THE ‘ARAB SPRING’ AS WINTER DESCENDS
Mitchell A. Belfer
National Review, January 18, 2012
Honest reflection on the past twelve months of discontent, as manifested in various forms of revolutionary zeal, rhetoric, and violence, exposes a solitary thread weaving through all the demonstrations and “rebel” and “opposition” movements that cycloned through the Middle East and North Africa: In each case, local issues were the engines of public mobilization. Whether discussing Mohammed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia, the tribal swaggering in Yemen, or demonstrators’ exploitation of opportunity (and Iranian money) in Bahrain, it is clear that the “Arab Spring” is a haphazard series of disconnected local events, united in time but varying greatly in motivation.
This idea contrasts with the all-too-frequent invocation of a loose web of universal values to explain these political outbursts. The Arab Spring is a set of rebellions against current rulers, but it has never been about a regional application of new systems of governance, mechanisms of accountability, or even sources of legitimacy. While some of the more thoughtful political movements have heralded democratization as a rallying siren, their sentiments were neither widely endorsed nor convincingly pursued.
Instead, democracy is rhetorically invoked to reinforce anti-democratic ideologies. Libya’s National Transitional Council has, according to Amnesty International, committed terrible atrocities against civilians. Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Party (the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood) pledges to construct and maintain Egyptian democracy while referring to women as “wives, mothers, and makers of men” and promising to help women in those roles. Similarly, the Al-Wefaq party in Bahrain demands democracy and, upon attaining that goal, boycotts elections while physically intimidating candidates.…
However loud the rhythmic chant of democracy may be, the transformation of any society cannot be achieved through balloting alone. Such political renovations require long and arduous processes to build public trust, institutionalize legal arbitration, and stabilize the national economy. While regular elections may be an important yardstick of a country’s democratic credentials, they are not infallible and, as events in the Middle East suggest, are likely to lead to a “tyranny of the majority” where the winner takes all.…
Violence has turned the Arab Spring into an “Arab Winter,” a bleak period defined by mass migrations of Egyptians, Libyans, and Tunisians to Europe; by sporadic violence-as-temper-tantrum by the leaders and followers of a dozen anti-establishment groups in Bahrain; and by low-intensity tribal warfare in Yemen and high-intensity civil war in Syria, all as silence falls over the international community.
The cynicism brought by such seasonal change is made more acute by events in Iran, which is reaching for regional hegemony through internal repression and external doublespeak. Iran supports Syria’s crackdown against demonstrators; it raves for democracy abroad while executing some 500 people—mostly political prisoners—per year; it supports the Arab Spring but crushed the “Persian Summer” in 2009; and, most recently, it facilitated the storming of the U.K. embassy as revenge for Britain’s criticism of the Iranian regime.…
This reinforces the truth that there is no homogeneous region called the Arab world, filled with homogeneous Arab people making homogeneous demands on homogeneous governments. Instead, each country carries its own cultural baggage, historical experience, political approach, strategic orientation, and local perspective. Only by understanding and accepting the unique conditions existing within each state can progress be made in the Middle East as a whole. Instead of relying on rash, quick-fix democracy, emphasis needs to be placed on fostering national dialogue within each state, or else we will risk a swinging pendulum that will knock the Arab countries backwards.…
AMERICA AND THE ARAB SPRING
Caroline B. Glick
Jerusalem Post, January 23, 2012
A year ago this week, on January 25, 2011, the ground began to crumble under then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s feet. One year later, Mubarak and his sons are in prison, and standing trial. [Last] week, the final vote tally from Egypt’s parliamentary elections was published. The Islamist parties have won 72 percent of the seats in the lower house.
The photogenic, Western-looking youth from Tahrir Square the Western media were thrilled to dub the “Facebook revolutionaries” were disgraced at the polls and exposed as an insignificant social and political force. As for the military junta, it has made its peace with the Muslim Brotherhood. The generals and the jihadists are negotiating a power-sharing agreement. According to details of the agreement that have made their way to the media, the generals will remain the West’s go-to guys for foreign affairs. The Muslim Brotherhood (and its fellow jihadists in the Salafist al-Nour party) will control Egypt’s internal affairs.
This is bad news for women and for non-Muslims. Egypt’s Coptic Christians have been under continuous attack by Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist supporters since Mubarak was deposed. Their churches, homes and businesses have been burned, looted and destroyed. Their wives and daughters have been raped. The military massacred them when they dared to protest their persecution. As for women, their main claim to fame since Mubarak’s overthrow has been their sexual victimization at the hands of soldiers who stripped female protesters and performed “virginity tests” on them. Out of nearly five hundred seats in parliament, only 10 will be filled by women.
The Western media are centering their attention on what the next Egyptian constitution will look like and whether it will guarantee rights for women and minorities. What they fail to recognize is that the Islamic fundamentalists now in charge of Egypt don’t need a constitution to implement their tyranny. All they require is what they already have—a public awareness of their political power and their partnership with the military.
The same literalist approach that has prevented Western observers from reading the writing on the walls in terms of the Islamists’ domestic empowerment has blinded them to the impact of Egypt’s political transformation on the country’s foreign policy posture. US officials forcefully proclaim that they will not abide by an Egyptian move to formally abrogate its peace treaty with Israel. What they fail to recognize is that whether or not the treaty is formally abrogated is irrelevant. The situation on the ground in which the new regime allows Sinai to be used as a launching ground for attacks against Israel, and as a highway for weapons and terror personnel to flow freely into Gaza, are clear signs that the peace with Israel is already dead—treaty or no treaty.
Egypt’s transformation is not an isolated event. The disgraced former Yemen president Ali Abdullah Saleh arrived in the US [last] week [to seek medical attention]. Yemen is supposed to elect his successor next month. The deteriorating security situation in that strategically vital land which borders the Arabian and Red Seas has decreased the likelihood that the election will take place as planned.
Yemen is falling apart at the seams. Al-Qaida forces have been advancing in the south. Last spring they took over Zinjibar, the capital of Abyan province. In recent weeks they captured Radda, a city 160 km. south of the capital of Sana. Radda’s capture underscored American fears that the political upheaval in Yemen will provide al-Qaida with a foothold near shipping routes through the Red Sea and so enable the group to spread its influence to neighboring Saudi Arabia.
Al-Qaida forces were also prominent in the NATO-backed Libyan opposition forces that with NATO’s help overthrew Muammar Gaddafi in October. Although the situation on the ground is far from clear, it appears that radical Islamic political forces are intimidating their way into power in post-Gaddafi Libya.…
In Bahrain, the Iranian-supported Shi’ite majority continues to mount political protests against the Sunni monarchy. Security forces killed two young Shi’ite protesters over the past week and a half, and opened fired at Shi’ites who sought to hold a protest march after attending the funeral of one of them. As supporters of Bahrain’s Shi’ites have maintained since the unrest spread to the kingdom last year, Bahrain’s Shi’ites are not Iranian proxies. But then, until the US pulled its troops out of Iraq last month, neither were Iraq’s Shi’ites. What happened immediately after the US pullout is another story completely.
Extolling Iraq’s swift deterioration into an Iranian satrapy, last Wednesday, Brig.-Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps Jerusalem Brigade, bragged, “In reality, in south Lebanon and Iraq, the people are under the effect of the Islamic Republic’s way of practice and thinking.” While Suleimani probably exaggerated the situation, there is no doubt that Iran’s increased influence in Iraq is being felt around the region. Iraq has come to the aid of Iran’s Syrian client Bashar Assad who is now embroiled in a civil war. The rise of Iran in Iraq holds dire implications for the Hashemite regime in Jordan which is currently hanging on by a thread, challenged from within and without by the rising force of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Much has been written since the fall of Mubarak about the impact on Israel of the misnamed Arab Spring. Events like September’s mob assault on Israel’s embassy in Cairo and the murderous cross-border attack on motorists traveling on the road to Eilat by terrorists operating out of Sinai give force to the assessment that Israel is more imperiled than ever by the revolutionary events engulfing the region. But the truth is that while on balance Israel’s regional posture has taken a hit, particularly from the overthrow of Mubarak and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists in Egypt, Israel is not the primary loser in the so-called Arab Spring.…
To understand the depth and breadth of America’s losses, consider that on January 25, 2011, most Arab states were US allies to a greater or lesser degree. Mubarak was a strategic ally. Saleh was willing to collaborate with the US in combating al-Qaida and other jihadist forces in his country. Gaddafi was a neutered former enemy who had posed no threat to the US since 2004. Iraq was a protectorate. Jordan and Morocco were stable US clients. One year later, the elements of the US’s alliance structure have either been destroyed or seriously weakened.…
Perhaps the most amazing aspect to the US’s spectacular loss of influence and power in the Arab world is that most of its strategic collapse has been due to its own actions. In Egypt and Libya the US intervened prominently to bring down a US ally and a dictator who constituted no threat to its interests. Indeed, it went to war to bring Gaddafi down. Moreover, the US acted to bring about their fall at the same time it knew that they would be replaced by forces inimical to American national security interests. In Egypt, it was clear that the Muslim Brotherhood would emerge as the strongest political force in the country. In Libya, it was clear at the outset of the NATO campaign against Gaddafi that al-Qaida was prominently represented in the antiregime coalition. And just as the Islamists won the Egyptian election, shortly after Gaddafi was overthrown, al-Qaida forces raised their flag over Benghazi’s courthouse. US actions from Yemen to Bahrain and beyond have followed a similar pattern.
In sharp contrast to his active interventionism against US-allied regimes, President Barack Obama has prominently refused to intervene in Syria, where the fate of a US foe hangs in the balance. Obama has sat back as Turkey has fashioned a Syrian opposition dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Arab League has intervened in a manner that increases the prospect that Syria will descend into chaos in the event that the Assad regime is overthrown.
Obama continues to speak grandly about his vision for the Middle East and his dedication to America’s regional allies.… [But] Obama’s behavior since last January 25 has made clear to US friend and foe alike that under Obama, the US is more likely to attack you if you display weakness towards it than if you adopt a confrontational posture against it. As Assad survives to kill another day; as Iran expands its spheres of influence and gallops towards the nuclear bomb; as al-Qaida and its allies rise from the Gulf of Aden to the Suez Canal; and as Mubarak continues to be wheeled into the courtroom on a stretcher, the US’s rapid fall from regional power is everywhere in evidence.
A TERRORIST’S TRIUMPHANT TOUR
P. David Hornik
FrontPage, January 10, 2012
The new star of Middle Eastern diplomacy is Gaza-based Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh. Most recently visiting Tunisia, he’s also been in Egypt, Sudan, and Turkey, and the itinerary will also include Qatar and Bahrain.
It’s Haniyeh’s first tour of the region since Hamas seized all power in Gaza in 2007. The timing is no coincidence. As Haniyeh himself told a rally in Tunis: “Israel no longer has allies in Egypt and in Tunisia, we are saying to the Zionist enemies that times have changed and that the time of the Arab Spring, the time of the revolution, of dignity and of pride has arrived.”
A crowd of 5000 men, women, and children in a stadium (another report puts the number much higher), waving PLO, Tunisian, and Hamas flags, responded with chants of “Death to Israel,” “The Tunisian revolution supports Palestine,” and “The army of Muhammad is back.…” The rally was organized by Haniyeh’s hosts, the recently elected, ruling Ennahda Party. Ritually called “moderate Islamist” in Western media, its longtime leader Rachid Ghannouchi said in 1994: “We must wage unceasing war against the Americans until they leave the land of Islam, or we will burn and destroy all their interests across the entire Islamic world.…”
At the time the “Arab Spring” broke out a year ago, Israeli warnings were at best ignored if not derided. Now, with Islamists prevailing in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, probably Libya, and possibly Syria, it makes perfect sense for a group like Hamas to feel a tailwind and a surge of confidence.
Hamas’s visions, however, go beyond stepped-up warfare against Israel with possible Egyptian and other Islamist support. The group, as revealed in a major new report by Jonathan D. Halevi, also has political ambitions of gaining Western recognition.… “For Hamas, the central lesson from the Arab Spring is the U.S. administration’s and the European Union’s abandonment of the pro-Western regimes and their readiness, even haste, to support the popular revolutions and recognize the Muslim Brotherhood as a legitimate political actor.” Encouraged, Hamas has been in intensive negotiations with the West Bank Palestinian leadership—now at an advanced stage—on joining the PLO. If that goes according to plan, Hamas believes it “will be internationally recognized and replace Fatah in representing the Palestinian people.…”
For now, the U.S. and the EU define Hamas as a terrorist organization and officially shun it.… That has not stopped a bevy of notable Westerners—Tony Blair, Javier Solana, Jimmy Carter, George Soros, James Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Brent Scowcroft, are some—from portraying the movement as essential to peace.…
Back in the real world, at Hamas’s twenty-fourth anniversary rally in Gaza on December 14, Haniyeh bellowed to a throng of 350,000 intermittently chanting onlookers that: “The armed resistance and the armed struggle are the path and the strategic choice for liberating the Palestinian land, from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river, and for the expulsion of the invaders and usurpers [Israel] from the blessed land of Palestine.…”
THE UNVARNISHED REALITY
OF CONTEMPORARY U.S.-ISRAEL RELATIONS
Barry Rubin
Rubin Reports, January 23, 2012
Do not speak of it in public. Do not expect any Israeli official to admit it. But Israel is facing an issue unlike anything it has had to deal with during the past 50 years: It cannot depend on the United States.
True, the relationship in terms of weapons’ supply remains good. Old programs continue to provide advanced arms to Israel. Nor is the problem the one most people think of first: on Israel-Palestinian, “peace process” issues. President Barack Obama’s Administration has seen that no real progress is possible on that front. It tends to blame Israel in public and Obama intensely dislikes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but those problems have little material effect. If that personal matter were the only issue involved Israel could muddle through as it has with other presidents. The difficulty with Obama is that his entire strategy in the Middle East is contrary to Israeli interests.…
The greatest threat to Israel today is the rise of radical Islamist regimes.… [And] here is where the problem with the United States comes in. Obama does not really view this trend as a threat. He spent the first half of his term engaging with Iran and its ally Syria. Obama and his administration regards the Islamists as people who are either already moderate or are likely to become so by governing. This is, of course, the opposite of the Israeli assessment.… To put it bluntly, the U.S. government does not even recognize the existence of the number-one threat to Israel.
And to make matters worse, the government that Obama looks to for advice, guidance, and interpretation of the region is not Israel but the Islamist regime in Turkey. That government’s sharp turn to a highly emotional anti-Israel policy has not cost it anything at all in terms of its relations with the White House, something that would have been unthinkable under any previous president.
That is why Israel, as well as the Middle East generally, is going to be an important issue in this year’s presidential election. To preserve relations with the United States, Israeli leaders will neither do nor say anything about that contest. Yet nothing could be more obvious than that Obama’s reelection would be extremely damaging for Israel’s security.
