Posted on 08/06/2003 7:27:19 AM PDT by the_greatest_country_ever
Shaking Up the Neighbors By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
AMMAN, Jordan — Shortly after the 25-member Governing Council was appointed in Iraq, the head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, questioned the U.S.-appointed Council's legitimacy. "If this Council was elected," complained Mr. Moussa, "it would have gained much power and credibility."
I love that quote. I love it, first of all, for its bold, gutsy, shameless, world-class hypocrisy. Mr. Moussa presides over an Arab League in which not one of the 22 member states has a leader elected in a free and fair election. On top of it, before the war, Mr. Moussa did all he could to shield Saddam Hussein from attack, although Saddam had never held a real election in his life. Yet, there was Mr. Moussa questioning the new U.S.-appointed Iraqi Council, which, even in its infant form, is already the most representative government Iraq has ever had.
But I also love Mr. Moussa's comment for its unintended revolutionary message: "power and credibility" come from governments that are freely "elected." If only that were the motto of the Arab League. Alas, it is not, but it might be one day, and that brings me to the core question of this column: What has been the Arab reaction to Iraq? The short answer is: Shock, denial, fear and some stirrings of change. The shock comes from how easily the U.S.-British force smashed Saddam's regime. The denial is manifest in the absence of virtually any public discussion among Arab elites as to why Baghdad fell so easily and why such a terrible regime was indulged by the Arab world for so long.
"The most striking thing," one Arab diplomat remarked to me, "is that there are no debates going on [in the Arab world.] There is no W.M.D. debate. There is no debate about the atrocities and the mass graves. Even inside Iraq there doesn't seem to be much soul-searching, like there was in Germany after World War II. That is worrisome to me. People have to learn from the mistakes that were made, and there is no attempt at doing that." The denial is closely related to the fears. Many Arab leaders and intellectuals seem to be torn between two fears about Iraq: fear that the U.S. will succeed in transforming Iraq into a constitutional, democratizing society, which would put pressure on every other Arab regime to change, and fear that the U.S. will fail and Iraq will collapse into ethnic violence that will suck in all the neighbors and look like Lebanon's civil war on steroids.
For now, though, a few governments are getting ahead of the curve, while most are still hiding behind it. Jordan's King Abdullah has been the most pro-active, pushing his conservative population down the path of economic reform, and is likely to begin experimenting soon with political reform as well.
Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah recently convened an unusual dialogue between Sunni and Shiite clerics in Saudi Arabia to head off tensions that could flow from Iraq's being ruled by its Shiite majority for the first time in its history. Fears that a democratically elected Shiite-led government in Iraq could stir downtrodden Shiite minorities around the Arab world to demand more power are rife among the dominant Sunni Muslims. Many Sunni Muslims look down on the Shiites as inferior. Think how Southern whites would feel if a black had been elected governor of Mississippi in 1920, and you'll have a taste of how uneasy the Sunnis are about a Shiite-led government in Iraq. While Saudi Arabia is introducing more reforms at home than generally thought, too often it is one step forward, one step back. Just the other day another moderate Saudi columnist, Hussein Shobokshi, was sacked under government pressure. According to The A.P., Mr. Shobokshi had recently written a column imagining a Saudi Arabia where his daughter could drive and he could vote. Egypt remains totally gridlocked on reform, while the Syrian regime is going totally the wrong way, tightening its grip at home and pushing out all the freethinkers in Lebanon's cabinet.
As long as it is not clear how Iraq is going to come out, Arab regimes can practice denial. But if there is a decent government elected in Baghdad in two years, it will be as easy to ignore as a 10.0 earthquake. I think Abdul Rahman al-Rashid, the editor of London's Asharq al-Awsat newspaper, got it right when he remarked to me of the U.S. invasion of Iraq: "It is a mix between Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the 1967 war. There is the shock of defeat like '67 and the introduction of new thinking in the region like Napoleon. I can't predict how it will all come out, but for some reason I think it will be positive."
What is it about the Arab culture that keeps it so hopelessly mired in the past?
It seems to me that the only time they've achieved success is when they've been motivated by the glorification of war. The spread of Islam from Mecca throughout the world eventually reaching as far as Spain was brought about through the glorification of war in God's name through the invocation of 'jihad', holy war, allowing the Arab World to flourish as they did in the Middle Ages by absorbing the vanquished lands into their own.
It is quite ironic that our modern numbering system is called "Arabic" numerals because it was actually invented in India but was somehow miscredited. But this is only one small illustration of the so called Arab Golden Age and what really contributed to its success.
And again in the modern era it appears that demagoguery and holy war seem to be the only way the Arab World has been able to motivate itself in any way.
But now,the Arab world has been made impotent and vulnerable as never before by President Bush's bold visionary resolve to shatter the ossified mindset so prevalent within the Arab culture by dramatically revealing the abject bankruptcy and startling nakedness of its vacuous, primitive society for all the world to see.
The last progress in civilization they made was B.M. (Before Muhammed)
It's their religion.
That was an easy one.
This is a duplicate post. Originally posted under the correct title:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/958870/posts
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Owl_Eagle
”Guns Before Butter.”
The facts of life are as follows: if you are not Muslim you are a target of jihad and you, your whole family and your community are sentenced to death.
Islam tends to validate this but did not cause it directly, and in a number of places in the world where it is true and Islam is not present, the same result applies (some places in Latin America, some places in Asia, a LOT of places in Africa). Where a single ruling elite holds control poverty results - also corruption, patronage, and political repression. It's a natural enough form of government in a tribal situation and is the natural answer to chaos, but it can't run a modern economy.
And a very large population of Christians and Jews who built and maintained these public works.
1). Islam gives the Arabs a profound sense of being a chosen people of G-d. Therefore, there is nothing to be learned from us heathen scum.
2). The romanticized myths of the medieval Caliphate lead the Arabs to believe that they have but to emulate the past to again reign supreme over us lesser mortals. A corollary is that the Arabs have nothing to learn from the modern world.
It's the tribal mentality of the Arab world. It stifles initiative, prevents real progress, and uses the culture of absolutism to control a weak, uneducated populace.
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