In order to understand the dangers and opportunities that confront us today as a result of recent events, it is important to understand an aspect of the region that is ignored in television, newspaper, and news magazine discussions, and even in most textbooks on the subject: the post-Cold War political topography of the Middle East.

Much has been written about the birth of the contemporary Middle East state system in the aftermath of World War I, and about the Mandate system, the history of the conflict between Jews and Palestinian Arabs, and the role and interests of Western powers in that conflict and in the region, generally. But what has been less explored, and less well understood, is the nature of the social forces that came to power during that time, and how and in what ways that time (the beginning of the Cold War) and those forces shaped the political topography of the region. One of the most important features of the post-World War I Middle East was the explosive rise of communist, socialist, and other leftist political organizations, and the intense social conflicts that emerged throughout the region as a result of them. These conflicts had a profound impact on the subsequent economic and political development of the region.

Of course, after World War I, similar struggles occurred in Europe and in much of the rest of the world. These struggles played out differently in different regions, and the ways and reasons that they did had a great deal to do with their post-World War II development.

In the Middle East, parties and movements of the Left which emerged after World War I in Iran, Egypt, Syria. Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere in the region, were suppressed by local security forces with the help of Britain and France. The resurgence of these groups and parties after World War II triggered a campaign in the 1950s and 1960s to eradicate, not only Communists and Socialists, but any element in the region calling for democratic government or for land reform. The campaign against liberal, left-of-center, and reformist elements, along with communists and socialists, was carried out by local elites, by means of violent conflict, bloody police action, expulsion and incarceration, and with the help, initially, of the British and later with that of the US, as well.

The effectiveness of this protracted campaign had profoundly important consequences for the region’s subsequent economic and political development. Probably the most salient consequence for the region, despite all that has been written about its rapid development, is its lack of development; for, in order to thwart the growth of the left, dominant classes sought to take advantage of new opportunities of increasing their wealth in ways that would allow them to avoid transforming their societies. As a result, most Arab economies are characterized by a ‘dualism’ in which restricted foreign-oriented enclaves exist within larger, traditional and non-industrial economies; in which elites enjoy a standard and style of living that is identifiably Western, while the standard of life of the mass of the population remains near subsistence levels. Nowhere in the region has industrialization acquired a sustained momentum: manufacturing's share of production in 1990 was only 13%, which is precisely what it was in the mid-1950s.

Another consequence of increasing salience over the last twenty years is the growth of a religious far right. At the same time that governments and wealthy groups throughout the region were suppressing the left, they were actively aiding the growth of the religious far right as a bulwark against communism and revolution.

Saudi money was central to this effort. Hundreds of millions of dollars went to Islamist* organizations in the Middle East and to their followers in Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, Kashmir, in regions of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and northern China.

In 1979, Islamists succeeded in seizing state power in Iran, inspiring Islamist groups throughout the region to greater efforts and accomplishments. Shortly after the Iranian Revolution, in November 1979, hundreds of Islamists seized the Sacred Mosque in Mecca with the aim of overthrowing the royal family and restoring a purified Islam to Saudi Arabia. With Islamist groups turning against their sponsors, the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan found a way to deflect their energies and keep them busy fighting an anti-communist jihad in Afghanistan. After the Soviet Union was expelled from Afghanistan, however, and with its subsequent demise and the end of the Cold War, US Cold Warriors no longer needed Islamists, and so the CIA stopped funding them. This triggered an Islamist war against the US and US allies, beginning in 1991.

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Much of the discourse on recent events has focussed on the supposed rage that American foreign policies in the Middle East and, more generally, US-led capitalist globalisation and imperialism, have engendered there. However, while the September 11^th attack is doubtless a product of US policies and practices, both in the Middle East and around the globe, there is no evidence that suggests that the concerns expressed in this discourse were those of the attackers’, or that they had anything at all to do with their motives for attacking New York and Washington. Nonetheless, constant repetition and reinforcement of Islamist slogans in Western news reports, feature stories and interviews, articles and books, and public and private addresses and statements; and Western anti-Americanism and confusion about the Middle East, have combined to fuel a public discourse which is obfuscating and immobilizing, and misses the larger forces shaping events in the region, and throughout the post-Cold War world.

It appears that the September 11 attack was the work of an Islamist network of organizations (al-Qa’ida, which is co-ordinated by Ossama Bin Laden). Those who believe that September 11^th is linked in some way to America’s foreign policies or to the indifference of its heartless capitalism to world poverty, should take note of the following:

• Neither US support for Israel, nor any other US policy, prevented Islamists (such as Ossama Bin Laden) from allying with the US and working closely with the CIA throughout the Cold War.

• The 1953 coup in Iran against the government of Prime Minister Mussadiq financed and directed by the CIA and Britain’s MI-6 was supported by Islamists.

• Islamists are not champions of Palestinian nationalism or of any Arab nationalist cause. Their cause--the expulsion of Jews and Christians from the Middle East-- is fundamentally incompatible with Palestinian nationalism. It weakens and divides the Palestinian nation by sowing enmity between Christian and Muslim Palestinians and, more generally, between Christian and Muslim Arabs and Arab nationalists. The Islamist cause is to free Palestine (‘and other Muslim lands’) by expelling foreign minorities and non-Muslims from the Middle East. This is not the Palestinian national cause, and it is one with which no Christian, and few Muslim, Palestinians sympathise.

• Islamists promote the notion that the US is waging a war against Islam because, by portraying America as an enemy of Islam, they can gain support for opposing ‘American-style’ liberalism and democracy and for the numerous Arab governments that, because of US support, have thwarted Islamist attempts to seize state power. It is curious that the notion of a clash between Islam and the West, which is roundly condemned when it is proclaimed by the American academic, Samuel (the ‘Clash of Civilizations’) Huntington, is accepted, both here and in the Middle East, when it is proclaimed by right-wing groups in the Middle East. As Edward Said recently wrote (in The Nation, October 22), the notion ignores (1) the internal dynamics and plurality of Islam and of the West, and to (2) the fact that the major contest in most modern cultures concerns the definition or interpretation of each culture; and (3) the great amount of demagogy and downright ignorance involved in presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilization.

Those who repeat the Islamist slogan that US imperialism is engaged in a war against Islam are perhaps unaware that America’s oldest, closest, and most important ally in the region is Saudi Arabia (and not Israel) —an Islamic country which gives massive support to the maintenance and protection of Muslim holy places, and uses religious police to enforce strict compliance with Islamic social norms, where shops close five times a day for prayers, women go veiled in public, and alcohol and public cinemas are illegal. The US-Saudi alliance is arguably one of the closest, and most secret, alliances of the 20^t century, and one that had a profound impact, not only on the Middle East, but throughout the world; for, throughout the Cold War, the Saudis lavishly funded anti-leftist forces all over the world--in Angola, Mozambique, Portugal, Italy, Afghanistan and Yemen. Saudi Arabia was a major financial backer of the Reagan Administration's anti-Communist campaign in Latin America and of its successful proxy war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union.

• Islamists oppose US support for right-wing Arab governments like Saudi Arabia because, in their view, those regimes are not far enough to the right. Bin Laden, is an ardent champion of far right-wing causes, and wants to seize state power in Saudi Arabia, as the Ayatollah Khomeini did in Iran in 1979, because he sees the Saudi theocracy as insufficiently right-wing (the Saudi government expelled Bin Laden in 1994 because he opposed its support for Marxist leaders of the former South Yemen against the ultra-conservative government in Yemen during a civl war there). By the time Bin Laden turned against the US in 1991, America had been a close ally of Saudi Arabia for nearly 70 years. His change of heart occurred when the Saudi government declined his offer to lead his fighting forces in defence of the country against Saddam Hussein. The Saudi government preferred to depend on US troops to do the job for, unlike Bin Laden, the US does not aspire to overthrow it.

• Islamists are not anti-Capitalist. Their economic agenda is less clear than their social and political ones, but we do know that it is capitalist and with a decidedly neo-Liberal capitalist stance with respect to labor; only the Islamist social agenda might be characterised as anti-Capitalist, in that it enshrines as a supreme value the assigning of market privileges on the basis of religion, gender, and birth. (It might be argued that these biases are not ‘anti-capitalist’, as they are found to some extent in all capitalist societies; however, in the West, everyone is free, at least to try, to oppose them.)

• Islamists do not, in any event, speak for the impoverished people in the Middle East. Generally speaking, poorer elements--peasants and the urban poor, as well as blue-collar workers with regular jobs--have not been active in Islamist movements (though poorer urban elements did, eventually, join with Islamist revolutionaries in Iran). The leaders of the al-Qu’ida network are wealthy people, and its most active elements are recruited from among middle-class graduates in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

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Many people see recent events as the beginning or exacerbation of a global crisis. If it is, we should perhaps view it, according to the meaning conveyed by the Chinese ideograph, as a ‘phase of danger and opportunity’,

What those dangers and opportunities are can best be appreciated by surveying the devastated political topography of the Middle East which produced the means and motives for the September 11^th attack, and which reveals something of importance for understanding the nature of the post-Cold War world.

The Cold War’s global crusade against communism did not make the world safe for democracy and human freedom. In its zeal to annihilate the left, it suppressed the liberal, reformist, and progressive elements and currents in the ‘developing world’ that, in Europe and elsewhere, supported and encouraged struggles for democracy and the democratisation of national politics. Thus, while the prospects for democracy look fairly good in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, they look fairly dim in regions, like the Middle East, where anti-communist regimes and ruling groups, with the support of Western powers, eliminated the social forces and conditions needed to produce and maintain democracy.

In light of recent events, we should perhaps stop celebrating the Cold War’s 'victory' over communism and begin, instead, to assess its costs. We can begin the audit by surveying the circumstances which provided the means and motives for the September 11^th attacks: the political vacuum in the Middle East and the absence of a left, center or, even moderate right sufficiently organized to successfully compete in an open election with Islamists and, as a result, the absence of democracy there.

This is a crucial juncture in the history of the Middle East. A misreading of its post-Cold War political topography can be dangerous. Many progressives have taken up the slogans and embraced the cause of anti-American Islamist groups in the belief that they are strengthening opposition to US military, financial and commercial policies and practices around the globe. However, these groups (1) are devoutly opposed to democracy, workers’ rights, women’s rights, and religious freedom; (2) are fighting for a capitalist, totalitarian, and racist world (which, as Sudan and Afghanistan have shown, will bring little if any positive change to the crowds that they bus into the cities for demonstrations against the US and for CNN camera crews); (3) are no more an ‘authentic’ expression of Islam than gun-totting Rabbis on the West Bank are for Judaism or American white-supremicist Christian [sic] movements are for Christians; and (4) are the best organized, wealthiest, and most powerful political movement in the Middle East today.

The historical lessons of uniting with one part of the right against another part of it are clear. We have only to recall the Iranian Revolution, which brought together elements and interests from the left and from the religious far right who had nothing in common except their opposition to the Shah. After the fall of the shah, the religious far right, by virtue of their far greater organization and power, expelled the left from government, brutally repressed it throughout the country, conducted a military campaign against religious minorities, and imposed a far right social agenda on Iranian society.

A clearer understanding of the legacy of the Cold War will help us to better understand the post-Cold War world and what prospects and means there are for changing it.

NOTE

* ‘Islamist’ is a term that religious movements basing themselves on an innovative interpretation of Islam have used to identify themselves. The utility of the term for the purposes of this commentary is that it underlines the difference between the doctrines and practices of Islam, on the one hand, and the movements being discussed here, on the other. It also avoids the use of the term ‘fundamentalist’, which Iranian clerics were pleased to adopt because it suggests, falsely in my view, that they represent a return to Islamic fundamentals.

Sandra Halperin, University of Sussex, s.halperin@sussex.ac.uk