for all their people. This last point is important because there are some who advocate for democracy only when they’re out of power; once in power, they are ruthless in suppressing the rights of others. So no matter where it takes hold, government of the people and by the people sets a single standard for all who would hold power: You must maintain your power through consent, not coercion; you must respect the rights of minorities and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise; you must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party. Without these ingredients, elections alone do not make true democracy.

Religious Freedom The fifth issue that we must address together is religious freedom. Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition. I saw it firsthand as a child in Indonesia, where devout Christians worshiped freely in an overwhelmingly Muslim country. That is the spirit we need today. People in every country should be free to choose and live their faith based upon the persuasion of the mind and the heart and the soul. This tolerance is essential for religion to thrive, but it’s being challenged in many different ways. Among some Muslims, there’s a disturbing tendency to measure one’s own faith by the rejection of somebody else’s faith. The richness of religious diversity must be upheld—whether it is for Maronites in Lebanon or the Copts in Egypt. And if we are being honest, fault lines must be closed among Muslims, as well, as the divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence, particularly in Iraq. Freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together. We must always examine the ways in which we protect it. For instance, in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation. That’s why I’m committed to working with American Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat [charitable giving]. Likewise, it is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit—for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear. We can’t disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretense of liberalism.

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In fact, faith should bring us together. And that’s why we’re forging service projects in America to bring together Christians, Muslims, and Jews. That’s why we welcome efforts like Saudi Arabian King Abdullah’s interfaith dialogue [which the king called for in an address to the United Nations in 2008] and Turkey’s leadership in the Alliance of Civilizations [founded in 2005 under the auspices of the United Nations at the initiative of Spain and Turkey to promote understanding and reconciliation between Muslim and Western societies particularly]. Around the world, we can turn dialogue into interfaith service, so bridges between peoples lead to action— whether it is combating malaria in Africa or providing relief after a natural disaster.

Women’s Rights The sixth issue that I want to address is women’s rights. I know, and you can tell from this audience, that there is a healthy debate about this issue. I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal, but I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality. And it is no coincidence that countries where women are well educated are far more likely to be prosperous. Now, let me be clear: Issues of women’s equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam. In Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, we’ve seen Muslimmajority countries elect a woman to lead. Meanwhile, the struggle for women’s equality continues in many aspects of American life and in countries around the world. I am convinced that our daughters can contribute just as much to society as our sons. Our common prosperity will be advanced by allowing all humanity— men and women—to reach their full potential. I do not believe that women must make the same choices as men in order to be equal, and I respect those women who choose to live their lives in traditional roles. But it should be their choice. And that is why the United States will partner with any Muslim-majority country to support expanded literacy for girls, and to help young women pursue employment through microfinancing that helps people live their dreams.

Economic Development and Opportunity Finally, I want to discuss economic development and opportunity. I know that for many, the face of globalization is contradictory. The Internet and television can bring knowledge and information, but also offensive sexuality and mindless violence into the home. Trade can bring new wealth and opportunities, but also huge disruptions and change in communities. In all nations— including America—this change can bring fear: fear that because of modernity we lose control over our economic choices, our politics, and most importantly our identities—those things we most cherish about our communities, our families, our traditions, and our faith.

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But I also know that human progress cannot be denied. There need not be contradictions between development and tradition. Countries like Japan and South Korea grew their economies enormously while maintaining distinct cultures. The same is true for the astonishing progress within Muslim-majority countries from Kuala Lumpur to Dubai. In ancient times and in our times, Muslim communities have been at the forefront of innovation and education. And this is important because no development strategy can be based only upon what comes out of the ground, nor can it be sustained while young people are out of work. Many Gulf states have enjoyed great wealth as a consequence of oil, and some are beginning to focus it on broader development. But all of us must recognize that education and innovation will be the currency of the twenty-first century, and in too many Muslim communities there remains underinvestment in these areas. I’m emphasizing such investment within my own country. And while America in the past has focused on oil and gas when it comes to this part of the world, we now seek a broader engagement. On education, we will expand exchange programs and increase scholarships, like the one that brought my father to America. At the same time, we will encourage more Americans to study in Muslim communities. And we will match promising Muslim students with internships in America, invest in online learning for teachers and children around the world, and create a new online network, so a young person in Kansas can communicate instantly with a young person in Cairo. On economic development, we will create a new corps of business volunteers to partner with counterparts in Muslim-majority countries. And I will host a Summit on Entrepreneurship this year to identify how we can deepen ties between business leaders, foundations, and social entrepreneurs in the United States and Muslim communities around the world. On science and technology, we will launch a new fund to support technological development in Muslim-majority countries and to help transfer ideas to the marketplace so they can create more jobs. We’ll open centers of scientific excellence in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia and appoint new science envoys to collaborate on programs that develop new sources of energy, create green jobs, digitize records, clean water, grow new crops. Today I’m announcing a new global effort with the Organization of the Islamic Conference to eradicate polio. And we will also expand partnerships with Muslim communities to promote child and maternal health. All these things must be done in partnership. Americans are ready to join with citizens and governments, community organizations, religious leaders, and businesses in Muslim communities around the world to help our people pursue a better life.

Common Ground The issues that I have described will not be easy to address. But we have a responsibility to join together on behalf of the world that we seek—a world where ex-

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tremists no longer threaten our people, and American troops have come home; a world where Israelis and Palestinians are each secure in a state of their own, and nuclear energy is used for peaceful purposes; a world where governments serve their citizens, and the rights of all God’s children are respected. Those are mutual interests. That is the world we seek. But we can only achieve it together. I know there are many—Muslim and non-Muslim—who question whether we can forge this new beginning. Some are eager to stoke the flames of division and to stand in the way of progress. Some suggest that it isn’t worth the effort—that we are fated to disagree, and civilizations are doomed to clash. Many more are simply skeptical that real change can occur. There’s so much fear, so much mistrust that has built up over the years. But if we choose to be bound by the past, we will never move forward. And I want to particularly say this to young people of every faith, in every country—you, more than anyone, have the ability to reimagine the world, to remake this world. All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort—a sustained effort—to find common ground, to focus on the future we seek for our children, and to respect the dignity of all human beings. It’s easier to start wars than to end them. It’s easier to blame others than to look inward. It’s easier to see what is different about someone than to find the things we share. But we should choose the right path, not just the easy path. There’s one rule that lies at the heart of every religion—that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. This truth transcends nations and peoples—a belief that isn’t new; that isn’t black or white or brown; that isn’t Christian or Muslim or Jew. It’s a belief that pulsed in the cradle of civilization and that still beats in the hearts of billions around the world. It’s a faith in other people, and it’s what brought me here today. We have the power to make the world we seek, but only if we have the courage to make a new beginning, keeping in mind what has been written. The Holy Koran tells us: “O mankind! We have created you male and female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.” The Talmud tells us: “The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.” The Holy Bible tells us: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” The people of the world can live together in peace. We know that is God’s vision. Now that must be our work here on Earth. Thank you. And may God’s peace be upon you.

PART II

Israel and the Palestinians QR

Map II.1. Israel

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Map II.2. Palestine

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he first Israelite kingdom in what would later be called Palestine by Greeks and Romans was established late in the second millennium BCE. A century or two later, King David made Jerusalem his capital. However, the “Land of Israel,” or Eretz Israel, as the Jewish people called it, was conquered repeatedly by a succession of imperial masters—including the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Roman empires. Most of the world’s Jews became scattered outside Palestine, which nonetheless has always continued to have a Jewish population. Palestine was absorbed into the great Arab expansion during the seventh century CE. It experienced a succession of Muslim dynasties, interrupted at intervals by the incursions of Crusaders from Europe. For four hundred years, from the early sixteenth century to the early twentieth century, Palestinian Arabs and Jews alike were the subjects of Ottoman rule. However, when the Ottomans allied themselves with the eventual losing side in World War I, their domains outside Turkey were divided up by the victorious European powers. If the Palestinian Arabs entertained hopes of an independent Arab state with the end of Turkish domination, they were to be disappointed. Even before the end of the war, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration (so-named for British foreign

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Map II.3. United Nations plan for partitioning Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, 1947. Jerusalem was to have been administered separately from either state. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:UN_Partition_Plan_For_Palestine _1947.svg.

secretary Arthur Balfour), which maintained that Britain would “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” so long as doing so would not “prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing nonJewish communities in Palestine.” It is difficult to imagine, however, how establishing a Jewish nation on territories occupied for centuries by Arabs would not prejudice the rights of “non-Jewish communities.” Nearly a century later, the Balfour Declaration remains an open wound for Palestinian Arabs, who far outnumbered Jews in Palestine, and who had not been consulted in the project of converting their lands into a Jewish homeland. After the war, the League of Nations assigned Palestine to Britain as a mandate, for the purpose of preparing the mandated territory for eventual nationhood. Subsequently, thousands of Jewish refugees fled Europe during World War II and the Holocaust, and many of them emigrated to Palestine. By 1946 the League of

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Nations was dissolving itself, to be succeeded by the United Nations. Britain sought to be relieved of its mandate responsibilities, despairing of creating a Palestinian state or states that both Arabs and Jews would find acceptable. In 1947, the United Nations approved Resolution 181, which recommended a plan for partitioning Palestine into a patchwork quilt of essentially noncontiguous areas that would nonetheless constitute independent Arab and Jewish states. The nettlesome issue of Jerusalem—a city holy to Muslims and Jews (as well as Christians) and claimed by both—would be neutralized, the United Nations believed, by administering the city under a “special international regime,” separate from either nation. Jewish groups accepted the plan; Arabs angrily rejected it. On May 14, 1948, Israel declared its status as a new nation in Eretz Israel, though without clearly defined borders. The next day five Arab nations—Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq—attacked Israel. Fighting continued for a year before a cease-fire established temporary borders, called the Green Line. With the armistice, Egypt assumed control of the Gaza Strip while Jordan annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem. However, some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs had become refugees during the fighting, barred by Israel from returning home or reclaiming their property. Today, more than sixty years after the displacement, the initial refugees and their descendants number several million people. The diaspora, called by Palestinians the Nakba, “the catastrophe,” is still commemorated annually. Likewise, the Palestinian “right of return” remains a contentious issue in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Another Arab-Israeli war broke out in 1967. In response to the mobilization of Arab armies, Israel launched preemptive strikes against Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. As a result of the so-called Six Day War, Israel took the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan; the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt; and the Golan Heights from Syria. These areas are the occupied territories, lying on Arab sides of the 1949 Green Line but held and administered by Israel. Six years later, in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel but were repelled after three weeks of difficult fighting. Yet relations between Israelis and Arabs, including the Palestinians, have not been exclusively hostile. In a 1979 ceremony on the White House lawn, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin signed a peace treaty between their two countries, as witnessed by American president Jimmy Carter. Egypt became the first Arab nation to officially recognize Israel, and Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. Under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Israel signed another agreement in 1993, commonly called the Oslo Accords, this time with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), headed by Yasser Arafat. The PLO, recognized by the Arab League as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, had dedicated itself to armed struggle against Israel. The United States and Israel consid-

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ered it to be a terrorist organization. But with the accords, the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist and renounced terrorism, while Israel withdrew from parts of Gaza and the West Bank, which were to be administered by a newly established Palestinian Authority. The nation of Jordan, which was home to many displaced Palestinians, also concluded a peace treaty with Israel the following year, establishing full diplomatic relations between the two countries. In 2005, Israel unilaterally disengaged from Gaza, withdrawing its armed forces. The following year, the largest faction of the PLO, Fatah, lost its majority to a more radical faction, Hamas, in Palestinian parliamentary elections. However, the United States had designated Hamas a terrorist organization. Along with the European Union, the United States refused to recognize Hamas as the legitimate leader of the Palestinian Authority, despite earlier US support for the democratic elections. Furthermore, violent contentions between the two Palestinian factions led to a split, with Hamas left in de facto control of Gaza while Fatah governed the West Bank. In 2011 Hamas and Fatah announced their reconciliation, with the intent of forming a unity government and holding new elections, but little progress has been made on that matter since. For many Middle Easterners, the creation of Israel, as imposed on Palestine by outsiders, and the concomitant dispossession of the Palestinians remain emblematic of the West’s long history of mistreatment of Arabs and Muslims. Whether they have any sincere solidarity with the Palestinians or not, Arab and Muslim moderates throughout the Middle East protest the sufferings of the Palestinians, while radicals stoke resentment against the West by citing the abuses the Palestinians have endured. It is not just the Nakba of 1948 that festers in Arab memories but Israel’s ongoing policy of establishing Jewish settlements on Israeli-occupied lands on the Palestinian side of the Green Line, especially in the West Bank and Jerusalem. That policy often appears transparently intended to transform the facts on the ground, making it ever more difficult to return the lands to the Palestinians if and when a Palestinian state is finally established. Israel is frequently regarded in two conspiratorial lights by its Arab neighbors. In the one view, Israel is a cat’s-paw for the United States, helping the Americans achieve policy objectives they could not easily carry out in the Middle East on their own. It was Israel, for example, that bombed Iraqi and Syrian nuclear sites (in 1981 and 2007, respectively). Surely the Israelis did so for compelling reasons of their own, but many would suspect that they also acted with the tacit approval, and perhaps the covert aid, of the Americans. Given the American concerns about Iranian nuclear weapons and Iranian threats to choke off Middle East oil supplies to the West, such collusion between Israel and the United States—if indeed that is what it has been—could happen again, particularly if Israel determines that destroying Iranian nuclear facilities has become necessary to its own survival.

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Conversely—and exchanging the feline for a canine metaphor—Israel is seen as the tail that wags the dog. Many Middle Easterners consider that American Middle East policy is controlled by Jewish interests within the United States, and for that reason American policy inevitably favors Israel and cannot be anything but intrinsically unfair to Arabs and Muslims. A notable player in Washington politics, for example, is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), self-described as “America’s leading pro-Israel lobby,” dedicated to strengthening the ties between the United States and Israel. Seen in that light, as it is by many Middle Easterners, it is no wonder that the United States cannot bring itself to censure in any effective way Israel’s refusal to follow United Nations directives to relinquish the occupied territories, to cease the construction of new settlements on Palestinian lands, and to work in diligent good faith with the Palestinians to establish a state of their own. In short, the United States is hardly the neutral referee between Israelis and Palestinians that it likes to see itself as. Accordingly, the Israel-Palestine question remains a wellspring of vexation in the Middle East.

H In chapter 7, Robert O. Freedman summarizes an embattled history of Israel, beginning with the nineteenth-century Zionist call for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Freedman reviews the web of conflicting commitments the English made during World War I concerning the disposition of Palestine after the war. The British mandate in Palestine ended in 1948, at which time Israel declared its nationhood and immediately had to stave off the attack of five Arab armies. Fighting marked Israel’s early years, with a 1956 Israeli attack on Egypt and the Arab-Israeli wars in 1967 and 1973. Even peace with Egypt in 1979 was followed by Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982 to battle the PLO, which maintained there a base of operations for attacking Israel. The fighting against Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon and a Palestinian uprising (intifada) in Gaza and the West Bank ultimately led to the Oslo peace agreements in 1993 and 1995, which created a new Palestinian Authority to administer Gaza and the West Bank. Nonetheless, a second intifada, coupled with Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, convinced hard-line prime minister Ariel Sharon to construct a security fence between Israeli and Palestinian areas. Sharon ordered Israeli settlements and the military out of Gaza and the northern West Bank, in large part to consolidate the Israeli majority in the remaining occupied territories. Freedman concludes by pointing out that Israel also faces a growing threat from beyond the Arab world, that is, from Iran. Iran is thought to be developing nuclear weapons, and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has called for Israel’s destruction. In addition, Iran remains allied with other enemies of Israel: the nation of Syria and the Islamist groups Hezbollah and Hamas.

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The United States and Israel have a “special relationship,” as acknowledged forthrightly by President Jimmy Carter. However, the interests of the two countries are hardly in lockstep. As discussed by Bernard Reich and Shannon Powers in chapter 8, the United States is a global power with global interests, while Israeli interests are more narrowly regional, with Israel’s national survival more immediately at stake. Reich and Powers consider the complex and multifaceted relationship between the United States and Israel through the administrations of Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. To focus for the moment on just the latter presidency, Obama’s attempt to engage the Muslim world more directly, as in his 2009 speech in Cairo (reprinted herein as chapter 6), has altered the exclusivity of the US-Israeli relationship, for better or worse. Both the United States and Israel are concerned about Iran’s nuclear program. But amid speculation that Israel might eventually feel compelled to strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, Obama remains more committed than Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a diplomatic resolution of the matter. Obama pressured Netanyahu to halt Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank as a step toward an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord. Netanyahu initially refused but then, in response to Obama’s Cairo speech, imposed a partial freeze. Furthermore, Netanyahu endorsed for the first time a twostate solution to the Israel-Palestine issue, which corresponded to the position of the United States on the matter. Reich and Powers conclude that the respective national leaders will continue to manage their differences, and the IsraeliAmerican special relationship will endure. In chapter 9, Glenn E. Robinson outlines a history of the Palestinians from the British mandate after World War I through 2009. He summarizes the trauma of the Nakba, in which over half of the Palestinian Arab population became refugees in the 1948–1949 fighting between Arab nations and the newly declared state of Israel. Robinson also notes how the fierce response of the Israelis to the operations of the Palestine Liberation Organization forced the PLO to relocate its headquarters from southern Lebanon to far-off Tunis. In the vacuum left by the absent PLO, a homegrown Palestinian uprising (the First Intifada) against the Israeli occupation flared up in 1987, before the weakened PLO in 1993 accepted peace terms in Oslo that it had previously rejected. The accords established the Palestinian Authority over the West Bank and Gaza, led initially by Fatah, the chief faction of the PLO. But the Fatah leadership faced a challenge from the Islamist group Hamas, whose leaders tended to be younger, more militant, and more in touch with the Palestinians on the ground than were the “Tunisians” of the PLO. Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 helped confirm to Palestinians that the armed resistance of Hamas was an effective policy. Hamas defeated Fatah in parliamentary elections and then turned on Fatah to seize control of the Gaza Strip. Robinson concludes that the fragmentation of

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Palestine between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank forebodes a bleak future for the Palestinians. One of the more controversial aspects of the Israeli administration of the occupied territories is that Israel has continued to build new settlements on the lands that would otherwise likely belong to a Palestinian state, should one ever be established. In 2000, Israeli political leader Ariel Sharon triggered a wave of Palestinian protests (the Second Intifada) when he visited the holy site of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. When Sharon later became prime minister, he responded to the violence by complementing the settlements of the occupied territories with the construction of a “security fence.” The fence roughly follows the border of the West Bank. “Roughly” is significant, for the “fence”—in places a concrete wall as high as twenty-five feet—deviates markedly from the Green Line boundary. According to Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar in chapter 10, those deviations prove that the true purpose of the barrier is not security but a brutal land grab, designed to split Palestinian villages, divide orchards and fields from the people who tend them, cut off Palestinian access to hospitals and schools, and generally fragment Palestinian territory and perpetuate its occupation by new Israeli settlements. The wall, the settlements, and other new outposts in the territories are “the realization of Sharon’s big plan to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state and thus thwart a peace agreement.” Zertal and Eldar contend that even Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005, arguably a major step in returning land to the Palestinians, was in fact aimed at diverting international attention from Sharon’s intention to hold on to the West Bank. In chapter 11, the late Samih K. Farsoun and Naseer H. Aruri ask, Who speaks for the Palestinian diaspora community? That is, if the leaderships of Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank represent the “internal” Palestinians (those within the occupied territories), what voice is given in negotiations with Israel to the millions of “external” (diaspora) Palestinians (those who live outside Israel and the occupied territories)? Central to the demands of the internal Palestinians are the return of the occupied territories, the dismantling of the security wall, and full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel. To this list the diaspora community would add adherence to UN Resolution 194 (1948), which calls for the right of refugees to return to their homes and property inside historic Palestine, including Israel. Farsoun and Aruri consider that the Palestinians are unlikely to achieve an independent state of their own. Instead, they foresee the possibility of a singlestate solution. In such a case, the nation of Israel would cease to be solely Jewish but would become a binational state in which the Arab and Jewish ethnic groups retain their cultural identities but “eventually coexist in harmony in an integrated economy and single sovereignty.” Not all Israelis are Jewish. A number of Israeli citizens are Palestinian Arabs, for example. But if being Israeli involves a dominant strain of Jewish history and culture, including some level of adherence to Judaism, what does that imply for Israelis who

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do not happen to be Jews but are Arabs or Muslims or Christians? In chapter 12, Calvin Goldscheider contends that the presumption of Jewish religion as a crucial definitional component of citizenship implies that Arab Israelis are now, and always will be, disadvantaged, second-tier citizens of Israel. Arab Israelis tend to reside in communities segregated from Jewish Israelis and to face severe socioeconomic inequalities. As a result, Arab Israelis are caught between their Israeli citizenship on the one hand and their identification with their Arab Palestinian cousins on the other. For that reason, says Goldscheider, “How Israeli Arabs will be linked to autonomous Palestinian areas and Arab states remains unclear.” One of those neighboring Arab states is Syria, which has been an overt enemy of Israel over the years. Syria was one of the five Arab countries to attack the newly independent Israel in 1948, and it participated in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. Furthermore, according to Hirsch Goodman in chapter 13, Syria has long served as a conduit for financial and military assistance from Iran to the jihadist groups Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Despite that history, Syria and Israel once came close to concluding a peace treaty but fell short of that goal with the death of Syrian president Hafez Assad in 2000. When Bashar Assad assumed power after his father, there was renewed hope of peace, but that ambition, too, withered away. Relations between the two countries returned to a more hostile nature again in 2007, when Israel attacked and destroyed a nuclear facility in Syria, with American “connivance,” says Goodman. Israel had an unexpectedly difficult struggle against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, but it believes today that it has contingency-planned adequate responses to both Hezbollah and Syria, should concerted responses be required. Consequently, the Israeli command does not feel overly threatened by either Hezbollah or Syria. Israel’s chief incentive for peace with Syria, then, would be to draw Syria out of the Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas sphere of influence and break the flow of Iranian support to the Islamist groups. Additionally, the civil uprisings in Syria that were sparked by the Arab Spring in 2011 have occupied Syria’s armed forces and weakened Assad’s regime considerably. And with Syria already being viewed by America with a jaundiced eye for its support of jihadist forces, its connections to Iran, and now its brutal responses to the rebellion within its borders, a war with American ally Israel can hardly be foremost on Assad’s mind. The world watches Iran, concerned that what Iran claims is a peaceful nuclearpower initiative is in fact a nuclear-weapons program. Iran continues to play the game of agreeing to allow international inspections teams to examine its facilities, only to come up with excuses for not complying promptly. Even without longrange missiles to deliver its warheads, a nuclear Iran would be a headache for the United States, but it is possibly a matter of national survival for Israel. In chapter 14, Steven R. David considers closely a number of ways the Iranian threat to Israel might play out. A first-strike surprise attack on Israel would end in Iranian national suicide. It would effectively destroy Israel, but Israel’s fighter jets and submarines

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would still be able to deal Iran a retaliatory deathblow. And the fear that Iran is run by religious fanatics who might embrace such a national martyrdom is far-fetched. David observes that Iran’s actions reveal it to be more rationally concerned with national survival than with religious fanaticism or hatred of Israel. Another scenario would be for Iran to smuggle nuclear weapons to Hamas or Hezbollah for use against Israel. However, Iran would certainly be suspected of and blamed for any such use of a weapon and would suffer the consequences. No rational Iranian government would place its survival in the hands of groups it cannot control. Finally, even if Israel resorted to preemptive strikes to demolish Iranian facilities, there is no guarantee that the destruction would be thorough enough to halt any weaponization program, and Israel would have opened itself to vengeful Iranian and Islamic retaliation. “In the end,” concludes David, “the likelihood remains that Israel will allow Iran to become a nuclear-armed state.”

CHAPTER 7 QR

Israel and the Arabs, and Beyond Robert O. Freedman

“Modern Israel had its political origins in the doctrine of nationalism, which . . . permeated Europe in the nineteenth century.” With that observation, Robert O. Freedman sketches the emergence of Zionism, the call of Jewish thinkers for a homeland of their own in Palestine. Prominent among early Zionists was Theodore Herzl, who wrote The Jewish State (1896) and organized the first international Zionist congress. In the heat of World War I and the struggle against Germany and the Ottoman Empire, the English made vague promises of Arab independence from the Ottoman Turks and declared that Palestine west of the Jordan River would be maintained as an internationally controlled zone. But in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 they also promised a Jewish “national home in Palestine.” After World War II, the newly formed United Nations called for the end of the British mandate—the administrative control that the British had exercised over Palestine for some twenty-five years—and endorsed the establishment of two states (with Jerusalem set apart as an international zone), a recommendation that Palestinian Jews accepted but Palestinian Arabs rejected. Freedman summarizes the military conflicts that followed the establishment of Israel in 1948, including the defeat of the invading Arab armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq immediately after the proclamation of the Israeli state in 1948; Israel’s 1956 attack (with England and France) against Egypt; and the 1967 war in which Israel seized the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. The chapter concludes with the observation that Israel continues to face threats even beyond the Arab world, as Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has openly called for the destruction of Israel, and Iran backs two enemies of Israel in particular: Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Hamas, which now governs Gaza. Robert O. Freedman is professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. Author of Russia, Iran and the Nuclear Question: The Putin Record and editor of The Middle East Enters the Twenty-First Century and Contemporary Israel: Domestic Politics, Foreign Policy, and Security Challenges, he is also a past president of the Association for Israel Studies.

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srael was born on May 15, 1948. It was a child of European nationalism of the nineteenth century, much as was Arab nationalism. On that date a group of Palestinian Jewish leaders, operating on the basis of the Zionist ideology, proclaimed the state of Israel. Their basic precept was that—just as the French had France; the Germans, Germany; the English, England; and the Italians, Italy—so, too, should the Jews have a state of their own. Israel, however, was also born in conflict with its Arab neighbors, who invaded Israel seeking to destroy it. That conflict, which became known as the Arab-Israeli conflict, has heavily influenced Israel’s development, as security issues have dominated Israeli politics and society since 1948. A second major factor influencing Israel was immigration. Israel, whose ethos was the ingathering of Jews from around the world, particularly where they lived under conditions of persecution, has absorbed millions of immigrants since 1948, beginning with the survivors of the Holocaust, who were followed by Jews from Arab countries in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and Jews from the former Soviet Union in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. Even in 2007, fifty-nine years after the state of Israel was proclaimed, immigrants form a large percentage of its population, which now numbers more than seven million. Israel has also become a source of pride for Jewish communities around the world, although differences with Diaspora Jewish communities, especially that of the United States, over religious issues and Israeli foreign policy have occasionally caused conflicts.

History Before 1948 Modern Israel had its political origins in the doctrine of nationalism, which was precipitated by the French Revolution and permeated Europe in the nineteenth century. Nationalism led to the unification of Germany and Italy, [to] revolts by the Poles against the Russians, and the Hungarians against the Austrians, and to the gradual weakening of Ottoman control in the Balkans, which began with the independence movement in Greece in the 1820s. These events led a number of Jewish thinkers to suggest that the time had come for the Jews, as an ethnoreligious national group, to have their own homeland. Indeed, the title of [Moses] Hess’s seminal book, Rome and Jerusalem: The Last Nationality Question, specifically stated that just as the Italians were creating a new state on the ruins of ancient Rome, so, too, should the Jews re-create their state in Palestine, which, until the Romans conquered it and destroyed the Jewish Temple in 70 CE, had been the Jewish state. The most important Zionist thinker in the nineteenth century was Theodor Herzl. In 1896, after witnessing the anti-Jewish rioting in France connected to the Dreyfus affair, in which a French Jewish army officer was falsely accused of giving military secrets to the Germans, Herzl concluded that there was no safe place for the Jews of Europe and that assimilation was not possible. In 1896 he wrote the

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book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), which called for a Jewish state in Palestine, and in 1897 he organized the first international Zionist congress in Basle, Switzerland. The conference called for international support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and for Jewish efforts to settle it. In sum, by the end of the nineteenth century, Zionist thinkers had concluded that a Jewish state was needed, both to provide a safe haven for persecuted Jews and to raise the national dignity of the Jewish people. A few Zionist leaders went further, arguing that a Jewish state would be “a light unto the nations.” While Herzl ran into opposition from both Orthodox and Reform Jews for religious reasons (the Orthodox Jews felt that only the Messiah could reestablish a Jewish state, while the Reform Jews asserted that it was God’s will to scatter the Jews around the world so that they could teach God’s laws), and from assimilated Jews in Europe and the United States, who did not share Herzl’s concern about rising anti-Semitism, he continued his Zionist efforts. Between 1897 and 1903, he visited the main chancelleries of Europe, trying to gain support for his plan. Herzl’s greatest success came in England, where he found a receptive audience, especially among “Christian Zionists” such as Arthur Balfour. Indeed, his discussions with English leaders were to set the stage for British promises to the Zionist movement during World War I.

World War I and the British Mandate During World War I, England had a number of objectives besides the defeat of the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire). One of these was to secure a land route to the Persian Gulf, from Egypt to Iran, in lands then occupied by the Ottoman Empire, in order to secure the route to India. British possession of Palestine, as well as Iraq, was critical to achieving this goal. In order to both gain support against the Central Powers and gain the land bridge to the Persian Gulf, English officials made three conflicting promises during the war. The first was to Sherif Hussein of Mecca (the Hussein-McMahon correspondence of 1915–1916), in which the Arab leader, who then controlled only the land around Mecca, was vaguely promised an independent Arab state from southern Anatolia to the Arabian Sea. The second promise was in the 1916 SykesPicot agreement with France, under which England got most of modern-day Iraq and Jordan, France got modern-day Syria and Lebanon, as well as part of southern Anatolia and northern Iraq, and Palestine, west of the Jordan River, was to be an internationally controlled zone. The third promise, the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, was to the Zionist movement, which during World War I had its primary headquarters in England. The Balfour Declaration was another vague promise, this time of a Jewish “national home in Palestine”; it did not stipulate the meaning of the term national home (state? autonomous area?) or where “in Palestine” the national home was to be (all of it? part of it?). At the peace conferences

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following the war, England and France could more freely deal with Palestine, which England received as a League of Nations Mandate, along with Iraq, while France received Lebanon and Syria. Just as England had made conflicting promises during World War I, so, too, did it pursue conflicting policies during the Mandate period (1922–1948), favoring the Zionists as in the Mandate document itself, which stated that England would facilitate Jewish immigration to Palestine, and favoring the Arabs, as in the Passfield White Paper (1930), which stated that England would terminate immigration. As the conflict between Palestine’s Jewish and Arab communities intensified during the 1930s, the British were hard put to work out a settlement between the two communities and never did succeed. In 1939, with World War II on the horizon and the continuing Arab revolt tying down large numbers of English troops, England again moved to pacify the Palestinian Arabs with the March 1939 White Paper, which limited Jewish immigration to Palestine to only seventy-five thousand over the next five years. The White Paper also limited Jewish land purchase possibilities to only 5 percent of the Mandate. The White Paper’s limitation on immigration and land purchase infuriated the Palestinian Jewish community. More important, it cost the lives of perhaps one million European Jews, who died in the Holocaust and otherwise might have made it to Palestine, something that still angers Israeli Jews today. With the outbreak of World War II, most of the Palestinian Jewish community supported the English, despite the 1939 White Paper. Following the war, the British, war weary and economically exhausted, brought the issue of Palestine to the United Nations in February 1947. The UN set up its own investigatory commission, which made two recommendations. The majority recommendation was for the partition of the British Mandate into Palestinian Arab and Palestinian Jewish states, with Jerusalem and its environs becoming an international zone. The minority recommendation was for a Jewish-Arab Federation. With the support of both the United States and the Soviet Union, the majority recommendation was passed by the UN General Assembly in November 1947, calling for an end to the Mandate and for the establishment of the two states. Following the UN decision, which the Palestinian Jews accepted and the Palestinian Arabs rejected, guerrilla war broke out between the two communities, with volunteers from neighboring Arab countries entering Palestine to help the Palestinian Arabs. The volunteers, however, were not able to help the Palestinian Arabs defeat the Palestinian Jews, and on May 15, 1948, Arab armies from Egypt, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq invaded the newly proclaimed State of Israel.

Israeli Foreign Policy Since 1948 In what became known as Israel’s War of Independence, the Israeli army—thanks to higher morale, interior lines of communication, better leadership, divisions

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among the Arabs, and arms from Czechoslovakia—defeated both the invading Arab armies and the Palestinian Arabs, enlarging the area it had been allotted under the UN partition resolution, primarily with land in the Galilee. At the same time Egypt seized Gaza, and Transjordan (which was soon to change its name to Jordan) seized the West Bank and East Jerusalem—areas that had been allotted to the abortive Palestinian state. As a result of the war, more than five hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs fled their homes, most to escape the fighting, and approximately one hundred thousand of them [were] expelled by Israel to prevent their acting as a “fifth column” behind Israeli lines as Israel came under attack from Egypt and Transjordan. In the aftermath of the war, terrorist attacks against Israel from Egypt and Jordan led to often massive reprisals by Israel on Egypt and Jordan, reprisals that were criticized by the United States and Western Europe. The United States, under both the [Harry S.] Truman and [Dwight D.] Eisenhower administrations, was courting the Arab world and urging Israel not only to accept the return of hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees, but also to cede to the Arabs some of the land it controlled after its War of Independence. Israel rejected both American recommendations, fearing the security implications. Making matters worse for Israel was the major Soviet-Egyptian arms deal of 1955, which supplied Egypt with hundreds of bombers (along with tanks and artillery) that directly threatened Israel. Under these circumstances, in 1956 Israel joined with England and France, which had supplied some weaponry to Israel, for a tripartite attack on Egypt. Israel’s role was to secure the Sinai up to ten miles from the Suez Canal; England and France were to oust [Egyptian president Gamal Abdel] Nasser under the diplomatic cover of protecting international shipping through the canal. Israel defeated the Egyptian army in the Sinai, capturing or destroying large amounts of Soviet-supplied weaponry. However, under heavy US pressure, Israel withdrew from the Sinai and Gaza, but not before a UN Expeditionary Force had been emplaced on Israel’s borders with Egypt, to deter terrorist attacks, and at the Straits of Tiran, to ensure the freedom of Israeli shipping there. (Nasser had previously closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping.) The 1956–1967 period was a relatively quiet one in Israel’s foreign relations, as Israel’s Arab neighbors, fearful of another military encounter, seemed more intent on confronting each other than on confronting Israel. In addition, following the Iraqi revolution of July 1958, US-Israeli relations began to improve as American policymakers began to see the value of a democratic and militarily strong Israel in the volatile Middle East. During the administration of John F. Kennedy (1961– 1963) the United States sold Hawk antiaircraft missiles to Israel to help protect it against the threat posed by the Egyptian bombers, although there were some serious differences between the two countries over Israel’s budding nuclear program. Israel’s relatively benign international situation changed radically in May 1967. Acting on erroneous information from the Soviet Union that Israel was about to

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attack Moscow’s client state, Syria, Nasser seized the opportunity to rebuild his diminished prestige in the Arab world by expelling the UN troops on the EgyptianIsraeli border and at the Straits of Tiran, and by signing a military alliance with Jordan, which augmented the 1966 Syrian-Egyptian alliance. Surrounded by enemies calling for its destruction, Israel launched a preemptive attack against Egypt. At the same time, it urged Jordan to stay out of the war. However, when King Hussein of Jordan responded to the Israeli request by shelling Jewish West Jerusalem from the Jordanian-controlled hills in East Jerusalem, Israel struck at Jordan as well, capturing East Jerusalem and the West Bank and driving the Jordanian army back across the Jordan River. Several days later, Israel attacked Syria, seizing the Golan Heights, from which the Syrian army had regularly shelled Israeli territory. The diplomatic situation for Israel following the 1967 War was far different from that after the Suez War of 1956. Now the United States agreed with Israel that it should hold the conquered territory until a peace agreement was reached with its Arab neighbors. In addition, the administration of Lyndon Johnson, working with the United Kingdom, succeeded in November 1967 in passing UN Security Council Resolution 242, which called, as part of a peace settlement, for Israel to withdraw from “occupied territories” (not “the” or “all” occupied territories), thus implying that Israel could keep some territory to make its borders more “secure,” as the UN resolution also stipulated. US military and economic aid to Israel grew, and during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when an overconfident and unprepared Israel was caught by surprise by the attack from Egypt and Syria, American weaponry helped to turn the tide of the fighting in Israel’s favor. In the aftermath of the war, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger began a shuttle diplomacy that led to the partial Israeli-Egyptian agreements of Sinai I (1974) and Sinai II (1975) and set the stage for the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement of 1979 mediated with the help of US president Jimmy Carter. US-Israeli relations remained strong under Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, whose administration gave at least tacit support to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The primary goal of the invasion was the destruction of the state-within-astate that the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) had constructed in South Lebanon, which served as a base for launching attacks against Israel. While Israel succeeded in destroying the PLO position in South Lebanon, it was far less successful in achieving its other invasion goals, which included creating a pro-Israeli Christian-dominated government in Lebanon, destroying Syrian influence there, and convincing the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza to accept the limited autonomy that Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin had offered them. Heartened by the difficulties Israel was encountering in Lebanon as the Iranianbacked Hizbollah launched attacks against Israeli troops there, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza rose up against Israel in December 1987 in what became known as the First Intifada. Initially, Israel did not know how to respond to the intifada, and its heavy-handed actions eroded its position in world public opin-

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ion. The First Gulf War (1990–1991), which followed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, however, diverted attention from the intifada, and PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s decision to support Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the war gravely weakened the Palestinian position, not only in the West but also among the Gulf Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia. Following the war, the election of Labor Party leader Yitzhak Rabin as Israel’s new prime minister in 1992 led to secret talks with the PLO that culminated in the Oslo I partial peace agreement of 1993, which called for mutual recognition, the end of Palestinian terrorism, and the establishment of a Palestinian Authority in Gaza (although Israeli settlements and army bases would remain there) and the city of Jericho. Oslo I was followed by the 1995 Oslo II agreement, which gave the Palestinian Authority both administrative and security control over the large cities on the West Bank, except for the city of Hebron. Meanwhile, Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty in 1994, under which Jordan promised not to allow the stationing of Arab armies on its soil, and Israel promised not to expel Palestinian Arabs into Jordan. The Arab-Israeli peace process suffered a blow, however, in November 1995 when Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish religious fanatic who opposed the Oslo agreements, [followed] by the election in May 1996 of Benjamin Netanyahu, who was considerably less enthusiastic about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process than Rabin had been. Nonetheless, Netanyahu signed two additional partial peace agreements with the Palestinians (Hebron in 1997 and Wye in 1998). The May 1999 elections, in which Ehud Barak defeated Netanyahu, also brought new hope to the peace process. However, even with the mediation of US president Bill Clinton, Israel and Syria could not agree on a peace treaty, primarily because of a border dispute in the area of the Sea of Galilee. Similarly, despite Clinton’s mediation efforts at Camp David in July 2000, Barak and Arafat could not reach an agreement, even though Barak offered to Arafat all of Gaza, 94 percent of the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. The subsequent outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000, replete with Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, led in 2001 to the election of Ariel Sharon as prime minister. Sharon, in 2002, ordered the Israeli army to reenter the Palestinian cities on the West Bank to stop the Palestinian terrorist attacks. Subsequently, he ordered the construction of a security fence between Israeli and Palestinian areas for the same purpose. In 2004, after an unsuccessful international effort known as the “road map” (sponsored by the United States, the European Union, the UN, and Russia) calling for a cease-fire followed by a three-stage process leading to a Palestinian state, Sharon came up with a plan to unilaterally pull Israeli settlements and military bases out of Gaza, as well as Israeli settlements out of the northern West Bank, to both cement the Jewish majority in Israeli-controlled areas and give the Palestinians a chance for self-government in Gaza. The plan was implemented in 2005, despite opposition by Israel’s Religious Zionist community. The peace process,

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however, was not helped by this development. Rockets from Gaza continued to be fired into Israel, and in the January 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections, Hamas won the majority and formed a government on the platform of no recognition of Israel and no long-term peace with Israel. The election struck a major blow to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Then, in the summer of 2006, Iranianbacked Hizbollah precipitated a month-long Israeli-Lebanese war, further raising tension in the Middle East. Sharon was succeeded by Ehud Olmert, who was confronted with a two-front war, following the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier by a Hamas-led force from Gaza in June 2006, and the kidnappings of two Israeli soldiers by Hizbollah operating from southern Lebanon in July 2006. Beyond the Arab world, Israel faced a growing threat from Iran, a country many thought to be developing nuclear weapons and whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in 2005 openly called for Israel’s destruction. Compounding the threat from Iran was that country’s solidifying alliance with Syria, which remained a major enemy of Israel, and its assistance to two other enemies of Israel: Hizbollah and Hamas. Adapted from Chapter 1, by Robert O. Freedman, in Robert O. Freedman, ed., Contemporary Israel: Domestic Politics, Foreign Policy, and Security Challenges (2008, Westview Press).

CHAPTER 8 QR

The United States and Israel Bernard Reich and Shannon Powers

Israel has historically enjoyed the support of the United States—so much so that Arabs of the Middle East commonly perceive that Israel is in effect a Western proxy state in their midst and, conversely, that Israel wields undue influence over US foreign policy toward the Middle East. While not denying that a “special relationship” exists between the United States and Israel, particularly with regard to the US commitment to Israel’s continuing security, Bernard Reich and Shannon Powers demonstrate that the two countries are hardly in lockstep agreement over issues. Though they might be in broad concord, the United States and Israel have frequently clashed over specifics and on the means to achieve goals—a situation shaped by differences between the global interests of the United States as the world’s lone superpower and Israel’s narrower and more regional interests. Tensions have waxed and waned between the governments over efforts for progress on peace talks with the Palestinians and over linking any such progress to alteration of Israel’s policies toward Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. As administrations have changed in both countries, their views have oftentimes diverged on the status of the occupied territories, the building of new Israeli settlements, and the creation of a Palestinian state. Nevertheless, US support for Israel remains strong overall. Bernard Reich is professor emeritus of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. He is author of numerous books on the Middle East, including A Brief History of Israel, Securing the Covenant: United States–Israel Relations After the Cold War, and An Historical Encyclopedia of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. He is also coeditor (with David E. Long and Mark Gasiorowski) of The Government and Politics of the Middle East and North Africa, sixth edition. Shannon Powers is a PhD candidate in political science at George Washington University, writing her dissertation on the politics of international criminal tribunals. She earned a BA from Hebrew University and an MA from George Washington University, both in political science. She also holds a JD from the University of Connecticut. The present chapter is a specially revised version of one she cowrote with Bernard Reich titled “The United States and Israel” in The Middle East and the United States: A Historical and Political Reassessment, edited by David W. Lesch and Mark L. Haas. 99

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he relationship between the United States and Israel has been characterized as special by many scholars, observers, policymakers, and diplomats alike. Irreducible to any one factor, the relations are strengthened by the multiple bonds on which they are founded even while not being codified in a formal alliance. The origins of this complex and multifaceted relationship can be traced back prior to the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 and finds expression in the continuing US support for the survival, security, and well-being of Israel. American presidents since Harry Truman have acknowledged the shared values between the two countries, and affirmations of a special relationship have become a common refrain in presidential statements and speeches. For instance, President Barack Obama has declared that “the deep bonds of friendship between the United States and Israel remain as strong and unbreakable as ever.” The framework within which the United States and Israel have interacted has changed over time, and policies perforce have changed to reflect the altered environment. The US-Israeli relationship had its origins during the time that the United States and Soviet Union competed for control following World War II. Both superpowers courted Israel in their efforts to incorporate new states into their spheres of influence. Israel was seen as a valuable prize in the newly important Middle East. Nevertheless, within the US government there was substantial disagreement concerning the appropriate policy, and US support for the Jewish state was a presidential decision, often opposed by the senior echelon in the Departments of State and Defense. Today, the US-Israeli relationship operates within the confines of a world order in which there is no alternative superpower nor USSoviet competition to curry the favor of states or regional groupings. A second difference is to be found in the perspectives of a small country confronting a large country (that is, the United States today, the only superpower), which sees the world through a different lens. The United States is a global power with global interests, affected by the residue of the Cold War and the attempt to maintain its hegemonic position; Israeli interests are more narrow and regional, and there are more “life-and-death” issues. A major influence bolstering the US-Israeli relationship is the US Congress. Congress plays a significant role in the relationship as it is both empowered and limited by constitutional and practical factors. Formally, Congress is vested with the spending authority and therefore retains substantial decision-making power when it comes to foreign aid, answering such questions as for what (economic and military assistance, loans or grants, and so on), how much, and to whom money is allocated. Not only is Congress a crucial element in determining what aid Israel gets, it also helps to determine whether Arab parties also receive aid (such as Hamas after its election victory in 2005). Congressional influence, however, extends beyond its formal authority over the allocation of foreign aid, as it frequently issues its opinions, in the form of declarations and resolutions, on

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both central issues and seemingly unrelated matters that are connected to the Israel factor. Congressional concerns about a Jewish state can be traced back to at least 1922, when Congress unanimously supported the Balfour Declaration (which President Woodrow Wilson had endorsed earlier) in the Lodge-Fish Resolution. Since Israel’s independence, Congress has repeatedly passed resolutions in support of Israel during Middle East crises, particularly in recognition of Israel’s right to defend its security and in condemnation of attacks within Israel’s borders. The rhetorical power of these statements helps draw attention to Israel’s position and secure the continued cooperation of the executive branch during periods of disagreement. For example, amid tensions between the [Barack] Obama and [Benjamin] Netanyahu administrations, three-quarters of the House of Representatives sent a letter to President Obama calling on him to work “closely and privately” with Israel on the peace process, in contrast to the public criticism his administration had been voicing. When it comes to American support of Israel, however, Congress is not simply acting on its own. A major source of Congress’s power on the issue stems from its representation of American public opinion. Public opinion polls over the years continue to reflect the concern of American voters for Israeli security and their strong preference for candidates who are supportive of Israel. This perspective tends to “confirm” the Arab view, in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war (also known as the Six Day War), that there existed a preferential and exclusive US-Israeli relationship. Despite the staunch support America provides Israel, the US-Israeli relationship is not the exclusive one that is often portrayed by Arab spokesmen and others advocating a different orientation to Israel in US policy. This has become increasingly clear in recent administrations—[Bill] Clinton’s attempts to implement the Oslo Accords, George W. Bush’s two-state “vision” and the “Road Map” for a final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Obama’s efforts at resuscitating peace negotiations through “proximity talks” and direct negotiations. Although there was a period of exclusivity favoring Israel following the events of the Six Day War, this lack of a dual relationship began to change after the Yom Kippur War of 1973. By 1977, Arab (especially Egyptian) views were taken into account and affected US policy. Thus, there was a change from exclusivity to dual-factor diplomacy that has endured and has even been strengthened by President Obama. While the special relationship between the United States and Israel has always revolved around US support for Israel’s continued survival, its content has varied over time. During the first decades after Israel’s independence, the relationship was grounded primarily in humanitarian concerns, in religious and historical links, and in a moral-emotional-political arena. Over time, the United States and Israel developed a diplomatic-political relationship that focused on the need to

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resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, and eventually the United States came to appreciate Israel as a strategic ally that helped further its national interests.

Statehood to 1967 The shared affinity between the United States and Israel predates Israel’s independence in 1948, even though it was not reflected in a coherent American policy toward the Middle East prior to World War II. When Israel declared independence, the United States was the first to grant it de facto recognition. President Harry Truman was primarily motivated by humanitarian and moral factors. He believed that the Jewish people had a legitimate historical claim to the land of Palestine deriving from the Old Testament, and he saw statehood as restitution for the atrocities of the Holocaust. But many within the executive branch, especially from the State Department, worried that support for the Jewish state would adversely impact American strategic and political interests in the Middle East. During the War of Independence, the United States maintained a posture of nonparticipation, abided by its December 1947 arms embargo, and favored UN efforts for resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. During the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, the Arab-Israeli conflict was viewed principally through the lens of containing the Soviet threat, and there was a stronger emphasis on US neutrality. Eisenhower spoke of an “impartial friendship,” did not make any formal security commitments to Israel, and maintained the regional arms embargo. Resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict continued to be an element in the overall goal of preventing Soviet encroachment into the region, but Israel’s importance receded under the increased weight of the Arab states’ oil and political value. Israel’s collusion with the British and French in the 1956 Sinai Campaign was the cause of more serious tensions in the US-Israeli relationship. In a national address delivered on October 31, 1956, Eisenhower denounced the Israeli action by saying, “As it is the manifest right of any of these nations to take such decisions and actions, it is likewise our right—if our judgment so dictates—to dissent. We believe these actions to have been taken in error. For we do not accept the use of force as a wise or proper instrument for the settlement of international disputes. . . . The action taken can scarcely be reconciled with the principles and purposes of the United Nations to which we have all subscribed.” Eisenhower supported UN efforts to terminate the conflict, and Israel ultimately withdrew from the Sinai under US and UN pressure. The United States did, however, provide some measure of assurance to Israel. An aide-memoire from Secretary of State [John Foster] Dulles to Israeli ambassador Abba Eban dated February 11, 1957, stated the United States’ belief “that the gulf [of Aqaba] comprehends international waters and that no nation has the right to prevent free and innocent passage in the gulf through the Strait [of Tiran] giving access thereto.” It further stated

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that in the absence of an overriding decision to the contrary, the United States was prepared to “exercise the right of free and innocent passage and to join with others to secure general recognition of this right.” The termination of the Suez crisis and the withdrawal of foreign troops from Egypt in 1957 inaugurated a period of relative tranquility in US-Israel relations. John F. Kennedy’s presidential term did not significantly alter relations with Israel. As a candidate, he promised a renewed effort to achieve a peace settlement, and as president he reiterated that policy. Kennedy sought a dialogue with Arab leaders, which he initiated through correspondence that pledged continued support of UN resolutions aimed at resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict and the use of US influence to establish a just and peaceful solution. The Kennedy administration also sought to address the Palestinian issue through the Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC), which had been established by UN resolution in 1948. The PCC sent Joseph E. Johnson, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to the Middle East specifically to investigate the Palestinian refugee problem. Despite some initial enthusiasm following his report, however, this effort did not result in any tangible accomplishments. Kennedy also believed that regional peace depended upon a balance of military power between the Israelis and Arabs. When the Soviets provided the Egyptians with the latest model jet fighters, Kennedy authorized the sale of HAWK antiaircraft missiles to Israel. This was the first major weapons transaction between the two countries, officially bringing an end to the American arms embargo. Lyndon Johnson’s tenure marked a significant turning point in the US-Israeli relationship. US ties with Israel seemed to reach a new level of friendship and support, exemplified by the first official Israeli visit to the United States in 1964 by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. Israel also sought to balance the Soviet arming of Arab states through its own arms acquisitions. In 1966, Johnson’s administration sold Israel tanks and Skyhawk aircraft. This not only bolstered Israel’s forces, but the public nature of the sale made clear to everyone that the United States was willing to help Israel defend itself. Following the termination of the Six Day War in 1967, the United States shifted its approach to the Middle East conflict from merely seeking stability to achieving a lasting peace agreement. This shift derived, in part, from the changed circumstances caused by the war, namely Israeli acquisition of territory that could be exchanged for peace, and the recognition that the situation was too dangerous not to attempt reaching a settlement. On June 19, 1967, Johnson outlined a program for peace based on five principles: “every nation in the area has a fundamental right to live and to have this right respected by its neighbors,” justice for the refugees, the right of innocent maritime passage, limits on the arms race, and “respect for political independence and territorial integrity of all the states of the area.” Johnson’s program ultimately became the foundation for UN Security Council Resolution 242, which adopted the land-for-peace formula.

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Post 1967: Palestinian Intifada Richard Nixon’s administration continued Johnson’s policies of selling arms to Israel and pushing for a peace agreement. Nixon declared US support for Israel’s deterrent strength. In support of this view, his administration sold Israel F-4 Phantom jets and provided emergency security assistance and supplies during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. The peace attempts initiated during Nixon’s presidency, however, were not successful. In 1969 and 1970, the United States pursued both bilateral US-Soviet talks and multilateral talks between the United States, France, Britain, and the Soviet Union, some of which focused on an ArabIsraeli settlement. Great-power involvement left Israel feeling insecure that the powers might impose a solution that did not meet its interests. In December 1969, US Secretary of State William Rogers put forth the most specific proposal the United States had yet to advance for a peace deal, centered on Israel and Egypt. Israel strongly opposed the plan on the grounds that it did not adequately provide for its security or interests and had not been negotiated between the parties to the conflict. Following the 1973 war, the United States made renewed attempts at resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, which were more successful. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger engaged in multiple rounds of shuttle diplomacy and secured disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt in January 1974 and between Israel and Syria in May 1974, but he failed to reach a permanent arrangement. On March 23, 1975, Gerald Ford ordered a reassessment of US Middle East policy in light of the failure of shuttle diplomacy and general disarray in US foreign policy following the fall of Vietnam. At the same time, the reassessment served to pressure Israel into moving its position closer to that of the Egyptians. Following another round of Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy in August 1975, the Sinai II Agreement was signed, which provided the first steps toward political accommodation between the parties. The accession of both Jimmy Carter and Menachem Begin to office in 1977 inaugurated a new period in the US-Israeli relationship, characterized often by increased public tension and recrimination. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s historic decision to visit Jerusalem and address the Israeli Knesset also reduced the exclusivity of the US-Israeli relationship that had been established after 1967 as a consequence of Soviet policy and the ruptures of relations between some Arab states and the United States. The Carter and Begin administrations became divided over many issues that directly affected the health of the US-Israeli relationship. They were in accord in some aspects, however, [such] as on the need to achieve peace and foster the security of Israel. Yet they would often disagree on the methods and mechanisms best suited to achieving those goals, the preferred end results, and the modalities that best served national interests. There were questions regarding the poor personal chemistry between policymakers on either side as well. Mutual dislike and mis-

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trust extended beyond Carter and Begin into the [Ronald] Reagan administration; the United States was unhappy with Begin and his minister of defense, Ariel Sharon, and Israel had strong anxieties about Caspar Weinberger and his policies. There were disagreements concerning the nature of the situation in the region, often focusing on alternative intelligence estimates of the threat to Israel’s national security. These differences involved data, analyses, and policy results. The consensus on major issues did not ensure agreement on all aspects or specifics of each problem. As the dialogue increasingly dealt with details rather than broad areas of agreement, there were disturbances in the relationship. The Carter administration had its most noteworthy success in effecting change in the Israeli position at Camp David and in the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. The main techniques included high-risk/high-visibility presidential involvement and Carter’s suggestion that Israel could not allow the failure of this president, who might then transfer the blame to Israel in Congress and public opinion. Israel was also influenced by the administration’s articulated reassurances for continuing economic and military assistance and by their tangible manifestation in the form of such assistance. Ronald Reagan came to office with a very different perception of Israel and its importance. His campaign rhetoric concerning Israel went beyond the customary pledges of friendship, suggesting strong and consistent support for Israel and its perspective regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. He saw Israel as an important ally and an asset in the struggle against the Soviet Union. He was opposed to dealing with the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] until that organization dramatically changed its policies by renouncing terrorism, accepting UN Security Council Resolution 242, and acknowledging Israel’s right to exist (which it eventually did in 1988). This pro-Israel perspective was retained and reiterated after he took office. The US-Israeli relationship during the eight years Reagan held office was generally characterized by close positive ties, but there were also specific, divergent interpretations regarding the regional situation, the peace process, and Israel’s security needs. Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor near Baghdad and PLO positions in Beirut during the summer of 1981, and it took action on other issues when it believed its national interest was at stake—even when it understood this would lead to clashes with the United States. The United States strongly opposed the raid on the Iraqi reactor, questioned the Beirut bombings, and postponed the delivery of previously contracted F-16 aircraft to Israel. Other issues emerged, including disputes about settlements in the occupied territories and Israel’s concern about a perceived pro-Saudi tendency in US policy manifested, in part, by arms supplied to Saudi Arabia, including F-15 enhancements and AWACS (airborne warning and control system aircraft). Reagan sought to reassure Israel that the United States remained committed to helping it retain its military and technological advantages over the Arab states. In

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fact, on November 30, 1981, the United States and Israel signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Strategic Cooperation (the MOU) in which the parties recognized the need to enhance strategic cooperation to deter threats to the region from the Soviet Union. For the Begin government it represented an important achievement, suggesting an improved relationship with the United States, and some mitigation of the negative effects of US sales of AWACS and other advanced weapons systems to Saudi Arabia. But this positive aura soon dissipated when Israel decided in December 1981 to alter the status of the Golan Heights by extending the law, jurisdiction, and administration of Israel to that area. The action generated swift negative reactions in Washington, including US support for a UN resolution of condemnation and the suspension of the MOU. Israel was stunned by the extent of the US reaction. Although Israel’s Golan decision exacerbated tensions, the turning point was Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which called into question the links between the United States and Israel and led to clashes over the nature and extent of Israel’s military actions and the US effort to ensure the PLO’s evacuation from Beirut. US forces, which had been withdrawn from Beirut following the PLO’s evacuation, returned there after the massacres of Palestinians by Lebanese Phalangists at the Shatila and Sabra refugee camps in September 1982, leading to the burdensome involvement of US marines in the turmoil of Lebanon. Reagan faced other difficult times. US efforts to secure the release of its hostages in Lebanon through arms sales to Iran erupted, in November 1986, into a public scandal that became known as the Iran-Contra affair. This infamous chapter in US history, among other matters, involved active Israeli participation in the planning and execution of some operations of the US National Security Council and demonstrates the high level of strategic cooperation between the two governments during the Reagan administration. The onset of the Palestinian intifada in December 1987 led to public disagreement over the methods employed by Israel to contain the violence and restore law and order. Israel’s use of live ammunition provoked protests by the State Department as early as January 1988. Israel’s deportation of Palestinian civilians charged with inciting the demonstrations led the United States to vote in favor of a UN resolution calling on Israel to refrain from “such harsh measures [which] are unnecessary to maintain order.” This was the first time since 1981 that the United States had voted for a resolution critical of Israel. The relationship between the United States and Israel underwent substantial, though incremental, change during the Reagan administration. Ronald Reagan saw Israel as a strategic asset. US economic and military assistance reached $3 billion per annum in essentially all-grant aid. Strategic cooperation between the United States and Israel reached new levels during this period, and on April 21, 1988 (in the Jewish calendar, the fortieth anniversary of Israel’s independence), the two states signed a memorandum of agreement that institutionalized the

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emerging strategic relationship. Growing links in the military sphere involved joint military exercises, sales and purchases of equipment, training, and related activities. Israel had also gained status as a major non-NATO ally. On December 14, 1988, in a press conference in Geneva, PLO leader Yasser Arafat read the script articulating a change in PLO views toward Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, renouncing terrorism, recognizing the state of Israel, and accepting UN Resolutions 242 and 338. Arafat thereby met the conditions for beginning a dialogue between the United States and the PLO that had first been enunciated in 1975 by then secretary of state Henry Kissinger. Secretary of State George Shultz formally announced, “The Palestine Liberation Organization today issued a statement in which it accepted UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace and security, and renounced terrorism. As a result, the United States is prepared for a substantive dialogue with PLO representatives.” The administration sought to reassure Israel that “those who believe that American policy is about to undergo a basic shift merely because we have begun to talk with the PLO are completely mistaken.”

Madrid Agreements and the Oslo Accords President George H. W. Bush took office in January 1989 with no long-range strategic plan or specific policies for the Arab-Israeli issue or the Gulf region of the Middle East. The end of the Cold War, the implosion of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and the emerging new democracies in Eastern Europe engrossed the administration and Congress and entranced the media and public. The Iran-Iraq War had given way to a cease-fire, the departure of Soviet troops altered the hostilities in Afghanistan, and a dialogue with the PLO, established in the last days of the Reagan administration, continued. Within the context of a changing international system, the Middle East was not a high national priority. During the first year and a half of the Bush administration, Israel and the United States were preoccupied with the effort to begin a negotiating process between Israel and the Palestinians. Bush administration frustration with the [Yitzhak] Shamir government was obvious in its preference for a [Shimon] Peres– led government after a successful vote of no confidence terminated the tenure of the Israeli government in the spring of 1990 and in its voiced concerns about the prospects for peace after Shamir succeeded in constructing a new government in June 1990. The peace process was moribund when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, attributable, in large measure, to the policies of the Shamir government in Israel (at least in the eyes of the Bush administration). During the Gulf crisis and the war against Iraq, Israel was relegated to a marginal role. Israel did not serve as a staging area for forces or as a storage depot for military materiel; nor was it utilized for medical emergencies. There was a conscious US

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effort to build a broad-based international force with an Arab component to oppose Saddam Hussein, and this was seen as requiring the exclusion of Israel from any such activity. Israel, for its part, was determined not to be used as a tool to break the coalition, although the Israelis did endorse the firm and rapid US reaction to Iraq. The inauguration of the Arab-Israeli peace process in the aftermath of the Gulf War revived traditional Israeli concerns about the United States as less than a wholly supportive and reliable ally. Within several months of the Gulf War ceasefire, the US-Israeli relationship was again characterized by discord. Tensions developed as the Bush administration appeared to link proposed housing loan guarantees, essential to the settling of Soviet Jewish immigrants in Israel, to Israel’s actions on settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and its responsiveness to the peace process. Secretary of State James Baker observed, “I don’t think that there is any bigger obstacle to peace than the settlement activity that continues not only unabated but at an enhanced pace.” In the autumn of 1991, tensions became public when Bush asked Congress to postpone consideration of Israel’s request for US guarantees of $10 billion in loans. Despite numerous denials and claims to the contrary, the Bush administration and the Shamir government were not harmonious on many of the issues central to peace in the Middle East. The outcome of the June 1992 elections in Israel, with Yitzhak Rabin replacing Shamir as prime minister, was welcomed by the Bush administration as a significant and positive factor that would alter the regional situation, the prospects for progress in the Arab-Israeli peace process, and the nature of the US-Israeli relationship. In late June 1992 Secretary of State Baker called for a quick resumption of Middle East peace talks, reflecting the administration’s view that the elections had resulted in the demise of a hard-line Likud government and thereby facilitated the prospects for success in the peace negotiations. They saw the onus now falling upon the Palestinians and other Arabs to make serious compromises and proposals for peace. US determination to see the peace process through was stressed by Bush in a speech to a joint session of Congress on March 6, 1991: “A comprehensive peace must be grounded in United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and the principle of territory for peace. This must provide for Israel’s security and recognition, and at the same time for legitimate Palestinian political rights. Anything else would fail the twin tests of fairness and security.” Eventually, Baker convened the Madrid peace conference at the end of October 1991. The Madrid conference was attended reluctantly by the parties, who retained substantial concerns about its nature. It did not achieve a substantive breakthrough, although it eliminated the procedural barriers to direct bilateral negotiations between Israel and its immediate neighbors when the Israeli and the Syrian, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Jordanian-Palestinian delegations met at an opening public session and an official plenary session and delivered speeches and responses. Bilateral negotiations between Israel and each of the Arab delegations followed.

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The Madrid conference was followed by bilateral talks in Washington later in 1991, talks that directly or indirectly contributed to the September 1993 Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles, the October 1994 Israeli-Jordanian peace, and IsraeliSyrian talks focusing on the Golan Heights. The first rounds achieved accord on nonsubstantive matters. Progress was measured primarily by the continuation of the process rather than by significant achievements on the substantive issues in dispute. The wide gap between the Israeli and Arab positions was not narrowed in these initial encounters. The United States adhered to its role as facilitator and sought not to intervene on substantive matters. It was not a party to the bilateral talks, and its representatives were not in the room or at the negotiating table, although it did meet separately with the parties and heard their views and perspectives. In the bilateral negotiations, the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian negotiations were the most central and most difficult. In the case of both Jordan and Lebanon, the general perception at the time was that agreements would be relatively easy to achieve, although these would have to await the resolution of the Syrian and Palestinian talks. In the case of Syria, the central issue was peace and the future of the Golan Heights, with little likelihood of compromise in the short term. In the Israeli-Palestinian discussions, the disagreement centered on the Palestinian desire for self-government and the Israeli opposition to that goal. Compromise was elusive, as the positions were mutually exclusive. However, Israeli proposals for elections in the territories and the reality of the situation in the region suggested areas for continued negotiation, ultimately leading to the “Oslo Channel” bilateral negotiations outside the Madrid process that resulted in the September 13, 1993, signing of the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn. Despite the achievements symbolized by the Madrid conference and the subsequent bilateral and multilateral discussions, by the time of the Israeli and US elections in 1992 no substantive breakthrough had occurred, and no specific achievement (beyond continuation of the process) had been recorded. Nevertheless, the Baker team seemed optimistic in the spring of 1992: although the differences between the parties were still wide, they would eventually narrow, and then it would be possible to bridge the gaps. US policy under the Clinton administration continued to emphasize the US role of facilitator. The accession of the Clinton administration to office in 1993 and of the Rabin government in 1992 provided the basis for a continuation of the relationship, but in a more positive mode, with strong and improving personal and country-tocountry relations focusing on the Madrid-inaugurated Arab-Israeli peace process. The United States reassured Israel that the US commitment to its security would be sustained. And a strong positive personal relationship seemed to develop between the American president and his Israeli prime minister counterpart. The relationship between Clinton and Rabin continued to grow closer and became more intimate as the peace process, begun at Madrid and amplified by Oslo,

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continued to make progress. Each achievement seemed to be marked by an added positive glow to both the personal chemistry and the political accord between the two partners. This, of course, was demonstrated and exemplified by the assassination of Rabin in November 1995. Clinton appeared to be personally moved by the death of his peace partner and issued the famous statement “Shalom, chaver” (goodbye, friend) that struck close to the heart of their dealings. The success of Benjamin Netanyahu in his race against Shimon Peres (Rabin’s foreign minister and alter ego in the peace process) in the first-ever popular election of the prime minister in Israel in the spring of 1996 illustrated again the unusual nature of the connection. The Clinton administration, seeking continuity in the peace process, clearly preferred that Shimon Peres succeed. Nevertheless, despite the outcome, the relationship endured, and the United States continued to support Israel’s security and quest for peace. Even though there was a lack of personal chemistry between Clinton and Netanyahu, many in the Republicandominated US Congress saw the latter’s victory as a positive accomplishment and endorsed his approach. The Clinton administration continued to press for progress on the peace process begun at Madrid and expanded in Oslo and by subsequent Israeli accords with the Palestinians and with Jordan. The prime minister of Israel, reflecting skepticism about the Palestinian position and a deep-seated concern for an arrangement that would ensure Israel’s security, as well as a personal goal of ensuring the stability of his governing coalition, acted with considerable deliberation and pursued a pace seen by the Clinton administration as far too slow. In the middle of 1998 the Clinton administration presented an “ultimatum” to Israel that was ignored and then faded from public view. The two states pursued the peace process and clashed with each other. But, as before, the administration often was not backed by the Congress, which seemed more sympathetic to the Netanyahu approach and position and provided public and private positive reinforcement to the Israeli government. These episodes and others in the Clinton tenure reflected the themes that marked the Carter-Begin relationship and characterized the broader relationship between the United States and Israel, which centered on endurance and continuity in the quest for peace and Israeli security and on discord concerning the best means to achieve those ends. The election of Ehud Barak as prime minister of Israel in May 1999 was seen in the Clinton administration, and elsewhere, as an opportunity for peacemaking to resume and make progress; expectations were high that he would be a prime minister in the mold of Rabin, his mentor and friend. Barak set out on an ambitious diplomatic program and, with Yasser Arafat, set February 12, 2000, as the target date for preparing a framework agreement for an Israeli-Palestinian permanent peace settlement, the completion of which was to occur by September 12, 2000. Israelis and Palestinians had a large number of meetings, and there was extensive involvement by the United States.

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As the Clinton administration entered its final year in office, accelerated efforts suggested a possible tripartite summit involving Clinton, Barak, and Arafat. But the parties were far apart. The objective of the summit negotiations in July 2000 at Camp David (generally referred to as Camp David II) was to put together a package that Barak believed would generate acceptance and recognition from the Palestinians, which had eluded Israelis to that point, on the basis of a two-peoples, two-states solution within the region. But this was not to be. Arafat rejected the Barak proposals, left the negotiating table, and thereby provided the basis for the al-Aqsa Intifada, which soon brought violence to the area. The Clinton tenure ended without an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord and with the area engulfed in violence.

Second Intifada and 9/11 The end of the Clinton administration and the ascension of George W. Bush to the presidency, together with the February 2001 election of Ariel Sharon as prime minister of Israel to replace Ehud Barak, brought to an end the Madrid-Oslo “peace process” in which President Clinton, personally, and his administration had been both central and active. Sharon and Bush would establish their own “special” connection and would be free to develop their own approaches to peace. Significantly, while the Bush administration called for an end to Arab-Israeli violence and initially put the onus on Arafat to call publicly for the termination of violence, it signaled its determination to be less activist and not to be involved in a detailed way on a continuing basis, suggesting it would not emulate the Clinton depth and extent of involvement in the details of the conflict. As violence continued to mark the Arab-Israeli sector after Sharon’s election, efforts to halt it, to restore confidence between the parties, and to resume negotiations became the core of the US efforts to facilitate a “peace process” (by whatever name) between Israel and the Palestinians. The situation was dramatically altered by the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. The Bush administration worked to create an international coalition to respond to terrorism, focusing on Osama bin Laden and the al-Qa’ida movement, and sought Arab and Muslim participation in that effort. For his part, bin Laden continued to link the attacks to the plight of the Palestinians and attributed that to unequivocal US support for Israel. Although these comments were widely discounted as efforts to further split the United States and the Muslim states, many in the Palestinian and Arab worlds saw this as an accurate depiction of the situation. The United States sought to clarify its position. In his press conference on October 11, 2001, President Bush noted that his administration would continue to focus on resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict within the context of continued US-Israeli friendship. At the same time, he noted, “I believe there ought to be a Palestinian state, the boundaries of which will be negotiated by the parties so long as the Palestinian state recognizes the right of Israel to exist, and will treat Israel

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with respect, and will be peaceful on her borders.” But negotiations for an end to violence and to achieve resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict were held hostage to the continued violence that erupted in the wake of the failure of the Camp David talks. A year after the termination of the Middle East peace process launched at Madrid, the new efforts seemed to be moving in the opposite direction. Arafat was unwilling or unable to halt Palestinian terrorism and violence against Israelis, thereby incurring Israeli responses and US concern, frustration, and disappointment. In late January 2002, President George W. Bush publicly expressed his disappointment in Arafat for his involvement in an arms shipment that could escalate Palestinian violence against Israel and for his not preventing terrorism. The Bush administration renewed its attempts at pushing the parties toward a peace accord by articulating a “road map” for peace in 2002, which it unevenly attempted to implement throughout the rest of its tenure. Ultimately, however, the United States proved unable either to secure the end of violence and terror or to get the Israelis and Palestinians back to serious negotiations. Palestinian civil conflict, sparked by Hamas’s surprise victory in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections and its violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, further dimmed prospects for an agreement, as did the 2006 Lebanon war between Israel and Hezbollah. The Bush administration made one last major attempt at obtaining a peace accord between Israel and the PLO at the November 2007 Annapolis conference, but, as most observers expected, those efforts proved futile.

The Obama Tenure Obama came to power amid much Israeli concern about his commitment to the historic but unofficial alliance between their countries. Despite recognition of his senatorial voting record as generally supportive of Israel and his pledge that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided,” several senior advisers to the Obama campaign were perceived by Israelis as insensitive to their security situation. Moreover, Obama’s new approach to the exercise of US global power, including his overture to the Muslim world and proposals for negotiating with adversaries such as Iran and Syria, left many Israelis concerned that an Obama administration would adopt policies that were incompatible with Israel’s interests or inimical to its security. Many were anxious about Obama’s sympathies on a more personal level as well. His expressions of concern for the plight of the Palestinians and the humanitarian situation in Gaza led Israelis to question whether Obama had the affinity for Israel that prior presidents had displayed and whether he had adopted the Palestinian narrative of the conflict in the Middle East. Obama’s close association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright of the Trinity United Church of Christ further

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fueled the fire of suspicion because of Wright’s praise for Louis Farrakhan, his 1984 visit to Muammar el-Qaddafi, and his strong criticism of Israel. Although Obama ultimately distanced himself from Wright, for many of Israel’s supporters, it was done too late, and too begrudgingly, to quell their concerns. Nevertheless, from 2009 through 2012, Obama’s presidency did not bring any significant clashes in the US-Israeli relationship. It was, however, characterized by intermittent periods of discord between Obama’s administration and that of Benjamin Netanyahu, who once again became prime minister in the spring of 2009. Some of the initial tensions stemmed from personal differences between the two leaders as they navigated the boundaries of their new working relationship, while others derived from the different interests of a regional versus a global power, the pressures of domestic constituencies and advisors, and especially Obama’s determination to do things differently than his predecessors had in the Middle East and the Islamic world. Obama’s initial approach to US relations with Israel differed from the past in two major ways. First, Obama detracted from the exclusivity of the US-Israeli relationship by engaging the Muslim world more directly than any prior president. His address at Cairo University, which invoked the Quran and emphasized that America and Islam “need not be in competition,” was not matched by any parallel outreach to Israeli audiences. Throughout his tenure, his discourse maintained an empathetic tone toward the Palestinians, as exemplified in his 2010 address to the United Nations General Assembly, which passionately endorsed the goal of Palestinian statehood. The Obama administration also seemed determined to reach a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians by adopting a tougher posture with Israel. Some former American envoys to the region had been arguing that the United States’ unconditional embrace of Israel was hurting, rather than helping, the peace process. The Obama administration appeared to take that perspective seriously. For instance, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton bluntly told the AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] Conference in 2010 that the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. She went on to say, “As Israel’s friend, it is our responsibility to give credit when it is due and to tell the truth when it is needed.” The Obama administration’s desire to reach a peace accord between the Israelis and the Palestinians was one of the major sources of disagreement between the United States and Israel. Netanyahu at first refrained from explicitly endorsing a two-state solution, and Obama made a complete freeze of all settlement construction in the West Bank a central point of contention between Israel and the United States. Israeli officials were quick to reject such a demand, insisting on the right to “natural growth,” a formula that had been at least tacitly accepted by the Clinton and Bush administrations. However, modifications in each position were soon forthcoming. In a speech at Bar Ilan University in June 2009, Netanyahu formally

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accepted the two-state solution and later unilaterally imposed a ten-month freeze on settlement activity in the West Bank, with an exemption for synagogues and some units already under construction. The United States appeared to ease its pressure on Israel and even praise its actions, but minor flare-ups, primarily over construction activity, continued. Tensions came to a head when, during a March 2010 visit to Israel by Vice President Joe Biden meant to revitalize the peace process, the Israeli Interior Ministry announced the approval of new housing construction in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Although the US reaction was angry, it was tempered, with American and Israeli leaders working willfully to assuage the dispute and reaffirm the linkages between the two states. In September 2010, with Netanyahu’s settlement freeze about to expire, the United States made one last push for direct talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Obama, along with Secretary of State Clinton and former British prime minister Tony Blair, acting as representative of the Quartet, hosted a working dinner for Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, along with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan. The stated goal of the direct talks was to reach a final status settlement implementing a two-state solution. Within the month, however, talks broke down as Abbas conditioned his participation in negotiations on a sustained building moratorium. Rather than directly pressure Israel, the Obama administration turned to incentives, reportedly offering the sale of twenty F-35 jets, US veto of a Palestinian declaration of statehood at the United Nations, and long-term security guarantees in the event of a peace deal—all in exchange for a three-month extension on the settlement freeze. Netanyahu refused unless Abbas recognized Israel as a Jewish state, which Abbas rejected. Obama resumed a more staunch position in May 2011 when, a day before Netanyahu’s visit to the United States, he declared that the basis for a negotiated settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians should be the pre-1967 lines, adjusted for security needs and West Bank settlements. Obama was the first American president to codify the pre-1967 boundaries as official US policy, and Netanyahu immediately rejected this formulation. Netanyahu countered that pre1967, Israel had only been nine miles wide, that these boundaries had led to war in the past because they were not defensible, and that Israel would require a longterm military presence along the Jordan River. He also pointed to the 650,000 Israelis who currently reside beyond those lines, mostly contained within small geographic areas, and the need to integrate those areas into Israel’s final borders. Following Netanyahu’s refusal to revive negotiations under these terms, George Mitchell, Obama’s special envoy for Middle East peace, resigned, and negotiations have been stalled since. The question of a proper approach to Iran’s nuclear program and possible pursuit of nuclear weapons has also been a source of disagreement between Israel and

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the United States. At the start of his term, Obama extended an invitation to Iran’s Islamic regime to engage diplomatically on the nuclear issue. The Iranian regime did not respond to Obama’s overtures, and the United States pressed forward with an increasingly stringent sanctions program, both domestically and through the UN Security Council. There are several points of convergence between the Israeli and US positions on Iran. Obama has made clear that, like Netanyahu, his goal is prevention and not containment. Both leaders have also expressed a preference for a peaceful solution and are fearful that a nuclear Iran could set off an arms race in the Middle East. The differences between them relate to timelines and can be traced back to their structural positions and divergent views on foreign policy tools. The United States, situated further away from Iran and possessing greater capabilities than Israel, can afford to wait longer before taking military action. Obama has therefore resisted Netanyahu’s sense of urgency, preferring to allow time for the sanctions to take full effect. Obama has further indicated that he is willing to wait until Iran actually makes an attempt to build a bomb before taking any military action. Israel, on the other hand, is concerned about Iran’s fortification of its key nuclear facilities to protect them from a military attack. Israel argues that even if Iran is not currently building a bomb, once it reaches a “zone of immunity” where its facilities are fully protected from military strikes, it will be free to build a bomb with impunity in the future. The Obama administration challenges this view as overly narrow and claims that even if Iran had a fully protected facility, there would still be other available options to stop Iran from building a weapon, such as shutting down its oil revenues or destroying the facilities that supply centrifuge parts. In addition to known policy disagreements, high-level advisors to Obama have not shied away from publically criticizing Israel, which has amplified the voices of those questioning whether the foundation of the US-Israeli relationship remains solid today. Secretary of State Clinton expressed concern about the state of Israeli democracy, outgoing defense secretary [Robert] Gates reportedly complained about Israeli inaction on the peace process and called Israel an ungrateful ally, and General [David] Petraeus told the US Senate that Israel’s unresolved conflict with the Palestinians presented challenges for the advancement of American interests. These expressions of frustration, however, do not reflect any rupture in the underlying ties. Military cooperation, American support of Israel in the international arena, and US public opinion favoring Israel have all remained constant under the Obama administration. Security and military ties between Israel and the United States have only grown closer since 2009. For the 2012 fiscal year, Obama asked for over $3 billion in security assistance funding for Israel, the largest to date. In addition, Obama asked Congress for another $205 million to support the production of the Iron Dome missile defense system, designed to shelter Israel’s population from the threat of

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short-range rockets. Furthermore, Israel and the United States are codeveloping the Arrow-3 interceptor to counter long-range ballistic missiles, and the United States is upgrading Israel’s Patriot Air and Missile Defense System. Israel and the United States continue to engage in joint military exercises, such as the biannual air defense exercise, Juniper Cobra, and the largest joint exercise between the two allies, Austere Challenge 12, is scheduled for the end of 2012. Internationally, the Obama administration has been steadfast in its defense of Israel in international organizations. The United States denounced the Goldstone Report on Human Rights in Palestine and Other Occupied Arab Territories as one-sided and led the boycott of the 2009 Durban Review Conference on account of its entrenched anti-Israel and anti-Western tendencies. In the UN, the United States tried to prevent UNESCO from accepting the Palestinians as a full member and never wavered from its pledge to veto a Security Council resolution recognizing Palestinian statehood. Finally, public opinion polls show that the mutual feelings of affinity between Israel and the United States endure. A Gallup Poll conducted in February 2010 revealed that 63 percent of Americans sympathized with Israel, and 56 percent of respondents in a February 2012 Public Opinion Strategies Poll had warm feelings for Israel. A 2011 Martilla Strategies Poll also revealed that 61 percent of Americans believed Israel to be a crucial American ally. Although Israelis waver in their attitudes toward Obama, this does not appear to impact their overall perceptions of the United States. In June 2009, a Smith Research Poll of Jewish Israelis found only 6 percent of respondents considered the Obama administration’s policies to be pro-Israel, and 50 percent thought they were more pro-Palestinian than proIsrael. A follow-up Smith Research Poll in April 2012 showed a dramatic increase in the president’s standing, with 24 percent of respondents believing that Obama’s administration was more pro-Palestinian and another 24 percent believing it favored Israel. A November 2010 Brookings Institution Poll also found that 51 percent of respondents had negative views of Obama, but 78 percent still expressed favorable attitudes toward the United States. Although the Obama-Netanyahu relationship has been somewhat unsteady and both leaders have looked to the broader constituencies they represent for political leverage, they have continued to recognize the mutual benefits of the historic friendship between their two countries and have found ways to accommodate one another. It appears that they will continue to manage their differences, as have other presidents and prime ministers before them, and the Israeli-American special relationship will endure. In his address before the 2012 annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, President Obama said, “Yes, we are bound to Israel because of the interests that we share in security for our communities, prosperity for our people, the new frontiers of science that can light the world. But ultimately it is our common ideals that provide the true foundation for our relationship. That is why America’s commitment to

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Israel has endured under Democratic and Republican presidents, and congressional leaders of both parties. In the United States, our support for Israel is bipartisan, and that is how it should stay.”

Endurance and Continuity Israel’s special relationship with the United States has not been enshrined in a legally binding commitment joining the two in a formal alliance. Despite the extensive links that have developed, the widespread belief in the existence of the commitment, and the assurances contained in various specific agreements, the exact nature and extent of the US commitment to Israel remains imprecise. Israel has no mutual security treaty with the United States; nor is it a member of any alliance system requiring the United States to take up arms automatically on its behalf. It has largely been assumed by both parties that the United States would come to Israel’s assistance should it be gravely threatened; this perception has become particularly apparent during times of crisis. Despite this perception and the general feeling in Washington (and elsewhere) that the United States would take action if required, there is no assurance that this would be the case. Israeli leaders continue to be interested in military and economic assistance as the primary tangible expression of the US commitment and have been particularly cautious about potential US participation in a conflict, fearing that combat losses might lead to a situation analogous to that in Vietnam. Thus, the exact role of the United States in support of Israel, beyond diplomatic and political action and military and economic assistance, is unclear. The United States is today an indispensable if not fully dependable ally. It provides Israel, in one form or another, with economic (governmental and private), technical, military, political, diplomatic, and moral support. It is seen as the ultimate resource against potential enemies, it is the source of Israel’s sophisticated military hardware, and its interest in lasting peace is central to the ArabIsraeli peace process. Although there is this positive relationship, there is also an Israeli reluctance, bred of history, to abdicate security to another party’s judgment and action. Israel will continue to consider its perceptions of threat and security as decisive. The two states maintain a remarkable degree of parallelism and congruence on broad policy goals. The policy consensus includes the need to prevent war, at both the regional and international levels, the need to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the need to maintain Israel’s existence and security and to help provide for its economic well-being. At the same time, however, there has been, is, and will be a divergence of interests that derives from a difference of perspective and overall policy environment. The United States has broader concerns resulting from its global obligations, whereas Israel’s horizon is more narrowly defined and essentially limited to the survival of the state.

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Despite the generally positive nature of the relationship since 1948, Israelis tend to recall a series of negative episodes as well. They highlight the 1947 arms embargo and the subsequent refusal to provide military equipment or other assistance during the War of Independence and the period that followed; [former US secretary of state John Foster] Dulles’s aid suspensions and general unfriendliness; US actions in connection with the Sinai War of 1956 and Israel’s subsequent withdrawal from the Sinai and the Gaza Strip; and the disappointing lack of action by the United States just prior to the Six Day War. In 1967—the year of the Six Day War with Egypt—Israel determined its need to act alone and estimated that the United States would not object to or seek to prevent its action, and when Israel decided to go to war, it did not consult or inform the United States. There has also been a divergence on methods and techniques to be employed, as well as discord on specific issues. During the Six Day War there was a clash over Israel’s mistaken attack (and causing of casualties) against the US intelligence ship Liberty. They disagreed on the matter of reprisals by Israel in response to Arab fedayeen (literally, “self-sacrificers”) actions and on the limits placed on the refugees from the West Bank in the wake of the Six Day War. There was major disagreement concerning the value of a great power to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israel’s need for military supplies, and the status of the occupied territories and Israel’s role with respect to them, including the building of settlements. They have argued over Israel’s desire for significant changes in the pre–Six Day War armistice lines as contrasted with the US perspective that there be “insubstantial alterations” or “minor modifications.” The two states will continue to hold divergent views on the several elements of the Palestinian issue, particularly the West Bank’s future, the rights of the Palestinians, and the potential creation of a Palestinian homeland, entity, or state. In many respects the issue of Jerusalem has highlighted the areas of discord. The United States has supported the Partition Plan designation of Jerusalem as a separate entity and has stressed the international character of the city while refusing to recognize unilateral actions by any state affecting its future. The United States refuses to move its embassy to Jerusalem and maintains it in Tel Aviv, thus illustrating the differing perspectives of the two states. These perspectives have placed the two states in conflicting positions continuously from 1947 to the present, especially since the Israeli declarations of Jerusalem as the capital of the state and the reunification of the city during the Six Day War. Changes of administrations in Washington, and of governments in Jerusalem, have all affected the nature and content of the links between the United States and Israel within the broad parameters of the enduring special relationship. The patterns of agreement and discord established from the outset have manifested themselves subsequently—broad patterns of concord on the more strategic and existential issues, accompanied by disagreement on the specifics of many of the elements of the Arab-Israeli conflict and on the means to achieve congruent objectives.

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At Israel’s birth the United States seemed to be a dispassionate, almost uninterested midwife—its role was essential and unconventional but also unpredictable and hotly debated in US policy circles. Today, more than sixty-four years later, some of the policy debate continues, and there are periods of discord in the relationship. Some of this reflects personality and related differences between US and Israeli leaders. But there is little doubt about the overall nature of the special relationship and of US support for its small and still embattled ally. Adapted from Chapter 13, by Bernard Reich and Shannon Powers, in David W. Lesch and Mark L. Haas, eds., The Middle East and the United States: A Historical and Political Reassessment, Fifth Edition (2012, Westview Press), with new additions by Bernard Reich and Shannon Powers.

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The Palestinians Glenn E. Robinson

Though the boundaries of “Palestine” have been imprecise and shifting since ancient times, the term refers generally to the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Glenn Robinson outlines a history of the area since it was incorporated into the Roman Empire in 63 BCE and then as it passed under the successive control of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. With the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I, Great Britain administered Palestine from 1917 to 1948. The British made vague and contradictory promises to Arab Palestinians about independence from the Turkish Ottomans and to Jews in both Palestine and Europe about an eventual Jewish homeland in Palestine, thus setting the stage for inevitable conflict between Arabs and Jews with the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. The consequent 1948 ArabIsraeli War scattered some 700,000 Palestinian refugees throughout the Middle East, and in the 1967 and 1973 wars the territory occupied by Israel expanded beyond its 1948 boundaries. Robinson calls attention to Israel’s recent withdrawal from Gaza and its continuing attempts to divide the West Bank according to unilaterally imposed boundaries. Essential to the Palestinian narrative, too, is the growing influence of Hamas in representing the Palestinian people, particularly in Gaza, counterposed to the role played by the longer-established Palestine Liberation Organization, led by Yasser Arafat and now Mahmoud Abbas. Robinson concludes with the bleak assessment that “Palestinians . . . do not control their own fate” but instead live under the power of other states. Glenn E. Robinson is associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and research associate in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He has authored and co-authored three books on Palestinian state building, including Building a Palestine State: The Incomplete Revolution.

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predominately Arab-Muslim people ever since the Muslim conquest in the seventh century CE, Palestinians are descendants of the peoples that had conquered the territory over the centuries—including the Jewish tribes who populated the area two thousand years ago. Palestinians today seek to create a viable and independent state.

The British Mandate With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Great Britain took control of Palestine. Arabs in Palestine had assumed that they would gain independence when Ottoman rule disintegrated, either by establishing a separate state or by merging with neighboring Arab lands. They felt betrayed when Britain imposed the mandate, and they immediately objected to the Zionist organization’s privileged status as well as to the continuing alienation of the land. During the 1920s, the nationalist movement was led by Palestinian elites who, for the most part, employed nonviolent tactics. During the 1930s, however, radicalized youth and labor activists goaded the leadership to use strikes and violence to confront both the British and the expanding Jewish population. Palestinians launched an armed insurgency in late 1935, leading to a general strike in 1936 that Palestinians sustained for an unprecedented six months. The strike was followed by a widespread rural revolt that lasted nearly two years. The rebellion welled up from the depths of Palestinian society—unemployed urban workers, displaced peasants crowded into towns, debt-ridden villagers. Most merchants and professionals in the towns supported the uprising, and the elite formed an Arab Higher Committee, which presented Arab demands to the British administration. After the British decapitated the Palestinian national movement and forcibly suppressed the revolt, Palestinians had no coherent organizations or skilled leaders with which to press for self-determination. Arab states, for the most part still in the last stages of gaining their own independence, were too involved in domestic issues to be of much support. Jewish violence against the British and Arabs increased. Finally, in 1947, the British announced that they were ending the mandate and turning the Palestine issue over to the United Nations. In November 1947, the UN General Assembly approved a partition plan that divided the Palestine Mandate into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an international area of Jerusalem. The Jewish state comprised about 55 percent of the territory, even though Jewish landholdings comprised less than 7 percent of the total land surface or 12 percent of arable land. The Jewish state would have nearly as many Arab as Jewish residents. The Arab state would control only about 40 percent of Palestine; deprived of the best agricultural land and seaports, it would retain Galilee, the central mountains (now primarily the West Bank), and the Gaza coast. The United Nations would administer Jerusalem as an international zone.

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The Palestinians rejected the partition plan and tried to defend their homeland, but their village-based militias could not stand up to Jewish forces, which seized control of nearly all the areas assigned to the Jewish state during a five-week campaign in April and May 1948. That campaign forced 300,000 Palestinians (of an eventual 700,000) to flee from their homes in villages and cities such as Tiberias, Haifa, and Jaffa. Following the British withdrawal on May 14, 1948, and the unilateral declaration of independence by Israel, Arab states sent in troops, and full-scale fighting erupted. The Arab armies were no match for the better trained and better equipped Israeli forces, and when armistice agreements were signed in 1949, only 23 percent of Palestine remained in Arab hands, and an additional 400,000 Palestinians had become refugees. The Egyptian army held the Gaza Strip, and Transjordanian forces held the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Fragmentation and Exile, 1948–1967 Some 85 percent of the Mandate’s Arab population fled during the 1947–1949 conflict. Displaced Palestinians became permanent refugees on June 16, 1948, when Israel’s new government decided not to allow any Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in lands under Israel’s control or in lands that would come under Israel’s control during the remainder of the war. The departure of Palestinians in 1948 from their homes and villages shattered Palestinian society. Most Palestinian refugees went to makeshift camps established by the United Nations. Over time, these camps evolved into squalid, cinder-block encampments housing the world’s largest refugee population. Of the 1.2 million Palestinian Arab population, over 700,000 became refugees, dispersed to Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. About 500,000 remained in place, of which 150,000 stayed in Israel (primarily in the Galilee region) with the remainder in the West Bank (annexed by Jordan) and in the Gaza Strip (administered by Egypt). The situation facing the Palestinians in the countries to which they fled varied considerably. Palestinian society was changed profoundly by this trauma, which they call alnakba (the disaster). The society was previously highly stratified and largely rural, with a powerful notable social class, a large peasantry, and a small middle class. Palestinian peasants were forced into wage labor, the elite lost the land that underpinned their power, and merchants lost their livelihoods. The physical dispersion made it difficult to reestablish a coherent political center. Living under different authoritarian regimes and subject to restrictions on political expression, the Palestinians suffered from constant pressure toward fragmentation. Palestinians’ political aims evolved significantly. At first they were determined to regain all of Palestine, but beginning in the 1970s an increasing number conceded that territorial partition—the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel—was the most that could be achieved.

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Controls imposed by the host countries took different forms. In Israel, Palestinians gained citizenship but lived under strict military administration until 1966. The movement of Palestinian residents was closely regulated, access to education and employment was restricted, and political activities were curtailed. In the Gaza Strip, the Egyptian military government maintained tight control over the restive Palestinians, of whom 80 percent lived in refugee camps. Palestinians living in Syria had the same access to jobs and schools as Syrian citizens, but their ability to travel abroad was curtailed. The Lebanese authorities were especially restrictive, denying Palestinians citizenship, the right to study in public schools, or [the right] to obtain permanent employment. Life was least disrupted in the West Bank, where most people remained in their original homes. Palestinians enjoyed citizenship rights in Jordan, which set Jordan apart from its Arab neighbors. But the regime never trusted them with senior posts in sensitive ministries and in the armed forces, and their loyalty to the monarchy remained tenuous. During the 1950s, Palestinians were attracted to the various forms of panArabism that asserted that Palestine could only be regained if the Arab world were united politically. The idea of Arab unity received a blow in 1961 when the union between Egypt and Syria dissolved after less than three years. The belief in Arab military strength was destroyed in June 1967 when the Israeli army defeated the combined Arab forces in a lightning strike and seized the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. That disillusionment accelerated processes that were already under way among Palestinians. They sought to transform their situation through their own actions rather than wait for Arab governments to rescue them. Small underground guerrilla cells sprang up in the early 1960s. Al-Fatah, founded in Kuwait in 1959 by the young engineer Yasir Arafat and several colleagues, launched its first raid into Israel on New Year’s Eve, 1965. The fedayeen (guerrillas) had a twofold strategy: They asserted that self-reliance was the route to liberation, and they sought to catalyze popular mobilization that would shame the Arab rulers into fighting Israel. When that war finally came in 1967 and ended disastrously for the Arab states, the Palestinian guerrilla movement was thrust into the leadership position on the issue of Palestine, eclipsing the leading role that had been played by Cairo, Amman, and Damascus.

The PLO and the Palestinian Diaspora, 1967–1993 The humiliating defeat in 1967 provided the opportunity for the Palestinian guerrilla groups to take control of the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] and transform it into an autonomous and important umbrella organization that came to represent Palestinian interests in the region and internationally. In 1969 they

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ousted the old PLO leadership and installed Arafat, head of the largest guerrilla faction, as its new leader. As an umbrella organization, the PLO contained many diverse and competing groups. The largest and most important was Fatah, led by Arafat, which espoused a nationalist ideology typical of national liberation movements everywhere. There was little social content to Fatah’s ideology, simply a call to regain lost lands. The PLO began to flex its muscle by creating “states within states.” The first mini-state was created in Jordan where King Hussein at first tolerated it. This ended when radical factions within the PLO openly called for the overthrow of his regime and then set about implementing revolution. The Jordanian army defeated the PLO in a bloody showdown in 1970 (later known as “Black September”), seized control over the refugee camps, and forced the guerrillas to flee to Syria and Lebanon in July 1971. While the PLO was establishing a base of operations in Lebanon, high-profile acts of political violence continued in the early 1970s. In retaliation for “Black September,” Palestinian commandoes assassinated Jordan’s prime minister when he visited Cairo in November 1971. In one of the most infamous acts of terror in modern history, Palestinians kidnapped and murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Operations across the Lebanon-Israel border likewise intensified. Palestinian attacks were matched by Israeli bombardments and special operations in villages and refugee camps in Lebanon. Tit-for-tat violence and assassinations continued between Israel and the PLO in Lebanon until 1982, when Israel launched an invasion of Lebanon in an operation designed to eliminate the PLO as a political force. PLO weakness compelled it to reevaluate its strategy. Recognizing that the balance of power did not favor Palestinian interests, some Palestinians began calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state only in the lands occupied by Israel during the 1967 war: the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. The Arab-Israeli war in October 1973 further consolidated the transformation of PLO policy toward accepting a two-state solution. The 1973 war was a victory for states, both Arab and Israeli. The performance of Egyptian and Syrian militaries was strong enough to dim the memory of their humiliations in 1967. Israel’s ultimate triumph on the battlefield in 1973, even after absorbing a devastating initial defeat, showed again that the PLO had no chance to militarily defeat Israel. The PLO took a major step toward embracing a two-state solution when it pledged to create a “national authority” over any liberated lands of Palestine. Several months later, the Arab League recognized the PLO as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” a move that led to the PLO achieving observer status at the United Nations and Yasir Arafat’s speech to the General Assembly in November 1974. The 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt dramatically altered the geostrategic landscape for the PLO. The peace treaty effectively removed the Arab

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world’s most powerful state from the Arab-Israeli stage, allowing Israel to have a much freer hand in dealing with other Arabs. Egypt under Anwar Sadat was most interested in gaining the return of the Sinai Peninsula and currying favor with the United States, both cornerstones of its new economic development strategy. Having neutralized Egypt politically, Israel turned its eyes toward eliminating the PLO. Leaders of Israel’s Likud party believed that crushing the PLO and its state-within-a-state in Lebanon would deprive Palestinians in the West Bank of political leadership, thus making permanent Israeli control of the West Bank more feasible. No longer feeling vulnerable to Arab counterattack, Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982. Israeli forces easily defeated the Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian forces it encountered on its drive to Beirut. Trapped, the PLO negotiated with the United States an exit of [its] forces to Tunisia and elsewhere in the Arab world. Israel’s gambit to destroy the PLO by invading Lebanon initially seemed to pay dividends. The PLO had been decimated, its remaining forces [were] scattered throughout the Arab world, its new headquarters [were] now in far-off Tunis, its factions were fighting each other more than Israel, and its prospects for pushing the international community to compel an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories seemed remote. Two events proved critical in rescuing the PLO from possible oblivion. First, Palestinians living inside the occupied territories launched their own uprising (Intifada) against Israel beginning in 1987. The Intifada showed that Palestinians inside the West Bank and Gaza would actively resist Israel’s occupation and confiscation of Palestinian lands even in the face of a badly weakened PLO in the Diaspora. Ironically, Israel itself helped rescue the PLO from obscurity when it engaged in secret peace negotiations with the PLO in Oslo, Norway, in 1993. At the time, the PLO as an organization was extremely weak. During the 1990–1991 Iraq war, the PLO made a serious strategic miscalculation by backing Iraq in its war against a US-led coalition determined to end Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia had long been the PLO’s chief financial backers through a tax they collected on Palestinians living in those countries that was then passed on to the PLO. Yasir Arafat’s public embrace of Saddam Husayn during the war caused Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to end their financial support of the PLO. The PLO went bankrupt. Because of its extreme weakness, the PLO offered Israel terms in Oslo that Israel had long demanded and that the PLO had long rejected. These PLO concessions included a long interim period [for negotiating a permanent agreement], no guarantee of ultimate statehood, continued Israeli control of all of Jerusalem during the interim period, and no explicit cessation of Israeli colonization of the occupied territories. Indeed, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza doubled in the decade following the September 1993 signing of the Oslo accords.

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The Israeli Occupation, 1967–1993 After the 1967 war developments in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip were markedly different from those affecting Palestinians elsewhere. The Palestinians in the occupied territories went through a period of relative political quiescence, and even experienced economic growth, while the others were engaging in radical politics, civil war, and displacement. Then, as the PLO gradually moved toward accommodation with its Arab hosts and mainstream nationalism, the “inside” Palestinians increasingly radicalized and mobilized. In particular, three structural changes helped to transform Palestinian society: the opening of Israeli labor markets to Palestinians, the extensive confiscation of Palestinian lands by the Israeli government, and the establishment and expansion of the Palestinian university system. After the 1967 war, Israel opened its domestic labor market to Palestinians from the occupied territories. Palestinians were recruited to do the unskilled or semiskilled jobs that Israelis refused to do themselves—primarily in the agricultural and construction sectors. By the 1980s, over 120,000 Palestinians—fully 40 percent of the Palestinian labor force—worked in Israel daily. This pool of recruits proved crucial in the general political mobilization campaign of the 1980s and the subsequent Intifada. A second change was the massive Israeli confiscation of land. In the immediate wake of the 1967 war Israel tripled the size of the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem and then annexed it. Large sections contained within the new boundaries of Jerusalem were unilaterally declared state lands and taken by Israel, often for Jewish settlements. Confiscation of land in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was even more extensive. Often Jewish settlements would be built on the land seized. On the eve of the Palestinian uprising in 1987, over half of the West Bank and one-third of the Gaza Strip had been confiscated or otherwise made off-limits to Palestinians. The third change was the creation and expansion of a Palestinian university system. In the decade preceding the Intifada, the Palestinian university student population grew from a few thousand to 15,000 to 20,000 annually. The effect was significant, as tens of thousands of Palestinians went through the university and its concomitant political socialization. The composition of the student population at these new universities was striking: 70 percent of the students came from refugee camps, villages, and small towns. It was from this student population that a new Palestinian elite emerged in the 1970s and 1980s—one that was larger, more diffuse, from lower social strata, more activist, and less urban than the notable Palestinian elite it largely replaced. As a result, Palestinian politics became more confrontational with Israel. The major strategy of this rising Palestinian elite in the 1980s was to build grassroots organizations designed to mobilize the Palestinian population against

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the occupation. Two international events helped spur the mobilization campaign. The Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty shifted the regional balance of power dramatically in Israel’s favor. The Palestinians recognized that any positive solution to their dilemma would be a long way off. Thus, the first objective was to make the West Bank and Gaza difficult for the Israelis to rule and absorb. Second, Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon had the unintended consequence of invigorating the emerging elite in the West Bank and Gaza and making it clear that they could no longer rely on the “outside” PLO for salvation—it would have to be done by those Palestinians still living there. While this new elite was widely affiliated with the major factions of the PLO, the political initiative clearly lay with those on the “inside.”

The First Intifada, 1987–1993 In December 1987 a mass uprising, or Intifada, against Israeli occupation began. It was a spontaneous event; no person or faction planned it, and the earlier social structure could not have produced such a sustained and organized revolt. It was not an armed uprising, nor was it particularly violent—it came in the form of thrown rocks, bricks, and occasional Molotov cocktails. Demonstrations, marches, and rallies were employed, especially in the first six months. However, the Intifada was primarily about mass organized disengagement from Israel. In political terms, Palestinians denied Israeli authority on any number of issues and created alternative authoritative bodies to govern Palestinian society. The principal locus of authority for over two years was the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), an ever-changing body of local PLO activists who published periodic leaflets directing the Intifada. The UNLU’s first confrontation with the military government came over strike hours demanded of commercial establishments. The UNLU would instruct merchants to close their businesses at certain hours, while the military government commanded that the businesses stay open those hours and close other hours. The confrontation went on for weeks, until finally Israel relented, and the UNLU was free to set strike hours and days. Their authority in these matters was recognized and widely obeyed, especially in the first two years of the Intifada. After an initial period of confusion, Israel responded to the Intifada harshly, using, in the words of then-Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, “force, might, beatings” to crush it. Well over one thousand Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces with many thousands more injured, and tens of thousands were imprisoned— many without charge or trial. Most important was the strategy of collective punishment, where many were punished—through house demolitions, curfews, destruction of crops, and similar means—for the actions of a few. The Intifada radicalized the Islamist movement, giving birth in its early days to the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas. Hamas (and the Islamic Jihad group) brought to Palestinian resistance a level of operational violence against Israeli targets

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that the PLO in the West Bank and Gaza had never employed, gaining converts and splitting Palestinian society. Hamas would continue to grow in strength. The “outside” PLO in Tunis was as surprised as Israel when the Intifada broke out and was not particularly important to the unfolding of events. Rather, Tunis sought to capture and control the Intifada, something it was never able to do completely. The PLO funneled resources and advice to the occupied territories in support of the Intifada and provided it with greater attention on the world’s stage. The PLO had not lost its legitimacy, but Tunis was geographically and situationally too far removed from the course of events in the West Bank and Gaza to matter much.

The Oslo Accords and Their Failure, 1993–2006 The return to power of Yitzhak Rabin and the Labor Party in the 1992 Israeli elections, combined with a keen PLO interest in moving toward a peace agreement (and thus extracting itself from the political grave it dug by backing Iraq in the 1990–1991 Gulf war), provided the basis for diplomatic progress. Secret negotiations begun in Oslo in January 1993 ultimately led to a breakthrough agreement between Israel and the PLO that was signed on the White House lawn in September 1993. The 1993 Oslo accords—formally known as the Declaration of Principles— identified the key issues that the parties would need to resolve in a timely manner to enter into a final status agreement. The Oslo peace process essentially ended in the summer of 2000. US President Bill Clinton called for a summit meeting at Camp David in July to negotiate a final status agreement between Israel and the PLO. Accounts vary of what exactly happened at Camp David. The dominant Israeli interpretation was that Arafat rejected a generous proposal and returned to prepare for a new round of fighting. The dominant Palestinian understanding was that Israel was not serious about making peace. Israel offered to return all of Gaza and a large portion of the West Bank to Palestinian control, but refused to engage the refugee issue and insisted on control over most of East Jerusalem. Palestinians noted that Israel’s proposal for the West Bank left Palestinians with three unconnected cantons (often referred to pejoratively as “Bantustans” [Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem]), each surrounded by Israeli territory. Each side came away from Camp David convinced that the other side was not interested in a real peace agreement. From the Palestinian perspective, the fundamental problem with the Oslo negotiations was that the parties were negotiating from two different base points. Israel’s negotiating posture, in essence, was that the conflict began in 1967 and, thus, what was to be negotiated was the disposition of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. From this vantage point, returning 100 percent of those lands won in the

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1967 war would seem one-sided, and discussing in a serious way refugees from 1948 would not be in order. The PLO’s negotiating posture dated the conflict to 1948. As a result, Palestinians believed they had already ceded 77 percent of historic Palestine, so asking for the remaining 23 percent (all of the West Bank and Gaza) constituted a fair and modest proposal. Moreover, finally settling the refugee issue was essential. Yasir Arafat fell ill in October 2004 and died in France a month later. Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) was elected as the new Palestinian president. The breakdown of the Oslo peace process led to two major Israeli moves. First, Israel began construction of a large barrier along its border with the West Bank. While the wall’s architect, Ariel Sharon, maintained the wall was a security barrier, not a political line, Sharon’s successor Ehud Olmert quickly pledged that the wall would represent Israel’s border with the western half of the West Bank. Israel’s second step was to withdraw from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005. Ridding itself of control of Gaza had long been popular among almost all segments of Israel’s population. The withdrawal went relatively smoothly, although, since it was done unilaterally, PA [Palestinian Authority] president Mahmoud Abbas could not claim political credit for it. Instead, the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas capitalized on the withdrawal as evidence that its policy of armed resistance was paying off.

Fragmentation and War, 2006–2009 Palestinian frustration with the lack of any real progress in ending the occupation and with the corruption and inefficiencies of the Palestinian Authority led directly to the success of Hamas in the 2006 parliamentary elections. Hamas won 44 percent of the national vote (to 41 percent for Fatah), but was able to parlay that plurality, because of an unusual electoral law, into a commanding majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council. Hamas’ victory led to [a] halt in negotiations to end Israel’s occupation. Israel froze relations with the PA as it concerned Hamas (Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas remained as president). The United States and Europe also sought to isolate the new Hamas government. Fatah did not take lightly the end of years of one-party rule, and all the benefits and privileges that went along with its dominion over Palestinian society. Fatah conspired to take back what it viewed as its rightful role and instigated significant social turmoil as a result. By June 2007, the Hamas government feared that Fatah was planning a coup to take back power. Hamas launched a pre-emptive putsch in its heartland, the Gaza Strip. Hamas routed Fatah in four days of heavy fighting, and took full control over the Gaza Strip. Fatah responded by dismissing the Hamas government and appointing a new government. Palestine was now effectively divided between a Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and a Fatah-controlled West Bank.

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Hamas’ seizure of the Gaza Strip immediately led to an Israeli siege, with substantial international support. This wrecked an already fragile economy. General scarcity made those with some resources, such as Hamas, even more important to the population. Hamas’ putsch in Gaza also sparked cross-border violence between Israel and Gaza. A July 2008 ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas brought four months of relative quiet, but no end to the economic strangulation of Gaza, as had been agreed in the ceasefire. The ceasefire ended on the night of the US presidential election, November 4, 2008. Israel raided Gaza in order to destroy suspected tunnels under the border with Egypt, killing a number of Hamas militants in the process. A cycle of escalating violence ensued, which included Hamas rocket fire into Israel. Matters came to a head on December 27, 2008, when Israel began an aerial bombardment of Gaza, followed on January 3, 2009, by a ground offensive. While far more Palestinians were killed—about 1400 to 13 Israelis—the nature of warfare has so changed in the modern era that Israel’s unquestioned military supremacy cannot be effectively utilized against what are essentially civilian militia ensconced in a general population. Even after the Gaza war ended, the siege of Gaza remained in place throughout 2009. Palestinian fragmentation and weakness were apparent, as was Israel’s inability to effectively determine outcomes in Gaza. The election of a hardline government in Israel in 2009 further dimmed the prospects for an end to the occupation anytime soon.

Hamas Rule in Gaza Hamas’ victory was not only a reaction to Fatah’s ineffective rule, but also a result of Hamas’ policy of continuing armed resistance to Israel’s occupation. Fatah had chosen to follow predominately a political process to end the occupation and create a Palestinian state, and that was seen to have failed. Hamas promised the path of armed resistance, which many Palestinians felt was the only viable means to end the occupation. Hamas rule in Gaza had mixed results. On the positive side, Hamas was given credit for bringing the era of near-anarchy to a close and establishing law and order. As part of this effort, Hamas took on clan militia in Gaza that were operating outside the law, often protecting lucrative black market enterprises, including large-scale tunnel operations linking Gaza to Egypt. On the negative side, Hamas was largely intolerant of challenges to its rule and ideology, continuing its proxy war with Fatah. The international isolation of Gaza under Hamas rule, including Israel’s tight siege, brought even more misery to Gaza, although the Palestinian population largely blamed others, not Hamas, for this condition. The conflict between Hamas and Israel contributed to the war beginning in December 2008.

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Future Prospects The future is bleak for the Palestinians, in large measure because they do not control their own fate. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are essentially powerless in a world of states; their future will be decided far more [by] others than by themselves. The fragmentation of Palestine between Hamas rule in Gaza and Fatah rule in the West Bank complicates Palestinian prospects. Palestinians cannot speak with a unified voice in such a situation, only weakening their ability to affect outcomes and to promote effectively their right to self-determination. Adapted from Chapter 12, by Glenn E. Robinson, in David E. Long, Bernard Reich, and Mark Gasiorowski, eds., The Government and Politics of the Middle East and North Africa, Sixth Edition (2011, Westview Press).

CHAPTER 10 QR

Sharon’s Fence Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar

In 2000, Ariel Sharon, then the leader of the opposition party in Israel, visited the Temple Mount, a site in Jerusalem that is holy for Judaism and Islam alike. His visit was widely viewed by Palestinians as a provocation designed to affirm that under a Sharon government, Israel would retain permanent sovereignty of the site. The Palestinian protests—known eventually as the Second Intifada (or al-Aqsa Intifada)—erupted about the time of the visit, though it is a matter of debate whether the visit itself was a primary cause of the uprising or one of many factors in a time of already volatile passions. When Sharon was elected prime minister in early 2001, one of his responses to the ongoing violence was to begin construction of a controversial “security fence”—consisting of roads, electric and barbed wire fences, and concrete walls as much as thirty feet tall—more or less around the borders of the West Bank. (The deviation of the wall from recognized borders is itself a matter of controversy.) The ostensible purpose of the wall is to protect Israeli citizens from attacks by Palestinians. However, Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar contend here that it is obvious that the wall does not serve security considerations but instead,“like a blind monster,” snakes its way across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, swallowing Palestinian land and villages and separating Palestinians from their means of livelihood. In the view of Zertal and Eldar, the wall outlines a future border of Israel that leaves the Palestinians less than two-thirds of the territory for their future state. Likewise, “amoebic chains” of new settlements take control of strategic areas and the aquifer of the West Bank as another part of Sharon’s plan to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state. Even Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Zertal and Eldar assert, was intended by Sharon to divert international attention from the West Bank, where Sharon planned to deepen the Israeli occupation. Idith Zertal is an Israeli historian and essayist and professor of contemporary history at the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Among her major publications are From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel and Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood. Akiva Eldar is chief political columnist and editorial writer for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz. With Palestinian journalist Salameh Nematt, he received the 2007 Eliav-Sartawi Award, conferred by Search for Common Ground to journalists whose work promotes greater understanding between Arabs and Israelis. 132

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he sophisticated electronic fences, on both sides of which security roads were paved and barbed wire was stretched—a complex barrier between fifty and 100 meters wide—as well as the gigantic stretches of concrete wall that started to soar above the ground as early as the summer of 2002, were constructed with no reckoning and no logic other than the purpose of enclosing as many settlements as possible on the western, Israeli side and dividing up and seizing Palestinian lands. The point was to implement the bantustan idea. The route of the barrier along the 128 kilometers (eighty miles) between the village of Salem and the settlement of Elkanah, for example, which was completed in August 2003, represented the many and contradictory purposes and implications of the project. Not only did it twist and turn and penetrate deep into the territory in order to provide security and protection to small settlements like Salit and Zufin; the route was also aimed at ensuring the settlers huge reserves of land stolen from the Palestinian owners. This particular sector of fence separated the inhabitants of the villages of Faroun, Al Ras, Kafr Sur, Kafr Jamal, Falamiya, and Jayyous, which are to the east of the fence, from 23,000 dunams (roughly 6,000 acres) of their lands and grazing grounds for their flocks, which were locked out to the west of it. The inhabitants of these villages need about ten different kinds of documents and permits in order to move around in the area and get to their fields. Moreover, the route of the fence obviously does not derive from security considerations. In several segments it passes through wadis [valleys], whereas the purely military, security consideration would have called for locating the barrier on high ground. The belated willingness of the barrier administration—following international criticism and under pressure from the High Court of Justice—to make significant changes in the route, and even to dismantle segments that were already built, undermined the government’s claims that less-harmful alternatives didn’t exist. The barrier system demonstrated Israelis’ existential anxiety, on the one hand, and the arrogance of the government bureaucracy, on the other. Like a blind monster it penetrated, along improbable routes, into the depths of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, enveloping even the tiniest settlements, splitting Palestinian villages, chopping up neighborhoods, uprooting olive trees, separating children from their schools, cutting people off from their fields and other sources of income, from hospitals and public institutions, and violating basic human rights. The brutal land grab, the penning in of entire towns and villages, and the harassment of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, supposedly in the name of security, was carried out in the spirit of [Ariel] Sharon. That spirit overwhelmed everyone, from the uppermost echelons of government to the head of the barrier administration. This megalomaniacal project, which competes in its extent and cost only with the settlement project itself, which it is intended to protect, quickly became a

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gigantic boomerang. The barrier that was supposed to prevent attacks by suicide terrorists inside Israel restored to Palestinians the legitimacy they had lost because of those murderous attacks. The route of the fence demonstrates that it is intended to perpetuate the occupation, and with it the settlements, and not necessarily to provide security for Israelis within their recognized borders. With the help of the barrier the Palestinians succeeded, at least for a while, in establishing an international anti-Israeli front. The army’s brutal reaction to nonviolent demonstrations along the route of the fence, which brought together Palestinian villagers, international volunteers, “anarchists against fences,” and groups of Israelis including former military people, added fuel to the flames. These injuries to peaceful civilian demonstrators, Israeli, Palestinian, and international alike, were in stark contrast to the measured and “sensitive” treatment the army afforded to Israelis violently protesting evacuation from Gaza in August 2005. It revealed that the Israel Defense Forces are in fact made up of two different armies: the army for dealing with Jewish settlers and the army for dealing with Palestinians, Arab citizens of Israel, and the minority on the Israeli left that has not yet despaired of demonstrating against the occupation. The gigantic concrete wall, which soars to the height of eight meters (more than twenty-five feet) in the stretch between Azariya and Abu Dis east of Jerusalem, slicing through lives and neighborhoods, has become one of the most documented sites in the world, a place of pilgrimage for journalists, demonstrators, peace activists, tourists, fashion shows, and graffiti artists. Above all, it has become a black joke, a symbol of the stupidity of a mighty military empire that is being gnawed at by the occupied territories it insists upon holding. The expanding opposition to the barrier, which has brought about strange momentary coalitions between the Left and the settlers, also comes from within the Israeli consensus. Protests, demonstrations, critical articles, insupportable sights provided by the barriers and gates, and the temporary restraining orders issued by the High Court of Justice all came together into an increasing civil, social uproar that began a movement toward change. Even before the dramatic court rulings regarding the barrier, the first by Israel’s High Court of Justice on June 30, 2004, and the second by the International Court of Justice (the World Court) in The Hague on July 9 of that year, those responsible for the project understood that they had gone too far. The zigzags and greedy improvisations they had carried out, the result of maneuvering between the contradictory pressures of Sharon’s plans, the settlers’ desires, signals from Washington, and the army’s demands, as well as Palestinian protests, did not stand the test of reality and ultimately led to the toppling of parts of the wall. By the beginning of February 2004, the government informed the High Court of Justice that the route would be moved closer to the Green Line [the armistice line established between Israel and its neighbors in 1949] and that a small number of fence segments that had been erected would be dismantled and rebuilt.

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The High Court of Justice handed down the June 2004 ruling regarding the route of the fence. The ruling, which called for major changes in the barrier route, was reinforced by the International Court of Justice, which recognized Israel’s right to defend its borders, even with the help of a physical barrier, but rejected its right to build a wall deep inside Palestinian territory. Though the Hague ruling was greeted in Israel with predictably vituperative and clichéd reactions, it did, as noted, bring about changes in the Israeli legal system. The instruction from Attorney General Menachem Mazuz to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to the effect that the government must “examine in depth” the applicability of the Geneva Convention to the territories would not have been possible were it not for the World Court ruling. This revolutionary admonition is also tantamount to a belated admission that Israel has ignored the convention for almost forty years. However, Sharon’s decision to extricate the army from Gaza, uproot the settlements there, and return the settlers to Israel proper (or to settlements in the West Bank), which was carried out with great drama, to a large extent diverted attention both in Israel and abroad from the separation barrier. Construction of the wall has continued, generally out of sight and out of mind. The wall continues to butcher Palestinian territory, increase the Palestinians’ distress, and steal from them not only fields, houses, and private and public spaces but also their future state. Both in Sharon’s day and now in the days of his successors, the wall is seen as the outline of Israel’s permanent border. The wall, together with the road blockades and the permanent and temporary barriers, has already in effect divided the Palestinian territories into enclaves, or cantons, and has left the inhabitants with less than two-thirds of the territory for a future state. According to a World Bank report released in May 2007, Israel has restricted Palestinian access to more than 50 percent of the West Bank. This fragmentation not only does not allow the inhabitants to lead normal lives with respect to their economy, education, health, and culture but also prevents them from shaping the institutions of an active and cohesive democratic society. Israel’s lofty demands that Palestinians strengthen their democracy and impose control on extremist organizations [are] thus nothing but deceptive talk covering its own deeds [and] aimed at eroding Palestinian society.

Amoebic Chains of Jewish Settlement During the first six months of Sharon’s unity government, from March to August 2001, settlers established approximately thirty new outposts in the territories. Among them were permanent outposts adjacent to mother settlements, along with temporary settlements, most of which were established in response to shooting attacks and some of which were evacuated before they became permanent. All of these settlement operations were carried out under the watchful eye of the defense minister from the Labor Party, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, and in effect with his agreement.

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Thus the statement by Foreign Minister [Shimon] Peres, at a meeting of the Labor faction in the Knesset [Israeli legislature], to the effect that the government had ceased to confiscate lands in the territories and had suspended building in the settlements apart from construction in built-up areas, was entirely baseless. The prolonged deceit concerning the outposts was not simply a matter of the empty demonstrative character of many of them, which were established not as actual places to live but as gestures of defiance, or as bargaining chips to be shut down later at little psychological or physical cost. Its essence was in the very definition of the outposts as “illegal,” a definition that legitimized by default all the other settlements, at least in the Israeli discourse and consciousness. In discussions between the settlers and the heads of the security systems, from the minister down to the brigadier general on the ground, a kind of agreement was achieved for the evacuation of isolated outposts here and there, which in many cases were nothing more than a lone container, an improvised guard post, a water tank, and a ragged flag. Every pseudo-evacuation of this sort, staged and ritualized according to a foreknown script, added another pillar to the legitimization of the rest of the settlements and undermined Israeli democracy and institutions. All of Israel’s prime ministers and defense ministers at the beginning of the second millennium either failed in their dealing with the outposts or did not want to deal with them at all. The first to have surrendered was Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who in 2000 signed the “Yesha-Barak settlements agreement,” which legalized dozens of outposts in return for the evacuation of a few empty mobile homes from scattered places. The amoebic chain that stretched across many kilometers of satellite outposts of the settlement of Itamar was born and legitimized in the agreement that Barak signed. Yet the visionary and planner of the whole project was Ariel Sharon. It was he who invented the method of breaking through the fences of the settlements and sending tentacles out in order to create chains of Jewish settlement and take control of strategic areas and the aquifer of the West Bank. No obstacle hindered him in the course of carrying out his plan—neither distance, nor topography, nor logistical difficulty, nor price, and certainly not the rights of the Palestinian inhabitants. The outposts are not a caprice of lawless settlers. They are the realization of Sharon’s big plan to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state and thus thwart a peace agreement. The continued nonevacuation of the outposts is not a result of anarchy or laxity or the government’s loss of control over the settlers, but rather a calculated and well-targeted policy. While Sharon had sworn fealty to the American president’s road map, which calls for a halt to new settlement construction, his government continued to allocate generous budgets to their development and expansion. His explicit written commitment to President George W. Bush to take down all of the outposts that had been established after March 2001 was, therefore, another one of those countless times when he did not speak the truth or did not mean what he said. Another instance of this was at the 2003 Aqaba summit, in

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the presence of Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), in which Sharon reiterated his promise to dismantle the outposts. In his speech at the Herzliya Conference in December 2003, which attracted attention in Israel and worldwide, Sharon again repeated that “the government under my leadership will not compromise on the implementation of the road map in all of its phases. . . . The illegal outposts will be dismantled. Period. Israel will stand by all its commitments also in the matter of construction in the settlements. There will be no construction beyond the existing building line, there are no confiscations of lands for construction, there are no special economic incentives, and there is no construction of new settlements.”1 Yet while the prime minister and his defense minister were repeatedly professing the dismantling of the outposts, new ones were springing up on the hills, while outposts that had been marked for evacuation deepened their grip on the land. Sharon’s evident scorn for President Bush’s road map and his promises to take down dozens of outposts was interpreted by the United States as “technical difficulties.”

Disengagement from Gaza On May 26, 2003, Sharon uttered the word that his predecessors had been very careful not to mention. He declared at a meeting of the Likud Knesset faction that “the occupation [of Gaza] cannot continue forever.” He added that it was impossible “to continue to hold 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation” and that it was necessary to put an end to this situation. However, it was neither in order to end the occupation nor to bring permanent peace to his people that Sharon planned the disengagement. On the contrary, the plan was aimed at deepening the occupation in the West Bank and perpetuating the domination over the Palestinians. All that is necessary to do is to follow his public statements attentively. Although he spoke about “maximum security” and “minimum friction between the Israelis and the Palestinians,” and about “an incomparably difficult measure of change in the spread of the settlements,” because “under a future agreement Israel will not remain in all the places where we are today,” in almost the same breath he promised that “in the framework of the ‘disengagement plan’ Israel would strengthen its control of those parts of the land that will constitute an inalienable part of the state of Israel in any future agreement.” And while the disengagement plan was presented as a first step in the implementation of the road map, which referred to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the near future, Sharon admitted that the road map no longer existed for him. Sharon’s confidant and close adviser Dov Weisglass acknowledged that the withdrawal from Gaza was aimed at diverting international attention from Israel and [at preserving] Israel’s hold on 1. Prime Minister’s Office, Media Branch, The Prime Minister’s Speech at the Herzliya Conference [Hebrew], December 18, 2003.

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the West Bank, and that the uprooting of a few thousand settlers from one place would perpetuate the hundreds of thousands in the other place. Toward the end of 2004, while Israeli army forces were crushing refugee camps in the Gaza Strip yet again and demolishing dozens of Palestinian homes with their inhabitants in another one of the army’s overreactions in the war of Israel against the Palestinians, the outposts remained in place and the method flourished. Israel’s departure from Gaza, which was followed with great excitement in the world media, has long sunk into the abyss of forgetting. In Gaza, Israel left behind scorched earth, devastated services, and people with neither a present nor a future. The settlements were destroyed in an ungenerous move by an unenlightened occupier, which in fact continues to control the territory and kill and harass its inhabitants by means of its formidable military might. But the trauma that was promised to the Israelis passed them by without leaving a mark. The tragedy remains the exclusive province of the evacuated settlers themselves, not of the Israelis as a whole. The great victor of the withdrawal and the destruction of the settlements, Ariel Sharon himself, was able to cause a political uproar in Israel and to undermine from within age-old political structures that had seemed eternal. Sharon is no longer on the scene. He disappeared from the arena at his peak, enveloped in admiration he had never won before, in part thanks to the disengagement. With him ended the age of the dinosaurs, who fought for the establishment of the State of Israel and saw, even if unconsciously, in the fact of its existence, its way of conduct, and its practices, a nearly miraculous, mythical occurrence, immune from rational and critical debate. Sharon’s successors, and in fact the heads of most political parties in Israel today, already belong to another era. All of them were born with the state or after it, and take it for granted. They are no longer historic, charismatic leaders, who never retire but only fade away in one way or another, but rather are pragmatic, all too human, flawed politicians in the age of globalization, the Internet, and relentless media. The time of grayer, duller days is here. On the whole this is good news for Israel, because even if Sharon’s successors declare that they will follow in his footsteps and cherish his legacy, their vision and their discourse have already departed from his, and so have their deeds. Adapted from Chapter 8 of Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, Lords of the Land: The War over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967–2007 (2007, Nation Books).

CHAPTER 11 QR

Whither the Palestinians? Samih K. Farsoun and Naseer H. Aruri

The displacement and dispersal of Palestinian refugees following the disastrous 1948 war with Israel, and the 1967 war as well, has meant that nearly half of all Palestinians—perhaps as many as 5 or 6 million people—live outside Israel and the occupied territories. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are represented by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and by parties and confederations such as Hamas, Fatah, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), but Samih Farsoun and Naseer Aruri raise the issue of who speaks for the diaspora community. The demise of PLO institutions has all but eliminated the transnational connectedness of the refugees and other diaspora communities, leaving them relatively voiceless in Palestinian affairs. One notable difference between the leaderships of “internal” (Gaza and West Bank) and “external” (diaspora) Palestinians is the priority given by the diasporan community to the right of refugees to return to their homes and properties inside historic Palestine, including what is now Israel. The right of return thus becomes a fundamental component of the Palestinian appeal to Israel and the international community, alongside the call for the return of the occupied territories (Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem), the dismantling of the security wall, and the recognition of the full equality of Palestinian citizens of Israel. Farsoun and Aruri conclude that the imbalance of power between a weak PA and a strong Israel means that the Palestinians are not likely to achieve an independent state of their own. That is, a two-state solution is an unlikely outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Instead, Farsoun and Aruri foresee a “binational” state as a more viable option, at least in the long run. In such a state, a combined Israel-Palestine would cease to be a Jewish state. The two ethnic nationalities would retain their cultural identities and, eventually, coexist in harmony, with equal rights and equal citizenship. The late Samih K. Farsoun was chair of the department of sociology at American University and a member of the executive committee of the Palestine Center in Washington, DC. With Naseer H. Aruri, he is coauthor of Palestine and the Palestinians: A Social and Political History, Second Edition, from which this selection is taken. Naseer H. Aruri is chancellor professor (emeritus) of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and president of the board of the Trans-Arab Research Institute (TARI). He is the author of Dishonest Broker: America’s Role in Israel and Palestine and The Obstruction of Peace: The U.S., Israel and the Palestinians. 139

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n 1994 [Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat returned to Gaza to set up the Palestinian Authority (PA) in accordance with the terms of the Oslo Accords. The jubilation of the Gaza people upon his entry was genuine, as they expressed the joy of freedom from harsh Israeli control. Through a large police force (agreed to in the accords), Arafat set about imposing order and his authority on a restive population, a chaotic situation, and the active resistance to the continuing Israeli occupation. Against his opponents, especially Hamas, Arafat utilized his triedand-true political tactics of negotiation to build a consensus and, failing that, cooptation, infiltration, and force. These tactics failed to resolve the disappointment and discontent of the great majority of the Palestinians with the accords, Arafat, and the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization). The political lines and divisions were drawn, and the crisis persisted. The accords between the PLO and Israel triggered not only a political crisis but also an institutional one. It raised the question of the representativeness, legitimacy, and credibility of the PLO, its institutions, and its leadership. With the creation of the Palestinian Authority, with limited civil and police powers over the population centers of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the relationship between the PLO and the PA became an issue. Just as confounding for all Palestinians was the election of a Legislative Council in the autonomy areas in January 1996. The PA and the council, legitimate as they may have been in the eyes of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip Palestinians (and much of the rest of the world), in no way could it speak for or represent the diaspora communities. Although the Legislative Council may have become the institution that articulated the will and aspirations of 1.3 million voters in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, who represented the 6 million diaspora Palestinians? Indeed, which institution was to authorize and ratify the “final status” agreements? The diaspora was without a collective or organized voice, perhaps for the first time since 1948.

Dissensions Between the “Internal” and “External” Communities After the initial shock of the Oslo Accords and the installation of the PA, the secular leftist opposition began a more pragmatic approach to the new political realities. It sought to strengthen the West Bank and Gaza Strip institutions and to work for their democratization. However, dissension in relations between the “internal” (West Bank and Gaza) cadres and “external” (diaspora) leadership emerged. The only serious opposition to both the Declaration of Principles [that is, the Oslo Accords] and the PA regime is Hamas and al-Jihad al-Islami [Islamic Jihad], which are particularly strong in the Gaza Strip. The specific objectives of the secularists and Hamas differed substantially. Whereas the former wanted to reform and revive the PLO and its institutions and to eliminate the Arafat leadership, the latter has been ambivalent [about] standing under the PLO umbrella, until its vic-

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tory in the legislative election of January 2006. The Hamas attacks against the occupation troops and Israeli civilians inside Israel have been branded by most of the international media and those controlled by the PA regime as terrorist actions against peace. The Hamas power base in the Gaza Strip is quite strong and represents, after the years of PA rule, a continuing challenge to the regime’s authority and legitimacy. The current PA-Israel inactive diplomacy under [PLO leader Mahmoud] Abbas and [Israeli prime minister Ariel] Sharon’s successors seems to rest on the assumption that Hamas must be neutralized. Sharon’s demands that Abbas demolish “the infrastructure of terror” as a precondition for negotiations are clearly a euphemism for disarming and destroying Hamas and a tactic for forestalling serious negotiations. And yet, the current PA under Abbas lacks the reputation and Palestinian consensus to be a truly representative body that can reach an effective diplomatic settlement with a hard-line Israeli government. As was revealed in the municipal elections in May 2005, Hamas enjoys more popularity than Fateh not only in the Gaza Strip, but also in the West Bank, as was demonstrated in the January 25, 2006, legislative elections. It has no reason to yield its power entirely to a corrupt and disorganized PA seen as incapable of gaining any concessions from Sharon. In an interview with a local Gaza news agency, Mahmoud al-Zahar, a senior Hamas official in the Gaza Strip, said Hamas was not willing “to serve as a fig leaf ” for PA control of Gaza following the Israeli disengagement of August 2005. Hamas, he said, would not give up its weapons and was liable to continue bombarding Israel with mortars and rockets from Gaza after the disengagement “in order to liberate the West Bank and Jerusalem.” And yet, Zahar said on an Arab television program on February 12, 2006, that “America is not our enemy, and she holds the key to peace in the Middle East.” Moreover, [the] Hamas leader in Damascus, Khaled Mish’al, declared at the same time that Hamas will respect all agreements signed by the Palestinian Authority. Even before the legislative elections, senior Hamas officials moved quickly to try to moderate the fears of civil war that Zahar’s earlier interview aroused among the Palestinian public. Sheikh Hassan Yusuf, a senior Hamas leader from Ramallah, for instance, published a statement saying that Zahar “exaggerated in describing [Hamas’s] differences of opinion with the Palestinian Authority and Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas].” The agreement to hold legislative elections in 2006 has already made Yusuf ’s perspective on the issue the more plausible. It is the perspective that is more likely to prevail with Hamas now at the helm. Hamas in power is expected to demonstrate the healthy measure of realism compatible with the constraints of power. Despite the display of such moderation on the part of central sections of Hamas, however, Sharon escalated his rhetoric against Hamas, with new demands that would result in the disenfranchisement of this group, which has steadily become an

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essential political player in the Palestinian arena. From New York, where he spoke before the UN General Assembly in September 2005, Sharon warned that Israel would prevent the organization of the elections if the PA failed to meet two conditions: disarming Hamas and getting it to abandon its anti-Zionist ideology. Remi Kanazi, founder of the political website “poeticInjustice.net,” explained the strategy this way: “Sharon is trying to politically de-legitimize Hamas by keeping it out of the elections, while demonizing Abu Mazen for not cracking down on ‘terror’ and using the excuse of having ‘no partner for peace’ as a ploy to further expand settlements, the Apartheid Wall, and to impose greater restrictions on Palestinian life in the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.”1 Not only did Sharon escalate his rhetoric about Hamas, but he also ordered aerial attacks on the Gaza Strip six weeks after the evacuations of the settlements there in accordance with the so-called disengagement (September 22 and 23, 2005). At the same time, a massive Israeli arrest campaign rounded up some two hundred key Palestinian figures running in municipal elections. Several of those arrested were planning to run on Hamas’s ticket for the Palestinian Legislative Council elections on January 25 [2006]. Most prominent was Sheikh Hassan Yusuf, the leader of the moderate wing of Hamas in the West Bank, and his two sons, as well as Mohammad Ghazal, a Hamas leader in the Nablus area. Most of the detainees were given five to six months of “administrative detention,” meaning they will be incarcerated without charge or trial for political reasons. At present, there are nine thousand to ten thousand Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons. The arrest of leaders of the moderate Hamas wing who were encouraging participation in the electoral process has increased Hamas’s popularity and in turn weakened the Palestinian Authority, leading to the decisive victory of Hamas but leaving the Palestinian political system without a vital center. Thus the Palestinian political spectrum in the aftermath of Arafat’s demise lacks a stable, dominant center and has a perplexed periphery and a confounded opposition.

Efforts Toward a Third Way The disaffected Palestinian majority has become disillusioned, demoralized, politically paralyzed, and unable to mount any significant action to change conditions in the occupied territories or internationally. This situation reflects the deepening crisis in the Palestinian national movement. This crisis has also produced widespread political cynicism and depoliticization and, among some, desperation and profound hopelessness. In the hapless slums of Gaza, many angry young men have volunteered for suicide missions against the Israelis. Many (including former Fateh militants) have rallied to the cause of Hamas not out of religious conviction 1. Remi Kanazi, “Shattering Democracy: Sharon’s Plan for Palestine,” Media Monitors Network, September 28, 2005, available online at http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/19841.

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as true believers but because Hamas has emerged as the only group to resist the truly unjust and disappointing turn of events. The Second Intifada of 2000 and Israel’s harsh measures to subdue it produced the Al-Aqsa brigades under Fateh leadership, which have been mounting suicide missions of their own. And yet in their bleak social, economic, and political situation, the Palestinian people have made efforts not only to redefine the nature of Palestinian national identity and consciousness but also to address emergent social issues. The slim hope of renewal among Palestinian progressives derives from the new contradictions that have arisen over the shape and structure of Palestinian society. “We are at a stage where the old Palestinian movement is dying, and a new movement is not created yet,” said Mustafa Barghouti, who challenged Mahmoud Abbas for the Palestinian presidency in the presidential elections of January 2005, and who heads a “third-way” group called the Palestinian National Initiative, or al-Mubadara in Arabic. The varied efforts of intellectual activists and leftist politicians to produce a third-force coalition have not had enough unity or coherence to produce a genuine mass-based movement. In early 2006, their combined efforts generated two separate groupings, which, despite a unity of purpose and ideological affinity, remain torn by personal differences and narrowly construed interests. The first grouping, called the Palestinian National Initiative (al-Mubadara), established on June 17, 2002, is rooted in the Communist Party and other nationalist secular factions. It is highly critical of the PA and its domestic as well as its foreign policy. The second group, the Palestinian Democratic Coalition (PDC) was formed on September 2, 2003, under a leadership whose roots are also in the Communist Party and other secular, nationalist/leftist groups. In fact, there is hardly any difference between the two contending coalitions’ perspectives on the so-called third way. In an interview with the Hebrew publication Mahsom, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, the leader of the Initiative, offered the following rationale for the existence of that movement: For the Israelis, the Palestinian people as a whole are divided between supporters of Fatah and supporters of Hamas, but everyone forgets— I hope not on purpose—that there is a large third camp, made up of almost half of the Palestinian people. This camp participated in the presidential elections and received more than 30 percent of the votes. And I represent this camp, which demands clean politics, free of corruption, nepotism, and the pursuit of narrow personal interests.2 With regard to the so-called peace process, both movements—the PDC and al-Mubadara—adhere to the two-state solution, and both are critical of Sharon’s 2. Mahsom, June 28, 2005, also available online at http://www.mahsom.com/article.php ?id=1147. Translated from the Hebrew by Daniel Breslau.

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so-called disengagement plan. Both were critical of Oslo, but both participated in the January 2005 presidential elections held under the terms of Oslo and the so-called peace process. Both are critical of the PA’s proclivity for making rapid concessions. In that regard, al-Mubadara’s Barghouti said the following: The PA accepted Israel’s rules of the game there as well and fell into the trap that Sharon set for it, that works against the interests of both sides, against the two-state solution. Sharon replaced the road map with his own plan and succeeded in drawing in the Palestinian Authority, the US, Europe, and the entire international community— they all were drawn into a plan that turns Gaza into a big prison and inflicts a death blow on the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. . . . The independent Palestinian state is the solution, since we will not leave our land.3

Opposition in the Diaspora Among the diaspora Palestinians, little in the form of opposition to the PA’s policies existed beyond passive antagonism, disaffection, anger, and rhetoric. Diaspora Palestinians are politically rudderless and isolated in the different and disconnected communities. The demise of the PLO institutions all but eliminated the transnational connectedness of the refugee and other diaspora communities. Despite the exceedingly numerous meetings held between Palestinian and Israeli negotiators since the signing of the Oslo Accords, the input of the community of five million Palestinian refugees has never been sought. When the right of return began to resurface as a top item on the Palestinian people’s agenda around 1999– 2000, the role of the Palestine Authority was minimal. In fact, the right of return was placed on the public agenda not by the PA or by the PLO, but by various segments of Palestinian and global civil society. The right of return, as defined in UN Resolution 194, became a rallying cry for grassroots organizing throughout the 1990s and especially after the failure of the Camp David meeting, which was, in effect, a failure of Oslo in July 2000. An international solidarity movement, which had been working on behalf of the Palestinian cause since the early 1970s, and which had to step aside after the “historic handshake” of Arafat and [Yitzhak] Rabin in September 1993, came back after the failure of Oslo in 2000, hoping to succeed where governments had failed in ameliorating the plight of the Palestinians, particularly the refugees. 3. Mahsom, June 28, 2005, also available online at http://www.mahsom.com/article.php ?id=1147. Translated from the Hebrew by Daniel Breslau.

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The Call for Sanctions, Boycott, and Divestment: 2005 About 170 Palestinian civil society organizations representing the three integral parts of ten million Palestinians—Palestinian refugees, Palestinians under occupation, and Palestinian citizens of Israel—have issued a call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions until certain objectives are realized. The call was originally issued on the first anniversary of the advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice on Israel’s wall under construction on occupied Palestinian land (July 9, 2005). It states, in part: We, representatives of Palestinian civil society, call upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era. We appeal to you to pressure your respective states to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel. We also invite conscientious Israelis to support this Call, for the sake of justice and genuine peace. The call states further that the nonviolent punitive measures should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by: • Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall. • Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality. • Respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194. The conglomeration of groups, individuals, NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], and parties constituting Palestinian society has the potential to create an oppositional movement if they choose to unify and to establish a coherent political movement. After all, their raison d’être (the right of return) no longer occupies a prominent place on the PA’s active agenda, which knows that Israel and the United States would regard any PA insistence on this fundamental right as hostile. The concession by Abbas giving up the right of return could itself line up a huge opposition against Abbas should the right-of-return movement, as well as the fragmented third way, choose to seek greater unity.

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Palestinian Destiny The Palestinian people now face a number of serious historic challenges whose resolution will determine their destiny as a people and the fate of their country. In the political sphere, the immediate dilemmas include finding a credible, rational, and legitimate political process for decisionmaking that will involve and satisfy most political groups and viewpoints, including the new ruling party Hamas and the radicals, as well as the mass of the “silent majority” in both the occupied territories and the diaspora. Central to the Palestinian political dilemma is the restructuring of the relationship between the PLO and the PA, in which the PA exists as the agency of self-rule in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, while a reinvigorated, legitimate, and functioning PLO (or successor organization) and its institutions reemerge as the political framework and representative of all Palestinians, not just those in the occupied territories. In the economic sphere, the dilemmas include planning development and investment in order to generate needed jobs; creating a legal and rational regulatory environment for the orderly conduct of economic and financial activity; and building the physical infrastructure. Above all, the Palestinians’ leadership must describe a vision of the future society—humane, free, democratic, socially just, and based on the rule of law—that would inspire the people to translate that vision into specific political, economic, social, and legal institutions and practice. However, even assuming unprecedented goodwill and cooperation on the part of the Israelis, these are tremendously demanding challenges for the Palestinian people and the ineffectual or incapable PLO/PA, previously under Arafat and then under Mahmoud Abbas. Now that Hamas has replaced Fateh, which had been in power twelve years, the Palestinian Arabs will have to grapple with two principal challenges. The first is the possibility that funds from the European Union and United States will be interrupted unless Hamas meets humiliating conditions: amending its charter, which considers Palestine the territory lying between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and recognizing Israel’s right to exist. The second challenge facing the Palestinians under Hamas could emerge if Hamas decides to translate its conservative social agenda into law. Palestinian society is highly secular and nationalistic and thus would be repelled by the injection of religion into politics and the legal system. It should be kept in mind that the Palestinian majority that voted Hamas into office was not endorsing the Hamas social agenda; it was voting against the ruling party, Fateh, because of its corrupt governance, cronyism, and inability to deliver an independent Palestinian state.

After Arafat Despite his largely ineffectual leadership, Arafat accomplished the extraordinary feat of injecting Palestine into the global public mind, but he was also a victim of US

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and Israeli rejectionist policies. He has been demonized and branded an unqualified partner for peace. By rights, his death should rob Israel and the [George W.] Bush administration of the “no-partner” mantra that has long served to freeze the socalled peace process and block any serious advance toward peace. And yet, his death will not provide the often-stated cliché about the new opportunity for peace. After his Arafat card was taken away, Sharon immediately fell back on the terrorism excuse. The new leader, Mahmoud Abbas, who has already renounced armed action as a means of resisting the Israeli occupation, will have to contend with a reformulated Sharon alibi that will ensure diplomatic paralysis. In fact, the so-called opportunity for peace in Palestine has never existed since the demise of Arafat. In Arafat’s absence, we cannot underestimate Israel’s propensity to foment disorder and instigate chaos in the occupied territories in order to support its spurious claims that Palestinians cannot govern themselves, though, in fact, the Palestinians in the occupied territories have already demonstrated political maturity by ensuring a smooth transition from Arafat to Abbas and then by holding successful legislative elections in January 2006 that were regarded widely throughout the world as fair, orderly, and democratic. Arafat’s absence from the scene will undoubtedly be felt by all sectors of Palestinian society, including his most ardent critics. It is not to be forgotten that the PLO, which he chaired throughout his adult life, remains the anchor of nearly six million dispersed Palestinians. And yet, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza seem to be putting their eggs in Abbas’s basket, whose own eggs are placed in rather empty US and Israeli baskets in the groundless hope that a measure of normality will eventually be restored. As Hamas transforms itself into a political party that won the January 2006 legislative elections, a possible alteration of the political landscape seems imminent. Fateh’s hegemony in Palestinian political life is being undermined for the first time since 1965. Arafat’s aloof successor, who lacks a base in Fateh and elsewhere, is not likely to reenergize a crumbling political organization, whose disparate groups are reluctant to take orders from the new chief, and whose crushing defeat in 2006 is likely to keep it paralyzed for years to come, unless it agrees to Hamas’s request for a coalition government. At present, the Bush administration is trying sabotage such a prospect in order to punish the Palestinians for having elected Hamas. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the Middle East remains in turmoil largely due to the unenlightened policy the United States has pursued in the region. The Bush administration’s embrace of the extremist agenda of the Sharon regime, as well as its military misadventures in Iraq, have only added to the turmoil in the region. Needless to say, the right of the Palestinian people to establish an independent state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital, the dismantling of all Israeli settlements on occupied Arab territories, and the confinement of Israel to its pre-1967 borders remain the key to peace in the Middle East—a fact that the United States has refused to confront since the beginning of the so-called peace process in 1969.

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A Binational, Single-State Solution? Like many other critics before us, we believe that a careful reading of the Declaration of Principles, its annexes, and the derivative Cairo, Paris, and Oslo II Accords indicates clearly that they provide only for a limited Palestinian administration— for a fraction of the Palestinian people on a fraction of its land—and do not envision the building of an independent Palestinian state. We believe that because of the imbalance of power between the politically weak Palestinian Authority and a strong Israel, the Declaration of Principles will not lead to Palestinian selfdetermination and independent statehood. What, then, would be the character of the emergent Palestinian entity? Gone are the days of struggle for the revolutionary liberation of Palestine, during which the Palestinian intellectual and political leaders had the luxury of imagining a liberated, progressive, democratic, and socially just future Palestine. That dream and that option are now destroyed as much by the erstwhile Palestinian leadership of the PLO as by the enemies of Palestine and the Palestinian people—Israeli, American, European, and Arab. We believe that the so-called peace process, and specifically the implementation of the Oslo-inspired agreements, will create in the occupied territories—with the consent of the PA—a permanent reality of fragmented, subjugated, exploited, miniature Palestinian cantons under Israeli-style apartheid. If in this analysis of the emergent Palestinian entity no direct mention is made of the Palestinians of the diaspora, it is because they have not only been disenfranchised by the PA but also largely abandoned to their own destiny by their leaders and the international community. In debates taking place inside the occupied territories among some Palestinian intellectuals about the future of the occupied Palestinian territories, two possible scenarios are being proposed: the Bantustan plan or the binational option. The first scenario (the Bantustan plan) is that of two peoples (Israeli and Palestinian) living under one—Israeli—sovereignty. Under this plan the Palestinians of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would—unlike the so-called Israeli Arabs (the Palestinian citizens of Israel)—have only civil autonomy, but like them, they would become controlled, economically disadvantaged residents of greater Israel. They could commute to work in lesser Israeli jobs but return at night to townshiplike communities of their own. In the binational option, Israel-Palestine would presumably become a democratic and not just a Jewish state, where the two ethnic nationalities would retain their cultural identity and eventually coexist in harmony in an integrated economy and single sovereignty. This option seems unlikely to us in the short run, much as it may superficially resemble the “secular democratic state” imagined by the Palestinian revolutionaries of the 1960s. It may, however, emerge in the long run, as the only viable alternative to perpetual conflict.

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Since about 1993, Israel and the United States have pursued policies that have dealt a crippling blow to the two-state solution, while continuing to pay lip service to the concept of an independent Palestinian state. One wonders whether they failed to realize that those policies have unwittingly paved the way to a binational solution and a single pluralistic state for Arabs and Jews in what the former call historical Palestine and the latter call Eretz Israel. The Oslo process sealed the fate of Palestinian statehood, ironically leaving the vision of a single state for two equal communities as the only dignified solution. For the Palestinians, a single binational state is not a new idea, having been their first choice after the 1967 occupation, when they called for a democratic secular state. That idea, however, which was linked to armed struggle, was summarily dismissed before it had even been debated, in order to accommodate the Arab states’ preference for a diplomatic struggle. The Palestinian leadership dropped the unitary approach and embraced a two-state solution. In retrospect, this might have been a most harmful decision. While Palestinian civil society inside the occupied territories focused on civil disobedience, trying to make the occupation not only undesirable but impractical, the PLO leadership outside put all its eggs in the Arab diplomatic basket, which is the US basket that brought disaster to the Palestinian cause. That was the beginning of the end of the two-state solution, perhaps leaving the unitary approach as the only alternative to apartheid. Any realistic alternative to Oslo and the Sharon-Bush understanding must guarantee the removal of constraints inflicted on the Palestinians in three spheres: those under the 1967 occupation, the Palestinians in Israel proper, and those of the diaspora. That guarantee would require a determined, systematic, and protracted struggle, combining the three segments of the Palestinian people with Israeli Jews who wish to be neither master of another people, nor privileged in an apartheid system, nor colonial settlers denying the existence of the indigenous natives of the land, nor wishing those natives’ disappearance. The goal of the struggle would have to be equal protection under the law in any such unified state: the illegality of any discrimination by the law, the end of segregation, and its social, economic, and legal removal. Equality for every single human being in Palestine-Israel would be the goal of the new struggle. Only when the Palestinians decide to rediscover their democratic secular framework of the 1960s and transform it from a slogan to a viable program that can be publicly debated and adapted to present realities will the hope for a real peace be rekindled. No matter by what name we refer to this entity—a binational state, a federal system, a cantonal arrangement on the Swiss model—the common denominators would still be equal rights, equal citizenship, plurality, and coexistence. Adapted from Chapter 13 of Samih K. Farsoun and Naseer H. Aruri, Palestine and the Palestinians: A Social and Political History, Second Edition (2006, Westivew Press).

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Ethnicity and Nation-Building in the State of Israel Calvin Goldscheider

In this essay, Calvin Goldscheider examines Israel’s connection to Jewish communities outside Israel and calls into question the role that ethnically Arab citizens of Israel (Arab Israelis) might play in Israel’s future. The two largest Jewish communities in the world are those of Israel and the United States. American Jewish identity over time has become defined less by religious ritual and belief and more by “ethnic” Jewishness, and particularly by support for the state of Israel. Yet the two communities are diverging. The American commitment to the separation of church and state is at odds with Israel’s religiously infused politics, and the American tolerance of Jewish diversity contrasts sharply with Orthodox Judaism’s intolerance of religious diversity in Israel. Arab Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza have not been officially integrated into Israel as citizens. In contrast, Arab Israelis are caught in the middle because, although they are Arabs, they are also Israeli citizens, albeit citizens who rank below Jewish Israelis in the social hierarchy of Israel. So long as being Israeli involves a dominant component of Jewish history and culture, Arab Israelis can never be fully Israeli. Barring fundamental changes in the Jewish state of Israel, Arab Israelis will remain socially and economically disadvantaged, and the nature of their links to the Palestinians and to Arab states will therefore remain an open question. Calvin Goldscheider is professor of sociology and Judaic studies at Brown University. His many books include Studying the Jewish Future, The Arab-Israeli Conflict, and Israel’s Changing Society, from which this essay is selected.

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y goal in this chapter is to focus on three questions. First, what is the relationship between Jewish communities outside of the state of Israel [and] developments in Israeli society? I shall refer to this as the “Jewish diaspora” question. Second, what has been the relationship of the state of Israel to the territories it administers (referred to as Judea and Samaria, or the West Bank, or Palestine by persons of different political-ideological orientations)? I shall refer to this as the “Palestinian” question. Third, what are the prospects for Jewish ethnic assimilation in Israel, and what is the role of the Arab or Palestinian citizens living in the state in the context of both the Palestinian and Jewish diaspora questions? I shall refer to this as the “ethnic-national” question.

The Jewish Diaspora Question The links between Israel and the Jewish diaspora, that is, Jewish communities outside the state, are important because these Jewish communities have been sources of immigrants to Israel. Hence, they have had a powerful influence on the changing population growth and ethnic composition of Israel. Moreover, these Jewish communities have been Israel’s financial and political backbone, supporting domestic programs and providing important aid for defense purposes and political legitimacy in the international arena. Jews outside of Israel have been partners in formulating the intellectual and ideological basis of Israeli society and have provided the political rationale for its reemergence. What occurs in outside Jewish communities has important consequences for developments in the state; what happens in Israel has implications for Jewish communities outside Israel. Three brief examples illustrate some of the more obvious interdependencies between Israel and Jewish communities outside of Israel. First, the size of particular Jewish communities and the pool of potential Jewish immigrants have varied since the 1950s, in part in relation to the rate of immigration to Israel. The end of Jewish emigration from Yemen or Iraq can only be understood against the background of the demographic demise of those Jewish communities. The commitment of American Jews to remain in the United States has a major impact on the relationships between Israel and the American Jewish community and the US government. Shifts in the cohesion of the Soviet Union and its breakup, along with implications of these changes for the Jewish population living there, were the most immediate cause of the large-scale immigration of Russian Jews to Israel in the 1990s. The impact of the timing and rate of Jewish immigration from various countries of origin to Israel must be understood in the context of these Jewish communities. A second example relates to the ways that events in Israel affect Jewish communities in the world. The 1967 Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors had a major impact well beyond the border of the state, increasing the financial and political support to Israel by Jewish communities around the world and more

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firmly anchoring their ethnic identities in Israel’s development. As the very survival of Israel was perceived to be threatened, the post-Holocaust generation of Jews outside Israel responded in a variety of ways to link itself to the future of the Jewish state. These developments, in turn, led to new and more conspicuous dependencies between Israel and Jewish communities, often involving the exchange of Jewish “ethnic” identity for financial and political support. A third illustration relates to the continuous terrorist attacks directed at Jews in Israel. These have always generated political responses and concerns among Jews outside Israel; attacks on Jewish communities in North and South America, in Europe, and in Asia and Africa have, in turn, generated responses from the Israeli government. Israel views itself as the guardian of the Jewish people; Jewish communities outside Israel are defined as part of the history and culture of Israeli Jews. An attack on Jews anywhere is treated as an attack on Jews everywhere, promoting a mutual, unwritten pact of normative responsibilities and obligations, reinforcing the bonds between Israel and Jewish communities around the world. These simple illustrations can be multiplied. My major point is that there are important linkages between internal developments in Israel and Jewish communities outside Israel that require analysis if the goal is to understand the dynamics of Israel’s changing society.

Who Is Jewish in Israel and in the Jewish Diaspora? Since Israel defines itself as the center of the Jewish people, an elementary question about the “ethnic” relationships between Israeli and non-Israeli Jews is, Who is included as a member of the Jewish people? The definitional question of Who is a Jew? in the state of Israel symbolizes the connections, and the gap, between the two largest Jewish communities in the world: that of Israel and [that of ] the United States. The issue of defining who is Jewish is not new historically nor is it particular to the state of Israel. All societies struggle with defining membership and citizenship. In Israel, the definition has been decided by Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, on “religious” grounds and has been implemented by the Jewish religious authorities of the state, that is, by Orthodox rabbis and their institutions. The paradox is that American Jews are concerned about the legalities of citizenship in a Jewish country thousands of miles away that the majority have not visited and in which most have no intention of applying for such citizenship and are unlikely to test whether they would ever fit those criteria.

American Jews To understand this elementary issue from the point of view of Israeli society, we can unravel the Israeli view of the core issue of Jewish life in the aftermath of European

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modernization: the integration and assimilation of Jews in modern, secular, open pluralistic societies. In its most simple form, the Israeli argument about the assimilation of diaspora Jews is as follows. In modern, open pluralistic societies, for example in America, Jews are assimilating. Assimilation, they argue, means the erosion of Jewish life in the process of becoming like non-Jews. Intermarriage is the most conspicuous indicator of such erosions, because when Jews intermarry with non-Jews, they are distancing themselves from their “traditional” roots, rejecting their Jewishness and their Judaism together with their links to the Jewish people, community, history, and culture. Such intermarriages are unlikely to occur in Israel (in large part because of the boundaries between Jews and Arabs). Since American Jews are assimilating, the Israelis argue, it is particularly unclear why they should be concerned about the way Jews are being defined in the state of Israel. Assimilating Jews should be particularly indifferent to formal issues about the Judaism of the Jews. Why should American Jews care about the way rabbis, from another culture and with very different values from theirs, jockey for political power and make legal and political pronouncements that are irrelevant to their lives and their Jewishness? Shouldn’t Jewish Americans, who are committed to American political values of separation of church and state (not necessarily Jewish or Israeli political values), be indifferent to religious-political parties in Israel? The answer to these questions relates to changes in Judaism in the process of modernization. Over the past century, American Jews have become less-observant religiously, their institutions have become secular, and their Judaism has been reformed. At the same time that traditional religious practices and institutions were declining, new ways of expressing Judaism were emerging and new forms of Jewishness were substituting for religion. As American Jews became less religiously and ritually observant, moving away from Orthodox toward Conservative and Reform Judaisms, the state of Israel became a major basis of communal consensus, reinforcing Jewish continuity as part of ethnic activities, in other words, Jewish peoplehood. Thus, religious changes did not imply the end of their commitments as Jews within their families and their communities or as part of the Jewish people everywhere and over time. “Ethnic” Jewishness, and especially its Israel-centered component, emerged to replace the Judaisms of ritual and belief. Most American Jews, then, define Israel as a very important part of their lives and central to the education of their children. Substantial proportions of American Jews have visited Israel, have relatives and friends living in Israel, and financially contribute to Israeli-related projects. Israel’s survival is bound up with the ethnic lives of American Jews since they consider themselves part of the Jewish people. The state of Israel has become a psychological anchor for many American Jews and is the sociocultural foundation of their Jewishness and a source of communal cohesion. American Jewish identity is defined by its pro-Israelism. Although there have been increases in the rates of intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews in the United States, there is no simple association between intermarriage

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and alienation from the Jewish community. In many intermarriages, the Jewish partner remains attached to the Jewish community through family, friends, and organizational ties; often the non-Jewish-born spouse becomes attached to the Jewish community, as do many of the children of the intermarried. Most of their friends are Jewish, many support Israel, and most identify themselves as Jews. Some proportion formally convert to Judaism; many are converted by religious procedures under the direction of Orthodox and Conservative rabbis, but more are converted to Judaism by Reform rabbis using nontraditional religious criteria. Taken together, the research evidence shows that the intermarried [and] certainly the formally converted (by whatever denomination and by whatever criteria) cannot be written off as lost to the Jewish community. Their families, rabbis, and Jewish organizations have not excluded them, and they have not excluded themselves. Can a citizenship law in the state of Israel write them off as Jewish people without creating concern among the intermarried, their families, their rabbis, their community, and their institutions? Even though immigration is not part of the agenda of most American Jews, their identity as Jews is intertwined in complex and profound ways with their associations with Israel. At the same time, about 85 percent of American Jews reject Orthodox Judaism as their form of religious expression, and most have developed religious alternatives; their legitimacy as Jews is unquestioned in America. Although, in large part, they have rejected the version of Zionism that insists on their immigration as the only legitimate solution to the Jewish condition in the diaspora, they have developed alternative versions of Zionism that allow them to have strong bonds to the state of Israel. Pro-Israelism has been their commitment without the ideological imperative of immigration or the rejection of the continuation of American Jewish life. American Jews are comfortable as Jews where they live and display their Jewishness openly and legitimately. Anchoring their Jewish identity in the Jewish state, which calls into question their legitimacy as Jews, their children’s legitimacy, and that of their religious leaders, becomes untenable. For some time, Orthodox rabbis have called into question the Jewishness of those who have become Jews by choice or who practice their Judaism differently from theirs. American Jews have, in large part, ignored these Orthodox rabbis and have been indifferent to their values. Orthodox Judaism in Israel, in its political form, has become more intolerant of Jewish diversity, at the same time that American Jews have embraced pluralism in Judaism. The United States and Israel represent different strategies of Jewish survival in the modern world. The state of Israel is a major source of Jewish culture, experience, identity, and history for American Jews, since it is their link to Jewish peoplehood, the quintessential form of political ethnicity. Israel is not their “national origin” in the geographic sense. In its constructed ideological form, Israel is no less powerful as a symbol of ethnicity for Jewish communities. For many Israeli Jews,

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the American Jewish community is the paradigm of erosion and decay and the lack of Jewish viability and continuity, yet a source of potential immigration. There are increasing indications that Israeli Jews and Jews in communities outside Israel are moving apart from each other. Although the state of Israel has become the center of Jewish peoplehood, large, cohesive, and powerful Jewish communities have emerged in modern pluralistic societies. These are legitimate and accepted ethnic-religious communities, with long-term roots in these societies, as well as strong linkages to Israel. Whereas most of the Jews outside of Israel are committed to the state, in their view and in their behavior they are not in “exile” or in diaspora. Their home is where they live, where they expect to continue living, and where they are raising the next generation to live. Mutual dependencies have developed between Israel and the Jewish communities outside Israel. These dependencies have changed over time as these communities have responded to each other and as technology has brought geographically spread persons into new forms of communication to exchange ideas, cultures, and people. The exchanges have flowed in both directions. In the past, there were major commonalities of background and experience between Israeli and American Jews. Both groups were heavily influenced by their European origins, and many Jews were raised in families where Yiddish was spoken and were rooted in Yiddish culture. Many struggled with second-generation status; in other words, they were raised by parents who were not native to the country in which they were living. Many shared the cultural and social disruptions of secularization and assimilation; the struggles of economic depression, war, and Holocaust in Europe; and the rebuilding of the lives of Jewish refugees. They shared in the most tangible and dramatic ways the establishment and the rebuilding of the state of Israel. In short, there was a shared sense of origins, experiences, and objectives in the past, although each group was living in a different society and building a new community with an appropriate set of institutions. New generations have emerged in Israel and in the United States that are more distant from Europe and from the commonalities of language. For them, the European Holocaust is history, and immigration origins are far away, as are the struggles of pioneering in Israel and upward generational mobility in the United States. The different experiences of Israel and the United States as societies have shaped the lives, lifestyles, institutions, and values of the people of these communities. Not only have past commonalities declined but also new gaps have emerged. A key example is the role of women in both societies. American Jewish women have been in the forefront of social changes in their increasing independence from traditional gender roles and family relationships. Their high levels of education, career orientations, small family size, and high aspirations for themselves and their children have been truly revolutionary. Many American men have shared and adjusted to these changes in the workplace and in families. In contrast, Israeli men and women tend to have much more traditional segregated family and social

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roles. Family relationships are more patriarchal, work patterns for women are less tied to careers, and Israeli women lack the autonomy of American women. So this particular gap, with its implications for work and family, has grown in recent years. Religion is the most serious manifestation of the gap between Israel and Jewish communities external to Israel. Judaism has been highly politicized in Israel, with control over religious institutions exercised by one segment of Judaism (the Orthodox). Religious leaders of Israel and of communities outside Israel have so little in common that there is virtually no communication between them. The commitment of American Jews to the separation of religion and politics contrasts sharply with the clear interrelationship of religion and politics in Israel, with the long-standing power of religious-political parties, and with the conspicuous intervention of religious leaders in Israeli politics. Religious pluralism characterizes Jewish communities outside Israel, and multiple expressions of Judaism are normatively accepted and valued; only one Judaism, Orthodoxy, is defined as legitimate in Israeli society. Israel and its leaders are not committed to ethnic or religious pluralism in the same way that is characteristic of American Jewry. The trajectories of changes in these two communities are moving in the direction of straining the relationships between them, not in closing the gap.

The Palestinian Question How have the external conflicts with Arab Palestinians reshaped and affected the changes within the state? How have they influenced the way Israeli society relates to its Arab minority and to the broader Arab-Israeli conflict? What is the situation of the Palestinians who are residents of the areas that have been administered and occupied by the state of Israel since the 1967 war? Through the end of the 1970s, these territories were referred to officially as administered territories and incorporated the West Bank and Gaza (the latter and Jericho came under Palestinian administration in mid-1994). They became officially known by their Biblical names, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza—reflecting the ascendancy of the Likud government in 1977 and its more nationalistic policies with regard to these territories. The political symbolism of this name switch is of profound importance in understanding the relationship of the Israeli government to these areas, which encompassed around 180,000 Jewish settlers and over 2 million Arab Palestinians at the end of the twentieth century. The Israeli government has never officially incorporated into Israel the Arab Palestinian population living in these territories, except for East Jerusalem in 1967. The political rights of citizenship accorded to Arab Israelis were not extended to those living in the West Bank and Gaza. The incorporation of the large Arab population within “Greater Israel” would have threatened the demographic dominance of the Jewish population. In the 1970s and 1980s, a series of demographic projec-

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tions showed clearly that the differential growth rates of Israel’s population and the Arab-Palestinian population under its administrative control would result in a declining Jewish proportion and would entail the risk of losing a Jewish majority in a little over a generation. Ironically, some of the most nationalistic among the Israeli Jewish population argue for the incorporation of the Palestinian population. If they were successful, the demographic result would be the emergence of an ArabPalestinian demographic majority. Hence, the more extreme among the Israeli nationalists instead argued for the incorporation of the administered land within the state, without integrating the Palestinian population. The alternatives to returning control over the administered territories to the Palestinians ranged from the development of a quasi-colonial relationship between Israel and the Palestinian population under its administration (which in part occurred) to the evacuation of the Arab population, to be replaced by Israeli residents (which has occurred only marginally). The notion of a combined Israeli-Palestinian state shared between Jewish and Arab-Palestinian populations was not acceptable to either side of the conflict. Such a state would require a radical transformation of the institutions, values, and symbols that mark Israel as a Jewish state. The size of the Arab population of these territories is somewhat in dispute, since there are different estimates depending on how Palestinians are defined and by which officials. Over the two decades beginning in 1970, there was a substantial growth in the population of the West Bank and Gaza, increasing to over 1.6 million persons from less than 1 million in 1970, and growing at a rate that would double the population every generation. Although not accurate, comparisons over time reveal a tendency toward very high population growth rates with the attendant consequences. With the return of Gaza and its population to Palestinian control in 1994, over 2 million Palestinians are likely to have remained under Israeli administration (in addition to the Israeli-Arab population). The birth rate remains quite high, as are death rates, and the potential for continuing rapid growth is high as a result. The administration of these territories by Israel involves political control and the presence or involvement of government agencies such as health, education, agricultural regulation, and administrative justice. This administration implies that economic decisions are more likely to serve the interests of the Israeli economy and that investments in local control are minimal. Local Palestinian residents have not been part of the political process that has shaped these economic policies. Domestic needs and local economic development have been secondary to the needs of the Israeli government, including the recruitment of labor to work in Israel and the flow of Israeli goods into the territories. The occupational patterns of men in these territories are revealing. There are few persons employed in white-collar jobs (less than 10 percent), and the overwhelming majority (over 7 out of 10 of the employed males) are skilled and unskilled workers in industry. A significant proportion of these people work in the

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state of Israel, commuting on a daily basis. In 1992, three-fourths of Arab Palestinians commuting to Israel were working in the construction industry. Looking at the employers, the evidence identifies the Jewish role in construction in particular and in the stratification picture in general. Although the number of Jews in construction declined and the number of Arabs from the territories increased significantly, the proportion of employers remained overwhelmingly Jewish. About 80 percent of the employers in 1975 were Jewish, as were 76 percent in 1987. These patterns of employment changed in the years 2000 and 2001, as less daily commuting to the state of Israel was permitted and violence between Israelis and Palestinians became daily occurrences. The Palestinian workers from the territories were replaced by temporary guest workers from a wide range of countries. The identity of the Israeli-Arab population has been influenced, sharpened, and challenged in a variety of ways by the links between Israel and the Arab Palestinians in the territories. First and foremost, Arab Israelis became linked to Arab Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza in their national aspirations. The links have heightened their sensitivities to the value of ethnic networks and their own national origins and have confronted them with the choice between identifying as Arab Israelis or as displaced Palestinians. Arab Israelis are caught in the middle. They are beneficiaries of the system created to control and protect them as a minority and as citizens of the state of Israel, and yet they are viewed as disloyal Palestinians by their Arab-Palestinian cousins. Although Arab Israelis identify as Palestinians in some contexts, they have been living as citizens in Israel for generations. Lacking the structural opportunities to integrate residentially and regionally with Jewish Israelis, they are a minority with rights and entitlements as citizens of the state. Their identity may be challenged and conflicted, but they do not always identify fully with the aspirations of the Palestinians in the territories. Since 1967, the Arab-Israeli population has been pushed up in the social and economic hierarchy in Israel, ahead of the noncitizen Palestinians (but remaining below Jewish Israelis). They have relinquished part of the lowest paid positions and unskilled work to Palestinian day workers and have been mobile in the Israeli social class system. Even though Arab Israelis live and work and go to school in Israel and have access to the goods and welfare of Israeli society, they are connected ethnically to Palestinians. The linkages between Israel and the territories since 1967 has reinforced and legitimated the minority status of its Arab-Israeli population. Some Israelis view giving up land as a violation of a fundamental ideological principle; others are more willing to consider trading territory for a process that would lead to peace. Palestinian control over land occupied by Israel for a quarter of a century is countered by arguments over who has the “right” to the land (divine or political) and by the Israeli concern that terrorism and uncontrollable conflict, not peaceful neighborly relations, will result from Palestinian autonomy and statehood. Fear and distrust have often been replaced by hatred and by Israeli sup-

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pression of Palestinian self-determination. This may be slowly changing, but it is a long process that requires unfolding and has been frozen since the second intifada, [or] uprising, of the Palestinian population beginning in 2000. In the 1990s, the world’s international situation had altered, particularly with the collapse of the Soviet regime and its diminished influence in the Middle East, with the changing role of the Persian Gulf states, and with the increasing ethnicnational identity of the Palestinians. Israelis and Palestinians had been talking to one another, yet terrorism continued. It is clear that Israel will give up territory (how much and when is not clear) and that the Palestinians will have increasing control over their own autonomous political unit in the West Bank, parallel to the developing institutions and infrastructure in Gaza. There is likely to be a gradual end to the Israeli military presence in the West Bank and diminished control over local Palestinian institutions (health, education, welfare, and economic). The indicators all point to processes that will result in new relationships between Israelis and Palestinians. But, as in the past, these forward patterns toward peaceful resolution have been placed in serious jeopardy by terrorism and mistrust, by actions and reactions, by armed struggle and resistance. In the late 1930s and 1940s, when faced with a similar dilemma, the Jewish government in Palestine, under the leadership of [David] Ben-Gurion, opted for people over land and accepted the idea of the partition of the land of Israel. It was a decision reached not without considerable pain and internal conflict. Faced with a similar choice, the leadership of Israel at the end of the twentieth century reached similar conclusions. The costs of continuing with occupation and violence were too high, development and peace were too important for the internal development in Israeli society, and the toll on the quality of life in Israel and in the administered territories was too high to justify the continuation of the status quo. The dependency of both populations on other nations and on outside support is too great for either side to only follow its ideological imperatives.

The Ethnic-National Question The divisions between Jews and Arabs are different from the internal divisions among Jews, although they share some basic similarities. What can one infer from this understanding of the sources of these differences about the relative permanence of these divisions and whether Jewish and Arab ethnicity in Israel is transitional? If ethnic communities are continuous features of Israel’s emerging pluralism, how is national integration affected? In short, does ethnic continuity conflict with national Israeli integration? It is clear that the earlier entry into Israel’s society of European immigrants and their socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds facilitated their relatively successful socioeconomic mobility and their access to power, resources, and opportunity. European immigrants could take advantage of their connections to the

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European-dominated society and economy that they found established as the state was developing. Burdened by larger families, higher mortality and morbidity, and fewer resources than Jews from Western societies, Asian and African immigrants arrived in Israel later in time, with a higher level of dependency on sociopolitical institutions. They came from less-developed societies, with fewer urban skills and less-powerful economic networks, and they were therefore less able to compete with European-origin groups in Israel. The timing of immigration and the cultural differences between groups reinforced these structural background factors that divided Israeli Jews. The differential timing of immigration and the changing ethnic composition of immigrant streams created the contexts of residential concentration among Jews. Ethnic residential patterns, more so than the legacy of social and cultural origins, shape what ethnicity continues to mean in the process of nation-building in Israel. Residential concentration forged from political and economic considerations has become the key process marking off Israeli-born Jews from each other as it has been the demographic foundation of the continuing Jewish-Arab distinctiveness. New Israeli patterns have emerged among Jews that are neither fully “Western” nor “Middle Eastern.” Residential segregation and its implication for access to opportunity are critical in retaining ethnic distinctiveness. Ethnic residential concentration is linked to educational opportunities and, in turn, to jobs; it is likely to relate to intra-ethnic marriages and a reinforced sense of ethnic self-identity, pride, and culture, connecting ethnic origins and families into networks of relationships. Ethnic residential concentration among Jews and between Jews and Arabs reinforces the overlap of ethnicity and socioeconomic factors through the impact of locational factors on access to educational and economic opportunities. Together, residential and socioeconomic concentrations shape the continuing salience of ethnic distinctiveness in Israel. When groups are integrated residentially, ethnic differences become marginal in their social, economic, and political importance; where residential segregation in Israel has persisted, it has become the primary engine of ethnic persistence and inequality. Although ethnic segregation is associated at times with poverty and lower socioeconomic status, it also implies supportive and family networks that shape the lives of many Israelis. Local institutions serve as further bases for ethnic continuity. These include ethnic family networks, economic networks that are ethnically based and some local institutions— synagogues, community centers, political interests, health clinics, and leisure-time and cultural activities (sports and music, for example)—that are concentrated among particular ethnic groups. Jewish ethnic continuities persist despite government policies and ideological orientations to deny the salience of ethnicity. The Arab-Jewish distinction is driven by these same processes of economic concentration, residential segregation, and institutional separateness. It also reflects the political legacy of the broader Arab-Israeli conflict, the role of Palestinians in their quest for national identity, and the importance of Jewishness in the political shape

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of Israeli society and its symbols. The ethnic identity of Arab Israelis can never be fully Israeli as long as being Israeli involves a clear and unmistakable Jewish cultural component, Jewish historical constructions, and dominant Jewish symbols. The economic integration of Israeli Arabs makes their distinctiveness sharper and their powerlessness obvious and does not increase their social integration. The Arab population of Israel is likely to struggle with the conflicts of their identity for another generation and with their unequal access to opportunities as citizens of the state. Jewish and Arab residential segregation in Israel and the resultant distinctiveness and disadvantage of Israeli Arabs are unlikely to be resolved without major internal changes in the society, its institutions, values, and political system. Barring such fundamental changes in the Jewish state of Israel, the residential segregation of Arab Israelis will continue, and the consequences for socioeconomic inequalities will persist. Only local control over institutions and the development of local opportunities for socioeconomic mobility in Arab-Israeli communities can reduce their disadvantaged status. How Israeli Arabs will be linked to autonomous Palestinian areas and Arab states remains unclear. Adapted from Chapter 12 of Calvin Goldscheider, Israel’s Changing Society: Population, Ethnicity, and Development, Second Edition (2002, Westview Press).

CHAPTER 13 QR

Syria’s Threat to Israel Hirsch Goodman

From the Golan Heights, artillery can command the north of Israel. Israel captured the Golan from Syria in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and then again in the war of 1973, and it has retained control of the strategic heights ever since. Any talk of peace between Israel and Syria will center on the return of the Golan to Syria. Syrian president Hafez Assad held promising peace talks with the Israelis, but with his death in 2000, the negotiations ended without a conclusive agreement. Bashar Assad succeeded his father, and the prospects for Syrian-Israeli peace looked bright for a while, but again no agreement has been concluded. In fact, Israel remains on the defensive against military threats from Syria. In September 2007, Israeli jets destroyed a plutonium reactor in Syria out of concern that it could be used to develop nuclear weapons. Israel’s attack was aided by the tacit cooperation of both Turkey and the United States. But the concern is not just with the Syrian threat in itself but with a concerted action against Israel by Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza. Syria is a major conduit through which Iranian arms and other support flow to Hezbollah and Hamas. As Hirsch Goodman emphasizes, Israel’s foreign policy strategy toward Syria is not simply to establish peace between the two countries but to “draw Syria away from the sphere of Iran, Hezbollah, the Islamic Jihad, and Hamas.” Meanwhile, learning their lesson from the unexpectedly difficult struggle Israel had against Hezbollah in 2006, Israeli military planners have targeted thousands of Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, should the need to strike arise again. However, Assad’s regime is considerably weakened by the internal turmoil currently wracking the country. Because of his oft-times brutal crackdown on dissidents in his country, Assad is increasingly isolated even among the region’s Arab states and faces as well the sharply negative American assessment of Syria’s connections to Iran and its nurturing of Islamist forces. Given all that, Goodman concludes,“a war with Israel is surely the last thing on Assad’s mind.” Hirsch Goodman is a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University and a former strategic fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. This reading is excerpted from The Anatomy of Israel’s Survival.

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he north of Israel is breathtakingly beautiful all year round, but in the spring it is magnificent. Blossoms carpet the landscape and the fields are green and lush, grapes heavy on the vine. Over half a billion birds migrate through the Galilee each year and the Hula, once a swamp, is now a national park thriving with wildlife, both flora and fauna. The beauty of the area, however, belies security realities there with the Galilee wedged between Syria and Lebanon. Israel conquered the Golan from the Syrians in 1967, and again in 1973. A year later there was a UN-brokered cease-fire between the sides and despite the enmity between them, the border has remained quiet since then. Syria under the Assads, on the other hand, has been at the center of the Middle East’s axis of evil and, despite attempts at supposed peacemaking with Israel, demonstrably remains so. It is a conduit to antigovernment forces in Iraq, a base for rejectionist and fundamentalist Islamic nationalists, including Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, and both a supplier and conduit of weapons, training, money, and support to Hezbollah. On the face of things, it ought to be far easier for Israel to give back the Golan in return for peace with Syria than the West Bank to the Palestinians. There are only twenty settlements up there, including one town, Katzrin, with a population of 7,000, almost half the total number of settlers on the Heights. Almost all the settlers on the Golan would accept proper and decent compensation if they had to move. There is an anti-give-back-the-Golan movement in Israel, but it arouses none of the passion of the West Bank and would not be a serious impediment to implementing a peace treaty. Peace has ostensibly always broken down over the issue of whether the Syrians would have a foothold on the Kinneret—the Sea of Galilee. Hafez al-Assad demanded it, claiming he wanted to have a barbecue on its shores with his feet in the water, and the Israelis have always been reluctant to have Syria anywhere near the country’s major water source. In truth neither of the sides found making peace a major imperative; they could live without it. The inability of the sides to make peace has not meant that the situation has remained static. While firmly in power, Syrian president Bashar Assad made overtures toward peace, first through the Americans and later with the Turks, and still dangles the hope from time to time, but in the background he has been preparing for war. In the nonconventional realm, Syria has continued to invest heavily in chemical weapons, or a “poor man’s nuclear bomb,” as Israeli analysts have called Syria’s chemical-capable missile force. The real shock, however, came at midnight [on] September 6, 2007, when the world discovered that Syria was on its way to acquiring a rich man’s bomb as well. Initially mystery surrounded the destruction of an unnamed Syrian facility somewhere in the mountains of the Deir Ez-Zor province. Within days, however, it was clear that Israeli jets with American and Turkish connivance, the latter allowing Israeli jets to fly through Turkish airspace on their way to Syria, had destroyed a nascent Syrian plutonium enrichment plant secretly acquired from North Korea.

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Overall, Israeli strategists believe they can deal with the Syrian threat but are not complacent about it. Israeli planners continue to take seriously the idea of a Syrian threat, especially one launched in tandem with attacks from Lebanon and Gaza. The discovery of the plutonium reactor was yet another indicator that Syria was not sitting on its hands. Together with Hezbollah and Hamas, and even without them, the Syrians can hurt Israel badly, especially if they have the element of surprise. To do so, however, would be suicidal. Israel has made it clear to Assad that among the hundreds of targets that have been programmed into Israeli attack systems, his family and all they possess will be prime among them. On the other hand, Israel is fairly well prepared to absorb a conventional attack. Many homes have sealed and protected rooms built by law, and there are ample neighborhood bomb shelters for those who don’t. Major damage could be caused by a salvo of several hundred missiles fired in a short period of time, but Israel would not take long to hit back, so a Syrian attack can be assumed to be limited in time and scope, little being achieved after the first missiles have landed. Israel’s response would be massive and sustained. A chemical attack by Syria would warrant a nonconventional Israeli response, something the Syrians would not even want to consider, one supposes. Therefore, in conventional terms, while Syria remains a factor in any strategic equation, the real incentive, if any, for Israel to make peace with Syria would be to draw Syria away from the sphere of Iran, Hezbollah, the Islamic Jihad, and Hamas, and to stop being a negative player in Iraq. The military benefits to Israel of peace with Syria are ambivalent, but changing the regional strategic balance by drawing Syria away from the rejectionists and fundamentalists and into the moderate camp would be a major achievement. When Assad first came into power, there was some hope he would take Syria down a new path. He began his term by releasing political prisoners, allowing some freedom of political expression, and loosening up on Internet use. But the “old guard” soon put him back on track and away from any radical ideas that could jeopardize their hold on power. They also steered him in the direction of his father’s old tricks, pulling the strings in Lebanon, helping antigovernment forces in Iraq, and acting as Iran’s messenger boy in the region, delivering arms and ammunition to Hezbollah and others. Hezbollah also underestimated Israel’s response to the war it started in 2006. Its head, Hassan Nasrallah, said as much in an open interview after the war, stating that had he known the ferocity of Israel’s reaction, he would have handled the situation differently. The war was sparked by a Hezbollah raid over the Israeli border and the killing and kidnapping of soldiers. It ended with Hezbollah’s strongholds in Beirut, its missile arsenals, its underground infrastructure in the South, and much of its command structure in ruins. Along with the punishment heaped on Hezbollah, Lebanon’s infrastructure was bombed and destroyed, including refineries, roads, and bridges. By 2010 Hezbollah, with Iranian and Syrian help, had bounced back again. The organization now

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has some 45,000 missiles stockpiled, some with a range of two hundred kilometers or more, and much of its military infrastructure is re-embedded in 250 Shiite villages in southern Lebanon, within kilometers of the Israeli border. Nasrallah has yet to come out from his underground shelter, and he speaks to his minions via videotape. Hezbollah is defined by the military as Israel’s number-one regional enemy but until 2006 was considered a tactical problem, not a strategic one. In 2006, at the outbreak of the war, Israeli military planners had 189 Hezbollah targets in their sights. Israeli military sources now claim to have 4,000 to 6,000, and to prove their point, in March 2011 the Israeli military provided the Washington Post with a map detailing 950 Hezbollah sites in southern Lebanon the Israelis considered “hostile.” Hezbollah had thought these secret, and knowing they had been revealed could not have been a source of much joy to either Hezbollah or their Iranian patrons. The military has redefined the way it sees Lebanon. It has gone from being seen as a “victim” country and unwilling battlefield for Israel’s wars with others to being a country governed by a troika of enemies: Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran. The Shiites, Hezbollah’s constituency, are the country’s largest ethnic group, at 30 percent of the population, and unlike the Christians and Sunnis, are united and loyal to Hezbollah. They control Parliament, have an army more sophisticated, better trained, and better financed than the Lebanese army, and through loyalists control much of the Lebanese military forces as well. Unbelievably, despite this, until March 2011 the Lebanese army continued to receive over $100 million in US aid annually, which is not unlike America’s provision of Stinger missiles to the Taliban in the late 1970s. The Israeli command is not threatened by either Hezbollah or Syria. They feel they have responses to both. In both cases the strategy is one of disproportionate response to any attack. They feel they have enough early warning, even with the technical advances both Hezbollah and Syria have made. They have contingency plans that cover all of Israel’s airfields being attacked simultaneously and have developed an array of attack weapons that do not depend on the air force, mainly drone-based and highly accurate, and destructive cruise missiles that can be launched from land and sea. Most of the Israeli air force is protected by bunkers and would survive any initial attack. Runways are quickly repaired, and for emergencies the country has built some major highways specifically as alternate runways should the country’s airfields be attacked. If attacked, Israel will launch a massive counterstrike with cruise missiles and drones on hundreds of predetermined targets with pinpoint accuracy. The internal turmoil that hit Syria, as with the other dictatorships in the Middle East in early 2011, has weakened the regime considerably, if not heralded its end—though probably only after a long, bitter, and bloody internal conflict. Assad has used his security forces brutally against the demonstrators, firing directly

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into crowds, arresting hundreds, executing soldiers who refused to obey orders, breaking kneecaps of young demonstrators with hammers and rifle butts. By May 2011, almost a thousand people had been killed amid escalating violence that only looked as if it could get worse. Even before the current wave of internal unrest, it was the assessment in Israel that despite his involvement with every negative force in the Middle East and beyond, Bashar Assad does not want war. While some Arab leaders respond to internal crisis by goading Israel into a war, as has been the case with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah on the Lebanese border, Syria would have little to gain from it. Syria is in America’s sights because of its negative role in Iraq and involvement with the Jihadist forces, and it is doubtful whether Iran would come to its aid. If it did so, it would risk giving Israel a legitimate excuse to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and the 45,000 missiles it has stockpiled with Hezbollah in Lebanon. And now, with [Syria’s] internal problems, a war with Israel is surely the last thing on Assad’s mind. Adapted from Chapter 9 of Hirsch Goodman, The Anatomy of Israel’s Survival (2011, PublicAffairs).

CHAPTER 14 QR

The Iranian Nuclear Threat Against Israel Steven R. David

Steven David contends that Israel is unique among all countries in facing explicit threats of physical annihilation. A nuclear-armed Iran would represent the foremost of those threats. Yet, would Iran truly choose to destroy Israel even if it could? David examines three scenarios in which Iran might be postulated to attack Israel with nuclear weapons. The first assumes that Iran becomes convinced it has an overwhelming firststrike capability that would extinguish the Jewish state. However, even the almost instantaneous destruction of Israeli cities, government, and society would still leave Israeli submarines capable of launching a return barrage of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, ensuring that Iran’s attack would result in “national suicide.” But suppose national suicide were not a deterrent for a religiously fanatic Iranian leadership. Volatile rhetoric aside, Iranian behavior has consistently been “relatively pragmatic and conservative” and has shown no signs of embracing cataclysmic martyrdom. Iran even chose to stand idly by as its presumed cat’s-paws, Hezbollah and Hamas, battled Israel in 2006 and 2009, respectively. Iran—Shiite and non-Arab as it is—moderates its actions to avoid direct conflict with its Sunni Arab neighbors. David observes that Iran soberly weighs its own survival more heavily than either religious dogma or hatred of Israel. A third possibility would be for Iran to transfer nuclear weapons to proxy militant groups, such as Hezbollah or Hamas. But Iran could not afford to place its survival in the hands of groups it cannot control. That the Iranian source of the weapons would be knowable, or merely suspected, would be cause for nuclear retaliation from Israel. Conversely, although possible Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities are currently much discussed, even a “successful” attack would “unleash tens of thousands of missiles against Israel” from Iran and its Hezbollah and Hamas allies. Concludes David, “In the end, the likelihood remains that Israel will allow Iran to become a nuclear-armed state.” Steven R. David is professor of international relations and former director of Jewish studies at Johns Hopkins University. His publications include Catastrophic Consequences: Civil Wars and American Interests and Choosing Sides: Alignment and Realignment in the Third World. This reading is adapted from David’s chapter in Israel and the United States: Six Decades of US-Israeli Relations, edited by Robert O. Freedman. 167

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lone among the countries of the world, Israel’s very existence is openly challenged. Leaders of countries, groups, and international organizations periodically call for its destruction. Some of these calls represent “soft” threats in that they do not seek Israel’s physical annihilation. Proposals to make Israel a binational state “for all its citizens” or to simply allow a non-Jewish majority to emerge in Israel also fall into this category. Other threats, however, call for the physical destruction of Israel in which most if not all of its inhabitants would be killed or expelled. Defeat in conventional war would likely bring about such an outcome. This is a fate Israel has dodged repeatedly since its first conflict, the 1948 War of Independence— a war that if Israel had lost would have ended the Zionist experiment then and there. Today, however, neither calls for a one-state solution nor even the prospect of massive war pose the greatest threat to Israel’s existence. Rather, if Israel is to undergo what has been termed “state death,” the cause is most likely to be attack by nuclear weapons, and the country wielding those weapons is most likely to be Iran. Nuclear weapons are unique because so much destructive power is contained in a small package. A single nuclear weapon the size of a suitcase can obliterate a city and all its inhabitants. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was “only” twelve kilotons, far smaller than many nuclear weapons that are likely to be used today. Making matters worse, the massive power of nuclear arms is typically combined with delivery systems such as missiles and jet aircraft that can reach their targets in a matter of minutes. Israel would be especially vulnerable to nuclear destruction because it is so small and its population highly concentrated. Israel is slightly smaller than New Jersey. More than 75 percent of its Jewish population is wedged into a narrow coastal strip from Ashkelon to Nahariya. The three cities of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa alone make up nearly half the population and are the economic, political, and cultural heart of Israel. Only a handful of nuclear weapons, perhaps no more than three, would be enough to end Israel as a Jewish state. Although no country could withstand a nuclear strike with equanimity, few match Israel in terms of its sheer vulnerability to a state-ending attack. The destruction of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem would wound Israel in a way that would make recovery highly improbable. Many countries and groups in the Middle East seek nuclear capability. Nuclear programs of one sort or another exist in Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Libya. None, however, is far enough along in the development of nuclear weapons to pose any real danger. In two cases—Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007—when it looked like enemies of Israel were getting close to making nuclear arms, Israel destroyed their reactors with fighter-bombers, crippling their capability to become nuclear-armed states. The threat that it would do so again should another adversary come close to developing nuclear weapons hangs forever in the air. Several militant groups have also expressed an interest in acquiring nuclear weapons, with al-Qaeda the most ominous possibility. However, making nuclear weapons, and

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particularly manufacturing the fissile material necessary for a nuclear explosion, is beyond the capability of any substate group. So, although theft or purchase of nuclear weapons by terrorists remains an ongoing concern, Israel need not worry about nonstate actors making nuclear weapons on their own. What Israel does worry about, and with good reason, is the prospect of Iran’s acquiring nuclear weapons. This concern stems first from Iranian leaders’ calls for Israel’s destruction. At a speech delivered at the World Without Zionism Conference, held in 2005, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, “The occupying regime [Israel] must be wiped off the map.” Although others have attempted to declare that the translation was not accurate, editors of the New York Times ascertained that was indeed what he said, a contention supported by official Iranian translations including the one on Ahmadinejad’s own website.

The Iranian Nuclear Program If Iran wants to destroy Israel, few would dispute that it is rapidly acquiring the nuclear weapons to do so. Iran’s nuclear program is long-standing, but it is only in the past decade or so that it has really taken off. The nuclear program began with help from the United States, which was eager to support Iran, then under the proAmerican shah. In 1957, the United States concluded a nuclear cooperation agreement with Iran as part of its Atoms for Peace Program and, a decade later, sold Iran a small, five-megawatt reactor designed for research. Spurred on by American encouragement, the shah announced in 1974 plans to build twentythree nuclear reactors, a huge number for any country but particularly high for a state whose ample oil and gas resources seemingly precluded a need for nuclear power. At the time of his downfall in 1979, the shah had concluded contracts for several nuclear reactors, with one reactor, at Bushehr, nearly completed. All this momentum came to naught when Ayatollah [Ruhollah] Khomeini came to power and promptly ended all developments in the nuclear field, calling them “unIslamic.” The catastrophic Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988 changed Khomeini’s mind about the advisability of nuclear weapons. In a previously classified letter, Khomeini wrote to former Iranian president [Akbar Hashemi] Rafsanjani at the end of the war declaring that Iraq’s use of chemical weapons and the indifference of the international community demonstrated Iran’s need to restart its nuclear program. The resulting program remained largely secret until 2002, when an Iranian exile group revealed that Iran had been working for decades on enriching uranium in Natanz. Enriching uranium to the point where a nuclear explosion can be achieved is no easy task. The isotope of uranium needed for a nuclear bomb—U-235—exists naturally but makes up only 0.7 percent of uranium. For a bomb, that 0.7 percent needs to be enriched, or purified, to much higher levels. There are several ways

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this can be done, the most common being to convert uranium to a gas and funnel the uranium through thousands of centrifuges where the lighter U-235 isotope gradually becomes separated from the heavier (and nonfissionable) U-238 isotope. Uranium enriched or purified to around 3 percent can be used as a fuel for many reactors, while uranium enriched to around 90 percent can be used for a nuclear bomb. The same centrifuges required to enrich uranium for the peaceful use of nuclear energy can be employed to further enrich the uranium to make a bomb; hence, there is no clear way to distinguish a peaceful enrichment program from one dedicated to making nuclear explosives. This enables countries like Iran to maintain a large enrichment capability to make bomb-quality uranium, all the while maintaining they are just making fuel for peaceful nuclear reactors. Making matters worse, Iran has already amassed a large quantity of uranium enriched to 3 percent. The physics of enrichment are such that it is much easier to purify uranium from 3 percent to 90 percent than it is to go from natural uranium to 3 percent. Iran can therefore continue to lightly enrich uranium consistent with the provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (of which it is a signatory), gradually increasing its supply. If the Iranian leadership decides to develop a nuclear weapon, it can use the existing stocks of 3 percent enriched uranium as a base (and some enriched to 20 percent) and then further enrich the uranium to 90 percent, thus acquiring the capability to build a nuclear bomb. There is no doubt that Iran has a major program in uranium enrichment capable of making enough fissile material for a bomb. By the end of 2009, Iran had already amassed over 8,000 centrifuges in Natanz, giving it the capability to produce two or more nuclear weapons per year. Moreover, Natanz is not the only enrichment plant run by the Iranians. In September 2009 President Barack Obama, along with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, announced that Iran was building a hidden enrichment facility in a mountain near the holy city of Qom. Neither the Qom nor the Natanz plants was revealed to International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors as required by the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Intelligence agencies from Israel, Britain, and France have all asserted that Iran is actively working on nuclear weapons, a conclusion given support by the International Atomic Energy Agency itself. Although an exact date of Iran’s acquiring nuclear arms is difficult to pinpoint, the revised American estimate of between 2012 and 2015 is most likely on the mark. Having developed nuclear weapons, Iran would have few difficulties launching them against Israel. Iran has about one hundred Shahab-3 ballistic missiles, some of which have ranges up to 1,300 miles, enabling them to hit virtually any target in Israel. Iran is working on other ballistic missiles with even greater ranges and payloads, enhancing its ability to strike at Israel with more weapons. Iran is also developing cruise missiles—essentially flying torpedoes—that could be launched from ships or from ground sites close to Israel armed with nuclear warheads. Rus-

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sia is supplying Iran long-range bombers, including the Tu-22 Backfire and the SU-24 Fencer, each of which has the range to reach Israeli targets. Iran’s ties with militant groups at war with Israel, most notably Hamas and Hizbollah, offer opportunities to launch short-range missiles into Israel and possibly even smuggle a nuclear device into the Jewish state.

Threat 1: An Iranian Disarming First-Strike Capability The view that Iran is well on its way toward acquiring nuclear weapons capable of reaching Israel by a variety of means is not in serious dispute. The question remains, however, as to how much of a threat to Israel’s existence a nuclear-armed Iran would be. After all, the United States has confronted nuclear adversaries throughout its history, with no major ill effects. These rivals included the Soviet Union, which at one point aimed over 10,000 nuclear weapons at the American heartland, and China, which had far fewer weapons but was led by a radical regime that openly discounted the dangers of nuclear war. Many scholars, most notably the political theorist Kenneth Waltz, have argued that far from causing war, nuclear weapons bring about peace. In this view, leaders recognize that nuclear conflict with other nuclear-armed states would be suicidal and therefore would never be undertaken. A nuclear-armed Iran may bluster and posture, but at the end of the day, its leadership would recognize that attacking Israel with nuclear weapons would mean the end of Iran as a country, to say nothing of their personal demise as well. There are many problems with this rosy scenario, most of which stem from the view that the success of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War might not apply to contemporary Iran. Deterrence will not halt an Iranian strike if the country’s leadership decides to launch a first strike that disarms Israel’s retaliatory forces. Such a strike could come out of the blue but probably would arise from some crisis. One can envision a situation where Israel and one of Iran’s proxies, such as Hizbollah, were engaged in a shooting war that threatened to escalate. Iran might then launch its nuclear weapons first, especially if it believed Israel was preparing to launch a strike on its own. If Iran did launch first and successfully disarmed Israel, little would stand in its way of finishing the job and totally annihilating the Jewish state. After becoming a nuclear power, therefore, Iran could conceivably develop nuclear forces that threaten Israel’s retaliatory nuclear arms and, should the Iranians become convinced that they have achieved a disarming first-strike capability, there would be little to stop them from launching an attack. Although it would be foolish to eliminate this possibility, the prospect of a rational Iranian leadership believing it could disarm Israel’s nuclear retaliatory capability is difficult to accept. Israel maintains a robust nuclear force of some one hundred to two hundred nuclear warheads deployed on a triad of weapons, each leg of which would likely survive an Iranian assault to deliver a devastating counterstrike of its

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own. On land, Israel maintains a fleet of Jericho ballistic missiles, with ranges that reach over 2,000 miles, enabling the country to attack virtually any target in Iran. The missiles are stored in limestone caves, complicating any effort to destroy them before they can be launched. In the air, Israel has squadrons of F-15 and F-16 fighters, nuclear capable and (with in-flight refueling) able to reach any point in Iran and return to Israel. The aircraft reside in blast-proof hangars and can be ready to take off at a moment’s notice, before any Iranian missiles could reach Israel. Most important, Israel has three Dolphin submarines from Germany and is planning to purchase three more. Each submarine has twenty-four cruise missiles, each of which can be launched with a nuclear warhead while the submarine remains submerged. These submarines are undetectable, making them invulnerable to any Iranian attack. Even if Iran launched a devastating nuclear strike that disarmed Israel and eradicated the country, the Israeli submarines would be able to wreak total destruction on Iran in return. No rational Iranian leadership could convince itself that it could hit Israel with nuclear weapons without committing national suicide. Insofar as nuclear deterrence works, the first-strike option for Iran is off the table.

Threat 2: Iranian Religious Fanaticism The second reason nuclear deterrence might not keep Israel safe is the fear that the Iranian leadership, because of fanatical religious beliefs, may simply be impossible to deter. Deterrence is the ability to persuade someone not to do something by threatening them with unacceptable punishment if they do. The view that the Iranian leadership cannot be deterred rests on the assumption that those controlling the nuclear weapons are driven by fanatical religious beliefs so that it makes sense to destroy Israel even if it means bringing about their own annihilation. The notion of Iran as a “suicide nation” has its roots in the view that many of the Iranian leaders believe in the Hidden Imam, the last of the Twelve Imams who, as a child, supposedly did not die but is awaiting a return to earth. Those who share this belief see the return of the Hidden Imam in a similar vein as some Christians view the Second Coming, that is, he will return to restore order and peace to a world gone wrong. The fear is that Ahmadinejad and many other Iranian leaders’ belief in a Hidden Imam will cause them to pave the way for his return. Before the Hidden Imam will reappear, the world has to undergo a massive, cataclysmic struggle. Only then will the Imam come to earth and create a paradise for believers while condemning the infidels to a horrific fate. That belief, combined with the celebration of martyrdom of the Basiji and a tradition of anti-Semitism in Shia thought, suggests that Ahmadinejad might provoke a nuclear war with Israel, creating the upheaval necessary to hasten the Imam’s return. The notion that Iranian leaders are impossible to deter is hotly contested by a wide range of military and political analysts. They first reject the notion that the

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Iranian leadership is led by religious extremists who welcome martyrdom. The specter of an irrational Iran embracing martyrdom becomes all the more farfetched when examining Iranian behavior since the 1979 revolution. Although the Iranian leadership has used volatile rhetoric (especially with regard to Israel) and has spoken often of the need to pursue Islamist goals, its behavior has been relatively pragmatic and conservative. Far from seeking to promote Islamic revolution throughout the world, Iran has often behaved with restraint. It is a major supporter of both Hizbollah and Hamas but stood idly by when each was pummeled by Israel in the wars of 2006 and 2009. Iran claims to be concerned about the plight of Muslims the world over but kept a low profile while Russia slaughtered thousands of Muslim Chechens over the past twenty years. The United States is regularly denounced as the “Great Satan” and Israel as the “Little Satan,” but Iran has been careful to avoid direct conflict with either country. Iran seeks to spread its influence throughout the Arab world but has been moderate in its efforts for fear of provoking a backlash from the overwhelmingly Sunni states. Iran’s distaste of dealing with infidels has not constrained its efforts to pursue economic and diplomatic ties with Russia and China. Even the quest for nuclear weapons can be seen as a means of defending Iran against very real threats from nucleararmed adversaries, such as the United States and Israel. Seen in this light, the best guide to Iranian policy is not religiously driven extremism but rather the desire of a leadership to survive in a very dangerous neighborhood. That survival requires that Iran not let either religious dogma or intense hatred of Israel get out of hand. Instead, Iran, like all other nuclear-armed states, will do whatever it can to not allow nuclear war to erupt, either by design or by miscalculation. Nuclear deterrence, it would seem, will be alive and well in Tehran, as it is with all other countries facing nuclear-armed adversaries.

Threat 3: Militants Armed with Nuclear Weapons from Iran A third path by which Israel may become the target of Iranian nuclear weapons is if Iran transferred nuclear weapons to militant groups who in turn used them against Israel. Iran has already sent thousands of missiles to the Lebanese militant group Hizbollah, which went to war with Israel in the summer of 2006. Iran has also been a key supporter of Hamas in Gaza, which fought Israel in the winter of 2008–2009. Both Hamas and Hizbollah openly call for Israel’s destruction. If Iran provided either group with nuclear weapons, it is conceivable they would use them against Israel. Attacking Israel with nuclear weapons would not pose an insurmountable problem for either group. A suicide aircraft, a boat headed for shore, a device smuggled in a shipping container, or maybe a primitive cruise missile could all be employed. Since the nuclear weapon would not come directly from Iran, the Iranian leadership might be convinced they could avoid retaliation. A loose nuke, after all, could come from several sources, including transfer by a

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sympathetic military officer in Pakistan, theft from Russia, or purchase from North Korea. A Hamas or Hizbollah nuclear strike then serves two ends: it delivers a mortal blow to Israel while preserving deniability for Iran. Though tantalizing, the idea that Iranian leaders would transfer nuclear weapons to Hamas, Hizbollah, or anyone is far-fetched. Much progress has been achieved in the world of nuclear accountability—determining the source of a nuclear weapon by examining the aftereffects of an explosion. Iran could never be certain that Israel would be unable to determine that it supplied the nuclear weapon, all the more so because Israel would not demand proof that would stand up in a court of law. Rather, the Israelis would simply have to suspect Iran was behind a nuclear attack to order a devastating retaliation. The very fact that such an attack occurred might be enough for the Israeli leadership to respond against Iran, a possibility any Iranian leadership could not discount. It is notable that although Iran has transferred missiles and other conventional weaponry to Hamas and Hizbollah, it has refrained from providing chemical or biological weapons, correctly seeing them as a red line not to be crossed. If Iran transferred nuclear weapons to Hizbollah or Hamas, it would be placing its survival in the hands of groups it cannot control, an action that any rational Iranian government would almost certainly reject.

Staying Alive: Responding to the Iranian Threat Stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons will not be easy, as the Iranian leadership sees nuclear arms as the key to their survival. By acquiring nuclear weapons, Iran is able to deter a nuclear strike from its enemies, especially Israel and the United States. A nuclear-armed Iran would be less likely to be a target of an American invasion, a lesson Saddam Hussein failed to appreciate, much to his regret. Although the mullahs are not popular in Iran, their efforts to acquire nuclear arms are embraced across the Iranian political spectrum. Most Iranians see efforts to halt their nuclear technology as another form of Western imperialism, of keeping Iran down, preventing it from assuming its rightful place as a regional hegemon. By agreeing to halt nuclear developments, especially in the light of Israel’s acknowledged nuclear arsenal, the Iranian leaders would be surrendering to their worst enemies. Such an open sign of capitulation would be politically disastrous, giving fuel to the perception that the mullahs are weak and ripe for overthrow. Although halting the Iranian nuclear program will be difficult, it is not impossible. Policymakers have suggested a range of approaches that some say hold out the hope of preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons or, if they do, from attacking Israel. These approaches include diplomacy, economic sanctions, creation of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, various coercive actions short of war, establishment of an effective defense, and a military strike. Israeli policy

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would play only a marginal role in the first two paths but would be central to the others. Although there is disagreement as to which approach to follow, there is a consensus that none of the choices is promising, with the challenge being to choose the least bad option. Diplomacy is attractive as a relatively cost-free, nonviolent approach to persuading Iran not to develop nuclear weapons. Those advocating a diplomatic approach suggest that the United States attempt to meet the legitimate fears of the Iranian leadership by guaranteeing that America will not seek to topple them. The United States could also help matters by toning down its anti-Iranian rhetoric and seeking a dialogue based on mutual respect and noninterference in Iranian internal affairs. America’s European allies can help by actively seeking warmer relations with Iran, a position for which they are especially well qualified since they do not carry the negative baggage of the United States, with its history of anti-Iranian policies and strong support for Israel. With its hold on power reassured, the hope is that Iran will be willing to forgo its nuclear aspirations and reap the benefits of closer ties with the West. Diplomacy may be worthwhile to pursue, but few believe it will convince the Iranians to halt their nuclear program. The diplomatic route has already been followed, with nothing to show for it. In 2004, Britain, France, and Germany succeeded in getting Iran to halt its enrichment of uranium and agree to more intrusive inspections of its nuclear programs by the International Atomic Energy Agency. That agreement, however, came about less due to the persuasive powers of European diplomats than Iran’s fears that the United States, feeling flush after a successful invasion of Iraq, would next turn its military force to Iran. Once the United States got bogged down in Iraq and the threat of American intervention in Iran evaporated, the mullahs quickly reneged on the agreement with the Europeans, restarted their enrichment of uranium, and again restricted the scope of IAEA inspections. American diplomacy has fared no better. Many complained that the Bush administration’s harsh words (including Iran in the “axis of evil”) poisoned relations between the two countries and that a more conciliatory approach would transform the hostile relationship. Nevertheless, Barack Obama came into office and attempted to warm relations with Iran, only to be summarily rebuffed. Given that the mullahs feed off their hostility to the United States, for them to compromise with the “Great Satan” would be to undermine much of their legitimacy. An American guarantee not to seek the toppling of the Iranian regime most likely would not be believed and would be rejected even if the Iranian leaders thought it genuine. Keeping lines of communication open makes sense, as does attempting to limit hostile discourse. It makes less sense to believe that diplomacy will cause the Iranian leaders to change any of their policies regarding the development of nuclear weapons. At first glance, economic sanctions appear to be a powerful tool to influence Iran’s decision on whether to move ahead with nuclear weapons development. Iran

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is very much a part of the globalized world, depending on trade and investment to keep its economy afloat. Oil exports alone make up fully 80 percent of Iran’s state budget and without them Iran’s economy would collapse. Although a major oil producer, Iran needs to import 40 percent of its refined gasoline products. Cutting off those imports would lead to widespread shortages of gasoline for transport and industry, bringing the Iranian economy to a screeching halt. So, why hasn’t the United Nations called for an embargo on Iranian oil? Why haven’t the countries of the world agreed not to sell Iran any refined gasoline? The answer is obvious: too many countries want to buy Iranian oil, sell it refined gasoline, or simply do business with Iran because it serves their interests. China buys oil and natural gas from Iran, Russia is selling Iran nuclear reactors while helping the country develop its oil and natural gas reserves, and many European states fear a rise in the price of oil should Iranian petroleum be removed from the market. Stopping Iran’s production of nuclear weapons is less important to much of the world than making money. As such, when the United Nations imposes sanctions on Iran, as it has done on four occasions thus far, they are modest, focusing on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and mullahs, but not to the extent that anyone is seriously harmed or inconvenienced. Sanctions imposed by the European Union and the United States in 2010 have been more biting. Gasoline imports to Iran have been cut, access to most foreign banks has been denied, and shipping has been curtailed due to difficulties of acquiring insurance. Still, few believe these measures will be enough to convince the Iranians to give up their nuclear plans. Economic sanctions might indeed work to persuade the Iranian leadership to change course, but only if key countries of the world agree to act in ways that would cripple the Iranian economy. That has not happened yet and there are few signs that it will. Diplomacy and sanctions are largely out of Israel’s hands to pursue, but Israel can pursue a range of coercive actions short of war, perhaps in coordination with the United States, to mitigate or eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat. Israel could, for example, seek to intimidate or eliminate Iranian nuclear scientists in order to halt or delay Iran’s nuclear program. In the 1960s, Israel sent letter bombs to German scientists developing ballistic missiles for Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, effectively ending the program. The number of Iranian scientists, however, is far too large and the difficulties of attacking them far too great for such an operation to be successful. Regime change appears to be an attractive option given the resistance to the mullahs, as seen in the widespread protests in the summer of 2009. The emergence of a democratic government in Iran may not end its quest for nuclear arms, but the threat it would pose to Israel would be substantially lessened. Regime change, however, is very difficult to bring about (think of the US experience in Iraq), and by destabilizing the Iranian regime, Israel may dramatically increase the threat of an Iranian attack. The final and most discussed option is a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Israel would prefer such an attack to come from the United States, but

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that appears increasingly improbable. If a military strike is to be launched against Iranian facilities, it almost certainly would be Israel acting alone. Israel has taken this kind of action before. In 1981, Israeli bombers destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor, Osirak, in a daring raid that set back Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program for many years, and in 2007 Israel destroyed a clandestine nuclear reactor in Syria, apparently built with the cooperation of North Korea. An Israeli strike against Iran would be far more complex but not necessarily impossible. A number of studies suggest that such a strike could be successful, albeit with many risks. Though details vary, the general consensus is that Israel would use around one hundred fighters, perhaps in combination with its Jericho ballistic missiles, to hit a wide range of Iranian nuclear targets, including the centrifuges at Natanz and near Qom. The aircraft might fly over several countries, including Turkey, Syria, and Iraq or Saudi Arabia (perhaps with Saudi permission). The mission would likely require midair refueling for the jets to reach their targets and return home. A successful strike would delay Iran’s nuclear development for several years, during which time international pressure might convince Iran not to continue with its nuclear development or perhaps allow for regime change in which a more palatable Iranian leadership would emerge. At the very least, the imminent production of nuclear weapons would be halted. Although a military strike holds out the hope of stopping Iran’s nuclear program, success is far from assured, while its consequences are likely to be staggeringly harmful to Israel, the United States, and the world community. Halting Iran’s drive to acquiring nuclear weapons will be far more difficult than Israel’s preventive strikes against Iraq and Syria. Instead of destroying a single nuclear reactor, Israel would need to attack a wide range of targets scattered throughout a large country. Since Iran is enriching uranium to produce bomb-quality fissile material, Israel must destroy thousands of centrifuges, many of which are dispersed, concealed, hardened against attack, and located in or near areas inhabited by large numbers of civilians. Once the military operation was over, Israel (and much of the rest of the world) would continue to face daunting uncertainties and challenges. Following the strike, Israel would not be certain just how much damage it had inflicted. There may be hidden sites left untouched by Israeli bombs, or targets that were hit may not have been destroyed. Even a strike that succeeded in hitting all the critical targets would not end Iran’s nuclear development program forever. At best, there may be a delay of a couple of years, after which Israel would find itself in the same position, debating whether to strike yet again. Nor would Iran suffer such an attack without responding. Iran could unleash tens of thousands of missiles against Israel, via its Hamas and Hizbollah allies. All this, for a “successful” Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. The alternative to an Israeli strike is for Israeli leaders to do nothing and allow Iran to develop nuclear capability. An Israeli decision not to launch a military attack

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is what the American foreign policy establishment and especially those of the realist school of international relations believe Jerusalem should and will ultimately choose. Realists argue that leaders (including those in Iran) are rational and deterrable. In this view, Israel will recognize that Iranian leaders do not mean what they say about destroying Israel and would not pursue policies that they know are suicidal. Not striking holds out the possibility that Israel may get lucky and escape serious harm versus the certainty of catastrophic ills that would befall the Jewish state should a military strike be launched. Just as America tolerated a fanatic Maoist China with nuclear weapons and accepted the previously “unacceptable” acquisition of nuclear arms by the rogue North Koreans, so too will Israel acquiesce in a nuclear capability for Iran. In the end, the likelihood remains that Israel will allow Iran to become a nuclear-armed state. The obstacles to militarily disarming Iran and the consequences of even a successful strike are just too overwhelming. That said, an Israeli strike (or even an American one) cannot be ruled out, something the leadership in Tehran must take very seriously. What is clear is that whatever Israel does, the decision it makes on Iran may well be the most consequential it has ever made. The best Israel can hope for, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, is to choose the worst possible option—except, that is, for all the others. Adapted from Chapter 8, by Steven R. David, in Robert O. Freedman, ed., Israel and the United States: Six Decades of US-Israel Relations (2012, Westview Press).

PART III

Iraq and Iran QR

Map III.1. Iraq

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n September 11, 2001, two hijacked passenger jets slammed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, causing them to collapse. In Arlington, Virginia, another plane dived into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the US Department of Defense. A fourth airliner crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. It had apparently intended to hit the US Capitol Building but fell short of its target when its passengers attempted to wrest control of the plane from the hijackers in the cockpit. Nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks, including the passengers on the planes, people on the ground, and the nineteen hijackers. Before 9/11, as the day became known, few Americans would have recognized the names of those who claimed responsibility for the attacks—al-Qaeda, a shadowy, militant Islamist network, and Osama bin Laden, the group’s leader. Nor did most Americans quickly make sense of the anger that motivated the attacks. Bin Laden was a Saudi Arabian by birth, and fifteen of the hijackers were Saudis. But Saudi Arabia was one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East. In audio and video files released later, bin Laden claimed that a motive for the assault was the imposition of sanctions against Iraq. However, Iraq was led by Saddam Hussein, a ruthless dictator who slaughtered many of his own people, notably Iraqi Kurds, and in 1990 invaded Kuwait, a neighboring Arab country. President George H. W. Bush called upon a multinational coalition, led by the United States, to quickly mobilize and expel the Iraqi army from Kuwait. After the so-called Gulf War, the international community imposed economic sanctions and no-fly zones on Iraq to ensure that the Saddam regime could not rebuild its military forces to dangerous levels or again deploy them against either Iraqi citizens themselves or neighboring countries. Al-Qaeda and bin Laden were no friends of Saddam’s Iraqi regime. Saddam considered Islamists such as al-Qaeda to be a fundamentalist threat to his chiefly secular grip on power, while al-Qaeda considered regimes such as Saddam’s to be insufficiently beholden to the religious strictures of Islam. And Saddam had, after all, just attacked fellow Arabs and Muslims in Kuwait. So why would al-Qaeda take such deadly retribution against the United States for defending the Kuwaitis against Saddam? American troops used bases in Saudi Arabia as staging grounds for the war against Iraq. Though the two countries had any number of different interests and disagreements, Saudi Arabia was one of America’s staunchest allies in the Middle East. Furthermore, the Saudis distrusted and feared Saddam, especially since he had revealed an unsettling bellicosity in his war with Iran (1980–1988) and then his invasion of Kuwait. Both Iraq and Kuwait are on Saudi Arabia’s northern border, making Saddam’s expansionist gambit all the more unnerving to the Saudis and giving them reason to allow coalition forces to establish bases within their borders. However, Saudi Arabia is also home to, and the official custodian of, two holy mosques: Mecca and Medina, the birthplace and burial site, respectively, of the Prophet Mohammad. Bin Laden considered the encampments of foreign troops on Saudi soil to be a sacrilege against Islam, especially as those troops were

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engaged in fighting his fellow Arabs and Muslims. Also, in the view of al-Qaeda, America’s close relations with Israel constituted further grounds for condemning the Western presence in Saudi Arabia and intervention in Iraq and Kuwait. Bin Laden and al-Qaeda operated a loosely organized terrorist network from bases in Afghanistan, where they operated under the shelter of the Taliban, a militant Islamist group that ruled the country. A month after 9/11, the United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan and swiftly dislodged the Taliban from power, driving its leadership, along with bin Laden, into the mountainous tribal region that constitutes Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, an area of rugged terrain that has for millennia defied the control of outside governments and armies. In 2002, an interim Afghan government was established under Hamid Karzai, who was subsequently elected twice to the presidency. But removal of the Taliban from power did not end its threat. From sanctuaries among the mountains of Pakistan and strongholds in the south of Afghanistan, the Taliban and al-Qaeda continued to mount hit-and-run raids. They received protection from tribal supporters in the mountains and (it was widely suspected) even from within Pakistan’s military intelligence leadership, though Pakistan is ostensibly an ally of the Americans. However, American attention was diverted from decisively defeating the Afghanistan insurgency as another goal took precedence. The United States alleged—even despite the economic restrictions and no-fly zones still imposed on Iraq after the Gulf War, as well as the United Nations’ on-the-ground inspections of Iraqi facilities—that Iraq was nonetheless managing to produce nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The Americans also charged the Saddam regime with aiding global terrorists, al-Qaeda in particular, often implying, if not actually stating, that Iraq had somehow been involved in the 9/11 attacks. The pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq was made on the basis of connecting 9/11 to Afghanistan and al-Qaeda and then (seemingly) connecting Iraq to al-Qaeda and thus back to 9/11. The charge was also made that Iraq was now poised to heighten its terrorist activities by employing its WMD. Even at the time, however, many remained unconvinced that the trail of evidence provided by the Americans demonstrated any substantial connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda or any development of WMD by Iraq. International skepticism over American claims about Iraqi weapons programs and terrorist connections meant that the United States failed to win UN support for a resolution that threatened Iraq with military action unless it complied with previous resolutions to allow UN weapons inspections. Despite that setback, the United States, with the support of the United Kingdom and other allies, launched an invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Within a month, Baghdad was captured, and Saddam had fled into hiding. (He would be captured late in the year and executed in 2006.) On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier off San Diego, stood in front of a huge banner reading, “Mission Accomplished,” and declared victory in Iraq. No WMD were ever found in Iraq.

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But driving the enemy from power did not end military conflict. As in Afghanistan, the Americans faced a rebel insurgency that did not fight by conventional means but engaged instead in guerrilla attacks before melting back into civilian populations. The insurgents also relied on suicide bombings and roadside explosives as tactical weapons. The chance to wage jihad against Western nonbelievers attracted Islamist militants from within Iraq as well as outside it. AlQaeda, for example, had maintained no discernible presence inside the country under Saddam, but in the chaos following the American intervention, it was able to establish itself with an influx of foreign militants, led initially by Abu Musab alZarqawi, a Jordanian. The insurgency was overlain by another source of violence: a deadly outbreak of sectarian conflicts between rival militias of the minority Sunni Muslims, who had been displaced from the positions of power they held under Saddam, and Shiite Muslims, who made up the majority of Iraq’s population and had now achieved predominance in the government. Without Saddam’s iron rule to hold such open hostilities in check, Sunnis and Shiites rekindled their long-held grievances toward each other in violent form. Fighting between militias, massacres of civilians, and bombings that targeted the mosques of rival sects became commonplace in the news emanating from Iraq. To counter the ongoing insurgency, the United States deployed over 20,000 new troops to Iraq in 2007, a measure commonly referred to as “the surge.” It is generally credited with stabilizing the military situation in Iraq. Meanwhile, interim and transitional governments gave way to a permanent Iraqi government under a new constitution. Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite politician, became the first prime minister of the new government in 2006; he was reelected in 2010. Under Maliki, Iraq negotiated a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) by which the United States agreed to withdraw—and did in fact withdraw—its forces by the end of 2011, leaving the Iraqis in charge of their own destiny. Iraq and Iran are rival powers in the Gulf region. In 1980, under Saddam Hussein, Iraq had invaded Iran, beginning an exhausting and inconclusive war that lasted until 1988. Iraq was universally condemned in that war for using chemical weapons against Iranians as well as against Iraqi Kurds. The United States supported Iraq and managed to engage in combat against the Iranian navy (sinking five ships), but the administration of President Ronald Reagan had also secretly and illegally supplied Iran with weapons. In balancing its support for Iraq with its support for Iran, the United States was pursuing a policy that would come to be called dual containment, using each country to counter the power and influence of the other. Later, President George W. Bush would label both countries (along with North Korea) as members of an “axis of evil”—with the word “axis” not coincidentally calling to mind Nazi Germany and the other Axis powers of World War II. With the fall of Saddam, Iraq was a debilitated state. It had suffered invasion, insurgency, and sectarian civil war, with consequent disruption of institutions, de-

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struction of infrastructure, displacement of refugees, and loss of life. It had seemed possible at times that the Iraqi nation might decay into a federation of Sunni Arab, Shiite Arab, and Sunni Kurdish states, or into separate states altogether. Whereas Saddam’s Iraq had been governed by a Sunni minority, post-Saddam Iraq was led by coalitions representing the country’s Shiite majority, which conceivably increased the influence of neighboring Shiite (though non-Arab) Iran in the internal politics of Iraq. An unintended consequence of the American invasion of Iraq, then, was to strengthen the relative power of Iran in the region. Relations between the United States and Iran have experienced many ups and downs. The shah of Iran had been a key Middle East ally of the United States, having consolidated his power in 1953 when the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq. However, the shah himself was deposed in 1979 by an Islamic revolution led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini from his exile in Paris. The ayatollah was vehemently antiAmerican, calling the United States “the Great Satan.” Late in 1979 an Iranian crowd stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six Americans hostage, holding fifty-two of them captive for 444 days—finally releasing them mere moments after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president. Yet, after Khomeini’s death, the Islamic Republic of Iran demonstrated more moderate stances toward the West under presidents Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami. Following 9/11, Khatami’s administration expressed sympathy to the United States, offered to share its intelligence on al-Qaeda, and stated its willingness to help the US effort in Afghanistan. The United States ignored these overtures, instead rebuffing the Iranians as part of the axis of evil. Though the United States could detect no direct Iranian role in 9/11, it did accuse Iran of harboring members of al-Qaeda. Under the much more conservative administration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (elected in 2005 and reelected in 2009), Iran has taken a harder line against the West. During his terms in office, the issue of Iran’s nuclear program has attracted increased attention from the international community. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) but has been found to be out of compliance for its failure to implement NPT safeguards and to disclose information about its uranium-enrichment program. Despite Iran’s declarations that its nuclear capabilities are employed solely for peaceful, civilian purposes, there is widespread international concern that Iran is in fact developing both nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them. Iran also seems to be employing a strategy of alternately agreeing to allow agents of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) into the country to inspect its nuclear facilities and then finding reasons to postpone or cancel the inspections—which only fuels speculation that Iran is simply stalling for time to accomplish imminent nuclear weaponization. The threat of Iranian nuclear weapons is taken perhaps most seriously by Israel, particularly since President Ahmadinejad has endorsed Ayatollah Khomeini’s

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suggestion that Israel should be “wiped off the map,” or words to that effect. Israel previously bombed nuclear sites that it considered threatening in Iraq (1981) and Syria (2007), and the question often arises whether the Israelis could, would, and should destroy similar Iranian facilities. Iran’s antagonistic attitude toward Israel also takes the form of training, arming, and funding Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and other groups considered to be terrorist organizations by Israel and the United States, among other countries. Such support can be administered directly, or it can be channeled through Syria, in particular. Based in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah is a militant Shiite force capable of launching both armed raids and Iranian and Syrian missiles across the Israeli border. With active Iranian support, Hezbollah fought and sustained a surprisingly successful effort against Israel in a month-long war in the summer of 2006. However, Hezbollah is more than a terrorist organization or armed-resistance force. It is also a political party that represents Lebanese Shiites in the national parliament and cabinet. As a leader of resistance to Israel and the United States in the Middle East, Islamist Hezbollah might have been expected to endorse the 2011–2012 popular uprising against the secular Bashar Assad regime in Syria. However, Hezbollah has instead expressed its support for the embattled Assad against the Syrian resistance movement, recognizing in that way Syria’s years of service as an ally and a conduit of Iranian aid to Hezbollah.

H How the “war on terror” waged by the United States against those responsible for 9/11—al-Qaeda and its Taliban protectors in Afghanistan and Pakistan— nonetheless morphed into a war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq is difficult to explain in objective terms. As Stephen Tanner discusses in chapter 15, the American invasion of Afghanistan, with Pakistan as an ally, quickly uprooted the Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership, much of which fled to the mountainous tribal area, “Pashtunistan,” between the two South Asian countries. But rather than sustaining the armed effort necessary to vanquish a renewed insurgency and reconstruct Afghanistan as a model Asian democracy, the Americans called a time out there in order to turn their primary attention to invading Iraq. Tanner suggests a number of possible motives—to secure Middle East oil supplies, to protect Israel, to “cash in” on America’s position as the world’s lone superpower after the Cold War, to take revenge on Saddam for outlasting the 1991 Gulf War—but the official justification for mobilization against Iraq was to deprive Saddam of the weapons of mass destruction that the United States contended he was accumulating. The claim that Saddam posed a threat to the American homeland was, in Tanner’s word, “absurd.” But the United States nonetheless invaded Iraq in 2003, leaving the war against the 9/11 perpetrators in Afghanistan as unfinished business. In the wake of World War I, Iraq had been carved out of former dominions of the Ottoman Empire, first as a British mandate and then in 1932 as an independ-

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ent country. Phebe Marr points out in chapter 16 that while nearly four out of five Iraqis are Arab, most of the remaining population are ethnic Kurds. In their homeland in the north of Iraq, the Kurds have always tried to maintain a strong degree of autonomy from the central Iraqi government, sometimes punctuating their position with shows of armed force and calls for an independent Kurdistan, perhaps in league with fellow Kurds in the adjacent mountains of Syria, Turkey, and Iran. Practitioners of Sunni Islam well outnumber Shiite Muslims in most Middle East countries; the reverse is true in Iraq. (Neighboring Iran is also chiefly Shiite, as well as non-Arab.) Under Saddam, the country’s Sunni minority ruled Iraq. After the American invasion and Saddam’s fall, however, Shiite Arab political factions now lead the national government, along with participation by Sunni Arab and Sunni Kurd minorities. The war in Iraq led to profound consequences for that country, other countries in the region, and the United States. In chapter 17 James DeFronzo summarizes some of those impacts—money spent, lives lost, refugees displaced, sectarian violence—and questions the initial justifications for the war. As he notes, investigations after the war found that, contrary to official assertions before the invasion, Iraq had not assisted al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks. In fact, the establishment of a major al-Qaeda network in Iraq occurred only after the American destruction of Saddam’s rule left a power vacuum in which insurgents could prosper and sectarian strife could break into open hostilities. Likewise, militant groups elsewhere— such as Hamas among the Palestinians and Hezbollah in Lebanon—benefited from the outrage of Arabs and Muslims against the war. Iran feared that it might be the next target for American intervention and, largely in consequence, elected hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president over more moderate candidates. The late William L. Cleveland and Martin Bunton pick up the theme of the misguided futility of the Iraq War in chapter 18. The war began as a show of American power under President George W. Bush—an aspect of a newly declared global war on terror fueled by anger over 9/11. It aimed to remove one Middle East dictator from power and thereby intimidate rival authoritarian regimes, particularly Syria and Iran. But instead of serving as a springboard for engineering political transformation throughout the Middle East, Iraq became a quagmire that drained American resources and sapped American credibility and respect throughout the world. Iran came out ahead, watching two of its biggest nemeses, Iraq and the United States, locked in a long and exhausting struggle with each other. Its reform-minded government was replaced in 2005 by one led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was uninterested in conciliation with the West. With the world’s attention directed at Iraq, Iran was freer, many feared, to pursue a secret, militarized nuclear program. An irony noted by Cleveland and Bunton is that America’s search for weapons of mass destruction where they did not exist, in Iraq, empowered Iran to build a vast nuclear infrastructure. President Barack Obama therefore faced an increasingly difficult challenge: balancing Iran’s right to

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pursue peaceful nuclear technology with ensuring, somehow, that Iran would not generate weapons-grade uranium. Saddam Hussein was toppled easily, but his fall and the subsequent and deliberate dismantling of Iraqi political and military structures by the Americans left Iraq fracturing into its ethnic and sectarian components. A newly elected government thus inherited a potentially failing state. With that as context, Phebe Marr (chapter 19) charts the consolidation of power achieved by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in post-Saddam Iraq. Maliki became prime minister in 2006 as a relatively unknown member of a lesser party within a larger Shiite coalition, some groups of which maintained ties to Shiite Iran. But Maliki quickly demonstrated a toughness that stood him in good stead. He appointed loyalists to leadership positions in the army and security services. By establishing government control in Basra, which had been overrun by Shiite militias, he demonstrated his governing policy of putting nationalism and centrism ahead of rigid sectarianism. Likewise, he restored government sovereignty in disputed areas that had been under Kurdish control. And he negotiated with the United States an agreement that would (and did) culminate in the US withdrawal from Iraq by the end of 2011 and that restored sovereignty to the Iraqis. Marr observes that a government that still relies considerably on a patronage system will likely exhibit a continued level of corruption. And until a vigorous parliament with a tradition of loyal opposition develops, a strong central government, such as that pursued by Maliki, is likely to be more authoritarian and less democratic than might be hoped. In chapter 20, David W. Lesch provides an insightful summary of the causal ramifications emanating from the consequential year 1979 with regard to Iran. In that year, the Iranian Revolution, led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, ousted the monarchy in the person of the shah of Iran and established the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Islamic revolution was viewed with trepidation by many (mostly Sunni) states in the region, which had no wish for their (usually minority) Shiite populations to be stirred into revolutionary fervor by the Iranian example (much less with Iranian backing). Saddam Hussein seized upon Sunni Arab anxiety and represented Iraq as a bulwark defending the Arab world against the expansion of baleful Persian and Shiite influences. Iraq attacked Iran in 1980, initiating an eight-year war. The United States openly supported Saddam and Iraq. However, in a complex web of back-alley diplomacy, the Ronald Reagan administration also secretly and illegally sold arms through the Israelis to the Iranians, hoping to secure Iranian influence with Hezbollah to release American hostages in Lebanon. (The money from the arms sales was then used illegally to fund the Contras, anticommunist insurgents in Nicaragua—hence the name Iran-Contra affair for the secret dealings.) Iraq emerged from the Iran-Iraq War deeply in debt, setting the stage for its invasion of wealthy Kuwait and its oil fields in 1990, which in turn set off the Gulf War, in which an international coalition of forces led by the United States forced the Iraqis back into Iraq. As a concluding note,

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Lesch observes that, during the Gulf War, Western “infidels” were based in Saudi Arabia—home of the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. That fact constituted an “affront that initiated Osama bin Laden’s quest against the United States.” The history of Iran’s relations with the United States is marked by the antagonisms that surfaced during the fervency of the Iranian Revolution under the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 and by the present standoffs regarding the inspection, or not, of Iranian nuclear facilities by outside observers. However, Mark Gasiorowski (chapter 21) also calls our attention to the more moderate, if nonetheless complex, strands of Iranian policies in the intervening years. For instance, the administration of President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989–1997) supported Hezbollah and its attacks on Israeli forces in Lebanon but also sought (unsuccessfully) an agreement with the US oil company Conoco to develop a large Iranian natural gas field. President Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005) called for better relations between the United States and Iran and did establish improved relations with other countries of the West. Iran maintained close ties to Syria and Hezbollah, as well as the radical Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but it also worked to improve relations with Egypt. Iran expressed sympathy for the 9/11 victims and aided the US effort in Afghanistan, but was then denounced by President George W. Bush as part of an “axis of evil” for its arming of Palestinians. Meanwhile, Iran’s nuclear program continued to develop, markedly so during the tenure of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His unapologetically confrontational style exacerbated conflicts with the West, which hoped to ensure greater regulation of Iran’s nuclear research and thus threatened and imposed economic sanctions on Iran to pressure it into suspending uranium enrichment. That standoff remains unresolved. Manochehr Dorraj (chapter 22) describes Iran’s support of Islamic revolutionary groups after its own revolution of 1979. Iran sent Revolutionary Guards to Syria to train Hezbollah to fight Israel in Lebanon and backed the more Islamist Palestinian factions of Hamas and Islamic Jihad over the more secular Palestine Liberation Organization, again in order to use them as proxies against Israel. Iran developed closer ties with Syria when the latter backed it during the war with Iraq (1980–1988), though Syria did not share Iran’s vision of establishing an Islamic republic in Lebanon. However, with the passing of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989–1997) sought to break Iran’s international isolation by reaching out to Saudi Arabia and Egypt in particular and by inviting expansion of the private sector and foreign investment in Iran. Ideological politics and exporting Islamic revolution gave way to more moderate and pragmatic courses, notes Dorraj. Mohammad Khatami’s administration (1997–2005) likewise sought greater liberalization and democratization at home and improved relations with Iran’s Arab neighbors. Khatami denounced the 9/11 attacks, and Iran extradited a number of al-Qaeda fugitives from Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia to stand trial. But Iran’s continued support of Hamas and Islamic Jihad led President George W. Bush to denounce Iran as a member of the “axis of evil” and to

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decline Iran’s offer to negotiate the differences between the two countries. The American rejection of the Iranian moderates paved the way for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to ride a conservative backlash to office in 2005. Under Ahmadinejad, Iran turned away from the West and strengthened its connections to Russia and China, while also expanding relations with the new Shiite government of Iraq as well as with Iraqi Shiite militias. Iran also supplies financial aid to Syria, which in turn facilitates Iran’s relations with Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad as they continue to confront Israel. A former intelligence officer with the US Marine Corps, Scott Ritter argues for improved US-Iran relations. He contends (in chapter 23) that the conflict between the two countries is distorted through the lens of Israel’s insistence that Iran possesses a nuclear-weapons program and is a threat to Israel. US foreign policy, says Ritter, is unduly influenced by the Israeli lobby in Washington, DC, notably by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), such that American interests are subordinated to those of Israel. As a result, American policy unnecessarily makes an adversary of Iran rather than seeking to negotiate the differences between the countries, as it could do in the absence “of the poisoning brought on by the Israeli call for conflict.” Ritter particularly finds that Israel’s regional conflict with Iran-supported Hezbollah in southern Lebanon is magnified into a wider-reaching conflict between the United States and Iran. Furthermore, according to Ritter, Hezbollah is not a “nonstate terrorist movement as portrayed by Israel and the United States” but is instead a legitimate response of the Lebanese people against Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982. But by characterizing Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, Israel and the United States correspondingly cast Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism, making “the possibility of a larger US-Iran conflict a very distinct reality.” With the change of leadership in Iraq following the American occupation, some predicted direly that Iran’s influence in the region would balloon. The fear was that a nuclear-armed Iran would dominate a Shiite-controlled Iraq and promote Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon and Sunni Hamas in Gaza, along with other Shiite movements throughout the Middle East. However, as Michael Axworthy observes (chapter 24), Shiites in other countries have generally shown little enthusiasm for Iranian-style Islamic rule. Meanwhile, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel to be “erased from the pages of time” was “foolish and irresponsible” and escalates concerns in Israel and elsewhere about Iran’s nuclear intentions. The IAEA has declared Iran in violation of its commitments under the NPT. The United Nations has called on Iran to suspend uranium enrichment and has imposed sanctions. But Axworthy argues that, so far as deterrence is concerned, an Iranian capability to produce a nuclear weapon would be almost as desirable for the Iranian regime as a weapon itself—a possibility that opens the door for resolving the nuclear impasse with diplomacy rather than military action.

CHAPTER 15 QR

Pashtunistan: Afghanistan, Pakistan—and Iraq Stephen Tanner

The 9/11 attacks on the United States were masterminded by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who maintained their base of operations in Afghanistan under the protection of the ruling Taliban regime. Bin Laden, a Saudi by birth, had become familiar with Afghanistan when he joined the resistance against the Soviet invasion of that country (1979–1989). The resistance fighters (mujahideen) received American money and weapons to fight the Soviets. At that time, too, bin Laden established relations with members of the Pakistani army, who helped train the mujahideen. American retaliation against al-Qaeda was swift. Within a month after 9/11, US troops arrived in Afghanistan to carry out the mission of overthrowing the Taliban government and uprooting al-Qaeda’s safe haven. Neighboring Pakistan was an American ally in that effort, though some in the military leadership were suspected of Taliban sympathies. The initial military campaign in Afghanistan was overwhelmingly successful: the Taliban and al-Qaeda were ousted without a single US fatality. However, the war in Afghanistan then bogged down for a number of reasons, including the historical independence of the countryside from whatever power purported to command the country from its capital (Kabul): “Overrunning Afghanistan is not the same as controlling it,” observes military historian Stephen Tanner. Also, although it is neatly drawn on maps, the onthe-ground Afghan-Pakistani border is nonexistent. It is a rugged area occupied by some 40 million Pashtuns, a tribal people with a fierce history of armed insularity from either Kabul or Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. With the American onslaught, the Taliban and al-Qaeda were able to flee to “Pashtunistan,” as Tanner calls the mountainous tribal region, and there find refuge and support for reorganizing and mounting counterattacks against American and Afghan security forces. But another reason for the failure to defeat the Taliban decisively and establish Afghanistan as a democratic state was that the United States took its eye off the ball. Flushed by the easy success and apparent victory in Afghanistan, neoconservatives with influence on the George W. Bush administration were seduced by the opportunity to leverage the newly declared “war on terror” to remake the Middle East in ways more compatible with the interests of the world’s lone superpower, the United States. And the immediate target was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. As 189

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Tanner notes, the chief public justification for the war—that Saddam was creating weapons of mass destruction (WMD), including nuclear weapons, and was prepared to employ them against the US homeland—was “absurd.” Nonetheless, 170,000 American troops were eventually deployed to Iraq, which was ultimately left with a Shiite-dominated government whose “natural ally in the region was Iran”—certainly not the consequence envisioned by American neoconservatives, who abhorred the anti-American Islamic theocracy of Iran as much as they had detested the anti-American secular dictatorship of Saddam’s Iraq. Meanwhile, though, fighting the war in Iraq meant that the United States had left the Afghan war largely neglected. In 2006, the Taliban mounted a major offensive, possibly with the connivance of elements of Pakistani military intelligence. However, a “surge” of American troops in Afghanistan—similar to the more than 20,000 additional troops deployed in Iraq to combat the insurgency there—helped stabilize the situation significantly, though the Taliban was far from extinguished. In May 2012—almost exactly a year after Osama bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALs in his house in Abbottabad, Pakistan—President Barack Obama announced that the original goals of the American presence in Afghanistan had been met, claiming that alQaeda had been defeated and that the Taliban’s momentum had been broken. In consequence, all US troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, finally ending what would be America’s thirteen-year war in that country. Stephen Tanner has written highly regarded books on military history, including Epic Retreats: From 1776 to the Evacuation of Saigon and Refuge from the Reich: American Airmen and Switzerland During WWII. The present reading is excerpted from the revised edition of Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the War Against the Taliban.

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even years after the overthrow of the Taliban in Kabul, Afghanistan was once more in chaos. Instead of a small holding force to support the new democratic government and to hunt down Al Qaeda remnants, over 62,000 Western troops were in the country by the end of 2008, their casualties rising each year. The United States was planning to send up to 30,000 more, while its defense secretary, Robert Gates, was making the rounds of European capitals warning of the collapse of the NATO alliance if more of its member states did not contribute meaningful military muscle. America’s carefully cultivated ally in the conflict, Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, had fallen from power, and Afghanistan itself had become a veritable narco-state, supplying 90 percent of the world’s opium. Local drug lords shared with the resurgent Taliban a resistance to both the government in Kabul and its high-minded foreign backers. Western aid projects in the countryside had stalled, and in many provinces ceased, because humanitarian workers and contractors could not be protected from violence.

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So what had happened in Afghanistan? For the United States and its allies, and those Afghans who truly desired modern governance based on a democratic/ free-market model, how did it go so wrong? First, the United States seriously miscalculated the nature of Afghan warfare. When it ousted the Taliban and its Al Qaeda allies by the end of 2001 without suffering a single military fatality of its own, the Bush administration mistakenly thought it had won a war. Overrunning Afghanistan is not the same as controlling it, however. Every past empire that set its sights on that disjointed land was able to easily penetrate its borders, overrun the territory, and overthrow the central government, which invariably held only loose reins to begin with as it was dependent for its strength on support from the countryside. It was this strength, based not on institutional authority but on an ancient and indefatigable warrior culture, with its refusal to ultimately submit to outside conquest, that the Americans failed to take into consideration. Second, America’s goals in Afghanistan following the attacks of September 11, 2001, became muddled. George W. Bush, who decried “nation-building” in his 2000 presidential run, appeared to go fuzzy once he had a nation of his own to build. The almost bloodless (for the US) fall of the Taliban left the Bush administration with a desperately poor, war-weary people who appeared eager to accept for the first time in their history Western democratic and free-market principles as a basis for regenerating their state. This perception was not an illusion, and the US had at least two years to demonstrate that the power of its ideals could translate into tangible benefits for the Afghans. Supported by its many allies—in effect, the entire world in the immediate aftermath of 9/11—the US might indeed have created a new precedent by setting up a prosperous democratic state in the center of Muslim South Asia. As it developed, however, Bush had another project on his mind—invading Iraq—and the Afghan project was deprived of both a serious reconstruction effort and the armed force necessary to support it. After 9/11, when nearly three thousand American families were mourning their dead, the United States had one primary goal: to wipe out Al Qaeda, the leadership of which was then present in Afghanistan. As a secondary goal, the US needed to crush the hard-core leadership of the Taliban so that it could not regain power and once again provide a safe haven for terrorists. Operation Enduring Freedom accomplished neither goal, only a deceptive period of calm in the territory. The third reason America’s effort in Afghanistan has come to grief is due to a faulty assessment of the Afghan-Pakistani border. In short, there is none. This arbitrary line, drawn through the mountains in 1893 by bird-watching Englishman Mortimer Durand was meant at the time to split the Pashtun people, the world’s largest remaining tribal-based society. His imperative was to delegate the main

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strategic assets, such as the Khyber Pass and the cities of Peshawar and Quetta, to the British Indian side [including what is now Pakistan—ed.]. This served well to confine the official limits of the Afghan state but at the same time created an “invisible” nation, not shown on maps, that straddles the border: Pashtunistan. Lying partly in Afghanistan but more in modern Pakistan, the existence of Pashtunistan proved essential in defying the Soviets and is now playing a similar role in foiling the goals of the United States. When the Bush administration claimed in late 2001 that Pakistan’s army would seal the border to prevent Al Qaeda and Taliban elements from escaping, it appeared not to know that a genuine border, such as would divide peoples, did not exist. When the Taliban government was ousted in December 2001, its surviving hard-core elements fled to remote regions of the country—historically beyond the authority of Kabul—or to similar areas of Pakistan. Its militia elements—men who had subscribed to the cause for pay, from coercion, clan loyalty, religious sentiment, or who had simply wished to support a winning side—switched their allegiance and returned to their homes. The Taliban’s primary claim to rule had lain in its ability to provide order to a country that had been brutalized by the Soviets and subsequently riven by chaotic civil war. Its failure at government, however, left the Afghan people open to the Western-supported alternative in late 2001. In fact, when the Taliban was first ousted it was a heady time for most Afghans, who had reason to expect untold benefits from the wealthiest nations on earth, as well as security without the Taliban’s draconian adherence to Sharia law. During this period, beginning in 2002, the remnants of the Taliban feared extinction, as their Pakistani patrons now at least nominally sided with the world’s sole remaining superpower. The country as a whole was more peaceful than it had been in decades. Assisted by the United Nations, by a plethora of newly arriving NGOs, and by the avowed intentions of President Bush, who in April had announced “a new Marshall Plan” for Afghanistan, [Afghan president Hamid] Karzai’s job was to demonstrate his government’s benefits to the Afghan people, before their wellknown cycle of resistance to foreign control—or even influence—resumed. With the sanction of the UN and under NATO control, an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), some four thousand strong, arrived in Kabul to allow the new central government time to get traction. The US maintained some eight thousand fighting troops, deployed mainly in the east, to continue to hunt down Taliban holdouts or Al Qaeda terrorists. It was during this lull in violence that the administration of George W. Bush decided to initiate a war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In fact, as early as Thanksgiving 2001, before the Taliban had been ousted from Kabul, Bush had requested General [Tommy] Franks to dust off contingency plans for an invasion of Iraq. Thus, while Osama bin Laden and most of his key Al Qaeda lieutenants, and Mullah Omar with his hard-core Taliban cadres, had escaped death or capture,

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still free in the remote fastness of Pashtunistan to rebuild their organizations, the United States decided to shift its focus elsewhere. The so-called War on Terror had taken on a life of its own, while those who had instigated it found themselves removed from the target sights. Future historians may someday deduce the precise motivation for the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, though it was more likely driven by a combination of factors, none sufficient alone but together providing a critical weight while the US psyche was still bathed in the blood-red trauma of September 11. Such factors included a desire to secure unlimited oil supplies; an impulse to assist Israel by neutering the Mideast’s most defiant Arab state; a hubristic desire to cash in on America’s post–Cold War status by implanting its values on other regions; and an instinctive urge on the part of George W. Bush to finish the business with Saddam Hussein that his father had supposedly shrunk from concluding during the 1991 Gulf War. No combination of these reasons alone would have sufficed to persuade the US public to sanction an unprovoked attack on Iraq, so the Bush administration was forced to conjure a true propaganda miracle: convincing the public that Iraq was an imminent threat to the US, purportedly because it possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). This was ironic indeed, because while the US had suffered from history’s most devastating asymmetrical attack—by nineteen ideologically driven men armed with box cutters—the Bush administration managed to convince the public that the true threat was from the technology of a secular state with a conventional dictator and a decrepit industrial infrastructure. In 2003 there was no possibility that Iraq possessed a significant nuclear weapons program. If the slightest sign of one had arisen, the US and its British ally would simply have obliterated it, since after 1991 their aircraft already covered two-thirds of Iraq in no-fly zones. During both the Gulf War in 1991 and Operation Desert Fox in 1998, allied aircraft had struck Iraqi military installations at will, as did Israel in 1983, when Saddam actually had a program. As for biological weapons designed to facilitate the spread of disease, no modern state had ventured to use such weapons in warfare, and the idea that Saddam—whose hospitals could not even acquire standard medicines due to economic sanctions— would be the first was unfounded. The true source of the “great WMD scare” of 2002 was the fact that Iraq had used chemical weapons in its long war against Iran in the 1980s. This was made possible—perhaps even necessary from the Iraqi point of view—because Ayatollah [Ruhollah] Khomeini’s forces were reprising World War I during that conflict with massed infantry attacks against a static front. Rather than be overwhelmed, Iraq resorted to gas-filled artillery shells and bombs, just as combatants had done in the Great War prior to the maturation of military aircraft and armored vehicles. Against a modern military such as the US possessed, with missiles, supersonic bombers, and fast armored fleets, such weapons would be useless, only guaranteed

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to invite massive retribution. During the Gulf War, in fact, when Saddam still had vast stockpiles of chemical munitions, he dared not use them. When Saddam’s regime fell after a three-week invasion in March/April 2003, there were few people on earth who did not expect the US to find some buried caches of old chemical-filled artillery shells from the 1980s, or perhaps some decaying stockpiles in warehouses. Not even these were found, but even if they had been the idea that such weapons could have posed a threat to the US homeland was absurd. The greater part of the fear that propelled the American public to support the invasion of Iraq might have been dispelled if instead of the term “weapons of mass destruction,” the more accurate term “World War I–type munitions” had been used. In any event, the tiger the US took by the tail in Iraq became evident much sooner than the one in Afghanistan, as first anarchy, then resistance flared immediately. By the end of 2008 the United States had deployed 170,000 troops in Iraq and suffered over 4,200 dead and 32,000 wounded, but was finally contemplating withdrawal. This was in part due to the insistence of the new Shi’ite-dominated government of Iraq, whose more natural ally in the region was Iran; in part due to the American public’s finally having sickened of the venture; and in no small measure due to the more urgent need for troops in Afghanistan, which by then was slipping out of control. A week after the fall of Baghdad, the Washington Post assessed the situation in Afghanistan: “The military is splintered by factionalism, the police force is untrained, the justice system is dominated by religious conservatives who have more in common with the Taliban than with Karzai, and tax collection is largely ineffective.” The problem, during this period, was not so much a lack of fighting troops, as the Taliban was still lying low, but security troops and trainers so that the government could assert itself in the provinces. The Western concept of central government, however benign in intent, had met its ancient alternative in Afghanistan, where the terrain itself provided isolation from faraway edicts, and local leaders had always preferred to rule their own fiefs. The diversion of US attention to Iraq at this juncture was all the more surprising because established wisdom in Washington had come to hold that America’s original mistake in Afghanistan had been neglecting the country immediately after the Soviets were ousted, thus allowing anarchy to rule, followed by the Taliban. Now the US was making the exact same mistake once the Taliban were gone. Back at the time of the invasion of Iraq, however, policymakers in Washington still considered Afghanistan a doable project. On May 1, 2003, while President Bush was landing aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln to make his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech, Donald Rumsfeld was making a similar announcement about Afghanistan: “8,000 US forces in Afghanistan have ended

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major combat operations,” he said, “and will shift their focus to stabilizing and rebuilding the country.” In late November 2003, Zalmay Khalilzad arrived in Kabul as the new American ambassador. A Pashtun Afghan by birth, he was able to work closely with Hamid Karzai and succeeded in putting US muscle behind the removal of a number of corrupt or uncontrollable local officials. His tenure abruptly ended in June 2005, however, as he was required to accept a new assignment in Iraq. The raging war there, in fact, had been sucking in America’s resources for two years. Robert Grenier, the former director of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center, told the New York Times, “The best experienced, most qualified people who we had been using in Afghanistan shifted over to Iraq.” The dearth of military resources due to the diversion to Iraq began to be dearly felt in 2005, when it became apparent that the US could not control the Afghan countryside. That year the opium crop exceeded four thousand tons, surpassing its previous peak, achieved just before the Taliban had banned the crop in 2000. With the resurgence of the opium trade, all the accoutrements of major drug operations returned, including private militias and transport networks, bribery and the corruption of local officials, and resistance to outside interference. With a governmental vacuum in the east and south, the Taliban had also returned, now controlling entire districts in conjunction with the drug lords. The coalition’s death toll in 2005 more than doubled to 130, with hundreds more wounded. In January 2006, operations in Afghanistan underwent their typical winter lull, with only one coalition fatality that month. Even in Iraq, some thought they saw a light at the end of the tunnel as sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shi’ites appeared to ebb. But then, in February, Iraq exploded anew when Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia destroyed the dome of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, one of the Shi’ites’ most precious shrines. It was an unthinkably wanton act, with no possible purpose than to increase the level of violence. The Shi’ites responded by sacking twenty-seven Sunni mosques in Baghdad, and both sides went at each other with a new level of ferocity, the Americans caught in the middle of a newly vicious round of chaos. Two months later, in Afghanistan, the Taliban reappeared in force and, for the first time since its ouster from Kabul, launched large units that threatened to overrun the southern provinces. With an increasingly desperate situation in Iraq on its hands, the US called on NATO, which had previously masqueraded under ISAF, to deploy forces in southern Afghanistan, abandoning its previous role of simply guarding Kabul and staging reconstruction projects in several peaceful locations in the north. The Canadians, British, Dutch, and some smaller contingents agreed, only to be caught up in the fiercest confrontational battles of the war. The Taliban’s spring offensive of 2006 had come as a surprise. Though multiple political and reconstruction failures in Afghanistan were seen clearly in Western

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councils, as well as the fact that the country had quickly become a narco-state (the opium trade providing nearly half its GNP), it had not been expected that the Taliban could return in such force with thousands of fully armed fighters. Where had they trained; where had they been recruited; and where were they now acquiring their weapons? The flat answer, as provided by Ahmed Rashid to the Asia Times after the bloody battles of summer 2006 was, “The Taliban could not have done this on their own without the ISI [Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence].” Pakistan’s military intelligence service had indeed provided assistance to the Taliban in the past (perhaps even created it), and there was little doubt that it was continuing to do so. Another answer in the same publication that fall further illuminated the issue: “[The Taliban] can almost be considered the army of an unofficial state lying across the Afghan-Pakistani frontier that has no formal borders but is bound together by ethnic, linguistic, ideological and political ties.” This unofficial state was Pashtunistan, beyond the writ of the governments in either Kabul or Islamabad. The Pashtun people, from whom the Taliban are almost completely drawn, exist as 12 to 15 million in Afghanistan (where no census has been taken for decades), with about 2.5 million existing as refugees. In Pakistan proper there are 28 million, meaning a total population of over 40 million. The Pashtuns in Pakistan live primarily in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along Afghanistan’s eastern border, and in the Northwest Frontier Province whose capital, Peshawar, was once one of Afghanistan’s major cities. Aside from the Pashtun regions, Pakistan has three other provinces: Baluchistan in its west (south of Afghanistan), which has been embroiled for years in a secessionist revolt, and the provinces of Punjab and Sindh, both of which share long borders with India. Combined with its chronic economic problems, its inability to fully control either its Baluchi or Pashtun populations, and its already small size in relation to India, with no other territorial allies at hand, Pakistan has been faced with a geostrategic dilemma from birth. America’s strategic problem in the region was clear-cut and relatively small from the start in 2001: wreak retribution on Al Qaeda for September 11, while ensuring that Afghanistan could not again become a staging ground for serious terrorist attacks against the West. Pakistan’s problem, however, has been more acute. Having warred with India, a country quintuple its size, three times since its independence in 1947, Pakistan needs Afghanistan, not only as an ally but to provide territorial depth if the narrow land at the crucial point of its own capital [were] ever penetrated or overrun. In the event of such an attack, Pakistan would not only require its own Pashtun population to rise in defense but would greatly rely on a friendly regime in Afghanistan for support. Of all the mistakes Hamid Karzai made at the beginning of his tenure, perhaps the worst was laying out a huge welcome mat to India, which promptly created a massive embassy in Kabul, set up consulates in major

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Afghan cities, promised aid (even troops, though this offer was prudently rejected), and began to arrange vast industrial and developmental projects. In Pakistan, alarm bells went off immediately. Though Karzai himself was a Pashtun, he was not the type upon which Pakistan could call for allegiance, and his Western supporters were even less reliable. The Bush administration’s decision to bypass the Non-Proliferation Treaty by extending nuclear aid to India, while refusing the same to Pakistan, caused more alarm. Though there is much evidence that President Musharraf sincerely strove for a partnership with the US, there was doubtless a sense in his military and the ISI that Pakistan was again being surrounded. With the current situation in Afghanistan—the US and NATO failing to control the country, while it slips back into the same kind of anarchy as after the Soviet invasion—Pakistan retains the most vital interest in its stability, under a compatible regime, preferably one it can control. Though its interest in an allied Afghan government is manifest, in its contest with the United States, as with the Soviets, Pakistan cannot let “the water get too hot.” A major mistake was made in July 2008 when the new Indian Embassy in Kabul was blown up (killing the Indian military attaché, among forty others) and US investigators found ISI involvement so obvious they could not help but go public. Generally, Pakistan needs to conceal its role, a factor which its own portion of ungovernable Pashtunistan helps make possible. Since no outside power can penetrate the region, much less control it, ISI is left with a free hand both there and in the adjacent Pashtun regions of Afghanistan—together the parts that comprise Islamabad’s necessary ally: Pashtunistan. All sides hold several cards. In Pakistan’s favor is the fact that the United States completely depends on its cooperation for the Western military effort in Afghanistan. Seventy-five percent of US supply comes through Pakistani territory. That Pakistan also possesses nuclear weapons, the only Muslim state to do so, also raises a caution flag in Washington. Although the current arsenal is aimed solely at India, the prospect of a new radical regime in Islamabad passing nuclear technology on to other Islamic states—or even worse, non-state organizations— comprises the ultimate nightmare in America’s War on Terror. The US could not risk a further destabilization of Pakistan, which could well happen if it emphasized its own goals in Afghanistan at Pakistan’s expense. Despite Bush’s avowed emphasis on spreading America’s ideals of “freedom,” albeit through the auspices of US military power, the administration consistently violated its own ethos after 2001 by maintaining alliances with dictators or monarchs in the Muslim world who were willing to serve America’s interests. Musharraf, who commanded the Pakistani army as well as serving as head of state, was an ideal such ally to the degree he could act pragmatically while ignoring his own public’s sentiments. The ultimate problem for Musharraf ’s Pakistan was how to maintain US support, or at least avoid its wrath, while at the same time addressing

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the more important problem of its own national security regarding India and the even more vital task of retaining the allegiance of its Pashtun population. While the Americans would surely not stay in the region for long, Pakistan’s problem with the Pashtun tribes would always remain. In the US, the apparent lull in Iraq created by Bush’s slow-motion “surge” of 30,000 troops in 2007 provided new confidence that a similar increase of troops in Afghanistan could quell that conflict also. Even Democrats who had opposed the Iraq venture seemed to favor increased military force in Afghanistan. Many in the West were startled to hear in September 2008 that Hamid Karzai had opened talks with the Taliban, in the holy city of Mecca under the auspices of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah. Karzai was pursuing the age-old imperative of Afghan rulers to forge alliances internally, finally realizing full well that the country could not permanently be subdued by force alone. There may have been a window of time when he thought that the world’s sole remaining superpower, together with its allies—including what was once called history’s most successful alliance, NATO—could achieve what had never been accomplished before. But then he realized that Afghanistan could only be ruled, if at all, by the old ways. The true question at the end of 2008 had become whether he had waited too long. Somehow, not only had the Western coalition lost its grip on Afghanistan, but the Pakistani government had lost its grip on its border regions. Pashtun tribesmen on both sides were now calling themselves “Taliban.” In short, the government in Kabul and its backers now faced an enemy comprised not of a formerly discredited Afghan religious movement but an uprising by the whole of Pashtunistan. Within the new spread of the Taliban concept, however, lies a new opportunity for the West to settle, and thence vacate, the conflict. The merger of the Taliban, once a hard-core movement of fundamentalists, with Pashtun or Afghan nationalists means that the former religious movement now has many ideological facets, a number of them moderate. If approached with prudence, there is an excellent chance that the Taliban can be brought into Afghanistan’s political system, if not via Western-sponsored elections then by traditional Afghan methods. The conviction that the US is dealing solely with “terrorists” can no longer be sustained; instead it is now dealing with a population. Adapted from Chapter 13 of Stephen Tanner, Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the War Against the Taliban, Revised Edition (2009, DaCapo Press).

CHAPTER 16 QR

The Land and People of Modern Iraq Phebe Marr

The Kingdom of Iraq was created as a British mandate in 1920. In 1932 it became the first mandate to achieve independence. The kingdom was converted to a republic by a military coup in 1958, and a series of succeeding coups culminated in 1968 with the Baath party in power. Baathist strongman Saddam Hussein became president in 1979 and ruled Iraq till he was displaced in the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. Iraq had not existed as a unified political entity before 1920. As a result, its borders remain contentious both from within and from without. Though about 75 to 80 percent of Iraq’s population is Arab, Kurds make up almost all the remainder. The Kurds occupy the mountainous regions of Iraq’s north and east and identify with their fellow Kurds in neighboring Turkey, Iran, and Syria. The Kurds in Iraq have often pressed for greater autonomy within the country, if not for outright independence. Phebe Marr’s description of Iraq predates the US-led intervention in that country in early 2003. Until that time, under strongman Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Arab minority ruled over a country that included the Kurds and a Shiite Arab majority. Since that time, however, the Sunnis have been largely displaced in national political processes by Shiite factions, which contend with friction from Sunnis that ranges from frustration to mass violence, especially in the form of bombings. The Sunnis generally occupy the northern and western parts of the country and the urban centers. Their religion tends to ally them with most other (largely Sunni) Arab countries. The Shiites are strong in the south and maintain connections to Shiite religious leaders in Iran. Anxiety about Iranian influence over a majority of Iraq’s population was an enduring issue for Saddam Hussein and remains a concern for the United States and the newly emerging Iraqi democracy even now. Phebe Marr is a member of the editorial board of the Middle East Journal and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the author of Egypt: Domestic Stability and Regional Role as well as The Modern History of Iraq.

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T

The Land

he state of Iraq has existed only since 1920, when it was carved from three former provinces of the Ottoman Empire and created under British aegis as a mandate. With a land area of 168,000 square miles (436,800 square kilometers) and a population of over 23 million in 2003, Iraq is the largest of the Fertile Crescent countries rimming the northern edge of the Arabian peninsula. Lying between the plateau of northern Arabia and the mountain ridge of southwest Iran and eastern Turkey, Iraq forms a lowland corridor between Syria and the Persian/Arabian Gulf. From its earliest history Iraq has been a passageway between East and West. Its borders are for the most part artificial, reflecting the interests of the great powers during the First World War rather than the wishes of the local population. As a result, Iraq’s present borders have been continuously challenged by peoples living inside and outside the country. The southern section of the border with Iran, a contributory cause of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, has not been finally settled, while a new, UN-demarcated border with Kuwait, agreed to by Iraq in 1993, under pressure, is still contentious. The southeastern portion of the country lies at the head of the Gulf. Iraq controls a thirty-six-mile (fifty-eight-kilometer) strip of Gulf territory barely sufficient to provide it with an outlet to the sea. From the Gulf, Iraq’s border with Iran follows the Shatt al-Arab north, then skirts the Persian foothills as far north as the valley of the Diyala River, the first major tributary of the Tigris north of Baghdad. From here the frontier thrusts deep into the high Kurdish mountain ranges, following the Diyala River valley. Near Halabja it turns northward along the high mountain watersheds—incorporating within Iraq most of the headwaters of the major Tigris tributaries—until it reaches the Turkish border west of Lake Urmiyya. The mountainous boundary with Turkey ends at the Syrian border just west of Zakhu, Iraq’s northernmost town. This northeastern region includes difficult and unmanageable mountain terrain and a substantial Kurdish population. The loss of control by the central government over substantial portions of this region in the 1990s made Iraq’s northern borders with Turkey and Iran porous. In the northwest the frontier separating Iraq from Syria meanders south across the Syrian desert from the Turkish border until it reaches the Euphrates near Qa’im. Here the borders make little pretense of following geography, jutting out into the adjacent desert and incorporating large areas of steppe. At the Euphrates the border turns west until it reaches Jordan, also a former British mandate, and then south a short distance to the Saudi frontier. From this point the border follows a line of water wells separating Iraq from Saudi Arabia until it reaches the Kuwaiti border at Wadi al-Batin, at which point it turns north again, forming a common frontier with Kuwait, until it reaches Umm Qasr on the Khaur Abd Allah channel leading to the Gulf.

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The terrain included within these boundaries is remarkably diverse, making Iraq a country of extreme contrasts. The Shatt al-Arab is a broad waterway with villages on its banks, lined with date groves. To the north of the Shatt lies swampland, traditionally inhabited along the Tigris by marsh dwellers living in reed houses built on stilts and raising water buffalo, and along the Euphrates by ricegrowing villagers. This natural wetland area, with high reeds and hidden waterways, has often functioned as a refuge for dissidents. A massive drainage system, constructed by the central government in the 1990s, has progressively dried up much of this terrain and is ending a traditional way of life. Between the marshlands and Baghdad is the delta, the most densely populated area of Iraq, once inhabited by the Sumerians and Babylonians of ancient Mesopotamia. It is a dry, flat area consisting almost entirely of irrigated farmland, with large mud-hut villages and regional market towns hugging the river banks. North of Baghdad the two rivers diverge widely to form the Jazira (Island), the territory between the two. Although some irrigation farming is practiced here, it is mainly rain-fed territory—a land of gentle uplands sprinkled with smaller villages and provincial towns. Mosul, near the site of Nineveh, is the Jazira’s major city and the center of its commercial life. To the north and east of the Jazira, the plains give way to foothills filled with settled villages and prosperous towns (mainly inhabited by a mixture of Turkish- and Kurdish-speaking people) and then to the high mountains, the home of the Kurds. Iraqi Kurdistan, as this territory has frequently been called, is a remote and inaccessible area of deep gorges and rugged, snow-capped mountains rising to 12,000 feet (over 3,600 meters), broken only by the fertile valleys of the Tigris tributaries. Within this diversity of territory the unifying feature of Iraq’s geography is its twin river system. From the dawn of civilization the rivers have provided the irrigation that made life possible for those inhabiting the flat, dry plains through which they flow, uniting the populations of the north and south and giving them a common interest in controlling the rivers and their tributaries. The rivers have also provided the arteries for trade and communication without which the cities that have made Mesopotamia famous could not have flourished. The rivers are not an unmixed blessing, however. The Tigris has often delivered torrential floods in the spring, too late for the winter crop and too early for the summer. The south of the country has a poor natural drainage system, causing progressive salinization of the soil if irrigation is not controlled or the soil flushed. Without dams, barrages, and artificial drainage systems, the rivers cannot support continuous agriculture. Whenever such an organized system has existed, the country between the two rivers has flourished; when it has not, decline, unrest, and turmoil have often resulted. Iraq today is a country rich in resources. With proper management, the river system can provide agricultural production to feed a good portion of the population. Its agricultural potential, declining through overuse and, in recent years,

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neglect and abuse, is now dwarfed by petroleum. Iraq’s proven oil reserves in 2000 were over 112 billion barrels, with another 200 billion of probable or possible reserves in areas not yet extensively explored. These reserves are the world’s second largest, exceeded only by [those of ] Saudi Arabia. With a national income of ID 15.3 ($51 billion) in 1980, before revenues declined owing to wars and sanctions, Iraq has ample sources of capital for development, if properly used and husbanded. After three quarters of a century of modern education, Iraq’s population has acquired much of the technical capacity to manage a complex economy. Yet Iraq’s problems as it faces the twenty-first century resemble those of its past. The challenge is to organize the political and social environment in a way that will bring Iraq’s considerable potential to fruition, give peace and prosperity to its people, and put an end to the repression and mismanagement that have often led to conflict, disunity, and decay.

The People If one can speak of an Iraqi state, it is not yet possible to speak of an Iraqi nation. Iraq’s present borders incorporate a diverse medley of peoples who have not yet been welded into a single political community with a common sense of identity. The search for this identity has been a shared, if elusive, project of all Iraqi governments. Considerable integration and assimilation has taken place since the inception of the mandate, but there have also been setbacks—especially in recent years—to the process of nation building, revealing the fragility of the demographic mosaic and even of the state itself. The first and most serious demographic division is ethnic, or more properly speaking, linguistic. Arabic speakers constitute 75 to 80 percent of the population; Kurdish speakers, 15 to 20 percent. The Arabs dominate the western steppe and the Tigris and Euphrates Valleys from Basra to the Mosul plain; the Kurds have their stronghold in the rugged mountain terrain of the north and east. However, the Iraqi Kurds are only a portion of a larger Kurdish population with whom they identify on linguistic, cultural, and nationalistic grounds. In 2003 there were a little over 4 million Kurds in Iraq; about 13 million in Turkey (about 23 percent of the population); 5 million to 6 million in Iran (10 to 12 percent of the population), and fewer than 1 million in Syria. There are smaller numbers in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Europe. A second major division splits the population along religious lines between the two great sects of Islam, the shi’a and the sunni. Since the overwhelming majority of the Kurds are sunni, this division affects mainly the Arabs, but the outcome has been to segment Iraqi society into three distinct communities: the Arab shi’a, the Arab sunnis, and the Kurds [Map 16.1].

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Map 16.1. Ethnoreligious groups in Iraq

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Arab Shi’a The division of the Muslim community originated shortly after the Prophet’s death in a political dispute over who should be selected caliph, or successor. The sunnis, the majority, have accepted all caliphs who have held office regardless of the method of selection, so long as they were able to make their claims effective. The shi’a, the minority, took the side of the fourth caliph, Ali, cousin and son-inlaw of the Prophet, claiming that the leadership of the community should have been his from the first and that only his heirs were legitimate successors. Eventually the leadership of the shi’i community devolved on religious scholars, called mujtahids. The fact that each individual shi’a is expected to follow a leading mujtahid gives the shi’i community stronger leadership and a greater sense of cohesion than its sunni counterpart. The shi’a began as a political party, gradually became an underground opposition movement, and finally evolved into a distinct religious sect. From the first, southern Iraq has been a stronghold of shi’i Islam. Various shi’i movements either originated or found a firm reception in southern Iraqi cities, where shi’i Islam eventually established a foothold so firm it could not be dislodged by the sunnis. As Arab tribes migrated from the Arabian peninsula in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and settled in the river valleys, they were converted to shi’i Islam by religious scholars and their emissaries. Today the shi’a are the largest single religious community in Iraq, outnumbering the Arab sunnis three to one and constituting a solid majority of the total population. Under the sunni Ottoman administration of Iraq, which began in the sixteenth century, Iraqi shi’a were largely excluded from administrative positions, from the military, and from government-sponsored education institutions that trained for them. Instead, shi’i mujtahids in the holy cities, often Persian in origin, were influenced by events in Persia. Not surprisingly, the shi’a, so long excluded from government, came to be deeply alienated from it.

Arab Sunnis In contrast to the shi’a, the Arab sunnis in Iraq tend to be more secular and, with the exception of some recently settled tribes, more urban in composition. As a result, their communal identity has been less developed. Unlike the shi’a, the sunnis do not accord special religious authority to their leaders—the scholars, jurists, and judges collectively known as ulama who define and uphold the rules that guide the community. Rather they follow the sunna, or customs of the Prophet (from which they take their name), and the shari’a, the body of Islamic doctrine, law, and ritual derived from the Quran and the sunna. It is to the shari’a, rather than to any particular leader, that the sunni community owes adherence, a factor that has made it far more loosely structured than the shi’i community.

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Despite their minority status, the Arab sunnis have traditionally dominated the political and social life of Iraq, originally due to Ottoman support but later due to the ability of sunnis to maintain the command posts of power. Although no census has been taken that distinguishes among various Muslim groups, the Arab sunnis probably represent about 15 to 20 percent of the population. Geographically they are concentrated in the northern part of the country, including the Arab tribal groups of the western steppe and the Arab villages of the northern Tigris and Euphrates areas. The remainder of the Arab sunni community is almost wholly urban, situated in the cities and towns of the central and northern provinces. Substantial numbers of sunnis also live in some cities of the south, especially Basra. Although the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War removed Ottoman support for sunni supremacy, it did not end sunni dominance. Although that dominance has waxed and waned over time, especially socially and intellectually, sunni political control was more pronounced at the end of the twentieth century than at any time since the mandate. This political dominance and the resulting enjoyment of most of society’s benefits have given the sunni community a closer association with—and vested interest in—the emerging Iraqi state. Arab sunnis have also had considerable affinity for the secular philosophies of Arab nationalism originating in neighboring (and largely sunni) Arab countries.

The Kurds The third major group, the Kurds, has proved the most difficult to assimilate. Language has been a major stumbling block. The Kurds speak an Indo-European language closely akin to Persian, while Arabic remains the official language of the central government and of the higher educational institutions in Iraq. Even more important has been the sense of ethnic—even national—identity that the Kurds have developed, especially in the twentieth century. The origin of the Kurds is still a matter of some historical dispute, with most Kurdish scholars claiming descent from the ancient Medes. Whatever their origins, the Kurds were almost completely converted to Islam. They became orthodox sunnis, part of a vast Muslim empire and often its staunchest defenders. From time to time, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Kurdish dynasties arose but lacked cohesion and were unable to maintain their autonomy. In the twentieth century, a sense of Kurdish identity based on language, close tribal ties, customs, and a shared history inspired Kurdish nationalist movements. Like their predecessors, however, these political groups lacked sufficient cohesion and coordination to achieve lasting results. The majority of Iraq’s Kurdish population today is to be found in the mountains of the northeast, with Sulaimaniyya as its intellectual center and stronghold and Arbil its political capital. Until recently most Kurds were rural. However, the

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destruction of much of the Kurdish countryside, especially adjacent to Iran, and the forced migration of much of this population due to local wars and Iraqi government actions, has resulted in resettlement of large numbers of Kurds in cities and towns. Of all Iraqi minority groups, the Kurds have been the most difficult to assimilate because of their numbers, geographic concentration, mountain inaccessibility, and cultural and linguistic identity. However, many bilingual Kurds have assimilated into Iraqi society sufficiently to enable them to play an active role in state and society.

Other Minorities Aside from these three major demographic groups, there are several smaller ethnic and religious communities in Iraq. In northern towns and cities along the old trade route that led from Anatolia along the foothills of the Zagros to Baghdad live members of a Turkish-speaking group known locally as the Turkman. Comprising between 2 and 3 percent of the population and most numerous in the cities of Kirkuk and Arbil, they are probably remnants of migrations of Turkish tribes dating from the Seljuk era of the twelfth century and of the Turkman tribal dynasties of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Turkman, mainly sunni and middle class, have for decades produced a disproportionate number of bureaucrats and have integrated rather well into modern Iraq. In the south is a group of shi’i Persian speakers with strong ties to Persia that have never been severed. Until the 1980s, they constituted 1.5 to 2 percent of the population, but in the wake of the Iran-Iraq war, this community was largely expelled from Iraq. The Iraqi Persian speakers have frequently looked to Persian rulers to support their interests, causing them to be regarded with suspicion by the Ottoman Turks and more recently by Arab nationalist governments. Another Persian-speaking group distinct from these town dwellers is the Lurs, less than 1 percent of all Iraqis. Often called faili or shi’i Kurds, they are almost all tribally organized villagers concentrated near the eastern frontiers of Iraq. Iraq also has a number of non-Muslim minorities—Christians, Jews, and a few other communities that predate Islam. The Jews were the oldest and largest of these communities, tracing their origin to the Babylonian captivity of the sixth century BCE. Overwhelmingly urban, the bulk of the Jewish community lived in Baghdad, where Jews were often prosperous and influential merchants. The position of the community was radically changed by the impact of Zionism. With the establishment of Israel in 1948, the situation of Iraqi Jews became untenable, and their exodus in 1951 left only a handful, whose position today is unenviable. Various Christian sects comprise a little less than 3 percent of the population. The largest denomination is the Chaldean Church, founded in the fifth century by the followers of the theologian Nestorius. In the sixteenth century they unified

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with Rome. Centered in Mosul and the surrounding plains, most Chaldeans speak Arabic, although some use a modified version of Syriac as a vernacular. Second in importance are the Assyrians, those Nestorians who did not unite with Rome. The British settled about 20,000 of them in the northern areas of Iraq around Zakhu and Dahuk following the First World War. The Assyrians, so called because they claim descent from the ancient Assyrians, proved to be one of the most unsettling elements in Iraq’s modern history prior to the Second World War. Their uninvited intrusion into the country through the intervention of a foreign power was deeply resented by the Muslims and especially by the Kurds in whose areas they were settled. In recent years, they have become more integrated. Other Christian groups include the Armenian, Jacobite, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, and Latin Catholic communities, but their numbers are small in comparison to other Christians. A small number of Protestants, almost wholly the result of the nineteenth-century Baptist and Congregational missions, live mainly in Baghdad and Basra. Two other religious communities of obscure origin deserve mention. One is the Yazidis. Racially and linguistically Kurdish, they are village dwellers located near Mosul. Their religion is a compound of several ancient and living religions, and its most notable element is a dualism most likely derived from Zoroastrianism. They have resisted attempts to integrate them into the larger society. The second group, the Sabians, is a sect of ancient origin and diverse elements inhabiting portions of the southern delta. Their faith stresses baptism and contains elements of Manicheanism, but not Islam.

Town and Tribe To these ethnic and sectarian divisions, somewhat blurred since mandate days, must be added a third social dichotomy that has played a profound role in Iraq’s modern history—the division between town and tribe. Though greatly softened in recent years by the growth of cities and the spread of education to the countryside, the legacy of tribalism is subtle but pervasive in Iraq. The historical importance of the tribes in Iraq can scarcely be exaggerated. Nomadic, seminomadic, or settled, at the time of the mandate they surrounded the handful of cities and larger towns, controlled the country’s communications system, and held nine-tenths of its land. In 1933, a year after Iraqi independence, it was estimated that there were 100,000 rifles in tribal hands and 15,000 in the possession of the government. Although only a few of these tribes were nomadic, the bulk of the settled population of the country, whether Arab or Kurd, was tribally organized and retained tribal mores and customs. The extension of tribal organization and institutions to rural Iraq has meant that much of the rural population failed to put down deep roots in the soil. The settled village community with its attachment to the land—the backbone of the

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social structure throughout most of the Middle East—has been a missing link in Iraq’s social fabric. Settled agricultural communities completely divorced from tribal structure have emerged in only two areas, the carefully tended date gardens of the Shatt al-Arab and the rain-fed, grain-producing plains of Mosul. Instead of love of the land, loyalty to family and tribe has dominated Iraq’s social and political life. Among the legacies of tribalism in Iraq are intense concern with family, clan, and tribe; devotion to personal honor; factionalism; and above all, difficulty in cooperating across kinship lines—the underlying basis of modern civic society. The only significant counterbalance to tribalism has been the economic and political power of the cities, but until modern times these were few in number and economically and culturally unintegrated with the rural hinterland. Aside from Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul, there were few cities worthy of the name at the end of the Ottoman era. Most were simply caravan stops like Zubair; fueling stations like Kut; or religious shrines like Karbala and Najaf, in which the benefits of law and order, trade and manufacture, were noticeable only against the background of poverty in the countryside. Rapid urbanization, the spread of education, and the extension of government into the countryside in the last half of the twentieth century have greatly eroded tribalism and decisively shifted the balance of power to the cities. Nevertheless, although tribal organization is rapidly disappearing in the countryside, tribal customs and attitudes have left tangible influences. In political life, family, clan, and local ties often take precedence over national loyalties and broader ideologies. For centuries this diverse medley of people has lived together in symbiotic proximity within the territory comprising Iraq. Although the population was often difficult to subdue by central governments, real civil conflicts, based on ethnic and sectarian animosities, were rare. But traditional society was a true mosaic, with considerable religious and social autonomy for its various components. The twentieth century, especially its fast-paced second half, with the emergence of new nationalist and religious ideologies and the need for greater interaction and cooperation—even integration—among communities has brought greater social tensions and challenges of organization and leadership not always met by the state. Adapted from Chapter 1 of Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq, Second Edition (2004, Westview Press).

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Impacts of the Iraq War James DeFronzo

The early justifications for the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 were several and shifting: to pursue terrorists and those who supported them (the original argument of the George W. Bush administration was that Iraq had had contacts with al-Qaeda and therefore was somehow behind the attacks of 9/11); to fight the terrorists “over there” so we wouldn’t have to fight them “over here”; and to destroy Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of chemical, biological, and possibly nuclear weapons of mass destruction (WMD) before they could be used against the United States. Those rationales became discredited—there was no official Iraqi contact with al-Qaeda, and therefore no indication that Iraq had any connection to 9/11; alQaeda and other terrorist and insurgent groups did not establish themselves in Iraq until the chaos following the US invasion; no WMD were ever found in Iraq—so the justifying arguments shifted to the need to remove a dictator in order to promote democracy in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. James DeFronzo suggests that a likely reason underlying the invasion was the strategic but surreptitious decision to safeguard American access to the vast oil reserves of Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, and he sketches the manifold consequences of the war. In addition to the many thousands of lives lost and the total economic cost of trillions of dollars, over 2 million Iraqis became refugees in their own country, and another 2 million left for other countries, mainly Syria and Jordan. The future of Iraq itself is uncertain, as it threatens to divide into federated or even independent Kurdish and Arab states—or Kurdish, Sunni Arab, and Shiite Arab states. Middle Eastern outrage against the prolonged US occupation of Iraq tended to focus on Israel and contributed to the increased strength of militant movements such as Hamas among the Palestinians and Hezbollah in Lebanon as they battled Israel. Bush’s condemnation of neighboring Iran as a member of the “axis of evil” led some Iranians to fear that they were the next target for an American invasion, a concern that weakened the relatively moderate administration of that country and contributed to the election of the hard-line Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president. DeFronzo also calls attention to the disparity between American rhetoric about promoting democracy and the American fear that genuine democracy would bring to power groups antagonistic to American interests in

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the region—a contradiction already evident in the enduring US support of nondemocratic but friendly and oil-rich regimes. James DeFronzo is emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut. His books include Revolutions and Revolutionary Movements and the award-winning three-volume encyclopedia Revolutionary Movements in World History.

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he Iraq War had profound impacts not only on Iraq, but on many other countries as well. Iraq’s Kurdish region became a de facto independent state, and much of the rest of the country experienced a resistance insurgency, counterinsurgent military actions, and sectarian violence. The invasion was widely viewed as increasing motivation for terrorism. Minimum estimates indicated that many tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed and millions forced to leave their homes. Fighting the war diverted US resources from Afghanistan, where the Taliban and Al Qaeda reorganized. The war also took the lives of thousands of American soldiers and wounded many more. Total economic cost, both direct and indirect, was estimated to be between $1 trillion and $3 trillion and may have exacerbated the US economic crisis that began in the fall of 2008. On the other hand, the war appeared to give the US government dominance over Iraqi energy resources and a potentially tremendous advantage relative to economic rivals. The decline in public support for the war after 2004 led to Democratic victory in the 2006 congressional elections and played a role in the 2008 presidential campaign and election. Election-day exit polls showed that the vast majority of those opposed to the war voted for Barack Obama. Internationally, the invasion and occupation severely damaged the moral status of the United States worldwide. The American people confronted a range of issues including how to end the war, regain the world’s trust, and more effectively combat terrorism. War advocates believed that American forces should remain in Iraq as long as necessary to defeat insurgents and terrorists and ensure the stability of Iraq’s new government. Opponents of the war disagreed among themselves regarding whether some US forces should continue a long-term presence in Iraq. Central questions regarding Iraq’s future included whether or to what degree Iraq should remain a unified country, and whether it or its successor states could be fully democratic and sovereign.

Impacts on Iraq The invasion removed a brutal regime, freeing Iraq from a personality cult reflected in numerous statues and public portraits of the leader, and from a oneparty political system that stressed Arab identity for a nation that in reality was

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multiethnic. In addition, economic sanctions against Iraq that had been in effect since the 1991 Gulf War were removed.

Sectarian Violence and Refugees The invasion led to sectarian violence, resulting in many thousands of Iraqis fleeing their homes to live among coreligionists in segregated neighborhoods. By September 2007 the Iraqi Red Crescent humanitarian organization indicated that in Baghdad alone almost 1 million people had relocated. The total internal displacement was about 2.3 million in 2008. In addition, as many as 2 million left Iraq for other countries, mainly Syria and Jordan. Syria, a country of only 19 million, became the destination of about 1.2 million Iraqi refugees. Refugee families were often female-headed because husbands or brothers had been killed. Poverty forced thousands of young Iraqi women to turn to prostitution to support their mothers and siblings or their own children, attracting sex tourists from wealthy Middle Eastern countries, such as Saudi Arabia.

Government and Sovereignty The invasion led to a new constitution that supported democracy but stated that laws could not violate traditional Islamic principles. Apart from the potential contradictions this might cause, the fact that the country was under foreign military occupation, and that the Baath Party was not allowed to participate in elections left the designation of Iraq as a democracy open to question. In parts of the country Baathists were persecuted or killed. Nevertheless, in December 2005 many political parties participated in a parliamentary election.

Kurds The invasion preserved the autonomy of the Kurdish region, and relative political stability brought economic development. Instead of losing skilled professionals and technicians, the Kurdish region saw a significant number of those fleeing the rest of Iraq, such as many Christians, seeking refuge there. The possibility of a future independent Kurdish state encouraged Kurdish rebels in Turkey and Iran. The Kurdish region is the most democratic part of Iraq but the majority of its people really favor becoming an independent nation. Of all Iraqis, the Kurds appear to have the most favorable orientation toward the United States. The Kurdish government offered the US military bases on Kurdish territory, which in part could serve to deter intervention from neighboring countries.

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The War on Terrorism Postinvasion investigations found no Iraqi assistance to Al Qaeda or role in 9/11. The invasion in which the United States retaliated for the loss of some 3,000 of its citizens by launching a war that took the lives of many tens of thousands in a country that played no role in the attack on America appeared, not surprisingly, to increase terrorism. It led to the establishment of a major Al Qaeda network in Iraq, which carried out attacks on coalition forces and mass bombings that killed thousands of civilians. Iraq became a major training ground for a new generation of terrorists and a historic cause that could motivate attacks on Americans for many years to come. The invasion, which many Iraqis viewed as unprovoked aggression costing the lives of friends, relatives, and soldiers defending their country, created strong reasons for Iraqis to kill Americans and delivered numerous targets in the form of US military personnel. The occupation also led to an unprecedented level of sectarian terrorist violence, including the torture and deaths of thousands by Shia or Sunni death squads. Critics asked whether [George W.] Bush administration policies were actually prolonging the war on terrorism. Failing to address the conditions and/or correct the policies that gave rise to motivations for terrorism could not but result in providing recruits for terrorist groups. But continuing the war on terrorism could serve the function that the post–World War II cold war did in providing an excuse for US governments to intimidate other nations or interfere in their affairs. Defense against terrorist attacks, then, would rely not on alleviating the circumstances that gave rise to terrorists, but on improving the means to deter or destroy them and taking advantage of the ongoing war on terrorism to achieve domestic and international political goals. In the end, the invasion justification was prevention. US forces were sent into action not to respond to an attack on America, or to defend an ally from aggression, or to protect the imminently threatened lives of US citizens, or even to demolish forces poised to attack the United States. Instead, when most other justifications proved false, the Baathist regime was defined as so hostile toward the United States and its allies that it was justifiable to destroy it because it might obtain the capability to become a threat in the future. It was this preventive-war Bush Doctrine that much of the world considered so dangerous because in theory its acceptance meant either that any nation in the world could employ it, leading to the outbreak of many wars, or that, as was surely the Bush administration’s intention, preventive war would be solely a US prerogative, a manifestation of American exceptionalism (the belief that America’s values and economic, social, and political systems were superior to those of other nations, providing the United States a unique God-given right to promote them around the world). The Iraq War also provided an object lesson of the new polarized international framework that President Bush had proclaimed on September 20, 2001, nine days

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after the Al Qaeda attacks. [In a statement] reminiscent of the most intolerant periods of the Cold War, he warned that other nations had to choose to either be with us against terrorism or be considered allied with the terrorists and eligible for American retribution. Furthermore, terrorists were portrayed as evil in essence, attacking America because of their desire to destroy its most cherished qualities, freedom and the democratic way of life. Therefore, terrorists could not be reasoned with or dissuaded by a change of US policy. The only option was to capture or destroy them.

Control of Oil Regardless of losses in US and Iraqi lives and hundreds of billions spent in fighting the war, the long-range benefits of the US conquest of Iraq might be viewed by some war supporters as significantly outweighing the costs. Increasing Iraqi oil production could help supply keep pace with growing demand. Control of Iraq was seen as enhancing US domination of the Middle East’s estimated 61.5 percent of the world’s known oil reserves. Through securing Middle Eastern nations as markets for American products and services, the United States could ensure its economic advantage over other oil-consuming nations. It was this strategic result that many war supporters almost certainly anticipated when pushing for the invasion. The war also allowed a redeployment of many US troops from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, lessening a potentially destabilizing problem for the Saudi royal family.

International Political Developments The Iraq War severely damaged US moral standing internationally as have few events in history. The majority of people in many countries believed the Bush administration had taken advantage of 9/11 to invade Iraq mainly to seize its oil. The invasion seemed to show that the US government would falsify evidence to justify going to war against a nation with valuable resources and act without UN consent, behavior for which other nations were punished.

United Nations The Iraq War demonstrated the weakness of the UN in the face of the world’s only superpower. The Bush administration was able to bypass the UN Security Council with ease once it was clear that the council would not approve the invasion. Secretary-General Kofi Annan denied that any nation had the legal right to invade and occupy Iraq without specific UN approval. But once Iraq was occupied, the UN attempted to ensure, through Resolution 1472, that “those causing the war should meet the humanitarian needs of the civilian population,” including “food and medical supplies.” But then Resolution 1483 recognized the

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authority of the United States and the UK to govern Iraq, sell its oil, and use the resulting revenue. However noble the UN’s intentions, this resolution made it appear that the UN was hypocritically reversing itself and approving an invasion most members had considered illegal.

Developments in Other Middle East Countries With the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s government, Israel was freed from a once significant threat as well as a government that had provided support to the Palestinian Arabs. On the other hand, outrage among most Arabs and Muslims over the invasion, which was widely believed to be due in part to the efforts of the Israelis, contributed to other problems: the increased strength of the militant Hamas Sunni Islamist movement among Palestinians and the Shia Hezbollah movement in Lebanon. In the January 2006 Palestinian elections Hamas won control of the Palestinian parliament and, specifically, of Gaza. In July violent conflict broke out between Hezbollah and Israel. Hezbollah launched hundreds of rockets against Israel and destroyed or badly damaged a number of Israeli tanks, killing about 150 Israelis, mainly soldiers. Invading Israeli forces and aircraft killed hundreds of Hezbollah fighters and Lebanese civilians and destroyed much of Lebanon’s infrastructure before the conflict ended and Israeli forces withdrew. Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia all opposed the invasion of Iraq but were affected in different ways. Syria and Jordan endured the immense burdens of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees. Saudi Arabia, while antagonistic to Saddam’s regime, feared that its removal could open the door for an Iranian takeover of Iraq’s largely Shia-populated, oil-rich south, and many Saudis reportedly contributed funds to Sunni insurgents. Iran, although it had suffered greatly during the Iran-Iraq War, which it blamed on Saddam’s government, opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq. Since Bush had included Iran as a member of the “axis of evil,” many Iranians feared that once US troops and military bases were in place in Iraq, Iran could be the next target for a US invasion. The invasion and Bush’s verbal assaults undermined Iran’s moderate political movement and contributed to the election of the more fundamentalistoriented Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president in 2005. The occupation, though, allowed the Iranian-aided SCIRI [Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq] and Dawa Shia Iraqi parties, many of whose leaders had resided in Iran before the invasion, to play major roles in the new Iraqi government, and in the view of some observers this constituted a “strategic victory” for Iran.

Can Democracy Succeed in Iraq? There are a number of reasons why a democratic political system might not succeed in Iraq. These include the possibility that after achieving power, Islamic po-

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litical parties might move Iraq away from anything recognizable as a democratic system. In other words, democratic voting for religious parties could mean a “one man, one vote, one time” temporary democracy that the elected religious politicians might soon effectively terminate. Another possibility is that Sunni Arab resistance to the domination of Shia political religious parties could lead to civil war and then to an authoritarian central government to maintain order. Others believe, however, that the sustained operation of a democratic political system could strengthen support for democracy in Iraq.

The Future of Iraq The 2003 US-led invasion can lead to any one of a range of futures for Iraq: the division of the country into two states, one Kurdish and one Arab, or three, including separate Sunni Arab and Shia Arab nations; the maintenance of a strained federal system; a US-dominated partial democracy or authoritarian state; continuous US military occupation of all or parts of the country; or a sovereign, democratic Iraq free of foreign occupation. An independent Kurdish state would serve as an inspiration and possibly a base of operations for rebel Kurds in other countries and would likely request a prolonged US military presence to deter intervention from Turkey, Iran, or Iraq. An independent Shia nation in oil-rich southern Iraq would probably be closely allied with Iran and might attempt to establish a more comprehensive Islamic Republic form of government than would be possible if Iraq remained one country. Iraq’s post-Saddam constitution, which has a federalist orientation and allows for the possibility of forming regional administrations for groups of provinces similar to the Kurdish Regional Government, may lead to the breakup of Iraq into three separate states and possibly increase interstate antagonisms in the area. [Some observers,] however, feel it is more likely and in fact in the greater interest of Iran that Iraq remain a stable unified state politically dominated by a Shia coalition of parties friendly to Iran. In a united Iraq, Sunni and Shia Arab resentment against foreign occupation has the potential to unify large numbers of the members of both groups. The possibility that a fully sovereign democratic Iraq could result in an elected government hostile to the United States likely generates a strong inclination among a number of US political leaders to maintain a permanent military occupation and allow only a USdominated Iraqi government. In all likelihood, the option of permitting Iraq to become a sovereign democracy could not become a reality without, in effect, a political revolution in the United States both in terms of government leadership and popular sentiment. Fostering real democracy there and in the Middle East as a whole is a risk that those who launched the invasion of Iraq almost certainly were not willing to take, regardless of their prodemocracy rhetoric, for fear of allowing populations with long-repressed hostility toward US foreign policy the right to select their own governments.

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Summary and Analysis The Iraq War cost far more in lives and economic resources than most Americans anticipated. When the invasion, touted in part as a war of liberation from dictatorship, transformed into an ongoing occupation, Iraqi nationalism was inflamed. Most Sunni and many Shia Arabs formed organizations that waged a multifaceted antioccupation insurgency. By empowering Shia groups that had been aided by Iran, banning the Baath Party, removing thousands of Baathists from government jobs, and disbanding Iraq’s armed forces, the occupation not only intensified the insurgency but also helped set the stage for the outbreak of sectarian violence on a level never before experienced in Iraq’s history. Although in some ways Iraq became more democratic, it failed, in the view of many observers, to regain the level of sovereignty it had before the invasion. The war, occupation policies, and ongoing fighting caused more than 4 million Iraqis to flee their homes, many seeking refuge outside the country. Rather than reducing terrorism, the invasion motivated many Iraqis, Saudis, North Africans, and others to join terrorist or insurgent groups and launch violent attacks not only against occupation forces, but also against Iraqis viewed as collaborating with them, including horrific mass suicide bombings. Although Al Qaeda did not exist in Iraq before the invasion, outside of a small part of autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan beyond Saddam’s reach, the war led many Iraqis and foreign Muslims to organize or join Al Qaeda–linked groups inside Iraq. The invasion and occupation of Iraq significantly eroded US moral standing worldwide. Much of the world was struck by what appeared to be transparent mercenary aspects of the American invasion. Once in possession of Iraq’s energy resources, the United States seemed to have no intention of ending the occupation or giving up control. American and coalition corporations were awarded attractive contracts, US citizens working for American companies in Iraq earned high salaries, US military personnel received enlistment bonuses, and eventually American authorities even began paying Sunni militias to at least temporarily desert the insurgency and fight against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Historically many Iraqis have been attracted to the concept of a democratic political system. But some observers questioned whether decades of authoritarian rule or the heightened intergroup violence and mistrust that followed the invasion would prevent the development and consolidation of a democratic government. Others doubted whether true democracy for Iraq was really a goal of those who had launched the war; rather they suspected the goal was an Iraq subservient to US interests. Britain did not establish a truly democratic political system in Iraq when it had the opportunity after World War I. Its leaders drew Iraq’s borders with the apparent intent of maintaining British control over Mesopotamia’s oil. Instead of fostering democracy in the Middle East, Britain and the United States collaborated in overthrowing a nationalist government in Iraq’s huge neighbor, Iran, in 1953

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and reinstalled the Iranian shah as a virtual absolute monarch. Over time this antidemocratic intervention led to the development and success of the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979, which had major effects on Iraq. Iraq’s secular leaders attempted to neutralize the perceived threat of Islamic fundamentalist revolution from Iran by launching the Iran-Iraq War in 1980. The unexpectedly long and devastating conflict left Iraq in a difficult economic situation, which Saddam mistakenly tried to alleviate through seizing Kuwait. This blunder ultimately resulted in the 2003 US-led invasion and the removal of the Baathist government with the stated goals of eliminating WMD [weapons of mass destruction], combating terrorism, and finally bringing real democracy to Iraq. Somewhat inconsistently, however, the United States continued to support nondemocratic but cooperative oil-rich monarchies, casting doubt on its stated political intentions in Iraq. It is likely that achieving a genuinely democratic and sovereign Iraq is of necessity contingent on dramatic political and policy change within the United States. Adapted from Chapter 10 of James DeFronzo, The Iraq War: Origins and Consequences (2009, Westview Press).

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America’s Troubled Moment in the Middle East William L. Cleveland and Martin Bunton

With the end of the Cold War, the United States was the world’s lone superpower. The administration of George W. Bush chose to use its unrivaled might to effect a sweeping political transformation of the Middle East and, not incidentally, ensure America’s access to the region’s vast oil reserves. Citing the “war on terror” in the wake of 9/11 and insisting as well that Iraq harbored arsenals of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the United States and its allies invaded Iraq and removed dictator Saddam Hussein from power, an action also intended to intimidate other authoritarian regimes in the region, notably Iran and Syria. Though it was alQaeda, located in Afghanistan where the ruling Taliban regime permitted it latitude, that was linked to the 9/11 attacks, the United States had quickly shifted its focus from Afghanistan to Iraq, even though most of its allies (except Britain) refused to endorse the notion that Saddam Hussein represented an immediate threat to world peace. Ultimately, a chief US justification for the Iraq War—that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD—proved illusory. Furthermore, with the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime, a bloody insurgency took hold among those Iraqis angered at the actions of foreign troops on Iraqi soil, and the nation descended into chaos and violence. The Sunni Arabs, a ruling minority under Hussein but now just a minority, saw power shift to the more numerous Shiite Arabs, who were divided by factions of their own, and the Kurds sought to consolidate their autonomous rule in the north. Meanwhile, America’s occupation of Iraq emboldened Iran. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad adopted a more defiant posture toward the outside world, denouncing Israel and bolstering fears that Iran’s nuclear program was not peaceful in intent. Subsequently, the administration of President Barack Obama strove for a new beginning for American foreign policy in the Middle East, but the policies at the end of Obama’s first year were surprisingly similar to those of Bush at the end of his second term. In Iraq, the United States was already committed to a drawdown of troops negotiated in late 2008 by the Republican administration. In Iran, Obama faced the dilemma of condoning the Iranian’s right to peaceful nuclear power without allowing them to develop a nuclear-weapons capability—and to manage that dance without seeming to interfere overtly in Iran’s turbulent domestic politics.

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The late William L. Cleveland was professor of history at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. Martin Bunton teaches Middle East and world history at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. He is the author of Colonial Land Policies in Palestine, 1917–1936.

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ny attempt to interpret the recent history of the Middle East runs the risk of being overtaken by rapidly changing events. Trends that appear to be of major significance at one moment can quickly be rendered peripheral by new and unexpected occurrences. Still, it is possible to identify those developments of the [first decade of the] 2000s that were singularly important at the time and are likely to be of historical significance in the years to come. Chief among them is the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003. This chapter will focus on the dramatic ways in which this war shattered a nation and changed the political and strategic landscape of the Gulf region. The three pillars of US cold war policy toward the Middle East since the 1950s had been ensuring the security and prosperity of Israel, containing Soviet ambitions, and securing access to the petroleum resources of the oil-producing states. Although there may be much to criticize about the assumptions on which this policy was based and the ways and means through which it was pursued, there could be no question that in the aftermath of the Gulf War of 1991, America had emerged triumphant in its goals. With its dominance unrivaled, the question of how the United States would conduct itself and what it would consider to be its primary interests and responsibilities in the region became critically important. The basic parameters of post–cold war policy were set forth by President George H.W. Bush during President [Bill] Clinton’s two terms in office (1993–2001). Yet the first term of President George W. Bush (2001–2005) brought about an unprecedented enthusiasm for a political transformation of the Middle East. This shift, in part due to the composition of the younger Bush’s administration and in part due to the post–September 11 environment, was a dramatic one. Whereas George W. Bush was elected in 2000 announcing, “We do not do nation building,” in 2003 his administration embarked upon regime change in Iraq, and in 2005 his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, denounced a sixty-year-old American foreign policy toward the Middle East that had “pursued stability at the expense of democracy” but achieved neither: “Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.” But Bush’s insistence at the same time on the prism of the “war on terrorism” through which all conflicts were understood became a source of much resentment. In the view from Washington, terrorists were simply terrorists, with minimal distinctions between al-Qa’ida and those groups involved in regional conflicts, such as Hizbollah and Hamas, who were more widely seen in the region as legitimate national resistance

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movements or as contenders in democratic processes and who, however reprehensible their tactics, needed to be engaged rather than defeated or excluded. The defining moment of the Bush administration was the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Intended as a massive show of American power, the invasion removed one dictator from the region and sought to intimidate rival authoritarian regimes, with a focus set squarely on neighboring Iran and Syria. Instead of Iraq becoming a springboard from which to engineer the political transformation of its neighbors, however, the debacle of the occupation drained American foreign policy of credibility and respect as well as resources and attested to American weakness, not strength. By 2008, Bush’s last year as president, America’s moment of initiative in the Middle East looked to be on the wane.

The Policy of Dual Containment One of the primary objectives of the Gulf War of 1991 was to maintain access to Middle Eastern oil. The United States continued to pursue policies designed to secure that access throughout the 1990s, but in a manner that differed markedly from the late cold war years. Instead of relying on a local power to serve as a surrogate enforcer of US Gulf policy, as it had done with the shah’s Iran before the revolution of 1979 and with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, the United States appointed itself as the protector of the Gulf. US ships patrolled the waters east of Suez, its warplanes made daily surveillance flights over Iraq, and its troops remained permanently stationed in the region. This was part of a policy called dual containment, which represented US efforts to isolate both Iraq and Iran through tough economic sanctions against the former and more modest restrictions against the latter. In Washington’s opinion, Iran represented a destabilizing force in the region, and until it modified its conduct it was to be economically isolated. The US policy establishment maintained that Iran would use the funds from its energy sales to acquire weapons of mass destruction. To keep Iran’s revenues down, the US government barred American companies from undertaking any trading and investment activities in the country, and in 1996 Washington took the extreme step of authorizing sanctions against any foreign companies investing more than $20 million in Iran. US containment efforts against Iraq were much more aggressive than those used against Iran. Washington insisted on maintaining the crippling economic sanctions imposed in 1990 until Iraq was deemed to be in full compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 687, which called for the destruction, under international supervision, of Iraq’s entire arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and the missiles capable of delivering them. The United States insisted that Iraq continued to possess undiscovered stores of weapons of mass destruction and that if the sanctions were lifted, Iraq would use its oil revenues to rearm and again become a threat to American stability in the Gulf.

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Despite Iraq’s lack of full cooperation, the United Nations Special Commission on Disarmament (UNSCOM) had managed to set up an elaborate monitoring system and had made substantial progress in its disarmament efforts. This ceased in December 1998 when President [Saddam] Hussein demanded an end to sanctions before he would allow UNSCOM to proceed further with its work. The United States and Britain responded with a concentrated three-day bombing campaign that was intended to weaken the Iraqi regime and produce the overthrow of Hussein. What had begun as a quick-strike mission turned into a destructive war of attrition that continued up to the US invasion of 2003. The lack of reliable information-gathering devices on the ground opened the way for the Bush administration’s manipulation of intelligence by exaggerating the extent of Iraq’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in its attempts to justify the invasion of 2003. In addition, the bombing of Iraq was an embarrassment to America’s Arab allies, particularly as Arab popular opinion openly reflected anger over the suffering of the Iraqi people. Under sanctions, rampant inflation and currency devaluation reduced Iraq’s once formidable middle class to poverty, and widespread unemployment contributed to a rise in crime and prostitution. The humanitarian disaster created by the sanctions prompted some Western critics to question the morality of the collective punishment that was being inflicted upon Iraqi civilians and to doubt the logic behind the policy of holding “the welfare of a nation hostage to the good behavior of a dictator.” This anger resonated even more loudly in Egypt and the Gulf monarchies, where popular resentment of US actions threatened to undermine the very rulers the United States was trying to protect. Dual containment was in itself a poorly conceived strategy, and its manifestation in the ceaseless bombing of Iraq revealed a bankrupt US policy that substituted force for diplomacy. However much Washington tried to blame Saddam Hussein for the confrontation, Arab public opinion saw little more than an imperious superpower unilaterally deploying its vast military arsenal against an Arab country while ignoring Israel’s ongoing violations of the peace accords signed with the Palestinians.

Al-Qa’ida and the Attacks of September 11, 2001 September 11, 2001—or 9/11, as it is also known—has entered public discourse as an infamous benchmark of a changed world. On that day, nineteen men hijacked four commercial airliners and turned them into flying bombs. One of the planes crashed into the Pentagon, a second crashed into a field, and the other two smashed into the upper floors of the two World Trade Center towers in New York City. The final death toll for the day was more than 3,200, including the passengers of the four aircraft. Shock mixed with outrage as the US public struggled to come to terms with the magnitude and significance of the events of that day. President Bush vowed to

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wage an all-out “war against terrorism” and to bring to justice the organizers of the mass murders. But who were they, and how were they to be discovered? Fifteen of the hijackers were of Saudi origin, the other four were Egyptian, and all were connected with a shadowy Islamist terrorist organization known as al-Qa’ida, which was headed by a wealthy Saudi expatriate, Usama bin Laden. Angered by what he perceived as an anti-Islamic foreign policy on the part of the United States and by the un-Islamic policies of the ruling elite in most Islamic countries, bin Laden had turned from a wealthy Saudi youth to [an] austere and radical Muslim terrorist. His name was linked to earlier attacks against US targets, and the Bush administration immediately alleged that he was the mastermind behind the events of September 11. Bin Laden’s base was located in Afghanistan, where the ruling Taliban regime sheltered him and permitted al-Qa’ida latitude for its organizational activities. The Taliban was a literalist Islamic regime that forbade female education, hanged television sets from trees, and generally followed a narrow and obscurantist interpretation of the faith, which it tried to impose throughout the country. In October 2001, President Bush launched the war against terrorism by authorizing a US-led invasion of Afghanistan designed to topple the regime, capture bin Laden, and set an example for other states that might harbor terrorist organizations. This action was widely supported by the international community, as some thirtyseven nations contributed troops or other forms of assistance. The military campaign was successful in overthrowing the Taliban, but bin Laden remained at large. The United States and its allies installed a friendly regime in the capital city of Kabul, but Washington did not follow through on an earlier pledge to fully rebuild the country. As a result, regional warlords retained much of their power, and major social and economic reforms were confined to Kabul. Blunt military force, especially American air power, had dispersed the Taliban and disrupted al-Qa’ida networks, but it had not destroyed them. In 2003, the Taliban regrouped and began the first of several more rounds of fighting with the coalition forces. And the very fact that foreign troops continued to occupy Afghanistan provided a ready-made rallying cry for the local resistance, facilitating the al-Qa’ida leadership’s efforts to attract dedicated recruits to its particular version of jihad. The attacks of September 11 gave rise to a brief period of US soul-searching in which the predominant question was “Why do they hate us so much?” It seemed to come as a surprise to many Americans that their country’s foreign policies could generate levels of anger and frustration sufficient to trigger such deadly retribution. Yet, recent history reveals a pattern of US policy that was insensitive to, and largely ignorant of, Arab and Islamic public opinion. Bin Laden himself identified the following as causes of grievance: the US position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, continued US support for the maintenance of economic sanctions against Iraq and the hardships they imposed on the Iraqi people,

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and the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia—a presence seen as an insult to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The first of these grievances generated the greatest anti-American backlash. Within the Middle East and beyond, the unconditional US support for Israel clashed with deep-seated sympathy for the Palestinians, who were seen as victims of an all-powerful colonizing Israel. Support for the Palestinian cause was deeply ingrained in the public consciousness of Arabs and Muslims, and Palestinian resentment and frustration were sentiments shared by those Arabs who also lived under authoritarian regimes. Although it is true that such sentiments were often exploited by embattled leaders seeking to shore up their regimes rather than to support the Palestinian cause, the presence of such easily tapped emotions was a significant factor in the rhetoric of anti-Americanism. Al-Qa’ida was a new phenomenon, a stateless international terrorist network that sought to establish an Islamic order along the lines of the Taliban government. Bin Laden’s ultimate objective was the overthrow of the Saudi and Egyptian regimes; his attack on the United States was calculated to generate an American military response that would outrage Arab and Muslim opinion and lead to popular uprisings against the US-supported rulers. In his television interviews and videos, bin Laden condemned the post–9/11 attack on Afghanistan, portraying the invasion as part of a Western anti-Islamic campaign; he also called on Muslims throughout the world to join him in a jihad against Christianity and Judaism. Political and religious leaders in the Arab Middle East condemned bin Laden’s use of religion for terrorist purposes, but popular opinion equally condemned the US bombing of Islamic Afghanistan.

The Occupation of Iraq By early 2002, the Bush administration had shifted its focus from al-Qa’ida to Iraq as the most threatening source of anti-American terrorism. Although no evidence connected Iraq to the attacks of September 11, Bush and his advisers endeavored to make a case for preemptive military action against that country. Their two most frequently cited justifications were (1) Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction posed a threat to the United States and its allies because Saddam Hussein could place those weapons in the hands of international terrorist organizations such as al-Qa’ida and (2) regime change was necessary for the benefit of the Iraqi people themselves. Two additional factors, generally concealed at the time, were Iraq’s possession of one of the world’s largest oil reserves and a lingering resentment among the hawkish members of the Bush administration over the fact that Saddam Hussein remained a defiant symbol of the decision not to overthrow him a decade earlier. Hoping at first to duplicate his father’s success in forming a UN-backed international coalition against Iraq, President Bush attempted to reactivate the arms

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inspection teams that had been expelled in the aftermath of the 1998 US bombing campaign. In fall 2002, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1441, stating that Iraq must disclose its holdings of weapons of mass destruction and allow unfettered access to all sites requested by the UN inspection teams. During the weeks that followed, the Bush administration continued to insist that Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons programs constituted a danger to the United States and its allies, even though the newly installed UN inspection teams failed to uncover any conclusive evidence of the existence of such programs. Notwithstanding this lack of evidence, it was apparent that the United States was determined to undertake military action against Iraq. In pushing its case for war, the Bush administration ignored its European allies and the United Nations. With the notable exception of the British government, which enthusiastically endorsed military action, Washington’s traditional NATO allies, especially France and Germany, refused to accept the notion that Saddam Hussein represented an immediate threat to world peace and should be overthrown by force. When it appeared that France would veto any Security Council resolution calling for an armed attack on Iraq, the United States unilaterally proclaimed Iraq to be in violation of Resolution 1441 and issued an ultimatum for Saddam Hussein and his two sons to give up power and leave Iraq within forty-eight hours. In response to these acts of US unilateralism, huge protest demonstrations were held throughout the world, and the sympathy that the international community had shown the United States following the September 11 attacks began to dissipate. On March 20, 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom began with a massive bombing campaign and the simultaneous invasion of Iraq by British and American ground troops based in Kuwait. Iraq’s oil facilities were quickly secured, though not without damage, and within three weeks US armored columns entered Baghdad. The regime of Saddam Hussein was no more. On May 1, 2003, against a backdrop that featured a large banner reading “Mission Accomplished,” President Bush declared the end of major combat operations. As the Americans in Baghdad and the British in Basra were both soon to discover, however, toppling a harsh regime was a much easier undertaking than administering and defending the occupation of a country whose inhabitants were at best lukewarm and at worst hostile toward the forces that had “liberated” them. Though most Iraqis, except for a core of supporters who were mostly Sunni Arabs, celebrated the end of Saddam Hussein, they could not but see their liberation as an incidental justification for the invasion. Moreover, the primary justification for the invasion, Iraq’s possession of an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, proved illusory. No such weapons could be found by the new US inspection teams that surveyed the country. This led to increasing criticism of the extent to which President Bush and [British] Prime Minister [Tony] Blair had manipulated intelligence reports in order to gain support for the invasion. As Paul Wolfowitz, deputy to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, later admitted, weapons of mass destruction were only given as

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the chief reason for the invasion because it was “the one issue that everyone could agree on.”

Political Fragmentation and Violence A United Nations Security Council resolution passed in May 2003 finally recognized the United States and Britain as occupying powers in Iraq. President Bush immediately delegated much of that authority to L. Paul Bremer III, a former head of counterterrorism at the State Department, who led what came to be known as the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). As the appointed viceroy, Bremer wanted national elections to await the promulgation of a constitution prescribing basic principles. He feared that the empowerment of the Shi’a majority through national elections would threaten the constitutional separations between mosque and state sought by Washington. But Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani—who held no political post but whose unparalleled authority among Shi’as in Iraq was quickly filling the political vacuum in ways Bremer failed to grasp—demanded that Iraq’s constitution be written by elected representatives and insisted that holding elections was the only legitimate way forward. It took much negotiation, but a “national unity” government finally emerged from elections held in May 2006. Under a new prime minister, Nuri al Maliki, it faced an uphill task. Iraqis had voted along ethnic lines, and any hopes that a new government would be able to impose its authority over the whole country were dashed by the emergence of more political deadlock and the deepening of sectarian cleavages. For one thing, the minority Sunni Arab population felt increasingly disenchanted by the dominant power exercised in Baghdad by Shi’a parties. The victorious Shi’a electoral block was itself divided between various factions jostling for power in Baghdad and Basra, armed with their own militias and allied in various ways to Iran. Meanwhile, the Kurdish leaders were primarily engaged in further consolidating their autonomous rule in the north, fighting in particular for control over Kirkuk. Paralyzed by sectarian divisions, Baghdad’s parliament lacked the means and the will to forge any sort of national consensus and make the compromises necessary to bring disaffected groups within its orbit. Political weakness in Baghdad was seriously compounded by the growing strength and independence of the various locally based sectarian militias, as well as of mafia-like gangs and militant groups affiliated with al-Qa’ida. The ability of these various groupings to act and fight independently of the central government, and in the process further erode the state’s central institutions, was in large part been due to their own access to resources, benefiting either from foreign funds or, more significantly, from exploiting domestic resources that previously were controlled at the center of the Iraqi state. The insurgency against the occupying forces first emerged among those Sunni Iraqis angered at the presence of foreign troops on Iraqi soil. Scores more quickly

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joined out of resentment toward the occupying forces for not providing security and jobs, with the ranks of potential recruits growing yet larger when Paul Bremer purged the administration of former Ba’thists and disbanded the Iraqi army, thereby sending thousands of embittered armed men into the streets. The presence of tens of thousands of private security contractors who operated in a legal grey zone, immune from Iraqi law, together with the horrifying stories of prisoner abuse by American soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison won even more recruits for the insurgency in Iraq. As the insurgency gathered steam, some Iraqis and foreign jihadists were attracted to a more extreme, religiously oriented attack on the US presence in the region. Al-Qa’ida clearly acquired a valuable new justification of its own for recruiting a new generation of jihadis, but their role in the postwar chaos of Iraq has likely been less pervasive than was portrayed by the Bush administration as part of its attempt to frame Iraq as part of the “war on terror.” Foreign jihadis were also less united than often portrayed, usually resembling an informal system of overlapping networks more than a specific branch of al-Qa’ida. Nonetheless, they played a key role in provoking lethal sectarian violence. American forces and members of the international community, including UN staff and aid workers, were targeted and sometimes killed in brutal beheadings videotaped and circulated to the media. But also coming under bloody attack was the Iraqi Shi’a community, viewed as apostates by Sunni extremists. Sectarian killing, which at its apex witnessed whole neighborhoods being ghettoized, intensified greatly after the February 2006 bombing of the goldendomed Askariyya shrine in Samarra, one of Shi’a Islam’s holiest places. By provoking Shi’a reprisal attacks, al-Qa’ida could make further gains by creating local security organizations that planned their own backlash of sectarian cleansing. The two most important Shi’a groups to have formed before the American invasion were al-Da’wa, the party of Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki, and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (formerly the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) whose militia, known as the Badr Brigades, has ties to Iran. The 2003 American invasion gave rise to a third rival grouping, the amorphous Sadrist movement under the leadership of Muqtada al Sadr. Young and rebellious, Muqtada al Sadr successfully built on the strength of the underground network established by his late father, a revered Ayatollah, Mohammed Sadiq al Sadr. With ambitions to be both the paramount Arab nationalist leader in Iraq and the primary Shi’a leader, Muqtada al Sadr acquired many enemies, Shi’a, Sunni, and American. His own Shi’a militia, known as the Mahdi Army, achieved prominence in the chaos of postwar Iraq. Clashes between his forces and those of rival Shi’a leaders led in early 2008 to Prime Minister al Maliki issuing an ultimatum to al Sadr to disband his militia or be excluded from future Iraqi elections. The Kurdish population, concentrated in the mountainous areas of northern Iraq, also have their own long-established fighting units, the peshmergas. But in

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contrast to the bloody fighting in the country’s central and southern regions, the Kurdish regional government based in Arbil has been gradually consolidating its autonomy, hoping that Iraq’s Arabs will fully accept its vision of a loosely organized federal system. Within this landlocked region, whose inhabitants seek as much independence as possible, several points of tension nonetheless gravely threaten the stability of the area. Three stand out. First is the question of Iraqi Kurdistan’s borders and, in particular, the future status of the city of Kirkuk. The Kurds have been implementing a reversal of the Arabization policies imposed under Saddam Hussein’s rule, which expelled Kurds from the city and brought in Arab families from the south. Further complicating the demographic question in Kirkuk is the presence of the Turkomen population, in whose rights neighboring Turkey takes a strong interest. A second, closely related issue, is the Iraqi Kurds’ relations with their ethnic brethren in neighboring states, particularly Turkey. Third is oil, a crucial issue in determining the Kurdish population’s future place in a federal Iraq. In addition to revenue-sharing agreements, tough negotiations need to be concluded over the future exploration and management of oil fields in the north and control over pipelines for export.

The Surge In December 2006 a change of policy was forced upon the Bush administration after a bipartisan panel appointed by the US Congress, known as the Iraq Study Group, exposed the situation in Iraq as “grave and deteriorating.” The report advocated encouraging diplomatic cooperation with Iran and Syria while gradually shifting the American role against the Iraqi insurgency from one of military engagement to one that supported the training and deployment of Iraqi forces. Though the report succeeded in forcing President Bush to accept the necessity of changing policy in Iraq, its advice was largely ignored, at least in the short term. Instead of a move away from a military solution, Bush instituted an even bigger “surge” of troops. The aim of this surge was to concentrate security efforts in Baghdad so as to provide a breathing space necessary to break parliamentary deadlocks and forge a common national project. Another key policy change, responding to arguments raised by American forces in the field, was to start working closely with Sunni tribal leaders, who had come together in a new alliance commonly referred to as the “awakening.” In addition to efforts toward showing greater recognition of the concerns of the aggrieved Sunni minority, American forces started aligning with Sunni groups that had turned against al-Qa’ida cells operating in their midst, using brutal methods that were repellant to Iraqis. Two related assumptions underlay the surge policy that began in June 2007. One was that any sudden withdrawal of American forces would lead to the devastating collapse of Iraq into wholesale sectarian warlordism. The other was that only with the American provision of security could a political solution in Iraq be

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negotiated. Advocates of an immediate withdrawal of American soldiers [from] Iraq, on the other hand, argued that the state had already collapsed and that only by announcing the departure of US forces could the efforts of Iraqi politicians be focused on making the necessary power-sharing compromises that the ruling Shi’a coalition had so far resisted.

Iran’s Nuclear Program According to most observers, America’s occupation of Iraq emboldened Iran: Not only was Saddam Hussein, with whom Iran had fought an eight-year war, eliminated, Shi’a allies were now in positions of leadership in Baghdad, and the United States, Iran’s archenemy for over a quarter of a century was, in the eyes of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “stuck in a whirlpool.” America’s relations with Iran’s theocratic regime have never been good. During the period of George W. Bush’s administration, they went from bad to worse. Bush included Iran along with Iraq and North Korea on his “axis of evil” list in 2002. In March 2003, following the quick toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Iran found itself walled in between two American military occupations (in Iraq and Afghanistan), and talk in Washington suggested that Iran was next in line for “liberation.” Meanwhile, the conservative hardliners who replaced president Mohammad Khatami’s reform-minded administration in 2005 quickly resorted to more adversarial foreign policies reminiscent of the early revolutionary years. Khatami’s successor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was as uninterested in showing a conciliatory face to the West as he was in continuing the liberalizing reforms at home. Ahmadinejad’s adoption of a much more defiant posture on the international stage and his harsh denunciation of Israel raised fears that Iran’s nuclear program, the resumption of which coincided with Ahmadinejad’s election, was not in fact peaceful. These developments fuelled arguments that the nuclear program needed to be preempted by military means. While there has been little firm evidence that the Iranian regime was developing a nuclear weapons program, Tehran nonetheless has repeatedly failed to properly account for its nuclear activities over the course of nearly two decades. An American national intelligence estimate report released in January 2008 revealed that Iran had in fact suspended its clandestine development of nuclear warheads in 2003. But this did not allay all administration fears: the harder part of making a nuclear bomb is the fuel enrichment process, and by 2009 Iran had some 8,000 centrifuges running in the city of Natanz. It was this issue that lay at the heart of the dispute, with Russia and China joining the United States, Britain, France, and Germany at the United Nations to pass United Nations Security Council resolutions aimed at forcing Iran to stop uranium enrichment before it mastered the whole nuclear fuel cycle. The sanctions resolutions at the UN have targeted enti-

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ties connected with Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, but the United States has pressed for a broader boycott of Iranian financial institutions. Iran consistently denied that its aim was to build nuclear weapons and insisted that the centrifuges established at Natanz only enriched a low-grade uranium necessary for civilian power reactors to produce electricity (the production of bombs requires highly enriched uranium). The development of the nuclear industry was presented as a safeguard to its energy security, that is, as forward planning for the day of depleted oil resources. More to the point, the development of a nuclear fuel cycle had become a matter of national honor. There was broad acceptance among the Iranian people for the position of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that Iran would never give up its legal rights under the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to peaceful nuclear technology, and general resentment grew at being held to double standards set by the international community that benefited nuclear arms powers such as Israel. In facing the challenges of weighing the prospect of nuclear independence and meeting popular expectations regarding national dignity against the potential for increasing global isolation, it appeared that the Iranian leadership faced their greater challenges at home than from abroad. Whereas soaring oil prices, and the strengthened position of its regional allies in Iraq and Lebanon, seem to have emboldened the leadership in facing down the threat of expanded international sanctions and moving ahead on uranium enrichment, other pressures at home are less easy to gauge.

Epilogue: US Foreign Policy During President Barack Obama’s First Year in Office When President Barack Obama took office in January 2009 he faced a lengthy list of complex and multifaceted challenges demanding urgent action. At home, the economy needed rescuing from a financial meltdown and healthcare demanded a radical overhaul. Abroad, the disentanglement of American forces from Iraq and the continued scrutiny of Iran’s nuclear program competed for the president’s attention with the ongoing war in Afghanistan, the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the closure of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, airline terrorism, relations with Russia, and climate change. This welter of intractable problems had by the end of the year let much of the air out of the euphoric expectations raised by Obama’s election, and further exposed the limits of American power. Obama’s biggest foreign-policy achievement was in redeeming the United States’ standing on the international stage. This was particularly evident in the Middle East. When George W. Bush made his last speech in the region in December 2008, an Iraqi journalist tossed shoes at him—a moment emblematic of the contempt in which Bush had come to be held. In sharp contrast, Obama’s speech delivered at

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Cairo University in June 2009 was welcomed throughout the Middle East for heralding a new beginning in American foreign policy. “I’ve come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” Quoting Thomas Jefferson, he said: “I hope that our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power the greater it will be.” Addressing the issue of Iraq directly, he declared that America had a dual responsibility “to help Iraq forge a better future— and to leave Iraq to the Iraqis.” Addressing the future of relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran, Obama promised to “move forward without preconditions on the basis of mutual respect.” Compared to his predecessor’s confrontational approach, President Obama’s promise of engagement changed the tone of relations and raised hopes, as well as expectations, throughout the Middle East. Beyond the realm of rhetoric, however, Obama’s Middle East policies at the end of his first year appeared surprisingly similar to those of Bush at the end of his second term. Why this is so in the case of Iraq and Iran requires one to consider the two contexts in turn. Whereas Obama was presented with a relatively fortunate set of circumstances in which to fulfill his promise to withdraw American forces from Iraq, in Iran an escalating cycle of protests and repression presented a real challenge to his policy of seeking broader engagement.

Iraq In February 2009, a month after taking office, President Obama announced that troop levels in Iraq would be cut by two-thirds by August 2010. The other third, or between 35,000 and 50,000 troops, would remain there to help train and support Iraqi security forces. But even these “transitional forces” would be removed completely by the end of December 2011. Within the United States, this declared transition to Iraqi responsibility attracted overwhelming support. Clearly, the American population wanted out of Iraq: far from dominating the discourse as it had for the past six years, American military involvement in Iraq abruptly disappeared from the news media. The consensus across party lines also underscored a huge shift from the fierce political debates over whether or not fixed timetables should dictate troop withdrawals. To Obama’s benefit, the issue had been significantly depoliticized by the ability of the previous Republican administration (including defense secretary Robert Gates, who was kept on by Obama) to pave the way for a new relationship between the United States and Iraq by the signing of the so-called Status of Forces Agreement [SOFA] in late 2008. It had taken the Bush administration months to negotiate this agreement officially marking the beginning of the end of the American occupation. The UN mandate authorizing the presence of foreign troops in Iraq was set to expire at the

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end of 2008, and Iraqi leaders were determined that whatever replaced it would return sovereignty to Iraq. Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki—who was increasingly positioning himself as an Iraqi nationalist—struggled hard to balance US concerns against the nationalist demands of Iraqi public opinion, in particular the widespread anger directed at the lack of accountability and freedom of action enjoyed by US-led forces inside their country. Iraqi leaders also faced pressure from Iran. Though Tehran initially advised its allies in the Shi’a-led Iraqi government to resist the accord, it accepted the final accord. Iran’s acceptance can be attributed either to the desire for improved relations with president-elect Obama or to its satisfaction that the agreement did not allow Iraqi soil [to be] used as a springboard for any American military intervention in Iran. The SOFA was backed by the 275-member Iraqi parliament in November 2008 with the support of 149 votes. As part of the gradual, yet firm, withdrawal of the US military presence in Iraq, the agreement required US troops to redeploy from cities and towns by the end of June 2009, a date that came to be hailed by Iraqis as “National Sovereignty Day.” Iraq had clearly passed an important milestone on the road to independence, but the country’s politicians still faced huge challenges. While it was true that, in relative terms, 2009 marked an improvement in the security situation across Iraq, it was also clear that a common national project, for which the 2007 surge was meant to create the conditions, had yet to be created. Analysts observed an exhaustion of support for separate militias owing allegiance to ethno-sectarian groupings, but also noted was that the lower incidence of violence chiefly reflected the sectarian relocation that had been brought about by the brutal civil war between the Shi’a majority and Sunni minority that had engulfed Iraqi society. The Shi’as had won, leaving the defeated Sunnis cleansed from formerly mixed neighborhoods. The vast majority of Iraqis who were displaced, in and outside the country, continued to struggle. In early 2010, with sectarian reconciliation still shaky, political manipulation and government corruption high, and the Arab-Kurdish struggle as bitter as ever, the volatile environment witnessed an escalation of violent bombings as a new set of elections approached. But Iraq’s fragile environment generated little debate in the United Sates as its leaders continued the process of disentangling its troops from Iraq. There was no call for the United States to delay its planned military pullout. What clearly had changed over the course of 2009 was the recognition that, huge as all of Iraq’s challenges are, Iraqis will have to sort them out for themselves. As notable as this shift was in US policies toward the Middle East, it is significant to note that it evidently did not impact the Obama administration’s decision to augment US troop levels in Afghanistan as a way to deal with the deteriorating situation there.

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Iran From the outset of his presidency, Obama made clear he would try to engage Iran diplomatically. This represented an abrupt departure from the charged rhetoric and policies of isolation pursued by his predecessors, especially George W. Bush’s suspected policy of regime change. In March 2009, for example, Obama directly addressed both “the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran” and “the people” when marking the occasion of Nowruz, Iranian New Year. The promise of a “new day” in relations between Washington and Tehran was greatly complicated, however, by the disputed results of Iran’s presidential election held in June. The June election results gave President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a landslide victory amidst allegations of vote-rigging. Despite harsh crackdowns by state security forces, protests against the election results transformed into resilient demonstrations against the theocratic regime itself. This opposition movement erupted first among professionals and the educated middle class but then became much more nationwide with trade unions and the working class all engaged. Compared to previous reform movements in Iran’s contemporary history, which tended to rally around individual leaders, this so-called green wave stood out for its reliance on social networks. The mobilization of anti-regime demonstrators was sustained by the hijacking of official occasions to evade the official ban on protests and empowered by the ability of their youth to circumvent the official restrictions on modern communications networks. The Iranian leadership suffered a grave loss of legitimacy at home, and it adopted an even more defiant and belligerent position on the international stage. The timing was terrible for President Obama’s efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Obama’s policy of engagement came under threat. He faced pressure at home to denounce the repressive actions of the Islamic Republic and to scale down his earlier talk of extending it an open hand. Obama, however, feared that any active support the United States offered the Iranian protesters would risk tarring the opposition as an agent of foreign interference. What eventually did derail Obama’s policy of engagement was the revelation in late September that Iran was secretly building a second uranium-enrichment plant, tunneled into the mountains near the holy city of Qom. Iran claimed that construction of this facility—as yet unoperational—was consistent with its efforts at Natanz to produce low-enriched uranium for a civilian nuclear program. But Western officials were skeptical that the size of the Qom facility would be useful for anything other than the production of weapons-grade material. Some analysts concluded that Iran was seeking breakout capability, that is, stopping short of actually constructing a nuclear weapon but setting in place the means to rapidly build one in the face of a future danger. Working with the other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany—sometimes referred to as the P5 + 1—President Obama faced an increasingly difficult challenge: how, on the one hand, to concede that Iran

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would not surrender what it saw as its right to pursue peaceful nuclear technology while, on the other hand, ensuring that Iran not continue to produce a fuel stock that could be converted into weapons-grade uranium, if it so wished. Talks in Geneva in October 2009 produced a deal that was structured around Tehran agreeing to export the bulk of its stock of low-enriched uranium for reprocessing in Russia and France, where it would be rendered into higher-enriched fuel and then returned to Iran for peaceful research and technologies. But Iran, again, equivocated. Iranian leaders raised specific concerns about the deal, especially regarding whether Russia and France could be trusted to uphold their end of the bargain. But the real problem appeared to be the deepening fissures within Iranian politics. The fact that the leading opponents of the regime firmly supported Iran’s right to develop its own nuclear program made it all the more important for the regime itself to adopt the toughest stance and assert nationalist principles. Political infighting was thus motivating all sides to be critical of any proposed resolution of the nuclear issue. Reverting to its original hard-line position, Tehran missed the deadline to respond to the Geneva deal. The start of 2010 thus saw Western calls for “crippling sanctions” become more bellicose (though Obama continued to openly warn Israel that a military strike would be catastrophic for the region). But it was not at all clear whether yet another round of sanctions imposed on Iran would in fact weaken a vulnerable regime, or instead impose further hardship on the population and allow the regime to deflect all blame onto foreign meddling. Although Russia appeared to be moving closer to supporting further sanctions on Iran, China was continuing to resist, eager to maintain its strong commercial relations with the Iranian economy. This increasing dependence on the utilization of sanctions to force a country to end a weaponization program it in fact denies having raises disturbing memories of 2002/2003. As Roula Khalaf has pointed out, “It is one of the great ironies of US foreign policy that the US invaded a country looking for WMDs that were never there and, along the way, empowered another—Iran—which had been secretly building a vast infrastructure for a nuclear programme.”1 Indeed, the failed policies of the previous decade certainly give rise to serious concerns about where exactly American relations with Iran are now heading. One set of questions that needs to be asked concerns the rush to judge another country’s weaponization program based on alarmist, worst-case-scenario intelligence assessments, the profound dangers of such action having just been underscored by the “weapons of mass destruction” case against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. A second set of questions concerns what sort of diplomatic cul-de-sac the American administration will find itself in when the sanctions scenario has played out and left it only with worse choices, including the demand that Obama go to war. 1. Roula Khalaf, “Parallels Exist on Iran and Iraq,” Financial Times, October 6, 2009. Adapted from Chapter 25 of William L. Cleveland and Martin Bunton, A History of the Modern Middle East, Fourth Edition (2009, Westview Press), with new additions by Martin Bunton.

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Maliki Consolidates Power in Post-Saddam Iraq Phebe Marr

In the following reading, Phebe Marr’s analysis of Iraq since the American intervention of 2003 focuses on the consolidation of power by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Under Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Arab minority ruled Iraq, but with his fall, the Shiite Arab majority has a much greater role in national politics, though the Sunni Arab and the ethnic (and chiefly Sunni) Kurdish minorities each maintain a significant political and military presence within the country. Maliki’s incursion against the militias of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Basra helped mollify accusations that Maliki was merely a Shiite partisan. His decisive actions against Kurds in disputed territories of the north strengthened his concept of a strong central government in Iraq. Likewise, Maliki gained stature by negotiating the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), by which the United States would (and in fact did) withdraw all its combat troops from Iraq by December 2011. In this chapter, Marr details how Maliki led a Shiite coalition, the State of Law, that staked out a largely nationalist, centralist position amid the highly charged ethnic and sectarian politics of the post-Saddam era. In the country’s 2010 national election, Prime Minister Maliki’s party was opposed by the Iraqi National Alliance (INA), another, more Islamist Shiite coalition that had the backing of neighboring (and Shiite) Iran. Also running slates in the elections were political alliances representing the Kurds and the cross-sectarian, Sunni-supported Iraqiyya coalition headed by Ayad Allawi. Allawi’s Iraqiyya coalition actually won the most seats in the election, though by a margin too narrow for it to form a new government. After a protracted stalemate, the two Shiite coalitions, State of Law and INA, realigned as a bloc, which ultimately led to Maliki’s remaining prime minister, despite the initial opposition of Sadr and other members to the new marriage of convenience between the secular and Islamist Shiite groups. Marr also considers the pressures exerted by Kurds and Sunnis on the central government and the influence of Iran on the Shiites of Iraq. Marr concludes by observing a conundrum of current Iraqi politics. A stronger and more effective central government will probably rely on a narrower political base and will likely become more authoritarian and less democratic. A stronger parliament, with a flourishing system of loyal-opposition parties, appears yet to be a distant aspiration. Phebe Marr is the author of The Modern History of Iraq, from which this reading is excerpted, with additional updating by the author. 234

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raq’s political, economic, and social structure had already been badly eroded under Saddam Husain, but the inept occupation of 2003 brought unprecedented political and social collapse and by 2006 almost pushed Iraq over the edge into a failed state. Without substantial international support and lacking in understanding of Iraq or clear planning for Iraq’s future, the decision by the United States to occupy Iraq was fraught with dangers. Toppling Saddam proved easy and swift, but replacing the government and the political and social institutions that underpinned the regime was a long, difficult, and costly process—for both the United States and Iraq. The initial attack, followed by unchecked looting and the illadvised dismantling of the previous political and military structures, created widespread destruction and a political and social vacuum, which foreign personnel proved unable to replace. Iraq soon began to fracture into its ethnic and sectarian components. By the end of 2006, Iraq was collapsing. An occupation and an ambitious nationbuilding project, begun with more optimism than realism, had started to unravel. Iraqi society was fragmenting along ethnic and sectarian lines, while a newly elected government, composed mainly of outsiders, had just taken over a new, and as yet untried, political structure. The United States had ended one threat—an aggressive regional regime—but created another: a potentially failing state.

Maliki’s Consolidation of Power, 2007–2009 In Baghdad the central government under Maliki began, with US support, to strengthen its position. Nuri al-Maliki had started his tenure as a weak, relatively unknown political figure embedded in a Shi’i coalition in which his party, the Da’wa, was the weaker member. But early on, Maliki began to demonstrate political toughness and persistence as well as a penchant for concentrating power in his own hands. Beginning in 2007, he began to increase his control over the army and the security services by appointing people loyal to him personally and bypassing institutional structures. Not surprisingly, his opponents, including some in the United States, accused him of being sectarian and working to consolidate the Shi’i hold over the security forces. They demanded his removal and replacement through a no-confidence vote in parliament—a crisis he faced twice during 2007. The situation illustrated Iraq’s conundrum: a new political system with untested rules of operation, a dysfunctional government that was too inclusive to make decisions, and continued fear among politicians of concentrating power in anyone’s hands. The first crisis reached a head during the summer of 2007. By this time, Maliki’s cabinet had already begun to fracture. On 7 August five ministers left, demanding reform and a new prime minister. This made seventeen absentee ministers, almost half the cabinet. Finally, after a good bit of US pressure, five top

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Iraqi leaders reached an agreement on 26 August to develop a core group under the presidency to meet and work out problems. Nonetheless, at the end of the year Maliki faced another threat of removal when opponents claimed he was not implementing the 26 August agreement. US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice visited Baghdad in December and again applied pressure on the cabinet for compromise. In the end, Maliki was saved once again. In the US view, Maliki, despite his obvious shortcomings, was more of a nationalist than a sectarian and could be nudged over time in a different direction. More important, however, was their recognition of the fractious and intransigent political environment Maliki faced, the weakness of his support base, and, above all, the time it would take to find a substitute—time that could, once again, lead to renewed violence and state collapse. Using this support, Maliki now moved ahead to establish stronger control over the government. Gradually, he staked out a position for himself as a “nationalist” and a “centrist” rather than a sectarian leader, and he managed to do so without relinquishing his ties and roots to his own Shi’i constituency. From an initially weak figure, he took a number of steps to make himself the main political contender in a fragmented political landscape and to gain control over the central government.

The Basra Incursion A government incursion into Basra, which began on 25 March [2008], was publicly billed as an attempt to bring errant militias to heel and to wrest Iraq’s port city from their control, but it was almost wholly directed against [Shiite cleric Muqtada al-]Sadr’s Mahdi Army. Basra clearly posed a major problem for the central government that had to be tackled. Basra was Iraq’s second-largest city, its only access to the Gulf, and its major oil-exporting center, but the city had fallen prey to Shi’i militias and criminal gangs (often indistinguishable). The various local factions engaged in a conflict over port facilities and oil exports that often spilled over into violence. Many used smuggling activities, including oil, to finance their activities. Iranian penetration and arms smuggling were rife, and feuding frequently turned violent. In addition, the local population was harassed about Islamic restrictions and often terrorized by militias. On 25 March the ISF [Iraqi Security Forces] entered the neighborhood of alTa’miyya, a Sadrist stronghold, where government forces soon faced resistance. Fighting rapidly spread to other neighborhoods as the Mahdi Army fought back. Maliki asked for coalition aid. Americans and British provided air and artillery support, which helped turn the tide. One reason the operation ran into difficulty soon became apparent: desertions and even defections to the other side by a number of Iraqi forces. These were mainly in the police, a weak link, but some of the army were also involved, espe-

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cially a brigade only recently trained in combat operations. Many, if not most, of these deserting forces were from the Basra area, indicating the problems involved in the use of local forces. After the battle, the Iraqi government dismissed 1,300 soldiers and police for disloyalty. But it is also clear that the Sadrists were under stress as well. On 30 March, Sadr ordered a cease-fire, and the parties turned to Iran to mediate. Maliki sent a negotiating team to Iran. Eventually, a cease-fire was arranged. Once the bulk of the Mahdi Army had stood down, the government’s forces were able to move in and take control of the rest of the city. On 24 April, they announced that Basra was now under government control. Law and order had returned to the city. Whatever the initial difficulties, the Basra operation was a success in restoring government control. Moreover, it was immensely popular in Basra, where citizens welcomed a return to normalcy. And much of the political gain went to Maliki. Whatever his motives, he had extended government control over a key province, once again weakened Sadr, and emerged as someone who looked more like an Iraqi leader than a sectarian partisan—a role he would increasingly play.

Dealing with the Kurds Maliki soon took another step in solidifying his position, this time pushing back on the Kurds. Kurdish separatism had never been popular with Maliki, and a move to regain control over some of the disputed territory now in Kurdish hands was not surprising. In August, Maliki launched a military campaign, presumably to fight al-Qa’ida, but government forces took the opportunity to engage some Kurdish peshmerga [militia] troops in disputed areas under Kurdish control. He succeeded in pushing Kurdish troops out of these areas and restoring government sovereignty. Kurds were furious, but after negotiations they agreed to remove 4,000 peshmerga and headquarter them in Kurdistan. Maliki then went further. The army began deploying its twelfth division in the Kirkuk governorate, establishing its headquarters in Kirkuk in October 2008, which was put under the command of an army brigade. And in preparations for the elections, Maliki shifted the command of units to Arabs. Again, the Kurds were angered but could not resist, lest their moves be interpreted as insubordination. These steps clearly mark the progress Maliki was making in outflanking not only real opponents but also members of his own government coalition. On 8 November 2008, he clearly outlined his emerging position. He supported a strong central government, defining what he meant by federalism. “We must build a strong federal state,” he said, “whose government will assume responsibility for sovereignty, security, external policy and other matters. The powers must in the first place belong to the federal government. . . . If some powers are not specified [in the constitution], they will be given to the trunk and not to the branches.”

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Relations with the United States: The Status of Forces Agreement Maliki’s march to prominence was based not only on outmaneuvering his domestic opponents but also on negotiating a new agreement with his major international overseer—the United States—that would give Iraq a surprising degree of independence. A case can be made that Maliki’s most important achievement in 2008 was the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the United States, a pact that promised withdrawal of US forces by 2011 and a shift to a more civiliandominated relationship defined in a long-term strategic framework agreement. Although Iraq had a long history of opposition to foreign treaties and a foreign military presence on the nation’s soil, there were clear reasons for majority support for the SOFA from most political actors. The Kurds, a major pillar of the coalition in power, were the most supportive. They had gained most from the occupation and American support and strongly favored its continuance. The Shi’i coalition faced strong pressure from Iran for withdrawal. But they recognized only too well their fragile domestic position. They owed the dramatic power shift in Iraq in their favor mainly to the US occupation, and their ability to remain in power would depend on the development of well-trained security forces loyal to themselves—far from an accomplished fact in the face of hostile militias, alQa’ida terrorism, and Sunni adversaries. But the Shi’a in power were not Western oriented. They were anxious to regain control over domestic forces and reduce dependence on the United States. Maliki, in particular, had maneuvered to gain control over the military and appeared anxious to achieve independence. As early as July 2007, he had told Senator Barack Obama, during a visit to Iraq, that he wanted the withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq by the end of 2010—a promise Obama went on to fulfill as president. By the following year, in August 2008 after military actions in Basra and Diyala, Maliki apparently felt confident enough of his forces to tell the Americans he wanted the withdrawal of all troops by 2011. Even Sunnis, who had been the most vociferous opponents of the US presence, had largely come around to support for some continuing forces—indeed, many now saw themselves as the potential victims if withdrawal were too rapid or accomplished before their inclusion in the political system. And no one wanted the continuing US military tie, especially its equipment and training, more than the military itself, so long as it came with the proper terms. The issue with all of these parties was the timing of withdrawal—that is, the need for a date by which Iraq’s complete control would be established. The only real opponents of the SOFA were extreme elements. The Sadrists, who were essentially out of power and saw little hope of getting in, virulently opposed the agreement and wanted “immediate” withdrawal. Behind them was the main regional opponent of a US presence—Iran—which exercised as much pressure as it could to hasten withdrawal. Among the Sunnis, only the most

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extreme—al-Qa’ida and militant Sunnis—whose numbers had now dwindled, were really opposed, and they had been reduced to the margins by 2008. The SOFA provided for US troop withdrawal and the terms that would regulate US troops while they were still in Iraq. The United States agreed to withdraw all its forces from cities, villages, and localities by 30 June 2009 and from all Iraqi territory no later than 31 December 2011. In the interim the Iraqi government requested the “temporary assistance” of the United States in maintaining security; in conducting operations against al-Qa’ida, other terrorists, outlaws, and “remnants of the former regime”; and in training, equipping, supporting, and supplying the Iraqi forces. As a whole, the SOFA and the long-term security agreement were regarded as a victory for Maliki’s agenda. Although the SOFA did extend the US presence for another three years, the withdrawal dates were specific and the terms put control in Iraqi hands. The strategic partnership was of benefit to all. The SOFA thus marked the end of one era and a transition to a new one, which would reduce US influence and put more control in Iraqi hands. However inept and dysfunctional the Bush era had been at the start in Iraq, it ended in a more rational and orderly fashion. The struggles and problems created by the occupation would continue in Baghdad, but they would play out henceforth mainly in the political, rather than the military, arena.

Maliki and the National Scene in Baghdad In Baghdad, Maliki and many others prepared for the important election in January 2010. Maliki faced opposition from all of his other mainstream competitors. His success and his actions in manipulating appointments and moving to dominate the political process during the previous two years had alienated all of his rivals. The Sadrists, originally his key supporters, had born the brunt of his military attacks and were unwilling to support him again. The Sahwa [anti-al-Qaeda Sunni] forces were alienated by his foot-dragging on hiring them and his weak efforts at “reconciliation.” The Kurdish parties were openly opposed to his efforts to push them out of disputed territory in the north. They had taken to calling him “a new Saddam.” ISCI [the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq] and its chief foreign supporters in Iran also had reason to turn against him because they had been weakened by his refusal to join them in a common Shi’i front.

Parties and Contenders Electioneering, well under way by September of 2009, involved the usual preelection attempts by the major parties to put together coalitions designed to get as many votes as possible from core constituencies without having to compromise on their main issues or on the candidate they would run for prime minister or president.

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And just as before, these coalitions (often involving unlikely or even incompatible partners) would wait until after the electoral outcome to bargain with other coalitions in forming a parliamentary majority. The main contending coalitions—all relatively familiar—were now down to four: Shi’i Islamists, Maliki’s State of Law, the Kurds, and a combination of secularists and Sunnis.

Shi’i Islamists First were the Shi’i Islamists, attempting to assemble all Shi’i parties under one umbrella. In this, they were undoubtedly encouraged by Iran. Maliki would not join, but the INA [Iraqi National Alliance] did succeed in including virtually all other Shi’i parties. The backbone, as in 2005, was ISCI partnering with the Sadrists, an unlikely and uncomfortable combination but one designed to bury the hatchet in an attempt to gather in the Shi’i vote. ISCI’s strengths included an established organization, well-known political figures, good financial backing (presumably from both religious and Iranian sources), and a solid, middle-class constituency. The Sadrists, the other main component of the INA ticket, were an unpredictable ally, undoubtedly persuaded to align with ISCI by Iran, the main foreign sponsor of this alliance. Sadr had been curbing the violence of his movement, seeking to play a role in the political process, but the movement still lacked organization and coherence. Moreover, the Sadrists were, aside from the extreme Sunni fringe, the major opponents of cooperating with the United States—a main Iranian aim but a liability for any Iraqi party going forward. But the Sadrists had a strong constituency inside Iraq. They still drew on support from the Shi’i underclass—the poor and the lower middle classes, both urban and rural, and a substantial portion of Shi’i youths enticed by Sadr’s more radical and anti-Western rhetoric and oppositionist stance.

Maliki’s State of Law The second major Shi’i coalition was that run by Maliki’s State of Law. He intended to draw on the Shi’i vote and extend his constituency to secularists and, if possible, Sunni Arabs as well, based on his pragmatic, nationalist, “law and order” platform. He attempted some outreach to Sunni and secular constituencies, and he did manage to get some respected individual Sunnis, but as one Sunni leader claimed, “Maliki can bring in Sunni politicians, whom he will give positions to in government, but he cannot bring in Sunni constituencies.”

The Kurds The Kurdistan Alliance strategy was to gather as much strength as possible in the election among Kurds for the alliance’s national agenda and then bargain with whomever won in Baghdad for participation in government, hoping to retain the earlier position as kingmakers. The main items on their agenda were well

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known—the Kirkuk referendum [on Kurdish claims to the northern city], control over disputed territory, settling of oil contract disputes, and a greater share of the national budget. There was also a new element, “integration” of Kurdish peshmerga into the newly emerging national army—that is, giving them training equal to that given by the United States to Iraqi armed forces. The Kurds could see a shifting balance of power here and wanted to maintain military parity.

The Secularists and Sunnis The fourth main coalition—a secular, cross-sectarian ticket with strong Sunni support—represented a change in the political landscape. The Iraqi Nationalist Movement, headed by [nominal Shiite Ayad] Allawi, was led by the [secular nationalist] Iraqiyya group. In some senses, this coalition appealed to some of the same voters—more pragmatic Iraqi nationalists—as Maliki did, but unlike Maliki, whose ticket was almost wholly Shi’i and relatively cohesive, this one was cobbled together from disparate groups. Allawi was well known for his secularism, opposition to Iran, former Ba’th membership, and tough “strongman” image. But new to this coalition was the strong Sunni Arab participation, indicating that these groups had learned from previous experience that fragmentation would not work in getting a seat at the table. Because Allawi’s nationalist positions were little different from their own, they decided to coalesce behind him on one ticket. It was not clear how this new coalition would do, given its status as a newcomer. However, Allawi did have considerable success gaining support from some Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia, for whom a Shi’i regime in Baghdad was anathema, and Syria, which also preferred a secular government in Baghdad. There was support from Turkey as well, probably with an eye to [the bloc’s] stance against Kurdish expansion in the north.

Election Results Four major blocs emerged as dominant, but the winner was unexpected. The top vote-getter, by a razor-thin, two-seat margin was Allawi’s Iraqiyya coalition with 91 seats (28 percent). Maliki’s State of Law took 89 seats (27.4 percent). The INA came in third with 70 seats (21.5 percent). Kurdish groups as a whole got 57 seats (17.5 percent). Overall, the most striking result of the election was fragmentation. There was no clear winner, despite Allawi’s two-seat margin, revealing deep divisions over the direction Iraq should take, ranging from religious and sectarian identity at one end of the spectrum to a more pragmatic, Iraqi nationalism in the center and ethnic separatist identity among the Kurds at the other end. There was virtually no cross-ethnic or cross-sectarian voting. The Shi’i majority provinces of the south voted overwhelmingly for one of the two Shi’i parties. The Sunni Arab majority provinces voted overwhelmingly for Iraqiyya. The Kurdish provinces voted for

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Kurdish parties. The mixed provinces did divide their votes, but in the end Iraqiyya was the only group that could garner cross-ethnic and cross-sectarian votes. The underlying lesson of the election, then, was that voters were still voting on ethnic and sectarian grounds to get power, but within these parameters they wanted more pragmatic, interest-based policies.

The Postelection Stalemate Voting was one thing; assembling a government was another. A postelection stalemate went on for months. The two Shi’i coalitions (INA and State of Law) appeared determined to prevent a return of Allawi’s Iraqiyya, with its secular agenda and its predominantly Sunni (and ex-Ba’thist) components. On 5 May, the INA and State of Law realigned as a bloc, even though INA did not want to see Maliki as prime minister. The new “bloc” would now have 159 seats in the CoR [Council of Representatives], just 4 short of the necessary 163 for a majority. The constitution specified that the parliamentary majority should be charged with forming a cabinet. Allawi claimed that his bloc was the majority because it won the most votes; the new Shi’i coalition under Maliki claimed that it should form the cabinet because it was now the largest bloc in the CoR. The Iraqi Supreme Court upheld Maliki’s interpretation. But that did not end the problem. Despite the formation of the new Shi’i bloc, it had to agree on a prime minister. Neither ISCI nor the Sadrists would agree to nominate Maliki. However, Maliki showed no signs that he intended to relinquish the prime ministership. The bargaining went on for a record eight months after the election and was only settled in mid-November. During the interlude, the extent of foreign interference in Iraq’s weak government became apparent. Iran summoned the Shi’i parties and the Kurds to Iran for negotiations in an effort to get them together. Allawi and Sadr were brought to Damascus to negotiate with each other and with the Turkish foreign minister. Vice President Joe Biden, responsible for the Iraq file in the United States, came to Baghdad to speed up the process and reportedly pushed a coalition government, one that would include Allawi and the Kurds but marginalize Sadr. The key issues, however, were Maliki’s refusal to step down as prime minister and the difficulty of others, especially ISCI, in accepting him. Finally, early in October, the Sadrists, presumably under Iranian urging, broke ranks and agreed to support him, essentially leaving the rest of the Shi’i coalition with little choice. On 10 November, an agreement was reached to allow Maliki to remain as prime minister in return for concessions designed to make room in the government for other parties and to put constraints on his power. One of these was the creation of a National Council for Strategic Policy to be headed by his main rival, Ayad Allawi. While the November agreement was vague in many respects, it attempted to enshrine the principle of tawazun (balance), a veiled reference to achieving a balance among ethnic and sectarian groups.

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The government which was finally formed included several Sunni members of Iraqiyya but it did not include Ayad Allawi or the National Council for Strategic Policy. The Kurds came away with the presidency and the key Foreign Affairs portfolio, but not much else. Not surprisingly, the struggle for power among the major blocs continued as did Maliki’s increasingly open attempts to concentrate power in his hands. This was particularly noticeable in the military and security areas. The three key security ministries, Defense, Interior, and National Security, were left unfilled and temporarily given acting ministers loyal to Maliki; top military positions and many second-level ministry appointments continued to be awarded to Maliki loyalists. Even more significant, in January 2011, Maliki put independent commissions under direct cabinet oversight. Although this provoked an outcry from parliament, the ruling remained. Maliki then turned to eliminating his main Sunni opponents, often tying them publicly to the Ba’thists. On October 11, over 140 faculty members were removed from Tikrit University on grounds of de-Ba’thification. In the same month, a wave of arrests swept up over 6,000 officers and former Ba’thists (mainly Sunnis) throughout the central and southern provinces, reportedly on grounds of an attempted Ba’thist coup. These moves prompted a Sunni backlash, with two Sunnimajority provinces calling for the creation of regions comparable to the autonomous Kurdistan region, governed by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Similar stirrings elsewhere in Sunni regions revived the nightmare of possible separatism and even renewed civil war. Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, among others, supported the movement, claiming people were unwilling to accept further injustice and bad management from the central government. This struggle finally reached a crisis stage in December 2011, when Maliki issued an arrest warrant for Hashimi, charging him with complicity in terrorist acts. Hashimi fled first to the KRG, where he was given protection by the Kurds, and later to Turkey. The Sunni opposition (Iraqiyya) temporarily boycotted the cabinet, but in February they returned to pass the 2012 budget. With money available for patronage through the ministries they controlled, none wanted to miss out on the largesse. Amid these governing crises—the fractious party in-fighting and general government dysfunction—the Kurds used the opportunity to strengthen their position in the north. In October 2011 Exxon-Mobil bid on a Kurdish oil contract in the north and was awarded with the right to develop six fields, despite the central government’s warning that companies that bid in the KRG would be excluded from bidding in the much richer south. Their move gave the Kurds greater confidence and more leverage in their struggles with the central government. The conflict escalated in April 2012 when the Kurds stopped sending oil from the north to Baghdad because of a dispute over payments to the KRG. In the spring of 2012, KRG president Massoud Barzani also raised the threat of separation, publicly hinting at secession if Kurdish demands were not met.

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Meanwhile, the US withdrawal process went forward. Although the Status of Forces Agreement concluded earlier had specified that all US troops would depart Iraq by the end of 2011, the United States expected to maintain a small “presence” in Iraq—possibly as large as 20,000—in part to help Iraq with domestic and regional security but also to provide some continuing US leverage in Iraq. However, negotiations for an extension of the SOFA collapsed. In December 2011, the last American forces left Iraq, closing a turbulent and contentious chapter in US-Iraqi relations. Although US troops left, the United States continued a “train and equip” mission, now operated from an office in the US Embassy. The United States would supply the Iraqi military with advanced equipment, including tanks and F-16 fighters, and train Iraqi officers and troops. However, it would be some time before Iraq would take possession of the planes, leaving them, essentially, without control over their skies and with weak border control. The United States also moved to reduce its huge civilian presence, a virtual necessity in the face of US budget cuts and the pressures of Iraqi politics. The US Embassy, the largest in the world, was cut, possibly by half, and a civilian mission to train Iraqi police was to be reduced or eliminated. This shift, while clearly reducing American influence, presaged a shift to a more normal diplomatic mission. If well managed, the transformation could improve the political climate. Ties in other areas—especially education and business—continued. By 2012, Iraq was sending thousands of students to the United States. However, the uncertain political situation and continued lack of security slowed business ties. The US withdrawal left Iraq in full charge of its domestic security situation. While the security situation had greatly improved since 2003—by May 2012 violence was at its lowest levels since 2003—terrorist bombings, assassinations, and other violent acts continued to kill and injure a number of people on a daily basis, especially south of the KRG. Iraq continued to be a weak, fragmented, and internally divided state, with a limited regional role and subject to constant pressures from neighbors. The chief regional challenge came from Iran, which had substantial influence in Iraq in multiple areas—political, economic, cultural, and religious—through a web of links. It had close, long-standing relations to the Shi’a leaders in power; multiple intelligence assets; strong economic links, including trade, investment, and the supply of some of Iraq’s electricity; and strong religious ties with Iraqi Shi’i leaders in Najaf and Karbala. However Iran’s leverage was limited. Most Iraqis feared the power of [their] far bigger neighbor and did not want its domination. They hoped to balance Iran’s influence with the more remote but potent partnership with the United States. Iraq, however, faced the dilemma of growing tensions between the United States and Iran over Iran’s potential acquisition of nuclear weapons. Should this dispute lead to military action by the United

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States—or its ally Israel—Iraq would undoubtedly be caught in the middle. In that case it would likely face destabilizing actions from Iran designed to harm US interests. Iraq could also look to Turkey for help in balancing Iran and in moderating Kurdish moves toward separatism. Turkey’s economic investment in Iraq—half of which was spent in the KRG—made it a major factor in Iraq’s development. Until recently, Turkey’s relations with both Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, and Baghdad, the national capital, were good, but tensions increased after the Hashimi affair and the differing policies of Turkey and Iraq toward the Asad regime in Syria. On the other hand, Iraq had poorer relations with Sunni-led Arab countries, especially in the Gulf, who fear its Shi’i-led regime and its “leaning” toward Iran, but here Iraq could point to some recent improvements. In March 2012 Baghdad hosted an Arab League summit, its first in decades, indicative of an improved security situation as well as recognition by the Arab world of Iraq’s status as an Arab power. Negotiations with Arab countries prior to holding the summit enabled Iraq to improve relations with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Saudi Arabia appointed a non-resident ambassador, the first since 2003, and Kuwait and Iraq settled the issue of reparations for damage to Kuwaiti airways, allowing Iraqi Airways to resume operations. Improvement on these fronts, however, was overshadowed by a new, regional danger—the escalating instability and violence in Syria in the wake of the “Arab Spring.” Here Iraq found itself at odds with other Arab neighbors and Turkey, fearing rather than supporting the overthrow of the Asad regime. There were several reasons why. First, Iraq worried that violence in Syria would spill over into Iraq. Second, the most likely replacement for the Asad regime would come from Sunni religious elements, possibly extremists, unlikely to embrace Maliki and the Shi’a now in control in Baghdad. Moreover, continued violence could make room for al-Qa’ida to expand in Iraq, after they had gradually been brought under control. Lastly, such a regime change in Syria would be viewed as a major strategic defeat for Iran, Asad’s chief ally, making Iraq a new strategic front for Iran and increasing Iranian pressures. Iraq wanted gradual transformation in Syria, not a sudden or violent change, much less a long, drawn-out civil war, which could exacerbate Shi’a-Sunni tensions in Iraq, encourage Kurdish separatism, and recreate the civil strife of 2006–2007.

Conclusion Most of the leaders in Iraq, whether insiders or outsiders, had been educated in and had strong ties to the Middle East rather than to the West. The leading Shi’i figures, such as Maliki, ISCI’s leaders, and Sadr, had been educated in Iraq and

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exiled in Iran or Syria. The Western-educated elite, such as Allawi, was fading from the scene and being replaced by younger successors with far less exposure to the West. This, in part, helped explain the emergence of more traditional values and practices, including the shift toward more communal and kinship identities. These factors indicate that Iraq will probably have a relatively weak, incoherent government for some time to come in which getting decisions made will be difficult. This includes foreign policy, where Iraqi weakness allows it to become a pawn in regional power politics. Controlling the patrimonial basis of power, the patronage system on which it is based, and therefore continued corruption will also be difficult. A stronger, more effective government, such as Maliki desires, will also have a narrower base and likely be more authoritarian. Although such a government may accomplish more in terms of economic development and effective policy, it will also be less democratic and generate more opposition, including militancy and continued moves toward separatism, from those excluded, unless Iraq develops the necessary trust among groups. Development of a stronger parliament with a real opposition party or coalition of parties, although not impossible, appears distant. Adapted from Chapters 10, 11, and 12 of Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq, Third Edition (2011, Westview Press), with new additions by the author.

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The Iranian Revolution and Its Consequences David W. Lesch

In his book 1979: The Year That Shaped the Modern Middle East, David Lesch contends that 1979 was a watershed year in modern Middle East history, particularly notable for the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But the first major event in the Middle East in 1979 was the culmination of the Iranian Revolution, when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile and established Iran as an Islamic republic. Across the Middle East, Iran’s Shiite Muslim revolution inspired both Sunni and Shiite Muslims who had become disenchanted with secular Arab nationalism. But it was also a threat to Sunni Muslim regimes, such as Saddam Hussein’s neighboring Iraq, which had no wish to see their Shiite populations fanned to religious and political fervor by Iran’s clerics. Saddam seized an opportunity to assert Iraq’s leadership among Arab nations by claiming to defend the eastern bounds of the Sunni Muslim world against the radical, Shiite extremism ascendant in non-Arab Iran. With those goals in mind, Iraq invaded Iran and began the eight-year Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). To prevent either Iran or Iraq from becoming too powerful relative to the other, the United States pursued a policy of “dual containment” by supporting first one side and then the other during the war. It openly armed Saddam Hussein and, in what became known as the IranContra affair, the administration of Ronald Reagan also secretly sold weapons to Iran, in violation of its own arms embargo, and, without informing Congress, covertly used the arms-sales revenues to fund a war in Nicaragua. The outcome of the Iran-Iraq War set the stage for the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the ensuing Gulf War of 1991. David W. Lesch is professor of history at Trinity University in San Antonio. He is author of The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria and editor of The Middle East and the United States: A Historical and Political Reassessment, Fourth Edition.

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he culmination of the Iranian revolution occurred in February 1979, when the Ayatollah [Ruhollah] Khomeini arrived in Teheran after fifteen years of exile and proclaimed the Islamic Republic of Iran, replacing the US-supported monarchy of the Shah of Iran, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. As events would show, this change severely disrupted the balance of power in and stability of the Persian Gulf region, an area that contains approximately two-thirds of the world’s known oil reserves. This fact alone preordained that an event of this magnitude would draw the attention of the international community. Even though the Iranian revolution was a Shiite Muslim revolution, Muslims across the Middle East, both Sunni and Shiite, who had become disaffected with secular pan-Arab nationalism and state-building since the effectual death of Nasserist pan-Arabism in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, hailed the event as a true harbinger of things to come. No longer would the Islamic world have to kowtow to the West and accept the inevitability of Israel. Islam’s cultural identity and heritage need not be replaced by Western cultural and economic imperialism. The Islamists who survived the secular Arab nationalist era of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s could now point with pride to a successful example of religious revolution and Islamic rule in the modern era to combat the internal and external threats to society. If the defeat of Nasserism and secular Arab nationalism in the 1967 ArabIsraeli war created the opening for a resuscitation of Islamism, the Iranian revolution provided the direction and momentum for Islamist groups. Pan-Islamism would replace pan-Arabism, and if successful, a Pax Islamica would reign over the region, with Iran showing the way. With a charismatic and firebrand demagogue such as Khomeini calling on the export of the Islamic revolution, the liberation of Jerusalem, and a confrontation against the Great Satan, the United States, the Middle East would never be the same. In an attempt to portray the revolution as an Islamic rather than simply an Iranian one, the Khomeini regime immediately engaged itself in a variety of issues close to the heart of all Arabs, namely, the Palestinian problem. Symbolically driving this point home was the fact that within about a week after the success of the revolution in February, the Khomeini regime closed down the Israeli embassy in Teheran and gave it to the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] and Yasir Arafat, who was visiting Iran at the time.

The Impact of the Iranian Revolution in the Region The impact of the revolution was immediately felt in the region. In Iraq, the secular, Sunni, Ba’thist ruling party of Saddam Hussein saw the revolution as both a threat and an opportunity. The revolution created a threat in that the majority of the population in Iraq was Shiite and, therefore, possibly susceptible to Iranian démarches [maneuvers] to overthrow a regime that was neither appropriately reli-

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gious nor adequately representative. It was an opportunity in that Iran was seen as vulnerable due to the domestic turmoil in the aftermath of the revolution as the parties that formed the coalition opposed to the Shah jockeyed for position within the new government. The rest of the Gulf Arab states—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman—were equally concerned about this new threat emanating from the east. This was particularly true of states that had substantial Shiite minority populations (Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) and Bahrain, a country that, not unlike Iraq, was (and still is) a majority Shiite state ruled by a Sunni minority regime. It did not take long for this threat to manifest itself in the region. On November 20, 1979, 225 well-armed Islamic militants took control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the holiest site in all of Islam. Even though the militants were, by and large, Sunnis, the Iranian revolution had galvanized Islamists throughout the Middle East to take the next step toward action against what they perceived as their combined enemies: the West, Israel, and co-opted and sycophantic Muslims. This was a very embarrassing episode for the Saudi monarchy, since the Al Saud are officially the Guardians of the Two Holy Places (Mecca and Medina), and a significant part of their legitimacy stems from the family’s control and upkeep of the shrines as well as the annual pilgrimage or hajj. The apparent inability of the Saudi monarchy to protect the Grand Mosque in the face of continuing accusations of corruption and subservience to the United States amounted to a very serious moment of vulnerability for the Saudi ruling regime. Only after an official religious ruling (fatwa) from the Grand Mufti in Riyadh did the regime attempt to retake the shrine through cautious force so as not to damage the structure itself, which only made it that much more difficult to overrun the militants. The resulting blood spilt in Islam’s holiest site almost shook the monarchy to the ground. Only a month later, another disturbance occurred that shook the Saudi regime and indicated to all interested observers that the reverberations from the Iranian revolution would be more than just fitful. The Shiite minority in Saudi Arabia lives, for the most part, in the northeast portion of the country in the al-Hasa region, where most of the active oil reserves in the country are located. The relationship is not coincidental; the Shiite population constitutes the lion’s share of oil field laborers. Overworked, underpaid, and underprivileged, the Shiites needed only a spark to cathartically unleash their frustration against the regime. That spark was the annual ashura celebration during the Islamic month of Muharram. With the Iranian revolution still burning in the hearts of many Shiites and with the Grand Mosque episode still fresh in their minds, the emotional atmosphere produced by the ashura celebration naturally led to riots amid loud support for the Ayatollah Khomeini. Again, the Saudi regime had to use force to put down the disturbances—and Saddam Hussein looked on with increasing consternation.

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Saddam Hussein’s Opportunism The Iranian revolution also presented to Saddam Hussein an opportunity. Already claiming a leadership position in the Arab world in the wake of Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, Saddam leveraged this newfound influence into the position of protector of the Arab world against Persian and radical (Shiite) Islamic extremism and expansionism. In one fell swoop, Iraq could fill two vacuums of power in the Middle East—one in the Arab world, and implicitly in the Arab-Israeli arena, created by Egypt’s departure and the other in the Persian Gulf arena brought about by the fall of the Shah. As a sign of Saddam’s heightened ambitions, he nudged aside President Hasan al-Bakr and assumed the position of president himself on July 16, 1979. Although he had been the strongman behind Hasan for years, Saddam was clearly now coming out of the shadows. He was now in position to implement his agenda. Iran was, to most observers, vulnerable. Ayatollah Khomeini had not yet solidified his position as supreme ruler, and it was still unclear how Islamic this new republic was going to be. With all the disarray within the regime and at least as much disruption within the Iranian military following the exiles, purges, defections, and executions that came in the wake of the revolution, it seemed that with only a slight push Iran would topple altogether. Paramount in Saddam’s calculations on taking advantage of this situation was making sure the United States would not come to Iran’s aid. US isolation from Iran became assured on November 4, 1979, when Revolutionary Guards, the shock troops of Khomeini’s revolution, stormed the American embassy in Teheran and took ninety persons, including sixty-three Americans, hostage (fifty-two Americans would be held for 444 days). Washington broke off relations with Iran, froze Iranian assets in the United States, and worked to isolate Iran within the international community, thus inaugurating a period of extreme hostility between the two countries. From Saddam Hussein’s perspective, this meant that the mostly American-supplied Iranian military would not be able to easily obtain spare parts, ammunition, or other complementary equipment from American sources. Bereft of these materials and many of the military personnel trained to use the equipment, the multibillion-dollar US-supplied military arsenal the Shah had amassed would be more vestigial than daunting. All of these new circumstances indicated to Saddam Hussein a unique opportunity with a possible fabulous payoff: the elimination of the threat from Iran and the attainment of personal and national ambitions of leadership in the Middle East. With this in mind, Iraq attacked southwestern Iran in September 1980, and the eight-year Iran-Iraq war was on.

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The Hostage Crisis and Its Impact in the United States and Iran So momentous was the Iranian revolution that even some of its direct repercussions became significant independent variables in and of themselves. The Iranian hostage crisis is a case in point. Although the storming of the American embassy and the taking of hostages was as much a function of internal power-play politics within the faction-ridden Teheran regime as a pure act of anti-Americanism, its repercussions would have at least as much impact on domestic politics in the United States as they did in Iran. The [Jimmy] Carter administration became hostage to the hostage situation. The inability of the Carter administration to either obtain the release of the hostages or rescue them enhanced the appearance of American weakness, a national complex that the country was still trying to shed in the aftermath of Vietnam. When a diplomatic resolution did not materialize, concurrent with the languishing popularity of the administration domestically, President Carter made the fateful decision to attempt a daring rescue in April 1980, while the hostages were reportedly still kept largely together in one location. The disastrous failure of the Desert One action, however, with loss of American lives and the abandoning of several helicopters in the Iranian desert, only added to the appearance of American impotence and [of ] the ineptitude of the administration itself. To say that the hostage crisis significantly hurt Carter’s chances for reelection is quite the understatement. The hostage crisis had significantly helped mold the national psyche into yearning for a strong-willed American patriot who would repair America’s image abroad and rebuild the military into a positive instrument of foreign policy. Arch-conservative Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in the 1980 presidential election was the natural response. The crowning blow to Carter delivered by Teheran was the fact that the hostages were released just minutes after Reagan was inaugurated president on January 20, 1981, 444 days after they had been taken. In Iran, the hostage ordeal helped solidify the power of Ayatollah Khomeini and his radical Islamist faction. His influence over the hostage-taking youths and his manipulation of the diplomatic process clearly popularized his position during this volcanic period of the revolution, cementing the Islamist theocratic nature of the regime and the position of Khomeini as the Supreme Guide.

Hizbullah and the Iran-Contra Affair The success of the Iranian revolution galvanized Islamists the world over. The rise of Khomeini obviously had a direct effect on the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the riots by Shiites in the eastern oil fields in Saudi Arabia, and, of course, the hostage crisis. Iran also became the direct sponsor of Hizbullah (the Party of

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God), a Shiite Muslim group that arose in South Lebanon as a result of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Hizbullah played a prominent role in the hostagetaking and assassinations of Westerners and hijackings in and around Beirut throughout much of the 1980s. The Iranian connection with Hizbullah also led directly to the infamous Iran-Contra affair exposed in late 1986. Hizbullah was, and still is, also supported by Syria. Syria’s support of the Shiite group has enhanced its leverage with regard to negotiations dealing with a hoped-for Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. The Iran-Contra affair was the Reagan administration’s attempt to sell arms to the Khomeini regime in Iran (which was obviously desperate for American weaponry and ammunition by that point in its war with Iraq) in return for utilizing its influence with Hizbullah in Lebanon, pressuring it to free American hostages. This was in contravention of Washington’s own Operation Staunch, which was (an attempt at) a worldwide arms embargo of Iran. The money paid by the regime in Teheran for the arms was then funneled illegally to the USsupported Contras in Nicaragua to support their attempts to overthrow the Marxist Sandinista regime in Managua. This was in direct violation of legislation passed by Congress that cut off covert assistance to the Contras. The irony in this whole episode is rampant. First of all, the Reagan administration came to office committed to a policy of not dealing with terrorists and not letting any hostage situation captivate the White House—in direct reaction to the failure of the Carter administration’s foibles in Iran. Second, the idea of dealing with so-called moderate elements in Teheran in an arms-for-hostages deal originated with the Israelis. From Israel’s perspective, the traditional Arab proverb “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” held true in this instance, as the common foes of Iraq made for strange bedfellows. Yet, it was the Israeli invasion in 1982 that created the environment for the birth of Hizbullah (as well as other anti-American and anti-Israeli groups in Lebanon) and the series of kidnappings and killings. The scandal rocked the Reagan administration and launched a series of investigations and hearings. The Arab allies of the United States in the Persian Gulf, who had been overtly supporting Iraq to varying degrees in its war with Iran, were obviously shocked and dismayed by the revelations of the arms-for-hostages deal. The United States seemed to be playing both sides of the fence. The Reagan administration’s need to regain credibility in the eyes of its Arab friends significantly influenced its decision to begin reflagging Kuwaiti oil tankers under US flags in June 1987, following the initiation of the so-called tanker war by Iraq and the subsequent response by Iran against those tankers, particularly Kuwaiti-registered ones that were carrying Iraqi oil. The United States thus established a direct military presence in the Persian Gulf, which overtly placed Washington on Iraq’s side in the Iran-Iraq war, leading to a number of military confrontations with Iranian forces in Gulf waters and solidifying a (hoped-for) strategic partnership with Saddam Hussein. Washington

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was blinded into thinking Iraq could assume Iran’s position under the Shah as America’s gendarme of the Gulf. As Gary Sick states, the reflagging operation was a fundamental turning point. For the first time since World War II, the United States assumed an operational role in the defense of the Persian Gulf. . . . President Reagan’s military intervention thus confirmed President Carter’s assertion that the Gulf was of vital interest to the United States and that the United States was prepared to use military force in pursuit of that interest.1 All of this stemmed directly from the Iranian revolution. The Islamist drive fueled by Khomeini that led to Hizbullah and ultimately to Iran-Contra and subsequent events also was felt elsewhere in the Middle East. The success of the revolution and the antipathy toward Israel overtly on display in Teheran galvanized growing Islamist opposition in Egypt toward Anwar Sadat’s regime, which was seen by Egyptian Islamists as having betrayed Islam by signing a peace treaty with Israel and for embracing the West politically, militarily, economically, and culturally. It is doubtful that the assassination of Sadat by the Islamic Jihad organization on October 6, 1981, the anniversary of the initiation of the 1973 ArabIsraeli war, would have occurred when it did if not for the inspiration from Teheran. Indeed, there were groups in Egypt that needed no reinforcement from Iran to hate the peace treaty, Sadat, and all he stood for—and attempt to kill him—but the revolution tended to “mainstream” Islamist dissent, popularizing it and generating the buildup of willing recruits, if not martyrs, for the cause in both Sunni and Shiite circles.

The Iran-Iraq War, 1980–1988 The most direct and immediately significant repercussion of the Iranian revolution was, of course, the Iran-Iraq war, which lasted from September 1980, when Iraq invaded Iran, to August 1988, when Iran reluctantly agreed to a UNbrokered cease-fire. The war was less important in and of itself, as it settled down into trench warfare within a year with scant movement on either side of the front for most of the conflict, but more because of its tangential effects. As previously mentioned, Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion for defensive and offensive reasons. Most of all, he saw an opportunity—Iran was vulnerable and isolated, and the regional and international situation seemed to be in Iraq’s favor. 1. Gary Sick, “The United States in the Persian Gulf: From Twin Pillars to Dual Containment,” in The Middle East and the United States: A Historical and Political Reassessment, ed. David W. Lesch, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 282.

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The Arab Gulf countries were not at all unhappy to see Iran and Iraq occupied with each other and weakening over the course of time. Because Iran was more of an immediate threat, the Arab Gulf states were compelled to monetarily support Iraq for most of the war. But they also were cognizant of the ambitions of Saddam Hussein and were fearful of his attempts to translate these ambitions into an attempted hegemonic position in the Gulf, especially if he emerged victorious—a fear that was confirmed when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. A host of miscalculations on both sides prolonged the conflict. Iraq attacked southwestern Iran not only for geographical and strategic reasons but also because that part of the country was host to the majority of Iran’s Arab minority. Indeed, the Arabs living there call it Arabistan, instead of the official name of this province, Khuzistan. Saddam Hussein hoped that the Arabs in Iran would support his invasion, making his putsch [attempted overthrow] that much more effective and depleting Iran’s ability to counterattack. Unfortunately for Baghdad, the Arabs in Khuzistan were largely ambivalent to the outcome. Iraq’s strategic limitations probably would have forced it to draw back its initial offensive anyhow, but the failure of the Arabs in Iran to come to Iraq’s aid at this point made a swift knock-out punch all but impossible. Similarly, when Iran went on the offensive in 1982, it too thought that “fellow travelers” in enemy territory would support its cause, in this case, the Shiite Arab Muslim majority in Iraq, most of whom lived in the southern part of Iraq toward the Iranian border. Again, however, a combatant had badly miscalculated. Although there were certainly some groups of Shiite Arabs that in fact did support Teheran actively, the expected en masse Shiite uprising never materialized, primarily because of the effective repressive apparatus of the Baghdadi regime and the distaste many, mostly secularized, Iraqi Shiites had for Khomeini’s brand of Shiism and theocratic regime. By 1982, Iran had beaten back Iraq’s initial attack and had gone on the offensive. Teheran, trying to take advantage of its superior numbers, established multiple fronts against the Iraqis, hoping to extend Iraqi forces beyond their defensive capacity and to wear down Baghdad through attrition: in the north (with the help of anti-Saddam Iraqi Kurds), in the center toward Baghdad, and in the south toward Basra. To the extent that Iraq had a strategy after 1982, Baghdad wanted to internationalize the conflict by bringing in the superpowers, especially the United States, so that they could exert pressure on Iran to cease and desist. Other than internationalizing the conflict, Baghdad was simply hoping to hang on as long as possible until the octogenarian Khomeini died, which, unfortunately for the Iraqis, did not come soon enough. (The Ayatollah passed away in 1989, almost a year after the war ended.) Indeed, it was the arms provided to Iran in the arms-for-hostages deal that significantly elevated Teheran’s ability to launch a major offensive in 1986. Iran took

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the Fao (Faw) Peninsula, thus cutting Iraq off from the Persian Gulf, and threatened to take Basra, Iraq’s second largest city. With the embarrassing revelation of the Iran-Contra affair and the existing desire not to see Iran victorious in this war, the United States was openly supporting Iraq, most ostentatiously displayed by the reflagging operation. In fact, Washington had reestablished diplomatic relations with Iraq (broken off since 1967) in late 1984, clearly betraying the pro-Iraqi disposition of the Reagan administration. There were some in policy circles who were advocating building up Saddam Hussein as the next “gendarme” of the Gulf—taking the place of the fallen Shah—and continuing the balance of power approach to the region. Furthermore, there were more than a few who suggested that Saddam Hussein could additionally take the place of Anwar Sadat and finish what the Egyptian president was unable to accomplish, that is, lead a moderate Arab consensus into a comprehensive peace with Israel. It seems preposterous now, considering the extremely antagonistic relationship between Iraq and the United States since the Gulf war, but at the time, Khomeinism was the point of focus, and Iran was at least as ostracized and held in as much contempt by Washington as Iraq has been in recent years. The common threat emanating from Iran after 1979 brought Baghdad and Washington closer together, establishing the foundation of the strategic relationship toward the end of the Iran-Iraq war that so colored the environment in which the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 took place.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) In a direct reaction to the Iran-Iraq war, the remaining Gulf states—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman—agreed in February 1981 to form the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). It was the culmination, in the face of the heightened instability in the region brought about by the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, of increasing cooperation among these six Arab Gulf states in previous years, particularly in the area of internal security. The GCC, as originally conceived, was supposed to be more of a security and defense organization than anything else. Ironically, the GCC has been most successful in the economic sphere, with the lowering or abolishment of customs duties, the enactment of trade agreements, and the facilitation of freer movement of people and goods within and among the GCC membership. In addition, the GCC has allowed Saudi Arabia to play a dominant role within the organization, cementing its new status as a vital player not only in the Persian Gulf area but also in the entire Middle East equation (and forming the triad of powers in the Gulf: Iran, Iraq, and the Saudi-led GCC). Most importantly in the long term, what the formation of the GCC indicated was the beginning of subregional organizations in the Arab world. No longer

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could the Arab League deal with all of the divergent issues in the Middle East. The Arab world had become too divided as a result of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, the Lebanese civil war (and subsequent Israeli invasion in 1982), and of course, the Iran-Iraq war. The “balkanization” of the Middle East had begun in earnest in the wake of the failure of Arab nationalism, resulting in a number of Arab states—Egypt, Syria, and the GCC states the most prominent among them—mapping out their own paths. This did not mean that certain countries and subregions became mutually exclusive of each other. Quite the contrary, this evolved into a more integrated matrix, for no area or grouping could be excluded completely from any equation dealing with any significant issue in the region.

The Gulf Crisis and War, 1990–1991 The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and the ensuing Gulf crisis and war for the remainder of that year and into early 1991 represented the next significant repercussion of the Iranian revolution of 1979—through the intervening prism of the Iran-Iraq war. One of the reasons the Arab Gulf states hesitatingly, and sometimes reluctantly, supported Iraq in its war with Iran was the fact that they understood the ambitions of Saddam Hussein, and if he emerged victorious from the war he might turn his eyes southward toward Kuwait and attempt to dominate the Gulf. It was a prophetic notion. The Iran-Iraq war set the stage for the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Iraq was severely in debt, having gone from a more than $60 billion surplus before the IranIraq war to a $40 billion debt. Saddam Hussein saw the bank to the south called Kuwait and its lucrative oil fields (which would have given Iraq control of 21 percent of the world’s known oil reserves) and wanted to initiate his own type of merger and acquisition. A significant portion of that debt was owed to Kuwait, which, unlike the Saudis, was unwilling to erase it. Perhaps the main reason Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait is because he thought he could get away with it. In fact, he came very close to it. As mentioned previously, Washington and Baghdad reestablished diplomatic relations in 1984, and the Reagan and [George H. W.] Bush administrations believed Iraq could be a very useful surrogate in both the Persian Gulf and Arab-Israeli arenas, filling the empty shoes of both the Shah and Anwar Sadat. Indeed, President Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, admitted in the aftermath of the Gulf war that they “stayed” with Saddam too long, hoping to moderate his policies and to essentially make him into what they wanted. In doing so, they failed to appreciate signals that in fact indicated that he was an expansionist dictator determined to achieve his national and regional ambitions. The Iraqi president, on the other hand, in a case of possibly hearing only what he wanted to hear, also failed to read Washington’s signals indicating its opposition to his policies. Baghdad apparently concluded that the United States was still

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hamstrung by the Vietnam syndrome and that with the end of the superpower cold war, Washington had no stomach and little domestic or congressional support for military intervention to protect a nondemocratic regime with which it had not had a particularly close relationship. Saddam obviously miscalculated. The Bush administration led the charge to liberate Kuwait for a variety of reasons: (1) it did not want Iraq controlling 21 percent of the world’s known oil reserves; (2) Iraq had directly threatened Saudi Arabia, an American ally whose borders are the reddest of all red lines in the Middle East—in fact, the decision to move Iraqi troops to the Saudi-Kuwaiti border may have been Saddam Hussein’s biggest strategic error; (3) the Bush administration realized as the crisis wore on that it would be a strategic nightmare for the United States to have Iraq’s million-man army and weapons-of-mass-destruction capability as a perpetual menace in one of the most vital areas of national interest; (4) unfortunately for Saddam Hussein, President Bush’s strategic thinking was not shaped by the Vietnam war syndrome, but by the Munich mentality that emerged out of World War II, in which Bush fought and was decorated (this experience taught Bush and others of this generation not to appease aggressors, as the Europeans had appeased Hitler following his appropriation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia—aggression of this order must not be allowed to stand); and (5) President Bush wanted to implement his New World Order, a new era in the wake of the end of the cold war that would usher in a cooperative international framework to rein in acts of “naked aggression,” such as the one perpetrated by Saddam Hussein. Many in the administration believed that an assertive response in this situation would reinforce the leadership role of the United States. Operation Desert Storm was launched in January 1991 with an intense aerial bombardment campaign and with the ground war commencing in February, a 100-hour thrust that successfully expelled the Iraqis from Kuwait. The Gulf war was over. The climactic interlude of 1990–1991 spelled the end of balance-of-power politics; the United States would no longer rely on either Iran or Iraq to be its gendarme in the Persian Gulf. Instead defense cooperation agreements were consummated between Washington and most of the GCC countries and equipment and materiel were prepositioned just in case military action again became necessary—for although defeated, Saddam remained in power.

Enhanced American Presence in the Gulf The United States adopted a forward policy in the region that required a significant direct presence. The flip side of this new strategic environment was the “dual containment” of Iraq and Iran. The term “containment” was quite popular in the early 1990s, since the policy it described was deemed successful in winning the cold war with the Soviet Union. Why not apply it at the regional level in the Persian Gulf

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against two so-called rogue countries? It was hoped that containment, through economic, political, and military pressure, would compel a change of regime-type, if not ideology, toward a more compliant, cooperative, and internationally acceptable status. Although dual containment has come under intense scrutiny, and even criticism, in recent years, the enhanced American presence in the region has remained, often producing a negative backlash among the Gulf Arab populations who had before the Gulf war become accustomed to, at best, a detached relationship with the United States. Even during the Gulf crisis, when the United Nations coalition was building up its forces in the region, there were rumblings in the Muslim world regarding the presence of “infidels” in Saudi Arabia, the site of Islam’s two holiest sites—Mecca and Medina. In fact, it was this perceived affront that initiated Osama bin Laden’s quest against the United States. Adapted from Chapter 3 of David W. Lesch, 1979: The Year That Shaped the Modern Middle East (2001, Westvew Press).

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Islamic Republic of Iran: Political Dynamics and Foreign Policy Mark Gasiorowski

Mark Gasiorowski sketches the political dynamics that have underlain the foreign policy of Iran since the 1978–1979 revolution. Iran under the shah had been closely allied with the United States and the West, but that very relationship ran counter to a deep anti-imperialist and even xenophobic current in Iranian political culture that opposes foreign influence. The conflict between modernist and traditionalist segments of Iranian society was a fundamental cause of the revolution, which established the current Islamic regime. The revolutionary fervor had subsided sufficiently by 1989 that President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani initiated a period of moderation, though one that encountered obstacles from both the Left and the Right. Rafsanjani was succeeded by Mohammad Khatami, whose 1997 landslide victory on a platform of fundamental change indicated that he had the support of a substantial bloc of pro-reformist voters. Nonetheless, Khatami’s reform efforts were largely blocked by the conservatives who controlled the key political institutions of the state, including most notably Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Khatami’s ineffective rule led to the disaffection of proreformists and contributed eventually to the election of the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005. Throughout the early revolutionary period, Iran’s foreign policy was dominated by hostility toward the United States, culminating in the seizure of the US embassy in 1979 and the consequent hostage crisis. Iran was an exporter of revolution and a fomenter of unrest, assisting Islamist Hezbollah in Lebanon and attempting to trigger a Shiite uprising in Iraq both before and during the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War. Oddly, Iran at this time bought arms from Israel and then directly from the United States. Iran also established close relations with Syria, which (again oddly) led it to support the secularist Baath Party in Syria while opposing it in Iraq and also to stand silently by as Syria cracked down on the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. Iran also developed connections to the Islamist Palestinian organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Nonetheless, even with the weakening of the moderates by 2001, Iran made several conciliatory gestures toward the United States, especially in the wake of 9/11, but angrily ended most 259

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cooperation when President George W. Bush described Iran as part of an “axis of evil.” Iran’s continued enrichment of uranium and its testing of missiles remain a source of tense relations with the West. Mark Gasiorowski is professor of political science at Louisiana State University, specializing in the Middle East and third world politics. His notable publications include US Foreign Policy and the Shah: Building a Client State in Iran and (with Malcolm Byrne) Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran.

I

ran’s history and social structure have shaped its political culture in several important ways. First, Iran’s long, rich history and the many instances of foreign intervention during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have made most Iranians deeply nationalistic and wary of foreign interference. These sentiments produced strong support for nationalist movements in Iran from the late 1940s through the early 1960s and led many Iranians to oppose the last Shah on the grounds that he was a puppet of foreign powers. The Islamist movements that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s emphasized similar themes, expressing their opposition to foreign influence and the Shah’s foreign connections in language that ranged from anti-imperialism to the culturally oriented, often xenophobic statements of many traditionalists. These themes have remained central to Iran’s foreign policy discourse ever since the establishment of the Islamic Republic. Second, the strong emphasis on martyrdom and social justice in Shi’a Islam have been recurring themes in Iran’s modern history. Even before the upsurge of Islamist movements in the 1970s, figures like [former prime minister] Mohammad Mosaddeq were widely revered by secularists and Islamists alike for their willingness to make sacrifices for a just cause. Martyrdom and morality then became central themes in the discourse of the 1978–1979 revolution and the Islamic regime it spawned, leading many Iranians willingly to sacrifice their lives during the revolution and in the Iran-Iraq war. Another recurring theme in Iran’s modern history has been an emphasis on political pluralism, reflecting not only the growing importance of the modern middle class but also the country’s Shi’a traditions, which include a tendency to support multiple religious leaders and norms of legalism, inclusiveness, and consensus-building among the clergy. This emphasis on pluralism has led all major popular movements in modern Iran to claim to speak in the name of the Iranian people and advocate political freedom, constitutionalism, and representative institutions. These pluralistic themes have been stressed not only by avowedly democratic, secularist movements but also by Islamist movements like [former president Mohammad] Khatami’s Reformist movement, and even the revolution-

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ary Islamist followers of Ayatollah [Ruhollah] Khomeini. As a result, before the election crisis of 2009, Iran’s Islamic regime featured an unusual mixture of authoritarian and democratic features, including a powerful repressive apparatus and institutions that ensure clerical control but also relatively free elections, a fairly open political climate, and frequently intense contestation among the diverse factions of the Islamist elite. Despite the many pressures on Iranian society since the early nineteenth century, family bonds remain very strong and have a substantial impact on patterns of social and political organization. As Iran’s economy has developed and its citizens have become more mobile, these family bonds have been replaced in part by connections based on childhood friendships or relationships established in universities or seminaries. These family bonds and other close connections have a considerable impact on Iranian politics. Politicians often rely heavily on their children, siblings, and old friends for assistance, and the latter benefit considerably from these connections. Political organizations also rely heavily on connections of this sort, giving them a personalistic character. Iranians judge politicians very much on the basis of family background and other personal connections and rely on their own relatives and close friends for connections and advice. As a result, Iranian politics has strong patrimonial and clannish tendencies, and the country’s civil-society institutions are fairly weak. Finally, political culture often differs considerably from one segment of Iranian society to another, making it difficult to speak of a single “Iranian political culture.” Most importantly, the political culture of the modern segment of Iranian society differs substantially from that of traditionalists, who are generally more religious, less educated, less cosmopolitan, more reliant on personal connections, and often deeply concerned about the decline of Islam and the spread of Western culture and values in Iran. The sharply different outlooks of the modern and traditional segments of society were a fundamental cause of the 1978–1979 revolution and have remained the most important theme in Iranian politics since the revolution, underlying the clashes between Islamic leftists and conservatives in the 1980s, centrists and conservatives in the early 1990s, and reformists and conservatives in the late 1990s and [the first decade of the] 2000s. The large Iranian diaspora community that emerged after the revolution is especially modernist in its outlook and very antagonistic toward the conservatives. Another important political cultural division exists between younger and older Iranians. Iranians born during the “baby boom” of the 1970s and 1980s are better educated, more cosmopolitan, less committed to the Islamic regime, and more deeply affected by the economic stagnation and cultural restrictions of recent decades. These young Iranians strongly favor increased political and cultural freedom and greater economic opportunity. While many are quite religious, they generally oppose extensive clerical involvement in government. They also have little interest in socialism and other secular ideologies. Most young Iranians are strongly

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attracted to Western culture, which they follow avidly on the Internet and satellite television. A large majority at first enthusiastically supported President Khatami but then grew disillusioned with the reformists’ failures. Consequently, while most young people strongly favor reform, many are apathetic and cynical about politics. Indeed, in one of the great ironies of the Islamic regime, many young Iranians today dream of emigrating to the West.

Political Dynamics Iran has changed substantially since the Islamic regime was established in 1979. The early 1980s was a period of revolutionary social transformation. The radical Islamist leadership undertook a comprehensive effort to “Islamicize” Iranian society in this period, restructuring the country’s laws and political institutions; turning schools, religious institutions, and the media into instruments of indoctrination; and forcing all Iranians to observe strict Islamic standards of dress and behavior. To accomplish this transformation the radicals sought to mobilize their supporters with inflammatory rhetoric and with dramatic actions like the US embassy hostage crisis and the war with Iraq. They also had to neutralize not only their political opponents but also many secularized Iranians, who strongly opposed their efforts. As a result, repression was fairly high during this period, though it did not approach the levels reached in Russia and China after their revolutions. Although many Iranians opposed the Islamic regime, many others supported it, giving it a populist character. Much of the revolutionary fervor that animated this period disappeared in the mid-1980s, and popular unrest grew considerably as a result of the war with Iraq, continuing repression, and economic deterioration. When [Akbar Hashemi] Rafsanjani became president in 1989, he responded to these changes by initiating a period of moderation. His strategy was to reduce unrest by revitalizing the economy and loosening cultural restrictions while keeping the political system largely intact. Opposition first from Islamic leftists and then from conservatives blocked many of Rafsanjani’s economic reforms, producing anemic economic growth in the early and mid-1990s. Rafsanjani’s failure to revitalize the economy led many Iranians to conclude that more extensive change was necessary, though relatively few wanted to eliminate the Islamic regime altogether. In 1997 this discontent led many Iranians to support the candidacy of Mohammad Khatami, who advocated fundamental change in the nature of the regime. In addition, two important societal changes helped pave the way for Khatami’s victory. First, the “baby boom” generation had begun to come of age by the mid-1990s, producing a large cohort of young people who were more sophisticated than their elders and had not developed strong personal attachments to the Islamic regime by participating in the revolutionary upheaval or the war with Iraq. Second, Iranian women, who had made

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greater sacrifices than men under the Islamic regime and whose education levels had increased sharply, had become more politicized. The emergence of large numbers of young people and women favoring extensive reform produced a huge constituency for Khatami’s reforms in 1997. Khatami’s landslide victory, the reformists’ overwhelming success in the 2000 parliamentary elections, and Khatami’s strong reelection in 2001 demonstrated that a large majority of Iranians wanted fundamental change. However, the conservatives still controlled key political institutions, including the position of [Supreme] Leader, the Council of Guardians [a powerful twelve-member council], the judiciary, and much of the security apparatus, and they used these institutions to block most of Khatami’s reform efforts. As a result, many Iranians became disillusioned with Khatami and the reformists, regarding them as ineffective or even insincere in their promises of reform. The ramifications of this discontent first emerged in the 2003 municipal council elections, when sharply lower turnout by pro-reformist voters led to the defeat of most reformist candidates. Much the same happened in the 2004 parliamentary elections. The final blow came in 2005, when [conservative Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad defeated his reformist and centrist opponents. In the first round of voting the three reformist candidates together took 35 percent of the vote, the centrist (Rafsanjani) took 21 percent, and the three conservatives together took only 39 percent, indicating that Ahmadinejad’s victory did not signal a sharp increase in support for the conservatives. Rather, his victory was due to continuing popular discontent with the reformists, widespread opposition to Ahmadinejad’s secondround opponent (Rafsanjani), and his own populist appeal. The 2006 municipal council and Assembly of Experts [an assembly in charge of selecting and supervising the Supreme Leader] elections and 2008 parliamentary elections demonstrated both that discontent with the reformists remained high and that Ahmadinejad’s hardline views and style were not very popular. The probable manipulation of the 2009 election results and the absence of reliable polls in Iran make it difficult to assess the implications of this election and the resulting political crisis. However, the country clearly was deeply polarized in late 2009, with a large bloc of Iranians strongly opposed to the views of Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader [Ali] Khamenei and increasingly opposed to the Islamic regime itself, while another large bloc continued to support the Islamic regime and the Supreme Leader, if not the president. It was impossible to judge the size and strength of these two blocs, leaving Iran’s future quite uncertain.

Foreign Policy Before the 1978–1979 revolution, Iran was closely allied with the United States and was becoming increasingly Westernized. The various factions that seized power in 1979 generally opposed these trends but nevertheless held very different

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views on how Iran’s foreign policy should be conducted. Consequently, disputes over foreign policy were a major focus of the power struggles that emerged after the revolution, and the character of Iran’s foreign policy has closely paralleled its domestic political dynamics. Iran’s foreign policy was highly confrontational during the first decade of the Islamic regime. Although Prime Minister [Mehdi] Bazargan wanted to change Iran’s pro-Western orientation, he wanted to do so in ways that would avoid confrontation with the United States and its allies. Most of Bazargan’s radical Islamist opponents were intensely anti-Western and wanted to break off relations with the United States, and many wanted violent confrontation with the West. Moreover, the radical Islamists were encouraged by their radical leftist rivals, whose antiWestern views were equally intense. As a result, the radical Islamists and radical leftists opposed Bazargan’s nonconfrontational foreign policy and undercut him at every opportunity. This struggle culminated in the November 1979 seizure of the US embassy by radical Islamist students. The radical Islamists used the resulting hostage crisis to drive Bazargan from power and push Iran’s foreign policy in a more confrontational direction, hoping to humiliate the United States, position Iran as the leader of a region-wide radical Islamist movement, and mobilize additional support for their efforts to carry out revolutionary social change at home. The central focus of Iran’s confrontational foreign policy during this period was hostility toward the United States, which was manifested not only in the hostage crisis, which lasted more than a year and drove US President Jimmy Carter from office, but also in harsh anti-American rhetoric and indirect attacks on US targets. Iran’s leaders routinely called the United States the “great Satan” and chanted “death to America” at meetings and rallies. Realizing that Iran was too weak to attack the United States directly, its leaders undertook a variety of indirect attacks. Most importantly, they encouraged and assisted radical Islamist terrorists in Lebanon who bombed a US marine base and the US embassy (twice) in Beirut, killing some three hundred US and Lebanese citizens and taking thirteen Americans hostage, two of whom died in captivity. They also assisted terrorists who hijacked US airliners and a cruise ship, killing several Americans, and laid mines targeted at US naval vessels and US-flagged commercial ships in the Persian Gulf. The United States responded by backing Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, attacking Iranian naval vessels in the Gulf, and presumably undertaking covert operations against the Islamic regime. Iran also carried out or facilitated attacks against various regional and European allies of the United States during this period. Its leaders made extensive efforts to export their Islamic revolution, especially in Lebanon, where they created and assisted the radical Islamist Hezbollah group, and in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Although Iran’s allies in these countries did not manage to trigger revolutions, they caused severe problems for their US-backed governments and carried out frequent attacks against Iran’s enemies. In particular, Hezbollah and other rad-

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ical Shi’a forces attacked not only US targets in Lebanon but also Israeli occupation forces and British and French peacekeeping forces, killing hundreds, and they seized many hostages. Iranian officials repeatedly fomented unrest during the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in the mid-1980s, leaving hundreds dead and severely embarrassing the Saudi government. Iran’s biggest efforts to export revolution and foment unrest were directed at Iraq. Iranian officials made extensive efforts to trigger a Shi’a uprising in Iraq, both before and after the September 1980 Iraqi invasion, and their July 1982 invasion of Iraq was aimed at toppling its secularist government and establishing an Islamic republic. Although Iraq certainly was not a US ally, Iran claimed that it was and portrayed its invasion of Iraq in part as an effort to drive the United States and Israel out of the region. Iran’s confrontational, anti-Western posture during the 1980s left it very isolated and desperately in need of allies who could sell it arms and provide other forms of assistance. This led Iran’s radical Islamist leaders to establish close relationships with several very unlikely countries. During the first few years of the Islamic regime, Iran purchased large quantities of weapons from Israel, which was the only country willing to flaunt US efforts to block the flow of US-made arms to Iran at this time. These Israeli arms sales eventually led to the 1985– 1986 Iran-Contra Affair, in which Iran bought arms directly from the United States. Iran also established close relations in the early 1980s with Syria, giving it an important ally in the Arab world. This left Iran’s leaders in the uncomfortable position of being closely allied with a country ruled by the same secularist Ba’th Party they were trying to overthrow in Iraq and remaining silent while Syria’s leaders carried out a brutal crackdown on their Moslem Brotherhood [a transnational Islamist group] opponents in 1982. Iran also bought large quantities of arms during this period from China and North Korea, whose communist regimes were avowedly atheistic. As the radical phase of the Islamic regime ended, Iran’s foreign policy became increasingly contradictory, with radicals seeking to maintain a confrontational, anti-Western posture and moderates hoping to ease the country’s isolation in order to concentrate on reconstruction. Iran’s July 1988 agreement to stop the war with Iraq ended its most ambitious effort to export revolution and produced considerable optimism that its foreign policy would become more moderate. However, in February 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini denounced [novelist] Salman Rushdie and called for Moslems to kill him. This created severe tension between Iran and Europe that lingered for many years. After Khomeini died in the summer of 1989, Iran again disrupted the Hajj pilgrimage and began a more concerted effort to assassinate Iranian exile opposition activists, which ultimately claimed dozens of victims in Europe and neighboring countries. Nevertheless, despite these hostile actions, President Rafsanjani began to make overtures to the West, apparently hoping this would facilitate his economic reform program. Most importantly, he

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indicated that Iran would help gain the release of US and other hostages still being held in Lebanon in exchange for better relations with the West. The last of these hostages were released in 1992. Iran also stayed out of the 1990–1991 Gulf War and reestablished diplomatic relations with Morocco and Saudi Arabia during this period. Iran’s foreign policy remained contradictory during the mid-1990s. It maintained its close connections with Hezbollah, which continued to attack Israeli occupation forces in Lebanon. Iran and Hezbollah apparently cooperated in bombing the Israeli embassy and a Jewish cultural center in Argentina in 1992 and 1994 and the Khobar Towers US military complex in Saudi Arabia in 1996, killing many in each case. Iran also helped foment Shi’a unrest in Bahrain and cooperated closely with radical Islamist Palestinian organizations and the radical Islamist government in Sudan during this period. In addition, Iran’s campaign of assassinating exile activists continued, and it worked to develop nuclear weapons and medium-range missiles in the mid-1990s. Nevertheless, Rafsanjani at the same time continued to make overtures to the United States, most notably by reaching an agreement in 1995 with the US oil company Conoco to develop a large Iranian natural gas field. The [Bill] Clinton administration rejected Rafsanjani’s overtures, blocking this agreement and expanding US economic sanctions on Iran. An important turning point in Iran’s foreign policy came in late 1996 and early 1997. After the Khobar Towers bombing, US and Saudi officials confronted Iran with evidence of its involvement and exposed a large number of Iranian intelligence officers operating abroad, making clear that they would take even harsher steps if Iran carried out additional attacks of this sort. In early 1997 a German court ruled that top Iranian officials had been involved in the 1989 assassination of four Kurdish Iranian dissidents in Germany, greatly embarrassing Iran and leading most European Union (EU) countries to withdraw their ambassadors from Iran. These two events seem to have enabled the moderates to wrest control over foreign policy from the radicals. Iran’s direct involvement in terrorist attacks against Western targets and its assassinations of Iranian exiles stopped altogether in early 1997 and had not resumed by late 2009. By the time President Khatami was elected in May 1997, many of Iran’s reformists had concluded that Iran should normalize its relations with the United States and most other countries, though not with Israel. Accordingly, during his first few months in office, Khatami repeatedly called for better relations with the United States. These statements culminated in an extraordinary television interview in January 1998 in which Khatami expressed “great respect” for the American people, condemned terrorism, and again called for better ties with the United States. Most conservatives still opposed the United States and were alarmed by Khatami’s actions. Supreme Leader Khamenei therefore publicly denounced Khatami’s televised statement and reiterated that the United States was Iran’s “en-

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emy,” indicating that he opposed rapid movement toward rapprochement. US officials at first reacted cautiously to Khatami’s overtures, waiting until June 1998 to reciprocate. By this time opposition from Khamenei and his allies made it impossible for Khatami to move forward. Nevertheless, until the end of the Clinton administration, US officials made concerted efforts to improve relations with Iran. Although Khatami did not succeed in improving Iran’s relations with the United States, he did forge better relations with many other countries, continuing trends that had begun under Rafsanjani. Khatami soon negotiated an agreement with the EU under which all EU members returned their ambassadors to Iran. In September 1998 his government promised Britain it would not enforce the death threat against Salman Rushdie, eliminating a major source of tension in Iran’s relations with Europe. Iran’s economic ties with Europe grew rapidly, and it soon began negotiating a major trade and investment agreement with European firms. Iran’s relations with most of its neighbors improved substantially as well. In December 1997 Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia visited Iran to attend the Organization of the Islamic Conference summit. Iran then sent former president Rafsanjani to visit Saudi Arabia a few months later, and the two countries signed agreements essentially normalizing their relations. Iran also forged better ties with most of the other Persian Gulf Arab countries, though its relationship with the United Arab Emirates remained strained over their conflicting claims to three strategically important islands in the Gulf. Iran’s relations with its arch-foe Iraq also improved, with the two countries holding talks and exchanging their remaining prisoners of war. Iran continued to enjoy good relations with Pakistan, Turkey, and most of the countries to its north, though its relations with Azerbaijan remained strained over the latter’s claims to Iran’s Azeri region. The only neighbor that Iran had hostile relations with during this period was Afghanistan, which was ruled by the hardline Sunni fundamentalist Taliban faction. The Taliban were very anti-Shi’a and were fighting bitterly against factions in northern and western Afghanistan that had close ethnic and political ties to Iran. In August 1998 the Taliban killed several Iranians who were working with these factions, bringing the two countries to the brink of war. Elsewhere in the region, Iran maintained its close relationship with Syria, Hezbollah, and the radical Islamist Palestinian organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad. However, at the same time it worked diligently to improve relations with Egypt, which had been severely strained since the early days of the Islamic regime, and with other moderate Arab countries. Iran’s relations with Sudan became much more distant after the radical Islamist leaders of that country were deposed in 1999. Iran’s relations with Israel even thawed slightly, with Khatami making several conciliatory statements and secret meetings occurring between the two sides. Iran also continued to develop close relations with Russia and various East Asian countries under Khatami. Russia agreed to finish building a nuclear reactor in Bushehr and sold Iran large amounts of military equipment. The two countries

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also worked closely to support anti-Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan. Iran expanded its commercial relations with Japan, China, and other East Asian countries as well during this period. As the reformists grew weaker in 2000 and 2001, Ayatollah Khamenei seems to have decided that Iran could begin to improve its relations with the United States, since the reformists would no longer benefit. Accordingly, Iran made several important gestures toward the United States. Iranian officials expressed deep sympathy toward the victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. When the United States then attacked Afghanistan in an effort to destroy al-Qaida and its Taliban allies, Iran provided assistance to US forces. Iran also played a key role in helping the United States establish a postTaliban government in Afghanistan. However, as these events were unfolding, Israel intercepted a freighter carrying weapons from Iran to the Palestinian Authority, creating a strong outcry in the United States. Soon after, US President George W. Bush bitterly denounced Iran, describing it as part of an “axis of evil.” Iran’s leaders were deeply angered by this statement, especially after the conciliatory gestures they had made, and they ended most cooperation with the United States. The Bush administration kept up its harsh criticism of Iran. Another crisis began to unfold in 2002, when evidence emerged that Iran’s nuclear program was more advanced than previously known and included activities aimed at building nuclear weapons. Britain, France, and Germany then began talks with Iran over the matter, and the EU suspended negotiations on trade and investment. In 2003 Iran agreed to suspend temporarily its efforts to enrich uranium and accept other demands made by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). However, additional concerns soon emerged, and Iran announced it would resume work on enrichment. The Europeans then negotiated a second temporary agreement with Iran to suspend enrichment activities in 2004. The election of President Ahmadinejad in June 2005 produced yet another turning point in Iran’s foreign policy. In August, Iran rejected a major European proposal on the nuclear dispute and resumed enrichment work. In April 2006 Iran announced that it had mastered the enrichment process, and by late 2008 it had produced enough low-enriched uranium to make a single nuclear weapon, if enriched further. Iran also had deployed dozens of missiles capable of hitting Israel and southeastern Europe by this time, though apparently it could not yet produce nuclear warheads for these missiles. After referral by the IAEA, the UN Security Council in late 2006 voted to impose economic sanctions on Iran. It then approved additional sanctions in 2007 and 2008. Following revelations that Iran was secretly building a second enrichment facility, the Western powers began to push for a fourth set of UN sanctions in late 2009. Iran’s foreign policy became more aggressive in other ways as well during this period. Ahmadinejad and other Iranian officials regularly denounced the United

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States and other Western countries, and Ahmadinejad made a series of statements calling for the destruction of Israel and expressing doubt about the holocaust. Iran continued to give extensive financial assistance and weapons to Hezbollah and radical Palestinian factions. More ominously, beginning in early 2007, US officials charged that Iran had been supplying roadside bombs and other assistance to insurgents in Iraq, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of US soldiers. US personnel also arrested several Iranian operatives inside Iraq. During this same period, Iranian officials repeatedly charged that the United States, Britain, and Israel were supporting terrorist attacks inside Iran by Arab, Kurdish, Baluch, and Mojahedin-e Khalq guerrillas, suggesting that Iran’s actions in Iraq may have been a response to these attacks. Numerous unconfirmed reports about US support for these guerrillas appeared in the Western press as well. US and Israeli officials repeatedly hinted that they might use military force against Iran during this period, while Iran and its allies vowed to respond severely with missiles and other means to any such attack. In 2008, both the United States and Iran seemed to step back somewhat from their highly confrontational approach of the preceding years. Diplomats from the two countries held official, bilateral talks for the first time in almost 30 years about conditions in Iraq. Several top US officials stated that they had no intention of attacking Iran. Perhaps coincidentally, attacks on US troops in Iraq and terrorist attacks inside Iran also declined substantially during this period. After his inauguration in January 2009, US President Barack Obama made a series of conciliatory gestures toward Iran, hoping to initiate a bilateral dialog. However, Iranian officials made little effort to reciprocate. By the end of the year Iran’s relations with the West remained very tense, and the United States seemed ready to adopt a tougher approach toward Iran. Adapted from Chapter 3, by Mark Gasiorowski, in David E. Long, Bernard Reich, and Mark Gasiorowski, eds., The Government and Politics of the Middle East and North Africa, Fourth Edition (2009, Westview Press).

CHAPTER 22 QR

Iran’s Regional Foreign Policy Manochehr Dorraj

The relationship between Iran and the United States has been troubled for decades. In the view of many Iranians, the troubles came into sharp focus with a CIA-backed coup against Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq in 1953. Many Americans would point to the Iranian Revolution of 1979 as a watershed. In that year, Islamist militants occupied the US embassy in Tehran and captured sixty-six Americans, fifty-two of whom were held hostage for 444 days. The United States broke off diplomatic relations with Iran in 1980 and has not restored them since. However, relations between the two countries were not always so difficult. Prerevolutionary Iran under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was largely pro-Western in orientation and even maintained close ties with Israel. Even given the radical reversal of Iranian foreign policy in the postrevolutionary Islamic Republic of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iranian policy objectives have modulated over time under successive administrations. In this chapter, Manochehr Dorraj considers how the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) drove a wedge between Iran and moderate Arab regimes such as Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia (which all supported Iraq) and strengthened Iran’s regional alliance with Syria, as well as with radical Palestinian groups opposed to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), such as Hamas. A major objective of the Islamic Republic was to empower populist and radical Shiite groups, commonly in opposition to secular Sunni Arab governments. With the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani sought to rebuild relations with Arab states in the region. President Mohammad Khatami continued and expanded Rafsanjani’s efforts to reach out to Iran’s neighbors and the rest of the world. Khatami condemned the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States, handed over a number of al-Qaeda members for trial, and contributed funds for the reconstruction of Afghanistan. For its pains, however, Iran (with Iraq and North Korea) was labeled a member of the “axis of evil” by US President George W. Bush. That rebuff by the United States weakened Iranian moderates and helped set the stage for the election of the hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who turned to Russia and China for support, solidified relations with Syria as well as Hamas and Hezbollah, and demonstrated a vituperative hostility toward Israel.

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Manochehr Dorraj is professor of political science at Texas Christian University. A frequent commentator on global and Middle East affairs, his publications include The Changing Political Economy of the Third World and Middle East at the Crossroads. He is coeditor (with Mehran Kamrava) of the two-volume Iran Today: An Encyclopedia of Life in the Islamic Republic.

T

Regional Foreign Policy of the Islamic Republic

he 1979 Iranian revolution was a major watershed in the Middle East. The image of an unarmed people overthrowing a powerful monarch captured the imagination of many throughout the region and the Muslim world. The revolution put an end to the pro-Western foreign-policy orientation of the shah’s regime and ushered in a new era. Iran’s regional foreign policy in the immediate aftermath of the revolution was guided by three abiding priorities: internal consolidation of power, export of Islamic revolution, and advancement of pan-Islamism. Although after the revolution Iran decidedly defected from the camp of the moderate regimes, it nonetheless continued cooperating with its non-Arab Muslim neighbors, such as Turkey and Pakistan, that had close ties to the United States. In sharp contrast, Iran’s relations with conservative Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf as well as Egypt and Jordan deteriorated. While anti-Israeli rhetoric took a prominent position in the ideological repertoire of the Islamic Republic, military cooperation with the state of Israel continued during the war with Iraq (1980–1988). Iran’s alliance with moderate regional powers, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and Israel, was then replaced with a new foreign policy that sought closer alliances with radical regimes and movements in the region. The slogan “neither East nor West” that characterized Iranian foreign policy in the immediate aftermath of the revolution was designed to assert the new independent Iranian ideological identity. PanIslamism was intended to achieve three related political objectives: to undermine conservative pro-Western Arab regimes, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Morocco, Jordan, and Egypt; to arouse the Muslim population of these countries against their respective political leaders; and to empower radical and populist Muslim opposition groups in the region, especially the Shia minorities residing in these countries. Iran regarded the Saudi royal family and their Wahhabi brand of Sunni Islam as illegitimate and exhorted Saudi Muslims to overthrow their regime. Tehran also supported the attempted takeover of the holy shrine in Mecca by Muslim militants in 1981. These policies alarmed the Saudi leadership and escalated tensions between the two countries. The Islamic Republic also supported several Shia factions—including Amal [a Lebanese Shia militia] and Hizbullah in Lebanon—ideologically, financially, and militarily. Regiments of Iranian Revolutionary Guards were dispatched to Syria to

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train Hizbullah and Amal fighters. The Iranian government also supported the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). But with the Iran-Iraq war and the PLO leadership’s support of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the honeymoon was over and the relationship with the PLO deteriorated. Instead, Tehran began to support PLO rivals such as Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Ideologically, the Islamic Republic felt closer to the Islamic political orientation of these two groups than to the secular vision of the PLO. The support of Palestinian militant groups set the stage for confrontation with Israel, the erstwhile ally of the shah’s regime. Although Iran and Israel have not had any direct military confrontations yet, they have fought a cold war through [Iran’s] surrogates—for example, Iran’s support of Hizbullah, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas, and Israeli military conflict with all three. The onset of the Iran-Iraq war created a wedge between pan-Islamic and panArab loyalties in the region. The moderate Arab regimes, such as Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), supported Iraq. Syria, Libya, South Yemen, and Algeria (the latter three to a lesser extent) supported Iran. During the war, Syria proved to be Iran’s closest regional ally. Linked by their common animosity toward Saddam’s regime and some shared political goals, there emerged a marriage of convenience between the theocratic government in Tehran and the secular Arab Baath nationalist government in Damascus. Like Iran, Syria also supported the radical Palestinian groups opposed to the PLO, as well as Hizbullah and Amal. However, while the Syrian regime of Hafiz al-Asad found Palestinian radical groups and Hizbullah useful for its proxy war against Israel and the advancement of its political objectives in Lebanon, unlike the Iranian government, it did not aspire to create an Islamic republic in its former territory. [Lebanon had been part of the French Mandate of Syria after World War I, and Syria had also occupied Lebanon from 1976 to 2005.] The Iranian government had to abandon its goal of creating an Islamic republic in Lebanon and confined its activities instead to financial and military support of its ally, Hizbullah. Concerned with the threat of the Islamic Republic and Saddam’s regional political ambitions, the conservative Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf, led by Saudi Arabia, created the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in 1981. The GCC was designed to create a collective security pact to protect member nations. Iran and Iraq were not included. In the same period, Iran broke diplomatic relations with Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco. Similarly, the 1979 hostage crisis (in which US embassy personnel were taken hostage for 444 days by militant Muslim students backed by the government) was followed by the breaking of diplomatic relations between the two countries, freezing billions of dollars of Iran’s assets in the United States, and the imposition of sanctions on Iran that have continued to this day. During the Iran-Iraq war, the

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United States supported Iraq, providing it with intelligence on Iranian troop movements, as well as weapons and financial and political support.

The Rafsanjani Administration By April 1988, Iran had suffered a series of setbacks on the battlefield. These demoralizing developments had a distinct impact on the decline of revolutionary zeal and strengthened the position of pragmatists led by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the key power brokers in the Islamic Republic who became president in 1989. As early as June 1988, Rafsanjani expressed his undisguised critique of Iran’s confrontational and isolationist foreign policy. As he put it, “One of the wrong things we did in the revolutionary atmosphere was to constantly make enemies. We pushed those who could be neutral into hostility and did not do anything to attract those who could become friends. It is part of the new plan that in foreign policy we should behave in a way not to needlessly leave ground to the enemy.”1 The second catalyst of change in Iranian foreign policy was the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. In his absence the path was open for a more moderate regional foreign policy. The Iran-Iraq war drove home a bitter lesson regarding the cost of political isolation. During that war, Saddam’s regime received financial and military support from Western allies, many Arab countries, and the USSR. In contrast, Iran found itself internationally isolated and had to buy many of its weapons from the black market at much higher cost. For the Rafsanjani administration it had become patently clear that the key to consolidating the revolution and the reconstruction of a war-ravaged economy lay in breaking out of international isolation. As the US economic and political sanctions continued, Rafsanjani took a two-pronged approach. First, he abandoned the policy of “neither East nor West” in favor of normalizing and expanding relations with both East and West. In this pursuit, Rafsanjani undertook a concerted effort to normalize relations with European nations and expanded relations with Russia and China. Second, he took political initiatives to put to rest the fear of Iran’s neighbors about the export of Islamic revolution, thus ending Iran’s regional isolation. He reached out to all regional powers (with the exception of Israel), most notable among them the pro-Western Arab Gulf monarchies (and GCC members), and Turkey and Egypt. Two important regional developments facilitated this new policy of rapprochement. First, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and [Saddam’s] subsequent military emasculation by the US-led coalition in 1991 convinced the Saudis that the real threat to the security of the Persian Gulf was Saddam’s regime. The Saudis also 1. Quoted in Scheherzade Daneshkhu, “Iran and the New World Order,” in The Gulf War and the New World Order, ed. Tareq Y. Ismael and Jacqueline S. Ismael (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), 295.

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realized that the only other power in the region strong enough to contain Saddam’s expansionist ambitions was Iran. Having seen their former ally (whom they had supported financially and politically during the Iran-Iraq war) turn against them, GCC countries now sought a more balanced policy. Saudis also hoped that rapprochement with Tehran would bestow upon them a measure of Islamic legitimacy and would dissuade Iran from exporting its revolution. Anwar al-Sadat’s policy of providing the shah with a safe haven in Egypt in the last years of his life had antagonized the Islamic Republic, and the relations between the two countries further deteriorated when Egypt supported Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. But with Rafsanjani’s ascendance to power, some initiatives were taken to break the ice and initiate a new dialogue with Cairo. The Rafsanjani administration hoped that normalizing political relations with America’s regional allies would send a signal to Washington about Tehran’s willingness to normalize relations with the United States. Under Rafsanjani’s two terms as president (1989–1997), the priorities of reconstruction of the war-torn economy required economic reforms, inviting increased participation by the private sector and expansion of foreign investment. Hence, control of the press, suppression of civil-society organizations, and restrictions on social life were relaxed. Revolution had run its course and the ideological politics of the Khomeini era gave way to a more moderate and pragmatic course in which the primacy of Iranian national interests replaced ideological commitment to exporting Islamic revolution. These policies paved the way for the presidency of a more reform-minded leader, Mohammad Khatami.

The Khatami Administration Khatami’s surprising landslide victory in the 1997 presidential election revealed the depth of hunger that lurked in Iranian society for reform and social change in domestic and international affairs. The majority of Iranian people longed to end their country’s political isolation and to be integrated into the global community. Khatami continued and expanded Rafsanjani’s efforts to reach out to Iran’s neighbors and the rest of the world. Khatami was committed to reconciling Islam and democracy, and democratizing the Islamic Republic. He saw reform at home as linked to foreign policy. He believed that a more appealing image of the Islamic Republic would enhance its stature and influence throughout the region and the wider world. While his democratic inclinations and commitments brought him in direct conflict with the conservative camp within the clerical establishment led by Ayatollah Ali Khameni, the supreme leader, he attempted to use his popular mandate to usher in change in Iran’s domestic and foreign policy, albeit with limited success. Under Khatami’s presidency Iran inaugurated the “Good Neighbor” policy, improving relations with moderate Arab regimes and solidifying relations with

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Syria and Hizbullah. Iran also established diplomatic relations with Egypt and expanded ties with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, and Algeria. The most significant development was the substantial improvement in Iran-Saudi relations. Rafsanjani’s 1996 historic visit to Riyadh was reciprocated by [Saudi] Crown Prince Abdullah’s trip to Tehran in December 1997. Both sides agreed to expand cooperation and trade. This was followed by President Khatami’s visit to Riyadh in 1999. Clearly, by the late 1990s it had become clear to the Saudi kingdom that the Islamic Republic was no longer interested in fomenting rebellion among Shia minorities in GCC countries. Hence, ideological conflict of the past had now given way to mutual accommodations. While Khatami repeatedly denounced terrorism, and in 1999 hosted a conference of Islamic nations in Tehran in which the participants passed a resolution denouncing terrorism, he continued to support the Palestinian movement and its drive for a homeland, calling for an end to Israeli occupation of their land. Khatami stipulated that “supporting people who fight for the liberation of their land, is not, in my opinion, supporting terrorism. It is, in fact, supporting those who are engaged in combating state terrorism. In fact, the Palestinian struggle is against Israeli state-sponsored terrorism.”2 He asserted that while he considered most of the US-proposed peace initiatives to be biased against the Palestinians, his regime would support any settlement between Palestinians and Israelis that enjoyed the backing of the majority of the Palestinian people. The Khatami administration’s support for the Palestinian cause and Hizbullah in Lebanon, combined with his attempt to reconcile Islam and democracy at home, enhanced the popularity of his regime in the Arab world. Khatami’s jubilant reception in Lebanon as a hero during his May 2003 visit was a testimony that his popularity reached beyond Iran’s borders. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States, Khatami took an active role in denouncing the attacks and sent his foreign minister, [Kamal] Kharrazi, to the fifty-six-member Islamic Conference in Qatar on October 10, 2001, which passed a resolution condemning the attacks in the strongest terms. However, Iran’s continued support for Hamas and the Islamic Jihad in the occupied territories opened his administration to the charge that he was weak and remained beholden to the hard-line conservative camp led by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khameni. The major catalyst in weakening Khatami’s pursuit of his moderate regional foreign policy agenda came in 2002 when US President George W. Bush put Iran on his list of “axis of evil” countries alongside Iraq and North Korea. This was followed by the Bush administration’s negative response to the Khatami government’s proposal for the resolution of all outstanding issues of conflict between

2. Quoted in Gary Sick, “Iran: Confronting Terrorism,” Washington Quarterly 26, no. 4 (Autumn 2003): 89.

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the two nations in 2003. Khatami’s hard-line opponents alleged that for all of his moderation and concessions in foreign policy, he had nothing to show in improvement of relationship with the United States. Despite Iran’s cooperation with the United States on terrorism in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration remained unresponsive and seemed intent on humiliating the Islamic Republic, calling for regime change. Iran extradited a number of al-Qaeda members (who had fled to Iran in the face of the US military onslaught against their bases in Afghanistan) back to Saudi Arabia to stand trial. Iran also contributed $560 million (the largest amount donated by any Third World nation) toward reconstructing Afghanistan. But apparently Washington was not impressed by these political initiatives and was in no mood for diplomacy or rapprochement. The political impact of American foreign policy toward Iran was to discredit Khatami and the reform movement. But it also strengthened the hard-liners and the swing of the political pendulum to the right. The ascendancy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power ushered in a right turn in Iran’s foreign policy.

The Ahmadinejad Administration Cultivating the public sentiment against corruption and the inability of the Khatami administration to adequately address economic inequalities pervasive in the society, Ahmadinejad promised to distribute oil money among the poor and to fight corruption. His populist agenda rendered him a “man of the people.” However, his parochial vision and political authoritarianism stood in sharp contrast to Khatami’s cosmopolitan views on Islamic democracy and the dialogue of civilizations. In the foreign-policy realm, Ahmadinejad attempted to revive the revolutionary foreign policy of the Khomeini era, with meager success. To counter US pressure and a hostile political posture, he rejuvenated Iran’s “Eastern strategy” (expanding ties with Russia and China) and put it on the front burner of Iran’s foreign-policy agenda. He considerably extended trade, energy, and military ties to Russia and China. Russia became the chief provider of nuclear technology to Tehran. China emerged as the major consumer of Iranian oil and gas and a major investor in Iran’s energy sector. Iran currently ranks second to Saudi Arabia as the major provider of energy to China in the entire Middle East, and China emerged as Iran’s number-one trade partner in 2008. Ahmadinejad welcomed the overthrow of Iran’s nemesis, Saddam Hussein, and considerably expanded relations with the newly elected Shia-dominated government in Baghdad. Many of these leaders had spent decades in exile in Iran, fleeing Saddam’s repression and persecution of the Iraqi Shia community. In the process, a close relationship was forged between Iraqi Shia leaders in exile and their Iranian hosts. Hence, the main Shia militia that was later incorporated into Iraqi security

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forces, the Badr Brigade, was trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Ahmadinejad provided the different factions of Iraqi Shias with financial and political support, including the radical populist leader Mughtada Al Sadr and his Mahdi army. Trade and political ties between the two countries expanded as well. Among regional powers, Iran played a major role in reconstructing Iraq, and by 2008 the volume of trade between the two countries increased considerably to $1.8 billion. Iran’s relationship with Syria further solidified under the respective leaderships of Ahmadinejad and Bashar al-Asad, as the two countries found themselves on Washington’s list of states that sponsor terrorism, and more important, as their regional interests in Lebanon and Palestine converged. Iran provides Syria with financial aid and fills some of its energy needs, while Syria facilitates Iran’s relations with Hizbullah and different Palestinian groups, such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. Syria serves as Iran’s supply route to Hizbullah and Palestinian groups. In the aftermath of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri’s assassination in 2005, in which the widely suspected involvement of Syrian agents drew global condemnation, Asad’s regime found itself isolated and under pressure from the United States and its allies, including the Lebanese government and people; it had to withdraw its forces from Lebanon in 2005. For all practical purposes, this development put an end to the mandate over Lebanon that Syria had enjoyed since 1976. This diminution of Syrian regional influence and its inability to use its proxies in Lebanon to gain leverage vis-à-vis Israel and other regional adversaries accentuated its isolation and need for allies. The Ahmadinejad administration rushed in to resume the mutually beneficial ties. On June 15, 2006, the two countries signed a strategic defense treaty further cementing their partnership. Some observers, however, regard Iran-Syria relations as a marriage of convenience between two ideologically different regimes. Given enough incentives and encouragement, Bashar al-Asad is likely to part ways with Iran. The repeated shuttle diplomacy of several US congressional delegations and the mediation of Turkey between Israel and Syria in 2007–2009 is regarded as an indication of a concerted policy on the part of Washington and Tel Aviv to create a wedge between Damascus and Tehran. Ahmadinejad also solidified his regime’s relationship with Hizbullah, providing Iran with a strategic depth and enabling Tehran to be a player in the Mediterranean region. Historically, the major players in Lebanese politics have been Maronite Christians and Sunni Muslims. The Shia have been marginalized and powerless, though Iranian and Lebanese Shia communities have long maintained a relationship. The Iranian revolution of 1979 and the empowerment of Iranian Shia clergy galvanized the Lebanese Shia and politicized them. By 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon, the Iranian government was actively involved in financing and training Hizbullah fighters who were engaged in a guerrilla campaign against the Israeli occupation of the Shia stronghold in South Lebanon. The ability of Hizbullah to ultimately drive Israeli soldiers out of South Lebanon in 2000 brought the organization much prestige and popularity in the Arab and Muslim

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worlds. As Yitzhak Rabin once exclaimed, “The Israeli occupation of South Lebanon let the Shia genie out of the bottle.” Hizbullah fighters would display their military skills yet once again when they fought to a draw the mighty army of Israel in June and July 2006. While Israeli strategy was to bombard the Lebanese infrastructure in hopes of turning the Christian and Sunni populations against the Shia community, in reality when more than 1,000 civilians lost their lives due to Israeli bombardments, Lebanese and global public opinion turned against Israel, and Hizbullah emerged as the symbol of resistance against Israeli might in the region. This outcome expanded the popularity and influence of Hizbullah throughout the region. Because of this surge in popularity, however, the electoral defeat of Hizbullah in the 2009 Lebanese election took many by surprise. [In the Lebanese parliamentary elections of June 2009, the March 14 Alliance, a pro-Western coalition, defeated the March 8 Alliance, a Hizbullah-led, pro-Syrian coalition.] The overthrow of the Sunni fundamentalist Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2001, followed by the overthrow of Saddam’s Sunni-dominated government in Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent empowerment of Iraqi Shia, coupled with the increasing power of Hizbullah in Lebanon, has made some of the leaders in the Arab world warn of an emerging “Shia Crescent” for which Tehran serves as the luminating source. While one can speak of a Shia revival with the emergence of the first Shia-dominated government in the Arab world in Iraq and the increasing regional influence of Iran and Hizbullah, it seems premature to speak of an emerging Shia political domination of the region, as some alarmist voices suggest. The disputed 2009 presidential election in Iran, in which 3 million people in Tehran alone demonstrated against the Ahmadinejad regime, revealed the eroding legitimacy of the Iranian theocracy and cast doubt on its future political viability. The profound crisis of legitimacy at the heart of “the crescent” and the 2009 electoral defeat of Hizbullah in Lebanon should put to rest any worries about the specter of an emerging Shia domination of the region. Adapted from Chapter 13, by Manochehr Dorraj, in David S. Sorenson, ed., Interpreting the Middle East: Essential Themes (2010, Westview Press).

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Iran, Israel, and the United States Scott Ritter

Intelligence specialist Scott Ritter contends in this chapter that the Israeli lobby, particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), exercises unparalleled influence over American foreign policy, even as it acts as a de facto agent of the state of Israel. As a result, Israel’s contentions that Iran poses a threat to Israel and that Iran possesses a nuclear weapons program, while unproven, have nonetheless defined US policy toward Iran, to the detriment of US interests in the Middle East. Ritter suggests that the United States would do better to stop perceiving Iran as a regional threat and instead concern itself with stabilizing relations and granting diplomatic recognition to Iran, lifting the unilateral American economic embargo, and establishing programs of cultural and economic exchanges that would go further in moderating Iranian society than does any program of containment and destabilization. Furthermore, the United States should view the Iranian nuclear-energy program favorably, for it would allow Iran to export more energy as the world’s hydrocarbon energy resources dwindle. Another of the dangers of undue Israeli influence over American policy is that the relatively minor conflict between Hezbollah and Israel is sometimes construed as a war by proxy between Iran and the United States, thus conferring a global significance on the conflict that it does not merit. Ritter argues that Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization but a legitimate organ of political expression of the Lebanese people in response to the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in 1982. By casting the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict as grander than it is, the United States and Israel make that conflict harder to resolve while also unnecessarily increasing the possibility of a larger conflict between the United States and Iran. Scott Ritter is a former intelligence officer for the US Marine Corps. From 1991 to 1998 he was a chief weapons inspector for the United Nations in Iraq, where he was in charge of searching out weapons of mass destruction within Iraq. His several books include Dangerous Ground: America’s Failed Arms Control Policy, from FDR to Obama; Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America; and Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein.

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The United States, Iran, and the Israeli Lobby

he conflict currently under way between the United States and Iran is, first and foremost, a conflict born in Israel. It is based upon an Israeli contention that Iran poses a threat to Israel, and defined by Israeli assertions that Iran possesses a nuclear weapons program. None of this has been shown to be true, and indeed many of the allegations made by Israel against Iran have been clearly demonstrated as false. And yet the United States continues to trumpet the Israeli claims. Many nations maintain large and active lobbies in the United States in order to promote their individual interests or concerns. None, however, brings to the table the scope and clout of the Israeli Lobby. None operates in the brazen manner in which this Israeli Lobby has grown accustomed to operating. One of the largest and most influential members of this Israeli Lobby is the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. Over the years, AIPAC has exerted its influence over the US Congress and the Executive Branch of government to a degree unparalleled by any other single nation or group of nations. AIPAC operates as a de facto agent of the State of Israel, and yet does not need to register as such. While the American supporters of Israel tout the common goals and interests that bind our two nations, in reality they operate a distinctly Israel-first policy. While I respect and defend Israel’s right to place its own interests above and beyond [those of ] any other nation, including the United States, I fervently reject, and am appalled by, any action undertaken by those who proclaim themselves to be American which subordinates American interests to those of Israel, especially when the stakes of such an issue put American lives on the line. I joined the US Marine Corps, and took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I have gone to war, and would do so again, to defend the ideals and values set forth in the US Constitution. There are times when, in so defending the Constitution, I may be called upon to act in a manner which defends the territorial integrity or interests of another nation, should such interests be entwined with those of my country. This is why I fought in 1990–1991; to defend the letter of the law as set forth by the United Nations Charter, and approved by the Security Council of the United Nations and the Congress of the United States, in coming to the defense of Kuwait following Iraq’s wanton invasion and occupation of that nation in August 1990, and to participate in combat operations in western Iraq designed to interdict Iraqi SCUD missiles from being fired against Israel. One could say that I fought in defense of Kuwait and Israel during that conflict, but let there be no doubt: I fought only for America. I can justify American lives being put on the line to stop missiles being fired against Israel back in 1991. I can justify America coming to the aid of Israel militarily if Israel itself were subjected to illegal acts of aggression. If Iran were to attack Israel without provocation, I would argue long and hard for America to come

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to the aid of its friend and ally. But I cannot tolerate the idea of America’s being pushed into a war of aggression against Iran when Iran threatens neither Israel nor America. And this is what is happening today. Israel has, through a combination of ignorance, fear, and paranoia, elevated Iran to a threat status that it finds unacceptable. Israel has engaged in policies that have further inflamed this situation. Israel displays an arrogance and rigidity when it comes to developing any diplomatic solution to the Iranian issue. And Israel demands that the United States take the lead in holding Iran to account. Israel threatens military action against Iran, knowing only too well that in doing so Israel would be committing America to war as well. When it comes to Iran, Israel can no longer be said to be behaving as a friend of America. And it is high time we in America had the courage to recognize this, and take appropriate actions. If there is to be peace with Iran, the United States must find a way to bring to rein Israel’s attempts, directly and indirectly, to unduly influence the formulation and implementation of US foreign policy. It is fine to be sympathetic and supportive of the state of Israel. I know I am. But it is never acceptable as an American to subordinate the national interest of your homeland for the sake and benefit of another nation. In the past, such behavior has been likened to sedition and treason. And just because the action is undertaken on behalf of Israel does not make it any less so than if it had been done on behalf of any other nation. National loyalty is a one-way street, and in America, for Americans, that one-way sign points only toward the United States of America. Reining in the Israeli desire for armed conflict against Iran would provide the United States with a tremendous amount of room from which to begin negotiating a non-violent solution to the Iranian crisis. First of all, America buys time from which it can more sanely and sagely assess Iran’s nuclear programs and ambitions. Second, it provides America with an opening to engage in sincere one-onone negotiations with Iran void of the poisoning brought on by the Israeli call for conflict. Third, it removes Iran as a preconceived regional threat, and as such allows the United States to modify its posture vis-à-vis other regional issues, especially those involving energy policy in the Caspian Sea basin. In this day and age of energy shortages, the vast [oil and natural gas] energy resources of the Caspian Sea basin hold the key to global economic stability and growth for the foreseeable future. A conflict with Iran would devastate the Caspian Sea basin, destabilize it politically, and retard its development for many years or even decades. The United States, like the rest of the world, should be concerned about issues such as human rights and individual liberties in nations such as Iran. But we have no right to interfere in the affairs of a sovereign state to the point that we pursue a policy of regime change in respect to a legally empowered government. The best regime change policy the United States could engage in vis-à-vis Iran would be to stabilize relations, recognize Iran diplomatically, lift the unilateral American economic embargo, and initiate a program of intensive cultural and economic exchanges which would do

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more to moderate Iranian society than any program of containment and destabilization considered by the [George W.] Bush administration. Iran is not a threat to America. In fact, the Iranian nuclear energy program should be viewed by the United States as desirable, given that its objectives are to increase the viability of Iran as a net exporter of energy during a time when the world’s hydrocarbon energy resources are diminishing. A sound American-Iranian relationship based upon mutual respect, nonaggression, and increased economic interaction will stabilize the Middle East and the world at large. Europe, Russia, China, and India will reap tremendous economic benefit. Israel will find its strategic position strengthened, not weakened, as Iran will seek to moderate its role and influence in the region along lines more beneficial to economic growth and prosperity. In doing so, new markets will be created for Israel to exploit. Energy supplies and prices will be stabilized. And, given America’s role as a global leader and power, all of this will act to the benefit of America, which will likewise share in the economic boost that will result from such a policy course. When one compares and contrasts this boost with the economic disaster that any war with Iran would bring with it, the boost becomes a boom, with the economic differential being measured globally in the trillions of dollars. It is not too late for America to change the course it has been charting for the past few years. But this course change will not happen on its own volition. It requires a fundamental re-examination of how the United States will choose to interact with the rest of the world in the years to come, whether we will still adhere to the hubris of having 300 million people dictate the terms of coexistence to a world of several billions, or operate with continued national impotence as another nation, Israel, dictates national security policy for all America. This requires a national debate, discussion, and dialogue on these very important issues, a dialogue that must take place sooner rather than later.

The Israeli-Hezbollah and US-Iran Conflicts Throughout the unfolding conflict between Israel and Lebanon, one theme remained consistent in both Tel Aviv and Washington, DC—that the ultimate responsibility for the violence in southern Lebanon rested not so much with Hezbollah, but rather with Iran. As such, the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel has become a sort of war by proxy, pitting Iran against the United States. Our collective entanglement with Israel threatens to take a minor regional problem (the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict) and turn it into a wider conflict that has farreaching implications for the entire world (any US-Iran conflict). If one looks at the demographics and geopolitical realities of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, it is nothing more than a regional conflagration that has as much significance as the ongoing violence in Chechnya or the simmering unrest between the Republic of Georgia and the breakaway territory of Abkhazia.

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The difference in these conflicts is Israel, which has used its unmatched ability to lobby and influence American politicians and policies so that its struggle with a legitimate Lebanese popular resistance movement—Hezbollah—has taken on global consequences that far outstrip any real impact of such a conflict. As such, a moderate border dispute has become, in the eyes of many, the first front in a major struggle that pits the United States (and Israel) against any and all in the Middle East who do not support either the concept of regional hegemony by Israel or global hegemony by the United States. The larger target in this mix is, of course, Iran, which has been singled out by both Israel and the United States as the ultimate “problem” that must be resolved if the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict is to be terminated in a manner beneficial to both Israel and the United States. Israel will never be able to defeat Hezbollah decisively. The main reason is that Hezbollah is not a nonstate terrorist movement, as portrayed by Israel and the United States, but rather a legitimate expression of the people of Lebanon, primarily Shi’a, who rose up in response to the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982. Israel’s ongoing actions against Hezbollah are not only militarily inconsequential but ineffective and counterproductive, as they simply feed the very dynamic that gave birth to Hezbollah and facilitated its growth. In many ways the inability of Israel and the United States to recognize this reality is mirrored by the similarly unrealistic analytical framework that has been constructed concerning Iran and its government. Both Israel and the United States labor under a model of action that seeks to isolate the Iranian government from the Iranian people, in total disregard for the historical and political imperatives that link the two (namely the dictatorial rule of the American-backed Shah of Iran). The ongoing actions of the United States and Israel serve not to weaken the bond between the Iranian people and the government of the mullahs but rather [to] strengthen it. The real danger of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict is that in casting it as a larger conflict between the United States and Iran, Israel and its American proxies have not only made resolving the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict virtually impossible but likewise have made the possibility of a larger US-Iran conflict a very distinct reality. The logic model is simple: the more Israel tries to defeat Hezbollah militarily, the stronger Hezbollah becomes. As Hezbollah gains in strength, Iran will be blamed, making any reduction of Hezbollah linked to a similar reduction of Iran. By casting Hezbollah as a nonstate terrorist organization, Israel and the United States in turn are casting Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism. This model eliminates the need of the United States to deal factually with issues such as Iran’s nuclear program. Adapted from the conclusion and the postscript of Scott Ritter, Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change (2006, Nation Books).

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The Iranian Predicament Michael Axworthy

According to Michael Axworthy, the United States missed an opportunity for rapprochement with Iran offered by reformist president Mohammad Khatami. In early 2003, Iran proposed bilateral talks toward a “Grand Bargain” between Iran and the United States. In return for an end to US hostility and for US recognition of Iran as a legitimate power in the region, Iran proposed that it would cease material support to Palestinian opposition groups such as Hamas; it would pressure Hezbollah to become “a mere political organization” within Lebanon; it would accept a comprehensive, two-state peace with Israel in return for Israel’s withdrawal to pre-1967 boundaries; and it offered full cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency in exchange for full access to peaceful nuclear technology. However, the George W. Bush administration refused to reply to the Iranian initiative, while continuing to insist that Iran was dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the sponsorship of terror. As Axworthy observes, Iran itself is a complex polity with numerous power centers and shades of opinion, with many countervailing currents at play. Iranians have compelling historical reasons for resentment against the West, but more than many other Middle Easterners they also have a liking for Europeans and Americans, even as they also feel misunderstood and abused by Westerners. And while some observers warn apocalyptically of a nuclear-armed Iran leading a Shiite surge in the Middle East, most Shiites show little enthusiasm for Iranian-style Islamic rule. For example, Shiites now dominate post–Saddam Hussein Iraq and are friendly to Iran, but they also see themselves as following an authority of their own, independent of Iranian Shiism. Iran may decide, and in fact may have already decided, that the capability of producing a nuclear weapon would be as desirable a deterrent as a weapon itself. If so, the Grand Bargain might indicate a sincere willingness to normalize relations with the United States in order to remove the threat of regime change and gain a stronger measure of security. Despite the hot rhetoric of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s wider leadership circle is substantially the same as it was in 2003, when it authorized the Grand Bargain offer. It would behoove the United States, then, to at least attempt to resolve its issues with Iran through negotiation. Michael Axworthy is director of the newly established Centre for Persian and Iranian Studies (CPIS) at Exeter University, England. Previously, he was head of the Iran Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He is author of The Sword of Persia, a biography of the Persian monarch Nadir Shah. 284

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ince 1979, Iran has followed a lonely path of resistance to the global influence of Western values—particularly that of the United States. One could see this as a reflection of the Iranians’ continuing sense of their uniqueness and cultural significance. The Iranian revolution in 1979 was the harbinger of Islamic revival more widely, showing that previous assumptions about the inevitability of development on a Western model in the Middle East and elsewhere had been misguided. As often before, others followed, for better or worse, where Iran had led. Some hoped in the late 1990s that the [former president Mohammad] Khatami reform movement might show the way out of Islamic extremism at the other end, but although there is good evidence that Iranians are today more skeptical of religious leadership and more inclined to secularism than most other nationalities in the Middle East, that hope appears, at least for the moment, to have been premature. The failure of the West fully to take advantage of the opportunity offered by a reformist president in Iran already looks like a bad mistake. One such opportunity came after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States when members of the Iranian leadership (not just Khatami, but also [former president Ali Hoseyni] Khamenei) condemned the terrorist action in forthright terms, and ordinary Iranians showed their sympathies with candlelit vigils in the streets of Tehran—more evidence of the marked difference of attitude between Iranians and other Middle Eastern peoples. Another opportunity came after Iran gave significant help to the coalition forces against the Taliban later in 2001, helping to persuade the Northern Alliance to accept democratic arrangements for post-Taliban Afghanistan. In 2002 Iranians were rewarded with President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, which lumped Iran with Iraq and North Korea. Finally, the Bush administration ignored an Iranian offer in the spring of 2003 (shortly after the fall of Baghdad) via the Swiss, for bilateral talks toward a Grand Bargain that appeared to promise a possible resolution of the nuclear issue and de facto Iranian recognition of Israel. The purpose of all this is not to reinforce the cringing sense of guilt that bedevils many Western observers who look at the Middle East. It is not All Our Fault, and no doubt if the Iranians had been in the position of strength that Britain was between 1815 and 1950, or that the United States has been in since then, they would have behaved as badly, and quite possibly worse. The Iranians also missed opportunities for rapprochement in the Khatami years. But too often we have gotten things wrong, and that has had a cost. It is important to see events from an Iranian perspective, to see how we got things wrong, and to see what needs to be done in order to get them right. The most important thing is this: if we make commitments and assert certain principles, we must be more careful to mean what we say and to uphold those principles. The Iranian reaction after 9/11 shows in high relief the apparent paradox in Iranian attitudes to the West, in general, and to the United States, in particular.

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Iranians have real historical grounds for resentment that are unique to Iran and that go beyond the usual postures of nationalism and anti-Americanism. But among many ordinary Iranians there is also a liking of and a respect for Europeans and Americans that goes well beyond what one finds elsewhere in the Middle East. To some extent this is again a function of the Iranians’ sense of their special status among other Middle Eastern nations. Plainly, different Iranians combine these attitudes in different ways, but the best way to explain this paradox is perhaps to say that many Iranians (irrespective of their attitude to their own government, which they may also partly blame for the situation) feel snubbed, abused, misunderstood, and let down by the Westerners they think should have been their friends. This emerges in different ways—including in the rhetoric of politics, as is illustrated by a passage from a televised speech by Supreme Leader Khamenei on June 30, 2007: Why, you may ask, should we adopt an offensive stance? Are we at war with the world? No, this is not the meaning. We believe that the world owes us something. Over the issue of the colonial policies of the colonial world, we are owed something. As far as our discussions with the rest of the world about the status of women are concerned, the world is indebted to us. Over the issue of provoking internal conflicts in Iran and arming with various types of weapons, the world is answerable to us. Over the issue of proliferation of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and biological weapons, the world owes us something.

The Ahmadinejad Administration The troubled course of the relationship between Iran and the West has entered a new and more confrontational phase under President [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad. His June 2005 election campaign was successful because, with the organizational backing of the Pasdaran [a branch of the Iranian military], he articulated the discontent of the poor and the urban unemployed, manipulating yet again Shi’a indignation at the arrogance of power. His opponent in the final stage of the election was former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, who for many Iranians represented the worst of the corrupt cronyism of the regime. But many voted for Ahmadinejad simply because for once they had a chance to vote for someone who was not a mullah. Most foreign observers, often unduly influenced by their contacts in prosperous, reform-inclined north Tehran, were taken completely by surprise at the result. Prior to his election Ahmadinejad, who had visited poorer parts of the country that had not seen a politician for years, emphasized economic and social issues; his religious enthusiasm and his urge to cut a figure in international relations has blossomed only since then. The election was far from fair or free—many reformists

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openly boycotted it, in protest at the exclusion of their candidates by the Guardian Council. In the second round Ahmadinejad received at most sixty percent of the vote in a sixty percent turnout—less than forty percent of the total number of electors. In the first round of the elections, with a wider field of candidates, he was the first choice of only six percent of the voters. In the summer of 2005 Niall Ferguson warned that Ahmadinejad could be the Stalin of the Iranian revolution. Ahmadinejad may have the instincts and aspirations of a Stalin, but the political position in Iran is not so open to his ambitions, and he seems unlikely to prove a figure of the same fierce, sinister intelligence. For months the Majles [parliament] blocked—in the end, successfully—his appointment of favorites and hangers-on to his cabinet. It seemed unlikely then, and seems even more unlikely now, that Ahmadinejad can deliver on his promises to the poor. His economic management has been heavily criticized within Iran, and his introduction of gasoline rationing in the summer of 2007 seems likely to undercut his populism further. After the introduction of the gas rationing, a poll appeared to show that 62.5 percent of the people who voted for Ahmadinejad in 2005 would not do so again. But if the nuclear confrontation with the West, for which he has been the figurehead, leads to sanctions, it could give him and the regime as a whole an alibi for their failure yet again to deliver on the economy and jobs. Some observers of the situation in Iraq and Iran have warned apocalyptically of the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran controlling a Shi’a-dominated Iraq, a resurgent Shi’a Hezbollah in Lebanon, and a rising (Sunni) Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza, combined with Iranian-backed Shi’a movements erupting in Bahrain and along other parts of the southern coast of the Persian Gulf. This is not a combination that Israel (let alone others) can afford to be complacent about, and the threats of President Ahmadinejad, even if more rhetoric than real, are still significant and influential. But all is not quite as it may seem. In the wider Middle East, with the possible exception of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shi’as show little enthusiasm for Iranian-style Islamic rule. For Shi’ism as a global phenomenon, the velayat-e faqih [the doctrine that the government should be ruled by Shiite scholars] looks increasingly like a radical step too far, and otherwise the most extreme voices in Islam come from the Sunni side. Under the influence of [Grand Ayatollah Ali] Al-Sistani and [cleric] Moqtada al-Sadr, Iraqi Shi’as have maintained an independent line, though more attacks and provocations by Sunni insurgents may push them further into the arms of the Iranians. Iran has an influence on Shi’a Iraq, and the Iranians tend to see themselves as the protectors of the Iraqi Shi’as—as they do for Shi’as elsewhere. But the Shi’ism of southern Iraq, centered on the great shrines of Najaf (the tomb of Ali), Karbala, and Samarra, has an authority of its own, independent of Iranian Shi’ism, which is centered on the theological schools of [the holy city of ] Qom. Iraqi Shi’as do not necessarily trust the Iranians. And many ordinary

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Iranians do not much like seeing their government spending money and effort on behalf of foreigners—whether Iraqis, Lebanese, or Palestinians—when plenty of Iranians lack jobs, housing, and decent living conditions. The ruling regime in Iran has many faults, but it is more representative than most in the Middle East outside Israel (though the trend is not encouraging—the Majles elections of 2004 and the presidential elections of 2005 were more interfered with and less free than previous elections). Despite repressive measures by the state, Iran is not a totalitarian country like the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. It is a complex polity, with different power centers and shades of opinion among those in power. There is space for dissent—within certain boundaries. There is real social and political change afoot in Iran, in which the natural dynamic toward greater awareness, greater education, and greater freedom is prominent. There are grounds for some cautious optimism. The preparedness of Iran and the United States in the spring of 2007 to speak to each other openly and directly for the first time since the hostage crisis is in itself a great step forward that looked impossible—from the perspective of both sides—a year or two ago. The talks are about Iraq. A priority for those talks must be to induce Iran to end the attacks on US and British servicemen in Iraq by Shi’a militia that have caused too many deaths and terrible injuries (the frequency of the attacks seems, in the winter of 2007/2008, to be diminishing). But attempts to lay a major part of the blame for the current problems in Iraq at the door of the Iranians have been dishonest. When the US government presented a dossier in February 2007 detailing allegations that Iran had supplied components for explosive devices to attack coalition armored vehicles, the number of deaths they connected to such attacks was 187, and the validity of the allegations was disputed. At that time the total number of casualties among US and coalition servicemen in Iraq was more than three thousand. Overwhelmingly, coalition servicemen have been killed and wounded not by Shi’a militias backed by Iran, but by Sunni insurgents backed by—whom? Presumably by elements within countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia. But we don’t hear so much about that. Iran has been accused of trying to destabilize the new Iraqi government. But why would Iran wish to do that when Iraqi Shi’as sympathetic to Iran are running that government already? Iranian involvement in Iraq is better explained not as aggrandizement aimed at any other outcome, but rather as a reminder from the Iranians to the United States and Britain that Iran has permanent interests on her borders. The Iranian regime, as pragmatism would suggest, has always insisted on its desire for stability in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It does not look like a good time, with Ahmadinejad in power, for the West to attempt a rapprochement with Iran. But willy-nilly, the United States and Britain need Iranian help in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the region in general. This is a simple reflection of the fact that Iran is a permanent and important presence in the Middle East, and that Iran has been the prime beneficiary of the removal of

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the Taliban and Saddam [Hussein], Iran’s former enemies. The present government of Iran is far from perfect, but there are other governments in the Middle East that are as bad or worse—on democracy or human rights—whom we have few scruples about describing as close allies. If we can deal respectfully with Iran as a partner and an equal—and not merely, as too often in the past, as an instrument to short-term ends elsewhere—we might be surprised at how far even the current hard-line regime would go in taking up the partnership. Then we would see the beneficial effects a better relationship could have within Iran. The Iranian leadership is not just Ahmadinejad, and his leverage in the Iranian system is less than it appears. The wider leadership circle—those who coordinate decisions in the Supreme National Security Council—is substantially the same as it was in 2003, when it authorized the Grand Bargain offer. There are many bleak aspects to the current situation in Iran. The arrests of women and visiting academics in the spring of 2007 were yet another retrograde step. Arrests to enforce the dress code (which relaxed significantly in the Khatami period) and prevent so-called immorality in public, such as a couple holding hands or kissing, intensified at the same time. Peaceful demonstrations are broken up and demonstrators arrested and held for extended periods. It is sad beyond words that the president of a country with such a diverse and profound intellectual heritage—and such an ancient and important Jewish presence—should seek to make a splash with a conference for an international rag-bag of wild-eyed Holocaust deniers and an exhibition of offensive and inane cartoons. But the propensity of the Iranian regime to Holocaust denial did not begin with Ahmadinejad, just as Iranian support for Hamas and Hezbollah, and their attacks on Israel, goes back many years. Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel to be wiped off the map—or according to a more precise translation, “erased from the page of time”—was foolish and irresponsible. His position on the problem of Israel and the Palestinians—that Israel was created for European Jews as a manifestation of European guilt after the Nazi Holocaust, and that the Israelis should go back to Europe—was ignorant and crass. The Jews of Israel came from a wide variety of countries over a long period, including large numbers in the last two decades from the former Soviet Union. Plainly the shock of the Holocaust was one factor in the establishment of Israel, but so too was the poor position of Jews in Islamic countries at that time. In the years immediately after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, roughly equal numbers came from Islamic countries on the one hand, and from Europe on the other (including, for example, around 260,000 from Morocco, 129,290 from Iraq, 29,295 from Egypt, 229,779 from Romania, 156,011 from Poland, and 11,552 from Germany in the period 1948–1955). Of course, many tens of thousands of Iranian Jews went to Israel in those years also. In that period Jews in the Middle East, just as much as the Jews of Europe, were seeking a country in which they could be masters of their own destiny—in which they could resist persecution with their

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own means, as opposed to hoping uncertainly for the friendly intervention of non-Jewish state powers. Anti-Semitism had not been just a European phenomenon, and in some degree the present problem of relations between Muslims in the Middle East and Israelis is merely a transformed and relocated version of the old problem of how the majority of Islamic peoples of the Middle East related to the minority of Jews in their midst. Notwithstanding the real need for a solution to the suffering of the Palestinians, for Ahmadinejad to expect the Israelis to return to their former status as second-class citizens and victims in the Middle East is unrealistic political posturing.

The Nuclear Dispute Ahmadinejad’s provocative remarks about Israel have sounded the more threatening because of the continuing dispute over Iran’s nuclear program. Most Western states have suspected Iran of trying to acquire nuclear weapon capability, which if acquired would be a contravention of Iran’s commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and associated agreements. The Iranians claim they have no nuclear weapon ambitions and say, correctly, that the other NPT signatory states are bound to assist Iran’s civil nuclear program under their NPT commitments. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has found no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapon program. But after the discovery of undeclared nuclear sites at Arak and Natanz in 2002, the IAEA has said that the Iranians have repeatedly failed to meet safeguards obligations, and that it could not be confident that there were no further undeclared nuclear activities or materials in Iran. The IAEA’s chairman, Dr. Mohamed El Baradei, has called for greater cooperation and openness from the Iranians to dispel legitimate suspicions about an Iranian nuclear weapon program. Others have pointed out that Iran was not obliged to declare the sites at Arak and Natanz, because they were not yet operational. In the autumn of 2005 the IAEA declared that Iran was not in compliance with the NPT Safeguards agreement. Since then, the UN Security Council has called upon Iran to suspend uranium enrichment, and has imposed sanctions. Uranium enrichment is achieved by spinning uranium gas in a centrifuge to separate out the more fissile uranium 235 isotope from the less fissile uranium 238 isotope. Uranium 235 is the isotope needed for nuclear reactions, and uranium containing a higher than normal proportion of Uranium 235 is described as “enriched.” Uranium enriched to between two and three percent is satisfactory for a civil nuclear reactor but needs to be further enriched to ninety percent or more for a nuclear weapon. This is the problem: civil uranium enrichment is a legitimate activity under the NPT. But once the enrichment process has begun, the difference between enrichment to levels consistent with civil use and the levels

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necessary for weapons is difficult to verify from outside. Iran has been enriching uranium since April 2006, and estimates for the time needed to gather enough highly enriched uranium for a bomb have ranged from two to eight years, depending on the number of centrifuges and the efficiency of their operation. The Israeli and US governments have made plain that they cannot accept Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon. But within Iran, Ahmadinejad and other politicians have presented opposition to their program as Western blocking of Iranian civil nuclear power, and the dispute has produced an upsurge of nationalist feeling in favor of Iran’s right to nuclear power. This shades ambiguously into support in some quarters for Iran to be a nuclear power—that is, a power with nuclear weapons, like Pakistan, India, Israel, France, Russia, the UK, and the United States. Meanwhile, as the clock ticks and the centrifuges spin, Israel warns that it will take military action to destroy the Iranian nuclear (weapon) program if it is not halted by other means. Some of the rhetoric against Iran in the United States can be dismissed as ignorance and political scare mongering. Israeli concerns cannot. It may be that the Iranian leadership are determined to acquire a nuclear capability. If so, even Israeli or US bombing campaigns could not stop it indefinitely— the processes could be dispersed and concealed in deep underground bunkers, if they have not been already. And Iran could do enormous damage to the United States and her allies in retaliation. But the declaration by Iranian religious leaders against ownership of nuclear weapons should be given some credence. Possession of a capability to produce a nuclear weapon, as opposed to an actual weapon, would be almost as desirable for the Iranian regime as a weapon itself—it would have most of the deterrent effect of an actual weapon, and the only real utility of nuclear weapons is deterrence. That may be the real Iranian aim—but even that may not be a fixed, determined aim. If Iran were able to normalize its relations with the United States, remove the threat of regime change, and obtain even a limited version of the sort of security guarantees US allies enjoy, the perceived need for a nuclear weapon capability would be much reduced, if not removed altogether. That may be part of the significance of the Grand Bargain offer of 2003. Either way, the United States should at least attempt to resolve the problem in this way before seriously considering military action. It should always be a principle to exhaust diplomacy before contemplating an act of war. That is the minimum that the soldiers and civilians who might die in the event of war have a right to expect of their governments. US/Iranian diplomacy has barely yet begun. It may be that after the National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007, and the revelation it contained, that the US intelligence agencies collectively believed that Iran had halted its nuclear weapon program in 2003, negotiation toward a normalization of relations may have become a little easier. At least the danger of conflict appears for the moment to have receded.

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An Empire of the Future? The deeper, reflective, humane Iran is still there beneath the threatening media headlines. Iranian cinema is one of the most remarkable phenomena of the country since the revolution. Banned from the themes of violence and sex regarded by Hollywood as indispensable, Iran has produced a cinema of unique poetic artistry and universal appeal that has won many international prizes. Many of these films develop subjects dealing with the mistreatment of women, the vulnerability of children, the effects of war, the distortions of Iranian politics and society, and other themes critical or tending to be critical of the Islamic regime. Some say that many Iranians, especially young Iranians, never watch these films, choosing instead to see Bollywood-style film romances. But this cinema nonetheless shows the enduring greatness, the potential, the confidence, and the creative power of Iranian thought and expression. Iran and Persian culture have been hugely influential in world history. Repeatedly, what Iran has thought today, the rest of the world (or significant parts of it) has believed tomorrow. At various stages Iran has truly been an Empire of the Mind, and in a sense it is still—Iranian culture continues to hold together an ethnically and linguistically diverse nation. Iran is poised now to take on a bigger role in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the region generally than it has taken for many years. But is Iran an empire of the future? In other words, can Iran take the role of importance and influence in the Middle East and the wider world that is her due? This has to be considered doubtful. One element of the doubt is whether the wider world community will allow Iran that role. But another doubt, the main doubt, is whether today’s Iran, governed by a narrow and self-serving clique, is capable of that wider role. In the past, at its best, Iran attained a position of influence by fostering and celebrating her brightest and best minds—by facing complexity honestly, with tolerance, and by developing principles to deal with it. Today Iran is ruled by merely cunning minds, while the brightest and best emigrate or are imprisoned, or stay mute out of fear. A generation of the besteducated Iranians in Iran’s history have grown up (more than half of them women) only to be intimidated and gagged. Iran’s international position has been one of extreme isolation for over twenty years, and when one of Iran’s sharpest and most humane minds, Shirin Ebadi, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, the enthusiasm with which she was fêted in the wide world contrasted dismally with the way she was ignored by the Iranian government on her return. Since 1979 Iran has challenged the West, and Western conceptions of what civilization should be. That might have been praiseworthy in itself, had it not been for the suffering and oppression, the dishonesty and disappointment that followed. Could Iran offer more than that? Iran could, and should. Adapted from Chapter 9 of Michael Axworthy, A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind (2008, Basic Books).

PART IV

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n oft-professed American commitment to democracy around the world is challenged, if not belied, by the ties of mutual support that historically or presently link the United States to sometimes repressive Middle East monarchies (such as the royal family in Iran and the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia) and to autocracies (such as the regimes of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and, for some time, even Saddam Hussein in Iraq). That American commitment is particularly tested in situations in which apparently free and open elections bring to power candidates and parties whose interests seem to run strongly counter to those of the United States. For example, a number of recent events have raised the very real possibility that, given chances to express their opinions in honest elections, peoples around the Middle East might well choose Islamist candidates and parties to represent them. If the United States officially considers certain of those Islamist parties to be terrorist groups, what is it to do? Should it admit that the democratic process has been followed and accept the results, even if the given election places “terrorists” in formal positions of power? Or should it stand up to terrorism by refusing to acknowledge the outcome of the electoral process, fair and democratic though it has been? The following section includes two readings on three Islamic organizations that the United States has classified as terrorist—the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Hezbollah—and examines their recent roles within the democratic processes of Egypt, the Palestinian Authority, and Lebanon, respectively. To protect their interests in the Suez Canal, Britain invaded Egypt in 1882 and established a protectorate there. Egypt became an independent kingdom in 1922, though the British maintained a military presence in the country and continued to exert a major influence on the conduct of national affairs. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna to oppose social injustice and what he saw as the undue British authority in Egypt. The organization dedicated itself to promoting sharia (traditional Islamic) law and local-level charitable activities as means to furthering social cohesion that did not rely on Western precepts. The Brotherhood’s opposition to the British led it to form a pragmatic association with Nazi Germany in World War II, and Brotherhood volunteers joined the Arab forces against Israel when it declared its nationhood in 1948. In this period, the Brotherhood clashed frequently with the Egyptian monarchy over its subservience to the British. The Brotherhood’s activities

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included bombings and assassinations, though al-Banna condemned such violence. Consequently, in December 1948 the Egyptian prime minister ordered the Brotherhood disbanded. Within days, the prime minister was assassinated, and al-Banna himself was gunned down the following February, perhaps in government retaliation. Early on, the Brotherhood supported the 1952 military coup against the monarchy that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power, but it broke with the coup leaders on realizing their secularist intentions for the new republic. The Brotherhood was again banned, and many of its members were imprisoned and sometimes tortured. Among those thrown into prison was Sayyid Qutb, a leading political theorist for the Brotherhood. Qutb attended college in the United States, but his exposure to Western culture and mores confirmed in him a rejection of Western values and convinced him to embrace Islamism even more firmly. In addition to a thirtyvolume commentary on the Quran, one of his chief works, Milestones (also translated as Signposts on the Road), is a manifesto for installing Islam as a divinely ordained basis for social authority, rather than relying on secular and hence corruptible authority. Qutb was disillusioned by Nasser’s Arab nationalism as insufficiently Islamic and as brutal in arresting and torturing dissidents. Qutb was released in 1964 but then rearrested in 1965 on charges of plotting to overthrow the government. The prosecution relied heavily on passages in Milestones to convict Qutb, and he was hanged in 1966. In the half century since, the Brotherhood has largely rejected violence. Its longtime administration of charities and social services in many of Egypt’s poorer neighborhoods and villages has translated into a readymade grassroots political organization that gives the Brotherhood an advantage over Egypt’s less-organized liberal and secular parties. While technically still illegal as a party, it took part in Egyptian politics and won a significant portion of parliamentary seats in the 2005 elections. Its participation in the national government was criticized by al-Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri (himself an Egyptian) as a tacit endorsement of a secular regime. Following the 2011 overthrow of Mubarak, the Brotherhood regained legal status. It set up the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) to contest for seats in the national parliament. In those elections (from November 2011 to January 2012), FJP and its allies won nearly half of the contested seats. But the victory of the Islamists was even more overwhelming than that. Another quarter of the seats were won by an Islamist bloc led by the Al-Nour party, ensuring that Islamists far outnumbered the liberal and secular opposition. The two Islamist blocs have had their differences, which earlier had led Al-Nour to separate from the FJP bloc. The more moderate Brotherhood insists it does not wish to impose its religious views on others, whereas Al-Nour party members show a greater tendency toward a more puritanical strain of Islam (Salafism) and urge the imposition of strict Islamic law on Egypt.

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The Brotherhood had promised not to run a candidate for the Egyptian presidency itself in the 2012 elections. To uphold that pledge on a technicality, its deputy chairman, Khairat El-Shater, resigned from the Brotherhood and entered the presidential contest as the FJP candidate. When El-Shater was disqualified by an Egyptian elections commission, Mohamed Morsi, chairman of the FJP, took his place. Morsi had earned a PhD and taught at American universities. Some of his children were born during his time in the United States and are therefore American citizens. Morsi was elected president of Egypt in 2012. Organizations linked to or inspired by the Egyptian Brotherhood appear throughout the Middle East and Africa. Like the Egyptian original, the groups have often been banned by national governments. For example, Iraq’s branch of the Brotherhood, the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP), was forced underground during the years of rule by the Baath Party and Saddam Hussein. The Brotherhood’s panIslamic ideology clashed with the secular, nationalist, and socialist goals of the Baath Party. In recent years, however, the IIP has reemerged as a leading advocate of Sunni interests in Iraq. Tariq al-Hashemi, the current vice president of Iraq, is a former leader of the IIP. The Muslim Brotherhood of Syria participated in the national government of Syria until it was banned in 1963, when the Syrian Baath Party took power in a coup. The Syrian Brotherhood played a leading part in the largely Sunni armed resistance to the new regime of Hafez Assad (which adhered to the Alawi sect of Shiite Islam) until the revolt was quelled in 1982. Lately the popular mobilization against the regime of Bashar Assad in 2011 and 2012 has opened the door for the Brotherhood—as well as other Islamist organizations, including al-Qaeda—to reassert itself in Syrian affairs. Despite the troubles that the Muslim Brotherhood has had with the Syrian governments of the two Assads, the Brotherhood-backed Palestinian group Hamas maintains its headquarters in Damascus, the Syrian capital, with Syrian support. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that emerged in 1987 during the First Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. “Hamas” is an acronym for the organization’s Arabic name, Islamic Resistance Movement, and the acronym itself forms a word variously translated as “enthusiasm,” “strength,” or “bravery.” Under Yasser Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had recognized the right of Israel to exist, but Hamas refused to acknowledge such a right. The charter of Hamas declares that the liberation of Palestine is the individual duty of every Muslim (not just Palestinians)—that is, in the face of the Jewish usurpation of Palestine, the banner of jihad must be raised. However, since it has chosen to participate in political processes, rather than serve merely as a paramilitary organization, Hamas has also indicated that it is now flexible enough not to be strictly bound by its own charter on that point.

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In 2006, Hamas defeated Fatah, the leading faction of the PLO, in Palestinian parliamentary elections. However, Hamas is listed by the US State Department as a foreign terrorist organization. The United States, Russia, the United Nations, and the European Union all rejected the victory of Hamas and indeed choked off financial aid that had been flowing to the Palestinian Authority, the government of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. They insisted that any Palestinian government renounce violence and recognize Israel (as the PLO but not Hamas had already done). The rift between Hamas and Fatah erupted into armed hostilities, with the result that Hamas assumed de facto authority in Gaza, while Fatah governed the West Bank. From Gaza in 2008, Hamas launched rockets on Israel, spurring Israeli retaliation in a brief war that lasted until January 2009. In 2011, Hamas and Fatah announced their intentions to reconcile in order to hold presidential and parliamentary elections to the Palestinian National Authority (as it had been renamed) in 2012, but the elections have yet to happen. Although Hamas is Sunni in its ideology, its resistance to the Israelis has been backed by Shiite Iran in the form of money, weapons, and training. Syria is a Sunni-majority country, but the ruling regime adheres to the Alawi Shiite sect. Syria likewise provides support to Hamas in Gaza, either on its own or by serving as a conduit for Iranian aid to Hamas as well as to Sunni Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. However, with Bashar Assad’s Syria experiencing popular uprisings and rebellions in 2011 and 2012, Hamas has shown less enthusiasm for supporting Assad and staying put in Damascus than Iran deems appropriate. In consequence, the Iranians have cut back on the financial assistance that Hamas has come to depend on. Iran appears to be shifting support instead to another of its Palestinian proxies, Islamic Jihad, and to Hezbollah, which has not balked at crossing the Lebanese border into Syria to help Assad quash the protestors and rebels. Hezbollah (“Party of God”) is a militant Shiite group, trained and armed by Iranian Revolutionary Guards. It arose in response to the 1982 invasion of southern Lebanon that Israel undertook to root out PLO bases. Hezbollah continues to receive financial and military aid from both Iran and Syria, which it often employs in ways that it contends further its stated goal of destroying Israel, following the radical Islamic theology of Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. For those reasons, Hezbollah is classified as a terrorist organization by the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom, and others, including Egypt. However, it portrays itself—and is viewed throughout much of the Arab and Muslim worlds—as a legitimate resistance movement against the Western and Zionist powers that established and maintain Israel. Like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hezbollah oversees extensive programs for social services and social development in southern Lebanon, fulfilling a number of functions that local and national governments do not perform, for whatever reason.

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Hezbollah has a history of giving the Israeli armed force a tougher fight than many might have expected, and its stock is therefore high in the Muslim world. Chief among the recent conflicts was the month-long war in the summer of 2006 in which Hezbollah crossed the border into Israel to capture Israeli soldiers to trade for prisoners in Israeli jails. Israel responded by invading Lebanon, even as Hezbollah launched rockets into Israel and engaged the Israelis from wellprepared defensive positions. The perception within Israel that it had underperformed against Hezbollah and thereby handed the Islamists a huge propaganda victory led to the resignation of the commander of the Israel Defense Forces. Iran stepped up assistance to the beleaguered Syrian regime of Bashar Assad in 2012 by supplying arms and training for Syrian troops. Hezbollah also sent fighters to engage the rebels and blocked the Lebanon-Syria border in an effort to prevent arms from reaching the Sunni opposition forces. Hezbollah also has a political wing and participates in the national government of Lebanon. It holds seats in the Lebanese parliament and cabinet as one of the chief representatives of the country’s Shiite Muslims. In February 2005, former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri was assassinated in a car-bomb explosion. A United Nations–backed tribunal subsequently indicted four senior members of Hezbollah for the murder, even as Syria, too, was widely suspected of a role in the plot. Syria and Hezbollah both denied culpability in Hariri’s assassination, but a dispute over the UN probe induced Hezbollah, in conjunction with Christian and Druze parties, to resign from the Lebanese government in 2011, thereby toppling it and forcing the selection of a new prime minister. Hezbollah and its allies accordingly secured eighteen of the new cabinet’s thirty posts (compared to the eleven they held previously). The new prime minister dedicated the government to defending Lebanon’s sovereignty and to liberating land still “under the occupation of the Israeli enemy.” The expanded power of Hezbollah within the Lebanese government was a cause for concern in the United States, which had to weigh whether and how to continue hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid to Lebanon that might be diverted to an organization on the official American list of proscribed terrorist organizations. The United States did halt shipments of weapons to Lebanon but continued to provide training to the military.

H The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has been in existence for more than eighty years and has Islamist branches and offshoots throughout the Arab world. It should be expected that an organization of that venerable age would not be monolithic but would have a history of internal differences and factionalization. In chapter 25, Marwan Bishara identifies the execution of Egyptian political theorist Sayyid Qutb in 1966 as the occasion for one major split within the party,

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between those traditionalists who embraced peaceful jihad and those militants willing to wage violent jihad against the social order. Those seeking most rigidly to expunge non-Islamic influences from all aspects of social life can be said to subscribe to political Islam. Political Islam, Bishara says, was nurtured in Saudi Arabia as a response to the secular pan-Arabism espoused by Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser. Religious fundamentalism mushroomed in the form of antisecular, antinationalist, puritanical Salafi Islam, which includes violent jihadis. In that category, al-Qaeda militants are disciples of Qutb, but they abandoned the Muslim Brotherhood because of its willingness to work within modern state institutions. In fact, the local-level social work performed by the Brotherhood enabled it to mobilize grassroots organizations for political action in the wake of popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere, as Islamists “struggled shoulder to shoulder with liberal, leftist, and nationalist groups” to define new political orders in which the disparate groups would coexist. Mark Perry (chapter 26) finds that dissimilar entities tend to be lumped under the term terrorist. Terrorist organizations, or groups or parties, that represent constituencies and participate in elections have political legitimacy and responsibilities and, therefore, have a stake in working things out with differently minded groups in the messy process of governing. They must be distinguished, Perry says, from mere terrorist networks that answer to no one. The former would include the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Hezbollah, while al-Qaeda would fall into the latter category. For Perry, then, the question is not whether we should talk to terrorists but which terrorists we should talk to. Hamas, for example, runs an array of social programs—schools, clinics, day care centers, athletic clubs, and so on—for its Palestinian constituency. Its governing bureau is drawn from popularly elected leaders of grassroots organizations. In interviews with Hamas leaders, Perry finds it significant that they no longer insist on the total removal of Israelis from Palestine but just call for the Israeli abandonment of the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. Says one leader, the Hamas charter, which calls for Israel’s destruction, “can be amended.” The Hamas leaders defend the targeting of Israeli citizens, however, as a necessary means to fight back against the better-armed Israelis. Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections, but US pressure on Fatah to reject a unity government with Hamas led Hamas to engineer a “coup” that split “Palestine” into Hamas-controlled Gaza and the Fatah-controlled West Bank. The undermining of Hamas after the elections “remains a deep stain on America’s avowed support for democracy,” concludes Perry. Chapter 26 continues with Perry’s interviews with leaders of Hezbollah. Lebanon’s Shiite “Party of God” is an enemy of Israel but also runs social service programs at home and participates in the national government. Hezbollah leaders openly confirm their strong relationship with Iran but maintain a certain independence from Iran itself and the Iranian-influenced Iraqi Shiites. Hezbollah has also “subtly distanced” itself from Syria when that country was forced to withdraw

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from Lebanon following the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. Instead, says Perry, Hezbollah has committed itself to the role of a permanent opposition party in shaping a Lebanese national identity that includes Lebanon’s Shiite and Christian minorities as well as the country’s Sunni majority. To that end, Hezbollah has learned to work across sectarian divides to achieve its political goals.

CHAPTER 25 QR

Islamists and Democracy: The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Marwan Bishara

Marwan Bishara analyzes the relationship between democracy and “the most influential Islamist movement in the Arab world—the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.” Founded more than eighty years ago, soon after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I, the Brotherhood has spawned any number of Islamist movements in countries across the Middle East. Its leaders have been persecuted, imprisoned, and executed by the Egyptian government over the decades, though Bishara contends that the Brotherhood has evolved into a primarily “social and charitable movement” that has shied away from involvement in politics. The more radical members of the group, who embraced tenets of radical Islam, including violent jihad, have generally splintered off from the Brotherhood. And another divergence of views divides the Brotherhood between conservative traditionalists, who advocate religious charity work to further the proselytizing of Islam, and those liberals who urge greater participation in the political processes of the country. As a result, the Brotherhood is distrusted by both ends of the political spectrum—by the government, which considers it an Islamist terrorist organization, and by the jihadists, including al-Qaeda, who consider the Brotherhood’s participation in the political life of the nation to constitute a backsliding acknowledgment of the legitimacy of secular ruling institutions. The Brotherhood displayed no evident leadership in the protest movements that swept across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011. But once the ruling administrations of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt were swept aside, the Brotherhood’s strong grassroots networks and community organizations enabled it to step quickly into the resulting power vacuums. The very success of the chiefly secular uprisings against those long-entrenched regimes demonstrated the weakened influence of militant jihadist organizations in the region. In contrast, according to Bishara, the Brotherhood, whatever its religious origins and tendencies, is less interested in imposing strict Islamist principles upon the populace than in working “shoulder to shoulder with liberal, leftist, and nationalist groups.”

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Marwan Bishara is Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst and the host of its flagship show, Empire, on geopolitical issues of the day. A citizen of Israel, Bishara is a Palestinian Arab born into a Roman Catholic family. He is author of Palestine/Israel: Peace or Apartheid. This reading derives from The Invisible Arab: The Promise and Peril of the Arab Revolution.

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he most influential Islamist movement in the Arab world—the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood—chose Mohammed Badi’e as its General Guide, or leader, in January 2010. He was unequivocal about the movement’s pursuit of a peaceful social and political agenda—how, under no circumstance, would it seek power through violence. Indeed, since its founding in 1928, the Brotherhood, which has branches and offshoots throughout the Arab world, has evolved into a social and charitable movement that has often been reluctant to take the political lead, even though it was marginalized and persecuted by the [Anwar] Sadat and [Hosni] Mubarak regimes. The leadership of the once outlawed Brotherhood—which boasts an estimated half million members in Egypt and is said to command the support of one-fifth to one-third of the country’s population—has begun to debate the need for a greater, albeit indirect, role for the movement in Egyptian political life. Badi’e is no young man. At sixty-three, this medical doctor, who was first imprisoned with the Brotherhood’s hawkish leadership in the 1960s, belongs to the older, conservative wing of the movement. (All told, he was imprisoned four times for more than thirteen years over the last four decades.) His election came at a time of rift between the conservatives, who insist their organization must remain an evangelical religious charity that works toward Islamizing society, and the younger, more industrious mid-level leaders, who reckon it is time to make a decisive entry into politics to effect change. The movement’s serious gains in the 2005 elections, when the group’s supported candidates won one-fifth of the seats in parliament, encouraged the politically minded members to make their mark on the movement. They hoped to continue the détente with the Mubarak regime while making incremental gains in the sociopolitical sphere. However, this optimism proved short-lived, as the regime shunned the Brotherhood and rigged the 2010 elections in an attempt to take full control of parliament and pave the way for Mubarak to transition power to his son Gamal. Although the Brotherhood was left in a very difficult situation, Badi’e sensed a “great opportunity” for the opposition forces “to unite, to join together in a popular political movement,” as he told his discouraged adherents. He may have been a movement conservative, but even he was responding to its younger, more liberal base to enter the political arena. He knew that the Brotherhood’s involvement in the 2005 elections—as “independents”—had given its political wing new power. Though he had no intention of spearheading a revolution, he was keen to cajole the restless and embittered mood of the opposition to see the silver lining in the black cloud that was hovering over Egyptian political life. The fact that Mubarak succeeded in angering just about everybody outside his immediate

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clique had made the Brotherhood less isolated and more capable of confronting the regime together with the disgruntled secular opposition. Revolution, it must be emphasized, is not a commonplace in the history of Islam. In fact, contrary to conventional wisdom, revolutions are rarely encouraged or praised, even when Muslims are faced with unjust Muslim leaders. Better to survive injustice than cause chaos that could turn into tyranny. That’s why the Muslim Brotherhood, the single largest Islamist movement in the Arab world, has historically supported reform and incremental peaceful change. However, following an attempt on President Gamal Abdul Nasser’s life in 1954, Muslim Brotherhood leader  Sayyid Qutb called for the removal of the pan-Arabist leader, referring to him as an apostate. This prompted a bloody crackdown on the movement by the regime. After Qutb’s execution in 1966, the Brotherhood split on the interpretation of his ideas, summarized notably in his book Signposts on the Road. The traditional leadership embraced peaceful jihad, and the extremist militants split and waged violent jihad to oust [those whom] they considered apostate rulers. The terrible cost paid by the Brothers has further polarized the proponents of peace and violent jihad. In response jihadi movements condemned the Brotherhood’s laxity and tolerance of secular dictators; the Brotherhood did not hesitate to condemn those who carried out terrorist attacks in Egypt and the rest of the world. All of this helps explain why the Brotherhood leadership didn’t spearhead confrontations with the regime over the years and why it didn’t lead the revolution on January 25, 2011. Indeed, when the January upheaval got under way, the Muslim Brotherhood was almost nowhere to be seen, except for its younger activists who joined the marches without the support of the group’s elders. The Brotherhood’s Egyptian branch dragged its feet, just as it had in Tunisia weeks earlier, and remained on the sidelines, even as the protests showed signs of success. The same happened in Syria and Yemen, where the local Muslim Brotherhood didn’t join the youth until their protests became serious and widespread. But as soon as its leaders realized the scope and momentum of the popular uprisings, the Brotherhood decided to join; better late than never. Once they connected with the protesters, the Brotherhood’s participation gave the revolution considerable heft. In Egypt they could flex their organizational muscle in the urban centers, while in Tunisia their strength was concentrated in rural areas. Its long experience in grassroots organization and its wide reach in the region made the Brotherhood and its affiliates a central part of the protest movement. Within days of the ousting of [Tunisian president Zine El Abidine] Ben Ali and Mubarak, the Brotherhood in Egypt and An-Nahdah in Tunisia surfaced as two of the biggest winners. Their grassroots networks, organized structures, and social subsidiaries were essential to win sympathy and support. These factors are likely to play an even greater role in the post-revolution stage.

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The Secular-Religious Geopolitics The rise of political Islam in the Arab world was nurtured in [the] context of the regional rivalry between secular Egypt and theocratic Saudi Arabia. After the nationalist Egyptian military officers took power in 1952 and began to speak in the name of the Arab world, Saudi Arabia took exception. It also bristled at the Ba’ath’s secular nationalist ideology and the Leftist seculars that had become such a potent popular force in several Arab countries. Unhappy with their secular nationalist agenda for the region, Riyadh found common purpose with Western powers irritated by Egypt’s independent foreign policy and its nonalignment in the Cold War. To offset Nasser’s Arab agenda and Egypt’s use of the Cairo-based Arab League, Saudi Arabia helped found the Islamic Committee in 1961–1963 that soon became the Conference of Islamic States where the Arabs are a minority. Raising the pan-Islamic banner was Saudi Arabia’s best and perhaps only way to confront Egypt’s secular nationalism and its leadership in the developing world and nonaligned movement. Egypt’s timid posture and relative isolation since it signed a separate peace treaty with Israel in 1979 left the door open for Saudi Arabia and its religious fundamentalist brand to mushroom throughout the region, most evidently through the growing anti-secular and anti-nationalist Salafi groups, including the violent jihadis. With Saudi help, private and public, these groups financed their activities in primarily secular societies, as Saudi Arabia opened its doors to religious students and scholars from all over the Arab and Muslim worlds. Some of the new movements boasted of representing the struggle of Arabs and Muslims throughout the world and, in the process, defamed the name of both in the international arena. Repression and public despair, coupled with rocketing unemployment rates and vast inequalities in the wider region, helped Salafi and jihadi groups to tap into the Arab region’s reservoir of fresh recruits, the youngest population on earth. Some went to Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Bosnia to fight under the banner of global jihad.

The Rise and Decline of al-Qaeda For all intents and purposes, al-Qaeda’s jihadi “holy war” doctrine was established by dissident members of the Muslim Brotherhood, such as Abdullah Azzam, who was the former head of the Jordanian Brotherhood and rejected the Brotherhood’s peaceful jihadi doctrine. Al-Qaeda militants are also disciples of Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood leader and ideologue who was imprisoned and executed by the Nasser regime in 1966. His clear and uncompromising writings and reflections on the Muslim world (and America) became the cornerstone for young jihadists in search of a holistic Islamic system.

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Jihadists abandoned the mother group after its leaders renounced revolutionary violence, following its painful confrontations with Arab regimes, and instead pursued religious, social, and political preaching as a way to win both hearts and minds in the Muslim world. Many of these radical “brothers” found their way to Afghanistan through the Brotherhood’s networks and later through their own “services bureau,” all of which were supported by the CIA’s effort to reverse the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan at the height of the Cold War, aided by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Once fully organized, following the death of Azzam, al-Qaeda leaders such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, formerly of the Egyptian [Islamic Jihad], accused the Muslim Brotherhood of betraying the cause of Islam and abandoning their “jihad” in favor of forming political parties and supporting modern state institutions. With the Soviet withdrawal at the end of the Cold War, al-Qaeda extended its campaign, turning against secular or “apostate” Arab regimes and against any form of Western presence (“Crusaders” and Jewish) in the Muslim world, from Andalusia in Spain to Kashgar in China, in order to establish an Islamic caliphate. The US’s deployment of half a million American soldiers to Saudi Arabia—the home of Islam’s two holiest sites—following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 presented al-Qaeda with an opportunity to rally Arabs and Muslims against the “new crusaders” and their regional clients. In the process, it evolved into a polycentric, theologically connected jihadi network made up of Arabs and Afghans who fought the Soviets alongside new groups ready to wage jihad under its banner anywhere in the world. It went on to carry out a number of attacks on US targets including two US embassies in Africa and a military frigate in the Gulf of Aden. Al-Qaeda was also linked to terrorist attacks in various Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Morocco and the escalation of violence in Yemen, Lebanon, and Palestine. The group’s franchise also spearheaded a full-fledged civil war in Algeria, which has led to a bitter backlash from the majority of Arabs who rejected the actions and the worldview of al-Qaeda and its affiliates among the “Islamic groups.” America’s mistaken reactions to the group notwithstanding, al-Qaeda’s ArabAfghans were generally hated in the Arab world and have had no Arab agenda of any sort that merited even the least consideration. It was only natural after the popular uprising swept through the Arab world that the violent jihadi groups would be the first losers in the upheaval of civil disobedience. The unity among people of all ideological trends, including the “mainstream Islamists,” [has] turned the tables against al-Qaeda’s demonizing tactics directed at all other Muslims. Tunisian Islamist leader Rashid Ghannouchi told me in the autumn of 2011, alQaeda was “finished” thanks to the revolution in Tunisia.

Debates Within the Islamist Movement Contrary to the monolithic version of political Islam presented by Western media, the Islamic world and its Islamist movements have gone through a long and deep

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transformation over the last several decades that has involved sharp theological and political disagreements as well as friction among [their] various components along sectarian and generational lines. There have been countless public debates and lively exchanges among Muslims over the means and ends of political Islam or the role of Islam in politics, state, and society. From its outset, the idea of politicizing Islam in the context of the modern state has provoked much controversy and created new gray areas between religion and politics. Secular dictators and parties have been as interested in filling in the blanks as their Islamist rivals, with each side arguing how best to accommodate governance with Islam. Secular regimes rejected on principle the religion-based political parties when the majority of the population was Muslim, accusing Islamist leaders of stratifying “good” and “bad” Muslims through politics. They also argued that considering Islamic Shari’a law was already either “a source” or “the main source” of legislation in their countries, there was no point in further Islamization or organized political Islam. On the opposite side, after decades of evolution, the influential Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood that was formed soon after the breakup of the Ottomans has accepted the alternation of power through democratic elections and embraced pluralism in social and political life but stopped short of supporting liberal democracy—a concept that has been practiced primarily by Western nations and increasingly stripped of its liberal component elsewhere in the developing world. One of the foremost of modernizers among the Islamist groups has been the Tunisian An-Nahdah under the guidance of Rashid Ghannouchi. The seventyyear-old Islamist was imprisoned twice in the 1980s and went into exile until after Ben Ali’s departure. He espoused egalitarian views with an emphasis on social and economic justice. Since its founding, the movement accepted the principle of political diversity, alternation of power, and the rule of the majority under a democratic constitution. Ghannouchi, who commands considerable respect among Arab Islamists, went further than the Brotherhood leaders to interpret “the rule of God” as ordained in the “will of the people.” An-Nahdah remained loyal to its principles despite Ben Ali’s attempts to uproot the movement’s members and purge its leaders through repression, imprisonment, and exile. Soon after Ben Ali’s ousting, Ghannouchi told Al Jazeera that he supports democracy and is categorically opposed to an Islamic caliphate. During an hour-long conversation two days after his party’s victory in the Tunisian elections—they won almost 40 percent of the vote—Ghannouchi summarized his vision of democracy to me: Democracy is when the people rule themselves by themselves through an authority that represents them. They should be able to constantly oversee it and overthrow it when they want. It is when citizens can enjoy their personal freedom, regardless their color, wealth, religion, and way of thinking. It is when the state is built on citizenship basics,

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which means the state does not belong to a certain family, person, or party. It belongs to all its citizens.

Opening a New Chapter The priorities and programs of the Islamist movements have varied over time and geography. Prior to the revolution, the Brotherhood [devoted] their effort [to] social and political advocacy, whereas the Salafists were mainly concerned with enforcing punitive religious dogma and spent very little time calling for political change. The Sufis, for the most part, lived peacefully under the regime so long as they were allowed to practice their religion. This changed with the advent of the mass protests as the Brotherhood became active in the revolutions against Arab autocracies, while other movements like the Salafists, Sufis, and jihadis remained on the sidelines until after the ouster of Ben Ali and Mubarak, when they emerged to take advantage of the new opening. Be that as it may, the Islamist groups emerged in 2011 as important pillars of change in Tunisia, Egypt, and across the region, as they struggled shoulder to shoulder with liberal, leftist, and nationalist groups. The theological approach to politics was opposed by a number of main opposition parties and movements from the secular right to the liberal and the radical left. Indeed, some were more worried [about] a “totalitarian Islamist” takeover than [about] “secular dictators.” For decades, Arab autocrats were relatively successful in playing on and exploiting the suspicion between their secular and Islamist oppositions. The 2006 elections in the occupied Palestinian territories notwithstanding, the Tunisian elections at the end of October 2011 are the first free competitive elections in an independent Arab nation between secular and Islamists trends. Most likely, the Palestinian Hamas, the Tunisian An-Nahdah, and Egypt’s Freedom and Justice party [of the Muslim Brotherhood] have opened the way for more such popular competitions that will have major influence over national identity and governance in the Arab region. Internationally, and notably in Western and US circles, the Islamists—and at times Muslims in general—are demonized as aggressive, bloody, paranoid, terrorist, and imperialistic in their outlook. The implementation of Islamic Shari’a [is seen] as a form of totalitarianism that’s worse than dictatorship, when Shari’a, agree with it or not, is simply a body of principles. While other Arabs judge the rise of Islamist political power on the basis of their vision for governance and commitment to democracy and pluralism, much of the Western fear is based in clichés of antiquated views of Islam and the Islamists or disinformation regarding the view of Muslims and Islamists in general of al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks. Adapted from Chapter 7 of Marwan Bishara, The Invisible Arab: The Promise and Peril of the Arab Revolution (2012, Nation Books).

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Talking to Terrorists: Hamas and Hezbollah Mark Perry

Should the United States shun all dialogue with terrorists? Does talking with terrorists confer upon them an unmerited legitimacy? Are there differences among terrorist groups such that talking to some (though perhaps not others) might be both morally acceptable and productive toward conflict resolution? Mark Perry distinguishes so-called terrorist groups from mere terrorist networks. The former seek to participate in elections, are answerable to some degree to the constituencies that elect them, and frequently supply to those constituencies social services that governments too often fail to provide. They also have to reach some kind of governing accommodation with other groups who participate in power structures. That is, they have learned to negotiate. Terrorist networks, on the other hand, are answerable to no one. By that definition, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood, though occasionally militant and even brutal, are (arguably) comparatively moderate, pro-democracy organizations to be distinguished from the radical likes of al-Qaeda. In conversations with leaders of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), Perry found that the movement no longer seeks to displace entirely the state of Israel but now instead limits its territorial ambitions to the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. Hamas ran a slate in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections, attentive to participating peacefully and democratically but also concerned that the United States would undermine the very elections it had promoted once it realized that Hamas had legitimately won. Indeed, according to the Hamas leaders, postelection pressures from America ignited the dispute between the victorious Hamas and the rival Fatah faction that left Hamas in control of Gaza, while Fatah governs the West Bank. Hezbollah is labeled a dangerous terrorist organization by the United States, primarily because of its opposition to Israel and its connections to Iran and Syria. Objectively, however, Hezbollah has cultivated a separation (though not utter independence) from both Iran and Syria and has conducted itself as a distinctly Lebanese political movement. In that capacity, it participates in government and reaches across sectarian divides to recruit political allies, including Christian parties. It is, Perry says,“a statelike actor within a nonstate.”

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Mark Perry is a military, intelligence, and foreign affairs analyst. For fifteen years an unofficial advisor to Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat, Perry is also the former codirector of Conflicts Forum, which fosters dialogues between Islamist movements and the West. This reading is adapted from Talking to Terrorists: Why America Must Engage with Its Enemies.

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Hamas

n July 2, 1994—ten years before the events in Amman, Jordan—Yasser Arafat arrived in Gaza at the head of a delegation of Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO] leaders. Arafat’s arrival in Gaza was a triumphant moment for his people. The PLO had once been viewed as one of the world’s most violent terrorist organizations. Now that had changed: Less than a year prior to his arrival in Gaza, Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin had met in Washington, DC, to sign a Declaration of Principles outlining steps toward Palestinian self-rule in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. In subsequent talks, Arafat and Rabin had negotiated a series of agreements that affirmed the PLO’s right to show “symbols of statehood” in the autonomous areas and allowed self-rule under an elected Palestinian legislature. The agreement was followed by a wide-ranging economic accord intended to ensure Palestinian economic growth. Arafat’s arrival in Gaza and his agreement with Rabin inaugurated an era of hope that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would end. Palestinians were ecstatic; Israelis were relieved. After decades of conflict, peace seemed at hand. Yet in the wake of Arafat’s arrival in Gaza, the PLO struggled to establish its government. Arafat and the PLO leadership took up residence in Gaza, with Arafat’s offices located in a hastily built headquarters on the Mediterranean beachfront. Almost immediately, construction began throughout Gaza and the West Bank on a series of ministries that would disburse the funds made available to the PLO by international donors. Money poured into the West Bank and Gaza, and Arafat and Rabin began the long and difficult process of rebuilding IsraeliPalestinian relations. Three weeks after Arafat’s arrival in Gaza, Abdul Aziz Rantisi—one of the senior leaders of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas)—arrived at Arafat’s headquarters with a group of bodyguards. Rantisi’s family had fled Jaffa in 1948 and taken up residence in Gaza. The young Rantisi had been a formidable student and had graduated from Egypt’s Alexandria University with a degree in pediatric medicine and genetics. As a student, Rantisi joined the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and rose through its ranks, before returning to Gaza as a physician. In 1987, Rantisi helped found the Islamic Resistance Movement. The movement’s earliest days were taken up with organizing social programs for the people of Gaza and the West Bank and building a political organization to rival the PLO.

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After the assassination of Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh, on July 22, 2002, Rantisi became Hamas’s most public spokesman. Articulate, vain, outspoken, and given to bouts of rage, Rantisi was anxious to meet the PLO leader. Rantisi disliked Arafat and thought him a bully, though acknowledging that he was the symbol of Palestinian nationalism. No one, Rantisi believed, had ever really stood up to him. Rantisi was vain enough to believe he would be the first to do so. The meeting between Arafat and Rantisi was set for a hot Gaza afternoon in late August 1994, just after midday prayers. What happened next is now a part of Palestinian political lore, related again and again by Arafat’s aides as proof of their leader’s strength and patience. According to an Arafat aide, Rantisi began to shout—his voice coming through the door and into the hallway. “You are traitor to the Palestinian cause,” Rantisi shouted, “and you have betrayed the Palestinian people.” For a seemingly interminable amount of time, Rantisi ticked off Arafat’s crimes: He had come to an agreement “with the Zionist entity”; he had “made friends with criminals”; he had “sold the birthright of the Palestinian people”; he had “divided families and tribes” and “ensured the permanent dispossession of our nation.” According to Arafat’s own account of the meeting, he sat impassively and without emotion behind his desk throughout this tirade, eyeing Rantisi with disdain. Eventually, Rantisi ended his condemnation and fell silent. Arafat leaned back in his chair, digesting what Rantisi had said. But then, leaning forward, he asked him a simple question: “What is it that you want?” Rantisi thought for only a moment: “Forty seats in the Palestinian legislature,” he said.

Defining Terrorists as Outside Civilization The exchange between Arafat and Rantisi raises the single most important question about terrorist organizations: Are they political parties capable of political engagement? Or are they intractable and uncompromising networks bent only on exacting pain and promoting violence? Are terrorist organizations worth talking to? In his influential book A Fundamental Fear, Dr. Salman Sayyid, a research fellow at the University of Leeds, questions the premises underlying the war on terror and writes eloquently on “the language of terrorism.” Sayyid argues that the current relationship between “the West” and Islam is actually a repetition of the colonial relationship the United States and Europe have maintained with the peoples of the Middle East. “The articulation of an ‘international community’ in opposition to (Islamist) terrorism replays the colonial discourse of a world order that is organized in terms of civilization and barbarism,” he says. “By defining the opponents of the current world order as external to that order, the ‘war against terrorism’ can be waged with a savagery similar to that used by the colonial powers to pacify their ‘savages.’” Sayyid articulates the assumptions about “terrorist organizations” promoted by Western policymakers: that terrorist organizations use violence for political ends,

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that they oppose “modernity,” that they seek to overthrow the rule of law, that they advocate erasing the line between church and state (or mosque and state), and that they support the overthrow of the world order. Because of this, Sayyid argues, Western policymakers believe that terrorist organizations lie outside the protections offered by both natural law and civil society. “Terror must be stopped,” President [George W.] Bush said in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 incidents. “No nation can negotiate with terrorists. For there is no way to make peace with those whose only goal is death.” The administration never softened this stance, even when urged to do so by friends and allies. As late as May 15, 2008, Bush characterized discussions with terrorists as an endorsement of evil. Once again, terrorism was compared to Nazism: “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939,” Bush said, “an American senator declared, ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is—the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.” The decision of whether or not to talk to terrorists begs an even more important question: Which terrorists should governments talk to? Mediators can answer the question of whether to talk by gauging the “legitimacy” of a terrorist organization. After all, the standard argument of those who believe that talking with terrorist organizations is always wrong (because it offers “the false comfort of appeasement”) is that talking to terrorists confers on them a legitimacy they do not already have. Political scientist Robert Nozick has suggested that legitimacy is not conferred but earned. Using this standard, terrorist organizations have legitimacy if they represent constituents—if they have political support in the first place. Applying this test yields interesting results. Those who would talk to Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, or Pakistan’s Jamat i-Islami would be able to argue that doing so only confirms these organization’s claims to political legitimacy—the four groups actually represent robust constituencies, and all of them have participated in democratic elections. The same would not be true for al Qaeda, Lebanon’s Fatah al-Islam, the German Red Brigades, or the Abu Nidal Organization, which are not political organizations answering to a well-defined population but political networks answering to no one.

Meeting in Beirut Do terrorists have anything to say? In August 2004 a delegation of Americans and Europeans traveled to Beirut to meet with the leadership of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and the Lebanese Party of God—Hezbollah. The purpose of the trip was to provide an opening to Islamist political organizations listed as terrorist entities by the United States. Delegation members believed their effort would begin a process that might persuade Western governments to open discussions with political movements whose legitimacy was derived from a

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broad base of popular support in their own communities and who were participating in or had agreed to participate in democratic elections. The delegates knew their meetings would be controversial: Both Hamas and Hezbollah were on US and EU lists of proscribed terrorist organizations, both had been accused of participating in the targeting and killing of civilians, and both had vowed enmity to Israel, which maintains close ties to the United States and its European allies. Each of the members of this delegation believed that opening discussions with Hamas and Hezbollah and other Islamist political movements in the Middle East could provide a way out of the present morass. Since the tragedy of 9/11, the delegates believed, the West had adopted policies that undermined its goals in the war on terror. Western policies reflected not only an undifferentiated view of Islamist organizations but a mistaken conflation of moderate, pro-democracy groups with the network of radical Salafists [jihadists] that had attacked the United States. Are Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist organizations (in the same sense as al Qaeda or its network)? Or are they more moderate groups open to political dialogue and change? The public statements of Hezbollah and Hamas reflected a desire to reinforce their political legitimacy by participating in elections and shaping programs to meet the needs of their constituencies: Hezbollah was engaged in a national parliamentary campaign in Lebanon in which its candidates were gaining increasing support, and Hamas was then considering entering candidates in the planned Palestinian parliamentary elections of January 2006. Both organizations had condemned the events of 9/11, both had publicly stated their willingness to open contacts with the United States and its allies, both had committed to providing broad support to their constituencies, and though both maintained that their conflict with Israel was legitimate, they had not ruled out a political resolution of that war. Both movements argued that their fight with Israel had nothing to do with the West, that neither the United States nor its European allies were their enemy. After several preliminary meetings, the group convened two larger engagements, bringing to Beirut a group that included former senior US and British diplomats and retired officers of Western intelligence services. These meetings took place with both groups in three-day sessions in March and July 2005. In no sense could it be said that any member of the American or European delegation arrived in Beirut sympathetic to the groups with whom they were speaking. A number of delegates were anxious to confront their interlocutors over their use of violence. A number of others were skeptical of any of the groups’ claims for engagement with the United States. Nearly all of the Western delegates had lost close friends in the region’s conflicts. The arrangement of the March and July conferences in Beirut in 2005 (as well as the meetings in Amman in 2004) reversed the power equation, so that the organizations represented could express their identity, as well as their political and social

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views, without interruption. But the underlying, and real, purpose of the arrangement was to allow the leaders of the “terrorist organizations” in attendance to define themselves and so to answer the specific questions posed by their critics: Did they “use violence for political ends”? Did they “oppose ‘modernity’”? Did they “seek to overthrow the rule of law”? Did they wish to “erase the line between mosque and state”? Did they seek to “overthrow the world order”? The answers to the questions were not predictable and resulted in an exchange on the nature of government, society, culture, and religion that was at once complex and differentiated.

The Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas The exchanges in Beirut in March began with a presentation by the Islamic Resistance Movement. The Islamic Resistance Movement traces its roots to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood or, more properly, to the al-ikhwan al-muslimun (Society of Muslim Brothers). The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by Hassan alBanna, an Egyptian schoolteacher, grew into a significant political movement throughout the region over a period of two decades, and it still ranks as the single most important political movement in Egypt. Less important in other parts of North Africa, the Muslim Brotherhood remains immensely popular in Egypt, Jordan, the West Bank, and Gaza and has a presence in nearly all Muslim societies. Although the movement’s adherents have been censured in the West as “radical Islamists” and in Egypt as “unrepentant jihadists,” al Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri actually sees the group as an enemy of Islam and condemns it for participating in the democratic process in Egypt, for “luring thousands of young Muslim men into lines for elections . . . instead of into the line of jihad.” Although the Muslim Brotherhood is widely viewed in the Middle East as a credible political movement dedicated to working within a democratic framework, most American and European officials and journalists claim otherwise. Their view mimics that of the Egyptian government, which has worked to undermine the movement since the mid-1950s, when it accused the movement of being a fundamentalist and revolutionary organization. The Egyptian government continues to harass the movement and regularly jails its leaders. British scholar Azzam Tamimi, perhaps the foremost thinker on the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, disagrees with the portrait, saying that the movement is rooted in its commitment to constituent services. The Muslim Brothers of today are noted for their roots among Egypt’s poor, and it is this that gives them their popularity, he notes. Through the years, the Muslim Brotherhood has either given birth to countless other Islamist movements in the region or served as a model for political action for other organizations. This is particularly true for Hamas—the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement. The Islamic Resistance Movement was created in 1987 in Gaza as an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in response to Israeli military actions resulting

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from the First Intifada. Like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas takes pride in its network of social programs, which include the establishment and operation of schools, clinics, social and athletic clubs, women’s organizations, day-care centers, orphanages, tutoring services, mosque-centered programs, and universities and colleges. “The Brothers are always the first on the streets after any disaster,” an Egyptian official notes with chagrin, “while our government makes sure the military is there, with their guns, to protect property. The difference between the responses is significant, I would think.” Like that of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Resistance Movement’s primary social and political focus is noncontroversial: It is constituent-based, though it has clearly undergone periods of extreme militancy. The leadership of the movement, Tamimi notes, is not unlike that of any other mainstream political movement. It is governed by a political bureau that mixes leaders from constituent political organizations with grassroots labor, women’s, and social groups. The organizational leadership is popularly elected from polling among small neighborhood groups that takes place during regular organizational meetings in schools, mosques, and community centers. It is not unknown for the top leadership to be replaced—as happened when Musa Abu Marzouk, the head of Hamas’s political and military bureau, was defeated in an election by the movement’s current leader, Khalid Meshaal. Additionally, unlike the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas derived at least a part of [its] early senior leadership cadre from disaffected members of a rival political organization (in this case from Fatah—the Palestinian mainstream organization of Yasser Arafat).

Hamas Leaders Speak The Hamas leadership present for the first meeting of Western delegates in March 2005 included Sami Khatar, Musa Abu Marzouk, and Usamah Hamdan—all senior members of the Hamas leadership. The three began their presentation with a statement of Hamas’s political beliefs and goals. “We will continue the struggle to provide national unity, to stop Israeli aggression. We will participate in Palestinian elections, we will establish the framework for rebuilding the Palestine Liberation Organization to represent all Palestinians, we will offer a truce with Israel, and we will continue our work to make certain that Israel abandons the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem,” Abu Marzouk said. “We do not endorse murder, but we do support resistance.” Abu Marzouk’s statement was significant: His formula—that Hamas would fight Israel until it “abandons” the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem—was the first indication that the movement had rethought its goals of establishing a Palestinian state on all the lands of the former British Mandate and of destroying the Jewish state. His statement contradicted the movement’s charter, which was explicit in calling for Israel’s destruction. “The charter is not the Koran,” he said. “It can be amended.”

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Abu Marzouk’s statement about democracy was also one of the first indications that Hamas would agree to run candidates in upcoming 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections. “We believe in democracy and we are a democratic organization,” Sami Khatar said. “We are confident in our support from the people, and we will serve in any government that is elected, whether we win or lose.” Sami Khatar was outspoken in his view that, should Hamas win the parliamentary elections, the United States would not accept the results: “The Palestinians decide their leaders, and the international community must accept that. And when we win those elections, it will be a great problem for the Americans, I am sure. Is the international community going to ignore these elections, the results of the elections?” He went on to note, “We want a democratic process. We want to be part of the political reality in Palestine, but not to have all the power. The resistance of Hamas will continue as long as occupation remains. Hamas is both progressive and moderate. We have no problem with communicating with the EU, UK, or US.” Hamas’s long period of targeting Israeli civilians in a series of bloody bombings of cafés and buses during the Second Intifada was the topic of the most detailed exchange during this March discussion. “We are against targeting civilians,” Abu Marzouk said, and we did not do so until 1994—after the Hebron Mosque massacre [perpetrated by Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein]. And they built a shrine to him [Goldstein] in Hebron. And at that point, since we were never attacked in that way before, we determined that Israelis kill civilians. But no one asks about Palestinian civilians. In the last five years, 347 Palestinian civilians have been killed. The numbers you see are exactly reversed for Israeli and Palestinian deaths. What about the targeting of civilians who are Palestinian? And the homes and the farms of Palestinians that are destroyed? The Israelis have rejected our offer, and we have made the offer, that both sides should stop killing civilians. But they rejected that offer. When pressed on their targeting of civilians, Hamas leaders expressed their conviction that there is no distinction between Israeli civilians and soldiers. “Every Israeli is a soldier,” one of them said. “Settlers are armed.” When asked whether, in their view, terrorism worked—that is, whether it yielded political benefits—the Hamas delegates answered that it served to unite their people and to gain support for their political program: If our tactics work, then Palestinians feel they are defending themselves. It wasn’t so easy losing our founders, our people, our leaders, and our friends. When all channels are closed to us, we use violence.

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We don’t have jets; we don’t have tanks. So we made the decision. It is one of the ways we resist; it is not the only way. We don’t agree to be considered terrorists by the US administration. We didn’t wage war on the United States, not even verbally. Why did the US administration take such a decision to make us terrorists? We have never ever expressed a link with Osama bin Laden, and we don’t support him. The discussion ended. “Their description of terrorism,” one of the delegates noted, “convinced me that we are not dealing with genetically encoded monsters, but hard-headed—albeit brutal—political actors who carefully choose their tactics and attempt to manage the effects of their actions. Just as we do.”

Hamas Wins the Palestinian Elections The Islamic Resistance Movement won the January 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections and moved to form a Hamas-led government. But within days of their electoral victory, Hamas leaders expressed a willingness to unify their ticket with the defeated Fatah movement in order to form a unity government that could “represent all factions of the Palestinian people.” The Bush administration responded to the Hamas victory with surprise, though then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice had been warned of the impending victory through a number of channels. Within weeks, the Bush administration was pressuring Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas [Abu Mazen] to refuse all participation in any unity effort. The pressure was explicit: During a meeting with Abu Mazen at the United Nations, Bush said that Fatah could expect the United States to withhold funding from his movement if there were any unity talks. The resulting paralysis in the Palestinian political environment threatened to spark an open war between the two organizations. But as the situation worsened throughout 2006, Saudi Arabia stepped in to mediate the dispute. In March 2007, during a meeting convened by the Saudi’s King Abdullah in Mecca, Hamas and Fatah leaders agreed to govern together. In the aftermath of the Mecca meeting, President Bush signed a “finding” directing the CIA to fund an armed opposition movement that would unseat Hamas leaders in Gaza. Millions of dollars were poured into the Fatah security services, and Egypt became a launching point for an American-funded initiative that would confront Hamas throughout the Gaza Strip. In June 2007, fearing the increased strength of Fatah gunmen in Gaza and faced with a deterioration of security, the Hamas militia struck first. In the United States, this “Hamas coup” is still viewed as stark evidence that the Islamic Resistance Movement represents an extremist current that is uncompromising and opposed to democracy. But the claim is not believed in the Arab world, where America’s role in the “coup” is viewed as evidence that, despite its

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rhetoric, the United States is committed more to the defense of Israel than to its own democratic principles. In truth, the role of the United States in undermining Hamas in the wake of the 2006 elections that gave them a majority in the Palestinian parliament remains a deep stain on America’s avowed support for democracy. It places us on the side of the Arab dictators.

Hezbollah Lebanon’s Hezbollah—“Party of God”—is viewed by the United States as one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist organizations. In 2003, then deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage called it “the A-team of terrorism,” more dangerous even than al Qaeda. America’s primary concern with Hezbollah is that it is an enemy of Israel— America’s most important strategic ally in the region—and a threat to American interests. Hezbollah and Israel have fought continually since the mid-1980s. The most recent conflict occurred in July and August 2006, when Hezbollah fighters turned back an Israeli invasion of Lebanon after kidnapping and killing seven Israeli soldiers. But Hezbollah has a history at variance with American and European stereotypes. It runs the most comprehensive and competent network of social service programs in Lebanon and is a willing and trusted participant in the nation’s confessionally based democratic system [in which government power is allocated among religious or ethnic communities according to their percentage of the population]. A visit to southern Beirut reflects the reach, power, and popularity of the movement. Modern high-rises have replaced the bombed-out section of the city, schools are open, roads have been repaired, and community centers are operating. The movement is both deeply rooted in the community and directed by capable leaders. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is considered one of the most articulate and sophisticated of the region’s political voices. In the wake of the 2006 war with Israel, Nasrallah’s personal popularity soared (as did that of Hezbollah), and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice complained to her staff about television reports showing Hezbollah leaders passing out American dollars to Beirut’s homeless. She called the practice outrageous, which drew a retort from one of her more outspoken aides: “Well, maybe that’s what we should do.” Hezbollah leaders openly confirm their strong relationship with Iran. But they are well known for taking a more independent line when it suits their purposes. When, in the spring of 2005, Iraqi Shia parties under Iranian influence busily positioned themselves as the leading edge of a new and powerful regional Shia resurgence, Hezbollah decided to go in the opposite direction: They downplayed their ties to their Iraqi Shia brethren and tied themselves more closely to Lebanese nationalism. Lately, the movement has also subtly distanced itself from Syria, a longtime ally. As a result of the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq

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Hariri, the Syrian government—which had an internationally mandated presence in Lebanon—was forced to withdraw its troops from the country. Huge antiSyrian demonstrations underscored the popularity of the anti-Syrian position and symbolized the outpouring of grief for the martyred leader. To show its own strength, Hezbollah organized pro-Syrian rallies, but without criticizing Hariri himself—with whom the Hezbollah leadership had had a strong working relationship. Hezbollah admirably straddled this midcourse position, showing support for its erstwhile ally without damaging its reputation as a domestic Lebanese political force. In the wake of the Syrian withdrawal, Hezbollah set out to redefine what it meant to be Lebanese, shaping a national identity that, though not splitting from the past, provided a political vision for Lebanon recognizing its diversity. It was a breathtaking program and seemed to imply that Beirut was neither a “suburb of Paris” (a common criticism of Beirut’s Christians) nor a “suburb of Tehran” (the standard retort of Beirut’s pro-Christian café class). The movement’s basic message was clear: Hezbollah’s Lebanon would be different from Shia Iraq, where Shia militias were enjoying a season of ethnic cleansing against the Sunni minority. Lebanon would be Shia, to be sure, but it would also be Christian and Sunni and, above all, Arab. Hezbollah is allied with Iran, but the organization views itself as a distinctly Lebanese political movement with deep ties to local communities. Its relationship with Iran has as its first premise that both Iran and Hezbollah are led by Shias, but Hezbollah’s status as a defender of a minority population requires a different set of calculations from those formulated in Tehran. Nowhere is this tyranny of geography more apparent than in Hezbollah’s relationship with Israel. Although the movement is intransigently and vocally opposed to Israel’s influence in the region, it regularly engages in indirect exchanges with that nation, primarily through the auspices of the German government. In addition, in Israel (particularly in the wake of the 2006 war), there is a quiet recognition that Hezbollah is popular and capable of defending itself and that its leadership is powerful and respected. Finally, although the United States regularly warns against Hezbollah’s desire to dominate the government of Lebanon, the movement has consistently recoiled from any government takeover. It prefers to remain a part of a broad coalition, in opposition, with a veto over government initiatives it does not like. Hezbollah is satisfied to remain a permanent opposition party in Lebanon at least in part because the movement has always prized its independence. Hezbollah leaders are outspoken in their defense of their rights, while making it clear they will not be pressured by movements or political parties that they believe are working to attack them. In this sense, then, Hezbollah’s long-term political strategy is both practical and defensive. It is more interested in protecting its position as Lebanon’s most influential and powerful political movement by serving its

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broadly based constituency than in undertaking the arduous task of ruling a diverse and divided national establishment. Hezbollah is also willing, when necessary, to reach across Lebanon’s sectarian divide to recruit allies. In February 2006, Hezbollah signed a “memorandum of understanding” with General Michel Aoun—the leader of Lebanon’s Christian Free Patriotic Movement—which set out a set of principles that confirmed its commitment to the strengthening of Lebanon’s independent judiciary, reinforced its adherence to the fight against government corruption, gave voice to its belief in the independence of Lebanese political institutions, and institutionalized its principle that Lebanon should be free of outside interference. The memorandum also confirmed Hezbollah’s right to maintain its arms as a part of Lebanon’s defense against outside aggression. Aoun was pleased with the agreement. “They are a trustworthy partner,” he said in early 2009. “They stand by their word.” The Hezbollah of the twenty-first century is quite different from the movement that found its roots in Lebanon’s Shia community nearly thirty years ago. In many respects, Hezbollah is no longer simply a movement, or even a state within a state. Rather, it is a statelike actor within a nonstate—an entity without which Lebanon itself would not exist. Adapted from Chapters 5 and 6 of Mark Perry, Talking to Terrorists: Why America Must Engage with Its Enemies (2011, Basic Books).

PART V

The Arab Spring QR

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he year 2011 witnessed an astonishing array of popular demonstrations against the ruling order. The demands for democracy, or at least for reforms that would allow an expanded role for popular participation in government and a greater respect for human rights and civil liberties, is commonly called the Arab Spring by news media, though other terms, such as the Arab Awakening, are also used. In very short order, two long-tenured autocrats were forced from office, first in Tunisia and then in Egypt, and those two successes in turn inspired yet other demonstrators across the Arab world to push for reform, or even revolution, in their own countries. By the next year, two other seemingly untouchable leaders had been ousted in Libya and Yemen. News media made much of the fact that social media—Facebook has been cited most prominently—helped make the revolts possible by allowing protestors to circumvent what had been a staple of repressive regimes: the government control of information. But if the mode of communication was novel, the grievances against the governments of the region had a longer history. The bulk of populations in many Middle East countries have continued to face rising food costs, unreliable access to water and electricity, booming numbers of young people, and the stark prospect of unemployment that confronts even the college educated. Arbitrary arrests, imprisonment, and torture are common aspects of justice systems, and political institutions are often inaccessible or at least unresponsive to popular demands. Given the rigid authoritarianism and often brutal repression characteristic of many Middle Eastern states, the rapid and widespread surge of protests across the many countries was striking, and especially dramatic were its successes against some long-established leaders who had hitherto maintained a firm grip on power for decades. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had served twenty-three years as the president of Tunisia, but that only earned him the distinction of being the shortesttenured of the autocrats to fall; even Hosni Mubarak’s thirty years at the helm of Egypt was only the third longest of the four terms in office. Ali Abdullah Saleh served as president first of North Yemen and then (on the unification of North and South Yemen) of the united Republic of Yemen, and his combined tenures added up to thirty-three years, but even he did not lead his country as long as Muammar Gadhafi headed Libya (forty-two years). As one measure of the transformations of 2011, the great majority of Libyans are under the age of forty and had therefore known no other leader but Gadhafi in their lifetimes.

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Yet, the Arab Spring has enjoyed far from unqualified success in uprooting old regimes and supplanting them with vibrant new democracies. In Bahrain, for example, the protests were put down not just by the national military but with the outside assistance of troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as well. In Syria, the uprising against the government has morphed into a drawn-out and bloody rebellion in which outside forces have large interests but, so far, only limited roles in determining the outcome. The replacement of one president of Yemen by a new one has not necessarily changed the power structure or dissipated the pressures for change that have besieged the government. The following paragraphs provide thumbnail sketches of the course of the Arab Spring in a few selected countries.

Tunisia Street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in December 2010 (and subsequent death in January 2011) provided the spark that ignited the 2011 Arab Awakening in Tunisia and throughout the Arab world. Though Tunisia has a relatively prosperous middle class, Bouazizi’s death catalyzed protests against the country’s rampant corruption, high unemployment rate, inflationary food prices, and limited political freedoms. Particularly despised were Leila Trabelsi, the wife of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and her family, who lived a lavish lifestyle replete with manors, cars, yachts, and jets and amassed personal fortunes of funds embezzled from the national treasury. Rumors that she took 1.5 tons of gold bars with her when she and Ben Ali fled into exile in Saudi Arabia in February 2011 are unsubstantiated, but many consider such an action to be entirely consistent with her character. With Ben Ali’s departure, a caretaker government arranged for the election of a new constituent assembly in October 2011. The once-banned and moderate Islamic party Ennahda won over 40 percent of the votes and now heads a coalition government. The leader of Ennahda has denounced the radical Islamism of Sayyid Qutb, opposed basing Tunisia’s new constitution on Islamic law (sharia), and supported greater rights for women and workers. Women hold 42 of the 217 seats in the new assembly. Of the states that have experienced a change of government in the Arab Spring, Tunisia, with its relatively well-educated populace and strong middle class, is usually cited as the case with the best chance of immediate success.

Egypt Inspired by the protests in Tunisia, Egyptians began demonstrating in January 2011. International television transmitted videos of secret police, posing as counterprotesting supporters of President Hosni Mubarak, charging on horse- and camelback into the crowds of demonstrators and swinging clubs at them. The violence only fueled the intensity of the antiregime protests until Mubarak, attempt-

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ing to appease and deflect his critics, shuffled his cabinet and declared that he would not seek another term. However, the concessions—or rather the transparent effort to pretend that meaningful concessions were truly being made—only energized further protest. Under continuing pressure, Mubarak stepped down on February 11, 2011, transferring power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). US President Barack Obama hailed the change, saying that “the people of Egypt have spoken” in favor of democracy and human dignity. The SCAF dissolved Parliament, suspended the constitution, and promised to lift repressive “emergency laws” that had been in effect for the thirty years in which Mubarak had held office. Mubarak stood trial for the deaths of protestors killed during the 2011 demonstrations that had forced him from office. He was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison in the summer of 2012. Meanwhile, as time passed in 2011, protests flared up again, this time against the SCAF for what many perceived as its dilatory direction of the transition to anticipated social reforms and democratic institutions. Elections for the new People’s Assembly were held in three phases from the end of 2011 through January 2012. Mubarak’s political organization, the National Democratic Party, had been dissolved out of concern that, as an existing party, it would hold an unfair advantage amid the scramble of new parties participating in the elections. Instead, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, together with Al-Nour, another, more austere Islamic bloc of parties, captured by far the majority of seats. Egypt also held its first-ever free presidential elections in May 2012. The several liberal and secular candidates divided the vote enough that a runoff election became necessary between the top two vote getters: Ahmed Shafiq, a former general and minister in the Mubarak regime, and Mohamed Morsi, who has strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Many Egyptians demonstrated to express their dismay that the revolution had evolved into a choice between a defender of the Old Guard and an Islamist. Just before the final presidential vote, the SCAF dissolved the recently elected and Islamist-dominated parliament and constricted the powers of the presidency, apparently out of concern that Morsi might win—as indeed he did. The United States recognized the results of the apparently fair and democratic election, and in July 2012 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Morsi in Cairo. Amid the tensions between the new chief executive and the country’s military caretakers, Egypt began to turn its attention to drafting a new constitution.

Bahrain In Bahrain, a Sunni minority rules a Shiite majority. The monarchy of King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa is chronically anxious that a disaffected Shiite population might represent a source of unrest in its own right and that it might also be subject to outside agitation by Shiite Iran and Shiite-controlled Syria. One source of the population’s discontent is that ministerial and other government posts are

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awarded disproportionately to Sunnis, especially to members of the royal family. Another source is the regime’s sometimes brutal suppression of political expression and activities. Furthermore, while the forty members of the lower house of the Bahraini parliament are elected, their proposals for legislation can be vetoed by the forty members of the upper chamber, who are royally appointed, and the king can overrule both houses. This arrangement all but ensures that the government is unresponsive to legislation initiated by popularly elected officials representing the majority of Bahrainis. With the examples of Tunisia and Egypt before them in February 2011, Bahraini protestors demonstrated for greater political freedom and respect for human rights. They called for the end of the monarchy, or at least for greater electoral representation, especially for the underrepresented Shiites. The government insisted that the protests had been orchestrated by Iran. Its military cracked down, resulting in widespread arrests and the deaths of some demonstrators. On March 14, forces from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—two fellow Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members—entered Bahrain to shore up the government and quash the pro-democracy protests. The king created an independent commission of inquiry in June 2011 to investigate the government’s response to the protests. In its report, the commission concluded that the government had tortured prisoners and committed other human rights violations. It also found no support for the assertion that the protests had been instigated or backed by Iran. The government responded to the report by starting to rehire fired workers and redress claims of abuse. US President Barack Obama in May 2011 denounced Bahrain’s assaults on peaceful protestors, then eased his criticism to urge a “national dialogue” between the government and the opposition. Bahrain is a strong supporter of the United States and hosts the Fifth Fleet of the US Navy, perched essentially at Iran’s doorstep. Bahrain in turn is strongly supported by its fellow Arab monarchies in the GCC: Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Qatar. In May 2012 Saudi Arabia pushed for a stronger Gulf Union among the GCC to further the coordination of foreign and defense policies. The Saudi proposal was intended to counter both Shiite dissent in Bahrain and the growing influence of Shiite Iran in the region generally. Despite Bahrain’s eager support for it, the plan met with skepticism from most other GCC members, in large part because they feared they might fall under increased Saudi domination within such a union.

Iraq In February 2011 Iraq experienced protests seeking greater government responsiveness to issues of corruption, unemployment, limited civil rights, and the lack of basic services such as water and electricity. The protests soon dissipated, however, under the weight of government crackdowns and curfews. The government

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established under the American occupation consists of a power-sharing arrangement among Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds, with a result that ethnic allegiances have become all the more entrenched. Each of the different factions thus accorded little leeway to the protests, lest they upset the precarious sectarian balance. Nonetheless, in response to the protests, the government agreed to subsidize electricity by making the first 1,000 kilowatt-hours each month free for consumers. Furthermore, in what some viewed as a concession to allay concerns about his efforts to concentrate power in his own hands, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced that he would not seek a third term and proposed that the constitution be amended to limit future prime ministers to two terms as well.

Libya In contrast to the rapid and relatively peaceful revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, Libya’s Arab Spring has been a bloody conflict marked by decisive outside intervention. In February 2011, armed rebels took control of much of Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, and repelled attacks by Muammar Gadhafi’s elite troops and mercenaries. Protests quickly spread to the capital city of Tripoli itself, but government forces soon recaptured much of the coast. As a measure to support the rebels, the US Senate urged the UN Security Council to establish a no-fly zone over Libya and to encourage Gadhafi to step down. Several members of the Arab League made a similar proposal to the Security Council, which then passed such a resolution (with abstentions from Russia and China). The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) assumed command of the no-fly zone and began air strikes against Libya’s air defenses and then its ground forces. No NATO troops were put onto Libyan soil; the attacks came from the air while NATO warships also maintained open supply lines to the rebels. Eighteen countries participated directly in the military campaign, including Jordan, Qatar, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates from the Middle East. The bombing halted a government advance on Benghazi and turned the tide, allowing rebel forces to capture Tripoli in August 2011. Gadhafi’s government was scattered, and Gadhafi himself went into hiding. He was captured by rebel troops in October and summarily executed. Libya currently experiences difficulties establishing a working balance between the self-appointed, interim central government and local authority. The country is riven by fighting between rival militias, and unemployment is high. In March 2012 tribal leaders and independent militias announced the formation of a semiautonomous region in the oil-rich region of eastern Libya.

Yemen A major protest in Yemen’s capital of Sana in January 2011 targeted a familiar litany of social ills, including high unemployment, government corruption and

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unresponsiveness, and human rights abuses. The protests widened to include calls for constitutional reform and the resignation of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. President of North Yemen for twelve years before the unification of North and South Yemen in 1990, Saleh had also served as president of the united country since then. In March, government snipers killed a large number of protestors. The brutality of the crackdown prompted a number of influential people to cut their ties to the government, including senior army officers, party officials, and even members of Saleh’s own tribe. Saleh announced that he would not seek a new term of office in 2013, but that promise did not mollify the protestors. The GCC announced a plan, endorsed by President Obama, by which Saleh would agree to step down in return for immunity from prosecution. Saleh verbally agreed to the plan but then refused three times to sign the formal agreement. In June 2011, Saleh was badly injured by a rocket-propelled grenade in an assassination attempt and had to seek medical attention in Saudi Arabia. He eventually did sign the GCC initiative in November 2011, left office on February 27, 2012, and sought exile in Ethiopia. His former vice president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, assumed the presidency. However, critics called the new arrangement simply a shuffling of the elite, without substantive change in the power structure. Saleh loyalists remain in the government, and his son and nephew retain command of elite military units. Saleh had been a staunch ally of Saddam Hussein and supported Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. He was also on good terms with Iran, as he had maintained Shiite rule over the Sunnis of formerly independent South Yemen. The unified country is threatened by instability from a number of sources: the north is plagued by Shiite insurgencies and the south by both separatists and Islamist militants, including alQaeda. New president Hadi has stepped up cooperation with the United States in an intensified campaign against al-Qaeda.

Syria The Arab Spring in Syria began in January 2011 as a series of protests against President Bashar Assad and his government. On March 15, hundreds of thousands of protestors demonstrated in major cities across Syria, and deaths of protestors mounted over the following weeks. The Assad government blamed foreign conspiracies for the country’s unrest and began employing troops, tanks, artillery, and air strikes against rebel strongholds in ever-more-violent suppressions of the uprisings. In many cases government forces destroyed large parts of the cities in which they attacked rebels, while also cutting off food, water, and electricity to the civilian populations. Assad is a member of the otherwise obscure Alawites, considered an offshoot of Shiite Islam by some. The majority of Syrians, however, are Sunni Muslims. The

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current conflict is generally not cast in overtly sectarian terms, but the regime draws internal support from members of the Alawite minority as well as from the Sunni business class and the Christian and Druze minorities. On the other hand, the more poorly armed opposition draws its support chiefly from among the Sunni population. Externally, the regime is supported by Shiite Iraq, Iran, and Hezbollah, while Sunni Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar have supported the rebels, as has Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood. The troubles in Syria can be seen as a proxy war, or at least a proxy conflict. Iran wishes to preserve the Assad regime, for Syria is Iran’s closest Arab ally in the Middle East. Furthermore, Syrian complicity allows Iran to export equipment, arms, and training to Islamist groups elsewhere, such as Hezbollah and Hamas. Conversely, the fall of Assad would very possibly bottle up Iranian influence in the region, which is a national interest for most Sunni and Arab countries and the United States. Israel is rather more divided on the question, for although Syria is an enemy of Israel, it has largely been a quiet and tolerable one. Overthrowing Assad might mean exchanging the devil one knows for the devil one does not. In that vein, al-Qaeda has not had a significant presence in Syria under Assad’s firm regime, but a number of recent suicide bombings in Syria are troubling signs that Sunni al-Qaeda affiliates are taking advantage of the Assad government’s distractions to establish a foothold there. The United States initially condemned the violence on both sides, while singling out, however, the transgressions of the government in arbitrary arrests and detentions, as well as the torture of prisoners. It ratcheted up sanctions on Syria for the government’s violence against the rebels. In July 2011 President Obama declared that Assad was on the wrong side of history and announced American support for international efforts to isolate the Assad regime and to stand with the Syrian people. Finally, in August, Obama explicitly said it was time for Assad to step down. The United States, among other countries, sends “nonlethal support” to the rebels. It is concerned that if it could somehow justify direct shipments of American arms to the rebels, those weapons might end up in the hands of Hamas or alQaeda. Nonetheless, the United States helps to “coordinate” financial backing and weapons shipments—including ammunition and antitank weaponry—to the Syrian opposition from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Gulf Arab states. Russia and China have blocked attempts by the UN Security Council to issue statements that condemn the violence in Syria and threaten sanctions. Russia in particular has long been an ally of Syria and is still selling arms to the government. Russia is careful not to approve any UN statement or resolution that appears to place more blame on Assad’s regime than on the opposition. It is wary out of concern that any such condemnation of the government might be leveraged into a UN-backed intervention in support of the rebels, as happened in Libya.

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Saudi Arabia It is interesting to note as well where in the Middle East the Arab Spring seems to have had little traction. In Saudi Arabia, members of the country’s Shiite minority demonstrated for greater representation in government offices and for the release of prisoners. The Saudi government characterized the protests as the result of foreign (meaning Iranian) agitation. It responded swiftly with what it itself called an “iron fist” to quell its internal disturbances and sent troops and tanks into Bahrain as well to put down the Shiite protests there. Amnesty International decried the widespread arrests and torture of Saudi protestors, often without fair trials. The Saudi government used a carrot as well as a stick to keep things calm within the kingdom by adding $130 billion to the budget for salary increases for public servants, new public-sector jobs, and new housing projects.

Iran Iran has tried to brand the Arab Spring as the Islamic Awakening, implying that Iran’s own Islamic revolution in 1979 is the root of the current wave of popular uprisings and that the demonstrations are motivated more by religion than by either secular or primarily Arab concerns. However, despite the West’s horror at the prospect of Iran’s spreading influence in the Middle East, for most of the Arab world, which is primarily Sunni, the Iranian model of rule by Shiite clerics is not at all attractive. Far preferable is Turkey’s blend of moderate Sunni Islam and secular democracy, combined with Turkey’s burgeoning economic development. In the wake of the 2009 Iranian presidential election, which was denounced by several leading contenders as fraudulent, Iran did experience massive public protests. It looked for a while as if the regime might totter, though it eventually held firmly to power. Yet that precedent of massive protest, called the Green Revolution at the time, suggested that the surge for Arab democratic reforms less than two years later might also extend to disaffected Iranians. But the streets of Iran were quiet in 2011. Shibley Telhami (chapter 31 of this volume) explains that the Arab Spring really is Arab. In addition to Facebook and other social media, the Al Jazeera television news network, which broadcasts in Arabic, was a major connecting force for Arabs across North Africa and the Middle East but had little impact in Persian Iran (or Turkish Turkey, for that matter). In addition, most Iranians probably are not strongly disaffected with the Islamic regime, the Green Revolution notwithstanding. They tend to support their government, uniting especially on nationalist principles in the face of outside pressures on Iran’s nuclear program.

Turkey It has been a recurrent theme running through the Arab Spring protests that the majority of people really want something akin to Turkey’s moderate brand of Islam,

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its secular democracy, and its strong economic growth. Except for the occasional violence used by Kurdish separatists, Turkey has not experienced the kind or degree of antigovernment protests characteristic of the Arab Spring. Turkey, of course, is not Arab, and neither is Iran, but some observers foresee that the fallout from the democratic wave of the Arab Spring might be increasingly fragmented and federalized Arab states rather than strongly centralized ones, leaving them vulnerable to the penetrating influences of outsiders such as Turkey and Iran. In Iraq, for example, despite long-standing Turko-Kurdish tensions, Turkey is establishing connections to the Iraqi Kurds in the north of Iraq with an eye to possibly building one or more pipelines for exporting Kurdish oil to the West, even as Iranian influence in the south of Iraq helps create a de facto Shiite buffer state there. Turkey generally allies with moderate Sunni Islamists throughout the region, while Iran generally supports Shiites as well as certain radical Sunni groups, including Hamas and Salafi fundamentalists. In Syria, for example, Turkey openly supports the opposition while Iran backs the Assad regime.

H Overshadowing even the assassination of Osama bin Laden and the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq in 2011 was “the wave of popular demonstrations that challenged and toppled autocratic rulers across North Africa, the Middle East, and the Arabian Peninsula.” Eugene Rogan (chapter 27) summarizes the democratic wave of 2011 as it played out in the different experiences of six countries: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria. The first four instances resulted in the fall of an autocrat, albeit by diverse routes. Presidents Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak were forced out of office with astonishing quickness; in both cases the military declined to intervene to rescue them. Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi was deposed and killed in a bloody war in which the rebels were aided by the intervention of forces under the aegis of NATO. Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh left office under terms negotiated by the GCC, but critics assail his immunity from prosecution under that agreement and observe bitterly that the power structure they had protested remains virtually intact. The rulers of Bahrain and Syria remain in power, however. Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa was propped up by the intervention of Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates forces, while Syria has descended into a stalemated state of armed insurrection against the Bashar Assad regime. Rogan notes three challenges lying ahead for the new democracies. First is forming broad-based, inclusive governments of national unity. Second, new constitutions will have to wrestle with the role of Islam in law, politics, and society. And third, the new democracies will have to prove that they can peacefully transfer power when an incumbent party loses an election. In chapter 28, Arthur Goldschmidt Jr. deftly sketches social, political, and economic aspects of Egyptian life since the 1952 revolution that ended that country’s monarchy. Led successively by Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Hosni

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Mubarak, Egypt is the most populous Arab state in the world. It has long been a vital player in regional politics, though its peace treaty with Israel in 1979 distanced it from the more popular hardline stances toward Israel held by many of its Arab neighbors. Despite great inputs of foreign aid by the Russians and the Americans, Egypt industrialized less than many other Arab countries. State-sponsored repression of dissent, along with rising prices and low wages (for those who could find work at all) all contributed a tinder of dissatisfaction that was sparked into revolution by Tunisia’s successful overthrow of its own dictator in January 2011. The thirty-year regime of Mubarak ended within a month, leaving SCAF in charge of guiding the country to whatever new phase it would now enter. Free parliamentary and presidential elections in 2011 and 2012 brought Islamists, specifically the Muslim Brotherhood, into power, though those powers were already being abrogated or circumscribed by the military even before the new president, Mohamed Morsi, was sworn in. With many Egyptians distrustful of both the military establishment and the Islamists, the task ahead of drafting a new constitution might well prove contentious. Veteran Middle East observer David W. Lesch delves more deeply into the Syrian case in chapter 29. He finds that there were reasons to be surprised, as President Bashar Assad certainly was, that the Arab Spring found a foothold in Syria. Assad himself was relatively young and relatively new (although, he and his father before him have together ruled Syria for over forty uninterrupted years), and he entered office with some (deserved or undeserved) reputation as a moderate reformer. Also adding to the unlikelihood of open dissent were the Syrian fears of the kind of sectarian strife that racked their neighbors in Lebanon and Iraq, the placement of Assad loyalists in key military and government posts, and Assad’s garnering of support from Christian and Druze minorities by skillfully playing on their fears of the country’s Sunni majority. That the current uprising has nonetheless transpired only confirms Assad’s apparently sincere belief, according to Lesch, that the rebellion cannot be an authentic expression of the Syrian people themselves but must somehow have been orchestrated by foreign conspiracies. As a result, Assad is distrustful of brokered agreements for cease-fires and peace negotiations proposed to him by outsiders, whether by the United Nations or even the Arab League. Instead, says Lesch, Assad and his loyalists will rely on themselves to squelch the rebels with Syria’s security forces, bloody though that course has already proved to be. Following the closer inspections of the Egyptian and Syrian cases by Goldschmidt and Lesch, respectively, James Gelvin (chapter 30) steps back once again to draw some conclusions about the sweep of popular resentment across the Arab world in 2011 and 2012. He identifies four conditions in all the Arab states of the region—that is, “transnational features” not particular to one regime or another— that made them vulnerable to angry protest. First has been the wedge driven between the regimes and their citizens by the drying up of government subsidies for

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social benefits. The motive force in that transformation has been pressures exerted by the international banking community that coerce regimes to adopt unregulated market capitalism (neoliberalism). The other transnational factors are the large and growing populations of young people in Arab states, coupled with high unemployment rates; the need to import food, despite fast-rising food prices; and the lack of popular representation that would otherwise allow changes of government (as from one party to another) without the need to tear down the entire political order to effect change. Gelvin also places the outcomes of the Arab wave into four provisional categories. In cases in which the military chose not to side with the regime (as in Tunisia and Egypt), the autocrats were quickly ousted from power. In other cases (as in Yemen and Libya), the regime itself fragmented into supporters and opponents of the country’s rulers, with the result that weak central governments now confront challenges to their authority by tribal leaders and independent militias. In Syria and Bahrain, uprisings have been met with firm armed responses by regimes that have also relied on sectarian and kinship ties to enhance the cohesiveness of the ruling clique. In a fourth group are several Arab monarchies, including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, where protests have focused on limited reform rather than revolution.

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The Arab Spring, 2011 Eugene Rogan

Despite the two surprisingly quick and easy topplings of long-established autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt in February 2011, the Arab Spring played out in quite different ways in different countries. Eugene Rogan summarizes the varying trajectories of the protests in six countries, beginning with the unlikely spark provided by Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in an out-ofthe-way Tunisian town, which in a matter of weeks forced President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali into exile in Saudi Arabia. The Tunisian experience encouraged protestors elsewhere across the Arab world and led next to the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, for thirty years the unchallenged president of Egypt, the Middle East’s most populous country. The next leader to fall, Muammar Gadhafi, did so in a far more violent fashion, as he was forced from office by a combination of homegrown militia fighters and NATO air and missile attacks. Gadhafi has been the only national leader to lose his life in the overthrow of regimes thus far. In Yemen, the brutal crackdown on protestors led even some of his own supporters to break with President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Saleh eventually relinquished power in return for immunity from prosecution, a deal that has angered his critics, who were already unconvinced that his departure by itself marked a true transformation of the Yemeni regime. Other regimes have thus far withstood the pressure for change at the top. Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa remains in power, aided by the intervention of troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which helped suppress Bahrain’s Shiite protests. And in Syria, President Bashar Assad has not hesitated to use the full force of the Syrian army to stave off a persistent but outgunned armed insurrection. Replacing neither a single leader nor an entire regime will ensure the success of democracy. Rogan notes three challenges that face any new Middle East democracy: establishing inclusive governments; drafting constitutions that, among other things, define the role of Islam in the nation’s political life; and handing over power peacefully when an opposing party defeats an incumbent party at the polls. Eugene Rogan is faculty fellow and university lecturer in the modern history of the Middle East, as well as the director of the Middle East Centre at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. He is author of The Arabs: A History, from which this reading selection is adapted. 330

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n 2011, the Arabs turned a page as the worst decade in the modern history of the Middle East drew to a close. The defining conflicts of the decade—the War on Terror and the Iraq War—reached closure in 2011. American commandos killed Osama bin Ladin on May 2, 2011, in his secret compound in Pakistan. The man behind the September 11 attacks was now dead. And, in December 2011, the last American troops withdrew from Iraq, bringing to a close nearly nine years of war and occupation. Yet both these momentous events were overshadowed by a wave of popular demonstrations that challenged and toppled autocratic rulers across North Africa, the Middle East, and the Arabian Peninsula. With the revolutions of 2011, the Arab world entered a new age of citizen action for human and political rights that endowed the region with a newfound sense of dignity and common purpose. Though the Arab revolutions of 2011 caught the entire world by surprise, the underlying pressures for change had risen to the surface in many Arab countries well before 2011. The Arab world is marked by its youthful population. According to UN figures, over 53 percent of the population is under the age of twentyfour. Yet Arab governments are failing to provide for their younger citizens. By 2009, youth unemployment rates in the Middle East were the highest in the world, with figures ranging from 20 to 40 percent in individual countries, as compared to the worldwide average of 10 to 20 percent. Graduates are leaving schools and universities across the region in growing numbers only to find that there are no jobs for their talents. Inevitably, the growing ranks of unemployed educated youth have grown increasingly disenchanted with their governments. By the start of the twenty-first century the old Arab social contract was broken. The Arab world’s autocratic governments had since the 1950s promised to provide for all the needs of their citizens in return for an absolute monopoly over politics. By 2000, all but the oil-rich Arab states had proved incapable of living up to their promises. Increasingly it was a narrow band of friends and family of the region’s rulers that were the prime beneficiaries of any economic opportunities. The level of inequality between rich and poor in Arab states rose alarmingly over the past two decades. Rather than address their citizens’ legitimate grievances, Arab states responded to growing discontent by becoming ever more repressive. Worse, these repressive regimes were actively seeking to preserve their families’ control over politics by dynastic succession, as aging presidents groomed their sons to succeed them. Not only was the Arab social contract broken, but these failing regimes threatened to perpetuate themselves. These tensions were most apparent in Egypt. In 2004, a group of activists formed the Egyptian Movement for Change, better known as Kifaya (literally, “Enough!”), to protest the continuation of Husni Mubarak’s rule over Egypt and moves to groom his son Gamal to succeed him as president. In 2008, younger, computer-literate opponents of the regime established the April 6 Youth Movement, whose Facebook page voiced support for workers’ rights. By year’s end, the

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group numbered in the tens of thousands, including many who had never engaged in political activity before. Egypt’s grassroots movements were no match for the Mubarak regime. In parliamentary elections held at the end of 2010, the ruling National Democratic Party secured over 80 percent of seats in elections widely condemned as the most corrupt in Egypt’s history. It was widely assumed that the elder Mubarak was paving the way for his son’s succession through a totally compliant parliament. Disenchanted, most Egyptians opted to boycott the elections to deny the new parliament any glimmer of a popular mandate. The Egyptian experience of frustration and repression was shared by people living under autocratic regimes across the Arab world. The disquiet set down roots through all layers of society and spread across Arab states before exploding in the revolutionary year of 2011.

Tunisia What no one had predicted was that change would begin in Tunisia. Known for its pro-Western policies and as a safe tourist destination, Tunisia was a deceptively calm country. Yet all it took was an individual tragedy to galvanize Tunisian citizens into an unprecedented movement for change that would enflame the entire Arab world. Mohamed Bouazizi was born and raised in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, one of those inland provincial places neglected by tourists and the government alike. He earned a precarious living and helped support his mother and siblings with the proceeds of his vegetable cart. Twenty-six years old, he was hoping to save enough money to expand his vegetable trade by buying a van. It was hard enough to make a living selling vegetables without having to pay off the municipal inspectors as well. Vendors in Sidi Bouzid claim that they had to pay ten Tunisian dinars (approximately US$7) to secure the inspectors’ permission to sell on the street. Failure to satisfy the inspectors led to fines for selling without a permit of twenty dinars (US$14). On December 17, 2010, Bouazizi was accosted by a forty-five-year-old female inspector. He didn’t have a permit, didn’t have cash for a bribe, and could not afford a fine. Eyewitnesses claimed that when Bouazizi defended his produce against confiscation, the inspector encouraged two of her colleagues to beat the young vendor and seize his wares. Smarting from his loss and public humiliation, Bouazizi went to the municipality to complain about his treatment and then sought an audience with the provincial governor of Sidi Bouzid. He received another beating at the municipality and a snub from the governor, who refused even to see him. Confronted by corruption, injustice, and public humiliation, Mohamed Bouazizi doused himself with paint thinner outside the gates of the governor’s office and set himself on fire. He suffered burns over 90 percent of his body before

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the flames could be doused by horrified onlookers. He was rushed to a hospital and placed in intensive care. Though Bouazizi was not to know it, his desperate act of self-violence marked the start of Year One of the Arab revolutions. That same afternoon, a group of Bouazizi’s friends and family held an impromptu demonstration outside the governor’s office. They threw coins at the metal gates, shouting, “Here is your bribe!” The police dispersed the angry crowd with batons, but they came back in greater numbers the next day. By the second day the police were using teargas and firing into the crowd. Two men shot by the police died of their wounds. Mohamed Bouazizi’s condition deteriorated. Word of the protests in Sidi Bouzid reached Tunis, where a restive young population of graduates, professionals, and the educated unemployed spread word of Mohamed Bouazizi’s ordeal via the Internet. They created a Facebook group, and the story went viral. A journalist working for the Arab satellite TV station AlJazeera picked up the story from Facebook and put it on the air. The statecontrolled Tunisian press did not report on the troubles in Sidi Bouzid, but AlJazeera did. With its story about the underprivileged standing up for their rights against corruption and abuse, Sidi Bouzid began to run nightly on Al-Jazeera’s programs to a global Arab audience. The self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi galvanized public outrage against everything that was wrong in Tunisia under President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s reign: corruption, abuse of power, indifference to the plight of the ordinary man, and an economy that failed to provide opportunities for the young. After twentythree years in power, Ben Ali had no solutions. However much the Tunisian dictator was reviled, it was his wife, Leila Trabelsi, and her family that became the focus of public outrage. It was common knowledge in Tunisia that the Trabelsis had enriched themselves at the nation’s expense, but the rumors were confirmed by the WikiLeaks website. On January 4, 2011, Mohamed Bouazizi died of his burns. An individual tragedy, a communal protest movement, a discontented nation, social networking websites, Arabic satellite television, and WikiLeaks: it was the making of the perfect twenty-first-century political storm. In the first two weeks of January, the demonstrations spread to all the major towns and cities of Tunisia. The police responded with violence, leaving hundreds wounded and more than two hundred dead. The country’s professional army, however, refused to fire on the demonstrators. When Ben Ali realized that he no longer commanded the loyalty of the army and that no concessions were going to mollify the demonstrators, he stunned his nation and the entire Arab world by abdicating power and fleeing Tunisia for Saudi Arabia on January 14, 2011. The Tunisian people, without outside encouragement or assistance, had toppled one of the Arab world’s most autocratic rulers through a nonviolent movement. The impact of the Tunisian revolution was felt throughout the Arab world. Presidents and kings watched nervously as one of their peers was toppled by citizens’

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action. If it could happen in Tunisia, analysts across the region speculated, it could happen anywhere. Egypt—of all the Arab states, the one best prepared for a popular uprising—was next.

Egypt The face that inspired the Egyptian revolution was battered beyond recognition. Khaled Mohamed Said was seized without warning by Egyptian plainclothes police in an Internet café in his hometown of Alexandria on June 6, 2010. According to eyewitnesses, the police bound the twenty-eight-year-old blogger’s hands behind his back and smashed his face into the marble-topped tables in the middle of the cybercafé. When the owner asked them to leave, the police took Said to a neighboring apartment building, where they beat him to death. The police said he resisted arrest and died of suffocation while trying to swallow a package of hashish. But the photograph his brother took with his mobile telephone while identifying Khaled’s battered corpse in the local morgue told a different story. The photograph was posted to the Internet. It was reprinted in newspapers and magazines. The tragedy of Khaled Said deeply affected the people of Egypt, who were horrified that their government could get away with the brutal murder of an innocent civilian in broad daylight. Wael Ghonim, a young Egyptian executive based at Google’s offices in Dubai, saw the death photo of Khaled Said and took action. He created a Facebook page called “We Are All Khaled Said” that attracted unprecedented attention from Egyptians linked to the social network. By the time Ben Ali was forced out of Tunisia, the Facebook community united by the Khaled Said memorial page numbered in the hundreds of thousands—a number that so exceeded the Egyptian police’s ability to monitor or control it that the webpage provided a safe haven for political activists to exchange views and organize. Following the fall of Ben Ali, Wael Ghonim issued a call for mass protests against Mubarak and his regime. Hundreds of thousands of democracy activists descended on central Cairo. Waves of protests known as the January 25 Movement swept the major cities of Egypt— Alexandria, Suez, Ismailiyya, Mansoura, across the Delta and Upper Egypt alike—and brought the country to a standstill. For eighteen days the whole world watched transfixed as Egypt’s democracy movement challenged the Mubarak regime—and won. Police in civilian clothes assaulted the protesters in Tahrir Square, posing as a pro-Mubarak counterdemonstration. The president’s men went to theatrical lengths, mounting a horse-andcamel charge on the democracy activists. More than eight hundred were killed and thousands wounded in the course of the demonstrations. Many more— including Wael Ghonim—were arrested and imprisoned without charge. Yet the Mubarak regime’s every attempt at intimidation was repelled with determination, and the number of protesters only grew. Throughout it all, the Egyptian army refused to support the government and declared the protesters’ demands legitimate.

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As Ben Ali before him, Mubarak recognized his position was untenable without the army’s support. On February 11 the Egyptian president stood down to jubilation and wild celebrations in Tahrir Square. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces assumed control of the country and dissolved parliament to oversee the transition to democratic government. However, Mubarak’s fall was only the first stage in Egypt’s revolution of 2011. The toppling of the Egyptian government was the most significant political event in the Middle East since the Islamic Revolution and fall of the Shah in Iran in 1979. Egypt is the Arab world’s most populous state and one of the region’s political heavyweights. After nearly thirty years in power, Husni Mubarak was considered unassailable. His fall confirmed that the Arab revolutions of 2011 would not be confined to Tunisia and Egypt but would affect the Arab world as a whole. In the aftermath of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, the Arab world entered a period of political ferment unprecedented in modern times. The courage of protesters and the rapid success they enjoyed in toppling deeply entrenched dictators enflamed the imaginations of Arabs across the Middle East. A new sense of Arab identity emerged from these movements, defined by popular demands for political freedoms, human rights, and dignity. For what happened in one part of the Arab world was more immediately relevant to fellow Arabs than events anywhere else. Armed with the same slogans used in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, activists took to the social network and to the streets to demand their rights—in Libya, in Yemen, in Bahrain, and in Syria.

Libya The Libyan uprising followed a very different course from the revolutions in neighboring Tunisia and Egypt. Rather than occupy a central square, Libyans liberated whole cities from the government’s rule, creating a rebel enclave in the eastern half of the country. The army split between rebel and loyalist factions, giving the Libyan conflict more the feel of a civil war. And the international community played a key role in the fall of Colonel Muammar al-Qadhafi when a UN-mandated no-fly zone developed into a NATO-backed campaign for regime change. Opponents of the Qadhafi regime made Libya’s second city of Benghazi their home base and established their ruling Transitional National Council in the city on February 27. Members of the armed forces and security services in the eastern half of the country rebelled against the Libyan government and joined an increasingly organized insurgency seeking the overthrow of Qadhafi, the self-styled “Brother Leader,” after forty-one years in power. In the early days of their rebellion, the insurgents were on the ascendant. They consolidated their position in Benghazi and the eastern coastal regions of Libya. Driving customized pickup trucks armed with heavy machine guns, they pressed forward from their base in Benghazi to occupy key coastal cities, including refinery ports like Brega and Ras Lanuf. By the end of February, the insurgents had extended

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their hold over the entire coast to the east of Benghazi and major towns near Tripoli such as Misurata. The Libyan dictator showed anger but no fear at the growing challenge to his rule. He imposed a total clampdown on all dissent in the capital. Qadhafi retained control over the best-armed and best-trained units of his army. Government forces engaged and defeated the rebels in a number of decisive engagements in the first weeks of March. As Qadhafi’s troops approached the rebel stronghold in Benghazi, the international community feared a massacre was imminent. On March 12 the Arab League met and took the extraordinary decision to request the United Nations to authorize a no-fly zone over Libya to protect rebel cities from air assault. On the basis of the Arab League decision, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973 on March 17 to approve a no-fly zone over all of Libya and authorized “all necessary measures” to protect Libyan civilians. The Libyan revolution was internationalized by the UN resolution. Almost immediately, key targets in the country were struck by missile and air attack by a NATO-led intervention force, with France, Britain, and the United States taking the lead. Qadhafi’s troops were forced back from Benghazi under lethal fire from NATO aircraft, reinforced by Arab air force units from Jordan, Qatar, and the UAE [United Arab Emirates]. The breakthrough came in a major rebel offensive on August 20 that led to the collapse of Qadhafi’s defenses in Tripoli. By August 23, Muammar al-Qadhafi and his sons had fled the city as their opponents celebrated the victory of their revolution. The Transitional Council gained international recognition as the new government of Libya and promised a quick transition to constitutional government. So long as Qadhafi and his sons remained at large, the revolution was incomplete. Qadhafi loyalists continued to fight against Transitional Council forces in his hometown of Sirte and in the loyalist stronghold of Bani Walid. After a prolonged siege, Sirte fell to Transitional Council forces on October 20, 2011. Muammar alQadhafi and his son Mutassim were both captured after the fall of Sirte and met violent deaths at the hands of their captors. With the capture of Qadhafi’s son and heir apparent Saif al-Islam on November 21, the overthrow of the Qadhafi regime was completed. At the end of 2011, the Libyan Transitional Council faced the daunting challenge of building the institutions of representative and accountable government on the ruins of Qadhafi’s failed state.

Yemen One month after the death of Qadhafi, on November 23, Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh became the fourth Arab autocrat to fall, after thirty-three years in power. [Saleh agreed on November 23, 2011, to step down, and he formally did so on February 27, 2012.—ed.]

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The revolution in Yemen seemed destined for stalemate almost from the outset. The country is fragmented internally along the lines of the formerly separate states of North and South Yemen (unified in 1990), is host to one of the more active al-Qaida franchises, and is embroiled in an armed insurgency with the Shiite Houthi community in the frontier regions bordering Saudi Arabia. President Ali Abdullah Saleh ruled over North Yemen from 1978 to 1990 and became president of the united Republic of Yemen in 1990. In keeping with Arab autocratic practice, he was grooming his son Ahmed to succeed him. With the lowest levels of human development in the Arab world, the people of Yemen viewed the prospect of a father-son succession perpetuating Saleh misrule with grave misgivings. Inspired by the Tunisian and Egyptian movements, large demonstrations numbering in the tens of thousands gathered in Sana’a, Aden, and Ta’iz in February 2011. What began as a peaceful protest movement in Yemen turned increasingly violent. On March 18 elements of the army loyal to the president fired on demonstrators, killing more than fifty unarmed civilians. Many of the president’s supporters resigned from their posts and joined the opposition. Whole units of the Yemeni army defected to side with the demonstrators. Ali Abdullah Saleh’s isolation was increasing as the international community called on the Yemeni president to step down. In June, the president himself was gravely wounded in a bomb blast set off in a mosque in the presidential compound that killed five members of his entourage. He was evacuated to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment, where his opponents hoped he might take asylum. Yet as soon as he was able to move, Ali Abdullah Saleh eluded his Saudi hosts and made his return to Yemen after three months’ convalescence. President Saleh’s return to Sana’a in September 2011 plunged the country into political turmoil anew. After ten months of political instability, Saleh finally signed an agreement brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council, with the support of the United States and European powers, to relinquish power with immediate effect in return for immunity from prosecution. With little advance warning, Saleh signed over power to his vice president, Abed Rabbo Mansour al-Hadi, on November 23. Yet the deal fell well short of protestors’ demands for regime change and does nothing to address the factional rifts that emerged among Yemen’s political elites in the months leading to Saleh’s abdication. Activists who wanted to see Ali Abdullah Saleh held responsible for the deaths of demonstrators—nearly 2,000 in all—do not believe he deserves legal immunity. There was little celebration in Yemen when Saleh stood down, because the Yemeni people remained unconvinced that his regime had been toppled.

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Bahrain Immediately after the fall of President Mubarak in Egypt, democracy activists set the date for a mass demonstration in Bahrain’s capital, Manama, for February 14. The date had local significance, marking the tenth anniversary of the referendum that initiated a process of constitutional reform known as the National Action Charter. The 2001 referendum had been a rare moment of national consensus in the turbulent Persian Gulf island state, as the Shiite majority made common cause with the ruling Sunni minority to transform their state into a constitutional monarchy. The momentum for reform stalled, and the political opposition grew vocal in condemning measures it believed discriminated against Shiite Bahrainis. Opposition members also spoke out against government corruption. These were the issues that mobilized Bahraini youths to gather at Pearl Square in Manama on February 14. The government of the sixty-one-year-old King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa responded with a show of force on February 17, intending to drive the demonstrators from Pearl Square. Five civilians were killed and more than two hundred injured in the operation. When the security forces withdrew from Pearl Square two days later, the area was immediately reoccupied by the angry protestors, who added one more demand to their list of reforms: the abdication of King Hamad and his uncle, Prince Khalifa ibn Salman Al Khalifa, who holds the distinction of being the longest-serving unelected prime minister in the world—in office since 1971. The standoff between the government and protestors continued for four weeks. The king offered concessions to his opponents. He declared a day of mourning for those who had been killed. He ordered the release of a number of political detainees. He even sacked a number of cabinet ministers. However, his every concession to the demonstrators proved insufficient to satisfy their demands. By mid-March, the movement showed no signs of abating. Demands for the overthrow of the monarchy were growing. The continued instability provoked growing concern in the Gulf region, where conservative monarchs were determined to contain the threat of revolutionary change. Moreover, the fact that most (though not all) of the demonstrators were Shiite Bahrainis led many in the Gulf to see Iran’s hand behind the uprising. On March 14, a joint Saudi-UAE intervention force drove across the causeway from Saudi Arabia into Bahrain to assist in putting down the revolution brewing in Pearl Square. Protestors were arrested, as were the doctors and nurses who had treated the wounded. In all, more than forty people died in the Bahraini uprising, as the Arab Spring suffered its first setback. King Hamad’s one concession to international criticism was to authorize an independent commission of inquiry into the protests and subsequent crackdown by the government. Its detailed 500-page report, published in November, revealed

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instances of torture, abuse of the judicial system, arbitrary action against state employees, and acts of intolerance against members of the Bahraini Shiite majority community. It was, in sum, a portrait of state repression. King Hamad, while blaming Iran for inciting “sectarian strife” in Bahrain, promised to punish those responsible for the abuses and to implement reforms to forge reconciliation after the deeply dividing experiences of February and March 2011. It is unclear what kind of reforms the king might attempt that would be acceptable to both his ruling Sunni minority and the demonstrators from the Shiite majority. At the end of 2011, Bahrain was far from equilibrium after a troubled year that had exacerbated deep divides in the island kingdom’s society.

Syria Syria was one of the last Arab countries to face a civilian uprising in 2011. President Bashar al-Asad, who succeeded his late father, Hafez al-Asad, in 2000, enjoyed a degree of legitimacy and public support that set him apart from other Arab autocrats. He was a relative newcomer after eleven years in power and still had a reputation as a reformer—however undeserved. That image was shattered by the regime’s arrest and torture of a group of teenagers in the farming town of Deraa, on the Syrian-Jordanian border, in the spring of 2011. One day in March, a group of rebellious youths painted slogans from the Arab revolutions of 2011 on a wall in Deraa. The People Want the Fall of the Regime, they proclaimed. The secret police arrested fifteen boys aged between ten and fifteen years old for the dissident graffiti. The boys were from leading families of Deraa whose parents were quick to rally their tribes and march on the residence of the regional governor to demand the release of their children. The security forces responded with water cannons and teargas before opening fire on the respected town leaders, wounding several of the protesters. Three people were killed in a subsequent demonstration. President Asad, mindful of how Ben Ali and Mubarak had been toppled by popular protest movements, dispatched a high-level delegation to Deraa in a vain attempt to diffuse the tense situation. The government’s men promised to bring those responsible for firing on the demonstrators to justice, and they released the fifteen young detainees whose arrests first sparked the protests. The boys returned home with clear signs of torture, many with their fingernails torn out. Instead of calming the situation, the release of the abused children of Deraa sparked outrage. The townspeople rose up in the thousands to tear down all symbols associated with the Asad regime in mass protests unprecedented in recent Syrian history. The army responded with increased repression, storming a mosque in the town’s center that had served as a base for the protesters, killing five. From the outset of the Syrian uprising, the vast majority of the army remained loyal to the regime and proved its willingness to fire on fellow citizens. By the end

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of 2011, UN estimates widely seen as conservative put the death toll at over 5,000. The government arrested more than 16,000 citizens, who faced terrible torture for daring to challenge their government’s authority. As the protest movement spread across the whole of Syria, the government responded by laying whole towns under siege. Faced with relentless opposition at home, the leadership of the Syrian resistance was forced abroad to neighboring Turkey. In July 2011, a group of military defectors formed the Free Syrian Army to lead an armed insurrection against the regime, and in August a group of civilian exiles created the Syrian National Council to serve as a governing body for the uprising. Though the Asad regime faces unprecedented internal opposition and external isolation, it looks likely to remain in power as long as the majority of the Syrian army remains loyal to it.

Islamist Victories These six partial or complete revolutions—in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria—represent the most remarkable accomplishments of the Arab Awakening and a total redrafting of the political map of the region. When Tunisians and Egyptians went to the polls at the end of 2011, they gave overwhelming support to Islamist parties. The Tunisian Ennahda Party won a plurality of over 41 percent, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood took an estimated 40 percent of the vote in the first two of Egypt’s three rounds of parliamentary elections (with the final round to conclude in January 2012), and the more conservative Salafi Islamist al-Nour Party took second place with an estimated 25 percent of the vote. These results discouraged many of the new liberal secular parties formed by those who led the revolutions of 2011 and raised real concerns among Western governments, who were fearful that democracy movements in the Arab world might lead to Islamic republics on Iran’s model. Western fears seem unfounded. The Islamists’ victory at the polls was a reflection of political reality rather than religious enthusiasm. Islamist parties in the region are well organized, with the sort of fund-raising ability that is necessary for any political party to succeed. They have secured grassroots support by providing for the needs of the common people with social services, food aid, education, and other benefits. They also enjoy a reputation for values and integrity and for demonstrating the courage of their convictions in opposing the corrupt and autocratic governments that have recently been overthrown in Tunisia and Egypt. Many Tunisians and Egyptians claimed they voted for Islamists less out of religious conviction than to elect an honest and incorruptible government.

Three Challenges Ahead Three challenges lie ahead for the new democracies in the Arab world. The first is the composition of the new Islamist-led governments in Tunisia and Egypt. Here

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the first signs are very promising. In Tunisia, the victorious Islamist party Ennahda has chosen to form a broad-based coalition with two liberal secular parties. Similarly, in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party has declared its intention to form a government with the liberal Free Egyptians coalition rather than establish an Islamist government with the Salafi al-Nour Party. Broadbased governments of national unity are most likely to prove stable in this postrevolutionary era, reassuring jittery tourists and investors that Egypt and Tunisia are open for much-needed business to revive their flagging economies. The second challenge facing the postrevolutionary governments in the Arab world will be the drafting of constitutions that enshrine the values of this new democratic age and enjoy the full support of all citizens—men and women, religious and ethnic majorities and minorities, secular and religious citizens. There are many lessons that Tunisians and Egyptians might draw from older democracies on the separation of powers between lawmakers and executive authorities and on the value of an independent judiciary and a free press. There are bound to be innovations that reflect the values and priorities of the newly liberated citizens of the Arab world. Given the power of Islamist parties in the new governments in the region, the role of Islam in law, politics, and society will be heatedly debated. The framers of the constitutions of Tunisia and Egypt bear a very heavy responsibility, for they will set the standard to which other Arab peoples will aspire as they seek to replace autocracy with new political freedoms. The third and ultimate challenge for this new age of Arab political pluralism will only come in future elections, when incumbent parties face the risk of losing power. If all parties abide by the rules of their constitution and accept the sovereign will of the people to choose and change their government by means of the ballot, then the revolutions of 2011 will be complete. Any attempt to subvert the rules is likely to provoke fresh citizens’ action. As Egyptian demonstrators said many times in 2011, they know their way back to Tahrir Square. Adapted from Eugene Rogan in The Arabs: A History (2011, Basic Books).

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Egypt: Mubarak and After Arthur Goldschmidt Jr.

Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981 by Muslim militants who opposed his backing of the exiled shah of Iran and Egypt’s 1979 peace with Israel. In the opinion of the militants, the treaty with Israel freed the Israeli government from the fear of Egyptian reprisals, allowing it to bomb guerrillas (and civilians) in Lebanon, conduct an air strike against an Iraqi nuclear reactor, increase Jewish settlements on the West Bank, and continue to oppress the Palestinians. Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, held power from Sadat’s death until mass demonstrations forced him to resign on February 11, 2011. Under Mubarak, Egypt relied greatly on weapons and support from the United States. In turn, in the wake of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Egypt supported the US-led coalition of forces to protect Saudi Arabia and liberate Kuwait. Yet Egypt under Mubarak also resumed ties with other Arab countries that had attenuated under Sadat, and it did not progress toward the complete peace with Israel that Sadat had envisioned. Egyptians can identify themselves at various times as Egyptians, Arabs, or Muslims. Egypt’s Arab identity is reviving, fueled in part by resentment against Israel for its repression of the Palestinians and (as Egyptians see it) its manipulation of US foreign policy. But Egypt’s Islamic sentiment also increased following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, enhancing the appeal of Islamic revolutionary groups among the Egyptian population. Deteriorating economic and social conditions also increased the attraction of Islamist groups, as did the coerciveness of the United States in Iraq and elsewhere and the US backing of Israel against the Palestinians. Arthur Goldschmidt Jr. concludes this chapter with summaries of the rise of opposition to Mubarak’s rule and his downfall, along with the sometimes turbulent transition to a new democracy in which a candidate with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood has won the presidency in free elections. Arthur Goldschmidt Jr. is professor emeritus of Middle East history at Pennsylvania State University. He is author of the Biographical Dictionary of Modern Egypt and Modern Egypt: The Formation of a Nation State, from which this chapter derives. He is a recipient of the Amoco Foundation Award for Outstanding Teaching and the 2000 Middle East Studies Association Mentoring Award. 342

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hen Husni Mubarak, Anwar Sadat’s vice president, succeeded the slain leader, he pledged in a public speech before the People’s Assembly to address Egypt’s domestic and foreign problems. Mubarak had a less flamboyant leadership style than either Gamal Abd al-Nasir or Sadat, but he made few significant policy changes. He held power for almost thirty years, making him Egypt’s longest-serving head of state since Mehmet Ali. He did not name a vice president until two weeks before his resignation. Mubarak’s succession was orderly in a dangerous time in Egypt’s history, a sign of the country’s political maturity. Under Mubarak, Egypt was one of the most stable countries in the Middle East. Since his resignation, Egypt has become more lively and more troubled. Informed observers wondered whether in fact Mubarak’s government enjoyed legitimacy in the eyes of the Egyptian people. His leadership was not charismatic, and over time it turned downright dictatorial. Egyptians grew apathetic about politics. Growing numbers did not even vote. A large number of Egyptians came to endorse political Islam, and recent surveys show that most believe their country’s laws should be based on the Shari’a. Some would favor the reestablishment of the Islamic caliphate. In the prolonged political and economic crisis following Mubarak’s resignation, the advocates of political Islam have gained enough supporters to win control of the People’s Assembly and possibly Egypt’s whole government. In international relations, Egypt has remained formally nonaligned. In practical terms, the government’s weapons and support come mainly from the United States. It is still committed to achieving a comprehensive peace settlement with Israel along the lines laid down at the 1978 Camp David Summit and in the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, but under Mubarak it resumed its ties with the other Arab countries and did not progress toward the complete peace with Israel that Sadat had envisioned. From reading the Egyptian press and hearing broadcasts and popular songs, many Israelis believe that Egypt has reverted to its former hostility to Jews, Zionism, and Israel; the Egyptians feel that their separate peace treaty freed Israel to annex the Golan Heights in 1981, invade Lebanon in 1982, crush the 1987–1991 Palestinian intifada, and block Clinton’s efforts to broker a peace settlement between 1995 and 2001. Although Egypt’s government still sides with the United States in its war against terrorism, the public has in recent years strongly opposed the American attacks and sanctions against and invasion of Iraq, as well as US support for Israel against the Palestinians. Four of the nineteen Arab men who hijacked the passenger planes and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, were Egyptians. More reserved than Sadat, Mubarak was an unknown quantity when he became president. His earliest acts were to refocus the attention of the People’s Assembly on Egypt’s socioeconomic problems and to free most of the 1,539 political and religious leaders whom Sadat had jailed in September 1981. Most Egyptians were relieved that Sadat’s assassination did not lead to a prolonged rebellion against the government, but the government did restore the 1958 Emergency

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Law, briefly suspended under Sadat. It suppressed an Islamist uprising in Asyut; many fundamentalists were imprisoned or put under house arrest, their magazines were banned, and their assets were impounded. Students were especially suspect: males were forbidden to grow beards or to wear gallabiyyas, and women had to remove their head coverings to enter university campuses.

Egypt, the Middle East, and the Superpowers Needless to say, a sensitive issue for Mubarak was the peace process with Israel, which in December 1981 annexed the Golan Heights. Israel’s retrocession of the remaining areas of the Sinai to Egypt on April 25, 1982, seemed to remove that constraint on the Egyptian government, but the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon deeply angered almost all Egyptians. In fact, though, Egypt’s inability to fight Israel was matched by the weakness of almost all the other Arab governments. Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) did intervene but could not halt the Israeli advance. Egypt did withdraw its ambassador from Tel Aviv and suspended the Palestinian autonomy talks mandated by its peace treaty with Israel; it never ruptured diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. Mubarak mended Egypt’s fences with PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, who had denounced that treaty, but only after Arafat had been driven from Lebanon by a dissident Palestinian faction. More telling was the action by most Arab governments to restore diplomatic relations with Egypt, even though Mubarak never renounced Sadat’s peace policy and even sent his envoy back to Tel Aviv in 1986. Jordan, Saudi Arabia, some of the Persian Gulf states, and even Iraq were reconciled with Egypt, implicitly validating its peace policies. Sadat’s assassination opened the way for Cairo’s reconciliation with Moscow, which agreed to reschedule Egypt’s massive debt to the Soviet Union, and the two countries resumed exchanging ambassadors in 1984. However, the US government remained Egypt’s main benefactor, providing $1 billion to $3 billion annually in military and economic aid, essentially the price Washington paid for ensuring Egyptian-Israeli peace. Most of this money paid for the importation of American arms, capital goods, and food, but projects in the 1980s included expanding the water and sewer system of greater Cairo, upgrading the telephone network, building new schools, introducing better varieties of wheat and rice, and the extension of family planning services. Military aid involved training and the provision of fighter jet planes, modern artillery, tanks (now assembled in Egypt), and armored personnel vehicles, but its showpiece was Operation Bright Star, joint Egyptian-American military operations begun in 1981 and repeated in oddnumbered years. They have continued, but with less publicity and more involvement by other countries’ armed forces. Due in part to these close ties between Cairo and Washington, the United States managed to enlist the help of Egypt and most of the other Arab states in the

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campaign against Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. Mubarak had attempted during July 1990 to mediate the quarrels between these two countries, which centered on Iraq’s repayment to Kuwait of debts incurred during the Iran-Iraq War, claims to an oilfield that lay athwart their territorial border, and Iraq’s desire for greater access to the Persian Gulf. The surprise attack on August 2 violated commitments that Mubarak had received from Iraqi president Saddam Husayn, and Egypt spearheaded efforts by the other Arab heads of state to persuade him to pull his troops out of Kuwait. When Arab diplomacy failed, Mubarak was one of the Arab leaders who agreed to join the allied coalition to protect Saudi Arabia and eventually to liberate Kuwait; some 40,000 Egyptian troops took part in Operation Desert Storm.

Political Changes in Egypt Starting in 1977 Egypt had a multiparty system, but in practice the National Democratic Party dominated the political scene with Mubarak as its leader, even if his methods seemed less dictatorial and less dramatic than those of his predecessor. Although regime politicians rarely criticized earlier leaders, Sadat’s passing occasioned little public grieving. Egyptians often criticized him in private and expressed some nostalgia for the now rather hazy years of Gamal Abd al-Nasir. The role of the People’s Assembly never became as important as Sadat may have envisioned early in his presidency, and on many foreign and defense policy issues, it had no role at all. Mubarak initiated more new laws than the parliamentarians, and even their committees were little more than sounding boards for his ministers. Egypt has a large and highly articulated court system, with an independent judiciary that criticized and at times nullified the acts of Mubarak’s administration. It even supervised the 2000 elections, but it remained vulnerable to pressure from the executive— especially the justice and interior ministries. In Mubarak’s last years in power, many high-profile criminal cases were tried in the military courts. Human rights under Mubarak were a major issue for Egypt. Although close ties with the United States seemed to foster more respect for individual liberties than was evident during the period of the monarchy or the dictatorship of Gamal Abd al-Nasir, this is illusory. Censorship of books, periodicals, and films continues, although the intrusive habits of Nasir’s censors, who routinely opened letters and taped telephone calls, did not resume under Mubarak. Individuals and groups often censor themselves to avert future trouble, though, knowing that they could be pressured by Islamists as well as by the Egyptian government. The government’s censorship and repression were applied against Communists, obstreperous groups and individuals, and Islamists, usually in the name of “fighting terrorism.” Using its emergency laws, the Mubarak regime banned certain newspapers and magazines, placed its foes under house arrest or preventive detention without charges or trial, tortured suspects in police stations and prisons, broke

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up meetings, and restricted political rallies and demonstrations. In fact, when demonstrations did occur, as in March 2003 against the American attack on Iraq, outside observers knew that they conveyed a message from Mubarak’s government, which, like its citizens, opposed the George W. Bush administration’s policies.

Economic Policy In economic matters, the Egyptian government still pursued a policy that combined state planning and ownership of basic industries with private enterprise, both domestic and foreign. The trend, however, was toward privatization of most businesses. Mubarak seemed more dedicated to solving Egypt’s economic problems than Sadat ever was. It is not clear, however, whether some of them can ever be solved. The country’s population, 80 million in 2010, increases by another million every ten months; at the same time, the amount of arable land has actually declined, owing in part to the demand for housing but also to a legacy of ill-conceived agricultural policies that make it more profitable for some peasants to turn their soil into bricks than to raise the three crops per year made possible by perennial irrigation. Although the Aswan High Dam initially increased the amount of cropped land and now generates more electricity than Egypt can use, it has deprived the land of the silt that formerly came down with the annual flood and, hence, has increased Egypt’s need for artificial fertilizers. The High Dam has also raised the water table, making it harder to flush away salt accumulations that reduce soil productivity. By 1980 Egypt imported more than half the grain consumed by its inhabitants, an ironic fate for a land that was the breadbasket of many ancient and medieval empires, but this dependency lessened during the last three decades. There were some hopeful agricultural trends. The percentage of Egyptians who actually worked as farmers gradually diminished, while their use of farm machinery, modern techniques of cultivation and irrigation, and technical knowledge all increased. Egyptian cotton remained an important export crop, but it used a much smaller share of the country’s agricultural land, while wheat, corn, rice, and sugar took up the slack. The diversion of some of the waters that have backed up behind the Aswan High Dam for the Toshka Project, inaugurated in January 1997, will eventually create a second Nile Valley in Egypt’s Western Desert, possibly raising the share of Egypt’s land that is cultivated from 5 to 20 percent. Much of the new land will be used to raise cash crops, for it is generally understood that the future success of Egyptian agriculture will depend on the development of products that can be sold to Europeans and to other Arabs, such as fruits, vegetables, beet and cane sugar, honey, poultry, eggs, cut flowers, and decorative plants. But will many Egyptians agree to move to this new and remote region? And will the second Nile draw away water that is still needed by the original River Nile? Egypt industrialized less than most Asian countries. All the showcase heavy industries that Nasir set up lost money. Sadat retained most of them to avoid an-

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tagonizing workers in the public-sector factories. Mubarak’s government sold them off or entered into partnerships that allowed the government and private investors to share in their ownership and management. Unemployment became a problem for secondary school and university graduates, running to between 15 and 20 percent during the 1990s and higher in the first decade of the twenty-first century. By contrast, in many skilled trades, even some agricultural ones, the labor supply was inadequate. The main reason for this scarcity was that 4 million Egyptians were lured to the oil-exporting Arab countries by wages ten times the amount they could earn at home. However, the decline in oil prices in the 1980s and 1990s severely reduced employment opportunities abroad. Because of the 1991 Gulf War, many expatriate Egyptians lost their jobs in Iraq and returned home. Falling oil revenues in the 1980s and 1990s also reduced the flow of Arab tourism to Egypt and reversed the trend of rising Arab investment in Egyptian real estate and industrial enterprises. Egypt’s own oil production and prices tended to parallel those of the larger oil exporters. Although it never joined the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Egypt set its level of production and prices in tandem with that group. Although Egypt lost foreign exchange from falling oil sales abroad, its growing production of natural gas made up for this. Income disparities grew larger. Although this was the case before the 1952 revolution, the egalitarian propaganda of the Nasir era made Egyptians less willing to accept vast differences between rich and poor, and the mass media showed each how the other half lived. Near-universal primary education may get higher marks for quantity than for quality, but it certainly added to the public’s awareness of the difference between the reality with which they were contending and the ideals of either capitalism or socialism. The value of the Egyptian pound dropped from US$2.80 in 1952 to 15 cents in 2003. A weak currency helps to promote exports but makes it harder for businesses to import capital equipment and for individuals to buy foreign-made consumer goods. Annual double-digit price inflation ensued, and morale suffered among the people. The Egyptian government narrowly avoided a crisis in repaying its foreign debts in 1987, when it opened extensive negotiations with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and Western governments to reschedule its payments. In May 1991 the negotiating parties signed the Economic Reform and Structural Adjustment Program (ERSAP), which called for macroeconomic policy adjustments (higher taxes relative to government expenditures), removal of government subsidies on consumer goods, elimination of price controls, foreign trade liberalization (elimination of quotas and protective tariffs), reform of labor legislation, and privatization of state-owned enterprises. Mubarak’s government implemented these reforms in the 1990s, temporarily strengthening the Egyptian pound while reducing the trade deficit. Overall national income rose, but most economists believe that the rich benefited at the expense of the poor.

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National Identity Egypt is both a nation (an object of loyalty) and a state (a political and legal system). The concept of the nation-state grew up in early modern times in Western Europe and North America. It did not necessarily apply either to the traditional loyalties of most Middle Eastern peoples or to the behavior patterns of their rulers. Faith and family remained the foci of popular identification. French and British imperialism (and schooling) did spread the spirit of nationalism, but mainly among a small stratum of the educated elite. Except in the sense of resistance to non-Muslim rulers, nationalism was slow to appear and spread in the Middle East. It developed in both intensity and extent in Egypt during the twentieth century, especially under Nasir and his successors, because of expanding public education, radio and television broadcasting, and almost universal male military service. Egyptians tend to meander among their Egyptian, Arab, and Muslim identities, responding to current political conditions. Egypt’s Arab identity went into eclipse after 1973, but it is now reviving, for the ties of language and culture with other Arabs are strong, as is resentment against Israel for what Egyptians view as its repression of the Palestinians and its manipulation of American foreign policy. Egyptian feeling, deep-seated though it may be, does not exclude other loyalties. Islamic sentiment increased following the June 1967 war and the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Sadat’s assassins, or at any rate those whom the government managed to capture, belonged to a relatively new secret society called al-Jihad (Struggle). Their feat actually increased the appeal to the Egyptian people of Islamic revolutionary groups, although they were strictly outlawed. Allied with the jihadists in killing Sadat was al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group), which grew out of the student Muslim groups formed in Egypt’s universities during the Sadat era, and the two groups set up a consultative council led by Shaykh Umar Abd alRahman, who later escaped to Afghanistan, the Sudan, and finally the United States, where he was arrested, tried, and convicted for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. Egyptians of both groups went to Afghanistan and aided the Muslim rebels against the Soviet military occupation of that country. Those who returned home in the early 1990s, often called “Afghans,” became leading terrorists against the Egyptian government, secularist writers, foreign tourists, and Copts between 1992 and 1997. One of the Egyptian Afghans was Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a physician who allied himself with Usama bin Laden and helped to form the network of terrorist groups, based in Afghanistan and many other Muslim countries, known as al-Qa’ida (the Base), now the focus for the American-led “war on terrorism.” Although most educated Egyptians still adhere to the ideals of secular nationalism and would not welcome an Iranian-style “Islamic republic” in their country,

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they moved away from Sadat’s “liberal socialism.” Some were attracted to the extremist groups, and more joined them as economic and social conditions continued to deteriorate. The Muslim extremists did not accord any legitimacy to the Mubarak regime and looked to Libya and other radical states to help them deliver Egypt from its state of jahiliyya (pre-Islamic ignorance). This term, applied by the Islamist writer Sayyid Qutb to secularized governments and westernized societies, has strong resonance for observant Muslims, who condemn rampant consumerism and immorality. These are evident not only in films and television shows imported from the West but also in the behavior of Gulf Arabs who take vacations from their own governments’ restrictions against extramarital sex, gambling, and drinking, all readily available to foreigners but not Egyptians in their country’s luxury hotels. It was easy for the extremists to exploit the bitter anger among the thousands of young men who served in the “Security Police” at a monthly wage of six Egyptian pounds—so easy that they exploded into mass demonstrations that destroyed three tourist hotels near the Giza pyramids in February 1986. Their shouted slogan was “They eat meat, we eat bread.” The Islamists organized campus demonstrations against Egypt’s participation in the 1991 Gulf War. They also provided textbooks, lecture notes, Islamic clothing, and transportation to campus for Muslim students. After the severe earthquake of October 1992, Islamist organizations provided faster and more effective health services and reconstruction aid than did the Egyptian government agencies to its injured and homeless victims. Their protests against American missile attacks on Iraq in 1993 and 1998 expressed the sentiments of most of the Egyptian people and presaged their popularly supported opposition to the American war on Iraq in 2003. Rather more ominously, many Muslims (in Egypt and elsewhere) applauded when Egyptian and Saudi terrorists hijacked American passenger jets on September 11, 2001, and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Egypt’s government was appalled, but the reaction of the Arab street was that the United States deserved what it got.

Rising Opposition to Mubarak For many years, Mubarak’s main opposition came from the Society of Muslim Brothers, which had been both powerful and popular in the last days of the monarchy and the beginning of the 1952 revolution but was outlawed by Nasir. It remained illegal, though sometimes tolerated, under Sadat and Mubarak. It ran candidates in parliamentary elections, at times in coalition with the New Wafd, at other times as “Independents.” The first legal group organized to oppose the regime was the Egyptian Movement for Change, commonly called Kifaya (Enough), which inspired protest demonstrations in 2004 and 2005. It did secure an amendment in Egypt’s 1971 constitution to permit candidates to run for president in opposition to the incumbent. In the scheduled 2005 presidential election,

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the New Wafd and the Ghad (Tomorrow) parties ran candidates, but Mubarak still got 88 percent of the vote. Kifaya faded soon afterwards. Rising prices and low wages afflicted growing numbers of Egyptians, leading to labor unrest. A group of textile workers called a strike for April 6, 2008, against Misr Spinning and Weaving Company in al-Mahalla al-Kubra. The strikers were brutally suppressed by state security forces, but a couple of educated Egyptian youths started a movement on Facebook to rally support for their cause, and soon more than 70,000 Egyptians had joined the new April 6 Youth Movement. This Facebook group rallied more support as it reported on Israel’s military attacks on the Palestinians in Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009. The murder in June 2010 of Khalid Said, a twenty-eight-year-old Alexandrian businessman accused of posting Facebook messages about drug dealing by Mubarak’s secret police, led to a new Facebook page titled “We Are All Khalid Said,” showing photos of the man before and after his assault and killing by state security forces. The developer of this Facebook page was a thirtyyear-old Google representative in Dubai, an Egyptian named Wael Ghonim, who would become the poster child of the 2011 uprising against the Mubarak regime. Egyptians, most of them young but augmented by men and women of all ages, all dressed in black, stood silently along the Alexandria Corniche and the Nile, as well as in other public areas, flouting the Emergency Law’s prohibition against unlicensed gatherings of more than five people. The National Assembly elections of November and December 2010, in which the regime used every possible method of ballot rigging and coercion to ensure victory for the National Democratic Party’s candidates, further fueled popular anger against Mubarak’s government. The immediate spark for the major Egyptian uprising was the successful overthrow of Tunisia’s long-entrenched, corrupt dictatorship in mid-January 2011. The April 6 Youth Movement and its allies planned major protest demonstrations in Cairo’s centrally located Tahrir Square, other districts of the capital city, and other cities and towns throughout Egypt for January 25. The date had symbolic significance for Egyptians, one recognized by the Mubarak government when it had declared, in 2009, a national holiday called “Police Day” to honor the mainstays of the regime. It commemorated an attack on January 25, 1952, by British troops in the Suez Canal Zone on two Egyptian police stations, killing fifty policemen. The event set off “Black Saturday,” the destruction of many buildings in central Cairo on January 26, setting in motion the movement that would culminate in the downfall of the monarchy and the feted July 23, 1952, revolution. Wael Ghonim himself claimed that the protesters chose this as their “day of rage” to show respect for individual policemen, even as they protested against the evils of Mubarak’s regime.

Mubarak’s Downfall State security police quickly isolated and squelched the demonstrations on January 25, but “days of rage” continued to grow, leading to an epic struggle between

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demonstrators and police using water cannons, teargas, and tanks for control of the “Lovers’ Bridge” leading from Zamalek to Tahrir Square. After several setbacks and many casualties, the protesters managed to cross the bridge and occupied Tahrir Square. Hoping to blunt the uprising, the government cut off mobile phone and Internet connections, but the demonstrators found ways to circumvent this. Mubarak dismissed his cabinet in favor of one headed by Ahmed Shafiq, named intelligence chief Omar Suleiman as his vice president, and announced that he would not seek reelection when his own term expired in September 2011. As the protesting crowds swelled, demanding the president’s resignation, the support of the United States and other foreign governments for Mubarak waned. Even sending plainclothes police mounted on camels and horses into Tahrir Square, assaulting demonstrators with clubs and knives, did not deter them. Mubarak delivered an appeasing speech on state television, to no avail. Finally, on February 11, Omar Suleiman announced on television that Mubarak had resigned and turned his presidential powers over to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). SCAF dissolved the counterfeit parliament and named a committee to revise the constitution and to prepare for new parliamentary and presidential elections. The young Egyptians thought they had won, but was their triumph real, and was it a revolution? The Tahrir Square crowd gave a louder ovation to Yusuf alQaradawi, an Islamist preacher and writer newly returned from exile, than to Wael Ghonim, who had spent twelve days in detention during the demonstrations. The Muslim Brothers, quiescent during the uprising, soon turned out to be the real victors. It was their candidates and those of the ultra-Islamist Nour Party who won the most seats in the National Assembly in the genuine election held in November and December 2011. And it was their candidate, a hitherto unknown engineering professor named Mohamed Morsi, who outdrew the more secular candidates in the first round of the presidential election held in late May 2012. SCAF, whose authority has been challenged repeatedly by demonstrators in Cairo and other cities, consisted mainly of military officers appointed by Mubarak, and their favored candidate, Ahmed Shafiq, had been his last appointed prime minister. He finished a close second to Morsi, and the final victor in the second-stage presidential elections was Morsi again, although SCAF stole some of his thunder by dissolving Parliament, calling for a new committee to draft Egypt’s constitution, and limiting the president’s powers.

Past, Present, and Future The Islamists’ slogan, “Islam is the solution,” expresses the basic loyalty of many Egyptians, but one wonders how applying the Shari’a or restoring the caliphate could solve the problems of an urbanized society living in the twenty-first century. Islamist groups had resorted to violence to weaken the hold of the Egyptian

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government over its citizens during the 1990s, but their terrorism actually antagonized the people as it threatened Egypt’s economy, dependent as it is on tourism and foreign trade. Now that the Society of Muslim Brothers is free to compete in the political arena, it may well end up governing postrevolutionary Egypt. However, Egyptians are also proud of what they call “national unity,” or the mutual tolerance between Muslims and Copts, and have faulted the Islamists for stirring up intercommunal tensions. The traditional subordination of women to men, often ascribed to Islam even by Muslims, is no longer functional in a society where women’s earnings outside the home have become necessary to support most families, urban or rural. Both sexes need all the training and education they can get to ensure their ability to make a living and to live a better life. Mubarak’s regime was judged harshly for its failure to alleviate (let alone solve) Egypt’s economic problems. Relations with other Arab and Muslim peoples, while certainly better than in Sadat’s time, were secondary in importance. When will Egypt have its true revolution? Egyptians rebel less often than most other Arabicspeaking peoples; their patience is legendary. They have deferred to autocratic rulers and bureaucrats to a degree that astonishes Syrians and Palestinians. Centuries of dependence on a strong ruler to ensure equitable distribution of Nile waters and protection from foreign invasion have created a political culture that glorifies order, tranquility, and forbearance. Modernization has sapped this ethos, however, and the danger of a new popular uprising, even against the Egyptian armed forces or the Muslim Brothers, is never remote. The United States since 1979 has spent about $2 billion a year to support the Egyptian government, more than the amount given to any other country except Israel. US aid policy in 2012 is geared more to politics than to need. Egyptians comprehend this reasoning behind Washington’s policy, and the degree of their gratitude depends on how much they want their present regime to last. Some complain that American aid is hard to see amid the continuing problems of congestion, unemployment, and low wages. The best projects are the ones that enable Egyptians to solve their own problems, but the main fault of US aid lies in its administration: Washington insists on a degree of supervision far stricter than that imposed on, say, Israel—a stance viewed by the Egyptians as an insult to their competence. Americans must realize that Egypt remains a leader of the Arab Spring, a major influence on the other Arab countries. Egyptians are almost as concerned about the 2012 presidential election in America as they are about their own. And the US government and people will need to exercise patience and wise judgment to work successfully with a post-Mubarak Egypt. Adapted from Chapter 12 of Arthur Goldschmidt Jr., Modern Egypt: The Formation of a Nation State, Second Edition (2004, Westview Press), with new additions by the author.

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Bashar al-Asad, Syria, and the Arab Spring David W. Lesch

Libya is the chief example thus far of an Arab Spring movement that resorted to intense armed conflict and successfully deposed the national leader. Syria is the chief example thus far of a resort to intense armed conflict that has failed to dislodge the national leader. When Bashar Assad succeeded his father, Hafez Assad, as president of Syria in 2000, he entered office with the hopes of many that his new regime would usher in an era of relaxed restrictions on political discussion and dissent. However, the few steps he took in that direction were soon reversed under pressure from the “old guard” in the government he’d inherited. Yet the younger Assad believed that Syria was immune to the prodemocracy, antiauthoritarian movement that swept the region in 2011. As David Lesch observes, Syrians disdain the chaos created by open ethnic conflict of the kind all too evident in its neighbors, Lebanon to the west and Iraq to the east. The government and military institutions are tightly cohesive, bound by the sectarian and kinship connections among Assad’s allies whom he has placed in key posts. And if Assad’s clique is composed principally of minority Alawites (a Shiite sect), he has skillfully bound to his regime other minorities—notably Christians and Druze—by playing on their fears of what Syria under the rule of the Sunni majority might be like. Yet the warning signs were there. Syria had a repressive security apparatus clamping down on popular discontent over corruption, poverty, and unemployment. The examples of Arab Spring protests elsewhere emboldened Syrians to express their discontent. Assad has claimed, and apparently sincerely believes, that the demonstrations and armed resistance alike are the result of foreign agitation. He has resisted outside attempts to calm the situation through diplomacy. Instead, says Lesch, Assad is dedicated to pursuing a “security solution” to the uprisings. David W. Lesch is professor of Middle East history at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He is author of several books, including The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria and 1979: The Year That Shaped the Modern Middle East. With Mark L. Haas, he is coeditor of The Middle East and the United States: History, Politics, and Ideologies and The Arab Spring: Change and Resistance in the Middle East, from which the present reading is adapted.

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Syrian president Bashar al-Asad officially took the constitutional oath of office and delivered his inaugural speech on July 17, 2000, in Damascus. By Syrian standards, it was a remarkably enlightened speech, replete with criticisms of certain policies of the past, even those of his predecessor and father, Hafiz al-Asad, who ruled Syria from 1970 until his death in June 2000. The frankness of the speech confirmed the hopes of many in and outside Syria that indeed Bashar was a breath of fresh air who would lead the country in a new direction. His speech conveyed clear ideas about how Syria could move forward in terms of economic reform and technological modernization, although it was ambiguous, even evasive, on the extent of political reform along a more democratic model. Despite this, however, there was a genuine air of exuberance among many who had longed for change in Syria. Bashar brought into the government a number of people who were generally thought to be reformers. This added to the anticipatory environment, although the “reformers” were tasked with the job of modernizing Syria, implementing administrative reform in the ministries to which they were assigned, and examining the economic weaknesses of the Syrian system and devising ways to correct it. They were not there to enact political reform or diminish the monopoly of power of the ruling Baath Party. Nonetheless, there was a noticeably more open political environment in the months after Bashar took office, leading many to call this period the “Damascus Spring.” The seven to eight months of the Damascus Spring were marked by general amnesties for political prisoners of all persuasions, the licensing of private newspapers, a shake-up of the state-controlled media apparatus, the provision of political forums and salons in which open criticism and dissent were tolerated, and a discarding of the personality cult that had surrounded the regime of his father. The regime appeared to be caught off guard by the precipitous growth of civil society organizations and pro-democracy groups and by the level of criticism directed at the government. It is generally believed that some of the stalwart elements in the regime—who were referred to at the time as the “old guard,” those who had reached positions of power under and been loyal to Hafiz al-Asad, especially in the military-security apparatus—approached Bashar and warned him of the deleterious effects of his societal opening up on the regime’s power base. As a result, most of the political and social reforms announced during the Damascus Spring were reversed directly or indirectly, even to the point that a number of prominent pro-democracy activists were reimprisoned. A winter of retrenchment set in, followed by years of primarily economic, monetary, and administrative reform but scarcely a trace of real political reform away from the single-party system that dominated this neopatriarchal authoritarian state.

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The Arab Spring in Syria? Fast-forward more than a decade to 2011. Despite the rumblings of change in Tunisia and Egypt, things in Syria seemed to be pretty stable, and Bashar al-Asad had reason to believe that his fortunes would continue to rise. As such, I can almost guarantee that Asad was absolutely shocked when the uprisings in the Arab world had started to seep into his own country by March 2011. I believe he truly thought he was safe and secure and popular in the country beyond condemnation, which may have contributed to his belief that a serious threat could only happen via conspiracy orchestrated by Syria’s external enemies. But in the Middle East of 2011, the stream of information via the Internet, Facebook, and Twitter could not be controlled as it had been in the past. The perfect storm in the Arab world of higher commodity prices that made basic items more expensive, a youth bulge that created a gap between mobilization (education and expectations) and assimilation (adequate jobs and a living), and even WikiLeaks, which revealed the profligate lifestyles of the ruling elite, bared for all to see the widespread socioeconomic problems, corruption, and restricted political space. In this Syria was no different. And after the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt led to the removal of the ancien régime in each country, the barrier of fear of the repressive apparatus of the state had been broken across the Arab world. Asad, though, thought Syria was indeed different. In fact, calls for similar protests to be held in January and February in Syrian cities by anti-Asad elements in and outside the country failed to produce much of a response. There just didn’t seem to be the same energy for opposition in Syria as in other countries, which only made the regime feel that much more secure. In January and February, amid the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen, Asad portrayed his country as almost immune from such domestic unrest. It was pointed out that the septuagenarian and octogenarian leaders of these countries were out of touch with their populations. They were also corrupt lackeys of the United States and Israel. The implication, of course, was that Asad, as a relatively young forty-five years old, was in touch with the Arab youth. He had also consistently confronted the United States and Israel in the region and supported the resistance forces of Hamas and Hizbullah, thus brandished credentials that played well in the Arab street. This may have bought him some time, but it was a misreading of the situation—or a denial of it. Syria was suffering from the same underlying socioeconomic factors that existed in other non-oil-producing Arab countries and created the well of disenfranchisement and disempowerment, especially among an energized and increasingly frustrated youth. However, there were indeed some differences between Syria and countries such as Tunisia and Egypt that led many to believe that the Syrian regime could weather the storm of the Arab spring—or at least be one of the last subjected to it.

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Because of Syria’s turbulent political development following independence, Syrians generally have had a disdain for engaging in activities that could produce instability and chaos. They only have to look across their borders on either side toward Lebanon and Iraq, two countries, like Syria, that are ethnically and religiously sectarian, to see how political disorder can violently rip apart the fabric of society. Of course, the regime constantly stoked this trepidation to reinforce the necessity of maintaining stability at all costs. It frequently portrayed itself as the only thing standing between stability and chaos. In addition, the fate of the Syrian military and security services is closely tied with that of the regime, so, unlike in Egypt, these institutions have not been as prone to separation from the political leadership; on the contrary, they aggressively led the violent crackdown against the protestors. Bashar al-Asad carefully maneuvered his most loyal allies into the military-security apparatus over the years, as he did in the government ministries and in the Baath Party. And the regime was careful to use the most loyal divisions in the military, particularly those made up mostly or entirely of Alawites, to spearhead the crackdowns in the cities and towns that generated the most unrest. On a related issue, the Syrian regime, dominated by the Alawite minority sect, had always portrayed itself as the protector of all minorities in a country that is 75 percent Sunni Muslim. In addition to the Alawites, there are various Christian sects in Syria comprising about 10 percent of the population, as well as Druze (3 percent) and a smattering of Jews and other obscure Islamic sects. The Asads have skillfully played on minority fears of the potential of repressive Sunni Muslim rule or instability in which minorities typically pay a high price. Finally, the Syrian opposition, in and outside the country, was for most of 2011 uncoordinated and often divided without any generally recognized leadership. There have been various attempts by Syrian opposition groups in exile during the uprising to come together in order to present a unified, inclusive front, which at first was more important in terms of attracting international support as well as to offer a real alternative to those Syrians who supported the regime simply because there was no legitimate alternative. In addition, in Syria, as happened in Iraq following the US invasion in 2003, there was a general feeling that the exiled opposition was illegitimate. With antipathy toward US policy at an all-time high during the first decade of the twenty-first century and into the second, opposition groups associated too closely with the United States would have a very difficult time gaining traction with most Syrians. It was easy for the regime to paint the opposition in and outside the country as a tool of the imperialists. Despite all of this, however, many of the underlying socioeconomic and political factors that lie at the root of the Arab uprisings were also present in Syria: unemployment and underemployment, poverty, massive corruption, and an unequal distribution of wealth. In addition, there was little political space; indeed, Syria has been a politically repressive state. Preemptive fear and intimidation are useful

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tools frequently employed by security agents as a deterrent against potential unrest. A certain level of countrywide paranoia exists as a result, which the regime uses to maintain control over the population. Syrians grew tired of the mukhabarat (secret police) state, especially as they watched in early 2011 as the popular revolts in Tunisia and Egypt seemingly threw off the yoke of repression and moved against the police and security services. They saw regular people in other Arab states say no to presidents who had enjoyed lifetime guarantees to rule. Gone are the days when presidents and prime ministers rule for decades. The two Asads have ruled Syria for forty-two years. People want to be able to choose their rulers, hold them more accountable, and have some sort of say in the future of their countries. Political space is so restricted in Syria, and after witnessing the Arab spring in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere, many Syrians began to think, Why not in our country? The power of the street— buoyed by the instruments and technology of social media—was on full display, knocking out one authoritarian leader after another. Of course, there are numerous questions now about what exactly will emerge in the aftermath of the Arab spring–induced removal of various regimes and whether it will indeed be better. But back in the volcanic and hopeful period of the movement in early 2011, its galvanizing effects were incalculable. Anything was possible. Or so it seemed.

Bashar’s World It is not the purpose of this chapter to examine the nature of the Syrian uprising in detail. It is still history in the making. It is enough to know that it happened and that a vicious government crackdown against the protestors has resulted, as of this writing in May 2012, in over 10,000 Syrians killed, according to a number of estimates. Wishing to avoid the need to take assertive action against the Syrian regime, particularly of the military kind, the international community procrastinated at first, hoping Bashar al-Asad would finally become the reformer many had expected him to be and would implement the necessary changes. It was hoped that the uprising would then simply fizzle out as a result. But as the regime vigorously held on, as the protests continued, and as the violence escalated, the international community, led by the United Nations and the Arab League, attempted to resolve the issue through negotiation one way or another, preferably by compelling Asad and his cronies to step down. By early 2012, calls for direct military action by some conglomeration of the international community, similar to what happened in Libya, in support of the protestors/rebels grew. As the Syrian leadership tenaciously held onto power, however, the international community was eager to somehow curtail the violence, even if it meant Asad’s staying in office, in order to prevent an all-out civil war that could spiral out of control into a regional conflagration. This would also put off the difficult decision of whether to support the uprising more vigorously, including with military intervention. But to all too

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many, it seemed that Bashar had become the prototypical Middle East tyrant. He unleashed the dogs on his own population and, at the end of the day, reminded Syrians that he was more like his father than the reformer many had hoped him to be when he assumed the presidency in 2000. When Asad spoke in his first speech to the nation on March 30, 2011, in reaction to the growing protests in his country, he branded terrorists, conspirators, and armed gangs as the primary reasons for the unrest; he still does at the time of this writing. Most of those outside Syria scoffed at such blatant misdirection from the real socioeconomic and political problems that brought the Arab spring to Syria. But many Syrians, even Asad himself, readily believe such exhortations. Their perception of the nature of the threat is vastly different from what we see outside Syria. Blame it on Syrian paranoia bred by imperialist conspiracies of the past, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and/or regime brainwashing to consecrate the necessity for the security state, but it is in large measure a function of living in a dangerous neighborhood where real threats are indeed often just around the corner. Asad is the product of an authoritarian system, one that is a paradigm of stagnation and control. The Syrian system is not geared to respond to people’s demands—it controls people’s demands. It is not geared to implement dramatic reform. It is constructed to maintain the status quo and survive. At any other time the reforms thus far announced—lifting the emergency law, providing for Kurdish citizenship, creating political parties, drafting a new constitution—would be viewed as significant. Now, however, they are seen as self-serving, after-the-fact, and insufficient. In any event, to reform more deeply and rapidly is anathema to the Syrian system simply because it would spell the end of the regime itself. Profound reforms are counterintuitive to the basic instincts of an authoritarian, neopatriarchal system. I got to know Bashar al-Asad fairly well. I see him neither as eccentric nor as a bloodthirsty killer along the lines of Muammar Gadafi or Saddam Hussein. People I know who have met all three readily agree with this assessment. There are those, however, who differ (sometimes vehemently), viewing Bashar as a corrupt tyrant from the very beginning. They oftentimes base their position on the evidence of continued repression and delayed reform. This is understandable, and if they were to say that the Syrian system was corrupt and repressive from the beginning of Asad’s rule, then I would wholeheartedly agree. If they said that he would have eventually succumbed to this system even if he was altruistic in the beginning, then they would be correct. But Bashar was different from the typical Middle East dictator, which led many people, including me, to hope for best—maybe even to engage in wishful thinking. That most who met him perceived Bashar to be a relatively ordinary person who then sanctioned a brutal crackdown of the uprising in what may have been a very matter-of-fact manner says something about human behavior and how even normal people can devolve under the pressure of power and delusion.

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While the rest of the world thinks Asad has been delusional (or at the very least has tried to deflect attention from the real causes of the uprising) ever since his March 30, 2011, speech blaming foreign conspiracies for the unrest in Syria, it is my contention that he and his inner circle really believe—more than most people can imagine—that there have indeed been foreign conspiracies from the very beginning. The Syrian leadership simply has a very different perception of the nature of any threat based on their own history, one in which Syria has been subject to conspiracies by external enemies just enough to lend credence to such exhortations for many Syrians. The Syrian leadership just has a different conceptual paradigm framing the nature of internal and external threats to their country. The Syrian leadership is tremendously suspicious of any brokered agreements, especially if they are mediated by the Arab League, United Nations, or some other manifestation of what it views as organizations controlled by anti-Syrian states. As Bashar confided to me some years ago (following former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri’s assassination), he was (and probably still is) convinced that the West and its regional allies are “out to get him” one way or another, either through force or diplomacy. While the Syrian opposition, their Arab supporters, and the West see Asad as untrustworthy and prevaricating, especially when he, in essence, conditionally accepted internationally brokered agreements to end the violence and did relatively little to implement the accords, the Syrian leadership views these exact same organizations and countries and their diplomatic efforts as pernicious attempts through diplomacy to buy time for the opposition to regroup and rearm. The Syrian leadership, in my opinion, believes that if they do not maintain unrelenting pressure on the rebels, the rebels will have time to strengthen their position and possibly even establish safe havens from which they can be supported from the outside. From the beginning, Bashar and his loyalists always saw and pursued a security solution to the uprising. Unfortunately, one way or another, whether the regime does or does not fall, this likely means continuing bloodshed and potential regional instability. Adapted from Chapter 4, by David W. Lesch, in David W. Lesch and Mark L. Haas, eds., The Arab Spring: Change and Resistance in the Middle East (2013, Westview Press).

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The Arab World at the Intersection of the National and Transnational James L. Gelvin

James Gelvin finds the very word “spring” inappropriate in labeling the recent Arab protest movement, in part because it implies a new beginning, when the movement of 2011 is better seen as “the culmination of a decades-long struggle for human dignity in the region.” In part also, “spring” implies a time of joy and renewal, when in fact several of the uprisings have already “turned pretty sour.” Gelvin identifies four “transnational elements” that “made all states in the Arab world vulnerable to popular anger.” These elements are not specific to a given regime (which would make them “national”) but are endemic to the Arab world and are therefore “transnational.” They are not causes in themselves but are factors that have allowed the protests to burst forth as they have. First is the transition to neoliberal economies—free and open markets, privatized industries—as insisted on by international banks. Such economies force regimes to abandon the safety net of social services that they have historically provided to their citizens in an implicit exchange for the people’s quiet obedience. But when services disappear, so does the incentive to obey the regime. Other transnational elements include the potentially explosive combination of large and rapidly increasing populations of young people with a dearth of employment opportunities and a reliance on imported foodstuffs even as food prices soar. Gelvin also considers many Arab regimes to be “brittle”—they are inflexible in the sense that the people have no outlet for protest through popular representation in the government. Political expression is therefore all or nothing. Thus protests often begin by immediately demanding the downfall of the regime rather than simply promoting a change of representatives in government. In a provisional categorization of the courses taken by the wave of protests thus far, Gelvin finds that the military stood aside in Tunisia and Egypt, leading rapidly to the ouster of Presidents Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak, respectively. Two other leaders (in Libya and Yemen) gave way in regimes that effectively shattered from within, splintering between supporters and opponents of the besieged regime. Bahrain and Syria demonstrate a third path: the regime has knit itself together cohesively with sectarian and ethnic ties in order to withstand popular uprisings and meet them with force. The fourth category consists of five Arab monar360

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chies in which (thus far) public protest is muted and seeks limited reforms rather than radical transformations. James L. Gelvin is professor of Middle East history at the University of California, Los Angeles. His several books include The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know, Israel Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War, and The Modern Middle East: A History. This reading is adapted from his chapter in David W. Lesch and Mark L. Haas, eds., The Arab Spring: Change and Resistance in the Middle East.

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n December 17, 2010, the world’s most famous street vendor, Muhammad Bouazizi, set himself on fire in front of the local government building in Sidi Bouzid, a rural town in Tunisia with a 30 percent unemployment rate. Earlier in the day, his wares had been confiscated, and he had been humiliated when he went to complain. The self-immolation touched off protests that reached Tunisia’s capital ten days later. Protesters brought a number of issues to the table: unemployment, food-price inflation, corruption, poor living conditions, lack of freedoms, and government unresponsiveness. At first, President [Zine El Abidine] Ben Ali, who had ruled for a quarter century, tried to pacify the protesters. In a pattern that would be repeated time after time in the Arab world, he promised 300,000 new jobs, new parliamentary elections, and a “national dialogue.” This did little to mollify the protesters. By January 14, 2011—less than a month after Bouazizi’s self-immolation—military and political leaders had had enough, and with the army surrounding the presidential palace, Ben Ali resigned and appointed his prime minister to head a caretaker government. Parliamentary elections were held in October 2011 with a 90 percent turnout. The parliament’s main order of business was to draft a new constitution. About a week and a half after Ben Ali fled, young people, many of whom belonged to the April 6 Youth Movement, began their occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo. (While Tahrir Square was but one site of many in Egypt where protests were held that day, it emerged as the symbolic center of the Egyptian uprising.) The April 6 Youth Movement got its name from a date in 2008 when young people using Facebook called for a general strike to support striking workers at a state-run textile factory. The general strike never happened, giving the lie to the miraculous powers now ascribed to Facebook and other social media. In 2011, however, the security forces and goons-for-hire failed to dislodge the protesters, and the army announced it would not fire on them. Strikes and antigovernment protests spread throughout Egypt. On February 11, 2011, the army took matters into its own hands: it deposed President Hosni Mubarak and established a new government under the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. This phase of the

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Egyptian uprising—what might be called the first street phase—was over in a mere eighteen days. The uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt created the template—a false template, as it were—according to which the media and the general public have viewed the success or failure of other uprisings in the region. There are three aspects of this template: First, in the public imagination at least, both uprisings were largely peaceful, with tech-savvy youths playing the lead role in the drama (an exaggeration on both counts). Second, both uprisings brought down autocrats when the “people’s army” refused to shoot at protesters. Finally, both got rid of autocrats in a matter of weeks. No matter what inspiration other uprisings that broke out in the Arab world in subsequent weeks derived from the Tunisian and Egyptian models, however, it would be wrong to look at them through the lens of Tunisia and Egypt. It is true that after Egypt, ongoing protests in Algeria and Yemen took a new turn as young people adopted the Egyptian style of protest. In both places, however, protests had very un-Tunisian, un-Egyptian results. In Bahrain, protests modeled on those in Egypt led to an invasion by troops and police from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and to fierce repression. In Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco, kings who had presented themselves as “reformers” now faced lists of demands including expanded representation, an end to corruption, and constitutional checks on monarchic power—but, significantly, they did not face calls for the end of their regimes, as had autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt. Libya soon descended into a six-month civil war that only ended after a fierce NATO air campaign. For the second time, outside intervention determined the course of an uprising. Finally, after months of predictions that it couldn’t happen in Syria, it did. In March 2011, Syrian security services arrested ten schoolchildren age fifteen and younger in the provincial city of Daraa. Their crime? Borrowing a slogan from the Egyptian uprising, they wrote as graffiti “Down with the nizam [regime]” on walls. When their parents went out on the streets to protest, the security services fired, killing several. The next day, 20,000 residents of Daraa took to the streets. The Syrian bloodbath had begun. These were the main sites of protest. There were others, less publicized. So what is going on?

A Spring or a Wave? Two metaphors are commonly used to describe what has been happening in the Arab world since December 2010. The first and most commonly used metaphor is “Arab Spring.” There are three problems with this title. First, it is calendrically inaccurate: only one of the uprisings—the uprising in Syria—actually broke out during a spring month. The others began in the dead of winter.

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The second problem with the title “Arab Spring” is that it is misleading. Spring is commonly associated with joy and renewal. The jury is still out on all the uprisings, and as of this writing, a number have turned pretty sour. After eighteen months, only events in Tunisia gave cause for (cautious) optimism: Ben Ali was gone, the army was back in its barracks, elections had been held, the next election was scheduled, and work on a new constitution had begun. In Libya and Yemen, breakup or total anarchy still remained a possibility, the Egyptian army had yet to abdicate the power it had seized on February 11, 2011, and Syria continued its descent into hell. This is not the sort of scorecard that breeds confidence. The final problem with the title “Arab Spring” is that it was already taken. Conservative commentators used the phrase in 2005 to refer to events in the Arab world that occurred in the wake of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the announcement of President George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda.” During that Arab Spring, Iraq held its first post-Saddam elections, the Cedar Revolution broke out in Lebanon, Saudi Arabians voted in municipal elections, Kuwait gave its women suffrage, and Husni Mubarak pledged that the next presidential elections would be the cleanest in Egyptian history. Unfortunately, the fulfillment of the promise of that Arab Spring proved elusive. In 2006, sectarian violence raged in Iraq. Although the Syrian army was forced out of Lebanon, Lebanese politics soon reverted to its usual dysfunctional state. While the first municipal elections were held in Saudi Arabia in 2005, the government postponed the next round, originally scheduled for 2009. Unsurprisingly, when those elections were finally held in September 2011, women were excluded from the electorate. And, of course, Mubarak’s pledge proved so hollow that in 2010 he could renew it, vowing that the next presidential elections would be the cleanest in Egyptian history. The only success story was women’s suffrage in Kuwait. In sum, the first Arab Spring was a nonevent unworthy of emulation. The title Arab Spring obscures the fact that what has been occurring in the Arab world since 2010 should not be viewed as an isolated event. Rather, it is the culmination of a decades-long struggle for human dignity in the region. Over the course of the past three decades, for example, protesters throughout the Arab world have, on numerous occasions, taken to the streets or participated in less dramatic forms of protest, such as petition campaigns, in their quest for human and democratic rights: the so-called “Black October riots” of 1988 in Algeria, which prompted the first free elections (subsequently overturned) in the Arab world; the Bahraini intifada (uprising) of 1994 to 1999, which began with the circulation of a petition signed by an estimated 10 percent of the island’s population demanding the restoration of a constitution that stipulated the election (not appointment) of a majority of parliamentarians and the expansion of the franchise to women; the brief “Damascus Spring” of 2000, a period of intense political ferment that began

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after the death of Syrian president Hafez al-Assad with the circulation of a petition signed by ninety-nine intellectuals demanding, among other things, the end of emergency rule, the release of political prisoners, and freedom of speech, assembly, and expression; the formation of Kefaya (Enough!) in Egypt in 2004, an amalgam of political currents ranging from nationalist to communist to Islamist that called for the resignation of Husni Mubarak and for electoral reform; the Cedar Revolution of 2005, during which protesters demanded not only the removal of Syrian forces from Lebanon but parliamentary elections free from Syrian interference. And the list goes on. The second metaphor commonly used to describe what has been happening in the Arab world since Bouazizi’s death is “wave.” There are pluses and minuses to viewing the various uprisings as part of a wave. On the plus side, there is no denying that later Arab uprisings borrowed techniques of mobilization and symbols from earlier ones. Town squares that became the sites of protest throughout the Arab world were renamed “Tahrir Square” after the main site of protest in Cairo, and many uprisings began with a scheduled “day of rage,” also borrowed from the Egyptian model. Then there is the highly touted use of social-networking sites for the purpose of mobilization, not to mention the common demands for human and democratic rights and social justice. However, the wave metaphor also obscures the fact that the goals and styles of the uprisings and protests have varied widely from country to country. The goal of some has been the complete overthrow of the regime, while others have aimed for its reform. In some places, initial protests came about after meticulous preparation; in others, the spark was spontaneous. And there have been times when uprisings have been predominantly peaceful, and other times when they have taken a violent turn.

Transnational Vulnerabilities to Popular Anger The wave metaphor might be salvaged if we remain aware that what is taking place in the Arab world has both transnational and national elements. Overall, four transnational factors have made all states in the Arab world vulnerable to popular anger.

Neoliberalism and the End of “Benefits for Compliance” First, beginning in the late 1970s and accelerating over the course of the past decade, the United States and international banking institutions have persuaded or coerced regimes throughout the region to adopt social and economic policies associated with neoliberalism. These policies shredded the post–World War II ruling bargain that had connected Arab governments with their populations.

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Before the 1980s, states throughout the Arab world had played an uncontested role in their national economies in an effort to force-march economic development. They also provided a wide array of social benefits for their populations, including employment guarantees, health care, and education. In addition, consumer goods like food and petroleum products were subsidized by the state. In some states—[Gamal Abdel] Nasser’s Egypt, postindependence Algeria, [Muammar] Qaddafi’s Libya, post-1958 Iraq, Syria at various times, and others—regimes justified their policies using a populist discourse that extolled anticolonialism and the virtues of the revolutionary masses. In others—Jordan and Saudi Arabia, for example—rulers appealed to tradition or efficiency. Whether “revolutionary” or “reactionary,” however, governments arrived at the same destination, although via different routes. In return for their generosity, Arab states expected obedience. Overall, then, the ruling bargain connecting states with their populations might be summed up in three words: benefits for compliance. Neoliberal economic policies got their tentative start in the Arab world in December 1976, when Egypt negotiated a $450 million credit line with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In return, the Egyptian government pledged to cut commodity supports and direct subsidies. Over the course of the next three decades, the IMF negotiated ever-more expansive agreements with cash-strapped governments in the region. These agreements were fairly consistent across the board: governments agreed to cut and target subsidies, remove price controls, privatize government-owned assets, balance their budgets, liberalize trade, deregulate business, and the like. Neoliberalism thus violated the norms of the ruling bargain. As mentioned earlier, populations throughout the Arab world confronted the new dispensation by engaging in acts of resistance that ranged from revolt to labor activism. Those populations have found two aspects of neoliberalism particularly repellent. The first is the fraying of the social safety net and threats to middle-class welfare, particularly in the form of cuts to across-the-board subsidies for food and fuel. The second is the sell-off of publicly owned enterprises. For many, privatization threatened state-employment guarantees. Furthermore, privatization led not, as promised, to free market capitalism but rather to crony capitalism as regime loyalists took advantage of their access to the corridors of power. Privatization also widened the gulf between rich and poor. The worst of the crony capitalists—Ahmad Ezz in Egypt, Rami Makhlouf in Syria, anyone named Trabelsi in Tunisia—thus came to symbolize systemic corruption in the buildup to the uprisings.

Youthful Populations The second transnational factor that has made regimes in the Arab world vulnerable is demography. Approximately 60 percent of the population of the Arab world is under the age of thirty. Even more telling is the percentage of youths between

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the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine, the period during which most enter the job market and compete on the marriage market. Youths between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine make up 29 percent of the population of Tunisia, 30 percent of the population of Egypt, 32 percent of the population of Algeria, and 34 percent of the population of Libya. They also make up the bulk of the unemployed. By 2010 there was a cohort of youth throughout the Arab world with a significant set of grievances. Under the proper circumstances, this cohort was available to be mobilized for oppositional politics.

The High Cost of Food The third transnational factor that has made regimes in the Arab world vulnerable has to do with the recent shock to the international food supply chain. The Arab Middle East is more dependent on aggregate food imports than any other region in the world. Egypt alone is the world’s largest wheat importer. Since mid-2010, the world price of wheat has more than doubled, spiking in January 2011. Economists attribute this to a number of factors, from speculation to drought to more acreage in the United States and Europe devoted to growing corn for biofuel. But beyond dependence on food imports, skyrocketing food prices are a particular burden in the Arab world for two reasons. First, the portion of household spending that goes to pay for food in the Arab world reaches as high as 63 percent in Morocco. Neoliberal economic policies adopted by governments in the region are the second reason the damage caused by skyrocketing food prices in the Arab world is particularly punishing. Pressure from the United States and the IMF has constrained governments from intervening into markets to fix prices and has forced governments to abandon across-the-board subsidies on food.

Brittle Regimes: The Lack of Popular Representation The final transnational factor making regimes vulnerable is their brittleness. The years between the onset of the economic crisis of 2008 and the first uprising, in Tunisia, were not good ones for governments throughout the world. Governments found themselves caught between bankers and economists recommending austerity, on the one hand, and populations fearing the end of the welfare state they had come to know, on the other. While uprisings were spreading in the Arab world, governments fell in the United Kingdom, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Iceland, Italy, and elsewhere and were challenged in France and the United States. Throughout it all, not one government was overthrown; nor were political institutions uprooted. Blame fell on politicians and parties and the policies they pushed. In the Arab world popular representatives could not be turned out of office because there were no popular representatives. This is why populations throughout

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the region took to the streets as their first option. This also explains why the most common slogan during this period has been “Down with the nizam [regime, system, order]” and not “Down with the government [hukuma].”

Four Clusters: The Courses of the Uprisings These four factors, then, made all regimes throughout the Arab world vulnerable to the sort of street protests we have witnessed since December 2010. Once uprisings began to break out in the region, they took a number of forms. In the main, the uprisings that have broken out so far might be placed into four clusters.

The Military Sides with the Protestors (Tunisia, Egypt) The first cluster consists of Tunisia and Egypt, where militaries, siding with protesters and not with autocrats, eased the ouster of the latter from power. Tunisia is tinier in terms of both size and population, relatively wealthier, more urbanized, and more cosmopolitan than its neighbor to the east. Yet Tunisia and Egypt have in common one thing that is unique in the Arab world: both have long histories as autonomous, developmentally oriented states. Beginning in the nineteenth century, both experienced over two centuries of continuous state building. As a result, functioning institutions autonomous from the government’s executive branch existed in both. Most important, there was a functioning military that could step in under crisis conditions. During the uprisings, the militaries of both states stepped in to preserve their privileges and essential parts of the nizam. To accomplish this, they ensured that the most provocative symbol of the regime—Ben Ali and his family in Tunisia, Mubarak and his in Egypt—was out of the way. Nevertheless, although the militaries initially took similar stands in Tunisia and Egypt, their subsequent actions diverged, again in accordance with their institutional histories. The Tunisian military had never seen action and was kept the smallest in the Arab world by Tunisia’s two postindependence presidents, Habib Bourguiba and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Both feared that a powerful military would threaten their hold on power. In contrast, the Egyptian military is the largest in the Arab world—about 450,000 active duty personnel—and is equipped with the best force-on-force hardware that $1.3 billion per year in military assistance from the United States can buy. It also controls a significant portion of the Egyptian economy (estimates run from 15 to 40 percent), with holdings in everything from real estate to manufacturing to agricultural production. The Tunisian military thus went back to its barracks under popular pressure; the Egyptian military, anxious to preserve a political position commensurate with its size as well as its economic empire, has, a year and a half after it seized power, yet to do so.

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The Regime Splinters into Opponents and Supporters (Yemen, Libya) The second cluster of states undergoing uprisings includes Yemen and Libya, where regimes fragmented, pitting the officers and soldiers, cabinet ministers, politicians, and diplomats who stood with the regime against those who joined the opposition. (Tribes and tribal confederations, upon which the regimes depended to compensate for institutional underdevelopment, also divided into opposing camps.) The fragmentation of regimes in the two states is not surprising: in contrast to Tunisia and Egypt, both Yemen and Libya are poster children for what political scientists call “weak states.” In weak states, governments and the bureaucracies upon which they depend are unable to assert their authority over the entirety of the territory they rule; nor are they able to extend their reach beneath the surface of society. It is partly for this reason that populations in weak states lack strong national identities. Such is the situation in both Yemen and Libya. To a certain extent, the weakness of the Yemeni and Libyan states is a result of geography. Neither country has terrain that makes it easy to govern—Yemen’s because of its roughness, Libya’s because of its expansiveness. To a certain extent, the weakness of the Yemeni and Libyan states is a result of their history (or lack thereof ). Both states are relatively recent creations, artificially constructed from disparate elements. Finally, the weakness of the Yemeni and Libyan states is a product of the ruling styles of their leaders: both Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen and Muammar Qaddafi of Libya avoided establishing strong institutions in favor of a personalistic style of rule. With virtually no institutions that might maintain regime cohesion, the regimes in Yemen and Libya simply splintered when exposed to the pressure of uprisings. This also accounts for the reason the uprisings in both states necessarily became violent and drawn out. Unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, there was no unified army that could intervene, declare its commitment to nonviolence, and keep regime loyalists and opponents separated. On the other hand, there may be an upside to the disintegration of the regimes in the two countries. Because institutions in both Yemen and Libya were weak and are unlikely to survive the overthrow of the ruling cliques, a better opportunity for revolutionary change exists in these two countries than in Egypt, for example.

The Regime Maintains Its Cohesion (Algeria, Syria, Bahrain) A third cluster of states includes Algeria, Syria, and Bahrain, where regimes maintained their cohesion against the uprisings. One might even say that in Algeria, Syria, and Bahrain regimes had no choice but to do so. Thus, once uprisings broke out in these three states, there was little likelihood that one part of the ruling institution would turn on another, as happened in Tunisia or Egypt, or that the ruling institution would splinter, as happened in Libya and Yemen.

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In Syria and Bahrain rulers effectively “coup-proofed” their regimes by, among other things, exploiting ties of sect and kinship to build a close-knit, interdependent ruling group. In Syria this group consists of Bashar al-Assad, his extended family, and members of the minority Alawite community (which makes up about 11 percent of the population). Thus Maher al-Assad, President Bashar al-Assad’s brother, is the head of the presidential guard, and General Assef Shawkat, Bashar’s brother-in-law, is deputy chief of staff. Neither can turn on the regime: if the regime goes, they go too. In addition, the regime has outsourced much of the repression to ashbah (ghosts; sing.: shabiha)—Alawite hoodlums who hail from the Assad family’s home region—who supplement the formal, overlapping security agencies. The ashbah have played a critical role during the uprising by “mopping up” pockets of resistance in neighborhoods previously softened up by bombardment—a task with which Sunni conscripts could not be trusted.

Five Monarchies (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Oman, Morocco) The final cluster of states that have experienced uprisings consists of five of the seven remaining monarchies: Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Oman. Here the word “uprising” is a misnomer. With the exception of the uprising in Bahrain, protests in the Arab monarchies share two important characteristics that set them apart from uprisings in the Arab republics: they have been more limited in scope, and they have demanded reform of the nizam, not its overthrow. It is not altogether clear why this discrepancy has been the case—or, for that matter, whether it will continue to be so. According to sociologist and political scientist Jack A. Goldstone, the demand is for reform and not revolution because monarchs have an ability presidents—even presidents for life—do not: they can retain executive power while ceding legislative power to an elected assembly and prime minister. As a result, the assembly and prime minister, not the monarch, become the focal point of popular anger when things go wrong. King Abdullah of Jordan has been particularly adept at placing blame for the slow pace of reform on the shoulders of others. Between the onset of the Arab uprisings and spring 2012, he has gone through four prime ministers. Goldstone’s argument has made quite a splash in the policymaking and academic communities, but it fails to convince. The model he provides more closely fits Jordan or Kuwait, which have operating parliaments, than, for example, Saudi Arabia, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the House of Saud. As a matter of fact, save for the fact that Saudi protesters demanded reform of the Saudi regime rather than its complete replacement, Saudi Arabia might be removed from the monarchies category altogether and placed in the same category as Algeria, Syria, and Bahrain. As vulnerable as the Saudi regime has at various times appeared, tribal and kinship ties suffuse it, inextricably binding the military and security apparatus

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with the royal family and religious establishment, which uses its position to lend the regime its veneer of legitimacy. As time goes on, events in one or more of the states discussed above, or in Iraq or Palestine, for example, may force us to rethink the entire wave of uprisings or the categorization of individual uprisings. This is, of course, to be expected. After all, what eighteenth-century Frenchman, reflecting on events a year and a half after the storming of the Bastille—an incident as electrifying for the French as Bouazizi’s self-immolation was for Arabs—could have foreseen the execution of Louis XVI (still two years distant) or the Reign of Terror (two years, eight months distant), much less the event that, for many historians, closed the books on the French Revolution: the coronation of Napoleon as emperor of France (nine years distant)? Adapted from Chapter 12, by James L. Gelvin, in David W. Lesch and Mark L. Haas, eds., The Arab Spring: Change and Resistance in the Middle East (2013, Westview Press).

PART VI

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The Contemporary Middle East: Some Questions, Some Answers Shibley Telhami

In the following question-and-answer essay, Shibley Telhami forthrightly addresses key questions concerning the Middle East and America’s interests in it. He notes that even after the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq at the end of 2011, Arab anger at the United States persists, especially for the decline of Iraqi influence and the concomitant empowerment of Iran. There is “no question,” says Telhami, that Iran is the “biggest winner” from Iraq’s troubles, which makes the Sunni Arab regimes of the region nervous and gives them reason to want to revive Iraq’s role in the Arab world—an appeal to the Arab identity of Iraqis might then help counterbalance the affinity between Iraq’s Shiites and their coreligionists in Iran. An American military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would probably delay for only a few years an Iranian nuclearweapons capacity. The possibility of provoking an angry Iran to eventual nuclear retaliation is worse than the option of pursuing economic sanctions and diplomacy, even if those efforts ultimately fail to prevent a nuclear Iran. Telhami reports that his public-opinion polls in recent years had shown a trend of increasing public anger with the rulers. The surprise, then, was not with the discontent displayed in the Arab Spring but with the fact that “dignity and freedom” were so commonly articulated as goals of the protests compared to narrower economic issues. The uprisings really were more Arab than Islamic, which is a leading reason why Persian Iran was relatively unaffected by the Arab Spring, despite its own massive protests following its 2009 elections. In Syria, the uprisings and the regime’s crackdown on them are likely to persist as a “bloody stalemate” for some time to come. Were the Bashar Assad regime in Syria to fall, however, it would deprive Iran of its only Arab government ally, and Hezbollah, too, would lose Syria as a link between Iran and Lebanon. But regime change in Syria could also open up Sunni-Shiite sectarian conflict in that country and allow al-Qaeda to establish a base of operations close to Israel. In Egypt, the military abandoned Hosni Mubarak, thus making his ouster inevitable. Although, as temporary custodians of the government, the military did set up parliamentary and presidential elections, it was distrustful of both the antimilitary young liberals and the Islamist parties and, so, moved deliberately in order not to jeopardize its own interests and privileges. No 372

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matter who runs the new government, though, Egypt will likely reassess the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979. Likewise, the Egyptian public is sympathetic to Hamas and favors its reconciliation with Fatah. Recent peace talks between the Palestinians and Israel have met with little or no success. Consequently, the Palestinians have tried to go directly to the United Nations to seek declaration of an independent Palestinian state. The United States supports a Palestinian state but has lobbied against using the appeal to the United Nations as the route to that goal. Telhami points out that the prospects for a two-state solution to the Palestinian issue “are diminishing by the day” because of continued expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. But most Israelis and some Palestinians would oppose the other option, a binational state, passionately. Continued conflict, including armed conflict, between Israelis and Palestinians seems probable. Shibley Telhami is Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland at College Park, a nonresident senior fellow at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a principal investigator in the Arab Public Opinion Survey, conducted annually in six Arab countries. His numerous books include The Stakes: America and the Middle East and The World Through Arab Eyes: Arab Public Opinion and the Reshaping of the Middle East. The present chapter was prepared specially for this volume.

How has the withdrawal of US combat forces from Iraq affected Middle East perceptions of the United States? In general, there has been slight improvement in the Arab attitudes toward the United States from 2010 to 2011. When President Barack Obama came to office, Arab public opinion was somewhat optimistic about him and about American policy in the Middle East, and Obama himself received more favorable than unfavorable ratings in the poll that I conducted in six countries in the spring of 2009: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Much of that hope was based on his announcement that he would pull out of Iraq and expectations that he would actively pursue comprehensive and just peace between Israel and the Palestinians. This contrasted sharply with attitudes toward the presidency of George W. Bush; for several years beginning with the 2003 Iraq War, President Bush was identified as the singlemost disliked leader in the world by the Arab public, even more disliked than the prime minister of Israel. By the summer of 2010, there was a total reversal of attitudes toward President Obama personally and toward the United States broadly. The principal reason in the polling was clear: his failure to broker Arab-Israeli peace and his seeming reversal of policy on the issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. With that in mind, the attitudes of Arab respondents in October 2011 improved somewhat from 2010, but they still lagged far behind 2009. The previous year saw the most amazing events sweeping the Arab world in the public uprisings

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that signaled the most important Arab public empowerment in the contemporary history of the Arab world. And while interpretations of the role of the United States in the Arab uprisings were mixed across the Arab public, they were generally somewhat positive. While it is hard to assess fully what issue made the most difference in attitudes toward the United States in 2011, we do know that the percentage of people who were disappointed with American policy toward Iraq in 2010 declined to about half in 2011, and from previous years we know that the two biggest issues that angered Arabs with regard to American foreign policy were Iraq and the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. So there is no question that, had a significant number of American forces remained in Iraq, the level of anger with American foreign policy would have been even greater. But one has to keep in mind that Arabs continue to be angry at the United States over the Iraq issue. That anger has to do with the devastation that the 2003 war has brought and with the decline of Iraqi influence in the Arab world and the empowerment of Iran. Strikingly, in Saudi Arabia, the poll that I conducted in 2011 showed that Saddam Hussein was the single-most popular world leader outside Saudi Arabia, which indicates how the deep resentment of American policy continues. Tied to this is a strong opposition found in the polls to the presence of American forces in the Arabian Peninsula, which, in the first place, was enabled by the 1991 American-led war to reverse the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The absence of visible American forces in Iraq will probably reduce the deep anger with the United States over Iraq, but it certainly will not eliminate it.

With the displacement of the Iraqi Sunni minority from power, what kind of relationship does the Shiite-dominated government of Iraq now maintain with Shiite Iran? While generally the Arab public wanted to see the American military withdrawn from Iraq as quickly as possible, many of Iraq’s neighboring Arab governments, particularly Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan, were concerned about the consequences of a rapid American withdrawal for the Iraqi Sunni minority, which has emerged as the biggest loser in the internal reconfiguration of power in Iraq. Obviously, Arab public opinion in the region generally reflects on Iraq through the condition of the Sunni Arabs as the majority of Arabs, certainly in the countries we poll, are Sunnis. Two sets of worries are sometimes mixed. One is a genuine Arab concern about the rise of Iranian power. In particular, the United Arab Emirates, which is a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council, has a major dispute with Iran over islands that the UAE claims and Iran controls. The second is a fear that the Shia majority in Iraq is in fact cooperating strategically with Iran. In places like Bahrain, which has a Sunni-controlled government but a Shia majority,

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and in Saudi Arabia, where there is a significant Shia minority, there is worry that Shia empowerment could pose threats to the ruling regimes. At one level, there is no question that Iran is the biggest winner, not just regionally but also in the degree of influence that it has acquired in Iraq. Many of the Iraqi Shia elites not only have ongoing religious relations with counterparts in Iran but have built political relationships as well. But it has always been the case that Shia Iraqis are also Iraqi and Arab; they are far from united politically, and, for many, the Shia aspect of their identity is by no means the dominant one. Both the Arab states and the ruling elites in Iraq have an interest in a revived Iraqi role in the Arab world and the Arab League. In fact, in 2012, Iraq hosted the first postwar Arab summit as a way of signaling its political return to the Arab fold. The Arab uprisings complicate the picture even more, as fear of challenge to the existing rulers in the oil-producing Arab states creates an incentive to posit that challenge as a sectarian Sunni-Shia issue and/or an ethnic Iranian-Arab issue, as we have seen in the unfolding of the events in Bahrain. In addition, one of Iraq’s neighbors, Syria, is undergoing a major uprising whose outcome remains uncertain and that will inevitably have ramifications for Iran and for Iraq. All of this means that uncertainty will continue, both with regard to Iraq’s ability to come together and overcome the Sunni-Shia divide on the one hand and the Kurdish-Arab divide on the other. And Iraq’s role vis-à-vis Iran and the Arab world will remain fluid and highly dependent on not only the course of the Arab uprisings but also possible conflict between Israel and Iran over Iran’s nuclear program.

Should the United States hope to deter Iran from achieving a militarized nuclear capability? If so, how? It is important to start with some assessments of Iran’s nuclear program and the options available in dealing with it. Iran has always said that its program is intended for peaceful purposes, and its supreme leader, Ali Khamenie, has decreed that it is un-Islamic to pursue nuclear weapons. Still, it is reasonable to doubt that Iranian leaders’ mere statements are binding religious decrees and instead to assess their behavior. By 2012, it was both the American and the Israeli intelligence assessment that Iran had not yet made the decision to develop nuclear weapons. In addition, leaked assessments from the US military and intelligence services indicate that even a full American military effort against Iran’s nuclear facilities would at most delay its program from one to three years. In fact, if the Iranians have not committed to building nuclear weapons, an attack on their facilities would almost certainly incline them to move in that direction. For that reason, the Obama administration has been very reluctant to entertain a military solution to the Iranian nuclear program, even as the US military inevitably continues to prepare contingency plans. But the issue for the administration has been principally Israeli reactions and concerns that an attack carried out by Israel on its own would draw the

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United States into a disastrous conflict with Iran. For that reason, the Obama administration worked hard in early 2012 to dissuade the Israelis from attacking, to tighten the sanctions against Iran, and to press Iran to come back to the negotiating table. The net result was a renewal of nuclear talks between the so-called P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) and Iran, as both Iran and the United States and its partners seemed to have more urgent interest in seeking an accord that would prevent military confrontation. Whether or not that ultimately bears fruit remains to be seen, but at issue is one central point of contention between Israel and Iran that is hard to resolve. Almost all experts agree that Iran will not give up its right to enrich uranium on its own soil, which is something that the Israelis have consistently said they cannot live with. Whether Israel is bluffing or not, no one can know for sure. But any agreement between Iran and the international community will probably merely place limits on Iran’s uranium enrichment and storage on its own soil rather than completely end its enrichment program. From the American point of view, the choice is not between either ending Iran’s nuclear-weapons potential through military means or allowing it to be fulfilled. It is between, on the one hand, entering a war with Iran that would merely delay its program by one to three years and almost certainly facing an angry nuclear Iran at war with the United States down the road, and, on the other hand, working diplomatically and economically to minimize the chance that Iran will develop nuclear weapons but still running the risk that it will ultimately acquire them. The first option is far worse for the United States. However, what the United States does on this issue depends highly on Israel’s calculations. Israel’s security establishment is divided on the wisdom of carrying out military attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities, but there is almost a consensus that Israel’s prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, and its defense minister, Ehud Barak, are far more inclined to support a military option. Analysts are divided on the extent to which that is a bluffing posture intended to influence the American choices, but no one can afford to take the chance of being wrong.

What fueled the Arab Spring’s widespread demonstrations against established rulers across much of the Middle East? For two decades prior to the 2011 uprisings, studies of Arab public opinion, including regular polling in the past decade, showed the Arab public to be increasingly angry with their rulers and the gap between governments and publics to be growing every year. This was not really a surprise for most analysts, as it was generally understood that the biggest puzzle in Arab politics over the last few decades has been how regimes have been able to maintain control, given the widespread discontent among their populations. Certainly there were many domestic and foreign policy reasons for this, but in the end, it was clear that most people felt that

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the rulers did not represent or stand for them. While economics and governmental services had much to do with the resentment, and these varied from country to country, it is striking that the most common chant in the Arab uprisings in every country had to do with aims for “dignity and freedom.” Sometimes they also included “bread,” as in Egypt, but it is noteworthy that the uprisings started in Tunisia, where the economic issues were not as severe as in some other places. Even in Egypt, the early leaders of the uprisings were not among the poor but included better-educated young people and, in some cases, ones with good jobs. The surprise brought by the uprisings therefore was not really the Arab discontent, which we all knew about, but how Arabs in the end were able to translate that anger into mass political action without the need for established political parties or charismatic leaders. In this regard, there is little doubt that the information revolution—including satellite television but especially the Internet and social media—provided not only independent sources of information that ended government monopolies on disseminating the news but, importantly, created new instruments to organize on a large scale without the traditional methods. Otherwise, the rulers could have done what they have done in the past: disrupt the organizations, arrest the leaders, and prevent mass gatherings, all of which would have made it harder for the public to gather en masse and ultimately break the barrier of fear that governments use as a wall to prevent the public from moving forward.

Why has Iran, which experienced popular protests of its own in the aftermath of its 2009 national election, nonetheless apparently been immune to the Arab Spring movement? Iranian leaders have been arguing that what has been termed the “Arab Awakening” is in fact an Islamic awakening in the Arab world. Aided by victories by Islamist parties in Tunisia and Egypt, they have attempted to argue that the public is merely seeking an Islamic rule akin to Iran’s and that Iran already had its revolution in 1979 (which, by the way, did inspire some Arabs at the time). However, that is a big stretch, as it has become clear in almost every episode of uprisings in the Arab world, especially in the early ones in Tunis and Egypt, that the model to which the rebellions aspire is more democratic than religious, even if Islam will undoubtedly play a role. But the real reason why Iran has not experienced the same level of uprisings is probably threefold. First, the uprisings are really Arab uprisings, not Islamic. We have not seen echoes of the Arab uprisings, certainly on the same scale, outside the Arab world. This is due in part to Arab identity but probably even more so to the fact that the Arab media broadcast principally within the Arab world. Language matters here, and whether Arab audiences are in Morocco, Yemen, or Egypt, they are primarily watching Arab satellite television, particularly Al Jazeera, which nearly half the Arab population identifies as their first choice for news.

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Since the information revolution is highly central to the uprisings, it is not particularly surprising that the central theater is Arab countries. Second, a majority of the Iranian people probably actually support their Islamic government, even if a significant minority adamantly opposes it. Following Iran’s last presidential elections, we saw courageous Iranians who were opposed to the regime challenge the government. They were ruthlessly repressed by government forces, but that cannot be a sufficient explanation for their lack of continuation. Witness the Syrian uprisings: for over a year, the Syrian regime has used its military force against public demonstrations in many parts of the country, with thousands of dead and wounded; yet that has not stopped the uprisings. It is also important to keep in mind that while many Iranians obviously want to see a free country and to overthrow an intolerant religious political order, on matters such as the Iranian nuclear program, there is far more unanimity among Iranians as that is a nationalist issue—so much so that some analysts have speculated that some of the Iranian hard-liners may actually welcome an Israeli or American military strike as a way to help unify the public behind the regime in the same way that the Iranian ruling clergy used the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1980 to consolidate power.

How likely is it that President Bashar Assad will, one way or another, relinquish power in Syria in the near future? When thousands are killed by government forces and thousands more are injured, it is hard to see how things could go back to normal. In 1982, Bashar Assad’s father, Hafez Assad, killed thousands to counter an insurgency, but the scale of the tragedy was only known later, in the absence of the type of media that instantly records much of what happens today. At the same time, it is hard to see a clear path to government change in Syria for three principal reasons. First, the regime obviously has significant public support, although how much is a subject of debate. Certainly the president’s politically dominant minority sect, the Alawites, remains largely supportive, and many of the other minorities, such as the Christians and the Druze, also appear to be largely supportive of the regime, which has provided them with privileges and protections. Some of the Sunni elites in major cities appear to be supportive as well. And the regime of course continues to hold the decisive upper hand in armaments and fighters. The second reason is that there is no international stomach for military intervention in Syria. Even in the Arab world, where the Arab public, according to opinion polls, is highly sympathetic to the rebels against the government, most people do not want to see Western military intervention, as they have no trust in the intentions of the West. Even in the case of Libya, where the overwhelming majority of Arabs were against former Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi, opinion polls show that in retrospect, Arabs think it was a bad idea to allow Western

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intervention. Neither the United States nor its European allies are anxious to get entangled in another conflict in the region. Third, Russia and China remain opposed to resolving the Syrian crisis by military means and appear determined to veto UN Security Council resolutions authorizing the use of force. This became more the case after the Libyan intervention, when Russia and China believed that NATO abused the UN Security Council resolution by acting beyond its mandate. Russia also worries about the potential increase in the power of Islamist militants, such as al-Qaeda, as the Assad regime loses control and has vowed to maintain its support for the regime in the face of international pressure. Moscow has endorsed the mission of former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, who was appointed as an envoy of the United Nations and the Arab League to seek a political solution to the crisis in Syria. But Russian interpretation of events on the ground and how to deal with them have often been at odds with those of the United States as well as the Arab League, with minimal progress made after months of trying. Turkey has considerable interest in Syria next door and has been most active in expanding the options to address the Syrian crisis. In coordination with certain Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia, it may at some point contemplate limited intervention in Syria in order, for example, to create a safe haven on Syrian territory, but this too remains uncertain as of the summer of 2012. For one thing, Turkey remains focused on the possible consequences of the empowerment of Syria’s Kurdish population for Turkey’s own large and assertive Kurdish minority. Unless there is a significant abandonment of the regime by segments of the military and sectors of the public that have been supportive so far, it is probable that a bloody stalemate will prevail for some time.

What might an end to the Assad regime portend for Syria’s relationships with Iran, Israel, and the United States? If the Assad regime collapses, this will clearly be consequential for the region and for the international community, but not necessarily in predictable ways, which is why some parties, including the Israelis, initially had mixed feelings about whether to seek the demise of a predictable regime that had been deterred by Israel since the 1973 Arab-Israeli War or to hope for the regime’s continuation in power. From the American point of view, the Obama administration had originally improved its relations with Syria by appointing a new ambassador in Damascus, but as the Arab uprisings swept through the region, the administration took a position supportive of the people, with some inconsistency, particularly in the case of Bahrain. Strategically, the international community, particularly the United States, takes into account four issues. First, given US and Israeli concerns about the rising power of Iran and its nuclear potential, observers note that Syria has been Iran’s

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only Arab government ally for more than three decades. There is a sense that Iran’s reach in the Arab world would diminish with the collapse of the Syrian regime. But on this score, there also has to be some concern that further isolation of Iran may actually push it toward self-reliance, including contemplating developing nuclear weapons. Second, Syria has been the Arab country most supportive of Hezbollah in Lebanon, which the United States has declared “a terrorist organization” and which fought a bloody war with Israel in 2006. It is likely that, at least in the short term, Hezbollah would lose a military and political ally and an important link between Iran and Lebanon in the Assad regime—although it remains unclear how much the group would be weakened, particularly if Syria collapsed into a period of uncertainty and instability, which would allow many groups, including Hezbollah, to exploit openings. Third, there is a worry that, as happened in Iraq, sectarian conflict within Syria would expand, especially given the tensions among the different groups that make up the Syrian population. Syrian opposition groups and their international backers have made continuous attempts to reassure minorities and worked to minimize the prospect of sectarianism, but witness how, even with all the American occupying forces in Iraq, the outcome could not be avoided in the end. Finally, there is the fear that al-Qaeda will find a new base for operations, this time very close to Israel. In fact, al-Qaeda affiliates have already taken credit for bloody bombings in Syrian cities, including major bombings in Damascus in May 2012 that killed dozens of people and wounded many more.

With President Hosni Mubarak now out of power, why has the Egyptian military seemingly been so slow to transfer authority to a civilian government? It was clear from the outset that the Egyptian military was part and parcel of the Mubarak regime, and it has been the backbone of every government in Egypt since military officers overthrew the monarchy in 1952. The surprise when the Egyptian uprisings started was that the military was prepared to abandon Mubarak himself. The prevalent sense was that the military officers “threw Mubarak under the bus” in order to save the military institution and its influence in a changing Egypt. So while they abandoned Mubarak, the extent to which they were prepared to give up much of their power and influence was not clear, especially given their extraordinary economic interests and privileges within the country, which have helped them create their own empire within Egypt itself. The military also assumed, not incorrectly, that it had much public good will, as Egyptians have traditionally looked at the military institution in positive terms. But it became clear by the fall of 2011 that the public was differentiating between its respect for the military institution on the one hand and its mistrust of the military

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rulers on the other. In the October 2011 poll, we began finding significant mistrust of the intentions of the military, with only a minority of Egyptians believing that the military was trying to help attain the aims of the revolution. The military was going to give as little as it had to and showed considerable flexibility, particularly in responding to the thousands that continued to pack Tahrir Square. It was more suspicious of the young liberals who wanted to see no military role in government than it was of the Muslim Brotherhood, with which it appeared to have a tacit deal. The Brotherhood didn’t want to rock the boat on foreign policy issues and was prepared to leave that realm to the military, and the military was prepared to give the Brotherhood space in the domestic arena and in the elections. But as things turned out, although the Muslim Brotherhood won the largest bloc of seats in the parliamentary elections, there were also other unexpected competitors, especially the more conservative Salafi Islamist parties, which were Egypt’s biggest election surprise. And there were also disagreements within the Muslim Brotherhood, especially with the withdrawal of one of its popular and liberal former leaders, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, who became a leading candidate for president, drawing away some of the Brotherhood’s younger members. This led the Brotherhood, which had said it would not field its own presidential candidate, to reverse itself. In the end, the first round of Egyptian presidential elections proved once again that electoral politics are largely about organization. With a relatively low turnout of only 46 percent, no candidate received more than a quarter of the votes, with five candidates achieving respectable percentages. But the two best-organized candidates led the rest, despite the obvious lack of enthusiasm: Mohamed Morsi of the Brotherhood and Ahmed Shafiq, a former Egyptian air force general, backed by the old establishment, including Mubarak’s National Democratic Party and obviously preferred by the military. This set up a second round of elections with close results that took several days to be announced, with 51 percent of eligible Egyptians voting. With early leaks showing Morsi possibly leading, a delay in announcing the results led to worries that the Egyptian military was attempting to use its allies in the system to engineer a win for Shafiq, its preferred candidate. But in the end, Morsi was declared the winner. He was endorsed and accepted by the military, though not before steps were taken to undermine the president’s power. In particular, the military, armed by an Egyptian Supreme Court finding that onethird of the seats were elected unconstitutionally, moved to dissolve the elected parliament, in which Islamists had achieved a majority. The Supreme Military Council also issued a series of constitutional modifications on the eve of the elections that gave it additional powers at the expense of the president. These steps—imposed by the military and supported by sympathetic courts—were bound to create tension, coming as they did just as the new president assumed

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his office. President Morsi and his supporters, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, appealed to the public, which continued to mobilize in Tahrir Square. Though such public demonstrations could quite possibly provoke further confrontations, at least until a new constitution could be drafted, both sides appeared keen to avoid violence.

In any Egyptian elections, how might a victory by Islamists, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, affect Egypt’s relations with Israel and the United States? It is noteworthy that all public opinion polls we have conducted in the past several years indicate that Egyptians rank the Palestinian question high in their priorities and that this issue remains the central prism through which they evaluate Israel and the United States. This is true not just for Islamists but for liberals and leftists as well. In fact, in many ways, the Mubarak regime was very much going against the broader wishes of the Egyptian people in forging a relationship of close alliance with the government of Israel. So regardless of who ultimately rules Egypt, the relationship with Israel has already dramatically changed. In the polling, we find that, in principle, most Egyptians still support a twostate solution, but a majority believes it will never happen. In the October 2011 poll, we found that Egyptians were roughly evenly divided between those who want to end the peace treaty with Israel and those who want to maintain it. In general, Egyptian leaders across the board, including Brotherhood leaders and even the conservative Salafis, have said that they will respect Egypt’s prior international agreements, including the peace treaty with Israel. But the focus has been more specifically on “reassessing” the terms of the agreement. While the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty is principally a bilateral treaty between Egypt and Israel, the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel had a component calling for Palestinian autonomy. Although there was no clear legal link between the Palestinian component of the agreement and the bilateral Egyptian-Israeli component, most Egyptians feel that the accords were a package deal and that the Palestinian component was not fulfilled. This may also explain why there is a pervasive Egyptian guilt that the Palestinian hand was weakened after the Egyptian-Israeli agreement and a sense of Egyptian responsibility toward the Palestinians. A flavor of things to come was evident in the first-ever Egyptian presidential debate between two of the leading candidates, Aboul Fotouh and former Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa. Fotouh, who is a moderate Islamist with some liberal support, argued that Israel is an enemy of Egypt and pushed Moussa to take a position on this issue. Moussa called Israel an adversary instead. But both agreed that if elected, they would reassess the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, with neither committing himself either way.

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What is the current relationship between the two Palestinian factions, Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Fatah in the West Bank? One consequence of the Arab Awakening has been that the uprisings have forced the Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas to move toward reconciliation. This happened for three reasons. First, the public uprisings in the Arab world resonated among Palestinians, with many taking to the streets and pushing both Fatah and Hamas toward reconciliation. Second, not only did the uprisings in Syria make the Hamas leadership in Damascus uncomfortable in an increasingly unstable environment, but these leaders were reluctant to take the side of the Syrian regime against a Syrian insurgency, much of which was led by Sunnis and supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. This led Hamas to abandon its headquarters in Damascus, rendering the faction somewhat more vulnerable and more prepared to deal with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah faction. At the same time, Abbas was weakened by the failure of the American-led peace efforts and had little to show for his engagement in the negotiations. He thus felt a need to reduce public opposition. Third, while the Mubarak regime was highly sympathetic to Abbas and clearly uncomfortable with Hamas, the Egyptian public and the newly empowered Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt were sympathetic to Hamas and certainly to Palestinian reconciliation efforts. All of this has led to an opening of a more serious dialogue between the two factions, although much remains to separate them, including American and Israeli opposition to reconciliation. That opposition is financially meaningful, for Congress threatened to cut off aid to the Palestinians, and the Israeli government is always in a position to withhold tax funds that it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. The bet is that once the dust settles regarding the Egyptian presidency and the constitutional change, the pressure from Egypt will be stronger than before on behalf of Palestinian reconciliation.

What is the status of talks between Palestinian representatives and Israel? Who (if anyone) is facilitating such discussions? When the Obama administration came to office, one of the first major foreign policy appointments was naming George Mitchell as American envoy to address the Arab-Israeli, particularly the Palestinian-Israeli, conflict. The administration clearly had some handicaps, not only in inheriting a severe mistrust on both sides after a decade without serious diplomatic movement but also in the division among Palestinians and the election of a right-wing Israeli government, many members of which were not supportive of the aims of establishing a Palestinian state on the West Bank and in Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. While the

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Obama administration initially made a principled stand opposing all Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including in East Jerusalem, it was unable in the end to persuade the Israelis to freeze settlements beyond a limited period. The administration lost much credibility in the region following that particular episode. Its position, though, from the outset, was to understand that the type of coalition that governed Israel, including parties of the ultra-Right and the appointment of a right-wing foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, made it difficult to envision a deal. The administration’s hope was that this coalition was a coalition of choice, not of necessity, as Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu of the Likud party had the option of expanding his coalition to include the largest party in the Knesset, Kadima. Ironically, Kadima was only brought into the government in May 2012 after the administration had all but given up on the prospect of a deal between Israel and the Palestinians. Contact between Israelis and Palestinians continued in the meanwhile. Palestinian envoys met with the Israeli prime minister, and following the national unity government deal in Israel in May 2012, the new government attempted to renew negotiations with the Palestinians. But the prospects for a deal remained low, given the preoccupation in the United States with the presidential elections, the uncertainties of the situations in Egypt and Syria, the unfinished reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, and the Israeli focus on the Iran nuclear issue. In this environment, the Palestinians have been attempting to go directly to the United Nations to seek support for a declaration of a Palestinian independent state. But although the Obama administration has been highly supportive of the goal of establishing a Palestinian state through negotiations, it found itself opposing the Palestinian move and lobbying UN members against it.

Which would be more achievable and viable, a two-state solution to the IsraeliPalestinian conflict or a single, binational (Israeli and Palestinian) state? Why? A few years ago, the answer to this question was very straightforward, particularly before the collapse of the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians at Camp David, Maryland, in July 2000. Most people within and outside the region believed that the two sides were headed toward a two-state solution. And despite a decade of losing faith, many, primarily on the Arab side, saw in the election of Barack Obama—with his pronouncements in favor of a two-state solution and his elevation of the Palestinian issue among his priorities in his first few months in office—an increase in the prospects for a peaceful settlement based on the twostate solution. But in the past two years, based on polls I have conducted among Arabs and Israelis, majorities in Israel and the Arab world have come to believe that the two-state solution will never happen. And yet, majorities say they still, in principle, support a two-state solution. Their dilemma is captured by their views on what might happen if, indeed, the two-state solution were no longer possible.

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In this case, the overwhelming majority of both Arabs and Israelis do not believe that the death of the two states would lead to one state or to the Palestinians’ simply giving up. Instead, most believe in one of two outcomes: either violence would ensue for years to come, or the status quo would continue; they don’t see a realistic solution. Analytically, we know that the prospects for a two-state solution are diminishing by the day, both because of the continued expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and because both Israelis and Arabs, particularly Palestinians, are losing faith in the possibility of a peaceful settlement. It is hard to know at what point one can declare with certainty that this solution is no longer possible, but many thoughtful analysts and politicians think that time has already passed. Yet several things are clear. First, the Zionist drive for a Jewish majority state is very powerful and continues to resonate with the overwhelming majority of Israelis and many Jews worldwide. It is improbable that this drive will change any time soon, so a binational state will be fought passionately. Second, the Palestinian people are determined not to abandon their drive to seek a state on at least part of Palestinian territory, and they will continue to command the support of much of the newly empowered Arab public, so this drive will persist. If both sides give up on a compromise solution, conflict, include armed conflict, seems probable. This chapter was specially written for this volume.

S ELECT B IBLIOGRAPHY QR William L. Cleveland and Martin Bunton

This section is intended primarily as an introductory bibliography of works in English to guide readers to the basic books on various aspects of Middle Eastern history. Each of the works listed here contains its own bibliography that readers seeking more specialized references may want to consult.

Reference Works and Periodicals The Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed. (Leiden, 1960–2006), with a changing editorial committee, has now reached twelve volumes. This major scholarly undertaking concentrates on terms, important figures, and concepts of classical and medieval Islam, but also pays some attention to modern developments. Reeva S. Simon, Philip Mattar, and Richard W. Bulliet, eds., The Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East, 4 vols. (New York, 1996), is intended for the student and the educated layperson and contains entries on a variety of fields (politics, history, the arts), covering the area from Morocco through Afghanistan. The International Journal of Middle East Studies (New York) is the scholarly journal of the Middle East Studies Association. It is comprehensive and multidisciplinary, publishing articles that embrace the full chronological scope of Middle Eastern studies from the rise of Islam to the present. The British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies often carries thoughtful interpretive essays. The Middle East Journal (Washington, DC) treats contemporary affairs and foreign policy matters and contains useful chronological and bibliographical sections. Middle Eastern Studies (London) concentrates on modern history. Middle East Report (New York) offers a critical, left-of-center approach to a broad range of current events. The periodical’s challenging and sometimes controversial coverage offers a perspective often at odds with official Washington policy. In addition to the journals that provide regional treatment, various scholarly organizations publish periodicals on almost every country in the Middle East. Many of these are excellent. For anyone seeking to follow current events in a systematic fashion, the Internet provides access to such essential newspapers as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Economist, the Financial Times, and the Guardian, as well as English-language editions of several daily and weekly publications originating in the Middle East, such as Egypt’s al Ahram, Israel’s Haaretz, Lebanon’s Daily Star, and al Hayat. There are also a growing number of valuable online blogs; among the best-informed and longest standing are Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, Helena Cobban’s Just World News, and Joshua Landis’s Syrian Comment.

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Egypt The most comprehensive and up-to-date treatment of modern Egypt is M. W. Daly, ed., The Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 2, Modern Egypt, from 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1998), which incorporates recent historical interpretations in a series of chronologically ordered chapters by leading experts. A skillful combination of synthesis and substance makes James Jankowski, Egypt: A Short History (Oxford, 2000), an excellent introductory survey. Although not without its biases, P. J. Vatikiotis, The History of Modern Egypt: From Muhammad Ali to Mubarak, 4th ed. (Baltimore, 1991), remains an important survey. The best study of the Muslim Brotherhood is Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (London, 1969). The 1967 war is analyzed in Nadav Safran, From War to War: The Arab-Israeli Confrontation, 1948–1967 (New York, 1969). One of the best analyses of the circumstances leading up to the 1967 war is Richard B. Parker, The Politics of Miscalculation in the Middle East (Bloomington, 1993). The same author’s edited collection, The Six Day War: A Retrospective (Gainsville, 1996), offers valuable perspectives on the policies and motivations of the belligerents and the major outside powers. An excellent account of the Islamic opposition is Gilles Kepel, The Prophet and Pharaoh: Muslim Extremism in Egypt, trans. Jon Rothschild (London, 1985). An important study that portrays the Islamist revival of the 1990s as permanent and moderate is Geneive Abdo, No God but God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam (Oxford, 2000). Robert Springborg, Mubarak’s Egypt: Fragmentation of the Political Order (Boulder, 1989), examines the relationship between political authority and economic change during the first six years of Mubarak’s presidency.

Syria For a general history, see A. L. Tibawi, A Modern History of Syria Including Lebanon and Palestine (New York, 1969). Previous studies of the mandate era have been superseded by Philip S. Khoury’s splendid work, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920–1945 (Princeton, 1987), but the insights in Albert Hourani, Syria and Lebanon: A Political Essay (London, 1946), remain valuable. Raymond A. Hinnebush has written several works on the Ba’athist period, the most ambitious of which is Authoritarian Power and State Formation in Ba’thist Syria: Army, Party, and Peasant (Boulder, 1990), a work that provides a political science perspective on the period 1950 to 1980. More succinct is the same author’s Syria: Revolution from Above (London, 2001), which focuses on the formation of the Syrian state from the early 1960s to the death of Hafiz al-Asad in 2000. The regionalist doctrine of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party is examined in Labib Zuwiyya-Yamak, The Syrian Social Nationalist Party: An Ideological Analysis (Cambridge, 1966). A sympathetic portrait of Hafiz al-Asad is provided in the biography by Patrick Seale, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East (Berkeley, 1989). An assessment of the Syrian president’s policies and objectives is found in Moshe Ma’oz, Asad, the Sphinx of Damascus: A Political Biography (London, 1988), and in the same author’s Syria and Egypt: From War to Peacemaking (Oxford, 1995).

Iraq The best historical survey of Iraq is the very fine work by Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge, 2000). See also Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq, 3rd ed. (Boulder, 2012).

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Accounts of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the resulting Gulf War include Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict, 1990–1991: Diplomacy and War in the New World Order (Princeton, 1993); Dilip Hiro, Desert Shield to Desert Storm: The Second Gulf War (New York, 1992); and a book compiled by the staff of U.S. News & World Report titled Triumph Without Victory: The History of the Persian Gulf War (New York, 1993). The coverage in Middle East Report offers a stimulating alternative view to the explanations released by the Bush administration. Two excellent studies of the border disputes between Iraq and Kuwait are David H. Finnie, Shifting Lines in the Sand: Kuwait’s Elusive Frontier with Iraq (Cambridge, 1992), and Richard Schofield, Kuwait and Iraq: Historical Claims and Territorial Disputes, 2nd ed. (London, 1993). The early phases of the 2003 American invasion of Iraq are discussed in Anthony Cordesman, The Iraq War: Strategy, Tactics and Military Lessons (Westport, 2003); a thorough analysis of the occupation is provided by Ali A. Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (New Haven, 2007). Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a journalist based in Baghdad from 2003 to 2004, shares his observations of American bungling in Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York, 2006), while Rory Stewart, a British official posted in southern Iraq, documents his experiences in The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq (Orlando, 2006). In her book Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq (New York, 2005), a young Iraqi girl publishes her observations, first posted on the Internet under the pseudonym Riverbend, of the war and occupation.

Palestine and Israel Zionism and the Mandate Period A basic collection of documents is contained in Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin, eds., The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict, 6th rev. ed. (New York, 2001). For the history of Zionism and the development of Zionist ideology, see Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State (New York, 1981); Ben Halpern, The Idea of the Jewish State, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA, 1969); and Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York, 1972). A work that illuminates not only the life of its subject but also the history of political Zionism and the diplomacy of the mandate era is Jehuda Reinharz’s excellent two-volume biography, Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Zionist Leader (New York, 1985), and Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman (New York, 1993). A comprehensive survey treating Palestine and Arab-Jewish relations from late Ottoman times is Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 6th ed. (New York, 2007). A more detailed but less focused survey is Mark Tessler, A History of the IsraeliPalestinian Conflict (Bloomington, 1994). A revisionist approach that views the practices of the first and second aliyahs within the framework of a colonial enterprise is Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914, updated ed. (Berkeley, 1996). Specific studies of the mandate, with strong emphasis on British policymaking, include Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict, 1917–1929 (London, 1978), which explains the machinery of government, and Christopher Sykes, Cross Roads to Israel, reprint (Bloomington, 1978). Barbara J. Smith, The Roots of Separatism in Palestine: British Economic Policy, 1920–1929 (Syracuse, 1993), argues that Britain’s economic policies facilitated the devel-

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opment of a separate Zionist economy as early as the 1920s. Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (Berkeley, 1996), examines the ways in which the mandate-era Zionist labor establishment was shaped by its internal debate on how to deal with Palestinian Arab workers and their unions. The final years of the mandate are examined in Michael Cohen, Palestine, Retreat from the Mandate: The Making of British Policy, 1936–1945 (New York, 1978), and the same author’s Palestine and the Great Powers (Princeton, 1982). The perspectives and policies of all the main participants are examined in Wm. Roger Louis and Robert W. Stookey, eds., The End of the Palestine Mandate (Austin, 1986). There is much that is still valuable in J. C. Hurewitz, The Struggle for Palestine, reprint (New York, 1968). Among the works on the development of Zionist institutions during the mandate are Noah Lucas, The Modern History of Israel (London, 1974), and Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak, Origins of the Israeli Polity: Palestine Under the Mandate (Chicago, 1978). The Jewish acquisition of land is examined in Kenneth W. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill, 1984). The thorny issue of population receives definitive treatment in Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (New York, 1990). The rise of political activity among the Palestinian notables is analyzed in great detail in Yehoshua Porath’s two studies, The Emergence of the Palestinian National Movement, 1918–1929 (London, 1973), and The Palestinian Arab National Movement, 1929–1939: From Riots to Rebellion (London, 1978). Philip Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem: Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni and the Palestinian National Movement (New York, 1988), presents the mufti in the context of the politics of the notables. The emergence of Palestinian national identity is the subject of Muhammad Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (New York, 1990); Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York, 1997); and Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History (Cambridge, MA, 2003), an updated version of an earlier work that now contains a lengthy section on the Oslo peace process.

Israel and the Palestinians After 1948 In recent years, a lively and occasionally acrimonious debate has swept through Israeli scholarly circles as a result of the work of a group of so-called new historians who have challenged some of the long-accepted historical assumptions about Zionism and the early years of the Israeli state. Their work and that of other like-minded revisionist scholars may be sampled in Michael N. Barnett, ed., Israel in Comparative Perspective: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom (Albany, 1996). Two critical reappraisals of Israel’s role in the events surrounding the war of 1948 by leading representatives of the new history are Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (New York, 1988), and Ilan Pappé, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951 (London, 1992). The contributors to Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim, eds., The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2008), examine the role of the states participating in the conflict with the objective of distinguishing various national myths from historical reality. A revisionist interpretation of Israel’s policy toward the Arab world from 1948 to 1998 is Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York, 2001). A spirited refutation of the new historians’ methods, evidence, and motives is found in Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History: The “New Historians” (London, 1997).

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In addition to Lucas’s The Modern History of Israel, cited above, Israeli political, social, and religious institutions are treated in Yossi Beilin, Israel: A Concise Political History (New York, 1992); Nadav Safran, Israel, the Embattled Ally (Cambridge, 1981), a domestic history that nevertheless also emphasizes the development of the US-Israeli relationship; and Alan Dowty, The Jewish State: A Century Later (Berkeley, 1998), a combination thematic and chronological analysis of the challenges facing the evolving Israeli democracy from the mandate to the 1990s. Israeli politics leading up to the 1967 war is researched in detail in Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East (New York, 2007). A good introduction to the workings of the Israeli electoral and political systems is Gregory S. Mahler, Israel: Government and Politics in a Maturing State (San Diego, 1990). A more critical approach to the US-Israeli relationship than Safran’s is found in Cheryl A. Rubenberg, Israel and the American National Interest: A Critical Examination (Urbana, 1986), and John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York, 2007). For the Palestinian community within Israel, see Ian S. Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel’s Control of a National Minority (Austin, 1980), which examines the system of controls Israel uses to maintain the quiescence of its Arab citizens. Lustick has also examined the rise of militant Jewish settler groups with special emphasis on Gush Emunim in For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (New York, 1988). Ilan Peleg, Begin’s Foreign Policy, 1977–1983: Israel’s Move to the Right (New York, 1987), is a critical interpretation of the role of the Right in influencing the Begin government’s policies. Taking 1967 as their starting point, Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak examine twenty years of changes in Israel in Trouble in Utopia: The Overburdened Polity of Israel (Albany, 1989). The reasons for the Palestinian exodus are carefully documented by Benny Morris, one of the new historians, in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 1947–1949, 2nd ed. (New York, 2004), which successfully refutes earlier explanations. The outstanding study of the PLO is Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for a State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993 (Oxford, 1997). Also valuable is Helena Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organisation: People, Power, and Politics (Cambridge, 1984), and Emile Sahliyeh, In Search of Leadership: West Bank Politics Since 1967 (Washington, DC, 1988). For the impact of the continued Israeli occupation on Gaza, see Sarah Roy, The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development (Washington, DC, 1995). On the Palestinian presence in Lebanon, see Rex Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon (Boulder, 1990). An important study of politics and gender within the Palestinian community in Lebanon during the period 1968 to 1982 is Julie M. Peteet, Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement (New York, 1991). A thorough study of the First Intifada is F. Robert Hunter, The Palestinian Uprising: A War by Other Means, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, 1993), a work that is enhanced by the author’s interviews with Palestinians during the early phase of the uprising. Joost R. Hiltermann, Behind the Intifada: Labor and Women’s Movements in the Occupied Territories (Princeton, 1991), focuses on how the formation of trade unions and women’s committees among Palestinians in the occupied territories contributed to the struggle for national liberation. A more recent account is Glenn E. Robinson, Building a Palestinian State: The Incomplete Revolution (Bloomington, 1997), which connects the rise of a new Palestinian elite during the intifada with Arafat’s oppressive policies as head of the PA [Palestinian Authority] after 1994. Robinson’s work also includes a useful analysis of Hamas. Additional studies of Hamas and other Palestinian Islamic activist organizations include Ziad Abu-Amr, Islamic

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Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza: Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad (Bloomington, 1994), and Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas (New York, 2000), which stresses the pragmatic nature of the organization. The Middle East reports of the International Crisis Group, available online, are consistently well-informed and up-todate, especially on the development of Palestinian politics since attempts at the political integration of Hamas were initiated. A useful reference work for the period after Oslo I is Lawrence Joffe, Kessing’s Guide to the Mid-East Peace Process (London, 1996), which reproduces the major documents, provides capsule biographies of the main participants, and offers an analysis of the peace process itself to mid-1996. Of the several studies that present the Oslo Accords as a potential disaster for the Palestinians, Farsoun Samih and Christina Zacharia’s Palestine and the Palestinians (Boulder, 1997) is recommended, as is Graham Usher, Palestine in Crisis: The Struggle for Peace and Political Independence after Oslo (London, 1995), and the study by Kimmerling and Migdal cited earlier. A more recent penetrating critique of the accords is Cheryl A. Rubenberg, The Palestinians: In Search of a Just Peace (Boulder, 2003). An account of the effects of the Oslo Accords on the individual states of the region is Robert O. Freedman, ed., The Middle East and the Peace Process: The Impact of the Oslo Accords (Gainesville, 1998). For an understanding of US policy during the rise and fall of the Oslo peace process, the chapters on the Clinton presidency in William B. Quandt, Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967, rev. ed. (Washington, DC, and Berkeley, 2001), are must-reads. For the 2000 Camp David summit and the impact of its collapse, a useful starting point is Charles Enderlin’s Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995–2002 (New York, 2003). Personal accounts of Camp David have been written by many of the participants (for example, Shlomo Ben Ami, Gilead Sher, Akram Haniyeh, Robert Malley, and Dennis Ross), and a valuable exchange of views took place in the New York Review of Books between 2001 and 2002.

Iran A very good introduction to all of Iranian history, with an emphasis on the modern period, is Elton L. Daniel, The History of Iran (Westport, 2001). Nikki R. Keddie’s stimulating Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (New Haven, 2003) includes three updated chapters covering events from 1979 to the late 1990s. One of the most lucid and perceptive studies of any transforming Middle Eastern society is Ervand Abrahamian’s Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton, 1982). Although the author concentrates on the twentieth century and the growth of the political Left, he provides insightful comments on modern Iran as a whole. The Iranian Revolution of 1978–1979 and its aftermath have been the subjects of numerous studies, and the list continues to grow. Only a sampling can be noted here. The best political and social analysis of the revolutionary regime from 1979 to the mid-1980s is Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution (New York, 1986). See also Nikki Keddie and Eric Hooglund, eds., The Iranian Revolution and the Islamic Republic, 2nd ed. (Syracuse, 1986); Mohsen M. Milani, The Making of Iran’s Islamic Revolution: From Monarchy to Islamic Republic, 2nd ed. (Boulder, 1994); Said Amir Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York, 1988); and Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (Berkeley, 1993), a stimulating work that situates Khomeini and his ideas in the realm of populism rather

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than rigid fundamentalism. Parvin Paidar’s Women in the Political Process in Twentieth Century Iran (Cambridge, 1995) is a challenging analysis of the links between gender and political process, with excellent sections on the Khomeini period. Eric Hooglund, ed., Twenty Years of Islamic Revolution: Political and Social Transition in Iran Since 1979 (Syracuse, 2002), is a solid collection of essays on domestic and foreign policy issues. One of the best studies of domestic politics and foreign policy since the death of Khomeini is David Menashri, Post-Revolutionary Politics in Iran: Religion, Society and Power (London, 2001). An outstanding and readily comprehensible study of contemporary Shia Islam is found in Roy Mottahedeh’s evocative work The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran (New York, 1985). For a collection of the writings of Khomeini, see the work translated and annotated by Hamid Algar, Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini (Berkeley, 1981). The early foreign policy of the Islamic Republic is examined in Rouhollah K. Ramazani, Revolutionary Iran: Challenge and Response in the Middle East (Baltimore, 1986). Critical assessments of US policy toward Iran are presented in James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations (New Haven, 1988), and Richard W. Cottam, Iran and the United States: A Cold War Case Study (Pittsburgh, 1988).

International Politics During and After the Cold War Era In addition to the country-specific studies listed above, a number of important works examine the interaction of external powers with the region as a whole. A very good introductory survey of US policy toward the Arab Middle East from the late 1940s to the early 1990s is Burton I. Kaufman, The Arab Middle East and the United States: Inter-Arab Rivalry and Superpower Diplomacy (New York, 1996). L. Carl Brown, ed., Diplomacy in the Middle East: The International Relations of Regional and Outside Powers (New York, 2003), examines the foundations of foreign policymaking among the core regional states as well as the Middle East policies of the United States, Britain, France, and Russia. The involvement of the United States and the USSR with various regional states is the subject of Fawaz A. Gerges, The Superpowers and the Middle East: Regional and International Politics, 1955–1967 (Boulder, 1994). David W. Lesch, 1979: The Year that Shaped the Modern Middle East (Boulder, 2001), is a stimulating interpretation of the impact of three major domestic and international events of 1979 on the subsequent unfolding of Middle Eastern history. Of the several works that deal with the crises generated by the attacks of September 11, 2001, we recommend Shibley Telhami, The Stakes: America and the Middle East: The Consequences of Power and the Choice for Peace (Boulder, 2002), and Fred Halliday, Two Hours that Shook the World: September 11, 2001: Causes and Consequences (London, 2002).

The Islamic Resurgence The Islamic resurgence has been the subject of numerous articles, monographs, and edited collections. Among the many edited works on the subject, John L. Esposito, ed., Islam and Development: Religion and Sociopolitical Change (Syracuse, 1980), contains several excellent essays that have stood the test of time, of which Michael Hudson’s “Islam and Political Development” is worthy of special note. Nazih Ayubi, Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World (London, 1993), is an important work that combines an analysis of Islamic

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theory on religion, politics, and economics with six country-specific studies. In Islam and Democracy (New York, 1996), John L. Esposito and John O. Voll examine Islam as a social and political phenomenon and provide case studies from six countries, ranging from Algeria to Malaysia. Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, an anthropologist and a political scientist, respectively, have written a stimulating comparative work, Muslim Politics (Princeton, 1996), that raises questions about ideological politics in various regional settings. A stimulating examination of the rise and decline of political Islam from the 1970s through September 11, 2001, is Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, trans. Anthony Roberts (Cambridge, 2002). Fawaz Gerges’s well-researched The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (London, 2005) describes the complexity of the jihadist movement and charts its development from Egyptian and Saudi origins to a movement with a global orientation. A variety of country-specific studies and theoretical issues are raised in John L. Esposito, ed., Political Islam: Revolution, Radicalism, or Reform? (Boulder, 1997), a work that also has a comprehensive bibliography. Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought (Austin, 1982), and Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics, 2nd ed. (New Haven, 1990), are sophisticated analyses. Samuel P. Huntington’s controversial work Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, 1996) posits a future confrontation between Islamic and Western civilizations. Huntington’s premise, which first appeared in article format, is refuted in John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, 2nd ed. (New York, 1995). A solid introductory study of the lives and writings of Muslim thinkers from al-Afghani to Khomeini is Ali Rahnema, ed., Pioneers of Islamic Revival (London, 1994). Two compilations of the writings of Muslims themselves on the topic are John J. Donohue and John L. Esposito, eds., Islam in Transition: Muslim Perspectives (New York, 1982), and John L. Esposito, ed., Voices of Islam Resurgent (New York, 1983). Studies that focus on modern Islamic law are J. N. D. Anderson, Law Reform in the Muslim World (London, 1976), and the very important work by Judith E. Tucker, In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Berkeley, 1998). Adapted from the Select Bibliography of William L. Cleveland and Martin Bunton, A History of the Modern Middle East, Fourth Edition (2009, Westview Press).

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Some alternative spellings of main entries appear in parentheses. 9/11 (Nine-Eleven, September 11). Coordinated suicide attacks by al-Qaeda militants who hijacked four American passenger jets and flew them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan and into the Pentagon in Washington, DC. (The fourth plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania.) Named for the date of the attack (September 11, 2001). ahl al-kitab. See People of the Book. Al Jazeera. An Arabic news network, headquartered in (and owned by) Qatar. al-Aqsa Mosque. Islamic holy site in Jerusalem, forming part of the Haram al-Sharif (a site also known as the Temple Mount). The site lends its name to the 2000 al-Aqsa Intifada (the Second Intifada) from the perception that the intifada was triggered by Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount. al-Qaeda (Al Qaeda, al Qaida, al-Qa’ida). A network of militant, fundamentalist Sunni Islamic groups pursuing global jihad. Al-Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, DC. Alawite. A member of a particular branch of Shiite Islam, largely concentrated in Syria. Alawites are not universally accepted as Muslim by other Muslims. Though Syria is predominantly Sunni, it is ruled by the Alawite regime of President Bashar Assad and his supporters. American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). A politically active organization, founded in 1963 to promote US policies in support of Israel; self-proclaimed as “America’s pro-Israel lobby.” Arab. Most literally, inhabitants of Arabia, but more broadly, peoples of diverse ethnic and geographic backgrounds who speak Arabic or otherwise identify with Arabic cultural traditions. Though most Arabs are Muslims, many are not. Though most countries in the Middle East and North Africa are predominantly Arab, some (Israel, Turkey, and Iran) are not. Arab Israeli. An ethnically Arab citizen of Israel; an Israeli Arab. Arab-Israeli War of 1948. Israel’s war of independence. In November 1947 the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 to divide Britain’s former Palestine Mandate into Jewish and Arab states in May 1948. Palestinian Arabs refused to recognize the arrangement. When Israel declared its independence in May 1948, it was invaded by Arab armies from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Fighting continued until 1949, when armistice lines were created that held until the 1967 Six Day War.

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Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Rapid war on June 5–10, 1967, between Israel and the neighboring states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, which were aided by other Arab states as well. In that war, Israel gained control of the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. Of those occupied territories, only the Sinai Peninsula has been returned—to Egypt, in accordance with the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005 but is still considered by the United Nations to be an occupying power there. The ultimate disposition of the remaining occupied territories remains a source of tension in Arab-Israeli relations. Also called the June War or the Six Day War. Arab-Israeli War of 1973. War started in 1973 by Egypt and Syria, with the aid of other Arab states, to regain lands lost to Israel during the 1967 Six Day War. After initial successes by the Egyptians and Syrians, the Israelis ultimately repelled the Arab forces. Also called the October War or the Yom Kippur War. Arab nationalism. Movement recognizing the common interests of Arab countries, based on history, language, culture, religion, and resisting Western influence in Arab affairs. Compare pan-Arabism. Arab Peace Initiative. Proposed solution (in 2002) to the Arab-Israeli conflict by then crown prince, now King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. The initiative proposes normalization of relations between Arab states and Israel in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from all occupied territories (Gaza, West Bank, Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem) and a settlement of the issue of Palestinian refugees according to UN Resolution 194. Arabian Gulf. See Persian Gulf. “axis of evil.” Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, as singled out by President George W. Bush in his State of the Union address of January 29, 2002, as nations supporting terrorist activities, seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction, or both. ayatollah. Title accorded to respected Shiite legal experts. Ayyubid. Pertaining to a dynasty of Salah al-Din (Saladin) and his descendants, who ruled much of the Middle East from Cairo and Damascus in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Baath (Ba’ath, Ba’th). Secular, pan-Arab political party that has held power in Syria (1963 to the present) and Iraq (first in 1963 and then from 1968 till the 2003 invasion of Iraq). Baghdad Pact. Cold War alliance of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom from 1955 to 1979, intended to contain possible Soviet expansion into the Middle East. The United States joined the military committee of the alliance in 1958. Balfour Declaration. Official statement in 1917 of British support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Bantustan. One of a number of small, noncontiguous territories set aside by a ruling majority for occupation by minorities. The term derives from territories designated for black Africans in South Africa under apartheid. In a Middle East context, it is often used pejoratively to accuse Israel of imposing harsh living conditions on Palestinians by confining them to small, scattered zones with few resources and with considerable difficulties of intercommunication and transportation. Bedouin. Desert Arab nomad.

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binational solution. Proposed one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue, in which all inhabitants of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank would share equal citizenship in a single nation. Compare two-state solution. Bush Doctrine. Foreign policy principles promulgated by the George W. Bush administration as part of its so-called war on terrorism in the wake of 9/11. The doctrine included assertions of the right of the United States to strike preemptively against foreign regimes that were deemed to harbor or support terrorists or that otherwise constituted a potential threat to the United States, and it included an insistent commitment to unilateral military action, if need be, by the United States in pursuit of its national-security interests. caliph. Successor to Muhammad as head of the ummah, the universal community of believers. caliphate. System of governance representing the political authority of the Sunni Islam community of believers (ummah) and headed by the caliph. Led initially by Muhammad’s disciples and eventually by Ottoman rulers, the caliphate was abolished in 1924 by the first president of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Certain conservative Sunni groups aspire to reestablish such a global Muslim community. Camp David Accords. Agreements in 1978 between Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, as mediated by US president Jimmy Carter, leading to Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai in return for normalization of relations with Egypt. Begin and Sadat shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize in consequence. Camp David II. Abortive 2000 peace talks among Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, and US president Bill Clinton. diaspora. Dispersal of a people from their homeland. Diasporas of the Jews followed both the conquest of the Kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians in the sixth century BCE and the destruction of Judea by the Romans in the first and second centuries CE. The term is often applied as well to the dispersal of Palestinians after 1948, resulting in a large number of Palestinian refugees living outside Palestine. dual containment. US foreign policy aimed at controlling military buildups and restraining other perceived threats to US interests in the Middle East posed by Iraq, Iran, or both. Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. Agreement of 1979, following the 1978 Camp David Accords, in which Israel and Egypt mutually recognized each other and Israel agreed to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula, which it had captured during the Six Day War of 1967. Ennahda. A moderate Islamic party in Tunisia. It won the largest share of votes in the parliamentary elections held after the ouster of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011. Eretz Israel. The region promised by God to the Israelites, according to the Hebrew Bible. The term generally refers to what was known as Palestine before the founding of Israel, which would now include modern Israel and the occupied territories, western Jordan, southwestern Syria, and southern Lebanon. The term has religious and political implications for right-wing Israelis, who oppose the “land for peace” formula in UN Security Council Resolution 242. Also called Greater Israel. Farsi. Persian; the language of Iran. Fatah (al-Fatah, Fateh). Founded originally as a Palestinian guerrilla group in 1954 by Yasser Arafat. Currently the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

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Since 2007 Fatah has governed the West Bank while a rival Palestinian faction, Hamas, has governed Gaza. fedayeen (fidayyin). “Self-sacrificers”; commonly refers to Palestinian guerrillas or militant Shiite commandos. Fertile Crescent. The arc of lands extending from the eastern Mediterranean (Israel, the occupied territories, Lebanon) through southeast Turkey, Syria, and Iraq to the western edge of Iran. Freedom and Justice Party. An Egyptian Islamist party with strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Mohamed Morsy, the Freedom and Justice candidate, won the presidency in Egypt’s first post-Mubarak presidential elections (2012). Galilee. Region of northern Israel with a large Arab population. Gaza Strip. One of the occupied territories, bounded by Egypt to the southwest, the Mediterranean Sea to the west, and Israel everywhere else, and densely populated by 1.5 million Palestinians. Israel seized Gaza (as it is often called) from Egypt in the Six Day War of 1967 and unilaterally withdrew from it in 2005. Hamas has controlled Gaza since 2007, when it expelled its rival, Fatah. Golan Heights. Mountainous region between Israel and Syria, captured from Syria and occupied by Israel since the Six Day War of 1967; one of the occupied territories. Great Satan. The United States; a derogatory epithet introduced by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Green Line. The armistice line established between Israel and its neighbors in 1949, following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The line divides Israel from its neighbors and from the territories captured in the 1967 Six Day War, including the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. The Green Line is significant as a possible boundary between Palestinian and Israeli states in a two-state solution. Guantánamo. Guantánamo Bay detention camp, also called Gitmo; a US detainment facility at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, which houses prisoners captured in Afghanistan. The camp has been controversial amid widespread charges of violations of the human rights of its prisoners. President Barack Obama ordered the facility closed by January 2010, but that deadline was not met. Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Economic union of six Persian Gulf states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates), founded in 1981 to facilitate improvements in finance, trade, and tourism. The GCC also maintains a joint military force headquartered in Saudi Arabia. Gulf War. The hostilities occasioned by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, with the subsequent expulsion of the Iraqis from Kuwait and the invasion of Iraq (in January– February 1991) by a coalition of international forces, the majority of whom came from the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and Egypt. hajj. Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Hamas. “Islamic Resistance Movement”; Palestinian Sunni Islamist group, created in 1987 and in control of Gaza after ousting rival Fatah in 2007. Haram al-Sharif. See Temple Mount.

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Hejira (Hegira, Hijra, Hijrah). The flight of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to what is now Medina in 622 CE, which is year 1 of the Muslim calendar. Hezbollah (Hizbollah, Hizbullah). “Party of God”; Shiite Islamist group and significant actor in Lebanese politics. Hezbollah emerged in 1982 as a militia organized and trained by Iranian Revolutionary Guards to resist Israeli occupation of Lebanon during the Lebanese civil war. Hijaz (Hejaz). Region of western Saudi Arabia bordering the Red Sea and containing the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Holocaust. Nazi genocide of approximately 6 million Jews during World War II. Hussein-McMahon correspondence (Husayn). Letters of 1915–1916 between Hussein bin Ali, sharif of Mecca, and Sir Henry McMahon, British high commissioner in Egypt, expressing British support of Arab independence in exchange for Arab insurrection against the Ottoman Empire. McMahon’s promises were supplanted by the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916 between France and Britain, which divided Ottoman territories between those two European powers. imam. Muslim religious or political leader; a leader accepted by Shiites as a legitimate successor of Muhammad. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). International body that pursues “the safe, secure and peaceful uses of nuclear science and technology.” The IAEA is an autonomous organization but reports to both the General Assembly and the Security Council of the United Nations. It is agents of the IAEA who have been, and perhaps will be again, charged with inspecting Iran’s nuclear facilities. intifada (intifadah). “Shaking off ” or “uprising.” The First Intifada (1987–1993) began as a relatively organized Palestinian demonstration against Israeli rule in Gaza and the West Bank. The Second Intifada (also called the al-Aqsa Intifada) was a period of spontaneous Palestinian-Israeli violence following Ariel Sharon’s visit to the al-Aqsa Mosque in 2000. Iran-Contra affair. Political scandal that came to light in 1986, revealing that the Ronald Reagan administration had secretly provided arms to Iran for that country’s aid in securing the release of American hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon and had subsequently transferred the proceeds of the arms sales to anticommunist Contra insurgents in Nicaragua. Iran-Iraq War. War between Iran and Iraq (1980–1988). Iranian Hostage Crisis. Diplomatic confrontation precipitated when a group of Islamist students and militants seized the American embassy in Tehran to protest President Jimmy Carter’s decision to allow the shah to enter the United States for medical treatment. Fiftythree Americans were held hostage for 444 days, from November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981 (the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration). Iranian Revolution. Events culminating in the overthrow of the Iranian monarchy under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and the establishment of an Islamic republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979. Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRG). Branch of the Iranian military founded after the Iranian Revolution; it has considerable influence in Iranian social, political, and economic life. The IRG influenced and assisted Hezbollah’s resistance to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

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Iraq War. Invasion of Iraq in 2003 by a multinational force, led by the United States and the United Kingdom, resulting in ousting Saddam Hussein from power and terminating the rule of a Sunni minority. The ostensible justifications for the invasion—Iraq’s possession or development of weapons of mass destruction and its links to al-Qaeda—proved unfounded. American forces withdrew completely from Iraq by the end of 2011, per a Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq. Islam. Monotheistic religion predominating in the Middle East, North Africa, and much of Asia, which believes that the Quran is the verbatim word of God as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. Islamic Jihad (al-Jihad al-Islami). Militant Palestinian organization with much in common with Hamas. Islamism. Advocacy of government that adheres to strict Muslim principles, with varying degrees of insistence on pan-Islamic political unity, the rejection or elimination of Western influences, or both. Sometimes called political Islam, among other terms. Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Israel’s military, including its army, navy, and air force. Israel-Jordan treaty. Agreement signed in 1994 that normalized relations between Israel and Jordan; Israel’s second peace treaty with an Arab state (after the 1979 treaty with Egypt). Jerusalem. Israel’s proclaimed capital and a holy city to Jews, Muslims, and Christians. East Jerusalem is an occupied territory held by Israel since the 1967 Six Day War. jihad. Muslim concept of one’s inner struggle for righteousness; the term is also applied to religiously sanctioned warfare against non-Muslims. One who practices jihad is a jihadi. Judea and Samaria. Historical names for what is more recently called the West Bank, captured by Israel from Jordan in the Six Day War of 1967. Judea and Samaria are respectively the portions of that territory south and north of Jerusalem. King-Crane Commission. US committee that in 1919 investigated possible dispositions of non-Turkish areas of the Ottoman Empire. The committee’s report was sympathetic to Arab nationalist aspirations and pessimistic about establishing a Jewish state, but it was not acted upon. Knesset. Israel’s legislature. Kurd. Member of a certain ethnolinguistic group concentrated in the contiguous mountainous portions of Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria; see Kurdistan. Kurdistan. The area occupied mainly by Kurds, comprising plateaus and mountainous areas in northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, southeastern Turkey, and part of northern Syria. League of Nations. International organization founded in 1919 and eventually replaced in 1946 by the United Nations. One of the league’s chief functions was to establish mandates among the non-Turkish areas of the former Ottoman Empire. Madrid Conference. Peace-process negotiations among Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Palestinians in 1991. The bilateral Israel-Jordan talks at the conference led ultimately to a 1994 peace treaty between those two countries. Maghreb (Magrib, Maghrib). Arab states in North Africa including Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, and often Libya and sometimes Mauritania. Compare Mashriq.

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Mahdi Army. Iraqi Shiite army founded by Muqtada al-Sadr in 2003. mandate. Commissions granted by the League of Nations to Western powers in order for them to administer certain territories previously controlled by powers defeated in World War I, until such time as those territories would be ready for self-rule. The French were assigned mandates in Lebanon and Syria; the British were assigned mandates in Palestine and Mesopotamia. Mashriq (Mashreq, Mashrek). The Arab states east of Egypt. Compare Maghreb. Mecca (Makkah). City in western Saudi Arabia; birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad, the holiest site in Islam, and the center of Muslim pilgrimage. Medina (Mahdina). City in western Saudi Arabia, the burial place of the Prophet Muhammad, and the second-holiest city in Islam. millet. A legally protected, largely self-administered non-Muslim religious community under the Ottomans. mosque. Place of Muslim worship, with prayer led by an imam. mullah. A Shiite Muslim educated (in varying degrees) in Islamic theology and law. Muslim Brotherhood. Transnational Sunni Islamist group founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna but with offshoots throughout the Arab world. Hamas is the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Also called the Society of Muslim Brothers. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). A military and mutual-defense alliance with member states in North America and Europe. In 2011, a NATO coalition carried out UN-sanctioned operations against the regime of Muammar Gadhafi in Libya, hastening that leader’s fall from power. Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Treaty to limit the spread of nuclear weapons and to help foster civilian nuclear-energy programs, so long as those programs do not contribute to militarized nuclear technologies. The treaty came into force in 1970 and currently has 189 countries as signatories. Iran is a signatory to the treaty but has at times been found in violation of it. occupied territories. Territories captured by Israel from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria during the Six Day War of 1967 and held by Israel since, including the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. The Sinai Peninsula was also captured at that time but was returned to Egypt in 1982 as part of the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. Operation Desert Storm. The military operations of the coalition forces during the Gulf War (1990–1991) that expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Operation Iraqi Freedom. The military campaign against Iraq in 2003, led by the United States and the United Kingdom. The campaign displaced Saddam Hussein from power. Oslo Accords. Also called the Declaration of Principles. Agreement ratified in 1993 in a public ceremony on the White House lawn, in the presence of PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, and US president Bill Clinton. An outgrowth of the Madrid Conference of 1991, the accords provided for the creation of the Palestinian Authority to administer Gaza and the West Bank. The accords were an interim agreement, deliberately leaving for later the permanent resolution of fundamental issues concerning Jerusalem, Israeli settlements, and Palestinian refugees.

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Ottoman Empire. Islamic empire with its capital at Constantinople (modern Istanbul). The Ottoman Empire endured from 1299 until it was succeeded by the Republic of Turkey in 1923. At its maximum extent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it controlled the Balkans in southeastern Europe, most of southwestern Asia, and coastal North Africa. Following its defeat in World War I, in which it had allied with Germany, the empire was partitioned by the victorious Western powers into what are now approximately forty nations. Palestine. The region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, though the boundaries have varied through history, from ancient times to the present. In the early twentieth century, the British Mandate of Palestine included Palestine (west of the Jordan River) and Transjordan (east of the Jordan River; modern Jordan). With the end of the British mandate following World War II, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, a plan accepted by Zionist leaders but rejected by Palestinian Arabs. See also Palestine Mandate. Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Organization recognized by Israel and many other states as the representative of the Palestinian people. Founded in 1964 with the goal of the liberation of Palestine through armed struggle, the PLO recognized Israel in 1993. The PLO is an umbrella organization with numerous member factions, the largest of which is Fatah. Yasser Arafat led the PLO from 1969 until his death in 2004. He was succeeded by Mahmoud Abbas. Palestine Mandate. British rule in Palestine from 1917 to 1948, as formalized in 1922 by the League of Nations as part of its disposition of former territories of the defunct Ottoman Empire following the empire’s defeat in World War I. Also called the British Mandate of Palestine. See also Palestine. Palestinian National Authority (PNA). Originally the Palestinian Authority (PA); an organization formed in 1994 for Palestinian self-administration of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, pursuant to the Oslo Accords between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel. Since 2007, when Hamas expelled Fatah from Gaza, the PNA’s authority has been limited to the West Bank. pan-Arab(ism). Movement seeking unification of Arab nations into a single state. Compare Arab nationalism. pan-Islamism. Movement advocating the political unity of all Muslims. People of the Book. Non-Muslim adherents to monotheistic religions with holy writings, or scriptures, that predate the Quran. The Quran specifically mentions Judaism and Christianity as two such faiths, which in consequence have often been accorded a great deal of tolerance and protection by Muslims. Also (in Arabic) ahl al-kitab. Persia. Iran; officially the Islamic Republic of Iran. Persian Gulf. Extension of the Indian Ocean separating the Arabian Peninsula from Iran. Sometimes called the Arabian Gulf, especially by most Arab states, or simply the Gulf. peshmerga. Kurdish militias. Quartet. Group of four nations and international organizations (the United States, Russia, the United Nations, and the European Union) established in 2002 to mediate IsraeliPalestinian peace efforts.

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Quran (al-Quran, Qur’an, Koran). Muslim holy scriptures, believed by Muslims to have been revealed by God to the Prophet Muhammad through the archangel Gabriel. Revolutionary Guard. See Iranian Revolutionary Guard. right of return. In the Palestinian context, the contention that Palestinian refugees have a right to return to their homes and to the property they left behind in the former Palestine Mandate as refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the 1967 Six Day War. Often cited in support of such claims, UN Resolution 194 resolves “that refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property.” right to exist. Concept integral to the Arab-Israeli dispute, in which Israel in particular, but the Palestinians as well, demand from each other and their neighbors recognition as sovereign states with legitimate claims to their territories in the former British Mandate of Palestine. The term arises from Israel’s explicit assertion of its “right to exist” in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, in which it offered to return territories captured in that war in exchange for recognition of that right. Egypt recognized Israel’s right to exist in the 1979 Camp David Accords, in return for which Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula. The PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist in 1993, and in return Israel recognized the Palestinian (National) Authority as the official representative of the Palestinian people. Hamas, however, has refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist. road map for peace. Peace process proposed in 2002 by the Quartet (the United States, Russia, the United Nations, and the European Union) with the ultimate goal of a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Sahwas. Sunni tribal militias that arose in Iraq to maintain security amid the fighting and chaos occasioned by the American occupation. Such native militias often proved helpful in resisting the incursions of al-Qaeda operatives. Salafi. Of or related to a certain puritanical, fundamentalist strain of Islam; often connected to those who espouse jihad against unbelievers or even against believers whose adherence to strict Islamic principles is considered lax by Salafis. Seljuk (Seljuq). Of or pertaining to an eleventh- and twelfth-century Sunni Muslim empire that once extended from Central Asia to eastern Anatolia (modern Turkey). shah. Title of royal rulers of Iran till 1979; Persian for “king.” sharia (shari’a). Codified Muslim law derived primarily from the Quran and the sunna, the sayings and actions of Muhammad. Shiite (Shia, Shi’a, Shi’ah, shi’a). Pertaining to the second-largest denomination of Islam (after Sunni Islam); one who belongs to that denomination. Though markedly a minority among Muslims worldwide and in the Middle East, Shiites do constitute majorities in Iran, Iraq, and Bahrain; ruling minorities in Syria and Yemen; and sizable minorities in Lebanon and Kuwait. Compare Sunni. Sinai Peninsula. Peninsula between Egypt and Israel bounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the north and two arms of the Red Sea (the gulfs of Suez and Aqaba) to the south. Israel captured and occupied the peninsula during the 1967 Six Day War but returned Sinai to Egypt in accord with the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979.

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Six Day War. See Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). In reference to Iraq, a 2008 agreement between Iraq and the United States under which US combat forces withdrew from Iraqi cities by June 30, 2009, and all remaining US forces withdrew from Iraq in December 2011. Strait of Hormuz. A strait linking the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Aden and thence the Arabian Sea, lying between Iran and the United Arab Emirates. About 35–40 percent of global oil shipments pass through the strait daily, making it of high strategic importance. Iran has on occasion threatened to blockade the strait in response to international pressures targeting its nuclear program. Sunni. Pertaining to the largest denomination of Islam; one who adheres to that denomination. Sunni Muslims are approximately 90 percent of the world’s Muslim population and constitute majorities in most Middle Eastern states; the exceptions are Iran, Iraq, and Bahrain, which have Shiite Muslim majorities. Compare Shiite. Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). A military junta serving as Egypt’s ruling government in the interim between the departure of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and the accession of a newly elected government in 2012. Sykes-Picot Agreement. Secret pact (1916) between France (represented by François Georges-Picot) and Great Britain (represented by Sir Mark Sykes), with the assent of Russia, for partitioning the Ottoman Empire. Taliban. Sunni Islamist movement that controlled Afghanistan from 1996 until the US invasion in 2001 and that remains an active paramilitary presence in that country. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda operated from Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban government. Temple Mount. Religious site in Jerusalem; in Jewish tradition, the site of the Holy of Holies of Solomon’s Temple and the holiest place in Judaism; the mount is called Haram al-Sharif, “Noble Sanctuary,” by Muslims and is the third-holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. Transjordan. Former Ottoman territory incorporated into the British Mandate of Palestine in 1921; closely equivalent to the modern state of Jordan. two-state solution. Envisioned resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would create separate Jewish and Arab states within what is now Israel and its occupied territories. Compare binational solution. ulama (ulema). Muslim jurists and scholars, collectively. Umayyad (Umayyid, Umayyed). Muslim dynasty and the empire it ruled from Damascus (661–750 CE) and Cordoba (756–1030 CE). ummah. The worldwide Muslim community. UN General Assembly Resolution 194. Resolution passed in 1948 in the context of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Among its principal articles was its assertion of the right of Palestinians to return to their homes. UN Security Council Resolution 242. Resolution adopted in 1967 in the aftermath of the Six Day War. It asserts that “a just and lasting peace in the Middle East” requires Israel to withdraw from all territories occupied in the recent conflict. It also advocates “respect for

404

Glossary

and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of every State in the area.” weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Biological, chemical, and/or nuclear weapons capable of killing large numbers of people at a time. West Bank. Territory bordered by the Jordan River to the east and surrounded by Israel to the north, west, and south. The area, called Judea and Samaria by Israel, was captured from Jordan by Israel in the Six Day War and remains an occupied territory. Palestinian affairs in the West Bank are currently administered by Fatah and the Palestinian National Authority. Yom Kippur War. See Arab-Israeli War of 1973. Zionism. Jewish nationalist ideology seeking to create and then maintain a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, the land promised by God to the Jews in the Hebrew Bible.

N OTABLE P ERSONS QR

Some alternate spellings are indicated in parentheses. Abbas, Mahmoud (1935– ). Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization since succeeding Yasser Arafat in 2004, leader of the Fatah faction, and president of the Palestinian National Authority since 2005. He is also known by the honorific Abu Mazen. Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud (1956– ). Elected president of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 2005 and reelected in 2009 in a disputed election. An outspoken critic of the United States and Israel, Ahmadinejad has also actively promoted Iran’s nuclear program, insisting it is for peaceful purposes, though many observers are concerned that its goal is nuclear weapons. Al Khalifa, Hamad bin Isa (1950– ). King of Bahrain since 2002. His rule was threatened by Arab Spring protests, which were put down by Bahraini forces with the assistance of troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Allawi, Ayad (1945– ). Former interim prime minister of Iraq (2004–2005). Allawi is a politically secular Shiite, and his Iraqiyya bloc includes both Shiite and Sunni leaders. Iraqiyya won the most seats in Iraq’s 2010 parliamentary elections, though rival candidate Nouri al-Maliki nonetheless eventually retained the prime ministership. Arafat, Yasser (1929–2004) (Yasir Arafat). Palestinian Arab nationalist, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, founder and leader of Fatah, and president of the Palestinian National Authority. He shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin “for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East.” Assad, Bashar (1965– ) (Bashar al-Assad, Bashar al-Asad). President of Syria since succeeding his father, Hafez Assad, in that position in 2000. Since 2011 his regime has been battling a determined if outgunned uprising, leaving thousands dead. Assad, Hafez (1930–2000) (Hafez al-Asad, Hafiz al-Asad). President of Syria, 1971– 2000. Succeeded by his son, Bashar Assad. Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal (1881–1938). Founder and reformist first president of the Republic of Turkey. His wide-ranging reforms of Turkish life included abolishing the caliphate in 1924. al-Banna, Hassan (1906–1949) (Hasan al-Banna). Founder of the (Egyptian) Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. He was assassinated in Cairo in 1949. Begin, Menachem (1913–1992). Prime minister of Israel, 1977–1983. With President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, he signed the Camp David Accords in 1978 and subsequently the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979. He shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize with Sadat. Ben Ali, Zine El Abidine (1936– ). President of Tunisia, 1987–2011. Ben Ali was the first of the rulers to be forced from office in the Arab Spring that began in early 2011. bin Laden, Osama (1957–2011) (Osama bin Ladin, Usama bin Laden). Founding leader of al-Qaeda. A Saudi by birth, bin Laden fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan,

405

406

Notable Persons

then later returned to Afghanistan to plan and launch the 9/11 attacks against the United States. He went underground following the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and was assassinated in Pakistan ten years later by a team of US Navy SEALs. Bouazizi, Mohamed (1984–2011). Tunisian street vendor. He set himself on fire in December 2010 to protest the confiscation of his goods and his subsequent treatment by officials. His death the following month sparked the Tunisian revolution, which in turn inspired the broader protest movement called the Arab Spring. Bush, George H. W. (1924– ). President of the United States, 1989–1993, and father of US president George W. Bush. Under the elder Bush, the United States led a coalition of international forces against Iraq in the Gulf War (1990–1991), successfully driving Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Bush, George W. (1946– ). President of the United States, 2001–2009, and son of US president George H. W. Bush. In his first term, the United States suffered the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In response, Bush ordered invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq, removing Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein from power. In 2002, Bush identified Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as members of an “axis of evil.” Gadhafi, Muammar (1942–2011) (Gadafi, Gaddafi, Khadafy, Qaddafi, al-Qadhafi). Official leader of Libya, 1969–1977, and “Brother Leader,” 1977–2011. He was toppled from power by a civil war in which the rebels were aided by a NATO-led coalition that included several Middle Eastern states. Gadhafi went into hiding but was captured and summarily executed in October 2011. Hariri, Rafiq (1944–2005) (Rafik Hariri, Rafic Hariri). Prime minister of Lebanon, 1992–1998 and 2000–2004. He was killed in a massive explosion while driving. In 2010, a United Nations–backed tribunal indicted four members of Hezbollah for Hariri’s assassination. Herzl, Theodor (1860–1904). Austro-Hungarian writer and founder of modern political Zionism. He wrote Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, 1896), calling for the founding of an independent Jewish nation in Eretz Israel. Hussein, Saddam (1937–2006) (Saddam Husayn). President of Iraq, 1979–2003, and a leader of the secularist Iraqi Baath Party. Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq fought the 1980– 1988 Iran-Iraq War and invaded Kuwait in 1990, precipitating the Gulf War in which a US-led coalition of international forces expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He was overthrown by the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and was subsequently captured, tried, and executed. Khamenei, Ali Hoseyni (1939– ). Iranian politician and cleric; president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 1981–1989, and supreme leader of Iran since 1989, succeeding Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Khatami, Sayyid Mohammad (1943– ). President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 1997–2005. He was elected as a reformist but was often thwarted by conservative forces in the Iranian government. Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah (1902–1989). Iranian politician and cleric, leader (from exile) of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and supreme leader of Iran, 1979–1989. al-Maliki, Nouri (1950– ) (Nuri al-Maliki). Prime minister of Iraq since 2006 and leader of the State of Law, a Shiite party. Mashal, Khaled (1956– ) (Khaled Meshaal, Khalid Mish’al). Principal leader of Hamas since 2004. Mosaddeq, Mohammad (1882–1967) (Mohammad Mosaddegh). Prime minister of Iran, 1951–1953. His nationalization of the Iraqi oil industry led to a British- and CIAbacked coup that removed him from power in 1953.

Notable Persons

407

Mubarak, Hosni (1928– ) (Husni Mubarak). President of the Arab Republic of Egypt, 1981–2011. He was displaced from office by popular pressure in February 2011 and went on trial for the murder of protestors who died in the demonstrations against his regime. Muhammad (c. 570–632 CE) (Mohammed, Muhammed, Muhammad ibn Abdullah). Founder of the religion of Islam and regarded by Muslims as the last and greatest of the prophets. Nasrallah, Hassan (1960– ) (Hasan Nasrallah). Leader of Hezbollah since 1992. Nasser, Gamal Abdel (1918–1970) (Gamal Abd al-Nasir). President of Egypt, 1954– 1970, and a leading proponent of pan-Arab nationalism. He led Egypt to a short-lived (1958–1961) union with Syria, known as the United Arab Republic. Netanyahu, Benyamin (1949– ). Prime minister of Israel, 1996–1999, and again since 2009. His speech at Bar Ilan University in 2009 endorsed the concept of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, though with many preconditions. The continued construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem remained a volatile international issue during his administration. Obama, Barack Hussein (1961– ). President of the United States, 2009 to the present. Awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza (1919–1980). Shah (emperor) of Iran, 1941–1979. The Iranian Revolution culminated with his departure into exile and the dissolution of the monarchy. Peres, Shimon (1923– ). Prime minister of Israel, 1984–1986 and 1995–1996. On the basis of discussions that led to the Oslo Accords, Peres was awarded the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize along with PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Qutb, Sayyid (1906–1966). Egyptian Islamist theorist and a leader of the (Egyptian) Muslim Brotherhood. His best-known book in the West is probably his manifesto, Milestones. He was charged with crimes against the state and hanged in 1966. Rabin, Yitzhak (1922–1995) (Yitzhaq Rabin). Prime minister of Israel, 1974–1977 and 1992 until his assassination in 1995. For his role in the Oslo Accords, he was awarded the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize along with Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres. Rafsanjani, Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi (1934– ). President of Iran, 1989–1997. Rafsanjani’s administration was relatively moderate and encouraged rapprochement with the West. Sadat, Anwar (1918–1981) (Anwar al-Sadat). President of Egypt, 1970–1981. He was a leader of the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Israel. He signed the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, which led to his winning a Nobel Peace Prize, shared with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. The treaty was unpopular among Egyptians and other Arabs and led to Sadat’s assassination by Islamists. al-Sadr, Sayyid Muqtada (1973– ). Iraqi cleric, with considerable influence among Iraqi Shiites, though without holding formal government office. In 2003 he organized many of his supporters into a paramilitary force, the Mahdi Army. Saleh, Ali Abdullah (1942– ). President of North Yemen, 1978–1990, and president of unified Yemen, 1990–2012. Yemen experienced a major uprising as part of the Arab Spring. Under an agreement proposed by the Gulf Cooperation Council, Saleh stepped down in February 2012 in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Sharon, Ariel (1928– ). Prime minister of Israel, 2001 until 2006, when he became comatose following a stroke. Under Sharon as prime minister, Israel withdrew unilaterally from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and constructed a controversial “security fence” in the West Bank.

C HRONOLOGY S INCE WORLD WAR I QR

1914–1919

World War I; Ottomans enter the war on the side of Germany.

1916

Sykes-Picot Agreement secretly defines British and French spheres of influence among territories expected to be carved from the Ottoman Empire.

1917

Balfour Declaration expresses Britain’s favorable view of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, though without “prejudice” to the rights of non-Jewish communities in Palestine.

1919

King-Crane Commission studies possible dispositions of non-Turkish areas within the former Ottoman Empire.

1920

By terms of the San Remo Agreement, the League of Nations assigns mandates in Palestine and Iraq to Great Britain and in Syria and Lebanon to France.

1921

British name Faisal I king of Iraq.

1923

Ottoman sultanate abolished; Republic of Turkey declared.

1924

Caliphate abolished.

1932

Iraq becomes the first state of the former Ottoman Empire to graduate from mandate status by achieving independence.

1936–1939

Palestinians revolt against British authorities.

1939–1945

World War II.

1941–1979

Reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran.

1945

Arab League formed; United Nations formed.

1948

Israel declares independence as British troops quit Palestine; Arab armies attack but are defeated; many Palestinian Arabs seek refuge outside Palestine.

1953

Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq removed from power by a British- and CIA-backed coup.

1954–1970

Presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt.

1958

Iraqi monarchy overthrown; Republic of Iraq established.

408

Chronology Since World War I

409

1967

Arab-Israeli War (Six Day War or June War); Israel seizes the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

1969

Yasser Arafat elected PLO head.

1970–1971

Jordan crushes PLO rebellion.

1970–1981

Presidency of Anwar Sadat in Egypt.

1973

Arab-Israeli War (Yom Kippur War); Syria and Egypt coordinate a surprise attack against Israel; after an initial setback, Israel penetrates Syria and crosses the Suez Canal into Egypt.

1974–1977

Prime ministry of Yitzhak Rabin of Israel.

1977–1983

Prime ministry of Menachem Begin of Israel.

1978

Israel invades southern Lebanon; Camp David Accords negotiated by US president Jimmy Carter, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.

1979

Iranian Revolution culminates; Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi goes into exile; Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returns to Iran and proclaims the Islamic Republic of Iran; Iranian Revolutionary Guards storm the US embassy in Tehran and take ninety people hostage (fifty-two Americans remain hostages for 444 days). Egypt and Israel sign a peace treaty, causing other Arab states to break ties with Egypt. Saddam Hussein officially takes power in Iraq.

1980–1988

Iran-Iraq War.

1981

President Anwar Sadat of Egypt is assassinated. Israel bombs Iraqi nuclear reactor; annexes the Golan Heights. Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates form the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

1981–1989

Presidency of Ali Khamenei of Iran.

1981–2011

Presidency of Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.

1982

Israel returns Sinai to Egypt; invades Lebanon and drives back Syrian and PLO forces. PLO moves headquarters from Beirut to Tunis.

1983–1984

Prime ministry of Yitzhak Shamir of Israel.

1984–1986

Prime ministry of Shimon Peres of Israel.

1986–1992

Prime ministry of Yitzhak Shamir of Israel.

1986

Iran-Contra affair exposed.

1987

Palestinian intifada breaks out in Gaza and the West Bank in protest of Israeli occupation.

410

Chronology Since World War I

1988

Palestine National Council declares independent state of Palestine; PLO formally renounces terrorism and recognizes Israel’s right to exist.

1989

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran dies.

1989–1997

Presidency of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani of Iran.

1990

Iraq invades Kuwait.

1991

Gulf War: US-led coalition hastens Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait; UN Security Council imposes economic sanctions on Iraq. Israel and Arab countries begin peace negotiations in Madrid.

1992–1995

Prime ministry of Yitzhak Rabin of Israel.

1993

Oslo Accords implemented as PLO and Israeli representatives sign Declaration of Principles on White House lawn.

1994

Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty.

1995

Oslo II: further Palestinian-Israeli agreements on phased Israeli troop withdrawals. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel assassinated.

1995–1996

Prime ministry of Shimon Peres of Israel.

1996–1999

Prime ministry of Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

1997–2005

Presidency of Mohammad Khatami of Iran.

1999–2001

Prime ministry of Ehud Barak of Israel.

2000

Camp David II: Ehud Barak of Israel and Yasser Arafat of the PLO fail to reach final peace settlement. Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount coincides with a new Palestinian uprising, the Second (or al-Aqsa) Intifada.

2001

9/11: Islamist militants hijack four American passenger jets and fly two of them into the World Trade Center and another into the Pentagon, killing over 3,000 people; United States leads coalition invading Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban regime harboring Osama bin Laden, who evades capture.

2001–2006

Prime ministry of Ariel Sharon of Israel.

2002

US president George W. Bush identifies Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” Saudi Arabia proposes Arab recognition of Israel in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in the 1967 war. Israel begins construction of a “security fence” around much of the West Bank.

2003

United States and United Kingdom invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. With support from Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations, President George W. Bush announces a “road map” for resumption of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

2004

United States transfers sovereignty to Iraq’s interim government. Yasser Arafat dies; succeeded as chairman of the PLO by Mahmoud Abbas.

2005

Mahmoud Abbas succeeds Yasser Arafat as president of the Palestinian

Chronology Since World War I

411

Authority. Israel withdraws from the Gaza Strip. Sunnis boycott Iraqi elections; Shiites and Kurds form new Iraqi government. 2005–

Presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

2006

Hamas wins control of the Palestine Legislative Council; Israel and the United States denounce the electoral victory and impose strict economic sanctions on the Gaza Strip. Hamas captures Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit; Israel refuses to exchange Palestinian prisoners for him. Hezbollah captures two Israeli soldiers, sparking Israeli attacks on Lebanese targets and rocket attacks by Hamas on Israel’s northern cities and settlements. Israeli warplanes bomb Syrian facility believed to be a nuclear research site. Saddam Hussein is executed.

2006–2009

Prime ministry of Ehud Olmert of Israel.

2007

President George W. Bush announces surge of US troop commitments in Iraq. Arab summit renews Saudi offer of recognition and peace in exchange for Israeli withdrawal to its 1967 borders; Israel rejects offer. Hamas evicts Fatah from the Gaza Strip; Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas appoints Fatah government in the West Bank. Israel announces plans to expand settlements in East Jerusalem.

2008

Palestinians fire rockets from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel, which retaliates by raiding Gaza. US and allied troops fight major battles against Muqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite forces in Baghdad. Israel’s cabinet approves prisoner swap with Hezbollah. After a six-month cease-fire, Hamas resumes rocket attacks against Israel, and Israel again invades Gaza.

2009

Israel’s military offensive in Gaza ends with cease-fire. President Barack Obama announces US troops will exit Iraq by December 2011. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wins reelection as president of Iran, though suspicions of fraud spark massive demonstrations over the next several months. The United States and France reveal that Iran has been constructing a secret uranium-enrichment facility near Qum.

2010

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls for a fourth round of sanctions against Iran (in addition to those imposed in 2006, 2007, and 2008). The international Atomic Energy Agency reports that Iran may be using its civilian nuclear program as a cover to develop nuclear weapons. Iran declares it will build two new uranium-enrichment facilities deep inside mountains to protect them from attack. The secular Shiite bloc of Ayad Allawi edges the Shiite bloc of incumbent prime minister Nouri al-Maliki by two seats in Iraqi parliamentary elections; nonetheless, Maliki ultimately remains in office for a second term. Tunisian vendor Mohamed Bouazizi sets himself on fire to protest his treatment by local officials.

2011–2012

See “Summary of Recent Events 2011–2012” in the front matter of this volume.”

I NDEX QR

Abbas, Mahmoud (Abu Mazen) Fatah and, 383 Hamas/Fatah unity and, 315, 383 as Palestinian leader, 64, 114, 129, 137, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147 peace talks, 114 Abdallah of Transjordan, 36 Abdullah, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, 267, 275 Abdullah, King of Jordan, 114, 369 Abdullah, King of Saudi Arabia, 74, 77, 198, 315 Abu Mazen. See Abbas, Mahmoud (Abu Mazen) Afghanistan “border” with Pakistan, 191–192, 198 India and, 196–197 Obama and, 71–72, 231 opium and, 190, 195, 196 Soviets and, 192, 194, 348 US invasion/aftermath, 5, 46, 181, 189, 190–192, 194–195, 198, 222, 223 US troops withdrawal, 190 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud election/as president of Iran, 62, 183, 187, 209, 214, 259, 263, 268, 270, 286–287, 288–289, 291 Iranian opposition to, 263 Israel and, 86, 98, 169, 172, 183–184, 188, 289–290 regional foreign policy overview, 276–278 West and, 185, 218, 228, 232, 268–269, 288 AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), 86, 113, 188, 279, 280 Al-Hayat, 45

412

Al Jazeera, 52, 305, 326, 333, 377 Al Khalifa, Hamad bin Isa, King, 321, 327, 330, 338–339 Al-Nour Party, 294, 321, 340, 341 Al-Qaeda Arab views of, 304, 306 formation, 348 Golden Mosque, Samarra, 195, 226 ideology, 298, 303 Iraq War (US) and, 216, 226 reorganization, 195, 210 rise/decline summary, 303–304 Syria and, 325, 380 terrorism, 5, 52, 57, 71, 180, 181, 189, 195, 225, 226, 304, 348, 380 US and, 5, 46, 57, 59, 61, 71, 111, 180, 189, 190, 192, 304 Alawites Assads and, 19, 295, 296, 324–325, 353, 356, 369, 378 mandates and, 34 overview, 19 Allawi, Ayad, 234, 241, 242, 243, 246 Amal fighters, 271–272 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), 86, 113, 188, 279, 280 American University of Beirut (Syrian Protestant College), 26–27 An-Nahdah, 302, 305, 306 Annan, Kofi, 213, 379 April 6 Youth Movement, 331–332, 350, 361 Arab Israelis, 89, 148, 150, 156, 158, 161 Arab nationalism Arab Revolt (against Ottoman rule), 29, 30–31 Arab nationalism

Index Britain/West agreements and, 30–32, 32 (map) definition/description, 24, 25 groups before World War I, 28 historical background, 25 Nasser and, 248, 298, 303 Ottoman Empire and, 3–4, 24, 26 Palestine and, 123 pan-Islamism replacing, 248 Western Christian mission schools and, 26–27 Young Turk revolution (1908) and, 27 Arab Spring “Arab Spring” title problems, 362–364 causes summary, 376–377 conditions for protests, 328, 360, 364–365 established autocrats/dynastic succession and, 319, 331 food costs and, 366 forms of, 360–361 future challenges, 340–341 Islamist victories summary, 340 lack of popular representation, 366–367 military siding with protestors, 367 monarchies and, 369–370 neoliberalism and, 364–365 opponents/supporters examples, 368 overview by country, 320–327 regime maintaining cohesion, 368–369 significance, 331 social media/Internet and, 319, 326, 331, 333, 350, 355, 362 as “wave,” 364 youth populations, 319, 331, 355, 362, 365–366 See also specific countries Arabic language, 7, 8 (map), 17 Arabs definition, 25 overview, 17 shared cultural elements, 17 Arafat, Yasser background, 123 Bush and, 44, 63, 112, 147 death/effects, 64, 129, 142, 146–147 Fatah and, 123, 124, 313 Iraq and, 97, 125 Mubarak and, 344

413

PA and, 140 peace efforts and, 84, 97, 107, 110, 111, 128, 144, 308, 344 PLO and, 84–85, 107, 120, 125, 140, 248, 295, 308–309 Rantisi meeting, 308, 309 Armenians, 22–23 Armitage, Richard, 316 Assad, Bashar Alawites and, 19, 296, 324–325, 353, 356, 369, 378 Arab Spring and, 245, 295, 296, 324–325, 328, 330, 353, 356–358, 359 Iran and, 277 Israel and, 163, 164, 166 perceptions of prodemocracy movements, 353, 355–356, 358–359 possible regime end effects, 379–380 regime as “coup-proofed,” 369 rule, 324–325, 328, 353 Syrians’ hopes for reform with, 61, 353, 354 views of, 258–359 Assad, Hafez, 19, 61, 162, 163, 272, 295, 354 Assyrians, 19 Aswan High Dam, 346 Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal, 30, 38 Azeri (Azerbaijani) language, 9–10 Azzam, Abdullah, 303, 304 Badi’e, Mohammed, 301 Badr Brigades, 226, 276–277 Bahai, 10, 20 Bahrain Arab Spring, 322, 338–339, 368–369 Sunni/Shiite tensions, 321–322 Baker, James, 108, 109, 256 Bakr, Hasan al-, 250 Balfour, Arthur, 82–83, 93 Balfour Declaration, 31–32, 38, 45, 82–83, 91, 93–94, 101 Banna, Hasan al-, 38, 293–294, 312 Baradei, Mohamed El, 290 Barak, Ehud, 97, 110, 111, 136, 376 Barghouti, Mustafa, 143–144 Bazargan, Mehdi, 264 Begin, Menachem, 84, 96, 104–105, 106, 110

414 Ben Ali, Zine El Abidine Arab Spring/overthrow, 300, 302, 305, 306, 327, 339, 360, 361, 363, 367 exile, 320, 333, 361 rule, 319, 333, 361, 367 wife/wife’s family, 320, 333, 365 Biden, Joe, 114, 242 Bin Laden, Osama assassination, 327, 331 background, 189, 222 hiding by, 192–193, 222 9/11 motives, 180–181, 187, 222, 222–223, 258 terrorism, 44, 52, 56, 57, 111, 180–181, 187, 189, 192, 222, 348 “Black September,” 124 Blair, Tony, 63 Bouazizi, Mohamed, 320, 330, 332–333, 361, 364 Bremer, L. Paul III, 225, 226 Bush, George H.W. Gulf War, 59, 180, 256, 257 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 44, 107, 108 post-cold war policy, 219 Bush, George W. Afghanistan invasion/aftermath, 5, 46, 181, 189, 190–192, 194–195, 198, 222, 223 Arab attitudes towards, 373 “axis of evil,” 5, 62, 163, 175, 182, 183, 187–188, 209, 214, 228, 259–260, 268, 270, 275, 285 Hamas/Fatah unity, 315 Israel-Palestine, 63–65, 101, 111–112, 136, 147, 149 Middle East democratization and, 46, 55, 60, 65–66, 75, 215, 219 Muslim expectations of, 44 “nation-building” and, 191, 219, 235 neoconservatives and, 45, 57, 60, 62, 189–190 war on terror, 37, 45–46, 55, 56–57, 59, 60, 189, 192–193, 212–213, 310 See also Iraq War (US); 9/11 attacks; War on terror Carter, Jimmy hostage crisis/Iran and, 251, 252, 264

Index Israel/US relationship, 87, 104–105 Middle East peace efforts, 84, 96, 104–105, 110 Christianity in Middle East (overview), 11, 12 (map), 15–16 sects, 10, 15–16 See also specific religions Churchill, Winston, 36, 178 Clemenceau, Georges, 33 Clinton, Bill Iran and, 266, 267 Middle East policies/Islamists and, 42–43, 44 peace efforts, 55, 62, 97, 101, 109–111, 128, 343 post-cold war policy and, 219 relations with Syria/Iran, 61–62 Clinton, Hillary, 113, 114, 115, 321 Cold war Middle East oil and, 57, 58, 219 US policy towards Middle East, 219 Copts Christianity and, 17–18 description, 17–18 Crusades Druze and, 18 Islamism and, 39 legacy, 4 Maronites and, 18 Palestine and, 82 Damascus Spring, 354, 363–364 Democracy in Middle East George W. Bush administration and, 46, 55, 60, 65–66, 75, 215, 216, 217, 219 Iraq War and, 215, 216, 217 Islamists and elections, 293, 316 Dergham, Raghida, 45 Druze history, 18 Israeli relations, 18–19 Dulles, John Foster, 102, 118 Ebadi, Shirin, 292 Eban, Abba, 102 Egypt Britain and, 28, 41, 293, 350

Index elections (2012), 295 oil, 347 peace efforts/results, 54, 84, 124–125, 250, 253, 382 “Police Day,” 350 repression, 328 Soviet arms and, 95, 103 US aid, 344–345, 352 See also Muslim Brotherhood; specific individuals Egypt Arab Spring description, 320–321, 334–335, 350–351, 361–362, 367 Egyptian army and, 334, 361, 367, 380–381 future challenges, 340, 341 impact of, 362 summary, 320–321, 334–335 Tunisia protests and, 320 Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. See Muslim Brotherhood Eisenhower, Dwight D., 95, 102 Ethnic groups of Middle East overview, 17–23 See also specific groups Farsi (Persian) language, 9 Fatah Arafat and, 123, 124, 313 creation, 123 Hamas relationship, 85, 87–88, 130, 131, 143, 296, 298, 307, 315, 373, 383, 384, 385 Palestinian government/West Bank, 85, 87–88, 129, 296 Faysal (Husayn’s son), 30, 33, 34, 36 Ford, Gerald, 57, 104 Fotouh, Aboul, 381, 382 France and Middle East mandates, 3, 4 Gadhafi, Muammar Arab Spring/fall, 323, 335, 336 capture/execution, 323, 336 rule/style, 319, 365, 368 Wright/Farrakhan and, 112–113 Gates, Robert, 115, 190, 230, 236 Ghannouchi, Rashid, 304, 305–306 Ghonim, Wael, 334, 350, 351

415

Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), 255–256, 257, 272, 273, 274, 275, 322, 324, 327, 337 Gulf War Arab states and, 344–345, 349 Arafat and, 97, 125 background, 256, 345 Bush administration reasons for, 257 Bush and, 59, 180, 256, 257 description, 180 economic sanctions against Iraq, 211 Israel and, 107–108 Middle East oil and, 220 public support for, 59 Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, 52–53, 56, 59, 97, 107–108, 180, 186–187, 193, 217, 256–257, 324, 345 Hamas description, 219–220 Fatah relationship, 85, 87–88, 130, 131, 143, 296, 298, 307, 315, 373, 383, 384, 385 headquarters location, 295 Iran and, 86, 90, 98, 267, 272, 296, 325 Iran nuclear weapons and, 171, 173–174, 184, 187 Israel and, 98, 141–142, 295, 307, 313 meetings in Beirut (2004/2005), 310–312, 313–315 Obama on, 67 origins/mission, 127–128, 295, 312–313 Palestinian government/Gaza and, 65, 74, 85, 98, 100, 112, 120, 129, 130, 140–141, 146, 214, 296, 315–316 Rantisi/Arafat meeting, 308, 309 seizure of Gaza Strip/Israeli response, 130 social programs, 298, 313 Syria and, 162, 164, 295, 296 territorial ambitions (current), 307, 313 Hariri, Rafiq, 63, 277, 297, 299, 316–317, 359 Hashimi, Tariq al-, 243, 245 Hebrew language, 8 (map), 10 Herzl, Theodor, 92–93

416 Hess, Moses, 92 Hezbollah description/actions, 219–220, 252, 264–265, 307 Iran and, 53, 86, 90, 98, 167, 171, 173, 174, 177, 184, 186, 187, 251–252, 259, 266, 267, 269, 270, 271–272, 277, 296, 297, 298, 316, 317, 325 Iran-Contra Affair and, 251–253 Israel and, 89, 96, 98, 112, 214, 266, 277–278, 279, 282–283, 297 Israel and US-Iran conflicts, 282–283 Lebanon and, 162, 165, 166, 173, 185, 186, 187, 188, 252, 259, 277–278, 287, 297, 317–318 meetings in Beirut (2004/2005), 310–312 origins/mission, 296 politics/government, 297, 317–318 social programs, 296, 298 Syria and, 63, 162, 163, 164–165, 184, 252, 271–272, 277, 296, 297, 298–299, 316–317, 325, 380 Hidden Imam, 172 Hostage crisis Carter and, 251, 252, 264 description, 250, 251, 252, 259, 262 Iran-Contra affair and, 182, 186, 247, 252, 253, 254–255, 265 Reagan and, 183, 251 Husayn-McMahon Correspondence, 29–30, 93 Husayn, Sharif/Amir, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 93 Hussein, Saddam assuming presidency, 250 background/style, 180, 199 death, 181 Iranian Revolution and, 247, 248–250 Iraq under, 235 Kuwait invasion/Gulf war, 52–53, 56, 59, 97, 107–108, 180, 186–187, 193, 217, 256–257, 324, 345 Muslim Brotherhood and, 295 nuclear program and, 174, 177, 193 as “replacement for shah,” 252–253, 255, 256 Saudi Arabia and, 273–274

Index Sunni Muslims and, 182, 183, 185, 186, 199, 247 See also Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988); Iraq; Iraq War (US) IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), 175, 183, 188, 268, 290 Indyk, Martin, 42 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 175, 183, 188, 268, 290 Iran, 179 (map) Afghanistan/Taliban and, 267, 268, 278, 285 American hostages/US response, 250, 251, 252, 259, 262 Arab Spring and, 326, 377–378 “baby boom” generation, 261–262 Bush’s “axis of evil,” 5, 62, 175, 182, 183, 187–188, 209, 214, 228, 259–260, 268, 270, 275, 285 cinema, 292 division between young/old, 261–262 economic sanctions against, 175–176, 220 election manipulation (2009), 263 family importance, 261 foreign intervention history and, 260 foreign policy overview, 259–260, 263–269 future of, 292 Hamas and, 86, 90, 98, 267, 272, 296, 325 Hezbollah and, 53, 86, 90, 98, 167, 171, 173, 174, 177, 184, 186, 187, 251–252, 259, 266, 267, 269, 270, 271–272, 277, 296, 297, 298, 316, 317, 325 Iraq War (US) and, 214, 218, 220, 228, 233 Iraqi Shiites and, 287–288 Israel/US relationship and, 280–283 martyrdom/social justice, 260 Obama’s engagement policy, 232, 269 oil, 51, 52–53, 266, 281 Persians and, 20–21 political dynamics after revolution, 262–263 political pluralism, 260–261 reaching out to West, 183, 187–188, 259–260, 268, 270, 276, 285–286

Index response to 9/11 attacks, 183, 187–188, 259–260, 268, 270, 276, 285 Saudi Arabia relationship, 51, 52, 53 shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi), 54, 169, 183, 186, 216–217, 248, 249, 250, 259, 260, 270, 274, 283, 335, 342 Syria relations, 270, 277, 325 US and Israeli lobby, 280–283 US policy of dual containment, 220 US relationship improvement, 280–283, 289 weapons from Israel, 259, 265 women and politics, 262–263 See also specific individuals Iran-Contra affair, 182, 186, 247, 252, 253, 254–255, 265 Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) description/results, 107, 250, 253–255 Iranian Revolution and, 217, 247, 248–249, 250, 253–255 Iranian views/effects, 169, 214, 262 Saddam Hussein’s plans, 180, 186, 217, 247, 248–249, 250, 253, 254, 255, 272 US and, 252–253, 254, 272–273 Iran nuclear program/weapons as defense, 55, 62, 169, 175 dispute/unknowns, 290–291 economic sanctions and, 175–176 Obama and, 74–75, 114–115, 170, 175, 185–186, 218, 232–233, 375 oil supplies and, 51, 53, 62 overview, 228–229 program/enrichment description, 169–171, 268, 290–291 response options, 174–178 Russia and, 267–268 solution to, 375–376 Iran nuclear weapons/Israel disarming first-strike scenario, 171–172, 375–376 Hamas/Hezbollah and, 171, 173–174, 184, 187 Iranian religious fanaticism scenario, 172–173 Israeli options, 87, 89–90, 176–178 militant groups scenario, 173–174 US and, 87, 114–115, 280–282

417

Iranian regional foreign policy Ahmadinejad, 276–278 Islamic Republic, 271–273 Khatami, 274–276 overview, 270, 271–278 Rafsanjani, 273–274 See also Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) Iranian Revolution (1979) background, 260, 261 impact in region, 247, 248–250, 252, 253 Iran-Iraq War and, 217, 247, 248–249, 250, 253–255 Khomeini and, 53, 186, 187, 247, 248, 250 Middle East oil and, 54 regional foreign policy during Islamic Republic, 271–274 See also Hostage crisis Iraq, 179 (map) agriculture, 201–202, 208 Arab Spring, 322–323 arms inspection teams, 221, 223–224 borders, 200 chemical weapons, 193 Christian sects, 206–207 democracy and, 214–215 economic sanctions against, 220–221 electioneering/elections (2009–2010), 239–242 future possibilities, 215 history (summary), 199 Kurds, 185, 202, 203 (map), 205–206, 226–227, 237, 243–244 land description, 200–201 languages, 202, 206 mandates following World War I and, 34, 35 (map), 36, 93, 94, 184–185, 216 minorities, 206–207 oil, 202 people, 185, 202, 203 (map), 204–207 Shiite Iran relationship and, 374–375 Shiite Islamists party, 234, 240, 241 Shiites, 202, 203 (map), 204 Sunnis, 202, 203 (map), 204–205 town-tribe dichotomy, 207–208 US policy of dual containment, 220 See also Gulf war; Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988); specific individuals

418

Index

Iraq War (US) al-Qaeda groups and, 216, 226 America’s Arab allies and, 221 Arab views, 373–374 Baath Party ban and, 211, 212, 216, 217 Bush administration approach/justifications, 5, 45–46, 57, 59, 60, 107–108, 181–182, 189– 190, 192, 193–194, 209, 212, 218, 221, 223–225, 233, 363 costs (human/economic), 5, 55, 58, 210, 211, 212, 216 democracy in Iraq and, 215, 216, 217 description, 46, 224, 235 following Saddam Hussein’s removal, 60–61, 181–183, 185, 194 impacts in other Middle East countries, 214, 228, 273–274, 276, 278 impacts on Iraq (summary), 210–211, 216 insurgency, 60–61, 182–183, 190, 210, 211, 216, 218, 225–226 Iran and, 214, 218, 220, 228, 233 Israel and, 107–108 Kurds/Kurdish region and, 211 mercenary aspects, 216 “Mission Accomplished” (Bush), 181–182, 194–195, 224 oil and, 209, 210, 213, 216 Saddam Hussein and, 55, 57, 61, 62, 72, 174, 181, 278 Syria and, 218, 220 UN and, 213–214, 223 US status and, 210, 213, 221, 229 US surge, 182, 198, 227–228 US withdrawal/SOFA and, 231, 234, 238–239, 373–374 Iraqi National Alliance (INA), 234, 240, 241, 242 Islam extent/spread, 3, 12–13, 14 (map) five pillars of, 13 overview, 11–15, 12 (map) schism/effects, 2, 14–15 Islamic Jihad Egypt and, 253, 304 Iran and, 162, 184, 187, 188, 259, 267, 272, 275, 277, 296 strength, 127–128, 140 Syria, 163, 164

Islamic Resistance Movement. See Hamas Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), 239, 240, 242, 245–246 Islamists changing priorities/activities, 306 debates within movement, 304–306 description/goals, 13, 14, 38–40 elections/US views on democracy and, 293, 316 meetings in Beirut (2004/2005), 310–312, 313–315 perceptions of US/Western Middle East policy, 37, 38, 40–46 Zionism and, 37, 38, 40–41, 43–44, 46 See also specific groups; specific individuals Israel, 81 (map), 83 (map) AIPAC, 86, 113, 188, 279, 280 American Jews and, 151–156 Arab Israelis, 89, 148, 150, 156, 158, 161 Balfour Declaration, 31–32, 38, 45, 82–83, 91, 93–94, 101 creation, 4, 24, 31–32, 36, 38, 82–84, 83 (map) destruction/nuclear weapons threats (overview), 168–169, 183–184 European nationalism and, 92–93 immigration issues, 92, 94, 108, 151, 154, 159–160 Jewish diaspora and, 151–156 Jews/“who is Jew” and, 10, 17, 22, 152 Syria and, 109 US Congress and, 100–101 US public opinion and, 101, 116 US relationship, 44, 59–60, 73, 85–86, 87, 95, 100–119, 280–283 See also Iran nuclear weapons/Israel; Palestine/Palestinians; Security fence Israeli-Arab conflict 1967 Arab-Israeli War, 37, 38, 43–44, 84, 95–96, 101, 103, 118, 123 Yom Kippur War (1973), 96, 101, 104, 124 Israeli-Palestinian conflict from 1948–1949, 84, 85, 94–95, 122 First Intifada (1987–1993), 86, 87, 96–97, 106, 127–128 Hamas’ seizure of Gaza Strip/aftermath, 130 history (summary), 82–86

Index Israeli disengagement from Gaza and, 137–138, 142 Israeli hold on West Bank (2000s), 137–138 Jerusalem (with partition), 83 (map), 84, 118, 121 Jewish settlements, 5, 43, 44, 63–64, 67, 74, 85, 86, 87, 88, 97, 99, 108, 113, 114, 132, 134, 135–138, 384 Palestinians calls for sanctions, boycott, divestment (2005), 145 Second Intifada (starting 2000), 86, 87, 88, 132, 143, 314 single-state (Bantustan plan) solution, 148, 384 two-state solution, 5, 64, 148–149, 384–385 See also Security Fence Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts Camp David meetings, 97, 105, 111, 128, 144, 343, 382, 384 current status, 383–384 Madrid Conference (1991), 43, 108–109, 110, 111, 112 Oslo Accords, 37, 43, 84–85, 86, 87, 97, 101, 109–110, 111, 125, 128–129, 140, 144, 148, 149 “road map” for peace, 55, 63–64, 73, 97, 101, 112, 136–137, 144 UN Security Council Resolutions 242/338, 96, 103, 105, 107, 108 US 1967, 58–59 See also specific individuals Israeli territories administration, 157–159 demographics, 156–157 employment patterns, 157–158 name changes/significance, 156 Jemal, 30 Jesus, 11, 15 Jews history, 21–22 intermarriage and, 153–154 in Iraq, 206 in Israel/diaspora, 151–156 separation of church/state and, 150, 153, 156 “who is Jew” question, 10, 17, 22, 152 See also Israel; Judaism

419

Johnson, Lyndon, 96, 103, 104 Judaism groups within, 16–17 overview, 12 (map), 16–17 See also Israel; Jews Karzai, Hamid, 181, 194, 195, 196–197, 198 Kennedy, John F., 95, 103 Khalilzad, Zalmay, 195 Khamenei, Ali, Ayatollah, 228, 229, 259, 263, 266–267, 268, 274, 285, 286 Khatami, Muhammad losing election, 66, 228 as president of Iran, 62, 66, 183, 187, 259, 262, 266, 267, 270 reforms and, 260, 262, 266, 270, 285 regional foreign policy overview, 274–276 response to 9/11 attacks, 183, 187–188, 259–260, 268, 270, 276, 285 West and, 266, 267 Khatar, Sami, 313, 314 Khomeini, Ruhollah, Ayatollah death, 254, 265 description, 248 as Iranian/Islamic leader, 169, 193, 249, 250, 251, 260–261 Iranian Revolution, 53, 186, 187, 247, 248, 250 Islamism and, 248, 251, 253, 265, 276, 296 Israel and, 183–184, 248 King-Crane Commission, 33–34 Kissinger, Henry, 96, 104, 107 Kurdish language, 8 (map), 9 Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), 243–244, 245 Kurds electioneering/elections (2009–2010), 240–242 history/culture overview, 21 Iraq and, 185, 202, 203 (map), 205–206, 226–227, 237, 243–244 Maliki and, 237, 243–244 oil and, 243, 327 religion, 21 tensions with Iraq (summary), 227 Kuwait. See Gulf War

420 Languages of Middle East (overview), 3, 6, 7–10, 8 (map) Lawrence, T. E. (Lawrence of Arabia), 3, 30, 31, 33 League of Nations, 3, 33, 34, 83–84, 94 Libya Arab Spring, 323, 335–336 youth population, 319 Lloyd George, David, 33 Madrid Conference (1991), 43, 108–109, 110, 111, 112 Mahsom, 143 Maliki, Nouri albackground, 245–246 Basra incursion/control, 186, 234, 236–237, 238 consolidation of power, 234, 235–246 Kurds and, 237, 243–244 as post-Saddam Hussein leader, 182, 186, 225, 226, 231, 235–246 State of Law coalition, 234, 240, 241, 242 US withdrawal/SOFA and, 234, 238–239 Mandates/spheres of influence (1924), 3, 4, 24, 31, 32 (map), 34, 35 (map), 36, 39, 93 Maronites overview, 18 Marzouk, Musa Abu, 313–314 McMahon, Sir Henry, 29 Mecca’s historical importance, 11–12 Middle East Bush administration democracy plans, 46, 55, 60, 65–66, 75, 215, 216, 217, 219 geographic description, 1–2, 1 (map) questions/answers, 373–385 “Mission Accomplished” (Bush), 181–182, 194–195, 224 Mitchell, George, 114, 383 Morsy, Mohamed, 295, 321, 328, 351, 381–382 Mosaddeq, Mohammad, 183, 260, 270 Mosques described, 13 Moussa, Amr, 382 Mubarak, Hosni Arab Spring/overthrow, 294, 300, 302, 306, 319, 320, 321, 327, 335, 338, 352, 361, 380

Index background, 343 economic policies, 346–347, 352 Egyptian national identity and, 348–349 Muslim Brotherhood and, 301–302 peace talks, 114, 382 rising opposition, 349–350 rule/style, 319, 331, 342, 343–346, 363, 382, 383 sons, 301, 331 trial/sentence, 321 US and, 65, 293 Muhammad descendants and, 14, 26, 28, 36, 38 history, 11, 12–13 Musharraf, Pervez, 190, 197–198 Muslim Brotherhood Badi’e and, 301 beliefs/strategy, 302, 305 divisions in, 300 early activities, 293–294 Egypt’s bans on, 294 Freedom and Justice Party, 294, 306, 321, 341 Iraqi branch, 295 Mubarak and, 301–302 Nasser and, 294, 302, 303, 349 origins/mission, 38, 293, 305 politics/elections, 294, 295, 300, 321, 328, 340, 341, 351, 352, 381, 382 social programs, 294ies, 298 Syria, 259, 265, 295 Muslims nations with largest populations, 6 See also Islam; Shiite Muslims; Sunni Muslims Nasrallah, Hassan, 164, 165, 316 Nasser, Gamal Abdel Muslim Brotherhood and, 294, 302, 303, 349 pan-Arabism, 248, 298, 303 rule, 95, 96, 176, 343, 345, 346, 347, 348, 365 Neoconservatives in Bush administration, 45, 57, 60, 62, 189–190 Netanyahu, Benjamin governing coalition, 384 Iran and, 115, 376 Obama and, 68, 101, 113, 114, 116

Index peace efforts/two-state solution, 68, 87, 97, 110, 113–114 settlements and, 87 New York Times, 169, 195 Nicholas I, Tsar, 3 9/11 attacks bin Laden’s motives, 180–181, 187, 222, 222–223, 258 description/results, 58, 71, 72, 180, 221–222, 349 Iran’s (Khatami) response, 183, 187–188, 259–260, 268, 270, 276, 285 US Middle East policies and, 56, 222–223 US response, 5, 37, 38, 44–46, 111, 221–222 views on/of Islamists, 10, 13 1967 Arab-Israeli War, 37, 38, 43–44, 84, 95–96, 101, 103, 118, 123 Nixon, Richard, 104 North Korea arms for Iran, 265 “axis of evil,” 62, 182, 228, 270, 275, 285 nuclear weapons and, 55, 62, 163, 174, 177, 178 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 67, 75, 170, 183, 188, 229, 290 Obama, Barack Afghanistan and, 71–72, 231 Arab attitudes towards, 373 Arab Spring and, 321, 325 on democracy, 75 economic development/opportunity, 77–78 Iran engagement policy, 232, 269 Iran nuclear power/weapons, 74–75, 114–115, 170, 175, 185–186, 218, 232–233, 375 Iraq and, 72, 238 Israeli-Palestinian issue, 72–73, 87, 383–384 Israeli-US relationship, 73, 100, 101, 112–117 Middle East situation (2009), 229–230 religious freedom, 76–77 on violent extremism, 71–72 women’s rights, 77 Obama, Barack/speech in Cairo (2009)

421

background/summary, 5, 67 reaction to, 67–68, 229–230 reprint, 68–79 Oil of Middle East cold war and, 57, 58, 219 demand (projected), 48 global spare capacity, 50 Gulf War, 220 importance summary, 48 increasing dependence on, 49–50 Iranian revolution and, 54 Iraq War (US) and, 209, 210, 213, 216 Kurds and, 243, 327 Middle East foreign policy and, 5 1973 embargo, 54 peak oil/effects, 48 tanker war, 252 See also specific countries Oil of Middle East/supply disruption threats extremists in Saudi Arabia, 52 Iran and, 51, 52–53 military threats, 50–51 mitigating, 53–54 Saudi regional orientation, 52–53 terrorism, 52 WMD and, 50, 51 Olmert, Ehud, 55, 65, 98, 129 Olympics, Munich (1972), 124 OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 347 Oslo Accords, 37, 43, 84–85, 86, 87, 97, 101, 109–110, 111, 125, 128–129, 140, 144, 148, 149 Ottoman Empire Byzantine Empire and, 2 decline, 3 millet system, 11, 22 World War I, 3–4, 28, 36 Pahlavi, Mohammad (shah) after Iranian revolution, 274, 342 fall, 186, 248, 250, 335 Iranian opposition to, 249, 260 Israel and, 270 US/West and, 54, 169, 183, 216–217, 248, 259, 260, 270, 283 See also Iranian Revolution (1979)

422

Index

Pakistan India and, 196, 197 nuclear weapons, 197 Pashtun people, 196 US and, 197–198 Palestine Liberation Organization. See PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) Palestine/Palestinians, 82 (map), 83 (map) after Arafat, 142–144, 146 British mandate and, 34, 35 (map), 36, 82, 83–84, 86, 91, 93–94, 121–122 geographic area, 120 history summary (before Israel creation), 82 Israeli land confiscation/occupation (after 1967 war), 126 labor force in Israel, 126 nationalist movement (1920s-1930s), 121 PA/Hamas relationship, 74, 140–142 PA/Oslo Accords, 140, 144 partitioning, 82–84, 83 (map), 118, 121–122 people description, 121 third-force coalition, 142–144 university system expansion, 126–127 See also Israel; Israeli-Arab conflict; Israeli-Palestinian conflict; IsraeliPalestinian peace efforts; Israeli territories Palestinian refugees causes, 24, 64, 85, 88, 103, 106, 120, 122–123 PLO and, 139, 147 right of return, 84, 139, 144, 145 Paris Peace Conference (after World War I), 33 Pashtun people/Pashtunistan, 191–193, 196, 197, 198 Patriot Act (US), 45 Peres, Shimon, 107, 110, 136 Persians overview, 20–21 PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) decline effects, 140, 142, 144 financial supporters and, 125 First Intifada and, 127–128 Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and, 86, 96, 106, 124, 125, 127, 188, 252, 279, 283, 296

1967–1993, 123–125 Oslo Accords and, 140 peace efforts, 107 views on, 84–85, 105, 308 See also Arafat, Yasser; Fatah Powell, Colin, 57 Powell Doctrine, 60 Putin, Vladimir, 54 Qaradawi, Yusuf al-, 351 Quayle, Dan, 39–40 Questions/answers on Middle East, 373–385 Quran origins, 13 Qutb, Sayyid, 294, 297–298, 302, 303, 320, 349 Rabin, Yitzhak, 84, 97, 108, 109–110, 127, 128, 144, 278, 308 Racial profiling, 44, 45 Rafsanjani, Akbar Hashemi as Iranian president, 169, 183, 187, 259, 262, 263, 265–266, 286 regional foreign policy overview, 273–274 West and, 265–266, 267 Rantisi, Abdul Aziz, 308–309 Reagan, Ronald hostage crisis, 183, 251 Iran-Contra affair, 182, 186, 247, 252, 253, 254–255 Iraq and, 252–253, 256 Israeli-US relations, 96, 105–106, 107 military and, 59 Rumsfeld and, 57 Religions and Middle East monotheistic religions beginnings, 3, 11 overview, 10–11, 12 (map) politics and, 10 See also specific religions Rice, Condoleezza, 219, 236, 315, 316 “Road map” for peace, 55, 63–64, 73, 97, 101, 112, 136–137, 144 Rumsfeld, Donald, 57, 60, 194–195, 224–225 Rushdie, Salman, 265, 267 Sadat, Anwar assassination, 253, 342, 344, 345, 348 peace efforts/results, 84, 104, 253, 342

Index rule/style, 343, 345, 348–349 shah and, 274 Sadr, Muqtada al-and Sadrists, 226, 234, 236–237, 238, 239, 240, 242, 245–246, 277, 287 Said, Khalid, 334, 350 Saif al-Islam, 336 Saladin (Salah al-Din), 39 Saleh, Ali Abdullah Arab Spring, 324, 327, 336, 337 rule, 319, 337, 368 Saudi Arabia Arab Spring, 326, 369–370 as Guardians of the Two Holy Places, 249 Iran relationship, 51, 52, 53 political Islam and, 298, 303 Saddam Hussein’s ambition and, 273–274 Saud family rise to power, 34 Saudi Arabia oil locations, 249 rise of extremists and, 52 Shiite minority/riots, 249 Sayyid, Salman, 309–310 Security fence court rulings on, 134–135, 145 description, 133, 134 effects on Palestinians, 133–135 security and, 133, 134 settlements and, 132, 134, 135–136 Sharon and, 55, 64, 86, 88, 97, 129, 132, 134, 135, 136 Shafiq, Ahmed, 321, 351, 381 Shah of Iran. See Pahlavi, Mohammad (shah) Shamir, Yitzhak, 107, 108 Sharia Islamic fundamentalism, 13 Quran and, 13 Sharif defined, 28–29 Sharon, Ariel Arab-Israeli relations and, 111, 141–142, 147, 149 Gaza/West Bank and, 137–138, 143–144 security fence, 55, 64, 86, 88, 97, 129, 132, 134, 135, 136 settlements and, 135–138 stroke, 64–65

423

Temple Mount visit (2000), 88, 132 US relations, 44, 59–60, 63, 64, 105 Shiite Muslims overview, 12 (map) Persians and, 20, 21 schism, 2, 14–15 sects, 10 Signposts on the Road/Milestones (Qutb), 294, 302 Sistani, Ali, Ayatollah, 225, 287 Suez Canal, 28, 30, 96, 103, 293, 350 Suleiman the Magnificent, 2 Sunni Muslims overview, 12 (map) schism, 2, 14–15 Sykes-Picot Agreement, 31, 32 (map), 39, 93 Syria Alawites, 19, 295, 296, 324–325, 353, 356, 369, 378 Beirut bomb blast (2005) and, 63 chemical/nuclear weapons and, 162, 163, 164 France mandate and, 3, 34, 35 (map), 36, 93 Hamas and, 162, 164, 295, 296 Hezbollah and, 63, 162, 163, 164–165, 184, 252, 271–272, 277, 296, 297, 298–299, 316–317, 325, 380 Iran relations, 270, 277, 325 Iraq war (US) and, 218, 220 Muslim Brotherhood, 259, 265, 295 as threat to Israel (overview), 89, 162, 163–166 UN Security Council Resolution 1559 and, 63 US relations before/after 9/11, 62–63 See also specific individuals Syria Arab Spring Assad’s perceptions of protests, 353, 355–356, 358–359 continuing stalemate and, 378–379 deaths/torture, 339–340, 357, 362 description, 165–166, 245, 324, 325, 328, 339–340, 357–358, 359 Hezbollah and, 184 international community and, 357, 359 Syrians’ disdain for chaos and, 353, 356 UN Security Council and, 325, 379

424 Taliban Afghanistan and, 57, 59, 181, 189, 190, 192, 194, 195, 198, 218, 222, 223, 267, 268, 278 Iran and, 288–289 Pakistan and, 196 Pashtunistan/reorganization, 192–193, 196, 198, 210, 222 spring offensive (2006), 195–196 US/coalition fight against, 57, 59, 71, 181, 189, 190, 191, 222, 268, 285 Tamimi, Azzam, 312, 313 Terrorist groups vs. terrorist networks, 307 Terrorists distinction between groups, 219–220, 298, 307, 311 as “outside civilization,” 309–310 See also specific groups; War on terror Trabelsi, Leila/family, 320, 333, 365 Treaty of Sèvres (1920), 34 Truman, Harry S., 58, 95, 100, 102 Tunisia, An-Nahdah, 302, 305, 306 Tunisia Arab Spring description, 320, 332–333, 361, 367 future challenges, 340–341 impact of, 320, 333–334, 362 Turkey Arab Spring, 326–327 Turkish language, 8–9, 8 (map) Turks overview, 19–20 United Kingdom and Middle East mandates, 3, 4 US interests/policies in Middle East change with 9/11, 58–59 cold war policy (summary), 219 dual containment, 220–221 9/11 attacks and, 56, 222–223 1945 to 2000, 57–59 presence in Gulf, 257–258

Index See also Iraq War (US); Oil of Middle East; specific countries; specific organizations; War on terror War on terror democratization of Middle East and, 46, 55, 60 George W. Bush administration, 37, 45–46, 55, 56–57, 59, 60, 189, 192–193, 212–213, 310 terrorist distinctions and, 219–220 US invasion of Afghanistan, 46, 181, 189, 190–192, 194–195, 198, 222, 223 West’s harmful policies, 311 See also Iraq War (U.S.) Washington Post, 165, 194 Weizmann, Chaim, 33 Wilson, Woodrow, 33, 34, 101 World War I mandates/spheres of influence following, 3, 4, 24, 31, 32 (map), 34, 35 (map), 36, 39, 93 postwar peace settlements, 33–34, 35 (map), 36 See also specific areas/countries Wright, Jeremiah, Reverend, 112–113 Yemen Arab Spring, 323–324, 336–337 Yom Kippur War (1973), 96, 101, 104, 124 Young Turk revolution (1908), 27 Yusuf, Sheikh Hassan, 141, 142 Zahar, Mahmoud al-, 141 Zawahiri, Ayman al-, 294, 304, 312, 348 Zionism beginnings, 92–93, 94 Zoroastrians, 9, 10, 11, 20, 207