The New Arab Wars by Marc Lynch

Author:Marc Lynch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610396103
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2016-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

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AUTOCRATS ON OFFENSE

In early September 2012, Arab public attention was gripped by reports of an appalling film appearing on YouTube. Entitled The Innocence of Muslims, this noxious (if little-seen) clip portrayed the Prophet Mohammed as a homosexual pedophile and mocked the tenets of the faith. As with the 2006 frenzy over Danish cartoons insulting the Prophet, politicians and Islamist movements across the region seized the opportunity to compete over who could most angrily denounce a film that few would otherwise have ever noticed.

In the age of the Arab uprisings, however, such mobilization carried far greater potential for escalation into broader political challenges. On September 10, major protests erupted in Cairo and several other Arab cities. In Cairo, protestors scaled the walls of the American Embassy complex to hang the black flag then associated with al-Qaeda—posing a major challenge to President Morsi, forcing him to navigate between his vital relationship with Washington and the Islamist sensibilities of his electoral base. Those dramatic events in Egypt would soon be overshadowed by the events the next day in Libya, when Ambassador Chris Stevens and two other US officials were killed in Benghazi.1

While the American political public would soon fixate on the events in Benghazi as a political scandal for the Obama administration, the events of that dreadful day had far greater meaning for the trajectory of the Arab uprisings.

The period between the fall of 2012 and first half of 2013 was a tipping point. This is when the Arab uprisings decisively shifted on to the track to damnation. The arming of the Syrian insurgency escalated, at just the moment when its composition shifted decisively towards Salafi jihadist groups. The Egyptian democratic transition went off the rails. Libya’s wobbling transition collapsed into open struggle between armed militias. Iraqi Sunni protests spiraled into violent confrontation with the Maliki government. Israel attacked Gaza, causing enormous human suffering. Even Tunisia’s transition seemed destined to collapse, though it would ultimately pull back from the brink. Israel came close to launching a unilateral military strike on Iran, and the U.S. sought to begin serious, secret negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.

Egypt’s July 3, 2013 military coup, discussed in the previous chapter, was a seismic event in regional politics, the effects of which spread quickly across multiple arenas. Its most immediate impact points were in the fellow transitional country of Tunisia and Libya. Sisi’s military coup and the massacre of Islamists at Rabaa six weeks later frightened both sides of the polarized Tunisian political sphere, strengthening the push by civil society organizations to find a consensus on the way forward and likely encouraging the ruling Ennahda Party to make deep concessions in order to avoid a similar transitional failure. In Libya, the coup emboldened General Khalifa Haftar to launch a military campaign to defeat the rival Islamist coalition; the Egyptian coup and its external backers helped to accelerate Libya’s collapse into civil war. The spiraling confict in Libya soon attracted UAE and Egyptian air strikes.

And then, in

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