Lineages of Revolt. Adam Hanieh
meant that they were always secondary to the principal goal of capitalist development.
These contradictory dynamics help to explain the evolution of the Arab states in the 1970s and 1980s. By the end of these two decades, the proclaimed goals of the Arab nationalist movement lay in tatters—Egypt had become a key US ally, and virtually all Arab states were laying the groundwork for strict neoliberal economic programs that would be launched under the auspices of the IMF and World Bank. By the mid-1980s, most of the Arab states had reoriented from a confrontation with imperialism toward a protracted incorporation into US and European power structures in the region. Somewhat ironically, as later chapters will trace, this incorporation actually helped strengthen the development of the national capitalist classes sought by Arab governments for decades. This occurred, however, not through a break with imperialism but through the insertion of this emergent class into the circuits of accumulation developed by the advanced capitalist states over the region as a whole.
1970s and 1980s: The Mechanisms of Counterrevolution
Overcoming Arab nationalism and subsuming it into the structures of imperial rule took place through a combination of political, military, and economic means. The overriding characteristic of this process was the widening of hierarchies and the differentiating of power at both the regional and national scales. By magnifying the region’s uneven patterns of development while simultaneously tightening its interdependencies, foreign powers were able to lock certain social forces within the Middle East into a framework of shared interests opposed to those of the vast majority. In spite of significant opposition, the principal consequence of these changes was the tempering of any anti-imperialist features of Arab governments and the sustained rollback of the populist measures on which they rested.
On the political and military front, Western governments—led by the United States—initially pursued this strategy through strengthening alliances with three main regional pillars: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Israel. Each of these countries was provided with large amounts of financial and military aid, and the specific socioeconomic and political characteristics of these three countries enabled them to emerge as the main articulation of US and European influence in the region. Their position within regional hierarchies was strengthened, and in return, they helped to confront the various radical movements that had developed during the 1950s and 1960s, whether nationalist or left-wing.
In the Gulf, the Saudi monarch, King Saud, had long been reliant on US aid and military support following the arrival of US oil companies to the country in the 1920s. But Saud’s anachronistic regime and close relationship with the United States faced the rise of revolutionary and nationalist movements during the 1950s and 1960s, which were severely repressed with the open support of US and British advisors. The influx of huge flows of petrodollars into the Gulf in the 1970s as a result of oil price rises (first in 1973–74 and again in 1979–82) underpinned the growth of a Saudi ruling class that was exposed to profound threats from below and from the wider region (see chapter 6). In this context, an alliance with the United States (and Britain) helped to strengthen the position of the Saudi monarchy and the social forces connected to it, laying the basis for a particular form of regional dominance that has persisted into the present.
In return for Western military and political support, the Saudi regime was all too willing to move to undercut Arab nationalism through the corrupting influence of petrodollars, which could be used to back pro-Western forces in the region without a direct link to Western funding.27 In line with this logic, Saudi Arabia was encouraged to employ Islam as a regional counterweight to nationalist and left-wing organizations, organizing “Islamic summits” that asserted Saudi influence and challenged Egypt’s role as the leading Arab state.28 A vitriolic propaganda war opened up between the Saudi and Egyptian governments, leading the US Senate to object to broadcasts from the Voice of Cairo radio station calling upon Saudi citizens to “overthrow these lackeys who have sold their honor and dignity and who cooperate with the arch enemies of the Arabs.”29 This proxy conflict with Egypt took its most vivid form during the eight-year North Yemen civil war, where Saudi Arabia was the main supporter of the royalist, pro-British forces that had been overthrown in 1962, while Egypt backed the republican movements arrayed against the ousted monarchy.
In the case of Iran, the United States (and Britain’s M16) had engineered a coup against Mossadegh in 1953, bringing to power a pro-Western government loyal to the Iranian monarchy, headed by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.30 The United States explicitly conceived of Iran as the principal base of control for the Gulf region, and military funding reached $1.7 billion under the first Nixon administration (1968–72), nearly three times the limit set by Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon Johnson.31 A 1969 report by the RAND Corporation—a prominent think tank closely connected to Washington policy makers—noted that Iran was a critical feature of US power in the Gulf because it could “help achieve many of the goals we find desirable without the need to intervene in the region.”32 This role was convincingly demonstrated in 1973 with the dispatch of the Iranian military to Oman to assist British troops in the repression of the Dhofar rebellion—a powerful struggle that gave birth to the PFLOAG and was at the heart of left-wing movements in the Arabian Peninsula. The Iranian troops, supplied with US helicopters and other weaponry, succeeded in crushing the rebellion.33 US military support to Iran skyrocketed from 1973 onward, amounting to more than $6 billion annually from 1973 to 1975. In addition, Iran received the most sophisticated weaponry available from the US military arsenal.34 As the United States extended military support to Iran, it also helped the Shah build a domestic security apparatus (the SAVAK) that became renowned for its vicious repression of any internal dissent.
The other major pivot of US power in the broader region was the state of Israel. As a settler-colonial state, Israel had come into being in 1948 through the expulsion of around three-quarters of the original Palestinian population from their homes and lands.35 Due to this initial act of dispossession and its overarching goal of preserving itself as a self-defined “Jewish state,” Israel quickly emerged as a key partner of foreign powers in the region.36 Inextricably tied to external support for its continued viability in a hostile environment, Israel could be counted on as a much more reliable ally than any Arab state. During the 1950s, Israel’s main external support had come from Britain and France.37 But the June 1967 war saw the Israeli military destroy the Egyptian and Syrian air forces and occupy the West Bank, Gaza Strip, (Egyptian) Sinai Peninsula, and (Syrian) Golan Heights. Israel’s defeat of the Arab states encouraged the United States to cement itself as the country’s primary patron, supplying it annually with billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware and financial support.
Israel’s victory in 1967 signaled a decisive turning point in the evolution of Arab nationalism.38 While pro-Western regimes continued to be challenged from below by various radical movements, and new nationalist governments came to power in Southern Yemen (1967),39 Iraq (1968), and Libya (1969), Israel’s victory dealt a devastating blow to the notions of Arab unity and resistance that had crystallized most sharply in Nasser’s Egypt.40 The military defeat was symbolically reinforced by Nasser’s death in 1970 and the coming to power of Anwar Sadat, who subsequently moved to reverse many of Nasser’s more radical policies. The priority placed by the United States on its relationship with Israel was further highlighted in 1973, following another war between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria. Despite initial Egyptian and Syrian advances in the opening salvos of the war, US airlifts of the latest military equipment led to Israel’s eventual victory. This was the framework in which the other front of imperialist strategy unfolded—the region’s economic subjugation.
The Economic Front
Alongside these political and military defeats, much of the Arab world was faced at the time with the realities of the global economic slump that had begun in the early 1970s. This downturn had two important ramifications for the Middle East. The first of these was the increase in oil prices in the early 1970s, which produced a sharp rise in the cost of oil for oil-importing countries in the region (while simultaneously feeding the prodigious growth in petrodollars for the Gulf, as noted above). The second impact of the world crisis was a drop in global demand, which hit export levels and created severe balance-of-payments problems for oil-importing countries. This was the context in which two interlinked elements emerged as central features of Western strategy in the region—aid