The murder of the United States Ambassador and three colleagues in Libya, followed by demonstrations in other countries of the Middle East, indicate that the cauldron is still boiling in that part of the world, as it certainly continues to do in Syria. The murders themselves were the sequel to boisterous demonstrations that culminated in an invasion and burning of the US consulate in Benghazi, allegedly protesting a film made in the United States claimed to be anti-Islamic.
These events have been quickly followed by demonstrations and attempts to attack other American diplomatic missions in Egypt and Yemen and have led observers to recall the invasion, in 1979, of the American embassy in Tehran, amidst massive demonstrations, and all that has followed in Iranian-American relations since.
The ferocity of the demonstrations in Egypt will have come as somewhat surprising to the US, which may well have thought that the modus vivendi between themselves and the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government there might have led to some long-term calm. But it seems clear that in matters of this kind, deemed to impinge on religious sentiment, the Brotherhood is not about to let itself be flanked by what are considered to be extremist Salafist Islamic – branches of the Sunni Muslim faith – groupings. While it is probably also the case that, as with the twists and turns of the Iranian revolution, there are elements which believe that in Egypt, as in other countries that have experienced the Arab Spring, the struggle will be a prolonged, rather than a one-shot affair.
The United States government will probably not be surprised by the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is still having difficulty in ensuring political calm even in Cairo, the capital city. President Obama, one of whose first external visits after taking office, was to Cairo in 2009, where he gave a much-lauded speech that seemed to legitimise the earlier demonstrations and changes of governments in Morocco and Tunisia in the Maghreb, and who claimed a kind of victory in managing a defeat of Gaddafi in Libya without overt American military participation on the ground there, could have felt that his strategy of pressure without military presence, unlike the previous US adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, might be having some success.
In Egypt in particular, however, the United States, with what seemed to be a successful strategy of utilizing pressure over the essentially military governments of Mubarak, eventually forcing the generals out without turmoil, and retaining its influence, has found that there is a large sediment of resentment and hostility among various factions of the Egyptian population.
Secondly it has found that in that religiously complex society, various factions, fearful of the dominant Muslimists, do not intend to cede all power to the post-election Brotherhood victors. The political strategy of the Salafists in particular, seems to be to find any port in a storm, and to use anti-Americanism as a weapon of convenience to mould at least a reasonable balancing force against the Brotherhood.
But the present protests suggest that instead of his expressions of sympathy and understanding of demonstrations for change in the Arab, and indeed Muslim, worlds from the Middle East to Indonesia being perceived in the United States itself as favourable to the country’s interests, in the present context of the pending American presidential elections, his Republican opponent is stretching to portray him as essentially soft on Muslim radicalism. And the Republicans tie this with seeking to construct an anti-Obama sentiment that suggests that this softness applies, as well, to the Palestinians in their struggle against the Israelis.
The tensions in the Middle East of course go beyond the present populist demonstrations of anti-Americanism. For the severe struggle now going on in Syria has engaged the United States in a battle between Sunni and Shi’ite forces throughout the Arab world. And in that context, the vibrancy of the Saudi Arabian diplomacy and actual participation in the Syrian civil war has also surprised some observers.
For the Saudis have not, as they might have traditionally done, waited for the Americans to virtually approve their participation in the anti-Assad struggle. They see the present situation as part of a similar struggle in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, where the governing Shi’ites, supported in some measure by the Iranians, are in engaged in a struggle against the minority Sunnis. The struggle there pits Saudi influence against essentially Shi’ite Iranian influence, which the Saudis see as a trial run for influence in the Gulf, and over the smaller Sunni-dominated monarchies.
For the first time in many decades too, the Syrian civil war has brought the government of Turkey, accustomed to playing a distant hand in the Arabian politico-religious struggles, more prominently into influencing how the conflict in that country is resolved. An inheritance of the Ataturk revolution in Turkey in the 1930s was the declaration of that country, in spite of its 80% Muslim majority, as a secular state. But the present Erdogan government has sought to redevelop a sense of the significance of religion in the state and society, and in consequence, this places it on one side in the wider Muslim inter-sect conflicts.
In that context Turkey sought, in the early stages of the Syrian conflict, to influence the Alawite-dominated Assad government towards a negotiated solution. But in the face of resistance by Assad, and not wanting to be as rigid and interventionist as the Saudi Sunnis, Ergdogan has now sought to limit his interventions in the Syrian imbroglio to seeking to ensure that the increasingly severe refugee problem does not put excessive pressure on the Turkish states.
The increasing complexity of the Syrian problem, a desire to minimize anti-Americanism in the Muslim world, a strategy of ensuring that his and NATO’s victory in Libya, with minimal American physical participation, and minimal influence of Arab demonstrations on the forthcoming American elections, must surely be inducing President Obama to hope that the present cauldron continues on a relatively slow, if not diminishing, boil; while the other NATO powers, so proud of their victory in Libya, seek to keep their noses clean, and concentrate on their own dominating economic problems.
