A History of the Middle East (64 page)

Washington’s response – the war on terror – deepened the divisions where there was scope for healing. The Orwellian terminology was apt for a campaign which was multi-pronged, global and ongoing. In their own countries, Western powers swiftly cracked down on émigré Muslims, chasing
jihadi
support groups underground. Abroad, US planes waged war on Afghanistan, overthrowing bin Laden’s hosts, the Taliban, and bombing his mountainous Tora Bora hide-out.

Middle Eastern regimes initially hoped to merge their own local struggles against their Islamist opposition with Washington’s global campaign. Their leaders took succour from watching Western powers replace the civil liberties discourse they had advanced in the 1990s with that of counter-terrorism. Led by Washington, Western governments applied the same measures they had once berated Arab states for – military and in camera tribunals, internment, indefinite detention, guilt by association – and tightened asylum procedures. ‘Join the approach that has long been charted by Syria,’ Bashar al-Assad
advised visiting American congressmen. Egypt’s prime minister, Atif Obeid, called on the US ‘to use our model to fight terror’.

The shifting Western focus allowed Arab regimes to back-pedal on democratic reforms and consolidate their security regimes. Jordan, a rare shining star of reform through the 1990s, suspended parliament, delayed elections, ruled by decree (promulgating a ban on the playing of religious cassettes in buses and taxis) and dispatched intelligence agents to take up editorial posts at the kingdom’s newspapers. Israel, Egypt, Libya and Algeria all handed Washington and London lists of local Islamists, and by linking them to al-Qaeda garnered Western support for their campaigns against their exiled oppositions. After a twenty-year boycott, Libyan leader Qaddafy was rehabilitated as a new recruit to the war on terror, and Algeria’s president was fêted at the White House in 2001, for the first time in fifteen years. ‘[Arab] dictators have never been so well regarded in the world as they have since September 11,’ bemoaned Moncef Marzouki, a prominent Tunisian dissident forced into exile.

Washington, however, was rife with debate on the wisdom of tying its colours to the region’s dictators. A vocal and increasingly prominent view argued that security regimes were less the panacea of global
jihad
than its cause.
Jihadi
violence was a product of internal and unaddressed ills inside the Arab world; had Arab regimes ruled less brutally and more equitably, they would not have exported their ills to the West. Regime-change, engineered externally, argued these ideologues known as neo-conservatives, would liberate populations from their current tyranny, install democracies, turn the population into stakeholders in their societies, and spread Western values. The neo-cons allied themselves with American imperialists and business interests inside the Bush Administration to plan the reconfiguration of the Middle East and its vast oil wealth.

The time was propitious for grand ventures. Flushed from its initial conquest of Afghanistan, Washington felt buoyed to tackle the region where the nineteen hijackers originated. Saudi Arabia initially seemed a fitting target since fifteen of the hijackers were Saudi citizens. The kingdom’s alliance with the US – which had
strengthened throughout the Cold War, when the Saudi brand of Islam had served to unsettle the Muslim underbelly of the Soviet bloc – faced severe strain. Post 9/11, US officials scoffed at their erstwhile allies as ‘Arab Taliban’, and wondered whether there might not be more reliable guarantors of US interests than the Al Sauds. The US–Saudi annual review of military relations was cancelled, and a $10 million gift from a Saudi prince to the victims of the World Trade Center less than politely returned.

Anger in the Arab world was also on the rise. Schoolchildren in the kingdom distributed lists of US goods to boycott. In a rare admission of vulnerability, the then Saudi ambassador to Washington, Bandar bin Sultan, defended the kingdom’s reluctance to join America’s anti-Taliban alliance. ‘In a Western democracy, when you lose touch with your people, you lose elections,’ he said. ‘In a monarchy, you lose your head.’

All the same, rather than destabilize the world’s prime energy supplier, Washington focused its sights on Iraq, a more tangential front of
jihad
. None of the hijackers were Iraqis; none of the hundreds of calls Western intelligence agencies monitored on bin Laden’s satellite phone stemmed from Iraq. In fact, Iraq’s programme of weapons of destruction, not its support for global
jihad
, was the US’s
casus belli
.

That said, Iraq offered many attractions for a comparatively low cost. Ten years of sanctions had whittled away its former strength, leaving its military arsenal, so impressive on paper, wasting and obsolete. Iraq also made an apt starting point for instituting regional change, and rebalancing America’s regional alliances away from autocrats and towards broader-based social forces. But, in the name of democracy, America opened the Pandora’s box of sectarianism. By toppling Saddam Hussein and ousting his narrow powerbase rooted in a security force drawn from Iraq’s central Sunni tribes, the US overturned four centuries of Sunni dominance of Shias.

While Sunnis comprised 85 per cent of Muslims worldwide, within the Middle East Sunni and Shia populations were more finely balanced. From the borders of Afghanistan to the Levant, Shias
constituted 140 million people, or half the population. In Lebanon they were the largest single confessional group, officially estimated at 38 per cent. They formed 65 per cent of Bahrain’s population; 42 per cent of Yemen’s, 35 per cent of Kuwait’s and 15 per cent of the UAE’s. In Saudi Arabia, they numbered 1.6 million, or 10 per cent of the population. There were also substantial Shia minorities in Syria, Turkey and Pakistan. But the largest Shia population of all was in Iraq.

Under Saddam Hussein, Sunni Arabs exercised power through Iraq’s security apparatus and the support they garnered from neighbouring Sunni Arab states who perceived Iraq as the Arab bulwark against Persian designs on the region. Yet Sunni Arabs comprised barely a fifth of the Shia majority state. Amid the rising sectarian rivalry, Shia populations around the world anticipated regime change as liberation from the Sunni yoke.

Sunni power brokers were less enthused, fearing Saddam Hussein’s fall might trigger a domino effect. Ever since Napoleon Bonaparte first conquered the Nile Delta in 1799, Western colonial powers had chipped at more than a millennium of Sunni Muslim rule, divvying-up the Near East between non-Arab or non-Sunni satraps. In the carve-up that followed the First World War, Christians had won power in Lebanon and Jews in Palestine; a generation later Alawites had won power in Syria. Fearing further erosion, Jordan’s King Abdullah warned that US policy would create a Shia arc extending horizontally from Iran west through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean, and vertically incorporating the world’s largest oilfields from the Shia-majority Azerbaijan in the north via Iraq to the eastern Arabian coast.

At the Arab summit in Beirut in March 2002, Gulf leaders publicly embraced Saddam’s deputy, Izzat Eddin Ibrahim. Visiting American officials preparing their war plans faced constant clamouring that the region’s crisis was in Palestine, where Israel was suppressing the second
intifada
, not Baghdad. Financial anxieties fuelled their fears. Jordan’s monarch feared for his oil supply which Iraq supplied for free, and UN agencies – which had served as the
conduit for $60 billion of Iraqi oil expenditures – faced the loss of their largest ever cash cow.

Saddam Hussein was neither an Iraqi Nasser nor an Arab Bismarck, and still less a new Saladin as some Arabs vainly hoped (Mussolini was a more likely antecedent). But his supply of medicines for Palestine’s wounded, his cry of ‘
Jihad
to liberate Palestine!’, his largesse to targeted social sectors (he built a housing estate for Jordanian journalists), and his image as a Sunni standard bearer all struck a popular chord. Thus, rather than celebrate the toppling of the region’s most brutal dictator, Arab demonstrators took to the streets to protest against it. Egyptian and Jordanian police opened fire to quell near daily protests. In Damascus and Riyadh, thousands flouted interior ministry bans to rally outside US consulates.

Inside Iraq, the mood was decidedly ambivalent. Washington was widely perceived as serving its own needs, not Iraq’s. Amid the countdown to war, the UN Security Council dispatched dozens of UN monitors to rake Iraq for elusive weapons of mass destruction, but none for human rights abuses. Sanctions too were widely blamed for eroding the coping mechanisms of Iraq’s people, while strengthening the regime by giving it control over the population’s bellies. That said, after a decade of foreign sanctions and internal brutalization, many looked for any way out. Shias, in particular, welcomed US intervention. Washington’s rhetoric of rescuing Iraq from tyranny dovetailed surprisingly with Shia millennial theology, which promised redemption from oppression. Democracy was all the more attractive if it could deliver majority (Shia) rule.

The speed of America’s conquest of Iraq was aptly likened to the six days in June 1967 it took Israel to conquer Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Sinai. Galloping 700 kilometres from the Kuwaiti border, US forces captured Baghdad in ten days, and the country in less than three weeks. Government forces largely fled. With remarkably few casualties, the invasion toppled the most militarized regime in the Arab world.

The pace of conquest, however, was illusory. As America’s forces raced north, they bypassed most of Iraq’s cities. The regime
collapsed, but a plethora of well-armed local chieftains and religious leaders filled the vacuum. In Baghdad, mobs pillaged the assets of central government, stymieing the possibility of an immediate resumption of central control. The machinery of state – public records offices, prisons and courtrooms – was reduced to ash, and symbols of power, including the world’s greatest Assyrian collection at the Iraq Museum, stripped. In the north, Kurdish
peshmerga
forces expanded their Kurdish autonomous zone southwards, into the territories of a purported ancestral Kurdistan, including the oil-rich town of Kirkuk. US generals, who weeks earlier had scorned Saddam Hussein’s seventy-two gold-plated palaces, Louis XIV furniture and private swimming pools gave free rein to their troops to delight in them, oblivious to the unfolding looting and warlordism raging outside the gates.

Two months after the invasion, Washington attempted to assert control by appointing Paul Bremer, a former US counter-terrorism department chief, to head its Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) charged with running Iraq. Within days of his arrival, he quashed planned local elections and ruled as sovereign, issuing fiats that began, ‘I hereby promulgate’, and were designed to serve as the architecture of a model state. By the time of his hurried departure thirteen months later, he had issued 100 orders, 17 memoranda, 12 public notices and 12 regulations, whose cumulative affect was to gut Iraq of its security forces, bureaucracy, nomenklatura and nationalized industries.

But for all his grandiose ambitions, Bremer never really projected his authority much beyond the walled Green Zone that US forces carved out of central Baghdad. Corruption was rife. His skeletal staff – often composed of novices and non-Arabic speakers – administered billions transferred in pallets of cash. US corporations grabbed the largest contracts, and after taking huge service charges handed them on to subcontractors who took their slice and did the same. What little trickled into Iraq was used to hire migrant labourers, as in Arab Gulf states. Iraqi employees and products were considered too high-risk. By the end of his tenure, Bremer had spent all Iraq’s oil revenues as well as the Iraqi assets which the UN had
frozen and licensed for his disposal. Of the promised reconstruction, there was no sign.

His political architecture was similarly threadbare. In deference to local demands for representation, he appointed a 25-member Governing Council of Iraqis, divvying out posts on the basis of sectarian demographic weight. Though hailed as Iraq’s most representative body because it awarded Shiites a majority, most of its members were long-term exiles. All but one of its nine rotating presidents lived abroad, five of them in London. Bremer’s plans were similarly foreign. His blueprint for revamping Iraq was based on the Allied reconstruction of post-war Germany. In place of de-Nazification he imposed de-Baathification, disbanding the forces of law and order to the last traffic warden. But while he perfected his plans in his palace, other forces unleashed by the US invasion reshaped Iraq on the ground.

Iraq’s Shia Conversion

Saddam’s overthrow precipitated a wave of Shia triumphalism. By the time US tanks rolled into Saddam City, the capital’s slum district which was home to two million Shiites, young clerics surfacing from years in hiding were already in control and fanning out through the city. By the end of April 2003, clerics controlled two-thirds of Baghdad’s clinics and a third of its hospitals. Saddam City was renamed Sadr City, after the two leading Shia clerics who had opposed Saddam. Across southern Iraq vigilantes led by clerics imposed their version of Islamic law, lashing alcohol merchants and destroying gypsy encampments.

After decades of suppression and closure, the
husseiniya
, or Shia prayer hall, resurfaced as the hub of communal decision-making. Exuberant Shia crowds whitewashed Saddam’s ubiquitous aphorisms and stencils from billboards and classroom walls, and replaced them with images of ayatollahs. They unearthed mass graves, where according to Human Rights Watch Saddam had buried 300,000
Shias. Shia seminaries, closed as part of Baath party policy as comprehensive as Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, also resurfaced. For the first time in centuries, Shia flags flew over Iraq’s institutions. In short, America’s toppling of the Baath spawned a Shia renaissance.

The religiosity appeared to take the American newcomers by surprise. Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy secretary of defence, had predicted Iraqi Shiites would be better friends for the US than the Saudis because they were ‘secular’. But within months the US-appointed Governing Council had signed a Basic Law, or quasi-constitution, stipulating that Iraq’s laws should conform to the Islamic canon.