Even while the war in Gaza has been ongoing for about five months now, there is renewed attention to the region as Iran launched drone and missile strikes against Israel on April 13.
With help from the U.S., England and Jordanian forces, the Israeli missile defense system shot down the vast majority of the incoming missiles and drones before they reached Israel. Iran’s attacks came in response to Israel’s April 1 strike against the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, that killed 11.
Israel and Syria have been at odds ever since the Syrian civil war ravaged the nation leading to thousands of deaths and countless refugees.
Gilbert Achcar, professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the University of London, in his 2016 publication Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in The Arab Uprising examines the Middle East after the Arab Spring, especially Syria and Egypt, to understand how a time of such democratic promise went so wrong. When discussing Syria, Achcar puts much of the blame on one source: Barack Obama.
Beginning in Tunisia in 2010 and quickly spreading into other Arab nations, demonstrators, aided by social media, began protesting governments to the point that several regimes fell in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen. However, in Syria the protests led to a civil war as the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad received support from both Russia and Iran.
Rebel forces backed by NATO and the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf were able to hold their own initially, but the situation got even more complicated in 2014 when ISIS invaded creating a three-way fight, not to mention periodic skirmishes against Kurdish and Turkish forces.
This is the point where Achcar picks up his dialogue. He explains why he believes the Arab uprisings failed where the Eastern European nations succeeded around the fall of communism, writing, “A crucial qualitative difference made it impossible for the Arab uprising to reproduce the pattern of ‘Velvet Revolution,’ which had characterized most of the Eastern European transformation. And that crucial factor is neither religious nor cultural. The crux of the matter is that the state system that ruled Eastern Europe was very exceptional historically, in that it was dominated not by propertied classes but by party and state bureaucrats, i.e. functionaries and civil servants. The vast majority of those bureaucrats— especially at the lower tiers of the pyramid— could envisage keeping their jobs or finding new ones, even improving their purchasing power, under market capitalism, while a significant portion of the upper tier could contemplate their own transformation into capitalist entrepreneurs.”
Achcar compared the Arab states to more like European absolute monarchies of earlier centuries and as such, “own the state to all intents and purposes; they will fight to the last soldier in their praetorian guard in order to preserve their reign.”
He goes on to explain the two major reasons for the failure of the rebel forces in Syria: underfunded and under armed. Syrian President al-Assad received weapons from Russia and Iran while the rebels never got the help they needed from Western governments, especially the U.S.
“The bottom line,” Achcar wrote, “is that Barack Obama has persistently denied the Syrian opposition the defensive weapons it has most crucially needed—and insistently requested— in order to circumscribe the regime’s military advantage: first and foremost, advanced anti-aircraft weapons.” Later he wrote, “had the attitude of the Obama administration been simply one of “non-intervention”, it could have been seen as catering to American public opinion against U.S. involvement in yet another military venture— although there is no indication that the public would have objected to U.S. support to the Syrian insurgency short of direct military involvement. But the administration did actually intervene quite decisively in the Syrian events by preventing its regional allies from providing the Syrian opposition with the qualitative weapons it needed.” Obama and then Vice President Joe Biden claimed it was difficult to find a moderate middle in Syria to support; Achcar claims it was because they could not find any group that would “guarantee their loyalty to U.S. interests.”
When it came to antiaircraft weapons, the rebels needed to combat the regime’s helicopters. Achcar claimed Obama used scaremongering to justify his decisions to withhold them, even though others like then Sen. John McCain claimed the rewards were worth the risk. Obama’s fear was that those weapons might get into the hands of terrorists.
Achcar claimed the scaremongering was an attempt to cover up “an unwillingness to help that is predicated on deep human indifference to the fate of the population of an oil-poor Arab country. Barack Obama would not lose sleep over the Syrian people’s calamity… as long as they were slaughtered by ‘conventional’ bombing. Only the use of chemical weapons constituted a “’red line.’” Secondly, Achcar claims the lack of weapons came from “the obsession with securing an ‘orderly transition’ and avoiding the repetition of the Iraqi debacle by preserving the bulk of the Syrian state apparatus.” Obama then went even further when he refused to stop the regime once they did use chemical weapons and even went as far to make sure U.S. planes fighting ISIS in Syria did not damage any of al-Assad’s forces. Achcar claims Obama will go down in history as the president responsible for the destruction of Syria and that “whereas the three previous presidents devastated Iraq by way of direct U.S. military aggression, Obama contributed to the devastation of Syria by letting its dictatorial regime achieve it.”
In Egypt, Achcar shows the rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood after the Arab Spring pushed out President Hosni Mubarak but also how its inability to govern and work with other forces in Egypt were its downfall. Eventually the military stepped in and removed Mubarak. While there is still officially a democratic government in place in Egypt, it is shaky.
Morbid Symptoms is not a book for the casual reader. It was written as a follow up to Achcar’s early work The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising. While this book is meant to stand alone, for an uninformed reader of the Arab Spring it can be confusing. The book does not cover the actual Arab Spring, but more the years following it. For a casual reader keeping the major players, organizations and events straight is difficult. While his attacks on the Obama administration are well documented, with plenty of quotes from Obama and Biden, Achcar is only looking at issues from the Syrian perspective and not one of a weary American public not interested in another Middle Eastern war. While the book is well written, it is suggested for readers well versed in modern Middle East geopolitics.
Published by Stanford University Press, Redwood City, Calif.,Gilbert Achcar’s Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in The Arab Uprising is available at Amazon.com.
James Finck is a professor of history at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. He can be reached at HistoricallySpeaking1776@ gmail.com.
