Arab Wars Reading Notes

Preface ● Libya: ○ “On September 11, 2012, the Islamist militia Ansar al-Sharia Libya launched a brazen military attack on US consulate and CIA station in Benghazi. Only a month earlier, US Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Liberman had pushed for American intervention in Syria by pointing to Libya, where ‘profound gratitude for America’s help in the war against Moammar Qaddafi has laid the foundation for a bright new chapter in relations between our two countries. The killing of US Ambassador Chris Stephens and two others in the heartland of the Libyan revolution by jihadist militia amidst chaotic anti-American protests put a cruel face on that new chapter. For many, if offered a disheartening epitaph for the Arab uprisings themselves.” (x) ○ “In the aftermath of the Benghazi attack, Libyan politics and society polarized dangerously, while jihadist groups took advantage of the security vacuum to rebuild themselves. In Washington, the smoldering ruins of Benghazi’s consulate turned Libya overnight from a tentative sign of a hopefully future into a blisteringly partisan nightmare.” (x) ● With Obama’s NATO intervention in Libya: ○ “Had Obama not acted, America would certainly have been blamed for allowing the uprising to end in bloodshed. But acting, in turn, caused a whole set of other unintended problematic outcomes. Some now argue that the real problem was not the intervention but rather America’s failure to provide for post-war stabilization. But Libya’s new political leaders had firmly rejected any such international peacekeeping force. Even had they not, the dark history of the occupation of Iraq ensured no such forces were forthcoming … and suggests that it would not have helped.” (xi) ● Lessons from Libya: ○ “Libya was a decisive turning point in the transformation of the Arab uprisings into a regional proxy war. Libya’s war offered the first violently cautionary tale against seeking democratic change after the dizzying success of protest movements in Tunisia and Egypt (Arab Spring -- 2012). It showed Arab power that they could convince the West to back their ambitions with military might but led Russia to block further such UN resolutions.subsequent Its collapse into civil war then became an object lesson in the dangers of intervention and state failure. Libya in many ways set the stage for Syria’s descent into a catastrophic war.” (xi) ● Broad Regional Reflections: ○ “Only a few years ago, the Arab world seemed poised to escape decades of autocratic misrule and state violence. Today, the hopes of millions of Arab citizens who heroically took to the streets demanding change have faded.” (xii) ○ “ The major short-term effect of the Arab uprisings has not been democratization, but rather a dramatic increase in regional interventionism, proxy war, and resurgent repression.” (xii) ○ “Autocratic regimes, in their single-minded pursuit of survival, are the root cause of the instability and have fueled the region’s extremism and conflicts.” (xiii) ○ “The Arab uprising marked a fundamental rupture in the status quo, an epochal event whose ramifications would take years to fully manifest. The changes reflected in those synchronized, massive protests rendered a return to the old ways inconceivable. These were generational changes that could not be judged by the monetary vicissitudes of an electoral outcome or a constitutional gambit or coup. They would have been measured in the new attitudes and expectations and behavior of the millions of Arabs suddenly able to act politically in ways previously inconceivable.” (xiv) Chapter 1: New Arab Wars ● Yemen: ○ “Yemen to roll back the seizure of Sanaa and Aden by the Shi’ite Houthi Movemnt. The Saudis and their Emirati partners sought to restore to power the deposed President Abd Rabbo Mansour al_hadi, who had been elected in 2012 … their allies in Yemen included southern regionalists, the Muslim Brotherhoodlinked Islah movement, and, implicitly, al-Qaeda. Arrayed against them, with opportunistic Iranian support, were not only the Houthis, but also forces loyal to the deposed President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a longtime Saudi ally … the architects of the Saudi intervention viewed the Yemeni political collapse primarily through the lens of Iranian regional ambitions.” (2) ● Libya: ○ Regional struggle between the UAE and Qatar, not Iran, both countries disputed who had authority over post-revolutionary Libya (2) ○ UAE and Egypt backed General Khalifa Haftar to militarily defeat Islamist and regional forces backed by Turkey and Qatar (2) ● ISIL/IS: ○ “Its emergence reminded the world that Iraq’s civil war ignited by the American invasion and occupation had never really ended.” (3) ○ “The June 2014 capture of Mosul and declaration of an Islamic caliphate by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had radically refocused the world’s attention. Only a few years earlier, the global jihadist movement had been on the ropes. They May 2011 American killing of Osama bin Laden had been a major symbolic and operational setback for al-Qaeda. The IS of Iraq had suffered severe losses at the hands of the “Sunni Awakening” and the US-led coalition in the late 2000s. The Arab uprising model of peaceful change had initially badly discredited al-Qaeda’s ideological vision. But by 2015, al-Qaeda and IS affiliates had surged into prominent positions in Syria, Yemen, Libya, the Sinai, and across North Africa, and their terrorist attacked had become a regular feature of life across the globe.” (3) ○ “The jihadist resurgence was rooted in the failure of the Arab uprisings and the openings created by the region’s new wars.” (3) ■ “Egypt’s July 2013 military coup had shattered the Muslim Brotherhood, weakening the most powerful competitors to the extremist organizations.” (3) ■ “State failure in Libya, Egypt, and Yemen had opened space for jihadist groups to reorganize, acquire weapons, and establish new strongholds.” (3) ■ “Syria’s war had mobilized massive financial and military support for jihadist movements that had once been shunned, and had galvanized a resurgence of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.” (3) ■ “Libya’s civil war had opened yet another new front for the renewed jihadist trend.” (3) ○ “ Yemen, Libya, Iraq, and Syria were only the most fully internationalized hot wars in a region increasingly beset by state failure, terrorism, and insurgency.” (4) ● Reflections from the Arab uprisings: ○ “Protest movements weighed the efficacy of peaceful and violent actions in part by observing outcomes elsewhere, just as did their would-be supporters.” (5) ○ “All of civil wars ripping apart Arab countries have been shaped profoundly by transnational flows of money, information, people, and guns … The role of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, Turkey, and the UAE have in many cases supplanted even the role of the United States as deeply [polarizing issues of contention in regional politics.” (5) ○ “Egypt’s once-proud Tahir Square revolution ended in a military coup, intense violence, the restoration of the old order, and a suffocating wave of repression and neo-populism.” (7) ○ “Syria’s grim, horrifying stalemate was disrupted by the emergence of the selfproclaimed Islamic State, which united with Iraqi ancestors to seize territory and declare a farcical caliphate.” (7) ○ “The Arabs who had joined the uprisings, often at great personal risk and cost, felt betrayed.” (7) ○ “Almost all proxy interventions by regional powers have failed to achieve their objectives, and have usually made things significantly worse at great cost … Again and again, these regimes found their plans going awry, their control over their proxies wanting, and their assumptions overturned.” (8-9) ○ “ The resurgence of autocratic regimes, rampant militarization, and proxy warfare, and the explosion of virulent new jihadist movements was not how the Arab uprisings were supposed to go.” (9) ● Iranian Nuclear Deal (JCPOA): ○ “The Arab uprising’s impact on regional order intersected with that of the international push towards agreement with Iran over its nuclear program … But for most regional actors, the nuclear issue was only one manifestation of a deeper struggle with Iran over regional power … The nuclear deal, no matter how effective at countering proliferation, threatened Arab regimes because it removed the foundation of a regional order built around countering Iran’s role.” (9) ● Conclusions: ○ “ The new Arab wars were driven by the frantic efforts of the old order to sustain itself against these inexorable changes.” (10) ○ “External involvement in the wars in Syria, Libya, and Yemen has destroyed those states, caused untold human suffering, and fueled the rise of ISIS. The Saudi-Iranian competition has unleashed virulent new forms of sectarianism. In the end, the determined refusal by entrenched elites to allow for progressive change has likely doomed the region to something far worse -- not just the Islamic State, but the much more significant forces that will emerge in its wake.” (10) ● Regional Order on the eve of the uprising: ○ Arab uprising begins in Tunisia in December 2010 with Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation ○ “Obama’s hope for change directly challenged the regional order that had consolidated following the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq … Regional politics were locked in an enduring divide between two blocs, a ‘Resistance Bloc’, led by Iran, and a ‘Moderation Bloc’ of Sunni autocrats led by Saudi Arabia. The two blocs fought their proxy wars across multiple arenas, including Iraq under occupation, Lebanon, Yemen, and Palestine. The region’s autocratic regimes, while seemingly firmly in control, were struggling with mounting economic problems and novel forms of political protest.” (10-11) ○ “That changed with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s. The removal of Soviet global competition allowed the United States to establish a new structural order in the Middle East, one in which all roads led through Washington.” (11) ○ “The formation of an Arab coalition in support of the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in 1990 decisively marked the passage from the Cold War order to an American-dominated regional system.” (11) ○ “Operation Desert Storm united traditional American allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia with adversaries such as Syria and (quietly) Israel.” (11) ○ “ The absence of any meaningful alternative to the United States forced regional players to choose between inclusion in the American’dominated international system or isolation as rogue states.” (11) ○ “America’s leadership of this unwieldy coalition required constant maintenance. Over the course of the 1990s and 2000s, America led endless but inconclusive Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian peace talks, which kept Washington at the center of ongoing diplomacy. It maintained “dual containment” against Iraq and Iran, which required a significant increase in its regular military presence in the Gulf.” (11) ○ “The mounting humanitarian toll of the sanctions against Iraq, blamed primarily on the United States, became a major popular issue across broad sector of the Arab public.Mounting public hostility to the United States only helped Arab dictators to justify their repressive ways, and Washington generally proved willing to look the other way.” (12) ● Post 9/11: ○ “The invasion of Iraq, the highly intrusive global war on terror, and the “Freedom Agenda” to promote democratic change altered the regional balance of power in ways that could only be sustained at unprecedented cost to the US. Saddam Hussein’s fall significantly increased Iran’s regional power, removing its primary military rival and allowing Iranian proxies to seize commanding positions in the politics of the new Iraq.” (12) ○ “The global War on Terror expanded American intrusion into Arab lives, politics, the economy, legal system, judiciary, educational system, media, and formal religious sector.” (12) ○ “All of this coincided with staunch US support for Israel despite the absence of any serious peace process and highly contentious wars with Palestinians and Hezbollah.It is no coincidence that this was a decade of both radically increased American interventionism and dramatically intensified antiAmericanism.” (12-13) ○ “This new regional order over time took root. Arab regimes became accustomed to this high level of American interventionism once they understood that it did not threaten their personal survival. They eagerly embraced an alliance structure based primarily on the containment of Iran and the prioritization of counterterrorism over democratization and human rights.” (13) ○ “By 2010, only Iran and Syria remained outside this American-led order, and both were actively seeking a way in … Most significantly, even Iran now saw nuclear negotiations as not just an obstacle but as a vehicle for changing its relationship with the United States and the broader international community.” (13) ● US Intervention in the post 9/11 setting: ○ “The competition between Qatar and Saudi Arabia and the battle between Islamists and regimes often mattered more directly than the Sunni-Shi’ite conflict.” (14) ○ “The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, which had been meant to break the “axis of evil” and empower pro-American moderates against radicals, instead tilted the regional balance of power decisively in favor of Iran. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein removed Iran’s only militarily capable Arab neighbor, leaving the Gulf states with few viable alliance options to balance Tehran.” (14) ○ US militarily and diplomatically bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan with counterinsurgency efforts (14) ○ At the peak of 2007-08 troops, the US had more than 160,000 combat deployed in Iraq (14) Moderate Bloc ● Sunni dictators allied with the US (and indirectly with Israel) ● Egypt ● Saudi Arabia ● Jordan Rejection Bloc ● Iran ● Syria ● Hezbollah ● Hamas ● UAE ● Secular arguments against Iran: ○ “Highlighting the Sunni-Shia divide could undermine Iran’s appeal to Arabs otherwise sympathetic to the ideas of resisting Israel and the American-led regional order. Sectarianism also helped to legitimate the internal repression of Saudi Shia citizens in the Eastern Province by portraying them as a potential vehicle for Iranian subversion.” (15) ○ “A regional order defined by moderate Sunni autocrats united against a radical Shi’a threat masked considerable internal competition, however. Saudi Arabia aspired to lead a unified Arab world against Iran, but faced multiple challenges.” (15) ● Competition for Arab leadership: ○ “Qatar, flush with natural gas wealth and enjoying the popularity of the al-Jazeera satellite television station, challenged Saudi domination in multiple arenas. Its diplomatic initiatives in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Palestine explicitly challenged Saudi patronage over those processes.” (16) ○ “Turkey, too, made a noticeable bid for Arab influence in the late 2000s … Turkey’s thriving economy, robust democratic institutions, and NATO membership all offered attractive counterpoints to the dysfunction of Arab states.” (16) ○ “ Israel was delighted by a regional order in which it enjoyed tacit alliance with most Arab regimes against Iran without making any meaningful progress towards a Palestinian state.” (17) ■ “But this Israeli comfort with the regional order could hardly be equated with stability or security. Israel fought multiple wars in this decade, at an enormous political and human cost. The reoccupation of the West Bank during the second Intifada had been extremely bloody and set back a decade’s worth of Palestinian institution-building. The 2006 war with Lebanon had been fought to a draw, which translated practically into a strategic and political victory for Hezbollah. The pummeling air wars against Gaza in 2008-09 and again in 2012 had achieved few strategic gains while galvanizing unprecedented levels and forms of international condemnation.The stagnation of the peace process and continued settlement construction, along with the lobbying against the Iran deal, sharply strained relations with the Obama administration.” (17) ● “In short, the regional order at the time of the uprising was predictable in its own way but could not be sustained. A regional order built around counter-terrorism and containing Iran nurtured its own internal contradictions and consistently failed to produce genuine stability or security. Arab autocrats were firmly in charge, but they were rotting from within … For years, Arab regimes confidently dismissed such problems, assuring the world and themselves that they had things under control. They did not.” (17-18) ● After the Uprising: ○ American “right-sizing” ○ “The Arab uprising reshaped the terrain for all of these battles. It challenged America’s position in novel ways, exposing the contradictions in its policies and the limits of its power. It first eclipsed and then accelerated sectarianism and the Saudi-Iranian conflict. It dramatically expanded the intra-Sunni power struggles into a greater variety of fractured states, potential allies, and adversaries. And it sharply exacerbated the threat perception of Arab regimes by revealing that popular challengers could actually overthrow them.” (18) ○ US shift to Asia, as the 2008 domestic economic struggles and seemingly neverending intervention in the Middle East continued ○ “The American grand strategy was in part premised on the underlying reality that there still remained no serious strategic competitor at the global level. The US remained the dominant power in the region. For all of Russia’s posturing and China’s economic growth, there was still no alternative to the American order.” (19) ○ “ The Arab uprising operated in an entirely different key: it sights to smash the system, not to fine-tune its mechanisms of control. The greatest impact of the Arab uprising may ultimately prove to be the dismantlement of the American Middle East regional order -- an outcome which terrifies the regimes protected by that order but of which almost all the original protestors, whether secular or Islamist, would likely approve.” (20) ○ Obama → “ They (og MENA leaders) profoundly distrusted an American president committed to easing the confrontation with Iran, extricating from Iraq, and avoiding the invitation to a new quagmire in Syria. They could hardly believe that the United States might be serious about supporting democratic movements, even Islamist ones. “Abandoning friends and rewarding enemies” was a potent sound bit against Obama.” (20) ○ “American policy will always matter in a region deeply shaped by the legacy of its imperium, of course, but there is no reason to believe that a more assertive American posture would have made a positive difference in the unfolding politics of the Arab uprisings.” (21) ○ “ America’s long policy of aligning with unsavory but cooperative regimes would become a crippling liability after the Arab uprising. A key vulnerability of the American imperium in the Middle East was the absence of any major ally which shared its fundamental values or goals.” (21) ○ “American right-sizing afforded an unusual degree of autonomy to regional powers since they had little fear of American punishment as the US tried to downsize its commitments and hand off more responsibility to its local partners.” (21-22) ○ “ The bargain of America’s imperium had always been that Washington would tolerate the domestic behavior of its regional allies, no matter how acute or embarrassing, so long as the oil flowed and they cooperated on antiCommunism, counterterrorism, and the containment of Iran or way in Iraq. The regimes know from experience that they could safely ignore the public lecturing about democracy.” (22) ○ Obama “allowing” Egypt’s Mubarak to be overthrown feared other autocratic leaders allied with the US ○ “The popular image of Obama is that he has been a weak and feckless steward of foreign policy, but the opposite is actually the case: the regional powers and their American political allies were repeatedly surprised and infuriated that they could not roll him.” (24) ■ → “Arab regime pressure typically found strong support within the American policy elite, but failed to persuade the Obama administration.” (24) ■ “For Obama, the agreement with Iran over its nuclear weapons remained the highest strategic priority. Iran’s steady accumulation of nuclear materials created a looming deadline for diplomacy.” (24) ○ “For most players in the Middle East, the nuclear deal represented a potential transformation of the regional order itself, on par with 1979’s Iranian revolution and Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement … Arab leaders generally feared such a strategic realignment more than they did Iranian nuclear weapons.” (25) ● The New Arab Proxy Wars: ○ “Implosion of the traditional powers favored the tiny principalities of the Gulf” (25) ○ “Libya’s uprising was the first to invite external intervention. Syria’s would soon follow, to disastrous effect … Even if regimes had not wanted to get involved, they could hardly cede influence to their rivals.” (26) ○ “And some regimes had far more offensive motivations, seeing in the uprising a rare opportunity to revise the regional order in their favor and establish their control in new ways. Regimes saw the opportunities and knew that their rivals saw them, too.And thus a classical security dilemma took hold in whichever greater intervention only left everybody less secure. Given this array of threats and opportunities, Washington found it almost impossible to restrain or influence its punitive allies or to deter its adversaries.” (27) ○ “ The Arab uprising, by weakening key states and empowering diverse nonstate actors, opened the gates to a dramatically new regional politics of proxy war and competitive interventions.” (27) ■ “Money and guns poured in, institutions collapsed, bodies piled up, and hatreds spread. The idealistic, courageous protestors of early 2011 were displaced by hard men with guns, extreme ideologies, and foreign patrons.” (27) ○ On terrorist groups: “Media platforms, access to sophisticated weaponry systems, and effective local proxies became a far more reliable indicator of power than did traditional metrics such as population or the number of men under arms.” (27) ○ “Direct military intervention became normalized as a policy instrument in Yemen and Libya in ways rarely seen before among Arab states. The post-uprisings period also offered innovative forms of cultivated patronage and indirect influence across multiple arenas.” (29) ○ “The unpopularity of American foreign policy meant that individuals or groups that openly identified with the United States faced potentially severe social stigma, political costs, and even state repression. With its open association becoming a kiss of death, the US was forced to either covertly cultivate its networks or to support very weak, isolated groups. The kiss of death had always been an issue, especially due to US support for Israel. It spiked during the decade of the 2000s, however, at precisely the historical moment when networks began to supplant states as key actors.” (31) ○ “Instead, America’s primary network in the Middle East was with precisely the 22security agencies and the autocratic regimes which the popular uprisings challenged. US’s imperium rested not on popular support, but on stolid alliances with the repressive regimes whose illegitimacy and governance failures would drive the Arab uprisings.” (31) ■ “Close associated with the security state was a solid foundation for imperium, but a bit embarrassing during a revolutionary moment when history seemed to be on the side of the people demanding democracy.” (31) ○ “ America’s focus on building neutral state institutions rather than supporting specific proxies challenged but ultimately could not overcome the emerging regional game … the public American posture was one of supporting the democratic transition regardless of who won elections … The US also, unlike other regional players, sought to hold its potential proxies to a relatively high standard of accountability.” (32) ○ “The Obama administration worried deeply, and wisely, about the risks of unintentionally arming Islamist extremists who would eventually use the weapons to attack America, Israel, or its regional allies.” (32) ○ “Israel, which had long dreamed of such Arab neglect, was ill-advised to take too much comfort from this, though: Palestine retained the ability to surge to the top of the Arab agenda at moments of crisis, and few Arabs had actually switched their allegiances in favor of an increasingly internationally isolated Israel.” (34) ○ “The fate of President Bashar al-Asad in the endgame of Syria’s conflict became perhaps the most potent symbolic proxy for these regional wars. Syria after 2011 unfolded as a near-textbook example of the logic of competitive proxy war.” (34) ○ “Monarchies, militaries, and old elites alike struggled to maintain a status quo eroded by genuinely fundamental transformations in the nature of politics and society.” (35) ○ “A dramatically empowered public opinion forced even the most autocratic regimes to take popular views a bit more seriously … the Arab uprisings erupted within a radically new informational environment, and there will be no return to the old ways.” (35) ○ “Every previous wave of popular mobilization in the Arab world has ended not with liberation or democracy, but in the retrenchment of a nastier form of authoritarianism.” (36) ○ “One of those methods for retaining power has long been the manipulation of sectarian and ethnic identities. Sectarianism, one of the most disturbing forms of regional identity politics in recent years, has been driven more by power politics and regime survival concerns than ancient hatreds. The US occupation of Iraq empowered Iran and unleashed a brutal sectarian civil war, which played out across the nascent transnational and social media.” (37-38) ● Islamists Amidst the Chaos ○ “The Islamic State and the virulent new forms of jihadism are fully the creatures of these political battles and structural changes. The IS itself emerged from the remnant of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq … It expanded beyond Syria and Iraq in large part because of the setbacks to the Arab uprising.” (38) ○ “IS itself thrives within a socially-mediated global arena which transmits its images, narratives, and ideas both broadly to mass audiences and deeply to potential recruits.” (39) ○ “Violent extremists waged jihad from the margins, appealing not only to religious motivations but also to those thoroughly alienated from mainstream society and seeking a violent outlet.” (39) ○ “The decade between 9/11 and the Arab uprisings witnessed fierce interpretive and political battles across multiple dimensions: On one front, Western and official Arab views conflating the Brotherhood with al-Qaeda as undifferentiated Islamism; on another, the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda figures furiously attacking each other and seeking to differentiate themselves.” (40) ○ “Al-Qaeda was left to the margins, no longer able to convincingly claim that violent jihad led by the vanguard was the only path to change.” (41) ○ “The Egyptian military coup which overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood-led government in July 2013 abruptly reversed the intellectual trajectory of the uprisings, proving to many Islamists that al-Qaeda had been right all along about the futility of peaceful political participation. This, along with the devastating wars in Syria and Libya, charted the course towards a dangerous new era for Islamism.” (41) ○ Zarqawi and the transformation of the Muslim Brotherhood (42-43) ● The New Arab Wars: ○ “The Arab uprising therefore involved at least four different, overlapping, lines of conflict”: (44) 1. The Iranian-Saudi conflict, reinforced by Israel’s priorities continued to structure much of the region’s alliances and interventions 2. The battle for leadership of the Sunni Arab world between Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Turkey often mattered even more 3. The challenge posed by different Islamist networks, from mainstream Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi movements to the violent extremists of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, represented a third level of conflict 4. A broader struggle between autocratic regimes and mobilized societies continued to unfold within a context framed by the three regional wars ● “All four of those conflicts were, in turn, shaped by questions about America’s changing role.” (45) ● “Arab regimes, never paragons of morality in the first place, grew more violent at home and abroad as they lashed out, seeking to restore their stability.” (45)