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Overview
Since the first wave of uprisings in 2011, the euphoria of the "Arab Spring" has given way to the gloom of backlash and a descent into mayhem and war. The revolution has been overwhelmed by clashes between rival counter-revolutionary forces: resilient old regimes on the one hand and Islamic fundamentalist contenders on the other.
In this eagerly awaited book, foremost Arab world and international affairs specialist Gilbert Achcar analyzes the factors of the regional relapse. Focusing on Syria and Egypt, Achcar assesses the present stage of the uprising and the main obstacles, both regional and international, that prevent any resolution. In Syria, the regime's brutality has fostered the rise of jihadist forces, among which the so-called Islamic State emerged as the most ruthless and powerful. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood's year in power was ultimately terminated by the contradictory conjunction of a second revolutionary wave and a bloody reactionary coup. Events in Syria and Egypt offer salient examples of a pattern of events happening across the Middle East.
Morbid Symptoms offers a timely analysis of the ongoing Arab uprising that will engage experts and general readers alike. Drawing on a unique combination of scholarly and political knowledge of the Arab region, Achcar argues that, short of radical social change, the region will not achieve stability any time soon.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781503600478 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/25/2016 |
| Series: | Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Morbid Symptoms
Relapse in the Arab Uprising
By Gilbert Achcar
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Gilbert AchcarAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0047-8
CHAPTER 1
Syria
The Clash of Barbarisms
If one side uses force without compunction, undeterred by the bloodshed it involves, while the other side refrains, the first will gain the upper hand. That side will force the other to follow suit; each will drive its opponent toward extremes ...
Carl von Clausewitz, On War (1816–1830)
My assessment of the Syrian situation in The People Want concluded as follows:
[S]ince there exists no political-military leadership equal to the task of the Syrian uprising, the sectarian dynamics of the conflict have inevitably intensified the longer it has gone on. The regime's increasingly blind, deadly violence and the accumulation of sectarian massacres perpetrated by its special forces or its shabbiha have begun to provoke reactions of the same general sort from Sunni fighters, who are, moreover, being egged on by the Saudi Wahhabis' sectarian propaganda....
The armed Syrian uprising is confronted with two acute problems. The first is the marked superiority of the regime's military forces ... [This] superiority is being maintained by outside support – political support and arms from Russia, financial support, arms, and fighters from Iran and its regional allies....
The Western capitals, with Washington in the lead ... never ceased to proclaim their unwillingness to intervene. As in Libya, they have refused to deliver weapons to the combatants out of fear that those arms will be directed against their interests in the medium or long term....
[Thus] the second acute problem with which the insurrection is faced [is] money. ... Money is needed to provision the Syrian combatants, as well as to provide them with the weapons that they cruelly lack. In this respect, the most privileged of all those fighting the Syrian regime are the fundamentalist Sunni groups: funds emanating from the Saudi government or the Wahhabi religious institution are reaching them. These funds give them an indisputable advantage over the networks of citizen-fighters who have declared allegiance to the [Free Syrian Army]. They thus intensify the potential danger that these fundamentalist Sunni groups represent for the Syrian uprising as well as for the country's future in general. From this point of view as well, the sooner the Syrian regime topples, the better. The longer it lasts, the greater is the risk that the country will plunge into barbarism.
Written in the autumn of 2012, this prognosis was predicated, on the one hand, on the fatal dynamics resulting from the lack of a counterweight to the Syrian regime's military prevalence, enhanced by Russian and Iranian full-spectrum support, and, on the other hand, on the reliance of Western powers on Gulf oil monarchies as funders of the Syrian opposition. In the early period of the civil war, when the armed force of the mainstream Syrian opposition – the Free Syrian Army (FSA), linked to the Syrian National Council, and later to the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces that succeeded the former as the main body of the mainstream opposition – was still predominant among insurgents on the battlefield, Washington did not provide it with anything more than token support. This was despite the fact that this mainstream opposition, with its dominant mixture of Muslim Brotherhood, traditional politicians and secular liberal modernists, was quite compatible with US interests. Later on, when this coalition started losing ground among anti-regime forces, to the advantage of rival Islamic fundamentalist forces that were both hostile to the progressive aspirations of the 2011 uprising and ideologically inimical to the West, Washington increased its support to the FSA within limits that remained closer to a symbolic gesture than to real support. The bottom line is that Barack Obama has persistently denied the Syrian opposition the defensive weapons it has most crucially needed – and insistently requested – in order to circumscribe the regime's military advantage: first and foremost, advanced anti-aircraft weapons.
The Abandonment of the Syrian People
A monopoly of air power and full control of the air above Syria have, of course, provided the Assad regime's most decisive military edge. The regime felt safe enough in that respect to indulge in cheaper and more murderous (i.e. more "cost-effective") low-altitude strikes: since the summer of 2012, the Assad regime has resorted increasingly to using helicopters as bombers, loading them with rudimentary but hugely and indiscriminately murderous and destructive "barrel bombs". To curtail this edge, the Syrian opposition did not, and could not, request large surface-to-air missiles of the kind that requires sophisticated military capabilities for its handling and use. It requested advanced portable missiles (known as man-portable air-defence systems – MANPADS), such as the US-made FIM-92H Stinger-RMP missile, a weapon whose market unit cost is less than $45,000. Turkey could easily have supplied such MANPADS with Gulf states' funding, as it is itself involved in the production of the Stinger systems. However, the US vetoed early on any such deliveries.
To keep control of the flow of weapons to the Syrian rebels, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar formed a joint operations room early this year [2012] in a covert project US officials watched from afar.
The US has limited its support of the rebels to communications equipment, logistics and intelligence. But US officials have coordinated with the trio of countries sending arms and munitions to the rebels. The Pentagon and CIA ramped up their presence on Turkey's southern border as the weapons began to flow to the rebels in two to three shipments every week.
In July, the US effectively halted the delivery of at least 18 manpads sourced from Libya, even as the rebels pleaded for more effective antiaircraft missiles to counter regime airstrikes in Aleppo, people familiar with that delivery said.
Up to the time of writing, the Syrian opposition, all tendencies included, possessed mostly antiquated Soviet-made antiaircraft weapons, including shoulder-fired missiles, seized from the Syrian army's stocks. The supply of a few Chinese-made MANPADS (FN-6) to Syrian rebel groups in 2013 enabled them to shoot down two Soviet-era helicopters (Mil MI-8), a feat that they celebrated with much fanfare. (Although this supply was shrouded in secrecy as it circumvented the US veto, the New York Times reported that they were sold by Sudan's government to Qatar, which arranged their delivery through Turkey.) These were no state-of-the-art MANPADS (the Chinese equivalent of the FIM-92 is the more advanced FN16), and most of them did not even work. And yet, the very fact that such achievements remained exceptional, and were celebrated each time accordingly, only illustrates the scarcity of such weapons in the hands of the Syrian opposition.
In the summer of 2013, when the Syrian regime was mounting a full-fledged counter-offensive, with the support of Iran and its regional proxies – when the situation was indeed "at the tipping point" in the words of a Western official quoted by the Wall Street Journal – General Salim Idris, then FSA's chief of staff, requested in a "desperate plea" (the journal's phrase) 100 shoulder-fired missiles. To no avail. Similar requests had been made to Washington since the previous summer. "But proposals to arm the rebels, advocated by then-Central Intelligence Agency chief David Petraeus and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, ran into opposition in the White House from Mr Obama." The conspicuous contrast between the scale of US support to the Syrian opposition and Russian support to the regime has been aptly emphasised by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad:
The conflict in Syria is often described as a "proxy war" between the US and Russia. Syrian rebels are rarely mentioned without the obligatory prefix "US-backed". (The regime army on the other hand isn't often described as "Russian-backed".) The backing, though tangible, takes distinctly different forms; and the support that the contending parties have received reflects the character of their patrons.
Not used to doing things by half, Russia has supplied the Syrian regime with bombers, gunships, armour and missiles. The US, on the other hand, has spent many years trying to ensure that no anti-aircraft weapon would reach Syrian rebels lest it affect its ally Israel's ability to bomb Syria with impunity. Instead, its support has taken the form of non-lethal aid, such as night-vision goggles and satellite phones. It took many years before it supplied outdated tow antitank missiles but has refrained from passing on any game-changing technology.
Had the attitude of the Obama administration been simply one of "non-intervention", it could have been seen as catering to American public opinion against US involvement in yet another military venture – although there is no indication that the public would have objected to US support to the Syrian insurgency short of direct military involvement. But the administration did actually intervene quite decisively in the Syrian events by preventing its regional allies from providing the Syrian opposition with the qualitative weapons that it needed, thus increasing the imbalance resulting from Russian and Iranian intervention on the side of the Syrian regime.
In order to justify his lack of effective support to the Syrian moderate opposition, one of Barack Obama's arguments – not to say pretexts – was that it lacked the necessary manpower to handle the weapons that it requested. Thus, on 19 June 2014 – in response to a journalist asking him: "The United States has been slow to provide significant weapons and training directly to the Syrian opposition. Has the expansion of the Syria war into Iraq changed your mind about the type of weapons and training we're now willing to give the opposition there?" – the US president argued the following:
The question has never been whether we thought this was a serious problem. The question has always been, is there the capacity of moderate opposition on the ground to absorb and counteract extremists that might have been pouring in, as well as an Assad regime supported by Iran and Russia that outmanned them and was ruthless.
And so we have consistently provided that opposition with support. Oftentimes, the challenge is if you have former farmers or teachers or pharmacists who now are taking up opposition against a battle-hardened regime, with support from external actors that have a lot at stake, how quickly can you get them trained; how effective [sic] are you able to mobilise them. And that continues to be a challenge.
When trying to justify the same lack of support, US vice president Joseph Biden argued exactly the contrary in a famously gaffe-ridden performance at Harvard University, on 2 October 2014: "The fact of the matter is the ability to identify a moderate middle in Syria – there was no moderate middle, because the moderate middle are made up of shopkeepers, not soldiers. They are made up of people who in fact [are] ordinary elements of the middle class in that country." Thus, in short, the Obama administration did not give effective support to the Syrian opposition because (1) it is composed of "farmers or teachers or pharmacists" instead of soldiers (Obama), and (2) there were no "shopkeepers" or "middle class" among them but only soldiers (Biden). The flagrant contradiction between the president's and his deputy's statements betrays the vacuity and falsity of such pretexts. Rather than a lack of confidence in the opposition's military skills, there are some grounds to believe that Washington did not seriously support any particular group of the Syrian opposition because it could not guarantee their loyalty to US interests. As then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey wrote in August 2013 in response to a formal query from a member of the US Congress: "Syria today is not about choosing between two sides but rather about choosing one among many sides. It is my belief that the side we choose must be ready to promote their interests and ours when the balance shifts in their favor. Today, they are not."
In tune with this political distrust is the argument that the Syrian opposition could not be trusted to keep US weapons from falling into the wrong hands – the hands of terrorist groups that are fiercely hostile to the United States and the West, such as al-Qaida. This was indeed the key pretext invoked by the Obama administration to justify its refusal to deliver anti-aircraft weapons to the Syrian dissidents, as well as its refusal to allow the United States' regional allies to provide them with such weapons, even if not US-made. When Washington's Arab allies – dismayed by the escalation in Tehran's backing of the Assad regime and disappointed by the failure of Moscow to exert firm pressure on the regime for a compromise at the Geneva talks (Geneva II Conference on Syria, January–February 2014) – requested anew from the Obama administration that it allow them to deliver anti-aircraft weapons to the Syrian opposition, their request was met with rejection all the same. The Wall Street Journal reported:
Saudi Arabia has offered to give the opposition for the first time Chinese man-portable air defense systems, or MANPADS, and antitank guided missiles from Russia, according to an Arab diplomat and several opposition figures with knowledge of the efforts. Saudi officials couldn't be reached to comment.
The US has long opposed arming rebels with anti-aircraft missiles for fear they could fall into the hands of extremists who might use them against the West or commercial airlines. The Saudis have held off supplying them in the past because of US opposition. A senior Obama administration official said Friday that the US objection remains the same. "There hasn't been a change internally on our view," the official said.
Faced with similar pressure from the United States' Arab allies, the White House leaked information aimed at giving the impression that it had weighed very carefully the option of providing anti-aircraft weapons to the Syrian insurgents. Time magazine carried an article on this issue, in which the view attributed to "an Arab official" that "the introduction of MANPADS could be a game changer in Syria, like it was in Afghanistan in the 1980s with Stinger missiles" is countered with a belittling of the potential impact of such weapons on the conflict, along with the adumbration of a catastrophic scenario of global economic disruption by terrorism: "A 2005 Rand Corp. study found that the shooting down of a civilian airliner might temporarily freeze air travel worldwide and produce total economic losses of more than $15 billion." The article concluded: "Even [US Senator John] McCain seems to acknowledge that MANPADS would have a primarily humanitarian use, as a defense against helicopter-borne barrel bombs. And for now at least, that's not reason enough for Obama to risk a $15 billion nightmare."
Leaving its cynicism aside, this argument does not even hold water; it is a blatant instance of scaremongering in order to make up a pretext. As Anthony Cordesman, a prominent expert on military and security affairs working for a bipartisan strategic think tank based in Washington, noted in a perceptive and comprehensive assessment of US options in Syria, "the US has now had years in which to modify key weapons like [MANPADS] and ATGMS [anti-tank guided missiles] to limit their active life, the areas in which they can operate, and their vulnerability to US countermeasures." When Washington reluctantly consented to deliver "a small number" of BGM-71 tow anti-tank missiles to Syrian anti-regime fighters in the spring of 2014, they were "equipped with a complex, fingerprint-keyed security device" controlling who could fire them, according to a security expert quoted by the Wall Street Journal.
Moreover, it is not as if no MANPADS have ever fallen into the hands of terrorists, or ever been used against civil aviation. According to a 2011 report by the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs of the US State Department, "Since 1975, 40 civilian aircraft have been hit by MANPADS, causing about 28 crashes and more than 800 deaths around the world. ... Thousands of MANPADS ... are believed to be outside of the control of national governments. The United States believes that a number of terrorist organizations, including al-Qaida, have MANPADS in their possession." To this it should be added that "the black market cost of MANPADS can vary widely, ranging from as little as a few hundred dollars to over one hundred thousand dollars, depending on the model and its condition." This is not to argue that MANPADS in the hands of lunatic terrorists are not a serious threat – they definitely are – but to show that the $15 billion scenario is not worth 15 cents. The potential terrorist threat would hardly have increased had the Syrian opposition been provided with MANPADS programmed in such a way that their operational workability would remain under control.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Morbid Symptoms by Gilbert Achcar. Copyright © 2016 Gilbert Achcar. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Of Revolutionary Cycles and SeasonsSyria The Clash of Barbarisms
Egypt The "23 July" of Abdul-Fattah Al-Sisi
Conclusion: "Arab Winter" and Hope