Scott Anderson talking:
there’s 22 nations in the Arab world. And if you look at the three that have really been sort of torn apart, fragmented by the so-called Arab Spring, it’s Syria, Iraq and Libya. And it’s not coincidence that those are also three of the very small group of countries that were kind of created from whole cloth by the Western colonial powers at the end of World War I. And in each of those countries, what you have is a very weak sense of national identity.
From the Ottoman Empire. They’re all part of the Ottoman Empire. And so there’s this very—this very fragile sense of national identity. And in all three of those cases, you had these very brutal totalitarian dictators come in. And among the other things they did, they were trying to forge this sense of national identity. And when the—you know, in the Arab Spring, when Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi are overthrown, Bashar al-Assad is on—very teetering, what people’s primary loyalty goes to is not to the state, often, but to their tribe, to their clan, to their sectarian affiliation.
the Ottomans was a rather ingenious empire, because the very weakness of the Ottomans was—they turned into their strength, which was—it was a very decentralized, very weak central authority empire. They gave their different provinces and different regions tremendous autonomy. As long as you paid your taxes and met your military conscription rates, you were kind of free to run yourself, you know, as you saw fit. Very little authority came down from Constantinople.
When the Ottomans joined Germany in World War I, they lost. They were on the losing side. And, you know, the winners from World War I, especially Great Britain and France, they saw the Ottoman Empire as—they called it “the Great Loot,” that this was the spoils of war that they could divide up. So they came into the Middle East, and they formed these artificial states.
Iraq was—Iraq is essentially a joining together of three autonomous Ottoman provinces—a Shia component, a Sunni component and a Kurdish component in the north. Syria is kind of just the opposite. Greater Syria encompassed an enormous area of—that today would be Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Jordan. So, with this kind of this Greater Syria region, they divided it up into sort of more manageable parcels. In the case of Libya, you had three provinces under the Ottomans that were very distinct. In that case, it was the Italians who came in and joined them together and created this colony of Libya.
there’s a commonality to the countries that have really fractured apart. Egypt—Egypt is a sad case in its own right, for different reasons. But I don’t think there’s ever been a realistic fear in Egypt that it’s going to somehow fracture apart, because there isn’t there—certainly, in Egypt, there’s a sense of nationalist identity going back a thousand, 2,000 years.
In Egypt, Laila Soueif, she’s the matriarch of this political dissident family that she has been active in, in resistance against the dictatorship going back to the 1970s. She was active against Anwar Sadat, then under Hosni Mubarak—she and her husband, who’s now deceased. She was—when the Tahrir Square demonstrations started in January of 2011, she was in the forefront of it. She has three children, who also all became activists.
And now two of the three children are in prison for extended periods. The interesting thing about Laila Soueif is that, very early on, even before Mubarak was overthrown—and it was about a 12-day revolution—she saw the danger signs of the revolution being subverted. She was lobbying for the kind of political leadership, the anti-Mubarak political leadership in the country, to essentially seize power. She was basically telling them, “Do not let the military kind of step in into this.” And she was not listened to. And really, what’s happened in Egypt over the last four or five years is very much a disaster foretold.
I interviewed probably just around 20 ISIS fighters, all in prison either in Iraq or in Kurdistan now. The one pattern I found over and over again was that these were—they were all young men, kind of with very bleak futures, either unemployed or underemployed, from working-class families, and not religious at all. None of these—according to them, they were not from religious families. They did not know the Qur’an very well. In a couple of cases, I knew the Qur’an better than they did. They were not recruited in mosques. They joined because their buddies joined, I mean, you know, because they saw stuff on social media. They’ve all—you know, everybody has mobile phones in that part of the world. And they’ve all—they had all seen the ISIS videos. And I think it was this kind of decision that young men make, that better to live large for a couple of years, and, you know, the power and the so-called glamour of—but the power that comes of carrying a gun, and then, you know, worry about what happens in the future two or three years down the road. So, I felt it was—certainly, in my experience, of these kind of foot soldiers, the grunts—they were primarily the ISIS members I’ve talked with—they had more akin to why somebody might join like an inner-city gang or why in Mexico they might join a narco gang. It’s this kind of despair at seeing any sort of future. But it’s not political, it’s not religious. It’s just this impulse to—you know, to have some sort of—I mean, it’s awful to say, in terms of ISIS, but adventure.
And like a lot of cults, what ISIS—you mentioned like the character, the subject of the article, Wakaz Hassan. He joined up—he was brought in by his older brother. Wakaz at that time was 19, his brother was 26. Part of his basic training was to execute six different prisoners of ISIS on six different occasions. So, it was this kind of brutalizing process where they brought him out of the barracks and he was told he had to shoot somebody in the back of the head, on six different times. And he was—at this point, he’s in. It’s like being in a cult, and now you’re there. And at least in his view, there was no way to get out once he had signed up.
– It’s in October 2002. This was right around the time the U.S. Congress voted to authorize war. Hillary Clinton voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq. You interviewed Muammar Gaddafi, and you asked him who would benefit if the Iraq invasion actually occurred. “The Libyan dictator had a habit of theatrically pondering before answering my questions, but his reply to that one was instantaneous. ‘Bin Laden,’ he said. ‘There is no doubt about that. And Iraq could end up becoming the staging ground for Al Qaeda, because if the Saddam government collapses, it will be anarchy in Iraq. If that happens, actions against Americans will be considered jihad.'”
Gaddafi was absolutely prescient of what was going to happen in Iraq. I had been trying to get an interview with Muammar Gaddafi for almost three years. And I finally got it, I’m convinced, because, by October, by the autumn of 2002, the drumbeat for war in Iraq was really building. I mean, it seemed pretty clear that the antiwar demonstrations were not going to have an effect: We were going in. And Gaddafi was worried that he was going to be next, that after the Bush administration overthrew Saddam Hussein, that they were going to come after him. And the Bush administration had already been floating that out. They had a hit list. And, you know, Gaddafi was on there. Then Assad was somewhere down the list, because he—you know, in Syria, they weren’t the full-fledged axis of evil, but they were rising up. So, yes, so I went and spent three weeks in Libya and interviewed Gaddafi. And he was absolutely right. Everything he predicted came true to the tee.
a very interesting thing is—one of the most memorable things in the interview is I—it was almost my last question to him, and it was kind of a platitude in this question. I said, “How would you like to be remembered?” And he was so comfortable in the interview and so kind of arrogant about his position in Libya. He started off giving this kind of very, very platitudinous answer. It was like, “Well, you know, I would hope to be remembered as selfless, you know, that I gave to my people, that”—you know, just these kind of throwaway answers. And then he kind of paused for a second, and he chuckled, and he leaned towards me, and he said, “And I hope this is actually really true.” You know, in other words, maybe it’s always just been all about me, anyway. So, no, he had no—I don’t think he had any clue that—what was coming. Nor did—you know, I think, over and over again, I don’t think Hosni Mubarak, right up ’til the day he had to resign, he ever thought he was going to go. I think it’s part of the nature of these kind of personality cults these dictators build around themselves, that they’re so inoculated that they’ve just really lost touch with reality.
If there’s any consolation in the current situation, I think we’re kind of near the—we’re near the bottom of how bad it can get. It’s hard to see how places get much worse, although Libya is going to get worse next year, because, along with the kind of division between different militias, you’re also headed for an economic crash that’s coming in Libya next year. They’re going to run—they’re just running out of money. It’s hard to see how Syria gets worse. It’s hard to see really how Iraq gets worse.
But I think that—so, it’s very hard to see what an intervention actually looks like. You know, I’ve often thought, well, you know, what is the Obama administration’s foreign policy in the region? And I don’t think it really has one. I think it’s utterly reactive at this point. But then it’s hard to imagine what a proactive policy in the region would actually look like. I mean, what do you do in a place like Syria? I mean, at least in Iraq, you’ve—there now seems to be kind of an operating coalition against ISIS. But I think the problem—and I personally feel that, militarily, ISIS is going to be pretty much destroyed in the near future. But ISIS is not just a military—it’s not a guerrilla group anymore. It’s an idea. And as I was talking about these young men, you know, you have millions and millions of young men throughout the Middle East with no economic futures, who are not necessarily religious or even political in any way, but also what you have throughout the region is a kind of a built-in resentment against the West. So, that whole breeding ground is just going to continue on, and I don’t see how you deactivate that.
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Scott Anderson
contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, author of The New York Times Magazine feature piece, “Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart.”
— source democracynow.org