4804
Chapter 5
The U.S. and Iraq: American Bull in a Middle East China Shop
Clement M. Henry
It must be one of the
most humiliating periods in their history. Who would like to see their country
occupied? I would not like to see foreign tanks in Copacabana. – Sergio Vieira de Mello
The late Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN
Human Rights Commissioner who was also the United Nations’ top official in Iraq, understood that the
Anglo-American occupation of Iraq humiliates many Iraqis. Most Arabs identify with what they perceive
to be a dishonoring of the Arab world and hence of themselves as well. They scorn their own governments for having
demonstrated disunity and impotence in the face of American threats prior to
the invasion of Iraq.
Other non-Arab Muslims share a similar anger and frustration. As a
postwar cross-country survey of public opinion indicates, most of the Arab and
Muslim respondents, headed by 93 per cent of the Moroccans but also including
Turks, Indonesians, and Pakistanis, regretted that the Iraqi military had not
put up a better fight.[1]
The present chapter will focus upon the consequences of the
occupation of Iraq for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), defined
here as the area stretching from Morocco eastward to Iran and from Turkey south to the Sudan and the Arabian Peninsula.
The region includes the entire set of predominantly Arabic-speaking
peoples because what happens in any Arab state has an impact upon the other
peoples who share a common language and culture. Turkey, Iran, and Israel are also included because of their
intimate involvement with the internal politics of neighboring Iraq and other matters of concern to
the Arabs.
Saddam Hussein was perceived in most
of the MENA as an evil tyrant, but nationalism and state sovereignty take
precedence over the values of democracy and human rights that most Muslims and
Arabs (including Christians) also share.[2] The foreign invasion and occupation of an
Arab and/or Muslim country is viewed as a greater evil than any of those
committed by a sovereign state against its own people. Findings of the Pew survey taken in April and
May 2003 are suggestive; despite the fact that no Algerians, Egyptians,
Syrians, or Saudis were included. A full
85 per cent of the Palestinians and 80 per cent of the Jordanians, many of who
share Palestinian origins, thought that Iraqis were worse off without Saddam,
whereas 87 per cent of the Americans and over three-quarters of the West
Europeans and Israelis thought the Iraqis to be better off now without him.[3] Palestinian opinions might be explained in
part by their own experiences of foreign occupation, but what about the
Moroccans (53 per cent), not to mention the Pakistanis (60 per cent) and
Indonesians (67 per cent) on the borders of the MENA and beyond? Turkish opinion was more evenly divided but
45 per cent thought Iraqis were worse off whereas only 37 per cent thought they
were better off. And even in Lebanon half of the respondents thought
they were better off, but over one-third disagreed.
Foreign occupation probably rings
more alarm bells and brings back more bitter memories for most of the peoples
of the Middle East and North Africa than those living in other parts of the
developing world, although other lands stretching south of the Sahara and from Pakistan
to Indonesia of course also experienced it, as did parts of Latin America. Since 1798, when Napoleon occupied Egypt for three years, the MENA region
has been the principal arena in which great outside powers compete for
influence and hegemony.[4] By virtue of its proximity to Europe, its geopolitical location astride
three continents, and subsequently its major oil discoveries beginning with Iran in 1908, the region was the prime
target of European imperialisms.[5]
The French proceeded to occupy and colonize Algeria in 1830, Tunisia in 1881, and most of Morocco in 1912, leaving a small part for Spain.
The British occupied Egypt in 1882 and in various ways
extended their influence over the Sudan, the Persian Gulf, and much of Iran.
The Italians invaded Libya in 1911 and decimated its
populations after the First World War.
With the breakup of the Ottoman Empire as a result of the war, the British acquired control over Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine while the French took Lebanon and Syria.
In short, virtually the entire region had experienced some sort of
unwanted Western presence by the mid twentieth century, the only exceptions
being Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
The United States perhaps never quite crossed the
line between technical assistance and real control over Saudi Arabia, but Aramco, a company registered
in Delaware, ran its oil fields until 1990, and
the US government helped to establish much of its
accompanying state infrastructure. Many of these MENA peoples, including some
Saudis, resented what they perceived to be foreign domination.
It is hardly surprising, then, that
the right of self determination and national independence acquired or regained
by most of these countries after the Second World War should be so highly
valued, even at the expense of other human rights.[6] The other factor to keep in mind in assessing
the impact of the Iraq war on the region is the continuing
Israeli occupation of those parts of historic Palestine that were not already incorporated
into Israel in 1948.
Most of the MENA populations perceive Israel to be an outgrowth of British rule
that remains an outpost of Western imperialism, especially since its occupation
in 1967 of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The daily images shown in the spring and summer of 2003
on Al-Jazeera, other Arab networks, and CNN as well, constantly invite
comparisons between Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the Anglo-American Coalition’s
occupation of Iraq.
The responses, too, of the suicide bombings of the U.N. headquarters in Bagdad and the crowded bus in Jerusalem happened on the same day, August
19.
Before the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and indeed even before September
11, 2001,
the Bush Administration was already being perceived more as an accomplice of Israel repressing the Palestinians than as
an outside mediator. From the time he
took office, the president refused to receive Yasser Arafat, much less pursue
the Clinton Administration’s active mediation for a two-state solution to the
Palestinian problem. The new
Administration’s initial decision to step away from the problem, despite the
mounting toll of Palestinian and Israeli lives in 2001, was seen as at least
tacit support for Israel’s efforts to intensify the
repression. After 9/11, Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon, whom President Bush received a number of times, successfully
identified Israel’s suppression of Palestinian terrorism with the
Administration’s War on Terrorism and got away with invading and reoccupying
those densely populated parts of the West Bank that earlier Israeli governments
had evacuated in 1995 following the Oslo Accords of 1993. Despite President
Bush’s official support for an eventual Palestinian state announced at his
press conference of June 24, 2002, his Administration lost much of
any remaining credibility as a peace broker between the two sides. Neo-conservative “moral clarity” meant siding
fully with Israel.
Both Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel’s principal adversaries in the
occupied territories and in Lebanon, respectively, were included on America’s official list of international
terrorist organizations. Ignoring any
distinctions that Palestinians and other Arabs made between terrorism and
national liberation movements, President Bush even ordered a freeze on the
funds of the political wing of Hamas, including related charities outside the United States.
Meanwhile the United States continued to insist that the
Palestinian Authority crack down on all terrorist activity but appeared less
insistent on the Israelis sticking to their obligations under the “Roadmap” for
peace. The devil lay in the details, which were not clearly spelled out:
As comprehensive security
performance moves forward, IDF withdraws progressively from areas occupied
since September 28, 2000
and the two sides restore the status quothat existed prior to September 28, 2000. Palestinian
security forces redeploy to areas vacated by IDF.[7]
To implement its security
obligations, the Palestinian Authority needed to see Israeli actions, such as
withdrawing their soldiers from areas densely populated by Palestinians, a stop
to the building of the wall around and including parts of the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem, bypass
roads, and settlements, removing existing settlements, eliminating checkpoints,
etc. Yet the Israelis were unwilling to engage in more than cosmetic gestures
until Palestinian actions convinced them that the Authority would really crack
down on the suicide bombers’ infrastructures.
The Palestinians and other Arab observers blame the Bush Administration
for its impossible situation. Many Israelis agree: 47 per cent of those
included in the Pew Survey believed that the United States favors Israel over the Palestinians too much while 38 per cent think the US is
fair and 11 per cent find it too tilted toward the Palestinians.[8] As of May-June 2003, before the blows to the
peace process in August, most Arab and Muslim opinion was already skeptical of
the viability of any two-state solution although two-thirds of the Israelis
(and almost as many Palestinians living inside Israel)
still believed in one.[9]
Had the United States appeared more even-handed to Arab and Muslim public opinion in the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict before going to war against Iraq, the
efforts to “liberate” Iraq from Saddam’s tyranny might have met less universal hostility.
Before the war public opinion in the region tended to view the Bush
Administration’s preoccupation with Iraq as
being primarily about oil and defending Israel
against its most serious potential adversary, rather than about weapons of mass
destruction, imagined links with Al Qaida, or a concern for Iraqi human rights
and liberties. And once the United States and Britain defied the majority of the UN Security Council by going to war
after failing to obtain a second resolution, they were guilty in most Arab and
Muslim eyes of violating the principle of national sovereignty without any
legitimate excuse. In this respect
public opinion in the region largely converged with that of the West Europeans,
but it was more critical of the conduct of the war and skeptical of American
efforts to avoid civilian casualties.[10]
Despite the anger and widespread
sense of humiliation, the peoples of the MENA have been remarkably quiescent
since the U.S. invasion in March 2003. None
of the expected major street demonstrations happened in the Arab world against
local governments aligned with the United States, and no regime was seriously threatened in other ways despite some
isolated acts of terrorism in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco,
and Saudi Arabia. Jordan’s
regime, headed by a young untested king and native English- speaker in a
country inhabited by a majority of Palestinian origins, was perhaps the most
vulnerable in the region. Yet the
parliamentary elections postponed since 2001 were finally held in June 17, 2003. Effectively screened beforehand, the winning candidates were with
few exceptions loyal, conservative local notables, assisted by an electoral
system that over represented rural tribal areas at the expense of the cities
with their Islamist and liberal oppositions.
The Islamic Action Front fielded only 30 candidates for the 110 seats
being contested and won 17, while the National Democratic Bloc, consisting of
leftist and nationalist opposition figures, failed to win a single seat.[11] Although low by Jordanian standards, the
58.8 per cent participation rate was high by American ones. In short, barely two months after the war,
the pro-American monarchy appeared strengthened, overcoming any tensions
between its international alliances and an angry public opinion that must have
been aware of the use of Jordan’s western desert as a staging area for US
Special Forces infiltrating Iraq. The
monarchy proved that it could practice electoral democracy to the satisfaction
of its American champions.
So also, for that matter, did the Republic of Yemen. Parliamentary elections held on April 27, 2003, limited Islah, Yemen’s Islamist party, to 46 out of 301 seats as the ruling party
“increasingly limits political space” and the regime “skilfully has portrayed
its cooperation with Washington as a success in forestalling a preemptive invasion of Yemen and
as necessary to attract foreign aid and investment.”[12]
However strong the drift of public
opinion in the MENA against the United States, perhaps, as Daniel Brumberg observes, “the more prosaic reality is
that most Middle Eastern states are too preoccupied with their own domestic
problems to be moved profoundly by events in Iraq.” [13] But the invasion of Iraq put
great strains on the most important US allies in the region, notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. The Arab governments proactively controlled any
popular demonstrations, lest they get out of hand. In Egypt,
for instance, “thousands of Egyptian riot police squeezed some 500
demonstrators into a corner” on the day in February 2003 when millions were
demonstrating throughout the world, including in New York City,
against the impending war on Iraq.[14] Even in distant Algeria,
with its major domestic preoccupations of civil strife and economic misery, the
regime was interested in warmer relations with the United States. It contained any potential
fallout from Iraq by permitting a fringe leftist party to hold a meeting opposing the
war in an enclosed room attended by few people.
The authorities discouraged any other manifestations about Iraq but
did permit a two-day general strike in February 2003, just four weeks before
the war, to let off steam about economic grievances. Algerians were privately very upset about
what was happening to Iraq but were not free publicly to voice their concerns in mass
demonstrations.
In most countries with closer ties
to the United States, especially those that were geographically closer to Iraq, the
tensions were greater. Egypt
tried to placate its public by encouraging the Arab League to take strong
positions against the war and subsequently by engaging in efforts with Saudi Arabia and Syria to reorganize the League to make it more effective. As Mohamed Sid-Ahmed observed, the creation
of an Iraqi Provisional Council produced an ambivalent reaction: “Although the Arab League
issued a statement describing it as a step in the right direction, it has also
stated that it would not recognise an administrative body in Iraq that derives its
legitimacy from the occupier.”[15] Egyptian foreign policy reflected the same
ambivalence, endorsing Security Council 1500 that “welcomed” but refused to
“endorse” this body appointed by and subordinate to Iraq’s Coalition Provisional
Authority. Publicly Egypt also tried for the sake
of domestic public opinion to put the best face on American efforts to keep Israel as well as the
Palestinians on the Roadmap to peace.
As the peace process collapses once
again, countries near the front lines of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict may
be less able to keep Iraq out of their domestic politics.
Opinion in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria is probably more sensitive to what is happening in the
Israeli-occupied territories than in Iraq, but
Islamist oppositions can play upon these concerns and also find useful support
in occupied Iraq, outside the reach of their own police states. The occupation has attracted a variety of
trans-national Islamist adversaries that may now use Iraq as
well as Afghanistan and some outlying regions of Pakistan
as refuges and bases from which to plan further attacks. The American identification of Saddam with Al
Qaida became a self-fulfilling prophecy after the invasion removed Saddam’s
border guards and secular police state protection against the Islamists. The invasion and occupation, too, have had
the effect of polarizing regimes and Islamist oppositions in the regime, to the
detriment of moderating trends on both sides.
Further from occupied Palestine, Turkey, Iran, and
the Arab Gulf states are more directly concerned with Iraq. Crown Prince Abdullah tried before the war to
render Saudi Arabia’s military connections with the United States less visible so as to appease public opinion inside the
kingdom. The US
command center (CENTCOM) was moved to neighboring Qatar, a
country almost the size of Connecticut whose 120,000 local inhabitants were unlikely to pose
problems. The Saudis also resumed a
political reform process, promised in 1962 and finally triggered by the
American military intrusion of 1990-91 into Saudi Arabia. The Consultative Council,
introduced in 1992, was now gradually to be upgraded, perhaps, into a partially
elected parliament. Meanwhile followers of Bin Laden attacked three expatriate
apartment compounds with car bombings in Riyad, and Al-Qaeda could well be
gaining new recruits among the Saudi youth, especially among the religiously
educated unemployed. Islamic networks
were apparently infiltrating Iraq from
Saudi Arabia as well as Iran and Syria.
Radical Islamic politics were perhaps of less concern to the
smaller municipal kingdoms of the Arab
Gulf, such as Bahrain,
but events in Iraq
could destabilize them more than the Iranian Revolution did in the early
1980s. Bahrain’s
population is over two-thirds Shi’ite yet politically disempowered by the Sunni
rulers. Were the Shi’ite majority in Iraq
to be empowered, the impact could encourage the Bahraini majority and
minorities in Kuwait
and Saudi Arabia
to become more politically active.
The other
important American ally in the region, Turkey,
has a heavy stake in Iraq’s
future as a united country. A Kurdish secession could exacerbate Turkey’s
own Kurdish problem and risk renewed conflict between Turkomen and Kurds on Turkey’s
southern borders, possibly provoking further incursions of Turkish troops. The new Turkish government headed by Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan finessed American requests to open a northern
front in Iraq passing through Turkey by appealing to parliament. As a result, his country lost promises of
substantial American economic assistance but gained good will among the
Europeans needed to support its eventual entry into the European Community.
Turkish public opinion, however, tends to oppose the American-led War on
Terrorism as well as the occupation of Iraq,
the United States
and has not broken off military ties with Israel.[16]
Its democratic institutions have successfully contained the various counter
pressures. The Americans had to respect
the will of the Turkish parliament not to let a second Iraqi front pass through
Turkey. But to assist the US, the Turkish government
was preparing in September 2003 to send 12,000 troops to bolster the occupation
forces in Iraq, but it was also awaiting a third UN Security Council resolution
to legitimate their status in the eyes of domestic as well as international
(non-American) public opinion (please
update).
The Arab
countries enjoy none of the shock absorbers of Turkish democracy. In fact Rami Khouri, a Jordanian journalist,
poked fun at the Egyptian foreign minister for insisting that any new Iraqi
authority be elected for it to be recognized by Egypt
or the Arab League. The underlying tone
is bitter:
Foreign armies stomp around our countries, true sovereignty is
becoming an increasingly notional and limited concept in more and more Arab
countries, extremist ideas spread more rapidly among our youth, violence
against Arab and foreign targets become routine in our societies, foreign
powers coolly experiment with plans to re-engineer Arab governance systems, and
the Arab-Islamic heartland is identified and targeted as the wellspring of
global terror. To respond to this mainly by rejecting the governing council in Iraq and
calling ephemerally for joint Arab action is a display of reactive negativism
and romanticism that is unworthy of the dignity of the Arab people in whose
name the governments speak.[17]
In his column the following week
Rami Khouri noted that the most impressive display of Arab democracy to date
was a contest for the most popular Arab singer:
the Palestinian beat the Syrian by a close 52 % to 48% vote with 4
million voting over the internet, the only activity open to civic minded
citizens in the Arab world in August 2003.[18]
More ominously, for virtually every
state in the region, the big fear is that Iraq, now
that the tyrant’s hand over its ethnic and religious differences has been
removed could become another Lebanon. The ethnic and sectarian rivalries already
extant in Iraq, compounded by the interests of outside parties, could produce
in that country a multidimensional conflict comparable to Lebanon, a formerly
“consensual” democracy. Certainly removing
Saddam has produced a political vacuum drawing across Iraq’s
now porous borders, of various Sunni as well as Shi’ite clerics and
politicians, Iraqi exiles, and militants from other Arab countries.
The Iranians, for example, are already involved in domestic Iraqi
Shi’a politics. The spiritual centers of Karbala
and Najaf in Iraq
are as holy to Iranians as they are to Shi’ite Iraqis. Clerics have returned from exile in Iran,
where Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim had founded the Supreme Council for the
Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). (Like other major Iraqi Shi’ite figures,
the ayatollah insists that his loyalties were to Iraqi Shi’ites. In fact, his brother, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim,
was a member of the Iraqi Governing Council.) Not all Shi’ites may have the
same goals. The Iranian revolutionary
hardliners wish more radical elements to prevail in Iraq. Others in Iran may hope that Iraq remain
destabilized as long as possible, keeping the Americans occupied and less ready
to hunt out weapons of mass destruction in Iran.
With Saddam gone, one should note, the clerics
generally have a major impact on public opinion in Iraq
because they monopolize the public stage in the absence of other institutions.
However, they are not of one mind. The largely conservative Iraqi leadership
wishes to protect religion from politics and avoid the mistakes of the Iranian
revolution. The more radical factions,
such as the one led by Moqtada al-Sadr, may enjoy a tactical advantage, as they
are more ready than the conservative majority to use their pulpits for purposes
of political mobilization. At this
writing, a majority of Iraqis still hesitate to follow the radicals who are
attempting to unite the various secular and Islamic political forces against
the foreign occupation.
The potential significance of Iraqi
nationalism and resentment against U.S.
foreign occupation, however, should not be underestimated. The moderate majority will be successful only
if there is a clear-cut timetable for the rapid restoration of Iraqi
sovereignty and the conversion, in any interim period, of occupying forces into
a United Nations peacekeeping operation. It is a situation, however, that
offers radical minorities a tactical advantage. Their actions can discourage
the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi Governing Council from taking
the necessary decisive actions to restore Iraqi sovereignty. The paradox of trying to impose democracy
upon a society that a tyranny has fragmented and atomized is that the national
community cannot be restored without democratic institutions yet these in turn
depend upon a state that the occupiers have destroyed.
The attempt to impose “regime
change” and democracy on Iraq by
military invasion and occupation, as suggested earlier, also poses problems of
legitimacy for those Iraqis who are engaged in attempts at democracy
building. Initiatives of the Coalition
Provisional Authority, such as the naming of an Iraqi Governing Council, are
widely perceived as illegitimate. But
even if the issues surrounding military occupation could somehow be
circumvented, Iraq would appear to be one of the less promising candidates in the
region for instant democratization.
Saddam Hussein destroyed virtually all elements of civil society. The middle classes have suffered over two
decades of wars and sanctions, and the country’s educational system has vastly
deteriorated, leaving an adult illiteracy rate of 60 per cent, higher than Morocco’s.[19] Iraq’s history of parliamentary elections and
constitutional pluralism was briefer than that of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and
Morocco, countries in the region that enjoy better prospects for
democratization. Any recipe for restructuring Iraq
along democratic lines is bound to require a lengthy tutelage. But any prolonged foreign presence,
especially an American one, is more likely to foster a national front of
liberation than democratic institutions preserving checks and balances.
The invasion of Iraq has
also rendered the cause of political reform more problematic in the rest of the
region. The incumbent regimes share an
interest with the United
States in political
stability, not democracy, and further openings to public opinion may only
engage governments in policies counter to the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq,
inviting American reprisals. The only
democracy that supports American goals is Israel,
and the apparent complicity between the two states further embarrasses the
other US allies in the region and enrages their public opinions. Under these conditions it is difficult to see
how any American programs can bear much fruit in the region, whether the
strategy is to encourage better governance for the sake of economic development
or to encourage political contestation more directly. Multilateral initiatives, such as the United
Nations Development Programme’s Program for Governance in the Arab Region, are
more acceptable in the region.
Neither a resumption of the peace
process between Israel and the Palestinians nor an international umbrella to cover or
legitimate the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq
appears imminent. It looks instead as
though Iraq is rapidly becoming a new Lebanon
for the United States. And like Lebanon
in the 1980s, Iraq in this decade may distract international and American attention
from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and again relieve Israel of
any significant pressures to make significant concessions to the
Palestinians. The region is then likely
to experience ever more violence. By aggravating the conditions that produce
them, Bush’s “war on terror,” in short, seems only to be breeding more
trans-national terrorists targeting the United States.
Notes
[1] Respectively 91, 82, 82, 82, 81 and 74 per
cent of those surveyed in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Indonesia, Palestine, and
Pakistan were disappointed about the lack of Iraqi military resistance; only in
Kuwait, among the Muslim countries included in the survey, were the
disappointed ones in the minority (29 per cent, compared to 61 per cent who
were happy about the lack of resistance).
Opinion in most of the other countries surveyed, such as Germany,
Israel, and Canada,
was overwhelmingly relieved, although pluralities of the Russians (45 per cent)
and the Brazilians (50 per cent) were disappointed, as were a substantial
minority (30 per cent) of the French.
The survey of nearly 16,000 people, undertaken in April and May, 2003,
included 20 countries and the Palestinians living in the West Bank
and Gaza. See The Pew Global Attitudes Project, Views of a Changing World June 2003, The
Pew Research Center For The People & The Press, August 21, 2003,
http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/185.pdf
[2] Majorities of up to 83 per cent of Muslim
peoples included in the Pew survey responded that “democracy can work here”
rather than rejecting it as a “Western way.”
Only in Indonesia
did the responses tip in the other direction, 41 per cent favoring and 53 per
cent rejecting democracy. Interestingly
only 50 per cent of the Turks thought it could work, despite the fact that Turkey
has a relatively more consolidated democracy than other Muslim countries.
[3] See:
http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/185.pdf.
[4] Carl L. Carl, International Politics
and the Middle East: Old Rules, Dangerous Game (Princeton University Press, 1984).
[5] See Alasdair Drysdale and Gerald H. Blake, The
Middle East
and North Africa:
A Political Geography
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985),
23-26.
[6] For a careful explanation of these
priorities, see Mohammed Al-Sayyid Said, “The War and Human Rights, or Why We
Oppose the War Against Iraq,”
The Cairo Center for Human Rights Studies (in Arabic, written shortly before
the United States
launched the war), August 1, 2003,
http://www.cinhrs/FOCUS/war%20and%20rights.htrm
[7] See
White House, A
Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, April
30, 2003,
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2003/20062.htm
[8] See: http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/185.pdf.
[10] The
French, however, were as skeptical as the Lebanese, with 74 per cent claiming
the Americans did not try hard enough to avoid civilian casualties. Skeptical
opinion ranged in the MENA, except Kuwait,
from 88 per cent in Turkey
to 97 per cent in Jordan. See:
http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/185.pdf
[11] “Elections mark return to democracy : IAF
confined to 17 seats, women limited to 6-seat quota: High voter turnout in
provinces at expense of capital,” Jordan
Star, June 19, 2003,
http://star.arabia.com/article/0,5596,282_8847,00.html
[12] Amy
Hawthorne, “Yemen's
Elections: No Islamist Backlash,” Arab
Democracy Bulletin 1 (June 2003).
[13] Daniel
Brumberg, “The Middle East’s Muffled Signals,” Foreign Policy (July/August 2003), 63.
[14] Asef Bayat, “The ‘Street’ and the Politics of
Dissent in the Arab World,” Middle East
Report 226 (spring 2003), 15. As a
consequence of proactive police tactics, dissent takes on new forms, such as
cyber campaigns to boycott American products and pop star protest songs,
leading to arrests of web designers and bans on songs.
[15] Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, “Re-reading the Iraq war,” Al-Ahram Weekly, August 21 – 27, 2003,
Issue No.
652.
[16] Only 22
per cent of the Turks surveyed in 2003 support the war, compared to 30 per cent
in 2002. See Pew, Op.cit., 28.
[17] Rami
Khouri, “A View from the Arab World,” Beirut, Lebanon,
August 13, 2003, 1
[19] The World Bank’s World Development Indicators 2001 indicated an adult (over 15 years
old) illiteracy rate of 45% in 1999, the same as Egypt’s. But the online (August 29, 2003) World
Development Indicators Database gives rates of 61 and 46%, respectively,
for the year 1999 and 60 and 43% for 2002.
See: http://devdata.worldbank.org/data-query/