Armed Forces in the Middle East

Politics and Strategy

Thomas Keaney, Barry Rubin, Thomas Keaney, Barry Rubin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780714652559
• eBook ISBN: 9781135288051
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

An examination of the Middle East's leading armed forces and their role in both military and political affairs. The book considers their missions, doctrine, training, equipment and effectiveness as fighting forces.

1

The Military in Contemporary Middle East Politics

BARRY RUBIN

Our views of the military’s role in Middle East politics have largely been formed by the history of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s in the region. Those years were the golden age of coups in the Arab world, a time when every Arab military officer could hope to become his country’s ruler some day. The armed forces were highly politicized and rulers generally failed to control them. During this period, too, the armed forces were the most effective national institutions and, at times, the only effective one.

Officers argued that politics was too important to be left to the politicians, whom they saw – by no means inaccurately – as incompetent and corrupt. The 1948 defeat, failure to gain Arab unity, a perceived subservience to Western states, and the slow pace of the development process were among the grievances that motivated officers to seek political power.

At the same time, coups by military officers often in fact represented revolts by various ethnic, religious, class and regional groups that were well represented in the officer corps while largely excluded from the political and economic elites. Thus, these coups were actually social revolutions in the form of military takeovers. At the time, many Western scholars saw Arab militaries as the necessary instruments for creating governments capable of nation-building and mass mobilization.

The current era, beginning in the 1970s, was shaped by these military regimes and by the remaining civilian rulers who had learned how to survive this threat. They were determined to prevent military officers from staging any fresh coups. Indeed, governments did have a great deal of success in preventing their armies from intervening in politics.¹ They have also built militaries that can successfully maintain internal order. But the price of that accomplishment is severe damage to their ability to function as armed forces actually fighting wars.²

Perhaps the biggest asset of Middle East militaries is that they often have more influence than their Western counterparts in obtaining the level of financial support they seek. They need not worry about public criticism. At the same time, though, few Middle Eastern armed forces can equal the professional qualities and operational advantages enjoyed by their counterparts in democratic states.

The limits placed on the regular militaries as a tool for fighting external wars have made it more necessary for states to develop other means of projecting power, ranging from sponsorship of terrorism to obtaining Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Certainly, the high level of conflict in the Middle East has led to periodic wars. Yet this history has clearly shown the risks involved in normal warfare and the frequency of defeat for Arab and Iranian armies. The possession of strong deterrence, especially by Israel, has also discouraged direct assault.

After the 1980s, the decline of one superpower sponsor in the region, the Soviet Union, and the relative strength and willingness to intervene of the sole remaining superpower, the United States, accelerated this trend. Consequently, such tools as the use of proxies, subversion, terrorism and an attempt to obtain WMD have become important means of power projection, compared with the use of regular armed forces.

THE ARMED FORCES AND STATE POWER

The first requirement for any government is to ensure its own survival. In the Arab world, this has meant finding a way to prevent the armed forces from seizing power in a coup. Simultaneously, governments have given the armed forces privileges, while also trying to weaken them in order to redirect their interests away from politics. Ironically, though, the armed forces have been kept out of politics only by measures that subordinate them to the government’s policy decisions, making governments dependent on keeping the officers happy, and making the actual use of the armed forces a dangerous strategy that is likely to produce defeats.

Today, only two of the 14 main Arab countries – Egypt and Libya – have rulers who are in power because they were career military officers.³ And even in these two cases, the chief executives (Husni Mubarak and Muammar Qadhafi, respectively) left active duty more than a quarter century ago.

Two more peripheral and less developed Arab states, Yemen and Sudan, have military dictatorships more typical of the Middle East in the 1950s-70s period. Sudan, which in many ways is different from other members of the Arab League, had military coups in 1958, 1969, 1985 and 1989. The current leader is Lieutenant General Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir, and the government portrays itself as Islamist. Yemen had its latest coup in 1979 and is led by Ali Abdallah Salah, who promoted himself to field marshal. He is a Ba’thist with strong pro-Iraq sympathies. Both of these countries have turbulent histories and a lack of alternative civilian political institutions relative to other Arab states.

In order to ensure that the military did not try to seize power, Arab governments followed several policies. There were two general ways by which politicians sought to win the armed forces’ backing: through material incentives for individuals and for the collective military institution.

First, officers are kept happy by high pay and special privileges. These benefits have been many and varied. In Syria, they can be said to include the right to smuggling and other illicit profits deriving from Damascus’s control over Lebanon. Special housing is another common perquisite.

Of course, while such privileges inflate budgets, the wage rates (especially for enlisted men) are relatively low. If economies were booming and a large middle class was being created, professionals and high-tech employees would be earning more than soldiers, creating problems of morale and retention. These problems exist especially in Israel.⁴

Arab military systems are still largely geared to recruiting and retaining less-educated, poorer people from the sectors most loyal to the regime. In many Arab states, military careers are still relatively lucrative, compared to the other options open to rural and disadvantaged people who can qualify for such jobs. Yet already urban, college-educated young people are reluctant to enter the armed forces. As time goes on, Arab militaries will have a harder time keeping up with the growing importance of high technology, advanced communications and other new features of warfare requiring highly trained elite personnel, as well as innovation and flexibility.

This problem already exists in the Gulf Arab monarchies, where easier high-paying jobs are available, but is solved by employing foreign mercenary soldiers. These countries have also tried to manage their manpower shortages by cooperating through the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), although efforts to develop a joint military force have had only limited success.⁵

Second, the armed services have been given high proportions of national budgets, thus detracting from development and social spending in order to ensure the military’s loyalty.

That point, while obvious, may be often missed by Western observers, who expect that the prospect of obtaining an economic ‘peace dividend’ is an incentive for ending regional conflicts. Given their importance for maintaining domestic stability, as well as the threats from neighbors faced by every state, military budgets are unlikely to decline. A purely ‘rational’ argument based on economics will not appeal to leaders who know they need a strong and happy military to survive.

Expensive weapons purchases are often undertaken based on military commanders’ preferences, rather than on the nation’s need for these specific arms or the armed forces’ ability to maintain them. Again, the demand for top-of-the-range weapons is important for rulers’ egos, national prestige and the deterrence of regional threats, yet these rationales, too, are often responses to the desires or decisions of military commanders.⁶ Turkey has a similar situation, since generals there can intervene constitutionally in the budget process to ensure their demands are met.⁷

Nevertheless, as military budgets and the costs of specific weapons systems climb higher, governments are forced to apply the brakes on spending. This has already been seen in such countries as Syria and Turkey. The need to obtain financing for weapons purchases can also affect foreign policy. For example, Syria portrays itself as a front-line state battling Israel in order to seek money from Gulf Arab monarchies. Iraq used a similar approach in defining itself as the Arab world’s defender against Iran.

In the case of the Gulf Arab monarchies, another motive for huge arms purchases from the United States is to create additional links to make certain that the superpower will play the role of protector for the regimes. As a result of seeking prestige and protection, however, civilian and military leaders often waste huge amounts of money without creating a more effective military establishment. For example, the United Arab Emirates buys advanced planes for which it does not have pilots, or even, perhaps, suitable runways.

Governments employ six other successful methods designed to weaken and divide the armed forces’ ability to threaten the government. These policies also, however, damage the military’s ability to fight external adversaries.

1. Multiple military branches and intelligence services are maintained to cancel each other out in terms of power and influence. This leads to wasted resources and poor coordination among forces. It also corrupts the intelligence-gathering process, since a premium is put on information that pleases rulers and discredits rivals, rather than on accurate data. Much of the intelligence effort goes to gather information on the military itself, including officers’ attitudes and any dissent that might exist in the ranks.

Asked why he needed so many security forces for the Palestinian Authority (PA), Yasir Arafat replied, The Syrians have 14, the Egyptians have 12.1 only have 6 to protect me’.⁸ Actually, he had as many as 12 different military agencies. These forces sometimes feuded and even fought among themselves.

For example, in 1998, Military Intelligence, led by Musa Arafat, a relative of Yasir Arafat, raided an office of the Tanzim, Fatah’s armed militia headed by Marwan Barghuti, Fatah’s leader in the West Bank. Barghuti then led a march on the Military Intelligence’s headquarters in Ramallah in which Musa Arafat’s men opened fire and killed one youth, nephew of a Palestinian Authority cabinet minister. Barghuti’s men then issued a leaflet stating, ‘Musa Arafat and his dogs suck Palestinian blood by dealing with stolen cars, whorehouses, and selling weapons. They prefer to be Israeli prostitutes, working here as the Israeli intelligence arm to separate the Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian people.’⁹

During the fighting against Israel in the intifada that began in 2000, different forces refused to share ammunition and supplies.¹⁰ In doing so, they were not flouting Arafat’s instructions but fulfilling the divide-and-rule structure that he had deliberately created to forestall future coup possibilities even before a state was established. Of course, fully independent states created more order and discipline among their various forces, but the basic principle of using multiple forces to enhance control remained the same.

In Arab countries, these units have overlapping responsibilities, spy on each other, and have no ability to coordinate among themselves. They are, then, deliberately put into competition with each other. While Arafat plays off different forces as more or less equal, in Arab states and Iran they form a hierarchy ranging from more apolitical and multi-ethnic regular units to increasingly elite forces tied closely to the regime through communal and ethnic interests. To ensure this support, the elite groups are subjected to more ideology, as well as favored with greater privileges. The concept is to make sure the special units and their officers feel their fate is closely linked to the regime’s survival.

In Iran, aside from the regular military, there is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij militia, both ideologically reliable and loyal to the regime, or at least the hardline faction. Given internal Iranian conflicts, these latter two forces are also, in a sense, a party militia that could be used in a factional civil war.¹¹

Saudi Arabia has both its regular forces and the tribal-based ‘White Army’. A special feature of the elite units is that they are more likely to be used in quelling internal unrest, since they can be considered reliable against anti-regime rebels who may come from a different religious, ethnic and geographical background.

Within Iraq, this multi-force system is developed to its peak of complexity and specialization.¹² Kurds are not drafted into the regular army – though there are pro-regime Kurdish militias. In the regular armed forces, there is a large proportion of Shi’a Muslims, who can even attain the rank of general. Beyond this, however, is a complex hierarchy. As Amatzia Baram has written:

In the army, as opposed to the Republican Guard (RG), support for the president is far less staunch. Thus, the RG is placed between all army units and the capital city, and the Special Republican Guard (SRG) is stationed inside of Baghdad, and thus between the RG and the inner rings guarding the president. As long as the regime looks stable, the RG, the SRG, Special Security (SS), and the Palace Guard (or Presidential Guard, Himayat al-Ra’is) will remain essentially loyal to [President] Saddam Husayn. If he is removed they have too much to lose: power and prestige, higher salaries than those of their army counterparts, and other privileges that increase in relation to a soldier’s proximity to the president.¹³

2. Promotions and assignments are based more on political loyalty than ability. This approach can make a distinction between professionally able and politically correct officers. Those who devote more time to proving their pro-regime credentials can advance more quickl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1. The Military in Contemporary Middle East Politics
• 2. Why Arab Armies Lose Wars
• 3. US Policy and Middle East Armed Forces
• 4. Russia’s Military Involvement with the Middle East
• 5. Guns and Butter in the Egyptian Army
• 6. The Syrian Army on the Domestic and External Fronts
• 7. Soldiers without Fortune: Palestinian Militarization in the Post-Statehood Era
• 8. The Jordanian Army: Between Domestic and External Challenges
• 9. The Israel Defense Force: Continuity and Change
• 10. The Military and Politics: A Turkish Dilemma
• 11. Saddam Husayn, the Ba’th Regime and the Iraqi Officer Corps
• 12. The Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran: An Assessment
• Index