Read The New Middle East Online
Authors: Paul Danahar
Iraq, under its Sunni strongman Saddam, was used by the West after the Iranian revolution to contain Shia influence in the region. Now it is a Shia country. The naivety of the US soldiers I met on the day they drove into Baghdad on 9 April 2003 was shared by the people who sent them to war. Those brave teenagers can be forgiven for that failing. That is not true of their masters in Washington. Not only did the Bush administration fail to think through its post-invasion plans, it did not think through the regional consequences.
The new Iraq will not simply do Iran’s will, but it will cuddle up close if the Gulf states and particularly Saudi Arabia do not properly engage with it. The Arab League summit in 2012 was an important symbolic step, but it was only a small step. The summit was brimming with the tensions and mistrust between Sunni and Shia powers that the US invasion in 2003 intensified.
Saddam was toppled so that the region could be reformed. Instead it was convulsed.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan revealed the limits of its ability to shape regions it considered central to its interests. The Soviets reached too far, fought a war they could not win, and left humiliated, humbled and broke. The war ultimately led to the Soviet Union’s collapse. Similarly the invasion of Iraq revealed the limits of America’s ability to shape the Middle East, though without the catastrophic consequences that realisation brought the Soviet Union. Iraq would be ‘A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics,’ predicted a young state senator called Barack Obama in October 2002. Iraq was America’s war of choice. It was when America overreached. It led to what a British diplomat told me felt like the sense of ‘an end of empire’, and he would know what that feels like.
But this is not the first time that America’s decline has been predicted. It happened when they were beaten into space by the Soviets. It happened in the 1980s when Japan’s economy was booming. It is happening again with the rise of China. America’s failures in Iraq forced it to pause and reconsider what it wanted to do with its still-unmatched economic and military might. Empires have collapsed in the past because they did not realise they had overreached until there was no way back. Iraq may prove to be a very painful but historically important moment for America. If it had ‘worked’, the temptation to try to do it again elsewhere in the Middle East might have proved too tempting for the Bush neo-cons, and the long-term damage to America might have been profound. The mistake America is making when it comes to the Middle East is letting it be thought that it is losing authority. It may become less interested in the region, but it should not create an impression that it is less powerful if it wants to protect the interests it does have without having to use that power.
The war in Iraq will linger behind the making of American foreign policy until a generation comes along that is too young to remember what an absolute disaster many now believe it really was. It defined the Bush administration and it framed the way the next president ran foreign policy in the region before and after the Arab Spring. Barack Obama made it clear from the start that his administration was going to be pragmatic in the Arab world. He was going to deal with the Middle East as it was rather than try to create the one he might wish for. The war in Iraq is why America was reluctant to intervene in Syria. The White House concluded that if it couldn’t stop a sectarian civil war in Iraq with tens of thousands of US soldiers on the ground what hope was there of achieving anything with a less intrusive intervention in Syria. Iraq also shaped Obama’s policy in the first violent conflict of the Arab Spring, the uprising in Libya. President Obama has been accused of ‘over-learning’ the lessons of Iraq and so failing to take a lead role in Libya and then Syria. But he believes it is his calling to get America out of wars, not into them. In 2011, after a decade of conflict, he wanted to pull American soldiers out of harm’s way. The aim under Obama was that the only people fighting and dying to control towns and cities in the Middle East would be the people who had been born in them.
7
If you give a boy a gun he thinks he is a man. The playground insecurities slip away. His height, his build, his age, his physical strength are all less important than the piece of metal he holds in his hands. The gawky teenager finds that suddenly he is an equal among men. The gun gives him a voice because people who hold the means of life and death must be listened to. The youngster can stop total strangers and make demands. ‘You!’ he may ask. ‘Where are you going?’ The man before him is perhaps his father’s age. The stranger sees in front of him a boy. If it were his son he would slap him down. But he sees that the boy has a gun, so he swallows his pride and answers the questions. And as he does so the boy truly realises his new authority. He understands the value of his gun. He understands what he loses if his gun is taken away. The moment the cold metal touches his fingertips the boy can now feel its power.
The gun can give the boy all of this in an instant. Now that he has his gun he must be told what he is being asked to fight, kill and perhaps die for. He needs a cause to replace his conscience. In most wars an appeal is made to the soldier’s patriotism, to some variant of ‘King and country’. That is what happens in most wars.
The bursts of fire from the anti-aircraft gun blistered their way across the field towards the lines of government forces dug in on the other side. The deafening noise and the smell of cordite suffocated my senses. I ran down the trench, which formed the front line just outside the besieged western Libyan city of Misrata. The ground was uneven. Each step was heavy and laboured as I sprinted along, my body bent in a half-crouch, trying to keep my head below the top of the ditch over which zipped incoming machinegun fire. Occasionally there was a cry of relief as a mortar round from the government forces missed its target. When I reached 23-year-old Abu Bakr I stopped, panting heavily from the run. I was wearing a heavy flak jacket and a fragmentation-proof helmet. Abu Bakr was wearing a blue and white Argentinian football shirt and flip-flops. He had an AK-47 over his shoulder and a broad grin across his face. He offered me some couscous. Libya’s was not an ordinary war.
‘Right now I’m learning how to use the Kalashnikov and an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade],’ he said cheerfully in his broken English. Before he spent his days shooting at the Libyan army he was at the local university studying ‘Archaeology and Tourism’. He gestured around at the men with him on the front line. ‘This is the normal people,’ he said. ‘They learn how to shoot, how to use the gun. We are in good spirits because we are right and the Gaddafi forces are wrong.’ I was looking at the middle class at war. The fighters were businessmen, students, shopkeepers, farmers. They were what every man hopes he can be if his country goes to war. They fought hard and they did not run.
I don’t know if Abu Bakr lived very long beyond the moment we shook hands and said goodbye, but three months later, as I stood in a refrigerated meat locker on the outskirts of his town, I did know that some of these ‘normal people’ had dragged the man lying before me out of a sewage pipe and beaten and sodomised him with a stick. ‘This is for Misrata, you dog’ were among the last words Gaddafi would hear before someone stepped forward and put a bullet into his head, ending the reign of the Arab world’s longest-serving leader.
But that didn’t end Libya’s war with itself.
The revolution in Libya was unique among those of the Arab Spring because it was absolute. The young men fighting in towns and cities across the country were not using their weapons to fight a war
in
Libya, they were fighting a war
against
Libya, or rather they were fighting against ‘The Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya’, which was what Colonel Muammar bin Mohammad bin Abdussalam bin Humayd bin Abu Manyar bin Humayd bin Nayil al Fuhsi Gaddafi, the ‘Brother Leader’, the ‘King of Kings’, the ‘Guide of the Great Revolution’, settled for on the fourth and final time he decided to rename his country. The young men knew what they were fighting against, but not what they were fighting for. And the longer the war went on, the more the loyalties of the young rebels drifted away from the already fragile idea of ‘Libya’ and settled instead with the men fighting alongside them and the town or city they were trying to defend.
But what happens when a young man is sent to war to destroy his own state? Once that has been achieved where does he place his loyalty? If he doesn’t know what he is fighting for, how do you convince him the war is over? How does the new state persuade the young man to give up his gun? The new Libya has yet to come up with answers to the questions left over by the business of destroying the old.
During the forty-two years that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi exercised control he smothered all freedom of expression, political debate and normal civil society. The cult of Gaddafi went much deeper than that of any other Arab dictator. He had ‘absolute, ultimate and unquestioned control’ over Libya’s state apparatus and its security forces, declared Judge Sanji Mmasenono Monageng in June 2011, when he read out the warrant for his arrest by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
‘The first thing he did was to attack the social structures, the social fabric of Libyan society,’ Sami Khashkusha, professor of Politics at Tripoli University, told me after the war.
He did that by eliminating the role of the family. All allegiance was to Gaddafi and his ideology. And he did that systematically by starting with the family, then moving into the village and then reaching to the mosque and the clergy itself, depriving it of its direct influence on everyday life and people, and this way he managed to control the hearts and minds of the Libyan people.
An entire generation had, from the moment they were born, been taught that the ‘Brother Leader’ was infallible. He was not infallible but he was irreplaceable. The power vacuum created by his overthrow was enormous. No single person was big enough to fill his shoes.
‘They are a big problem, I see them as small Gaddafis,’ said Dr Abd-el Raouf of the young fighters strutting around the country after the civil war had ended. Dr Raouf worked in one of only two psychiatric hospitals in the whole country. He believes Libya will remain traumatised for many years, and that it has neither the resources nor the cultural willingness to recognise the scale of the problem. ‘Most of the battles were fought by civilians, not soldiers, and they have suffered a lot. They’ve seen people killed in front of them. They experience sleep disorders, behavioural changes, and some have lost their minds.’ The true number of post-traumatic stress cases was ‘uncountable’ he told me.
I see ten to fifteen new cases each day. But because psychological problems are not recognised in this society, they are taboo, I think this is just the tip of the iceberg. The country has still not recognised the psychological impact of the war. It’s a very, very huge problem. The young people who we need to build the country, they are lost. You don’t need to rebuild the hospitals, or the cities, or the roads or houses. You need to rebuild the human beings, and it’s difficult, it’s going to take a long, long time to change their mentality, to change the way they think and to manage their problems.
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi spent his life creating a state as dysfunctional as he was. The civil war that killed him has only made that psychosis worse. The biggest problem facing Libya today is those small Gaddafis. They were a product of the forced union between disparate peoples.
The event that sparked the uprisings took place on 15 February 2011 after the arrest in the eastern city of Benghazi of a human rights lawyer, Fathi Terbil. He represented the families of prisoners massacred in 1996 by the Gaddafi regime at the Abu Salim prison in Tripoli. Inspired by the other revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, the protesters organised their own ‘Day of Rage’. It took place across the country on 17 February 2011, and that is the day that Libyans see as the start of their revolution. Social media, as everywhere else, was its engine, much of it driven by Libyans in exile. People still refer to ‘Feb 17th’ as shorthand for their uprising and #Feb17 became its moniker on social networks throughout the civil war.
It was in Benghazi, the country’s second-largest city, that the government first lost control and never got it back. It is Benghazi that was the birthplace of the 2011 uprising. But it was also the city that gave birth to Gaddafi’s revolution. It was in its Military Academy, which he joined after attending secondary school in Misrata, that he met the men with whom he would later launch his coup. Benghazi was where the idea of his ascent took shape. But once he had taken control of the country he marginalised the city and the east of Libya in general, and thus sowed the seeds of his regime’s collapse.
I did not know the name of the young man who was dying in the room next door, but I was watching a stream of snapshots of his life ebbing away while the door swung back and forth as the nurses rushed in and out. The doctor running the operating theatre in the small eastern Libyan desert town of Ajdabaya didn’t know his name either when he came out covered in his blood to pronounce him dead.
The first law of warfare? Do not shoot yourself. During his short life the young man may have been a cherished son and a wonderful brother. As a soldier though he was an idiot. The kind of idiot who tries to clean his gun by banging it on the ground with the safety catch off, fires a bullet into his chest, and creates an exit wound in his neck from which he bleeds to death. And he was not alone. The eastern front line of the civil war was, by the spring of 2011, full of arrogant, incompetent rebel fighters roaming haplessly around with their guns slung low across their shoulders like electric guitars. And so too were the hospitals. These men were wasting their time. Some were wasting their lives.