The New Middle East (6 page)

It may not be affordable for the Gulf states soon either.

New technology in the form of the Internet played an important role in bringing down the regimes that have no oil. New technology may eventually do the same to the regimes that have it. ‘Fracking’, or more accurately hydraulic fracturing, is opening up huge deposits of shale gas and increasingly what is called ‘tight oil’ across North America. As that technology spreads around the world, so will these alternative energy sources, and that may fundamentally change the world’s relationship with the present energy-exporting nations. ‘We are talking about a massive reduction in demand for Middle East energy, and in the case of Middle Eastern countries that live off exported energy they really have nothing else,’ Dr Aviezer Tucker, the assistant director of the Energy Institute of the University of Texas, told me. ‘So it could seriously destabilise regimes that have got used to using this income from the export of energy to subsidise the stability of the regime. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have nothing, absolutely nothing else. They don’t have an educated population, they don’t have the engineers, there’s nothing.’

For now the numbers of protesters in the Gulf states have been small enough for the security forces to crack down. They got away with it because in the oil-rich and therefore strategically important Gulf states Western values come a poor second to Western interests. Nowhere was this more publicly displayed than in the barely audible US reaction to Saudi Arabia sending troops and armoured vehicles across the causeway to help violently suppress the largely peaceful demonstrations for political reform staged by the Shia majority that had been taking place in the neighbouring Sunni kingdom of Bahrain.
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And it soon became clear that Bahrain was just a prelude to the main sectarian event. The Western world’s willingness to take a back seat as protesters were chased around Manama’s Pearl Roundabout was a hint of the almost free hand they would give the Gulf states to meddle in Syria too. The US will compromise over its values as long as it needs the Gulf’s energy exports. But if over the coming decades the Western nations can adapt their transport systems and infrastructure to these new forms of energy then they will not need the Saudis to sustain the world economy. Their relationship will then end in a quick divorce.

History has given us some unbelievably evil rulers, men who have tortured and murdered with their own hands. Many of the worst were in the Arab world. But history has in return nearly always rewarded us for the excesses of a great dictator with a demise as dramatic and theatrical as the life that preceded it. History had stood still in the Arab world for thirty years. When it came back to life with the collapse of the old Middle East the fate of the Arab dictators did not disappoint. What went through their minds as they absorbed the truth, as they finally understood it was time to scurry down into the network of tunnels like a rat in a pipe to try to make their escape? What went through the minds of these men, as the Arab Spring drove them from their seats of absolute power? What were the words used by the trusted aides of Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Egypt’s Mubarak or Libya’s Gaddafi to convey the news? How do you tell someone who believes his people will willingly sacrifice their lives to protect his own that they are massing outside right now to rip his throat out? Did all those loyal lieutenants pause at the door, hand poised over the handle, still formulating the words to convey to their lord that it was over? And what happened next? Were there tantrums? Was there a stony silence? Were there exhortations to their God to help them, despite their many Godless acts of cruelty?

However they met their ends, their lives were big enough to create enduring iconic imagery: Saddam firing off a rifle from his balcony; Gaddafi raging against America from the rubble of his Bab al-Aziziya compound; a fallen Mubarak being wheeled into court wearing sunglasses and a scowl. They were the ‘Strong Men’ of the Middle East, but one of them, the black sheep of the family, knew history would not stand still for ever.

More than any other Arab leader, Gaddafi understood just how dispensable the old order was to the Western powers when its Strongmen stopped being useful. He warned them all during a scathing speech at the Arab League summit in Damascus in 2008 as he addressed the fall of Saddam Hussein. The camera operated by Syrian state TV was fixed on him as he railed against the Arab League’s inaction over the invasion of Iraq by the American-led coalition. Suddenly he stopped and looked around the room, realising that his words were eliciting only condescending smiles. Then he heaved a deep and exasperated sigh. ‘A foreign force occupies an Arab country and hangs its leader while we are looking and laughing,’ he said. Clearly frustrated by the reaction in the room, again he asked: ‘How is a ruler and head of an Arab League member state hanged? I am not talking about Saddam Hussein’s policies or our falling out with him. We all had our disagreements with him; we all disagree with each other. Nothing holds us together except this hall!’

This remark produced knowing laughter from the assembled Arab League leaders, but the camera stayed on Gaddafi’s face, which broke into a smile. He took a long pause and looked around the room, and then Syrian TV cut to its own leader, Bashar al-Assad, who was himself laughing at Gaddafi’s remarks. ‘An entire Arab leadership is killed and hanged on the gallows. Why?’ Gaddafi raised his hand and waved it towards the leaders of the Arab world states. ‘In the future, it is going to be your turn too!’ he said. The whole room broke into loud laughter. ‘Indeed!’ he said as the laughter continued. ‘America fought alongside Saddam against Khomeini. He was their friend! . . . In the end they sold him. They hanged him. Even you, the friends of America, no, I will say we, we, the friends of America. America may approve of our hanging one day.’ Again loud laughter ran through the room. He was of course absolutely right.

The revolutions were the breaking of a contract between these Strongmen and the secular middle classes. The people had traded democracy for stability. The dictators made the same pact with the Western governments. The deal was made in the wake of the Iranian revolution in 1979. That too had been a popular uprising, against the autocratic rule of the Iranian Shah. But his overthrow eventually led to an equally repressive regime. That one, because of its religious nature, started to reach into the homes of the urban middle classes and try to tell them how to think, how to live and how to dress. So the message for decades from the Arab dictators was ‘Islamist extremists or me’.
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Over time the people stopped believing this, but the outside world did not. The people in the Arab nations were ready for democracy but the Western world was convinced otherwise. The Iranian uprising not only created the first militant Shia state, thus upsetting the balance of power in the region, it also produced a theocracy that wanted to export its revolutionary fervour. In Shia Islam the powerful position of its religious leaders means they can easily become the ultimate political authority too, as happened in Iran. That is not usually the case in Sunni Muslim societies, where religious figures are generally expected to advise, not rule. But when the West saw the Shah being overthrown by what were quickly labelled at the time the ‘mad mullahs’ it was thoroughly rattled. The Sunni-led authoritarian states played on those fears. Sometimes the Strongman claimed he was holding back Islamic fundamentalists, sometimes he said he was all that stood in the way of wild sectarian violence.

The Western governments not only bought this line, in the twilight years of the old Middle East they were quietly acquiescing in the extension of dynastic rule across the Arab world. It had already happened in Syria, though not quite as the father Hafez al-Assad had planned. His favoured son Bassel, whom he had been grooming for power, was killed in a car crash in 1994, so Bashar became the accidental dictator. In Libya the struggle for succession was between the second son, Saif al-Islam, and the fourth, Mutassim,
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though with most of his siblings dishing ‘enough dirt for a Libyan soap opera’ many Libyans, according to the US embassy in Tripoli’s secret diplomatic cables, saw Saif as their ‘knight in shining armor’.
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In Syria and Libya, though, the public had no say about who would come next, and the instruments of the state were either sidelined or signed up to the plan. In Egypt it was different.

Hosni Mubarak had not built the regime he led, he was a product of it. The military built the state, and it was from there that the leadership had been drawn since the country had overthrown the monarchy in 1952. And so it was the grooming of Mubarak’s younger son, Gamal, that helped seal Hosni Mubarak’s fate. Gamal was a corrupt businessman, not a soldier. The military saw a dynastic succession as a betrayal of the 1952 revolt – something Mubarak failed to grasp right up to the end.

If the Middle East had not had oil it would have been allowed to make its own mistakes and get on with building democratic states. But it did have oil, and the West wanted oil more than anything else. Easy access to oil required stability across the region, and that gave the Cold War era regimes of the Middle East a shelf-life well beyond the expiry date of the geopolitical circumstances that had nurtured them. Everyone, but most importantly successive American administrations, believed that democracy in the Middle East would simply cause them too much trouble. The dictators argued that their people were not ready for it. Many of the kings in the Gulf states said the whole idea was un-Islamic. Then along came a man carried by events beyond his own making who tried to forge a philosophy from the wreckage of the 9/11 attacks to make his country feel safe again. The cause of democratising the Arab world suddenly had a new and powerful champion.

George W. Bush announced the tenets of the big idea of his presidency, the ‘Freedom Agenda’, in his second inaugural address in January 2005. ‘The survival of liberty in our lands increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands,’ he said. ‘The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world . . . So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.’
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God was returning to shape the region again and George W. Bush was the first person to realise that. He told a senior Palestinian leader: ‘I am driven with a mission from God . . . God would tell me “George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.” And I did . . . And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me: “Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.” And, by God, I’m gonna do it.’
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But he didn’t.

He pushed for elections in the region, but then Arabs started voting for the wrong people, Islamists. That wasn’t the plan. So Western governments supported economic reform instead, but that only helped the dictators steal even more money. So Western aid started going back into civil society projects that seemed like a nice safe way of being seen to do something while, critics said, not doing very much at all. The ‘mission from God’ became rather less driven. Instead it sort of ambled about a bit, took in the view and told the Arab people to be patient. The ‘Freedom Agenda’ in the Middle East was put on the back burner. Meanwhile its consequences quietly bubbled on.

The branches that form from big policy initiatives often live long after the roots have been dug up and thrown on the compost heap. And so the American embassy in Tunisia, during the last years of the Bush administration, was still cheerfully cabling back to base about their attempts to spread the word. ‘Advancing the President’s Freedom Agenda is Post’s number one Mission Strategic Plan goal,’ Washington was earnestly informed. ‘Some of our outreach efforts involved musical performances that also served as useful vehicles for promoting the Freedom Agenda’s underlying values.’ One of which was an ‘extraordinary fusion of Arab and Appalachian music’.
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Democracy was coming to the region, though nobody knew that yet. There was a Freedom Agenda for the Middle East, but its programme would be written by people ashamed of their past and desperate for a future.The era of the Strongman was about to end. The vanity of the dictators had blinded them to the infirmity of age and the fact that their regimes were well past retirement. The old Middle East was finally ready to collapse under the weight of its contradictions. It just had to start somewhere.

Tunisia was not a place from which the world, or the region, expected great drama. The young revolutionaries in neighbouring Egypt were genuinely embarrassed that it was not they, but the Tunisians, who had started the Arab Spring. Even the few Western academics who studied the country before the uprisings felt duty-bound to explain why ‘anyone should bother to write or read a book about Tunisia’s modern economic and political development’.
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There was certainly nothing to indicate what was to come, because ‘Revolutionary change [has] never been part of the country’s history.’
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So what led the Tunisians to kick-start a global event as significant as the revolutions of 1989 that brought to an end the Soviet Union and the Cold War in Europe?