The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East

315 Pages·2016·2.07 MB·English

by  Marc Lynch

Copyright © 2016 by Marc Lynch Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a Member of the
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016931932
ISBN 978-1-61039-610-3 (EB First Edition) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Sophia Faith and Alexander Reyes
Contents PREFACE
1 | The New Arab Wars
2 | The Arab Uprising
3 | Intervention and Militarization
4 | Syria’s uprising
5 | Democracy’s Chance
6 | Autocrats on Offense
7 | Syria in Hell
8 | The Saudi Gambit
9 | Where Do We Go from Here?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX
Preface
“We are coming tonight. There won’t be any mercy,” warned Libya’s Moammar
Qaddafi on March 17, 2011, as his troops pushed relentlessly towards Benghazi,
the beleaguered base of the month-old rebellion. As Qaddafi’s forces advanced,
rebel leaders appealed desperately for the international community to intervene
to protect them. The coming catastrophe unfolded on live television in the midst
of a regionwide tidal wave of popular protest and furious regime crackdowns.
The streets were watching, and the fate of the Arab uprisings seemed to hang in
the balance.
The world’s response was extraordinary. The usually divided Arab League
spoke with a single voice, calling for international action against Qaddafi. The
United Nations Security Council, against all odds, passed a resolution
authorizing military action to protect the Libyan rebels. NATO jets began
bombing almost immediately, halting the regime forces and soon driving them
back.
The airstrikes did not lead to a rapid victory, however. Six months of long,
difficult stalemate followed, until a sudden rebel move into Tripoli overthrew
Qaddafi’s regime. On October 20, Qaddafi himself was killed by rebels in Sirte.
The National Transitional Council, the political leadership of the uprising that
took control as the new Libyan government, announced an ambitious road map
for a transition to a democratic Libya. By the spring of 2012, Libya seemed to
vindicate the hopes of the Arab uprisings, the American strategy of limited
military intervention, and a better Middle East.
But then, it all went wrong. The new Libyan state struggled to establish
security, find political consensus, or build effective institutions despite holding
democratic elections. The armed groups that had fought for the revolution
refused to disarm, evolving into militias that controlled the streets. On
September 11, 2012, the Islamist militia Ansar al-Sharia Libya launched a
brazen military attack on the US consulate and CIA station in Benghazi. Only a
month earlier, US Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman
had pushed for an American intervention in Syria by pointing to Libya, where
“profound gratitude for America’s help in the war against Moammar Qaddafi
has laid the foundation for a bright new chapter in relations between our two
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countries.” The killing of US Ambassador Chris Stephens and two others in the
heartland of the Libyan revolution by a jihadist militia amidst chaotic anti-
American protests put a cruel face on that new chapter. For many, it offered a
disheartening epitaph for the Arab uprisings themselves.
In the aftermath of the Benghazi attack, Libyan politics and society polarized
dangerously, while jihadist groups took advantage of the security vacuum to
rebuild themselves. In Washington, the smoldering ruins of Benghazi’s
consulate turned Libya overnight from a tentative sign of a hopeful future into a
blisteringly partisan nightmare. As America recoiled in horror and militia
violence rapidly spread, the Libyan state rapidly crumbled. Oil production and
the rest of the economy collapsed. The government recognized by the
international community controlled only one part of the country, while a rival
government dominated the rest. The country degenerated into a civil war
between two heavily armed coalitions, each receiving significant financial and
military support from external powers. Jihadists established new strongholds in
the fractured terrain.
The Obama administration’s decision to join with NATO and its Arab allies
to intervene militarily in Libya stands today as a crucial turning point in the Arab
uprisings—one with effects far beyond that country’s borders. The lessons of
that intervention remain deeply contested. The intervention succeeded in its
short-term goal of protecting Libyan civilians by preventing a near-certain
massacre, and helped to remove one of the nastier of the Arab dictators. Had
Obama not acted, America would certainly have been blamed for allowing the
uprising to end in bloodshed. But acting, in turn, caused a whole set of other
unintended problematic outcomes. Some now argue that the real problem was
not the intervention but rather America’s failure to provide for post-war
stabilization. But Libya’s new political leaders had firmly rejected any such
international peacekeeping force. Even had they not, the dark history of the
occupation of Iraq ensured no such forces were forthcoming . . . and suggests
that it would not have helped.
Why begin this story with Libya, rather than with the crisis in Syria or the
challenge of the Islamic State? Because Libya was a decisive turning point in the
transformation of the Arab uprisings from domestic peaceful uprisings into a
regional proxy war. Libya’s war offered the first violently cautionary tale against
seeking democratic change after the dizzying success of protest movements in
Tunisia and Egypt. The NATO intervention showed Arab protestors and
autocrats alike that armed insurrection could succeed by attracting external
assistance. It showed Arab powers that they could convince the West to back
their ambitions with military might, but led Russia to block further such United
Nations resolutions. Its subsequent collapse into civil war then became an object
lesson in the dangers of intervention and state failure. Libya in many ways set
the stage for Syria’s descent into catastrophic civil war.
Libya’s failed promise is personal to me. When these events were unfolding,
I was writing as a columnist for Foreign Policy, meeting regularly with Obama
administration officials, and appearing frequently in the media. I argued for the
US to intervene to support the Libyan protestors, both to protect civilians from
extreme state violence and to sustain the momentum of the Arab uprisings by
deterring armed repression of protestors elsewhere. Libya was the first American
war since Bosnia that I supported. That this intervention failed led me to publicly
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rethink many of the arguments for American intervention in the Middle East. It
baffles me that the lesson which most of Washington learned from the
tribulations of the Libya intervention was that Obama should also have
intervened in Syria.
I began writing this book in part to continue rethinking the assumptions and
arguments that shaped my initial analysis of not only Libya but also of the
broader Arab uprising. I hope that it encourages others to do the same. Political
scientists, journalists, and participants in the momentous events of the last five
years have produced an enormous amount of real-time analysis. Much of it has
been absolutely first-rate, and I draw heavily in this book on the collective
scholarship of hundreds of thoughtful, deeply informed, and brilliantly analytical
individuals. What, in the heat of the fray, did we tend to underestimate or
exaggerate? What problems did we miss, or fail to propose adequate solutions
for what we correctly diagnose?
One thing we most certainly did not get wrong was the epochal and
fundamentally transformative nature of the Arab uprising. It’s true that the five
years since that historic eruption have been cruel to those who hoped for positive
change in the Middle East. Only a few years ago, the Arab world seemed poised
to escape decades of autocratic misrule and state violence. Today, the hopes of
millions of Arab citizens who heroically took to the streets demanding change
have faded.