War
stalks revolution in Middle
East By Sreeram Chaulia
Historically, there is a strong sequential
correlation between revolution and inter-state
war. Radical overhaul of a country's
socio-economic or political system rarely remains
confined to that state and often triggers a wider
regional or international conflagration. This is
because revolution is a volcanic phenomenon that
knows no artificial borders. If ideas cannot be
imprisoned the way bodies can, then revolution is
the most exhilarating or pernicious idea,
depending on where one stands.
The
mobilization of counter-revolutionary forces to
restore status quo ante in a society undergoing
revolution, or to "teach a lesson" to other
revolutionaries in the region and beyond that
their emulative efforts will be crushed, is a
time-tested tactic of conservative powers who have
everything to lose if the
revolutionary fervor
snowballs. In tumultuous times, decisive show of
strength and pre-emptive violence is viewed by
counter-revolutionary powers as necessary to quell
the spreading unrest and secure themselves from
the rushing tide of their own people.
This
is exactly what occurred after the French
Revolution, when perilously threatened monarchies
of Britain, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands,
Prussia and Austria acted collectively on behalf
of the dynastic principle of rule and declared war
on France in the 1790s. Western allies of World
War I ganged up against revolutionary Russia from
1918 to 1923 in order to "strangle Bolshevism in
its cradle" (Winston Churchill). The covert
overthrow attempts and long undeclared war
unleashed by the US on Fidel Castro's regime after
the Cuban Revolution of 1959 were classic acts of
offensive defense to roll back "the rising din of
communist voices in Asia and Latin America." (John
F Kennedy) The war imposed by the then pro-Western
Saddam Hussein of Iraq against revolutionary Iran
from 1980 to 1988 fell into the same pattern of
trying to catch the genie and shove it back into
the bottle.
In all these cases, the wars
that followed revolutions in teleological fashion
sowed chaos, destruction and destabilization on
regional and meta-regional scales. They did not
succeed in unseating the targeted revolutionary
regimes, but exacerbated crippling spirals of
divisions and internal war within societies that
just experienced revolution. Counter-revolutionary
wars, even the largely domestic ones like the
Cristero War of the 1920s in Mexico, become
internationalized and succeed in the sense of
creating a yearning among sections of population
to return to or sustain the repressive but orderly
past. The inherent chaos and uncertainty of
revolutions are magnified and laid bare due to
counter-revolutionary wars, paving the way for
Napoleon-like dictatorial figures to usurp
authority.
The current strategic
environment in the Middle East bears resemblances
to the above scenarios from the past. Saudi
Arabia, the staunchest bastion of monarchical and
religious conservatism in the region, has just
taken the first military steps that portend a
deepening inter-state war through proxies. By
dispatching heavily armed platoons of over 2,000
troops, 800 of which are from the United Arab
Emirates (UAE), into Bahrain to shore up the
protest-besieged al-Khalifa dynasty, Riyadh has
immediately stirred up a hornet's nest. Iran, the
self-appointed worldwide guardian of Shi'ite
interests, has immediately slammed the Saudi move
as "unacceptable" because the revolutionary
uprising of Bahrain's Shi'ites for majority rule
against the Sunni Khalifa regime was seen as
strategically welcome in Tehran.
Saudi
Arabia's open resort to sending its armed forces
to prevent revolution in Bahrain comes after weeks
of tacit supply of weapons through the
25-kilometer-long King Fahd Causeway that borders
the two countries. The Saudi monarchy and its
sister royals who head governments of the Gulf
Cooperation Council (GCC) waited to first see if
the standard authoritarian responses of
carrot-and-stick by the Khalifas of Bahrain would
work in calming the turmoil. But the revolutionary
fever and inspiration from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya,
Yemen and Jordan was so infectious that the
marginalized Shi'ite majority of Bahrain kept
returning to Pearl Square in Manama despite the
crackdowns.
For the GCC, much like the
paranoid European alliance that waged war on
France in the 1790s, overt military intervention
by Saudi and UAE troops is the last throw of the
dice to stop the upending of the old order on a
continental basis. Given that Bahrain under the
Khalifas has an apartheid-like polity with
Soviet-era totalitarian dimensions, the GCC's
military plunge into Bahrain has shades of the
brutal counter-revolutionary invasions of Hungary
(1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) by the USSR. With
Soviet tanks and boots patrolling the streets of
Budapest and Prague, the ancient regimes were
reinforced and saved.
However, the Iran
factor places limits on this comparison. As long
as Tehran is outraged and capable of mounting a
"counter-counterrevolutionary" response, there is
no guarantee that Saudi and UAE armored personnel
carriers and heavy artillery will end up
protecting the Khalifas and squashing Bahrain's
pro-democracy ground swell. The ironies are
compounded here because Iran is itself long past
its revolutionary self and is using all means to
crush its own pro-democracy activists at home.
An Iranian counter punch to the GCC in
Bahrain through proxy warriors or by stirring up
Shi'ite rebellion in Saudi Arabia's oil-rich
Shi'ite-majority Eastern Province threatens
escalation into a major Middle Eastern inter-state
war, the likes of which has not been witnessed
since the Yom Kippur war of 1973.
In the
fog of full-fledged war, transnational revolutions
become secondary and status quo powers can divert
people's attentions through appeals to narrow
nationalism or sectarianism. If there is one actor
that can disentangle the poisonous web that could
turn Bahrain into another Nicaragua (where
US-trained and armed Contras were inserted to
topple the leftist Sandanista regime in the
1980s), and render the broader Middle East into
the centerpiece of a world war, it is the United
States.
Bahrain is host to the Fifth Fleet
of the US Navy and a vital lynch pin of the US
military's Central Command. The Barack Obama
administration should drive sense into the Saudis
and the GCC to withdraw from Bahrain before it
becomes a deadly war zone like Libya. Technically,
the GCC's troops have crossed into Bahrain upon
the invitation of the ruling Emir, Shaikha Salman
al-Khalifa. But in the eyes of the discriminated
Shi'ite majority of Bahrain, foreign Sunni forces
entering their country in the name of restoring
"stability" are invaders to tilt the scales
against democratization currents.
Washington cannot be short-sighted by
nodding at the Saudi-led intrusion, because
history shows how horrific the consequences of
counter-revolutionary wars are. Too often, the
predicament of the Barack Obama administration
since the pro-democracy spirit burst out in the
Middle East has been touted as a choice between
values and strategic interests. The crisis in
Bahrain challenges this dualistic interpretation,
because the removal of the hated Khalifas in that
country through peaceful endogenous means, as in
Tunisia and Egypt, is strategically more
beneficial to Washington than the onset of a hot
war between Saudi Arabia and Iran whose flames
will take down the whole region.
The real
choice is between myopic interests (as defined by
Washington's inability to distance itself from
tails like the Saudi monarchy and Israel, both of
which are ‘wagging the dog') and farsighted
interests that avoid catastrophic infernos. Obama
need not be a revolutionary to discipline Riyadh.
It just takes some commonsense and a deeper
reckoning with the disastrous historical
ramifications of allowing counter-revolutionary
wars to metastasize.
Sreeram
Chaulia is Vice Dean of the Jindal School of
International Affairs in Sonipat, India, and the
author of the forthcoming book, ‘International
Organizations and Civilian Protection: Power,
Ideas and Humanitarian Aid in Conflict Zones' (IB
Tauris).
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