This is a hefty 480-page account of the Middle East in the aftermath of the Arab Spring by a highly experienced BBC correspondent, so why did it feel such hard work, and why did I find myself heartily disliking the author long before the end? There are several reasons.
To begin with, I was deterred by the patronising, facetious tone of the opening chapter (examples below). Then, in the following, more serious chapters, Danahar does two interrelated things: he arranges the material about each of the countries he surveys (Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Libya, Iraq, Syria) in a surprisingly non-chronological, apparently arbitrary way, which makes it difficult to follow the course of events or understand causal relationships or even be clear about key turning points. And this is exacerbated by the second element, namely Danahar’s apparent determination to name-drop every politician, commentator or local he’s ever met or interviewed.
When Michael Ignatieff interviews politicians in Empire Lite, his questions, the answers, and his reflections on them, are beautifully focused on the ideas and issues he is exploring. But in this book, although the politicians or generals or religious leaders Danahar interviews obviously speak more or less to the topic at hand, there is no discernible thread or focus to their comments. The result of these tactics is that each chapter turns into a porridgey morass of disconnected dates and unrelated soundbites. Danahar makes so many hundreds of minor ephemeral points that the main issues are buried.
Patronising and bad comedy
The first chapter, about the collapse of the old Middle East, is written in a patronising, would-be comic style, characterised by facetiousness and sarcasm. It’s a terrible example of what happens when BBC journalists are told to make their work ‘more accessible’ and, as a result, attempt to make subjects simple and funny.
Thus, when he explains that the Arab Spring was the expression of the frustration of the young generation in each of its countries, he doesn’t give any facts or figures or statistics, he just mocks and ridicules the old dictators of these countries:
But then these were old men who probably needed help from their grandchildren to operate the DVD player. (p.22)
The dictators in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria tightly controlled the traditional media (press and TV) but:
The Grandads were too blind to see that their political class didn’t control the message any more. By the time they tried to turn the Internet off it was too late. (p.22)
This comes over as patronising and condescending and stupid. It lacks anything useful in the way of evidence, data, statistics, facts and analysis. It is a silly, cartoon version of the world and it is the dominant tone of this introductory survey.
A few weeks before the NATO jets began to rev up their engines to drop their first payloads on the regime of ‘the world’s most famous dictator’, the man who would soon soar up the charts to grab that title from him was still pretty confident that he faced no serious trouble at home. (p.27)
He’s talking about Colonel Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad, but in the language of Top of the Pops. Why? Does he think it will make the subject more ‘accessible’? It doesn’t. It just comes over as patronising and childish. Here’s another, typical gag:
We in the West need to understand this region, because Vegas rules do not apply. What happens in the Middle East does not stay in the Middle East. (p.17)
Here he is explaining why democracy is important:
Democracy is a safety valve. The ability to get together with a bunch of like-minded people and wander down the street hurling abuse at your leaders is a good thing for society. Without it the pressure just grows. (p.41)
The Internet. The Grandads. The Strong Men of the Arab World. Democracy. Everything is capitalised as for children. Janet and John. Blue Peter. BBC Bitesize.
We all know George W. Bush was a twerp but that’s no excuse for writing twerpishly about him. Here is Danahar describing George Bush’s ‘Freedom Agenda’ and Bush’s apparently sincere belief that he was on a mission from God to bring peace to the Middle East:
He [Bush] pushed for elections in the region but then the Arabs started voting for the wrong people, Islamists. That wasn’t the plan. So Western government supported economic reform instead, but that only helped the dictators steal even more money. So Western aid money started to go back into civil society projects that seemed like a nice safe way of doing 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. (p.36)
See what I mean by patronising and condescending? Note the complete absence of facts or dates. Instead there’s just Danahar’s cheap sarcasm. Here is his cartoon summary of America’s puzzlement at the Arab Spring:
America not only doesn’t understand the rules of the game, it can’t work out what winning might look like. Since the revolts it has been roaming around the table looking at everyone else’s hand, offering advice on which hand to play, but because it acted like it didn’t have a stake in the game, nobody was really listening. (p.7)
Not helpful, is it? Weak attempts at humour are no substitute for intelligent analysis. Here is his explanation of why the Arab Spring kicked off in Tunisia:
Middle-class people don’t riot, or at least they didn’t before the Arab revolts. Middle-class people, by definition, have something invested in the system. It might not be much but it is theirs. So when trouble breaks out their instincts are normally to moan, not march. But nothing upsets the middle-classes like a show-off. And if the flashy neighbours are showing off with your money, the gardening gloves come off!
This is what happens when journalists think they’re stand-up comedians. ‘The gardening gloves come off!’ What a prannet.
Anti-West
Another reasons for disliking this book is that Danahar pins most of the blame for the failure of the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions not on the actual inhabitants of the countries in question, but on ‘the West’. According to Danahar, ‘the West’ doesn’t understand the Arab world. ‘The West’ uses racist stereotypes of Arabs. ‘The West’ propped up dictators like Saddam and Assad for generations (p.21). ‘The West’ preaches democracy but then rejects it as soon as Islamist parties are elected (p.22). ‘The West’ projected its own facile wishes for a liberal third way onto the revolutions (p.23). When someone in ‘the West’ called them ‘the Facebook revolutions’ it’s because ‘the West looked for labels it could understand to explain a region it did not’ (p.22). Silly old, stupid old West, eh?
On and on goes Danahar’s barrage of accusations. ‘The West’ preaches democracy and human rights but conveniently forgets them when it has to do deals with Saudi Arabia for its oil (p.31). ‘The West’ ‘bought the line’ peddled by the old dictators that it was them or chaos, them or dangerous fundamentalists (p.34). Silly old West.
This all gets very tiresome very fast. Danahar’s pose of blaming ‘the West’ for everything is itself a stereotype, a Guardian-reader cliché, precisely the self-hating condescension towards his own country and culture which a certain kind of university-educated, white, Western, middle-class liberal deploys in order to feel smugly superior to it. When Danahar berates ‘the West’ for its racist ignorance or its hypocrisy he obviously isn’t including himself in ‘the West’. He is not part of the racist West. He is not part of the hypocritical West. He is perfectly attuned to the Arab world. He understands everything. After all, he works for the BBC and so is a god.
At one point he says ‘the West’ only reports on violence in the Arab world, thus fuelling the stereotype that the Arab world is violent (p.21). Well, er, isn’t he himself a, you know, journalist? Hasn’t he himself ever reported on violence in the Arab world? In fact his book overflows with reportage about revolution, insurgency, intifada and civil war all across the Arab world. So isn’t he, in other words, a fully paid-up member of the system which he opens his book by sarcastically criticising?
Plainly, Danahar considers himself an exception to the rule; when he reports on violence it is not how other reporters, those ghastly riff-raff, report on violence – he reports on it from above the fray, from the lofty vantage point of a BBC correspondent. This is exactly the tone of smug superiority which runs through another BBC foreign correspondent, Fergal Keane’s, self-congratulatory book about Rwanda. Maybe it’s a requirement for the job.
Israel, again
After the deeply off-putting introduction, the book goes on to long, rambling, often confusing chapters about the Arab Spring and its aftermath in Egypt, Palestine, Israel. There’s a chapter about America’s attempts to cope with the course of events, and then on to reviews of events in Iraq, Libya and Syria.
The Arab Spring affected the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and changed the dynamic affecting the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Hamas. And it had some effect in Israel although, despite reading the Israel chapter twice, I couldn’t tell you exactly how. Maybe unnerved the Israeli government and army as they watched to see who would end up running the countries around them.
My main thought on Danahar’s chapters about Palestine and Israel was – why, at just over a hundred pages, is a quarter of a book which is meant to be about the Arab Spring devoted to the Israel-Palestine question?
The bias in international reporting
When I worked on Channel 4’s international affairs programme, I was the ‘Asia’ editor. I produced discussion pieces about the tail end of the Iran-Iraq war (1988) through to the first Gulf War (1991). In between, I tried every week to get items on the air about other parts of Asia, for example, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, or south-east Asia such as Thailand, Laos, Vietnam or Indonesia, but found it difficult-to-impossible. Even getting stories about China onto the programme was virtually impossible since, back in those days, the only reported events were the stiflingly boring Communist Party congresses.
No, the three countries that appeared on the programme week in, week out, with mind-numbing inevitability, were America, Israel and South Africa. Atrocities could happen in Indonesia or Cambodia, political arguments in India, elections in Bangladesh, riots in Kyrgyzstan – my editor and the commissioning editor weren’t interested. But one settler got shot in Israel or the South African police opened fire on a group of black protesters and, whoosh! We’d immediately schedule ten-minute discussions assessing the state of the never-ending peace process or have yet another talkfest about the apartheid regime. And an American senator or congressman only had to make a controversial remark or a judge somewhere in Kansas make a ruling about abortion or civil rights and, whoosh! off we had to go to America for yet another in-depth report about America America America.
What I learned from working on an international affairs programme was the enormous in-built bias in the media towards certain countries and certain stories and against most others. There are at least four reasons for this. 1) It’s easier to get stories out of countries where journalists and film crews can operate freely. So Israel and South Africa, for all the shortcomings of their regimes, were First World countries with excellent transport and power and communications infrastructure. Sometimes a bit perilous, but basically very good countries to report from.
2) Everyone already knows the narrative. The Arab-Israeli conflict has taken on the character of a fairy story (a particularly Grimm fairy story) with an extremely clear, black-and-white narrative about the conflict between the Goliath of the all-powerful, unpleasantly right-wing but recognisably democratic Israeli state and the David of the plucky underdog, the downtrodden oppressed Palestinians, all too often represented by awful terrorist organisations, first the PLO and now Hamas. The simplicity of the narrative makes it easy to conceptualise, describe, and analyse. It’s Easy to package. Same used to be true of apartheid South Africa. Apartheid authorities = evil; black freedom fighters = heroes and martyrs; Nelson Mandela = a saint.
They were pantomime narratives with pantomime goodies and baddies. Easy to understand, easy to write about, easy to feel moral indignation about, easy to go on marches about.
Compare and contrast the difficulties I had trying to persuade my editor to do an item about the general election in Bangladesh, where 17 different parties were standing, and the ruling party was riven by corruption accusations, or the latest political scandal in Indonesia. I never stood a chance of getting those kinds of stories on the show because 1) the countries were difficult to operate in and get stories out of, 2) the situations were complex and unfamiliar, so would take some time to explain properly by which time, it was assumed, the audience would have turned over to watch Love Island.
Incidentally, it was even worse for my friend who was the Africa editor. She was initially angry, frustrated, tried to make a change, protested, and eventually slumped into sullen acceptance of the fact that she would never get a story on the programme about any other African country but South Africa. During the apartheid years, any speech by a government minister, any shooting in a black township, any announcement by the ANC got more coverage than entire wars in Chad, Sudan, Congo and so on. Because it was easy to report from (five star hotels, excellent satellite links) and the narrative was fairy-tale easy to cover in a short studio discussion.
3) Related to the points above is the way that Western journalists and editors shared the same basic assumption that these places mattered to their audience. Regarding Israel, maybe because of residual British guilt at having mismanaged our mandate over Palestine, probably more to do with the active Jewish community in Britain, it was assumed that British audiences had a kind of vested interest in what goes on in Israel. In the same way, many British firms had business connections and investments in South Africa; lots of pukka Brits have lived and worked there. Again it was assumed the audience had various kinds of attachment to the place in ways they just didn’t to Indonesia or Malaya or Bangladesh.
(In fact, some 650,000 people of Bangladeshi origin live in the UK, or 1% of the UK population, twice as many as Jews, about 370,000 or 0.5%. So it’s not a case of raw numbers. And obviously the British Empire ruled Bangladesh as much as it ruled between-the-wars Palestine; facts which reinforce my theory that it’s to do with ease of access and simplicity of narrative.)
4) Lastly, over and above these points, there was what you could call the student-level, Guardian-reading and Labour Left feeling that we, the British government, ought to be doing more in both places to bring about justice, democracy etc. A moral and political commitment to these places. Remember all the marches and rallies and speeches about apartheid during the 1970s and 80s? And the marches and speeches and rallies which still go on about Palestine? Left and progressive politics was and is committed to the injustices in those places in ways that just don’t apply to injustice and grievance in Indonesia or Bangladesh.
So these 4 reasons help to explain why just a handful of foreign countries were (and their modern equivalents still are) vastly over-represented in the British media while others, in fact most of the countries in the rest of the world (Chad, Guatemala, Angola, Tajikistan) go virtually unreported in the media from one year to the next.
I wouldn’t say this is conscious racism – the two countries I’ve highlighted as dominating the headlines in the early 1990s included Arabs and Jews and blacks – and in fact all bien-pensant liberals were falling over themselves to speak up for Palestinians and black South Africans, so it’s not racism in the obvious sense.
But the four reasons I’ve listed above go some way to explaining why there is a kind of institutional and deeply embedded bias in all reporting of world affairs by almost all Western media. Some countries are easy to report from and feature simple black-and-white narratives (Russia = invading bully; Ukraine = plucky underdog) and so they tend to get the headlines. Countries which are harder to move around freely, or lack a good comms infrastructure, or where the issues are complex and require a bit of explanation – not reported so much, or hardly at all.
Hopefully, you now see the point of my heading ‘Israel, again’. I was hoping this book would provide a good narrative account and analytic explanation of the revolutions in countries I don’t know that much about (Libya, Syria), describing the Arab Springs which were carried out in Arab countries by Arab peoples.
Instead, as Danahar’s text set off on a long rambling account of the Arab-Israeli conflict which included all kinds of historical digressions – taking in the Balfour Declaration, the first Temple, Mohammad ascending into heaven from the Dome of the Rock, Abraham, descriptions of the three Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973, the various intifadas, Israel’s 1982 incursion into Lebanon, its invasions of the West Bank, rocket attacks, illegal settlements blah blah blah – I found myself thinking: why is a quarter of this book about bloody Israel (again)?
As to the actual content, it can be summarised thus: Israel has been becoming more right wing, with the ongoing rise of intolerant religious/sectarian political parties and groups in society, and Supreme Court rulings which are tending to define Israel more and more as an exclusively Jewish state, increasingly excluding and alienating the 2 million citizens of the country (total population 8 million) who are not Jewish.
Some commentators blame the fiercely right-wing turn Israeli society has taken (and the collapse of the old Israeli Left) on the sizeable influx of Russian immigrant Jews, who are more fiercely anti-Arab and pro the illegal settlement of the occupied West Bank than the average population. These Russian immigrants are blamed for fundamentally changing the nature of Israeli society (p.224). If Danahar’s correct in this description, then the liberal, democratic and progressive Israel I grew up admiring has vanished forever.
Rambling text
Danahar arranges his chapters in long repetitive, unstructured and emphatically unchronological narratives. So in the Israel chapter, one minute we’re in 1917 (Balfour Declaration), then in 1982 (invasion of Lebanon), then it’s 1967 (Arab-Israeli war) and suddenly 2003 (US invades Iraq), in no particular order, as his train of thought rambles over the subject.
On one level this makes the text quite enjoyable, a bit like Tristram Shandy. Every time I opened the book I came across sections I couldn’t remember reading, and had no idea where I was in the story, since the narratives in each chapter deliberately follow no chronological or logical order. Pot luck. Spin the wheel.
On a more practical level, however, it meant I got to the end of the chapter about, for example, Egypt, with no clear idea what happened during the Arab Spring protests there. I think the street protests in spring 2011 led to the overthrow of Egypt’s long-time authoritarian leader, Hosni Mubarak; after a period of confusion, elections were held which returned the previously banned Muslim Brotherhood to government. They, and their leader, Mohammed Morsi, turned out to be terrible at running a country, at trying to balance and reconcile all the opposing factions, and began to behave increasingly autocratically while at the same time street crime/lawlessness increased. Until eventually the army, led by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, in July 2013 stepped in to end the chaos, deposed Morsi, and imposed yet another round of military rule. I think.
In the same way, the two connected chapters about Palestine-Israel ramble all over the place, burying the impact of the Arab Spring under layers of digression about every other conceivable subject. For example, the Israel chapter includes long passages about some of the extreme orthodox Jewish groups and parties which seem to be growing in Israel, passages which weren’t really about the Arab Spring at all, but fit more into Danahar’s broader thesis that the entire region is becoming more prone to religious sectarianism and extremism.
I registered this idea, processed it and then thought – hang on; what about the Iranian revolution of 1979? I was alive at the time and remember it having a huge, seismic impact, far more game-changing than the Arab Springs. Ten years later, when I worked on the international affairs programme, many of the experts I spoke to associated the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the creation of a theocracy based on Sharia law with the advent of a completely new phenomenon – Islamic fundamentalism.
This was then echoed and amplified by the example of the mujahideen in Afghanistan who, for ten long years (1979 to 1989), brought the concept of Islamic fighters into the front room of anyone in the West who owned a telly and watched the news. In other words, I thought this phenomenon, the rise and rise of Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic sectarianism had been becoming slowly more widespread for 30 years or so before the Arab Spring.
I suppose it’s possible to argue that the Arab Spring came after the experience of Iraq collapsing into bitter sectarian civil war and ethnic cleansing from 2003 onwards had ramped up sectarian bitterness a notch; but this had been prepared decades earlier when Sunni Saddam went to war with Shia Iran in 1980, by Sunni-Shia clashes in the Lebanon, by the uneasy rule of the Shia minority Alawi sect over a majority Sunni population in Syria and many other Sunni-Shia clashes across the Arab world.
And as to extreme religious orthodox groups in Israel, I swear to God I’ve been watching TV documentaries or reading articles about them for decades. In fact a stock part of any debate about whether we should have proportional representation in the UK is to cite the example of Israel where PR means that the tiny ultra-orthodox parties can have an influence out of all proportion to their numbers or democratic mandate.
So this is another reason I didn’t like this book. Not only does Danahar go on at extraordinary length about issues and historical events which are peripheral to the nominal subject of his book (what have extended interviews with the Israeli haredi community got to do with the Arab Spring?) but many of the ideas he derives from it seem surprisingly, well, stale and obvious. Religious fanaticism is on the rise in the Middle East! Haven’t we known this for decades and decades?
America, again
What I wrote above about Israel and old apartheid South Africa is a million times truer of America. Regular readers will know of my dislike of the way the arts and media industries in the UK slavishly kowtow to all things American (the Barbican, Radio 4). I was surprised to realise just how much this lickspittle adulation extended, during the Iraq and Afghan wars, to politicians like Tony Blair and the entire staff of the British army who went out of their way to suck up to the Americans. According to Jack Fairweather and Frank Ledwidge the only reason the British chiefs of staffs recommended deploying the British Army to Afghanistan in 2006, and Blair and Reid enthusiastically agreed, was to try and rebuild our reputation with the Americans after we fouled up so badly in southern Iraq. British military policy was dictated by keeping in with the Yanks.
So it irritated me that a) Danahar places his chapter about American policy in the Middle East before he gets to the actual Arab Spring events in the key states of Libya and Syria; and b) that the chapter about America is longer (52 pages) than the chapters on Iraq (43), Libya (44) and only just eclipsed by Syria (56). America, as usual. America, again.
Mind you he isn’t a fan. The reverse. Danahar’s America chapter is 50 pages of snarky sarcasm about how quickly the Americans were wrong-footed, told in Danahar’s trademark Horrible Histories style:
Perhaps it was the moment America’s old and decrepit foreign policy in the Middle East found itself caught in the headlights, just before the juggernaut driven by a generation of young Arab youths turned it into roadkill. (p.231)
History as sketch show.
Then I was further disheartened to discover that half the America chapter is – guess what? – predominantly about America’s closest ‘ally’ in the region, Israel (again!), with page after page after page chronicling Barack Obama’s difficult relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu. OK, there is some coverage of Saudi Arabia, about its break with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, about its (apparent) lack of any home-grown talents or industries apart from oil; and about Israel and Saudi’s common interest in fearing Iran’s nuclear programme. But Israel, America, America, Israel, God spare us.
According to Israeli military figures, Israel carried out a decisive attack on Syria’s nuclear programme in 2007, a devastating attack which destroyed the programme and which both sides have kept hushed up (p.377). Danahar explains how Netanyahu sees his historical role as being the man who saved Israel from Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and how he has consistently called for bombing runs to destroy Iran’s facilities, but how Israel isn’t strong enough to do this on its own, it needs America. And how Obama refused to countenance such a thing and preferred to work through sanctions.
This is interesting enough, but I was hoping for more analysis of Arab countries in a book about the impact of the Arab Spring; not to read page after page after page after page about America or Israel or both.
(As I finished this review, 5 July 2023, America launched an incursion into the West Bank, ostensibly to liquidate ‘militants’ but, inevitably, resulting in civilian casualties and triggering a car attack in Tel Aviv. Just as I’m about to publish this, Hamas launched its atrocious pogrom against Israelis living near Gaza and Israel is responding with a full-spectrum assault on the whole of Gaza whose brutality many Israelis are starting to doubt. So it has gone on during my entire life, and will continue long after I’m gone.)
A blizzard of interviews
By page 300 I’d noticed a verbal tic of Danahar’s which I thought was very symptomatic of the book’s shortcomings. On page after page he says he interviewed this, that or the other senior figure in this, that or the other relevant country, and records how they ‘told him’ their view or take or version.
The more I pondered all these ‘told me’s’ the more symptomatic I realised they are. Danahar is a journalist. Journalists work on relatively short ‘stories’ which they file one at a time to newspapers and magazines or TV or radio, generally on a quick turnaround. It is a badge of achievement to add into these stories that you interviewed or got access to very senior figures in the army or government or whatever relevant part of the administration as well as, at the other end of the spectrum, ordinary people like teachers taking part in protest marches or innocent citizens whose house has just been bombed etc. Quoting one or two of these in every ‘story’ wins you brownie points, shows how well ‘in’ you are with people in the know and/or have done the legwork to get piping hot eye-witness accounts.
My point is that this entire approach, which is a central aspect of journalistic technique, doesn’t work so well in a book. Instead, having two or three extensive quotes from a galaxy of sources, on every single page does the opposite to what it does in an article – it makes the narrative cluttered and confusing. So many people are quoted saying so many things that it becomes very difficult remembering who’s who, what they said and why.
The people quoted in Michael Ignatieff’s books (which I regard as a kind of gold standard) speak to the issue under consideration, and their quotes are chosen in such a way as to elaborate and elucidate the central topics and ideas, to sustain a train of thought. Ignatieff selects and edits his quotes very carefully in order to further and deepen his analysis.
By contrast, Danahar just quotes people because they shed a bit of light on this event, have a view about this or that personality, saw this thing happen, knew that person, are a paid commentator or protester or whatnot, have a bit to chip in. Pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap. When he quotes Nikolas Sarkozi and Obama being caught by microphones at the UN agreeing that they both hate Netanyahu, I realised a lot of these ‘exclusive’ interviews are little more than high-level gossip. Crucially, his quotes don’t contribute to the narrative, they rarely shed much light. Instead, the sheer number of people popping up with this or that comment on this and that turn of events are a major reason why the text feels so dense and confusing.
Danahar has spoken to hundreds of the right people and yet has somehow, magically emerged with next to no interesting or useful analysis. In his series about contemporary international affairs Michael Ignatieff interviewed far fewer people but his interviews have a laserlike precision; Danahar’s build up a huge, colourful and completely confusing mural.
‘I was there’
This is related to another aspect of the book, which is fine, which is very creditable in journalism but also doesn’t work in a book, which is constantly telling all his readers that he was there. Danahar was there when Obama made his big speech in Cairo, and again at the UN (p.265). Danahar was there when Colonel Gaddafi addressed his General People’s Congress for the last time on 2 March 2011 (p.342). Danahar interviewed Gaddafi in person after the revolt had begun (p.353). The Great Leader even put his arm round Danahar’s shoulders (p.354), and, a few months later, Danahar was at the morgue to see Gaddafi’s mutilated corpse (p.358). Danahar interviewed Bashar al-Assad (p.371). Danahar was there in Baghdad when the Americans entered the city (p.283). Danahar was there in the West Bank as the Israeli rockets flew overhead, he was there, he saw it with his own eyes.
All this is fabulous in an immediate, rushed, eye-witness piece for a newspaper or magazine, but boring and distracting in a book with pretensions to analysis. I don’t care whether he choked on teargas in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian protests, or ducked under incoming fire in the West Bank. That’s irrelevant to what ought to be an objective analysis of the events and their meaning.
But Danahar can’t leave his journalistic mindset behind. He has spoken to hundreds of people and he is determined to quote every single one or die in the attempt; and he was there to eye-witness this invasion and that firefight or this key speech or that momentous signing, and he’s not going to let you forget it.
Indeed, most of the chapters open, not with a significant moment in the events he’s chronicling, but with a personal story of him being on the spot in Egypt, or Israel or Iraq.
‘Even if you win, it is difficult to rule an angry people,’ he told me. (Introduction)
‘I can’t believe we’ve won, I can’t believe we’ve won,’ shouted a man to me over the noise of the chants and firecrackers as Cairo’s Tahrir Square exploded into an ecstatic mix of joy and relief. (Chapter 2)
My ears were working perfectly so I could hear him screaming: ‘Made in the US, look! Made in the US.’ (Chapter 5)
It started for me mid-morning on a quiet street, much like any other, in 2003 in central Baghdad. (Chapter 6)
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. (Chapter 7)
The village sat nestled among cornfields and green pastures where sheep grazed in the crushing midday sun under the watchful eye of local shepherds. A dusty little road wound its way up through the surrounding fields to the small grey-brick homes sitting on a rocky outpost overlooking the countryside. As I entered the house from the dazzling light outside, it was difficult at first to understand why my boots were sticking to the ground in the dark little room. (Chapter 8)
So not only is the text confused and rambling and so stuffed with quotes it feels like an old mattress, but it is continually punctuated with grandstanding reminders of how clever Danahar was to be in the right place at the right time. Fine if you like magazine journalism. Distracting and, ultimately, irritating if you’re looking for analysis.
Anthony Loyd’s war books contain as much or more about himself, and candid revelations about his personal life far in excess of Danahar’s, BUT…a massive but…these personal passages are balanced by intelligent, insightful, priceless analyses of what was going on in the wars Loyd reported on, and why. Loyd’s analyses give you a real sense of what was happening, and how politics and warfare work on the ground. I remember much of his stuff about Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Kosovo because it was so insightful, he really helped me to understand those wars.
In addition, Loyd’s complex mingling of reportage with autobiography give you insights into the trade of foreign correspondent, insight into what drives pampered westerners to seek out warzones and scenes of atrocity. They manage to be not only excellent war reporting, but subtle meditations on the trade of war reporting itself. There’s nothing that subtle or interesting here.
Initial facts about the Arab Spring
The Arab nations are disproportionately young. In many, half the population is under 25 (p.7). In all the chapters, about all the major Arab states, Danahar repeats the same point: there is not enough work for these young people to do and no work means no marriage, no family, no identity, no future (e.g. Libya, p.364).
It began in Tunisia. Tunisia was ruled by President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had been in power for 24 years and had erected a huge security apparatus to keep it that way. His family ran everything and were known as The Family. The whole thing was dominated by his infamous wife, Leila Ben Ali.
It began on 17 December 2010 when Mohamed Bouazizi, a street trader, poured petrol over himself and set himself alight in protest at having his street trader goods confiscated by the corrupt police. This incident was distributed like wildfire via social media and triggered protest marches which turned to riots in January 2011. The marches and protests became so large that, when some of the army and security forces began to show their support for the protesters, Ben Ali and his family fled the country. The example of Bouazizi was beamed round the Arab world and was, arguably, incited and inflamed by the Arab-focused news media, particularly the Qatar-owned TV channel al-Jazeera.
Iraq
Saddam was toppled so that the region could be reformed. Instead it was convulsed. (p.324)
I’ve now read half a dozen books about Iraq. Danahar’s account suffers from several trademark flaws. For a start, he devotes a lot of time to rehashing the well-known story of the buildup to the American invasion of 2003, the looting which followed, Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority, his decision to sack every member of the Ba’ath party from their jobs and dissolve the army and all Iraq’s security forces, two of the worst decisions made anywhere ever, the collapse of the country into insurgency and then sectarian civil war – all old news by 2015, and even older as I read it in 2023. But Danahar tells all this in his usual arsey-versey manner, mingling dates and events in single sentences, sweeping past issues I know to be complicated with just a phrase.
And, of course, the buildup, invasion and then catastrophic mismanagement afterwards are almost entirely American affairs so it’s yet another example of America, again. George Bush again, and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer and Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, again.
For me his account only gets interesting when he gets to Obama, who took office in January 2009, because Obama isn’t covered in the accounts of Thomas Ricks and other early histories I’ve read.
So it was useful to read Danahar’s take on Obama’s attempts to extricate America from Iraq, along with the baleful impact of the billions America invested there i.e. ongoing terrible infrastructure collapse, and long-standing resentment, even hatred, among all those who lost family members in the terrible violence.
America left no friends behind in Iraq. (p.322)
Danahar is more critical of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki than other authors I’ve read have been, for the simple reason that he is writing later (2015) as the evil caused by Maliki’s shameless sectarian support of Shia militias and his sustained attacks on Sunni politicians and communities had led to dire results. Most notable of these was the rise of ISIS, which was an offshoot of al Qaeda in Iraq, itself manned by disaffected Sunnis, including former Iraqi Army officers.
The Iraqi army was in no shape to deal with this because, according to US assessments, by then al-Maliki had ‘hollowed out big chunks of the Iraqi military. He de-professionalised it, moving out some of the competent leadership, moving in people loyal to him who didn’t know what they were doing…’ (p.322)
So when ISIS forces stormed across the border from Syria in June 2014, Maliki’s army turned tail and fled. Soldiers threw off their uniforms and ran away.
The Iraqi army was proving itself not to be much of an army at all. (p.414)
Four Iraqi army and federal police divisions disintegrated, abandoning all their expensive US-supplied weapons to the jihadists. Black humour doesn’t come much blacker. So that by mid-2014 ISIS found itself ‘governing’ a large part of eastern Syria and north-western Iraq, and was a magnet for every (Sunni) jihadist who truly believed the caliphate was being restored and the end times were at hand. (See my review of ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger.)
Danahar appears to agree with Emma Sky’s view that Obama went to the opposite extreme from Bush and his neocons, by withdrawing American forces too fast; in too fast, out too fast. Obama wanted to be shot of the whole problem but in completely withdrawing US troops and leaving Iraq to the tender mercies of al-Maliki, he was partly responsible for the vacuum into which ISIS burst. And promptly found himself dragged back into Iraq to try and sort out the mess.
After trying to ignore the rise of ISIS during 2013, Obama was finally forced to take notice when ISIS captured the major city of Mosul and began to carry out well-publicised atrocities in its new territory. In June 2014 he sent the air force to pound ISIS strongholds and US special forces back into Iraq to assist Kurdish forces in taking on ISIS. Obama painfully learned the truth of the laconic remark Powell allegedly made to Bush back before the invasion even took place: ‘You broke it, you own it.’
Anyway, the final page of Danahar’s Iraq chapter has little to do with Iraq itself because, without quite understanding how, we are back discussing America, again. Danahar’s final thoughts are all about the US of A. He makes the intriguing suggestion that, had the invasion of Iraq achieved its goal (creating a beacon of democracy in the Middle East) it might have tempted the Americans on to the kind of over-reach which marks the end of empires. Instead, the invasion and occupation were such a crushing failure that they forced the entire US establishment, politicians, civil servants and military, to pause and rethink their interests and goals.
Fair enough, interesting point – but this thoughtful conclusion does seem like … America, again.
Libya
Four big takeaways: 1) Gaddafi created a cult of personality more total and far-reaching than any other Arab leader. He was the Arab world’s longest-serving leader (42 years; p.327). He smothered all freedom of debate, political parties and civil society. So, when he was overthrown, there was a bigger vacuum.
2) It was triggered by one man. Just as Mohamed Bouazizi, the street trader, triggered the revolt in Tunisia, so Libya kicked off after a human rights lawyer, Fathi Terbil, was arrested in Benghazi on 15 February 2011. Protesters organised a ‘Day of Rage’ on 17 February and that is the date which became associated with the uprising (p.329).
3) There is a major split between east and west Libya, which were originally two distinct provinces of the Ottoman Empire and only yoked together as a result of Italy’s violent colonisation in the 1930s (p.334). When the revolt against Gaddafi broke out, there were two distinct groups of rebels, who didn’t interact. According to Danahar the National Transitional Council (NTC) based in Benghazi in the east, proved reluctant or incapable of helping the rebels in the west, Gaddafi’s powerbase. They also didn’t come to the aid of smaller towns in their region, a failure which encouraged local militias to believe it was every man for himself i.e. to split the anti-Gaddafi forces into lots of fragments (p.333). So that’s part of the cause of the civil war which lasts to this day.
4) ‘The NATO intervention was unquestionably the deciding factor in Libya’s civil war,’ (p.358).
Timeline
17 February 2011 – Day of Rage
27 February 2011 – National Transitional Council set up in Benghazi
21 March 2011 – NATO forces intervene i.e. bomb Gaddafi / Libyan army positions
27 June 2011 – International Criminal Court issues an arrest warrant against Gaddafi and his entourage
20 August 2011 – Gaddafi ousted from power in Tripoli and withdraws to his home town of Sirte which he declares the new capital of Libya
20 October 2011 – Sirte captured by rebel forces, Gaddafi found, lynched and murdered
End of the first Libyan civil war
Start of the second Libyan civil war
11 September 2012 – al Qaeda forces attacked the US consulate in Benghazi killing the US ambassador and 3 others leading to a government crackdown on Islamic and rebel militias which had lingered on after the war, and slowly escalated into a new civil war
Libya became split between the House of Representatives, also known as the ‘Tobruk government’, which is internationally recognised as the Libyan Government, and the rival Islamist government of the General National Congress (GNC), also called the ‘National Salvation Government’, based in the capital Tripoli.
The last pages of the Libya chapter give an entertaining overview of the chaos the country descended into by 2014. It’s worth quoting Danahar’s explanation, at length:
Things got so bad so fast because the Gulf states would not stop interfering. Qatar kept funneling money to the Islamists and its favoured militias in Misrata. The UAE and Egypt found their own proxy in the form of an old Libyan army general named Khalifa Haftar. Egypt first got involved because President al-Sisi didn’t want a country led by the Brotherhood on his doorstep. Hatred of the Brotherhood also motivated the UAE, which sometimes cut out the middle man and used their own fighter jets to bomb Libyan militias. After Islamist extremists beheaded twenty-one Coptic Christians working in Libya, al-Sisi started air strikes too. (p.367)
It’s nice to see Danahar calling the Arab League a joke. That was our view back in the early 1990s but I note that it’s now acceptable to say it openly. Why? Because the League promotes a unicorn called ‘Arab unity’ while all across the region Arabs are at each others’ throats, often literally (see al Qaeda beheadings in Libya, Syria and Iraq). Tot up the dead and injured from the civil wars in Libya, Yemen, Syria and Iraq:
- Syrian civil war: 570,000+ killed and counting
- Iraqi insurgency, civil war, and ISIS war: 220,000+ killed and counting
- Yemeni Civil War: casualty figure at 350,000+ killed and counting
- Libyan Crisis: 40,000+ killed and counting
- Egyptian Crisis: 5,000+ killed and counting
Arabs have killed about a million other Arabs in the last decade. Some unity. Instead there is a complex web of interference in all these conflicts by other Arab states, often lined up behind opposing factions, supplying arms and bombing each other’s militias.
Their differing objectives meant that Saudi Arabi and Qatar were, behind the scenes, at each other’s throats over Syria. The US tried, and failed, to get them to co-operate. (p.376)
And Arab incompetence. Not my view, Danahar’s:
Within weeks of Mubarak’s overthrow the institution which had symbolised much of what is wrong with the Arab world during his rule [the Arab League] was suddenly in danger of losing its hard-won reputation of being utterly useless in a crisis. (p.235)
By the time his book went to press (2015) Libya looked increasingly like a country in name only, being split down the middle with two governments, two armies and two sets of foreign sponsors, with some towns and cities under no one’s control but the scenes of ongoing urban warfare and terrorist attacks.
Characteristically, Danahar winds up his Libya chapter by reflecting on America (again). It was NATO bombing which halted and ‘degraded’ Gaddafi’s army, allowing the rebels to seize territory. But Danahar ends with President Barack Obama regretting, in retrospect, that the West hadn’t worked out a plan for what to do after Gaddafi’s overthrow. It beggars belief that 8 years after they made that gross mistake in Iraq (what do you do after you overthrow the dictator?), America admitted it had made the exact same mistake in Libya. History is the blackest of black comedies.
Syria
Danahar makes one big point about Syria, which is that when protests against the authoritarian rule of Bashar al-Assad began and then turned violent, a sizeable proportion of the Syrian population did not join the protests because they had seen what happened in neighbouring Iraq when a tyrant was overthrown i.e. descent into sectarian civil war. This was particularly true of non-Muslim minorities such as the sizeable number of Christians in Syria and the minority Alawi sect identified with the Assad family. Therefore a notable percentage of the population acquiesced in Assad’s rule, not because they supported him but because they were terrified of what would happen if he was overthrown. Therefore the protesters, rebels and insurgents couldn’t muster the widespread popular support they needed. Therefore Assad was able to keep enough of a powerbase to launch increasingly violent war against his own people (pages 321 and 375).
It started in March 2011 when 15 schoolchildren in the town of Dera’a were arrested and tortured for writing on a wall the slogan ‘The people want the overthrow of the regime’. On 18 March, after Friday prayers, some of the population gathered to protest the brutal treatment of the children whereupon the security forces opened fire and killed four. At the funeral of these dead, the security forces opened fire again, killing even more unarmed civilians. And so the city rose in rebellion, which spread to other cities.
Once again, the Arab League cocked it up:
‘Everyone missed the train on this crisis,’ a diplomat in Damascus told me. ‘The UN did not show up, the Europeans and Americans did not show up. They left it all in the hands of the Arab League. Then the Arab League started messing it up from day one. They are the ones who radicalised it.’ (p.379)
Three reasons why the Syria civil war is so intractable:
- Syria is a regionally, ethnically and religiously fragmented society. The opposition to the regime could never be united into one group, not by the UN or the US, not by the most proactive Gulf states Saudi and Qatar, not by the patronage of neighbouring Turkey; but obstinately persisted in fragmentary militias and parties.
- This was played on by Assad who sowed division between neighbour and neighbour, carrying out atrocities (massacring men, women and children in one village and blaming it on the different religion or ethnic group in the next village. Bosnia. Balkanisation. Spreading fear. Massacres, reprisals, revenge).
- The number of outside countries piling in to support their own groups and agendas, namely (pro-Assad) Iran and its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, and Russia; (against Assad) Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. And then, of course, the hapless West in the shape of the bewildered Yanks, drawn into yet another Middle Eastern conflict they couldn’t resolve.
Sides in the Syrian civil war
Pro Assad
Russia had supported the house of Assad back in the Cold War days, Russia had business investments in Syria and a Russian naval base at Tartus. Russia sees Assad as a secular leader battling a sea of Islamic fundamentalists.
Iran supports Assad because a) Assad’s Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shia Islam and b) as a major regime in the Arab world beholden to them and thus a counterweight to anti-Iran Saudi Arabia.
Anti Assad
Saudi Arabia‘s main foreign policy concern is the rise and rise of Iran as a regional power; Iran quickly came to the aid of Assad, threatening to create a Shia arc of influence from Iran, through Iraq, through Syria, and on into Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon. The Saudis, despite their instinctive dislike of popular rebellion (which might threaten their own conservative monarchy) nonetheless opposed Iran’s ally Assad and began payrolling and supplying Islamic militias.
Qatar supplied arms and ammunition to Islamists with a view to creating a new government run by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Turkey, led by the Muslim populist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and antipathetic to Assad’s secular militaristic regime, condemned Assad’s brutality, supported the rebels and, led by paranoia about the knock-on effect of Syrian Kurdish separatism for their own Kurdish region, has ended up occupying northern parts of Syria.
As so often, I wondered why America feels so obligated to get drawn into these toxic conflicts. Why doesn’t it just walk away and let them all slaughter each other? If this is what Arab culture amounts to – endless sectarian slaughter – why don’t America and the West leave them to enjoy it?
Danahar’s encouragement to intervene
The world
In his coverage of Syria Danahar did something which really pissed me off; he indulged in precisely the high-minded, moralising blackmail which dragged us into Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, all considered disastrous. What I mean is he uses the kind of emotionally charged rhetoric which journalists can throw around without having to bother about the consequences:
Homs was where the wider world first learned of the savage brutality of the Assad regime and then realised it didn’t care enough to do much about it. Homs was where the world began its betrayal of the Syrian people. (p.379)
This is meretricious grandstanding. Who is this ‘world’ he talks of? Is he talking about you and me, did you betray the Syrian people? Or does he mean major international organisations like the UN and the EU? Well, the UN made repeated attempts to find a settlement but failed because of the intractable nature of the conflict: Assad refused to back down, the opposition weren’t united or strong enough to overthrow him, the backers of both sides (Iran and Russia versus Saudi and Qatar) also wouldn’t back down.
What does Danahar think ‘the world’ should have done so as not to betray the Syrian people? Invaded Syria and overthrown the tyrant? Joined the war as yet another outside player, and bombed the Syrian army into oblivion? We all know what happens when the West begins an air campaign (see Kosovo), within a matter of days it’s bombing civilian convoys or blowing up the Chinese embassy and its hands become as sullied as anyone else’s; and it may, eventually, lead to a ceasefire but not to a real solution (Kosovo).
Christopher Phillips book on Syria shows that everyone was delighted when the French-led bombing of Gaddafi’s forces in Libya emboldened the opposition and led to the dictator’s capture and brutal murder (October 2011) but then…Then the opposition collapsed into rival warlords and civil war, not unlike the chaos which followed the overthrow of Saddam eight years earlier, and now, 12 years later, Libya is in effect a failed state, divided into two feuding regimes.
The criticism made of ‘the West’ is that it didn’t follow up on the air strikes, didn’t engage with, fund and organise the opposition enough and steer them towards a unified settlement. But could they have? How much would that have cost? Should Barack Obama have gone to Congress and asked them to provide tens of billions more to send troops to supervise the reconstruction of Libya? Like they supervised the reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan? How many troops? For how long?
The one great conclusion of all the books I’ve read by Jack Fairweather, Frank Ledwidge, Thomas Ricks, Rory Stewart and Michael Ignatieff is that ‘the West’ needs to acknowledge that 1) it can intervene a lot less effectively in conflict zones than it used to think, 2) that its interventions are almost always counter-productive, and 3) its interventions always lead to more lives lost, not least among Western armed forces but also, always, among the local people.
So Danahar made me really cross by playing to the gallery and striking this bleeding heart pose of caring journalist stricken that ‘the world’ was just standing by and letting Assad murder his own people. What should we have done instead, Paul? Bomb Syria? Invade Syria? Assassinate Assad? Or should we have ‘cared’ more? What does that even mean?
The cavalry
Danahar concludes his Syria chapter with:
If the Arab Spring and the years that followed had been a revelation to the world, it had been an education for the Syrians too. The most important thing they had learned was this. While the war raged there would be no foreign cavalry marching over the horizon to save them. Until the fighting ended the Syrian people were on their own. (p.425)
This is objectionable on at least three grounds. 1) ‘Foreign cavalry’? He is, of course, talking about the much-maligned West but why, why, why should British and American (or Canadian or Danish) soldiers die in their hundreds because Bashar al-Assad is a murderous tyrant? We had a go at ‘saving’ the people of Iraq and the people of Afghanistan and you know what? Within weeks they had united in attacking the infidel crusader occupiers. This is Tony Blair’s line in his infamous Chicago speech where he put the case for humanitarian intervention if a dictator is massacring his own people; this was precisely the rationale behind his decision to back Dubya and send hundreds of British troops to their pointless deaths in Iraq. We intervened in Libya and fragmented the country.
Has Danahar learned nothing?
Why should ‘the West’ save the rest of the world? Libya, Iraq and Syria aren’t screwed-up disaster zones because of western imperialists from a hundred years ago, but because they were ruled by extremely typical Arab dictators who suppressed every form of civil society for decades so that, when they fell, none of their people knew how to run anything, all they knew was how to seize power for themselves, generally using extreme violence, and creating a political vacuum into which flooded psychopathic Islamic extremism. Well, the Arabs are welcome to the world they’ve created. There are 22 countries in the Arab League, including some of the richest in the world. Let them sort it out. Or, to turn it around, if Arabs can’t sort out Arab problems in Arab countries, why should anyone believe that non-Arab, non-Muslim outsiders can?
2) Anyway, Danahar is wrong. It’s not that there is no cavalry riding over the hill to save the Syrian people (good God, these trite Hollywood metaphors turn so many writers’ brains to mulch); it’s that there are too many cavalries riding over the hill. Danahar’s entire Syria chapter describes the intervention in Syria of Russia, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, plus numerous jihadist factions (al Qaeda, ISIS). The problem isn’t lack of cavalry; Syria is overrun with cavalry.
(And I am just reading Christopher Phillips’s long and mind-bogglingly detailed account of the Syrian civil war which lists in great detail precisely how much manpower, money and materiel poured into Syria from the half dozen main foreign players and beyond. Dozens of cavalries rode over that hill and then all started attacking each other.)
3) Anyway, ‘the world’ did try to save Syria. Repeatedly. Christopher Phillips’s account goes into great detail about the repeated attempts of the UN, the EU, the Arab League, America and various other outside players to broker some kind of ceasefire and peace deal. Skimming through the Wikipedia article about the Syrian peace process gives you a good sense of the immense amount of diplomatic work which went in to repeatedly trying to find a solution. But Phillips’s account gives you a powerful sense of why all of them fell short, breaking on the complete intransigence of the Assad regime itself, or the vested interests of key players, namely Russia, Iran and Turkey.
So it seems both morally despicable to me that Danahar ends his long rambling book by slamming the West for not ‘riding to the rescue’ of yet another Arab country, as if ‘the world’ is as simple as a Hollywood movie. And it seems plain factually incorrect of him to say that ‘the world’ abandoned Syria, when ‘the world’ (UN, US, Arab League) made repeated, sustained efforts to stop the fighting.
Europe endured hundreds of years of barbaric wars until we finally fought ourselves to a standstill in 1945 (although plenty of low-level conflicts raged on for decades afterwards). Maybe other regions of the world are going to go through the same process, agonisingly, for centuries.
Or maybe this is just what human beings are like. Everywhere. And the fortunate billion who are lucky enough to live in the peace and plenty of Western Europe and the Anglosphere are enjoying a blip in history, a window of relative stability, before the big impacts of global warming start to kick in and the entire global population collapses into growing instability and violence.
Maybe our idea of ‘human nature’ in ‘the West’ is hopelessly partial and incomplete because of the accident of history, the relative peace and plenty, we happen to be living through. And the people of Libya, Syria and Yemen, Sudan, Rwanda and Congo, of Bosnia and Afghanistan, of Sri Lanka, Timor, Cambodia and Myanmar, have a better grasp of what human beings are really like.
Conclusions
1. Overthrowing Arab dictators leads to worse repression…
Danahar’s book confirms what I thought at the time, when the Arab Spring revolts broke out back in 2011, as I followed events in the news. Naive young middle-class ‘revolutionaries’ took to the streets in spontaneous protests which weren’t centrally organised but snowballed and gathered their own momentum, leading to the overthrow of the ailing regimes and aged rulers in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.
But being naive young fools who, apparently, had never read a history book in their lives, none of these impassioned demanders of freedom and democracy appear to have had an inkling that, when you overthrow a dictator, once all the partying and midnight rallies and wild drives through the capital honking your horn are over, the old brute isn’t automatically replaced with a government of liberals and progressives, as so many of the young urban protesters and their sympathisers in the West expected. Instead, he is likely to be replaced by the quickest to organise and most ruthless in seizing power (p.24).
Thus the overthrow of Charles I led to the repressively Puritan dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell; the overthrow of Louis XIV led to the repressive dictatorship of Robespierre; the overthrow of the Czar didn’t lead to the arrival of a moderate, modernising Duma but to a coup by the best organised and most ruthless party in Russia, the Bolsheviks. When the Shah of Iran was overthrown he wasn’t replaced by a moderate, sensible etc but by the religious fundamentalism of Ayatollah Khomenei. And so on, forever.
(This pretty obvious point, that in a revolution the moderates are overwhelmed by the extremists, is made by Christopher Phillips in his excellent book The Battle for Syria, page 189, as he explains the logic which led moderate protesters to be outflanked by extremists until the extemest of the extremists, Islamic State, seized huge swathes of eastern Syria and western Iraq.)
2. Or, alternatively … chaos
Or you get scenario two: if there is no single organised party in waiting to step into the vacuum then … there will be chaos. In 2003 Saddam Hussein was overthrown in Iraq. Result? Chaos, rise of religious intolerance, civil war and ethnic cleansing. Apparently, the protesters who marched against Ben Ali in Tunisia, Gaddafi in Libya, Mubarak in Egypt, and Assad in Syria, were unaware of the example of Iraq, an Arab country like theirs, where a dictator just like theirs was forcibly overthrown. I appreciate they thought their countries would be different, and that they weren’t initially marching for regime change just for reform to make their lives less unbearable. What I’m struck by is how many of them, and their naive backers in the West, were so surprised when what happened in Iraq proceeded to happen in their countries, too.
In 2011 Gaddafi was overthrown. Result? Chaos, civil war, division of country between rival warlords. In 2011 the good people of Syria tried to overthrow their ‘Grandad’, Bashar al-Assad. Result? Syria became the most fought-over place in the world, with at least 12 different parties, factions, militias, ethnic groups and neighbouring countries all fighting each other.
I’ve just finished reading Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger’s book ‘ISIS: The State of Terror (2015) towards the end of which they make one simple but dazzlingly important point:
The only thing worse than a brutal dictatorship is no state at all. (ISIS: The State of Terror, p.237)
Or, as Barbara Bodine one-time US ambassador to Yemen puts it in Danahar’s book:
‘I don’t know anybody who liked dealing with dictators but there’s a perverse simplicity to it.’ (p.3)
Or as Danahar himself puts it:
In Egypt, where revolutionaries failed to smash the old regime, its remnants quietly nurtured and nourished those insecurities and plotted a return. In Libya, where the regime was destroyed, young men with guns bullied their way into the vacuum. In Syria, where the state held firm, it did so by unleashing the most appalling violence. It plotted to divide its opposition by setting neighbour against neighbour until no-one knew whom to trust…The Iraqi leadership [Nouri al-Maliki] pulled its country back into the sectarian abyss. The regional mayhem left many longing for the miserable certainties of their old lives under dictatorships. (p.4)
3. A cause of points 1 and 2 is the lack of democratic leaders in the Arab world
There’s a third aspect to the problem, which is less attention-grabbing than the previous two but equally if not more important. In Jack Fairweather’s book about the West’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan he makes the simple point that, once the Coalition had overthrown Saddam Hussein, it discovered that … there were no moderate, democratically-minded leaders to step into the breach.
America, as it always does in these situations (see Korea, see Vietnam) favoured a long-time exile from the country in question to become leader, in the case of Iraq, Ayad Allawi mainly because he’d spent decades lobbying and brown-nosing in Washington, cultivating the right people and persuading them that he would favour US interests. The only catch was that Allawi was almost completely unknown in Iraq and had no constituency. So when Allawi was imposed on the political turmoil post-Saddam, the only interest he was seen as representing was the invader’s.
Meanwhile, potential leaders who had remained in country during the dictatorship, often did so because they represented intractable constituencies which were too big for the dictator to tackle directly and could rely on a long tradition of resistance to central rule.
When change came, these local, often tribal leaders carried on representing their constituencies against what they perceived as just one more form of centrally imposed government, just as they had opposed all previous forms of central administration. This category includes the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who had fierce support among Iraq’s impoverished urban Shi’a communities, but also rogues like Abu Hatem, the self styled Prince of the Marshes, in the south, or the leaders of the two main Kurdish guerrilla armies in the north.
Thus Iraq had political ‘leaders’, but none of them the kind of democratically minded, technocratic, moderate politicians who, in western countries, can be assigned responsibility for government departments and expected to run them with a modicum of ability and fair mindedness. Nothing like.
Fairweather’s point is that there was an almost complete absence of those kind of people in Iraq and a total absence in Afghanistan. Instead, as this account suggests, you had a squabble of figures who had historically only represented one tribe or religious group or region. None of them had a national perspective and it was hoping too much to expect them to put national interests first, above the very community loyalties which had brought them to power and sustained them, sometimes for decades.
Therefore, it was entirely natural and predictable that into the vacuum created by overthrowing the old dictator did not step a cohort of Scandinavian-style, well-educated and democratically-minded politicians and technocrats, but instead a squabbling rivalry of warlords, drug barons, ethnic and religious sectarians, whose sole concern was representing the interest of ‘their’ people, placing as many of ‘their’ people in ministries and positions of power as possible, and then stealing as much money as possible from the state, for themselves and to pay off their chief backers and supporters.
Frank Ledwidge can barely bring himself to call the Afghan government a government at all, referring to it instead as a gang of warlords and drug barons who the international community gave tens of billions of dollars to, which the crooks used to build up property portfolios in the West, salt away in Swiss bank accounts and pay off their entourages. Danahar, also, refers to ‘atrocious leadership’ as being one of the basic political facts of the Middle East (p.4).
Christopher Phillips, in his detailed book about Syria, points out that, although the opposition rallied round the idea of getting rid of the wretched Bashar al-Assad, nobody – not the Americans, the Saudis, the Qataris, none of the rebels armies or jihadist groups – could think of a suitable replacement, could think of an alternative leader for the country, which goes a long way to explaining why the Syrian civil war rumbles on to the present day.
Before you start campaigning to overthrow your dictator have a plan about who you’re going to replace him with.
So: these are three well-established realities which should have informed everyone’s thinking about the so-called Arab Springs. Anyone bearing them in mind would not have been in the least surprised when overthrowing Gaddafi led to the collapse of Libya into civil war, when protests in Yemen led to civil war, when the uprising in Syria led to the bitterest civil war anywhere for decades. Egypt got off lightly when the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been clamouring for power for generations, turned out, once handed power, to be rubbish at ruling and were replaced within two years by yet another military regime. Given the chaos erupting in countries to the west and east and south (with yet another civil war kicking off in Sudan, as of spring 2023), I’d say the Egyptians got off lightly. An oppressive authoritarian state is miles better than no state at all.
4. Should the West intervene?
No. Read any of the last ten books I’ve reviewed about Britain and America’s interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq to understand why. The fundamental reason is not that Arab nations refuse to be ‘democratised’ by outsiders, or that Arab nations are particularly unsuited to ‘democracy’, or that we in the West are staggeringly ignorant and simple-minded in our understanding of Arab culture – though all these things are true.
The main objection is simply that we’re useless at intervening. As Stern and Berger put it in their book about ISIS:
The rise of ISIS is to some extent the unintended consequence of Western intervention in Iraq. Coalition forces removed a brutal dictator from power but they also broke the Iraqi state. The West lacked the patience, the will and the wisdom to build a new, inclusive one. (ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger, page 238)
On Radio 4 today I heard a woman journalist in Afghanistan passionately reporting on the oppression of women in Afghanistan. Taliban government. Fundamentalist Islam. Oppression of women. Which bit comes as a surprise?
The only interest in listening to her piece came from wondering: what, exactly, does this woman journalist expect us to do about it? Invade Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban and put in place a moderate, modernising regime? Reconstruct the country’s infrastructure and be greeted everywhere as friends and liberators?
Um. Didn’t we just get through trying that? In Iraq and Afghanistan, both? And how did they turn out? Social collapse, bloody civil war, mass refugees, while a) losing lots of Western soldiers killed by ‘insurgents’ , b) killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians, c) stoking civil war and ethnic cleansing, and d) achieving nothing permanent in the way of ‘reconstruction’ or ‘development’, despite e) spending over $2 trillion in both countries. Shall we try that again? No.
Maybe we will finally learn the hard lesson which Michael Ignatieff’s series of books about the new world disorder lead up to, echoed in Frank Ledwidge’s two analyses of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the moral of Rory Stewart’s detailed, acerbic account of his time as governor of an Iraqi province – which is that western governments and international bodies need to be much, much, much more realistic about the pitifully little that they can achieve by intervening in the internal affairs of failing states; and much, much, much, much more cautious about where we intervene and why, and what we can realistically expect the outcomes to be.
The harsh reality is that our interventions are almost always catastrophically counter-productive. We are, quite simply, useless at ‘nation building’, for the scores of reasons listed in Ignatieff, Ledwidge, Fairweather and Stewart’s books.
So the girls and women of Afghanistan will suffer from the oppressive behaviour of the men of Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. Just as the people of Syria, Yemen and Sudan will continue to endure unending civil wars, the Uyghur Muslims and Tibetans will suffer under China’s oppression, the Amazonian Indians will be wiped out, hundreds of thousands of people will starve to death each year in Africa, and any country neighbouring Russia is likely to be invaded and devastated by Putin’s brutal armies.
That’s what the world is like. I didn’t create it. I don’t approve of it. I’m just trying to understand it by unsentimentally studying the facts of how we humans actually behave.
Credit
The New Middle East: The World After The Arab Spring by Paul Danahar was published by Bloomsbury Books in 2013. References are to the revised 2015 paperback edition.
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