An Arrested
Middle East – The ‘New Strategy for Securing the Realm’
DissipatesBy Alastair Crooke
June 01, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
Some eight years ago, I
wrote about the
outbreak of popular stirring in the Middle East, then
labelled the ‘Arab Awakening’. Multiple popular
discontents were welling: demands for radical change
proliferated, but above all, there was anger – anger at
mountainous inequalities in wealth; blatant injustices
and political marginalisation; and at a corrupt and
rapacious élite. The moment had seemed potent, but no
change resulted. Why? And what are the portents, as the
Corona era covers the region once again with dark clouds
of economic gloom and renewed discontent?
The U.S. was conflicted, as these earlier rumblings
of thunder spread from hilltop to hilltop. Some in the
CIA, had perceived popular movements – such as the
Muslim Brotherhood (MB) (although Islamist) as the
useful solvent that could wash away lingering stale
Ottoman residues, to usher in a shiny westernised
modernity. Many over excited Europeans imagined
(wrongly), that the popular Awakenings were made in
their own image. They weren’t.
The facile interpretation of the Awakening as a
liberal democratic ‘impulse’ was at best, an
exaggeration, if not a pure fantasy. I wrote then (in
2012): “What genuine popular impulse there was at the
outset … has now been subsumed, and absorbed into three
major political projects associated, rather with a push
to reassert [Sunni] primacy across the region: a Muslim
Brotherhood project, a Saudi-Salafist project, and a
militant Salafist project [which subsequently was to
evolve into ISIS]”.
The key
early player was the Muslim Brotherhood. I
wrote:
“No one really knows
the nature of the Brotherhood project: whether it is
that of a sect, or if it is truly mainstream; and this
opacity is giving rise to real fears. At times, the
Brotherhood presents a pragmatic, even an uncomfortably
accommodationist, face to the world, but other voices
from the movement, more discretely evoke the air of
something akin to the rhetoric of literal, intolerant
and hegemonic Salafism. What is clear, however, is that
the Brotherhood tone everywhere, is increasingly one of
militant sectarian [i.e. Sunni] grievance.”
This was the common thread: All these supposedly
popular dynamics had become tools in the “fervour for
the restitution of a Sunni regional primacy – even,
perhaps, of hegemony – to be attained through fanning
rising Sunni militancy and Salafist acculturation”.
Containing Iran, of course was a primary aim
(encouraged, of course, by Washington). But these forces
collectively comprised a project in which Gulf leaders
managed and pulled the levers – and paid the bills too.