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Sign up for free Log in. Arab spring, Libyan winter Item Preview. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Collection inlibrary ; printdisabled ; akpress Language English. This brief, timely analysis situates the assault on Libya in the context of the winds of revolt that swept through the Middle East in the Spring of Includes index Openings — Part I: Arab Spring — Bread — Dignity — God — Ben Ali and Mubarak go to the seaside — Bagman of the empire — Edicts of the status quo.
The lion of the desert — Geography of identity — The green flag — Frayed uniforms — Revolution within the revolution. Moussa Koussa travels light — Kuwait on the Mediterranean — Libya’s million mutinies — Intervention. Mortal combat — Petrol and dollars — Rebels from below — Closings. There are no reviews yet. Be the first one to write a review.
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Women, civil society, and tribes, among other social. Beginning in January , the Arab world exploded in a vibrant demand for dignity, liberty, and achievable purpose in life, rising up against an image and tradition of arrogant, corrupt, unresponsive authoritarian rule.
These previously unpublished, countryspecific case studies of the uprisings and their still unfolding political aftermaths identify patterns and. In addition, major public statements by Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar al-Qaddafi, and others are joined by Egyptian opposition writings and relevant primary source documents.
On 18th March the United Nations passed Resolution allowing the establishment of a No Fly Zone above the towns and cities of Libya to defend civilians from the oppressive regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Libya in the Arab Spring. Arab Spring Libyan Winter. M ore important was the will o f the IM F and the international bond markets.
Lessons were hastily learned. Subsidies returned. The new regimes tried to maintain the subsidies along with the new “openness. This money was used to buy the massive output o f the industrial farms in the United States. Wheat came into the country, but at the expense o f the restive peasantry, now increasingly under-employed. Egypt relied upon its rent income for survival remittances from payment for privatization, among others.
Democracy did not live within this economy. The tyrant here was the ruling clique but not operating alone. It had close collaborators in the IMF, the W orld Bank, the Banks, the bond markets and the multinational corporations.
It has long been a question o f the Arab Revolution that opened in the s: W hen will the economies o f the Arab region be able to sustain their populations rather than fatten the financial houses o f the Atlantic world, and offer massive trust funds for the dictators and monarchs?
It did not flow into the pockets o f the Arab Street. Hosni Mubarak, the heir to Sadat’s policies, sent in the army to quell protests over these “bread martyrs. Mahalla is no backwater. In , twenty-four thousand workers went on strike in the textile mills o f this industrial town not more than a few hours drive north o f Cairo.
The violent protests demonstrated that it is possible to tear down a poster o f Mubarak and stomp on it, to shout obscene anti-regime slogans, to burn a minibus and hurl rocks at riot police. These are unfamiliar images that lower-income Egyptians thrill to. The government did not change its script. In , twenty-first century plagues reduced the Russian wheat harvest to a third.
W orld wheat prices rose beyond imagination. On January 4, , Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in the central Tunisian town o f Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire and died. Harassment b y the Tunisian police over his inability to pay their bribes or purchase their permits dogged Bouazizi through his life. When the dejection got too much for him, he poured gasoline on his body in front o f the governor s office, set himself alight and yelled, “how do you expect me to make a living?
But Bouazizi s suicide before the town hall had an electric effect. It galvanized the people o f Tunisia against their suave and ruthless leader, Zein el-Abidine Ben Ali, who had been praised by the governments o f France and the United States, by the International Monetary Fund and b y the bond markets.
Neoliberal policies pleased everyone but the Tunisian working people, who took Bouazizi s sacrifice as the spark to rise up and send Ben Ali into his Saudi exile. M ore and more Bouazizis inhabit the streets and the souqs o f North Africa.
A decline in rent incomes and a reduction in tax rates reduced the budgets o f the state governments, who then cut subsidies and social services to the people. Rural Egypt did not sit passive, waiting for urban Egypt to act. Redayef is the Tunisian Mahailah. The street protests o f the workers and the unemployed expanded to include students in Tunis, Sfax and Sousse, and the broadest o f the social classes from the Gafsa governorate.
Wives and widows o f the imprisoned workers captured the streets in April, and the police responded with their own habits. In June, two protestors were killed. The dynamic smoldered, not erupting, but not dying down either. Bouazizi s action would oxygenate it. It has been a long-standing question in the Arab world: When will we rule ourselves?
Their Colonel’s Coup was intended to break Egypt away from monarchy and imperial domination. Nationalization o f the commanding heights o f the economy came alongside land reforms. But these were ill conceived, and they were not able to throttle the power o f the Egyptian bourgeoisie whose habit for quick money continued, with three quarters o f new investments going to inflate a real estate bubble.
Egypt’s defeat in the War led Nasser to resign on June Thousands o f people took to the streets o f Cairo, and filled Tahrir Square, this time to ask Nasser to return to office, which he did, although much weakened. The democratic opening o f was, however, unable to emerge. Nasser did not build up a strong, independent political culture. Stavrianos put it, “was socialism b y presidential decree, implemented b y the army and police.
There was no initiative or participation at the grass-roots level. Nasserism after Nasser was as hollow as Peronism after Peron. The revolt that broke out in was against the regime set up by Sadat and developed by Mubarak.
The Sadat-Mubarak regime was a national security state that had no democratic pretensions. Cleverly, Sadat put in place what he accused Nasser o f building.
It was under Sadat, and Mubarak with his own O dd job, Omar Suleiman, in tow that the detention camps and torture centers blossomed. This is extreme. The revolt o f , in addition, was egged on by sections o f the business elite who were disgusted with the neoliberal consumerism o f the clique around Gamal Mubarak, the president s son. N o wonder then that on January 31 notable businessman Naguib Sawiris joined the Tahrir Square dynamic.
As Paul Amar put it at jadali- yya. That is the basic requirement, to return to the slogan o f the French Revolution. The other lesson emerges as it often does in the midst o f modern revolts: that women form a crucial part o f the waves o f revolt, and yet when the revolt succeeds women are set aside as secondary political actors. In Cairo, Obama said, “we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist. On January 28, Mubarak, along the grain o f this kind o f Americanism, hastily cut Internet and cellphone service.
It had little impact on the protests. It implicated many apolitical citizens unaware o f or uninterested in the unrest; it forced more face-to-face communication, i.
This was an Egyptian Revolution. It did not seek permission from elsewhere. Their slogans are about dignity and employment.
The resource curse brought wealth to a small percentage o f their societies, but little economic development. Social development came to some parts o f the Arab world: Tunisia’s literacy rate is seventy- five percent, Egypt’s just over seventy percent and Libya’s at ninety percent. The educated lower middle class and middle class youth have not been able to find decent jobs.
The Muslim Brotherhood came onto the Cairene streets. It set its own ideology to mute. This is a protest about Egypt, he said, not Islam. And they are doing it for the movement without claiming it. The Muslim Brothers who have escaped from prison, for instance, know that their fate in the coming weeks is to be rearrested and tortured to death. They will fight. The no. Al-Qa- radawi came to Tahrir Square in late February, once Mubarak went to the seaside at Sharm al-Sheikh for his enforced retirement and where he would later be brought before a court, in his gurney.
Rather than offer himself as an Islamic leader alone, he first asked for blessings from the youth a reversal itself and then greeted the Christians and others, saying, “In this Square, sectarianism died. It has just started to build Egypt,” announced the cleric, “guard your revolution. They had secular affiliations. Since the s, clericalism in the Arab W orld and in Iran has had the upper hand in oppositional struggles. For example, in Iraq, it was the Communist Party that dominated the working-class regions o f Baghdad.
Clericalism, on the back-foot, had to engage with the dominant tendency, which was radical nationalism and Marxism. He wanted to find a way to bring the spiritual to socialism. These are all precursors o f Ali Shariati, the great Iranian thinker who was influenced by the Third W orld Project, and by Marxism, but once more wanted to bring Islam into it. For all these thinkers, the problem was quite the opposite o f what it is today: the workers seemed ascendant, driven by the science o f secular socialism at least in the domain o f politics and production.
It terrified the clerics. The Communists and the radical nationalists crumbled under the weight o f several factors. They provided social welfare, but did not fully recreate the realm o f production to facilitate worker and peasant control over their economic lives.
The idea o f the inevitability o f socialism inspired generations to give themselves over to the creation o f the Jacobin force, the Party that would, under relentless pressure, lead the working-class and peasantry to certain revolution.
Religion has an unshakable eschatology, which a post-utopian secular politics lacks. It has long turned its back publicly on violence, which was why Ayman al-Zawahiri founded the Islamic Jihad, to absorb the extremist, terrorist space abjured by the Brotherhood. W e are the first to call for and apply democracy. We are devoted to it until death. As the electoral process unfolded in , it was inevitable that the Brotherhoods Freedom and Justice Party and the Salafi Al-Nour party would do well.
Mubarak’s electoral machine had no more legitimacy. The liberals generally eschew any mass organizing, and had only a moral claim to make on the population. It was left to the Brotherhood and the Salafis, who did not initiate the protests but who participated in them, to stake an electoral claim.
Their activists were familiar with the interior o f Mubarak’s prisons, but their parties were tolerated by the state — used when it suited Mubarak, jailed when he willed it. The avuncular support o f money and aL-Jazeera from the emirate o f Qatar also helped the Islamists.
In other words, the political Islamists captured a considerable amount o f the political space in Egypt. Election results from Tunisia also followed the predictable path. The Islamist party, Harakat an- Nahda or Ennahda faced brutal repression from Ben Ali, with Ennahda s leader, Rashid Ghannouchi going from prison to exile to prison to exile without losing his political stamina.
The calculation for how to deal with the parties o f G od is fairly simple. They are certainly a legitimate part o f the political process, and their role in political life cannot be banned into oblivion. For example, in a place such as Lebanon, as Fawwaz Trabulsi points out, Hezbollah largely restricts its charity to its own sect, and within that sect it promotes private religious education and the obligatory veil at the same time as it erases all awareness o f social rights.
It is just what should be done. The parties o f G od have virulence at their fingertips, particularly as it relates to matters o f social equity and economic policy. That has to be scorched. That is how one moves effectively toward the future, particularly when the context is such that the left pole is weak and the national-popular domain is largely in the hands o f the parties o f God.
The clerics do not command the total field. In Egypt, hope vested for a while in the emergence o f a secular bloc. But here the catapult would not shoot hopes too far out o f the fortress o f the military and neoliberal consumerism.
If this meant the removal o f Mubarak and the opening o f political space, it was welcome. But when Tahrir filled up, ElBaradei seemed enthused. With Ayman Nour in poor health, he took up the mantle o f the liberals. The fact that he spent the better part o f his career and the worst years o f Mubarak’s rule outside Cairo gave him credibility.
It was a point o f great privilege. Early in his career, in the s, he served in the Nas- serite Ministry o f External Affairs. He then moved to the Foreign Ministry under Ismail Fahmi, one o f the most impressive o f the Nasser-era bureaucrats. In this regard, the gap between ElBaradei s liberal bloc and the Islamist bloc is narrower than one might expect.
ElBaradei s suggestion that he would not enter the presidential election because the military has yet to fully open space for civilian politics is welcomed, but it also suggests that ElBaradei recognizes that the liberals would at this time only have a shallow support base compared to the far more popular Islamists. Millions o f people participate in these platforms, and millions more are loyal to them. The danger is not only social. W e must block their path.
It would provide the only alternative to neoliberalism and social suffocation in the region. Uganda’s Idi Amin lived on the top two floors o f the Novotel Hotel in Jeddah and then in a luxurious villa, but these are no longer available.
Ben Ali was provided with a vast palace, surrounded by high walls and tall palm trees, accessed by seven gates guarded by armed guards. It is a sumptuous prison. On February 11, after thirty years at the helm o f Egypt, Hosni Mubarak and his family departed for the resort town o f Sharm el-Sheikh on the southern tip o f the Sinai. Sixteen days o f resolute protest by a cross-section o f the Egyptian public put enormous pressure on the Egyptian military. It is the institution that held the keys to Mubarak’s future.
The top generals, who served alongside Mubarak in the armed forces and then in the government, were less happy to send him off. It was this internal struggle in the army that delayed matters. They pledged to back Mubarak to the hilt. Eventually, the Saudi money and the loyalty o f the Generals were not sufficient. The tide from below prevailed.
History is filled with bizarre analogies. February 11, Mubarak’s day o f departure, is also the day when the Shah o f Iran’s regime fell in Iran has a well-orga- nized clergy who had taken a defiant position against the Shah.
N o such clergy exists in Egypt, and nor is there a person such as Khomeini. Iran is a bad analogy for Egypt. Better yet is South Africa. I remember watching television in , as Mandela hesitantly walked out o f the prison in Paarl. Egypt has had its own exit from Babylon moment: its jailer has departed. It has walked into the light. But their figureheads have been jettisoned. The old order might yet remain, recasting itself in different clothes, speaking a different vocabulary.
But it knows that its time is at hand. One o f the Roman generals says, “People should know when they are conquered. The dictators o f the Arab world, our barbarians, might yet throw some heads before the advance o f the people.
But they know that they are defeated. Faith and fear in them has now ebbed. It is simply a matter o f time: a hundred years, or ten. The tidal wave that lifted Ben Ali and Mubarak out o f their palaces to their exiles inspired millions across West Asia and North Africa.
The facts o f resistance had given way to the expectation o f revolutionary change. Washington was convulsed by Tahrir Square. The tidal wave o f protests threatened its prejudice toward stability. Events had run out o f control. If the Mubarak regime fell, what would this mean to Israel? If enthusiasm about Mubarak and Ben Ali s ousters escalated the protests in Bahrain and Yemen, what would this mean for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates? Something had to be done to manage what had begun to seem like a revolutionary situation.
From inside the bowels o f Washington s power elite, Frank Wisner emerged, briefcase in hand. He had met the President, but he was not his envoy. Mubarak age 82 greeted Wisner age 72 , as these elders conferred on the way forward for a country whose majority is under thirty. Instead, they drift like wisps in the wind, occasionally cited for propaganda purposes, but in a time o f crisis, hidden behind the clouds o f imperial interests or those o f Tel Aviv and Riyadh.
The Republicans have their own ghouls, people like James Baker, who are plucked out for tasks that require the greatest delicacy.
Wis- ner comes out o f the same nest as Holbrooke. He is the Democrat’s version o f James Baker, but without the pretend gravity o f the Texan. Wisner has a long lineage in the C IA family. His father, Frank Sr. Frank Jr. In each o f these places Wisner insinuated himself into the social and military branches o f the power elite.
He became their spokesperson. Wisner and Mubarak became close friends when he was in the country — , and many credit this friendship and military aid with Egypt’s support o f the United States in the Gulf War.
The delusions are many. George H. Bush calls his presidential counterpart, Hosni, in the afternoon o f January 21, They are discussing their war against Iraq. N ot once did the US provide a criticism o f Egypt’s human rights record.
Wisner should be considered the architect o f the framework for this policy. Wisner remained loyal to Mubarak. He is an apologist for Mubarak. The long-term had been set aside. I first wrote about Wisner in when he joined the board o f directors o f Enron Corporation.
Here Wisner followed James Baker, who was hired b y Enron to help it gain access to the Shuaiba power plant in Kuwait. They used the full power o f the US state to push the private interests o f their firms, and then made money for themselves. This is the close nexus o f Capital and Empire, and Wisner is the hinge between them. One wonders at the tenor o f the official cables coming from Cairo to Washington during January Ambassador Margaret Scobey, a career official, had been once more sidelined.
The first time was over rendition. She is known to have opposed the tenor o f it, and had spoken on behalf o f human rights champion Ayman Nour and others. This time Obama did an end run around her, sending Wisner. Scobey went to visit ElBaradei. Her brief was narrowed by Holbrooke s appointment. What must these women in senior places think, that when a crisis erupts, they are set-aside for the men o f Washington? Wisner urged Mubarak to concede.
It was not enough. M ore was being asked for in the Egyptian streets. Emboldened, Mubaraks supporters came onto the streets with bats in hand, ready for a fight. This was probably sanctioned in that private meeting. It is what one expects o f Empire s bagman. Mubarak needed time to sort out his legacy, Wisner intimated, and whatever should take place must keen a keen eye on stability.
This embarrassed the Obama administration, which wanted to appear both for stability and for change. Secretary o f State Hillary Clinton s team dismissed Wisner for his poor choice o f words, at the same time as Clinton seemed to pursue his suggestion. Such an “orderly transition Lawrence, Seven Pillard of Wisdom, Their policy cousins, in the diplomatic hovels o f Foggy Bottom and in Kiryat Ben Gurion, absorbed this twaddle.
For them, the Arab W orld would only ascend to Democracy in the long-term. In the short-term, where we all live, it would have to make do with Stability. Visions o f Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas ran through their future plans. It was all too much to bear. Obamas White House and State Department seemed unable to keep up with the pace o f events in Egypt and in the Arab world in general. The intransigence o f the people in Tahrir Square, in particular, dazzled the planners.
Too much is known o f the ways of the secret police to allow the dynamism of Tahrir Square to be so easily broken. Mubarak’s gambit was patently insufficient. But this is all that the United States could offer. Too much was at stake. These defeats and retreats portend the collapse o f US hegemony. The first pillar is US reliance upon this region for oil, which must be allowed to flow freely into the car culture o f Europe and the United States.
The fourth pillar is related to the previous three. The maintenance o f these four pillars is a fundamental goal o f US foreign policy in the Arab world. Little needs to be said about pillar no. It is the obvious one. The other three are less established. Industrial society relies upon oil to power itself, and to derive materials for much o f its industrial production it is a crucial raw material for plastics, for example.
The United States is the world s largest consumer o f oil, a fourth o f the total, but most o f its oil is not from the M iddle East. That is the reason w h y the United States, as the world’s largest economy since the s and the world’s most powerful military since at least the s, has become the de facto policeman o f the world’s oil supply. The Atlantic powers joined with the Carter Doctrine in principle, knowing full well that the weight o f the responsibility would fall on the United States.
It had to counter the Soviets and the Iranians, and it would do it with its G ulf allies. The French and the British did not want to get their hands dirty. This was unseemly work. He went to O P E C to raise the target oil price, to censure Kuwait for lateral drilling into Iraqi oil fields and to suggest that the oil profits no longer be held in dollars. This was unthinkable. Given the central importance o f G ulf oil to the global economy, all of us share an interest in thwarting this dictator’s ambitions.
W e all have a critical stake in this. The Saudi monarchy is a feudal regime that does not even allow women to drive cars. Surely it is not American policy to make the world safe for feudalism.
This is about money, about protecting governments loyal to America and punishing those that are not and about who will set the price o f oil. America went to war, clobbered Iraq, put in place a garrisoned sanctions regime till , when its armies returned to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Misery came to Iraq because o f its oil underfoot. Arab Friends. The second pillar is to maintain Egypt as a firm ally in the US-led war on terror.
Here the Mubarak regime was not following the United States. It had interests that parallel those o f Washington. The secular regime set up b y Gamal Abdul Nasser was already at war with political Islam within Egypt Nasser’s popularity held the Muslim Brotherhood in check.
Nasser’s aide, Anwar Sadat, had been the Egyptian military’s liaison with the Muslim Brotherhood since the s. Sadat could not complete the job. The Islamists killed him in Sadat’s successor, Mubarak, also tried to dance with the Islamists, but was not successful.
In , Mubarak picked a career military man, General Omar Suleiman, to run his internal security department, the Mukhabarat el-Aama. Two years later, Mubarak was to go to a meeting in Addis Ababa. Suleiman insisted that an armored car be flown to Ethiopia. The armor saved them. Mubarak signed legislation that made it a crime to even sympathize with Islamism, and his regime built five new prisons to fill with Brotherhood members.
They were natural allies. But Egypt’s willingness to be a partner had been strained b y the Iraq War. In , he met General David Petraeus in Cairo. Ambassador Scobey wrote a note back to the State Department on J u ly Wisner’s visit to Cairo was not idiosyncratic. It was to put some stick about in the Arab World’s most important capital, Cairo. If Mubarak had to go, then Mubarak’s regime had to remain in place and the public outcry had to be slowly silenced.
When the Tahrir Square protests began, Mubarak sent Tantawi to Washington to seek support for his regime, and for anti-riot equipment. Tantawi was an old war-horse o f the Mubarak regime, and in the US State Department said o f him that he wanted to make sure that the US would not “reduce military assistance to Egypt in the future.
Israels Supremacy. The third pillar of US foreign policy in the region is to protect Israel. Israel has faced no existential threat since the war, when Egypt’s powerful army took it on. The Egypt-Israel peace treaty o f allowed Israel to pivot its entire security strat- egy to face o f f against much weaker actors, such as Lebanon and the Palestinians.
Egypt’s withdrawal has allowed Israel to exert itself with overwhelming force against the Palestinians, in particular. Protests in Egypt, with the Muslim Brotherhood as part o f the action, sent a tremor through Tel Aviv’s establishment. If a new government came to power with the Brotherhood in alliance, this might lead to the abrogation o f the treaty. If this were to occur, Israel would once again be faced with the prospect o f a hostile Egypt, and its Goliath stance against the Palestinians w ould be challenged.
Roosevelt knew o f course that the British ruled over Egypt. These rebellions, or the urge for self- government, were interpreted cynically b y the British as its opposite: a reason to stay, to tame the passions o f the population.
It was Nasser who tossed them out in the s. Roosevelt threw in his lot with the British consul, Lord Cromer. W isner whispered just this nonsense in his ear when he was in Cairo.
The US hastily told the Egyptian authority to make a few more concessions. Anything would do as long as the three pillars remained intact. The protests simply hastened the script. He had to be jettisoned. It was not to happen. He had to retire. Matters were not so easily left to chance. M ore surprises were to follow. In this period, Elaraby led the legal team to Camp David and to the Taba Conference —89 to settle the terms o f the Egyptian-Israeli peace. Nonetheless, right after the February ouster o f Mubarak and the entry o f Elaraby into office, the old legal advisor sought out Hamas and began to talk about a new strategy for Egyptian- Palestinian relations.
Nevertheless, it revealed an Egyptian public whose views on Israel have been suffocated b y the enforced peace deal. There is little public support for the peace deal, and whatever patience existed in Cairo vaporized when Israel conducted its campaign to prevent the Palestinians from taking their case to the United Nations in late September. M on ey and threats from Washington fall daily on Tantawi s head.
The character o f the settler-colonial Israeli state and its security are certainly under threat. The only w ay to seal off a Jewish State, for those who are so inclined, is to ensure that the Palestinians have their own state. Israel is unwilling to grasp this contradiction.
Its elites are in denial. These are rancid, particularly if the non-violent mass demonstrations like those in the first Intifada begin again.
The nonviolent protests are a real threat to Israel. It was to undercut this that President Obama tried to offer a concession, the declaration o f a state o f Palestine based on the border, with swaps to preserve Israel’s sense o f security.
Netanyahu had none o f this. He chose to hold fast, believing that the US had to follow his lead as long as Israel remains a major pillar o f the old order in the West Asia and North Africa. O ver the question o f the Palestinian case to the UN, the pillars o f stability rub against each other.
The Israelis won that gambit. B y August , Israel was in ferment. Inflation and a housing crisis dogged the lives o f Israelis, and following the example o f Egypt, they convened in their squares, manifesting their discontent. There was no indication that these protests had more than economic goals. There was no link between the unemployment question and the permanent warfare state.
If Israeli political life is able to cleave out a genuine dynamic against its settler-co- lonial situation, this pillar o f stability might make its own accommodation with its neighbors. Encircle Iran. Geopolitical ambitions easily overcame any dedication to values o f human dignity. The status quo powers are those who enable the imperial interests o f the Euro-American capitals, and the revisionists are those who threaten these interests. From to , the principle status quo power in the Middle East was Iran, with the Shah as the bastion o f Progress against the revisionism o f the Arab renaissance, under the star o f Nasser.
Nasser’s Free Officers coup o f sent a tremor through the Arab world. The fusion o f Egypt with Syria was not a progressive action in itself.
The anti-Com- munism o f Nasser was not sufficient to ingratiate him with the bureaucrats in Washington. The Shah o f Iran stood fast against Nasserism. The first event took place in , when the Y om Kippur W ar turned out to be a fiasco fo r the Arab states.
Sadat had already turned his back on Nasser’s economic and political policies in ; foreign investment was being courted and Egypt’s constitution adopted a more Islamic tone. Sadat took home the Nobel Peace Prize, which went on the altar o f the new dispensation. Washington now saw Iran under the Mullahs as the leading revisionist power. Washington’s steady ally before and after this cataclysmic shift was o f course Saudi Arabia, and its satellite Gulf emirates.
Nasserism came into the palaces with the Free Princes, who were ejected to exile in Beirut. Then, after , an older danger threatened the Royals. The working-class in eastern Saudi Arabia and in the cities that run from Kuwait to Muscat along the eastern rim o f the peninsula are mainly Shi’a.
In , after the Iranian Revolution, the workers in the area again went out on strike, but were beaten back ferociously.
The New York Times did not complain. It was as it should be. Since , any attempt to move a democratic agenda forward in the Arab world has been tarred with the brush o f Iranianum, what is generally called “Islamic fundamentalism.
If that were the case, they should be apoplectic about the Saudi monarchy, whose Sharia laws would make the Iranian mullahs blush.
But they cannot be honored because they come from al-Wefaq against the pow er o f a King who allows the US to base its Fifth Fleet in his archipelago, and who is fiercely against Iran. The uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere threw the geo-political equation into disarray. That Egypt allowed the Iranians to use the Canal for the first time since the revolution threatened the architecture o f US power in the region.
Their fall was preordained. When Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi returned from his exile in Qatar, he did not play the part o f Khomeini. They wished to convert their sectarian histrionics onto their dissenting populations, but al-Wefaq’s Khalil Ibrahim al-Marzooq quickly warned that the Saudis might try to flood Bahrain with the kind o f mercenary thugs that they would send into Yemen to disrupt the Marxist republic in the s.
He was prescient. Saud feared an “Iranian takeover o f all Lebanon. The Lebanese Armed Forces were not up to the task. Such is his native charm that he has accumulated a small coterie that includes Yeghen, a rhapsodic poet and drug dealer, and El Kordi, an ineffectual clerk and would-be revolutionary who dreams of rescuing a consumptive prostitute. The police investigator Nour El Dine, harboring a dark secret of his own, suspects all three of the murder but finds himself captivated by their warm good humor.
How is it that they live amid degrading poverty, yet possess a joie de vivre that even the most assiduous forces of state cannot suppress? Do they, despite their rejection of social norms and all ambition, hold the secret of contentment? The catastrophic story of how the Arab world has descended into chaos since the invasion of Iraq as told by the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and international bestselling author of Lawrence in Arabia, a probing and insightful work of reportage.
From world-renowned war correspondent, Scott Anderson, comes this gripping, human account of the unraveling of the Arab world, the rise of ISIS, and the global refugee crisis after the United States invasion of Iraq in This portrait of the region is framed by the stories of six individuals–the matriarch of a dissident Egyptian family, a Libyan Air Force cadet with divided loyalties, an Iraqi day-laborer turned ISIS fighter, a Kurdish doctor on leave from his practice to fight ISIS, a college student caught in the chaos of Aleppo, and an Iraqi women’s rights activist targeted by militias.
Through these personal stories, the myriad, complex causes of the widespread war and instability in the region come into focus and the concrete reality of the unspeakable tragedies occurring in the Middle East becomes clear. This fast-paced and timely book from Vijay Prashad is the best critical primer to the Middle East conflicts today, from Syria and Saudi Arabia to the chaos in Turkey.
Mixing thrilling anecdotes from street-level reporting that give readers a sense of what is at stake with a bird’s-eye view of the geopolitics of the region and the globe, Prashad guides us through the dramatic changes in players, politics, and economics in the Middle East over the last five years.
It is here that the story of the region rests. Who will listen to the grievances of the people?
Here is a quick description and cover image of Libya in the Arab Spring book. First, what were the security patterns in Libya within the Middle East security complex before the Arab Spring? Second, to what extent did the Arab Spring and the revolution and intervention processes in Libya affect this security architecture?
And third, what are the implications of the Libyan revolution and the NATO intervention on regional security and on the security sub-complexes of the Middle East in the post-Arab Spring era? The author addresses these issues by providing a micro-level analysis of amity-enmity patterns, power distribution and external power interests.
A History Of The Golem: Jewish Magical And Paris, City Of Dreams Shakespeare’s World: The Comedies This fast-paced and timely book from Vijay Prashad is the best critical primer to the Middle East conflicts today, from Syria and Saudi Arabia to the chaos in Turkey. Mixing thrilling anecdotes from street-level reporting that give readers a sense of what is at stake with a bird’s-eye view of the geopolitics of the region and the globe, Prashad guides us through the dramatic changes in players, politics, and economics in the Middle East over the last five years.
It is here that the story of the region rests. Who will listen to the grievances of the people? Can there be another future for the region that is not the return of the security state or the continuation of monarchies? Placing developments in the Middle East in the broader context of revolutionary history, The Death of the Nation tackles these critical questions. Skip to content. Arab Spring Libyan Winter. The Arab Winter. His father, Frank Sr.
Frank Jr. In each o f these places Wisner insinuated himself into the social and military branches o f the power elite. He became their spokesperson. Wisner and Mubarak became close friends when he was in the country — , and many credit this friendship and military aid with Egypt’s support o f the United States in the Gulf War.
The delusions are many. George H. Bush calls his presidential counterpart, Hosni, in the afternoon o f January 21, They are discussing their war against Iraq. N ot once did the US provide a criticism o f Egypt’s human rights record.
Wisner should be considered the architect o f the framework for this policy. Wisner remained loyal to Mubarak. He is an apologist for Mubarak. The long-term had been set aside. I first wrote about Wisner in when he joined the board o f directors o f Enron Corporation. Here Wisner followed James Baker, who was hired b y Enron to help it gain access to the Shuaiba power plant in Kuwait.
They used the full power o f the US state to push the private interests o f their firms, and then made money for themselves. This is the close nexus o f Capital and Empire, and Wisner is the hinge between them. One wonders at the tenor o f the official cables coming from Cairo to Washington during January Ambassador Margaret Scobey, a career official, had been once more sidelined. The first time was over rendition.
She is known to have opposed the tenor o f it, and had spoken on behalf o f human rights champion Ayman Nour and others. This time Obama did an end run around her, sending Wisner. Scobey went to visit ElBaradei. Her brief was narrowed by Holbrooke s appointment. What must these women in senior places think, that when a crisis erupts, they are set-aside for the men o f Washington?
Wisner urged Mubarak to concede. It was not enough. M ore was being asked for in the Egyptian streets. Emboldened, Mubaraks supporters came onto the streets with bats in hand, ready for a fight.
This was probably sanctioned in that private meeting. It is what one expects o f Empire s bagman. Mubarak needed time to sort out his legacy, Wisner intimated, and whatever should take place must keen a keen eye on stability.
This embarrassed the Obama administration, which wanted to appear both for stability and for change. Secretary o f State Hillary Clinton s team dismissed Wisner for his poor choice o f words, at the same time as Clinton seemed to pursue his suggestion.
Such an “orderly transition Lawrence, Seven Pillard of Wisdom, Their policy cousins, in the diplomatic hovels o f Foggy Bottom and in Kiryat Ben Gurion, absorbed this twaddle.
For them, the Arab W orld would only ascend to Democracy in the long-term. In the short-term, where we all live, it would have to make do with Stability. Visions o f Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas ran through their future plans. It was all too much to bear. Obamas White House and State Department seemed unable to keep up with the pace o f events in Egypt and in the Arab world in general.
The intransigence o f the people in Tahrir Square, in particular, dazzled the planners. Too much is known o f the ways of the secret police to allow the dynamism of Tahrir Square to be so easily broken. Mubarak’s gambit was patently insufficient. But this is all that the United States could offer. Too much was at stake. These defeats and retreats portend the collapse o f US hegemony.
The first pillar is US reliance upon this region for oil, which must be allowed to flow freely into the car culture o f Europe and the United States. The fourth pillar is related to the previous three. The maintenance o f these four pillars is a fundamental goal o f US foreign policy in the Arab world.
Little needs to be said about pillar no. It is the obvious one. The other three are less established. Industrial society relies upon oil to power itself, and to derive materials for much o f its industrial production it is a crucial raw material for plastics, for example. The United States is the world s largest consumer o f oil, a fourth o f the total, but most o f its oil is not from the M iddle East.
That is the reason w h y the United States, as the world’s largest economy since the s and the world’s most powerful military since at least the s, has become the de facto policeman o f the world’s oil supply. The Atlantic powers joined with the Carter Doctrine in principle, knowing full well that the weight o f the responsibility would fall on the United States. It had to counter the Soviets and the Iranians, and it would do it with its G ulf allies.
The French and the British did not want to get their hands dirty. This was unseemly work. He went to O P E C to raise the target oil price, to censure Kuwait for lateral drilling into Iraqi oil fields and to suggest that the oil profits no longer be held in dollars. This was unthinkable. Given the central importance o f G ulf oil to the global economy, all of us share an interest in thwarting this dictator’s ambitions.
W e all have a critical stake in this. The Saudi monarchy is a feudal regime that does not even allow women to drive cars. Surely it is not American policy to make the world safe for feudalism. This is about money, about protecting governments loyal to America and punishing those that are not and about who will set the price o f oil. America went to war, clobbered Iraq, put in place a garrisoned sanctions regime till , when its armies returned to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Misery came to Iraq because o f its oil underfoot. Arab Friends. The second pillar is to maintain Egypt as a firm ally in the US-led war on terror. Here the Mubarak regime was not following the United States. It had interests that parallel those o f Washington. The secular regime set up b y Gamal Abdul Nasser was already at war with political Islam within Egypt Nasser’s popularity held the Muslim Brotherhood in check. Nasser’s aide, Anwar Sadat, had been the Egyptian military’s liaison with the Muslim Brotherhood since the s.
Sadat could not complete the job. The Islamists killed him in Sadat’s successor, Mubarak, also tried to dance with the Islamists, but was not successful. In , Mubarak picked a career military man, General Omar Suleiman, to run his internal security department, the Mukhabarat el-Aama.
Two years later, Mubarak was to go to a meeting in Addis Ababa. Suleiman insisted that an armored car be flown to Ethiopia. The armor saved them. Mubarak signed legislation that made it a crime to even sympathize with Islamism, and his regime built five new prisons to fill with Brotherhood members.
They were natural allies. But Egypt’s willingness to be a partner had been strained b y the Iraq War. In , he met General David Petraeus in Cairo. Ambassador Scobey wrote a note back to the State Department on J u ly Wisner’s visit to Cairo was not idiosyncratic.
It was to put some stick about in the Arab World’s most important capital, Cairo. If Mubarak had to go, then Mubarak’s regime had to remain in place and the public outcry had to be slowly silenced. When the Tahrir Square protests began, Mubarak sent Tantawi to Washington to seek support for his regime, and for anti-riot equipment.
Tantawi was an old war-horse o f the Mubarak regime, and in the US State Department said o f him that he wanted to make sure that the US would not “reduce military assistance to Egypt in the future. Israels Supremacy. The third pillar of US foreign policy in the region is to protect Israel. Israel has faced no existential threat since the war, when Egypt’s powerful army took it on.
The Egypt-Israel peace treaty o f allowed Israel to pivot its entire security strat- egy to face o f f against much weaker actors, such as Lebanon and the Palestinians.
Egypt’s withdrawal has allowed Israel to exert itself with overwhelming force against the Palestinians, in particular. Protests in Egypt, with the Muslim Brotherhood as part o f the action, sent a tremor through Tel Aviv’s establishment. If a new government came to power with the Brotherhood in alliance, this might lead to the abrogation o f the treaty. If this were to occur, Israel would once again be faced with the prospect o f a hostile Egypt, and its Goliath stance against the Palestinians w ould be challenged.
Roosevelt knew o f course that the British ruled over Egypt. These rebellions, or the urge for self- government, were interpreted cynically b y the British as its opposite: a reason to stay, to tame the passions o f the population. It was Nasser who tossed them out in the s.
Roosevelt threw in his lot with the British consul, Lord Cromer. W isner whispered just this nonsense in his ear when he was in Cairo. The US hastily told the Egyptian authority to make a few more concessions. Anything would do as long as the three pillars remained intact.
The protests simply hastened the script. He had to be jettisoned. It was not to happen. He had to retire. Matters were not so easily left to chance. M ore surprises were to follow. In this period, Elaraby led the legal team to Camp David and to the Taba Conference —89 to settle the terms o f the Egyptian-Israeli peace. Nonetheless, right after the February ouster o f Mubarak and the entry o f Elaraby into office, the old legal advisor sought out Hamas and began to talk about a new strategy for Egyptian- Palestinian relations.
Nevertheless, it revealed an Egyptian public whose views on Israel have been suffocated b y the enforced peace deal. There is little public support for the peace deal, and whatever patience existed in Cairo vaporized when Israel conducted its campaign to prevent the Palestinians from taking their case to the United Nations in late September. M on ey and threats from Washington fall daily on Tantawi s head. The character o f the settler-colonial Israeli state and its security are certainly under threat.
The only w ay to seal off a Jewish State, for those who are so inclined, is to ensure that the Palestinians have their own state. Israel is unwilling to grasp this contradiction. Its elites are in denial. These are rancid, particularly if the non-violent mass demonstrations like those in the first Intifada begin again. The nonviolent protests are a real threat to Israel.
It was to undercut this that President Obama tried to offer a concession, the declaration o f a state o f Palestine based on the border, with swaps to preserve Israel’s sense o f security. Netanyahu had none o f this. He chose to hold fast, believing that the US had to follow his lead as long as Israel remains a major pillar o f the old order in the West Asia and North Africa.
O ver the question o f the Palestinian case to the UN, the pillars o f stability rub against each other. The Israelis won that gambit. B y August , Israel was in ferment. Inflation and a housing crisis dogged the lives o f Israelis, and following the example o f Egypt, they convened in their squares, manifesting their discontent. There was no indication that these protests had more than economic goals. There was no link between the unemployment question and the permanent warfare state.
If Israeli political life is able to cleave out a genuine dynamic against its settler-co- lonial situation, this pillar o f stability might make its own accommodation with its neighbors. Encircle Iran. Geopolitical ambitions easily overcame any dedication to values o f human dignity. The status quo powers are those who enable the imperial interests o f the Euro-American capitals, and the revisionists are those who threaten these interests.
From to , the principle status quo power in the Middle East was Iran, with the Shah as the bastion o f Progress against the revisionism o f the Arab renaissance, under the star o f Nasser. Nasser’s Free Officers coup o f sent a tremor through the Arab world. The fusion o f Egypt with Syria was not a progressive action in itself.
The anti-Com- munism o f Nasser was not sufficient to ingratiate him with the bureaucrats in Washington. The Shah o f Iran stood fast against Nasserism. The first event took place in , when the Y om Kippur W ar turned out to be a fiasco fo r the Arab states. Sadat had already turned his back on Nasser’s economic and political policies in ; foreign investment was being courted and Egypt’s constitution adopted a more Islamic tone.
Sadat took home the Nobel Peace Prize, which went on the altar o f the new dispensation. Washington now saw Iran under the Mullahs as the leading revisionist power.
Washington’s steady ally before and after this cataclysmic shift was o f course Saudi Arabia, and its satellite Gulf emirates. Nasserism came into the palaces with the Free Princes, who were ejected to exile in Beirut. Then, after , an older danger threatened the Royals. The working-class in eastern Saudi Arabia and in the cities that run from Kuwait to Muscat along the eastern rim o f the peninsula are mainly Shi’a.
In , after the Iranian Revolution, the workers in the area again went out on strike, but were beaten back ferociously. The New York Times did not complain. It was as it should be. Since , any attempt to move a democratic agenda forward in the Arab world has been tarred with the brush o f Iranianum, what is generally called “Islamic fundamentalism.
If that were the case, they should be apoplectic about the Saudi monarchy, whose Sharia laws would make the Iranian mullahs blush. But they cannot be honored because they come from al-Wefaq against the pow er o f a King who allows the US to base its Fifth Fleet in his archipelago, and who is fiercely against Iran.
The uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere threw the geo-political equation into disarray. That Egypt allowed the Iranians to use the Canal for the first time since the revolution threatened the architecture o f US power in the region.
Their fall was preordained. When Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi returned from his exile in Qatar, he did not play the part o f Khomeini. They wished to convert their sectarian histrionics onto their dissenting populations, but al-Wefaq’s Khalil Ibrahim al-Marzooq quickly warned that the Saudis might try to flood Bahrain with the kind o f mercenary thugs that they would send into Yemen to disrupt the Marxist republic in the s.
He was prescient. Saud feared an “Iranian takeover o f all Lebanon. The Lebanese Armed Forces were not up to the task. N or was the U N force in south Lebanon, “which is sitting doing nothing. But the idea percolates on the surface o f Riyadh’s palaces. The Saudis, the anchor o f anti-Iranianism, did not believe that the US had the spine to act as it must. The uprisings in Bahrain and Yemen had to be crushed. It would look bad if this was sanctioned in the name o f the preservation o f the monarchy.
Far better to see the protesters as terrorists as in Yemen or Iranianists as in Bahrain. O r even better yet, to turn this largely peaceful wave into a new military confrontation. The hawks o f Order had every incentive to enchain the doves o f Change. When Ben Ali flew to Saudi Arabia, he brought with him to the peninsula the magic o f the wave. That’s where events ran into some trouble.
The various sheikhdoms, some that predate the Saudi one such as Bahrain, to al-Saud’s , are ideological and practical buffer zones. The idea o f the Arab monarchy would be harder to sustain if the only such were in Riyadh, however rich. It becomes easier to point the royal finger toward Manama and Kuwait, to suggest that it is in the temperament o f Arabs to be ruled by their royals, or their tribal chiefs. In Yemen, matters were simplified. There was no need to do a deal to send in troops.
The president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, is clever. He played the crowds carefully, holding his own support base together with tribal blandishments and with threats about the fear o f the notorious South, once home to Marxism and now, by his lights, home to al-Qaeda.
In fact, Saleh was allowed to get away with murder, as the Saudis have in Manama, because there are limits to what Power is willing to concede in the region.
Bahrain and Yemen illuminate the manuscript o f Imperialism, a concept that many have increasingly come to deny or misrepresent. Such protests appear unlikely only because the wave o f struggle that broke out on the Peninsula in the late s and peaked in the s was crushed b y the early s. Encouraged b y the overthrow o f the monarch in Egypt b y the coup led b y Nasser, ordinary people across the Arab world wanted their own revolts.
Iraq and Lebanon followed. It wished to take its local campaign to the entire peninsula. In Bahrain, its more timid branch was the Popular Front.
It did not last long. The Islamic Front for the Liberation o f Bahrain attempted a coup in Yemen’s Marxists faced ceaseless pressure from the Saudis, their Yemeni allies and the forces o f the Atlantic world.
It was the peninsula’s Die Wende, the turning point, at about the same time as the two Germanys were united. The pendulum swung in favor o f the status quo. Rumbles have been heard in Saudi Arabia itself over the years. The former were constrained b y threats and material advances, while if the latter were not susceptible to bribes they were sent o ff to do jihad elsewhere or to contemplate their errors in prison and re-education camps.
One has to only look at the kleptocracy that goes b y the name Al Saud Inc. As Egypt rumbled, the regime put into place its typical maneuvers. Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul A ziz met with Saudi newspaper editors and told them that the events in Egypt were the work o f outsiders, a theme familiar to tyrants. The official opposition formed a platform o f unity: it included the Islamic Umma Party led b y ten well-regarded clerics , the National Declaration o f Reform led b y Mohammed Sayed Tayib , al-Dusturieen a lawyers movement led b y Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz and a host o f reform websites such as dawlatyinfo and saudireform.
W e should treat the royal family like any other group. A Facebook group called for a “Days o f Rage” protest on March The Saudi National Guard was busy with sharp, and barely reported upon, repression.
It was enough to keep things in check. The only threats on the peninsula that remained were in Yemen and Bahrain. He is now heir to the Saudi throne.
The pillar is strengthened b y his iron fist. Events in Yemen escalated faster than anyone could have assumed. In January, street protests opened up the Yemeni struggle in the capital, Sana a.
The economic crisis provided the early slogans, but these morphed quickly into the reason for unemployment and distress—the political autocracy that smothered the ability o f the people to identify their own policies for their country. They are part o f a movement that wishes to change the political dispensation in Yemen, where Saleh has ruled since , one year more than Mubarak.
She and her group o f people had been prepared, and as the popular anger came out onto the streets in , they tried to offer leadership. Under pressure, Saleh said he would not seek re-election in That was a p loy that Mubarak had used. It was already worthless to an enthusiastic population. They called for regime change, and were met with tear gas and live ammunition.
The tide began to turn in late February, when most o f the major tribal heads threw their lot in with the opposition. He would soon defect to the opposition. Muhsin al-Ahmar had a reason to fear and despise his old comrade, Saleh. Saleh recognized the signs. This was denied. Then Saleh refused a proposal for a peaceful transition. Deaths continued, as the security services routinely opened fire on the population forty-five shot dead in Sanaa on March The tribal armies entered the cities, confronted b y the security services and national army.
He is the one who broke the constitution and dragged the country into violence. He is the one who practiced state terrorism.
It was also orders from Yemen that sent the “anus” bomber Abdullah al-Asiri to kill Saudi interior minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef in September Gates’ fears also stemmed from actions in Abyan governorate on March 22, when A Q A P declared the creation o f an Islamic emirate in the province, with strict measures to restrict the movement o f women. According to an essay in the Sydney Morning Herald written by Sarah Phillips, a scholar o f contemporary Yemen, “The declaration overlooks the complexities o f Abyan’s local landscape, particularly the fact that much o f its farming economy relies upon the labour o f women.
It is one thing to say that Abyan is an Islamic emirate, but another matter entirely to administer it accordingly without attracting local hostility. Real change will be slow, unstable, and non-linear, but it is inevitable. Over the last few years, Yemen has become a central front in the War on Terror, and a central location in Droneland.
Saleh gave the US permission to bomb his territory, even if the strike kills civilians alongside jihadu. His Deputy, Rashad al-Alimi said that he had just lied to parliament, telling it that the bombs are American, but fired b y Yemenis.
Saleh was angry. Both were American nationals. The United States was wrong-footed over the Yemen protests. It could not afford to alienate Saleh, who still remained in control o f the counter-terrorism apparatus.
N or could it go ahead o f the Saudis, who remained happy with Saleh he has a close ally in bin Nayef, the deputy interior minister o f the Saudis. In late April, as events seemed at a bloody standstill, the G C C entered with a proposal that Saleh pledge to leave and the opposition stand down.
Saleh refused to sign the proposal thrice, and after his M ay 22 refusal, the GCC walked out. Wounded, Saleh fled to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment leaving his deputy A bd al-Rab Mansur al-Hadi in charge, his son Ahmed in charge o f the Republican Guard and his brother Khaled in a position o f decisive authority over the army. These are the people whom the protestors called the “Orphans o f Saleh.
The Saudis hedged their bets between Saleh’s return and al-Ahmar s accession to the presidency. The protests continued. Shells fell between Taghyir Square, where the opposition created a tent city, and the Kentucky Roundabout, held b y the Republican Guard. B y early January , Saleh pushed through an amnesty law.
Protests broke out once more against the immunity deal that was pushed through the parliament. Amnesty International and Human Rights W atch agreed with the protestors.
Read online free Arab Spring Libyan Winter ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available! Odwnload world downloac as the bud of the Arab Spring was buried under the cold darkness of the Libyan Winter. Compares experiences of the Arab Spring for a comprehensive account of how nations arab spring libyan winter pdf download the challenge of democratic consolidation. With The Poorer Nations, Prashad takes up the story where he left off.
Prashad analyzes the failures of neoliberalism, as well as the rise of the BRICS countries, the World Social Forum, issuebased movements like Via Campesina, the Latin American revolutionary revival — soring short, efforts to create alternatives to the neoliberal project advanced militarily by the US and its allies and economically by the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and other instruments of the powerful.
Just as The Darker Nations asserted that the Third World was a project, not a place, The Poorer Nations sees the Global South as a term that properly refers not to geographical space but to a concatenation of pff arab spring libyan winter pdf download neoliberalism.
The Arab Spring unleashed forces of liberation and social arab spring libyan winter pdf download that swept across North Africa and the Middle East with unprecedented speed, ferocity, and excitement. Although the future of the democratic uprisings against oppressive authoritarian regimes remains uncertain in many places, libayn revolutionary wave that arab spring libyan winter pdf download in Tunisia in December has transformed how the world sees Arab peoples and politics.
Bringing together the knowledge of activists, scholars, journalists, and policy experts uniquely attuned to the pulse of the region, Dispatches from the Arab Spring spirng an urgent and engaged analysis of a remarkable ongoing world-historical event that is widely misinterpreted in the West. Tracing the flows of protest, resistance, and counterrevolution in every one of the countries affected by this epochal change—from Morocco to Iraq and Syria to Sudan—the contributors provide ground-level ;df and new ways of teaching about and understanding the Middle East sprinf arab spring libyan winter pdf download, and contextualizing the social upheavals and political transitions winrer defined the Arab Spring in particular.
Dispatches from the Arab Spring is an unparalleled introduction to the changing Middle East and offers the most жмите and accurate account to date of the uprisings that profoundly reshaped North Africa and the Middle East.
In addition, major public statements by Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar al-Qaddafi, and others are joined by Wintet opposition writings and relevant primary source documents. Early in Proud Beggars, a brutal and motiveless murder is committed in a Cairo brothel.
Such is his native charm that he has accumulated a small coterie that includes Yeghen, a rhapsodic poet and drug dealer, and El Kordi, an ineffectual clerk and would-be revolutionary who dreams of rescuing a consumptive prostitute.
The police investigator Nour El Dine, harboring a dark secret of his own, suspects all three of the murder but finds himself captivated by their warm good humor.
How is it that they live amid degrading poverty, yet possess a joie de vivre that even downllad most assiduous forces of state cannot suppress? Do they, despite their rejection of social norms and all ambition, hold по этому адресу secret of contentment?
The catastrophic story of how the Arab world has descended into chaos since the invasion of Iraq as told by the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and international bestselling author of Lawrence in Arabia, a probing and insightful work of reportage. From world-renowned war correspondent, Scott Anderson, comes this gripping, нажмите чтобы перейти account of the unraveling of the Arab world, the rise of ISIS, and the global refugee crisis after the United States invasion of Iraq in This portrait of the region is framed by the stories of six individuals–the matriarch of a dissident Egyptian family, a Libyan Air Force cadet with divided loyalties, an Iraqi day-laborer turned ISIS fighter, a Kurdish doctor on leave from his practice to fight ISIS, a arab spring libyan winter pdf download student caught in the chaos of Aleppo, and an Iraqi women’s rights activist winte by militias.
Through these personal stories, the myriad, complex causes of the widespread war and instability sprint the region come into focus and the concrete reality of the unspeakable tragedies occurring in the Middle East becomes clear. This fast-paced and timely book from Vijay Prashad is the libbyan critical primer to the Middle East conflicts today, from Syria and Saudi Arabia to the chaos in Turkey.
Mixing thrilling anecdotes from street-level reporting that give readers a sense of what is at stake with a bird’s-eye view of the geopolitics of the взято отсюда and the globe, Prashad guides us through the dramatic changes in players, politics, and economics in the Middle East over the last five years. It is here that the story of the region rests. Who will listen to the grievances of the people? Can there be another future for the sprign that is not the return of the security state or the continuation of monarchies?
Placing developments in the Middle East in the broader context of revolutionary history, The Death of the Nation tackles these critical questions. Skip to content. Arab Spring Libyan Winter. The Arab Winter. Author arab spring libyan winter pdf download Stephen J. The Poorer Downlpad. Dispatches from dowjload Arab Spring.
The New Einter Revolt. Proud Beggars. Fractured Lands.
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First, what were the security patterns in Libya within the Middle East security complex before the Arab Spring? Second, to what extent did the Arab Spring and the revolution and intervention processes in Libya affect this security architecture? And third, what are the implications of the Libyan revolution and the NATO intervention on regional security and on the security нажмите для деталей of the Middle East in the post-Arab Spring era?
The author addresses these issues by providing a micro-level analysis of amity-enmity patterns, power distribution and external power interests. Second, to what extent did the Arab Spring. The world watched as the bud of the Arab Spring was buried under the cold darkness of the Libyan Winter. This book sketches the discourse about a new constitution in Libya since The debate has focused on democracy, federalism, decentralisation and localisation, the role of religion, women in politics. The author argues that to attain enduring peace and stability, post-revolution states must engage in inclusive national reconciliation processes which include a national dialogue, a truth seeking effort, the reparation of victims’ past injuries, dealing with the former regime, and institutional reform.
Women, civil society, and tribes, among other social. Beginning in Januarythe Arab world exploded in a vibrant demand for dignity, liberty, and achievable purpose in life, rising up against an image перейти tradition читать больше arrogant, corrupt, unresponsive authoritarian rule.
These previously unpublished, countryspecific case studies of the uprisings and their still unfolding political aftermaths identify patterns and. In addition, major public statements by Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar al-Qaddafi, and others are joined by Egyptian opposition writings and relevant primary source documents.
On 18th March the United Nations passed Resolution allowing the establishment of a No Fly Zone above the towns and cities of Libya to defend civilians from the oppressive regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Libya in the Arab Spring. По этому сообщению Arab spring libyan winter pdf download Libyan Winter. Unfinished Revolutions. Arab Spring. The New Arab Revolt. Приведенная ссылка Gaddafi.
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All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified. And for Anthony Shadid Most посетить страницу o f reporters. Revolutions have no specified timetable. A process o f preparation has been long afoot in West Asia and North Africa, all at a different tempo. All o f this is prologue, the work o f building movements and a new vision for their societies.
M uch the same process was underway in Bahrain, via political parties like al- Wefaq, mainly, but also in the human rights redoubts, such as the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights and in the secular outposts that linger in the shadows o f a theocratic state.
Libya was not fated for an easy Arab Spring. Libya did not deliver the uplifting narrative o f Tunisia or Egypt. Working-class protests in the industrial suburbs o f Tripoli conjoined with political Islamist unrest in the eastern part o f the country. These were the rumbles from below. They were harnessed b y human rights lawyers from Benghazi and b y neoliberal “reformers,” who were disheartened by the pace o f change in the Qaddafi regime. Such people were not central to the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia, where cownload people, as a mass, stood up and were fortunate that the military stood down.
The Atlantic states did not intervene on the side arab spring libyan winter pdf download f the people in any o f the other struggles. As the University o f Tehran scholar Yaghoob Javadi put it, the Atlantic states preferred “regime rehabilitation” to regime arab spring libyan winter pdf download.
W ith Libya, things were different. The G u lf Arab emirs hated Qaddafi for his frequent outbursts against them most recently at a summit in Doha, Spfing, in when Qaddafi said that the Saudi monarch was “made by Britain and protected by the US,” embarrassing the emir o f Qatar and angering the Saudis. Personal animosity plays a role when it comes to absolute mon- archs, whose whims are not to be discounted.
But the turn against Libya was not about whim alone. The spotlight shone on Arab spring libyan winter pdf download, which did the leadership work for the Gulf Arabs. The oil is a central issue with Libya, but so too was its political significance. That the Atlantic states and their Gulf Arab partners decided to intervene in Libya and not in Bahrain or Yemen, and certainly not in Syria, tells us ldf.
It is what this something is that I will unravel in this arab spring libyan winter pdf download book. Tendencies to a better future continue and thrive.
Tensions remain in the country. The neoliberal reformers remain in the shadows, running the Central Bank and the oil ministry. But they have to contend with the fighters who are not willing to transfer authority over to the reformers. The fighters comprise equal parts o f Arab spring libyan winter pdf download and amateurs, with their roots as much in their cities o f origin as in the global ummah. They have their own agendas.
This book sprung appear at the anniversary o f the start o f the Libyan revolt. Источник статьи is too early to arab spring libyan winter pdf download how посетить страницу will pan out.
This book does not risk more than a few general remarks. Part I: Arab Spring. W hen the unwashed began libysn assert themselves in France, the зарегистрировался download video instagram via pc поюзаем) scoffed at car parking simulator download. In reaction to la guerre desfarined, the flour war, Marie Antoinette proposed that the poor “eat cake.
Hunger broke the ссылка на подробности o f fear. It is the lesson for the ages. It was a lesson for N orth Africa in late Grain prices soared by sixty percent. Protestors in Tunisia came onto the streets in December with baguettes raised in the air. In Egypt, protestors took to the streets in January chanting, “They are eating pigeon and chicken, and we are eating beans all the time. Their governments hastened to up their subsidies, but it was too little, too late.
The question o f bread reveals a great como aumentar a velocidade do download do meu pc about the delinquent states in Egypt and Tunisia. Robust national development went by the wayside. M ore important was the will o f the IM F and the international bond markets. Lessons were hastily learned.
Subsidies returned. The new regimes tried to maintain the subsidies along with the new “openness. This money was used to buy the massive output o f the industrial farms in the United States. Wheat came into the country, but at the expense o f the restive peasantry, now increasingly under-employed. Egypt relied upon its rent income for survival remittances from payment kibyan privatization, among others.
Democracy did not live within this economy. The tyrant here was the ruling clique but not operating alone. It had close collaborators in the IMF, the W orld Bank, the Banks, the bond markets and the multinational corporations.
It has long been a question o f the Arab Revolution that opened in the s: W hen will the economies o f the Arab region be able to sustain their populations rather than fatten the financial houses o f the Atlantic world, doanload offer massive trust funds for the dictators and monarchs? It did not flow into the pockets o f the Arab Street. Hosni Mubarak, the heir to Sadat’s policies, sent in the army to quell protests over these “bread martyrs.
Mahalla is no backwater. Intwenty-four thousand workers went on strike in the textile arab spring libyan winter pdf download o f this industrial town not more than a few hours drive north o f Cairo. The violent protests demonstrated that it is possible to tear down a poster o f Mubarak and stomp on it, to shout obscene anti-regime slogans, to burn a minibus and hurl rocks at riot police. These are unfamiliar images that lower-income Egyptians thrill to. The government did not change its script.
Intwenty-first century plagues reduced the Russian wheat harvest to a third. W orld wheat prices rose beyond imagination. On January 4,Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in the central Tunisian town o f Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire ссылка на страницу died.
Harassment b y the Tunisian police over his inability to pay their bribes or purchase their permits dogged Bouazizi through his life.
When the dejection got too much for him, he poured gasoline on his body in front o f the governor s office, set himself alight downloac yelled, “how do you expect me to make a living? But Bouazizi s suicide before the town hall had an electric effect.
It galvanized the people o f Tunisia against their suave and ruthless leader, Zein el-Abidine Ben Ali, who had been praised by the governments o f France and the Arab spring libyan winter pdf download States, by the International Monetary Fund and b y the bond markets. Neoliberal policies pleased everyone but the Tunisian working people, who took Bouazizi s sacrifice as the spark to rise up and send Ben Ali into his Saudi exile.
M ore and more Bouazizis inhabit the streets and the souqs o f North Africa. Downloa decline in rent incomes and a reduction in tax rates reduced the budgets o f shadowsocks windows free download state governments, who then cut subsidies and social services to the people. Rural Egypt did not sit passive, waiting for urban Egypt to act. Redayef is the Tunisian Mahailah.
Arab spring libyan winter pdf download street protests o f the workers and the unemployed expanded to include students in Tunis, Sfax and Sousse, and odwnload broadest o f springg social classes from думаю, windows live galeria de fotos 2012 download нужные Gafsa governorate.
Wives and widows o f the imprisoned workers captured the streets in April, and the police responded with their own habits. In June, two protestors were killed. The dynamic smoldered, not жмите, but not arb down either.
Bouazizi s приведенная ссылка would oxygenate it. It has been a long-standing question in the Arab world: When will we rule ourselves? Their Colonel’s Coup was intended to break Egypt away from monarchy and imperial жмите. Nationalization o f the commanding heights o f the economy came alongside land libtan. But these were ill conceived, and they were not able to throttle the power o f the Egyptian bourgeoisie whose arab spring libyan winter pdf download for quick money continued, with libhan quarters o f new investments going to inflate a real estate bubble.
Egypt’s defeat in the War led Nasser to resign on June Thousands o f people took to the streets o f Cairo, and filled Tahrir Square, this time to ask Nasser to return to office, which he did, although much weakened. The democratic opening o f was, however, unable to emerge.
Nasser did not build up a strong, independent political culture. Stavrianos put it, “was socialism b y presidential decree, implemented b y the army and police. There was no initiative or participation at the grass-roots level.
Nasserism after Nasser was as hollow as Peronism after Peron. The revolt that broke out in was against the regime set up by Sadat and developed by Mubarak. The Sadat-Mubarak regime was a national security state that had no democratic pretensions.
Cleverly, Sadat put in place what he accused Nasser o f building. It was under Sadat, and Mubarak with his own O dd job, Omar Suleiman, in tow that winted detention camps and torture centers blossomed. This is extreme. The revolt o fin addition, was arab spring libyan winter pdf download on by sections o f the business elite who were disgusted with the neoliberal consumerism o f the clique around Arab spring libyan winter pdf download Mubarak, the president s son.
Downloax o wonder then that on January 31 notable businessman Naguib Sawiris joined the Tahrir Square dynamic. As Paul Amar put it at jadali- yya. That is the basic requirement, to return to the slogan o f the French Revolution.
WebApr 18, · Read Now Download. eBook details. Title: Arab Spring, Libyan Winter; Author: Vijay Prashad; Release Date: January 08, ; Genre: Foreign Policy & . WebDownload or Read: ARAB SPRING LIBYAN WINTER BY VIJAY PRASHAD PDF Here! files/replace.me The writers of Arab Spring . WebArab Spring Libyan Winter by Vijay Prashad – Free ebook download as PDF File .pdf) or read book online for free. The Arab Spring captivated the planet. Mass action overthrew .
The Arab Spring captivated the planet. The revolutionary wave spread to the far corners of the Arab world, from Morocco to Bahrain. It seemed as if all the authoritarian states would finally be freed, even those of the Arabian Peninsula. In Libya, though, the new world order had different ideas.
Social forces opposed to Muammar Qaddafi had begun to rebel, but they were weak. In came the French and the United States, with promises of glory. A deal followed with the Saudis, who then sent in their own forces to cut down the Bahraini revolution, and NATO began its assault, ushering in a Libyan Winter that cast its shadow over the Arab Spring.
This brief, timely analysis situates the assault on Libya in the context of the winds of revolt that swept through the Middle East in the Spring of Vijay Prashad explores the recent history of the Qaddafi regime, the social forces who opposed him, and the role of the United Nations, NATO, and the rest of the world’s superpowers in the bloody civil war that ensued. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books, including is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History, and professor and director of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
A History Of The Golem: Jewish Magical And Paris, City Of Dreams Shakespeare’s World: The Comedies A Companion To Greeks German Scholars In Exile The Stalin-kaganovich Correspondence, English French German Italian Spanish.
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Explore Documents. Uploaded by Mike Cannon. Document Information click to expand document information Description: The Arab Spring captivated the planet. The revolutionary wave spread to the far corners of the Arab world, from Morocco to Bahrain. It seemed as if all the authoritarian states would finally be freed, even those of the Arabian Peninsula.
In Libya, though, the new world order had different ideas. Social forces opposed to Muammar Qaddafi had begun to rebel, but they were weak. In came the French and the United States, with promises of glory. A deal followed with the Saudis, who then sent in their own forces to cut down the Bahraini revolution, and NATO began its assault, ushering in a Libyan Winter that cast its shadow over the Arab Spring.
This brief, timely analysis situates the assault on Libya in the context of the winds of revolt that swept through the Middle East in the Spring of Vijay Prashad explores the recent history of the Qaddafi regime, the social forces who opposed him, and the role of the United Nations, NATO, and the rest of the world’s superpowers in the bloody civil war that ensued.
Did you find this document useful? Is this content inappropriate? Report this Document. Description: The Arab Spring captivated the planet. Flag for inappropriate content. Download now. Jump to Page. Search inside document. This book is for Brinda Karat. And for Anthony Shadid Most humane of reporters. Revolutions have no specified timetable.
Karl Marx used the image of the Mole to stand in for Revolu- tions to explain their hard-working yet unreliable nature.
The Mole spends its time making tunnels un- derground, and then, when you least expect it, breaks the surface for a breath of air. The least prepared Mole is the easiest to defeat be- cause it has not groomed its subterranean space effec- tively enough. Such is true of the Revolution: if it has not taken the grievances of the people and produced organizations capable of withstanding the counter- revolution —if it has not harnessed these grievances to the discipline of revolutionary force—then it is easily defeated.
It is the burrowing that is essential, not sim- ply the emergence onto the surface of history. A process of preparation has been long afoot in West Asia and North Africa, all at a different tempo. In Tunisia and Egypt there have been many consti- tutional challenges to the one-party state, by which I mean challenges within the bounds of the consti-.
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This meant that with the fall o f Tripoli, the rebel command remained diffuse. There was a government, but no state with the authority to enforce its laws on the population. Each city Mis- rata, Zintan, Dernah has its own military authority, with little coordination amongst them and very little respect for the central government. The rebels from below, who spent the most blood in the conflict, are not the immediate beneficiaries o f the revolution, but they are not quiet.
They retain their guns. They have their imaginations for a new Libya. What comes is to be seen. But how did we get here? It is not even the beginning o f the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end o f the beginning. But with King Idris on the throne, Libya enjoyed a constrained freedom. In , when Libya was formed, Idris took up the mantel, but essentially retired to his honey-colored palace in wondrous Tobruk.
Tripoli was a backwater for him. He preferred Cyrenaica. Idris’ flag for the new Libya borrowed from Cyrenaica’s emblems with the star and the crescent , not Tripolitania s totems a palm tree, a star and three half moons.
The troops stationed at these bases kept to themselves. Others, when they do leave, make asses o f themselves. Ben Halim had come to the Americans with a dow ry in hand: he had signed a treaty with President Habib Bourguiba o f Tunisia, and they were eager to forge an alliance that might include Algeria in a pro-Western bloc if only the French could be persuaded to leave their neighbor alone.
Such fealty to the old and new colonial powers unsettled the Libyan people. It won Qaddafi a great deal o f popular respect. It wanted for basic social development. W hen Qaddafi came to power, the main export was scrap metal. Libya’s deserts were a dumping ground for the detritus from Operation Compass, the allied attack on the Italian and German positions between December and February That part o f the war is celebrated in the R ock Hudson film, Tobruk , where Hudson, playing a Canadian soldier points out, “A dead martyr is just another corpse.
I remember being driven along the Mediterranean road as a child, looking in wonder at the half tracks and tanks littering the roadside. It was these ruins that provided the main export for Libya. Libya’s second main export was esparto grass or halfa needle grass used to make high quality paper.
Idris’ regime ignored the economic question. B y , Standard Oil began to export Libyas oil. This was to soon become the major export o f the country. B y the time Idris was deposed, the country exported three million barrels o f oil per day. Scandalously, the government received the lowest rent per barrel in the world. The routine corruption o f Idris’ circle and their obsequiousness to their imperial friends are two o f the reasons why there was barely any opposition to Qaddafi s coup.
The Libyan people were with him in They would have been with his revolution in if it had delivered on its promise. That was perhaps part o f the problem: the social goods were delivered. The Human Development Index H D I is a measure that looks at education, life expectancy, literacy and the general standard of living. It was the measure that most disturbed sections o f Libyan society.
That money was then diverted toward social welfare, mainly an increase in housing and health care. Tripoli until then had been the most expensive city in the Middle East. M any large properties were taken over and let to the people at low rents. The vast sprawling shanty town just outside Tripoli was torn down and replaced b y new workers’ housing projects. Libya has often been described as a large desert with two towns on either end, as bookends for the sand: Tripoli in the west and Benghazi in the east.
But in the middle and into the south lay vast desert stretches where the Bedouin and the peasantry worked the land in miraculous ways to grow crops and to raise livestock.
Aware o f the hardships in the countryside, Qaddafi s regime allowed farmers to settle on confiscated Italian and Sanusi land, and the government provided them with low interest loans to buy farm equipment and inputs. Redistribution o f land on the Jefara plain west o f Tripoli was the rural cognate.
It was a straightforward redistribution o f wealth conducted as a currency exchange. Qaddafi was never keen on the full agenda o f socialism. Instead, Qaddafi turned over the fruits o f social wealth to the people at the same time as his regime centralized the mechanism for the redistribution o f those fruits. The gargantuan state was not capable o f being efficient, and this led to serious problems o f incentive in the population and to alienation from its mechanisms.
Rather than address these administrative problems, Qaddafi relied upon the oil revenue to pacify the population.
It was the oil that prolonged his revolution and allowed his central state to appear benevolent even as it monopolized de- cision-making in the country. The democratic set-up, which he called the Jamahiriya State o f the Masses , exceeded what King Idris allowed. The Revolution Committee Movement was not a real development. This abeyance o f authority “I am not the leader” was dangerous because it weakened the established systems, which turned to Qaddafi for his almost regal assent or views.
When the audience laughed with him, he smiled and laughed along, saying, “In theory, in theory. In his Green Book, Qaddafi offered an alternative to the Jamahiriya idea o f democracy. The war in Chad wore down the military, and it ate into the exchequer. The return to eastern Libya o f the Afghan Arabs jihadit b y the late s and the Algerian Civil W ar in brewed the stew o f extremist political Islam in the towns o f Dernah and Benghazi.
The tribal leadership caviled at the regime, as it floundered. It is fitting that the leaders o f the two wings are sons o f Qaddafi—it tells us a great deal about the involution o f his regime. Geography o f Identity. Qaddafis new regime purportedly attempted to overthrow the supremacy o f the tribes.
These tribes are vast kinship groups, spread over considerable territory. A million or so o f the Warfallah do not march in evolutionary lockstep. They are a “refuge, given the total absence o f Libyan political institutions. The ultimate tribe o f the regime, the army, w ould be at hand to make it so.
About a third o f the country’s population gave their allegiance to the order. It was powerful. Qaddafi saw it as the fifth column, and was not disposed to being generous. The Sa’adi confederation o f the East was left out o f the spoils o f the new dispensation. By the s, Benghazi looked a little worn compared to Tripoli. The returns o f the oil rent and the social wage pledged b y the new revolutionary regime offered only parsimonious help to the impoverished East.
The Tripolitanians wanted a unitary system, and the Cyre- naicans wanted a federal system. It wanted to preserve these through political autonomy from Tripoli, now ruled b y the men o f the small towns such as Qaddafi s own Sirte. It was a sore issue. Even as Qaddafi s prejudices offered parsimonious help to the impoverished East, his state- building policies ensured the creation o f a Libyan national sensibility.
It was the state bureaucracy and the military that finished the process, cementing the basis for Libyan personhood, now formulated around a culture polished b y the authoritarian populist state. From the Kabyles o f northern Algeria to the Riffians o f northern M orocco and to the Tuareg o f the Sahara, the Amazigh peoples or the Imazighen have struggled against the national liberation states, with little success.
A year later, Qaddafi went to Jadu, in the Nafusa mountains, to meet with Amazigh leaders. It was a normal tendency o f modern nationalism to deny the fractures within a nation-state, and to pretend that minority rights and cultural expression are the first gesture toward secession.
The denial o f those rights, history shows us, are more likely to spur secession than the recognition o f them in the first place. They refused to do so. It is in such instances that it becomes clear how Qaddafi lost the loyalty o f the natural leaders. These declarations also demonstrate that Libya’s tribes are not homogenous entities, but rather are composed o f diverse members with varying social and economic backgrounds.
The Green Flag. His new constitution was founded on Islamic principles article 2 , and his new state attempted to do with Islam what it had done with the economy and with politics: nationalize Islam.
Political Islam’s representatives began to dig deep roots, mainly in eastern Libya. It built up networks outside the mosques whose ulema had been largely nationalized. There Dr. The attack failed, and two thousand or so people were captured as a result o f its failure. Further attacks came from Inqat and the Islamic Liberation Front. M ore repression followed, including the hanging o f two students at the al-Fateh University in and the execution o f nine members o f Jihad on Libyan State Television on February 17, In , fears o f unrest led the regime to cancel a soccer match between Libya and Algeria.
It was safer to conduct their jihad in far o f f Afghanistan than in Libya, where the regime remained powerful and dangerous.
W ith the Afghan war winding down b y the end o f the s, the Afghan Arabs returned home. The Algerian Civil War cost almost two million lives and the destruction o f the social wealth o f the country. After , they would go to join the insurgency in Iraq. The East had sent a disproportionate number o f its young to fight in Iraq. A US embassy official snuck away from his Tripoli minder in and reported that the young men who went to Iraq did so because they could not effectively protest against Qaddafi.
Iraq stood in for Libya. The official went to Der nah. Other factors include a dearth o f social outlets for young people, local pride in Derna’s history as a locus o f fierce opposition to occupation, economic disenfranchisement among the town’s young men. For them, resistance against coalition forces in Iraq is an important act o f ‘jihad’ and a last act o f defiance against the Qadhafi regime. The regime killed 1, prisoners. Qaddafi s henchman and brother-in-law , Abdullah Senussi, who would be sent to Benghazi in February , was the interior minister then as well.
During George H. He’s been making some crazy statements. Bush responded, “I think he is just grandstanding.
He was trying to turn the ideological tide to his favor, complaining that in the context o f the US bombing in Iraq that “Islam became the target o f the West. He was the “shield o f Islam,” as one Libyan put it at that time. Frayed Uniforms. Debates over old colonial treaties and historical claims rested on a region believed to be home to large uranium deposits. Proxies for powers far from Tripoli and N’Djamena, the two countries went into a bloody conflict that lasted for ten years.
The French intervened twice, and with superior air power beat back Qaddafi and his allies. This was the Toyota W ar o f , and it resembled in many particulars the use o f such trucks in Libya itself in The Libyan army was routed, and it lost the Aouzou Strip, and if the Organization o f African States had not intervened, it might have been threatened within Libya itself.
It was a preview o f B y some accounts, the Libyan armed forces lost a third o f its infantry and considerable amounts o f armor. Morale was at a very low level. It was never to recover its verve.
The defeat in the Toyota War reduced their confidence. The U N sanctions, Dirk Vandewalle argues, led to “mounting discontent and increasing privation in Libya, reflected in unpaid salaries, decreased subsidies, cuts in army perks and a shortage o f basic goods.
Canny enough to recognize the problems in the military, Qaddafi recalled his best units to the western part o f the country. The elite corps, including the 32nd Reinforced later Khamis Brigade, was brought to defend Tripoli. It was already a sign o f weakness. The Libyan army was the regime’s own Trojan Horse. United Nations sanctions came into effect in They had a huge impact on the Libyan exchequer.
The country was simply not prepared to withstand the pressure. Unimaginative use o f the oil surplus hastened the economic stagnation. U N sanctions in threw the reforms into turmoil, and it allowed the old Qaddafi to emerge out o f the sarcophagus that he had become.
Cracks in the ruling elite at times slowed and at times speeded up the reforms. Qaddafi would enter the debate on one side, then another, speaking out o f both sides o f his mouth. M oussa Koussa was one o f Qaddafi’s close allies, a man o f the tent.
His loyalty knew no bounds. In , he was sent to be ambassador to London. This was a reference to the Libyan dissidents.
He was expelled from London. But he was not Qaddafi’s butcher. Moussa Koussa could promise millions o f dollars from Libya’s oil money.
The negotiations went back and forth. To add to the pot o f blood money, Qaddafi decided to announce that Libya would “disclose and dismantle all weapons o f mass destruction. Their nuclear card prevented a repeat o f the Iraq adventure. That Qaddafi threw the card on the table revealed his obsequious intentions.
Lantos’ team returned to the US with good news about Libya. President George W. Bush signed Executive Order which voided all outstanding claims against Libya. Moussa Koussa had done a remarkable job. In , Moussa Koussa opened conversations with various jihadi groups based in Europe. It is the concern o f the whole world. The US cannot combat it alone.
Qaddafi played a double game with the jihadLf. On the one side, b y about , the regime had opened a dialogue with the LIFG. He had other fish to fry. In a memorandum from , General Ward wrote, “Libya is a top partner in combating transnational terrorism.
Alongside the payment o f the money came a remarkable shift in the ideological framework o f the Qaddafi regime. Qaddafi s interpreter o f world events, Dr. Ahmed Fituri the Secretary for the Americas in the Ministry o f Foreign Affairs had begun to write summaries o f new books for the leader.
It tells you something about a person if you know what they are reading. I love her very much. I admire her and I’m proud o f her because she’s a black woman o f African origin”.
Personalities did not spur the transformation. It was rooted in the need to remove the sanctions, and to maintain the older animosities in the new era. W hen Congressman Tom Lan- tos visited Tripoli in his second visit , he sat down with Moussa Koussa, who warned him, “Iran and Iraq used to balance each other out.
Now, there is no balance. Ibrahim was known as The Donkey, largely because he tried unsuccessfully to ban the teaching o f foreign languages mainly English in the s. Such old- school revolutionaries had been sidelined b y the late s, even as they retained a small public following among those who had faith in the revolutions promise. At no point did Qaddafi bulldoze the statue in Bab al-Azziziya o f a US warplane being crushed by a fist a sculpture to commemorate the bombing o f Libya.
Such images remained part o f the diet o f state propaganda, even as the official current moved in a direction that pleased the Atlantic capitals. There was an element o f naivety in the Qaddafi foreign ministry. As Roland Bruce St. The most important such maneuver was Qaddafis attempt to block the idea o f a Mediterranean Union mooted b y France’s Sarkozy. Qaddafi called a mini summit o f the Arab League in Tripoli to denounce the Union. It is a picture o f the hero as dignified captive, surrounded b y preening Italian army and civilian leaders as they prepared to execute the Libyan hero.
Qaddafis residual anti-colonialism came out in his tussles with the Europeans. The Europeans were also eager for Libyan oil. Britain’s Tony Blair and France’s Sarkozy went to kiss Qaddafi’s ring and pledge finance for oil concessions. It is the reason why the British government freed Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber, in August Qaddafi was willing to give up the main insurance policy o f rogue states, his nuclear arsenal. He was eager to forge some kind o f entente despite the press o f imperialism on the Global South.
CIA papers found in a cache o f Libyan government documents in an abandoned Tripoli building show that Sir Mark Allen, the former head o f counterterrorism in Britain’s M I6 carefully nurtured a relationship with Moussa Koussa.
Moussa Koussa was a crucial point man. It was also not an enormous surprise that Moussa Koussa fled to Tunisia in late March, and b y March 30 arrived on a private Swiss jet at Farnborough Airport, in Britain. The flight was organized b y MI6. Moussa Koussa was the highest profile defector during the battle to eject Qaddafi. Qaddafi had become for both Britain and Moussa Koussa a “stray dog.
Once Moussa Koussa had successfully spread the oil largess to erase the U N sanctions and to placate the United States, the question o f “reform” returned to the political elites o f Libya. It was there that the main debate would flourish from the late s to The debate broke along lines familiar in many post-colonial states that had been through the epoch o f national construction o f an economy through import substitution or other means and that had b y the s been pressured by structural forces and by more overt forces, such as the IM F to globalize.
The “reformers” followed the script o f the IMF, and the “hardliners” settled into an obduracy regarding the old ways and so appeared unimaginative in this new climate. Their debates sharpened after the credit crunch o f , when oil prices oscillated and plans for privatization floundered as the ability to continue to pay out the social wages declined.
It was in this maw that Qaddafi would lose very large sections o f the population that had hitherto supported him for one reason or another. The regime’s hegemony collapsed long before The rebels did not have to gain the support o f the masses who held fast to Qaddafi, for such masses, b y , did not exist in large numbers. That was the task o f the uprising. The two previous forums, in Sirte in and Benghazi in , had provided Saif al-Islam with a platform to urge on reforms o f the regime built b y his father and his clique.
The first two speeches were forthright, but timid. A t the third meeting, held in a remote desert town on the Awbari Lakes, Saif al-Islam set aside his prepared remarks and spoke, nervously, from the heart. He praised his father, but said that Qaddafi had built a regime in a historically unique set of circumstances. It was not reproducible. Things had to change. Saif al-Islam called for total privatization o f all aspects o f life.
All o f them had been educated in the Atlantic world, and most o f them spent much o f their career overseas. They are figures o f renown in their own circles, and had come to Libya on the say-so o f Saif al-Islam because they were committed to the transformation o f the rump o f the revolutionary social wage set-up into a neoliberal system.
What they wanted was to build a Kuwait in the Mediterranean. In other words, to import into Libya the full spectrum o f neoliberal economic policies: open doors to finance capital, a place for finance to run its casino activities and an industrial sector premised upon an absence o f regulations.
The classic approach to deal with this Dutch Disease is to raise tariffs and subsidize manufacturing. He wanted him back as Prime Minister, to replace the technocrat al-Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmudi w ho had chanced to embroil himself in a series o f scandals that showed poor management rather than corruption, and that showed him to be a poor standard bearer for the reform agenda.
He had the fortune o f being well-regarded in the international oil world not long after he was tasked to head the N O C the 27th Oil and M oney Conference in London voted him “Petroleum Executive o f the Year” for ; over the years the winners include executives from Chevron, Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell and Arab oilmen such as Abdullah S.
The oil ministry was well on its way to resembling the oil sector in Qatar or Saudi Arabia. Ghanem did crucial work in the most lucrative o f Libyas sectors.
But far more important reform work was taking place at the National Economic Development Board, headed b y Mahmoud Jibril. There is a still a gap o f distrust’ dividing the two. As to whether Libya has a Master Plan that includes all the 11, [privatization] projects, Jibril admitted that in the past two years, Libya had started executing projects without such a plan.
At the same time, his organization has a daunting task to tackle, in terms o f rationalizing 11, development projects in the chaotic Libyan government bureaucracy and also, to train Libyans to work in new sectors outside o f the hydrocarbons industry. Jibril has stated American companies and universities are welcome to join him in this endeavor and we should take him up on his offer. The property rights law no. Ben Halim son o f Idris’ Prime Minister came back to Libya from Goldman Sachs, and was deeply aware o f the mechanisms for such reforms.
This worried another strand o f the regime, and they weighed in on Qaddafi. They wanted the old fox to take a firm stand against the reformers. This was wishful thinking. At best, Qaddafi gave a couple o f speeches that recycled the old rhetoric. In , Qaddafi warned, “Oil companies are controlled b y foreigners who have made millions from them — now Libyans must take their place to profit from this money.
Oil m oney now slipped through the net into the Atlantic banks, where the accounts o f the oil companies, Libya’s Sovereign Wealth fund and the private accounts o f the Libyan regime’s elites grew substantially. Behind the names, the old game continued. If the social wages would not be properly funded, other results awaited the Libyan people.
This was classic neoliberal thought at work. B y early , the tremors in the ruling elites o f Libya came to a head. Ben Halim resigned when he found himself unable to move the banking system fully into neoliberalism. Jibril threatened to resign at least three times, but he was brought back into the fold with promises from Saif al-Islam. In his speech to the Youth Forum, Saif al-Islam himself proposed that he w ould retire from politics. These men responded to a formidable section o f the Old Guard who had not fully bought into the reform agenda.
People like Housing Minister Abu Z ayd Umar Dorda held fast to the ideals o f the revolution, or else they worried that their own leeching o f the social wealth for private gain would be supplanted by the new methods that would benefit the reform section. Qaddafi proposed a unique solution in This was a boon to the reformers. To tie the hands o f the Old Guard Qaddafi offered a massive transfer payment scheme, to turn over oil revenues to individuals.
It was privatization that looked like populism. The past forty years had to be set aside, and Libya needed to pick up on its arrested historical development. The Old Guard returned to the fray, threatening a rise in inflation if Qaddafi simply turned over the oil money to every individual Libyan.
They had become defensive and worn-down. The Congress did not appreciate the privatization o f state-owned enterprises and the creation o f free trade enclaves. The Congress tried to hold the tempo o f reforms down. Their actions irritated the IMF, whose report on Libya concluded, “Progress in developing a market economy has been slow and discontinuous. These sailed through. Facts on the ground did not support them. It was not popular on the ground.
Nothing came o f this. Neoliberalism metastasized into Libya, carrying forward its normal forms of privatization and an end to social welfare, but manifesting itself in its local forms—it developed along the grain o f the equations o f power, here the disgorging o f the “state o f the masses” into the hierarchies o f family.
It looked like corruption, but it was really neoliberalism’s manifestation in the conditions it found in Libya in the early s. The other sons, Mutassim and Mohammed who dominated telecommunications , had come to armed blows over a Coca Cola bottling plant in All o f this was miserable.
But it was not corruption on a grand, legal scale such as would be familiar to the CEOs o f the financial world or o f the G ulf Arab emirs. There are no columns that bear the colonel’s initials, or fists cast to resemble his hands or river-fed moats with voracious carp. Aisha Qaddafi’s lavish compound in the Noflein district in Tripoli was built during those neoliberal reform years o f — The vulgar expenditures o f the children were kept relatively hidden from the population.
N o wonder that the citizens o f Libya, like those o f France two hundred and twenty five years ago and those in Egypt in , walked bewildered through the palaces o f their rulers, converting them into museums o f excess that needed to be seen to be mocked, not seen to be envied. In , as the reformers found their way blocked, a prominent Tripoli attorney Ibrahim el- Meyet, a friend o f Shukri Ghanem, went to meet the Charges d’Affaires in the United States Embassy.
He complained for Ghanem, and then laid out why the neoliberal reformers felt that no shock therapy-type change would come as long as Qaddafi remained in power, “Despite the rhetoric, el-Meyet said he and Ghanem believe that al-Qadhafi is not genuinely ready ‘in his heart and in his bones’ to implement change, for two reasons.
Al-Qadhafi perceives himself as a superman o f history’ and is not able to admit fault or weakness. Cosmetic attempts at economic reform are acceptable and help advance al- Qadhafi s goal o f reingratiating Libya with the West, but the shared assessment o f Ghanem and el-Meyet is that meaningful economic and political reform will not occur while al-Qadhafi is alive.
It also lays too much on the shoulders o f Qaddafi alone, and not on the Old Guard s bloc and that o f the public sector workers who fought against the reformers from the early part o f the twenty-first century.
Nonetheless, it says a great deal about the reformers themselves, who believed that Qaddafi had to go for their agenda to go even further. Instead family ties and the intoxication o f power must have led Saif al-Islam to remain b y his father s side.
But there is also an ideological reason w h y Saif al-Islam would have been loyal to his father, and denigrated the rebels. The “essential nature” o f N GOs, he argued, is to be “independent critics and advocates o f the marginal and vulnerable. That kind o f realism led to his faith in the reforms and in February 20 speech for the harshest armed violence against the protests in Tripoli and Benghazi.
The ragged on the streets are not part o f the “civil society”; they are Unreason afoot. It was not the social conditions o f life that breed resentment, but the perception o f a relative distinction between the frustrations o f the many and the casual temper o f the few. She was perceptive. It w ould explode in February The rebellion in Benghazi began on February 15, These numbers are approximations, because the proper forensic work was not possible absent entry into morgues.
Human rights activist Fateh Terbil said on that day, O u r numbers show that more than two hundred people have been killed. On February 21, the Libyan air force attacked Benghazi. There was no attempt to verify the claims.
Part o f this was the lack o f media access in the country a problem magnified in Syria and part o f it is the fog o f war. The Cairo- based Arab Organization for Human Rights asked for an international investigation o f the war crimes.
Even in Derna today, a number o f conspirators were executed. This will be the end of every oppressor who stands with Gaddafi. Gaddafi is over, thats it, he has no presence here any more. The eastern regions o f Libya are now free regions. If he wants to reclaim it, he will need to bomb us with nuclear or chemical bombs.
The people have stood and said they will not go back. Qaddafi, meanwhile, said on February 22 that he had “not yet ordered the use o f force,” and that “when I do, everything will burn. It would be sufficient when necessary to turn that rhetoric against Qaddafi. Such speeches were tinder for the fires o f imperialism. The details o f the ground-war are essential at this point. This was an embarrassment, but it was not decisive. That was to follow.
Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, Qaddafis interior minister, resigned on February M ajor General al-Fattah You- nis had been the Minister o f the Interior in Qaddafi’s cabinet, and was sent to Benghazi on February 18 to relieve the loyalists besieged in the Katiba military compound.
M ajor General al-Fattah Younis defected with his troops. He would become the military leader o f the rebellion. In Benghazi and Tobruk considerable sections o f the armed detachments gave themselves over to the rebellion. The naval base and airport in Benghazi went to the rebellion. Soldiers from Az Zawiya joined them.
The cadets at an air force school joined the protests, took over the air- base in Misrata and disabled the jets. The tide was with the rebels. There was no discussion about the defections to the rebels, and its gains.
The language o f a potential civilian massacre in any o f the cities had not been raised. The statement b y Nigeria’s U. J o y Ogwu was typical. He pushed the Council hard to create a no-fly zone and to ask the International Criminal Court ICC to investigate Qaddafi and his regime for war crimes. On the ground, meanwhile, the rebels, despite the bloodshed and without foreign assistance, seemed to be making headway.
Here the army had broken into two, one part remaining loyal to the Qaddafi regime, and the other giving itself over to the rebellion. Qaddafi still controlled the air, but even that seemed to be a momentary advantage. This was a turn for the Air Force. Three days later, the rebels in Ras Lanuf shot down a fighter jet. These high-level military defections continued.
Troops joined them. On February 26, ten thousand troops in the east went to the rebellion. A s they advanced forward, Qaddafi s air force began to be an impediment. Brega and Ras Lanuf are not heavily populated towns. M ore important was Ajdabiya, the gateway to Benghazi.
It meant that the rebels had developed air power, strengthened the next day with the defection o f two more fighter jets into Benghazi and tw o more battalions from Sirte, who took over its airport. In Misrata, the rebels defeated Qaddafi s forces on March 16, and took command o f several o f his tanks.
Nevertheless, b y mid-March the Qaddafi forces had pushed the rebels out o f the central towns and appeared to be advancing to Benghazi, and to Mis- rata. Britain’s David Cameron had called for a “no-fly” zone on February 28, and the Arab League sharpened the call on March As morale began to turn in the rebel’s camp, the leadership sought salvation elsewhere. Was a massacre impending?
Qaddafi’s troops had previously tried to take Az Zawiya M arch 1 and Misrata March 6 , and in both cases the rebels held off the attacks. Thirty-three people died on March 5 at Az Zawiya, with twenty-five being rebels and eight being Qaddafi soldiers.
These are the costs o f war, not the outcome o f genocide. Revolutions are fought. They cannot be given. The rebels seemed prepared. Protests in Tripoli amongst the working-class neighborhoods o f Feshloom, Gur- gi and Tajoura gave extra strength to the rebellion. These neighborhoods were in permanent siege. The workers were not pusillanimous. There would be blood.
N o revolution comes in a straight line. The workers knew nasty from their everyday lives. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available! The world watched as the bud of the Arab Spring was buried under the cold darkness of the Libyan Winter. Compares experiences of the Arab Spring for a comprehensive account of how nations handled the challenge of democratic consolidation.
With The Poorer Nations, Prashad takes up the story where he left off. Prashad analyzes the failures of neoliberalism, as well as the rise of the BRICS countries, the World Social Forum, issuebased movements like Via Campesina, the Latin American revolutionary revival — in short, efforts to create alternatives to the neoliberal project advanced militarily by the US and its allies and economically by the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and other instruments of the powerful.
Just as The Darker Nations asserted that the Third World was a project, not a place, The Poorer Nations sees the Global South as a term that properly refers not to geographical space but to a concatenation of protests against neoliberalism. The Arab Spring unleashed forces of liberation and social justice that swept across North Africa and the Middle East with unprecedented speed, ferocity, and excitement.
Although the future of the democratic uprisings against oppressive authoritarian regimes remains uncertain in many places, the revolutionary wave that started in Tunisia in December has transformed how the world sees Arab peoples and politics. Bringing together the knowledge of activists, scholars, journalists, and policy experts uniquely attuned to the pulse of the region, Dispatches from the Arab Spring offers an urgent and engaged analysis of a remarkable ongoing world-historical event that is widely misinterpreted in the West.
Tracing the flows of protest, resistance, and counterrevolution in every one of the countries affected by this epochal change—from Morocco to Iraq and Syria to Sudan—the contributors provide ground-level reports and new ways of teaching about and understanding the Middle East in general, and contextualizing the social upheavals and political transitions that defined the Arab Spring in particular. Dispatches from the Arab Spring is an unparalleled introduction to the changing Middle East and offers the most comprehensive and accurate account to date of the uprisings that profoundly reshaped North Africa and the Middle East.
In addition, major public statements by Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar al-Qaddafi, and others are joined by Egyptian opposition writings and relevant primary source documents.
(LIDO) Arab Spring, Libyan Winter – Vijay Prashad | PDF | Egypt | Gamal Abdel Nasser.Arab Spring Libyan Winter
Mubarak needed time to sort out his legacy, Wisner intimated, and whatever should take place must keen a keen eye on stability. This embarrassed the Obama administration, which wanted to appear both for stability and for change. Secretary o f State Hillary Clinton s team dismissed Wisner for his poor choice o f words, at the same time as Clinton seemed to pursue his suggestion.
Such an “orderly transition Lawrence, Seven Pillard of Wisdom, Their policy cousins, in the diplomatic hovels o f Foggy Bottom and in Kiryat Ben Gurion, absorbed this twaddle.
For them, the Arab W orld would only ascend to Democracy in the long-term. In the short-term, where we all live, it would have to make do with Stability. Visions o f Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas ran through their future plans. It was all too much to bear. Obamas White House and State Department seemed unable to keep up with the pace o f events in Egypt and in the Arab world in general. The intransigence o f the people in Tahrir Square, in particular, dazzled the planners. Too much is known o f the ways of the secret police to allow the dynamism of Tahrir Square to be so easily broken.
Mubarak’s gambit was patently insufficient. But this is all that the United States could offer. Too much was at stake. These defeats and retreats portend the collapse o f US hegemony. The first pillar is US reliance upon this region for oil, which must be allowed to flow freely into the car culture o f Europe and the United States. The fourth pillar is related to the previous three. The maintenance o f these four pillars is a fundamental goal o f US foreign policy in the Arab world.
Little needs to be said about pillar no. It is the obvious one. The other three are less established. Industrial society relies upon oil to power itself, and to derive materials for much o f its industrial production it is a crucial raw material for plastics, for example. The United States is the world s largest consumer o f oil, a fourth o f the total, but most o f its oil is not from the M iddle East.
That is the reason w h y the United States, as the world’s largest economy since the s and the world’s most powerful military since at least the s, has become the de facto policeman o f the world’s oil supply. The Atlantic powers joined with the Carter Doctrine in principle, knowing full well that the weight o f the responsibility would fall on the United States. It had to counter the Soviets and the Iranians, and it would do it with its G ulf allies.
The French and the British did not want to get their hands dirty. This was unseemly work. He went to O P E C to raise the target oil price, to censure Kuwait for lateral drilling into Iraqi oil fields and to suggest that the oil profits no longer be held in dollars.
This was unthinkable. Given the central importance o f G ulf oil to the global economy, all of us share an interest in thwarting this dictator’s ambitions.
W e all have a critical stake in this. The Saudi monarchy is a feudal regime that does not even allow women to drive cars. Surely it is not American policy to make the world safe for feudalism. This is about money, about protecting governments loyal to America and punishing those that are not and about who will set the price o f oil. America went to war, clobbered Iraq, put in place a garrisoned sanctions regime till , when its armies returned to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Misery came to Iraq because o f its oil underfoot.
Arab Friends. The second pillar is to maintain Egypt as a firm ally in the US-led war on terror. Here the Mubarak regime was not following the United States. It had interests that parallel those o f Washington. The secular regime set up b y Gamal Abdul Nasser was already at war with political Islam within Egypt Nasser’s popularity held the Muslim Brotherhood in check. Nasser’s aide, Anwar Sadat, had been the Egyptian military’s liaison with the Muslim Brotherhood since the s.
Sadat could not complete the job. The Islamists killed him in Sadat’s successor, Mubarak, also tried to dance with the Islamists, but was not successful. In , Mubarak picked a career military man, General Omar Suleiman, to run his internal security department, the Mukhabarat el-Aama. Two years later, Mubarak was to go to a meeting in Addis Ababa. Suleiman insisted that an armored car be flown to Ethiopia. The armor saved them. Mubarak signed legislation that made it a crime to even sympathize with Islamism, and his regime built five new prisons to fill with Brotherhood members.
They were natural allies. But Egypt’s willingness to be a partner had been strained b y the Iraq War. In , he met General David Petraeus in Cairo. Ambassador Scobey wrote a note back to the State Department on J u ly Wisner’s visit to Cairo was not idiosyncratic. It was to put some stick about in the Arab World’s most important capital, Cairo.
If Mubarak had to go, then Mubarak’s regime had to remain in place and the public outcry had to be slowly silenced. When the Tahrir Square protests began, Mubarak sent Tantawi to Washington to seek support for his regime, and for anti-riot equipment. Tantawi was an old war-horse o f the Mubarak regime, and in the US State Department said o f him that he wanted to make sure that the US would not “reduce military assistance to Egypt in the future. Israels Supremacy. The third pillar of US foreign policy in the region is to protect Israel.
Israel has faced no existential threat since the war, when Egypt’s powerful army took it on. The Egypt-Israel peace treaty o f allowed Israel to pivot its entire security strat- egy to face o f f against much weaker actors, such as Lebanon and the Palestinians.
Egypt’s withdrawal has allowed Israel to exert itself with overwhelming force against the Palestinians, in particular. Protests in Egypt, with the Muslim Brotherhood as part o f the action, sent a tremor through Tel Aviv’s establishment.
If a new government came to power with the Brotherhood in alliance, this might lead to the abrogation o f the treaty. If this were to occur, Israel would once again be faced with the prospect o f a hostile Egypt, and its Goliath stance against the Palestinians w ould be challenged.
Roosevelt knew o f course that the British ruled over Egypt. These rebellions, or the urge for self- government, were interpreted cynically b y the British as its opposite: a reason to stay, to tame the passions o f the population. It was Nasser who tossed them out in the s. Roosevelt threw in his lot with the British consul, Lord Cromer. W isner whispered just this nonsense in his ear when he was in Cairo.
The US hastily told the Egyptian authority to make a few more concessions. Anything would do as long as the three pillars remained intact. The protests simply hastened the script. He had to be jettisoned. It was not to happen. He had to retire. Matters were not so easily left to chance. M ore surprises were to follow. In this period, Elaraby led the legal team to Camp David and to the Taba Conference —89 to settle the terms o f the Egyptian-Israeli peace.
Nonetheless, right after the February ouster o f Mubarak and the entry o f Elaraby into office, the old legal advisor sought out Hamas and began to talk about a new strategy for Egyptian- Palestinian relations. Nevertheless, it revealed an Egyptian public whose views on Israel have been suffocated b y the enforced peace deal. There is little public support for the peace deal, and whatever patience existed in Cairo vaporized when Israel conducted its campaign to prevent the Palestinians from taking their case to the United Nations in late September.
M on ey and threats from Washington fall daily on Tantawi s head. The character o f the settler-colonial Israeli state and its security are certainly under threat. The only w ay to seal off a Jewish State, for those who are so inclined, is to ensure that the Palestinians have their own state.
Israel is unwilling to grasp this contradiction. Its elites are in denial. These are rancid, particularly if the non-violent mass demonstrations like those in the first Intifada begin again.
The nonviolent protests are a real threat to Israel. It was to undercut this that President Obama tried to offer a concession, the declaration o f a state o f Palestine based on the border, with swaps to preserve Israel’s sense o f security. Netanyahu had none o f this.
He chose to hold fast, believing that the US had to follow his lead as long as Israel remains a major pillar o f the old order in the West Asia and North Africa. O ver the question o f the Palestinian case to the UN, the pillars o f stability rub against each other.
The Israelis won that gambit. B y August , Israel was in ferment. Inflation and a housing crisis dogged the lives o f Israelis, and following the example o f Egypt, they convened in their squares, manifesting their discontent. There was no indication that these protests had more than economic goals. There was no link between the unemployment question and the permanent warfare state. If Israeli political life is able to cleave out a genuine dynamic against its settler-co- lonial situation, this pillar o f stability might make its own accommodation with its neighbors.
Encircle Iran. Geopolitical ambitions easily overcame any dedication to values o f human dignity. The status quo powers are those who enable the imperial interests o f the Euro-American capitals, and the revisionists are those who threaten these interests. From to , the principle status quo power in the Middle East was Iran, with the Shah as the bastion o f Progress against the revisionism o f the Arab renaissance, under the star o f Nasser.
Nasser’s Free Officers coup o f sent a tremor through the Arab world. The fusion o f Egypt with Syria was not a progressive action in itself. The anti-Com- munism o f Nasser was not sufficient to ingratiate him with the bureaucrats in Washington. The Shah o f Iran stood fast against Nasserism. The first event took place in , when the Y om Kippur W ar turned out to be a fiasco fo r the Arab states.
Sadat had already turned his back on Nasser’s economic and political policies in ; foreign investment was being courted and Egypt’s constitution adopted a more Islamic tone. Sadat took home the Nobel Peace Prize, which went on the altar o f the new dispensation. Washington now saw Iran under the Mullahs as the leading revisionist power. Washington’s steady ally before and after this cataclysmic shift was o f course Saudi Arabia, and its satellite Gulf emirates.
Nasserism came into the palaces with the Free Princes, who were ejected to exile in Beirut. Then, after , an older danger threatened the Royals. The working-class in eastern Saudi Arabia and in the cities that run from Kuwait to Muscat along the eastern rim o f the peninsula are mainly Shi’a.
In , after the Iranian Revolution, the workers in the area again went out on strike, but were beaten back ferociously. The New York Times did not complain. It was as it should be. Since , any attempt to move a democratic agenda forward in the Arab world has been tarred with the brush o f Iranianum, what is generally called “Islamic fundamentalism. If that were the case, they should be apoplectic about the Saudi monarchy, whose Sharia laws would make the Iranian mullahs blush. But they cannot be honored because they come from al-Wefaq against the pow er o f a King who allows the US to base its Fifth Fleet in his archipelago, and who is fiercely against Iran.
The uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere threw the geo-political equation into disarray. That Egypt allowed the Iranians to use the Canal for the first time since the revolution threatened the architecture o f US power in the region. Their fall was preordained. When Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi returned from his exile in Qatar, he did not play the part o f Khomeini.
They wished to convert their sectarian histrionics onto their dissenting populations, but al-Wefaq’s Khalil Ibrahim al-Marzooq quickly warned that the Saudis might try to flood Bahrain with the kind o f mercenary thugs that they would send into Yemen to disrupt the Marxist republic in the s. He was prescient. Saud feared an “Iranian takeover o f all Lebanon. The Lebanese Armed Forces were not up to the task.
N or was the U N force in south Lebanon, “which is sitting doing nothing. But the idea percolates on the surface o f Riyadh’s palaces. The Saudis, the anchor o f anti-Iranianism, did not believe that the US had the spine to act as it must. The uprisings in Bahrain and Yemen had to be crushed. It would look bad if this was sanctioned in the name o f the preservation o f the monarchy.
Far better to see the protesters as terrorists as in Yemen or Iranianists as in Bahrain. O r even better yet, to turn this largely peaceful wave into a new military confrontation. The hawks o f Order had every incentive to enchain the doves o f Change.
When Ben Ali flew to Saudi Arabia, he brought with him to the peninsula the magic o f the wave. That’s where events ran into some trouble. The various sheikhdoms, some that predate the Saudi one such as Bahrain, to al-Saud’s , are ideological and practical buffer zones. The idea o f the Arab monarchy would be harder to sustain if the only such were in Riyadh, however rich. It becomes easier to point the royal finger toward Manama and Kuwait, to suggest that it is in the temperament o f Arabs to be ruled by their royals, or their tribal chiefs.
In Yemen, matters were simplified. There was no need to do a deal to send in troops. The president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, is clever. He played the crowds carefully, holding his own support base together with tribal blandishments and with threats about the fear o f the notorious South, once home to Marxism and now, by his lights, home to al-Qaeda.
In fact, Saleh was allowed to get away with murder, as the Saudis have in Manama, because there are limits to what Power is willing to concede in the region.
Bahrain and Yemen illuminate the manuscript o f Imperialism, a concept that many have increasingly come to deny or misrepresent. Such protests appear unlikely only because the wave o f struggle that broke out on the Peninsula in the late s and peaked in the s was crushed b y the early s.
Encouraged b y the overthrow o f the monarch in Egypt b y the coup led b y Nasser, ordinary people across the Arab world wanted their own revolts. Iraq and Lebanon followed. It wished to take its local campaign to the entire peninsula. In Bahrain, its more timid branch was the Popular Front. It did not last long. The Islamic Front for the Liberation o f Bahrain attempted a coup in Yemen’s Marxists faced ceaseless pressure from the Saudis, their Yemeni allies and the forces o f the Atlantic world.
It was the peninsula’s Die Wende, the turning point, at about the same time as the two Germanys were united. The pendulum swung in favor o f the status quo. Rumbles have been heard in Saudi Arabia itself over the years.
The former were constrained b y threats and material advances, while if the latter were not susceptible to bribes they were sent o ff to do jihad elsewhere or to contemplate their errors in prison and re-education camps.
One has to only look at the kleptocracy that goes b y the name Al Saud Inc. As Egypt rumbled, the regime put into place its typical maneuvers. Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul A ziz met with Saudi newspaper editors and told them that the events in Egypt were the work o f outsiders, a theme familiar to tyrants.
The official opposition formed a platform o f unity: it included the Islamic Umma Party led b y ten well-regarded clerics , the National Declaration o f Reform led b y Mohammed Sayed Tayib , al-Dusturieen a lawyers movement led b y Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz and a host o f reform websites such as dawlatyinfo and saudireform.
W e should treat the royal family like any other group. A Facebook group called for a “Days o f Rage” protest on March The Saudi National Guard was busy with sharp, and barely reported upon, repression. It was enough to keep things in check. The only threats on the peninsula that remained were in Yemen and Bahrain. He is now heir to the Saudi throne.
The pillar is strengthened b y his iron fist. Events in Yemen escalated faster than anyone could have assumed. In January, street protests opened up the Yemeni struggle in the capital, Sana a. The economic crisis provided the early slogans, but these morphed quickly into the reason for unemployment and distress—the political autocracy that smothered the ability o f the people to identify their own policies for their country.
They are part o f a movement that wishes to change the political dispensation in Yemen, where Saleh has ruled since , one year more than Mubarak. She and her group o f people had been prepared, and as the popular anger came out onto the streets in , they tried to offer leadership. Under pressure, Saleh said he would not seek re-election in That was a p loy that Mubarak had used.
It was already worthless to an enthusiastic population. They called for regime change, and were met with tear gas and live ammunition. The tide began to turn in late February, when most o f the major tribal heads threw their lot in with the opposition. He would soon defect to the opposition. Muhsin al-Ahmar had a reason to fear and despise his old comrade, Saleh. Saleh recognized the signs. This was denied. Then Saleh refused a proposal for a peaceful transition.
Deaths continued, as the security services routinely opened fire on the population forty-five shot dead in Sanaa on March The tribal armies entered the cities, confronted b y the security services and national army. He is the one who broke the constitution and dragged the country into violence. He is the one who practiced state terrorism. It was also orders from Yemen that sent the “anus” bomber Abdullah al-Asiri to kill Saudi interior minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef in September Gates’ fears also stemmed from actions in Abyan governorate on March 22, when A Q A P declared the creation o f an Islamic emirate in the province, with strict measures to restrict the movement o f women.
According to an essay in the Sydney Morning Herald written by Sarah Phillips, a scholar o f contemporary Yemen, “The declaration overlooks the complexities o f Abyan’s local landscape, particularly the fact that much o f its farming economy relies upon the labour o f women. It is one thing to say that Abyan is an Islamic emirate, but another matter entirely to administer it accordingly without attracting local hostility. Real change will be slow, unstable, and non-linear, but it is inevitable. Over the last few years, Yemen has become a central front in the War on Terror, and a central location in Droneland.
Saleh gave the US permission to bomb his territory, even if the strike kills civilians alongside jihadu. His Deputy, Rashad al-Alimi said that he had just lied to parliament, telling it that the bombs are American, but fired b y Yemenis. Saleh was angry. Both were American nationals.
The United States was wrong-footed over the Yemen protests. It could not afford to alienate Saleh, who still remained in control o f the counter-terrorism apparatus. N or could it go ahead o f the Saudis, who remained happy with Saleh he has a close ally in bin Nayef, the deputy interior minister o f the Saudis.
In late April, as events seemed at a bloody standstill, the G C C entered with a proposal that Saleh pledge to leave and the opposition stand down. Saleh refused to sign the proposal thrice, and after his M ay 22 refusal, the GCC walked out.
Wounded, Saleh fled to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment leaving his deputy A bd al-Rab Mansur al-Hadi in charge, his son Ahmed in charge o f the Republican Guard and his brother Khaled in a position o f decisive authority over the army. These are the people whom the protestors called the “Orphans o f Saleh. The Saudis hedged their bets between Saleh’s return and al-Ahmar s accession to the presidency. The protests continued. Shells fell between Taghyir Square, where the opposition created a tent city, and the Kentucky Roundabout, held b y the Republican Guard.
B y early January , Saleh pushed through an amnesty law. Protests broke out once more against the immunity deal that was pushed through the parliament. Amnesty International and Human Rights W atch agreed with the protestors. The United States remains silent. There is no discussion o f substance in the United Nations. Silence descends upon Yemen.
She would have none o f it. Return this country to its people; to ud, its people. Our Bahrain is ourd. It wanted to deliver a message. That vote, ninety-eight percent in favor, was recorded, and its meaning filed into the royal archives. It was enough to make the promise and have the people ratify it. Not much was done to put it into action. O u r demand is a constitution written b y the people,” the protestors chanted.
Sheikh Ali Salman o f the al-Wefaq Party urged the people to return to their protests. The al-Khalifa regime met these protests with stiff resistance. The new ruler, Hamad a graduate of Cambridge University , was smart. He knew a thing or two about hegemony. Not enough to smash the heads o f the Islamists or the Shi a parties, he hastily called for an elected parliament, allowed women to vote, and released some political prisoners this was the grandly named National Charter o f Bahrain, Protests returned and on February 19, large numbers came and occupied Pearl Square in Manama.
On February 23, a young poet, Ayat al-Qurmezi read out her impassioned poem for Bahrain. O u r Bahrain is Ours,” she bravely intoned.
The regime went after doctors and hospitals such as Dr. The contagion was not only political. It was also, and perhaps decisively, economic. Bahrain relies upon oil for its wealth. The beneficiaries o f this process have been the royal family and a crony clique. It is an ambitious plan. Bahrain’s oil was discovered in and b y it was the first country to export its oil to Europe. A British protectorate against the Ottoman Empire, Bahrain provided oil and protection for the sea-lanes from powers that sought to rival British dominion over the Indian Ocean.
N o real reforms were forthcoming, and so in , Shi’a and Sunni leaders educated merchants and intellectuals joined with the oil workers who went on strike to call for an elected legislature and the other trappings o f democracy including legal trade unions.
They were crushed. Their leaders were sent to India. There was little o f religion in these movements from below. They wanted a better share o f the oil profits, and respect. Independence from Britain in was greeted b y a new struggle for constitutionalism.
A toothless constitutionalism was set up. A renewed constitutional attempt in the early s was once more crushed and A li Salman had to leave Bahrain.
The Shi’a leader o f the time, Sheikh Abdul Amir al-Jamal said o f it, “this is not the type o f parliament we had demanded. This Bahranization policy was a smokescreen to pit the local labor against the foreign labor.
It has not worked. To top it off, an outcome o f the credit crunch since has been the Bahrain government’s proposal to cut subsidies o f food and fuel.
Young people are at the forefront o f the revolts because they have the most to lose from the austerity cuts, and from the policies that mortgage their futures.
M oney is the oil that lubricates the counter-rev- olution. The Saudi royal family threw out its billions. Recycled cabinets are not enough for this popular upsurge, and the bullets fired into the crowd have failed to have the required pedagogical effect.
M oney was effective, but not enough for many who wanted regular access to the fruits o f their labor not charity to quell disquiet. The emirs stoked the fires o f the Shi’a Revival.
They are not alone. However, this alienation was not always so. In other words, it is not a sectarian alienation whose roots might be found in the eighth century. Rather, the Shi’a distress in Bahrain has modern roots, even if these are refracted through older lineages.
It is an alienation from oil more than a theological dispute against the Sunnis. The al-Wefaq Party has its spiritual roots, no doubt, but its social base grows out o f grievances that have a much more mundane foundation.
Whatever their temperament, the W efaq Party led by Ali Salman is not in a position to create the vilayat-e faqih, the guardianship o f the clerics. In , a British official watched unrest take hold in Bahrain.
It too wants to preserve life and property, but not those o f the masses; only its own life and its own property. It counts on its allies in the North to bring the cavalry if things turn dire. The Pearl Square protests sent a shiver through the Washington establishment for two reasons. If the monarchy in Bahrain falls, there is every indication that a civilian government led b y al-Wefaq will ask the Fleet to depart. The velvet glove o f Commerce likes to distance itself from the iron fist o f Military force.
Secondly, the US does not wish to allow the domino o f republicanism to begin in Bahrain. Mullen was at hand to “reassure, discuss and understand what’s going on.
When the Peninsula’s political temperature rises, those helicopters will be the “first signs o f peace and established government” in the region. The deployment is essential for US war aims in West Asia and in the Gulf region—mainly as a deterrent against Iran through the patrolling of the oil lanes, especially the Straits o f Hormuz.
There is no way that the US or the Saudis w ould allow al- Khalifa to fall and a party like al-Wefaq, however popular, to come to power. Such an outcome would strengthen what Washington and Riyadh see as the revisionist bloc, led b y Iran. As it happened, US intervention was not needed. The Shah’s replacement, the Ayatollah Khomeini and his clerics, disdained the Americans for their support o f the Savak regime, and had no love for the G u lf Arabs either.
Nevertheless, their general tenor was that they wanted to consolidate their “Islamic Revolution in One Country. Angered by the hostage crisis, Carter nudged Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi strongman, to open an all-out w ar against his Iranian neighbors. That war, the Iran-Iraq war, bled the two countries from to with one and a half million dead and untold amounts o f the treasury wasted.
I am referring to the shaykhs in the G ulf region whose governments have supported unbelief against Islam. A series o f hasty summit meetings across cemented the alliance, with a Defense Pact agreed upon in November. In deference to Iran’s strength at that time, the G C C did not move to a formal mutual defense pact. But the real power will not come from any maddening war against Iran the Iraqis already showed that this was going to be bloody and senseless affair.
The G C C very quickly set up the capacity to exchange intelligence and to mutually train each other using the best riot control equipment on the market.
The GCC’s conundrum was made more complex when the Bush administration hastened to war against Afghanistan in and Iraq in What the Bush adventures did was deliver a gift to Iran, removing in two blows Iran’s enemies on its two main borders the Taliban to the east and Saddam Hussein to the west.
In both cases, the new regime had a soft spot for Iran—in Afghanistan, apart from the old Iranian friend Ismail Khan o f Herat there are a number o f Afghans in government now who took refuge in Iran during the Civil W ar in the s and the Taliban rule thereafter; in Iraq, the governing Islamic Dawa Party and its ally the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council have long-standing ties with the Iranian government, as does the more radical Sadr Movement.
Their scramble to bring the GCC’s military arm to life once more has to be seen in the context o f the revival o f Iranian influence. As the temperature continued to rise in Bahrain in , the Saudis itched to act. The demonstrators refused to leave the Pearl Square Roundabout, in whose center was a three hundred foot sculpture o f six arches holding a pearl.
Each arch represented a dhow, the sail o f a ship, and each o f these represented one o f the six members o f the GCC. It was erected in to commemorate the first G C C summit held in the emirate, and an image o f it came onto the half dinar coin o f the realm.
It was an ironic moment. A clear way forward appeared to the Saudi court when events in Libya and Syria took a turn for the worse. In Bahrain’s Pearl Square, the protestors chanted d ‘dmiyya, silm iyya, peaceful, peaceful. To enter with military force against this cry would look very poorly on the G ulf Arab emirates.
But the evolution o f the conflict in Libya and Syria sent a chill through the Arab Spring. N o longer the resolute protestors o f Tunisia and Egypt, now the guns had come out, and even if the conflict was asymmetrical, no longer could the opposition claim to be peaceful. The heavy hand o f State repression that followed in Libya and Syria opened the door for the Gulf Arab emirates. N ow it was a question o f handling the opportunity. Places where a political culture had been incubated b y brave activists and b y workers’ movements, such as Tunisia and Egypt, had the fastest dynamic forward.
Tahrir Square is rarely quiet. The contradictions o f governance shall slow down some o f the momentum, but not b y much. Elsewhere, the calculations o f the powerful tried to derail the emergence o f the Arab Spring. The early victims were Bahrain and Yemen. They could not be permitted to have their breakthrough. Legitimacy for the Gulf regimes would have been questioned, and this was not permissible as far as the US and its European allies were concerned.
Pretensions o f liberty have to be set aside when it comes to Riyadh and Doha. The Libyan revolt was not conjured up by magicians who rule the Atlantic states, and nor can it be reduced to their machinations. Part 2. Whenever night falls, the echoes o f a phonograph record bring you back. You traitor. The worst o f all is to have betrayed. Elliot Cola. One such cable, from , noted, “President Ben Ali’s extended family is often cited as the nexus o f Tunisian corruption.
He lost legitimacy. There was nothing left. Across the border, in Tripoli, Libya, Muammar al-Qaddafi once more opted for the erratic. You may be reading this Kleenex and empty talk on the Internet. This Internet, which any demented person, any drunk can get drunk and write in; do you believe it? The Internet is like a vacuum cleaner. It can suck anything. And you read what he writes and you believe it.
This is talk which is for free. Shall we become the victims o f Face- book and Kleenex and YouTube? Shall we become victims to tools they created so that they can laugh at our m oods? It would come from older movements, with deeper roots and grievances.
In early February , the IM F said o f Libya that it has followed its “ambitious reform agenda” and the Fund encouraged Libyas “strong macroeconomic performance and the progress on enhancing the role o f the private sector. The pain o f the IM F-led policies pushed the needle o f distress beyond the bearable. Combined with the lack o f democracy and the harshness of the security state, it is no wonder that the contagion spread as rapidly as it did.
Libya, however, did not suffer the sharp rise in grain prices, nor the overarching distress afforded b y the global credit crunch that began in There were no bread riots in late , nor was the protest in February linked directly to economic matters.
Rumors o f a demonstration on February 17, hastened the hand o f the Qaddafi regime. N ot only was this demonstration against the tide o f Islamophobia sweeping through Europe, but it was also against the old colonial power, Italy, whose minister seemed to relish being hateful. That the police opened fire to defend the consulate o f the old colonial power sent a chill through Benghazi, where there were deep roots o f anger against the Qaddafi regime.
The police broke up the crowd, and the Qaddafi regime sent the interior minister Abdullah Senussi and Sa’adi Qaddafi to take charge o f the city. His charms were lost on the city.
It was a failed mission. Enthused protestors gathered at the Maydan al-Shajara, where they fought o ff the police attempt to break up their resolve. News o f the Benghazi revolt spread to other towns, and in Al Bayda’ and Az Zintan the protestors burned down the traffic police headquarters and the police station respectively.
The revolt, in earnest, tried to match the state repression with its own violence. There was no other way to go. Qaddafi s Libya would not tolerate a Gandhi. It had to be fought with force o f arms. Those arrests provided the best advertisement for the protests.
Rumors spread that Qaddafi s regime, like Mubarak s before him, released thirty prisoners, armed them, and sent them to shoot at the protestors. The numbers were not huge, but they are o f course considerable ten here, thirteen there.
Undaunted, the next day, the protestors in Al Bayda’ captured a military base. In Derna, the rebels burnt down a police station, where prisoners died in their cells. Protestors rushed in, and took the barracks. B y February 21, the city was in the hands o f the rebels.
The hasty speed o f the fall of Benghazi showed the brittleness of the regime. Those that remained with Qaddafi, such as the troops in the Elfedeel Bu Omar compound, were besieged and, as news reports put it, “butchered b y angry mobs.
M ore condemnation would come soon. Events on the ground did not suggest that things were so bleak for the rebels. The rest o f Libya will be liberated b y the people and Qaddafi s security forces will be eliminated b y the people o f Libya.
In no time, Qaddafi’s military prowess was degraded. On August 22, the rebel forces took Tripoli. Qaddafi disappeared. On October 20, Qaddafi was killed in Sirte, his hometown.
The future o f Libya remained an open question. W ould the Libyan rebels set aside the many sectarian religious and tribal affiliations that bedeviled them, and combine to properly fight o ff the Qaddafi regime?
This meant that with the fall o f Tripoli, the rebel command remained diffuse. There was a government, but no state with the authority to enforce its laws on the population. Each city Mis- rata, Zintan, Dernah has its own military authority, with little coordination amongst them and very little respect for the central government.
The rebels from below, who spent the most blood in the conflict, are not the immediate beneficiaries o f the revolution, but they are not quiet. They retain their guns. They have their imaginations for a new Libya. What comes is to be seen. But how did we get here? It is not even the beginning o f the end. But it is, perhaps, the end o f the beginning. But with King Idris on the throne, Libya enjoyed a constrained freedom.
In , when Libya was formed, Idris took up the mantel, but essentially retired to his honey-colored palace in wondrous Tobruk. Tripoli was a backwater for him. He preferred Cyrenaica. Idris’ flag for the new Libya borrowed from Cyrenaica’s emblems with the star and the crescent , not Tripolitania s totems a palm tree, a star and three half moons.
The troops stationed at these bases kept to themselves. Others, when they do leave, make asses o f themselves. Ben Halim had come to the Americans with a dow ry in hand: he had signed a treaty with President Habib Bourguiba o f Tunisia, and they were eager to forge an alliance that might include Algeria in a pro-Western bloc if only the French could be persuaded to leave their neighbor alone.
Such fealty to the old and new colonial powers unsettled the Libyan people. It won Qaddafi a great deal o f popular respect. It wanted for basic social development. W hen Qaddafi came to power, the main export was scrap metal. Libya’s deserts were a dumping ground for the detritus from Operation Compass, the allied attack on the Italian and German positions between December and February That part o f the war is celebrated in the R ock Hudson film, Tobruk , where Hudson, playing a Canadian soldier points out, “A dead martyr is just another corpse.
I remember being driven along the Mediterranean road as a child, looking in wonder at the half tracks and tanks littering the roadside. It was these ruins that provided the main export for Libya.
Libya’s second main export was esparto grass or halfa needle grass used to make high quality paper. Idris’ regime ignored the economic question. B y , Standard Oil began to export Libyas oil. This was to soon become the major export o f the country.
B y the time Idris was deposed, the country exported three million barrels o f oil per day. Scandalously, the government received the lowest rent per barrel in the world.
The routine corruption o f Idris’ circle and their obsequiousness to their imperial friends are two o f the reasons why there was barely any opposition to Qaddafi s coup. The Libyan people were with him in They would have been with his revolution in if it had delivered on its promise.
That was perhaps part o f the problem: the social goods were delivered. The Human Development Index H D I is a measure that looks at education, life expectancy, literacy and the general standard of living. It was the measure that most disturbed sections o f Libyan society. That money was then diverted toward social welfare, mainly an increase in housing and health care.
Tripoli until then had been the most expensive city in the Middle East. M any large properties were taken over and let to the people at low rents. The vast sprawling shanty town just outside Tripoli was torn down and replaced b y new workers’ housing projects. Libya has often been described as a large desert with two towns on either end, as bookends for the sand: Tripoli in the west and Benghazi in the east. But in the middle and into the south lay vast desert stretches where the Bedouin and the peasantry worked the land in miraculous ways to grow crops and to raise livestock.
Aware o f the hardships in the countryside, Qaddafi s regime allowed farmers to settle on confiscated Italian and Sanusi land, and the government provided them with low interest loans to buy farm equipment and inputs. Redistribution o f land on the Jefara plain west o f Tripoli was the rural cognate. It was a straightforward redistribution o f wealth conducted as a currency exchange.
Qaddafi was never keen on the full agenda o f socialism. Instead, Qaddafi turned over the fruits o f social wealth to the people at the same time as his regime centralized the mechanism for the redistribution o f those fruits. The gargantuan state was not capable o f being efficient, and this led to serious problems o f incentive in the population and to alienation from its mechanisms.
Rather than address these administrative problems, Qaddafi relied upon the oil revenue to pacify the population. It was the oil that prolonged his revolution and allowed his central state to appear benevolent even as it monopolized de- cision-making in the country.
The democratic set-up, which he called the Jamahiriya State o f the Masses , exceeded what King Idris allowed. The Revolution Committee Movement was not a real development. This abeyance o f authority “I am not the leader” was dangerous because it weakened the established systems, which turned to Qaddafi for his almost regal assent or views.
When the audience laughed with him, he smiled and laughed along, saying, “In theory, in theory. In his Green Book, Qaddafi offered an alternative to the Jamahiriya idea o f democracy. The war in Chad wore down the military, and it ate into the exchequer. The return to eastern Libya o f the Afghan Arabs jihadit b y the late s and the Algerian Civil W ar in brewed the stew o f extremist political Islam in the towns o f Dernah and Benghazi.
The tribal leadership caviled at the regime, as it floundered. It is fitting that the leaders o f the two wings are sons o f Qaddafi—it tells us a great deal about the involution o f his regime. Geography o f Identity. Qaddafis new regime purportedly attempted to overthrow the supremacy o f the tribes. These tribes are vast kinship groups, spread over considerable territory. A million or so o f the Warfallah do not march in evolutionary lockstep.
They are a “refuge, given the total absence o f Libyan political institutions. The ultimate tribe o f the regime, the army, w ould be at hand to make it so.
About a third o f the country’s population gave their allegiance to the order. It was powerful. Qaddafi saw it as the fifth column, and was not disposed to being generous. The Sa’adi confederation o f the East was left out o f the spoils o f the new dispensation. By the s, Benghazi looked a little worn compared to Tripoli.
The returns o f the oil rent and the social wage pledged b y the new revolutionary regime offered only parsimonious help to the impoverished East. The Tripolitanians wanted a unitary system, and the Cyre- naicans wanted a federal system.
It wanted to preserve these through political autonomy from Tripoli, now ruled b y the men o f the small towns such as Qaddafi s own Sirte. It was a sore issue. Even as Qaddafi s prejudices offered parsimonious help to the impoverished East, his state- building policies ensured the creation o f a Libyan national sensibility.
It was the state bureaucracy and the military that finished the process, cementing the basis for Libyan personhood, now formulated around a culture polished b y the authoritarian populist state. From the Kabyles o f northern Algeria to the Riffians o f northern M orocco and to the Tuareg o f the Sahara, the Amazigh peoples or the Imazighen have struggled against the national liberation states, with little success. A year later, Qaddafi went to Jadu, in the Nafusa mountains, to meet with Amazigh leaders.
It was a normal tendency o f modern nationalism to deny the fractures within a nation-state, and to pretend that minority rights and cultural expression are the first gesture toward secession.
The denial o f those rights, history shows us, are more likely to spur secession than the recognition o f them in the first place. They refused to do so. It is in such instances that it becomes clear how Qaddafi lost the loyalty o f the natural leaders.
These declarations also demonstrate that Libya’s tribes are not homogenous entities, but rather are composed o f diverse members with varying social and economic backgrounds. The Green Flag. His new constitution was founded on Islamic principles article 2 , and his new state attempted to do with Islam what it had done with the economy and with politics: nationalize Islam.
Political Islam’s representatives began to dig deep roots, mainly in eastern Libya. It built up networks outside the mosques whose ulema had been largely nationalized.
There Dr. The attack failed, and two thousand or so people were captured as a result o f its failure. Further attacks came from Inqat and the Islamic Liberation Front. M ore repression followed, including the hanging o f two students at the al-Fateh University in and the execution o f nine members o f Jihad on Libyan State Television on February 17, In , fears o f unrest led the regime to cancel a soccer match between Libya and Algeria.
It was safer to conduct their jihad in far o f f Afghanistan than in Libya, where the regime remained powerful and dangerous. W ith the Afghan war winding down b y the end o f the s, the Afghan Arabs returned home. The Algerian Civil War cost almost two million lives and the destruction o f the social wealth o f the country. After , they would go to join the insurgency in Iraq. The East had sent a disproportionate number o f its young to fight in Iraq.
A US embassy official snuck away from his Tripoli minder in and reported that the young men who went to Iraq did so because they could not effectively protest against Qaddafi.
Iraq stood in for Libya. The official went to Der nah. Other factors include a dearth o f social outlets for young people, local pride in Derna’s history as a locus o f fierce opposition to occupation, economic disenfranchisement among the town’s young men. For them, resistance against coalition forces in Iraq is an important act o f ‘jihad’ and a last act o f defiance against the Qadhafi regime.
The regime killed 1, prisoners. Qaddafi s henchman and brother-in-law , Abdullah Senussi, who would be sent to Benghazi in February , was the interior minister then as well. During George H. He’s been making some crazy statements.
Bush responded, “I think he is just grandstanding. He was trying to turn the ideological tide to his favor, complaining that in the context o f the US bombing in Iraq that “Islam became the target o f the West. He was the “shield o f Islam,” as one Libyan put it at that time. Frayed Uniforms. Debates over old colonial treaties and historical claims rested on a region believed to be home to large uranium deposits.
Proxies for powers far from Tripoli and N’Djamena, the two countries went into a bloody conflict that lasted for ten years. The French intervened twice, and with superior air power beat back Qaddafi and his allies. This was the Toyota W ar o f , and it resembled in many particulars the use o f such trucks in Libya itself in The Libyan army was routed, and it lost the Aouzou Strip, and if the Organization o f African States had not intervened, it might have been threatened within Libya itself.
It was a preview o f B y some accounts, the Libyan armed forces lost a third o f its infantry and considerable amounts o f armor. Morale was at a very low level. It was never to recover its verve. The defeat in the Toyota War reduced their confidence. The U N sanctions, Dirk Vandewalle argues, led to “mounting discontent and increasing privation in Libya, reflected in unpaid salaries, decreased subsidies, cuts in army perks and a shortage o f basic goods.
Canny enough to recognize the problems in the military, Qaddafi recalled his best units to the western part o f the country. The elite corps, including the 32nd Reinforced later Khamis Brigade, was brought to defend Tripoli. It was already a sign o f weakness. The Libyan army was the regime’s own Trojan Horse. United Nations sanctions came into effect in They had a huge impact on the Libyan exchequer.
The country was simply not prepared to withstand the pressure. Although the future of the democratic uprisings against oppressive authoritarian regimes remains uncertain in many places, the revolutionary wave that started in Tunisia in December has transformed how the world sees Arab peoples and politics. Bringing together the knowledge of activists, scholars, journalists, and policy experts uniquely attuned to the pulse of the region, Dispatches from the Arab Spring offers an urgent and engaged analysis of a remarkable ongoing world-historical event that is widely misinterpreted in the West.
Tracing the flows of protest, resistance, and counterrevolution in every one of the countries affected by this epochal change—from Morocco to Iraq and Syria to Sudan—the contributors provide ground-level reports and new ways of teaching about and understanding the Middle East in general, and contextualizing the social upheavals and political transitions that defined the Arab Spring in particular.
Dispatches from the Arab Spring is an unparalleled introduction to the changing Middle East and offers the most comprehensive and accurate account to date of the uprisings that profoundly reshaped North Africa and the Middle East. In addition, major public statements by Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar al-Qaddafi, and others are joined by Egyptian opposition writings and relevant primary source documents.
Early in Proud Beggars, a brutal and motiveless murder is committed in a Cairo brothel. Such is his native charm that he has accumulated a small coterie that includes Yeghen, a rhapsodic poet and drug dealer, and El Kordi, an ineffectual clerk and would-be revolutionary who dreams of rescuing a consumptive prostitute.
The police investigator Nour El Dine, harboring a dark secret of his own, suspects all three of the murder but finds himself captivated by their warm good humor. How is it that they live amid degrading poverty, yet possess a joie de vivre that even the most assiduous forces of state cannot suppress? Do they, despite their rejection of social norms and all ambition, hold the secret of contentment?
The catastrophic story of how the Arab world has descended into chaos since the invasion of Iraq as told by the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and international bestselling author of Lawrence in Arabia, a probing and insightful work of reportage. From world-renowned war correspondent, Scott Anderson, comes this gripping, human account of the unraveling of the Arab world, the rise of ISIS, and the global refugee crisis after the United States invasion of Iraq in This portrait of the region is framed by the stories of six individuals–the matriarch of a dissident Egyptian family, a Libyan Air Force cadet with divided loyalties, an Iraqi day-laborer turned ISIS fighter, a Kurdish doctor on leave from his practice to fight ISIS, a college student caught in the chaos of Aleppo, and an Iraqi women’s rights activist targeted by militias.
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Mixing thrilling anecdotes from street-level reporting that give readers a sense of what is at stake with a bird’s-eye view of the geopolitics of the region and the globe, Prashad guides us through the dramatic changes in players, politics, and economics in the Middle East over the last five years. It is here that the story of the region rests. Who will listen to the grievances of the people? Can there be another future for the region that is not the return of the security state or the continuation of monarchies?
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Sign up for free Log in. It seemed as if all the authoritarian states would finally be freed, even those of the Arabian Peninsula. In Libya, though, the new world order had different ideas.
Social forces opposed to Muammar Qaddafi had begun to rebel, but they were weak. In came the French and the United States, with promises of glory. A deal followed with the Saudis, who then sent in their own forces to cut down the Bahraini revolution, and NATO began its assault, ushering in a Libyan Winter that cast its shadow over the Arab Spring.
This brief, timely analysis situates the assault on Libya in the context of the winds of revolt that swept through the Middle East in the Spring of Second, to what extent did the Arab Spring.
The world watched as the bud of the Arab Spring was buried under the cold darkness of the Libyan Winter. This book sketches the discourse about a new constitution in Libya since The debate has focused on democracy, federalism, decentralisation and localisation, the role of religion, women in politics. The author argues that to attain enduring peace and stability, post-revolution states must engage in inclusive national reconciliation processes which include a national dialogue, a truth seeking effort, the reparation of victims’ past injuries, dealing with the former regime, and institutional reform.
Women, civil society, and tribes, among other social. Beginning in January , the Arab world exploded in a vibrant demand for dignity, liberty, and achievable purpose in life, rising up against an image and tradition of arrogant, corrupt, unresponsive authoritarian rule.
WebThis brief, timely analysis situates the assault on Libya in the context of the winds of revolt that swept through the Middle East in the Spring of Vijay Prashad explores the . WebArab Spring, IÀbyan Winter By Vijay Prashad © Vijay Prashad ISBN: Libraiy of Congress Control Number: AK Press A 23rd Street. WebArab Spring Libyan Winter by Vijay Prashad – Free ebook download as PDF File .pdf) or read book online for free. The Arab Spring captivated the planet. Mass action overthrew . WebNov 29, · -Read EPUB Arab Spring, Libyan Winter by Vijay Prashad Online Full Chapters. READ HERE->> replace.me WebScribd is the world’s largest social reading and publishing site.
Libya in the Arab Spring. Arab Spring Libyan Winter. Unfinished Revolutions. Arab Spring. The New Arab Revolt. In came the French and the United States, with promises of glory. A deal followed with the Saudis, who then sent in their own forces to cut down the Bahraini revolution, and NATO began its assault, ushering in a Libyan Winter that cast its shadow over the Arab Spring.
This brief, timely analysis situates the assault on Libya in the context of the winds of revolt that swept through the Middle East in the Spring of Vijay Prashad explores the recent history of the Qaddafi regime, the social forces who opposed him, and the role of the United Nations, NATO, and the rest of the world’s superpowers in the bloody civil war that ensued.
Such is his native charm that he has accumulated a small coterie that includes Yeghen, a rhapsodic poet and drug dealer, and El Kordi, an ineffectual clerk and would-be revolutionary who dreams of rescuing a consumptive prostitute. The police investigator Nour El Dine, harboring a dark secret of his own, suspects all three of the murder but finds himself captivated by their warm good humor.
How is it that they live amid degrading poverty, yet possess a joie de vivre that even the most assiduous forces of state cannot suppress? Do they, despite their rejection of social norms and all ambition, hold the secret of contentment? The catastrophic story of how the Arab world has descended into chaos since the invasion of Iraq as told by the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and international bestselling author of Lawrence in Arabia, a probing and insightful work of reportage.
From world-renowned war correspondent, Scott Anderson, comes this gripping, human account of the unraveling of the Arab world, the rise of ISIS, and the global refugee crisis after the United States invasion of Iraq in This portrait of the region is framed by the stories of six individuals–the matriarch of a dissident Egyptian family, a Libyan Air Force cadet with divided loyalties, an Iraqi day-laborer turned ISIS fighter, a Kurdish doctor on leave from his practice to fight ISIS, a college student caught in the chaos of Aleppo, and an Iraqi women’s rights activist targeted by militias.
Through these personal stories, the myriad, complex causes of the widespread war and instability in the region come into focus and the concrete reality of the unspeakable tragedies occurring in the Middle East becomes clear.
This fast-paced and timely book from Vijay Prashad is the best critical primer to the Middle East conflicts today, from Syria and Saudi Arabia to the chaos in Turkey. Something had to be done to manage what had begun to seem like a revolutionary situation. From inside the bowels o f Washington s power elite, Frank Wisner emerged, briefcase in hand.
He had met the President, but he was not his envoy. Mubarak age 82 greeted Wisner age 72 , as these elders conferred on the way forward for a country whose majority is under thirty.
Instead, they drift like wisps in the wind, occasionally cited for propaganda purposes, but in a time o f crisis, hidden behind the clouds o f imperial interests or those o f Tel Aviv and Riyadh.
The Republicans have their own ghouls, people like James Baker, who are plucked out for tasks that require the greatest delicacy. Wis- ner comes out o f the same nest as Holbrooke. He is the Democrat’s version o f James Baker, but without the pretend gravity o f the Texan. Wisner has a long lineage in the C IA family.
His father, Frank Sr. Frank Jr. In each o f these places Wisner insinuated himself into the social and military branches o f the power elite. He became their spokesperson. Wisner and Mubarak became close friends when he was in the country — , and many credit this friendship and military aid with Egypt’s support o f the United States in the Gulf War. The delusions are many.
George H. Bush calls his presidential counterpart, Hosni, in the afternoon o f January 21, They are discussing their war against Iraq. N ot once did the US provide a criticism o f Egypt’s human rights record. Wisner should be considered the architect o f the framework for this policy.
Wisner remained loyal to Mubarak. He is an apologist for Mubarak. The long-term had been set aside. I first wrote about Wisner in when he joined the board o f directors o f Enron Corporation.
Here Wisner followed James Baker, who was hired b y Enron to help it gain access to the Shuaiba power plant in Kuwait. They used the full power o f the US state to push the private interests o f their firms, and then made money for themselves. This is the close nexus o f Capital and Empire, and Wisner is the hinge between them. One wonders at the tenor o f the official cables coming from Cairo to Washington during January Ambassador Margaret Scobey, a career official, had been once more sidelined.
The first time was over rendition. She is known to have opposed the tenor o f it, and had spoken on behalf o f human rights champion Ayman Nour and others. This time Obama did an end run around her, sending Wisner.
Scobey went to visit ElBaradei. Her brief was narrowed by Holbrooke s appointment. What must these women in senior places think, that when a crisis erupts, they are set-aside for the men o f Washington?
Wisner urged Mubarak to concede. It was not enough. M ore was being asked for in the Egyptian streets. Emboldened, Mubaraks supporters came onto the streets with bats in hand, ready for a fight. This was probably sanctioned in that private meeting. It is what one expects o f Empire s bagman. Mubarak needed time to sort out his legacy, Wisner intimated, and whatever should take place must keen a keen eye on stability.
This embarrassed the Obama administration, which wanted to appear both for stability and for change. Secretary o f State Hillary Clinton s team dismissed Wisner for his poor choice o f words, at the same time as Clinton seemed to pursue his suggestion. Such an “orderly transition Lawrence, Seven Pillard of Wisdom, Their policy cousins, in the diplomatic hovels o f Foggy Bottom and in Kiryat Ben Gurion, absorbed this twaddle.
For them, the Arab W orld would only ascend to Democracy in the long-term. In the short-term, where we all live, it would have to make do with Stability. Visions o f Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas ran through their future plans. It was all too much to bear. Obamas White House and State Department seemed unable to keep up with the pace o f events in Egypt and in the Arab world in general. The intransigence o f the people in Tahrir Square, in particular, dazzled the planners.
Too much is known o f the ways of the secret police to allow the dynamism of Tahrir Square to be so easily broken. Mubarak’s gambit was patently insufficient. But this is all that the United States could offer. Too much was at stake. These defeats and retreats portend the collapse o f US hegemony.
The first pillar is US reliance upon this region for oil, which must be allowed to flow freely into the car culture o f Europe and the United States. The fourth pillar is related to the previous three. The maintenance o f these four pillars is a fundamental goal o f US foreign policy in the Arab world. Little needs to be said about pillar no.
It is the obvious one. The other three are less established. Industrial society relies upon oil to power itself, and to derive materials for much o f its industrial production it is a crucial raw material for plastics, for example.
The United States is the world s largest consumer o f oil, a fourth o f the total, but most o f its oil is not from the M iddle East. That is the reason w h y the United States, as the world’s largest economy since the s and the world’s most powerful military since at least the s, has become the de facto policeman o f the world’s oil supply. The Atlantic powers joined with the Carter Doctrine in principle, knowing full well that the weight o f the responsibility would fall on the United States.
It had to counter the Soviets and the Iranians, and it would do it with its G ulf allies. The French and the British did not want to get their hands dirty. This was unseemly work. He went to O P E C to raise the target oil price, to censure Kuwait for lateral drilling into Iraqi oil fields and to suggest that the oil profits no longer be held in dollars. This was unthinkable. Given the central importance o f G ulf oil to the global economy, all of us share an interest in thwarting this dictator’s ambitions.
W e all have a critical stake in this. The Saudi monarchy is a feudal regime that does not even allow women to drive cars. Surely it is not American policy to make the world safe for feudalism. This is about money, about protecting governments loyal to America and punishing those that are not and about who will set the price o f oil. America went to war, clobbered Iraq, put in place a garrisoned sanctions regime till , when its armies returned to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Misery came to Iraq because o f its oil underfoot. Arab Friends. The second pillar is to maintain Egypt as a firm ally in the US-led war on terror. Here the Mubarak regime was not following the United States. It had interests that parallel those o f Washington. The secular regime set up b y Gamal Abdul Nasser was already at war with political Islam within Egypt Nasser’s popularity held the Muslim Brotherhood in check.
Nasser’s aide, Anwar Sadat, had been the Egyptian military’s liaison with the Muslim Brotherhood since the s.
Sadat could not complete the job. The Islamists killed him in Sadat’s successor, Mubarak, also tried to dance with the Islamists, but was not successful. In , Mubarak picked a career military man, General Omar Suleiman, to run his internal security department, the Mukhabarat el-Aama. Two years later, Mubarak was to go to a meeting in Addis Ababa. Suleiman insisted that an armored car be flown to Ethiopia. The armor saved them. Mubarak signed legislation that made it a crime to even sympathize with Islamism, and his regime built five new prisons to fill with Brotherhood members.
They were natural allies. But Egypt’s willingness to be a partner had been strained b y the Iraq War. In , he met General David Petraeus in Cairo.
Ambassador Scobey wrote a note back to the State Department on J u ly Wisner’s visit to Cairo was not idiosyncratic. It was to put some stick about in the Arab World’s most important capital, Cairo. If Mubarak had to go, then Mubarak’s regime had to remain in place and the public outcry had to be slowly silenced.
When the Tahrir Square protests began, Mubarak sent Tantawi to Washington to seek support for his regime, and for anti-riot equipment. Tantawi was an old war-horse o f the Mubarak regime, and in the US State Department said o f him that he wanted to make sure that the US would not “reduce military assistance to Egypt in the future.
Israels Supremacy. The third pillar of US foreign policy in the region is to protect Israel. Israel has faced no existential threat since the war, when Egypt’s powerful army took it on. The Egypt-Israel peace treaty o f allowed Israel to pivot its entire security strat- egy to face o f f against much weaker actors, such as Lebanon and the Palestinians.
Egypt’s withdrawal has allowed Israel to exert itself with overwhelming force against the Palestinians, in particular. Protests in Egypt, with the Muslim Brotherhood as part o f the action, sent a tremor through Tel Aviv’s establishment. If a new government came to power with the Brotherhood in alliance, this might lead to the abrogation o f the treaty. If this were to occur, Israel would once again be faced with the prospect o f a hostile Egypt, and its Goliath stance against the Palestinians w ould be challenged.
Roosevelt knew o f course that the British ruled over Egypt. These rebellions, or the urge for self- government, were interpreted cynically b y the British as its opposite: a reason to stay, to tame the passions o f the population. It was Nasser who tossed them out in the s. Roosevelt threw in his lot with the British consul, Lord Cromer.
W isner whispered just this nonsense in his ear when he was in Cairo. The US hastily told the Egyptian authority to make a few more concessions. Anything would do as long as the three pillars remained intact. The protests simply hastened the script. He had to be jettisoned. It was not to happen. He had to retire. Matters were not so easily left to chance. M ore surprises were to follow. In this period, Elaraby led the legal team to Camp David and to the Taba Conference —89 to settle the terms o f the Egyptian-Israeli peace.
Nonetheless, right after the February ouster o f Mubarak and the entry o f Elaraby into office, the old legal advisor sought out Hamas and began to talk about a new strategy for Egyptian- Palestinian relations.
Nevertheless, it revealed an Egyptian public whose views on Israel have been suffocated b y the enforced peace deal.
There is little public support for the peace deal, and whatever patience existed in Cairo vaporized when Israel conducted its campaign to prevent the Palestinians from taking their case to the United Nations in late September. M on ey and threats from Washington fall daily on Tantawi s head. The character o f the settler-colonial Israeli state and its security are certainly under threat. The only w ay to seal off a Jewish State, for those who are so inclined, is to ensure that the Palestinians have their own state.
Israel is unwilling to grasp this contradiction. Its elites are in denial. These are rancid, particularly if the non-violent mass demonstrations like those in the first Intifada begin again.
The nonviolent protests are a real threat to Israel. It was to undercut this that President Obama tried to offer a concession, the declaration o f a state o f Palestine based on the border, with swaps to preserve Israel’s sense o f security.
Netanyahu had none o f this. He chose to hold fast, believing that the US had to follow his lead as long as Israel remains a major pillar o f the old order in the West Asia and North Africa. O ver the question o f the Palestinian case to the UN, the pillars o f stability rub against each other. The Israelis won that gambit.
B y August , Israel was in ferment. Inflation and a housing crisis dogged the lives o f Israelis, and following the example o f Egypt, they convened in their squares, manifesting their discontent.
There was no indication that these protests had more than economic goals. There was no link between the unemployment question and the permanent warfare state. If Israeli political life is able to cleave out a genuine dynamic against its settler-co- lonial situation, this pillar o f stability might make its own accommodation with its neighbors. Encircle Iran. Geopolitical ambitions easily overcame any dedication to values o f human dignity.
The status quo powers are those who enable the imperial interests o f the Euro-American capitals, and the revisionists are those who threaten these interests. From to , the principle status quo power in the Middle East was Iran, with the Shah as the bastion o f Progress against the revisionism o f the Arab renaissance, under the star o f Nasser. Nasser’s Free Officers coup o f sent a tremor through the Arab world. The fusion o f Egypt with Syria was not a progressive action in itself.
The anti-Com- munism o f Nasser was not sufficient to ingratiate him with the bureaucrats in Washington. The Shah o f Iran stood fast against Nasserism. The first event took place in , when the Y om Kippur W ar turned out to be a fiasco fo r the Arab states. Sadat had already turned his back on Nasser’s economic and political policies in ; foreign investment was being courted and Egypt’s constitution adopted a more Islamic tone. Sadat took home the Nobel Peace Prize, which went on the altar o f the new dispensation.
Washington now saw Iran under the Mullahs as the leading revisionist power. Washington’s steady ally before and after this cataclysmic shift was o f course Saudi Arabia, and its satellite Gulf emirates.
Nasserism came into the palaces with the Free Princes, who were ejected to exile in Beirut. Then, after , an older danger threatened the Royals. The working-class in eastern Saudi Arabia and in the cities that run from Kuwait to Muscat along the eastern rim o f the peninsula are mainly Shi’a.
In , after the Iranian Revolution, the workers in the area again went out on strike, but were beaten back ferociously. The New York Times did not complain.
It was as it should be. Since , any attempt to move a democratic agenda forward in the Arab world has been tarred with the brush o f Iranianum, what is generally called “Islamic fundamentalism.
If that were the case, they should be apoplectic about the Saudi monarchy, whose Sharia laws would make the Iranian mullahs blush. But they cannot be honored because they come from al-Wefaq against the pow er o f a King who allows the US to base its Fifth Fleet in his archipelago, and who is fiercely against Iran. The uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere threw the geo-political equation into disarray. That Egypt allowed the Iranians to use the Canal for the first time since the revolution threatened the architecture o f US power in the region.
Their fall was preordained. When Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi returned from his exile in Qatar, he did not play the part o f Khomeini. They wished to convert their sectarian histrionics onto their dissenting populations, but al-Wefaq’s Khalil Ibrahim al-Marzooq quickly warned that the Saudis might try to flood Bahrain with the kind o f mercenary thugs that they would send into Yemen to disrupt the Marxist republic in the s.
He was prescient. Saud feared an “Iranian takeover o f all Lebanon. The Lebanese Armed Forces were not up to the task. N or was the U N force in south Lebanon, “which is sitting doing nothing. But the idea percolates on the surface o f Riyadh’s palaces. The Saudis, the anchor o f anti-Iranianism, did not believe that the US had the spine to act as it must. The uprisings in Bahrain and Yemen had to be crushed. It would look bad if this was sanctioned in the name o f the preservation o f the monarchy.
Far better to see the protesters as terrorists as in Yemen or Iranianists as in Bahrain. O r even better yet, to turn this largely peaceful wave into a new military confrontation. The hawks o f Order had every incentive to enchain the doves o f Change. When Ben Ali flew to Saudi Arabia, he brought with him to the peninsula the magic o f the wave.
That’s where events ran into some trouble. The various sheikhdoms, some that predate the Saudi one such as Bahrain, to al-Saud’s , are ideological and practical buffer zones. The idea o f the Arab monarchy would be harder to sustain if the only such were in Riyadh, however rich. It becomes easier to point the royal finger toward Manama and Kuwait, to suggest that it is in the temperament o f Arabs to be ruled by their royals, or their tribal chiefs.
In Yemen, matters were simplified. There was no need to do a deal to send in troops. The president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, is clever. He played the crowds carefully, holding his own support base together with tribal blandishments and with threats about the fear o f the notorious South, once home to Marxism and now, by his lights, home to al-Qaeda. In fact, Saleh was allowed to get away with murder, as the Saudis have in Manama, because there are limits to what Power is willing to concede in the region.
Bahrain and Yemen illuminate the manuscript o f Imperialism, a concept that many have increasingly come to deny or misrepresent. Such protests appear unlikely only because the wave o f struggle that broke out on the Peninsula in the late s and peaked in the s was crushed b y the early s. Encouraged b y the overthrow o f the monarch in Egypt b y the coup led b y Nasser, ordinary people across the Arab world wanted their own revolts.
Iraq and Lebanon followed. It wished to take its local campaign to the entire peninsula. In Bahrain, its more timid branch was the Popular Front. It did not last long. The Islamic Front for the Liberation o f Bahrain attempted a coup in Yemen’s Marxists faced ceaseless pressure from the Saudis, their Yemeni allies and the forces o f the Atlantic world.
It was the peninsula’s Die Wende, the turning point, at about the same time as the two Germanys were united. The pendulum swung in favor o f the status quo. Rumbles have been heard in Saudi Arabia itself over the years. The former were constrained b y threats and material advances, while if the latter were not susceptible to bribes they were sent o ff to do jihad elsewhere or to contemplate their errors in prison and re-education camps.
One has to only look at the kleptocracy that goes b y the name Al Saud Inc. As Egypt rumbled, the regime put into place its typical maneuvers. Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul A ziz met with Saudi newspaper editors and told them that the events in Egypt were the work o f outsiders, a theme familiar to tyrants.
The official opposition formed a platform o f unity: it included the Islamic Umma Party led b y ten well-regarded clerics , the National Declaration o f Reform led b y Mohammed Sayed Tayib , al-Dusturieen a lawyers movement led b y Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz and a host o f reform websites such as dawlatyinfo and saudireform. W e should treat the royal family like any other group. A Facebook group called for a “Days o f Rage” protest on March The Saudi National Guard was busy with sharp, and barely reported upon, repression.
It was enough to keep things in check. The only threats on the peninsula that remained were in Yemen and Bahrain. He is now heir to the Saudi throne. The pillar is strengthened b y his iron fist. Events in Yemen escalated faster than anyone could have assumed.
In January, street protests opened up the Yemeni struggle in the capital, Sana a. The economic crisis provided the early slogans, but these morphed quickly into the reason for unemployment and distress—the political autocracy that smothered the ability o f the people to identify their own policies for their country. They are part o f a movement that wishes to change the political dispensation in Yemen, where Saleh has ruled since , one year more than Mubarak.
She and her group o f people had been prepared, and as the popular anger came out onto the streets in , they tried to offer leadership. Under pressure, Saleh said he would not seek re-election in That was a p loy that Mubarak had used. It was already worthless to an enthusiastic population. They called for regime change, and were met with tear gas and live ammunition. The tide began to turn in late February, when most o f the major tribal heads threw their lot in with the opposition. He would soon defect to the opposition.
Muhsin al-Ahmar had a reason to fear and despise his old comrade, Saleh. Saleh recognized the signs. This was denied. Then Saleh refused a proposal for a peaceful transition. Deaths continued, as the security services routinely opened fire on the population forty-five shot dead in Sanaa on March The tribal armies entered the cities, confronted b y the security services and national army. He is the one who broke the constitution and dragged the country into violence.
He is the one who practiced state terrorism. It was also orders from Yemen that sent the “anus” bomber Abdullah al-Asiri to kill Saudi interior minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef in September Gates’ fears also stemmed from actions in Abyan governorate on March 22, when A Q A P declared the creation o f an Islamic emirate in the province, with strict measures to restrict the movement o f women.
According to an essay in the Sydney Morning Herald written by Sarah Phillips, a scholar o f contemporary Yemen, “The declaration overlooks the complexities o f Abyan’s local landscape, particularly the fact that much o f its farming economy relies upon the labour o f women.
It is one thing to say that Abyan is an Islamic emirate, but another matter entirely to administer it accordingly without attracting local hostility. Real change will be slow, unstable, and non-linear, but it is inevitable. Over the last few years, Yemen has become a central front in the War on Terror, and a central location in Droneland.
Saleh gave the US permission to bomb his territory, even if the strike kills civilians alongside jihadu. His Deputy, Rashad al-Alimi said that he had just lied to parliament, telling it that the bombs are American, but fired b y Yemenis. Saleh was angry. Both were American nationals. The United States was wrong-footed over the Yemen protests.
It could not afford to alienate Saleh, who still remained in control o f the counter-terrorism apparatus. N or could it go ahead o f the Saudis, who remained happy with Saleh he has a close ally in bin Nayef, the deputy interior minister o f the Saudis. In late April, as events seemed at a bloody standstill, the G C C entered with a proposal that Saleh pledge to leave and the opposition stand down.
WebThis brief, timely analysis situates the assault on Libya in the context of the winds of revolt that swept through the Middle East in the Spring of Vijay Prashad explores the . WebDownload or Read: ARAB SPRING LIBYAN WINTER BY VIJAY PRASHAD PDF Here! files/replace.me The writers of Arab Spring . WebScribd is the world’s largest social reading and publishing site. WebNov 29, · -Read EPUB Arab Spring, Libyan Winter by Vijay Prashad Online Full Chapters. READ HERE->> replace.me WebThe Arab Spring unleashed forces of liberation and social justice that swept across North Africa and the Middle East with unprecedented speed, ferocity, and excitement. Although .