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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.

[9] Ibid.

[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

[18] Ibid.

[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/