Since World War II, there has been halting but nonetheless significant progress toward establishing democratic, constitutional regimes in many areas of the globe. One region, however, stands out as a glaring exception to the general picture of the gradual spread of democratic systems worldwide. This region is the Middle East, which for nearly half a century has been an almost universally bleak desert as far as the development of vibrant, full-fledged democratic systems is concerned. The very few exceptions to this rule are themselves hedged around with conditions.1 All that has seemed to thrive in recent years in this vast zone of undemocratic governance stretching from the Atlantic to the Caucasus and the frontiers of Pakistan and Afghanistan have been autocracies, kleptocracies, absolute monarchies, and other forms of despotic and authoritarian rule, some covered with a transparent fig-leaf of sham “democratic” forms.
Indeed, in some respects the situation is palpably worse today in many Middle Eastern countries than it was in the 1940s and 1950s, when various forms of parliamentary democracy, albeit marred by significant flaws in each case, obtained in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran, as well as in Turkey and Israel. At that time, it appeared as if countries in the Middle East might have the possibility of continuing to evolve toward more democratic forms of governance. That has certainly not been the case in the intervening decades down to the present. By contrast, many areas of Latin America, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and even some parts of Africa, all of which were bywords for arbitrary, or autocratic, or otherwise undemocratic governance for the first decades of the postindependence period after 1945, are today characterized by new and often thriving democracies, reinforced by economic growth, the expansion of new middle classes, and the growing maturity of constitutional institutions.
With little or no serious historical or other scholarly underpinning, a plethora of commentaries purport to ascribe the undemocratic nature of most current Middle Eastern regimes to something inherent in Islam, the predominant religion in the region. These ahistorical, essentialist, and occasionally borderline-racist theories (of the genre “Muslims are incapable of …”) are belied by the growth of democracy, albeit often in a troubled fashion, in large majority-Muslim countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Nigeria. They are belied as well by the lengthy history of struggles for democracy and constitutionalism in Middle Eastern countries between the latter part of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth. These go back to the Ottoman constitutional periods from 1876 to 1878 and 1908 to 1918; the struggle between the autocratic Egyptian khedive and an assembly that insisted on more power in the 1870s and until 1882; and the first Iranian constitutional period from 1905 to 1911. While none of these efforts were ultimately successful, they reveal the attraction of democratic and constitutional ideals for the elites and many of the people of this region. These struggles to achieve more democratic governance continued under the sometimes unstable parliamentary regimes that lasted in more than a half-dozen Middle Eastern countries for many decades during the twentieth century. Very rarely, if ever, over the years down to World War II did the European great powers use their influence in favor of democracy or constitutionalism in these countries. They often did quite the opposite, subverting democracy, aligning with autocrats, and preventing free expression of public opinion.2 Notwithstanding all of this evidence for the compatibility of democracy with Islamic societies, and the establishment, albeit sometimes temporary and sometimes checkered, of democratic systems in the Middle East over several generations since the 1870s, there clearly is a serious problem today where democracy is concerned in most of that region.
In some measure, that problem has to do with some of the well-known obstacles to democratic governance: much of the Middle East is certainly affected by having powerful states with a tradition of strong rulers; elites loath to give up their privileges or their control of the political system; high levels of poverty and illiteracy in some sectors in certain countries; and weak political parties, unions, and professional associations. In an earlier era, the Middle East also suffered from the constant interference of European powers, some of which, like absolutist tsarist Russia, were ideologically opposed to democracy in any form, and all of which tended to undermine democratic regimes whenever these obstructed their economic or strategic interests. In the case of the Middle East, a region that was subject to a very high degree of such external intervention, this was a particular problem for the Ottoman and Persian constitutional experiments and for democratic governance in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and a number of Middle Eastern countries thereafter. These and other specific obstacles certainly prevented greater progress toward democracy before World War II, and have done so again over the past sixty-five years.
Like most historians, I hesitate to offer a single explanation for a multidimensional problem like the retarded growth of democracy in a region as vast and varied as the Middle East over so long a period. Nevertheless, it is worth considering whether the Cold War, which I have tried to show in preceding chapters played a particularly important role in the Middle East, may have been a factor that contributed to this bleak situation. For the Cold War was only another episode in this region’s recent history of being a target for external intervention, which rendered it, to use L. Carl Brown’s term once again, a highly “penetrated” system for more than two hundred years.3 And as I showed in the previous chapter, the Cold War seriously exacerbated the conflicts that erupted in that region between 1945 and 1990. This in turn intensified the wars that scarred the Middle East during most of this period, and that still persist there.
Often these conflicts and the wars they engendered have been described as if they were sui generis, as if they were all age-old, particularly complex, and particularly resistant to analysis in terms of standard categories. Even cursory examination shows that this is simply not the case: the Iran-Iraq and Arab-Israeli conflicts, to take the two most prominent examples, far from having been ongoing since time immemorial, are essentially products of the twentieth century. The fact that the current protagonists (for complex reasons having to do with the obsessive need of modern nationalisms to manufacture ancient roots) quite arbitrarily choose to look back to Abraham and Moses, the Jebusites and the Israelites, the Sassanians and the Umayyads, and the Safavids and the Ottomans in framing their disputes does not make this any less the case, or these far-fetched parallels any more correct. For all their undoubted complexity, these and most other conflicts in the region, like that over the western Sahara, or between Libya and Chad, or in Sudan or the Horn of Africa, or those involving the Kurds or Lebanon, are essentially common, garden-variety outcomes of colonization, the arbitrary drawing of boundaries by the colonial powers, the decolonization process, and the rise of nation-state nationalism. Similar conflicts, with similar roots, can be found in every region of the formerly colonized world.
Moreover, Middle Eastern countries have witnessed precisely the same processes whereby war has led to the strengthening of the executive authority at the expense of other branches of government and at the expense of the citizenry and its rights, which is well known to have operated in countries in other regions. For examples, one need only think of the governments of Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau in World War I, or of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill during World War II, or of George W. Bush after September 11, 2001. Of the Middle East, as of any other region of the world, one can say with James Madison that “war is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.”4 If this is true in countries with old and well-established constitutional systems like Britain, the United States, and France, it is all the more the case in the Middle East, where there is such a strong tradition of powerful executive authority, a tradition that stretches back to the very first states and empires in human history, established there well over six millennia ago. So in the wars and nagging conflicts that have afflicted this region since World War II, wars whose flames I have shown in the preceding chapter were often fanned by the superpowers in their heated competition with each other, and that reinforced an already strong tradition of executive monopolization of power, we have one possible cause of the retardation of the spread of democracy in the Middle East over the past sixty years or so. There were other causes.
In his perceptive analysis of the Cold War in the third world, historian Odd Arne Westad describes the core motivations that drove the efforts of the United States and the Soviet Union in their global endeavors and in their competition with each other as the quests for “liberty” and “justice,” respectively.5 Thus, Westad argues, the United States saw itself as leading an “Empire of Liberty,” self-described as the “free world,” while the USSR claimed that it led an “Empire of Justice,” self-described as the “socialist camp.” By this he meant that each proclaimed that in its global policies it was seeking to represent and spread these core ideals. For Americans, according to Westad, spreading liberty meant above all things fostering private enterprise and individual freedom, and the conditions for maximizing these freedoms. For Soviet ideologists, the extension of justice meant essentially progress toward social justice and freedom from economic exploitation. For each, other ideals and rights were entirely secondary to these core goals.
In their competition in the third world, the two superpowers were in some measure faithful to their core ideals, as they understood them. The United States saw as its primary task keeping developing countries from succumbing to the blandishments of communism and thus being excluded from the free-market system, which it saw as the sine qua non of true liberty. “Freedom” in the American lexicon thus meant primarily a free-market economic system, freedom to choose, freedom to consume, markets that were freely accessible to American manufactured goods, the free production of primary products that the advanced industrial economies needed, and American freedom to invest the world over, and to repatriate the profits of such investment. In general, American policymakers had concluded, such policy goals were best achieved by alignment with the wealthy local elites in these developing countries.
The Cold War was not the first time American decision-makers had recited such a free-market mantra abroad. The same principles had earlier been espoused by the United States in its relations with the countries of the Caribbean and Latin America, and they found an echo in the “open door” policy of the United States toward China. The antecedent of these American ideas, of course, was the espousal of free trade by Great Britain over the centuries when its global dominance in the fields of finance capital, trade, and industry meant that “free trade” necessarily translated into considerable advantage for British economic interests, and was a pillar of the hegemony of the liberal British Empire.6 Even before the United States achieved comparable ascendance in these fields, American business elites perceived the advantage this form of freedom would give their interests, especially in small or weak countries.
In the period antecedent to World War II, in spite of occasional lip service to the need to promote democracy in the world, neither Great Britain nor the United States had interpreted this doctrine to mean that they were necessarily obliged to make strenuous efforts where democracy in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America was concerned. Unspoken, but just beneath the surface, was the belief that the world’s darker peoples were not “fit” for democracy, at least not without lengthy supervision by their richer, whiter, and more powerful big brethren. Such thinking lay behind the Mandate system for former colonies of the defeated powers championed by Woodrow Wilson after World War I and incorporated into Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which stated that the “tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to the advanced nations.”7
By contrast, the Soviet Union worked diligently to encourage socialism and other redistributive approaches to the economy in the developing countries under its influence as a means of reducing social inequalities. “Justice” for the Soviets meant the end of European colonialism and economic exploitation by the Western capitalist economies, the end of exploitation by the local upper classes in the poor countries of the third world, and a just distribution of resources. All of this, Soviet doctrine taught, could best be achieved through the leadership of the working classes, themselves led by communist parties obedient to the wishes of the first socialist state, the Soviet Union.8 In the absence of such parties, or where they were suppressed, the USSR eventually tried to align itself with forces or regimes at least nominally committed to these goals. This abandonment of a strict reliance on disciplined, obedient Communists to advance this “justice” agenda was begun reluctantly and hesitantly at first, and with many tergiversations, under Stalin.9 Soviet support of the Chinese Nationalists in the late 1920s was one of the first examples of this shift. It was later continued with somewhat fewer inhibitions under Stalin’s successors, as with the exception of East and Southeast Asia it became apparent that there were very few regions in the developing world where communist parties had any chance of coming to power.10
Whatever else one might say about the superpowers, and whatever else they may have claimed, both of them did strive to uphold their core values of liberty and justice, as they understood them, as long as this did not interfere with their other goals. It is important to recognize, however, that throughout the Cold War neither the goal of “liberty” nor that of “justice,” as American and Soviet policymakers interpreted these terms, included a core commitment to the promotion in the third world of democracy per se, or of human and other rights. This was the case although both claimed to be paragons of democracy at home and in their alliances in Europe (with the “free world” on one side of the iron curtain, and “people’s democracies” on the other), and although both occasionally used the language of rights, which in the American case came to be heard more frequently toward the end of the Cold War. Whatever their record elsewhere—and in advanced capitalist states like those of Western Europe and Japan after World War II, the United States certainly did promote democracy, even as it advanced the core free-market components of its “liberty” agenda—there is little if any evidence that at any stage during the Cold War either superpower made the promotion of democracy a central tenet of its third world policies. They certainly did not do so in the Middle East, where superpower meddling in the internal affairs of the countries of the region often served exactly the opposite purpose.
Iran is perhaps the quintessential case of both superpowers not only failing to promote, but actually undermining, Middle Eastern democracy in their headlong pursuit of their strategic and economic objectives. Throughout its modern history, Iran had suffered from the heavy-handed interference of external powers in its internal affairs, including repeated episodes of being occupied in whole or in part by tsarist Russian, imperial British, and American and Soviet troops. These foreign interventions included the notorious efforts of Russia and the British to sabotage the constitutional regime and the elected Majlis, or Assembly, in the years after the 1905–6 Constitutional Revolution. These efforts were finally crowned with success, ending in the closing of the Majlis and the suspension of the Constitution in favor of the renewed absolutism of a puppet shah during the 1911 Russian occupation of Tehran and northern Iran and the British occupation of the south of the country. In another episode already discussed, a later ruler, Reza Shah Pahlavi, was dethroned by the British and Soviets in 1941 for having pro-Axis sympathies and replaced by his son Mohammad Reza Shah. This occurred when their two countries jointly occupied Iran once again after the Soviet entry into World War II had been precipitated by Hitler’s invasion of Russia. The bitter experience of repeated, often concerted, intervention in Iranian internal affairs by the great powers to their north and south was deeply imprinted on Iranians in general, and in particular on the generation of democratic and nationalist politicians like Mohammad Mosaddeq who led the Majlis that came to dominate Iranian politics in the later stages of World War II and in the immediate postwar years.
I have shown in chapter 2 that Iran was the site where the forces of the United States and the Soviet Union first came into direct contact during World War II, as by 1942 both countries, together with Britain, had troops in joint occupation of Iran. Moreover, as I have also shown, the nascent superpowers very quickly entered into a rivalry in and over Iran because of the country’s vital strategic position and its valuable oil resources. This rivalry drove most of what both sides did in the Middle East in the years that followed and until the end of the Cold War. The impact on Iranian domestic politics, and ultimately for the fate of the precarious democratic experiment in Iran, was disastrous.
In the initial stage of the postwar superpower competition over Iranian resources and over strategic position in the country, however, Great Britain maintained its traditional influence in Tehran, and its paramountcy in the vital south of the country, where Iran’s oil fields were located. The Soviet attempt to obtain oil concessions or, failing that, surreptitiously explore for oil in the north, as well as the USSR’s reluctance to withdraw its wartime occupation forces when the war was over, all described in chapter 2, were probably driven largely by Stalin’s long-standing obsession with the British. This obsession went back to the Russian Civil War that erupted just after the Bolshevik Revolution. At that time, Stalin was in charge of Soviet forces in the southern parts of the former tsarist domains in their struggle against the British and the counterrevolutionary White Army, which Britain was supporting in an effort to strangle the revolution in its cradle. The fact that his old antagonist of more than twenty years earlier, Winston Churchill, that inveterate anti-Soviet Cold Warrior before his time, was back in control of British Near East policy from 1940 onward, could only have reinforced Stalin’s already intense paranoia about the British.
Crucially, there was now a new situation in Tehran that neither the Soviets, nor the British and Americans, fully took into account in the years that followed. This situation was created by the Allied powers’ 1941 removal of Reza Shah, formerly an officer in the Cossack Brigade who had been the founder of the modern Iranian state, and of the short-lived Pahlavi dynasty. In the 1920s Reza Shah had taken advantage of the preoccupation elsewhere of both the British and the Soviets to expel the feeble Qajar dynasty and establish a new autocratic order at the expense of a tame and weakened Majlis. The disappearance of the overbearing Reza Shah and his replacement by his weak-willed young son Mohammad Reza Shah in 1941 had given free rein to the Majlis to exercise the power that since 1906 had frequently been denied to it by the autocratic bent of the rulers of the Qajar and Pahlavi dynasties, and by the incessant interference of foreign powers. During World War II, the Majlis had shown its new power by rejecting an oil concession to the USSR, and again, after Soviet occupation forces had withdrawn, by supporting the Iranian prime minister’s effort to crush the autonomous regions that had been established in Iranian Azerbaijan and Kurdistan with the support of Soviet troops. In 1946 the Majlis again rejected a Soviet request for an oil concession in the north of the country.
Even before the war ended, the Majlis was thus exercising its power, which Iranian leaders felt was constrained in particular at this stage by the blackmail of the Soviets. As we have seen, the latter had demanded an oil concession in an area controlled by their troops, troops that at the same time were preventing central government forces from putting down the insurrections in the north and bringing under control the Azeri and Kurdish autonomous regions that the Soviets had fostered. Iran, together with other southern neighbors of the Romanov Empire, had frequently been pressured by Moscow in this way before 1917. However, we have seen that the 1921 treaty with the new Soviet state, which was extremely weak at this early stage of its existence, had for two decades relieved Iran from most forms of pressure from the north. Now, after two decades of relative quiet on its northern borders, and after the Allies had deposed the shah—his departure had not displeased democratically inclined Iranians, who had suffered under his autocratic rule—Iranians found themselves facing the same kind of pressure and bullying from the newly powerful Soviet Union as they once had faced from tsarist Russia.
With the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Iran by 1946, internal conditions in the country evolved further. In this fluid situation, the new shah proved completely unable to impose his authority as his autocratic father had once done, and the representative Majlis rapidly filled the vacuum. The Majlis and the Iranian prime ministers who answered to it now had free rein to stand up not only to the Soviets, but also to the other great power that had traditionally dominated Iran, Great Britain. This proved to be a more daunting task than facing down the Soviets had been, particularly since in 1945–46 the other two concerned powers, the United Kingdom and the United States, had strongly backed Iran in its resistance to Stalin’s bullying. There was no great power backing it this time. The showdown came, not surprisingly, over oil once again. It developed in 1951 after the Majlis, now led by Mohammad Mosaddeq, a popular nationalist prime minister whose government enjoyed a large parliamentary majority, was stymied in its attempt to extract a better profit-sharing deal from the British, who still maintained their virtually absolute control over the production of Iranian oil. At Mosaddeq’s urging, the Iranian assembly responded by voting to nationalize Iran’s oil resources. It thereby undid the effect of the unequal ninety-nine-year concession obtained by William Knox D’Arcy in 1901, which had thereafter been purchased and controlled by the British government in the form of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC).11
During the interwar period, Reza Shah had tried and failed to obtain a better deal for Iran’s oil, and the postwar nationalization of the AIOC was initially seen as a great coup for the constitutional regime, which appeared to have succeeded where the autocratic shah had failed. Thereupon Britain, unwilling to contemplate losing the oil resources its empire had depended on for over forty years, began a concerted campaign to undo Iran’s action. This involved persuading world oil companies not to buy nationalized Iranian oil (the major American oil companies, having recently suffered from the Mexican oil nationalization, abhorred the idea of producing countries nationalizing “their” assets, and so needed little persuasion to join the boycott). It also involved using Britain’s considerable influence inside Iran, built up over many decades of cultivating clients, supporters, agents, and spies, to covertly undermine Mosaddeq’s government and the constitutional regime. The Iranian government argued in vain to world public opinion that a British Labour government had only a few years earlier nationalized its own coal and steel industries and its railways from private owners. Why could Iran not do the same with its own resources? It was clear from the frosty response from London that what was sauce for the British goose was not sauce for the Iranian gander.12
As often happens to countries dealing with the United States during an electoral cycle, the Iranians proved to be unlucky when administrations changed in Washington, D.C., in January 1953. Although the Truman administration had been generally sympathetic to the concerns of its British ally, like that of Roosevelt it was also motivated by residual anticolonial impulses and by a vague sympathy with anticolonial nationalism in the third world. Moreover, at home Truman had had his own problems with big business, and in particular with the big oil companies, and he was not overly inclined to favor them abroad.13 All of this changed when the Republicans took over the American executive branch for the first time in twenty years, after Adlai Stevenson’s defeat in the 1952 elections. The new Eisenhower administration was highly favorable to business interests, and to the oil companies in particular. Moreover, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had been an international banker who had worked closely with the oil industry. Dulles and his brother Allen, the director of central intelligence, were profoundly anticommunist in outlook, and looked moralistically on any nationalization of private property as natural steps toward the horrors of socialism and communism.
During the Truman administration, the British had repeatedly importuned the United States to join in a sharp rejoinder to the intolerable “insolence” of Mosaddeq. This, the British argued, should take the form of a pro-shah coup d’état, which they were already preparing. Harry Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, had resisted the idea. But with Eisenhower in office, the Dulles brothers very soon fell in with the plan, and convinced President Eisenhower of the necessity of this drastic step. The pretext that the British used to convince John Foster and Allen Dulles, and that they in turn used to convince the president, was the alleged danger of Iran falling into communist hands. A Communist Iran was in fact quite a far-fetched prospect, given the relative weakness of the pro-Soviet Iranian Communist Party (the Tudeh), the breadth of the nationalist coalition that supported Mossadeq, and the fear with which Iranian nationalists across the political spectrum regarded Russia, tsarist or Soviet. Nevertheless, the specter of Iranian reds under the bed was enough to scare Washington, which finally went along with British urgings. The result was Operation Ajax, the joint CIA/M16 overthrow of Iran’s elected, constitutional, parliamentary regime in 1953 by the two great democratic Western powers. It was replaced with the despotism of Mohammad Reza Shah, directly behind which stood both of these powers, although the Americans, with their far more extensive resources, quickly won the upper hand in Tehran.
The Iranian coup was a crucial turning point for the United States in the Middle East, as had been Stalin’s unprecedented bullying of Turkey and Iran in 1945–46 for Soviet policy in the region. In a certain peculiar sense, both superpowers had been loyal to their core ideals (if not necessarily their proclaimed ones) even as they intervened in their different ways in Iran’s internal affairs. The Soviets claimed they were acting in the name of the “working masses” and of the oppressed nationalities of Iranian Azerbaijan and Kurdistan, while the Americans were only upholding the sanctity of private property and the paramountcy of free enterprise. The results were nevertheless traumatic for Iranians and others in the region, and highly deleterious to one of the oldest and most closely watched experiments in democratic and constitutional government in the Middle East. Deep and abiding Iranian fears of Russia and Britain were rekindled, to be joined by what proved to be a lasting resentment toward the United States.
Even more serious, the leaky ship of evolution toward democracy in Iran had been driven firmly aground, blown there by Stalin’s brutal pressure tactics, the cynical cupidity of British policymakers, and the shortsightedness and alarmist gullibility of American decision-makers. The bitter legacy left by these arbitrary interventions in Iranian politics, and the subsequent intensive American patronage for the hated regime of the shah, would fester for over a quarter of a century. Eventually, with the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79, the inevitable happened, producing an incandescent eruption of anger at the United States that has continued for many years, and that helped to produce the grim, theocratic regime in power today in Tehran. As might have been expected, the undermining of a shaky but potentially viable liberal, democratic system, first by the USSR and then by the United States and the United Kingdom, two states that were great apostles of liberal and democratic values, naturally produced an authoritarian and illiberal reaction in Iran, just as did similar actions elsewhere in the Middle East, both before and after the Iranian Revolution.
If author Tim Weiner’s 2007 chronicle of the CIA’s covert actions is to be believed, the 1953 coup was the first major post–World War II American effort at “regime change.” It was to be followed in short order by the removal of another democratically elected leader who was no more a communist than had been the hapless Mohammad Mosaddeq: Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala.14 This was not to be the last such American effort at government overthrow, but what is most important for our story is that the regime the CIA and MI6 were changing in Tehran was a democratic, constitutional one. Its replacement by an autocratic and repressive regime, pliable and obedient to the wishes of its powerful American backers, became the first element in a pattern where democracy was rarely if ever a consideration for American policymakers in the Middle East, any more than it was for their Soviet opposite numbers, or than it had been for their British predecessors as regional hegemons.
The Iranian coup announced to the entire Middle East that receptiveness to Western economic demands and rigid, knee-jerk anticommunism were the main criteria for those who wanted American support. Regional economic elites quickly got the message and learned to tell the Americans what they wanted to hear. American approval was what these elites themselves generally wanted, in any case: for the other side of this coin was the opportunity to get a share of the profits of the free-market system, and to get American support for repression of their domestic rivals. These rivals could easily be painted as communists or communist sympathizers to a receptive audience in Washington in situations where an insufficiently threatening number of genuine communists existed, guaranteeing the supportive Western response that local elites desired.
While Iran was the first and most important site of superpower interference that undermined the possibility of progress toward stable, democratic governance in the Middle East, it was far from being the last. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, however, most of the external meddling in the Middle East did not come from the superpowers, but rather from the old colonial powers, Britain and France, both of which still retained great residual influence in much of the region. They continued to intervene systematically in the internal affairs of nominally independent countries like Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria, while they maintained their direct and indirect colonial rule over the other countries of North Africa, the Gulf, and southern Arabia: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Sudan, Libya, Aden, Oman, the Trucial States (now the United Arab Emirates), Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait.
We have seen that in addition to Iran, the exceptions to this situation of the lingering predominance of British or French influence included three cases where the superpowers rapidly became involved: these were the 1947–48 great-power maneuvering over the establishment of Israel, the crises in postwar Turkey (and Greece), and Saudi Arabia. In all three cases, one or both of the superpowers became implicated at a very early phase of their rivalry with each other in the Middle East. Indeed in Saudi Arabia this took place even earlier than the inception of the Cold War, with the granting of an oil concession to American companies in 1933. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia had established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1926, another example of Ibn Sa‘ud’s efforts to reduce his kingdom’s lingering dependence on Britain.15 Once they had established their predominant position in all these arenas, the superpowers rapidly elbowed out the old colonial powers. This was true of Iran, Turkey (and Greece), and Saudi Arabia. The only exception was Israel, where after 1948 France and to a lesser degree Britain became the main arms suppliers, and the former retained strong residual influence until the mid-1960s.
As we have seen, Israel owed its existence in large measure to American and Soviet support for the 1947 UN General Assembly resolution for the partition of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state, and to the superpowers’ diplomatic and military support for the new state after it was established in May 1948. Both the United States and the USSR hoped to win Israel to its side, albeit for different reasons. The Soviets were rudely disillusioned when Israel aligned itself with the United States over the Korean War in 1950. Stalin, moreover, had been dismayed at the enthusiastic reception that Golda Meir, the first Israeli ambassador to the USSR, received from Soviet Jews, which awakened the latent anti-Semitic tendencies of the aging and suspicious Soviet leader and his entourage.16 Israel thereafter drifted into the orbit of France, and later Britain, although U.S. economic and diplomatic support continued, albeit at a relatively low level. As I showed in the preceding chapter, this situation only changed fully after the 1967 war, by which time Israel had become completely aligned with the United States on Cold War and other issues.
Turkey, meanwhile, after the 1945–46 crisis over Stalin’s imperious territorial demands, became one of the focal points of the Truman Doctrine, and was incorporated into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) soon after the alliance’s formation in 1949. Both Israel and Turkey had democratic systems, although in the latter the country’s governmental institutions were in the last analysis in the grip of the military and other elements of the state apparatus. Members of this secular elite saw themselves as the true heirs of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Kemal Atatürk, and acted as if they knew better than the electorate, the parliament, or the prime minister what was good for the people and the republic. Acting on these sentiments, the Turkish military was to depose and execute the country’s first freely elected prime minister, Adnan Menderes, in 1961, severely setting back the cause of democracy in Turkey. Thus began a series of overt and barely covert interventions by the military and its civilian allies in the government bureaucracy and the judiciary in that country’s politics that continues in some measure until the present day. The coup elicited no serious protest from Washington, which appeared to care far more about Turkey’s continued international alignment with the United States than about how the country was governed. This lack of interest in democracy on the part of the two superpowers became a common Cold War pattern, and could be seen early on in Saudi Arabia, the first American foothold in the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia, as I described in chapter 2, was the scene of a stroke of good fortune by what eventually became a consortium of the biggest American oil companies when they outbid their British rivals and obtained an exclusive concession to explore for and exploit Saudi oil reserves. We have seen that President Roosevelt and later American presidents highly appreciated the value of this privileged position. As I have already noted in chapter 1, the United States was thereafter careful to ensure that it maintained its paramountcy in Saudi Arabia, establishing an air base at Dhahran in 1945. To this day American policymakers have carefully treated Saudi Arabia and its regime as the major strategic asset that they were and are to the global position of the United States. In spite of the xenophobia of some of the Saudi monarchy’s Wahhabi supporters, Saudi Arabia remained untroubled for many years by nationalist agitation against the American connection, which was largely screened off from the view of most of the Saudi public.17 By the mid-1950s, however, with the spread of modern education and the greater openness of Saudi Arabia to the strong nationalist currents in the rest of the Arab world, the situation began to change. These developments did not impel the ruling family to loosen its absolute grip on political power. Far from encouraging it to do so, the United States fully supported this absolute monarchy in resisting pressures from external sources as well as pressures to liberalize from within Saudi society, particularly after the highly competent King Faisal succeeded his profligate brother Sa‘ud in 1962.
As the Cold War developed, the United States and the Soviet Union inexorably became more deeply embroiled in the affairs of other Middle Eastern countries beyond Iran, Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. The Soviet Union, which had been shut out of the region in the interwar years in part because of its own weakness and that of most regional communist parties, attempted to make up for lost time after World War II and establish itself there. It initially did so by such diverse stratagems as supporting Kurdish and Azeri autonomy inside Iran, support of the establishment of Israel, and asking to be granted a UN trusteeship over the former Italian colony of Libya. None of these efforts was successful in producing a foothold for Soviet power. Nor was the USSR initially able to exploit another potential avenue for Soviet influence, the local communist parties in the Arab world. These parties became highly unpopular with Arab nationalist public opinion in 1947–48 after the USSR suddenly changed its previous position of opposition to Zionism and voted for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Immediately thereafter, all the Arab communist parties had obediently changed their stands and supported the creation of Israel. The turnaround made them appear to be what they in some measure were: stooges of a foreign power rather than independent political parties.
Thanks to their highly trumpeted anticolonial stance, however, the Soviets had one major asset in the region: the deep and lingering resentment of nationalists all over the Middle East against British and French colonialism. Although the United States had also enjoyed an anticolonial reputation in the Middle East since the era of Woodrow Wilson, the USSR was often able to align itself with anticolonial sentiment more effectively than the Americans, since the latter had to show some deference to the interests of their British and French allies. These old colonial powers were eager in particular to retain their influence in the region, and to continue to maintain military bases there, which often made them, and by extension the United States, anathema to nationalist public opinion in the Middle East.
The United States labored under another related disadvantage by comparison with the USSR: its drive to obtain Middle Eastern bases of its own in order to complete the encirclement of the USSR from the south. This pursuit at times led the United States to fall in with the British, in particular in their desire to maintain their unpopular Middle Eastern military bases. The idea of the “containment” of the Soviet Union’s perceived aggressive behavior found its origins in George Kennan’s 1946 “Long Telegram” from Moscow, later transformed into the well-known anonymous 1947 Foreign Affairs article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.”18 By the end of the decade, Kennan’s thesis, or at least a popularized understanding of it, had grown inexorably into an American idée fixe: the constitution of a chain of military alliances around the entire Soviet periphery. The first and the most important of these alliances was NATO, established in 1949 to confront the massive Red Army in Eastern Europe. In the Middle East, plans for such alliances were floated under a number of rubrics, including the Middle East Command, the Middle East Defense Organization (MEDO), and the one that was eventually established, the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), commonly known as the Baghdad Pact.19 Although the United States in the end did not join CENTO (Great Britain, also a prime mover in all these alliance schemes, did become a member), this grouping constituted another link in the notional chain Washington was building, and was thus a crucial element in the global American strategy of military containment of the Soviet Union.
The problem for the United States when it tried to preach the virtues of such Middle Eastern alliances against the Soviet Union, which involved host countries providing bases for Western troops while receiving American weapons and support, was that in light of their history, most people in this region had come over many years to see foreign military bases of any kind as outposts of colonialism. In Egypt, for example, the nationalist struggle against Britain’s much-hated military bases had been going on since the British occupation of 1882. Only a few years earlier, in 1936, Britain had finally removed its garrison from the heart of the Egyptian capital to the Canal Zone, whence successive Egyptian governments had thereafter tried in vain to evict them. These proposed alliances boiled down to Western powers, including Britain and France, as well as the United States, maintaining bases in countries that had just gotten rid of British and French troops or were still trying to do so. It did little good for American envoys to raise the alarm about the danger of the Soviet Union’s looming presence. Outside of Iran and Turkey, where Soviet power was close by and historical memories of continuous earlier Russian encroachments and of Stalin’s recent bullying was fresh, American warnings of the menace of Soviet expansionism aroused little fear in the Middle East. To public opinion in Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, Amman, and Baghdad, such arguments were unconvincing, and the idea of the British and the French coming back through the rear window (now together with their American friends) after being shown the front door was thoroughly unacceptable. If some of the Arab countries felt danger from another power, it was from Israel, which by 1956 had decisively defeated several of them in two wars in the space of eight years. The Soviet Union, needless to say, had a field day painting the United States with the colors of the old European colonialist powers, and in depicting all the Western powers as the neocolonialist patrons and backers of Israel in its confrontation with the Arabs.
The pressure to join American-sponsored alliance systems continued nonetheless, and played a large role in the polarization in the Arab world that, as we saw earlier, developed into what Malcolm Kerr called the “Arab Cold War,”20 between a camp headed by Nasser’s Egypt and another headed by King Faisal and Saudi Arabia. The same East-West polarization later affected the Arab-Israeli conflict, and, again as we have seen, both this conflict and the regional conflicts of the Arab cold war eventually came to track closely with the Cold War itself, with the superpowers aligned with one or another side in each of these confrontations. Arab states, including Egypt and Syria, that resisted pressures to join superpower-dominated alliance systems and tried to remain nonaligned were stigmatized by John Foster Dulles’s moralistic foreign policy as little better than communist dupes. Earlier, under the influence of chief communist ideologist Andrei Zhdanov’s 1947 “two camps” theory,21 which appeared to presage a division of the world as rigid as that described by Kennan’s famous Foreign Affairs article two months earlier, the Soviet Union initially seemed to take an equally dim view of nonalignment as between the communist and capitalist camps.22 However, even before the death of Stalin in 1953, the USSR had begun to take a more flexible view of nonalignment. It thus was able to benefit in an opportunistic fashion from the Eisenhower administration’s relative rigidity on this score. It benefited as well from the global resistance on the part of many countries to joining great-power-dominated alliance groupings, which led to the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement at the Bandung summit in 1955, at which Indonesian leader Sukarno hosted other leading third world figures like Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser.
For Egyptian president Nasser, the pressure from Washington to take sides eventually proved intolerable.23 He rapidly found himself cut off from the United States, which in 1955 abruptly withdrew a World Bank offer to help fund the Aswan High Dam. This led to the nationalization of the Suez Canal, and thereafter to the 1956 Suez War. Willingly or unwillingly, Egypt, Syria, and later Iraq and other Arab countries eventually found themselves drawn into the orbit of the Soviet Union, partly because the United States, with its “with us or against us” approach, left them little choice, and partly to obtain arms made necessary by the regional conflicts described in chapter 4. On the other side of this divide, Iraq before the 1958 revolution, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other countries ended up aligning themselves with the United States and Britain. In the end, only Iraq and the non-Arab states Iran and Pakistan, as well as Great Britain, joined CENTO: as mentioned, the United States, ironically, never joined the alliance, and Iraq left it after the 1958 revolution. Thus an alliance system meant originally to encompass both Arab states and the “Northern Tier” of Turkey and Iran ended up including only the latter. The agitation and polarization precipitated by the formation of Western alliance systems nevertheless roiled the politics of the Arab world for nearly a decade. Among the countries that were the most destabilized by Western pressure to join these Cold War alliances during the 1950s were Lebanon and Jordan, to whose complicated internal politics, and troubled attempts to establish democratic governance, I now turn.
Under the pressure of the growing regional polarization just described, smaller, weaker Middle Eastern countries like Lebanon and Jordan were subjected to the greatest stresses, and it was here that some of the greatest damage to the region’s halting and uncertain progress toward democracy was done. As I pointed out in the previous chapter, in a highly penetrated system such as that of the Middle East, it is often hard to disentangle the intertwined roles of international, regional, and local actors. Jordan and Lebanon provide perfect examples of this phenomenon: in the midst of a succession of grave internal crises, they were subject to strong external pressures from the superpowers, from other great powers, and from a plethora of regional actors, ranging from bigger Middle Eastern states to transnational parties like the Ba‘th.
Contemporary observers differed widely as to the nature and the identity of the main source of such pressures. In official Washington and London, most saw the intervention of “international communism,” and what they at times perceived as its pawn, Arab nationalism under Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, as the guiding force behind the turbulent events destabilizing both countries. In Moscow as well as in some quarters in the Arab world, it was the intervention of the United States, Britain, and local clients acting entirely at their behest that was perceived to be the main factor at work. Both views failed to give sufficient credit to the agency of indigenous political forces within the two countries, but in such penetrated systems it was (and often still is) at times truly difficult to be sure precisely who was doing what and to whom. In any case, these events led up to the climactic crisis year of 1958, when a bloody revolution in Iraq in July resulted in the overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy and the pro-Western prime minister, Nuri al-Said. Fearing that the Iraqi example would cause the toppling of a series of regional dominos starting with Jordan and Lebanon, the Western powers panicked, and four thousand British paratroopers landed in Amman and nearly twenty thousand U.S. Marines and soldiers landed in Beirut.24 Although these forces’ presence was not long-lasting, it was indicative of how gravely the situation was viewed by American and British policymakers.
While we may not be able to determine fully the balance between internal and external factors in these crises, there is enough evidence for us to assess the results of some external pressures, and of these Western interventions in particular, for the fate of democracy in Lebanon and Jordan. Each was a divided polity in some fashion, and each had a precarious political system. Each had also been created as a national entity partly in response to the needs and requirements of an imperial power, France in the case of Lebanon, and Great Britain in the case of Jordan, although important internal elements were also at work in the formation of both of these states, and came to play important roles within them.
The League of Nations Mandate system had bequeathed each of these countries a nominally functional representative body in the early 1920s, within the context of a constitutional republic in the case of Lebanon and a constitutional monarchy in the case of Jordan. Both of these political systems had been consistently subjected to extraordinary pressure, manipulation, and intervention by the Mandatory powers in order to assure these powers’ continued ultimate control. In a variety of ways, these constant interventions over a period of decades by the democratic Western powers discredited the forms of democracy and constitutionalism, as similar interventions did in Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Egypt.25 Upon their achieving nominal independence (in 1943 for Lebanon and 1946 for Jordan) there was some question whether such external interference would cease, and also whether the Lebanese and Jordanian parliaments and the two countries’ respective constitutions would be able to stand up to their powerful chief executives, the first president of independent Lebanon, Beshara al-Khoury, and Amir—later King—Abdullah of Jordan.
In the case of Lebanon, at the end of World War I, France, which since 1861 had been the traditional great-power patron of the autonomous Ottoman administrative Governorate of Mount Lebanon, inhabited mainly by Maronite Catholics, had desired to expand the area dominated by its Maronite allies. Seeing the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, France sought to further its “divide and rule” strategy in Syria by adding to the area of the Mount Lebanon Governorate those regions it desired to separate from the rest of Syria, thereby at the same time turning the governorate into a Greater Lebanon, or Grand Liban. The Syrian regions to be added to Mount Lebanon were inhabited mainly by Sunnis, Greek Orthodox, and Druze, who were strongly influenced by Arab nationalism and generally hostile to French colonial designs. France was also responding to the aspirations of pro-French Maronite leaders who desired to see their domain expanded, now that their patron had won World War I and was in a position to fulfill both its ambitions and theirs.
France therefore in 1920 had created this Grand Liban, which eventually became today’s Republic of Lebanon. It did so by attaching to the relatively homogenous Governorate of Mount Lebanon, with its large Maronite majority, districts on the coast (including the cities of Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon, and Tyre) and in the south (Jabal ‘Amil), east (the al-Biqa‘ Valley) and north (the Koura, ‘Akkar, and Hirmil regions). These areas contained primarily large Sunni and Shi‘a Muslim and Greek Orthodox populations, and some Druze. None of these groups had the slightest reason to desire being brought as minorities into a Maronite-dominated Greater Lebanon, or to become “Lebanese.” Needless to say, they were not consulted by French colonial planners, who were no more accommodating of the voices of inconvenient natives than had been Lord Balfour, cited at length in chapter 3.26
France’s ambitious and acquisitive policies in the wake of World War I thus set the stage for some of the divisions that have bedeviled Lebanon down to the present day, creating some of them ab initio and exacerbating others. Thereafter, the French Mandatory authorities systematically manipulated the political system within the new Lebanese state they had created. They did so by creating a confessional democracy, one in which members of parliament are chosen by their religious or ethnic (but not geographic) origin, and which favored their clients and allies. Other manipulations included the 1932 census, the reliability of which has since been questioned, as it inflated the number of Christians and deflated those of Muslims,27 sophisticated gerrymandering of electoral districts, and a collection of other stratagems and tricks that ensured the outcomes their policies required.28
However, when French power was crippled by the defeat of Vichy forces in Syria by the British in 1941, the weight of heavy-handed French intervention was lifted for the first time since 1920. With the French thumb lifted from the scales, a major re-equilibration of the Lebanese political system rapidly took place. This occurred in the context of the 1943 National Pact between Sunni and Maronite leaders without, however, changing the confessional nature of the Lebanese political system or its domination by selected elites. Under the 1943 pact’s new dispensation, the president would remain a Maronite, more power would be granted to the Sunni prime minister, the Sunnis would accept the legitimacy of Lebanon’s separation from Syria and its existence as a separate nation-state, which many Sunnis had previously contested, and the country would remain open to both the West and the Arab world, rather than tilting exclusively toward France. Other sects, notably the large underprivileged and underrepresented Shi‘a community, were ignored in this deal, although few protests were heard at the time. There was nevertheless a serious question as to whether this fragile system could endure the internal and external strains it faced. It was to be severely tested in the mid-1950s.
Jordan was also a peculiar case, albeit for different reasons.29 Unlike Lebanon, where the new state was built around the nucleus of the previously existing Mount Lebanon Governorate established by the Ottomans, which in turn had its origins in the well-established Ottoman-era Emirate of Mount Lebanon, never in the history of the previous centuries had the region today known as Jordan had any sort of separate existence. The sparsely populated area had traditionally been governed from Damascus, where it had its main trade and administrative connections, and it also had long-standing commercial and family links with Palestine, especially with Nablus, Jerusalem, and Hebron.30 After the French had extinguished King Faisal’s Syrian kingdom in 1920, Faisal’s older brother Abdullah in early 1921 had ridden northward from the Hijaz with a military force, ostensibly to avenge this defeat, and halted in what is now Jordan, the only part of the short-lived Syrian kingdom that the French had not occupied after their defeat of Faisal’s army, as they did not want their forces to enter an area that had been allocated to the British under the World War I Sykes-Picot partition of the region between the two powers. Meanwhile, British forces in Palestine had never extended their control eastward across the Jordan, since this area had previously been under the control of Faisal’s government in Damascus.
At this moment, in March 1921, British policymakers and experts from all over the region happened to be gathered in Cairo for a conference with the new colonial secretary, Winston Churchill.31 They were there to decide how to continue to maintain control over the Middle East in the wake of the shocks to Britain’s regional position from the Egyptian revolution of 1919, the Iraqi revolt of 1920, and the disappointment with Britain of Arab nationalists after the destruction of the first modern independent Arab state in Syria by the French in the same year. The inclination of these British mandarins, in the face of the failure of previous attempts at direct rule in Egypt and Iraq, was to grant the appearance of self-government while as much as possible withholding the substance of real power. This formula was adopted in several areas of the Arab world. It led both to the prolongation of British dominance of the region, which for a brief moment had seemed in jeopardy, and also to long-lived Arab resentment against Britain, as the limits of the nominal independence that the British were granting rapidly became apparent.
Churchill and his advisors in Cairo found themselves confronted in Jordan with the delicate problem of a client preparing to attack an ally from an area that constituted something of a vacuum between French power in Syria, that of Britain in Palestine, and the Arab kingdom to the south in the Hijaz. They decided to make a virtue of necessity by creating an Emirate of Transjordan and installing Abdullah as its ruler.32 This was the genesis of the peculiarly shaped entity (although the shape also owed much to other, earlier British decisions and deals)33 that eventually became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The main institution thereafter created by the British in Jordan was the British-commanded, British-officered, British-armed, and British-financed and controlled army, called “the Arab Legion.”34 The name of this force constituted a fine piece of irony, of the sort perhaps only the British colonial mentality was capable of. However, Jordan eventually also came to have a government, a parliament, and all the trappings called for by the Mandate system, although the entire state apparatus was at all times thoroughly dominated by the overbearing Abdullah, behind whom stood his imperious British patrons.
By the 1950s, however, things in Jordan had begun to change, notably after the formal annexation by Abdullah of the West Bank in 1950, and after the old king’s assassination in 1951 by Palestinian nationalists, and his subsequent replacement first by his son Talal and then almost immediately by his extremely youthful grandson, Hussein.35 Deprived of the experienced and wily Abdullah as their local ally, British influence diminished in Jordan, as the palace and the British embassy slowly lost their previously nearly complete control. Nationalist Jordanian politicians of various stripes and growing nationalist and radical political parties for a time partially filled the resulting vacuum, politics moved into the street and became more unruly and less predictable, and the country veered away from American- and British-backed alliance systems and swung toward nonalignment.
In the mid-1950s, powerful new external pressures would be brought to bear on the vulnerable political systems of both Lebanon and Jordan.
The events leading up to the “revolutionary year” of 1958 in the Middle East have been extremely well detailed elsewhere.36 They came to a head in Lebanon and Jordan, as well as in Iraq, where the British-installed and -dominated monarchy was overthrown that year in a tumultuous revolution. This upheaval provoked fears in Washington and London that a wave of radicalism would wash over Amman and Beirut as well, bringing to power there nationalist regimes aligned with Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, which would be under Soviet influence. Cold War reflexes were at work here, and only this can explain the panicked response of American and British policymakers in sending troops to Lebanon and Jordan.37 In what follows, I will focus on how what transpired in the years leading up to the climactic events of 1958 affected democracy in the two small and unstable countries we are looking at. However, it is essential to keep in mind that events in Lebanon and Jordan took place as part of a broad, radical, nationalist current that was sweeping the entire Arab Middle East, the precipitate decline of British and French power and prestige in the region in the wake of the Suez fiasco, and the growth in the regional influence of the two superpowers, which in some measure was taking place at the expense of the shrinking profiles of the two old colonial ruling powers.
We have already seen that in Jordan, British influence was waning in the early 1950s after the assassination of King Abdullah and the accession to the throne first of his son Talal, and then a year later of the young Hussein. Although surrounded by the same cast of obliging palace politicians as had ably served his grandfather, like Tawfiq Abu al-Huda and Samir al-Rifa‘i, and strongly supported by most senior army officers, by his formidable mother, Queen Zein, and by the British, King Hussein faced a totally different situation than had Abdullah for most of his reign. This was partially the result of the natural growth of the Jordanian population and increases in literacy and urbanization, and partially the consequence of Abdullah’s ambitions, which had led to the annexation of the West Bank in 1950. The young king was thus facing an increasingly urbanized, politicized, and nationalist body politic, the volatility of which had been significantly augmented by the addition of the largely anti-Hashemite and anti-British Palestinians of the West Bank. Many of these were embittered refugees driven in 1948 from their homes in Palestine, who blamed the British and the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan in part for their predicament. But it was Jordanian politicians, the political parties, and the swelling population of Amman and other East Bank cities that posed the biggest problem for the king and his British allies.
To this considerable internal problem of a radicalized and politicized citizenry were added external regional influences. The most powerful of them was that of Egypt. Jordanians were susceptible to the appeal of the nationalist Egyptian military regime that had come to power in 1952, as were others in the Mashriq, the Arab East running from Syria to Lebanon to Iraq, the Arab principalities of the Gulf, the Arabian Peninsula, and Yemen. In 1954 this regime, led by the charismatic Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser, had finally ended seventy-two years of British occupation, in 1955 had helped pioneer the Non-Aligned Movement and had nationalized the Suez Canal, and in 1956 had survived the tripartite aggression of Britain, France, and Israel (largely due, as we have seen, to both superpowers’ opposition to the attack). The Egyptian regime capitalized on these perceived successes, actively propagating its influence through multiple means, including its powerful radio station Sawt al-Arab, the “Voice of the Arabs.” Large numbers of Jordanians (and other Arabs) responded to Egyptian calls to Arab states to boycott Western alliances by opposing the Baghdad Pact (CENTO) and increasingly criticizing what was perceived as the Hashemite kingdom’s excessive reliance on the British.38
Bombarded by this Egyptian propaganda, and under intense popular and increasing parliamentary pressure, King Hussein attempted to appease his critics by dismissing the British commander of the Arab Legion, Sir John Bagot Glubb, known as Glubb Pasha, and most other senior British officers in March 1956. The swing of Jordan toward Arab nationalism continued, however, with the parliamentary elections of October 1956. These were the first and possibly the last fully free and fair elections in Jordanian history, and returned a parliament dominated by nationalists and a few leftists, leading to the formation of the government of Suleiman Nabulsi, the first Jordanian prime minister chosen truly as a result of elections rather than by the palace and the British. Indeed, the British ambassador, Charles Johnston, admitted privately that these elections were “the first approximately free ones in the history of Jordan.”39 For the six months of its existence, the Nabulsi government struggled to establish a new relationship with the monarchy, the army, and the British. Complicating this process was the fact that Jordan had never before been allowed this degree of freedom by its royal and British masters, and the new government was thus finding its way in entirely unfamiliar territory. Meanwhile, the external pressures on the country did not diminish. Events came to a head in April 1957, when the king, fully backed by the British, used the pretext of an alleged military plot against the monarchy to dismiss the government. After a very brief interlude when another government, this one less overtly nationalist but independent and including some ministers from Nabulsi’s cabinet, was brought in, the king installed a government made up entirely of trusted palace retainers (described by the British ambassador as “frankly authoritarian”40).
Thus ended Jordan’s brief democratic experiment, but only after a farcical meeting at the royal palace, when the young king and the British ambassador initially failed to browbeat the Jordanian politicians who had been selected to adorn the new cabinet into taking their portfolios. It was left to the queen mother, the formidable Zein, to openly threaten the reluctant would-be ministers, finally bringing them around and persuading them to join the new government, which they knew would serve as no more than window dressing for what would amount to martial law. The British ambassador’s description of this incongruous scene is worth quoting: “Finally Her Majesty told the Ministers designate that they would not be allowed to leave the Palace until they had taken the oath of office, and it was on this not altogether encouraging basis that the new Government was eventually formed.”41 Although this episode may seem like a scene from the days of gunboat diplomacy (combined with Ruritanian comic opera), it was in fact driven not just by the reflexes of an autocratic monarchy or by Britain’s neocolonial relations with Jordan and its elite, but by an obsessive underlying fear of communism on the part of both the British and the Americans. This fear is what animated British and American opposition to Jordanian nationalists, who were luridly (and incorrectly) pictured as communists or under Soviet influence in the dispatches of Western diplomats in Amman.42 Among the casualties here, and the following year, when British paratroopers arrived in Jordan to prop up the still shaky monarchy and the “frankly authoritarian” regime that the British and the Jordanian king and queen mother had imposed, was the evolution of Jordanian democracy: the victim of its own enforced immaturity, of the unrestrained autocratic impulses of the Hashemites, of old British habits of neocolonial rule, and of the Cold War.
Lebanon during the 1958 crisis was described in Washington as suffering primarily from the meddling of Egypt and Syria, which had just joined together in the United Arab Republic (UAR), a unitary state run from Cairo that was seen as strongly backed by the Soviet Union. Lebanon’s legitimate government, headed by the pro-Western president Camille Chamoun, was seen from the same perspective as suffering this fate largely because it was inclined to join in Western defense schemes and was willing to align itself with the West. While this analysis was true in some measure, in the eyes of most Lebanese and Arab observers, and nearly all historians since, the country was also going through a serious constitutional crisis: Chamoun was making an effort to amend the Lebanese constitution to allow him to serve a second six-year term. In order to do so, the Lebanese president needed an overwhelming parliamentary majority, which he just happened to have secured in 1957 in one of the most notoriously rigged elections in Lebanese history. Incumbents all over the country went down to defeat, all of them ferocious opponents of the president’s unpopular plan to amend the constitution in order to prolong his stay in office, and all of whom should have been secure in safe parliamentary seats located in their traditional fiefdoms. Beyond rigging the elections for this purpose, in his excessive pro-Western orientation and hostility to the UAR, and in his disdainful diminution of the role of the Sunni prime minister, Chamoun was seen by many of his opponents as ignoring the balance between the West and the Arab world and between the Maronite office of president and the Sunni office of prime minister, which were both prescribed by the confessional provisions of the 1943 National Pact.
This was the crucial background to the Lebanese civil war, and to the upheavals of 1958, which ended with the landing of U.S. Marines in Beirut. To this background should be added two elements. The first is that a similar constitutional crisis had arisen when Lebanon’s first president, Beshara al-Khoury, had attempted to do the same thing Chamoun was trying to do, to prolong his term unconstitutionally. Khoury had been forced out of office by massive opposition after only three years of a second term, and was replaced, ironically, by Chamoun. The second is that we know that Chamoun was able to rig the 1957 elections through the distribution of massive bribes, which were made possible by large sums delivered to him by the United States. We know this because the American intelligence agent who served as the bagman in this operation, Wilbur Crane Eveland, describes personally performing this service in his memoirs in some detail. Thus, Eveland tells of driving up to the presidential palace in Baabda in his Cadillac, and of handing Chamoun briefcases full of cash for him to use in order to rig the election.43
Given that American policymakers perceived that Soviet and Egyptian money and influence were guiding the actions of the Lebanese opposition to Chamoun, which they saw as Muslim-dominated and Arab nationalist and radical, even communist, in orientation, the Cold War reasoning behind this sort of policy can be understood. In fact, Chamoun and his foreign minister, Dr. Charles Malik, were telling the Americans things that they knew would alarm them about the opposition (things they may themselves have believed44), which in fact was neither Muslim dominated, nor entirely Arab nationalist, and certainly not communist influenced. It was made up mainly of traditional, conservative politicians, who were enraged at having been unfairly unseated from Parliament in rigged elections. The opposition was led among many others by the Maronite patriarch, Cardinal Meouchi, and the leading Maronite politician of the north of Lebanon, Hamid Franjieh. Neither of them was a Muslim, or exactly an Arab nationalist or a radical, and certainly none of the most prominent opposition leaders was a communist by any stretch of the imagination, although many were supporters of Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the Druze leader, Kamal Junblatt, proclaimed himself a socialist. The opposition was in fact in essence no more than a new iteration of the very same coalition of Lebanese politicians that had opposed Beshara al-Khoury’s similar unconstitutional shenanigans only a few years earlier.
The damage done by American meddling in service of Cold War objectives based on a complete misreading of the Lebanese situation was not restricted to the rigging of the 1957 elections. This blatant undermining of the legitimacy of the parliamentary system was a major precipitant of the 1958 civil war, perhaps the most important one, combined with the unsettling impact on Lebanon of the union of Egypt and Syria into the UAR in early 1958. Perceived in Washington as yet another dangerous shift of Arab nationalism toward the Soviet orbit, this union in fact did not end up giving any advantage to Moscow; quite the contrary. Indeed, the small but active Syrian Communist Party was obliged to dissolve against its will in March 1958, a few months after the union between Egypt and Syria went into effect and as one of the conditions of its formation. This showed that communist influence was in fact shrinking rather than growing as a result of the union of Egypt and Syria, and gave those American policymakers capable of reading these events correctly another in a series of recurring indications of how useful Arab nationalism might be as a bar to communist influence.
The Lebanese crisis found rapid resolution after the landing of American forces in Beirut, by means of a diplomatic deal struck between the Egyptians and U.S. presidential envoy Robert Murphy to replace Chamoun with the commander of the Lebanese Army, Gen. Fuad Chehab. This solution showed that earlier perceptions of many in Washington about both Lebanon and Egypt had been highly flawed, not to say utterly detached from reality. The crisis in essence revolved around the constitutional question of the presidential succession and the related question of the prerogatives of the Maronite president, and not around Egyptian (or Soviet!) “interference in Lebanon’s internal affairs.” As soon as the succession question was resolved by refusing Chamoun another, unconstitutional, term, which he had originally sought with the support of Washington (ironically, this could only be done with the aid of Cairo), the crisis ended immediately.
The American-Egyptian deal nevertheless had a negative long-term impact on Lebanon. While it resolved the constitutional crisis, preserved the confessional system by providing for somewhat broader prerogatives for the Sunni prime minister, and eased tensions within the country, it also taught the lesson that Lebanese crises could not be resolved by the country’s political system. It taught the further lesson that Lebanese crises could only be dealt with by external powers, which held the keys to Lebanon’s stability, reinforcing beliefs among many Lebanese that had persisted since the nineteenth century.45 The deal established a dangerous precedent that was to be repeated in 1969, when a crisis over the Palestinian military presence in Lebanon was resolved in Cairo by the Egyptian president. The same precedent was repeatedly invoked during the much more bloody Lebanese war of 1975–90, which was finally brought to an end via accords negotiated at Taif in Saudi Arabia. It was repeated once again with the resolution of a grave governmental crisis in May 2008 by the amir of Qatar and the Arab League meeting in Doha, discussed in the next chapter. Long after the Cold War has ended, many Lebanese today still await a resolution from without to their internal problems, because of this precedent set in large part as a result of misguided Cold War considerations and great-power blindness to the realities of a small country which, like Jordan, has the misfortune of being part of a highly penetrated system.
The fate of democracy in Iran in the early 1950s, and in Lebanon and Jordan, two small Arab countries, in the mid- to late 1950s, may seem unimportant. The example of how and why democracy was undermined by, among other things, the Cold War, may not seem sufficient to prove that the superpowers cared far more for their interests and their rivalry with each other than they did about anything else in the Middle East, notably the evolution of democratic governance. But to see how true this was, one need only consider how in the years that followed, events in this region hewed rigidly to this pattern. Again and again, Middle Eastern regimes (many of whose roots were entirely indigenous, like those in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt) were enthusiastically encouraged in their authoritarian bent by their superpower patrons—indeed, sometimes, as in the cases of Egypt and Iraq, they were encouraged to move in this direction by both superpowers, serially of course.
In Iraq, for example, a liberal parliamentary regime that had been thoroughly corrupted and profoundly undermined by the naked manipulations of the British and the rulers they had imposed on the country46 collapsed in 1958. It was replaced for nearly five years by a dictatorship headed by Brig. Abdul Karim Kassem that relied partly on the large and powerful Iraqi Communist Party for mass support. Needless to say, as we saw in the last chapter, where real Communists in serious numbers and with considerable influence were concerned (a situation quite unlike the Jordanian and Lebanese cases), both the Soviet Union and the United States immediately became deeply involved. In support of their Communist comrades in Iraq, Soviet leaders initially went to the point of jeopardizing the USSR’s close relations with Egypt, the biggest, strongest, and most influential country in the Arab world, and its first client in the region. The new Iraqi regime did “progressive” things in this period, such as initiating land reform, spreading literacy, extending electrification, and expanding education, but so did the UAR, which was also building a big dam, which to the Soviets was a sine qua non of progressive modernity.47 Eventually, after the bloody 1963 coup that ousted Kassem, the Soviets reconciled themselves to the loss of his regime, and maintained their good relations with its successor and with the Egyptian government. The point is that for the Soviets, in the end what was truly vital was the extension of their influence and the curtailment of that of the United States, not their “progressive” ideals about justice, or the fate of their Iraqi comrades. The Soviets showed that this was the case later on by retaining close ties to Iraq under the Ba‘th Party, notwithstanding the Ba‘thist regime’s repeated, ferocious anticommunist purges.
Similarly, the United States quickly made up to its former archenemy in Cairo in 1958 and 1959 when it was perceived in Washington (after the departure of the inflexible John Foster Dulles from the State Department) how useful the Egyptians and their Ba‘thist allies could be in undermining the Kassem regime and in confronting the power of the Iraqi Communist Party. This lesson was not forgotten, and as we saw in the last chapter, the CIA was to make use of it in cooperating with the Ba‘thists when they came to power in Baghdad briefly in 1963 and again much more permanently in 1968, assisting them with their bloody eradication of Iraqi Communists. It is easy to see what all of this might have had to do with the Cold War. It is harder to see what Communists killing Nasserists and Ba‘thists in Iraq before the Kassem regime was overthrown in 1963, or Ba‘thists killing Communists later on, had to do with the ideals of the USSR and the United States, notably the promotion of democracy as regards the United States. Undoubtedly, however, both sides could relate their support for such actions in some contorted way to their stated ideals of liberty and justice.
There may well not have been any chance to revive some type of democratic governance in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq after the forms of parliamentary democracy and constitutionalism were so thoroughly discredited by their manipulations by local rulers, the old colonial powers, and later the superpowers, from the 1920s through the 1950s. However, what is certain is that the covert and occasional overt interventions of the superpowers from World War II onward, besides exacerbating regional conflict, as we saw in the previous chapter, profoundly undermined whatever limited possibility there might have been of establishing any kind of democratic governance in a range of Middle Eastern countries from the late 1950s and through the 1970s and 1980s.
Speaking at a public event at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., toward the end of the Cold War, a retired senior Central Intelligence Agency analyst who had served as national intelligence officer for the Middle East and vice chair of the National Intelligence Council stated retrospectively that throughout the Cold War, policymakers and analysts in the U.S. government paid attention to only one thing in the Middle East: the Soviets and their local allies. Once the USSR ceased to be a factor in a Middle Eastern country, he noted, that country almost ceased to be of interest in Washington.48 While these remarks provoke several reflections about the Middle East since the end of the Cold War—a period that has seen a massive upsurge in U.S. interest in the region keyed to terrorism rather than communism—one reflection is pertinent to this chapter: how much harm to the internal political development of this region, and in particular to its peoples’ aspirations for democracy, was done by the two superpowers’ obsessive focus on each other, sometimes to the exclusion of all else, and their constant, insidious jockeying for Cold War advantage? The evidence of Iran, of Lebanon and Jordan, and also of Iraq and other countries in the region is that it was grave.