- Courtesy of Andrew Sullivan:
The impending ouster of the Arab world's most notorious post-colonial dictatorship may prove a turning point in the broader history of Middle Eastern totalitarianism
Although it is too early to envisage the shape of a future Iraqi state, it is clear that we are witnessing the end of a certain model of statehood developed in several Arab countries during the 20th century.
The model was presented under a range of labels, including qowmi (nationalist) and ishtiraki (socialist) or, sometimes "nationalist-socialist".
Most of the states where the model developed had come into being in the aftermath of the First World War and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. In every case, Britain and France, the two European colonial powers that had inherited the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, played the central role in shaping the new states.
These new states, at times described as "Sykes-Picot" offspring, were almost invariably shaped as instruments for protecting and/or furthering some specific strategic interest of the colonial power concerned.
Iraq, for example, was created around the oilfields of Mosul and Kirkuk. The Egyptian state's task was to help protect the Suez Canal. Lebanon was carved out as a state to safeguard the interests of the Christians of the Orient under French protection. Transjordan was a British military outpost with the task of keeping an eye on the Arabian Peninsula to the south and east, and providing a base for intervention in the Levant.
The new state was built around an army created by the colonial power largely for policing purposes. In almost every case the newly created army relied on ethnic and religious minorities to constitute its officers corps. In Iraq, Assyrian,Turkmen, Kurdish, Faili, and Arab Sunni Muslims provided the backbone of the British-made army from the onset. In Syria, the French favoured the advancement of officers from the minority Alawaite community. In Transjordan, Bedouin, Circassian, and Chechen fighters provided the bulk of the officers' corps. In Egypt, many senior officers had Turkish and Albanian ethnic backgrounds.
With the advent of the decolonisation movement, the newly created army-based Arab states lost their original function. Anxious to protect its position of power and privilege, the military elite gradually adopted the nationalist discourse. In practice, however, it did not join the struggle for independence until the colonial power concerned had indicated its readiness to withdraw.
After independence, the Arab military elites found themselves without a clear role. They decided to assume a new role by seizing power in a series of coups d'etat. Armies that had been created as instruments of colonial domination, re-defined themselves as standard-bearers of Arab nationalism. The excuse they found for their intervention in politics was the Arab defeat at the hands of the newly created Israeli state in 1948. The Arab military blamed their poor performance on incompetent or even treacherous political leadership, and vowed that, once they are in power themselves, they would restore the lost Arab honour.
The series of coups, begun in Syria in 1948, continued with the seizure of power by the army in Egypt (1952), Iraq (1958), Yemen (1960), the Sudan (1962), and Libya (1969). Even newly independent Algeria soon fell under military rule (1965).
In most cases the military overthrew a traditional type of regime, often in the form of a monarchy backed by tribal structures.
Because the traditional system of rule had based its legitimacy on Islam and tribal loyalties, the new military regimes adopted nationalism and, in some cases socialism, as central themes of their political discourse. The nationalist theme was doubly attractive because it cut across religious divides and thus legitimised rule by officers who subscribed to creeds other than mainstream Sunni Islam. The socialist theme appealed to the urban poor and the secular intelligentsia that wished to distance itself from tribal and "feudalistic" social and cultural structures.
The army's direct assumption of power led to a gradual militarisation of Arab politics in which force was regarded as the main source of legitimacy.
The military rulers did what they knew best: wage war. They began by fighting civil society with the aim of destroying within it all potential sources of alternative authority and legitimacy.
They disarmed as many of the tribes as they could, and executed, imprisoned, exiled or bought most of their leaders. In some cases, such as the series of anti-Kurd campaigns in Iraq between 1932 and 1988, operations launched by the state reached the level of genocide. Operations that amounted to what we now know as "ethnic cleansing" were also conducted against Coptic Christians in Upper Egypt and Jews and Persians in Iraq.
(At one point almost a fifth of Baghdad's population had been Jews. By 1968, however, only a handful had remained, all others having fled to Iran, emigrated to Israel, or been led to their deaths by successive military rulers. In 1972-73 Saddam Hussein conducted the biggest "ethnic cleansing" operation in Iraq's history by expelling over 600,000 Iraqis to Iran on the grounds that they might have had Persian ancestry.)
Next it was the turn of religious authorities to be brought under state control and deprived of the independence they had enjoyed for over 1000 years. Traditional religious organisation such as Sufi fraternities, esoteric sects, and charitable structures were either infiltrated or dismantled. The new state assumed control of the endowments property worth billions, depriving civil society of its most important economic base.
The army-based state also annexed the educational system, nationalising thousands of private Koranic schools, and dictating the curricula at all levels of schooling.
The traditional guilds of trades and crafts, some with centuries of history, were also attacked and disbanded.
Political parties and cultural associations did not escape that destructive urge. In the 1950s some of the newly independent Arab countries were home to genuine political movements representing the various ideologies of the 20th century. By the end of the 1970s all, including parties such as the Ba'ath, that were nominally in power in Syria and Iraq, had been destroyed.
The elimination of the independent press, the ownership and control of all radio and television networks by the state, and the vast resources allocated to "information" ministries, enabled the new Arab regime to stifle dissident voices and impose its version of reality.
Evolving towards a totalitarian model the new army-based Arab state embarked upon a wholesale nationalisation programme. In some cases, such as the nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956, the plan clashed with the remaining interests of the former colonial powers and led to war. In other cases, such as land reform in Egypt in the late 1950s and the seizure of small businesses by the first Ba'athist regime in Iraq in 1963, the result was economic dislocation and widespread hardship for the most vulnerable strata of society.
The fact that the state controlled the biggest sources of national revenue - e.g. the canal in Egypt, and oil in Iraq - facilitated the imposition of a system of command economy. In most cases the state had no real need of the population for the satisfaction of any of its normal needs. The new Arab state drew little or no revenue from taxes and met its budgetary needs thanks to revenue from national assets such as oil, the canal, and, from the 1960s onwards - foreign aid.
Nor did the new Arab state need the people to run an economy in which vital sectors were managed and operated by foreign experts and workers. In 1990, for example, Iraq hosted 1.5 million foreign workers and experts, almost 50 per cent of the total urban work force.
The new Arab state could also do without the people when it came to national defense. As already noted, the officers' corps often comprised minorities that also provided the bulk of manpower for special units designed to protect the regime. In a broader context, the regimes relied on foreign alliances, mostly with the Soviet Union, for arms, training and ultimate protection against potentially hostile neighbours. In the late 1960s Egypt was host to some 25,000 military experts from the USSR and its allies.
Needless to say the new regimes, holding no elections, did not need the people to vote for them either. Elections were not introduced until the 1980s, and even then the aim was to confirm the rulers in power with 99.99 percent majorities. By the early 1970s the traditional Arab civil society had been all but destroyed. A totalitarian state, ideologically confused, unsure of its legitimacy, addicted to violence, and ridden by corruption dominated all aspects of life.
THE ALLOCATION of large budgetary resources to the military also perverted the national economies of the country's concerned. Average spending on Arab armies in the 1950s represented no more than 2.3 percent of their estimated gross domestic products. By the mid-1980s, however, that figure had risen to 18 percent ,with some countries - Iraq and Syria notably - spending as much as 23 percent.
Virtually all Arab states raised and maintained armies far larger than their demographic base would warrant. The military machine also perverted the labor markets by drawing to itself the bulk of the scant technical and managerial skills available.
In time, the Arab military developed into a new caste of rulers that controlled most decision-making positions: ministers, provincial governors, ambassadors, chief executives of state-owned companies, and even media editors were recruited among active or retired officers.
The new caste was further reinforced by an even more tightly knit sub-caste: the intelligence and security services, the mukahaberat, that established themselves as the veritable sources of power in almost all Arab states.
The emergence of this new monstrous state apparatus was accompanied by tens of thousands of executions, the imprisonment of countless people, the flight into exile of millions, and, last but not least, the destruction of the moral fabric of Arab society.
The new Arab regime had waged war not only on its own society; almost inevitably, it also became involved in a series of external wars none of which reflected the national interests of the countries concerned.
The Suez dispute could have been resolved through negotiations to phase out, over a number of years, Franco-British ownership. Instead, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel-Nasser provoked a war he must have known he could not win against a Franco-British-Israeli alliance. The fact that he was bailed out of his crushing defeat thanks to diplomatic efforts by the US and the Soviet Union does not alter the fact that Nasser took a reckless risk with Egyptian national interests.
In 1960 Nasser intervened in Yemen, first through covert operations, and then by despatching a 60,000-strong occupation army to be bogged down there for almost seven years. In the early 1960s Nasserist agents and sympathisers engineered the annexation of Syria to Egypt. In 1967 Nasser provoked another, and more disastrous, war with Israel, ending up with the loss of the Sinai Peninsula and the Israeli army dipping its feet in the Suez Canal. Syria, Jordan and Iraq also participated in that war, thus sharing Egypt's defeat. Egypt also became involved in smaller military operations in the Sudan, Congo, Somalia, and the British protectorates of southern Arabia.
The Iraqi military regime flexed its muscles with an attempted annexation of Kuwait in 1961 setting a pattern that was to continue for three decades. Between 1969 and 1975 it was engaged in a major, but highly unpublicised, frontier war against Iran that ended with Iraqi capitulation in 1975. In 1977 Iraq was involved in a military showdown with Turkey over the waters of the River Euphrates. Border clashes took place between Syria and Iraq in 1978. In 1980 Iraq invaded Iran, starting a war that lasted eight years and claimed a million lives on both sides. And in 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait and has been in a state of war against the United Nations ever since.
The Syrian military regime, for its part, clashed with Turkey, over the Iskanderun enclave, and fought several battles with the Jordanian army under the pretext of protecting the Palestinians. From the late 1950s onwards, military intervention in Lebanon was to become a permanent feature of Syrian policy. Syria, alongside Egypt, was involved in the 1973 war against Israel.
Other Arab military regimes had their share of war on varying scales.
Algeria triggered a war against Morocco over Spanish Sahara from the 1970s onwards. In the 1980s Libya invaded Chad which, despite the investment of billions of dollars, ended up with a decisive defeat for Colonel Muammar Kaddhafi's regime.
All the Arab military-based regimes also developed and used terrorism as a routine instrument of policy.
ONE CAN hardly find a terrorist organisation, from the Japanese Red Army to the Irish Republican Army, and passing by the Basque ETA and the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso, that did not forge some link with one or more of the Arab military regimes at one point. In some cases the links came via various Palestinian terror organisations, including Yasser Arafat's Al Fatah. In other cases the link came through Soviet and East German intelligence services. In the 1970s Syria and Iraq were the most active centres of international terrorism, providing shelter and diplomatic, and in some cases financial support, to dozens of groups.
Depending on the Soviet bloc for aid, protection, and diplomatic guidance, the army-based Arab regimes closed their societies to influences from the West, thus reversing a trend of openness that had started in the 19th century. Many of the Arab regimes concluded treaties of friendship and cooperation with the USSR and sent tens of thousands of their young men and women to study in the Soviet empire.
The result was a deepening of the culture of totalitarianism within the ruling elite. By the mid-1980s the last representatives of Western-style liberal thought that had persisted in the Arab world were either dead or dying.
That opened the way for the re-emergence of Islamic extremism as the only alternative to military-based regimes.
IN EGYPT the regime alternated between a policy of ruthless repression of the Islamists (under Nasser), unsuccessful co-optation (under Sadat), and a mixture of the two (under President Hosni Mubarak).
In Libya the state has been fighting an Islamist insurgency since 1986. In Syria the regime managed to break the back of the Islamist movement by organising the massacre of an estimated 20,000 people in the city of Hama in 1983.
In Iraq, the regime used the iron fist against the Islamists, mostly Shiites, throughout the 1980s, but adopted an Islamist posture of its own in 1991 as a tactic to rally support against the US-led coalition. In 1991 Saddam ordered that the slogan Allah Akbar - God is the greatest - be inscribed on the Iraqi national flag. In Algeria the regime's war against the Islamists started in 1986, and has intensified since 1992. In the Sudan the military first came to power in alliance with the Islamists but broke with them in 1999 and has conducted a crackdown against their leaders and organisations ever since.
By 2003 the Arab Islamist movement was in deep crisis.
In Egypt it was split between those who urged accommodation with the regime and those who preached an endless war. In the Sudan the Islamists were going through a process of "self criticism" and trying to recast themselves as almost Western-style democrats, but convinced few people.
In Iraq, the Islamist movement found itself faced with the choice between alliance with the US to topple Saddam Hussein or a pact with Saddam in the name of patriotic unity.
In Algeria, despite persistent terrorist violence, the divided Islamist movement seemed to be peaking out. In Libya the Islamist guerrillas appear to be reduced to an enclave in the Jabal al-Akhdar region, while in Syria hopes for reform under President Bashar Assad led to a split within the Islamist movement.
The pan-Islamist movement seems to have suffered a strategic setback as a result of the failure of the Islamic revolution in Iran, the tragic experience of Islamism in the Sudan, and the dramatic end of the Taleban regime in Afghanistan.
The emergence of Al Qaeda and its terrorist leadership as the most potent symbols of Islamism, also weakened the movement by alienating key elements within the Arab urban middle classes. Al Qa'eda's extremism frightened large segments of Arab traditional opinion, forcing them to rally behind the regimes in support of the status quo.
THE SEASON of change in Iraq comes at a time when both the military-based Arab state model and its principal challenger, the Islamist movement, are in crisis. Nor can traditional monarchy, still prevalent in some Arab states, offer a serious alternative. Jordan's campaign to promote the restoration of monarchy in Iraq has already been rejected by virtually all Iraqi opposition parties.
What, then, could be the key elements of a new Arab state model?
The failed model could be described as a power-state, known in Islamic literature as saltana, in which legitimacy is based on the possession and use of the means of collective violence. In saltana there are no citizens, only subjects, while the ruler is accountable to no one but God, and even that only in theory.
The only alternative to the failed model is the model that could be described as the political-state in which legitimacy emanates from the free exercise of the will of the citizens.
Such a model could be based on what late-medieval scholar Ibn Khaldoun called al-assabiyah which, translated broadly, means a secular bond among citizens. The key feature of this model is pluralism, known in modern Islamic political literature as ta'adudiyah and kisrat-garai.
Both the Islamists and the secular authoritarians of Islam have persistently argued against the idea of bonding through citizenship. Nevertheless, Islamic political and philosophical literature offers a wealth of analyses that could be deployed in any battle of ideas against both the Islamist and secular enemies of pluralism.
Both (10th-century Muslim philosophers) Abu al-Nast al-Farabi and ibn-Sina, partly inspired by non-Muslim works, showed that there need be no contradiction between revelation and reason in developing a political system that responds to the earthly needs of the citizens.
On the contrary, because Islam imposes strict limits to the powers of the rule it is, theoretically at least, impossible to use it as a basis for tyranny and dictatorship.
It follows, that the new state model for the Arabs should revive and reassert those limits.
THE NEW Arab state should allow civil society to revive, reorganise, and re-dynamise its institutions.
This should be accompanied with a massive program of privatisation designed to reduce the role of the state in controlling and dictating economic policy and the allocation of national resources in general. An early privatisation of the media should receive top priority as it had in postwar Germany and Japan.
In a multi-ethnic, multicultural country such as Iraq, a federal state structure would further ensure popular participation in decision-making while limiting the powers of the central authority to impose any radical ideology on the nation as a whole.
The Arab world's armies should be shrunk, with their role redefined so as to emphasise external defense rather than internal repression, and their relations with the political authority clearly spelled out.
The Arab Middle East is one of the few regions in the world to be as yet untouched by the democratization movement that elsewhere in the world has sprung since the mid-1980s and eventually swept away the Soviet empire and numerous Third World dictatorial regimes.
The liberation of Iraq provides an historic opportunity for opening the entire Arab world to the experience of freedom. Missing that opportunity for the sake of tactical considerations would lead to a strategic mistake by the liberators.
The writer, an Iranian author and journalist, is editor of the Paris-based Politique Internationale.