There could well be some validity in the criticisms addressed to Qatar and its swollen role. But what is reprehensible is that when the people of the Mashriq, the Arab Levant, make such criticisms, they fail to recall, even for a moment, the collapse that has blighted their three major centers, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria, which had once received European and modern influence, and internalised it to this or that extent. This happened in the Arab Levant before other parts of the Arab world. But it seems that it is there, before elsewhere, that this experience is coming to an end. Therefore, self-criticism must come ahead of denouncing the roles of others, no matter what the verdict on these may be. One can perhaps say that the pioneer of this view was Saddam Hussein. It is he who propelled it to the point of direct occupation, as happened when he invaded Kuwait, establishing and then perpetuating a kind of an unprecedented split in the Arab world between the Arab Levant and the Arab Gulf. The basis of the collapse we are seeing today in the three centers, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, is the military coups that those countries discovered early on. In 1936, the first coup took place in Iraq at the hands of Bakr Sidqi, an officer who, only three years ago, had perpetrated the massacre of the Assyrians. In 1941, the 'Golden Square' coup took place, led by Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, which launched the climate that led to the Farhood, the first pogrom in the Islamic world against Jews. In 1958, the republican coup, which was dubbed a revolution, took place, followed by two coups in 1963, the first of which brought Baath to power, and the second removed it, leading up to the coup of 1968, which reinstated the Baath and in 1979 brought Saddam Hussein al-Takriti to power. Since then and until 2003, Iraq became known as Saddam's Iraq. Syria, which did not fail to catch up with Iraq, saw three coups in 1949 that brought, successively, Hosni al-Zaim, Sami Hinawi, and Adib Shishakli to power. The latter then carried out a second coup in which he bolstered his powers. When he was toppled in the mid-1950s, Syria was ruled by a military junta that hid behind a civilian façade, before handing over the entire country to Egypt. After that, unity with Egypt (1958-1961) was ended with one coup followed by another, until Baathists took power with another coup in 1963. In 1966, Baathists carried out a coup against Baathists, and in 1970, Hafez al-Assad carried out a coup against the rest of his comrades, until the country became known as Assad's Syria. Egypt, for its part, knew only one coup in July 1952. This coup was pioneering in that it presented conspiratorial action as a ‘revolution,' and the country went on to be ruled by the military complex until the revolution of January 2011. Within that constituent coup there were successive ‘coups' in the political direction of the regime, without consulting the views of the people, for example when Sadat shifted away from Nasserist policies, and then Mubarak away from Sadat's policies. In the meantime, societies in the Arab Levant became hotbeds for suppression and political desiccation, as well as social ruptures and brain drains in parallel with an endemic inability to keep pace with developments in the world, especially with globalization and the economy's increased reliance on free individual initiative. The region in question saw a very high proportion of exorbitantly costly wars, not only with Israel, such as the direct wars in Egypt and Syria, or by proxy in Lebanon, but also in Yemen (launched by Egypt), Kuwait, and Iran (launched by Iraq). On the whole, claims about the ‘leading role' played by the countries of the Arab Levant are nothing but familiar hot air, while no other region in the Arab world can play this ‘leading role' for which the need is declining to begin with. But instead of criticizing coups, we chose to criticize the ‘cities of salt,' that is, the cities of the Arab Gulf, and of course, the United States. In truth, we still have room to tolerate coups, as we demonstrated strongly a few days ago in Cairo.
