US Hard Power in the Arab World

Resistance, the Syrian Uprising and the War on Terror

Layla Saleh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367205324
• eBook ISBN: 9781315512990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Neither stability nor change in the post-colonial Arab world can be fully understood without considering the international context, and American Foreign policy in particular. However, the exact nature of America's presence in the Arab world, and the scope and modes of its influence, all appear to have reached a crossroads since the Arab uprisings.

'US Hard Power in the Arab World' traces the US's "power of persuasion" in the Arab Middle East from the onset of the War on Terror in 2001 through to the Arab Spring. With a particular focus on Syria, the book explores the limits of an American "smart power" amid the emergence of a growing indigenous "soft power" whose ire is directed not only at Assad's regime, but also at the violence perpetrated or enabled by the international community, headed by the US. It is argued that the blurring of the two forms of "soft" and "hard" American power has tarnished the credibility of US policies geared to win hearts and minds in the Arab world.

'US Hard Power in the Arab World' narrates the contests between attraction and intimidation, public diplomacy and military occupation, elites and publics, seduction and resistance. Drawing upon a multitude of primary sources, including personal interviews with Syrian activists and opposition figures, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Middle East Politics, as well as those concerned with American Foreign Policy and the Arab Spring.

1 Introduction

Narrating a “Smart” US into the Arab World

War and peace are not necessarily sequential anymore. Winning battles and winning hearts and minds, the force at arms and the force of diplomacy, have become joint operations.

US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage
(US Department of State 2004)

Introduction

In a transitional context as steeped in global power differentials as the Arab Middle East, who coerces, who persuades, where, and how? This is a book about the limits of an American “smart power” challenged by the emergence of an indigenous “soft power” at a pivotal moment in Arab history. It narrates contests between attraction and intimidation, public diplomacy and military occupation, elites and publics, seduction and resistance. Demonstrating the intractable entanglement between American soft power conceived in the shadow of its “hard” US military counterpart, this book traces the conceptual and policy trajectory of the US’s “power of persuasion” from the War on Terror and into the Arab Spring. Challenging the theoretical conception of soft power as the exclusive domain of (Western) elites, it explores the indigenous, popular soft power of Syria’s thuwwar (revolutionaries) as they struggle to attain freedom and dignity domestically while asserting their “voice” in international politics. Recent academic work on Syria has focused on examining the domestic causes and consequences of the uprising (Bishara 2013; Hinnebusch 2012; Ismail 2011; Leenders 2013; Lefevre 2013; Pierret 2013; Wedeen 2013); accounting for Assad’s resilience (Heydemann 2013; Stacher 2012); emphasizing regional influence and fallout (Hokayem 2013; Majed 2013); investigating the conflict’s militarization and protracted war (Abboud 2015); and deciphering the trajectories and travails of ISIS’s ascent (Filiu 2015; Lister 2015; Moubayed 2015). Some scholars have interpreted US policy on Syria relative to a general pattern of American responses to the Arab Spring (Brownlee 2012; Challand 2014; Gerges 2013; Heydemann 2014).

Exploring new empirical terrain within a novel theoretical framework, this book probes interlocking circles of state structure and popular agency and the resulting chains of action-reaction-action they spur. The analysis here decisively considers “the people” in an exploration of the intersections of American foreign policy and Arab politics. Publics and states encounter and contest one another domestically, regionally, and internationally in assorted combinations and through various iterations of power. This book thus offers a narrative of continuity, disruption, and resumption in US foreign policy as it is engaged, challenged, and resisted by a Syrian sha’b (people) often omitted in academic and policy discourse. Power—soft, hard, and smart—is monopolized by no single actor, its dissemination and effects constrained to no single level of analysis. An Assad-repressed, US-overlooked, Arab-inspired sha’b resists the Baath, engages and challenges Uncle Sam, receives and responds to Obama’s “smart” treatment, all in cyclical fashion. Syria’s thawrah thus becomes a site of challenge and contestation, interaction and engagement among and between agential publics and national and transnational state structures.

On Friday, September 26, 2014, residents of a smattering of towns across Syria—in ISIS-controlled Raqqa but also “liberated” suburbs of Aleppo—went out in protest, as many had done for years since the thawrah (revolution) began in early 2011. This time, however, their ire was directed not (just) at Bashar al-Assad’s mukhabarat (security) regime and its violently suffocating repression. Al sha’b yureed isqat al nizam (the people want to topple the regime) had become a “given,” familiar demand. New here was the denunciation of violence perpetrated by an “international community” headed by the United States, self-styled global watchdog and dispenser of democracy. This Friday was named “Civilians don’t need more international killers,” as protestors objected to the anti-ISIS coalition’s airstrikes in Syria seen to hinder, not help, the cause of the revolution (Al Jazeera 2014). By July 2015, the Syrian Human Rights Network had documented 173 civilian deaths at the hands of the anti-ISIS coalition (Al-Arabi Al-Jadid 2015). It seemed the US had more than avenged the death of journalist James Foley, dramatically beheaded on camera in a highly stylized video released by ISIS immediately preceding President Obama’s announcement of Operation Inherent Resolve’s first airstrikes in Syria.

Such a “moment” in which US bombs kill civilians alongside Coalition “targets,” marking America’s contribution to the consistently mounting (and overwhelmingly civilian) death toll in the country, is significant in the trajectory of the Syrian revolution. This occasion joins other consequential turning-points such as Bashar al-Assad’s public invitation to continued violations of Syrian sovereignty in July 2015¹ and the military “coordination” agreement between Israel and Syrian international patron and weapons provider Russia (Oliphant 2015), or the first Russian airstrike on Syrian soil under the pretenses of fighting ISIS (Enab Baladi 2015). Such critical junctures have upset longstanding narratives concerning Syria’s relations with international actors. How did Syrians and the US government, two sets of players in the many-sided bloodbath of the now barely recognizable thawrah silmiyyah (peaceful revolution), arrive at this moment? Why had US soft power failed to win the hearts and minds of Syrians? The US, the potential munasir (defender) and da’im (supporter) of al sha’b al soori, the Syrian people, was being denounced for its direct killing of Syrian civilians. Its pounding airstrikes appeared to indicate among Syrians more shared US ground with the barrel bomb-dropping (but still “rogue”) regime of Bashar al-Assad, the Hezbollah and Iranian militias, and the foreign-staffed ranks of ISIS than Obama’s democracy-promoting, people power-celebrating discourse of 2011. The War on Terror was back, it seemed, with democratization relegated outside the realm of priority and barely registering in the statements of US officials now preoccupied with ISIS, terrorism, extremist ideology, and a “refugee crisis” threatening Europe, Australia, and America. This book is an attempt to untangle the dynamics between US foreign policy towards the Arab world, from a War on Terror-darkened context into the Arab Spring, with a specific focus on the Syrian uprising that catapults “the people” into the domain of international relations and foreign policy. American soft and smart power are singled out for an analysis that probes their intractable interdependency and its effects on the popular reception of American development assistance, civil society “empowerment,” and democracy promotion in the Arab Middle East. This contextualization opens the theoretical space to unsnarl the roles of soft and hard power in American War on Terror policy and to examine alternative forms of indigenous soft power. Only thus can the US campaign against ISIS but not Assad, and flagrant popular resistance to Operation Inherent Resolve, be understood.

Key to interpreting the course of US–Syrian Arab Spring interactions is an examination of the power-knowledge dynamics that underpin them. Perhaps nowhere is the power-knowledge nexus as materially consequential as in the realm of Western foreign policy-making, from the Orientalism that justified and sustained European colonialism to the post-WWII “modernization” agenda of the United States. More recently, the War on Terror has been self-consciously informed by—if often violating—tenets of diplomat and political scientist Joseph Nye’s concepts of soft and smart power. Yet power’s actors are multiple, its pathways numerous, and resistance to it legion. Critical analyses can no longer afford to “except” Arab publics. Exploring the interplay between the two forms of power at the site of great power elite-Arab indigenous popular interactions, this book critically interrogates the theoretical framework of Nye’s soft power and its relationship to hard power in US War on Terror policy. Here I argue that a blurring of the two forms of power and their respective targets “by design” has tarnished the credibility of US policies geared to win hearts and minds in the Arab world. The book then assesses the extent to which US foreign policy towards a region now simmering with popular uprisings, most volatile in Syria, exhibits continuity or disruption from a security-oriented War on Terror grand strategy.

Turning to a critical case of an Arab “public,” this book goes on to examine Syrian popular interactions with the US, arguing that investigating the dialectic between two levels of analysis often studied separately, domestic (nowrevolutionary) politics and US foreign policy, is integral to unpacking developments in both Syria and Washington. Thus Syrian popular engagement with a US wielding a self-narrated smart power strategy that disseminates various combinations of hard and soft power towards the people, Assad’s regime, and ISIS, is crucial. The analysis of the dialectic between Syria’s revolutionaries (thuwwar) and the US serves as an initial exploration of how US smart power plays out on the “receiving end,” and how popular uprisings can resist hard power. This interaction is proposed as a form of indigenous soft power challenging not only domestic authoritarian regimes, but also resisting Arab-US power dynamics as it transforms the people (al sha’b) into a nascent and important, if multifarious and disjointed, foreign policy actor.

Research Questions and Scope

This epistemic journey thus begins with an explication of the theoretical foundations of the concepts of US soft power and its echoes in the scholarly literature on political reform in the Arab world. The relevant discourse includes sometimes nuanced, other times unabashedly culturalist scholarly explorations about the adoption of (Western, but putatively “universal”) liberal democratic “norms”; the potential, existence, viability, and expansion (or contraction) of civil society; and the ever-elusive “holy grail” of democratization itself. Such investigations form a site of unending debate in the often concentric circles, typical of much concerning Western discourse and policy on the AME, of academic “expert,” policy pundit, and practitioner discussions regarding the stalled, if not aborted, Arab Spring beginning in early 2011. Against, but also in tandem with, such a theoretical backdrop, this book delves into US policy—conceptualized and argued as an interactive space—in the AME since the start of the War on Terror, with a particular focus on Syria. It seeks to answer questions such as the following: What has US soft power in the Arab world looked like after the 9/11 attacks? How has official US foreign policy discourse framed the goals and strategies of US soft power? In what ways has US soft power been narrated as a complement to, or a substitute for, US hard power? What can a critical analysis of relevant discourses reveal about relevant power dynamics—between US officials and Arab leaders, or Arab publics, or both? How prominently do democracy and civil society promotion feature in this discursive register of US foreign policy in the region? In what ways is “rogue” Syria singled out—or ignored—as a particular object of US projections of power, hard, soft, or smart, in the War on Terror enterprise?

Years into the costly and incomplete US occupation and forcible “democratization” of Iraq, and the inconclusive, shaky consequences of its long invasion and “rebuilding” of Afghanistan, how does the US discursively react to the Arab Spring ignited in Tunisia, its tremors felt from Rabat to Manama? How is the “security vs. freedom” tension, long-debated and much-argued in relation to the US domestic political scene,² transposed onto the Arab context as War on Terror and democracy promotion go head-to-head? To what extent are the intersections between discursive constructions of US “values” and “interests” tested by the turbulence of Arab transitions, as cycles of revolution-counter-revolution, election-military coup, repression-insurgency, proxy-regional warfare play out and Syria becomes the bloodiest quagmire of them all? The book explores the domains in which the US, long the world’s “democracy promoter-in-chief,” inserts itself, or alternatively remains silent, about the unfamiliar terrain of indigenously led, if often externally infiltrated, political change in the Arab world. It further seeks to examine the implications that the dramatic initiation and uneven, unstable unfolding, of the Arab Spring has on long-standing theories of foreign involvement in democratization. This work thus considers how the US wielding of soft power, from rhetorical stakes dug into the diplomatic sand to humanitarian aid to shuttle diplomacy to flurries of UN Security Council theatrics, display similar or different patterns from its War on Terror incarnations.

Reflecting the bottom-up, indigenous theoretical and empirical leanings of this exploration, the book also attempts to answer questions on the “other side” of US discourse on the Arab Spring in particular. In the context of these popular uprisings (intifadat sha’biyyah), how do Syrians in particular envision themselves vis-à-vis the West and the US more specifically? What role do they attribute to the US in the political and economic situation—repression, regression, corruption, stagnation—against which they are revolting? To what extent do they “discourse,” directly or indirectly, with the US as they seek to overthrow the despotic if not decrepit but dapperly youthful “Dr. Bashar” and his mukhabarat regime? How do Syrians seek to gain sympathy and secure support for their dignity revolution (thawrat karamah) as they woo the so-called international community (al-mujtama’ al duwali)? To this end, the book probes how “the people” (al sha’b)—Arab and overwhelmingly Muslim no less—exhibit and exert their own soft power and public diplomacy targeting the US. It thus investigates the ways in which the thuwwar respond to, dialogue with, and challenge the increasing “securitization” of the Arab Middle East in US policy. Can the credibility of threats, such as Obama’s pledge to strike Assad’s government if it dared to use chemical weapons, be evaluated or measured by “publics”? In the age of digital media and a globally penetrating revolutionary, people-power ethos, to what extent can a sha’b be considered a significant foreign policy “actor”? The people’s uprisings of the Arab Spring and the Syrian thawrah in particular are further examined as counter-narratives that may upset the culturally embedded political scaffolding of global power dynamics and “East-West” or “Orient-Occident” binaries. Ultimately, an important line of investigation is whether soft power as conceived by Nye, in which the US has invested billions of dollars and extensive diplomatic capital, remains viable as a theoretical concept and a policy prescription.

Methods and Data

Undergirding this book’s exploration is an epistemological presumption of the productive power of discourse that constructs “reality,” anchored in an intimacy between knowledge and power and shaping social, and thus political, behavior (Foucault 1972; 1978). Cross-culturally, Orientalist discourses creating an East/ West binary, ensuring the latter’s domination over the former, have their roots in the knowledge-making power epitomized in social science “expertise” and media na...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Narrating a “Smart” US into the Arab World
• 2 Outside-In Arab Political Change
• 3 “Hardening” Soft Power: The State of Exception
• 4 War on Terror Tales
• 5 There and Back Again: Enter the Arab Spring
• 6 Soft Power in the Syrian Revolution: Silmiyyah
• 7 Conclusion: The Thawrah in the World
• Index