The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (18 page)

Rashed, like much of the staff, is a real liberal. His columns have been translated into English to demonstrate that liberal opinion does have a strong place in Arab media, if not all of Arab society. Indeed the network adopted this perspective not because the business model assumes a larger market share—Al Arabiya, like Al Jazeera, has never run anything but deficits—but because it suits Saudi financial and political interests ill served by the jihad that Saudi princes back elsewhere. With so much at stake, the Saudi royals have virtually total control over the content of the media they own, and London-based Saudi journalists winding down in a Soho pub on Friday nights are accustomed to fielding phone calls from members of the royal family with last-minute edits.

In the end, satellite news networks have little to do with opening up public space for the Arab masses; Arab media is a conversation between Arab elites, used to influence opinion, promote interests, and tinker with the internal design of rival regimes. As Al Jazeera is
an instrument of Qatari foreign policy that allows its owner, the emir of Qatar, to project more power than the size and resources of the tiny emirate would naturally dictate by targeting conservative Arab regimes, the Saudi-owned liberal media advances the pro-business, pro-U.S. aspect of Saudi policy.

 O
ne of the common misconceptions about the U.S.-Saudi relationship is that Riyadh supplies Americans with most of their energy resources. In fact, while Saudi Arabia is the swing producer of oil, only about 20 percent of our oil comes from the Gulf; our presence there is in order to prevent any disruption that would send oil prices everywhere soaring and to secure the free flow of fossil fuels that supply most of western Europe, Japan, China, and India with their energy needs. If it seems strange that the Bahrain-based U.S. Fifth Fleet plays watchdog for the rest of the world’s oil, it is worth remembering that American trade and commerce depend on the stability and prosperity of other nations and the global economy as a whole. U.S. hegemony in the Persian Gulf is a vital national interest for every American regardless of the size of his or her automobile and has been so ever since Franklin Delano Roosevelt struck a deal with King Abdul Aziz Al-Saud in a February 1944 meeting on Egypt’s Great Bitter Lake.

Oil is not just the lifeblood of the world economy; it also determines Washington’s ability to wage war, a pursuit that requires a lot of fuel, and we were particularly keen to protect it from the Soviets during the Cold War. But because the United States advertised itself as anti-imperialist—a prerogative that helped us ruin the British position in the region—we couldn’t very well administer an empire ourselves. Instead, Saudi Arabia and the Shah’s Iran became the twin pillars of our Gulf security strategy.

Getting local allies to protect U.S. interests and do the dirty work so that Washington doesn’t have to dispatch troops is called “offshore
balancing,” a strategy that worked well in the eastern Mediterranean, where Israel’s might, and staunch American support, have prevented the outbreak of a full-scale, or state-versus-state, war for over thirty-five years. However, the Persian Gulf is a different situation, for no matter how many arms we sold Riyadh and Tehran, Washington had no Gulf proxy strong enough to patrol the region on its behalf or even, as the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran showed, capable of saving themselves.

In 1980, a year after Khomeini’s overthrow of the Shah removed one pillar of U.S. security in the Persian Gulf, President Jimmy Carter laid out the Carter Doctrine. It stipulated that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
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This policy was bolstered in 1981 while the Iran-Iraq war was in full swing and Ronald Reagan pledged that the United States would use force to protect the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
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The fall of the Berlin Wall almost a decade later provided an opportunity to rethink our Gulf strategy: With the Soviets gone, who threatens the Gulf oil that the industrialized nations depend on? As Khomeini had shown in 1979, it was local actors who posed the biggest threat to Gulf stability. And so it should not have been a very big surprise when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 and threatened to make a run at the grand prize, Saudi oil fields.

After Operation Desert Storm, Washington left a large force in Saudi Arabia to deter local threats, but as we now know, thanks to bin Laden’s helpful explanation, the presence of infidel troops compromised the Islamic bona fides of the state and destabilized the royal family. That fact should have alerted Washington to the strategic dangers of Gulf schizophrenia. If the world’s largest known reserves of oil were imperiled by domestic elements in Saudi Arabia, which can neither protect itself nor be protected without threatening
the legitimacy of the royal family, then the regime that Washington considered the cornerstone of its Gulf security strategy is inherently unstable. The Saudi royal family could very well meet the fate of the Shah.

In time, American policy makers saw the situation was even worse than they had imagined when, after 9/11, the schizophrenic nature of Saudi policy at the same time became plain: while members of the Saudi royal family relied on U.S. military might to protect them from foreign enemies, their domestic security depended on their ability to redirect the political furies of domestic rivals onto those same Americans who protected them. The Bush administration was rightly furious with the Saudis but had little leverage in compelling them to choose a side once and for all. Ideally, the White House would have liked to play balance-of-power politics and use Iran to pressure Riyadh, but given the nature of the regime in Tehran, that was tantamount to playing Russian roulette with a U.S. vital interest, for the Persian Gulf, one of the world’s most important waterways, is essentially an American lake.
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Even the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, paradoxically, did not strengthen Washington’s hand, since Saddam, who in 1990 had seemed poised to overrun Riyadh, had in the years since become a linchpin of Saudi regional security. He not only contained Iran but also, as his fall from power in 2003 demonstrated, papered over Sunni weakness.

It is generally believed that the United States’ greatest concern over the Iranian nuclear program is for Israel, a conviction that Washington has done little to correct. By limiting their public concerns to what WMD in the hands of the clerical regime meant for Israel, the Americans refrained from putting the Gulf Arabs in an awkward position. The truth, after all, is that Israel has a nuclear deterrent and can defend itself, and the GCC states can’t. They depend entirely on the United States for protection from their Shiite rival. If the nightmare scenario of an Iranian nuclear program is that it poses an existential threat to the Jewish state, in its more practical
day-to-day application, a doomsday device in the hands of Tehran’s revolutionary regime would allow it to set the Middle East’s political, cultural, and financial agenda, tipping the scales in favor of the Shia Persians and against the Sunni Arabs, who have been the regional power for almost a millennium and a half.

Iran’s nuclear program is not in itself the main issue; it is merely one of Tehran’s assets—along with Hezbollah, Hamas, and such—but it is the most prominent, and the fear and noise surrounding the program have distracted Washington and the international community from recognizing that it is merely one instrument with which Iran can accomplish its strategic aims: to overturn the U.S.-backed regional order, send the Americans packing, and become the strong horse in the Persian Gulf.

And so with no other choice, Washington found itself stuck with the Sunnis, and forced to leave its dispute with Riyadh till later. For the Saudis the situation was more desperate: with their American protector tied down in Iraq, where U.S. forces had taken down their man Saddam and crippled their expeditionary force in Al Qaeda, the only instrument of power the Sunnis had left at their disposal was an oil weapon they were loath to use, and their media.

As a result, beginning in late 2005, the Sunnis turned up the heat on the resistance bloc, with Al Arabiya playing a leading role. In a winter 2005 interview, the former vice president of Syria accused Syrian president Bashar al-Assad of killing the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. In spring 2006, in another interview, Hosni Mubarak addressed the Iran question in baldly sectarian terms. “Most of the Shias [in Arab countries] are loyal to Iran,” said the Egyptian president. “And not to the countries they are living in.” Egypt’s Shia population is virtually nonexistent, but Mubarak articulated the fears of GCC rulers, who typically regard their large number of Shia subjects as a potential fifth column. In May 2008, during Hezbollah’s takeover of Beirut, Al Arabiya assiduously presented the Sunni version of events on the ground. It documented some of Hezbollah’s less successful operations and prominently featured
footage of a terrified couple and their infant son, images intended to put Hezbollah’s actions in West Beirut on par with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. The Dubai-based network helped create the regional Sunni consensus, which was that Hezbollah and its Iranian patron needed to be flogged.

The Saudi-owned media made much of the fact that Al Jazeera, house organ of the resistance bloc, was owned by an Arab ruler hosting the U.S. military. The emir of Qatar was among those chiding the Americans for refusing to recognize and assist Hamas as the legal representatives of the Palestinian people. Interestingly, the harangues of a tribal chieftain/hereditary monarch who had deposed his father, which accused the United States of hypocrisy for not living up to its own standards, were not entirely without merit.

Of course the fact that American pressure won the Palestinians their ability to choose their own leaders does not therefore require Washington to fund and befriend whomever the Palestinians chose to elect. Citizenries that elect their governments are accountable for the policies they choose at the ballot box, Palestinian voters no less than American ones. The Arabs did not understand the principles of representative government, but the White House’s freedom package included no instructions on how democracy actually works. Instead, it was handed off like a toy on Christmas morning, like an iPhone left out for the Arabs to figure out on their own.

When the Americans showed a lack of faith in their own ideas, Arab pathologies filled the vacuum, and Washington came to accept the schizophrenia of the Arabic-speaking Middle East as a suitable condition for democracy. U.S. policy makers, from the president on down, justified their laissez-faire attitude with the argument that Arab democracy would not look like ours anyway but would embody the traditions and morals of Arab society. It was inevitable after all that the Arabs would take a pass on some of the social values that Americans tend to associate with a democratic way of life, like gender equality and other issues like “anti-religious speech and behavior.”
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But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t host a book fair and
ban books, or an international sports tournament and block participants from countries you don’t like. And you can’t call a form of political organization that draws red lines on freedom of expression and persecutes Middle Eastern minorities like atheists and women Arab democracy. If democracy is not universal, if all men are not created equal with certain inalienable rights, then it is not democracy in any meaningful sense of the word. The special pleading on behalf of “Arab democracy” should have made it clear that Arab societies were simply not equipped, not at this time anyway, for the transformation that the White House had envisioned. Likewise, it was obvious that the Americans didn’t know where they were going either or, even worse, where they’d come from.

The White House’s freedom agenda was at cross-purposes: while it demanded from Middle Easterners what was effectively a political and cultural revolution from the bottom up, the American strategy was to install democracy from the top down. Democracy would democratize the Arabs, just as technology would release their rich creativity, and the new Arab media would lead to freedom of expression. But these are by-products, not starting blocks, and the notion that they are capable of activating a society’s progressive impulses without the efforts of real human beings to transform those societies is absurd. Democracy does not liberate a captive people; it is the system of governance with which a society of free men and women that agrees on the equality of all chooses to express its political energies. Without those underlying ideas, democracy, like media and technology, is just a neutral value that can be used to good or bad ends.

The virtues of any technology depend on the condition of the culture using it, a fact that Washington, as well as others, sometimes does recognize—or else the international community, including the Arabs, would not be so intent on keeping the Islamic Republic of Iran from acquiring a nuclear program. Democracy is not, as President Bush liked to say, transformative. Elections did not make the Arabs free; they just made the Palestinians free to vote for Hamas.
The new Arab media will not liberate the masses; it is merely another instrument that Arab leaders use to fight each other. And as for technology, on 9/11 Arab fighters used airplanes, a Western technology designed to bridge distances and nations, to kill almost three thousand people.

 “T
here are a hundred years’ worth of bills that the Arabs haven’t paid,” said Hazem Saghieh, the Lebanese-born columnist for
Al-Hayat
, the London-based pan-Arab daily, and one of the leading voices of contemporary Arab liberalism. We were having breakfast in downtown Beirut, an area rebuilt after Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil wars, an eruption of forces still resonating throughout the region. Despite his warm, quick laugh, he describes himself as a pessimist by nature. “In Iraq,” he says, “the Americans thought the problem was Saddam’s regime. Once you get the regime out of the way, then things would be okay. But they’re not. The Arabs on the other hand have always thought the problem in the region was colonialism, Europe, the United States, but it’s not. The problem is the society.