Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution - Softcover

Prashad, Vijay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520293266 ISBN 13: 9780520293267

Publisher: University of California Press, 2016

Synopsis

This fast-paced and timely book from Vijay Prashad is the best critical primer to the Middle East conflicts today, from Syria and Saudi Arabia to the chaos in Turkey. Mixing thrilling anecdotes from street-level reporting that give readers a sense of what is at stake with a bird's-eye view of the geopolitics of the region and the globe, Prashad guides us through the dramatic changes in players, politics, and economics in the Middle East over the last five years. "The Arab Spring was defeated neither in the byways of Tahrir Square nor in the souk of Aleppo," he explains. "It was defeated roundly in the palaces of Riyadh and Ankara as well as in Washington, DC and Paris." The heart of this book explores the turmoil in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon-countries where ISIS emerged and is thriving. It is here that the story of the region rests. What would a post-ISIS Middle East look like? Who will listen to the grievances of the people? Can there be another future for the region that is not the return of the security state or the continuation of monarchies? Placing developments in the Middle East in the broader context of revolutionary history, The Death of the Nation tackles these critical questions.

About this title

About the Author

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, journalist, and commentator. He is the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College. From 2013 to 2014, he was the Edward Said Chair at the American University of Beirut. He is the author of many books, including Karma of Brown Folk, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting, and The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World. He writes regularly for Frontline, The Hindu, Alternet and BirGun and is a contributing editor for Himal Southasian.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution

By Vijay Prashad

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Vijay Prashad
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-29326-7

Contents

Introduction, 1, 
1. Obituary of the Arab Spring, 7, 
2. The State of the Arab Revolutions, 26, 
3. The Anatomy of the Islamic State, 54, 
4. Destruction of Countries, 137, 
5. Turkey and the Camp of the Counterrevolution, 166, 
Epilogue: Yemen and Palestine, 191, 
Acknowledgments, 199, 
Notes, 203, 
Index, 223, 

CHAPTER 1

Obituary of the Arab Spring

Arab children,
Spring rain,
Corn ears of the future,
You are the generation
That will overcome defeat.
Nizar Qabbani, "Hawamish 'ala daftar
al-naksah" (Footnotes to the
book of the setback), 1967

Popular rebellions reflect the urges of a people, but the people are themselves not always capable of victory. If the structure of social order in a particular formation is weakened by war or by economic turmoil, the popular rebellions might be able to move history forward. Even here, the record shows that unless there is an organized force that is ready to seize the day, historical motion can falter. Older, dominant social classes that have a monopoly over violence hastily enter the fray to their advantage. Human history is littered with failed uprisings. They are the norm. Success is the exception. But neither failure nor success holds back the frequency of revolts. These are in the nature of human desire: the march toward freedom.

Slogans defined the air of 2011 — Khubz wa-ma' wa-Ben Ali la ("We can live on bread and water, but no more Ben Ali") and Yasqut, yasqut hukm al-'askar ("Down, down with military rule"). Enthusiasm was the order of things in North Africa. Men and women, young and old, from various social classes, descended onto the squares of towns and cities to say: enough. Decades of futility had burdened their history. Intellectuals in Tunisia dusted off copies of the poetry books of Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi (1909–34), singing "To the Tyrants of the World" to a new tune,

You've taken off heads of people and the flowers of hope; and watered the cure of the sand with blood and tears until it was drunk.

The blood's river will sweep you away and you will be burned by the fiery storm.

In Egypt, a young folk singer, Ramy Essam, held his guitar tightly in Cairo's Tahrir Square to sing, "We are united, we demand one thing: Leave, leave, leave." That word — leave (or irhal) — came from a chant to a song. It defined the ambition of the people: they wanted the departure of the tyrants.

So they fell. Tunisia's Ben Ali went first, followed by Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. Ben Ali and his family went to Saudi Arabia. Mubarak went to his seaside home in Sharm al-Sheikh. Both moved to towns on the Red Sea. Courts found both of them guilty — although as events soured in Egypt, Mubarak would be forgiven. Not so Ben Ali, who still lives under the protection of the Saudis in Jeddah.

Matters began to get complex. Saudi Arabia's legions snuffed its own disgruntled population with jail sentences and handouts, and then entered Bahrain to crush its Pearl Monument encampment. NATO's jets fired up to bomb Libya and bring the force of imperial arms into the uprisings. Proxy armies and money of the old order entered both Libya and Syria, changing the mood of the Arab Spring from jubilation to trepidation. The Syrian poet Adunis, whose flinty (and Orientalist) comments on the rebellion disturbed his reputation, captured the grave pall that fell over the region by the time Libya and Syria entered the frame. In al-Hayat, one of the leading daily pan-Arab newspapers (31 March 2011), Adunis wrote, "A politics led in the name of religion by a cart pulled by two horses — heaven and hell — is necessarily a violent and exclusionary politics." He continued mournfully, "The present in some of its explosions is copying the events of the past with modern instruments." At the time Adunis was pilloried for his pessimism.

Five years on, obituaries of the Arab Spring have now begun to emerge. The general sense is of futility: What was the point of the uprising if the outcome is worse than the situation that existed? Mass social change is rarely predictable. No people rise up with the expectation that they will fail. That is why the opening of every mass struggle is deeply inspirational. It is also the case that each mass struggle results in a new order that is not capable of its original spark. Sitting in his Turkish exile in 1930, Leon Trotsky wrote his magisterial History of the Russian Revolution. Thirteen years had elapsed since the 1917 October Revolution. The revolution was already being derided. "Capitalism," Trotsky wrote in his conclusion, "required a hundred years to elevate science and technique to the heights and plunge humanity into the hell of war and crisis. To socialism its enemies allow only fifteen years to create and furnish a terrestrial paradise. We took no such obligation upon ourselves. We never set these dates. The process of vast transformation must be measured by an adequate scale."

How to measure the Arab Spring that began in 2011? In Tunisia and Egypt, mass political action certainly deposed unpopular leaders, but it was not able to transform the regimes. Figureheads went, but the tentacles of elite power remained intact. The highest expectation of these revolts was that they would inaugurate an epoch of democratic governance for these two countries. In other words, Tunisia and Egypt would have experienced a bourgeois revolution.

Much was expected of Egypt, but these expectations were exaggerated. Mubarak left on 11 February 2011. Two years later, on 3 July 2013, the military conducted a coup against the elected government of Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. Apart from the Muslim Brotherhood, few other parties had a link with sections of the people. This was not the métier of the liberals. They were professionals who had little political contact with the masses. Hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood's suffocating agenda had thrown the liberals into a convoluted alliance with the military by 2013. One of the most uncomfortable facts of recent Egyptian history is that more people came out onto the streets on 30 June 2013, to oppose the government of the Muslim Brotherhood, than in 2011 in Tahrir Square. All kinds of people took to the streets that day: Salafis alongside liberals, reactionaries alongside revolutionaries. The liberal stalwart Mohamed ElBaradei said that the military "will just come back to stabilize. And then we will start all over again." This was naive. The military dismissed the political process, began its campaign of imprisonment of dissent, and portrayed itself as the inheritors of Gamal Abdel Nasser and stability. Tensions in the Sinai Peninsula over the rise of Islamist radicalism and the emergence of chaos in Libya provided the military's new leader, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, with a raison d'être. But tension in the Sinai began in 2010, predating both the Tahrir uprising and the emergence of the Brotherhood to power. If anything, the emergence of terrorist cells signals the failure of the military rather than its necessity. Human-rights groups are unable to give an accurate figure for those who are in prison under spurious charges and for those who have been killed in clashes and mass executions. The current government's own definitions of imprisonment and murder do not allow for ease of calculation. Everyone whom the government does not like, it seems, is now a terrorist. It is the term of art for dissenter.

Even celebrations of Tahrir are forbidden on 25 January. On the fourth anniversary of Tahrir, in 2015, the security services killed twenty-three people, including the poet and socialist Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, who was shot with flowers in her hands. Thousands came to bury her. The fifth anniversary — in 2016 — was silent. The military came out to hand out flowers. They now claim the day.

Threats to the bourgeois turn in Tunisia came from all directions — the old order eager to reappear without Ben Ali, the IMF wanting cuts in the budget, extremist groups incubating in the slums of Tunis. What saved Tunisia was its trade union, the Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT), which claims 20 percent of the country's population as its members. It is the most representative civil society organization in the country, although it went through decades of somnolence. When the new, post–Ben Ali period in Tunisia seemed to be on the verge of falling apart, the UGTT dragged to the table its historical enemy, the employers' association, and its allies in the human-rights field to draw up a roadmap for the country. That roadmap, created by these social forces, handcuffed the political parties into a dialogue that led to the new constitution. It was the Tunisian working class, therefore, that created the basis for stability in the new Tunisia. It is this working class that won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2016. The classical gesture of the Nobel Committee would have been to honor the two main political luminaries: Rached Ghannouchi, of the Ennahda party; and Beji Caid Essebsi, of the Nidaa Tounes party. After all, when Ben Ali fled the country, it was the Ennahda — largely in exile and part of the Muslim Brotherhood current — that seized the political opportunity. But the old order did not fall easily. Beji Caid Essebsi had been appointed the interim prime minister. Essebsi is the perpetual survivor. He was a close associate of Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia's main leader in the anticolonial struggle and then its first president. When Ben Ali overthrew Bourguiba in 1987, Essebsi threw his lot in with the younger generation. During the Arab Spring, Essebsi again corralled sections of the Tunisian elite out of its allegiance to Ben Ali and threw in his lot with the future to become interim prime minister. Between the Ennahda leadership and Essebsi a modus vivendi was established, despite great rancor. After elections in October 2011, Essebsi handed over power to the Ennahda candidate, Moncef Marzouki. Three years later, Essebsi's Nidaa Tounes (Tunisia's Call), a secular front, defeated Marzouki, giving Essebsi the presidency. If the Nobel had been awarded in the conventional way, the prize would have gone to the leadership of Ennahda and Essebsi for the peaceful transition from the reign of Ben Ali to the new dispensation based on the 2014 constitution. But that would not have captured the essence of what happened in Tunisia.

When matters seemed bleak in 2013, it was not the political parties that broke the mold and aligned themselves to a peaceful path. The UGTT took up that historical task — drawing in the employers' association and the two human-rights groups to form the Quartet. Danger stalked their approach. Two important left leaders fell to assassins' bullets in 2013. Chokri Belaid, of the Democratic Patriots' Movement, was shot dead on 6 February, and Mohammed Brahimi, of the Popular Front, was assassinated on 25 July. The Revolution of Freedom and Dignity seemed to be moving into perilous waters. Anything could have happened. Strikes and protests were met with violence. Tunisia was on the knife's edge. It was at this point that the Quartet's maneuver was essential. As the representatives of society, the Quartet forced the political parties to come to the table. Ghannouchi's Ennahda party had been accused of being behind the assassinations. This was the summer when the Muslim Brotherhood was removed from power by a Western-backed military coup in Egypt. Ennahda, which is allied to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, was at a disadvantage. It also needed a way out. The forces led by Essebsi, some of the old regime, knew that they could not crack down on the workers in the streets and on Ennahda. The army did not move on their behalf as it did against Morsi. Tunisia required a compromise. That is what the Quartet delivered. Absent that, Tunisia might have gone down the road of Egypt. It was saved from that travesty.

Tunisia's respite could very well be temporary. Behind the veneer of the Nobel lies a grave reality. A high debt overhang and frustration in the gullies of the small towns and cities provoked Essebsi in early 2016 to suggest that ISIS is in the shadows. On the Tunisian side of the Libyan border, battles are common between security forces and ISIS (as well as various other outfits). The town of Ben Guerdane was caught in such a battle in March 2016. But oxygen for Tunisia's economy — as a respite for its security threats — was not forthcoming. The policy space for Tunisia is narrow, with little imaginativeness from the World Bank, the IMF, and the commercial lenders. They are unwilling to countenance a massive investment to shore up this fledgling democracy. For now, the multilateral agencies look the other way as Tunisia increases its public-sector employment and funnels higher wages to these workers. A proper exit from the shadows is not available. The vortex of instability remains open.

Tunisia established a constitutional democracy, although its political class — with some new faces — does not have the political wherewithal to solve some of the pressing problems of the population — namely, jobs for the burgeoning youth. Egypt has drifted back into the arms of the military.

SULTANS OF ARABIA

Freedom is an elusive idea. Ravages of history have produced institutions that favor the elite, who are resilient in the ways of metamorphosis. During antifeudal movements, petty royalty threw off their regal garb, donned the suits of the bourgeoisie, and took their places at the front of the new order. The great Arab nationalist revolutions of the twentieth century — from Egypt to Libya — rid the region of monarchs, but failed to deepen the roots of popular democracy. They roused the people, but often asked them to stand behind the military. Green uniforms stood in as sentinels of revolution. The actual revolutionaries — labor and peasant organizers, communists — went to prison. The colonels and captains seized their rhetoric.

In one redoubt of the region — the Arabian Island (al-jazira al-arabiyya) — monarchy fashioned itself as an ally of the gunboats of the West. It had no roots in the desert. It was a purely modern invention — 1820 for the al-Khalifa dynasty of Bahrain, and 1932 for the al-Saud dynasty of Arabia. The West decided — early — that the defense of the Arab monarchs was tantamount to self-preservation. Much of this had to do with oil. The Carter Doctrine of 1980 — to protect the Saudi monarchy — merely put into legalese what had been common policy till then. It was the nail in the coffin of freedom for the Arab lands. The West, with its superior firepower, backed the Arab monarchies, flush with petrodollars, against the will of the Arab people, from Morocco to Iraq. The founding of the World Muslim League in 1962 — with complete U.S. support — suggested to the Arab lands that secular nationalism and socialism were anathema — that the hand on the tiller of Arab history had to be Saudi. Saudi Arabia and the West — unlikely partners — exported Saudi Arabia's version of Islam (Wahabbism) and the West's paranoia about Communist intervention across the region. Prisons opened up for the Left, and Saudi-funded mosques threw their doors open for the adherents. This sets in concrete the social formation of the Arab lands.

Long before the Arab Spring came Arab nationalism — the ideology that the Arab people must create their own destiny outside the confines of Western control. The contours of Arab nationalism were wide — mostly secular, often socialist, typically with a resounding emphasis on the "Arab people." The early Arab nationalism — rooted in the Nahda (Awakening) of the nineteenth century and made manifest in the Arab Congress of 1913 — was initially elitist and chauvinist. An echo of that old chauvinist Arab nationalism can be heard from Saudi Arabia today when it speaks of "Arab solidarity" (particularly against Iran). Grandees of the Ottoman administration with talents frustrated by the preferences toward the Turks sought their own national project — with themselves as the main beneficiaries, and with the peasants (fellahin) as political cannon fodder. People like Rida Pasha al-Rikabi, Izzat Darwazeh, Shukri al-Quwatli, and Saad Zaghlul Pasha held the reins of this movement. Their nationalism whipped from the widest Arab canvas to their localities — whether Egypt for Saad Zaghlul Pasha or Syria for Rida Pasha al-Rikabi. That both were pashas — the title of a high-ranking Ottoman official — says a great deal about their social position and their ambitions.

Gamal Abdel Nasser and his military associates, after the 1952 overthrow of King Farouk's monarchy, seized this mantle of Arab nationalism. It would then sweep through Iraq, which overthrew the monarchy of King Faisal II in 1958, and into Libya, which overthrew King Idriss in 1969. Nasser, Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim of Iraq, and Colonel Muammar Qaddafi of Libya wore uniforms, but they were not initially defined by them. Arab nationalism was greater than the men who became its icons. It was an ineffable sensibility for self-rule and for an end to Western intervention (including the colonization of Palestine by Israel). Grand images of Arab efflorescence spread from city to countryside; boldness had arrived in the region. Nasser's speeches traveled the region through Sawt al-Arab, the Voice of the Arabs radio, interspersed with the revolutionary poems sung by Abdel Wahab and Umm Kulthum and long paeans to the revolutionary Algerians, Yemenis, and Palestinians. Pan-Arabism was the revolt of the common Arab people (al sha'ab al 'arab). Linkage of Arab nationalism to the Third World Project at the Bandung Conference (1955), in the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organization (founded in 1958), and in the Non-Aligned Movement (founded in 1961) sharpened its anti-imperialism. Antipathy to monarchies and imperialism became its ethos. Support for Arab nationalists across the region became axiomatic. Nasser put resources into the Yemeni civil war and encouraged the union between Egypt and Syria. But there were limits to this Arab nationalism. It distrusted Communists, whom it threw into prison. It could not fathom non-Arab minorities — particularly the Kurds, whose national aspirations ran counter to the Arab nationalism prevalent in Iraq and Syria during the 1950s and 1960s. (It did not help that Jalal Talabani pushed the Kurdish Democratic Party in Syria to change its name to the more provocative Democratic Party of Kurdistan — announcing the name of the country rather than merely the population.) Arab nationalism could not contain all the energy of nationalism, with older animosities between Iraq and Egypt — say — coming in the way of true unity. Antipathy to Zionism and to imperialism drew them together, even as other fissures kept them apart.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution by Vijay Prashad. Copyright © 2016 Vijay Prashad. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0520293266
• ISBN 13: 9780520293267
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 246