Dispatches

When Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was thrown from the palace in early 2011, the country turned into a three-sided ideological battleground between Islamists, liberals and leftists, and the military. The liberals and leftists were shown up as irrelevant last year when the Muslim Brotherhood and the totalitarian Salafists together won two-thirds of the parliamentary vote, and again when the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi was elected president in June of this year.

The field was then whittled down to only two factions, and it looked for a while like the army would win. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces stripped the presidency of much of its power before Morsi took office, which made the Islamists appear hardly any more relevant than the liberals and leftists who spent much of last year camped out in Tahrir Square.

But Morsi and his comrades in the Brotherhood now appear to be winning. Two days ago he fired Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, along with several other chief officers from the military, and rescinded the restrictions on his own office’s power. The army surrendered, or at least appeared to have surrendered, when it described as “natural” the transfer of power to Morsi.

The army isn’t out yet, but it’s down. If it doesn’t strike back, this week will mark the beginning of a new Egypt.

This would be terrific news if the Muslim Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party were liberal and democratic, but they aren’t. Just yesterday the government announced that two Egyptian journalists will soon be put on trial, one for allegedly inciting Morsi’s assassination, the other simply for publishing “false information” that “insulted” the president. If you can’t insult the president in a newspaper, neither the president nor the system can be called democratic.

Most Egyptians voted for Islamic government of one kind or another, and it looks like they’re going to get it, good and hard.

It’s impossible to say in advance what that will look like if Morsi has his way with the place. And it’s tempting to look at four specific models of government in the region—in Iran, Turkey, Gaza, and Saudi Arabia—and assume that Egypt will resemble one or another, but it probably won’t. It’s especially unlikely to resemble Turkey.

Turkey’s current prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a (relatively moderate) Islamist, but Turkey is vastly more advanced, liberal, and secular than Egypt. And its constitution is aggressively secular. Erdogan’s AK Party could be voted out of power at any time. The current governing party is Islamic, but there’s nothing Islamic about the system. Turkey has checks and balances. Erdogan has been trying to change that, but the government per se is not an Islamic state. And there’s no chance Egypt will emerge with a constitution that looks anything like the one governing Ankara and Istanbul.

The more worrisome possibility is that Egypt will look something like a Sunni Iran, but at least in the short run it isn’t going to happen. After the 1979 revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini created the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), partly to do battle with his liberal and leftist political opponents, but also because he rightly didn’t trust the military—a conscription army created by the Shah’s previous government—to follow his orders. So Iran today effectively has two separate armed forces. The regular army protects the country from its external enemies and the Revolutionary Guard protects the regime from its internal enemies.

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has nothing like the IRGC. If it does move to create its own militia inside the country, the regular army will neutralize it at once. The military appears to have acquiesced to the Islamist government for the time being, but Morsi will still need to sleep with a gun under his pillow.

The Hamas government in Gaza may seem at first glance like an obvious model for the Muslim Brotherhood now that it has finally acquired power in Cairo almost a century after it was founded. Hamas, after all, is its Palestinian branch, and it has ruled the territory unopposed since vanquishing the Palestinian Authority’s Fatah forces in 2007. Egypt and Gaza are perhaps the most ideologically and vehemently anti-Israel places in the world, and they both abut Israel to the south.

There’s a huge difference here, too, though. Hamas is little more than a ragtag terrorist militia. It’s like an incompetent version of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard without a regular army to keep it in check. It can do what it wants not because it’s particularly formidable but because the only armed Palestinian alternative is in the West Bank, which is separated from Gaza by Israel.

Saudi Arabia is the least likely model of all. The Al Saud regime is an absolute monarchy that made an alliance of convenience with the Wahhabi Islamist establishment, and it survives by using the nation’s oil wealth to dole out subsidized goods and free services to the middle class. Egypt is the poorest Arab country after Yemen and Mauritania. Loyalty to the state will never be purchased with generous handouts.

More likely than not, whatever Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood do in Egypt will end up creating a fifth model of Islamic government in the Middle East that doesn’t currently exist anywhere else. And because Egypt is the cultural capital of the Arab world, it will stand a real chance of being exported and replicated in other places. Hang on. The ride will be bumpy and long.

Postscript: My new book, Where the West Ends, is now available. You can get a trade paperback copy from Amazon for 19.99, and if you have a Kindle or Amazon-compatible e-reader you can get the electronic version for only 9.99.

Michael Moynihan asks in Foreign Policy magazine why so many travel guides make excuses for dictators. I've noticed this, too. And I've come to expect it.

Egypt’s new president Mohamed Morsi just purged Mohamed Hussein Tantawi and several other military leaders who have been ruling the country since Hosni Mubarak was thrown out of the palace. He also voided a law that stripped his office of power that the now-ousted rulers had recently passed.

One of two things just happened, and I don’t yet know which. Egypt has begun the transition in earnest from a military dictatorship to a land ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood, or Morsi has set himself up to be removed by a coup d’etat. The Egypt of 48 hours ago is gone either way.

Robert D. Kaplan has a knack for predicting geopolitical upheavals long before they occur, and he sent me an article he wrote for The Atlantic in 1993 where he did it again. This piece, called “Syria: Identity Crisis,” is a must-read.

His 1993 analysis of where Syria is likely heading largely lines up with my own in 2012. He starts by first explaining how Syria got the way it is now.

Syria—whose population, like Lebanon's, is a hodgepodge of feuding Middle Eastern minorities—has always been more identifiable as a region of the Ottoman Empire than as a nation in the post-Ottoman era. The psychology of Syria's internal politics, a realm whose violence and austere perversity continue to baffle the West, is bound up in the question of Syria's national identity. The identity question is important: events inside Syria reverberate throughout the Middle East.

Keep in mind that modern Syria is named after a much larger region within the Ottoman Empire that included a great deal more than the realm Bashar al-Assad currently rules. (The Nazi-like Syrian Social Nationalist Party, which is aligned with Assad and Hezbollah, seeks to recreate those older borders and conquer parts or all of Syria’s neighbors.)

Here’s Kaplan again, describing what happened when the British and French controlled the formerly Ottoman lands in the Levant after World War I.

Anglo-French rivalry for spoils resulted in a division of Syria into six zones. A sliver of northern Syria became part of a new Turkish state, which was being carved out of the old Ottoman sultanate by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. (This area was separate from the Hatay, whose annexation would come later.) Syria's eastern desert became part of a new British mandate: Iraq. Southern Syria, too, was soon controlled by the British, who created two additional territories: a mandate in Palestine and a kingdom in Transjordan, the latter ruled by Britain's First World War ally Abdullah, a son of the Sharif of Mecca. The French got the territory that was left over, which they in turn subdivided into Lebanon and Syria.

Lebanon's borders were drawn so as to bring a large population of mainly Sunni Muslims under the domination of Maronite Christians, who were allied with France, spoke French, and though not exactly Catholic had a concordat with the Holy See in Rome. Syria, Lebanon's neighbor, was a writhing ghost of a would-be nation. Although territory had been cut away on all sides, Syria still contained not only every warring sect and religion and parochial tribal interest but also the headquarters, in Damascus, of the pan-Arabist movement, whose aim was to erase all the borders that the Europeans had just created. Thus, although it was more compact than the sprawling pre-war region called Syria, the new French mandate with that name had even fewer unifying threads. Freya Stark, a British diplomat, said of the French mandate, "I haven't yet come across one spark of national feeling: it is all sects and hatreds and religions."

Each of Syria's sects and religions was—as it largely still is—concentrated in a specific geographical area. In the center was Damascus, which together with the cities of Homs and Hama constituted the heartland of the Sunni Arab majority. In the south was Jabal Druze ("Druze Mountain"), where lived a remote community of heterodox Muslims who were resistant to Damascene rule and had close links across the border with Transjordan. In the north was Aleppo, a cosmopolitan bazaar and trading center containing large numbers of Kurds, Arab Christians, Armenians, Circassians, and Jews, all of whom felt allegiance more to Mosul and Baghdad (both now in Iraq) than to Damascus. And in the west, contiguous to Lebanon, was the mountain stronghold of Latakia, dominated by the Alawites, the most oppressed and recalcitrant of French Syria's Arab minorities, who were destined to have a dramatic effect on postcolonial Syria.

Syrians gave democracy a shot after the French left, but the country became one of the least stable in the entire world, with military coup following military coup as various factions jockeyed for power and none able to figure out how to unite everybody. Damascus had 21 different governments in 24 years. The only leader who has ever managed to hold modern Syria together was the Alawite Baathist Hafez al-Assad, father of the current Syrian president, and he did so by creating a suffocatingly oppressive and, at times, ruthlessly violent Soviet-style police state with an Arab nationalist ideology.

So what’s likely to happen now that the system Hafez al-Assad created is coming down around his son’s ears? Will Syria revert to form and have something like another 21 governments during the next 24 years?

Perhaps, but I doubt it.

Let’s go back to Kaplan again, this time on the prospect of post-Assad Syria. He wrote this nineteen years ago. Some of it seems a bit off now, but most it is more relevant today than it was then. You should read the whole thing, but here’s the gist of it:

Future scenarios for Syria resemble those predicted for Yugoslavia during the Cold War years. From the standpoint of the present, the scenarios always seem implausible. But from the standpoint of historical process and precedent, they seem inevitable.

Syria will not remain the same. It could become bigger or smaller, but the chance that any territorial solution will prove truly workable is slim indeed. Some Middle East specialists mutter about the possibility that a future Alawite state will be carved out of Syria. Based in mountainous Latakia, it would be a refuge for Alawites after Assad passes from the scene and Muslim fundamentalists—Sunnis, that is—take over the government. This state would be supported not only by Lebanese Maronites but also by the Israeli Secret Service, which would see no contradiction in aiding former members of Assad's regime against a Sunni Arab government in Damascus. Some Syrians, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, look forward to the collapse of both Israel and Jordan and their reintegration into Syria, as they waited in the 1940s for the incorporation into Syria of the autonomous states in Latakia and Jabal Druze.

[…]

For the moment, then, Assad staves off the future. It is Assad, not Saddam Hussein or any other ruler, who defines the era in which the Middle East now lives. And Assad's passing may herald more chaos than a chaotic region has seen in decades.

My new book, Where the West Ends, is now available. You can get a trade paperback copy from Amazon for 19.99, and if you have a Kindle or Amazon-compatible e-reader device you can get the electronic version for only 9.99.

Everyone who lives in the United States and who pre-ordered an autographed copy of my new book, Where the West Ends, should get it this week. I signed and shipped all of them over the weekend, and aside from a couple of large orders, they all went out Priority Mail.

Those of you who live outside the United States will have to wait a little bit longer, depending in part on your distance from the U.S. and also on the efficiency of your local postal system.

If you enjoy the book, please don’t hesitate to post a review (even a short one) on Amazon.com.

Thanks to you all!

Most of Hezbollah’s official allies in Lebanon are bribed and bullied into supporting it. The principal bullying instrument lately has been the Syrian car bomb. So if the Assad regime is pulled down in Damascus, expect a great deal of Hezbollah’s local support to simply evaporate.

It’s already starting to happen even while Assad is still standing.

Here is Amir Taheri:

In his Army Day speech, President Michel Suleiman, an ex- general, rejected all three pillars of Hezbollah’s discourse:

* Hezbollah insists that it maintains an unofficial army to “resist Israeli aggression.”

Suleiman said: “Defending the nation and ensuring its sovereignty with the force of arms is the exclusive prerogative of the national army.”

* Hezbollah also claims to be part of a “Resistance Front,” along with the Islamic Republic in Tehran and the Assad regime in Damascus. This, it says, means waging “relentless war” against the United States and Israel until “the Islamic Revolution” triumphs worldwide.

Suleiman, by contrast, pointedly asserted that no one had the right to involve Lebanon in conflicts that have nothing to do with it.

“We will not be dragged into problems created by others,” he said.

* Hezbollah has turned southern Beirut, parts of the Bekaa Valley and parts of south Lebanon into no-go areas for the Lebanese national army and police.

In tones that would have been unimaginable even a month ago, Suleiman said the national army would assert its presence throughout the national territory:

“The state shall never accept that the army abandons its role in any parcel of national territory,” the president said. “No to mini-states and sectarian enclaves anywhere in national territory.”

Suleiman also raised the issue of disarming Hezbollah, a goal already enshrined in documents of national accord as well as three UN Security Council resolutions.

“We reject the chaotic spread of arms and are opposed to the use of weapons outside the national framework,” he said.

UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan has resigned from his role as the Quixotic would-be peacemaker in Syria.

There was never any chance that he could broker a durable cease-fire and peaceful transfer of power. A man like him can be effective if two sides in a conflict are tired of fighting and want to negotiate in good faith with each other, but blood-soaked totalitarians in a struggle for their very survival will never go for Dr. Phil-style solutions.

The war in Syria won’t end until one side is utterly vanquished.

Last year Vogue published an article about Asma al-Assad, the wife of the tyrant of Syria, called “A Rose in the Desert.” It was written by Joan Juliet Buck and was quite possibly the worst piece of journalism I’ve ever read. The piece is so horrendous that Vogue actually scrubbed it from the Web site.

If you missed it or want to re-read it, however, you can still find it at www.presidentassad.net.

God help me if I ever willingly make myself such a tool. Assad has hit the trifecta—he’s a totalitarian dictator, a state-sponsor of terrorism, and a war criminal. He wasn’t yet a war criminal when Buck wrote her piece, but he was a totalitarian dictator and a state sponsor of the who’s-who of radical Islamist terrorist organizations. Everyone knew this. Everyone. The woman had no excuse.  

She just wrote a longer piece for The Daily Beast called “Mrs. Assad Duped Me.” I’ll draw your attention to this one without further comment.

An enormous shipment of copies of my new book, Where the West Ends, has arrived at my house, so those of you who pre-ordered autographed copies should get them shortly. It will take me a few days to process, sign, and ship them, but you paid good money so it’s my top priority.

If you missed the deadline for an autographed copy, you’ll be able to pick one up from Amazon soon. A Kindle version will also be available.

The war in Syria continues to get even uglier. As Neal MacFarqhuar reports in the New York Times, more and more foreign jihadists are sneaking into the country each day.

The past few months have witnessed the emergence of larger, more organized and better armed Syrian militant organizations pushing an agenda based on jihad, the concept that they have a divine mandate to fight. Even less-zealous resistance groups are adopting a pronounced Islamic aura because it attracts more financing.

[…]

Fighters, activists and analysts say that jihadi groups are emerging now for several reasons. They generally stand apart from the Free Syrian Army, the loose national coalition of local militias made up of army defectors and civilian volunteers. Significantly, most of the money flowing to the Syrian opposition is coming from religious donors in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf region whose generosity hinges on Salafi teaching.

I can certainly understand why the Obama administration wants to stay out of this. Syria is truly a problem from hell. The liklihood of a happy ending is vanishingly close to zero. That will still be true even if the United States does get involved.

But the most likely outcome will continue to worsen the longer this lasts. And if Al Qaeda, the Qataris, and the Saudis have the most on-the-ground influence when the dust clears, the odds that Syria will remain a terrorist-sponsoring enemy of the United States even after regime-change are substantial.

Those of you who ordered autographed copies of my new book, Where the West Ends, shouldn’t have to wait too much longer. I placed the order for the books a week ago, but I ordered a lot of them so it’s taking a while to have them processed and shipped to me. They should arrive at my house shortly, though, and when they do I will sign and ship them immediately to you by Priority Mail.

Pro-Assad Web sites are claiming that the Syrian government assassinated Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the current intelligence chief and the former ambassador to the United States. The Syrians accuse him and the CIA of orchestrating the recent bombing in Damascus that killed several top regime figures, undermining the initial claim that the attack was carried out by an Islamist suicide bomber.

I have no idea if the Syrians really killed Bandar bin Sultan or if he’s even dead. (The Saudis might want to trot him out soon if he’s still alive.) If Assad is responsible for killing him, though, expect the Middle East to heat up substantially.

White House press secretary Jim Carney refused to publicly name the capital of Israel yesterday. All he was willing to say when asked repeatedly is that the White House position on Israel’s capital hasn’t changed.

You can watch the video and read the transcript here.

This is all really quite silly.

It’s a fact—not an opinion—that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. Anyone who insists otherwise is in denial.  You may wish Tel Aviv was its capital. You may even wish a united Al Quds was the capital of the Arab state of Palestine. But those things can only be true in an alternate universe or in the future. In this universe, in 2012, Israel exists and Jerusalem is its capital.

Only one of Israel’s national government buildings—the ministry of defense—is in Tel Aviv. All the others are in Jerusalem. And all of them are on the western side of the city inside the internationally recognized borders. The only people who dispute Israel’s right to exist in west Jerusalem are those who dispute Israel’s right to exist anywhere.

I can understand why Carney sighed when he first heard the question and preferred not to answer. He doesn’t want Arab governments to have a conniption fit.

The problem, though, is that he is enabling delusional rejectionists. It’s always easier in the short run to let self-destructive beliefs and behavior go unchecked, but it always makes the problem worse in the long run.

After a suicide-bomber killed five Israeli tourists in Bulgaria, the Israelis are (again) asking the European Union to blacklist Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. Europe (again) refuses to do so.

Erato Kozakou-Marcoullis, the foreign minister of Cyprus just 30 minutes off Lebanon’s coast, says Europe would consider adding Hezbollah to the list of banned terrorist organization “if there were tangible evidence of Hezbollah engaging in acts of terror.”

Let’s just pretend for the sake of argument that terrorism against Israelis is somehow different from terrorism against anyone else. What about the assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister Rafik Hariri in downtown Beirut, a brazen act of terrorism for which Hezbollah has been indicted by the United Nations?

Still not good enough?

How about Hezbollah’s invasion of Beirut in May of 2008?

What about Hezbollah’s plot to destroy the Hyatt Tower in downtown Baku with a series of car bombs?

Its first act of terrorism was the destruction of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983. I could sit here all day and list all the incidents between then and now, but I won’t. European officials know perfectly well what Hezbollah has done. Their refusal to blacklist it has nothing to do with their ignorance or with Hezbollah’s innocence.

UPDATE: Walter Russell Mead adds:

[T]he EU has at least provided a new answer to an old question.

Q: What do you call something if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck?

A: A political wing.