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The Rage for Order exchange, part 1: ‘Dictators are not an alternative to Middle East chaos’

[additional-authors]
June 15, 2016

Robert F. Worth spent fourteen years as a correspondent for The New York Times, and was the paper’s Beirut bureau chief from 2007 until 2011. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine and The New York Review of Books. He has twice been a finalist for the National Magazine Award. Born and raised in Manhattan, he now lives in Washington D.C.

The following exchange will focus on his critically acclaimed book A Rage for Order (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).

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Dear Mr Worth,

In the introduction to your book, which follows the tragic deterioration from the Arab uprisings of 2011 to the horrors and violence of 2015, you write the following words:

Why did we not see it coming? Looking back, I think it was partly a willed refusal. It was the dictators and their agents who were constantly warning that the revolts would end in civil war and Islamist bloodlust. They’d been saying so for years— even before the uprisings— and all the while doing everything they could to make those predictions come true. Faced with such cynicism, it was natural to insist on believing in an alternative, no matter how unlikely.

Now, ever since the beginning of the uprisings, you could find commentators who were saying that the Arab world needs the “dictators and their agents” to save it from the very unpredictable, very religious “Arab Street.” These commentators often seem to feel that what has happened since the uprisings has proved them right.

My first question: what can taking a closer look at the 2011 protestors and their dispelled dreams teach us about the idea that the Arab world is 'better off with Mubaraks, Assads and Gadhafis?’ How has your view of the Arab strongman changed throughout the writing of the book?

Yours,

Shmuel.

***

Dear Shmuel,

The aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings has led many people to the view that the Arab world needs its autocrats and that the stability provided by figures like Mubarak, Ben Ali, and even Qaddafi is preferable to the chaos and civil war we are now seeing. I believe this is a fundamental misreading of what is going on in this part of the world. The Arab dictators of recent times are not an alternative to the chaos and terrorism we are now seeing; they are its wellspring and primary cause. The notion that the stability they represented could somehow have been preserved is false. The notion that it can be retrieved – as Sisi is trying to do now in Egypt – is also false.

It’s important to recall that the Arab dictatorships – which are all quite similar in form – began in the 1950s with their exemplar, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Nasser was a staggeringly popular leader across the Arab world, and not just because he represented freedom from colonialism. Nasser was not personally corrupt. He died poor, and though he made many awful mistakes and fostered terrible patterns of police-state behavior, he also believed in certain ideals. He failed utterly to realize these ideals, but he genuinely believed in a modern, egalitarian state that would lift its citizens economically and socially. In later decades, that changed. By Mubarak’s time, all pretense of a socialist ideology – or any other form of national purpose and legitimacy – was gone. The state’s only real goal was the preservation of its own power, by obtaining and distributing money through a network of cronies in business, the military, and so on. Actual governance was a side issue at best. In some Arab countries, the autocrat deliberately hollowed out governmental functions (and even much of the military), so as to pre-empt any challenges. The “state” became a shell, under which a corrupt elite enriched itself, while preserving just enough police and military force to crush challengers and intimidate the citizenry.

This made uprisings of the kind that took place in 2011 inevitable. Moreover, the total lack of accountability in this system led to a level of desperation among ordinary people that was fertile ground for extremists. Such extremism was of course a threat – but dictators like Bashar al Assad and Ali Abdullah Saleh found ways to manipulate this threat into an advantage, and to help preserve their own power. Saleh made Al Qaeda into a scarecrow with which to obtain far, far more Western and American money and military aid than he’d ever received previously.

In the wake of the 2011 uprisings, we are left with a landscape of renewed autocracy and jihadist groups. These appear to be at odds, but in many places they exist in a kind of symbiosis, just as they did prior to 2011. Dictators like Assad in Syria need ISIS so that they can present themselves as the only viable alternative. That may in fact be true in the short term in some places in the Arab world. But in the longer term, these corrupt autocracies are precisely what generated the awful mess we are now witnessing. To feed and preserve these systems is the worst possible thing the West can do. I do not mean to suggest that the West should topple autocrats like Assad; again, more chaos would only make things worse. But it’s important to recognize that his regime, and others like it, do not represent a solution. The first step towards a healthier future in the Arab region – which will take a long, long time – is to acknowledge this.

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