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| ESCAPING ARAB FAILURE |
| 2004-04-26 |
| 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. * Nor did the general Arab population or its leaders take a public stand against those who would renew their oppression. And those who will not defend their own freedom do not deserve to be defended by others. 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. Ralph Peters |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #7 tipper, that's interesting and I got the gist of it, even though it was above me in terms of historical knowledge. If I'm good at one thing, it's seeing trends and where they are headed. Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you. But when the leave bow down their heads, the wind is passing through. Few spaces on a ship have a window. Yet there is a good reason why there is always one located in the weather office. No matter what the data screams, every weatherman knows that the best way to predict the weather is to look outside and see for him/her/self. No matter what the historical models predict, there is a wind blowing today that must be recognized for the direction it is taking. History, the NYT, the WAPO ...all the data are meaningless compared to the force of the wind. The elite may still seek to find shelter in the romanticism of Voltaire, but his text is old and moldy now. It is of yesterday and not of today. I maintain that America is waking up to slowly understand the nature of the threat that we face. It was inconceivable to us before 911 - yet it is becoming ever more clear to us now. At the risk of overdramatization - the wind is blowing. Nothing can stop it. |
| Posted by: B 2004-04-26 11:19:23 AM |
| #6 One of the big problems we are still facing is the semi-random nations created by the colonial powers. A small nation can be dominated by one ethnic groups fairly easy. A large, multiethnic, nation is much harder to dominate. A nation composed of a single ethnic group doesn't have this problem I see two solutions: (1) Erase a few of those lines and create larger powers (2) Promote the breakup of different nations along ethnic lines. Which solution works best would depend upon the region, of course. I think creating larger nations in West Africa, for example, would be a benefit while creating larger nations in Mesipotamia could be more problematic. Blindly sticking to artificial lines that seperate ethnic groups/clans and that lump hostile groups together is madness. I'm not suggesting the US should go about and rearrange the globe, but this should be an underlying policy to nations we find ourselves closely involved with. |
| Posted by: ruprecht 2004-04-26 11:06:08 AM |
| #5 Richard Sandall has an excellent commentary, on this subject also, which was published in Quadrant in Dec 2001. It deals with the place of T. E. Lawrence in the Arabist cult, and is possibly an insight into the minds of those elite in the West, who romantise Arab Barbarism. |
| Posted by: tipper 2004-04-26 10:16:27 AM |
| #4 More from the continuing series..."As America wakes up and smells the coffee". I agree with this, " It’s a matter of culture, not race". People are people. But the difference between their culture and ours is Christianity...where mother's tell their children to look inward, to forgive and promote charity. While their mothers tell their children there is no need to look inward or to love your neighbor, just blame the Jews...and now the Americans. Good Morning America. Welcome to the clash of civilization. |
| Posted by: B 2004-04-26 10:06:15 AM |
| #3 We as a nation can lead the Arab World to the well of freedom but we cannot make them drink from it. Perhaps their societies are still too closely tied to the bonds of clan and tribe to allow a sysytem of civil governance to take root. If that be the case perhaps the best they can hope for is the proverbial benevolent dictator |
| Posted by: cheaderhead 2004-04-26 10:02:54 AM |
| #2 Mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. Bernard Lewis has a number of excellent books on this subject, probably the best of which, "What Went Wrong? : The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East", just came out in paperback. In 1938,Lewis earned a PhD in the history of Islam from the University of London and, with time out to fight in WWII, has been teaching ever since both at the University of London and, since 1974, at Princeton. Now a professor emeritus, he spends most of his time writing and consulting. |
| Posted by: RWV 2004-04-26 9:30:50 AM |
| #1 "might be dysfunctional"? I think there is a sizeable number of Arab cultured people who can pull off freedom. But as the article states...It's pretty apparent that the islam thing is broken vs the 21st century. |
| Posted by: Lucky 2004-04-26 2:58:43 AM |