Here's one obvious lesson of the Tunisian Revolution of 2011: paranoia about
Muslim fundamentalist movements and terrorism is causing Washington to make bad
choices that will ultimately harm American interests and standing abroad.
United States State Department cable traffic from capitals throughout the
Greater Middle East, made public thanks to WikiLeaks, shows that US
policymakers have a detailed and profound picture of the depths of corruption
and nepotism that prevail among some "allies" in the region.
The same cable traffic indicates that, in a cynical Great Power calculation,
Washington continues to sacrifice the prospects of the region's youth on the
altar of "security". It is now forgotten that America's biggest foreign policy
headache, the Islamic Republic
of Iran, arose in response to American backing for Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, the
despised Shah who destroyed the Iranian left and centrist political parties,
paving the way for the ayatollahs' takeover in 1979.
State Department cables published via WikiLeaks are remarkably revealing when
it comes to the way Tunisian strongman Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and his extended
family (including his wife Leila's Trabelsi clan) fastened upon the Tunisian
economy and sucked it dry. The riveting descriptions of US diplomats make the
presidential "family" sound like True Blood's vampires overpowering Bontemps,
Louisiana.
In July of 2009, for instance, the US ambassador dined with Nesrine Ben Ali
el-Materi and Sakher el-Materi, the president's daughter and son-in-law, at
their sumptuous mansion. Materi, who rose through nepotism to dominate
Tunisia's media, provided a 12-course dinner with Kiwi juice - "not normally
available here" - and "ice cream and frozen yoghurt he had flown in from Saint
Tropez", all served by an enormous staff of well-paid servants. The ambassador
remarked on the couple's pet tiger, "Pasha," which consumed "four chickens a
day" at a time of extreme economic hardship for ordinary Tunisians.
Other cables detail the way the Ben Ali and Trabelsi clans engaged in a
Tunisian version of insider trading, using their knowledge of the president's
upcoming economic decisions to scarf up real estate and companies they knew
would suddenly spike in value. In 2006, the US ambassador estimated that 50% of
the economic elite of Tunisia was related by blood or marriage to the
president, a degree of nepotism hard to match outside some of the Persian Gulf
monarchies.
Despite full knowledge of the corruption and tyranny of the regime, the US
Embassy concluded in July 2009:
Notwithstanding the frustrations of
doing business here, we cannot write off Tunisia. We have too much at stake. We
have an interest in preventing al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other
extremist groups from establishing a foothold here. We have an interest in
keeping the Tunisian military professional and neutral.
The
notion that, if the US hadn't given the Tunisian government hundreds of
millions of dollars in military aid over the past two and a half decades, while
helping train its military and security forces, a shadowy fringe group calling
itself "al-Qaeda in the Maghreb" might have established a "toehold" in the
country was daft. Yet this became an all-weather, universal excuse for bad
policy.
In this regard, Tunisia has been the norm when it comes to American policy in
the Muslim world. The George W Bush administration's firm support for Ben Ali
makes especially heinous the suggestion of some neo-conservative pundits that
Bush's use of democratization rhetoric for neo-imperialist purposes somehow
inspired the workers and internet activists of Tunisia (none of whom ever
referenced the despised former US president).
It would surely have been smarter for Washington to cut the Ben Ali regime off
without a dime, at least militarily, and distance itself from his pack of
jackals. The region is, of course, littered with dusty, creaking, now
exceedingly nervous dictatorships in which government is theft. The US receives
no real benefits from its damaging association with them.
No dominoes to fall
The Bush administration's deeply flawed, sometimes dishonest "war on terror"
replayed the worst mistakes of Cold War policy. One of those errors involved
recreating the so-called domino theory - the idea that the US had to make a
stand in Vietnam, or else Indonesia, Thailand, Burma (Myanmar) and the rest of
Asia, if not the world, would fall to communism. It wasn't true then - the
Soviet Union was, at the time, less than two decades from collapsing - and it
isn't applicable now in terms of al-Qaeda. Then and now, though, that domino
theory prolonged the agony of ill-conceived wars.
Despite the Barack Obama administration's abandonment of the phrase "war on
terror", the impulses encoded in it still powerfully shape Washington's
policy-making, as well as its geopolitical fears and fantasies. It adds up to
an absurdly modernized version of domino theory. This irrational fear that any
small setback for the US in the Muslim world could lead straight to an Islamic
caliphate lurks beneath many of Washington's pronouncements and much of its
strategic planning.
A clear example can be seen in the embassy cable that acquiesced in
Washington's backing of Ben Ali for fear of the insignificant and obscure
"al-Qaeda in the Maghreb". Despite the scary name, this small group was not
originally even related to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, but rather grew out of
the Algerian Muslim reformist movement called Salafism.
If the US stopped giving military aid to Ben Ali, it was implied, Bin Laden
might suddenly be the caliph of Tunis. This version of the domino theory - a
pretext for overlooking a culture of corruption, as well as human rights abuses
against dissidents - has become so widespread as to make up the warp and woof
of America's secret diplomatic messaging.
Sinking democracy in the name of the 'war on terror'
Take Algeria, for instance. American military assistance to neighboring Algeria
has typically grown from nothing before September 11 to nearly US$1 million a
year. It may be a small sum in aid terms, but it is rapidly increasing, and it
supplements far more sizeable support from the French. It also involves
substantial training for counterterrorism; that is, precisely the skills also
needed to repress peaceful civilian protests.
Ironically, the Algerian generals who control the strings of power were the
ones responsible for radicalizing the country's Muslim political party, the
Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). Allowed to run for office in 1992, that party
won an overwhelming majority in parliament. Shocked and dismayed, the generals
abruptly abrogated the election results. We will never know if the FIS might
have evolved into a parliamentary, democratic party, as later happened to the
Justice and Development Party of Turkey, the leaders of which had been Muslim
fundamentalists in the 1990s.
Angered at being deprived of the fruits of its victory, however, FIS supporters
went on the offensive. Some were radicalized and formed an organization they
called the Armed Islamic Group, which later became an al-Qaeda affiliate. (A
member of this group, Ahmed Ressam, attempted to enter the US as part of the
"millennial plot" to blow up Los Angeles International Airport, but was
apprehended at the border.)
A bloody civil war then broke out in which the generals and the more secular
politicians were the winners, though not before 150,000 Algerians died. As with
Ben Ali in neighboring Tunisia, Paris and Washington consider President Abdel
Aziz Bouteflika (elected in 1999) a secular rampart against the influence of
radical Muslim fundamentalism in Algeria as well as among the Algerian-French
population in France.
To outward appearances, in the first years of the 21st century, Algeria
regained stability under Bouteflika and his military backers, and the violence
subsided. Critics charged, however, that the president connived at legislative
changes, making it possible for him to run for a third term, a decision that
was bad for democracy. In the 2009 presidential election, he faced a weak field
of rivals and his leading opponent was a woman from an obscure Trotskyite
party.
Cables from the US Embassy (revealed again by WikiLeaks) reflected a profound
unease with a growing culture of corruption and nepotism, even though it was
not on a Tunisian scale. Last February, for example, ambassador David D Pearce
reported that eight of the directors of the state oil company Sonatrach were
under investigation for corruption. He added:
This scandal is the
latest in a dramatically escalating series of investigations and prosecutions
that we have seen since last year involving Algerian government ministries and
public enterprises. Significantly, many of the ministries affected are headed
by ministers considered close to Algerian President Bouteflika.
And this was nothing new. More than three years earlier, the embassy in Algiers
was already sounding the alarm. Local observers, it reported to Washington,
were depicting Bouteflika's brothers "Said and Abdallah, as being particularly
rapacious". Corruption was spreading into an increasingly riven and contentious
officer corps. Unemployment among youth was so bad that they were taking to the
Mediterranean on rickety rafts in hopes of getting to Europe and finding jobs.
And yet when you read the WikiLeaks cables you find no recommendations to stop
supporting the Algerian government.
As usual when Washington backs corrupt regimes in the name of its "war on
terror", democracy suffers and things slowly deteriorate. Bouteflika's flawed
elections which aimed only at ensuring his victory, for instance, actively
discouraged moderate fundamentalists from participating and some observers now
think that Algeria, already roiled by food riots, could face Tunisian-style
popular turmoil. (It should be remembered, however, that the Algerian military
and secret police, with years of grim civil-war experience behind them, are far
more skilled at oppressive techniques of social control than the Tunisian
army.)
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