Palestine, Iraq, and American Strategy (part 2 of 2)
Michael Scott Doran
From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2003 issue
nytimes.com
THE JAWF INTIFADA
Al Qaeda invoked Palestine as a trump card in a game of Arab nationalist one-upmanship, trying to delegitimize the Saudi regime and weaken its grip on power. It was a kind of political theater that invited audience participation. When a figure such as Osama bin Laden attacks the United States, he hopes to energize disaffected groups and create cadres that, although mobilized in the name of Palestine, will actually work on behalf of local agendas.
A similar phenomenon has been taking place recently in Al Jawf, a region located in northern Saudi Arabia east of the Jordanian border. In the two years since the second intifada broke out, Al Jawf has earned the distinction of being the only place in the Saudi kingdom repeatedly and consistently to defy laws criminalizing popular demonstrations. Matters reached a head last April 5 in the town of Sakaka, where about 4,000 angry young men congregated in town squares, burned Israeli and American flags, and called on Arab states to take action on behalf of the Palestinians. To restore order Saudi authorities had to dispatch three transport planes carrying 500 riot police, and for weeks afterward these forces continued to patrol the area.
As extensive reporting in the London-based Arabic daily Al-Quds al-Arabi has made clear, the demonstrations "were organized in solidarity with the Palestinians and in protest over the neglect which the region is suffering at the hands of the government." Al Jawf is one of the most backward places in Saudi Arabia. Many towns in the region, including Sakaka, lack electricity and the basic amenities of modern life. Located far from ports and oil revenues, lacking access to the corridors of power, the residents of Al Jawf feel deprived. They secretly quote lines from their poet laureate, Dabis al-Murkhan, who immortalized the region's anti-Saudi sentiments: "By God, were the skies to rain sheikhs and agencies ffi the tyranny that has been heaped on us would not pass away."
Like bin Laden, in their protests the people of Al Jawf chose to express their grievances by playing the Palestine trump card. By decrying the "shameful Arab silence" in the face of Israeli military operations, they telegraphed to their government a simple message: prove that you are authentic Muslims and Arabs by taking meaningful action on Palestine. Of course, the protesters knew that the government, given its strong economic and security ties to the United States, would do no such thing, thus tacitly admitting its complicity in the oppression of fellow Arabs. What was really at issue in Al Jawf, therefore, was less Israeli-Palestinian relations than the legitimacy of the Saudi government -- something that can be seen from the details of the protests themselves.
The demonstrations were organized by a group called the Popular Committee of the Jawf Region for the Support of the Palestinian People. Although on the surface there might seem to be little seditious about such an organization, in context it represented a direct challenge to the Saudi government, which had already established a number of its own official committees for supporting the Palestinians -- the most notable of these being the Saudi Committee for the Support of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, chaired by the interior minister, Prince Nayif bin Abdulaziz, who among other duties runs the police and the secret police.
In a limp attempt to undermine the protestors, Nayif stated that "those wanting to show support to their Palestinian brothers must do it with money, not words." And sure enough, three days later the Saudi government ran a telethon to raise money for the Palestinian cause. (This latter event was widely reported in the United States but rarely presented in its proper domestic, as opposed to international, context.)
But the fund raiser did not satisfy the aspirations of protesters in Al Jawf, nor would more criticism of Israel and more diplomatic engagement in the Middle East by the United States. The wedge that separates Washington from Al Jawf and its sister regions throughout the Arab world does not depend primarily on whether Israel is prepared to yield 85 percent or 100 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, or even on whether Palestinians are fighting or living in peace. It stems more from the poverty, repression, and frustration that fuel the region's symbolic politics, and will remain until those larger issues are somehow addressed.
TRUMPING WASHINGTON
Using Palestine as a trump card is not a new gambit. Since the foundation of the Arab League in 1945, the states of the region have been split into two camps: one supportive of the status quo and aligned with Western powers, and one hostile to it and them. The anti-status quo states have inevitably played the Palestine card in order to deny the Western powers loyal allies in the region. In the Middle East today, three major actors (Iraq, Iran, and Syria) and two minor ones (Hizbollah and al Qaeda) are all doing something similar. Their primary goal is to drive a wedge between the United States and Saudi Arabia. They fear the imposition of a Pax Americana in the region and regard Israeli-Palestinian violence as a tool for keeping the United States at bay. For them, in fact, the revolt in Palestine is, among other things, a proxy war against the United States.
Recent developments in the Saudi-Iraqi relationship show how the game is played. Saddam Hussein first resorted to the tactic against Saudi Arabia in 1990. In preparation for the invasion of Kuwait, Baghdad expressed its casus belli in terms of Kuwait's alleged participation in a Zionist-imperialist conspiracy to destroy Iraq. Saddam accompanied this rhetoric with bellicose anti-Israel statements, such as his famous threat to burn half of the Jewish state with chemical weapons. When the American counterattack began, Saddam backed up his threats by targeting Israel with Scud missiles, trying to foster such unrest inside Saudi Arabia that it could not host the American troops required to oust the Iraqi forces from Kuwait. At the time, Saddam's gambit failed. Over the last dozen years, however, he has continued to pursue the same strategy, and finally it is starting to pay dividends.
Social changes inside Saudi Arabia since the Persian Gulf War have created a constituency that responds more readily to Saddam's lures. Today, two in five Saudis are under 15 years old. The country's population has exploded while its economy has stagnated, with the result that its per capita income has dropped. Under these conditions, a new generation of disaffected Saudi youth has come of age. Fifteen young Saudis attacked New York and Washington on September 11, approximately 80 more are in captivity in Guantanamo, and untold others are moldering in shallow graves in Afghanistan or filtering back home after the fall of the Taliban. These numbers alone suggest that more is going on inside Saudi Arabia than just the fact that, as official spokesmen would have it, a few suggestible young men fell in with the wrong crowd.
Many from this generation hold the United States responsible for their plight and for the sad state of affairs in the Arab and Islamic worlds more generally. For its part, Riyadh has no ideological resources or public vocabulary with which to counter them and justify its dependence on the United States. Saddam plays the Palestinian card to exploit this gap between ruler and ruled. For the ploy to succeed, the disgruntled young need not admire Saddam personally, nor find the Iraqi model attractive, nor care one iota about the suffering of the Palestinians. Baghdad wins simply if a significant number of Saudis, for whatever motive, reject cooperation between Riyadh and Washington and hitch a ride on the Palestine issue as a means of expressing that rejection.
Saddam's campaign enjoyed its greatest success at the Arab League summit in Beirut last March. The official symbolism of the meeting had Riyadh and Baghdad putting aside their differences in order to demonstrate unity at a moment when Israel, their putative common enemy, was at war with the Palestinians. The assembled leadership of the Arab world even raised a cheer when Iraqi Vice President Izzat Ibrahim received a kiss from Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah.
If Palestine provided the symbolism for this Iraqi-Saudi rapprochement, however, it had little to do with the substance. The real story at Beirut was neither the Israeli incursion nor the peace plan that the Saudis floated as a response. It was the battle over Arab authenticity and regional order in the Persian Gulf. Riyadh and Baghdad were negotiating the fate of the Iraqi government, which stood uncomfortably under Washington's sword. Wrapping themselves in the Palestinian flag, Saudi Arabia and Iraq arrived at a quid pro quo: Iraq pledged to "respect the independence, sovereignty, and security of the state of Kuwait and safeguard its territorial integrity," and the other Arab states called for "lifting the sanctions on Iraq and ending the tribulation of the fraternal Iraqi people" while expressing their "categorical rejection of attacking Iraq." Saddam, meanwhile, granted Crown Prince Abdullah the pan-Arab legitimacy that he needed to prove to his own people that he was not a puppet of foreigners, in return for a Saudi pledge to reject any American plan to topple the Iraqi regime.
The Beirut summit diminished the overtly abusive propaganda coming from Baghdad, but it did not end the Saudi-Iraqi conflict. Immediately after the summit adjourned, Saddam continued to make mischief. On April 6, the day after the riot in Sakaka, thousands of Saudi protesters marched on the U.S. consulate in Dhahran, chanting slogans calling for the government to turn off the flow of oil to the West. Saddam was clearly listening, and out of feigned concern for the Palestinians he obeyed the command. Two days later he announced his decision to stop the export of oil for 30 days "or until the armies of the Zionist entity withdraw unconditionally from the Palestinian territories they have occupied, and respect the will of the people of Palestine, and the will of the Arab nation." This was not a serious attempt at an economic embargo but a challenge to the Saudis either to follow suit or be seen as puppets of the Americans. And in fact, sandwiched between Saddam and their own public, the Saudis have continued to be leery of American invasion plans.
Many saw the Saudi peace plan presented in Beirut as a beacon by which the United States could chart a new, more "evenhanded" Mideast policy. That plan calls for an Israeli withdrawal to the June 4, 1967, borders in return for full normalization between Israel and the Arab states. The fact that all of those Arab states signed off on the idea is certainly significant, marking as it does the first explicit suggestion of a potential all-Arab recognition of Israel. But the boldness of Riyadh's move has been greatly overrated.
The Saudi plan was not about Palestine-as-place, but rather about balancing the demands of cultural authenticity against the need for an alliance with the United States. In Washington, the Saudis depict it as the work of peacemakers carrying water for American interests. At home, however, Riyadh can point to the plan and depict it as an ultimatum to Washington: "You Americans roll back the Israelis, or else!" The plan requires no practical action by the Saudis or, for that matter, by any Arab party until the far-off time when the Americans will have returned the situation in Palestine to its early 1967 status quo, at which stage Riyadh claims it will stand up and be counted. Far from getting themselves dirty with peace-processing, the Saudis cleverly devised a way to avoid touching Palestine for as long as possible, recognizing that in the end it can only burn them. When it comes to managing the conflict the United States is largely on its own, and Washington should plan accordingly.
The dance between Baghdad and Riyadh demonstrates that for Arab states the Palestinian issue is a game of four-dimensional chess. When an Arab leader announces a policy toward the issue, he makes a move directed simultaneously at critics at home, Arab rivals abroad, the United States, and the Palestinians and Israelis themselves -- with the last being by far the least important audience. The sad fact is that with the possible exception of Jordan, alleviating the suffering of the Palestinian people is not a primary policy objective of any Middle Eastern state. For Washington to mistake symbol for substance and tie itself into knots trying to resolve the Palestinian problem before tackling other matters would thus be a sucker's move, providing its enemies with even greater incentives to incite violence there while avoiding other arenas where it has greater freedom of action and chances for success.
FIRST THINGS FIRST
The United States' present dilemma stems directly from its role as guarantor of the contemporary Middle Eastern order. This order serves several important interests of the United States, regional governments and elites, and the international community at large. But it also fails to serve the interests of many of the people who actually live under it. Those who seek to overturn the regional status quo, such as al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, may be thought of as America's own "near enemies"; they represent clear and direct threats that must be countered firmly and effectively. But factors that contribute to the region's popular anger and despair constitute "far enemies" and must eventually be dealt with just as firmly and effectively if the American-sponsored order is to last and thrive over the longer term.
The United States must indeed help address the festering wound of Arab-Israeli conflict, for so long as several million Arabs chafe under unwanted foreign rule the realities of Palestine-as-place will continue to help fuel the disruptive power of Palestine-as-symbol. But those who say that it should be tackled before or instead of Iraq and al Qaeda have their strategic priorities backward. The near enemies must be met first, both because the danger from them is more urgent and because countering them successfully will actually ease the drawn-out task of addressing the far enemies of occupation, tyranny, and social and economic malaise.
The uneasy, decade-long stalemate with Iraq and halfhearted attempt to contain Iran have raised a question mark over the future of American power in the Persian Gulf. Policies that were intended as patchwork solutions to temporary problems have remained stuck in place even when the problems persisted, thanks largely to inertia and lack of attractive alternatives. Unpleasant for the United States, this has proved far more so for its local allies, especially the Saudis. The presence of large numbers of American troops on Saudi soil irritates nationalists and Islamists alike and eventually may come to threaten the stability of the Saudi regime.
Domestic and foreign opponents of Riyadh often express their hostility to the regime and its alliance with Washington through the rhetoric of Palestine, but care must be taken to distinguish symbol from substance. The new generation in Saudi Arabia, along with its many disaffected counterparts throughout the region, nurtures dreams of an authentic and independent Arab order -- a powerful, unified bloc of Muslims presenting a common face to the outside world. Radical Islamists and other opponents of the status quo are hard at work sending these youths a simple message: "The Americans are finished; your government has the ability to expel them, but for its own crass motives it chooses to ignore this policy option." The Saudi regime does not possess the ideological resources to sell the alliance to its public, and at a time when the American presence in the region appears under attack and on the defensive, the rebelliousness grows.
The first order of business for the United States must therefore be to demonstrate forcefully that challenges to its authority in the region will be defeated. Its near enemies can be met in no other way, since their opposition to the present order is deep-rooted and total. Unless America is prepared to abandon its position and pull back from the region, as the British did three and a half decades ago, it must carry its struggle against al Qaeda and Saddam to the finish, putting an end to all doubt regarding its resolve. Thwarting Saddam's ambitions and continuing to root out bin Laden's henchmen and associates, moreover, will do more than take care of immediate menaces. It will also serve to sober up onlookers with oppositionist ambitions of their own, making them recalculate the odds of defying a power that has demonstrated its intention to remain a permanent and dynamic regional player.
Once the near enemies have been bested, however, the moment will arrive to launch a vigorous and sustained effort to address the far enemies, as the crucial second stage in strengthening the Pax Americana. Unless the suppression of Saddam is seen to lead to a better life for the Iraqi population, and unless American strength and resolve is used on behalf of all the region's people, not simply the governments of American allies, then a new set of near enemies will certainly arise and have to be dealt with in their turn. In the long run, the strength and passion of Palestine-as-symbol will be sapped only by the creation of a new, more persuasive historical narrative that allows the people of the Middle East to see the United States, and the West more generally, as their partner in the quest for a better life. |
