Creative Chaos And The Middle East
The realities of Bush- and Obama-era failures gave birth to MENA conspiracy theories
Middle Eastern and North African countries are no strangers to fomenting their own conspiracy theories.
In several years of traipsing back and forth across the region, I’ve encountered any number of outlandish narratives — from the stock-in-trade anti-Semitic claims that 9/11 was Israel’s doing or that the death toll of the Holocaust was vastly (and deliberately) exaggerated by Zionists to bizarre tales of US troops press-ganging legions of third-world conscripts to fight on the front lines of Iraq. Even more mind-bending was a recent suggestion that wealthy Egyptian Christians (such as Naguib Sawaris) plotted for decades to get the West to use the term “Egypt” instead of “Misr” (the Arabic term for the country) in order to undermine the standing of their Muslim co-citizens.
However, to my knowledge, there is exactly one study of the Arab world’s conspiracy theories: by Matthew Gray of Australia National University. Gray suggests that the failure of ideological projects in the region — Arab nationalism, pan-Islamism, democracy — has left a broad political vacuum for any narrative that can make sense of the world, further fueled by the secrecy and opacity of the region’s generally authoritarian governments.
Like the best conspiracy theories, they’re difficult to falsify and, when you do, the believers will move the goalposts. People will spin a more and more tangled narrative to encompass any objections you might have. Furthermore, these facts to the contrary are no doubt manufactured to lead you astray; perceived incompetence on the part of the conspirators is actually a sign of cunning.
Of course, it doesn’t help that the region is a popular subject of actual conspiracies — like Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA’s overthrow of democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh in 1953, a coup that brought back the Shah and led,eventually, to the Revolution and the rise of the current Islamist authoritarianism.
As such, these regional theories tend, like a pearl, to coalesce around some grain of truth (provided they’re not based in naked ethnoreligious bigotry, in which case even the grain of truth isn’t necessary). These truth grains leave clues as to how these narratives were spun. Grasping the plotline may do little to convince the gullible, but at least allows you to get your bearings.
Creative Chaos
Setting aside the garden-variety conspiracy theories above, the master narrative is that of a broad American plan to redraw the entire map — a new Skyes-Picot agreement to carve up the region, a New Middle East shaped to America’s liking, a plan to sow constant chaos and carnage in the service of American interests.
Broadly, this plan is referred to as one of creative chaos — or al-fawda al-khalaqa — a phrase attributed to (but seemingly never uttered by) former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Versions circulating online — at least those that bother to cite sources — refer readers to Rice’s March 2005 interview with the The Washington Post editorial board. While there is no direct mention of “creative chaos,” the administration’s desire to stir the stagnant waters of the region (or at least justify their actions in such terms) is clear:
Nobody wants to see the rise of greater fundamentalism or greater — let me use “extremism.”
But it is really, as opposed to what at this point. It isn’t as if the status quo was stable the way that it was. What we really learned on September 11 as you really started to look underneath what was going on there, is that the Middle East is a place that’s badly in need of change, that some of these malignancies that are represented by the rise of extremism have their roots in the absence of other channels for political activity or social activity or the desire for change…
Can we be certain [that democratic institutions will lead to greater stability]? No. But do I think there’s a strong certainty that the Middle East was not going to stay stable anyway? Yes. And when you know that the status quo is no longer defensible, then you have to be willing to move in another direction.
A more quotable quote followed in 2006, when Rice was in Lebanon to broker an end to an Israeli incursion aimed at uprooting Hezbollah:
What we’re seeing here, in a sense, is the growing — the birth pangs of a new Middle East and whatever we do we have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the new Middle East not going back to the old one.
In fairness, “creative chaos” — a term typically reserved for management styles that aim to boost productivity by inducing a certain amount of stress — is a passable if crude summary of neoconservative views towards the region that prevailed within the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11, embodied in the lines above and nearly every speech Rice gave on the subject from 2005 to 2006.
For too long, so the thinking went, the US had pursued the illusion of stability through the imposition of tyranny in the region; now the country would call forth a durable democratic peace, whether through direct imposition — as in Iraq — or through the Broader/Greater Middle East and North Africa Initiative of political engagement “ aimed at fostering economic and political liberalization.” No less a figure than the Marxist gadfly Christopher Hitchens clambered aboard that speeding train, convinced that the stagnation of stability represented by Saddam presented a looming and increasingly Islamic threat to the West.
Creative Destruction
The Bush administration would, of course, would go on to junk its freedom agenda in the region the moment the wrong sorts of people started winning or credibly contesting elections — chiefly Muslim Brotherhood candidates running as independents in Egypt or Hamas in the Palestinian territories. The Iraqi intervention would leave a legacy of ashes: anywhere between 178,000 and half a million “excess deaths” by 2013, to say nothing of over 4,000 US war dead and more than 30,000 US wounded.
Yet the idea of creative chaos as the main driver of US policy persists. Every move by American politicians is seen as a move to fragment the Arab world further and plunge the region at large into sectarian violence and upheaval, all in service to the US imperative to protect Israel and/or steal the region’s oil and/or sell weapons.
Again, it’s not as though all of this comes from nowhere. The US makes no secret of its MENA interests including the the security of Israel, the steady flow of black gold to international markets, and arms deals with skittish regimes. But America’s grim legacy in MENA countries is one born more of shortsighted thinking, ignorance, and incompetence rather than masterful manipulation. And obviously so.
Still, good luck trying to convince conspiracy theorists of that.
- Al-Qaeda? It’s obviously a US creation. (Never mind that Reagan’s administration lent support to an already active Osama bin Laden during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on the basis of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”)
- ISIS? Clearly it’s a group of non-Muslims employed by Hillary Clinton and/or Barack Obama to bring the region under ever-greater US control. (Forget that it was the confusion, disorder, and widespread destruction during the US occupation in Iraq — America’s actual abortive attempt at bringing stability — that laid the groundwork for the group to grow and oppose US interests, among others.)
- Bush’s gung-ho invasion of Iraq and Obama’s forbearance in Syria were all part of the same plan to topple rulers across the Muslim world.
- The Arab Spring was plotted by Condi Rice and Crooked Hillary in tandem.
- The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was engineered by America to rip the country apart.
- Sectarianism in general.
The list goes on.
The Reality
The status of creative chaos as a master narrative is based in the belief that every regional development can be attributed to an American plot. It also means that any journalist or analyst foolish enough to re-imagine the region’s borders in a public forum is likely to become part of the mosaic. Case in point: Robin Wright’s “analysis” and accompanying map in The New York Times in September 2013, “How 5 Countries Could Become 14,” was tailor-made for conspiracy fodder.
Not all that many from the English-speaking world are likely to wade into the swamp of the Arab world’s conspiracy theories, save a handful of Arabic students, diplomats, businessmen, and the odd expat professional. But it’s not entirely clear that the theories are any worse than the reality:
- that ideologues inside the US and UK administrations convinced their principals that invading a sovereign country half a world away was a great way to ensure stability,
- that the “coalition of the willing” was woefully unprepared for the demands of occupation, combining deep ignorance with deeper arrogance and creating a power vacuum that would plunge the country into devastating — not “creative” — chaos,
- that those chiefly responsible for the catastrophe — President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair — would live out their lives, respectively, as an elder statesman of the Republican Party (not to mention amateur painter) and a highly paid bullshit consultant, and
- that citizens of all countries involved would largely forget about the invasion, however gaping a hole it might have left in their treasuries.
Perhaps this is something worth trying to convince people of on both sides of the Atlantic: that you can cause far more destruction through a potent mix of hubris, idiocy, and short-term thinking than through an intricate plan with a 1,001 moving parts, that it’s more comforting to imagine a world in which travesties are engineered by people who know what they’re doing rather than one in which brutality, ambition, and greed are exacerbated by gross incompetence and ignorance.
Andrew Leber is based in Boston.
