Since 1979, any attempt to move a democratic agenda forward in the Arab world has been tarred with the brush of Iranianism, what is generally called “Islamic fundamentalism.” It is not Islam or autocracy that worries the planners of the World Order. If that were the case, they should be apoplectic about the Saudi monarchy, whose Sharia laws would make the Iranian mullahs blush. What drives Langley and The Harold Pratt House crazy is the issue of Iranian influence, and so of the revision of the power equation in the Middle East. These intellectual bureaucrats stretched the short, tight skin of Shi’ism over the gigantic body of the Arab world. Hamas and Hezbollah are treated as Iranian mailboxes in Palestine and Lebanon respectively.
The Iranian Revolution certainly gave the historically oppressed Shi’a population of the Arabian Peninsula courage to call for self-respect. Eager to live dignified lives, these populations took refuge in religious organizations that provided them with a framework to make their call for dignity comprehensible. Bahrain’s al-Wefaq National Islamic Society is, as a US State Department cable candidly noted (September 4, 2008), neither a fundamentalist nor a sectarian party, but it “continues to demand a ‘true’ constitutional monarchy in which elected officials make policy decisions, the prime minister is accountable to the parliament, and the appointed upper house loses its legislative power.” These are elementary, civic claims. But they cannot be honored because they come from al-Wefaq against the power of a King who allows the US to base its Fifth Fleet in his archipelago, and who is fiercely against Iran. It is far easier to tar parties like al-Wefaq as Iran’s proxies, and to categorize the simple demands of the people for dignity as “the Shia revival” (as Vali Nasr does in his 2006 blockbuster, The Shia Revival).
The uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere threw the geo-political equation into disarray. If Hosni Mubarak looked out of his villa in Sharm el-Sheikh a few days after his arrival there, he would have seen two Iranian vessels (a frigate and a supply ship) power around the bend at Ras Mohammed, up the Gulf of Suez and cross into the Mediterranean Sea through the Canal. These two “war ships” docked in Syria on February 24. That Egypt allowed the Iranians to use the Canal for the first time since the 1979 revolution threatened the architecture of US power in the region.
Alireza Nader, of RAND, told the New York Times, “I think the Saudis are worried that they’re encircled—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon; Yemen is unstable; Bahrain is very uncertain.” The US war in Iraq handed the country over to a pro-Iranian regime. In late January, the Hezbollah-backed candidate (Najib Mikati) became Prime Minister of Lebanon, and Hamas’ hands were strengthened as the Palestinian Authority’s remaining legitimacy came crashing down when al-Jazeera published the Palestine Papers. Ben Ali and Mubarak’s exile threw Tunisia and Egypt out of the column of the status quo states. Libya’s Qaddafi and Yemen’s Saleh have been loyal allies in the War on Terror. Their fall was preordained.
As the status quo withered, its loyal dogs tried out the old chant about the threat of Islamic Fundamentalism. Mubarak’s chorus about the Muslim Brotherhood was off key. When Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi returned from his exile in Qatar, he did not play the part of Khomeini. The Sheikh opened his sermon in Tahrir Square with a welcome to both Muslims and Christians. Qaddafi’s shrieks about a potential al-Qaeda in the Maghreb being formed in the eastern part of Libya repeated the paranoid delusions of the AFRICOM planners. Bahrain’s Hamad al-Khalifa hastened to kiss the hem of King Abdullah’s substantial jalabiya, and to plot together about the Shi’a challenge to the Sunni monarchs. They wished to convert their sectarian histrionics onto their dissenting populations, but al-Wefaq’s Khalil Ibrahim al-Marzooq quickly warned that the Saudis might try to flood Bahrain with the kind of mercenary thugs that they would send into Yemen to disrupt the Marxist republic in the 1970s. He was prescient. This is exactly what happened, as we shall see.
In 2008, during the armed confrontation between the Lebanese government and Hezbollah, the Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal met with the US Ambassador David Satterfield. Saud feared an “Iranian takeover of all Lebanon.” He wanted armed intervention. The Lebanese Armed Forces were not up to the task. Nor was the UN force in south Lebanon, “which is sitting doing nothing.” What was needed was for the US and NATO to provide “naval and air cover” and for an “Arab force” drawn from the “Arab periphery.” It did not come to pass. But the idea percolates on the surface of Riyadh’s palaces.
The Saudis, the anchor of anti-Iranianism, did not believe that the US had the spine to act as it must. The uprisings in Bahrain and Yemen had to be crushed. It would look bad if this was sanctioned in the name of the preservation of the monarchy. Far better to see the protesters as terrorists (as in Yemen) or Iranianists (as in Bahrain). Or even better yet, to turn this largely peaceful wave into a new military confrontation. The hawks of Order had every incentive to enchain the doves of Change.
VI. On the Rim of Saudi
When Ben Ali flew to Saudi Arabia, he brought with him to the peninsula the magic of the wave. That’s where events ran into some trouble. The Saudi monarchy found it intolerable that democracy dare to make its presence felt on its borders. The various sheikhdoms, some that predate the Saudi one (such as Bahrain, 1783 to al-Saud’s 1932), are ideological and practical buffer zones. The idea of the Arab monarchy would be harder to sustain if the only such were in Riyadh, however rich. It becomes easier to point the royal finger toward Manama and Kuwait, to suggest that it is in the temperament of Arabs to be ruled by their royals, or their tribal chiefs. Saudi Arabia was prepared to go to any length to vanquish the protests in Bahrain, which it did with armed force after doing a monumental deal to which we shall return eventually. In Yemen, matters were simplified. There was no need to do a deal to send in troops. The president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, is clever. He played the crowds carefully, holding his own support base together with tribal blandishments and with threats about the fear of the notorious South, once home to Marxism and now, by his lights, home to al-Qaeda. Saleh had two other cards in his pocket: (1) that the Saudis did not want instability on the Peninsula, and besides, after attempting to overthrow him in 1994 they have now come to terms with his rule; (2) that the United States and Saudis are petrified of al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP). Yemen remained on the front pages of the newspapers of the region, and on the inside pages of the Atlantic papers only because of the courage of the Yemeni people. But there was no real pressure for regime change from either Riyadh or Washington. In fact, Saleh was allowed to get away with murder, as the Saudis have in Manama, because there are limits to what Power is willing to concede in the region. Bahrain and Yemen illuminate the manuscript of Imperialism, a concept that many have increasingly come to deny or misrepresent.
Such protests appear unlikely only because the wave of struggle that broke out on the Peninsula in the late 1950s and peaked in the 1970s was crushed by the early 1980s. Encouraged by the overthrow of the monarch in Egypt by the coup led by Nasser, ordinary people across the Arab world wanted their own revolts. Iraq and Lebanon followed. On the peninsula, the people wanted what Fred Halliday called “Arabia without Sultans.” The People’s Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf emerged out of the Dhofar (Oman) struggle. It wished to take its local campaign to the entire peninsula. In Bahrain, its more timid branch was the Popular Front. It did not last long. With Nasserism in decline by the 1970s, the new momentum came to this Arabian republicanism from the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain attempted a coup in 1981. They had the inspiration, but not the organization. This Arab archipelago could not go the way of Yemen, where a revolution allowed a Marxist organization to seize power in 1967. Yemen’s Marxists faced ceaseless pressure from the Saudis, their Yemeni allies and the forces of the Atlantic world. In 1990, with the Soviet Union on the wane, the North (led by Saleh) absorbed the South. It was the peninsula’s Die Wende, the turning point, at about the same time as the two Germanys were united. The pendulum swung