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The Middle East is no
stranger to doom and gloom. The most enduring conflict of the past
century, between Israelis and Palestinians, drags on drearily today.
The first wars of the 21st century have also unfolded there, in
Afghanistan, Iraq, western Sudan and Lebanon.
This being so, the West has
a long history of espying new spectres in the region. In the 1950s and
1960s it was Nasser, Egypt's passionate pan-Arabist leader. In the
1970s it was Palestinian terrorism; in the 1980s Khomeini's Islamic
revolution; since the turn of the century, al-Qaeda-style mayhem; and
now again revolutionary Iran, newly expansionary and perhaps, some
day, armed with nukes.
Some of these imagined
threats to the global order have been leftist and nationalist, some
reactionary and religious, some radical and violent. Yet all have
drawn their mobilising power from a single source. They have all been,
in essence, resistance movements, inspired by a seemingly unquenchable
popular urge to challenge the dominant perceived injustice of the day,
whether it be European colonialism, Zionism, American hegemonism or
the grip of local governments charged with selling out to the West.
The most reliable populist
cry today remains “resistance”. Sudan's strongman, Omar al-Bashir,
blasts the proposed deployment of UN troops
in Darfur as the spearhead of a new Western crusade. The Shias and
Sunnis in Iraq may be fighting each other for dominance, but the call
to “resist” the American occupiers and the weak (though elected)
government they sponsor wins passionate followers to both camps.
Hizbullah rouses region-wide cheers for bloodying Israel's nose.
Clearly, although times have changed, this dynamic has not.
What has changed is that the
call to resist now inspires unprecedented enthusiasm, galvanising many
disparate political streams at once, secular and nationalist as well
as Islamist. The religious element, boosted by the great revival that
has swept Muslim societies across the globe, adds a scriptural
drumbeat to the call. And lately the impulse to resist has also been
strengthened by the failing prestige of traditional countervailing
forces—America, the moderate governments in the region and the
liberal-minded minority of their citizens.
The most obvious sign of the
renewed attraction of resistance is the strengthening of a
rejectionist front built around the alliance between Iran and Syria.
The bond between these countries' very different regimes—one
ostensibly secular and Arab nationalist, but in fact an insular,
sectarian dictatorship, the other a Shia theocracy—goes back a
quarter-century. It was forged in opposition to their mutual neighbour,
Iraq, then under the belligerent fist of Saddam Hussein. But the scope
of this odd couple's shared interests widened over time. It came to
include such goals as keeping Lebanon under Syria's thumb, undermining
peace moves between Israel and the Palestinians so as to pressure
Israel into disgorging the Golan Heights, occupied in 1967, and making
sure America burned its fingers so badly in Iraq that the superpower
would not think of similar adventures elsewhere. The Syrian-Iranian
alliance also embraces smaller clients who share these goals, such as
the main Islamist parties championing “resistance” in Lebanon and
Palestine, Hizbullah (the Party of God) and Hamas (which means “zeal”,
but is, revealingly, an Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance
Movement).
Not so long ago, this
ungainly partnership was faring poorly. In 1997 Iranians elected a
liberal-leaning president, Muhammad Khatami, who seemed intent on
shedding his predecessors' confrontational stance. In early 2000,
Syria came close to making peace with Israel. (Very close indeed: the
actual area of the Golan Heights that remained disputed was a
150-metre-wide strip.) Though hailed as a victory by Hizbullah,
Israel's unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon that spring put
into question the need for continued resistance by Lebanese
guerrillas. At Camp David that summer the Palestinian issue looked set
for a resolution that would have rendered quaint Hamas's stated aim of
destroying the Jewish state.
The Iraq factor
The past few years have
reversed all these trends. The collapse of the Camp David summit and
the eruption of a second, far more violent intifada
radicalised the Palestinians, with the result that elections in
January of this year produced a landslide for Hamas. Disappointed by
the failure of American peace brokerage and America's drift, under the
Bush administration, into ever more solid support for Israel, Syria
reverted to putting pressure on its Israeli adversary by other means,
such as supplying huge numbers of rockets to its Lebanese client,
Hizbullah, and offering political sanctuary to Hamas. Radical
conservatives in Iran, meanwhile, outmanoeuvred fractious liberals to
secure the election, in June 2005, of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a
hardliner, as president. The supreme leader of Iran's revolution,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who masterminded this coup, quickly proceeded
to accelerate the country's nuclear programme.
But it was, above all,
American policy that boosted the rejectionist alliance. Seeking
targets to retaliate against after September 11th, the Bush
administration chose to focus on what it labelled “state sponsors” of
terrorism. It also lumped together groups such as Hizbullah and Hamas,
whose chief agenda was local and nationalist and did not threaten
America, with the global terrorist network of al-Qaeda, which had not
only declared war on the superpower and on “Jews and Crusaders”, but
had also launched hostilities in the most dramatic fashion
conceivable.
In May 2002 the
administration added Syria to its “axis of evil” (originally Iran,
Iraq and North Korea). This seemed odd at the time, since Syria was
providing America with useful counter-terrorism intelligence, and Iran
had played a helpful role in the overthrow of the Taliban in
Afghanistan. In 2003 America rebuffed a back-channel Iranian effort to
start a dialogue, and later that year slapped sanctions on Syria. “We
would have been happy to play the game with them,” sighed a Syrian
official at the time. “But they wanted all our cards with nothing in
return.”
America's invasion of Iraq,
meanwhile, produced a cascade of responses that bolstered the
resistance front. The intrusion threatened to drive a physical wedge
between Iran and Syria, and so reinforced their mutual need. It
emboldened Iraq's Kurdish minority, so raising fears of unrest in
Syria's and Iran's own oppressed Kurdish regions. Yet it also
empowered the long-disenfranchised Shia majority, a natural bridgehead
for Iranian influence. And obviously it removed Saddam Hussein's army,
the main military obstacle to the projection of that influence farther
afield.
Far more important, the
invasion massively buttressed the old rejectionist thesis that
America's aim was to divide and rule the Muslim world, to control its
oil and to impose Western culture. Here, stirring faded memories, was
a Christian army overrunning a Muslim land, in pursuit of what George
Bush once carelessly called a “crusade” against terrorism. And here,
on the ground, was “resistance” in action, visibly humiliating the
intruding warriors.
In this potent narrative of
victimhood Israel, of course, has been held up as a prime example of
Western malevolence. But Israel's recent war with Hizbullah added rich
fuel. Hizbullah may have provoked the war, but that counted little to
the Arab world's television audiences. The tenacity of Hizbullah
fighters in defence of their villages added to the lustre of
resistance. America's foot-dragging diplomacy, and the hypocritical
aloofness of the “moderate” Arab leaders of Saudi Arabia and Egypt,
who clearly hoped privately for Hizbullah's defeat, seemed to
substantiate charges of complicity in the killing.
So entrenched now is the
idea of an American-led assault on Muslims that virtually any new
development is immediately enlisted as further evidence. The fact that
terror attacks on Westerners, carried out in the name of Islam, may
have raised some hackles goes without mention. So does the fact that
countries such as Syria, under the cloak of resistance to the West,
continue to promote agendas in Lebanon and elsewhere that have nothing
to do with anti-Americanism, but with cementing their own regional
influence.
Even high-minded Western
initiatives now arouse suspicion. The effort to deploy a tougher
peacekeeping force in Darfur, where some 200,000 people have been
killed and perhaps 1m displaced by a government-assisted slaughter of
Darfuris, is widely seen as a subterfuge. The head of the Egyptian
lawyers' union, a group which might be expected to defend the rights
of the weak, recently declared that the true target of
UN peacekeepers was Egypt: Sudan was simply
“the next stop after Iraq on the road to the heart of Cairo”.
The manner of the
ceasefire in Lebanon aroused scepticism, too. To many, the insertion
of a UN peacekeeping force was aimed at
recouping by diplomacy what Israel had lost by fighting. A recent poll
found that 84% of Lebanese believe the war was “a premeditated attempt
by the United States and Israel to impose a new regional order in the
Middle East”. As for the international siege of the Palestinians until
they renounce terrorism and accept the right of Israel to exist (see
story), the
popular perception is that the West, having claimed to support
democracy, is now punishing Palestinians for having elected Hamas in a
fair vote.
The shadow of Iran
In the popular mind,
attempts to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions also mesh neatly with the
narrative of Western powers holding back Muslims, or applying double
standards. Why can't Iran have nukes if Israel can? Iranian diplomats
ably exploit such doubts. So do a growing number of fellow-travellers
in regional politics, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian
Islamist group whose ideological offshoots include Hamas and the main
opposition movements in American-allied Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait and
Yemen. “Any country should have the right to obtain nuclear technology
or even nuclear arms for deterrence, especially if it is being
threatened by another nuclear country,” says the Brotherhood's deputy
leader, Muhammad Habib.
Such overt support from the
most influential Sunni political grouping is telling. Clearly, Iran's
vociferous backing of resistance movements has done wonders—outside
Iraq—to heal the age-old rift between the two main branches of Islam.
Elsewhere, the example of Hizbullah has—among ordinary citizens, at
least—largely dispelled looming fears, first voiced by Jordan's King
Abdullah, about the emergence of a “Shia crescent” from the
Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf where Iranian mullahs might call
upon millions of minority Arab Shias to rise up against Sunni Muslim
dominance. Lebanon's Shia resistance has provided what one senior
Western diplomat calls a new political paradigm: “an Arab party that
actually means what it says and does what it promises.”
Ayatollah Khamenei,
brandishing a Kalashnikov and speaking in his fluent classical Arabic
in a Friday sermon on October 13th, put the matter more bluntly.
Blasting critics of Hizbullah as “cringing hirelings of the Great
Satan”, he said that the Iranian-funded militia's victory had made the
group so loved that Muslims everywhere felt they had participated in
it. The claim is not far-fetched. In far-off Brunei, by the South
China Sea, the sultan issued orders for the obligatory performance of
special prayers for Israel's defeat. In Egypt, a solidly Sunni country
ostensibly allied to America, the two most popular politicians,
according to a recent survey, are the Hizbullah chief, Hassan
Nasrallah, and President Ahmadinejad of Iran.
Understandably, such
evidence of a powerful mood-swing on the Arab “street” dismays and
alarms pro-Western Arab leaders. It is not simply that the governments
of countries such as Egypt and Jordan, which long ago settled their
own problems with Israel, fear renewed public pressure to resume
“resistance” (ie, war), which is what the Muslim Brotherhood promises
if it comes to power. These American allies are hostile to Hizbullah
because the group provides a dangerous example of a potent non-state
actor armed and supported by neighbours. They abhor the Syrian regime,
blaming it for meddling (and murdering) in Lebanon and for undermining
efforts to persuade Hamas to recognise Israel. They are spooked by
Hamas's electoral success and the possibility of Islamist encroachment
much closer to home. The Muslim Brotherhood made impressive gains in
Egypt's parliamentary elections last year, and is expected to do
equally well in Jordanian polls scheduled for 2007. Morocco, another
American ally, also faces elections next year, with analysts
predicting a shoo-in for the Islamist opposition.
America's shaky
friends
As for Iran, Egyptians have never forgiven its revolutionary leaders
for naming a Tehran street after one of the assassins of their
peacemaking president, Anwar Sadat. Lebanon's shaky governing
coalition, now in a stand-off with Hizbullah, sees Iran as the main
obstacle to a deal under which Hizbullah might focus on being a
political party and give up its arms. Gulf states feel a more direct
threat, since many of them host American military bases.
The rulers of archly Sunni
and conservative Saudi Arabia, in particular, have long viewed Iran as
a dangerous rival. In the 1980s they blamed it for stirring unrest
among the kingdom's large Shia minority, and in response helped
bankroll Saddam Hussein's war against the Islamic Republic. During the
recent Israel-Lebanon war, when some Saudi youths made the mistake of
sticking posters of the admired Mr Nasrallah on their windscreens,
Saudi police promptly arrested them.
The Bush administration has
belatedly tried to rally its allies and to bolster such beleaguered
figures as the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and the prime
ministers of Lebanon and Iraq. But the response has been half-hearted.
This loose collection of accommodationist governments is finding it
hard to gain traction against the resistance ideal. One problem they
face is Israel, whose increasingly harsh operations against
Palestinian fighters in the West Bank and Gaza have made it more toxic
than ever. Israeli and Arab moderates both want to cool temperatures
over Palestine and Lebanon and to contain Iran. But Arabs are uneasy
at any hint of an alliance with the Jewish state.
America's own refusal to
engage directly with the resistance block has polarized and
complicated the situation. Discomfort with America grew particularly
acute over the Lebanon war, when countries such as Saudi Arabia were
forced, by public outrage at Israel's crushing response, to back away
from their criticism of Hizbullah for having started the war.
Yet, although it may lack
the rejectionists' unity of purpose and their popular appeal, the
accommodationist axis of American friends is not entirely toothless.
Gulf countries now have plenty of oil cash with which to win goodwill
by, for instance, rebuilding Lebanon and shoring up the Palestinian
economy. Such largesse could prove persuasive, too, in trying to coax
Syria away from its tight embrace of Iran, since Syria's economy
relies on oil reserves that are fast running out.
They might also make
progress, with those on the Arab street who are still willing to
listen, by posing the question of whether ordinary people really want
to sacrifice lives and treasure in an endless fight against Israel.
The answer of large numbers of Lebanese during the recent war was a
resounding no. Raghida Dergham, a columnist for the Saudi-owned daily
Al Hayat, writes sarcastically that if what she calls the
axis of extremism is resolved on war, “we hope it is ready to liberate
Palestine and not exploit the Palestinians as a tool for the ideology
and hegemony of others.”
This comment pricks at both
Iran and Syria. Few Muslims elsewhere are aware that Mr Khamenei,
aside from being supreme leader of the revolution and running the
powerful intelligence services, also styles himself Leader of the
Islamic World. This suggests a much wider agenda than simple
“resistance”. As for Syria, while it champions Islamist liberation
movements abroad, mere membership of the Muslim Brotherhood inside the
country remains a capital crime.
Arab moderates may be able
to convince the Bush administration that the best way to ease tension
would be for America itself to be more flexible. That would be wise,
because the rejectionist front may not be as intractable as it
appears. Syria's president has repeatedly signaled that he would shift
his position if only some reward, such as a chance to recover the
Golan Heights, were offered. Recent polling among Palestinians shows a
similar openness to persuasion.
It is also clear that a
powerful sector of Islamist opinion is so fundamentally rejectionist
that it will never change. The best the West can do may be to ensure
that it does not push more moderates into that camp. It could start by
remembering that people choose to “resist” when they feel threatened.
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