BOOK
REVIEW Rationalizing US policy in the new
Middle East The Arab
Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New
Middle East, by Marc Lynch.
Reviewed by Kaveh L Afrasiabi
This
book by an American political scientist with ties
to the Barack Obama administration provides an
in-depth, albeit theoretically defective and
politically biased, analysis of the on-going
tumult of the multi-faceted phenomenon known as
the Arab Spring, with special focus on the role of
new social media in both integrating the political
space across national frontiers, forging a new
sense of identity, and facilitating pro-democracy
mobilizations.
Divided into eight
chapters, The Arab Uprising has a narrative
that is "messy by design" purportedly to reflect
the complex and increasingly murky nature of the
on-going developments in
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya,
Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere in the Middle East.
The early chapters on the
politico-historical background cover the
inter-Arab "cold war" between the region's
conservative and radical regimes, the political
ramifications of the Kuwait war and the more
recent invasion of Iraq, decried by most Arabs as
imperialistic (p61), the deadlocked Middle East
peace process, and the pattern of corrupt dynastic
rules.
This is followed by several
chapters that examine the "tidal wave" of mass
protests, the domestic and external context of
Arab masses' "new hope", the balance of
revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces, the
Libyan civil war and foreign intervention, Saudi
Arabia's intervention in Bahrain to contain a
Shi'ite rupture, Yemen's inconclusive political
transition, and so on, altogether making this book
essential reading for understanding the Middle
East, even though the narrative is on the whole
half-satisfying for the following reasons.
First, it lacks a sophisticated
theoretical framework, and dispenses with a
systematic analysis of socio-economic structures
in favor of a journalistic rehashing of the
familiar empirical accounts of the Arab Spring
that is largely bereft of a much-needed class
analysis. For example, the author's passing
reference to the "shrinking middle class" in
pre-revolutionary Egypt (p85) is questionable and
overlooks the modern growth of the urban middle
class that has acted as an engine for political
change.
The book's periodization of the
Arab Spring is untenable, and the narrative is
replete with references to a "new Arab public
sphere" that simply refers to the role of new
means of communication and their effects in terms
of social mobilization, ie, a facile term innocent
of the complexities found in the theoretical
literature, for example the works of Jurgen
Habermas. [1]
Second, no apt study of the
Arab Islamists' populism is presented here, and
Lynch is too enamored of the new social media -
blogs, the Internet, Twitter, or the "Al-Jazeera
effect" - to adequately delve into the net
contribution of the informal, community-based
associations, and the role of mosques, charities,
and the like, in triggering the mobilizations. [2]
Regarding Al-Jazeera, credited for
creating a "unified public space" across national
boundaries, this is at odds with the author's own
observation of its partisan role as a foreign
policy arm of the Qatari regime, both tacitly
supporting the repression in Bahrain (p139). With
respect to Bahrain, aside from the absence of any
detailed discussion of the activist Shi'ite
groups, the book gives undue credit to the hated
ruling family for its supposed modernization.
Third, the entire narrative is informed by
a secularist bias that occasionally leads to
illicit bifurcations, such as with Egypt's
"revolutionaries" at Tahrir Square and the
Islamists, again discounted by reference to the
masses of Islamist youths taking part in the
historic struggle (p73), as well as to a broader
underestimation of the new Islamic resurgence via
the Arab Spring.
Unfortunately the problem
of incoherence is a severe one and repeatedly the
author contradicts his own thesis, particularly in
the sections dealing with the US's reaction to the
Arab Spring.
Thus, fourth, while
criticizing past US presidents for failing to
prioritize democracy in the Arab world, Lynch
praises President Obama for taking the side of
revolutionaries over the embattled regimes and
making the crucial decision of supporting military
action by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) in Libya under the "responsibility to
protect" UN principle.
As Noam Chomsky and
a number of other authors have rightly pointed
out, it is simply a myth that Obama has fully
committed the US to Arab democratization, and even
Lynch himself shyly in the concluding chapters
admits that Obama nodded to Saudi Arabia's
repression in Bahrain as well as Riyadh's defense
of the hated status quo in Yemen (p157).
Indeed, the mere fact that the Obama
administration remained silent when the Egyptian
military junta dissolved the parliament in June,
2012, is yet another reminder that contrary to
Lynch's simplistic portrayal of the US policy,
consistently adopting the public statements as
reflections of actual policies - there is a great
chasm between rhetoric and policies that require
critical scrutiny.
In turn, fifth, this
points at another major lacunae in the narrative,
that is, its inability to dissect the structures
of Western clientelism in Egypt and elsewhere
causing decades-long perpetuation of dependent
authoritarianism (see Mainstream
political science masks Western clientelism,
Asia Times Online, May 12, 2012).
Finally,
connected to its rationalization of US's Middle
East policy, the book consistently projects a
benign image of Israel as always acting in
self-defense and going to wars simply provoked by
its adversaries - hardly an accurate history of
the Arab-Israeli conflict. Subtle justification
for Israel's aggressive policies thus go hand in
hand with a highly indefensible account of Obama's
and NATO's interventionist policies, such as with
respect to Libya, wholeheartedly supported by the
author, even though the NATO mission went well
beyond the UN mandate and caused considerable
civilian casualty - this fact is adamantly
contested by the author, who wrongly assumes an
"Arab consensus" (p174) on invasion of Libya
simply because there was a majority vote at a
poorly attended Arab League meeting.
In
conclusion, on the whole this book fails to go
beyond the empirically given or properly
contextualize the "overdetermined" multiple causal
factors that have led to the revolutionary
ruptures throughout the Middle East, a tall order
well beyond the grasp of this book's limited
theoretical framework and its lopsided
conventional account of the role of social media
in Arab Spring.
The Arab Uprising: The
Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East
by Marc Lynch. Public Affairs, (March 2012).
ISBN-10: 1610390849. Price US$26.99, 288 pages.
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This is followed by several
chapters that examine the "tidal wave" of mass
protests, the domestic and external context of
Arab masses' "new hope", the balance of
revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces, the
Libyan civil war and foreign intervention, Saudi
Arabia's intervention in Bahrain to contain a
Shi'ite rupture, Yemen's inconclusive political
transition, and so on, altogether making this book
essential reading for understanding the Middle
East, even though the narrative is on the whole
half-satisfying for the following reasons.
