East was Iran, with the Shah as the bastion of Progress against the revisionism of the Arab renaissance, under the star of Nasser. Nasser’s Free Officers coup of 1952 sent a tremor through the Arab world. The creation of the United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria) in February 1958 pushed Lebanon into almost terminal civil chaos in May, and in July the Iraqi Free Officers overthrew their feeble king. Inside the palaces of Saudi Arabia, the Free Princes formed a battalion to diminish the autocracy of King Saud. The fusion of Egypt with Syria was not a progressive action in itself. It was done, largely, to eliminate the dynamic Communist Party and the pro-Communist General Afif al-Bizri. The anti-Communism of Nasser was not sufficient to ingratiate him with the bureaucrats in Washington. They despised his anti-imperialism, and later, his unrelenting position on Israel. To be a status quo power, then, was to be a defender of the interests of Washington and London (with Paris in tow) and to be an ally of Israel’s erratic strategy for its singular objective. The Shah of Iran stood fast against Nasserism.
A geo-political earthquake tore open the foundation of this map. The first event took place in 1973, when the Yom Kippur War turned out to be a fiasco for the Arab states. Sadat had already turned his back on Nasser’s economic and political policies in 1971; foreign investment was being courted and Egypt’s constitution adopted a more Islamic tone. Now, Sadat turned tail for Camp David in March 1979, where he accepted an annual American bribe for a peace treaty with Israel. Sadat took home the Nobel Peace Prize, which went on the altar of the new dispensation. A few months before Sadat went to Camp David, his friend Reza Pahlavi, the deposed Shah of Iran, arrived at Assuan, Egypt to begin his long exile around the world before he returned to Egypt’s Al-Rifa’i mosque to be buried. The Shah’s departure from Iran and Sadat’s return from Camp David set in motion the new alliances. Washington now saw Iran under the Mullahs as the leading revisionist power. The bulwark for the United States and Israel was now Sadat’s Egypt and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which was hastily sent off with a pot of money to begin hostilities against Iran (the war lasted from 1980 to 1988, with little territorial gain but a massive loss of life and treasure).
Washington’s steady ally before and after this cataclysmic shift was of course Saudi Arabia, and its satellite Gulf emirates. The Saudis’ deal with the US goes back to the 1950s, when the steady stream of oil from the Gulf lanes to the gas stations of the heartland was guaranteed as long as the US pledged to protect the shaky monarchies from their hostile neighborhood, and their often hostile populations (by the Saudi Arabian National Guard, heavily armed and often trained by the United States). Nasserism came into the palaces with the Free Princes, who were ejected to exile in Beirut. Then, after 1979, 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 of the peninsula are mainly Shi’a. Oil worker protests in Qatif (also called Little Najaf, the religious city in Iraq) date back to the emergence of the oil industry in the Kingdom. In 1979, 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 1979, any attempt to move a democratic agenda forward in the Arab world has been tarred with the brush of Iranianism, what is generally called “Islamic fundamentalism.” It is not Islam or autocracy that worries the planners of the World Order. If that were the case, they should be apoplectic about the Saudi monarchy, whose Sharia laws would make the Iranian mullahs blush. What drives Langley and The Harold Pratt House crazy is the issue of Iranian influence, and so of the revision of the power equation in the Middle East. These intellectual bureaucrats stretched the short, tight skin of Shi’ism over the gigantic body of the Arab world. Hamas and Hezbollah are treated as Iranian mailboxes in Palestine and Lebanon respectively.
The Iranian Revolution certainly gave the historically oppressed Shi’a population of the Arabian Peninsula courage to call for self-respect. Eager to live dignified lives, these populations took refuge in religious organizations that provided them with a framework to make their call for dignity comprehensible. Bahrain’s al-Wefaq National Islamic Society is, as a US State Department cable candidly noted (September 4, 2008), neither a fundamentalist nor a sectarian party, but it “continues to demand a ‘true’ constitutional monarchy in which elected officials make policy decisions, the prime minister is accountable to the parliament, and the appointed upper house loses its legislative power.” These are elementary, civic claims. But they cannot be honored because they come from al-Wefaq against the power of a King who allows the US to base its Fifth Fleet in his archipelago, and who is fiercely against Iran. It is far easier to tar parties like al-Wefaq as Iran’s proxies, and to categorize the simple demands of the people for dignity as “the Shia revival” (as Vali Nasr does in his 2006 blockbuster, The Shia Revival).
The uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere threw the geo-political equation into disarray. If Hosni Mubarak looked out of his villa in Sharm el-Sheikh a few days after his arrival there, he would have seen two Iranian vessels (a frigate and a supply ship) power around the bend at Ras Mohammed, up the Gulf of Suez and cross into the Mediterranean Sea through the Canal. These two “war ships” docked in Syria on February 24. That Egypt allowed the Iranians to use the Canal for the first time since the 1979 revolution threatened the architecture of US power in the region.
Alireza Nader, of RAND, told the New York Times, “I think the Saudis are worried that they’re encircled—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon; Yemen is unstable; Bahrain is very uncertain.” The US war in Iraq handed the country over to a pro-Iranian regime. In late January, the Hezbollah-backed candidate (Najib Mikati) became Prime Minister of Lebanon, and Hamas’ hands were strengthened as the Palestinian Authority’s remaining legitimacy came crashing down when al-Jazeera published the Palestine Papers. Ben Ali and Mubarak’s exile threw Tunisia and Egypt out of the column of the status quo states. Libya’s Qaddafi and Yemen’s Saleh have been loyal allies in the War on Terror. Their fall was preordained.
As the status quo withered, its loyal dogs tried out the old chant about the threat of Islamic Fundamentalism. Mubarak’s chorus about the Muslim Brotherhood was off key. When Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi returned from his exile in Qatar, he did not play the part of Khomeini. The Sheikh opened his sermon in Tahrir Square with a welcome to both Muslims and Christians. Qaddafi’s shrieks about a potential al-Qaeda in the Maghreb being formed in the eastern part of Libya repeated the paranoid delusions of the AFRICOM planners. Bahrain’s Hamad al-Khalifa hastened to kiss the hem of King Abdullah’s substantial jalabiya, and to plot together about the Shi’a challenge to the Sunni monarchs. 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 of mercenary thugs that they would send into Yemen to disrupt the Marxist republic in the 1970s. He was prescient. This is exactly what happened, as we shall see.
In 2008, during the armed confrontation between the Lebanese government and Hezbollah, the Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal met with the US Ambassador David Satterfield. Saud feared an “Iranian takeover of all Lebanon.” He wanted armed intervention. The Lebanese Armed Forces were not up to the task. Nor was the UN force in south Lebanon, “which is sitting doing nothing.” What was needed was for the US and NATO to provide “naval and air cover” and for an “Arab force” drawn from the “Arab periphery.” It did not come to pass. But the idea percolates on the surface of Riyadh’s palaces.
The Saudis, the anchor of 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 of the preservation of the monarchy. Far better to see the protesters as terrorists (as in Yemen) or Iranianists (as in Bahrain). Or even better yet, to turn this largely peaceful wave into a new military confrontation. The hawks of Order had every incentive to enchain the doves of Change.
VI. On the Rim of Saudi
When Ben Ali flew to Saudi Arabia, he brought with him to the peninsula the magic of the wave. That’s where events ran into some trouble. The Saudi monarchy found it intolerable
