The Great Betrayal in the title of Lebanese-born American professor of international relations Fawaz A Gerges’s new book refers to the continued failure of western and Arab elites to grant the people of the Middle East the freedom they have craved since the 19th century.
Time and again, flickers of hope of a freer, more prosperous future have been extinguished – a fate that Gerges traces to an exploitative clientelist system put in place in colonial times and which has continued in familiar, if slightly altered, fashion in the post-independence era.
Western powers’ presence in the region was both opportunistic and expedient, taking advantage of the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of the first World War, and the Arab quest for freedom which resulted in Arab armies, under the Hashemite King Faisal, fighting with the Allies in the same conflict.
The British, having already moved into Egypt, with a pliant King Farouk installed, set up similar arrangements in the Levant, as did the French. The post-settlement mandate system allowed both the UK and France to honour Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination, while maintaining control of a strategically important region without the need for a large military contingent. It was a system that was imperialist in everything but name and was resented as such by the natives, fuelling resentment, not just of the British but also of the local elites that administered the states.
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The Great Betrayal: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in the Middle East by Fawaz A Gerges – engaging read for seasoned observers
The system would echo throughout the postcolonial era. Decolonisation, as Gerges says, did not usher in freedom from foreign intervention, with the French and British continuing to meddle, and also the United States and the Soviet Union, who both exploited the regional fissures, propping up increasingly brutish dictators in return for “stability” in their interest. The rottenness of the arrangements would also do lasting damage to the reputation of liberal democracy among Arab peoples.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917, which occurred in the slipstream of the Ottoman break-up, also fed into resentment among Arabs, and is, as Gerges suggests, responsible for the enduring popularity of conspiracy theories in the region.
First, the client states established by the British in Egypt, until 1952, and in the various British and French mandates in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria vitiated the public respect for parliamentary democracy, viewed as it was as an ineffectual figleaf for a corrupt system. Later, under the Arab strongmen of the postcolonial era, secularism took a similar battering in the eyes of the public.
It didn’t help that the very secular strongmen from time to time cultivated as it suited them Islamists to see off left-wing opposition. Such was the case in Sadat and Mubarak’s Egypt and also in Boumédiène’s Algeria, a foolish cynicism that would later bring blowback in each country and which was replicated in the Israeli security establishment’s nurturing of Hamas as a rival to Fatah from 1987 on.
The arbitrary drawing-up of states, such as Syria and Iraq, by the Sykes-Picot agreement, on formerly Ottoman holdings – purely to benefit French and British interests – also created communities of competing ethnicities who found themselves on the wrong side of a border that had never previously existed. These would, post-independence, be exploited in turn by figures such as Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar, and Saddam Hussein, to keep a lid on restive populations.
Gerges foresees a multipolar world determining the future of the region, where the less moralising approach of both Russia and China is likely to land somewhat better among Arab peoples than the American sermons that are not backed up by deeds
But it is for the ruinous short-sightedness of US policy in the Middle East that Gerges reserves particular scorn. This arose initially in efforts to rein in regional nationalists who were a bit too friendly with the Soviets (such as Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, whom MI6 and the CIA helped overthrow in 1953), and also propping up the young state of Israel (though it is also true that Washington was considerably less indulgent of Israel in the decades before the Islamic Republic of Iran became a serious regional player).
After struggling to bring Gamal Abdel Nasser to heel throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the US cultivated relationships with Egyptian presidents Anwar Sadat (getting him on board with normalising relations with Israel in 1978) and Hosni Mubarak, lavishing Cairo with tens of billions of military aid over decades, while living standards in the country declined and popular discontent festered. Support for the Shah of Iran’s bloody rule also paved the way for a dark regime of a different stripe to take hold in Tehran thanks to popular rancour. Saddam was another dictator nurtured, until he miscalculated by invading Kuwait in 1990.
It would, of course, be the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the encapsulating “War on Terror”, that would do lasting damage to America’s reputation in the region. It was perceived, Gerges says, as Washington declaring war on the entire Arab world. It would also spiral into disaster for the region, resulting in the rise of Islamist insurgents in Iraq, who later morphed into the Islamic State under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and an increasing Iranian influence in the region. The Biden administration’s support for Israel as it pummelled Gaza with unremitting cruelty, while Washington condemned Russian aggression in Ukraine, has most likely forever discredited the lofty words of western governments in the Middle East.
Gerges has stirring faith in the people of the Arab world, never giving into despair. As someone from a Christian Arab background who has written a number of studies of jihadist groups, including al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, he might be forgiven for sinking into pessimism, but he refuses any facile theories of historical inevitability and gives short shrift to the notion popular in the West, and among certain Arab elites, that Arab peoples, and Muslims in general, are not suited to democracy or functioning societies.
Gerges pushes back at the notion that the Arab Spring failed, asserting instead that it is not yet over. It has, rather, weathered a couple of setbacks after its initial waves, one in 2011–2103 and the next in 2018–2019; he insists it will eventually bear fruit. The eventual downfall of the Assad regime last December is the first sign that he may be right. (The Great Betrayal was completed before the Syrian opposition took Damascus. I don’t know whether Gerges considered adding a postscript to reflect it, though he may have considered it prudent not to make any premature judgments.)
Even as the past 15 years have been marked by sectarian killings across the region, Gerges also sees a post-sectarian generation growing up in the 21st century in the Middle East, who, he predicts, will fill the vacuum left by the dominant ideologies, Arab nationalism and political Islam. An ultimately successful campaign, predating the Arab Spring, by young people in Gerges’s native Lebanon to give people the right to remove their religious affiliation from their national identity card is an embodiment of this spirit.
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Nonetheless, he acknowledges that the formal Arab opposition is a mirror image of the existing despotic order: illiberal and insular, and it tends to be able to quickly out-organise and outpace liberals and progressives, just as the Islamists in Iran did following the 1979 revolution. For progressive elements to gain the upper hand will take time, he says, requiring the “conceptualisation and institutionalisation” of such a post-sectarian identity.
Gerges foresees a multipolar world determining the future of the region, where the less moralising approach of both Russia and China is likely to land somewhat better among Arab peoples than the American sermons that are not backed up by deeds. Gerges is wary of the Russians, given their bloody role in putting down the Syrian rebellion, though he gives far too much credit to China for its supposed support of the Palestinians – in reality, this support is fine talk as much as the Americans’ advocacy of human rights is, and Beijing shows no signs of giving up its lucrative investments in Israel’s security sector.
In fairness to Gerges, though, he does acknowledge that the hands-off approaches of both Russia and China are likely to embolden regional dictators as much as US support did in the past. It is fair to say that things are likely to get worse before they’ll get better.
The Great Betrayal is a fine, if not exactly essential book. It is a collection of thematics rather than a close study of any particular country or era. Some countries – Egypt, Syria and Iraq in particular – are given greater consideration than others. There are only occasional forays to the Maghreb, if only to illustrate points, and hardly anything is said about Saudi Arabia or the Gulf, with only Yemen given extensive treatment on the Arabian peninsula.
Perhaps Gerges deems the petro-autocracies as lost causes for Arab freedom (there is not a single mention of Jamal Khashoggi in a brief passage on Mohammed bin Salman). And while Gerges makes his broader argument with conviction, the scope is perhaps too broad, and the prose a bit dry, for it to appeal to the general reader. More seasoned observers of the region will find this an engaging read if not a source of anything particularly new.
Further reading
Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations by Avi Shlaim (Verso, 2009)
A fine collection of essays and reflections by the esteemed British-Israeli historian on the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians, ranging from the Balfour Declaration to the 2008 Gaza invasion. Clear-sighted and critical of some of Israeli society’s founding myths, this volume also features a reflection on his friend, the late Edward Said.
The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East by Juan Cole (Simon & Schuster, 2014)
Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan, studies the generation of Arabs that propelled many countries in the region to revolt in 2011. Replete with extensive interviews and research on the youth movements of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, it is a book as indispensable for sociologists as it will be for contemporary historians, suffused with a sense of hope that the intervening years have not quite snuffed out.
The Return by Hisham Matar (Penguin, 2016)
Libyan-born British writer Matar’s Pulitzer-winning memoir about his return to Libya after the fall of Gaddafi to find out more about the 1990 abduction, from the family home in Cairo, of his dissident father, whom he never saw again. A moving tale of love and loss that reads like a thriller, especially in one encounter with Saif al-Islam Gaddafi in a London hotel, and it unfolds against the backdrop of post-revolution Libya’s collapse into chaos.
