Read Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East Online
Authors: Robin Wright
One third of Iraqis lived in poverty by 2007. The average Iraqi fared significantly worse than the day Saddam Hussein left power. In a nationwide poll, more than six out of ten said their lives were going badly—double the figure just a year earlier.
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By 2007, electricity barely met half the demand. Before the war, in 2003, Baghdad had electricity for at least sixteen hours and up to twenty-four hours a day. In 2007, the capital had power for about five hours a day.
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Nationwide, eighty-five percent of Iraqis lacked a stable source of electricity, the United Nations reported. To cook, Iraqis were returning to the use of
tanoors,
the traditional mud ovens heated by glowing wood coals, because supplies of both electricity and propane fuel were unreliable.
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Meanwhile, Iraq’s various insurgents had become self-sufficient. Through criminal activity, kidnapping for ransom, counterfeiting, and oil smuggling, they made up to 200 million dollars a year,
The New York Times
reported.
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The military scorecard of tactical successes and failures aside, Iraq was a crumbling state. And Iraq was becoming America’s greatest foreign policy failure—ever.
But the toll was not limited to Iraq. Its disintegration affected the entire Middle East.
The United States had originally calculated that ousting the Middle East’s most notorious dictator would shake arrogant regimes and passive populations out of their political lethargy. The new momentum, according to Washington’s advocates of war, would in turn help “drain the swamp” of both old autocrats and new Islamic radicals. After Saddam’s demise, they argued, reformers in neighboring Iran were more likely to rally against the theocrats. Emboldened democratic activists would be encouraged to demand truly free and fair elections in Egypt. Syria’s regime would be squeezed into easing its oppressive rule. Even the conservative sheikhdoms would have to recognize the trend.
The new forces unleashed would in turn counter the wave of militant Islam. Both religious fanatics and autocratic hard-liners would be so weakened, the argument went, that a regionwide peace could finally be negotiated with Israel.
It was instead quite the opposite. Everywhere I went, I heard a similar refrain from people of all political parties and religious affiliations: In Iraq, the world’s mightiest democracy had undermined—even sabotaged—prospects for political change.
In Morocco, the Equity and Reconciliation Commission chief, Driss Benzekri warned that democracy was being discredited. “When the principles of democracy are memorialized with the images of war, people become disillusioned,” the former political prisoner told me. “They leave a distorted image of democracy.”
Saadeddine Othmani, the Islamist head of Morocco’s Justice and Development Party, fretted that militants would gain ground. “The United States has chosen an approach,” he said, “that will crush moderate Muslims and produce only extremism.”
In Lebanon, Harvard-educated political analyst Paul Salem worried that the Iraq experiment could even undo progress made in the past. “Any real election in the Middle East today is likely to produce an anti-American government. That’s just the mood now,” he said. “If you pushed the Egyptians to have a fair election, you’d probably find the new government abrogating the peace treaty with Israel, and then we’d all be back in a different universe.”
Kefaya, the best known Egyptian democracy movement, launched a campaign in 2006 to amass one million signatures on a petition demanding that Egypt annul its peace treaty with Israel.
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Al-Masri al-Youm,
Egypt’s most independent newspaper, ran an opinion piece declaring, “America, we hate you.”
“Iraq will not be an easy thing for the Middle East to survive,” Salem added. “And the United States is stuck in the Middle East it created.”
Iraq’s overall impact was to taint the United States even more than the region’s odious autocrats. “However opposed Syrians are to our own regime,” warned Syrian dissident Yassin Haj Saleh, “they now distrust the Americans more.”
In six countries with solid American ties—Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—only twelve percent of the people surveyed had a favorable opinion of the United States.
“The vast majority of people in every country believe the Middle East has become less democratic than it was before the Iraq war,” said Shibley Telhami, who conducted the survey with Zogby International.
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In an extraordinary twist, Arab anger was greater at American leadership than at Israel. When asked what foreign leader they disapproved of most, President Bush scored the highest—more than three times higher than then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
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There was little gratitude for the past. In Kuwait, which had been liberated under American leadership in 1991, protesters burned the American flag in front of the United States Embassy during Hezbollah’s war with Israel in 2006. Several thousand protesters carrying Hezbollah flags and posters of Nasrallah gathered outside parliament and chanted anti-American slogans. They were joined by several members of parliament.
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Throughout the region, the Iraq experiment also strengthened, even emboldened, the antidemocratic forces the United States had intended to contain or defeat.
President Bush cited the “war on terrorism” as a justification for the Iraq war, but al Qaeda and Iran actually benefited. Iraq became al Qaeda’s most active base of operations. Challenging the United States became a cause capable of luring thousands of new recruits and deepening Islamic militancy regionwide.
“The United States was not too long ago seen by Muslims as a partner and as a model of democracy, even when it was criticized,” said Aziz Rebbah, head of the youth wing of Morocco’s moderate Party for Justice and Development.
“Today, if we had no borders in the Arab world, thousands of people would be willing to go to Iraq. Nobody thinks you really want democracy in Iraq.”
In the biggest irony, Iran’s theocrats reaped the most out of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The United States had hoped to put in place a secular, multiconfessional, pro-Western democracy; Iraq ended up with an elected government led by Shiite Islamists, including many who had lived in exile for years in Tehran. The militias trained and armed by Iran ruled many streets. Iranian-trained clerics were powerful players.
The United States was increasingly caught up in damage control—not only in the Middle East. No foreign-policy initiative had been more disastrous to core American values, interests, goals, and status around the world.
On the eve of President Bush’s 2007 State of the Union speech, global opinion of the United States had plummeted. Almost three quarters of those polled in a survey of twenty-five countries on six continents disapproved of American intervention in Iraq.
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More than two-thirds said the Iraq war had done more harm than good.
In Britain, America’s closest ally, more than eighty percent opposed the U.S. intervention. Almost three out of every four Britons said America’s presence in the Middle East provoked more conflict than it prevented. And almost sixty percent said the United States played a mainly negative role in the world.
“It’s been a horrible slide,” Doug Miller, president of international GlobeScan polling company, told
The Washington Post.
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By 2007, virtually every goal set by the United States for its intervention in Iraq was more illusive than on the eve of war in 2003. Terrorism was a far greater threat. Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction was a graver danger. Iraq was more unstable, with the war itself looking increasingly unwinnable. The sectarian divide across the Middle East was threatening to redraw the Middle East map.
“We are at a potentially historic moment when the modern Arab state order that was created by the Europeans in 1920 has started to fray at its edges and its core, perhaps in what we might call the Great Arab Unraveling,” opined Rami Khouri, the Lebanese political columnist who dotes on American sports. “Shattered Iraq is the immediate driver of this possible dissolution and reconfiguration of Arab states that had held together rather well for nearly four generations.”
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Strategically, the United States was also more vulnerable, as it held less credibility and influence in the Middle East than at any time since its oil needs and alliance with Israel took it deep into the region after World War II.
If the 1956 Suez Canal crisis marked the demise of Europe’s influence in the Middle East, the Iraq War could well mark the demise of American influence. The United States may still be the major player, but mainly by default and largely on paper. Washington will be unable to threaten the use of sustained force or confrontation again anytime soon for fear of even greater backlash.
The U.S. experiment with force to create democracy also took a heavy toll on the agents of change. It stranded new activists and movements regionwide. As Iraq disintegrated, the region’s autocracies acted as if they had carte blanche to do as they pleased. Several of the dissidents I interviewed for this book, particularly in Egypt and Syria, were subsequently detained for their activities. Most were still held as this book went to press, some for more than a year. Anwar al Bunni, the Syrian human-rights lawyer, was sentenced to five years.
“The complete failure in Iraq,” said Syrian political analyst Sami Moubeyed, “will only keep other regimes in power longer.”
Some of the new democrats felt American aid or support was downright dangerous. In 2005, during Iranian writer Akbar Ganji’s long hunger strike, President Bush issued a statement expressing concern about his deteriorating health in prison and demanding his unconditional release for medical treatment. The White House appealed to human-rights activists around the world to rally to the Iranian writer’s cause.
“His valiant efforts should not go in vain,” the statement said. “Mr. Ganji, please know that as you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you.”
But in 2006, during Ganji’s first trip to Washington to pick up a freedom-of-speech award, he stayed as far away from the White House as he could.
“You people have great accomplishments,” the diminutive Iranian dissident told me. “But no one trusts the American government now. Many people wanted to set up meetings while I was here. All the dissidents in Iran asked me not to.”
Iranian activists felt betrayed by America’s tactics, he said, especially compared with their own peaceful efforts. “Violence and force,” Ganji said, “can never by themselves create genuine beliefs.”
Yet Ganji was not giving up his campaign for democratic change. Nor were others.
Ghada Shahbender, the Egyptian mother who formed a group to monitor presidential and parliamentary elections, came to Washington in 2007. Despite growing obstacles in Cairo, she had persevered—and was making something of a name for herself in the region. When Yemen held elections in 2006, she was invited to help monitor its polls.
She was also planning long-term. “Democracy is not about one-time elections,” she told me as we had dinner overlooking the Potomac.
Shayfeencom (We’re Watching You) had recently launched a campaign against Egypt’s endemic corruption. The government countered with a warning not to cross into politics. But then her group, Shahbender told me with a chuckle, discovered a simple discrepancy. The UN Convention Against Corruption, which Egypt formally ratified in 2005, stipulated that it had to be published by every signatory to inform its citizens of their rights in fighting corruption—which Egypt had not properly done. So We’re Watching You turned around and took the government to court.
“Even if we don’t win, we’ve made a point,” Shahbender said. “It’s a step.”
Shahbender had brought sixteen teenagers with her to Washington. They were part of her latest venture—Kid-mocracy 2007. It was a trial program that she and a few friends pulled together in less than three months to expose young Egyptians to democratic practices.
“Students in Egypt don’t know what a constitution is. They simply aren’t required to learn about it,” she told me. “I didn’t even read the whole thing until we organized this program. So what we need is basic civic education.”
Shahbender’s group launched a competition for students aged thirteen and fourteen. Kids studied democracies around the world and then wrote an essay evaluating four countries, based on United Nations criteria. Two of them had to be Egypt and the United States. The sixteen winners won a two-week trip to the United States—one week at a Massachusetts school to do a joint human-rights project with their American counterparts, the other week touring Washington, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. The students saw both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill. They experienced local government at the Boston State House. They saw the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall in Philadelphia. And they watched international diplomacy at the United Nations.
“Our resources are flimsy, so we have become professional beggars among our friends,” Shahbender said. “My god, can’t you just imagine what the 500 billion dollars the Americans have spent in Iraq would do if it had been used for real promotion of democracy!”
I asked Shahbender what impact the Iraq experiment with democracy had on her efforts.
“In Iraq, Bush set back democracy and freedom in the region more than any other American president,” she told me. “Most Egyptians now raise their eyebrows and speak quite sarcastically about American democracy.”