After being humiliated by state authorities, Mohamed Bouazizi, an unknown street vendor in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouaziz, set himself on fire on Dec. 17, 2010. Just a few weeks before, WikiLeaks had published revelations confirming what virtually every Tunisian knew: The regime of Ben Ali was thoroughly corrupt and operated like a mafia family. But the U.S. backed Ben Ali throughout his many years of dictatorial rule. Bouazizi’s action may be comparable to Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Ala. Who knew then what would follow? In Tunisia, within weeks Ben Ali was toppled. Then Egypt erupted, then Syria and Libya. Impregnable regimes suddenly looked vulnerable. The political landscape of the Middle East had dramatically changed. People came out in the streets in unprecedented numbers.
Rami Khouri is a well-known journalist in the Middle East. Based in Beirut, he is the editor-at-large of The Daily Star. His articles are syndicated in major newspapers around the world. He is the director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Khouri is also a recipient of the Pax Christi International Peace Award for his efforts to bring peace to the Middle East.
The following interview was conducted on Oct. 17, 2013, at the University of Denver in Denver, Colo.
David Barsamian—Antonio Gramsci said, “The old is dying and the new cannot be born, and in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” I’m wondering, in the context of the Arab Middle East and the various revolts that began in December 2010, what your perspective is on that trajectory.
Rami Khouri—I think that quote is absolutely correct. What happened in the period between December 2010 and June 2011 was an extraordinary series of rolling revolts, popular uprisings, revolutions, and populist activism and challenges to existing regimes, some of which had been in place for 40 years under the same leader, like in Libya, or the same family, as in Syria, or the same regime, as in Egypt, the army. So this sudden uprising that changed so many of the principles that had defined the Middle East for so many decades—really two or three generations—was so sudden and so vast in its consequences that it was very clear that the dust would not settle very quickly, and there would be a long period during which people tried to reconfigure the political power structures and the legitimacies of their societies. This is a process that in Western democracies took one or two centuries. We don’t expect it to take that long in our countries, but it certainly needs more than one or two years.
So I think we’re passing through the phase now of this period of the old regimes being changed or challenged and the new ones not yet being created. There are many, many reasons for that, which we can discuss. But I think we have to be very patient and just watch the process unfold and recognize the epic nature of this process, where ordinary people, for the first time ever in the history of these societies—and I say first time ever meaning in the last 8,000 years of settled human life—have a say and an opportunity to shape their own countries, to shape their government systems, to define their national values, to set up mechanism of accountability, etc., etc. This is not something that happens quickly or easily.
D.B.—Let’s talk about the spark that ignited the series of revolts, starting with Tunisia. U.S. government cables extremely critical of the Ben Ali regime, likening it to a mafia family, were published by WikiLeaks on Nov. 28, 2010. Three weeks later, Dec. 17, Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor who refused to pay bribes to the police, dowsed himself with gasoline and set himself on fire. He later died. That was the ignition that launched the revolt in Tunisia. What is your perspective on Tunisia? You’ve written favorably on Tunisia, saying it “continues to show the way.”
R.K.—Tunisia was literally the spark and Mohamed Bouazizi, unfortunately, also literally was the spark. He set himself on fire. This ignited a spontaneous, widespread, and continuing series of citizen uprisings all across the Arab world. His show of protest, or maybe it was self-affirmation—we don’t know exactly what he meant to do when he set himself on fire—resonated instantly and ferociously with people all across the region. People understood exactly why he did this. And in the first signs of the weakness of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s regime in Tunisia, when that regime started to falter and then when he fled, immediately people recognized all across the region that these police-state, dictatorial-type regimes are not quite as strong as we think they are. In fact, some of them were overthrown and some have fought back, like in Syria and Bahrain.
What happened with Bouazizi was that he articulated, both in his suffering and his protest sentiments, what several hundred million Arabs instinctively felt. I describe him as a kind of Rosa Parks figure. When Rosa Parks refused to get off that bus, she was doing something that millions of black people instinctively understood they wanted to do. But they didn’t do it; she did it. When she did it and she was arrested, instantly this created a civil rights movement locally in Montgomery, and then all across the American South. In Bouazizi’s case it was a similar situation. He was just one person, but the suffering he felt at the hands of the police who mistreated him, and then when he went to the governor’s office a few hours later to ask for a redress of grievance and was sent away, what he endured, resonated throughout the Middle East.
Within a few hours this ordinary citizen, twice in his encounters with the official representatives of his own government—not an American invading army or an Israeli occupying army or some foreign army, but his own government—two officials in his community that he encountered, treated him like dirt. They basically told him: You have no rights. We can do anything we want with you. We can humiliate you. We can, as the police woman did, take his scales away and prevent him from working and therefore doom his family to poverty or even worse. He was the only breadwinner of his family. He was bringing home around $73 a week. There were seven people in his family, his mother and six siblings, that were kept alive and some of them went to school because of his earnings. He suddenly couldn’t do any of that, because this one police officer and the governor’s office totally denied him any kind of citizenship rights or any basic human rights.
That feeling resonated widely and strongly with millions of people in the Middle East. So we have to look back and see Bouazizi as a symbol of the suffering of people all across the Arab world at the hands of their own dictatorial or autocratic regimes, and also the humiliation that he felt, that he could do nothing about it. He had no rights, he was an invisible man. He had to take his suffering and live with it. Well, he didn’t take it and live with it. He made a protest. Whether that protest of setting himself on fire was a sign of defiance or a sign of suicidal hopelessness or a sign of self-assertion—saying, I’m not an invisible man, I do have agency, I do have the capacity to do something, and here’s what I’m doing, I’m protesting by setting myself on fire to show you that I will not just sit down and die quietly, and if I’m going to die, maybe I’ll do it by making a statement—we don’t know. He died, so we don’t know what was going through his head. But what he did resonated so widely across the region that it sparked all these protests. When Al Jazeera TV started to cover the events in Tunisia, people were sitting watching their TVs day and night. They couldn’t turn off the TV, they were so enthralled by what was going on. And, of course, the rest is history, and the unrest spread across the region.
The key thing is to go back and constantly ask ourselves, What were the grievances that millions and millions, tens of millions, maybe 200 million people around the Arab world, felt that connected them to Bouazizi and drove these revolts? And where are those grievances today? That’s the important question. What happened in the last two and a half, three years, happened. So, are the people of the Arab world still suffering under these same kinds of humiliating conditions, situations of hopelessness, vulnerability, and marginalization? We don’t really know, because we still don’t have mechanisms that clearly express the political sentiments of ordinary people. We’ve had some indications with elections here and there, but we’re still kind of groping in the dark on this.
D.B.—The Ennahda Party seems to be a kind of moderate Islamic formation that’s been trying to work with other groups in civil society within the country.
R.K.—The Ennahda in Tunisia is a more sophisticated form of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and in other Arab countries, partly because the leadership, [Mohamed] Ghannouchi and others, spent decades in exile, in England mostly and around Europe. So they were very influenced by the kind of civil society and Western democratic experiences that they encountered in their exile. When they came back and they won a plurality—they didn’t win a majority; I think they had around 40-41 percent of the vote in Tunisia, but they were lead partners in the three-partner coalition government—they understood better than the Muslim Brothers in Egypt that you have to work in a collective way with other groups in society, you can’t try to force your will and dominate society. So they were much more amenable to making deals, to making compromises. They had their chance, running the government for over a year, and they didn’t do very well. They didn’t respond to the basic needs and grievances and rights and expectations that ordinary citizens have been expressing for years and years.
The Ennahda is a more sophisticated version of the Muslim Brotherhood but still also a failure in its chance to govern politically, democratically, and legitimately. They had the chance. They didn’t succeed. They have to rethink, regroup. How can they maintain their ability to work politically in society, draw on the support that they have from so many people, which they still have, but also be politically effective and deliver the goods? People want political leaderships and governments to do something about jobs, about schooling, about health care, water, housing, transportation, reasonably priced food. If the government doesn’t deliver on those things, people will bring in another government. This is what we’re passing through now in Egypt and Tunisia and elsewhere.
D.B.—The revolt in Tunisia and the overthrow of the Ben Ali dictatorship immediately led to what happened in Egypt, starting on Jan. 25. And in an amazing, short period of time, by Feb. 11, the entrenched dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, backed to the hilt by the U.S., was overthrown. Egypt is no ordinary Arab country. It’s the bellwether of the region, it’s been the cultural and political center. But you’ve described it as a “forlorn global backwater of mediocrity and mismanagement.”
R.K.—That’s what it had become under military rule for 60 years. It was a vibrant leader, a cultural center, a center of political and intellectual dynamism for years and years. But after 1952, when the military took over and controlled Egypt—and still does today, by the way—under that leadership, with one-party control, when the National Democratic Party was formed under [Anwar] Sadat, it became a backwater. It became totally marginalized, totally mediocre, inefficient, corrupt, lifeless. It was one of the sad things of the modern Arab world.
It will regain its place in the region, because it’s chromosomally there; in the cultural chromosomes of the region, Egypt is something powerful, vibrant, living, dynamic, creative, bigger than life. And it will come back again. But it has to reclaim a measure of political legitimacy in its government institutions that it has not yet achieved.
This is the difficult part. It’s easy to overthrow somebody like Mubarak, we see in retrospect. It wasn’t that difficult. The reason it was easy was because the armed forces, who are the real power, decided that they weren’t going to fight to keep him in power, they were going to let him go. But the armed forces are still in power. They’re still the power behind the scene. They’ve named this temporary government now. They’re the ones who still call the shots. So that’s the big question: When do you fully transfer power from the military to civilian authorities?
D.B.—In those Tahrir Square demonstrations, which captured the imagination of the world, a familiar slogan was, “The army and the people are one hand.”
R.K.—Right. And this reflects something that has been documented very well in public opinion polling going back 10-15 years. The armed forces in most Arab countries have significant respect among the population. It’s the police and the intelligence agencies that the people don’t like, because they’re the ones who beat you up and they’re the ones who are corrupt and make you pay bribes. But the armed forces tend to have a lot of respect. There are several reasons. One of them is that these are institutions through which ordinary people can develop careers and make something of their lives. Second, people see them as protecting the nation, the sovereignty of the state, its territory. And in some cases, as in Egypt, people also look at the armed forces as the ultimate protector of the ability of the people to live a dignified life. In Turkey you had a similar role. The armed forces were always there in the background. But eventually they lost that role, with the changes in Turkey. In Egypt the armed forces are still there. They’re still largely respected. People were very happy to let the supreme commander of the armed forces, the SCAF, take control of the transition for the first year after Mubarak was overthrown. And now they’re back again, with a lot of Egyptians happy to have them back managing another transition.
But it is also clear, from the way that people behaved two years ago—when Egyptians were pushing very hard to make sure that the army actually did turn over power to an elected, legitimate civilian government—that people don’t want the army to rule forever. They like the armed forces to be there in the background to prevent any crazy group taking over society and to provide a basic sense of physical day-to-day security. So the relationship between citizens and the armed forces in Egypt and other Arab countries is quite a peculiar one.
The reason that this is the case is because these countries don’t have legitimate civil institutions of government. They don’t have democratic systems, they don’t have citizenship rights. So you need somebody you can turn to to make you feel that your humanity, your basic civil and human rights are protected to a minimum degree. And that institution is the armed forces. Other people, of course, look to God, and they go to the Islamic groups. They look to religious institutions to give them that sense of protection and hope and succor, that things will be better in the future. But the armed forces play a very peculiar role…
D.B.—The Muslim Brotherhood, formed in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, did provide that kind of faith-based organization, to which Egyptians, in the millions, I dare say, responded. Mohamed Morsi was elected in 2012. He had, let us say, a checkered administration. There were massive demonstrations again in late June 2013, and then there was a coup that was not a coup on July 3. Walk us through the series of events leading to Morsi’s downfall.
R.K.—That year, from June 2012 to June 2013, was a phenomenal historical experience for Egypt and the Arab world. What happened was, first you had a legitimately elected president from the Muslim Brotherhood Party, and the parliament had a majority of Muslim Brotherhood supporters. So for the first time ever you had, in an important Arab country, democratically elected, legitimate Muslim Brothers in power as incumbents. So that first step was important. And people were happy to see them take office. There was no major problem. People felt that they were there to help achieve the goals of the revolution. And Morsi’s first act upon being elected, before he was sworn in constitutionally by the constitutional court judges, was going to Tahrir Square, he went to the crowds. He was symbolically saying that his legitimacy comes from the people, not from some army officer who swears him in or some judge who swears him in or some old constitution. It’s from the people. And people liked that. They responded very positively to that. So he took office legitimately.
Then what happened was, over the next year the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi acted with total and absolute mediocrity and inefficiency, even thuggery and buffoonery to some extent. They were a huge disappointment. Everybody was shocked, their supporters as well as their critics. Nobody expected them to be so incompetent. They were unable to achieve anything of significance at the level of policy, of government, of institutional development of democratic systems, of consensus building, of expansive pluralistic decision-making. At any level they were a total failure, even basic day-to-day security and provision of basic services like gasoline and bread. They also tried to grab power more and more by putting all their people in positions of authority and sidelining others.
So people got worried after a year, and they saw that the country was falling apart economically, that security was deteriorating, there was no sense of real democratic transition. That’s when you had this popular uprising, the Tamarrud movement, taking the issue of “How do we get rid of the Muslim Brothers” back to the people, and asking for early elections. They were asking for a democratic transition. They weren’t asking for an overthrow or a coup. The Tamarrud movement got millions and millions of signatures and held street demonstrations. They were basically asking for early presidential elections: Let the people again validate whether Morsi should stay in office or get somebody better.
Then the army stepped in and did their coup. So it was a coup that walked into the picture on a platform that was provided by popular demonstrations. This was a critical link between popular sentiment, which has legitimacy, and the army coup, which is illegitimate. It shouldn’t have happened, but it did. And now we’re in this new transition phase.
The reality is that you have two major groups in the country that are powerful and have popular credibility: the armed forces and the Muslim Brotherhood. Neither of them has shown the ability to actually govern well. And the people, broadly speaking, I think, have also made it clear that they don’t particularly want the Muslim Brotherhood again to run society, because they were incompetent and thuggish, and they don’t want the army again. So Egypt is in a very delicate situation right now. Having tried military rule, tried Muslim Brotherhood rule, didn’t like either of them, now they’re trying to again go through a transition process to come up with a new constitution and then establish new institutions of governance. It’s a very important transition that Egypt is passing through, that must be navigated slowly and carefully.
They’ve learned from all of the mistakes over the last two years: that you don’t rush the constitution through, you don’t shove it down people’s throats, you don’t pack the committee forming the constitution with your own supporters, that a constitution must be something that reflects the majority will of all the country, that it represents the whole country, it doesn’t represent one political group. So I think people have learned those mistakes, and now they’re trying again.
What’s a big mystery is why the non-Muslim Brotherhood political activists—the civil society groups, the secularists, the nationalists, the lefties, the youth movement, the revolutionary youth—were also incompetent. Because they were incompetent. They couldn’t get their act together. They couldn’t form political movements that could counter the Muslim Brothers. The only one that did to some extent was the Tamarrud movement, this youth-driven movement to get the petition to have early elections to get rid of Morsi. It’s not clear if that force, that dynamic of the Tamarrud movement, these young people getting petitions all over the country, will transfer now into some kind of organized political group. It may or it may not. We’ll see.
D.B.—The Brotherhood has been declared an illegal organization. Its assets are being seized. Morsi is in jail, along with the top echelon of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership. Hundreds if not several thousand people have been killed, with many more thousands in jail. Why the violent response from the military, which has all the guns?
R.K.—I think the violent response from the military is because they have no experience in political pluralism. They don’t know how to do democratic transitions, they don’t know how to do constitution writing, they don’t know how to do negotiations and compromises and deal-making in a political context. They acted roughly, quickly, hastily. They were panicking to some extent. And possibly you had some people in the military who actually saw an opportunity to take power again. It’s possible that [Abdel Fattah] el-Sisi or other people with him actually want to run for president and be elected.
D.B.—They have appointed their people in most of the governorates, provinces, of the country.
R.K.—Historically, in the last 35 years or so, government appointees to local governorates or heads of big corporations or state bodies have almost always been filled by former army officers. This is how the military creates what’s called the “deep state.” So there are thousands of former army officers in positions of running government offices, military, economic corporations, local governorate positions, mayoral offices, local government institutions. There are all kinds of mechanisms by which these thousands of former military people are now in power. But they were not elected. This is something that Egypt has to overcome down the road. And this can only happen through a democratic process.
D.B.—The Egyptian military, like their counterparts in Pakistan and in Iran, also has a business empire. They have a huge economic stake in the Egyptian economy.
R.K.—There is a big business side to the armed forces in Egypt, which they have developed over the last 30-40 years. The country seems to have adjusted to this because they’re producing things that the country needs: clothes, food products, tourism, even some resorts. They produce the goods and services that the country needs. Bread. So there isn’t a big controversy over whether the military should run this large commercial empire. That’s not a big problem right now. The big problem is, “Should the military run the political governance system?” That’s where the controversy is. The ability of the armed force to efficiently run commercial enterprises is actually something right now that is a plus for them, because they can help to get the country back on its feet again and get the economy growing again. But I think people will leave that for the moment and focus much more on the political institutions of the state.
The military has to have some of these privileges maintained for it to accept actually staying out of politics. That’s the deal basically that’s been agreed to, that the military can continue to have certain privileges and certain things that its officers enjoy—good housing, good pensions, many of them when they retire get appointed to jobs in semi-government institutions. That’s the part of the deal that the government accepts and the public accepts, in return for the military eventually getting out of politics and turning it over to the civilians.
D.B.—Washington has concerns about Egypt, not necessarily about the Egyptian people, but they’re worried about the peace treaty with Israel, they’re worried about its warships having privileged access to the Suez Canal, and they’re concerned about their military flights using Egyptian airspace. The peace treaty seems to be a big issue for them.
R.K.—The peace treaty between Egypt and Israel I think is not in jeopardy.
D.B.—Isn’t it very unpopular with the average person on the street?
R.K.—Yes and no. People are critical of Israel because of the way Israel still mistreats Palestinians, and also because of the infringement on sovereignty that many Egyptians feel came out of the peace treaty with Israel, where there are controls about what military equipment Egypt can have in the Sinai. Israel has to approve that. Some people don’t like that. But people also don’t want to go back to war with Israel. They are pretty clear about that. The same in Jordan. People are critical of Israel, but the peace treaties that Egypt and Jordan have with Israel are not in jeopardy.
What is in jeopardy is the close relationship with the U.S. And there people are much more vocal and much more critical. If they see the U.S. meddling too much or trying to boss people around, they will push back. This is one of the new realities in the Middle East. You see it in Turkey, Iran, in different Arab countries, Saudi Arabia even, Egypt, where people will push back against the U.S. government, will take policy courses that the U.S. doesn’t like, but will do them because they feel they’re in their own interest.
D.B.—The Obama Administration has already cut back some military aid to Egypt.
R.K.—That’s a symbolic gesture. The U.S. would rather not see the armed forces carrying out coups against elected presidents. The U.S. isn’t going to cut off ties with the Egyptian military.
D.B.—Talk more about the economic background before these revolts took place. This is a highly water-stressed region. In Syria, for example, for years there was a severe drought that impoverished many farmers, drove them into cities, where they struggled. You mentioned rising food prices. Something like 80 percent of food grains in the Arab Middle East are imported. People can’t afford basic necessities.
R.K.—Again go back to Mohamed Bouazizi as a symbol of the lives that several hundred million Arabs lead. If you say there are around 360 million Arabs today, probably 200-250 million are low-income or poor with zero political rights and stressful socioeconomic conditions. Bouazizi and people like him suffer a combination of two kinds of degradation: They have unequal access to basic social and economic needs—jobs, income, housing, food, etc., at one level—and they also have a lack of political rights and human rights. So those two things, the material needs of life and the intangibles of their rights, are both defined by massive deficiencies and inequities in the Arab world. Ordinary citizens put up with material deprivation if they’re poor but they feel that maybe there’s an opportunity to get a better life and they can go to school and get a better job, or, if there is a problem, that they can go to court and get a hearing. So you can balance lack of material rights with sufficient political rights.
Once you lose that balance—and this is, I think, what happened with Bouazizi and with so many others who protested—once you feel that you actually don’t have any opportunity to improve your socio-economic conditions or your political conditions, that you’re basically destined to live a life of servitude and marginalization and vulnerability and humiliation, that’s when somebody goes over the edge and decides to go out on the street and march, even at the risk of being arrested and tortured and killed. But even with that risk, they still go out. Hundreds of thousands of people, or millions of people in some cases, go out on the street and do that. Essentially what they’re saying is: My life is not worth living under the present conditions. If I’m treated like an animal, if I have no opportunity to give my kids a better future, if my life has no meaning, then I might as well risk it and try to give it meaning and try to improve it.
This is a classic attitude of any person who goes out and challenges an unjust political and economic order to try to make it better, knowing that the risks are serious but that the risks of not going out and challenging that order are greater because of the absolute certainty of a lifetime of poverty and marginalization and dehumanization.
D.B.—How have the monarchies, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates managed to hang on in this tumultuous moment?
R.K.—The monarchies have done two things. And there are different kinds of monarchies. You have the wealthy ones, like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and then you have the not wealthy ones, like Morocco and Jordan. The wealthy ones have done it basically by pumping huge amounts of money into their societies and literally buying people off. The Saudis and the Kuwaitis, right after the uprisings started, spent something like $150 billion to improve people’s salaries, to give people free handouts. There was an incredible show of basically buying off discontent. The other thing is, those regimes have more legitimacy than the republican regimes like Egypt and Syria. The monarchies have a longer established line of legitimacy. They tend to be a little bit more in tune to what their people need. As monarchies they feel that their legitimacy comes basically from serving their people, at least that’s how they put it.
D.B.—But maybe not in Bahrain, where a Sunni king is ruling a majority Shi’a population.
R.K.—And that’s why in Bahrain there is more or less an armed revolt, because in Bahrain it’s a question of political inequity, discrimination. But if you look at Jordan or Morocco or Saudi Arabia, there the monarchies have a different kind of legitimacy from the countries where you had people like [Muammar] Qaddafi or Zine al-Adidine Ben Ali. So it’s a combination of those two things. People in those countries have not gone out in the street to overthrow the regimes. Even in Bahrain the demonstrations were for reform; they weren’t to overthrow the ruling family. People are asking for reform. They want constitutional change, they want less corruption, they want more participation, more accountability. So they’re asking for reforms rather than overthrow. And they got some reforms done, but very limited. Most of the activism that is being done in the monarchies is being done through social media, on the internet. But this reflects a sentiment of grievances among ordinary people that will perhaps one day be translated into street demonstrations and things of that nature. There have been some demonstrations, but very limited.
D.B.—The ongoing situation in Iraq can only be described as heart breaking. A day doesn’t go by when you don’t read short reports in The New York Times—20 people killed, 30 people killed, 40 people killed. If it hits triple digits, it may graduate to a larger article. You’ve written about “the grave and criminal consequences of the war in Iraq that George W. Bush and Tony Blair unleashed in 2003.” I wonder if you know that right here, where we’re sitting, the University of Denver, an elite school, in September 2013 gave George W. Bush a humanitarian award.
R.K.—I didn’t know that.
D.B.—There was some protest—faculty, students, the general population.
R.K.—This is a free country. People can do whatever they want. And they will get pushback. So there were protests against Bush getting the award and there were other people who felt that it was the right thing to do.
The reality is that Bush and Condoleezza Rice and Tony Blair and others carried out a criminal deed in Iraq when they invaded, and they should be held accountable, even just in the court of public opinion. What they did was completely against any legal or moral standards of decency, let alone law. Just human decency. What they did was atrocious. And the killing is going on and the dying is going on. By the way, the Salafist militant Islamic terrorists, the al-Qaeda type groups that are spreading now across Syria and Iraq and from there going all over the world, if people are really worried about them, as they should be, they should ask George Bush and Tony Blair and Condoleezza Rice why they unleashed the war in Iraq, which was the starting point to turn Iraq and now Syria into the world’s biggest mobilizer, trainer, and exporter of these Salafist Islamist killers.
The consequences of what happened in Iraq when the American-British-led invasion took place will plague the region and possibly the world for many, many years. It’s one of the important lessons we have about how big powers behave. In retrospect, people should go back and understand why people were protesting against that invasion.
D.B.—Before it happened.
R.K.—When Obama recently was thinking of attacking Syria, there were again protests and complaints. And people, again, should take that seriously. Because when you do that, when a big power goes and attacks a country far away unilaterally, simply on the basis of what that attacking country feels is right, it generates huge opposition all over the world and it has consequences. Iraq is the best example of this.
D.B.—Condoleezza Rice, incidentally, is a graduate of this university, as was Madeleine Albright, another secretary of state.
R.K.—I’m sure Condoleezza Rice was a fine student, but she was an awful secretary of state.
D.B.—And national security adviser.
R.K.—You judge people by their actions. And what people do in their youth is different from what they do as adult political leaders.
D.B.—The ongoing bloodletting in Iraq is, at least in the U.S., always defined as sectarian. It’s Sunni versus Shi’a. Is that accurate? Are there any class issues at work here?
R.K.—It is accurate to an extent. You have had problems in Iraq for many years among Sunnis and Shi’ites and Kurds and others. But Sunnis also suffered under the Saddam Hussein regime, as much as Shi’ites and Kurds did. The Kurds and the Shi’ites had uprisings, which were put down by the Iraqi regime.
But what happened in Iraq during and after the war…by taking away the Iraqi government and the state system and the armed forces, you unleashed these forces in society. And one of the big forces was Shi’ites wanting revenge against Sunnis for having run this police state, killer government for so many decades. The Kurds in the north expanded their autonomy. But the Shi’ites became dominant, and took over the government, with a lot of support from Iran.
So what’s happened is that people are expressing political grievances but articulating them in sectarian terms. The real problem isn’t Sunni and Shi’ite, because Sunnis and Shi’ites have co-existed in most countries for many years.
D.B.—And intermarried.
R.K.—Indeed. There were problems. In Lebanon, for instance, Shi’ites were kind of third-class, downtrodden. They were like blacks in the U.S. in the 1940’s and the 1950’s: They were the poorest of the poor, they didn’t have full rights, they had the worst jobs and the least education. But you never had open fighting between them. You never had Sunni-Shi’ite explosions in other people’s mosques and bombings of other people’s neighborhoods. Now that sectarian problem has developed. But at its core it’s not really a sectarian issue; it’s an issue of political abuse of power, authoritarian despotism, and people just wanting revenge.
Some of this is stoked from the outside. So for example, when somebody bombs a Shi’ite mosque, it could be some of these al-Qaeda guys from Afghanistan, or Saudis or Pakistanis or Yemenis or whoever they are, who are deliberately provoking Shi’ite-Sunni tensions. Syria plays that out to a certain extent. Lebanon too. So it has become a serious sectarian issue now, but at its core it’s not really about sectarianism, because these people have tended to find a modus vivendi over many, many centuries.
D.B.—The U.S.-U.K. invasion of Iraq exacerbated that problem.
R.K.—Very much. It actually brought it out into the open in a violent way. It created the opportunity for people in Iraq to take revenge against each other. The invasion didn’t invent sectarian problems; those tensions were already there. As I said, you had Shi’ites who revolted against Saddam Hussein’s rule even before. But it just made the situation a lot worse.
D.B.—There have been interesting developments since the election of Hassan Rouhani in Iran in June 2013. There was the famous Obama phone call to Rouhani in New York. There are negotiations now, finally, after decades of complete silence, between the U.S. and Iran. Do you see this as an opening and a breaking down of hardline positions that have been in place for so many years?
R.K.—The Iran-U.S. rapprochement is incredibly important. It’s one of the most significant political developments in recent decades. It’s going to open the door towards a slow resolution of the issues that both sides have raised. The Iranians have raised many issues against the U.S., the West, and Israel. And the West and Israel and the U.S., and some Arab countries, have raised concerns about Iran’s nuclear development. They’re afraid Iran will get a nuclear bomb. So all those issues are now being addressed simultaneously. This is why it’s so significant and why we’re getting these breakthroughs. Because for the first time you’re getting the U.S. government officially making concessions to Iran, while Iran has been making positive gestures to the U.S. and to the negotiating mechanism, the “P5+1,” that exists to talk about the nuclear issue under the UN umbrella.
This is what’s important to understand. The Americans made two huge concessions to the Iranians. They said, We are not going to try to bring down the Iranian regime, and they accepted that Iran can enrich uranium at a level that does not allow it to create a bomb, and under international supervision, which the Iranians have always said is all they want. So the U.S. has already given Iran two major concessions. And Iran simultaneously is saying, We’re perfectly willing to have intrusive international inspections, we’re willing to limit the amount of enriched uranium, the level of enrichment, etc.
That’s why we have this breakthrough, because both sides have recognized that you can solve this problem politically, but you can only solve it when both sides make gestures of equal magnitude to the other side.
The approach that was used before—the Dennis Ross approach, the George Bush approach, the early Obama approach—was a complete failure, where you say you’ve got to pile on the pressure, you have to have crippling sanctions. Hillary Clinton’s [approach was] nonsense. The hardest sanctions ever applied in the world. Those tough sanctions did not make any change in Iran’s nuclear development program. In fact, while the U.S. was piling on sanctions after sanctions, the Iranians kept developing thousands and thousands of new centrifuges that were spinning highly enriched uranium.
So I think what we’re seeing is the failure of sanctions and military threats, which has been the American-Israeli approach. And what we’re seeing is the success of an approach that recognizes that Iran and the Western countries both have important issues on the table that need to be addressed, and only by addressing them both simultaneously can you get a breakthrough, which is the point I think we’re at now.
D.B.—I hate to keep injecting the University of Denver, but since we’re here, the foreign minister of Iran, Javad Zarif, is a graduate of this university.
R.K.—That’s a good sign, because he’s a decent and wise man, maybe partly because of his education here.
D.B.—Who knows? The U.S. footprint in the Middle East is enormous. It has a huge base in Bahrain. The Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf are virtually U.S. lakes, patrolled by armadas. Yemen is being bombed, Somalia is being bombed, other countries are being threatened with military action. Where do you see U.S. policy in the region, given this background of militarization and intervention and ongoing support for Israel, going?
R.K.—It’s become pretty clear in the last 20 years or so that the U.S. has very mixed perceptions of what its priorities are in the Middle East. Is it protecting oil flows? Is it protecting conservative Arab regimes, most of which are police states? Is it protecting Israel at any price? Is it fighting terrorism? Is it promoting democracy? There has been no clarity, no consistency in American foreign policy in the Middle East, and lots of contradictions.
We see the consequences, particularly after the invasion of Iraq and with the continuing criminal actions by using drones, this global assassination campaign. The U.S. has become a hit squad. They’re going around the world assassinating people without putting them on trial, without getting any credible evidence against them. They kill whoever they want. And if they end up killing a wedding party in Pakistan or Yemen, tough bananas. This is unacceptable. And the world is pushing back against this.
This is another sign, I think, of the confusion or lack of clarity that the U.S. has experienced in the Middle East. It’s important now, with these uprisings going on, during this period of turbulence and lack of clarity in terms of what’s going to happen inside the Arab countries, that the U.S. be much more firm and clear about what it does support, what it does value, where it will provide assistance to people in the Middle East, and where it will push back against people. But what we have going on now is an extraordinary, unprecedented moment where in Turkey, in Iran, in the Arab countries, you have the potential for all of these countries to be run by reasonably democratic governments that are very happy to be on very good terms with the U.S., as long as the U.S. respects their rights and their legitimate needs and interests and doesn’t go around acting like a thug or a bully or a mafia hit man.
D.B.—The ongoing devastating war in Syria is going into its third year. Obama has announced that Assad must go—not exactly a negotiating position to start with. How do you see this playing out? You know what happened in Lebanon, where war continued for 15 years, until finally people stopped because of exhaustion.
R.K.—Syria is the biggest proxy war in modern history. You have more people fighting in Syria than I think we have ever seen in any single country in the last hundred years. You’ve got local people fighting, you’ve got regional people fighting, and you’ve got the Americans and the Russians and the Chinese involved. You’ve got five or six or seven major regional battles that are now also taking place simultaneously inside Syria, between Shi’ites and Sunnis, Iranians and Arabs, Kurds and Arabs, Arabs and Israelis, secularists and Islamists, monarchists and republicans. You’ve got this extraordinary range of battles by different people, all coming together in Syria.
For every one of these protagonists it’s an existential battle: They cannot afford to lose. Whether it’s Hezbollah or the U.S. or Saudi Arabia, Iran, Assad, Russia, whoever it is, they’re terrified that if they lose in Syria, they’re going to lose all over the region. So they feel that they’ve got to pull out all the stops and put everything they have into this fight—and win it. That’s why it’s so vicious and it’s getting worse and it’s virtually impossible to resolve through any kind of local negotiations by the Assad regime or the opposition. This issue in Syria will be resolved when the Americans, the Russians, the Iranians, and the Saudis get together and start working on a transition to a more peaceful future.
D.B.—How do you see the Kurdish issue evolving? There’s a de facto autonomous state in northern Iraq, there’s a large Kurdish population in Iran, in neighboring Turkey, and in Syria as well. They’re often called the largest group in the world that doesn’t have a state.
R.K.—The Kurds absolutely deserve a state. They are a genuine national force, they are a country, they are a nation. They have their distinct culture and history and language. They should be a sovereign country. But the reality is that that’s not going to happen soon. The most that can be expected is that the autonomous region in northern Iraq, and soon in northern Syria, and then more autonomy in Turkey, will allow them free movement amongst one another and they will be able to exercise all of their identity rights as Kurds. They will be able to have their own schools, their own language…manifest their culture and take care of their interests through their interactions with one other. But also live in, hopefully, democratic societies where if they have a grievance they bring it up in Turkey or Iran or Iraq or Syria through that government system in each country. I don’t see a Kurdish state evolving very soon, but I think ultimately, in the long run, after 30-40 years, we’re going to see the emergence of a kind of unofficial Kurdish state, or certainly a Kurdish homeland in the areas where the Kurds are a majority, with possibly northern Iraq being the epicenter of that.
D.B.—The largest Kurdish population is in eastern Turkey. Turkey was rocked by demonstrations in mid-2013. This was a major challenge to [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan and the AKP, the moderate Islamic party that’s been ruling there for more than decade. Were you surprised by what happened in Turkey?
R.K.—What happened in Turkey has to be seen in a global context, because it also happened in Brazil, it happened in Occupy Wall Street, it happened in Arab countries, it happened in Spain. It’s not a purely local issue. There are local dimensions, of course, but I think we have to see it as part of a global process, where citizen activism and citizen discontent and self-assertion actually now matter. If citizens feel that their own government, even if it’s democratically elected, is mistreating them, they’re going to go out on the streets and express their opposition through peaceful demonstrations. So I see developments in Turkey as part of a global process of more citizen empowerment.
It’s also a function of a phenomenon we see in a lot of places where elected governments think that they can do anything they want. Their egos take over, and they lose the capacity to be sensitive to the rights of their own people. So they get this pushback and sort of a check from their own people, which is good for them.
D.B.—Sept. 25 marked the 10th anniversary of the passing of Edward Said. He did much to break down some of the traditional “Orientalist” discourse, but you see some of that reappearing in the new rhetoric surrounding the revolts in the Arab Middle East.
R.K.—There is some of that happening. In the early days of the uprisings, in early 2011 especially, the immediate reaction of many Western countries or officials was, “Well, what does this mean for Israel? Are the Islamists going to take over?” They didn’t react to this by saying, “Does this mean that Arab men and women will be free and self-determinant and sovereign?” When people demonstrate in Burma, people in the West are very happy, and they say, “Oh, that’s great. They’re going to be free, they’re going to get rid of the dictatorship.” When people demonstrate in Egypt, they say, “What does this mean for Israel? What does this mean for Iran?”
There’s a sense that the full humanity and the complete citizen and human rights of Arab citizens are not quite appreciated by major elements of Western society. They still see the Arabs as a subordinate population whose validity comes only from the Israelis giving them validity, or American corporations or NATO or somebody else. So there’s still a problem with how people—not all people but many people in the Western world—look at Arabs and Muslims as people who don’t quite measure up to the full rights that all other human beings have in the world.
D.B.—We started this interview with a Gramsci quote, and let me end it with one, because one of Edward Said’s favorites was his “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
Thanks very much for your time.
R.K.—It’s been a pleasure.
David Barsamian
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Thank you both for your excellent interview and probing questions on the Middle East. We really need many more discussions and reviews of this nature. Thank you again!!