This week marks the 10th anniversary of the Arab Spring uprisings. Two previous commentaries this week have dealt with the geopolitics of those momentous events. This third part below is a personal reflection by the author who found himself unexpectedly embroiled in the maelstrom. It was life-changing…

I had been living in Bahrain for two years before the tumultuous events of the Arab Spring exploded in early 2011. Before that turmoil ignited, I was working as an editor on a glossy business magazine covering the Gulf region and its oil-rich Arab monarchies. But in many ways, I hadn’t a clue about the real social and political nature of Bahrain, a tiny island state nestled between Saudi Arabia and the other big Gulf oil and gas sheikhdoms of Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Oman.

During my corporate media employment I enjoyed a charmed life: a hefty tax-free salary, and a swanky apartment with rooftop swimming pool, jacuzzi and gym, which overlooked the sparkling Gulf sea and other glittering buildings that seemed to sprout up from reclaimed spits of land off the coast.

It was all weirdly artificial, if not hedonistically enjoyable. The luxury and glamor, the opulence. Unlike the other Gulf states, Bahrain had a distinctly more liberal social scene – at least for the wealthy expats. There were endless restaurants offering cuisine from all over the world. There were bars that freely sold alcohol which is “haram” in the other strictly-run Gulf Islamic monarchies. There were loads of nightclubs and loads of pretty hookers, most of them from Thailand and the Philippines. It all had the atmosphere of Sin City and forbidden fruit for the picking.

I later realized that Bahrain was not “cosmopolitan” as the business magazines and advertisements would gush about. That was just a euphemism for a vast system of human trafficking. All the service businesses were worked with menial people from Asia and Africa who were cheap and indentured labor. Where were the ordinary Bahrainis? What did they do for a living? In the cocooned expat life, the ordinary Bahrainis didn’t exist. Rich expats were there to enjoy tax-free salaries, glamorous glass towers, loads of booze and, if desired, loads of cheap sex.

My wake-up call came when my so-called professional contract was terminated after two years. That was in June 2010. Like a lot of other expats, my job came a cropper because of the global economic downturn that hit after the Wall Street crash during 2008. Advertising revenue failed to materialize for the magazine I was employed on. The British owners of the publishing house – Bahrain is a former British colony – told me, “Sorry old chap, but we can employ two Indians on half your salary.”

So that was it. I was out on the street. Going back to Ireland was not a realistic option. The economy was crap there too and job prospects dim. So I decided to hang in there in the Gulf and apply for jobs across the region. I downsized to a more modest apartment and lived off some savings. The job hunting was the usual wearying, self-debasing grind. “There’s nothing more than I would desire than to work as editor on your prestigious oil and gas trade magazine in Dubai.” Copy and paste as required for countless emailed job applications.

Then came the Arab Spring. The entire region of North Africa and Middle East erupted at the end of 2010, first in Tunisia then in the new year spilling over to Egypt and beyond. Watching TV news was like watching a satellite map of a cyclone sweeping across countries. It was an unstoppable force of nature. There were protests flaring up in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the Emirates, and they soon arrived in Bahrain. The rallying call among the masses was for more democratic governance, for free and fair elections, for economic equity.

Little did I know during my earlier charmed expat existence, but Bahrain was a particularly explosive powder-keg. Later, however, I was an unemployed journalist who suddenly found himself in the middle of a storm. It was only then that I began to really understand what Bahrain was all about. I mean the ugly, brutish nature of this “kingdom”.

To be honest, I wasn’t looking for work as a freelance reporter. I had done that in a previous life in Ireland. I was still a journalist, but reporting on political news wasn’t appealing anymore.

During my fruitless job-hunting period for a “dream number” in Dubai, I filled in my time and tried to earn a bit extra by hawking around bars in Bahrain with a guitar and microphone. I had done a bit of that in my previous life in Ireland, not very successfully mind you. But I thought I’d give it a go in Bahrain. On February 14, 2011, I was doing a gig at Mansouri Mansions hotel in the Adliya district of Manama, the capital. It was Valentine’s night. There’s me singing cheesy love songs – Elvis’ ‘I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You’ – and there were hardly any customers. The place was dead.

Then the word came around. “We’re closing early. There’s trouble on the streets.” The whole city was eerily quiet. The Bahrain uprising had begun, not in the capital, but in the outlying towns and villages. On February 14, a young Bahraini man Ali Mushaima was shot dead by state security forces during protests. I was still oblivious to the extent of what was happening.

Overnight the atmosphere in Bahrain was changing to a much more menacing, volcanic one. There was immense popular anger over the young man’s killing.

I was in a taxi in the Juffair area of Manama going to enquire about doing a music gig at another bar. My petty concerns were shattered by the young taxi man who was animated about the protests and the death of Ali Mushaima the night before. The taxi man – Yousef, who I got to know – explained to me about Bahrain’s history. About how the majority of the people are Shia muslims who have lived for centuries under a despotic Sunni monarchy. The Al Khalifa royals were originally from the Arabian Peninsula, a clan of raiders and bandits. They invaded Bahrain as pirates in the 18th century and were made the rulers over the island by the British who wanted a strong-arm regime to look after their colonial possession and sea routes to India, the so-called jewel in the British imperial crown. The Khalifa clan would later become obscenely wealth after oil was discovered in Bahrain in the 1930s, the first such discovery of oil in the Gulf, predating that of Saudi Arabia’s. Over the decades, the Bahraini majority would be marginalized and impoverished by their British-backed rulers.

I asked Yousef, the young taxi man, “So what do you make of all these wealthy high-rise buildings and the glamor of Bahrain?” He replied, “It means nothing to us – the Shia people of Bahrain. We are strangers in our own land.”

Yousef appealed to me to attend a protest that night. It was at the Pearl Roundabout, a major intersection and landmark sculpture in Manama. The protesters were taking their grievances right to the very capital, not confining themselves to the outlying squalid towns and villages where the Shia majority were forced to live in ghettoes by the Khalifa regime.

What I encountered was a revelation. Suddenly I felt I was finally meeting the people of Bahrain. Tens of thousands were chanting for the regime to fall. The atmosphere was electric but not at all intimidating for me. People were eager to explain to this foreigner what life was really like in Bahrain, as opposed to the artificial images that plaster business magazines and Western media advertisements for rich investors.

Then I knew right there that there was a story to be told. And there I was ready and willing to tell it.

The protests were quickly met with more violence from the Bahraini so-called Defense Forces. “Defense Forces”, that is, for the royal family and their despotic entourage. The protesters were unarmed and non-violent, albeit passionate in their demands for democracy.

The Pearl Roundabout became a permanent encampment for the protesters. Tents were set up for families to rest in. Food stalls were teeming. A media center was operated by young Bahraini men and women. There was an exhilarating sense of freedom and of people standing up for their historic rights.

For the next three weeks, the Khalifa regime was on the ropes. The police and army were overwhelmed by the sheer number of protesters. At rallies there were easily 200,000-300,000 people at a time. For an island of only one million, there was a palpable sense that the long-oppressed majority had awakened to demand their historic rights against the imposter Khalifa regime. People were openly declaring, “the Republic of Bahrain”. This was a revolution.

In a lucky break, I was filing reports for the Irish Times and other Western media. The money was much appreciated, but more importantly there was an edifying, inspirational story to be told. A story about people overcoming tyranny and injustice.

All that would change horribly on March 14 when the Saudi and Emirati troops invaded Bahrain. The invasion had the support of the United States and Britain. What followed in the next few days was brutal repression and killing of peaceful protesters. The Pearl Roundabout was routed by indiscriminate state violence. Its sculpted monument was demolished to erase the “vile” memory of uprising. Men, women, medics, opposition thinkers and clerics were rounded up in mass detention centers. People were tortured and framed up in royal courts, sentenced to draconian prison terms. To this day, 10 years on, many of the Bahraini protest leaders – many of whom like Hassan Mushaimi and Abduljalil al-Singace I interviewed – remain languishing in jail.

However, a strange thing happened. Just when the story was becoming even more interesting – if not heinous – I found the Western media outlets were no longer open for reports. Some of my reports to the Irish Times on the repression were being heavily censored or even spiked. The editors back in Dublin were telling me that the news agenda was shifting to “bigger events” in Libya and Syria.

The corporate news media were shifting their focus to places where Western governments had a geopolitical agenda. Genuine journalistic principles and public interest didn’t matter. It was government agendas that mattered. The Irish Times and myriad other derivative media outlets were following the agenda set by the “majors” like the New York Times, CNN, the Guardian, the BBC and so on, who were in turn following the agendas set by their governments.

For Washington and London and other Western governments, the Arab Spring became an opportunity to foment regime change in Libya and Syria. The protests in those countries were orchestrated vehicles to oust leaders whom Western imperial states wanted rid off. Muammar Gaddafi in Libya was murdered in October 2011 by NATO-backed jihadists. Syrian President Bashar Al Assad nearly succumbed but in the end managed to defeat the Western covert war in his country thanks to the allied intervention of Russia and Iran.

All the while, the Western media were telling their consumers that Libya and Syria were witnessing pro-democracy movements, rather than the reality of NATO-sponsored covert aggression for regime change.

A person might be skeptical of claims that Western media are so pliable and propagandist. I know it for a fact because when I was reporting on the seismic events in Bahrain – which were truly about people bravely and peacefully fighting for democracy – the Western media closed their doors. They weren’t interested because there were “bigger events elsewhere”. Bahrain, like Yemen, would be ignored by the Western media because those countries didn’t serve the Western geopolitical objectives. Whereas Libya and Syria would receive saturation coverage, saturated that is with Western imperial propaganda.

Bahrain was and continues to be ignored by Western media because it is an integral part of the Saudi-led Gulf monarchial system which serves Washington and London’s imperial objectives of profiteering from oil, propping up the petrodollar and sustaining massive weapons sales. Democracy in Bahrain or in any other of the Gulf regimes would simply not be tolerated, not just by the despotic rulers therein but by their ultimate patrons in Washington and London.

I continued to report on the regime’s atrocities in Bahrain. My reports would be taken by alternative media sites like Global Research in Canada and indie radio talk shows in the United States. The money wasn’t great, but at least I could try to get the story out. In June 2011, four months after the Arab Spring began in Bahrain, the regime copped my critical reporting. I was summoned over a “visa irregularity” to the immigration department but instead was met by surly military police officers who told me I was “no longer welcome in the kingdom of Bahrain”. I was given 24 hours to leave “for my own safety”.

I returned to Ireland where after a few months I would relocate to Ethiopia in September 2011 to work as a freelance journalist for Global Research, initially. Later I began to work for Iran’s Press TV and Russian media. I first started working for this online journal, Strategic Culture Foundation, in late 2012. And my best move? I married an Ethiopian woman whom I had met in Bahrain during the Arab Spring.

Witnessing the struggle for democracy and justice in Bahrain was a privilege, one that I hardly expected or even wanted initially. But it fell to me. I witnessed such bravery and kindness among long-suffering Bahraini people who shared their grievances with generosity and graciousness despite the horror and oppression around them. Their struggle continues in spite of the lying, conniving Western governments and their media lackeys.

Ten years ago this month, the Middle East and North Africa were convulsed by uprisings and subterfuges. The Arab Spring is generally thought of as a single wave of pro-democracy movements that swept the vast region. Far from it, however, the events were a mixed bag in which Western powers were not on the right side of history, as Western media would portray. Indeed, these powers played a nefarious role to ensure that the Arab Spring was kneecapped in order to cripple any progressive potential.

A look at the contemporaneous events in Bahrain, Libya and Syria shows the baleful role that the United States, Britain and other European NATO powers actually played. The Arab Spring certainly encompassed many more nations, but the specific events in those three mentioned Arab countries highlight the pernicious agenda of the Western powers which has left an ongoing legacy of misery, failure, conflict and terrorism for the entire Middle East and North Africa region.

As reported in a previous commentary, the American and British governments played an instrumental role in suppressing a popular revolution in Bahrain, which began on February 14, 2011, against a despotic but pro-Western monarchy – the Khalifa regime – which is also a surrogate for the richer and more powerful House of Saud regime in neighboring Saudi Arabia. The Saudis were given a green light by the Americans and British to invade the Persian Gulf island on March 14, 2011, to brutally put down a month-long uprising by a majority of Bahrainis who were demanding free and fair elections, human rights and independent rule of law.

The irony is that Washington and London were claiming to support these same democratic values in other Arab countries which were undergoing unrest.

On March 15, 2011, Western governments and media hailed what they called was the beginning of a “pro-democracy” uprising in Syria against the government of President Bashar al Assad. Then on March 19, the United States, Britain and other NATO powers began a military intervention in Libya said to be in the name of “protecting human rights” from the armed forces under control of the head of that state Muammar Gaddafi.

The Americans and British were compelled to move quickly to suppress the Bahraini revolt because it potentially threatened the entire chain of absolute Gulf Arab monarchies. If democracy were to emerge in Bahrain that would be destabilizing for the other oil-rich Gulf states whose authoritarian rule is vital for sustaining the global petrodollar system and Western imperial interests in the Middle East, not least of all lucrative military exports. Sacrificing Bahrain’s democratic aspirations was the price that Washington and London were all too willing to pay, without a qualm.

To this day, Bahrain’s democratic aspirations are violently repressed by the monarchy in league with Saudi rulers, as well as American and British complicity, including media silence.

When the Saudis received the green light for invading Bahrain on March 14, 2011, the quid quo pro, according to Pepe Escobar, was that American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got assurance from the Gulf monarchies that they would ensure no objection among the 22-nation Arab League for the imminent NATO military intervention in Libya. Thus the suppression in Bahrain paved the way five days later for the NATO blitzkrieg on Libya, a relentless eight-month aerial bombing campaign that culminated in the overthrow and murder of Gaddafi on October 20.

Subsequently, Libya would precipitously descend from the foremost developed nation in Africa into a war-torn failed state riven by civil war, jihadist warlords and human trafficking which has plagued Europe to this day. It is grotesque that the Americans, British and other NATO powers justified their criminal aggression on Libya in the name of protecting human rights and promoting democracy as part of the Arab Spring events.

What’s even more reprehensible, the failed state of Libya would soon become a supply route for the CIA and British MI6 to deploy jihadist mercenaries and weaponry for the NATO and Arab sponsored regime-change operation unfolding in Syria.

On March 15, 2011, one day after the Anglo-American sponsored operation to kill the democracy movement in Bahrain, events took on a sinister development in Syria. In the southern Syrian city Daraa on the border with Jordan, rooftop snipers killed security forces and anti-government protesters. The Western media immediately hailed the beginning of a pro-democracy movement in Syria against the central Assad government in Damascus. But scarcely reported then or since was that the snipers were covertly deployed by NATO powers in what would ignite a regime-change war. That war, which lasted for nearly 10 years and continues to destabilize Syria’s northern border, was cynically and disingenuously portrayed by Western media as a pro-democracy uprising when in reality it was a covert war of aggression by NATO powers, financed by Gulf Arab regimes and involving jihadist mercenaries recruited from dozens of countries.

Libya was a key link in the CIA and MI6 operation know as Timber Sycamore which funneled terrorist fighters and weapons to Syria to propagate the secret NATO war to overthrow President Assad. That operation eventually failed largely because of the military intervention in late 2015 by Russia in support of the Syrian government. Support from Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah was also vital in defeating the Western powers’ regime-change plan.

The legacy from events a decade ago still reverberate to this day. Several members of the current Biden administration bear responsibility for the destruction, including the present Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Libya is a divided nation racked by economic collapse despite its vast oil wealth. Syria is war-torn with a death toll of perhaps 500,000 and struggling with reconstruction because of American and European sanctions against the Assad government. The terrorism that was spawned in those countries for the Western objective of regime change continues to haunt the Middle East and beyond.

And, as for Bahrain, a long-suffering people who simply demanded democracy were and continue to be brutally suppressed by despotic Arab regimes at the behest of the United States and Britain – two nations that claim to be exemplars to the rest of the world for democracy, human right and rule of law.

Ten years ago this week, the Bahraini people launched a daring, peaceful uprising against a despised and despotic monarchial regime. During the next four weeks, the Al Khalifa regime was rocked to its shaky foundations as hundreds of thousands of Bahrainis took to the streets of the Persian Gulf island state.

What followed, however, was a crucial – if despicable – intervention by Britain and the United States which unleashed a wave of brutal repression – a repression that continues to this day. Without this British and American operation, the Bahraini regime would have fallen to a popular uprising.

At stake for London and Washington was not just the tiny island of Bahrain itself but the stability of the entire chain of Persian Gulf monarchies, principally Saudi Arabia. The Gulf sheikhdoms are essential for maintaining the geopolitical interests of the Western powers in the Middle East, for propping up the petrodollar system which is paramount to American economic sustenance, and prolonging lucrative trade for British and American weapons manufacturers.

If Bahrain were to succumb to a democratic uprising by its people demanding free and fair elections, independent rule of law, more equitable economic governance, and so on, then the Gulf monarchies would be “threatened” by example. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman are the other Gulf states which are ruled over by monarchs. They are all clients of Western powers, facilitating American and British military bases across the region which are vital for power projection, for example prosecuting wars and confronting designated enemies like Iran. Bahrain hosts the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet base as well as a new British naval base that was opened in 2016. In short, Bahrain could not be allowed to attain democracy as that would have a domino effect across the entire region jeopardizing U.S. and British interests.

The democratic aspirations of the Bahraini people are poignantly apposite. The majority of the indigenous population are followers of Shia Islam with many cultural connections to ancient Iran which lies to the north across the narrow Gulf sea. The Bahraini rulers descend from a colonial settler tribe which invaded the island in the 18th century. The Khalifa tribe hailed from the Arabian Peninsula originally. Their occupation of Bahrain was one of conquest and pillage. Unlike most Bahrainis the usurpers professed to following Sunni Islam and held the native population in contempt, lording over them and imposing arbitrary, extortionate levies under pain of death. But the British Empire constructed the new rulers into a monarchy in 1820 in order to perform a sentinel duty over the island in a key waterway leading to Britain’s imperial jewel in the crown, India. The British Empire had similar protectorate arrangements with all the other Gulf Arab territories.

Down through the centuries, British colonial officers and soldiers were relied on to enforce the Khalifa regime in Bahrain. Uprisings by the people would recur periodically and would be violently suppressed by British security forces.

The pattern was repeated during the 2011 Arab Spring revolts which swept across North Africa and the Middle East. Some of these revolts were manipulated or fomented by Western powers for regime change, such as in Syria and Libya. But in Bahrain, it was a truly democratic impulse that galvanized the Shia majority to once again demand their historic rights against what was viewed as an imposter, despotic regime.

Such was the regime’s shaky hold on power that the tide of popular uprising nearly swept it aside during the four weeks following the beginning of the Bahrain uprising on February 14, 2011. This author was present during this tumultuous time which saw up to 500,000 people take to the streets – nearly half the population. Pearl Roundabout in the capital, Manama, became a de facto “Republic of Bahrain” with peaceful encampments and daily throngs defiantly telling King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa that it was “game over” for his crony regime. It was a heady time and the regime’s imminent perilous fate was palpable. Plunging the people into a bloodbath would be the escape route for the rulers and their Western sponsors.

On March 14, 2011, thousands of troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates invaded Bahrain and began a bloody repression against unarmed protesters. People were rounded up for mass-detention and torture. Young men were shot dead at point-blank range. The vicious repression that began a decade ago continues to this day – albeit ignored by Western news media. All of the Bahraini pro-democracy leaders languish in prisons without due process. Several prisoners have been executed for alleged terrorist crimes after “confessions” were beaten out of them.

Only days before the Saudi-Emirati invasion of Bahrain, on March 9, 2011, the regime was visited by senior British and American security officials. On the British side were Sir Peter Ricketts, the national security advisor to then Prime Minister David Cameron, as well as General Sir David Richards, the head of British military. In a second separate meeting, on March 11, three days before the onslaught, the Khalifa regime was visited by then U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. We don’t know the details of those discussions but media reports stated at the time that the British and Americans were “offering their support for the royal family”.

Britain and the United States worked together to kill the Bahrain revolution of 2011 and its people’s long-held aspirations for democratic governance. The repression goes on with British and American officials frequently visiting Bahrain to express support for the Khalifa regime. Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited the island in August 2020 and fawned over the regime for its support to Washington’s policy of normalizing ties with Israel. There is no sign of the new Biden administration taking a more critical position towards Bahrain. Indeed it was the Obama administration in which Biden was vice president that colluded with Britain in the slaughter of the Bahraini revolution back in 2011.

Thus, when Britain and the United States talk about promoting democracy and human rights in places like Hong Kong, Venezuela, Russia, or anywhere else, just remember their bankrupt credibility as proven by Bahrain. Western news media – despite their claims of freedom and independence – also deserve condemnation. Those media have steadfastly ignored the plight of Bahrainis in deference to their government’s geopolitical interests.

A follow-up commentary on the Arab Spring events 10 years ago will look at how the United States and Britain hypocritically and disingenuously moved to intervene in Libya and Syria at the very same time that these powers were suppressing the legitimate pro-democracy movement in Bahrain.

Vijay PRASHAD

A decade has now slipped by since a man named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid on Dec. 17, 2010.

Bouazizi, a street vendor, took this extreme step after policemen harassed him for trying to survive. Not long after, thousands of people in this small Tunisian town gathered in the street to express their anger. Their outburst spread to the capital city, Tunis, where trade unions, social organizations, political parties and civic groups marched into the avenues to overthrow the government of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Demonstrations in Tunisia inspired similar outbreaks around the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt to Spain, the chant of Cairo’s Tahrir Square — ash-sha’b yurid isqat an-nizam  (“the people want to overthrow the regime”) — redolent with the emotion of hundreds of millions.

People poured into the streets, their sentiment captured by the Spanish term indignados: indignant, or outraged. They came to say that their hopes were being crushed by forces both visible and invisible. The billionaires of their own societies and their cozy relationship with the state — despite the global downturn spurred by the credit crisis of 2007-08 — were easy to see.

Meanwhile, the forces of finance capital that had eroded the capacity of their governments (if they were favorable to the people) to provide humane policies were much harder to see, but no less devastating in their consequences.

The sentiment that fueled the slogan overthrow the regime was shared widely by large majorities of people who had become dulled by the futility of voting for evils and lesser evils; these people were now seeking something beyond the horizon of the election games which seemed to bring so little change. Politicians ran for elections saying one thing, and then did the exact opposite when they took charge.

In the United Kingdom, for instance, the student protests that broke out in November-December 2010 were against the betrayal by the Liberal Democrats of their pledge not to raise fees; regardless of who they voted for, the outcome was that the people suffered.

“Greece, France: now here too!,” chanted the students in the U.K. They could have added Chile, where the students (known as los pingüinos, or “the penguins”) took to the streets against the education cuts; their protests would pick up again in May 2011 and last almost two years in el invierno estudiantil chileno, the “Chilean Student Winter.”

U.K. student protesters mount traffic lights in central London, Dec. 9, 2010. (bobaliciouslondon, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

In September 2011, the Occupy Movement in the United States would join this wave of global outrage, emerging out of the gross failure of the U.S. government to address mass evictions spurred by the mortgage calamity that morphed into the credit crisis of 2007-08. “The only way to experience the American Dream,” someone wrote on the walls of Wall Street, “is while sleeping.”

Overthrow the regime was the slogan because faith in the establishment had weakened; more was demanded of life than what was on offer from the neoliberal governments and the central bankers. But the point of the protests was not simply to overthrow the government alone, since there was widespread recognition that this was not a problem of the governments: it was a deeper problem about the kind of political possibilities that remained open to human society.

A generation or more had experienced austerity cuts by governments of different kinds, even social democratic governments that were told that the rights of the wealthy bondholders – for instance – were far more important than the rights of the totality of the citizens. It was bewilderment at the failure of what appeared to be progressive governments, such as the Syriza coalition in Greece later in 2015, to deliver on their basic promise of no more austerity that spurred this kind of attitude.

Global Scope 

The uprising had a truly global character. A million people in Red Shirts in Bangkok on March 14, 2010, took to the streets against a state of the military, the monarchy and the monied sections; in Spain, half a million indignados marched in the streets of Madrid on  October 15, 2011.

The Financial Times ran an influential article calling it “the year of global indignation,” with one of its leading commentators writing that the revolt pitted “an internationally-connected elite against ordinary citizens who feel excluded from the benefits of economic growth, and angered by corruption.”

“‘The only way to experience the American Dream,’ someone wrote on the walls of Wall Street, ‘is while sleeping.’”

A report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) from October 2008 showed that between the 1980s and the 2000s, inequality rose in each of the 20 richest countries in the world who are members of the OECD. The situation in the developing world was catastrophic; a report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) from 2008 showed that the share of national consumption by the poorest fifth of the population in developing regions had declined to 3.9 percent from 4.6 percent between 1990 and 2004.

This was gravest in Latin America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa, where the poorest fifth accounted for merely 3 percent of national consumption or income.

Whatever funds had been gathered to help the banks stave off a serious crisis in 2008 did not translate into any income redistribution for the billions of people who saw their lives become increasingly precarious. This was the major spur for the uprisings of that period.

A Sign of Hope 

It is important to point out that in all these statistics there was a hopeful sign. In March 2011, Alicia Bárcena, the head of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), wrote that despite the high levels of income inequality, poverty rates in the region had dropped due to the social policies of some of the governments in the region.

Bárcena had in mind the social democratic governments such as in Brazil under President Lula da Silva, with schemes such as the Bolsa Familia, and left governments such as in Bolivia under President Evo Morales and Venezuela under President Hugo Chávez. The indignant in these parts of the world had entered government and were driving a different agenda for themselves.

How swiftly the wealthy turned from the language of “democracy promotion” to the language of law and order, sending in the police and the F-16s to clear out public plazas and to threaten countries with bombardment and with coup d’états.

The Arab Spring, which drew its name from the 1848 revolts across Europe, quickly turned cold as the West encouraged a hot war between regional powers (Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey) with the epicentres in Libya and Syria. The destruction of the Libyan state by the 2011 NATO attack sidelined the African Union, suspended all talk of the Afrique as a currency to substitute for the French Franc and the U.S. dollar, and drew in a massive French and U.S. military intervention along the Sahel region from Mali to Niger.

Berliners waving revolutionary flags in March 1848,  painter not identified. (Wikimedia Commons)

Immense pressure to overthrow the government in Syria began in 2011 and deepened in 2012. This fragmented Arab unity, which had been growing after the illegal U.S. war on Iraq in 2003; made Syria the frontline of a regional war between Iran and its adversaries (Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates); and diminished the centrality of the cause of the Palestinians.

In Egypt, General Mohamed Ibrahim, the interior minister in a new government of generals, said coldly, “We are living a golden age of unity between the judges, the police, and the army.” The North Atlantic liberals rushed behind the generals; in December 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron honored Egypt’s president – a former general – Abdel Fattah el-Sisi with the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest award.

In Latin America, meanwhile, Washington instigated a series of shenanigans to overthrow what was known as the Pink Tide. This ranged from the attempted coup against the Venezuelan government in 2002 to the 2009 coup in Honduras and the hybrid war prosecuted against every progressive government in the American hemisphere from Haiti down to Argentina.

A decline in commodity prices — especially oil prices — spluttered economic activity in the hemisphere. Washington used this opportunity to exert information, financial, diplomatic and military pressure on the left governments, many of which could not withstand the pressure. The coup against the government of Fernando Lugo of Paraguay in 2012 was a harbinger for what was to come against President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil in 2016.

Front right: Grave in Tunisia of Mohamed Bouazizi, hailed by Arab commentators as one of the “heroic martyrs of a new Middle Eastern revolution.” (Thijs Roes, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Every inch of hope to change the economic and political system was driven underfoot by war and coups and by immense pressure from organizations such as the IMF. Older language of “tax and subsidy reform” and “labor market reform” re-emerged to suffocate attempts by states to provide relief to the unemployed and the hungry.

Long before the coronavirus, hope had become calcified and rottenness had become normal as migrants drowned in seas and sat in concentration camps while dead money slipped across borders to tax havens (offshore financial centers hold upwards of $36 trillion, an astronomical amount).

A glance backward to the uprisings of a decade ago requires that we pause at the door of the prisons in Egypt, where some of the young people who had been arrested for their hopefulness remain incarcerated. Two political prisoners, Alaa Abdel El-Fattah and Ahmed Douma shouted to each other between their cells, a conversation which was published as Graffiti for Two. What did they fight for?

“We fought for a day, one day that would end without the suffocating certainty that tomorrow would replicate it as all days had been replicated before.” They sought an exit from the present; they sought a future. Revolutionaries, when they rise, Alaa and Ahmed wrote, care “for nothing but love.”

In their prison cells in Cairo, they hear stories of the Indian farmers, whose struggles have inspired a nation; they hear of the striking nurses from as far afield as Papua New Guinea and the United States; they hear of striking factory workers in Indonesia and South Korea; they hear that the betrayal of the Palestinians and the Saharawi people provoked street actions around the world.

For a few months in 2010-2011, the “suffocating certainty” that there is no future was set aside; a decade later, the people on the streets seek a future that is a break from the insufferable present.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research via consortiumnews.com

– Julius Caesar

The illegal invasion of Libya, in which Britain was complicit and a British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee’s report confirmed as an illegal act sanctioned by the UK government, over which Cameron stepped down as Prime Minister (weeks before the release of the UK parliament report), occurred from March – Oct, 2011.

Muammar al-Gaddafi was assassinated on Oct. 20^th, 2011.

On Sept 11-12^th, 2012, U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, U.S. Foreign Service information management officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Tyron Woods and Glen Doherty were killed at two U.S. government facilities in Benghazi.

It is officially denied to this date that al-Qaeda or any other international terrorist organization participated in the Benghazi attack. It is also officially denied that the attack was pre-meditated.

On the 6^th year anniversary of the Benghazi attack, Barack Obama stated at a partisan speech on Sept 10^th, 2018, delivered at the University of Illinois, that the outrage over the details concerning the Benghazi attack were the result of “wild conspiracy theory” perpetrated by conservatives and Republican members of Congress.

However, according to an August 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report  (only released to the public in May 2015), this is anything but the case. The report was critical of the policies of then President Obama as a direct igniter for the rise of ISIS and the creation of a “caliphate” by Syria-based radical Islamists and al-Qaeda. The report also identified that arms shipments in Libya had gone to radical Islamist “allies” of the United States and NATO in the overthrowing of Col. Muammar al-Gaddafi. These arms shipments were sent to Syria and became the arsenal that allowed ISIS and other radical rebels to grow.

The declassified DIA report states:

“AQI [al-qaeda –iraq] SUPPORTED THE SYRIAN OPPOSITION FROM THE BEGINNING, BOTH IDEOLOGICALLY AND THROUGH THE MEDIA… WESTERN COUNTRIES, THE GULF STATES AND TURKEY ARE SUPPORTING THESE EFFORTS… THE WEST, GULF COUNTRIES, AND TURKEY SUPPORT THE [SYRIAN] OPPOSITION… THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN REGIME…” [emphasis added]

Another DIA document from Oct 2012 (also released in May 2015), reported that Gaddafi’s vast arsenal was being shipped from Benghazi to two Syrian ports under the control of the Syrian rebel groups.

Essentially, the DIA documents were reporting that the Obama Administration was supporting Islamist extremism, including the Muslim Brotherhood.

When the watchdog group Judicial Watch received the series of DIA reports through Freedom of Information Act lawsuits (FOIA) in May 2015, the State Department, the Administration and various media outlets trashed the reports as insignificant and unreliable.

There was just one problem; Lt. Gen. Flynn was backing up the reliability of the released DIA reports.

Lt. Gen. Flynn as Director of the DIA from July 2012 – Aug. 2014, was responsible for acquiring accurate intelligence on ISIS’s and other extremist operations within the Middle East, but did not have any authority in shaping U.S. military policy in response to the Intel the DIA was acquiring.

In a July 2015 interview with Al-Jazeera, Flynn went so far as to state that the rise of ISIS was the result of a “willful decision,” not an intelligence failure, by the Obama Administration.

In the Al-Jazeera interview Flynn was asked:

Q: You are basically saying that even in government at the time you knew these groups were around, you saw this analysis, and you were arguing against it, but who wasn’t listening?

FLYNN: I think the Administration.

Q: So the Administration turned a blind eye to your analysis?

FLYNN: I don’t know that they turned a blind eye, I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision.

Q: A willful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood?

FLYNN: It was a willful decision to do what they’re doing.

Flynn was essentially stating (in the 47 minute interview) that the United States was fully aware that weapons trafficking from Benghazi to the Syrian rebels was occurring. In fact, the secret flow of arms from Libya to the Syrian opposition, via Turkey was CIA sponsored and had been underway shortly after Gaddafi’s death in Oct 2011. The operation was largely run out of a covert CIA annex in Benghazi, with State Department acquiescence.

This information was especially troubling in light of the fact that the Obama Administration’s policy, from mid-2011 on, was to overthrow the Assad government. The question of “who will replace Assad?” was never fully answered.

Perhaps the most troubling to Americans among the FOIA-released DIA documents was a report from Sept. 16, 2012, which provided a detail account of the pre-meditated nature of the 9/11/12 attack in Benghazi, reporting that the attack had been planned ten days prior, detailing the groups involved.

The report revealed that it was in fact an al-Qaeda linked terrorist group that was responsible for the Benghazi attack. That despite this intelligence, the Obama Administration continued to permit arms-trafficking to the al-Qaeda-linked Syrian rebels even after the 9/11/12 attacks.

In August 2015, then President Obama ordered for U.S. forces to attack Syrian government forces if they interfered with the American “vetted, trained and armed” forces. This U.S. approved Division 30 Syrian rebel group “defected” almost immediately, with U.S. weapons in hand, to align with the Nusra Front, the formal al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria.

Obama’s Semantics War: Any Friend of Yours is a Friend of Mine

“Flynn incurred the wrath of the [Obama] White House by insisting on telling the truth about Syria… He thought truth was the best thing and they shoved him out.”

– Patrick Lang (retired army colonel, served for nearly a decade as the chief Middle East civilian intelligence officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency)

Before being named Director of the DIA, Flynn served as Director of Intelligence for the Joint Staff, as Director of Intelligence for the U.S. Central Command, and as Director of Intelligence for the Joint Special Operations Command.

Flynn’s criticisms and opposition to the Obama Administration’s policies in his interview with Al-Jazeera in 2015 was nothing new. In August 2013, Flynn as Director of the DIA supported Gen. Dempsey’s intervention, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in forcing then President Obama to cancel orders to launch a massive bombing campaign against the Syrian government and armed forces. Flynn and Dempsey both argued that the overthrow of the Assad government would lead to a radical Islamist stronghold in Syria, much like what was then happening in Libya.

This account was also supported in Seymour Hersh’s paper “Military to Military” published in Jan 2016, to which he states:

“Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop the smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. ‘If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic,’ Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria.’ The DIA’s reporting, he [Flynn] said, ‘got enormous pushback’ from the Obama administration. ‘I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.’

[According to a former JCS adviser]’…To say Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow that through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody else is better” issue that the JCS had with Obama’s policy.’ The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success’. So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing U.S. intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State [ISIS].” [emphasis added]

According to Hersh’s sources, it was through the militaries of Germany, Israel and Russia, who were in contact with the Syrian army, that the U.S. intelligence on where the terrorist cells were located was shared, hence the “military to military”. There was no direct contact between the U.S. and the Syrian military.

Hersh states in his paper:

“The two countries [U.S. & Syria] collaborated against al-Qaida, their common enemy. A longtime consultant to the Joint Special Operations Command said that, after 9/11, ‘Bashar was, for years, extremely helpful to us while, in my view, we were churlish in return, and clumsy in our use of the gold he gave us. That quiet co-operation continued among some elements, even after the [Bush administration’s] decision to vilify him.’ In 2002 Assad authorised Syrian intelligence to turn over hundreds of internal files on the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Germany. Later that year, Syrian intelligence foiled an attack by al-Qaida on the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, and Assad agreed to provide the CIA with the name of a vital al-Qaida informant. In violation of this agreement, the CIA contacted the informant directly; he rejected the approach, and broke off relations with his Syrian handlers.

…It was this history of co-operation that made it seem possible in 2013 that Damascus would agree to the new indirect intelligence-sharing arrangement with the U.S.”

However, as the Syrian army gained strength with the Dempsey-led-Joint Chiefs’ support, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey escalated their financing and arming of al-Nusra and ISIS. In fact, it was “later” discovered that the Erdogan government had been supporting al-Nusra and ISIS for years. In addition, after the June 30^th, 2013 revolution in Egypt, Turkey became a regional hub for the Muslim Brotherhood’s International Organization.

In Sept. 2015, Russia came in and directly intervened militarily, upon invitation by the Syrian government, and effectively destroyed ISIS strongholds within Syrian territory. In response, Turkey shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 on Nov 24^th, 2015 for allegedly entering Turkish airspace for 17 seconds. Days after the Russian fighter jet was shot down, Obama expressed support for Erdogan and stated at a Dec. 1^st, 2015 press conference that his administration would remain “very much committed to Turkey’s security and its sovereignty”. Obama also said that as long as Russia remained allied with Assad, “a lot of Russian resources are still going to be targeted at opposition groups … that we support … So I don’t think we should be under any illusions that somehow Russia starts hitting only Isil targets. That’s not happening now. It was never happening. It’s not going to be happening in the next several weeks.”

Today, not one of those “opposition groups” has shown itself to have remained, or possibly ever been, anti-extremist. And neither the Joint Chiefs nor the DIA believed that there was ever such a thing as “moderate rebels.”

Rather, as remarked by a JCS adviser to Hersh, “Turkey is the problem.”

China’s “Uyghur Problem”

Imad Moustapha, was the Syrian Ambassador to the United States from 2004 to Dec. 2011, and has been the Syrian Ambassador to China for the past eight years.

In an interview with Seymour Hersh, Moustapha stated:

“‘China regards the Syrian crisis from three perspectives,’ he said: international law and legitimacy; global strategic positioning; and the activities of jihadist Uighurs, from Xinjiang province in China’s far west. Xinjiang borders eight nations – Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India – and, in China’s view, serves as a funnel for terrorism around the world and within China. Many Uighur fighters now in Syria are known to be members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement – an often violent separatist organisation that seeks to establish an Islamist Uighur state in Xinjiang. ‘The fact that they have been aided by Turkish intelligence to move from China into Syria through Turkey has caused a tremendous amount of tension between the Chinese and Turkish intelligence,’ Moustapha said. ‘China is concerned that the Turkish role of supporting the Uighur fighters in Syria may be extended in the future to support Turkey’s agenda in Xinjiang. We are already providing the Chinese intelligence service with information regarding these terrorists and the routes they crossed from on travelling into Syria.’ ” [emphasis added]

This view was echoed by a Washington foreign affairs analyst whose views are routinely sought by senior government officials, informing Hersh that:

“Erdoğan has been bringing Uighurs into Syria by special transport while his government has been agitating in favour of their struggle in China. Uighur and Burmese Muslim terrorists who escape into Thailand somehow get Turkish passports and are then flown to Turkey for transit into Syria.”

China understands that the best way to combat the terrorist recruiting that is going on in these regions is to offer aid towards reconstruction and economic development projects. By 2016, China had allegedly committed more than $30 billion to postwar reconstruction in Syria.

The long-time consultant to the Joint Special Operations Command could not hide his contempt, according to Hersh, when he was asked for his view of the U.S. policy on Syria. “‘The solution in Syria is right before our nose,’ he said. ‘Our primary threat is Isis and all of us – the United States, Russia and China – need to work together.’“

The military’s indirect pathway to Assad disappeared with Dempsey’s retirement in September 25^th, 2015. His replacement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Joseph Dunford, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in July 2015, two months before assuming office, “If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia.”

Flynn’s Call for Development in the Middle East to Counter Terrorism

Not only was Flynn critical of the Obama Administration’s approach to countering terrorism in the Middle East, his proposed solution was to actually downgrade the emphasis on military counter-operations, and rather focus on economic development within these regions as the most effective and stable impediment to the growth of extremists.

Flynn stated in the July 2015 interview with Al-Jazeera:

“Frankly, an entire new economy is what this region needs. They need to take this 15-year old, to 25 to 30-year olds in Saudi Arabia, the largest segment of their population; in Egypt, the largest segment of their population, 15 to roughly 30 years old, mostly young men. You’ve got to give them something else to do. If you don’t, they’re going to turn on their own governments, and we can solve that problem.

So that is the conversation that we have to have with them, and we have to help them do that. And in the meantime, what we have is this continued investment in conflict. The more weapons we give, the more bombs we drop, that just fuels the conflict. Some of that has to be done, but I’m looking for other solutions. I’m looking for the other side of this argument, and we’re not having it; we’re not having it as the United States.” [emphasis added]

Flynn also stated in the interview that the U.S. cannot, and should not, deter the development of nuclear energy in the Middle East:

“It now equals nuclear development of some type in the Middle East, and now what we want… what I hope for is that we have nuclear [energy] development, because it also helps for projects like desalinization, getting water…nuclear energy is very clean, and it actually is so cost effective, much more cost effective for producing water from desalinization.”

Flynn was calling for a new strategic vision for the Middle East, and making it clear that “conflict only” policies were only going to add fuel to the fire, that cooperative economic policies are the true solution to attaining peace in the Middle East. Pivotal to this is the expansion of nuclear energy, while assuring non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, which Flynn states “has to be done in a very international, inspectable way.”

When In Doubt, Blame the Russians

How did the Obama Administration respond to Flynn’s views?

He was fired (forced resignation) from his post as Director of the DIA on April 30^th, 2014. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who was briefed by Flynn on the intelligence reports and was also critical of the U.S. Administration’s strategy in the Middle East was also forced to resign in Feb. 2015.

With the election of Trump as President on Nov. 8 2016, Lt. Gen. Flynn was swiftly announced as Trump’s choice for National Security Adviser on Nov. 18^th, 2016.

Just weeks later, Flynn was targeted by the FBI and there was a media sensation over Flynn being a suspected “Russian agent”. Flynn was taken out before he had a chance to even step into his office, prevented from doing any sort of overhaul with the intelligence bureaus and Joint Chiefs of Staff, which was most certainly going to happen. Instead Flynn was forced to resign on Feb. 13^th, 2017 after incessant media attacks undermining the entire Trump Administration, accusing them of working for the Russians against the welfare of the American people.

Despite an ongoing investigation on the allegations against Flynn, there has been no evidence to this date that has justified any charge. In fact, volumes of exculpatory evidence have been presented to exonerate Flynn from any wrongdoing including perjury. At this point, the investigation of Flynn has been put into question as consciously disingenuous and as being stalled by the federal judge since May 2020, refusing to release Flynn it seems while a Trump Administration is still in effect.

The question thus stands; in whose best interest is it that no peace be permitted to occur in the Middle East and that U.S.-Russian relations remain verboten? And is such an interest a friend or foe to the American people?

The author can be reached at cynthiachung@tutanota.com

Libya’s long-running civil war has taken a new turn in recent weeks after the Turkish-backed Government of National Accord launched an offensive against would-be strongman Khalifa Haftar, pushing him and his Libyan National Army out of Tripoli and a number of near-by strongholds. But anyone who thinks that peace is at hand after nine years of anarchy and collapse should think again. Odds are all but certain that all it will do is introduce new chaos into a country that has already seen more than its fair share.

But before we speculate about the future, let’s pause for a moment to consider the past and how the craziness began. When historians conduct their post-mortem analyses, chance are good that they’ll zero in on one date in particular – Apr. 13, 2011. That’s the day Barack Obama welcomed Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, emir of Qatar, to the White House. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had just spent weeks lining up support for the effort to topple Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi in the wake of the Arab Spring. But in mid-March, she decided that the coalition was too western, too Euro-centric, for delicate post-colonial sensibilities, and so she set out to woo energy-rich Qatar as well. When Al-Thani at last agreed to come on board, his reward was an audience with His Coolness himself, the U.S. president.

But Obama should have paused before leaping into the unknown. Although Qatar enjoys a benign reputation thanks to its extensive economic and cultural ties with the west, its political profile has long been strangely bifurcated – liberal in some respects, increasingly Islamist in others. By the late 1990s, it was making a name for itself as a center for the ultra-austere branch of Islam known as Salafism. By 2003, reports were growing that local charities were funneling money to Al-Qaeda. But Washington paid little attention. How could such reports be true if Qatar was helping to depose the Gaddafi, long a thorn in the side of American imperialism? If he was working in behalf of U.S. hegemony, which is to say the ultimate good, didn’t that mean that he had to be good as well?

Such is the cartoonish mindset that prevails in Washington. After privately conferring with Al-Thani, Obama then paraded him before the press. “I expressed to him my appreciation of the leadership that the emir has shown when it comes to democracy in the Middle East,” he told reporters, “and, in particular, the work that they have done in trying to promote a peaceful transition in Libya.… He’s motivated by a belief that the Libyan people should have the rights and freedoms of all people. And as a consequence, Qatar is not only supportive diplomatically but is also supportive militarily.”

At which point, some emperor-has-no-clothes type might have popped up to ask: how can an absolute autocrat like Al-Thani care about rights and freedoms in Libya when it denies such privileges to his own people at home? A few hours later, Obama offered a few comments at a Democratic fundraiser in Chicago that were picked up by na open mike.

“Pretty influential guy,” he said of Al-Thani. “He is a big booster, big promoter of democracy all throughout the Middle East. Reform, reform, reform – you’re seeing it on Al Jazeera.”

Then he added: “Now, he himself is not reforming significantly. There’s no big move towards democracy in Qatar. But you know part of the reason is that the per-capita income of Qatar is $145,000 a year. That will dampen a lot of conflict.”

Immense energy wealth – adjusted for inflation, oil prices at the time were pushing $130 a barrel – evidently means that Qatar gets a free pass when it comes to democratic niceties that other countries are expected to observe.

But Obama was wrong about what all that money would do. Rather than tamping down conflict, it fanned it. Using his position in the U.S.-led alliance serving for political and diplomatic cover, Al-Thani seized the opportunity to distribute an estimated $400 million to Libyan Salafist rebels in the form of machineguns, automatic rifles, and ammo. Within months, insurgents were hoisting the maroon-and-white Qatari flag over Gaddafi’s once-impregnable presidential complex in Tripoli.

The result was bedlam. Even though Libya would eventually elect a national parliament, gunmen flush with Persian Gulf cash forced it to adopt a host of Islamist “reforms” – burkhas, gender segregation, compulsory hijabs at universities, the works. Islamists went on a rampage, killing U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens in September 2012, kidnapping Prime Minister Ali Zeidan in October 2013, kidnapping a group of Egyptian diplomats the following January, and then storming the national parliament two months later, shooting and injuring two lawmakers. The Obama administration thought of punishing Qatar by holding off military assistance and the like. But after objections from both the Pentagon and the State Department, and the administration held its tongue. A Libyan politician named Mohammed Ali Abdallah would later say of the Americans:

“They created the monsters we are dealing with today, which is these militias that are so empowered they will never subordinate themselves to any government.”

Quite right – and those monsters have only grown bigger and more vicious as the years have passed. So why did the U.S. allow a close ally to overturn the apple cart? One reason is incompetence, but another is America’s longstanding alliance with Sunni extremism. Remember – rather than merely cooperating with such elements, America helped call them into existence by partnering with the Saudis to create an anti-Soviet holy war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Even though the effort left Afghanistan in ruins, the pattern has repeated itself again and again in Bosnia, Syria, Yemen, and Libya as well. Whenever Americans intervene in the Muslim world, Sunni jihadis backed by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and other Persian Gulf oil monarchies invariably follow. Despite occasional blowback in the form of 9/11 and other such incidents, the U.S.-jihadi alliance has continued without major interruption.

The result in the case of Libya is a black hole where a more or less functional state used to be. Since geopolitics abhor a vacuum, outside powers can’t resist throwing themselves into the fray. But not only are Islamists on the GNA side – they are increasingly prominent in the Haftar camp as well. Since such elements are ultimately loyal only to their paymasters in the gulf, deepening chaos can be the only result.

Keep that in mind as the anarchy in Libya intensifies and spreads, leading in the worst-case scenario to a military blow-up between Turkey and Russia, which is among Haftar’s prime supporters. While no one knows how far the process will go, we have a good idea of how the breakdown began – with Barack Obama’s belief that money would buy peace. This is how corrupt oligarchies think. But it made no sense then, and it makes even less now that energy prices are crashing through the floor and the region is sliding deeper and deeper into ruin.

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.

And for an early instant, those in the U.S. who had bet on the Muslim Brotherhood, glimpsed victory. Egypt fell to the MB; Syria was subject to a full-spectrum ‘war’, and the Muslim Brotherhood openly expressed its objective to ‘take’ the Gulf, where it had long established covert cells and networks.

But it was overreach. The Muslim Brotherhood was, it seemed to interested parties, about to steal (like Prometheus), the fire which belonged exclusively to ‘the gods’. Plus, the MB were revealing obvious flaws: Its leadership in Cairo was deeply unconvincing. In Syria, where the movement never had significant penetration (single digit percent support), it was being quickly displaced by war-experienced Salafists coming in from the war in Iraq.

The American, European and Gulf leaders (i.e. the gods) turned sharply away from the Muslim Brotherhood (Qatar was the exception) – and turned instead to ISIS and Al-Qaida. The ‘gods’ were set on making an example of a non-compliant Assad and increasingly, they looked to the latter – ISIS – to inject the required savagery to claw down Assad – in the face of the latter’s tenacious fight-back.

In any event, sentiment turned violently against the MB from many quarters. Secular Arab nationalists had always heartily detested the MB, and the al-Saud and Emirate leaderships similarly detested the Muslim Brotherhood (albeit for different reasons).

But there was always a fundamental contradiction in the American flirtation with the Muslim Brotherhood: it was that Washington’s objective was never regional reform – whether secular or Islamist; the aim always was to preserve a malleable status quo in the Middle East.

U.S. neo-cons were then at the peak of their influence. Since 1996, they had insisted on unqualified U.S. support for the region’s Kings and Emirs versus the Ba’athists and Islamists. It was they who won out easily – against CIA officers such as Graham Fuller – in the debate on whether or not to support any sort of ‘Arab Awakening’.

The U.S. sided with Saudi Arabia and UAE in mounting the coup against the Muslim Brotherhood President in Cairo. And still today, the U.S. and its European protégés support the UAE’s Crown Prince in his vendetta war against Islamists everywhere, from the Horn of Africa to the Magreb – and against Turkey too, as the Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘mother-ship’.

This ‘war on Islamists’ has provided cover for the counter-revolutionary repression of any reform of the ‘Arab System’ – a rearguard Gulf action initially triggered by fears that any ‘Awakening’ might sweep away Gulf ruling families. Today, the UAE continues to try to seed compliant strongmen, General Sisi lookalikes, in states such as Libya and now Tunisia.

So, here we are. But, where are we going? And, above all, why no reform? Can this continue, or will the region explode under the effects of the Covid-triggered, recession?

No reform at all, for a full decade? What’s the block? Well, in the first place, the background lies with those two key neo-con policy papers: the 1996 Clean Break, and David Wurmser’s follow-on, Coping with Crumbling States. These two documents laid the basis for the U.S. (and Israeli) endorsement of Gulf States acting as ‘policeman’ and regional strongmen (a role that the UAE has taken to a new peak), managing any rumblings of dissent (such as in Libya).

These ‘policy papers’ may have been the precursors, but in the final analysis, the ‘block’ simply is, and has been, Israel – both indirectly and directly. The Clean Break’s full title was a New Strategy for Securing the Realm (i.e. Israel). It was a blueprint for underpinning Israel’s security. Ditto for Wurmser’s paper.

In sum, either U.S. or Israeli fears, or U.S. concerns to appease domestic U.S. constituencies, lie at the bottom of this stasis: Israeli and the U.S. élites are wholly comfortable with this malleable status quo – and fear it changing in any way that they cannot control. No reform for the Middle East – only disruption.

Here is the point: There has been no reform, but there is a new dynamic at work. Power is an attribute that is based in deference and powerful illusion. So long as people are willing to defer to a leader; so long as people are persuaded by the illusion of power; so long as people fear – the leader leads. But should the illusion become evident as illusion, nothing easily can prop it up. Power is ephemeral; it dissipates like mountain mist. And the U.S. is losing it.

The western response to the Coronavirus spoke loudly: The U.S. and Europe have appeared powerful because they projected the illusion of competence; of being able to act effectively; of being strategic in their actions. On Coronavirus, the U.S. has shown itself incompetent, dysfunctional, and indifferent to human affliction.

Trump is fighting an existential war: on the one hand, the coming Election is not merely the most important in the U.S.’ history. It will be existential. No more is Blue/Red a contrived theatre for the electorate – this is deadly serious.

For an important segment of the population (no longer the majority), to lose in this coming election would signify their ejection from power and politics, and their substitution by a culturally different class of Americans, with different cosmopolitan and diversity values. It is the tipping point – two irreconcilable visions of American life believe that they can continue only if they own the whole order, and the other side be utterly crushed.

And on the other hand, Trump sees the U.S. fighting a similarly existential war, albeit at a global plane. He is fighting a hidden ‘war’ to retain America’s present dominance over global money (the dollar) – the source of its true power. For Americans to lose this parallel competition to the EU’s and China’s multilateral values of global co-operation and financial governance, would imply Americans’ (i.e. white Anglo Saxon’s) ejection from control over the global financial system, and (again) their substitution by a quite different vision (i.e. a Soros-Gates-Pelosi vision), advocating the ‘progressive’ values of ecological and financial, global governance.

Again – two irreconcilable visions of the global order, with each party believing that it must own the whole order to survive.

Hence Trump’s full-spectrum disruption of China (and the whole multilateral ideology) to maintain dollar hegemony. Europe, on one side, exemplifies the shift towards a transnational regulatory and monetary super-state. And China, on the other, is not only Europe’s willing partner, but the only power capable of sitting atop this globalist ambition, giving it the (required) financial weight and substance. This constitutes the existential threat to the U.S.’ exceptional control of the global financial system – and therefore over global political power.

A sovereignty-ist Russia may not be as drawn to this cosmopolitan vision as China, but really it has little choice. Because, as President Putin repeatedly points out, the dollar constitutes the toxic problem plaguing the world trading system. And in this, Russia cannot stand aloof. The dollar is the problem for the Middle East too, with its noxious corollaries of oil, currency, trade and sanctions wars. The region will not long be able to sit on the fence, keeping distant from this struggle for the global financial order.

The Middle East, as deference to the U.S. illusion of power wanes, has as little choice as has Russia: It will be pushed to view the U.S. as its past, and to ‘Look East’ for its future.

And Israel will cease to be the pivot around which the Middle East revolves.