Juan Cole, The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014, pp348 A VIEW FROM CAIRO: Under the rubric of repeated requests by the beleaguered Iraqi government and the battle-scarred Kurdish Peshmerga (fighting force), the United States again has predicated a pretext to launch an aerial bombardment of Iraq, or to be more precise, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a militant Islamist terrorist organisation that is neither Muslim nor a state per se. And, Washington, as ever, is dancing precariously on the head of an Arab pin. Subtitled How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East, Juan Cole, one of my favourite American authors, has struck a familiar tone. Cole's latest seminal study has two aspects, both sprouting from his deep and unshakable commitment to tell the truth about contemporary Arab societies. And, weighing in at 333 pages and spanning three decades, there is nothing trivial about Cole's perception of the political dynamics of the Millennial Generation of the Arab World. Cole's tale is told through motley impressions. Prophetically, way back in 2003, writing in the journal of the University of Michigan International Institute, Cole cautioned that the invasion of Iraq would lead Iraq's Sunni Muslim Arabs to embrace militant Islamist terrorist movements such as Al-Qaeda. Today, indeed, many Sunni Iraqis are joining the Al-Qaeda affiliate the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Cole rightly warned that the invasion of Iraq would inevitably be rejected by Iraqis and the Arab world as a form of neocolonialism. Not surprisingly, the New York Times Book Review paid tribute to Cole's fascinating and scintillatingly most engrossing masterpiece. “This field guide to the politics of modern Islam traces the history of the different movements whose violent offshoots are still morphing,” elucidates the New York Times Book Review. Nevertheless, it would be naive to imagine that Cole's latest bombshell is exclusively about God-fearing, bullet-scarred zealots, bloody clampdowns by authoritarian governments and savage reprisals by the likes of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad type secularists. The author of Engaging the Muslim World (Palgrave, 2009), Cole openly and unabashedly cites the US embassies across the Arab world as key sources, straight from the horse's mouth so to speak. “By 2009 officials at the US embassy [in Cairo] were becoming increasingly interested in the role of bloggers in Egyptian politics and estimated that by spring of that year there existed 160,000 blogs in the country. They were a prime manifestation of Egypt's youth movements,” the author of the meticulously well-researched work pores over Washington's declassified information. Cole similarly ventures into the hard-scrabble backstreets of Shia Muslim South Beirut and revisits a dramatically reborn Sunni Muslim West Beirut. However, it is his old love Cairo that captures Cole's critical inquiry of the vigorous youthful Arab mind. “An [US] embassy cable reported, ‘Hossam Bahgat of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights told us that blogging allows Egyptian youth to air their views about social and political issues in ways that were unimaginable six years ago,” Cole muses. An evening of chit-chat (lailat al-samar), the traditional Arab pastime is no longer in vogue, except perhaps on the Internet, as the author observes. “In this book I tell the story of how the youth movements in North Africa and Egypt arose and describe their protagonists, struggles, passions, and ideas. I paint a broad picture of the revolts in the first half of 2011 in each of the three countries [Tunisia, Egypt and Libya] I treat, and I analyse the specific tactics and repertoires the youth used to accomplish their aims.” In a nutshell, this thoroughly researched masterpiece documents in detail how the Arab Youth, “the Millennial Generation”, deposed not only the rotten to the core republican monarchies of the Arab world, but perhaps more crucially, they also toppled theocratic authoritarianism. As it so happens, Cole was born on 23 October (albeit in 1952), even as Al-Ahram Weekly, no street sheet, appears on Cairo's newspaper stands today. A happy coincidence, perhaps. But the subjects he tackles are far from chimerical. Cole is candid. “In 2006 Wael Abbas, an activist blogger, began posting graphic videos taken surreptitiously, of police brutalizing their prisoners. One showed a bus driver being sodomized with a pole. The Egyptian public reacted with horror; people told them the scene reminded them of American torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison. In late 2007, Google suspended Abbas's You Tube account, deleting one hundred video clips, including some twelve that depicted torture in police stations”. Cole is so keen on exposing the tacit connivance of Western powers and in particular the US with the Arab dictatorships that quixotically thrived under US surveillance until they came crashing down at the instigation of the cyber savvy Arab youth that right-wing conservatives often claim accusingly that he may occasionally see too much in it. “In this book I tell the story of how the youth movements in North Africa and Egypt arose and describe their protagonists, struggles, passions, and ideas,” Cole extrapolates. An accomplished academician and commentator on the contemporary Arab political and social scene, Cole appears frequently on controversial by American standards Al-Jazeera America andDemocracy Now. Cole, as one of the most highly respected left-wing critics of US foreign policy, was a harsh critic of the George W Bush administration. In the aftermath of 11 September, 2001, Cole turned increasingly to writing on militant Muslim movements with specific reference to the implications of United States foreign policy on the Arab world, the Iraq War, and the Iran crisis. Likewise, Cole founded the Global Americana Institute with the specific objective of translating works concerning the United States into Arabic. A prolific writer, Cole is clearly sympathetic to the Arab cause. Cole became interested in Islam and Arabic literature while a teenager living in Eritrea when his father was stationed there. He went on to study the Arabic language at Northwestern University. He later left the US for Beirut to perfect his command of the Arabic language and culture. Next, he enjoyed a stint at the American University in Cairo, returning to his native America at the University of California, Los Angeles. It is worth mentioning that his study of Arabic included classical historical, theological and philosophical texts and classical and modern Arabic literature. Cole believes that Arabs deserve candour from their leaders. He pins his hopes for a more prosperous and democratic Arab world buoyed by political stability on the Arab youth. “This generation of New Arabs has shaken a complacent, stagnant, and corrupt status quo and forever changed the world,” asserts the author authoritatively. Militant Islamist movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, seeking sneakily to take advantage of the political opening paved by the Arab youth suffered serious and irreversible setbacks, contends Cole. And, this is why he champions the cause of Arab youth. He is acutely aware of the shortcomings of the American democracy Washington wishes to forcibly impose piecemeal on the world and mold the globe in its own image and likeness. Cole likewise details the ramifications of US foreign policy in persistently propagating delusions about the Arab world. “All this is not to say that the religious right is unimportant or marginal among young people in the countries of the Arab Spring. Just as leftist groups have emerged into prominence, so too has a new generation of Muslim [Islamist] activists, including the Renaissance [Al-Nahda] Movement in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt,” Cole concedes. The author's exegesis is that the Islamists in the Arab world, and particularly in North Africa, consigned to oblivion the political clout and institutional strength of secularists Islamists forgot to lift their their sight from the political flotsam that propelled the Muslim Brotherhood into power and bestowed the presidency, the highest office in Egypt, on Mohamed Morsi in June 2012. “And, in the summer of 2013 secular-minded youth opposed to what they saw as creeping theocracy during the Morsi presidency (30 June 2012 to 3 July 2013)” helped provoke his political demise and ouster. “In the aftermath Egyptians in overtly religious garb were sometimes harassed by outraged secularists.” The West, too, must plump for honesty. “The question of whether Web-log commentary helps or damages an academic's career. It is a shameful question. Intellectuals should not be worrying about ‘careers', the tenured among us least of all,” Cole notes. He has no qualms about the drawbacks of American democracy. “Most Americans who speak out can face sanctions from other institutions in society. Journalists are fired all the time for taking the wrong political stance,” the author elaborated further. Cole is clearly candid. Candour and his capacity to derisively dismiss American democracy as a myth is a considerable accomplishment and makes Cole's book well worth the wait. Among Cole's major academic specializations has been the history of modern North Africa and the Middle East, even though in this particular work, The New Arabs, he focuses on North Africa. He highlights the secular-religious divide that is tearing the region apart. However, he concludes that the secularists have the upper hand. Instead of shivering at the memory of the short-lived Islamist rule, “an impressive 84 per cent of Egyptians told one pollster that they regarded democracy and economic prosperity as the main goal of the Arab uprisings of 2011. And, only nine per cent said they thought that the goal was to set up an Islamic government,” Cole ingeniously puts his finger on the pulse of the Egyptian zeitgeist. The popularity of the Islamists plunged and their poll lead dwindled after they elucidated their hidden political agenda. There is nothing sacred about a militant Islamist movement lying to itself about its political fortunes. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood miscalculated and their deception and misrepresentation of Islam ultimately led to their unceremonious expulsion from Egypt's political arena. “Morsi's authoritarian and sectarian actions clearly took a large toll. A Gallup poll found that the favourability rating of the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party plummeted from about 50 per cent to only 19 per cent between April 2012 and early June 2013. Perhaps more worrying, the [Egyptian] public quickly became convinced that the electoral process was corrupt”. In other words, the corrupt politics of the Muslim Brotherhood was no different than that of the Mubarak era. The Islamists were not set for a shinier political future than their secularist predecessors. And, Cole reserves his harshest criticism to ex-president Hosni Mubarak and his son and heir apparent Gamal and his inner circle of tycoons. “The stench of cronyism and corruption reached its height in 2008,” Cole insightful research makes clear. “Mubarak arranged to win his just-for-show presidential election in September with 88 per cent of the vote. Ayman Nour was allowed to get seven per cent. Having been trotted out as a putative rival in the presidential race for Washington's benefit, he was sentenced to five years in prison later that year,” the author remarks. “Young intellectuals from smaller groups such as the Revolutionary Socialists had argued that the Old Left's antipathy to the Brotherhood was misplaced; they appealed to Trotsky's principle of the united front and claimed an alliance of progressives with the religious activists against the regime could be effective,” Cole contends. Cole's understanding of contemporary Egyptian and Arab political dynamics is extraordinary. He latches onto to quagmire engendered by the generational gap. “The licensed parties, all of them small and ineffectual, were the right-of-centre Wafd, the (Old Left) Progressive Unionist Party, the Nasserist Party, and the Muslim fundamentalist Labour Party,” he pays heed to the their failings, citing specific examples of their foibles. “The Wafd blocked Nour's Tomorrow Party from joining because of a long-running feud of its head, Numan Gumaah, with the liberal politician,” Cole states categorically. “Small unlicensed parties such as Hamdeen Sabahi's Karama (left-wing Nasserist) and the Wasat Party (liberal Muslim) were also included,” pinpoints the author. Between 2004 and 2009, Cole had a regular column at Salon, the award-winning online news and entertainment Web site. His academic niche may be the Arab world, but Cole is an internationalist, to boot. A prolific writer, Cole is clearly sympathetic to the Arab cause. He recently reflected on the increasingly European empathy with the Palestinian predicament and in particular the Irish inclination to identify with the Palestinians as a subjugated and oppressed people. “With the clearly colonial actions of Israel in the Palestinian West Bank and the brutality of Israeli Occupation of Gaza, Israel looks more and more to the Irish like the British colonialists who sold off Irish-grown food abroad in the midst of the potato famine,” the author wrote recently in Will Ireland recognize Palestine, in Informed Comment, the author's weblog founded in 2002. “Ireland is a bellwether for European sentiment. The central narrative of Irish nationalism has been British colonialism and its atrocities in Ireland. After the Holocaust, many Irish intellectuals sympathized with Zionism, seeing it as similar to Irish nationalism,” Cole extrapolates. “A few European Union member states had recognized Palestine before joining the EU, such as Poland. Only Sweden has done so after joining the EU,” Cole elucidates. In much the same vein, Cole is keenly interested in the current state of affairs in the Fertile Crescent, the Arab countries to the immediate north of the Arabian Peninsula in the Middle East including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. He expressed particular proficiency as far as scrutinizing the international brouhaha surrounding the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is concerned. The author wrote in TruthDig, drilling beneath the headlines that “ISIL has been able to invade Al-Anbar's third largest military base, home of the Seventh Army, and to loot it for medium and heavy weaponry, including tanks and armored vehicles”. And, Cole noted how “ISIL is now estimated by some Iraqi army officers to be in control of 80 per cent of Al-Anbar Province”. And, in spite of the incessant US aerial bombardment presumably designed to contain ISIL's power, Washington's strategy is doomed to bankruptcy. US military intervention inevitably creates chaos as the sad case of Libya so lucidly spells out. “Apparently ISIL strategy is to next completely take Ramadi, the capital of Al-Anbar, and to use it as a base for taking Baghdad”. However, ISIL, alas, is not the subject of Cole's unsurpassed The New Arabs A PARISIAN PERSPECTIVE: “The Arab world is young,” writes US academic and commentator Juan Cole at the beginning of his book The New Arabs. Some Arab societies have a median age half that of greying first-world countries such as Japan and Germany, and almost all of them have a lot of often very dissatisfied and frustrated young people. This “youth bulge” of “Generation Y millennials,” young people who came of age in the first decade of the new millennium, is not unique to the Arab world, Cole points out, as Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia also have a great many young people. However, Arab millennials typically face problems that can seem to block their aspirations: “significantly more urban, literate, wired and secular than their parents,” the author says, the Arab world's young people have found themselves with “little prospect of gaining political power or economic betterment.” “The political systems in the Arab republics were locked up by geriatric, formerly socialist one-party states that had turned into oligarchies. Political positions were given to a relatively small clique of regime sycophants as a form of patronage. The regime overproduced college graduates, training youth for white-collar and managerial positions that did not exist and had no prospect of existing,” forcing young people either to put their lives on hold as they prepared for a better future that was unlikely to come or to emigrate in search of opportunities abroad. This “combination of poor employment prospects, lack of integration into elite structures, and repression has often radicalised intellectuals and contributed to revolutionary upheaval,” Cole comments. In the case of the Arab world, the explosion came in the Arab Spring revolutions of early 2011 when young people in first Tunisia, and then in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria, rose up in revolt against regimes that in some cases had been in place before they were born, bringing about the region's first-ever youth-led revolutions. In his account of these events Cole focuses on the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Youthful demonstrators played only a marginal role in the handover of power in Yemen, he says, where the former president remained the leader of the country's ruling party, and “there was no pre-existing youth movement in one-party Syria of the sort I recount in Egypt and Tunisia.” In the latter countries, on the other hand, as well as to a lesser extent in Libya, the revolutionary youth used “specific tactics and repertoires” to accomplish their aims, among them “taking to the streets, scrawling graffiti, making videos of police brutality, occupying city squares, mounting Facebook protests and allying with striking workers.” These tactics, “enabled by blogging, Facebook and Twitter campaigns, satellite television and smartphones,” gave the revolutions a common character. They were also led, if that is the right word for youth movements that avoided any centralised leadership, by what the author calls “New Left” activists unaffiliated to traditional political party structures and keen to pioneer “new forms of horizontal connectedness” between “student unions and the youth wings of non-governmental organisations and small opposition parties,” while also seeking “to reach out on a generational basis to establish wider linkages” with ideological sympathisers and competitors. This gave rise to some “strange bedfellows as the revolutions unfolded,” Cole adds, with middle-class and left-liberal youth allying themselves with Islamist “religious forces against authoritarian governments,” as well as in some cases with workers' movements. However, the lack of central leadership or political programmes that went beyond a rejection of the older political parties and organisational frameworks also turned out to be a weakness of the new way of doing politics. The activists associated with the youth revolutions tended “to network rather than be party members,” Cole writes, “preferring pragmatic action to ideology.” While this enabled them to bring huge numbers of demonstrators out onto the streets in the initial phases of the revolutions, it did not always stand them in good stead during the elections and periods of consolidation that followed. The author's view, reiterated in his conclusion, is that through the 2011 revolutions a “generation of New Arabs has shaken a complacent, stagnant, and corrupt status quo and forever changed the world.” But shaking the status quo is not the same as changing it, and in the chapters of his book dealing with events in Egypt, for example, while he credits the youth revolutionaries with putting effective pressure on the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) that took over the government of the country following the resignation of former president Hosni Mubarak and with helping to oust former president Mohammed Morsi in July 2013, he also admits that “three years after the overthrow of Mubarak, the ideals of the left-liberal youth movements were far from being attained, and in some areas of law and practice there was a reversion to Mubarak-era techniques.” Cole states that the youth revolutionaries, while catalysing the changes that took place during and after the revolutions, were rarely in control of events and did not always succeed in forcing the march towards genuinely post-revolutionary societies. In the Egyptian case this pattern became evident even during the 2011 uprising itself when vice-president Omar Suleiman went on television to announce Mubarak's resignation and the head of the armed forces, Hussein Tantawi, became de facto president. The youth revolutionaries “had inadvertently provoked a military coup,” Cole comments, “when most of them had aimed instead at moving to a left-liberal civilian government.” Things were better in the case of Tunisia, Cole says, where there was a “civilian transition,” rather than the “Praetorian one” seen in Egypt, following the flight of the former president Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali and the effective dissolution of the single-party Rassemblement constitutionnel démocratique (RCD) government. Yet, even here the youth movements, while they succeeded in removing the dictator, “did not accomplish all or even most of their goals by 2014, and in some ways the continued power of the old elites and the rise of the illiberal politics of the religious right,” associated with the Islamist Al-Nahda Party that has formed the core of Tunisia's post-revolutionary coalition governments, has even “threatened to reduce some liberties.” “The engaged youth… tended to be sidelined by the return of parliamentary politics after the end of the dictatorships, inasmuch as that sort of politics favoured an older and more established kind of politician. Yet their techniques of street campaigning, demonstrations, sit-ins, social media campaigns, and coordination with a broad spectrum of groups for the attainment of their goals allowed them to continue to influence developments, though their also met with significant defeats,” Cole comments. He is impatient with “conspiracy theorists,” writing that there is no evidence that “the United States was behind the overthrow of Mubarak” and citing in evidence the secret US diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks in late 2010. There is “nothing in the public record [that] suggests that the Obama administration wanted to see Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali or Hosni Mubarak deposed, and great powers for the most part are status quo powers,” he writes. However, this wording seems to leave open the possibility that the Obama administration did want to see the ejection of the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, killed as he fled NATO airstrikes in October 2011, and it is a fact that the Libyan revolution was different from the other cases Coles examines in that it involved significant and obvious foreign intervention. Cole is an unrepentant supporter of that intervention, organised under UN Security Council Resolution 1973 which authorised “all necessary measures… to protect civilians” in Libya and establish a no-fly zone, despite its still-controversial character. “Although the NATO intervention was controversial in the West, it was universally welcomed by the Libyan youth revolutionaries,” he writes. “Most NATO airstrikes, aside from the ones targeting Gaddafi's compound in Tripoli, were aimed at military targets outside the cities, especially arms depots and armoured convoys… Neither before nor after the war was there any evidence that NATO acted primarily out of concern for oil contracts, which had already been secured under Gaddafi and, if anything, were put in danger by the intervention.” The New Arabs mixes a narrative of events in three of the countries of the Arab Spring with the author's own reflections, culled from frequent visits to the countries concerned. While it might sometimes seem that the Arab millennials of the book's title are not much further along the path to the new societies that they so bravely fought for three years ago, the author's faith in that direction is undimmed. “A new generation has been awakened and has learned how to network and mobilise, and as I write they have already shaken the political establishment in Egypt and Tunisia twice,” Cole concludes. “As the millennials enter their thirties and forties, they will have a better opportunity to shape politics directly, so that we could well see an echo effect of the 2011 upheavals in future decades.”
