For Pacifica Radio, I'm Scott Horton.
This is anti-war radio.
Tonight's guest is Dr.
Steven Zunis.
He is professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco, where he chairs the program in Middle Eastern Studies and is Middle East director for the Foreign Policy in Focus project of the Institute for Policy Studies.
That's fpif.org.
And his own personal website is stevenzunis.org.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Pretty good.
Thank you.
Good to be on again.
All right.
Well, it's great to have you here.
And I was hoping that we could sort of get, you know, best we can do in half an hour kind of a tour around the Middle East and a review of the Arab Spring now into the winter of 2011 and try to get an assessment of where the various states of revolt are.
And of course, the various positions the United States is taking and intervening.
Be happy to.
I guess I could just start off by saying that what we're seeing in the Middle East and North Africa, in many ways, is a continuation of a global trend of popular civil insurrections for for greater democracy and freedom.
And we've seen them from the Philippines to Poland, from Chile to Serbia.
We've there's a phenomenon that's been going on for a good 30 years now or more.
But it's really and it's not really the first in the Middle East, either.
There have been some similar uprisings, but but not to the extent that we have seen more recently.
And like these other uprisings, they've been overwhelmingly nonviolent people finding that they actually have more power by coming out in mass popular contestation, public space strikes, boycotts, alternative institutions, that that is an easier way in many ways of tripping up the regime than taking up arms.
That is, soldiers are much less likely to fire into crowds of unarmed demonstrators than people who are shooting at them.
The regime is less likely to know how to respond to the situation.
You can find a lot more people become involved, a higher percentage of the population, not just able bodied young men, as you often see in armed struggles, but young and old, male and female, you know, Christian, Muslim, secular, I mean, you know, it's been an amazing turnout in terms of the sheer numbers and millions of people we saw in Egypt, for example.
And, well, you know, it seemed like when Ben Ali fled Tunisia, like on every channel and every paper, you could just see this giant light bulb went off over Egypt, where they all said, you can do that, you can just go outside and get rid of them.
Let's do it.
Boom.
And there they went.
Yeah, well, actually, actually, interestingly, and in Egypt, they had been planning just this kind of thing for years, the groups like the Gafaya, April 6th movement, and others had been talking quite openly about this kind of popular mobilization.
They, most people, including myself, in fact, who had been examining it, did think it would, it would more likely happen later, maybe when Mubarak tried to pass the mantle to his ne'er-do-well son, Gamal.
But that happened a lot earlier than many people expected.
But in fact, there are a number of people, myself included, who actually predicted the Egyptian revolution even before Tunisia happened, because their civil society had been growing there quite a bit.
There'd been a dramatic escalation of strikes by trade unions.
There was a, there'd been a lot of smaller protests, which had been usually broken up pretty, pretty brutally.
But there were stirrings.
I mean, often we don't see these things until, you know, you have hundreds of thousands of people in the street and all the media is there and that kind of thing.
But as in any kind of popular struggle, it's often the culmination of years of mobilization.
Right.
Well, you know, there are people, and a lot of truths depend on your own point of view kind of thing, but some are very suspicious of the entire Arab Spring, or at least in big pieces, that really it's all a CIA plot.
They're going to try to get you coming and going and here Hosni Mubarak's getting old anyway.
So groups like the National Endowment for Democracy come in and like a pseudo legit CIA front and funnel a bunch of money to young twittering revolutionaries who go in there to try to at least get out in front of whatever big change is coming.
And it sounds like what you're talking about is foreign intervention in in Egypt.
How much of the revolution was due to that foreign intervention, do you think?
Very, very little.
I mean, again, the people are planning and organizing this for years.
Most of the NED money went to these more establishment kind of top down NGOs.
They did some training and election monitoring, that kind of thing.
But the grassroots folks, the people who really did organize this, they did not, they weren't offered any money.
And if they were offered, they would have probably turned it down on principle.
You know, these were these are primarily leftist in the core groups that were organizing this, that were very, very suspicious of U.S. imperialism and the like.
I mean, some of these movements actually originally grew out of the student movement opposing the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
And so there is they did nothing to do with a U.S. intervention.
The United States was stacking with Mubarak.
We were, I mean, compare the maybe ten to thousand dollars of this NED money compared to the one point five billion the United States gave to the Egyptian government.
Yeah, I mean, Hillary Clinton urged restraint on both sides the whole time and tried the Obama team.
Obviously, we're trying to back Mubarak up until the very last minute when they absolutely couldn't keep him.
And then they said right on the front page of The New York Times, but we really want to have our second runner up be the former head of the torture secret police, Omar Suleyman.
And that didn't seem like sophisticated propaganda covering the fact that they were behind the revolution.
They were caught totally off guard.
Exactly.
And then what do you think of this?
Because here's my theory, Stephen Zunis, I think that the reason they intervene in Libya, paramount over any of the others, I think it was mostly about trying to disrupt the narrative that, hey, look, every dictatorship in the Middle East is backed by the United States.
And this whole thing really is an anti-American revolution against these dictators.
And they wanted to, at the very least, confuse the narrative that, no, here's America is on the side of the revolutionaries.
Look at us helping the poor, downtrodden masses of Libya against their evil dictator, when he was the most expendable of all their friendly dictators in the region for obvious reasons.
He was just back in from the cold.
He had given up his centrifuges, etc.
Yeah, I mean, I really I really do think that the one of the great things about the Arab Spring up until that time was that it was indigenous, that it was largely nonviolent, that it was not something that foreign forces intervene with.
And again, you know, Gaddafi was clearly the weakest of these dictators.
He'd alienated just about anybody, everybody in society.
And while the original protest before they went violent, and then before the intervention by the West was, I think, as sincere and genuine as these others, it was quickly eclipsed by these elites that were backed by NATO.
And when going well beyond the mandate of the United Nations to protect civilian lives through a no-fly zone, they essentially became the air force of the rebel groups.
And it's really interesting to see what has happened in Libya since that time, you know, that you have these armed groups that are fighting each other over who controls the spoils.
I mean, they're fighting over the control of the airport, the international airport in Tripoli.
They've been fighting over a whole number of things.
And this is another disadvantage with armed struggle, is that when you overthrow a dictator in a largely nonviolent movement, you're able to build these broad coalitions, you know, there's a lot of give and take, and it helps sow the seeds of a more pluralistic society.
Whereas in armed struggle, you have a martial values, strict authoritarian command, and people who end up running the government kind of want to run society the way they ran their military, by the same kind of martial values.
And people also get the message that power comes not through massive non-cooperation with legitimate authority, but through the power of the barrel of a gun.
So that's why historically, this is not 100%, I mean, there are exceptions in both directions, of course, but on average, that dictatorships that are overthrown in these largely nonviolent insurrections, usually become stable democracies within a few years, whereas dictatorships overthrown through armed struggle are much more likely to end up in either a factious civil war, or another dictatorship, or both.
Well, it looks like now the guy who at least calls himself the military leader of the transitional government is this guy, Bill Hodge, who, once upon a time, and is now suing over the fact that the UK and the CIA, I guess, the MI6 over there and the CIA kidnapped him and tortured him and turned him over to Qaddafi to be tortured.
And he's now the guy that we just helped win.
He's a veteran of the Iraq and Afghan wars where he fought against the Americans.
Yeah, it is ironic.
We're seeing there's a whole number of areas.
Does it mean that if there's really a government that's not chosen by Western powers in any of these countries, that basically, they're going to be Islamic governments one way or another, like we're saying?
I think, I think in the more likely scenario, you know, where the transition is smoother, we'll see a situation like Tunisia, where you have a very moderate Islamist group, you know, comparable to the Turkish Islamists, that makes alliance with some of the more secular left wing parties and forms a forms a coalition government.
And there's, you know, give and take.
And again, a democratic order evolves.
However, in some countries, though, where civil society is weaker, where resentment of a foreign intervention is strongest, where the more democratic and secular nationalist opposition has been more thoroughly suppressed, it does, you know, it does leave an opening for more hardline Islamists to come to the fore.
Now, my only worry about that is that if a government has the word Islamic in the name, then that means America is going to bomb them like what happened in Somalia.
Well, not necessarily.
I remember the most fundamentalist Islamic regime in the world, at this point, is Saudi Arabia, which is our great, we bombed there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, and, and probably the second most would be these guys we are keeping in power in Afghanistan, who are more or less Taliban light.
We are, in fact, quite willing to to work with Islamists as long as they support the US objectives.
But in places in Iran, yeah, we are, we're Islamists have taken the, you know, been able to take advantage of anti Western sentiment and that kind of thing.
And essentially, the the old Arab nationalism with a with an Islamic faith, that that's the kind of thing that upsets us policymakers a lot more.
Well, we see they're overthrowing the Baathist right now, in Syria, what do you make of that?
How much of that civil war/regime change, whatever the hell they're calling it, do you think is the US Britain?
Very little.
What happened with the United States, actually, is that we could have had more influence.
But back in 2005, or 2003, Congress passed the so called Syria Accountability Act, which was one of the most hypocritical, bizarre pieces of legislation ever passed, that essentially cut virtually all ties with the Damascus government.
So, you know, we have very little influence in that country.
In fact, it united the various, you know, factions against us.
And there's there's, but but what we're with the trouble, the danger, I think, in Syria, is that because of repression, the regime has been been so awful.
A lot of people have given up on the nonviolent resistance, and you have this group called the Free Syrian Army, which has sprung up, which in some cases, actually been fighting Syrian forces, the vast majority of people died have been nonviolent protesters, but there are increasing numbers of clashes between this group of defectors.
I would not be surprised if the United States and the Western governments were working with the Free Syrian Army.
But the the rebellion itself, the initial rebellion, the popular rebellion, is pretty pretty broad based, and genuinely indigenous.
And these are nationalists, I've actually met with a number of them.
And they are, they are much opposed to any foreign intervention, because they both both in principle, but also they fear would just play into the regime's hands.
Well, you know, they say that the CIA and NATO are bankrolling, they're trying to build up this Free Syrian Army.
And apparently there are reports that a bunch of Libyans, I guess, because the Transitional Council, whatever pretended government there in Libya now, is worried about all these extra fighters they have on their hands are trying to send them off to go and fight the jihad in Syria now.
Although, you know, like you're saying, I guess, I think this is all such Keystone cops kind of behavior that it's not going to do anything, really.
No, no, I mean, the fate of these countries is ultimately, I believe, in the hands of the people themselves.
And that's what's so important about it.
Because, you know, the whole, the whole fiasco in Iraq was, you know, I mean, they, I think they realized pretty early that all this talk about weapons and mass destruction is a big lie.
So you know, they really started pushing the idea of, oh, we're, we're bringing democracy and that, and that kind of thing.
And, and that's why on Fox and, and, and elsewhere, you know, I was, I was, you know, labeled, you know, pro Saddam Hussein, because I didn't, I didn't think the war was a good idea.
And I didn't support democracy.
And I would literally get even the mainstream media would give me calls, you know, saying, do you support the judicial policy of backing us, the dictators?
Or do you support Bush's policy of promoting democracy in the Middle East?
Like, that was the only choice, right?
Yes, we want democracy in the three dictatorships in the region that we don't control yet, or at least currently, that we've lost to more dictators than any previous president.
And yet, because he used this democracy rhetoric, you know, people, you know, thought this was a shift in policy, talked about, we have to spread democracy from Damascus to Tehran.
Well, I think, in addition to Baghdad, and of course, well, I think everybody could agree that Syria and Iran and, you know, could use more democracy.
He didn't talk about spreading democracy to Tunis, to Cairo, or to Riyadh, or Manama, or Rabat, or any of these other US backed dictatorships.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Steven Zunis from Foreign Policy and Focus.
And did you see the Daily Show where Jon Stewart says to Connolly's arise, geez, I guess you guys in your democracy agenda deserve all this credit.
And I thought he doesn't really know why he's right.
The reason he's right is because 10 years of American war over there in that region outright, you know, troops on the ground war over there has radicalized the people, not necessarily toward radical Islam or whatever, but it's radicalized them against their local puppets of us.
And also, they had to debase our currency to pay for the war.
And then all the other countries have to debase their currencies to keep up or else it'll throw them into trade imbalance or whatever.
And so now people can't afford to feed their families, they were already living on $1 a day, now their dollars only worth 50 cents.
And so they're out in the street.
And so the blowback from their democracy agenda is that they lose all their puppet dictatorships.
I mean, it's amazing.
I mean, Bush did for democracy in the Middle East, what Donald did for socialism in Eastern Europe, you know, you have this great idealistic concept, but uses an excuse for for domination and oppression, and militarization, etc, etc.
I mean, Bush set back the cause of democracy in the region, because you could have all these dictators, including quite hypocritically, dictators are backed by the US would then label the pro democracy forces in their country as as as supporting US imperialism in the region.
You know, so it played right into the hands of dictators, you know, of all stripes, by by making a support for democracy, which I think is which I believe is a universal desire into, you know, something that was somehow, you know, a foreign creation.
And so you know, but but again, the exciting thing about the Arab Spring is that the outcome of them might may not be ideal in the eyes of Washington, it may not be ideal for people like me who identify with the democratic left.
But I don't, but but at least, you know, at least today, people in the Middle East are taking charge of their own destinies, you know, through this massive, you know, popular mobilization.
And I think that's really the most significant thing we have seen of this past year, that people are no longer, you know, the stereotype we have in the Middle East, that they're on the one hand, either, either robotic, believe supporters of dictators or hapless victims, or whatever, on one extreme, or crazed terrorists on the other, that they just like, you know, the people of Poland and Czechoslovakia and the Philippines and, and in Chile and elsewhere, you know, decided to take their, their future in their in their own hands.
And that is what what's really exciting about it.
And though, yes, any kind of transition is going to be messy, especially when you have foreign powers trying to take advantage of it one way or the other.
But, but it I see this, despite the setbacks, despite all the craziness that that this has been a very positive, positive development.
Yeah, well, I agree.
I think, you know, all the hyperbole about, well, everything is going to be great now or whatever.
No one ever really said that what was so impressive was the realization, all at once, everybody from Morocco to the Philippines, as you said, watching satellite TV, hey, we can go outside and get rid of our dictators just happened there.
And it just happened there.
And maybe here ought to be next.
Which brings me to my last question, which is, can you tell us anything about Morocco and Algeria?
How bad those dictatorships are?
How big the protest movements are?
How much America gives their dictatorships?
And then, of course, Yemen and Bahrain are two of the most important stories of the Arab Spring.
And we only have seven minutes for all these things.
I don't know if you just want to briefly Yemen, Yemen, you know, apparently, Salah is out of there, though a lot of his henchmen and are still still in power, the the movement is kind of stalled at the moment, but it has at its peak, it was one of the most impressive in terms of how widespread it was, unlike these other countries were, where people had very little access to firearms.
There's about, you know, Yemen's like the most heavily armed society in the world, like, like three guns per person or whatever.
But even there, you had these tribes, then coming in with their rifles and their Pantra Via style bandolieros, coming out and then throwing them on the ground and chanting peaceful, peaceful, and then joining the nonviolent demonstrations.
So, you know, Yemen, as crazy and factious as a society, really came together and challenging this, the US backed dictatorship and some kind of transition is in place now.
There's no idea where it's going to end up.
Bahrain is one of the greatest great tragedy because because Bahrain had one of the largest or mobilized working class that we really were in, you know, into a democratic transition, strong civil society, brutally suppressed by the US backed dictatorship there.
They brought in troops from Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and other US backed dictatorships to crush this, this overwhelmingly nonviolent movement.
The regime with support from some people in the Obama administration falsely claimed it was an Iranian backed Shiite fundamentalist uprising, which it most certainly was not.
The vast majority of people happen to be Shias because the majority of people on the island are Shias.
But it was, you know, by no means an Iranian Iranian plot.
It was, it was, you know, included Sunnis and others in the movement as well.
That's been suppressed for now, but I think we'll be hearing more from them later.
In terms of Morocco and Algeria, those regimes, while authoritarian, have been more skillful, I think, than some of the others in terms of, of allowing for some genuine reform, some opening up, enough to appease the, the, the pro-democracy forces to some degree.
Morocco has had to battle a nonviolent uprising in the occupied Western Sahara, which is a country that recognizes an independent sovereign state by over 80 nations.
They're a full member of the African Union, but they've been under Moroccan military occupation, you know, for 35 years now.
But the armed struggle ended in the late nineties in return for a Moroccan promise for a referendum on the state of the territory.
But Morocco, backed by the U.S. and France, reneged on this promise.
And so the people of Western Sahara have been engaging in an on and off intifada, largely nonviolent struggle against the occupation.
That is continuing.
And we do see occasional protests in Morocco itself for, for greater freedom and democracy.
But I, outside of Western Sahara, I don't see major uprisings in either of these countries anytime real soon.
But I think that, particularly in Morocco, you know, the, the degree of corruption and, and the economic problems, you know, combined with the fact that the democratic opening in that country has been, you know, very, very limited.
I think, you know, we will see certainly a rise in demand for greater freedom there as well.
Morocco is the big U.S. ally in that area.
And where we send much of our, you know, our military assistance and intelligence assistance and, and, and other efforts of influence.
I think there will be a revolution in Iraq.
Well, you know, there was an uprising against the corruption and repression of the Maliki regime in March, it was brutally suppressed with, with hardly a murmur from the Obama administration.
The way, the combination of Saddam Hussein's totalitarianism and the U.S. occupation and the sectarian violence we spawned there has made it very difficult for a, you know, a more, you know, a, you know, secular civil society movement to emerge.
But that really is the only hope for the country is that if they can get away from above these divine rule tactics that have been imposed upon them, and we have been, unfortunately, because of U.S. policy, we've seen a great drain of the secular middle class that literally millions of people have fled the country.
And so, you know, and the, the two main secular institutions of society, the civil service and the, the armed forces were abolished by the United States and replaced by these sectarian militias and these, you know, and, and, and the various, the bureaucracies have become basically sectarian fiefdoms of the various factions.
So, you know, the United States has done what it could to destroy civil society in that country.
So it's going to be, Iraq's going to be a hard one to emerge to, to have a genuinely democratic transformation there, I think, for some time.
Yeah.
Well, we better invade them again to give them democracy.
Here we all chanted for some reason, because TV said the surge worked a million times, but that still didn't make it work, I guess.
No, not, not, not at all.
In fact, the, the, the, the, the dramatic reduction in, in fighting about the same time as the surge came far more from efforts by Iraqis themselves to, to heal divisions, the, the, the Sunni groups aligning with the government against Al Qaeda extremists, and then Muqtada al Qaeda's militia agreeing to become part of the, of the government as well.
And those, those were, you know, those took place completely separate from the surge.
So the, the very idea of the surge somehow reduced the, the fighting there seems to be contrary to the evidence.
Well, and the whole irony too, is this is the whole thing got started, just as the Sunni based insurgency was crying uncle basically lost Baghdad, and they could only fight so many enemies at once.
So like you said, they decided to switch sides and fight against the Al Qaeda kooks that had been their allies for the last couple of years.
And so there's no one left to fight against, except Muqtada al-Sadr, who is a major part, he was at least one third, now he's probably more like two thirds of the Iraqi National Alliance, which is the government of the country that we're fighting for the whole time.
Yeah, it is, it is this whole, the whole thing is full, full of ironies.
And I think it just, again, underscores the idiocy of believing that the United States can somehow bring democracy and stability to that part of the world.
The best thing the United States can do is just to get the hell out of the way, stop propping up these dictators, stop sending our troops over there, and let the people of those societies on their own, in their own way, bring the society to a more democratic and just and pluralistic place where they can choose their own government, and not something that's chosen by the military or outsiders or anything else, but where people really have control of their own destiny.
And we've seen glimpses of how that might happen.
And we just need to encourage that and help move forward.
And basically just get the hell out of the way.
Everybody, that's the great Stephen Zunis.
He's from Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.
That's fpif.org.
Thanks very much for your time.
My pleasure.
That's Antiwar Radio for this evening.
Thanks very much for listening.
All the archives of my foreign policy interviews are at antiwar.com/radio.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
