Introduction
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6/24 "US and Iran: Beneath the Roiled Surface"
5/18 "Iraq: New Strategies"
5/13 "The Edge of the Razor"
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THE STRATFOR GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT:
"THE DEATH OF ARAFAT"
November 11, 2004 2359 GMT
By George Friedman
www.stratfor.com
_______
That Yasser Arafat's death marks the end of an era is so obvious
that it hardly bears saying. The nature of the era that is ending
and the nature of the era that is coming, on the other hand, do
bear discussing. That speaks not only to the Arab-Israeli
conflict but to the evolution of the Arab world in general.
In order to understand Arafat's life, it is essential to
understand the concept "Arab," and to understand its tension with
the concept "Muslim," at least as Arafat lived it out. In
general, ethnic Arabs populate North Africa and the area between
the Mediterranean and Iran, and between Yemen and Turkey. This is
the Arab world. It is a world that is generally -- but far from
exclusively -- Muslim, although the Muslim world stretches far
beyond the Arab world.
To understand Arafat's life, it is much more important to
understand the Arab impulse than to understand the Muslim
impulse. Arafat belonged to that generation of Arab who
visualized the emergence of a single Arab nation, encapsulating
all of the religious groups in the Arab world, and one that was
essentially secular in nature. This vision did not originate with
Arafat but with his primary patron, Gamal Abdul Nasser, the
founder of modern Egypt and of the idea of a United Arab
Republic. No sense can be made of Arafat's life without first
understanding Nasser's.
Nasser was born into an Egypt that was ruled by a weak and
corrupt monarchy and effectively dominated by Britain. He became
an officer in the Egyptian army and fought competently against
the Israelis in the 1948 war. He emerged from that war committed
to two principles: The first was recovering Egyptian independence
fully; the second was making Egypt a modern, industrial state.
Taking his bearing from Kamal Ataturk, who founded the modern
Turkish state, Nasser saw the military as the most modern
institution in Egypt, and therefore the instrument to achieve
both independence and modernization. This was the foundation of
the Egyptian revolution.
Nasser was personally a practicing Muslim of sorts -- he attended
mosque -- but he did not see himself as leading an Islamic
revolution at all. For example, he placed numerous Coptic
Christians in important government positions. For Arafat, the
overriding principle was not Islam, but Arabism. Nasser dreamed
of uniting the Arabs in a single entity, whose capital would be
Cairo. He believed that until there was a United Arab Republic,
the Arabs would remain the victims of foreign imperialism.
Nasser saw his prime antagonists as the traditional monarchies of
the Arab world. Throughout his rule, Nasser tried to foment
revolutions, led by the military, that would topple these
monarchies. Nasserite or near-Nasserite revolutions toppled
Iraqi, Syrian and Libyan monarchies. Throughout his rule, he
tried to bring down the Jordanian, Saudi and other Persian Gulf
regimes. This was the constant conflict that overlaid the Arab
world from the 1950s until the death of Nasser and the rise of
Anwar Sadat.
Geopolitics aligned Nasser's ambitions with the Soviet Union.
Nasser was a socialist but never a Marxist. Nevertheless, as he
confronted the United States and threatened American allies among
the conservative monarchies, he grew both vulnerable to the
United States and badly in need of a geopolitical patron. The
Soviets were also interested in limiting American power and saw
Nasser as a natural ally, particularly because of his
confrontation with the monarchies.
Nasser's view of Israel was that it represented the intrusion of
British imperialism into the Arab world, and that the
conservative monarchies, particularly Jordan, were complicit in
its creation. For Nasser, the destruction of Israel had several
uses. First, it was a unifying point for Arab nationalism.
Second, it provided a tool with which to prod and confront the
monarchies that tended to shy away from confrontation. Third, it
allowed for the further modernization of the Egyptian military --
and therefore of Egypt -- by enticing a flow of technology from
the Soviet Union to Egypt. Nasser both opposed the existence of
Israel and saw its existence as a useful tool in his general
project.
It is important to understand that for Nasser, Israel was not a
Palestinian problem but an Arab problem. In his view, the
particular Arab nationalisms were the problem, not the solution.
Adding another Arab nationalism -- Palestinian -- to the mix was
not in his interest. The Zionist injustice was against the Arab
nation and not against the Palestinians as a particular nation.
Nasser was not alone in this view. The Syrians saw Palestine as a
district of Syria, stolen by the British and French. They saw the
Zionists as oppressors, but against the Syrian nation. The
Jordanians, who held the West Bank, saw the West Bank as part of
the Jordanian nation and, by extension, the rest of Palestine as
a district of Jordan. Until the 1967 war, the Arab world was
publicly and formally united in opposing the existence of Israel,
but much less united on what would replace Israel after it was
destroyed. The least likely candidate was an independent
Palestinian state.
Prior to 1967, Nasser sponsored the creation of the Palestine
Liberation Organization under the leadership of Ahmed al
Shukairi. It was an entirely ineffective organization that
created a unit that fought under Egyptian command. Since 1967 was
a disaster for Nasser, "fought" is a very loose term. The PLO was
kept under tight control, careful avoiding the question of
nationhood and focusing on the destruction of Israel.
After the 1967 war, the young leader of the PLO's Fatah faction
took control of the organization. Yasser Arafat was a creature of
Nasser, politically and intellectually. He was an Arabist. He was
a modernizer. He was a secularist. He was aligned with the
Soviets. He was anti-American. Arafat faced two disparate
questions in 1967. First, it was clear that the Arabs would not
defeat Israel in a war, probably in his lifetime; what,
therefore, was to be done to destroy Israel? Second, if the only
goal was to destroy the Israelis, and if that was not to happen
anytime soon, then what was to become of the Palestinians? Arafat
posed the question more radically: Granted that Palestinians were
part of the Arab revolution, did they have a separate identity of
their own, as did Egyptians or Libyans? Were they simply Syrians
or Jordanians? Who were they?
Asserting Palestinian nationalism was not easy in 1967, because
of the Arabs themselves. The Syrians did not easily recognize
their independence and sponsored their own Palestinian group,
loyal to Syria. The Jordanians could not recognize the
Palestinians as separate, as their own claim to power even east
of the Jordan would be questionable, let alone their claims to
the West Bank. The Egyptians were uneasy with the rise of another
Arab nationalism.
Simultaneously, the growth of a radical and homeless Palestinian
movement terrified the monarchies. Arafat knew that no war would
defeat the Israelis. His view was that a two-tiered approach was
best. On one level, the PLO would make the claim on behalf of the
Palestinian people, for the right to statehood on the world
stage. On the other hand, the Palestinians would use small-scale
paramilitary operations against soft targets -- terrorism -- to
increase the cost throughout the world of ignoring the
Palestinians.
The Soviets were delighted with this strategy, and their national
intelligence services moved to facilitate it by providing
training and logistics. A terror campaign against Israel's
supporters would be a terror campaign against Europe and the
United States. The Soviets were delighted by anything that caused
pain and destabilized the West. The cost to the Soviets of
underwriting Palestinian operations, either directly or through
various Eastern European or Arab intelligence services, was
negligible. Arafat became a revolutionary aligned with the
Soviets.
There were two operational principles. The first was that Arafat
himself should appear as the political wing of the movement, able
to serve as an untainted spokesman for Palestinian rights. The
second was that the groups that carried out the covert operations
should remain complex and murky. Plausible deniability combined
with unpredictability was the key.
Arafat created an independent covert capability that allowed him
to make a radical assertion: that there was an independent
Palestinian people as distinct as any other Arab nation.
Terrorist operations gave Arafat the leverage to assert that
Palestine should take its place in the Arab world in its own
right.
If Palestine was a separate nation, then what was Jordan? The Ha-
shemite kingdom were Bedouins driven out of Arabia. The majority
of the population were not Bedouin, but had their roots in the
west - hence, they were Palestinians. If there was a Palestinian
nation, then why were they being ruled by Bedouins from Arabia?
In September 1970, Arafat made his move. Combining a series of
hijackings of Western airliners with a Palestinian rising in
Jordan, Arafat attempted to seize control of Jordan. He failed,
and thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered by Hashemite and
Pakistani mercenaries. (Coincidentally, the military unit
dispatched to Jordan was led by then-Brigadier Zia-ul-Haq, who
later ruled Pakistan from 1977 to 1988 as a military dictator.)
Arafat's logic was impeccable. His military capability was less
than perfect.
Arafat created a new group -- Black September -- that was
assigned the task of waging a covert war against the Israelis and
the West. The greatest action, the massacre of Israeli athletes
at the Munich Olympics in 1972, defined the next generation.
Israel launched a counter-operation to destroy Black September,
and the pattern of terrorism and counter-terrorism swirling
around the globe was set. The PLO was embedded in a network of
terrorist groups sponsored by the Soviets that ranged from Japan
to Italy. The Israelis became part of a multinational counter-
attack. Neither side could score a definitive victory.
But Arafat won the major victory. Nations are frequently born of
battle, and the battles that began in 1970 and raged until the
mid-1990s established an indelible principle -- there is now, if
there was not before, a nation called Palestine. This was
critical, because as Nasser died and his heritage was discarded
by Anwar Sadat, the principle of the Arab nation was lost. It was
only through the autonomous concept of Palestinian nationalism
that Arafat and the PLO could survive.
And this was Arafat's fatal crisis. He had established the
principle of Palestine, but what he had failed to define was what
that Palestinian nation meant and what it wanted. The latter was
the critical point. Arafat's strategy was to appear the statesman
restraining uncontrollable radicals. He understood that he needed
Western support to get a state, and he used this role superbly.
He appeared moderate and malleable in English, radical and
intractable in Arabic. This was his insoluble dilemma.
Arafat led a nation that had no common understanding of their
goal. There were those who wanted to recover a part of Palestine
and be content. There were those who wanted to recover part of
Palestine and use it as a base of operations to retake the rest.
There were those who would accept no intermediate deal but wanted
to destroy Israel. Arafat's fatal problem was that in the course
of creating the Palestinian nation, he had convinced all three
factions that he stood with them.
Like many politicians, Arafat had made too many deals. He had
successfully persuaded the West that (a) he genuinely wanted a
compromise and (b) that he could restrain terrorism. But he had
also persuaded Palestinians that any deal was merely temporary,
and others that he wouldn't accept any deal. By the time of the
Oslo accords, Arafat was so tied up in knots that he could not
longer speak for the nation he created. More precisely, the
Palestinians were so divided that no one could negotiate on their
behalf, confident in his authority. Arafat kept his position by
sacrificing his power.
By the 1990s, the space left by the demise of pan-Arabism had
been taken by the rise of Islamist religiosity. Hamas,
representing the view that there is a Palestinian nation but that
it should be understood as part of the Islamic world under
Islamic law, had become the most vibrant part of the Palestinian
polity. Nothing was more alien from Arafat's thinking than Hamas.
It ran counter to everything he had learned from Nasser.
However -- and this is Arafat's tragedy -- by the time Hamas
emerged as a power, he had lost the ability to believe in
anything but the concept of the Palestinians and his place as its
leader. As Hamas rose, Arafat became entirely tactical. His goal
was to retain position if not power, and toward that end, he
would do what was needed. A lifetime of tactics had destroyed all
strategy.
His death in Paris was a farce of family and courtiers. It fitted
the end he had created, because his last years were lived in a
round of clever maneuvers leading nowhere. The Palestinians are
left now without strategy, only tactics. There is no one who can
speak for the Palestinians and be listened to as authoritative.
He created the Palestinian nation and utterly disrupted the
Palestinian state. He left a clear concept on the one hand, a
chaos on the other.
It is interesting to wonder what would have happened if Arafat
had won in Jordan in 1970, while Nasser was still alive. But that
wasn't going to happen, because Arafat's fatal weakness was
visible even then. The concept was clear -- but instead of
meticulously planning a rising, Arafat improvised, playing
politics within the PLO when he should have been managing combat
operations. The chaos and failure that marked Black September
became emblematic of his life.
Arafat succeeded in one thing, and perhaps that is enough -- he
created the Palestinian nation against all enemies, Arab and non-
Arab. The rest was the endless failure of pure improvisation.
(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
www.stratfor.com
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