A decade of anti-government protests in the Arab world have thrown popular trust in the military into the garbage bin and undermined the military’s position as one of the most trusted institutions.
In 2011 it was thebarriers of fearthat protesters broke. Created by autocratic rulers, fear was what long kept the disgruntled from taking their grievances to the street.
In 2019 and 2020 those barriers have been further reduced with protesters refusing to back down despite the use of brutal force by law enforcement and security forces in Lebanon and Iraq and occasional violence elsewhere in the Arab world.
Changed popular perceptions of the military are the result. Increasingly, the military is seen at best as positioning itself to salvage what can be salvaged of an ancien regime and at worst the enforcer of a hated regime.
“Iraqis broke the shackles of fearand reached the point of no return. The movement will not stop, and the Iraqi people will never be silenced…,” said Ali Hashim, a protester in Baghdad, speaking only a week after one night of mass killings in December.
Inincreasingly violent clashes in Beirutearlier this month, protesters unsuccessfully sought to persuade the security forces they were attacking that their demands for a complete break with Lebanon’s political elite was also in the interest of men in uniform.
Algeria’s newly elected presidentAbdelmadjid Tebboun is struggling to garner legitimacywith mass protests continuing nine months after the toppling of Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Voters voted with their feet in last month’s presidential poll with 60 percent abstaining.
Algeria was railroaded into the election by its powerful military in a bid to outflank protesters by holding the poll before they had an opportunity to prepare for it.
A crucial nail was driven into the coffin of the notion of a unity of purpose between protesters and armed forces with the 2013 military coup in Egypt that produced one of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes under general-turned-president Abdul Fattah Al-Sisi.
Protesters realize almost a decade after the 2011 protests in which demonstrators declared victory once leaders like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had resigned, that their only chance of success is to retain their street power until elites, including the military, agreeas appears to be the case in Sudanto a truly transformational process.
In Sudan, unlike in Egypt in 2011, this meant protesters and/or civil society groups ensuring that they had a seat at the table before they surrendered the street.
In Lebanon protests escalated as a result of the elite’s attempt to address the crisis with the appointment as prime minister of Hassan Diab,widely seen as beholden to Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia and political group.
Mounting violence on the streets of Lebanon and Iraq in which hundreds of protesters have been killed or wounded will do little to rebuild confidence in the military and allied security forces.
If Lebanon and Iraq are anything to go by, clashes are likely to escalate and leave deep-seated scars.
“Our backs are against the wall. We have nothing more to lose. We are fighting a regime with a history of 40 years of corruption and their armed defenders,” said a masked protester on the streets of Beirut.
“Arab and Iranian ruling elites and their own citizens now openly fight and resist each other, seeking to define their countries’ identities and policies. This is probably the most consequential ideological battle in the Middle East since its state system was established a century ago,” Mr. Khouri said.
It’s an epic battle that has turned the once revered military into yet another institution that finds itself on the wrong side of history.
“The only way out of our current predicament is thesimultaneous rejection of both domestic despotism and imperial arrogance.We need a politics that doesn’t merely claim security, freedom, and equality for a select group or class, but that understands these rights as inalienable and for all people,” said a statement by Iranian students demanding an end to all foreign interference in the affairs of the region, be it by the United States, Iran or the conservative Gulf states.
James M. Dorsey
Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, an adjunct senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture.