ABSTRACT
Most studies of the political role of Middle Eastern armies have been written from one of two perspectives. The first is concerned to find an explanation for the frequent occurrence of military ‘coups’, the second to address the larger question of the role of the army in the general process of state-or nationbuilding. This is perhaps understandable given the salience of military interventions in the recent history of the region but it has yielded little insight. By and large, writers on Middle Eastern coups have tended to base their explanations on the simple premise that an army’s only way to exercise political power is by means of the overthrow of a civilian regime. They have also been prone to attach too much importance to specifically local factors, such as the allegedly militaristic nature of Islam or of Arab culture, as reasons for military intervention.1 However, officers in barracks can be just as influential as officers in government. And coups and military regimes are such a common feature of the post-colonial world that their occurrence must be due in large part to international, rather than simply Middle Eastern, factors. Notions such as the one that seeks to define the nation-building role of the officer corps as that of the ‘middle class in uniform’ have proved equally unhelpful.2 Armies have their own institutional imperatives which mean that their technological, educational or administrative resources are not simply available to the rest of society for whatever civilian purpose they may happen to be needed.
