And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East Read online

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  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  EPILOGUE

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About Richard Engel

  Photo Credits

  Index

  For Mary and Henry

  PROLOGUE

  MOST OF THE NATIONS OF the Middle East can be divided into those with long histories and no oil, and those that have lots of oil and very little history. With a few notable exceptions, both groups share a common feature: they were cobbled together by outsiders. The borders of the modern Middle East were drawn by Europeans after the First World War with no regard for the interests or backgrounds of the people who inhabited it. The lines that separate Jordan, Syria, and Iraq were mostly drawn by England and France a century ago. Before that, for the first thousand years after the explosive birth of Islam, interactions between what has come to be known as the Muslim East and the Christian West were limited and often hostile. The Middle East was a mystery to Westerners. Pilgrims and priests occasionally visited the Holy Land, eager to walk in Jesus’s footsteps, but few had much interest in the people who lived in the wider region. Early Christians generally envisioned the Muslim Prophet Mohammed as a sinister pretender, a false prophet who spread his faith by the blade of a scimitar. Some medieval Christians thought Mohammed was a spurned pope who created his own domain and credo like the Fallen Angel.

  In Dante Alighieri’s early fourteenth-century Divine Comedy, in the Inferno, Canto XXVIII, Dante actually meets both Mohammed and Ali, the patriarch of Shia Muslims. It is a gruesome encounter. The two Muslim leaders are condemned to the eighth circle, ninth sub-circle, of Hell. For Dante, Hell was like a prison with cell blocks set aside for different types of offenders. Dante put Mohammed and Ali in the level of Hell reserved for “sowers of religious divisiveness.”

  Since Mohammed and Ali were considered dividers of religious unity—that is to say they threatened the unity of Christians—their punishment was to have their flesh torn apart. It was poetic justice: the dividers were to be themselves divided. Mohammed was split with a sword down his middle. Every time he healed, a demon would flay him open again. Ali has his face cleft in two. Mohammed’s punishment was acted out in the 1911 silent movie l’Iinferno, the first full-length Italian feature film. It was far more graphic than the cartoons of Mohammed that have run in European newspapers, triggering reprisals from Islamic radicals.

  Equally, the early Muslims of the Middle East wanted nothing to do with the West, discounting it as a land inhabited by Christians who were too stubborn or too stupid to accept Allah’s final and complete message to mankind, as revealed to Mohammed and written down by his companions in the Koran.

  The two worlds’ main interactions were the Crusades and the taking of hostages to sell for ransom or to enslave at the oars of merchant and pirate ships. It’s no accident that most of the historic towns along the coasts of Italy and Greece were built high on hilltops and surrounded by walls. The inhabitants were terrified of being captured by Muslim pirates. Sicilians still sing folk songs about the evils of the saraceni, the Saracens, one of several names Europeans used to identify their Muslim enemies. Spain’s most famous author, Miguel de Cervantes, was himself enslaved by Barbary Pirates for five years until a ransom was paid. The few Westerners who did venture into the lands of the “Mohammedians” were pilgrims or, later, adventurers, foreign agents, and treasure hunters who usually went home to write books about the dark-eyed women cloistered in harems and the antiquities they stole or bought from locals who placed little value on pre-Islamic rocks.

  Everything changed with the First World War. The Middle East was reorganized, redefined, and the seeds were planted for a century of bloodshed. The Islamic world, led at the dawn of the twentieth century by the failing Ottoman Empire, had made the fatal choice of joining the losing side. The Ottomans, under the rule of a group of reckless and cavalier reformers called the Young Turks, sided with Germany and Kaiser Wilhelm II, the vainglorious emperor who dreamed of being the conqueror of Europe and the mythical Middle East like his idol, Napoleon, but similarly ended up making a mess of both. After nine million were dead in the trenches, the Ottoman Empire was no more.

  The Russian tsar, who joined World War I with visions of taking control of Constantinople and unfettered access to the Mediterranean, wasn’t around to claim his share of the slaughtered goose. The Russian Empire had collapsed in wars with the Bolsheviks, leaving England and France to feast on the Ottoman carcass. They carved out mandates and anointed kingdoms.

  Lebanon, a Christian enclave on the Mediterranean coast, was of special interest to France. Many French crusaders had passed through the Lebanese cities of Tyre and Sidon on their way to Jerusalem. Syria, once one of the most important of the semiautonomous Ottoman regions, went to France as well, although much reduced in size. The British took Jordan as their special project—then called Transjordan—a “desert kingdom” that had never existed. Further south, Sunni Muslim Wahhabi fanatics aligned with Ibn Saud, a warrior chief from a desert outpost in central Arabia, and conquered what is now Saudi Arabia with their unbending religious zeal and British-supplied guns.

  Egypt, the greatest of all the Middle East’s ancient empires, was a British-run show as well, largely administered from the UK’s embassy on the Nile and the bar of the Shepheard’s Hotel. Iraq was a jigsaw puzzle, a forced combination of three Ottoman provinces, each dominated by a different ethnic or religious group: the Kurds in the north, Sunni Arabs in the center, and Shiites in the south. The British began suppressing revolts in Iraq almost as soon as they took charge of their jumbled creation.

  The tiny Gulf States of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were considered of little consequence, convenient ports on the way to India, populated by a smattering of pearl divers and camel drivers. These little kingdoms were left to local emirs who later became among the world’s richest men when oil was discovered under their sands.

  The most problematic of Britain’s new responsibilities, the child who cried loudest at night, was Palestine, promised to the Jews as a homeland without informing the Palestinian inhabitants that their farms and villages were part of the deal.

  The mandates and European-advised kingdoms muddled along until Europe decided to attempt suicide again in World War II. After that, France and England had neither the money nor the political will to remain as the Middle East’s shepherd. The United States became the region’s new godfather.

  The Eisenhower Doctrine in 1957 promised Middle Eastern countries economic and military aid in times of crisis. The Carter Doctrine specifically vowed to protect the Persian Gulf. The United States saw the Middle East as a battleground in its global struggle against Soviet communism. Cold War politics, support for Israel, and access to oil determined policy toward the Middle East.

  A new generation of Arab leaders emerged under the American umbrella, a crop of Arab nationalists and autocrats. But they were paper tigers. While their leaders shouted over their state-controlled radio stations about Arab unity and Muslim power, th
e Arab states were serial losers in wars against the tiny Jewish state of Israel, losing Palestine in 1948 and then, in a single week, large chunks of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in 1967. Only the strongest of the Arab despots survived these humiliations. They became the Middle East’s strongmen. They were secular, nationalist, corrupt, and without exception brutal to their own people. Their names became synonymous with their nations: The Assad family in Syria. Egypt’s military men: Nasser, Sadat, and Hosni Mubarak. Tunisia’s “Little Mubarak,” Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali. Libya’s flamboyantly bizarre colonel Mu’ammar Gadhafi. Iraq’s gangster thug Saddam Hussein.

  Over the years, I met many of them. Saddam had a terrifying gaze. I wanted to take a step back when he looked me in the eye. Even though I saw him through a glass screen in a courtroom where he was facing a death sentence, he still looked like a man who meant business and seemed as if he could order your death with no more concern than knocking the ash off his cigar. Gadhafi, who I saw in Tripoli just months before he was killed, seemed like a washed-up, strung-out rock star, eyes hidden behind sunglasses, his face hanging and tired, but he had a commanding enough presence to draw crowds of adoring, mostly female, fans. Mubarak, who I saw often at press events at his palace in Cairo, was initially considered to be a competent ruler, but with age increasingly seemed like a stubborn old man surrounded by generals in tight uniforms and civilian advisors in bad suits. When I met the second president from the Assad clan, Bashar, at his palace overlooking Damascus, he looked awkward and had the detached air of a rich kid who grew up abroad and had no feeling for his people or concern for their lives.

  These were some of the big men who inherited the state system carved out of the Middle East after World War I and the brief mandate period that followed it. They were powerful enough to recover from their countries’ losses to Israel. They were part of the system the United States depended on for decades to keep a volatile and religious region of rich governments and poor people in line, and to keep the oil flowing. In the end, however, the big men were all undone by a fatal combination of their own poor management and the actions and inactions of two two-term US administrations: Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

  For twenty years, I watched the rise and fall of the big men, and the chaos that followed their demise. This was the slice of the Middle East’s history I witnessed firsthand.

  When I arrived in the region in 1996, Mubarak, Ben Ali, Saddam Hussein, Gadhafi, and the other big men were untouchable institutions. They were the embodiments of the states they ran. They were called al-Rais, an Arabic derivation of “the head,” and without them the body didn’t dare to move. Insulting al-Rais in public would get you fired or arrested. It was a crime for fishmongers in Egypt and Iraq to wrap their Nile perch and red mullet in newspapers that had the presidents’ photograph on them. It was understood that big men stole and appointed their children and wives to high-profile and well-paid charities and political posts. The people were under-educated and under-employed, but the states held together, maintained a cold peace with Israel, and kept producing oil and shipping it out.

  Of course, all the big men had rivals. They were all opposed by Islamic dreamers and fundamentalists. Islam has never accepted a division of church and state. For Islamists the distinction is nonsensical and heretical. In their eyes, Islam is a perfect system handed down by Allah himself through his chosen vessel with specific instructions on how men and women should manage their daily lives. So why wouldn’t states also use it to administer their affairs? If Allah dropped a user manual from heaven, shouldn’t all humans and their leaders read it and follow it? The big men imprisoned and tortured their Islamist rivals. Gadhafi locked them in Abu Salim Prison where in 1996 guards massacred 1,200 inmates. Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, killed an estimated twenty thousand residents of the city of Hama in 1982 to crush an uprising led by the Muslim Brotherhood. Saddam is thought to have massacred over one hundred thousand Shiite rebels after the 1991 Gulf War, although the exact number may never be known. He imprisoned Sunni fanatics too. Guards punished them by drilling perfectly round holes in their shins with power drills. I’ve seen the scars. Saddam imprisoned anyone who exhibited the slightest hint of religious radicalism. It was considered seditious and disloyal, which made the accusations by the Bush administration that he was in league with Osama bin Laden to plot and execute the 9/11 attacks so preposterous. Saddam was a murderous tyrant, but Islamic al-Qaeda–style radicals came to Iraq because of the US invasion and not, as the Bush administration claimed, the other way around.

  The Middle East I knew under the big men was angry, oppressed, and rotten to the core. I like to think of the Middle East back then as a row of decaying houses that looked ornate, impressive, and sturdy from the outside but were full of termites and mold. Like hollowed-out trees, the states that looked strong from the outside could be toppled by a slight push. President George W. Bush gave them a hard shove. Through six years of direct military action, by invading, occupying, and wildly mismanaging Iraq, the Bush administration broke the status quo that had existed since 1967. He knocked over the first house. In the years that followed, Obama, elected by a public opposed to more adventurism in the Middle East, broke the status quo even further through inconsistent action.

  President Obama encouraged uprisings in the name of democracy in Cairo, turned his back on Mubarak, supported rebels with force in Libya, and then wavered on Syria. Red lines were crossed. Promises were broken. Trust was lost. The combined impact of Bush’s aggressive interventionism and Obama’s timidity and inconsistency completely destroyed the status quo. The United States didn’t create the Sunni-Shia conflict: it began over a millennium before the Declaration of Independence. The United States didn’t create ISIS: its brand of backward intolerance and violence has been a part of wars in the Islamic world since the earliest days of the faith and helped found modern Saudi Arabia. The United States isn’t responsible for giving the Kurdish people a state or denying them one. Although everyone in the Middle East tends to blame Washington for everything from car bombs to the weather, the United States isn’t responsible for the woes of the Middle East. But like old houses that were barely standing, Washington’s actions and missteps pushed them off their foundations and exposed the rot within, unleashing the madness of the Iraq war, the bloodbath in Syria, Libya’s post-Gadhafi anarchy, and ISIS.

  I have watched the Middle East in a momentous transition. I saw a historic turning point. For twenty years, I saw the big men at their prime, and chronicled their downfall and the mayhem that followed. It took from 1967 to 2003—over three decades—to build the big men. It took a decade—2003 to 2013—to destroy them. I suspect a new generation of big men will return. No people can tolerate chaos forever. Dictators will offer a way out and many of the exhausted and brutalized people of the Middle East will accept them, and I suspect Washington will as well.

  * * *

  MOROCCO, 1987. I GUESS THAT’S when it all started. I was thirteen and staying with my parents at La Mamounia, a glamorous hotel in Marrakech. My father worked on Wall Street, and I had a comfortable upbringing. We traveled a lot.

  Each morning the staff put copies of the International Herald Tribune in embroidered bags outside guests’ rooms.

  One evening, while waiting for my parents to come down for dinner, I passed the time reading the Herald Tribune. I was entranced. It was the first time I had been exposed to international news. Not just breaking news such as earthquakes and wars and diplomatic breakthroughs, but also news of art fairs in Paris and theater in London and opera in Italy.

  I remember sitting on a staircase, next to a horse carriage. My mother came down the stairs, typically all dressed up—there was a bit of another era in my mother. And she said, “The Herald Tribune is based in Paris. I can imagine you working for it.”

  I thought, That’s it. I want to live in Paris and I want to write for the International Herald Tribune. I’ll have an apartment overlooking the Champs-Élysées,
and I’ll wear a white suit and smoke cigarettes out of a bone holder. That was the vision.

  While at Stanford, I decided that vision would be my life. I was drawn by the romance of it, by the prospect of traveling to new and exotic places, by sitting in an apartment overlooking the city and writing dispatches about intrigues and politics and spies and damsels and all the rest.

  The core of the vision never changed, but the venue did. As my college graduation approached, I asked myself, Where is the place to be? It’s not 1936, so I don’t want to go to Paris. It’s not 1986, so I don’t want to go to Eastern Europe. It’s 1996. What’s going to be the story of my generation? I thought it would be either China or the Middle East. I assumed China would be a business story, and I wasn’t much interested in business stories. I thought they were a little bit boring and would keep me chained to my desk. So I settled on the Middle East.

  I had mixed feelings about Stanford and felt cooped up in Palo Alto, but I’ll give it this: my international-relations classes got me thinking about the world geopolitically. With the Cold War over, the United States was the dominant hegemonic power, as my professors liked to say. And in a unipolar world, clashes between cultures, regional and religious groups would be the big foreign stories. That made the Middle East the biggest story.

  I pulled out a map and traced the countries with my finger. Iraq? Saddam Hussein was in power and journalists couldn’t do much there. Jordan? Not much going on, and not an exciting place to be. Syria? Similar problem to Iraq. Jerusalem, Israel, and the West Bank? I thought Israel was an interesting possibility, but the country was already flooded with journalists, and I thought I would have a hard time finding fresh stories.

  That left Egypt. It was the biggest country in the region, and I didn’t think many journalists were there. It also had the great value of simply being Egypt, with the pyramids and the whole pharaonic history, which I love.