The Tail Wags the Dog: International Politics and the Middle East

THE TAIL WAGS

THE DOG

International Politics and the Middle East

Efraim Karsh

In memory of Fred Halliday

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. The Making of the Modern Middle East

2. Britain’s Palestine Moment

3. Innocents Abroad

4. Adrift in Iran

5. The Cautious Bear

6. The Only Remaining Superpower?

7. The Limits to Power

8. Clueless in Arabia

9. The Spring That Never Was

Epilogue

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

In the morning hours of Tuesday, 22 July 2014, US Secretary of State John Kerry arrived at the presidential palace in Cairo for a meeting with Abdel Fattah Sisi. Israel and the ‘Islamic Resistance Movement’ (better known by its Arabic acronym Hamas) were in the midst of their third war in five years and the US administration sought to convince the newly inaugurated president to desist from his mediation attempts and endorse a ceasefire proposal by Turkey and Qatar – Hamas’s foremost patrons.

Engaged in a mortal fight against Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s parent organization, which he had removed from power the previous year, Sisi had no intention of helping its Gaza offspring and he lost no time indicating his view of the American initiative. Rather than spirit Kerry to his appointment, as is the common practice on such occasions, Sisi required the secretary of state and his entourage to undergo a thorough metal detector screening – in full view of the world media. And while the State Department shrugged off the incident as a glitch by an overzealous employee, the Egyptian press and social media applauded it as a courageous snub of the world’s ‘only remaining superpower’ (as the United States has been commonly known since the collapse of its Soviet nemesis).¹

However extraordinary, the image of America’s top diplomat manhandled by security guards of a client state in receipt of tens of billions in US economic and military aid was just the latest (if the most striking) of a long series of foreign policy humiliations endured by the Obama administration in the Middle East. At the end of June 2014 the White House’s plea for revocation of the prison sentencing of three Al Jazeera journalists on concocted security charges was flatly rejected by Sisi, while four months later Vice President Joe Biden was forced to publicly apologize to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for having (correctly) criticized Ankara’s blanket permission to foreign jihadists to cross into Syria.²

More significantly, when in October 2013 Washington suspended weapons supplies to the Egyptian army in retribution for its overthrow of the country’s Muslim Brotherhood regime a few months earlier, Cairo hosted the Russian foreign and defence ministers on a state visit – the first of its kind since changing its orientation from East to West four decades earlier – and in February 2014 then-Minister of Defence Sisi, already Egypt’s effective ruler, visited Moscow, where he met with President Putin and signed a large arms deal in return for the restoration of the port services enjoyed by the Russian navy until the mid-1970s. Having apparently got the message, on 10 June a humbler Barack Obama called Sisi to congratulate him on his electoral victory and to reaffirm ‘the strategic partnership between the United States and Egypt’. Three weeks later Kerry travelled to Cairo to voice strong support for the new president and to express the administration’s eagerness to repair its strategic relationship with Egypt, beginning with the resumption of arms transfers.³ Which didn’t prevent Sisi from hosting Putin for a historic visit to Cairo in February 2015, at the height of Washington’s bitterest confrontation with Moscow since the end of the Cold War.

While these incidents offer a sad testament to the freefall of America’s regional standing and prestige during the Obama years – even in comparison to the George W. Bush administration’s darkest moments⁴ – they are by no means an exception to the overall pattern of Middle Eastern great power relations during the past two centuries. For, contrary to the common perception of regional affairs as an offshoot of global power politics, modern Middle Eastern history has been the culmination of long-existing indigenous trends, passions and patterns of behaviour; contrary to their treatment as hapless objects lacking an internal, autonomous dynamic of their own, Middle Easterners have been active and enterprising free agents doggedly pursuing their national interests and swaying the region pretty much in their desired direction, often in disregard of great-power wishes. External influences, however potent, have played a secondary role, constituting neither the primary force behind the region’s political development nor the main cause of its notorious volatility.

Of course, the British Empire destroyed its Ottoman counterpart during World War I, occupied Iran together with the Soviet Union during World War II, and co-engineered a coup d’état in Tehran a few years later; while Moscow overthrew the Afghan government in December 1979, a feat repeated 22 years later by Washington, which proceeded to topple the Iraqi regime in the spring of 2003.

Yet these were all extreme exceptions that underscored the farthest limits of external interference rather than its endemic pervasiveness. None of the interventions represented a deliberate design on the region; all were grudging responses to undesirable developments that could have readily been averted by the local actors, which would in turn come to have a decisive, if not the final, say in these interventions’ ultimate outcomes. Just as the Soviets were squeezed out of Afghanistan after a decade of bitter fighting only to see the ascent of a worse regime than the one they had toppled, so 14 years after its overthrow by a US-led international coalition the Taliban is poised to return to power in Kabul despite the massive military, economic and political resources expended to prevent this eventuality. Likewise, not only did the US-led intervention fail to reconstitute Iraq as a modern-day stable democracy despite the expenditure of thousands of lives and over a trillion dollars, but the country’s eight-year-long occupation unleashed violent centrifugal forces, hitherto checked by Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, which have brought it to the verge of disintegration. No less seriously, the Iraq intervention has boosted Tehran’s regional influence and reduced Washington’s ability and readiness to contain its dogged quest for nuclear weapons – the foremost threat to regional security in the coming years.

More broadly, the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, on whose ruins the contemporary Middle Eastern state system arose, was a corollary of a global conflict that saw the fall of far more powerful European empires and set in train a process of national self-determination that was to end the worldwide imperial epoch before too long. Within this larger order of things, the Ottoman Empire was not the hapless victim of secret diplomacy bent on carving up its territories but a casualty of its own catastrophic decision to join the war on the losing side. This was by far the most important decision in the history of the modern Middle East, and it was anything but inevitable. Had Istanbul stayed out of the conflict, as pleaded by the Anglo-French-Russian Triple Entente, it would have readily weathered the storm and the region’s future development might well have taken a different course.

Indeed, even after the Ottoman entry into the war London was reluctant to divert the necessary resources for its defeat from the European war theatre and for months remained wedded to the Muslim empire’s continued existence, leaving it to a local Meccan potentate – Sharif Hussein ibn Ali of the Hashemite family – to push the idea of its destruction. Impressed by Hussein’s (false) promises to raise the Ottoman Empire’s Arabic-speaking subjects in revolt against their Muslim suzerain, the British accepted his main territorial demands, albeit in a highly equivocal fashion, then persuaded their French and Russian allies to endorse them in what came to be known as the May 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement (named after its two main negotiators – Sir Marc Sykes and François Georges-Picot). And while Hussein never came close to fulfilling his end of the bargain, and the Sykes–Picot Agreement never saw the light of day (in contravention of its lasting denigration as the source of all evil), the sharif’s false pretences would have a considerable impact on the future shape of the Middle East: the emirate of Transjordan (later to be known as the Kingdom of Jordan) was established in 1921 to satisfy the ambitions of his second son Abdullah, while in the same year the modern state of Iraq was created at the instigation of Abdullah’s younger brother Faisal. Hussein himself became King of the Hijaz, Islam’s birthplace, only to be evicted a few years later by a fellow Arabian potentiate, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, founding father of Saudi Arabia.

If at the weakest point in their modern history, during World War I and its immediate aftermath, the local Middle Eastern actors managed to be decisive in the restructuring of their region, it was hardly surprising that their bargaining power was substantially enhanced during the cold war era, when global polarization and the nuclear balance of terror constrained great-power manoeuvrability. For all their exertions, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union, the two powers that had supplanted the traditional European empires after World War II, had a decisive say in their smaller allies’ grand strategies. Time and again they were powerless to contain undesirable regional developments – be it the fall of Iraq’s pro-Western Hashemite dynasty (in 1958), Egypt’s defection to the Soviet camp in the mid-1950s and its shift to the American fold two decades later, the building of Israeli settlements in the territories occupied during the 1967 war, or the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran – and were forced to acquiesce in actions with which they were in total disagreement. Just as Israel went to war in June 1967 and destroyed Iraq’s nuclear weapons program 14 years later without Washington’s blessing when it deemed its existence threatened, so Egypt’s war of attrition (1969–70) and the October 1973 war, Syria’s military intervention in Lebanon (1976) and the Iraqi invasions of Iran (1980) and Kuwait (1990) took place against Soviet wishes and advice. Only in terminating hostilities did superpower intervention seem to carry any weight, if of a very limited kind and mostly where Israel was concerned. The Soviets failed to convince Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to accept a ceasefire on the first day of the October 1973 war, or to force Syrian President Hafez Assad to stop his offensive against the PLO in the summer of 1976; and neither superpower managed to bring Tehran and Baghdad to end their eight-year war.

This is not to say that the US and the USSR slavishly followed the wishes of their junior partners, or that their impact was not critical at times. Rather, whatever success they had was largely due to the convergence of their own wishes with indigenous trends. It was the trauma of the October 1973 war that made Israelis painfully aware of their vulnerability and allowed the US administration to mediate the Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreement of 1975, just as it was the determination of Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to end the longstanding enmity between their peoples that rendered American mediation effective. But when the Carter administration attempted to sustain the momentum and bring the Palestinians into the picture, it ran into the brick wall of PLO rejectionism.

Twenty-one years later, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat aborted two more presidential attempts to mediate peace with Israel by rejecting, in July and December 2000, President Bill Clinton’s proposals (accepted by Israel) for the creation of an independent Palestinian state in 95 per cent of the West Bank and the entire Gaza Strip, with east Jerusalem as its capital. Even after Israel had confined him to his Ramallah compound following the launch of his war of terror in September 2000 (shrewdly euphemized as the ‘al-Aqsa intifada’ after the mosque in Jerusalem), and even after President Bush had urged the Palestinians to substitute a new and democratic leadership for Arafat’s corrupt and oppressive regime, there was little Washington could do to enforce this vision; the US president was forced to watch helplessly as his own preferred candidate, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), was unceremoniously subverted by Arafat. A decade later Barack Obama would be similarly snubbed when his predecessor’s would-be Palestinian leader ostentatiously left the US-sponsored peace talks with Israel in favour of an imposed solution on Palestinian terms.

By now the Cold War had long ended and the Soviet Union had disintegrated, along with its Communist bloc, leaving the United States ‘the only remaining superpower’. Yet notwithstanding the initial euphoria attending these developments, their impact on the Middle East has been rather negligible. For one thing, the fundamental asymmetry inherent in great-power/small-state relations, whereby the latter’s parochial outlook and localized interests make it better tuned to the threats and opportunities in its immediate environment than its larger counterpart, whose global range of interests precludes full and lasting concentration on specific regional problems, has been unaffected by the changes in the international system. For another, the void left by the diminution in superpower rivalry was quickly filled by a host of concerns, from greater American preoccupation with domestic problems to the expansion and integration of the European Union, to the economic and sociopolitical restructuring of the former Communist regimes. With great-power attention vacillating between these competing calls on their resources, local actors have largely retained their political and strategic manoeuvrability.

Thus, for example, for all its unprecedented global preeminence the United States failed to deter Saddam Hussein from invading Kuwait or to induce him to withdraw peacefully from the emirate, and was forced to go to war to this end; and while the war ended in a resounding victory, its very occurrence, let alone Saddam’s survival for another 12 years, underscored the limits of great-power influence in the ‘New World Order’. Indeed, Washington’s ability to wage the war in the first place hinged on Saudi Arabia’s permission to use its territory for this purpose as well as Egyptian, Syrian and Gulf states’ support for the move – stemming as it did from local self-interest rather than US pressure.

Nor did the United States succeed in preventing the creation of the al-Qaeda terror organization and its launch of a worldwide jihad culminating in the 9/11 attacks – the most devastating assault ever on the American homeland; and though the ‘war on terror’ triggered by the attacks degraded al-Qaeda’s military capabilities and decimated its leadership, it failed to destroy it altogether as the organization morphed into a loose coalition of no less lethal terror groups, some of which have subsequently assumed disparate lives of their own, notably the Islamic State (IS) that managed to conquer substantial parts of Syria and Iraq and to proclaim the restoration of the millenarian caliphate.

And yet, without discounting the Obama administration’s foreign policy blunders – from wilfully ignoring the surge of militant Islamism to mishandling the ‘Arab Spring’ (as the upheavals sweeping across the region since December 2010 were initially misnamed), to failing to contain Tehran’s dogged quest for the Bomb – there are limits to Washington’s ability to influence regional dynamics. Just as no foreign surgeon could have saved the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ (as the Ottoman Empire was famously known) unless he helped himself, so no ‘only remaining superpower’ can fix the Middle East’s endemic malaise. Only when the region is a place where religion does not trump all sociopolitical loyalties; where citizenship is not synonymous with submission; where political, ethnic and religious differences are not settled by internecine strife and murder; and where individuals and societies take responsibility for their actions rather than blame others for their misfortunes, will its inhabitants at last be able to look forward to a real ‘spring’.

1. THE MAKING OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST

It is a commonplace to view the modern Middle East as an artificial creation of the West. According to this conventional wisdom, which is adhered to across the political spectrum, the record goes something like this: the European powers, having ‘slowly picked the Ottoman Empire to pieces’ during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,¹ drove it into World War I so as to expedite its demise and gobble up its lands. They did so by duping the naive Arab nationalist movement into a revolt against its Ottoman suzerain, and then cheated it of its fruits by carving the region into artificial states in complete disregard of local yearnings for political unity, thereby sowing the seeds of the region’s future turmoil.²

While there is no denying the thesis’s widespread appeal, there is also no way around the fact that, in almost every particular, it is not only demonstrably wrong but the inverse of the truth: the Ottoman Empire was not a hapless victim of European imperialism but an active participant in the great-power game; the destruction of this empire was predominantly self-inflicted; there was no Arab yearning for regional unity; the European powers did not break the Middle East’s political unity but rather over-unified the region; Britain neither misled its Arab allies nor made simultaneous contradictory promises regarding the post-war settlement in the Middle East; and the creation of the post-Ottoman regional order was no less of the making of the local actors than of the great powers.³

The Eastern Question Revisited

Far from setting their sights on Ottoman lands, the European powers shored up the ailing Muslim empire during the protracted era preceding its collapse, or the Eastern Question as it is commonly known.⁴ In the 1830s, these powers saved Istanbul from assured destruction by its ambitious subject – Egypt’s governor Muhammad Ali. Similarly, Britain and France, later joined by Sardinia, bailed out the Ottomans from their ill-conceived holy war (jihad) against Russia, triggering in the process what came to be known as the Crimean War of 1854–5. When in the 1870s the Ottomans were confronted with a general revolt in their Balkan provinces that culminated in a fully fledged war with Russia, it was yet again the great powers that redressed their setbacks and kept the almost moribund Muslim empire alive. The same scenario repeated itself as late as 1913, when Istanbul was about to be overrun by a coalition of Balkan states, only this time Russia played the lead role in salvaging the Ottoman existence.

This pattern of outside powers saving the Ottomans resulted not from luck but from political acumen. The Ottoman Empire might have been the ‘Sick Man of Europe’, to use Tsar Nicholas I’s famous metaphor, but it would not just lie down and die. Instead it did whatever it took to survive, be that skilfully pitting its enemies against one another or using European support to arrest domestic disintegration and external decline; and notwithstanding its internal weakness and marked inferiority to its European counterparts, the Ottoman Empire managed to stay in this intricate game of great-power politics for a surprisingly long period of time, and even to outlive (if only by a slim margin) its two formidable rivals, the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian empires.

Another source of Ottoman success relates to European imperial solidarity. Those were the high days of imperialism; the Ottomans were an empire among empires and, apart from their strategic, economic, and political interest in Ottoman survival, the European powers were loath to knock a fellow empire out of existence lest they rock the Continental imperial order. This solidarity had its limits, of course, and the Europeans did occasionally encroach on Ottoman territories (as they did on each other’s lands), notably with the French occupation of Algeria (1830) and Tunisia (1881) and the Italian conquest of Libya (1911–12). But these were nibbles at the fringes of empire that had little effect on the Ottoman edifice.

The only substantial great-power infringement on Ottoman territorial integrity – the British occupation of Egypt – was born of chance, not design. Unaware of the brewing crisis in Egypt (where disgruntled military officers challenged the authority of the Ottoman viceroy, or khedive) until it reached boiling point, policymakers in London found themselves sliding down a slippery slope. At the end of June 1882, London declined the sultan’s plea to take over Egypt;⁵ two months later, after the sultan refused to participate in an international effort to defuse the Egyptian crisis, it was sufficiently alarmed by the deteriorating situation in the country to do precisely that without his formal approval. Yet even before the invading forces completed their mission the British ambassador to Istanbul informed the sultan that ‘Her Majesty’s Government contemplated shortly commencing the withdrawal of the British troops from Egypt’, while the foreign secretary promised to withdraw from Egypt ‘as soon as the state of the country, and the organization of proper means for the maintenance of the Khedive’s authority, will admit of it’. This promise was to be repeated sixty-six times between 1882 and the end of World War I, only to be aborted time and again by Ottoman policies.⁶ As such, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the British invasion of Egypt was not an imperialist feat of conquest and colonization⁷ but a demonstration of great-power entanglement in an undesirable regional crisis that it had done little to create and over which it exercised little control: had the sultan not mismanaged the Egyptian situation on a grand scale, British intervention would have been readily averted; had he responded to London’s post-invasion overtures, a quick British withdrawal from Egypt might well have ensued.⁸

Despite extensive external support, the Ottoman Empire steadily contracted due to internal fragmentation and decay. However adept in manipulating European interests to their advantage, the Ottomans could not perform miracles. Like their imperialist peers they never developed an adequate response to the ultimate empire-buster of modern times: the rise of nationalism. Nationalism had wrested Greece from Ottoman domination already in the 1820s and thereafter relentlessly squeezed them out of their European provinces, resulting in the independent states of Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Albania.

And it was the desire to redress these setbacks that largely accounted for the Ottoman decision to enter World War I. Istanbul was neither forced into the war in a last-ditch bid for survival, nor ‘driven into an alliance with Germany and Austro-Hungary – the Central Powers – against the Triple Entente of Russia, Britain, and France’.⁹ Rather it was in the highly enviable position of being courted by both warring camps: the Central Powers wished for its participation and the Entente hoped for its abstention. As early as 18 August 1914, less than a month after the outbreak of hostilities, the British, French and Russian ambassadors assured the grand vizier of the empire’s continued survival were it to stay out of the war, while the British Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, told the Ottoman ambassador to London that his empire’s territorial integrity ‘would be preserved in any conditions of peace which affected the Near East, provided she preserved a real neutrality during the war’. Five days later, at Ottoman request, the three powers put down this pledge in writing.¹⁰

That the Ottoman leaders chose to ignore this guarantee of imperial survival reflected their determination to reverse centuries of decline and reassert their empire’s lost glory. This in turn meant the liberation of Egypt and Cyprus from British occupation; the recovery of Turkey’s lost territories in Europe, first and foremost Macedonia and Western Thrace; and, above all, the destruction of Russian power as overtly stated in the Ottoman proclamation of war: ‘Our participation in the world war represents the vindication of our national ideal. The ideal of our nation and people leads us toward the destruction of our Muscovite enemy to obtain a natural frontier to our empire, which should include and unite all branches of our race.’¹¹ As late as the autumn of 1916, more than two years after the outbreak of the Great War, Ottoman officers in the Levant were still talking openly of an intended march on India via Iran and Afghanistan.¹² This terrible miscalculation led in the short run to the destruction of Turkey-in-Asia by the British army during World War I. In the long run, it led to the century of flux and instability that has caused so much misery to so many.

Not the Great Arab Revolt

Just as the chain of events culminating in the fall of the Ottoman Empire was set in train by Istanbul’s supremely reckless decision to side with the losing war coalition, so it was not the British government but Sharif Hussein of Mecca, perpetrator of the ‘Great Arab Revolt’ against the Ottoman Empire, who provided the initial impetus for the creation of the modern Middle East by manoeuvring the largest empire on earth to extend itself well beyond its original plans for the post-war era.

The key turn took place in the second half of 1915. As late as June of that year, British policymakers were still amenable to the continued existence of Turkey-in-Asia as evidenced by the recommendations of an interdepartmental committee, headed by Sir Maurice de Bunsen of the Foreign Office, which regarded the preservation of a decentralized and largely intact Ottoman Empire as the most desirable option.¹³ But just four months later the British high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Arthur Henry McMahon, had been sufficiently impressed by Hussein’s (false) pretence to represent ‘the whole of the Arab Nation without any exception’¹⁴ to tentatively accept his vision of an Arab successor empire (presumably headed by himself).

Hussein’s achievement was nothing short of extraordinary given the near total lack of nationalist fervour among the Ottoman Empire’s Arabic-speaking subjects. One historian has credibly estimated that a mere 350 activists belonged to all the secret Arab societies operating throughout the Middle East at the outbreak of World War I,¹⁵ and even if one accepts that the leaders of these societies ‘were mostly notables with substantial followings of their own’,¹⁶ they were but a drop in the ocean.

There was no ‘Arab Nation’ at the time, only an intricate web of local loyalties to one’s clan, tribe, village, town, religious sect or localized ethnic minority; ipso facto there could be neither general craving for pan-Arab unification nor exasperation with the failure to achieve this objective. Most secret societies did not even seek Arab independence until after the outbreak of war but rather greater autonomy within the Ottoman Empire. No less important, they articulated not merely the refrain of pan-Arabism, as is universally believed, but even more so the cause of distinct local patriotism, the only message striking some responsive chord among their respective constituents. As T. E. Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia), probably the foremost Western champion of the pan-Arab ideal, put it in a 1915 memorandum on the conditions in Syria:

Between town and town, village and village, family and family, creed and creed, exist intimate jealousies, sedulously fostered by the Turks to render a spontaneous union impossible. The largest indigenous political entity in settled Syria is only the village under its sheikh, and in patriarchal Syria the tribe under its chief … All the constitution above them is the artificial bureaucracy of the Turk … By accident and time the Arabic language has gradually permeated the country, until it is now almost the only one in use; but this does not mean that Syria – any more than Egypt – is an Arabian country.¹⁷

This means that Hussein represented little more than himself. The minimal backing he and his two prominent sons – Faisal and Abdullah – received from a few neighbouring tribes had far less to do with a yearning for independence than with the glitter of British gold and the promise of booty. The Hashemites could not even count on the support of their own local constituency. As late as December 1916, six months after the launch of their revolt, the residents of Mecca were ‘almost pro-Turks’,¹⁸ and it would not be before the winter of 1917 that the pendulum would start swinging in the Hashemite direction.

Even then, the thought of the sharif of Mecca wresting the caliphate