Arab nationalism, radicalism, and the specter of neocolonialism

Ever since the beginning of the crisis in the Gulf on August 2, we have been told that this is the first crisis of the new world order. " This new world order was created following the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the end of the Cold War, which was formally marked on July 5,1990, at the two-day NATO summit in London. Yet what seems like a new beginning for the West remains an illusion for the Arab world today.

The Arabs-by that I mean the people and not most of the regimes-find themselves forced to live in a world order not of the nineties, but one manufactured by the imperialist powers after the Great War of 1914-1918. In the early 1920s, virtually every new state in the Middle East was created to meet the strategic needs of Britain and France in the world order of that era. A state like Egypt which had historical roots took hold (though not its monarchy which was set up only to facilitate British control; it was overthrown by the Egyptian army in 1952). Other states like Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq have had to struggle hard to establish their legitimacy. Meanwhile, the Arabic-speaking states of North Africa continued as colonies: Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia under the French, and Libya under the Italians. They became independent only after Second World War. A small piece of land called Kuwait also continued to exist under colonial rule, as a British protectorate.

Thus the Arabs, who had hoped to emerge from the defeated Ottoman empire in some kind of a national federation-in control of their own human and economic resources-found themselves partitioned into states under the tutelage of either Britain or France. The promise of self-determination, implicit in Lenin's diplomacy and President Wilson's "Fourteen Points" of January 1918, made it no longer possible for Britain and France to impose direct colonial rule over the Arab lands they had agreed to partition in 1916. They therefore came up with a proposal whereby these same areas would be ceded to them by the League of Nations as their "mandates" under the fiction that these territories were being prepared for future self rule. Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan came under British mandate, Lebanon and Syria under that of France. Ironically, the new state of Saudi Arabia, perhaps the least developed state and society in the region, was not mandated to an imperial power; oil had not yet been discovered there.

The Arabs naturally saw the entire scheme as a great betrayal. It was also seen as the failure of the liberal leadership which had promised to lead the Arab people into the modern age under constitutional and parliamentary government. Instead, the region found itself governed by weak, discredited regimes which were either directly or indirectly controlled by foreign powers.

The popular response to these setbacks came in the form of radical Arab nationalism, both Islamic and secular. Islamic nationalists, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, attempted to reinterpret Islam to meet the challenge of the modern world, arguing that Islam was compatible with numerous ideological tendencies, including democracy, socialism, and nationalism; only secularism and communism, because of their hostility to religion, were viewed as incompatible with a reinterpreted Islam. The secular nationalists, such as the Baathists in Iraq, also drew inspiration from the wide spectrum of ideologies then current in Europe-ranging from Mussolini's fascism to socialism and communism. Both nationalist tendencies, the Islamic and the secular, shared the common aim of regaining full sovereignty and control over the destinies of their people.

The partition of the Arab world into separate states, however, presented the nationalists with an internal as well as an external challenge. The ruling classes of the newly constituted countries emphasized the particularism of their own states, paying only lip service to the idea of Arabism. They went so far as to emphasize their Pharaonic past (Egypt), their Babylonian past (Iraq), or their Phoenician past (Lebanon). In the face of the fragmentation of the Arab world and the rise of particularist ideologies, the nationalists articulated a Pan-Arabist position. They continued to speak of one Arab nation consisting of a number of Arab states. They defined an Arab in the broadest, secular terms: whoever lives in our country, speaks our language, is brought up in our culture, and takes pride in our glory is one of us." Sati al-Husri (1880-1968), a leading exponent of secular, pan-Arab nationalism, saw the problems created by the division of the region into separate states and tried to square the circle by proposing that:

The apparent difference among the populations of the Arab states are accidental and superficial, and do not justify the assumption that they are members of different nationalities simply because they are citizens of different states, all of which have come into being as a result of the manoeuvres and horse-trading activities of the Powers .... There are several Arab peoples, but all of them belong to one nation, the Arab nation ... Any member of these peoples is an Arab.

Arab nationalism is the result of contemporary international realities and ramifications which have surrounded it since the beginning of the twentieth century-rather like the realities and ramifications which confronted the Italian and German movements for unity in the previous century.

Pan-Arab nationalism retained this essential position, but it made little headway as the regional states grew stronger.

The end of the Second World War and the creation of another new world order, this one under U.S. hegemony, aroused great hope. The new hope was dashed, however, by what the Arabs described as The Catastrophe," that is to say the creation of Israel. Nothing exposed more forcefully the weakness of the Arabs than the ability of the Western world to create in their midst an alien state, for that is how the Arabs perceived Israel.

The newworld order created after 1945 introduced Cold War politics into the region, and the Middle East became one of the principal targets of neocolonialism. The U.S. government, in its effort to encircle the Soviet Union with military alliances, created the Baghdad Pact in 1955 but succeeded in coopting only one Arab state, namely Iraq. The postwar world also saw decolonization, and, in reaction to the Cold War, the emergence of the non-aligned movement. The non-aligned movement provided a new forum for radical Arab nationalism, now led by the charismatic Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had come to power in Egypt in 1952.

Nasser refused to join any Western alliance, and his achievements in dealing with the West aroused great enthusiasm both in Egypt and throughout the region. In 1954, he negotiated the withdrawal of British troops from the Suez Canal after an occupation lasting 72 years. In 1955, he obtained arms from the Soviet Union, after being turned down by then U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. In 1956, he nationalized the Anglo-French Suez Canal Company, symbol of oppression and degradation. Also in 1956, Nasser obtained Soviet financing for the Aswan Dam, the symbol of Egypt's future, after being rebuffed by the World Bank. Egypt's union with Syria in 1958 and the creation of the United Arab Republic seemed only the first step in the achievement of pan-Arab dreams. Nasser had come to symbolize Arab hopes and aspirations, the leader capable of liberating the Arab nation from Western control.

Western policy makers have always regarded any leader with nationalist, let alone radical, aspirations who attempted to move his society toward independent development and greater equality as a threat to their hegemony. Western policy for dealing with such people has been to isolate them and bring about their fall in one way or another. The overthrow of Mohammad Mossadeq, the conservative prime minister of Iran who nationalized Iranian oil, by the British M.I.-6 and the C.I.A. was the first such success in the Middle East.* In time Nasser became the target of the strategy of subversion.

What bears emphasis from our present vantage point is that Western actions designed to remove radical nationalists from power, far from stifling the fires of radicalism and nationalism, only fueled them. The first abortive attempt to bring down Nasser in 1956, the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt, sharply radicalized the Arabs. Nationalist forces threatened to overthrow virtually every pro-Western regime in the region. The British had to send troops to Jordan to save King Hussein's throne in 1958. In that same year, the U.S. marines landed in Lebanon and intervened in a civil war to maintain the status quo and the hegemony of the minority Maronite elite. But no one could save the pro-Western monarchy in Iraq from the military coup of July 1958.

Moreover, in such a dynamic political climate, even the Sheikh of Kuwait found himself paying lip service to Arab nationalism. In 1961, he canceled his protectorate treaty with Britain, since it was no longer compatible with local sentiment, and declared Kuwait's sovereignty. It was, however, a sovereignty which the Iraqis refused to recognize and which required the protection of British troops.

The following year, the military takeover by Nasserite officers in Yemen brought the threat of radicalism to the doorstep of Saudi Arabia, Washington's most valuable U.S. client in the region. Yemen became the symbol in the struggle between Nasser and the Saudis, with the West deeply committed to the conservatives. The civil war in Yemen began in

* [Douglas Little's article in the Winter 1990 issue of the Middle East Journal suggests that the C.I.A. had had earlier successes-in particular in Syria during 1949.] 1962 and only ended with the Israeli attack on Egypt in June 1967. During those five years the Saudis mobilized the conservative forces in the region. They used Islam as the antidote to nationalism, marking the rise of what has come to be known as "Islamic fundamentalism."

With Egypt's defeat in June 1967, Nasser's influence in the region sharply declined, while pro-Western regimes like Saudi Arabia and Jordan asserted their power. Nevertheless, the region had been further radicalized by the humiliation of defeat inflicted by the West. The regimes in Syria and Iraq passed into the more determined hands of Baathist officers and politicians, bent on continuing the struggle for national autonomy. Muammar Qaddafi seized power in Libya in 1969 and immediately challenged the West by having the U.S. vacate the massive Wheelus airbase and adopting an independent oil policy. Most important, the emergence of the Palestine Liberation Organization as an autonomous movement determined to fight for its people's right to self-determination galvanized the Arab world. Yet the setback for Nasserism was also a setback for nationalism and nationalists. It is therefore no coincidence that Islamist ideologies-independent of the Saudis-began to emerge to fill the vacuum.

The early 1980s were the high tide of these Islamist movements, and the tide began to recede following the weakening of the so-called Islamic revolution in Iran. This is not to say that Islamist idiom will disappear from the discourse of struggle against the West. On the contrary, even as nationalism reasserts itself, its proponents integrate Islamist idiom and symbols within it. Hafez al-Asad, President of Syria and a convinced secularist who crushed the Syrian Islamists in the most brutal manner, is a case in point. So is Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Both men, despite their commitment to a secular ideology, use Islamist discourse and symbols to maintain their legitimacy and popularity.

And that brings me to the subject we are here to discuss: the crisis in the Gulf. How are we to explain the popular support for Saddam Hussein despite the fact that he is so clearly in the wrong in invading and annexing another Arab state? He is in no sense a popular, charismatic leader in the Nasser mold. He has accomplished little and he is generally detested for the brutality of his regime. His success thus far lies in the fact that he has been able to define the conflict in terms of anti-imperialism and the struggle between the rich and the poor.

More significantly from the perspective of the Arab masses, Saddam Hussein has set out to challenge the status quo established by the West and a supportive Shah of Iran in the mid-seventies. The Shah's power had forced Iraq to sign an agreement in 1975 giving Iran the lion's share of the Shatt al-Arab water-way, Iraq's only access to the Gulf, and Saddam Hussein's goal in the costly and disastrous Iraq-Iran war was to tear up the 1975 accord and gain unhindered access to the Gulf. The invasion of Kuwait, however, had much deeper and longer standing historical roots. It was designed to undo a situation which Iraqi governments of all political complexions, monarchic or republican, had accepted only under duress while Britain exercised hegemony in the region. In their partition of the region, the British had separated out Kuwait, first as a protectorate and then as a sovereign state, to serve their own strategic and economic interests. However much Saddam may be hated and feared in the region, his initiative was generally received with favor among Arabs simply because he was attempting to break out of a situation imposed from the outside.

People in the region see Washington's response as yet another attempt by the West to maintain the Arab status quo based on antique and anachronistic states. This attempt becomes impossible to reconcile with the changes taking place in the Soviet bloc which the world daily witnesses and praises as advances towards democracy. The Arabs see the contradictions and the double standards in the West's attitude all too clearly.

Given all the setbacks and degradation suffered by the Arab world in this century, and with no end in sight, it is not surprising that Arab opinion, especially among the Palestinians, has been totally demoralized and in a state of despair. Saddam Hussein, with all his bravado and posturing, suddenly has became the symbol of resistance to the United States, which seems bent on imposing a new order on the region-a new order which would be even more difficult to challenge without the counter-weight of the other superpower, the Soviet Union.

Saddam Hussein ought to be cut down to size. But that should be the task of his own people in alliance with the people of the region and the United Nations. A war waged by the United States to bring down the Iraqi regime will only aggravate an already tense situation and create turmoil for years to come. King Hussein of Jordan, who reflects opinion prevailing in the Arab world, has rightly observed that U.S. actions in the Gulf treats only the symptoms and not the causes of the crisis.

COPYRIGHT 1991 Monthly Review Foundation, Inc.
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