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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran | |
| Spengler: What do you do when there isn't a solution? | |
| 2011-03-31 | |
The Arab bazaar speculates in foodstuffs as aggressively as hedge funds, and the Syrian government's attempt last month to keep food prices down prompted local merchants to hoard commodities with a long shelf life. Fruit and vegetable prices, by contrast, remain low, because the bazaar does not hoard perishables. The fact that prices rose after the government announced high-profile measures to prevent such a rise exposed the fecklessness of the Assad regime. In response to the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, President Assad reduced taxes on oil and sugar, and cut import tariffs on basic foodstuffs. Bloggers report that the prices of basic foodstuffs have risen by 25% to 30%. What happened is seen frequently in Third World command economies: local importers bribe customs officials to control the flow of goods, and then hoard them. "The only beneficiaries of the price-reduction decrees," the blogger concluded, "are the traders." What are essentially dictatorships like Syria rule through corruption. It is not an incidental fact of life, but the primary means of maintaining loyalty to the regime. Under normal circumstances such regimes can last indefinitely. Under severe external stress, the web of corrupt power relations decays into a scramble for individual advantage. The doubling of world food prices over the past year has overwhelmed the Assad family's ability to manage through the usual mechanisms. The Syrians sense the weakness of the regime, which rests on the narrow base of the Alawi religious minority. Virtually every sector of Syrian society has a grudge against the Assads, most of all the Muslim Brotherhood, which led an uprising in the city of Hama in 1982 that Hafez al-Assad crushed with casualties estimated at between 10,000 and 20,000. Ethnic fractures have not yet contributed to the unrest, but the country's Kurds are "ready, watching and waiting to take to the streets, as their cause is the strongest", as Robert Lowe, manager of the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics, told CNN on March 24. From the Straits of Gibraltar to the Hindu Kush, instability will afflict the Muslim world for a generation, and there is nothing that the West can do to stop it. Almost no-one in Washington appears to be asking the obvious question: what should the United States do in the event that there are no solutions at all? No one, that is, but US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius March 22 that "the unrest has highlighted 'ethnic, sectarian and tribal differences that have been suppressed for years' in the region, and that as America encourages leaders to accept democratic change, there's a question 'whether more democratic governance can hold ... countries together in light of these pressures'." The implication [Ignatius writes]: ''There's a risk that the political map of the modern Middle East may begin to unravel too, with, say, the breakup of Libya.'' Former president George W Bush wanted to build democracy, and the Barack Obama administration has embraced the "Arab spring" with the enthusiasm of a Sorbonne undergraduate in May 1968. "Helping to get them right" is "a challenge for American foreign policy as any we have faced since the end of the Cold War," as William J Burns, the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee March 17. This flight of fancy was flagged by the Israel-based analyst Barry Rubin (at rubinreports.blogspot.com). The administration's romantics, such as Samantha Powers, the Irish human-rights activist who once called for UN troops to take over the Israel-Palestine conflict, and United Nations ambassador Susan Rice, appear in charge of Middle East policy. Anyone who doubts that ideology trumps raison d'etat in the Obama White House should read Stanley Kurtz' just-published book, Radical-in-Chief. The Republicans for the most part are competing with Obama to show that they can do a better job of fixing the Middle East. "Barack Obama's union base is looking like a national security issue," complains Daniel Henninger in the March 24 Wall Street Journal, because the unions oppose free trade agreements that he thinks would fix Egypt's economy. Never mind that two-fifths of Egyptians are illiterate and that (according to Egypt's new Finance Minister Samir Radwan) ''the products of the education system are unemployable." Like most of his colleagues in the commentariat, Henninger feels obliged to offer a solution. He writes, "Many people in US public life don't want to get involved with this Middle East tangle. Alas, the gods do not ordain a timeline for crises. These insurrections - now spread across 11 separate nations - are a big, historic moment, similar in some ways to what happened around Eastern Europe before the Berlin Wall fell. The US didn't blow that one. What's needed now is an equivalent level of leadership and strategic thinking to ensure we don't fall on the wrong side of this one." It is worth recalling just what happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall. America won the Cold War not by enticing the Soviet Union into democratic reforms but by proving to Russia's generals that they couldn't win - by installing missiles in Germany that could hit Moscow in four minutes, by shredding Russian forces in Afghanistan, by demonstrating the weakness of Russian avionics, and by threatening (in part as a bluff) to build a missile defense system. The result was to bring ruination to the Russian economy and ruin tens of millions of lives. Male life expectancy plunged into the mid-50-year range largely due to alcoholism, and millions of Russian women turned to prostitution. After the Cold War, American free marketeers fanned out like missionaries to spread the capitalist gospel around the world. In some respects we succeeded. Asia listened, and flourished. Yeltsin had not yet invited the oligarch Roman Abramovich to move into an apartment at the Kremlin, which he did in 1996. But it did not take long to see that the job description of an "economic adviser" was to find means for Russian officials to steal everything available and bank the proceeds abroad. This was not so much corruption as free-for-all looting. There were no restraints because communism had erased Russian civil society and made the people passive and despondent. Russian democracy under Yeltsin allowed the sheep the right to vote about whatever it liked while the wolves ate their fill. It took a restoration of the old security services in the person of Vladimir Putin to restore a degree of order. Russia remains a crippled giant, a raw-materials monoculture dependent on more than ten million foreign workers to compensate for its demographic decline. And Russia was a superpower that nearly beat America in the Cold War, the first country to send a man into space, the home to many of the world's best scientists and mathematicians. The Muslim world has not produced an innovation of note in seven centuries; except in Turkey, it lacks a single university that can train students to world standards (and only 23% of Turkish students finish high school). To expect the Arab Middle East to compete with Asia in light manufactures or information-technology outsourcing is whimsical. Iran might have had a chance before Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, but most of its human capital has long since fled. Pakistan is a half-illiterate failed state. Turkey has kept its head above water, but just barely, as I reported last week (The Heart of Turkness, March 22, 2011); Indonesia and Malaysia have more to do with emerging Asia than the Middle East. The only pocket of Arab population with an economic future might be the West Bank territories, where the gravitational pull of Israel's high-tech economy draws in Arabs educated at universities founded after Israel conquered the region in 1967. At the University of Samaria on the other side of the Green Line, one sees scores of young Palestinian women in headscarves. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt understands the local situation much better than American policymakers of both parties. As Israeli officials observe, it has no ambition to rule Egypt for the moment, for the Brothers believe that Egypt's position is hopeless for the time being. No matter who is in power for the immediate future, the country will descend into chaos. The Brotherhood will wait in the wings, hoping to emerge as a national savior at some future date. What might emerge from the Arab world two or three generations from now is beyond anyone's capacity to foresee. As individuals, Arabs are as talented and productive as anyone on earth. For the time being they are caught in the maelstrom of a failing culture. The social engineers of the neither the American left nor right will ''get them right," in Undersecretary Burns' grammatically challenged expression. Gates is right: the existing political structures will not hold. As he told David Ignatius, ''I think we should be alert to the fact that outcomes are not predetermined, and that it's not necessarily the case that everything has a happy ending ... We are in dark territory and nobody knows what the outcome will be.'' As I said of Egypt in my February 2 essay: we do not know what kind of state will follow Basher Assad. We only know that it will be a failed state. | |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #7 Good essay, good comments The very notion that there is "no solution" to anything would seem to be a challenge to liberal orthodoxy. |
| Posted by: ryuge 2011-03-31 17:08 |
| #6 Worth a read. Good catch TW. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2011-03-31 16:10 |
| #5 I'll tell you one thing. When MME becomes one huge Somalia and the oil stops, it won't be the people who been stopping domestic drilling and nuclear power (their foot soldiers yes, but not the bosses) who will be freezing & starving. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2011-03-31 15:30 |
| #4 "What do you do when there isn't a solution?" Kobyashu Maru. Change the rules |
| Posted by: Mercutio 2011-03-31 14:11 |
| #3 AH: It is somewhat reassuring to think of it as an "1848 moment". When the American Revolution came about, it started a chain reaction that circled the globe. Suddenly everyone realized that royalism was hopelessly inefficient and could not compete in the modern world of industrialism. Copies of the US constitution poured out of the US to every corner of the globe. Unfortunately, it first took hold in France, where the situation was so bad that ultra-radicalism took root and heads were chopped off. The grotesque excesses of the French put a real damper on the democratic revolution, so things settled down for a while until everyone could figure out what went wrong. When they did, it was the year 1848, one hell of a year. And Europe, then, was like the Middle East today. (Tragically, it was also the same year that just the opposite of the democratic revolution was born as well, when Marx and Engels published the communist manifesto.) The democratic revolutions began in Sicily. Then the king of France abdicated and France became a republic. Then Hungary. Then a giant Chartist (enfranchisement) rally in London. The Pope withdrew his support for a unified Italy, which was the first major reaction against the revolutions. The Austrian army attacked a popular revolt in Prague and crushes it. A rebellion against British rule in Sri Lanka. Ireland is struck both by a revolt and the potato famine. Switzerland become a republic based on the US constitution. The Dutch revise their constitution to make it more American-like. Revolt in Brazil. Greater Poland. Wallachia. Belgium. Denmark. All in all, most of the revolutions failed, and were followed by counter revolutions, but the die was cast. Royalism was on the way out as a means of government. What this means in the current situation is several things. First and foremost, a small minority ruling a large majority, as in Syria, formerly in Iraq, is going to come under intense pressure. Yet efforts by minorities in the Gulf States to destabilize are likely all going to fail. In Egypt, because they plan to hold elections soon, the two biggest movements, the Muslim Brotherhood, but *also*, Mubarak's political party, the National Democratic Party, will hold sway. But while the NDP is likely going to be punished, don't assume it will be an MB sweep, either. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2011-03-31 09:29 |
| #2 AH, I've heard it said that when an ideology is on death's doorstep and has run its course, that is when it reaches its most extreme. Outcome egalitarianism has had a 220 year run. I see what has happened to the world since the 1930's and more so since the 1960's and outcome egalitarianism looks like car with a stuck accelerator headed for a wall. Politicians, entertainers, mass media, educators, and even some "churches" have attached themselves, velcro-like, to the concept. It has even (see the modern Democratic Party and their association with the government takeover of the charity industry - aka known as the welfare state - and public sector unions) extended its tendrils into the alternative (and functionally superior) vision of a good and decent and prosperous society that came out of the Enlightenment, the U.S. The system of giving money and food and things away to people on credit in order to prop up the delusion that everyone can be made equally happy is dying a horrible death in front of us, as evidenced by the food riots pretending to be revolutions in the ME and North Africa and the vehenment and sometimes violent protests in Wisconsin. There will be lots more of this going forward, as the concept dies before its adherents realize its corpse is rotting. None of these folks will happily admit that their lifestyle wasn't real and that it was propped up by money confiscated unfairly from others. The problem is that the concept of government enforced out come egalitarianism is failed and it is a physical impossibility that it can work in the real world, no matter what people think, say, do, sing, or pray. No. More. Money. Whatever their paltry virtues might be, a society or government which presumes that one of its primary functions is to eliminate or even mitigate to any extent differences in eonomic outcomes based on individuals' skill set, intelligence, and work ethic is ALWAYS more evil and oppressive than those which do not, despite the other's warts and bruises. Perhaps in some distant future the whole human race will come to this realization, but not soon. |
| Posted by: no mo uro 2011-03-31 08:14 |
| #1 The current world & domestic situation is looking like a Perfect Storm of historical catastrophes, and the USA has Obama at the helm. God save us. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2011-03-31 01:02 |