Nour and others. This time Obama did an end run around her, sending Wisner. Scobey went to visit ElBaradei. Similar treatment was meted out to Ambassador Anne Patterson in Islamabad. 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 of Washington?
Wisner urged Mubarak to concede. It was not enough. More was being asked for in the Egyptian streets. Emboldened, Mubarak’s 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 of Empire’s bagman. At a security conference in Munich shortly after his Cairo trip, Wisner made a historic gaffe. Mubarak needed time to sort out his legacy, Wisner intimated, and whatever should take place must keen a keen eye on stability. “You need to get a national consensus around the preconditions of the next step forward, and the president must stay in office in order to steer those changes through,” he said via satellite feed. This embarrassed the Obama administration, which wanted to appear both for stability and for change. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s team dismissed Wisner for his poor choice of words, at the same time as Clinton seemed to pursue his suggestion. She recommended an “orderly transition,” and proposed that Mubarak leave and give the keys to the state to his deputy Omar Suleiman. Such an “orderly transition…takes some time,” she noted, “There are certain things that have to be done in order to prepare.”
VI. Edicts of the Status Quo
“[The Arab Revolt] aroused mixed feelings and made strong friends and strong enemies, amid whose clashing jealousies its affairs began to miscarry.”
—T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1922.
Ululations of joy broke out in Tel Aviv when it became clear in late January 2011 that neither the United States nor the Egyptian ruling elite wanted to succumb to the torrents from below. It was all very well to allow managed democracy in Eastern Europe or in Central Asia, but such illusions were out of the question for the Middle East. A cobwebbed tradition of Orientalist scholarship had proclaimed the Arab incapable of Enlightenment inventions such as democracy (a convenient example is Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind, 1973). Their policy cousins, in the diplomatic hovels of Foggy Bottom and in Kiryat Ben Gurion, absorbed this twaddle. For them, the Arab World 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. When the masses gathered in Tahrir Square, they were not harbingers of Democracy for Washington and Tel Aviv: instead, they augured something worse than Mubarak—rule by the Muslim Brotherhood. Visions of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas ran through their future plans. Israel would be encircled by cartoon character Ayatollahs who resembled Jafar, the Grand Vizier of Agrabah (from Disney’s 1992, Aladdin). It was all too much to bear.
Obama’s White House and State Department seemed unable to keep up with the pace of events in Egypt and in the Arab world in general. One revolutionary wave after another put various scenarios for diplomacy and intervention into the shredder. The popular uprisings did not keep to any timetable, and their phases seemed hard to predict. The intransigence of the people in Tahrir Square, in particular, dazzled the planners. Frank Wisner’s friendly chat with Mubarak got the old man to agree to leave by September. In his place came Intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, an old friend of Israel and the United States. But the people in Tahrir Square seemed to know that if they went home and disbanded the fist that they had created, in the dark night Suleiman’s agents would swoop into their homes, take them to Abu Zaabal to be hung upside down and beaten. Too much is known of 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. The four pillars of US foreign policy had to be allowed to remain intact. If they fell, then the US would lose the Middle East in the same way as it has substantially lost South America. These defeats and retreats portend the collapse of US hegemony.
The first pillar is US reliance upon this region for oil, which must be allowed to flow freely into the car culture of Europe and the United States. The second pillar is that its allies in the Arab World (such as Ben Ali, Mubarak, the Saudis and Qaddafi) must stand firm with the Atlantic powers in its war on terror. Omar Suleiman had opened his jails to the CIA “ghost prisoners” and Qaddafi had closely collaborated with the US intelligence services and with Suleiman in the transit and torture of suspected al-Qaeda members (such as Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi). The third pillar is, of course, that the Arab allies have to tether their own populations’ more radical ambitions vis-à-vis Israel. Egypt accepted a US annual bribe of $1.3 billion in order to honor its 1979 peace agreement with Israel, and this has allowed the Israelis to conduct their asymmetrical warfare against the Palestinians and the Lebanese. The fourth pillar is related to the previous three. It is to circumvent what the US State Department calls “Iranian revisionism” against the status quo. The maintenance of these four pillars is a fundamental goal of US foreign policy in the Arab world. Little needs to be said about pillar no. 1. It is the obvious one. The other three are less established.
Oil.
“Middle East oil was as essential to mutual security as atomic warheads.”
—US Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson, National Security Council, July 15, 1960.
Industrial society relies upon oil to power itself, and to derive materials for much of its industrial production (it is a crucial raw material for plastics, for example). The United States is the world’s largest consumer of oil, a fourth of the total, but most of its oil is not from the Middle East. Rather, it gets its oil from the Americas (Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela and domestic production), from Africa (Nigeria and Angola), as well as from Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Reliance upon Middle Eastern oil is a global phenomenon, and its production affects global oil prices—it is not the physical delivery of Middle East oil to the United States that is the issue, simply that the oil must be kept flowing to maintain low oil prices and to enable industrial society to proceed at its exponential pace. It is also an imperative for the private multinational oil corporations who require their protection costs to be borne by the public sector, namely to the US armed forces. That is the reason why the United States, as the world’s largest economy since the 1920s and the world’s most powerful military since at least the 1990s, has become the de facto policeman of the world’s oil supply.
After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the United States pledged through the Carter Doctrine that the defense of the Saudi realm was tantamount to the defense of the United States, and that the full might of the US military would be used to counter any attempt by “any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region.” The “outside force” referred equally to the Soviets and to the Iranians (ironic, considering that the name “Persian Gulf” is given to the waters from the ancestors of the Iranians). The Atlantic powers joined with the Carter Doctrine in principle, knowing full well that the weight of the responsibility would fall on the United States. It had to counter the Soviets and the Iranians, and it would do it with its Gulf allies. The French and the British did not want to get their hands dirty. This was unseemly work.
When Saddam Hussein’s armies invaded Kuwait in 1990, it threatened the delicate balance that the Atlantic powers held over the oil lands. Earlier in that year, Saddam went to claim his prize for going to war against Iran during the 1980s. He went to OPEC 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. On August 10, 1990, US Secretary of State James Baker went to NATO to underscore that the alliance “could not allow any hostile power to gain a stranglehold over its energy resources. Now Saddam Hussein poses just such a threat. Given the central importance of Gulf oil to the global economy, all of us share an interest in thwarting this dictator’s ambitions. We all have a critical stake in this.” Two days later, Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times, “The United States has not sent troops to the Saudi desert to preserve democratic
