CAIRO - It is now the long morning after
for President George W Bush and his merry band of
misguided Middle East grand strategists, who
gambled big by letting the Israeli army run wild
in Lebanon and came up empty.
As in Iraq,
circa March 2003, the Arab world was supposed to
have been shocked and awed by an almighty display
of US-made firepower, with the uppity Islamists
rather than the uppity Arab
nationalists on the receiving
end this time around.
Hezbollah would wilt
beneath the firestorm and Lebanese democracy would
flourish anew through the cracks of the newly made
rubble. Seeing their proxy brought low, Syria and
Iran, Hezbollah's backers, would cower in
frightened obeisance.
But it was not to
be. Hezbollah faced down the Israelis, with its
small guerrilla force outmaneuvering Israeli units
at every step. For example, the elite Sayaret
Maglan unit, wrote Uzi Manihami in The Times of
London, "were astonished by the firepower and
perseverance of Hezbollah". Said one Maglan
soldier: "Evidently they had never heard that an
Arab soldier is supposed to run away after a short
engagement with the Israelis."
The United
States, having held Israel's hat while it killed
more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians (but still
failed to achieve its objectives), now faces an
even greater crisis of credibility than it already
did, if such a thing is imaginable.
And
ironically, the war has given even greater
momentum to the Islamist movements already
bolstered by America's ham-fisted policies in
Iraq, Palestine, Iran and elsewhere.
Egypt
is a perfect example. Here Hezbollah's success
against Israel and the Hosni Mubarak government's
failure to support the Shi'ite militia (initially
it joined Jordan and the Saudis in blaming
Hezbollah for the conflict) have emboldened the
opposition. The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's
largest opposition group, has been a particular
beneficiary. Responding to the public mood
somewhat better, the group's leader, Mahdi Akef,
offered to dispatch "10,000 mujahideen" to
Lebanon.
It takes a great deal to shake
the Arab world's sleeping giant - Egypt's
world-weary masses are less depoliticized than
they are political cynics preoccupied with making
ends meet. The government is likewise preoccupied
with keeping its people sated with their daily
bread, while filling the streets with security
forces just in case a loaf is not enough to stifle
any rumblings of discontent, no matter how small.
These factors combined to ensure that no
more than 1,000 Egyptians (in a country of more
than 70 million) managed to reach any one street
protest during the war. But this should not
obscure the fact that the opposition, of all
trends, were boosted by the Mubarak government's
equivocal response to the war and Hezbollah's
success, and unified in vociferous opposition to
US support for Israel.
Egypt may not be
the regional force it once was, but most analysts
would still agree that where Egypt goes, so may
the Arab world - and in that sense, the war
doesn't augur well for the US.
Some
analysis had imagined the Sunni-Shi'ite divide
widening over this war. Former US ambassador to
Israel and pro-Israel lobbyist Martin Indyk sees
in the Saudi, Jordanian and Egyptian positions the
possibility for Israel of "a tacit alliance with
the Sunni Arab world against Iran". But the Arab
public has shown none of officialdom's
squeamishness about throwing its lot in with
Shi'ite Hezbollah, and state rhetoric has shifted
to take public sentiment into account.
Egypt is the largest Sunni-majority Arab
state, and its authorities at al-Azhar, the most
important seat of Sunni learning, have not
begrudged tiny, Shi'ite Hezbollah its success
against mighty Israel.
Beyond the pulpit,
more important, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah
has become a folk hero. His namesakes populate the
maternity wards, including the twins Hassan and
Nasrallah of Alexandria. His portrait adorns
taxis, bookstores, cafes and, for some reason, the
stalls of an inordinate number of fruit sellers
(fakahany) in the Egyptian capital. And he
came in first in a poll of those leaders most
admired by Egyptians that was carried out by
government opponent Saadedine Ibrahim's Ibn
Khaldun Center.
The fact that Iranian
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad came second in that
poll is symptomatic of US failures in the region.
Iran's willingness to risk a confrontation with
the US over its nuclear program has won it many
admirers and, rather than fearing an abstract
Persian or Shi'ite threat, many Arabs wish their
governments were similarly forthright.
Hezbollah's public relations bonanza in
the Arab world encapsulates secularism's long,
slow defeat in its effort to convince the public
that it has the answers to their myriad
afflictions. Try as they might, the liberal
opposition in Egypt fail to capture the popular
imagination. Their anti-authoritarian message is
reasonable enough, but falls flat in a region that
feels itself under siege.
But even were
liberals' fortunes to turn, it would be cold
comfort for the Bush administration. Whatever
faith liberals held in the United States as a
force for good has long since vanished. The Kefaya
movement, for example, which campaigns for
Mubarak's ouster, is the ideological opposite of
the more powerful Brotherhood. They were,
nevertheless, of one mind when it came to Lebanon,
with Kefaya matching the Brotherhood's bluster
with its own petition to procure a million
signatures to abrogate Egypt's peace treaty with
Israel.
The normally pro-US liberal
sociologist Saadedine Ibrahim, a thorn in the
regime's side who was jailed for his troubles,
recently wrote scathingly of the bitter harvest
for US policy.
"Their policies in support
of the actions of their closest regional ally,
Israel, have helped midwife the newborn," he
wrote, mocking US Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice's stone-hearted comment during the
bloodletting that these were but the "birth pangs
of a new Middle East". "But it will not be exactly
the baby they have longed for. For one thing, it
will be neither secular nor friendly to the United
States," Ibrahim said.
Even the most jaded
cynics in the region have been taken aback at the
way Bush has talked up the need for democracy,
only to leave victorious Islamists in what few
elections there are (bar Iraq, where the US has
little choice but to hedge) twisting in the wind.
From the Bush administration's
indifference to human-rights violations when they
victimize Islamists, to its failure to condemn
Israel's jailing of Hamas ministers, to its
palpable fear of the Brotherhood's gains in Egypt,
to its support for the attack on Lebanon in part
in the hopes of turning the Lebanese against
Hezbollah, the trend is clear: "Instead of
welcoming these particular elected officials into
the newly emerging democratic fold, Washington
began a cold war on Muslim democrats ... Now the
cold war on Islamists has escalated into a
shooting war," wrote Ibrahim.
There is no
great mystery as to the reasons the Islamists win
elections; they run against failed political
systems; in a region strangled by corruption they
are considered incorruptible; they provide social
services where governments fail; they don't
compromise when it comes to standing up to the US
and Israel; and especially after Hezbollah's
victory, they are seen as capable on the
battlefield - the royalists and republicans hold
summits, the Islamists blow up Merkava tanks.
Another key to their success has been the
moderation of their goals and willingness to work
within the system and with their ideological
opponents. In some cases, that includes adopting
their opponents' rhetoric. Nasrallah has done
himself no harm by peppering his speeches with
appeals to Arab nationalism. Nasrallah has dropped
references to an Islamic Lebanon to win allies of
all denominations.
The Muslim Brotherhood
in Egypt and Hamas in Palestine have also softened
their messages. This can be seen through the
actions of the Brotherhood's 88 members of the
Egyptian parliament, as Joshua Stracher and Samir
Shehata note in Middle East Research and
Information Project.
"The Brotherhood
parliamentary bloc is being noticed in Egypt for
its work across ideological lines to serve
constituents and increase its collective knowledge
of local, national and international affairs,"
they write. "Moreover, the delegation has not
pursued an agenda focused on banning books and
legislating the length of skirts. It has pursued
an agenda of political reform."
A river
in Egypt For all the obviousness of its
self-inflicted wounds, the Bush administration is
in a public state of denial. Speaking on August
29, Rice seemed as if she had, Van Winkle-like,
slept through the past three years or so.
"Five years ago, who could have imagined
that a vibrant debate about democratic reform and
economic reform and social reform would be raging
in every country of the broader Middle East?" she
said. "Who could have imagined the positive
changes we have already witnessed in places as
different as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait
and Morocco, and Jordan?"
Rice clearly
realizes that when it comes to US foreign policy
in the Middle East, it is possible to fool a lot
of Americans a lot of the time. It is harder,
however, to fool anybody in the Arab world any of
the time, rendering stillborn US efforts at public
diplomacy.
In the Arab world, US actions
across the Middle East are seen as part of an
integrated strategy to promote US interests
regardless of Arab ambitions - much the same way
they're seen by policymakers in Washington. So
when Israel went into Lebanon, and the Bush
administration made no secret of its desire to
forestall an immediate ceasefire, the US was
understandably blamed for Israel's war.
That anger was well founded. Renowned
investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, for one,
has written of the Bush administration's deep
involvement in the planning of Israel's bombing
campaign in Lebanon. One reason it did so was in
the hopes of testing how effective US weaponry
would be against Iranian nuclear installations, as
Iran was assumed to have helped Hezbollah build
its bunkers. Reports since the end of the war have
hinted at the administration's deep despondency at
the outcome, of course.
The support
Hezbollah receives from Iran and Syria was part of
the justification used for the war, and is now
being used to explain away Hezbollah's success.
This explanation may wash in the US, but it
doesn't in the Arab world.
As a recent
study by the World Policy Council (WPC) stated,
"Much has been made in the US media of the Syrian
and Iranian-origin weaponry used by Hezbollah ...
There has been no parallel discussion of the
origin of Israel's weaponry, the vast bulk of
which is from the United States."
Americans may not be informed about this
omission, but Arabs certainly are. Particular
outrage was caused by reports during the war that
the US, with British assistance, had replenished
Israeli stocks of precision-guided bombs. The
initial report, on July 22, came just as reports
of massive Lebanese civilian casualties
circulated.
According to the WPC report,
during the Bush administration, from 2001 to 2005
"Israel received $10.5 billion in foreign military
financing ... and $6.3 billion in US arms
deliveries".
It is difficult to overstate
the degree to which Arab military defeats to the
US Army in the two Gulf wars, and to the US-backed
Israeli army, particularly in the Six Day War of
1967, have fed a sense of humiliation and
resentment at the US.
But with the US now
bogged down in Iraq and Israel stunned in southern
Lebanon, there is a feeling that something beyond
compliance with US dictate may be possible. Even
Bashar al-Assad of Syria now talks of liberating
the Golan by guerrilla war, something his father
never dared do. The US and Israel are not Zeus,
raining lightning bolts on helpless mortals below,
it seems to many, but earthbound Achilles,
fearsome but vulnerable.
These events do
not presage an Islamic revolution, the coming of a
new caliphate, or a war of civilizations. But they
will and are creating the kind of upheaval that is
unlikely to be in America's favor.
What
remains now of the Bush administration's plans for
the "broader Middle East" is not clear. A managed
transition to pro-Western democracy has now become
much more difficult. Sonar would be needed to plot
the depths of anti-US and Israeli sentiment across
the political spectrum.
And even the most
self-possessed neo-conservative must now realize
that the problem is not pro-Western dictators
mystifying their publics Oz-like from behind the
curtain with tales of the dastardly Zionists - it
is well-informed, anti-Western publics, newly
inspired, clamoring at the gates for their leaders
to show the same resourcefulness as the guerrillas
of south Lebanon.
Let Bush fear the
fakahany of Cairo.
Ashraf
Fahim is a freelance writer on Middle Eastern
affairs based in New York and London. His writing
can be found at www.storminateacup.org.uk.
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