The Closed Circle:
An Interpretation of the Arabs*
David Pryce-Jones
* Originally published by Weidenfeld &
Nicolson (UK, 1989),
Reprint editions: Phoenix Books (UK, 2002),
Harper and Row (US, 1989), Ivan R. Dee (US, 2002)
Elie Kedourie:
“As the violence of the Middle East has
come to America, many Westerners are stunned and confounded by this
new form of mayhem that appears to be a feature of Arab societies.
This important book explains how Arabs are closed in a circle defined
by tribal, religious, and cultural traditions. David Pryce-Jones
examines the forces that
‘drive
the Arabs in their dealings with each other and with the West’.
In the postwar world, he argues, the Arabs reverted to age-old tribal
and kinship structures from which they have been unable to escape. In
tribal society, loyalty is extended to close kin and other members of
the tribe. The successful nation state – the model that Westerners
understand – generates broader loyalties, but the tribal world has no
institutions that have evolved by common consent for the common good.
Those who seek power achieve it by plotting secretly and ruthlessly
eliminating their rivals. In the Arab world, violence is systemic.
“As with the best
historical works, The Closed Circle is the outcome and the
resolution, of a puzzlement. David Pryce-Jones has been observing the
Arab world for many years... The reader...will find himself in contact
with an original and reflective mind, the product of which is
refreshing and most stimulating.”
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Postscript 1990-2003
In the Arab world, the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1991 had momentous and
immediate implications. Arab power holders had long been accustomed to extracting
arms and subsidies in pursuit of their personal policies by taking positions
or maneuvering between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold
War. In the first decade or so of his rule, Saddam Hussein had been able to
profit by playing one superpower against the other. Hafez Assad in Syria,
and Yasser Arafat for the Palestinians, had staked their future on Soviet
supremacy in the Cold War; Hosni Mubarak and the Saudi royal family had on the
contrary aligned themselves with the United States. American moral and
political support for Israel complicated the choices open to Arab
power holders, and the relationships between them. Nonetheless, a time has
arrived quite unexpectedly in which the bitter cycles of enmity in the whole
Middle East might ease, and even come into realignment. Arab power holders who
correctly calculated the shifts in the balance of power could expect rewards,
while whoever miscalculated would be punished.
The far-reaching might of the Soviet Union, moreover, and the tens of millions
of victims left in its wake, had long appeared to testify to the efficacy of
the premier example of the single-party police state. But now this archetype
of despotism had imploded in a welter of elections, parliaments and assertions
of democracy. The immense Soviet security apparatus could not save Mikhail
Gorbachev from Boris Yeltsin. In one sense, Yeltsin was utterly familiar in
Middle Eastern perspectives as a careerist challenger, a former colleague who
aspired to absolute power; in another sense, Yeltsin offered a dire warning
that people would reject absolutism and tyranny if only someone had the
strength of character and the appeal to mobilize them.
With his unlimited appetite for power, Saddam Hussein was quick to grasp that
the ebbing of the Cold War offered opportunities for independent action and
aggrandizement hitherto blocked by the superpowers. Early in 1990, he sent for
the American ambassador, April Glaspie, and in somewhat veiled terms revealed
that he had a grievance with Kuwait. Afterwards, the ambassador stressed her
opinion that she had not mislaid Saddam Hussein, but he at least drew the
conclusion that the United States would adopt no position in any inter-Arab
dispute. That August, he invaded Kuwait, driving its ruling family into exile,
arresting many men, some hundreds of whom were never seen again, pillaging the
national museum and the national bank, and finally declaring that henceforth,
Kuwait was to be an integral province of Iraq.
Had integration been a peaceful process agreed between the parties, then of
course everyone else would have had to accept a fait accompli.
Commentators began to speak of Saddam as an Arab Bismarck. He preferred to let
it be known that he saw himself as a pupil of Stalin’s. The elimination of one
member state of the United Nations by another had no precedent. Intelligence
reports further indicated that Saddam was within measurable distance of
acquiring a nuclear weapon, thus perpetuating at least a regional balance of
power in his favor. The United States, under President George Bush, formed a
coalition, moved troops to Saudi Arabia, and in a swift campaign in March 1991,
liberated Kuwait. In a way that would have been unimaginable only a few years
earlier, the fading Soviet leadership and the rising Russian leadership both
accepted without demur this dramatic projection of American power in the
Middle East.
The more or less general expectation was that the United States would, without
delay, advance on Baghdad, eliminate Saddam one way or another, and free the
people of Iraq to choose a regime for themselves. In anticipation of such
moves, the Iraqi Shi`a and Kurds rose in rebellion. Abstaining from
assisting this uprising, the United States surprisingly allowed Saddam to
retain his elite military formations and helicopters, in effect leaving him a
free hand to do his worst. Soon Saddam’s forces had killed many tens of
thousands more Shi`a and Kurds, shelling historic mosques in the
process. They further drained the deltas of the Tigris and Euphrates, putting
an end to the ancient way of life of the Marsh Arabs.
President Clinton inherited this stand-off from President Bush. Very much a
man of the 1960s, he believed in making love, not war. American policy
dwindled to “containment” of Saddam, with such expedients as sanctions and a
no-fly zone for Iraqi aircraft, and expensive and abortive attempts by the CIA
to mount a coup. The United Nations succeeded in sending inspectors to Iraq to
search out Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Quite what proportion of
these weapons they destroyed remains uncertain, but in any case, by means of
extended manipulations and deceptions, Saddam weakened their mission, and
finally expelled them from the country. Outstandingly illustrating how the
will of an absolute ruler can triumph over half-hearted democratic procedures,
Saddam had managed to convert a shattering defeat into victory.
In Arab and Muslim eyes, the United States had proved not only weak but also
devious and unpredictable. The crushing of Saddam was understandable as an
exercise of power, but what could be the purpose of despatching half a million
men around the world only to leave him in place? The answer came from an
unexpected source. Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors in Iran were certain
that the United States was out to destroy Islam, and was seeking a firm base
in the region for that purpose. To them, the Americans were in the age-old
image of crusaders. Again, there was no rational motivation for the supposed
anti-Islamic crusade, and the only possible explanation of it was the innate
bad character of Americans. The ayatollahs disposed of the resources of an
oil-rich state to spread an ever more generalized fear and hate of the entire
West, and to mobilize the whole of Islam against it with whatever tactics of
terror were available. They sent hit men to assassinate opponents or critics
at home and abroad, they aided Muslim extremists in the civil wars in Sudan
and Algeria, they armed and directed groups such as Hizbullah and
Islamic Jihad, and finally they embarked on a program to build nuclear
weapons.
The natural counterweight to Shi`a Iran in the Gulf is Sunni or
Wahhabi Saudi Arabia. In earlier Cold War years, both countries had
been considered “pillars” of American foreign policy. Iranian anti-American
animus increasingly drove the United States to rely on Saudi Arabia and the
garrison maintained there. Tension grew between Iran and Saudi Arabia to the
point that Iranians were forbidden to make the pilgrimage to the holy shrines
of Mecca and Medina. But the Saudi royal family and its beneficiaries also
paid the ayatollahs the compliment of imitation in the name of Islamic
solidarity, spending billions of their petrodollars on building mosques and
paying the salaries of propagandizing Wahhabi imams in Christian
as well as Islamic countries, financing religious schools or madrassas
which fuelled religious fanaticism – 7,000 in Pakistan alone, almost as many
in Indonesia, and some as far afield as Bosnia, Chechnya and the Philippines.
Worldwide competition of the kind encouraged all those Muslims who believe
that Islam is more a political ideology than a religious faith. Their Islamism
demands militancy, jihad against unbelievers (a category which includes
Muslims of whom they happen to disapprove as either heretical or Westernized).
Blending expectations with threats, they have appropriated a high proportion
of the available Iranian and Saudi dollars, and supplemented their funds by
other criminal means, including drug running. Islamist ideology overwhelmed
Algeria in a civil war which had claimed perhaps as many as 200,000 victims.
For the 20 years and more during which he has ruled Egypt, Hosni Mubarak has
resorted to military law to keep local Islamists in check. Every Muslim
country now has its Islamist groups along the lines of the Taliban,
al Qai`dah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Hizbullah. R.
Hrair Dekmejian, an expert on the subject, has identified no less than 175
such groups. Some are out in the open, others secretive, not to say
conspiratorial. “Islam will dominate the world” is a popular Islamist slogan.
This appeal may lack the universality of Communism, but organizational methods
and belief in the legitimacy of force to gain their ends are common to the two
ideologies.
Many Muslims have ambiguous feelings about the West. The wish to share Western
standards of living goes with bitterness about the poverty and inequality of
their own societies. Islamism appeals directly only to a minority of Muslims,
but it has altered the social climate. In the course of the 1990s, immense
sums of money which could have been spent on development instead served to
inflate a generalized resentment of the West and its friends into an armed
cause. Put at its simplest, Western demand for oil returned to the West in the
form of violence and terror.
* * *
Yasser Arafat’s miscalculations were multiple. In the 1991 Gulf War, he backed
Saddam Hussein vociferously. “Oh Saddam, strike Tel Aviv,” Palestinians on the
West Bank and in Gaza accordingly chanted when a number of Scud missiles were
fired over their heads at Israel, in fact doing little damage. In retaliation,
some hundreds of thousands of unfortunate Palestinians were then summarily
expelled from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. A friendless and exposed Arafat
consented to a peace process, initiated and negotiated secretly through
intermediaries in Oslo, and culminated in a grand ceremony in September 1993,
with the signing of agreements on the White House lawn under the expectant eye
of President Clinton. On behalf of the PLO, Arafat was to renounce violence,
while Israel agreed to withdraw according to a somewhat complicated
time-governed agenda from territories which had fallen into its hands as a
result of the 1967 war. As envisaged since the days of the British Mandate,
there was to be a two-state solution. Arafat and his interlocutors from the
Israeli Labor Party, Prime Minister Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres,
duly received the Nobel Peace Prize. Arafat himself returned from exile in
Tunis to headquarters in Jericho, then Gaza City, and finally Ramallah. Hope
triumphed briefly over experience.
A public relations maestro, Arafat has been all things to all men, and it may
prove impossible ever to establish whether he was sincere in embarking on a
peace process, or duplicitous. Critics certainly existed within the PLO, and
in Hamas, which only a few months after the White House ceremony once
more resorted to violence. In New York, Edward Said set what became
increasingly the fashion among intellectuals when he condemned the peace
process as the “Palestinian Versailles”. (In much the same spirit, an Israeli
fanatic was to assassinate Rabin as a “traitor”.) In 1996, Arafat was elected
head, or President, of the Palestinian Authority. The rival candidate was an
elderly lady, but the election nonethless gave Arafat an aura of legitimacy to
speak for the Palestinians, and engage them in peace-making, if he so chose.
Certainly nation-building was hardly his first preoccupation. According to
estimates, he has siphoned off sums of the order of millions, if not billions,
of dollars into accounts on which he has the signature, and he uses this money
for his own political ends, including the buying of favors and paying the
various security services on which his power depends. Imprisonment and even
murder await those who overstep the limits in expressing opinions against
Arafat. Although small-scale, the PA is as authoritarian and corrupt as any
fully fledged Arab one-man regime.
Terror attacks against Israel also turned 1996 into a bloody year. In other
parts of the world, and at other times, there had been suicide bombers. Some
sheikhs and imams have glorified suicide bombers, but others have condemned
them on the grounds that suicide is prohibited in Islam. Furthermore, whoever
kills himself or herself in such a way cannot ascertain whether the sacrifice
of life has promoted the cause, or on the contrary led to revulsion against
it, and so stiffened the opponents’ resolve. Dealing with the phenomenon, one
Israeli government after the other has gone round in circles: Arafat was
responsible for law and order, they maintained, and so they cracked down on
him to fulfil the obligations to which he was ostensibly committed. Arafat
replied that the majority of the suicide bombers were Islamists (though there
is evidence of co-ordination with PLO groups), and Israel should strengthen
rather than weaken him if he is to police Hamas or other jihadists.
Ehud Barak became Prime Minister of Israel in 1999, and one of his immediate
decisions was to withdraw Israeli forces and Lebanese proxies from a buffer
zone which they had been occupying in southern Lebanon, and where they were in
almost daily conflict with Hizbullah, the proxy of Iran and Syria. The
withdrawal occurred in haste and confusion, but Barak presented it both as
prudent and an expression of good will. To Hizbullah, Hamas and
the PLO, Israel appeared to be making a concession in return for nothing, that
is to say on the run. To President Clinton, here was an opening for a revived
peace process, and the implementation at last of the two-state solution.
Summoning Arafat and Barak to Camp David in July 2000, he exerted maximum
persuasion. Improvising as he went along, Barak offered concession after
concession (which the Israeli electorate might well have rejected) to find
that Arafat pocketed them and asked for more. The negotiations petered out
inconsequentially and rancorously. At the end of the process, Arafat praised
Clinton as a great man, and Clinton is alleged to have replied, “I’m a
colossal failure and you made me one.” The United States might be the one and
only superpower, Islamists and their supporters concluded, but it still could
not achieve its declared aims.
Evidence again suggests that Arafat believed peace would bring him only some
agreed share of Palestine, whereas by means of war, he could hope to shatter
the Jewish state, turn the clock of history back and rule over the whole of
Palestine. At his instigation, a second intifada began in the aftermath of the
Camp David fiasco. “The flag of Palestine will fly over Jerusalem,” he
proclaimed tirelessly to all willing to listen, calling for “a million
martyrs”. The undisputed national leader who could have brought into being a
Palestinian state instead chose to undo the work of his career, leaving his
people to pay the price. His historic role, then, has been to avoid
compromise.
Over a period of three years, rather more than 100 suicide bombers and other
terrorists have killed not far short of 1,000 Israelis, and wounded many more.
Palestinian casaualties have been three or four times higher. The suicide
bombers for the most part are young, well-educated students or sometimes
professional people; very few of them are from the poorer strata of the society.
Committing themselves to their lethal mission, they make a confessional video
on behalf of those who have recruited them. These films reveal intense
one-dimensional or brain-washed personalities, far outside the realm of reason
or humanity, in the grip of a death cult. They are consummating the terrible
saying often heard in Palestinian circles: “The world is ruined, let it be
more ruined.” This despair is presented as heroic, to that the younger
generation is educated and conditioned to hate Jews, and from there it
develops into a generalized anti-Semitism in the wider Arab and Muslim world.
No state, nation or constructive future of any kind can come out of such
nihilism, only nothingness.
* * *
Like Soviet dissidents before them, Arab intellectuals have to go in fear of
their liberty and lives. Many have found refuge in exile. Kanan Makiya, an
Iraqi, is one, an academic in America and the author of two courageous
and coruscating books, Republic of Fear in 1986, and Cruelty and Silence in
1993. More than anyone else, he brought to public attention the
anfal, or campaign of atrocities
which Saddam Hussein waged against his own people, with the officially
sanctioned murder of at least 100,000 non-combattant Kurds. (Edward Said,
himself an academic in America, accused Makiya of being a Mossad agent.)
Makiya was the first to ask the crucial question, “What historical function
did all this extra violence serve ?”
One and all, the Arab states are incomplete, partially formed, neither defined
nor defended by proper institutions or jurisdictions, and therefore at the
mercy of the power holder. “What is law?” Saddam Hussein once asked
rhetorically, to give the answer, “Two lines of writing above my signature.”
Violence is inescapably a prime instrument of government, and it has the very
clear historical function of perpetuating power, endlessly renewing itself in
repetitive cycles of bloodletting. In one perspective, Saddam Hussein and
Yasser Arafat are inhuman killers; in another perspective, they are only doing
what the incompleteness of the state and its social ties would oblige anyone
else in their position to do.
Long ago, al-Hajjaj, a notoriously cruel governor of Baghdad, warned his
subjects against having a will of their own: “I see heads before me that are
ripe and ready for the plucking, and I am the one to pluck them, and I see
blood glistening between the turbans and the beards…I swear by God that you
will keep strictly to the true path, or I shall punish every man of you in his
body.” Makiya also quotes a Baathist official addressing a crowd in a Baghdad
square in 1969, where corpses were dangling on lamp-posts:
The Iraq of today shall no more tolerate any traitor, spy, agent or fifth
columnist! You foundling Israel, you imperialist Americans, and you Zionists,
hear me! We will discover all your dirty tricks! We will punish your agents!
We will hang all your spies, even if there are thousands of them.
Ayman al-Zawahiri is an Egyptian doctor who has become Osama bin Laden’s
right-hand man in Afghanistan with al Qai`dah. In a recently published
booklet with the title, Knights under the Prophet’s Banner, he writes,
Tracking down the Americans and the Jews is not impossible. Killing them with
a single bullet, a stab, or a device made up of explosives or killing them
with an iron rod is not impossible. Burning down their property with Molotov
cocktails is not difficult. With the available means, small groups could prove
to be a frightening horror for the Americans and the Jews.
An essential component driving this violence continues to be the appeal to
honor, and the corresponding disavowal of shame. In the absence of socially
and politically agreed possibilities of self-expression, the individual needs
to rescue his dignity, at whatever level of the society he finds himself.
Otherwise, he has no identity, he becomes an object, perceiving himself as
unworthy, fit to be abused. Saddam Hussein told an American television
interviewer, “We will maintain our honor, the honor that is required in front
of our people.” In the course of a pre-war broadcast, a sentence of his such
as “May the infidels, the enemies of God and humanity be shamed,” takes for
granted a popular appeal. So too an Iraqi tank commander destroying a statue
of Saddam could say conversely, “What has befallen us of defeat, shame and
humiliation, Saddam, is the result of your follies, your miscalculations and
your irresponsible actions.” Arafat can count on the appeal to “daily
humiliations”, saying with marked exaggeration that “the Palestinians are the
only people in the world still living under foreign occupation,” and going on
to ask, “How is it possible that the entire world can tolerate this
oppression, discrimination and humiliation?” The rhetoric of shame and honor
particularly infuses his speeches. Questioned about his possible expulsion by
Israel from the West Bank, he indulged in a classic example of the style: “To
a remote area! To the desert! They are most welcome. ‘Oh Mountain! The wind
cannot shake you.’ They will not take me captive or prisoner, or expel [me],
but as a martyr, martyr, martyr. ‘Oh Allah, give me martyrdom.’” In Iran,
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei describes the intifada as “a
blessing from God that fittingly humiliated the power-mongering Zionists”.
Cartoons regularly depict Israelis and Americans as cowards or as Nazis. A
senior official of Islamic Jihad spoke of a suicide bombing which
killed 15 people in a Jerusalem pizza restaurant as “a successful operation
against pigs and monkeys”. One day in August 2003, an Israeli force including
tanks occupied a part of Jenin, in the process incurring 13 casualties and
killing 52 Palestinians, most of them armed terrorists whom they were seeking
out. When the operation ended and the Israeli troops withdrew, the crowd
rushed out shouting, “Victory is ours.” The secretary-general of the
Palestinian cabinet said on television, “We hope that the Israelis have
learned the lesson,” and the local leader of Islamic Jihad exclaimed,
“We fought very bravely and forced the Zionist soldiers to retreat in
disgrace.” And the mother of a recent suicide bomber, a lawyer by profession,
characteristically greeted her daughter’s death with the words, “May God bless
her; she made us raise our heads high.”
An Arab intellectual in exile observed in a letter to a British newspaper in
March 2003 that all Arab countries are “undifferentiated cruel despotisms”. In
this plight, he continued, what is left to people is honor. Their identity is
at stake, even at risk, until such time as political processes evolve, and
successful power-sharing and nation-building introduces values more open to
compromise, not requiring defense through violence.
* * *
Nineteen ninety-three saw a preliminary bomb explosion against the World Trade Center in New
York which claimed only a handful of victims;
those who committed it were arrested and sent to prison. There followed
attacks on American soldiers in a barracks in Saudi Arabia, on embassies in
East Africa, and on a warship. Loss of life mounted. Slowly, Osama bin Laden
emerged as the organizer of this sustained campaign, the first person to use
Islamism as the pretext to mount a careerist challenge against the United
States.
He began to issue fatwas or declarations of war, as in this example in
1998: “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and
military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any
country.”
In his late 40s, Osama bin Laden was a Saudi, one of the many sons of an
entrepreneur who had close ties to the Saudi royal family and had made a
fortune as a building contractor. Tall, well-mannered, speaking and writing a
stylish Arabic, Osama bin Laden had some familiarity with the West. As an
adult he seems to have been influenced by the teachings of the Muslim
Brotherhood, and of Sayyid Qutb in particular. Such sources convinced him too
that Christians and Jews are in unholy conspiracy against Islam. But Islamism
had defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan, he held in flat rejection of the
American input to that campaign, and would surely prove irresistable
everywhere. Broken after the fighting and the consequent civil war, the
country was in the grip of Mullah Muhammad Omar and the Taliban,
enforcing an Islamist dictatorship as cruel as any. In concert with Mullah
Omar and the Taliban, bin Laden sought refuge in Kabul and built up
al Qai`dah. It is said that he may have trained as many as 50,000 followers
recruited from the whole range of Muslim countries. The presence of American
troops in Saudi Arabia was a specific grievance, and it may well be that his
ultimate objective was to seize power in his own country.
To President Clinton, this challenge appeared too improbable, too unequal to
take very seriously, and he ordered only token gestures of self-defense. In
reality, bin Laden was preparing meticulously to strike the United States. On
September 11 2001, 19 al Qai`dah terrorists, all but four of them Saudis,
hijacked aircraft and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon;
targets carefully selected for their prestige. Rather more than 3,000 people
were killed indiscriminately.
Not just a massive act of terror, here was a rejection of America, its way of
life, and everything it stood for. In bin Laden’s imagination, as he
reiterates in videos which he releases, Christians and Jews are engaged in a
conspiracy against Islam, and Muslims therefore have the God-given duty of
killing them. For him, here is a true war of civilizations. Saddam Hussein did
not share bin Laden’s nightmare, but for power and political reasons was every bit
as willing to support violence against the United States. It fell to the
second President Bush to correct his predecessor Clinton’s superficiality
concerning bin Laden, and his own father’s heedlessness of Saddam Hussein. In
swift and successive campaigns, American forces occupied Afghanistan and Iraq.
In the latter case, the official Egyptian newspaper al Ahram crowed about
“heroic Iraqis ready to fight to the last drop of their blood”, while a
commentator on Syrian television said, “Iraq has inflicted major losses on the
coalition forces, and the Americans and British are suffering a defeat they
will never forget.” The demands of honor are shown to be capable of nothing
less than the negation of reality.
In the manner of past imperial powers, the United States is now in civil and
military control of Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike previous imperial powers,
however, the United States is not bent on conquest but aspires to remake those
countries into independent nation-states, if possible democratic or pluralist
in some form or other, at least with decision-making not exclusively the
prerogative of the strong. The Islamist depiction of the world – so static, so
schematic – is likely one day to vanish, as fantasies do. Absolutism is
another matter. In Iran, in Saudi Arabia and Syria, absolute rulers give every
indication that they will fight to the death against reform which introduces
power-sharing. Should the United States succeed in endowing Iraq with some
form of democratic self-government, then the example must transform the society
and its values far and wide. Israel and the Palestinians are folded into this
self-same position. Each in its way, the United States and Israel are exerting
a very real pressure on Arabs and Muslims to define what it means to be a
Muslim in today’s world. If this involved mere conspiracy, Arabs and Muslims
could safely ignore it; actually here is the search for the identity on which
their future depends.
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