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| Iraq-Jordan |
| ESCAPING ARAB FAILURE |
| 2004-04-23 |
| Ralph Peters WE shouldn’t be discouraged by the recent round of violence in Iraq. It was predictable. But there were two disheartening signs: * We should be troubled that, in this bloody month, none of the insurgents waved an alternative constitution - unless we count their perversion of the Koran. None of those violent men is fighting for freedom - they’re fighting to strangle liberty in the cradle. They are, without exception, forces of reaction, not liberation, no matter how madly al-Jazeera twists the facts.Operation Iraqi Freedom has been, among other things, an attempt to give Arabs hope for a better future. The ultimate outcome won’t be known for years, but we must prepare ourselves for the possibility that the Arabs are going to fail themselves again. With sufficient troops, we can force Iraq’s Arabs to behave. But we can’t force them to succeed. Ultimately, Iraq is not a test of the limits of American power. When necessary, we can do whatever must be done for our security and prosperity. Our use of force, in Iraq and elsewhere, has been remarkably - even foolishly - restrained. If Iraq collapses into medieval fantasies and blood feuds, we still may be proud of having given this crippled civilization a last, great chance to heal itself. We’ve made mistakes, but their impact is minor compared to the unwillingness of Iraq’s Arabs, Sunni or Shi’a, to build a free and civil society of their own. In the United States, campus-generated political correctness was never more than a joke - capable of turning somber conservatives purple but unable to alter anything that matters. The far more dangerous form of political correctness is that which prevails in the dream-world of diplomacy: We pretend that all civilizations have equal merit. But they don’t. It’s time to face up to the functional and moral collapse of the Arab world - if we can’t describe the problem honestly, we shall never deal with it effectively. Arab civilization has failed. Disguised in part by the trappings of oil wealth, the Middle East has become humanity’s sinkhole, less promising, if richer, than Africa. But no facade of garish hotels in the hollow states that line the Persian Gulf, and no amount of full-page advertisements funded by the Saudi government, can hide the truth any longer: The Arab Middle East has become the world’s first entirely parasitical culture; all it does is to imitate poorly, consume voraciously, spit hatred, export death and create nothing. Arab civilization offers its people no promising future, only rhetoric about a past whose achievements have been as exaggerated as they were impermanent. The present is a bloody, heartless muddle. For all the oil wealth and expatriate university degrees, for all the hired-in expertise and Western "engagement," Arab civilization has degenerated to a point where it provides the rest of humanity nothing useful of its own design - while offering its own citizens only a culture of blame, corruption and lethargy. It’s a matter of culture, not race. In the free atmosphere of America, Arabs do as well as anyone else. All populations have their share of talent - but the oppressive environment of the Middle East enervates those individuals it does not crush entirely. Iraq has been given a chance to break free of the thrall of a bankrupt culture, to establish a rule-of-law democratic government observant of human rights. But the chances are increasingly good that Iraq’s Arabs will fail to achieve and maintain even minimal standards of good governance. The time has not yet come, but, contrary to the sort of diplomatic wisdom that so long protected Saddam, we can walk away if Iraq’s Arabs refuse to help themselves. And we can break up the country to protect the Kurds - a far better solution than turning Iraq over to the venal brokers of the United Nations. The failure of Arab civilization in our time is the greatest such disaster in mankind’s history. And, bitter though we find the proposition, the failure is so colossal that it cannot be neatly contained. Whether in Iraq today or elsewhere tomorrow, we cannot fully extract ourselves from this problem simply because our enemies won’t let go. If Iraq chooses failure, we can leave. But we’ll be back, somewhere in the Middle East. Because, as we saw on 9/11, the Middle East will continue to come to us. Blame is the opium of the Arabs, and the sweetest blame for their failures is that directed at the United States (and, of course, Israel). It is our power itself, not its uses, that enrages Arabs trapped in their self-made weakness. The oft-cited examples of the Arab world’s problems, from a lack of interest in secular education and a poor work ethic to staggering corruption and the oppression of women, are symptoms, not root causes, of Arab failure. Past a certain analytical point, we come up against the wall of our own taboos - we cannot admit that the psychological premises of an entire civilization might be dysfunctional. Arab failure isn’t about that which has been done to the Middle East, but that which the Middle East has done to itself. Iraq still has a chance, if a slimmer one than we had hoped. But even if Iraq’s Arabs disappoint our ambitions, our efforts will have been worthy and our losses not in vain. Intervention was unavoidable, whatever the critics say. Continued passivity in the face of the Middle East’s implosion would only have made the price higher in the end. We all would be better off were the Arabs to surprise us by building healthy, prosperous, modern societies. We would be foolish not to wish them well. But we would be equally foolish not to prepare ourselves for the consequences of their accelerating failure. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #6 Arab civilization has been in decline for a long time, since the fall of Granada in 1492 and their defeat at Vienna in 1683. Bernard Lewis outlines in "What Went Wrong? : The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East", the Arab world's withdrawal from contact with the West and the resultant disastrous stagnation their societies. Although European imperialism forced physical contact with the West in the 19th and 20th centuries, by then the Arabs had lost the capability for independent thought and action. The Arab world hasn't produced anything but trouble for the last 600 years, so why are we surprised that it is so hard for them to become part of our modern reality. |
| Posted by: RWV 2004-04-23 3:35:00 PM |
| #5 Here is where I absolutely disagree with Peters. The only people that can change their civilization are the Arabs and their satellite Turkic, Magrehbi, Pakistani, and Malay societies. This is why we are there, to give them the opportunity to pick up the ball and run with it. To build something new, and in the process wash away the past. We provide the tools and knowhow, and they provide the effort. If the Iraqis succeed, excellent. If not, then separate the known elements that do want to succeed (read: Kurds) from those that don't. And those that don't should be warned to squabble only among themselves and not to attempt to export their misery, lest they risk being finally ground into dust. |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2004-04-23 2:05:01 PM |
| #4 I'm glad that Peters still has hope. I lost mine during the looting. There is no sense of civil obligation in that civilization. Just naked self interest and tribal bonds enforced only by fear. Some will bring up the bloggers. Well there is always a thin veneer of Westernized folks in these cultures. We turn to them because they speak our language. They say soothing things to us and we believe them. But when you rip away the veneer, we see a very different picture. Every unit in society is based on oppression: from the "nation" through the neighborhood down to the family. Some hate the oppression and, as Steven den Beste might say, were born Americans. We tend to identify with these also since they are like us. They are not the majority. What about the Sufis? They are more spiritual, right? More spiritual but just as likely to fight to preserve tribalism and oppression as this article shows. What about the Turks and Indonesians? Their cities are Westernized and they seem to be progressing. Yet their countrysides are filled with Islamic violence and 7th century ignorance. The Islamist seem to do some of their best recruiting in these Westernizing countries. Why? In times of trouble, cities die fast. Famine and disease spread quickly. What would have happened in Bagdad if any other conqueror had taken it? Perhaps the millions of dead that the fringe left had predicted. I'm sorry if I bring anyone down. This is the enormity of the task that confronts us. The Islamists know that we cannot coexist. That's why they vow to destroy us. Our civilizations are not miscible like the Confucian civilizations of the Far East and our own. To Westernize Arab civilization, one must first destroy the the authority and power of every sheikh and Ayatollah. One has to force dozens of nations to open banks that allow the masses to invest, not just the 1% that owns all the fertile land. Then you have to convince that 1% that it would be better for them to invest in factories and utilities rather than rent producing land -- in other words to sell their land to the peasants. We cannot do these things any more than a communist can truly manage an economy. Here is where I absolutely disagree with Peters. The only people that can change their civilization are the Arabs and their satellite Turkic, Magrehbi, Pakistani, and Malay societies. The collapse of Arab civilization will be violent no matter what we do. The more we are engaged with them, the more violence that will spill over to our countries. |
| Posted by: 11A5S 2004-04-23 1:49:40 PM |
| #3 at last we know dot coms real name. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2004-04-23 1:12:25 PM |
| #2 :( Can someone post some good news? It's so dark... |
| Posted by: Anonymous4021 2004-04-23 1:00:10 PM |
| #1 no!no!no! it's the jeeeewss! we are billion people being subjugated by 3 million blood thirsty jeeees! |
| Posted by: Dan 2004-04-23 12:12:23 PM |