And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East (2 page)

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.

So a few weeks after graduating, I embarked on the dream that began taking shape when I was a kid. I arrived in Cairo in June 1996 with two suitcases and about $2,000 in my pocket. My apartment was in a seven-story walk-up in a neighborhood called Mit Ouba on the Giza side of Cairo. It was as barren and dirty as a flophouse, with almost no furniture and nothing on the walls. Dust was everywhere, a fine dust that gets between your teeth, in your eyes and nose, the kind of dust you can’t get
rid of. When I sat on the sofa, dust rose like a cloud. Several of the windows had no glass. I covered them with cardboard in my forlorn battle against the dust. And this was one of the bigger and better apartments in my building.

President Hosni Mubarak’s state didn’t really have much reach in Mit Ouba. I never saw black government cars or soldiers or even police. The narrow alleys were filled with children and trash, piles and piles of trash. I couldn’t understand why people didn’t pick it up. Cigarette packs, empty potato chip bags, and cookie wrappers swirled in the hot, dry air. Sheep stood tethered, splotches of pink painted on their fatty tails to show they’d been inspected and deemed halal. Goats munched on plastic bags. This was the meat Egyptians could look forward to.

The water came in a trickle because the building was only supposed to be five stories and the top two were illegal. So naturally the owner didn’t buy an extra pump to push the water up the last two flights. When the water did arrive, the pressure was insufficient to use the handheld shower piece. I had to hold it almost to the ground to get any water out of it at all.

The building lacked central gas, and air-conditioning was an impossible dream. Everyone had a gas canister for his or her stove, and when the man who sold the canisters came by in his donkey cart, he would bang on them with a wrench. So when you heard his metal drum, you’d run downstairs and get him to install a fresh canister.

I came into my apartment one time and found six guys from the building cooking on my stove. They didn’t even seem surprised when I walked in. They kept cooking and tactfully made something for me while I sat down at the table.

When they’d finished cooking their meals, they cleaned the
dishes, thanked me very much, and took their food back to their homes. I guess they figured that a single foreigner had gas to spare. It was actually a pleasant evening, a good opportunity for me to practice my Arabic on them. I didn’t feel as if they were exploiting me in any way; it was just the idea of borrowing salt taken one step further.

There was no crime in Mit Ouba, which amazed me. I had a computer and a fax machine in my apartment, but I left it unlocked. Everyone in the building left his or her apartment unlocked, not that people had much to steal. I never heard of anyone being mugged. I never heard about a rape, but I wouldn’t have anyway. Victims were often married off to their attackers.

I went out on the streets dressed as a foreigner, and my light complexion made me stand out even more. I usually had money in my pockets, certainly more money than the local guys, who had little or no money in their pockets. But I was never accosted, never threatened in any way.

All the people in the neighborhood had debts, including me. Everyone kept a tab at the local grocery store. You paid for the canned meat (appetizingly called “luncheon meat”), cookies, oil, soap, and so on at the end of the month, or whenever the grocer decided the debt was too big for him to carry. It depended on the reliability of the customer. I usually got to around one hundred pounds, which back then was worth about $35, before the grocer started asking for money. The idea of the tab was to give people time to get over the hump until payday. If someone was late paying his debt or disputed the amount, a cleric was called in, oaths were sworn on the Koran, and the matter was settled.

Egypt was a hard place to run, perhaps beyond the capabilities of any government. Back then around 60 million people lived on a
tiny slip of green that zigzagged up the Nile River like a crack in the desert. People drank from the Nile and dumped sewage in it too. The education system was abysmal. What kept it all together was Islam. Islam was the solution, or at least that’s what the Muslim Brotherhood was selling. The Brotherhood was a political and religious organization that was officially illegal. President Mubarak let the group work in the open so the government could monitor its activities. The Brotherhood took a strict religious line and effectively ran most of the schools, factories, and trade unions. It operated a parallel government, funded with donations from its 2 million members.

If you were a foreigner in Cairo in 1996, you could forget about privacy. You were never alone. Everywhere you went, people would come up and start talking to you. Some of it was just curiosity—about the United States and why I came to live in Egypt. Sometimes people were also trying to drum up business. If a man was a plumber, he’d talk to me for a little while, then he’d let me know if I needed a plumber, he was my guy. No one was ever hostile to me. The people were wonderfully welcoming and often invited me into their homes. These encounters taught me a lot about the country and helped me learn Arabic quickly. Within a few months I was holding basic conversations and felt comfortable with the language after the first year or so.

The more religious people wanted to talk about Islam and invited me to convert. I became a “devout” Muslim by osmosis. I didn’t pray or believe, but in Mit Ouba you had to act Muslim. Language was culture out loud. I learned Arabic the way it was spoken in Mit Ouba. Every sentence began with “If Allah wills it” or “By the grace of Allah.” When a shopkeeper wished me
salaam alaikum
, “peace be with you,” I learned to answer with the forced poetry of “and peace be upon
you
, and the mercy of Allah and His blessings.” I mumbled “In the name of Allah” before taking a sip of water. If I hiccupped, I said, “Praise Allah.”

For two years, I almost never spoke to an Egyptian woman, unless she sold bread or vegetables, but even those precious interactions—exchanges of produce and crumpled currency—were limited. There was never any physical contact. No hands on the shoulder, no hugs, and certainly no Parisian-style double kisses between
jeune femme et homme
. Even when the old, veiled woman who sold sprouting onions and parsley from a wet blanket handed me change, I was careful not to touch her fingers. The rules were clear without an explanation. I don’t know what the protocol was for sitting next to a woman. I never sat next to one.