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| Fouad Ajami - Through Arab eyes, blindly |
| 2003-04-12 |
| Cities beget their own legends, and there is a legend of Baghdad, and its conquest by the Mongols in 1258--the end of the Islamic caliphate and the beginning of an age of decline and disorder. In the legend, the brilliant city of learning was thoroughly sacked; the books in its vast libraries were dumped in the Tigris, and thousands of the city's people were put to the sword. In the fevered imagination of the crowds chanting Saddam Hussein's name, in the Arab lands away from Baghdad, those men and women of the American-led coalition are the new Mongols. History does not always instruct, though; its analogies often go astray. It was in the nature of things that those crowds in Arab lands far from Saddam's great prison would raise the Iraqi dictator's banners. It was of a piece with the sorrows and retrogressions of contemporary Arab political culture that the muftis in Beirut and Damascus and Cairo would call on the believers to rise up in Iraq's defense and give the master of Baghdad religious cover. There was no way of conciliating the Arabs to this campaign, no public diplomacy that could still the fury of those crowds. A contrived sympathy for the Iraqi people suddenly crowds the airwaves and the printed media of Arab lands. Through the hard years of Saddam's rule, however, these same Arab media had nothing to say about the manner in which he and his fellow Tikritis shattered the autonomy of Iraq's Shiite shrine cities and executed or drove into exile countless ulema, or religious scholars. The Iraqi ruler tormented and deprived his country, and turned its political life into a private dominion of his clan, his sons and his retainers, but the crowds in Cairo and Casablanca and Amman had paid that tale of disinheritance and terror no heed. Terror--and silence. In 1991, the Iraqi regime waged a brutal war against Iraq's Shiite majority: Tens of thousands perished in a campaign of unspeakable cruelty. "No more Shiites after today," the guardians of the regime proclaimed. Saddam wanted to administer an unforgettable lesson to his Shiite subjects, and thus it was that he sent into the Shiite centers his dreaded cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid ("Chemical Ali" is his nickname, given to him after his use of chemical weapons on Iraqi Kurds three years earlier). Chemical Ali left behind him in the southern part of Iraq a searing memory of fear and terror. Yet no demonstrators flooded the streets of Arab cities back then, no Muslims took to the streets of France and Belgium. Cairenes paid not the slightest attention. The thing was written off as the age-old violence of Iraq, retribution handed out by a faithful son of the Araby determined to keep the "Arabism" (read Sunni Arab dominion) of Iraq, and its borders, intact. The Arabs are clearly watching, and seeing, a wholly different war. No credit is given for the lengths to which the architects of this campaign have gone to make the blows against the Iraqi regime as precise as possible, to spare the country's civilians, oil wealth, and infrastructure. You can't convince the millions of Arabs who receive their truth from the satellite channel al Jazeera, or from the London-based Arabic dailies, that these Western commanders are no rampaging "crusaders" bent on dispossessing Iraqis of their oil wealth. Pity a people left to such craven victimology and willful denial. A thoughtful Saudi commentator, Abdul Rahman Al Rashed, has seen in the fevered way this war is covered a continuity with the old ways of days past. The new technology and satellite channels, he says, mimic the journalism of the West. But the borrowed technology is put at the service of an old and stubborn refusal to face and name things as they are. The task of reforming the Arab world cannot be the overriding concern of the predominantly young men and women entrusted with fighting this war. But the promise of reform must be there to vindicate and redeem the campaign. In the latest dispatches, the holy city of Najaf was reported jubilant. It was like the "liberation of Paris," an American officer said of the throngs that gathered around their liberators. The redemption of this war will come on Iraqi soil, with the tales told by Iraqis finally let loose from a long, brutalizing captivity. In the end, it will not really matter what Cairo and Gaza think of this war. |
| Posted by:Anonymous |
| #1 When Iraq is a country again there is a chance (although only a chance), that the new government will speak truth to their Arab neighbors in a way that will be understood. Odds against it but worth a try. |
| Posted by: mhw 2003-04-12 20:40:39 |