[Debate] (Fwd) Uprisings and Interventions in the Middle East and N.Africa (Vijay Prashad)

[Patrick Bond]

  Uprisings and Interventions: An Interview with Vijay Prashad
  <http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/4981/on-uprisings-and-interventions_an-interview-with-v>


  <http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/4981/on-uprisings-and-interventions_an-interview-with-v>Apr
  10 2012 by Magid Shihade
  <http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/contributors/35098>

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[A destroyed aircraft from a NATO strike in the Tripoli International 
Airport. Image by Il Fatto Quotidiano/Flickr.] [A destroyed aircraft 
from a NATO strike in the Tripoli International Airport. Image by Il 
Fatto Quotidiano/Flickr.]

Since the start of the events in the Arab World, termed as the so-called 
"Arab Spring," Vijay Prashad 
<http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/contributors/57116> has been writing 
about the different countries where people turned against their regimes 
across the region. He has done so by consistently contextualizing the 
events, while still providing thorough analyses of local dynamics and 
histories. In his book--/Arab Spring, Libyan Winter/-- Prashad discusses 
the case of Libya, its similarities and differences with other 
revolutions in the Arab world, and the history of the Libyan regime, as 
well as the "international" intervention.

*Magid Shihade (MS): Were the revolutions in the Arab world sudden 
events, disconnected from the past?*

*Vijay Prashad (VP):* The revolts in North Africa and West Asia were 
both sudden and anticipated, although the scale was a surprise. Over the 
course of the past decade, there has been an escalation of protests in 
the region -- largely around issues of well-being, rising prices and so 
on. The great demographic shifts (with youth being sixty percent of the 
population) are compounded by high rates of joblessness. Young people 
were four times likely to be jobless than others in the region. This was 
always a combustive situation. The joblessness is not driven by 
Malthusian pressures -- too many people, too few jobs to sustain them. 
It was rather the result of a tonic of neoliberal domestic policies and 
by the general second-class status of the Global South as the North 
constructs international policy to favor the corporations.

Add to this troubled economic situation a barren political climate, with 
the national security state as the dominant form from Tunisia to Syria. 
These states have run away from the promise of Nasserism or Arab 
Nationalism -- the original form was itself slightly allergic to 
democracy, but this new form, incubated in the 1970s is entirely 
premised on ruthless suppression of the populations and a pretense of 
democracy with closely managed elections. The Mukhabarat or internal 
security forces are far more the significant institution than the 
parliament (which was often cosmetic) and the media (which was simply 
gibberish when it came to political matters, but of course very 
effective with its soap operas when it came to transforming culture into 
anesthesia).

Social life in North Africa, and in West Asia to an extent, already 
pushed against the boundaries of the consensus sought by the neoliberal 
authoritarianism of the regimes. Protests had become commonplace, 
whether from the workers of Mahallah or the Muslim Brothers, or indeed 
the array of small liberal and left organizations from the cities or the 
peasant organizations from the countryside.

What was unexpected was the scale of the uprising, and the resilience of 
the protestors. It seemed almost as if they knew that they were fighting 
for their lives. To return home was to be not only defeated for the 
moment, but it would mean that the neoliberal authoritarian regimes 
would now seek them out to crush their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. 
That is why both the central square in Tunis and Tahrir Square in Cairo 
could not be vacated. It was a matter of life and death. The spontaneous 
sensibility was well matched by the organized forces -- it was this 
combination that sent Ben Ali and Mubarak into their various forms of exile.

*MS: How different is the Libyan case? Or what difference is there 
between Libya and say Egypt or Tunisia?*

*VP*: Libya was always different. Its people had been partly cushioned 
from the collapse of economic life -- the subsidies fueled by oil 
exports had not been withdrawn. But people do not live by bread alone. 
Over the course of the past two decades, the Qaddafi regime sought to 
privatize vast areas of social life, and to turn the Libyan state into 
something that would more properly resemble the state in Egypt -- 
subordinate to private enterprise but harsh in its use of an already 
harsh Mukhabarat. In Libya, the Islamists had faced the wrath of the 
internal security forces. The long history of repression against them 
galvanized their revolt. It was the means by which this repression that 
was carried out against the Islamists since 1996 that turned the 
professional and liberal class against the regime and into a sympathetic 
relationship with the Islamists. I'm thinking here of the human rights 
activists, who joined the Islamists against the authoritarianism of the 
regime without themselves being Islamists politically or devout religiously.

But in Libya despite the fact that the people were not able to 
experiment through political struggle, the deep gulf between the people 
and the regime enabled them to seize vast sections of the landscape for 
the rebellion very quickly. Within weeks, the entire east was in the 
hands of the rebellion. Sections of the west, notably Misrata, had also 
slipped from Qaddafi's grip. Parts of Tripoli itself, particularly the 
working class districts of Tajoura and Suq al-Jumah, turned against the 
regime. The harshness of Qaddafi's response has to be measured by the 
habits of his regime (they always responded like this) and by their fear 
that society was lost to them (they had not previously experienced such 
a wave of disaffection in so many places). Yes, Qaddafi's regime struck 
back hard, but it had become clear by early March that the progress of 
the revolution was swift and it would have succeeded in its terms. In 
the process of its fight, it would have clarified its own commitments 
and its own measure of what the new Libya would have been. Before it 
could do so, the West intervened. And it was this intervention that has 
made the creation of a new Libya very problematic. That is precisely the 
story I tell in my book.

*MS: You say that people do not live by bread alone. Given that, are 
there other foreign policy or regional issues that perhaps motivated the 
upsurge?*

*VP*: Here the story is interesting. You might remember in 
/Orientalism/, Edward Said took to task Harold Glidden's analysis of 
honor and shame in Arab culture. Glidden was interested in the 
humiliating defeat suffered by the Arab armies in 1948. I had always 
found this an interesting section in Said's book. I agreed with him that 
Glidden's account bordered on racism, with a psychological narrative 
about the Arabs that portrayed them as infantile and overly sensitive. 
Glidden's claim was that humiliation of honor had to be regained through 
the shedding of blood, and so on. It was mostly ridiculous.

But there is a kernel of truth in the first part of the suggestion -- 
which is to say that there was something humiliating to be both under 
authoritarian dictatorships that promised so little and took so much, 
and it was humiliating to see the West and the Israelis walk all over 
the Palestinians for at least the past thirty years. The humiliation of 
Mohamed Bouazizi is a general condition amongst the casual workers of 
North Africa and West Asia -- to be caught with no plan for one's life 
and to suffer the indignity from a neoliberal authoritarian structure 
that takes so much from you -- that is intolerable. One should not 
underestimate the great hunger for self-determination or democracy or 
whatever you want to call it. The West seeks to assume that this 
"democracy" is its donation to the world, but that is ridiculous. The 
striving for justice and for self-government is as old as human 
civilization.

The idea of humiliation should be extended as well to the disdain for 
the general sense of the proneness of the Arab nation since at least the 
late 1970s. In terms of international relations, Arab Nationalism has 
been utterly vanquished. No Arab political force has been able to exert 
itself against imperialism, and when the shadow of such a force tried, 
as with Saddam Hussein in 1990, its hollowness was shown for what it was 
(and tragically its appearance brought out many in support of Saddam's 
adventure, thinking it was the emergence of independence when it was the 
ridiculous mimicry of what had been and no longer was, which is a 
genuine popular Arab Nationalism). The total domination of the Israelis 
over the Palestinians, and for decades over Lebanon, simply underscored 
this sense of historical defeat. The /intifadas /of 1987-1993 and 
2000-2006 were able to galvanize support, but only for a contest that 
was militarily (not morally) always on the side of the Israelis. It is 
no surprise therefore that among the liberal-left in Tahrir Square were 
Kefaya, which emerged in 2004 but drew from currents associated with the 
solidarity campaign with the second Intifada, and the March 20 Movement, 
named for the large protest against the 2003 War on Iraq. These two are 
indicators of the broad vision for the Arab Nation, something akin in 
time to the Bolivarian consciousness set forth by the 1989 /Caracazo/ 
and the "pink tide" in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and the rest of 
South America.

*MS: What was the position of Western powers towards the Arab 
revolutions? What opportunity did the situation in Libya provide Western 
powers with, and for what end?*

*VP*: The West was stunned by the uprisings in North Africa, and of 
course in the Arabian Peninsula. It was the latter that was most 
threatening because they came too close to the great allies of the West, 
the Gulf Arab monarchies. The Saudis have made it clear that they will 
not tolerate any democratic experiment on their borders. The history of 
Yemen's republicanism is testament to that -- the Saudis ran a long 
standing insurgency against it, and brought the regime to heel (Saleh 
was once a very close ally of Saddam Hussein, and even supported 
Hussein's invasion of Kuwait; his knee went to the ground before the 
Saudis not long after). Defense of the realm of the Saudis is an 
extension of the defense of the US (as the Carter Doctrine makes clear). 
The Saudis would have none of the revolt in Bahrain and Yemen. These had 
to be controlled. And the transition in Egypt needed to be managed. The 
West also feel flat before the Saudis on this.

Even the Israelis, for all their talk of being the "only democracy in 
the Middle East," were not happy to welcome the revolts. Their 
intelligence services are often good, and they recognized that absent 
the neoliberal authoritarianism, political Islam would make major gains. 
Israel benefits greatly from the old regimes. It is what allowed Israel 
to have asymmetrical domination over the Palestinians and Lebanon -- the 
Egyptians had been bought off with their annual bursary from the US 
government to their military, and the monarchies were always wary of any 
challenge to the US and its proxy in the region, as well the Syrians had 
become Israel's border guard in the Golan region. With the "Arab nation" 
prone, Israel could indulge in its one-sided adventures against Lebanon 
(1982 and then 2006), the Occupation in general and then the occasional 
merciless bombardment (Operation Cast Lead, Gaza, 2009).

No attempt to control the dynamic in the region (special envoys and so 
on) was successful. It took the Libyan war to enable the West to 
insinuate itself as the active agent. It is remarkable that NATO became 
a social force in North Africa . . . taking space from the rebellion 
from below that had generated its own history, and produced its own 
gains. It would now have to share the spoils with NATO, and the NATO 
states. Where the West was almost discredited for its affiliation with 
the neoliberal authoritarian regimes, it was able to rehabilitate itself 
via the NATO intervention.

*MS: What do you say to the argument that Western powers (US, Europe, 
and Israel) are interested in destabilizing the region, and that either 
they encourage the revolutions in some places, or they will be benefit 
anyway from it?*

*VP*: I tend to have a more contingent view of history than that 
question implies. In other words, I think that the West was caught off 
guard. It had assumed that the neoliberal autocrats were there for good. 
Where the revolts could be properly managed, with Saudi tutelage, they 
were handled appropriately -- in Yemen, Vice President Hadi took over 
from President Saleh, but it is Saleh's son, Ahmed, who controls the 
Republican Guard and lives in the Presidential Palace; nothing changed 
in Bahrain; nothing was permitted in Saudi Arabia. What the West seeks 
is stability and the Saudi-Qatari momentum promises this to the oil 
merchants and the arms merchants, to the White House and to the Élysée 
Palace.

The revolt in Libya had its own dynamic. It was not forged by NGOs or 
"democracy promotion" funds from the US. It emerged out of the 
contradictions of recent Libyan history. What the West did was to 
insinuate itself into the revolt as the protector of civilians, when it 
seemed pretty obvious that the civilians and the defected troops were 
doing a pretty good job of defending themselves. I go over the evidence 
of the potential genocide in my book, and essentially junk it. It was 
propaganda to allow NATO entrance, and to blind us from what was going 
to happen in Saudi and in Bahrain -- the Libyan war was smokescreen to 
block out evidence of the massive crackdown in the Peninsula, including 
in Yemen. The US and its allies encouraged their pillars of Order to 
reestablish themselves--the 5^th Fleet in Manama had to have a stable 
home, after all, and the Iranians were not to be allowed any successful 
allies in the Peninsula, having already lost Iraq to the Revisionists 
thanks to the US intervention there.

*MS: What is the ethical stand that you think is suitable for people of 
progressive politics when it comes to peoples' revolutions, and to 
western powers interventions?*

*VP*: This is a very important and difficult question. When a revolt 
breaks out, should the Left join with it regardless of its social basis? 
Does the revolt have to have a Left character to be defended by the 
Left? Not necessarily so. The first obligation of the Left it seems to 
me is to defend a popular uprising against any state that seeks to use 
overwhelming force against it. That is the minimum for any kind of 
humanist Left. No regime, however progressive, should be given carte 
blanche to bomb civilian areas.

That said, there is no question that none of the regimes in North Africa 
had a progressive cast by 2011. Qaddafi's regime began well in 1969, but 
by the 1980s its entire national liberation agenda had collapsed. The 
Ba'ath regime always had an antipathy to the Left and to the agenda of 
Nasserism--it tethered the Syrian Communist Party and sequestered the 
agenda of Arab nationalism to the interests first of its bureaucracy and 
then, by the 1990s and 2000s, to the neoliberal elite that had emerged 
in the major cities, principally Damascus. To believe that these are 
progressive regimes that need to be defended by the Left is to live in a 
delusion. Just because they make noises every once in a while about 
imperialism or Zionism should not blind us to their role as 
subcontractors of imperialism (both Syria and Libya have welcomed 
prisoners from the West to torture through the extraordinary rendition 
program).

Finally, history does not move forward following some kind of script, 
with the revolutionaries always coming forward trained in the kinds of 
books we wish them to have read or with the kind of agenda that we would 
fully get behind. The move by the various social forces against the 
neoliberal authoritarian regimes lays open space for the emergence of a 
proper new Left, which will have to be very clever in the way it makes 
room for itself against political Islam and imperialism, two social 
forces that are by their programs given to the suffocation of the 
people. The Islamists will probably ride to power in each of the newly 
opened up spaces, and because they have a retrograde economic and social 
agenda will quickly either lose their legitimacy or else will push a 
very harsh social platform that will be divisive and so might allow them 
a lease of life. The Arab Left that resurfaces and regroups will have to 
be very creative on this new terrain.

*MS: Given this position you have staked out, should progressives 
support foreign (especially) NATO interventions in the South, or more 
specifically in the Arab world?*

*VP*: If, for instance, people are being butchered and there is no way 
to defend them, and NATO is the only chance for their lives -- only a 
hard-hearted ideologue would not see that NATO's intervention would be 
essential.

Such a scenario is rarely what we are presented with. This is a cartoon 
image of what the NATO media announced about Libya. Going back and 
looking at the evidence two things are clear: first, that the numbers 
being thrown about in February-March 2011 for a death count were grossly 
exaggerated (notably a famous tweet from /al-Arabiya/) and second, that 
the rebels were holding their own, and indeed had the momentum on their 
side.

The problem with a NATO intervention is not entirely germane to the 
rebels on the ground--they would likely welcome any armed force on their 
side. That is without question. The problem is rather with the growing 
power of NATO to act without any oversight, and to act "out of area" 
(that is to say Europe). When the UN Security Council passed Resolution 
1973 asking all member states to use "any means necessary" to protect 
civilians, the African Union hastened to send a high level panel to 
Tripoli and Benghazi to begin talks towards a ceasefire. NATO, 
meanwhile, powered up its jets, forbade the African Union team from 
flying into Libya and began its bombardment. Since that bombing started, 
evidence has emerged that during the 24,000 sorties there were 
considerable civilian casualties. In other words, in the name of 
protecting civilians, NATO killed untold numbers of civilians. A team of 
Arab human rights organizations and the UN Human Rights Council has 
asked for NATO to allow them to investigate its records to trace the 
numbers of civilian casualties and whether these were because of 
deliberate targeting of civilian areas. NATO refused. Indeed, its legal 
advisor wrote to the UN Human Rights Council to argue that NATO could 
not ever be seen to commit war crimes. The suggestion was impossible. 
Then, in the Security Council, the Russians have called for an 
evaluation of Resolution 1973, to see if it was indeed used most 
effectively to protect civilians. Of interest is the Libyan town of 
Tawerga, where the rebels under NATO cover removed the 30,000 largely 
dark skinned residents; this is ethnic cleansing with NATO collusion. 
NATO has refused to comply with any such evaluation. This is one of the 
reasons why the Security Council is loath to allow NATO any leash to act 
in similar situations, such as Syria.

So NATO does not want any evaluation of its role in Libya. This is a 
very important problem. In our modern, democratic world we have come to 
terms with the central idea that the military must be subordinate to and 
accountable to civilian authorities. But NATO is not subordinate to or 
accountable to any other bodies but itself. To allow NATO to operate 
without accountability violates this important prejudice of modernity. 
One cannot allow NATO to run roughshod over the political authorities 
and over the planet. That is unacceptable.

NATO is a not a social force for the rejuvenation of Arab society and 
Arab politics. The agenda of the NATO states is antithetical to the 
dreams of the "Arab Spring." NATO states will push the same kinds of 
neoliberal programs that they have pushed over the course of the past 
few decades, and NATO states will seek to build up the military in the 
new states as their main door to control the destiny of the region. All 
this has to be rejected. History has begun to move away from the days of 
Western imperialism. They will seek to prolong their power with all 
means necessary. It is for the people of the Arab lands, like the South 
Americans before them, to show NATO the door.

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