Better to Be Feared Than Loved, cont.

IT HAS RAPIDLY BECOME accepted wisdom in Washington that the United States is in ever-worsening trouble in the Arab Middle East. The collapse of the peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians has, according to this zeitgeist, left America bereft of friendly Muslims in the region, thereby jeopardizing both the Bush administration's global campaign against terrorism and its inchoate plans to topple Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. In particular, Ariel Sharon's military incursion into the West Bank, which has reinvigorated in the Arab mind all the awful imagery of General Sharon's drive to Beirut in 1982, has crippled Secretary of State Colin Powell's quest for "an integrated strategy" for the Middle East and humiliated the president, who'd urged an Israeli withdrawal "without delay." American credibility among the Arabs, so the theory goes, is in tatters.

Fortunately, this depiction of the United States in the Arab world makes no sense. The reverse is probably closer to the truth: that America is actually now in a far stronger position to prosecute a war against the Baathist regime in Iraq than it was before the Israeli Defense Forces reoccupied the West Bank. Its standing in the Arab world, that is, its ability to achieve its strategic goals, has gone up, not down, because of Israel's recent military operations. Israel's house-to-house combat in Jenin will undoubtedly reinforce Arab awe at Israeli prowess. This can only aid President Bush's larger war against terrorism rooted in Islamic militancy. Jenin, like the battle of Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut in '82, may make a real peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza someday possible. One look at Palestinian chairman Yasser Arafat today--hyperventilating, shaking, stuttering in both English and Arabic, pathetically appealing to memories of "my brother" Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (as if that seasoned general wouldn't have pulverized the Palestinian Authority for its holy-warrior kamikaze attacks on Israeli civilians)--should tell us that we are probably at the dawn of a post-Arafat era in Palestinian politics. That would be very good, for only when Arafat is gone will there be a real chance for an adequate settlement of the differences among the denizens of the Holy Land.

This continuing misapprehension of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its impact on the U.S. position in the Middle East is distressing, though not surprising, 52 years after Israel survived its first Arab war. Wrapped up in the peace process are bureaucratic equities--primarily those of the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency--and analyses that span several generations. But the reality is that Israel's repeated victories over the frontline Arab states have enormously increased Washington's coin from Morocco to Iran. The American-Israeli nexus has been for many, if not most, Arabs an inextricable part of the American mystique, the recurring reminder that Western power could not be overcome. The Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat understood this well, which is why he decided to move away from the pro-Soviet, anti-American, and anti-Israeli camp. Sadat's successor, Hosni Mubarak, who has played a two-faced game with America, supporting Washington in VIP meetings while encouraging vicious anti-American propaganda in his controlled popular press, still understands the reality of American power and the unchallengeable ties between Washington and Jerusalem.

Muslim militants and fundamentalists, who see culture and religion in crystal clear terms, have never had any difficulty discerning this indissoluble power nexus. The fundamentalists understand that the United States will not become "evenhanded" toward the Arab Muslim world since liberal democracies align naturally with each other. And Arab Muslim states (so fundamentalists fervently pray) can never become liberal democracies. For the militants and fundamentalists in Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and no doubt in many of the security and paramilitary organizations of the Palestinian Authority, Israel is the cutting edge of liberal Western civilization. It's America's base camp in the Muslim umma, the social, religious, and geographic sphere of Muslim sovereignty, where non-Muslims must be subordinated to a Muslim-controlled political system.

And when you look at militant Islamic literature--the statements of Osama bin Laden and his holy-warrior organization al Qaeda are illuminating examples--you of course don't find Sharon's crushing military victories over Egypt in 1973 and the PLO in 1982 as evidence of the promise that Israel can be destroyed. Sharon is the Devil's right-hand man, the warlord who makes the battle between Good and Evil in the fundamentalist mind such a close, precarious struggle. American and European liberals may loathe Sharon, who is a rampaging, politically incorrect expression of realpolitik, but his antagonists in the Middle East fear him. What they do not fear, and what has been the font of the militants' hopes, is the Israel under Prime Minister Ehud Barak that precipitously withdrew from Lebanon in the summer of 2000 and attempted through concessions to grasp permanent peace treaties with Syria and Arafat. What they do not fear is the America that ran from Beirut truck-bombs in 1983 and from rocket-propelled grenades in Mogadishu in 1993.

Osama bin Laden and other Muslim militants, like the leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and in his own profound way Arafat, are quite sensible strategists: They inspire the young with hope, not depression; with victories, not defeat. They do not promise that Israel or the United States will be like ancient Rome at its height--that legion will follow legion until its enemies are crushed or scattered in an endless exile. Their promises are not millenarian. They are in the near future. As the Palestinian Authority was fond of broadcasting before Sharon decided to reverse the decade-old habit of Israeli restraint, the "final struggle" was at hand.

With his decisive victory on the West Bank--and it is decisive just because Sharon did it and everyone in Israel and the Arab world knows that he will do it again--Sharon is in the process of pushing the Arab idea of coercing and dominating Israel into the distant future, beyond the immediate passions of young Palestinian men and women, who live for the present. Probably far sooner than most people imagine possible--a few years, not decades--the defeat of Israel through terrorism will become for most Palestinians what the conquest of Constantinople was for the medieval Arab world, an appealing image that no longer sufficiently inspires. When that happens, some kind of peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza will become possible. Assuming of course the United States can neutralize the increasing interference of Iraq and Iran. The Camp David discussions of July 2000 will look then to the Palestinians like a mythical promised land.

WASHINGTON NEEDS to look back at Lebanon in 1982--the cerebral cortex of those who despise Sharon in the Middle East, Europe, and America--to see how the Palestinians' worst defeat failed to damage the United States's position in the Middle East. Relations with the Arab states continued as before, which was not necessarily a good thing, since our tolerance of such regimes as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria--the perpetrators of enormous anti-American mischief--has harmed the United States for decades in the region. With accusations of "blitzkrieg" and slaughter in the print media and on both Arab and Western television (remember NBC's John Chancellor), the mythical Arab street did not rise. Furthermore, oil boycotts never developed. If one recalls the relative supply-and-demand price stability in the energy markets throughout the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, it is very hard to take seriously all the talk on both sides of the Atlantic about the regional or international impact of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation.

In 1982, American diplomats and case officers abroad may have had a few unpleasant dinners and meetings with their Arab counterparts, but U.S. power and influence wasn't belittled in the region. On the contrary, the war, which the Arabs uniformly believed Washington had sanctioned, as they now believe it has sanctioned Sharon's incursions, demonstrated convincingly to all America's reach and power. Israel made mincemeat of the PLO and Syria, which under Hafez al-Assad learned painfully and definitively the costs of war with America's closest Middle Eastern ally. (The Lebanon war between the Israelis and the Syrians also demonstrated to the Soviet Union that its goose was cooked in both armor and aerial combat. Not an insignificant achievement in the third-world conflicts that greatly determined the outcome of the Cold War.)

Only the Bush administration has the capacity to undo America's eminence in the Middle East. The Arabs can't and most won't really even try. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot diminish the United States unless President Bush pivots from an ahistorical understanding of the Arab Middle East.

Fortunately, President Bush has not been schooled in Washington's foreign-affairs establishment. His instincts, which produced in the Axis of Evil speech the clearest and most intellectually potent foreign policy since Ronald Reagan's, don't please the diplomats and intelligence professionals, who remain acutely uncomfortable with good-versus-evil as a roadmap for American action abroad. The president's instincts may propel him to pop the myth that America must solicit an Arab coalition to defeat Saddam Hussein. Untutored, the president may just ask: Why would America need Muslim or Arab cover for military action against Iraq? What moral sanction can dictatorial regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia possibly give us? What real aid can they give to the war on terrorism if they cannot call suicide bombers terrorists? Is the average Arab who hates us, for whatever reasons, going to hate us less because his rulers tell him to?

In World War I, the British had to confront an Ottoman sultan who declared a holy war against them. Recognized by millions of Muslims as both sultan and caliph, "the commander of the faithful," the Ottoman monarch and his warlords hoped they could rouse the faithful of the British Raj, where thousands of Muslims served as soldiers under the Union Jack. Some in the Foreign Office were deeply concerned. Faithful Arabs, of course, never arose en masse, though most stayed quietly loyal to the Sublime Porte. The Hashemites from Arabia--soon to be the guardians of Islam's holy cities of Mecca and Medina--however, put their fingers in the air and determined that the British Empire was going to crush the Ottoman. Being allied with a victorious infidel seemed far better than being the brother of a loser.

The Bush administration ought to reflect on the Hashemite example when voices from within and critics from without suggest that America--vastly stronger than the British Empire in 1914--somehow requires the spiritual or logistical assistance of Arabian princes for a war against the ruler of Baghdad or a war against terror. They ought to seriously question the intentions of "moderate" Arab dictators who suggest that their regimes might be in danger because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No pro-American dictator went down in the Arab world in 1982. Broadcasting against the Israeli forces in the West Bank, and perhaps soon against American forces in Iraq, the Al Jazeera satellite television channel, which some say has completely reworked the popular dynamics and politics of the Middle East, will likely in the long term do the opposite of what its producers and reporters intend, by showing the hopelessness of opposing American power.

As Al Jazeera unintentionally served America's interests in the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, it will do so again if the Bush administration remains firm in its resolve. President Bush's moral clarity on terrorism, tyranny, and weapons of mass destruction is the best hope the Arab world has for rescuing itself from the moral abyss of suicide bombers and public sympathy for a totalitarian regime that rules through rape. The president, more so than any since Reagan, has become the prime mover of history. In the next few months, we'll all see where he leads us. In the meantime, Ariel Sharon, bellicose brute that he may be, has done America a significant favor by having the guts to send the IDF back to the West Bank, where neither he nor his army wanted to go.

Which shows only that you are incapable of thinking about political science intelligently. Machiavelli addresses the question of whether the inspiration of love or fear (awe, respect) is a more valuable instrument in the execution of political authority. The issue does not arise in the example of Caligula: his power was absolute, and he was not interested in identifying principles of sound government; he was only interested in what he could get away.

The essay of Machievelli to which this article alludes (for the sake of the politically literate) identifies the reality that, in the domain of politics, the "love" of men is fickle and self-interested, a matter of convenience. Therefore, even if we were to send in our troops to Israel and set up gas chambers and march the entire Jewish population of Israel in to their deaths, the Arab street would only love us momentarily; they would perceive that the sacrifice of the Jews was nothing more than a feeble attempt to placate their ressentiment, their insatiable lust for destruction, and we would be back to square one, just like Neville Chamberlain before us.

"Prejudiced nonsense. Egypt made peace with Israel. So did Jordan. How do you accommodate those facts? Sadat risked his life to shake hands with Begin. He did it because it was right. What's needed is enlightened leadership, not thugs like Arafat and Sharon."

Egypt made "peace" with Israel because Israel did exactly what my post advocated--kicked Arab ass. "..because it was right" wasn't part of the equation--it was the only way they could get the Sinai back. Jordan did so because they knew (and know) that Israel CAN "kick their ass" anytime they so desire.

My exposure to Arabs from many different nations happened long before the US was conceived as "the Great Satan", from Arab students who came to the US to attend American universities. The university I attended offered a major summer program in "English as a second language" and drew MANY foreign students (not just Arabs) who then fanned out from there to attend colleges and universities all over the US. I worked at the U. during those summers as a student residence-hall supervisor while also taking courses, and had close contact with all these folks. The Arabs were uniformly the biggest bunch of lying sneaks I have ever had the misfortune to be exposed to. And these were students from the very top strata of the "Arab intelligentsia". Is reality prejudice?? I don't think so.

What is YOUR first-hand experience with the "wonderful" Arabs, Feeny??

Tsk, tsk tsk, little supercilious newbie. I've read Pliny, Julius Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, Ovid and many others ... in Latin. I long ago read Gibbon, Van Loon, Suetonius, Plutarch and a host of other historians ; probably before you got out of diapers. You need a reread of the Punic Wars ; instead of continually watching Mel Brook's " HISTORY OF THE WORLD, PART II " so often. : - )

You have a new date of membership, but perhaps you're just an " oldie " , who's been banned. Keep up the childish personal insults, and you'll be so again.

None of this; however , has anything at all to do with the thread's topic and your shilling for terrorists, misuse of the English language, or abject lack of understansing about what it will take to defeat enemies. So, unless you are capable of better debate, spare us all your sophestry. Oh, and by the by, you left out forces air heat, an almost modern flush lav, and an unheard of religious tolerance, as Roman accomplishments and introductions to barbaric soceties.

Hmmmmmmm ... you don't know me , nor what I know about ancient civilzations, yet you personally attacked me . When you got it back, all you could do is whine, whimper, whinge , and arrogantly go off on a pedantic, self aggrondizing , boring pedagogic tangent. I know everything you wrote, and more. Since you evidently adore trotting out such inane trivia, shall I now write you an elvating monlith about Titslinger, the inventor of the modern Bra ? Oh yes, and they had thse , as well as bikinis , in ancient Rome.

Anyone , who has read Ovid ( and I have ... in the original Latin and several English translations, dear ) knows that they used toothbrushes ; of a sort. Real, MODERN toothbrushes ; however, weren't around until Victorian England. Since this isn't a game of Trivial Pusuit, dear, all of these silly Ripley Believe It or Nots , are irrelivant, juvenile, purile , inane, and banal.

Were you at the Pro-Pali rally, in D.C. today ? If not, why not ? That's a more seminal query and addendum to this thread. : - )

BTW, you aren't impressing anyone around here, with your posts. They are neither pertinent, nor on topic. As a matter offact, thus far, you appear to be only an excellent waster of bandwidth ; someone incredibly devoid of a capacity to stay focused and enamoured of your own voice. : - ) Sooooooooooo , find a mirror, and do talk to yourself. Maybe you should write yourself E-mails. At least then , someone will appreciate what you have written. LOL

The Middle East conflict has nothing in the least to do with any so-called oppression. It is entirely due to the fact that so few Jews being so much more powerful than so many Arabs humiliates and emasculates them. Because Israel exists, every Arab man feels like a capon. Indeed, if the Israelis converted to Islam tomorrow they could treat the Palestinians in a typically barbaric Islamic manner and no one anywhere would have any problem with that. This is entirely about a wounded sense of entitlement.

Once upon a time, practically every great city in the world outside of China, India, Kyoto, and Constantinople was Muslim. Once upon a time the Muslim world was civilized. But since 1600, when the Muslim world decided to turn its back on science and learning and modernity it has become as decadent and corrupted as a family too rich too long. Now it is incapable of producing anything higher than the car bomb. It exports only oil and terrorism, producing nothing requiring brainpower. It is natural that a civiliation that utterly lacking in creativity, that incapable of assuming any responsibility for its actions would respond only with spite and envy at a world that passes it by. Israel is technologically superior because it has a creative, intelligent, forward looking, brave and innovative people. The Arab world can only buy machines that they haven't the competence to use or maintain much less build for themselves because they are lazy, by turns boastful and cringing, fundamentally incompetent, childish, venal, and crippled by a bloated grandiosity. Societies have personalities and some personalities are just plain better than others.

Ascribing Israeli strength solely or even primarily to US backing is false. The 1948 War was fought with the same WW2 surplus equipment on both sides. Who won ? There was no qualitative difference between the Mysteres and Ouragons of the Israeli Air Force and the Mig 15/17's of the Egyptian Air Force in 1956. Again in 1967 when the Israeli Air Force used primarily Mirages, the Arab armies disintegrated because they were poorly led and poorly trained, not because of ANY technological gap. In 1967 the Egyptian officers, like the Iraqi officers of 1991, deserted their frontline units and fled to save their skins, something no Israeli officer would ever do. Arab armies have a consistent history of looking good on paper but disintegrating in combat like the Soviet Army did in Byelorussia in June, 1941.

It has nothing to do with technology per se. It is a matter of culture. Let us take an example. An infantry unit is advancing and the officer out front is killed. Arab soldiers accustomed to despotism, accustomed to a society where only a fool would choose to bring attention or responsibility on himself or act without permission, would simply huddle leaderless. In an Israeli unit, someone will step forward and say "Come on, follow me" and the attack will be pressed forward. People who are the products of a culture of freedom feel safe to step forward and take chances.

Commodity wealth seems to have the cultural effects of easy money. It rots the national character and there is such a thing as national character. It corrupted Spanish society, it corrupted Argentine society, it corrupts Nigerian society, it corrupts Arab society. It fosters a national character of grossly entitled trust fund brats, of swaggering sheikhs/hidalgos, of get rich quick thieves and scammers, of a cultural disinclination to effort and hard work and rising on the basis of what you can do instead of who you know. It fosters conceit, grandiosity, entitlement, and mental and physical laziness. There is no sign of Arab society developing any capacity of actually making or producing things. There is every sign that like Argentina once the wartime boom profits ran out and there was nothing left for the Peronists to redistribute the country simply sank out of the developed world because its people refused to grow up, that the Arab world will simply sink into fundamentalism and rage and poverty and delusions of grandiosity.

There are those in the Arab world who see the signs and would like to turn it around. There were those who tried to save 17th century Spain and 20th century Argentina and the Ottoman Empire. But they could not prevail in the face of cultural inertia and so it will be with Islam.

Feenian, what you all describe are aspects of Arab civilization - NOT the brutal religion the majority of them subscribe. It is readily apparent that the mathematical and medical innovations from the Arabs came NOT from Islam, but from the culture itself, prior to Islam asserting its violent and cruel reign. Since Islam conquered these lands by the sword, the innovations have died. What innovations currently come from the dictatorships of Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, and other Islamic countries? Nothing significant.

The fact of the matter is - these countries, and the world, would be better off without Islam. Islam in almost every case has meant dictatorship, oppressive regimes, and a horrific persecution of other religions.

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