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| Arabia |
| What Is the Arab World's Problem? |
| 2008-07-28 |
| Until the United States develops an adequate substitute for oil, we are stuck in the Middle East protecting the free flow of affordable fossil fuel that not only fills American SUVs but also ensures the stability of global markets. Pollack makes a good case that were it not for our presence in the Gulf, we would not be such a valuable target on the jihadist hit list, and were we to leave tomorrow, the threat to the United States from Arab terror outfits would largely subside. Since we are not leaving, we need to repair the region with a broad program of economic and political reform, different from the Bush administration's quick-fix obsession with elections that merely lent democratic legitimacy to Islamist groups in the Palestinian Authority, Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt. Pollack argues that a process of real liberal reform will take decades, if not longer. Islamism, which Pollack is at pains to distinguish from Islam, is a vital force in the region precisely because it represents the progressive and rational current of Islam that sought to reconcile a society marked by fatalism and backwardness with "the forces of modernity" embodied by the West. That trend, starting with 19th-century Muslim reformers Jamal al-din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abdu, gave rise to the Islamist movement, from the Muslim Brotherhood all the way down to the most notoriously violent organizations in the region like Hamas and al-Qaida. For Pollack, as for many U.S. policymakers, a key question is whether Islamists should be allowed to participate in the democratic process and, if so, which ones should qualify. However, the Islamists, both moderate and extreme, are already a part of Middle Eastern political culture, whether we like it or not. The problem is with our intellectual framework: By focusing on how to jump-start the "democratic process," we have failed to recognize what the region really looks like. Besides Lebanon and now Iraq, there is no mechanism for power-sharing or transmitting authority from one ruler to the next, except through inheritance or coup d'état. Arab politics is a fight to become what Osama Bin Laden called the "strong horse," which means if you want power, you have to take it. Islamist violence is not attributable to a lack of economic opportunities, as Pollack contends, or to any other "root cause." The Islamists are simply playing by regional rules, where terror and repression are two sides of the same bloody coin—insurgents and oppositionists wage terror campaigns to win power, and the regimes use torture and collective punishment in order to repress their domestic competition. That is to say, Middle Eastern regimes are not the source of the region's problems. As the decapitation of Saddam Hussein's regime showed, the psychopaths, princes, and presidents for life who rule Arab states are merely the hothouse flowers of a poisonous political culture. "The States are as the men are," Plato writes in The Republic. "They grow out of human characters." The failure to respect this basic and ancient political principle marks by far the greatest intellectual error of neocon Middle East policy and thus of the entire liberal intelligentsia from which it arises. As we saw with Hezbollah's orgiastic celebrations for released child-murderer Samir Kuntar, the problem with the Arab world is Arab societies themselves. The Iraq war should have cured us of any illusions about the Middle East, but the administration's incoherence let us put many of the region's problems on Bush's tab. American opinion will be easier on the next president and harder on the Middle East itself as we come to distinguish between our problems, mistakes, and limitations and those of the Arabs. The paradox is that one of our sharpest limitations is that we believe democracy is a universal cure-all, good for all people at all times, when that is almost certainly not the case. However, as Pollack argues, democratic reform seems to be the only thing that will save the Middle East from consuming itself in violence, for the region can get worse than it is now, much worse. This is going to end one of two ways. Either these guys are going to act up too much once too often and we have to whack them really good or we develop alternatives (nukes and coal)and they become irrelevant. Either way it will end badly for them. |
| Posted by:Nimble Spemble |
| #4 |
| Posted by: knerfley 2008-07-28 19:37 |
| #3 |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2008-07-28 19:21 |
| #2 |
| Posted by: ed 2008-07-28 18:57 |
| #1 |
| Posted by: McZoid 2008-07-28 16:05 |