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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 The problem was that there was never an Islamist success in modern times until Jimmy Carter handed them one by abandoning Iran. And as soon as Carter did that, Russia invaded neighboring Afghanistan setting the stage for the second Islamist success. And then the Iranian Islamists created the third Islamist success with Hezbollah in Lebanon. I have seen the enemy ... and it is us. Thanks Jimmah! WORST.PRESIDENT.EVER |
| Posted by: knerfley 2008-07-28 19:37 |
| #3 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. The last two sentences of the essay and Nimble Spemble's final comment sum up the situation nicely, although I disagree that there remains the alternative of starving the Middle East into submission; the region has too much money socked away in other investments, and the people are now accustomed to the idea of moving to greener pastures such as Europe and North America, where some of them will continue to fight their jihad regardless of conditions back home. However, being that we are civilized men and women, we had to give Muslim Asia (not merely the Arab World) -- as represented by the two countries where we exerted any control, Iraq and Afghanistan -- a chance to prove themselves capable of evolving into acceptable neighbors before eradicating them as functionally rabid dogs too dangerous to be allowed to live in the same universe as the rest of us. The experiment has not yet run its course, I believe, but it is interesting to see others beginning to conclude that it has. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2008-07-28 19:21 |
| #2 What Is the Arab World's Problem? Islam and modern health/sanitation. Take either away and the problem becomes self limiting. |
| Posted by: ed 2008-07-28 18:57 |
| #1 Most Muslims believe that democracy usurps power from their deity. Their clerics only play the voter card when they believe it can lead to victory. As for the so called 19th "reformers," they emulated the Romantic movement's internationalism, so as to advance the Islamist agenda. Abdu later became Mufti Sahib of al-Azhar University in Cairo. He, like Afghani, were reactionaries. Currently, Muslims promote the "islamization of knowledge," in the same way that Marxists promoted the "socialization" of same. They are not an integral element where they reside in the West; they are inherently subversive. |
| Posted by: McZoid 2008-07-28 16:05 |