Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East (3 page)

Confronted with all these complex alliances, bitter hatreds and inherited obsessions, and bewildered by all this churning violence, the average outsider is tempted to decide they’re all crazy and just ignore the whole mess. That could even be the best thing to do in some cases, but the problem is that at least some of the violence will affect the West no matter what it does or doesn’t do. So it’s worth trying to understand what’s actually going on and why.

Take the sixteen days of atrocities listed above, for example. At first glance it seems that almost half of the victims enumerated were non-Muslims, but that is an
optical illusion. We know the actual numbers of dead in the Tunisian and Kenyan attacks, but comparable killings in Syria, Iraq and Yemen were not enumerated, because innocent civilian dead are rarely counted accurately (or even at all) in that kind of fighting. Even excluding those who died in combat or were part of the “collateral damage,” and counting only those who were deliberately executed for being the wrong kind of Muslim, the Muslim death toll during that period would certainly be at least a low multiple of the non-Muslim victims of terrorism.

The slaughter at the Bardo Museum in Tunisia (March 18) was intended to advance the cause of Islamist revolution in a Muslim country. The victims were foreign tourists, and Tunisia depends on tourism for about 10 percent of its Gross Domestic Product and an even higher proportion of its jobs. The Bardo attack frightened many tourists away, and the subsequent slaughter of 38 foreign tourists by a lone terrorist on Sousse beach on June 26 pretty well closed Tunisia’s tourism industry down, so most of those jobs will now vanish. This may destabilize the country, which is a high priority for Islamist revolutionaries, because the country was home to the sole successful non-violent democratic revolution of the Arab Spring. For the Islamists’ project to succeed there, they need to discredit and destroy the reforms of that revolution.

The fighting in Yemen (March 22, March 26 and April 2) began as just one more of the tribal power struggles that litter Yemeni history. The Houthis, who have had great
success in the current civil war, are Shias (as are about two-fifths of the Yemeni population), but the war is not primarily about religion. At least as important is the fact that the Houthis are northerners in a country with a deep historical split between north and south. Moreover, they are allied with Yemen’s former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was forced to resign in 2012 under the terms of a “Gulf Initiative” that had strong Saudi Arabian support.

The air strikes and the threat of a land invasion by a Saudi-led pan-Arab alliance of Sunni countries are intended to stop the Houthis from taking control of Yemen because the Saudis, who see an Iranian plotter behind every bush, have convinced themselves that the Houthis are actually just a tool in an Iranian power play to establish a Shia base on Saudi Arabia’s southern border. But in amongst all this paranoia and folly, two Islamist groups, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS, have set themselves up in the less populated south and east of the country with the intention of creating bases of their own. Indeed, they are doubtless hoping at this point that if the Saudi-led coalition breaks the Houthi hold on Yemen but does not get its own troops on the ground fast enough and in sufficient numbers, the Islamists will be able to sweep the board with their own fighters and create another branch of “Islamic State” like the existing one in Syria and Iraq. AQAP and ISIS would probably end up fighting each other for control of that state, but they may be capable of cooperating long enough to set it up, if they get the chance.

The Syrian civil war (March 27 and March 31) stumbles on, with advances by Islamist anti-regime forces both in the north and in the outskirts of the capital, Damascus. The point to note here is that all the non-Islamist forces have been either driven out of business or absorbed by the Islamists in the course of four years of fighting. The U.S. government, which still wants to believe it can avoid supporting either the Islamists or Bashar al Assad’s blood-soaked dictatorship, continues to insist that it can build some “third force” of rebels who will defeat both the regime and the Islamists, but that is sheer fantasy. Sooner or later Washington will have to choose.

Boko Haram (March 28–29) has had things all its own way for the past three years, mainly because the Nigerian army could not or would not fight, but the government was finally forced to focus on the insurgency in the northeast because of the upcoming general election (which had to be postponed), and the death toll during the voting was much lower than had been feared. The decision of Abubakar Shekau to affiliate his organization with Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s Islamic State is largely symbolic at this point, as little or no direct contact is possible between the two, but it does show the power of the idea: the territories controlled by the two men are 3,000 miles (5,000 kilometres) apart.

The massacre of Christians in northeastern Kenya (April 2), one of a number of massacres carried out by the Somali terrorist group al Shabaab in the past three years, is “retaliation” for the dispatch of Kenyan troops to Somalia
as part of an African Union force. The force has the task of restoring peace in the country after a quarter century of anarchy and civil war, but in practice its main enemy has been al Shabaab, which has been part of the al Qaeda network for more than three years. (It had been asking to join since 2009, but Osama bin Laden rejected its application, urging it to review its operations “in order to minimize its toll to Muslims.” This is probably why it now kills mainly Christians in its attacks in Kenya, but in Somalia itself the great majority of its victims are, of course, Muslims.)

The Ansar Beit al Maqdis group in Egypt (April 2) has not yet extended its operations to Cairo, where other Islamist terrorist groups have been active since the military overthrow of the elected Muslim Brotherhood government led by Mohamed Morsi in 2013. However, it does enjoy a fair degree of control over the northern Sinai coastal region, particularly in the area close to the Israeli frontier. In the ongoing competition between al Qaeda and Islamic State franchises, Ansar Beit al Maqdis has opted for the latter.

The atrocities in Iraq during the reconquest of Tikrit (March 3) were one more sign that the local power struggles in various Arab countries where Sunnis and Shias used to live side by side in relative peace (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and the kingdoms and emirates of the Arabian peninsula) are beginning to coalesce into a generalized Sunni-Shia war. This would be a catastrophe that could blight the entire region for a generation.

One overriding conclusion is unavoidable: the people of the region, regardless of their specific political and sectarian loyalties, are very,
very
angry. Angry at their history, angry at those whom they hold responsible for their history, angry even at themselves for allowing themselves to become the victims of that vicious, lethal history.

They tell a story in the Middle East—if you’ve heard it before, stop me now—about a scorpion who wanted to cross a river. Being unable to swim, he asked a frog to carry him over on his back. The frog refused, fearing that the scorpion might sting him and kill him, but the scorpion pointed out that he would never do such a thing because if the frog died, he would drown. “Okay, hop on,” said the frog, and set out across the river. Halfway across, the scorpion stung the frog. As they both sank beneath the water, the frog gasped out, “Why?” “This is the Middle East,” the scorpion explained.

Among the educated Arab elite there is a pervasive historical melancholy about the lost Golden Age, the first four centuries after Arab armies overran the southern and eastern territories of the (by then Christian) Roman Empire in the latter 600s. As the Arab conquerors had the wit to retain and even improve upon the administrative and scientific accomplishments of the Greco-Roman cultures they now ruled, the early Arab empires were culturally, technologically and intellectually superior to any other civilization in western Eurasia except, perhaps, Byzantium (what was left of the Eastern Roman Empire after the conquests).

The tide began to turn with the real start of the Christian
reconquista
in al Andalus (Muslim-ruled Spain) in the mid-eleventh century, although it took four more centuries to extinguish Muslim rule in all of Spain and Portugal. Around the same time, the Arabic-speaking parts of the Levant (Palestine, Syria, Iraq) were conquered by the Seljuk Turks, an Islamized pastoral people from Central Asia who originally spoke Turkish but used Persian as an administrative language. By the time that the First Crusade, a Western European campaign to recapture the formerly Christian lands on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, culminated in the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, the whole of the eastern Arab world was already under foreign rule. The resistance to the Crusaders was commanded mainly by Kurdish and Turkish leaders, not by Arabs.

The Crusades finally petered out in defeat with the fall of the last Christian stronghold in the Holy Land in 1291, but by then a far greater calamity had struck the Arab world: the Mongol destruction of Baghdad, and indeed of all of Iraq, in 1258. (Iraq did not recover to its pre-Mongol level of population until the early twentieth century.) The Arab Golden Age was over, and no genuinely Arab regime again ruled over the agricultural heartland of the Arab world, from Egypt to Iraq, until the latter part of the twentieth century. Indeed, from the early sixteenth century on it was all part of the Ottoman Empire, and its rulers spoke Turkish.

Arab intellectuals know every bitter step in this story of decline and defeat. The great majority of ordinary Arabs don’t know the details of the story, of course, but they are well aware that something went terribly wrong in Arab history a long time ago, and that it has been downhill ever since. The last century is particularly bitter, and is well remembered by all parties. The Arabs were promised independence by the British during the First World War (Lawrence of Arabia and all that) and duly revolted against Ottoman rule, only to discover that Britain and France had made a secret deal in 1916 to carve up the Arab world between themselves. Under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Britain got Iraq, Palestine and Jordan, and France got Syria and Lebanon (the British already had Egypt). Some Arabs refused to accept this carve-up, but their protests were crushed, and after 1918 there were once again no genuinely independent Arab countries except for a few impoverished sheikhdoms in the desert parts of Arabia.

After the Second World War ended in 1945 the European empires went into retreat, and during the 1950s and 1960s every Arab country got its independence (although some of them had to fight quite hard for it). The post-independence priority everywhere was not democracy but “modernization.” These countries hungered desperately for prosperity and respect, and both seemed to be most readily attainable by following the Eastern European/Soviet model of rapid industrialization and educational uplift, which was doing quite well economically at the time. (Economic growth in
Soviet-bloc countries did not fall behind the capitalist/democratic model until the later 1960s.) So a flock of young Arab military officers seized power from the kings and parliaments left behind by the departing imperial powers—Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Hafez al Assad in Syria, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and so on—promising to deliver a rapid rise in both national power and individual living standards. They also promised to put an end to the Israeli state, which had fought its way into existence in the very heart of the Arab world, with much Western support, in 1948.

The new leaders failed everywhere. They failed militarily, losing further wars to Israel in 1956, 1967 and 1973, mainly because they lacked the organizational ability to take advantage of their vastly superior numbers: in every war from 1956 onwards, the Israelis actually had more troops on the battlefield than their Arab opponents (plus, of course, strong support from Britain and France, and later from the United States as well). They failed economically because they were military officers whose training had not prepared them in any way to run countries and manage economies. And even if they had had the right skills, the development model they adopted, which in the end did not work that well even in the “socialist” countries of Eastern Europe, was hopelessly inappropriate for countries with low literacy, low urbanization, almost no industrial or scientific establishment, strong tribal and clan identities, and deeply rooted patriarchal values. At any
rate, they failed, and by the late 1970s it was clear to everybody that they had failed.

A six-paragraph tale of woe spanning almost a millennium, but it does explain why Arabs are so angry. They feel cheated by the West, by their own governments, by history. Even today there is little modern industry and almost no serious scientific research happening in the Arab countries. Average incomes (except in the few oil-rich states) are lower than in any other region of the world except sub-Saharan Africa—and on current trend lines will fall even below Africa’s in another ten or fifteen years. Half the women in the Arab world are illiterate.

As for the military rulers who had presided over this full-spectrum failure, they did not retire from power in disgrace; they clung fiercely to power despite their failures, and as their popularity declined their regimes compensated by becoming more brutally oppressive. And they (or their lineages) survived a very long time: Gaddafi lasted forty-two years, Bashar al Assad is still in power forty-five years after his father took power in Syria, and General Abdel Fattah al Sisi is the fourth general to rule Egypt in unbroken succession (apart from the brief democratic experiment in 2011–13) since 1954. The surviving monarchies, like Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, have likewise changed little over the decades.

And so, naturally enough, many young Arabs who came to adulthood in the 1970s, trapped in the dead end of the generals’ failed “modernization” projects, were driven
to consider revolution as a way out. But a revolution needs an ideology, and in practice will not thrive if the ideology on offer is simply a warmed-over version of the one the revolutionaries are seeking to overthrow—“We will carry out the same modernization project, based on Soviet-style crash industrialization, but we will do it more efficiently than the lot currently in power.” A completely different approach was needed, and many of the revolutionaries found it in the “Islamist” thought of an Egyptian writer, scholar and poet called Sayyid Qutb.