Myth-Making and Sectarian Secularists in the Middle East http://warontherocks.com/2016/09/myth-making-and-sectarian-secularists-in-the-middle-east/ Amil Khan September 1, 2016 Let’s start with full disclosure: “Cyrus Malik” and I are friends. I am also somewhat familiar with pseudonyms, as I used one myself — Londonstani — for years writing for the since retired Abu Muqawama blog. Cyrus and I both deal with the politics of conflict in the Middle East and focus extensively on Syria. However, we work with different sides. As a result, our frequent tea sessions in the Middle East’s various hotspots are generally characterized by the rapid and sustained exchange of accusations and punctuated by shawarma chomping, nargile smoking, and the sipping of tea (not usually in that order). Although I was surprised to see Cyrus airing his views in a public forum, thanks to the well-established tradition of rhetorical trench warfare between us, I already had a good idea of the arguments contained within the two War on the Rocks articles he wrote recently on sectarianism in the Middle East and U.S. policy. Cyrus makes the case that the U.S. foreign policy community is all wrong about sectarianism in the Middle East and has been following a faulty approach as a result. Policymakers, he argues, have been seduced into supporting the sectarian ambitions of a group of unrepresentative Sunnis, while commentators lobby for more robust action against the sectarian extremists’ enemies — especially the regime of Bashar al-Assad. For my part, I don’t get the impression the U.S. government is blithely supporting ISIL-light groups. And, considering the Obama administration shied away from limited strikes after the 2013 chemical weapons attack, I don’t think columns of analysts and commentators are going to prompt regime change now. However, the verbal hand grenades and carefully aimed facts really start flying when Cyrus suggests regimes, such as that of Assad, represent a counter balance to the ISIL and al-Qaeda worldview and, therefore, Washington should ease off a little. In 16 years working in the region — first as a Middle East correspondent and then as an advisor working with political and military groups — I have spent a lot of time with people who are looking to overthrow their regimes. Having also lived for long periods in their countries, I have some idea as to why. In his articles, Cyrus uses Syria as a case in point, and it does serve as a good example. Over the longer-term, the U.S. position towards Syria has been relatively benign, particularly when you consider Syria was aligned with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, serves as conduit to Hizballah, supported Hamas, and is Iran’s main ally in the Arab world. It was during the Cold War that the United States sought approving nods from Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, when negotiating regional peace deals. In 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Syria contributed 14,500 soldiers to the U.S.-led Operation Desert Storm against Iraq. And, despite rumors that President George W. Bush was planning to roll tanks into Syria right after he was done with Iraq, the United States continued to render men it detained in the global war on terror to Bashar’s prisons right up to 2005. The United States and Syria might not have been the best of friends, but they weren’t enemies in any real sense either. U.S. policy towards Syria’s government changed in 2011 when its security forces tried to stop unarmed, non-sectarian, non- religious, pro-reform demonstrations by killing protesters. In the 41 years between Assad senior’s seizure of power and that point, the regime failed to make any real moves towards reform. Instead, it just became increasingly corrupt, cruel, and greedy. The dictatorships of the Arab world — whether they claim to be religious or secular — don’t genuinely care about ideology. What they care about is staying in power, and their cack-handed efforts to do so have caused the multi-decade governance catastrophe that has allowed sectarianism to flourish. Cyrus and I agree that we don’t think regime change is a good idea and we want to see the regimes reform. But where he is willing to take the likes of regime advisor Bouthaina Shabaan at face value when she says internal reform is taking place, I don’t think Syria or the Arab dictatorships in general are genuinely willing to change or capable of enacting it on their own. In his first essay, Cyrus claims there are similarities between Egypt under Nasr and his successors, and Syria under Assad. In both, he claims, citizenship and secularism trump sect. As someone who spent most of his twenties living in Egypt and travelling around the region, I dispute that characterization but I do think there are useful similarities between the two autocratic systems that are worth exploring. One of Egypt’s defining characteristics was its ability to portray itself in whatever guise was most convenient: Arab nationalist, secular, religious, traditionalist, or modern. This wasn’t a case of a country with many facets but the calculation of a cynical governing elite. For example, a TV anchorwoman might be sacked for wearing a headscarf, while the authorities organize sexual assaults against largely secular, female activists demonstrating for a more democratic government. The brazen nature of the regime’s complicity in the 2005 “Black Wednesday” sexual assaults was particularly shocking. I was covering the demonstrations that day and saw uniformed senior policemen deploy violent criminals rounded up from jail cells against defenseless women. The police even ordered their men to block escape routes. Sometimes they physically restrained the women until the thugs could reach them. Commentators at the time put the regime’s behavior down to confidence. A senior official later told me the government believed the United States would keep its criticism muted due to its fear Egypt may step back from its role at the time as a mediator between Palestinian factions and between Palestinians and Israelis. Other less well- known incidents include arrests of gay men during raids on parties and nightclubs and their subsequent prosecution on charges of “contempt and despite of heavenly revealed religions.” Leaders from the beleaguered Egyptian human rights community said in private they saw the incident as an attempt to trap them into presenting themselves as defending homosexuality. Monitoring the local press, I would see hundreds of arrests a year of men and women, such as Manal Wahid Mana’i, across the country who seemed to run foul of the country’s supposed secular courts for nothing other than their religious beliefs. Despite regular and often quite grotesque violations of the principles of secular government and abuse of those that called for them, the regime had no problem presenting itself as the last bastion of enlightened, secular rule when talking to its supporters abroad. In 2006, Hosni Mubarak’s son, Gamal, traveled to Washington to lobby senior Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Chaney, following U.S. criticism of Cairo’s heavy-handed tactics against peaceful pro-reform demonstrations. One of the members of Gamal’s delegation later privately said the younger Mubarak had told their hosts that if they pushed a democratic agenda too far, they risked having Islamist parties come to power across the Arab world. When I used to interview Egyptian officials and their Islamist opponents, I was constantly struck by the similarity in their views regarding power. Both groups felt they had the right to arbitrarily dictate the parameters and details of public life. In most cases, the fundamental point of difference between them was the issue of who got to wield power rather than how it should be done. Syria’s ruling elite is similarly adept at maintaining a secular, progressive image while resisting all efforts to reform a brutal, callous, and regressive core. Cyrus says he is not calling for it to be supported but the narratives he outlines about the nature of the Syrian conflict cohere very closely to the regime’s talking points. On close examination, what you see is that — much like its Egyptian counterpart — the Syrian regime is quite capable of shamelessly presenting itself as progressive and secular while exploiting religious, ethnic, or social differences to serve its own purposes. In his book, Years of Upheaval, Henry Kissinger describes negotiating with Hafez al-Assad to facilitate what would eventually become the Camp David Accords: “His tactic was to open with a statement of the most extreme to test what the traffic would bear. He might then allow himself to be driven back to the attainable.” Assad the younger has followed a similar ploy in his approach to public diplomacy in the aftermath of the uprising against his rule, but he replaces “attainable” with “tolerable.” The regime’s “most extreme” statement is “the opposition are all extremists.” Cyrus is reflecting this when he writes: When the uprising started in Syria… Insurgents in Syria had created failed state zones, power vacuums full of militia and a conservative Islamist Sunni population mobilized on sectarian grounds. This effectively airbrushes out those ordinary, mostly young Syrians who first stood up to the regime by demanding the regime really become what it claims to be. Further down, Cyrus dismisses these people entirely by stating that they “have no influence because they have no militias.” This isn’t exactly true. The overarching goals of the 2011 uprising against the regime were generally understood to revolve around the principles of freedom, dignity, and social justice.