The Middle East after Saddam

...If Iraq were routed, Saddam destroyed, and the Iraqi military machine demolished— according to conventional wisdom—a new world order could be created in the Middle East and stability restored to the region...

...Tgether with other American magazines, we are experiencing an increase in the cost of mailing Dissent via the Post Office that comes to more than 20 percent...

...The Arab reality, as reflected in the consciousness of both the masses and the intellectuals, is the oil emirates squandering their wealth—the wealth of the Arab nation—in the casinos and brothels of the West, while opposite them are the millions suffering deprivation as well as the distress of the Palestinians, which is not even close to a solution—even after three years of the intifada, twenty-four years after the Six-Day War, and forty-three years after the founding of the State of Israel...

...kings and presidents, with none of whom he can identify...

...It is important to remember that the problem is not only Saddam Hussein and his military might, just as the solution is not the restoration of the al-Sabah dynasty to its feudal estate or the safety of the royal Saudi government...

...Saddam Hussein is not the disease...

...Hitler achieved so much support among the German people during the thirties because, after World War I and the Versailles Treaty, Germany and the Germans had a great many just claims against the West, in economics, politics, and ideas...

...While the oil sheikhs enjoy unprecedented luxury and splendor, overpopulated Arab countries continue to wallow in poverty and the problems of the population explosion...

...Hitler took these just claims and turned them into darts poisoned by the filth of his ideology, which saw Bolsheviks, capitalists, and Jews as responsible for all of Germany's woes...

...By invading Kuwait he captured the imagination of the Arab masses in most Arab countries and the Palestinians as well...

...Only in this light is it possible to understand Islamic fundamentalism as a cry of protest for the despair of a hundred years of attempts to emulate the West and draw encouragement and inspiration from it...

...In this way, and only in this way, can we understand the enormous resonance Saddam Hussein has in the Arab world...

...even a communist, God forbid...

...And anyone who tried to argue that it was hard to guarantee stability in the region solely with the establishment of a Palestinian state, and that such a state could not contribute to regional stability if the region as a whole was based on a gap between emirs and tyrants, was considered an apologist for the status quo and perhaps a lobbyist for the Likud and an adherent of the Greater Israel Movement...

...And thus, members of the Ba'ath party—secular Arab modernists—can turn into Islamic extremists...

...Egypt's ability to preserve its internal balance while making peace with Israel—and there is a connection between the form of government in Egypt and its willingness to reconcile itself to the reality of Israel—is even more impressive in light of the ugly alternatives all around, including the Lebanese horror and the Libyan absurdity...

...But the Arab failure is perhaps more profound and more searing because it occurs against a background of a rich Arabic-Islamic cultural legacy...

...Two things characterized this accumulation of wealth in the hands of the traditional dynasties...

...He is merely its most extreme and radical expression...

...In this respect, there is a similarity between him and Hitler, not in the propagandistic sense used by many Western (and Israeli) observers, but rather as a factual assessment...

...As a result, the West was not capable of understanding the Iraqi threat or its scope...

...As long as the oil flowed, the West was willing to get along with any Arab ruler, whether he was a feudal sheikh or a Ba'athist military tyrant, and to rake in as much wealth as possible from wheeling and dealing with him and his regime...

...The possibility that the social imbalance would create a dangerous explosive did not interest anyone...

...Although the solution of the problem itself is not at hand and is dependent on the outcome of the war, defining it and understanding it are possible and important even now...

...There were good reasons for the West to focus on those two points: the guarantee of oil at reasonable prices for the oil-dependent Western economy is a legitimate, vital, and justified interest...

...The best Arab and Western (and Soviet and Israeli) minds will have to deal with this problem, which will perhaps be similar to what happened in Europe (and Japan) after 1945...

...However, as a consequence of the traditionalist, old-fashioned structure of these oil countries, they went through an accelerated process of economic modernization without any significant change in their political and social forms of government...

...The problem is not Saddam...

...By challenging the whole world, Saddam guaranteed that his end would be, apparently, like Hitler's...

...This polarization in the Arab world occurred against a background of an Arab ideology which has claimed—since the rise of Arab nationalism at the beginning of the century—that the Arab world is one world, united in solidarity and lending institutional and political expression to this unity through the Arab League and the unified effort for the liberation of Palestine...

...sort or another, or communism of the Soviet variety— all came from the West...

...The West conquered the Arab world and, in the process, became a symbol to be both imitated and hated...

...AWACS planes for Saudi Arabia—why not...

...The West was both rejected by the Arab world and adopted by it...

...Nasser's pan-Arab radicalism also wanted to take over secular nationalist ideas of the West and adapt them to the complex Arab reality...

...In a similar way, Saddam plays on the just grievances and frustrations that fill the Arab world...

...The failure of modernization, the love-hate relationship with the West, the failure to deal with Israel, the despair with Western democracy and with communism, and the enmity toward the oil rulers—for every person who respects himself and his nation must feel degraded by their existence (especially if he relies on their charity, as do many Palestinians in Kuwait and the Gulf)—all these combine into the situation where a cruel despot finds himself becoming a symbol of the downtrodden and persecuted...

...Never has there been a society like Arab society, so united by the ideal of unity and solidarity and so 150 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions, divided, fragmented, and polarized in reality...

...Islamic fundamentalism is now nourished by this lovehate relation...

...In Iraq, for example, it has helped the Ba'ath regime to advance impressively the standard of living of Iraqi society...

...Israel forms its focus and symbolizes the Western ethos the Arab world both detests and wants to emulate, unsuccessfully and with intense yearning...

...Between this attraction toward the West and the repulsion from it, Arab society was pulverized and the Arab intelligentsia flung back and forth—an intelligentsia that sees Paris, London, New York, and Moscow as sources of inspiration and imitation but also of profound hatred...

...Without the frustration and humiliation of the Germans, Hitler would not have risen to power...

...In recent years, anyone who claimed that the Arab world was based on social injustice and terrifying inequality that could one day explode was considered by statesmen and sober scholars in the West as an ivory-tower intellectual, a bleeding heart, and perhaps (who knows...

...But that is not the case...

...The leaders of Saudi Arabia did support the Palestinian Liberation Organization economically and politically, but, at the same time, they continued the good life, and are careful not to sacrifice the slightest iota of their wealth and position for their Palestinian brethren...

...Only the liquidation of these factors of frustration—and not just the end of Saddam—can create a more stable Middle East...

...Economic and political control remained in the hands of those same traditional strata (as their base was broadened and their life-styles were changed...

...The Palestinians and their singular problem also widened this gap between the ideal and the real...

...Thus the Saud dynasty in Saudi Arabia and the al-Sabah family in Kuwait (and other families of sheikhs in the Gulf) were transformed from heads of tribes to heads of the richest countries in the world...

...princes and emirs who are strict about torturing all those who drink beer in their kingdom and who drink fine whiskey themselves in sexually mixed company in the West...

...Its financial position—above and beyond its oil wealth—influences the investment policies of the Western world more than any investment company or industrial giant...

...The problem is the social, economic, political, and ideological structure of the Arab world...

...In the last twenty years oil has brought an indescribable accumulation of wealth in those Arab countries where it exists in abundance...

...Even radical ideologies that intended to unite the Arab world against the West— secular nationalism a la Nasser, Arab socialism of one This article is reprinted, with permission of the author, from the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, February 1, 1991...

...Thus, on the one hand, the ideology, symbols, and language of solidarity emerged in the Arab world and, on the other hand, there is the reality of a growing social and economic gap between unimaginable wealth and unending poverty...

...All these attempts failed...

...The parallel with Saddam Hussein is striking...

...There is no magic solution to this problem, the path to it will be strewn with trial and error, with failures and conflicts, and no one today can envision the shape of the new Middle East, just as in 1939, no one could have imagined the shape of Europe after 1945...

...Saddam Hussein burst into this arena, brutally ousted one of the richest and most despised rulers in the Arab world, stood up to the admired-and-hated West with a historic bravado, and promised the Arab world everything that Arab ideology had always promised: a panArab solidarity that would bring about a just and equal division of the enormous wealth buried under the sands of the Arabian Desert, the destruction of the reactionary regimes and the artificial borders drawn (in fact) by Western imperialism and perpetuated by all Arab rulers without ideological distinction or social origin— by presidents as well as kings, emirs as well as military tyrants, and that he would also solve the Palestinian problem—as every Arab ruler (including the King of Saudi Arabia and the Emir of Kuwait) had always promised to solve it—through the destruction of Israel...

...With all his brutality, aggressiveness, and tyranny, he expresses a social phenomenon and a historical reality that are much more complex and threatening than the personality of this violent village thug who became a brutal ruler possessing weapons that endanger the region and the entire world...

...Thus, Saddam Hussein can carry on a war using purchased Western technology—and declare that the battle is between the Arabic-Islamic spirit and soulless Western technology...

...First, the Arab elites, educated in English and French schools, tried to adopt parliamentaryconstitutional models, resulting in regimes like those of King Farouk in Egypt and Nuri Said in Iraq...

...When the Gulf War ends in an Allied victory — aanndd it will not end otherwise, even if the cost and suffering are harsh—the world will have to deal with the real and complicated problem: how to encourage the creation in the Arab world of a social, economic, and political order that will allow the Arabs, including the Palestinians, to express their uniqueness and their culture and that will guarantee oil at reasonable prices for the world economy—all that along with the creation of a more just and equitable Arab society, which will not be limited to the choice between sheikhs and corrupt rulers on the one hand and brutal dictators on the other...

...Not all of Hitler's followers were guttersnipes and sick Jew-haters...

...Meanwhile, their rich relations throw them crumbs and leftovers from time to time, half as charity, half as bribery to keep them from upsetting the status quo that enables the rich to go on enjoying their riches...

...he is only the symptom...

...In the last twenty years, the attention of Western policy has been devoted solely to two aspects of Middle Eastern reality: guaranteeing the flow of oil at reasonable prices for the Western economy and the investment of petro-dollars in the Western economy, for one, and the Palestinian problem, for another...

...Into this vacuum between ideal and reality, between the vision of unity and sacrifice and the reality of lying and demoralization, came Saddam Hussein...

...Israel will also have to make her contribution to such a framework and, within it, will also have to find a solution to the Palestinian problem...

...Well, we'll try...

...Those who sneer at a "war for oil" ignore the fact that without oil the culture and economy of the West cannot exist...

...Moreover, this Arab failure is accompanied by an additional factor: the blessing—or curse—of oil...

...Second, the Arab masses in the Middle East do not share this wealth, which is concentrated mainly in the Arabian Peninsula...

...This is a harsh and terrifying vision, but it is hard to avoid it because the West was almost completely impervious to the real problems of the Arab world...

...The failure of the Arab world is not unique and must be seen within the framework of the failures of modernization of the Third World in general...

...on the other hand, the legacy itself appears to constitute an obstacle to modernization...

...and Palestinians who have become at best hewers of wood and drawers of water (albeit for fat salaries) in the courts of the rulers of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, while no one is willing to give up even a crumb of comfort to really help them either economically or politically...

...Except for Egypt, which, with a delicate and fragile balance, SPRING • 1991 • 149 Comments and Opinions has managed to preserve a stable and valid form of government that is not overly oppressive, the political map of the Arab world knows only military-ideological dictatorships like Iraq's and Syria's on the one hand, and conservative monarchical regimes like Saudi Arabia's and Kuwait's on the other...

...If we do not understand the problem, we shall end up being disappointed by the results of the war, even if it ends in a crushing victory over Saddam Hussein...

...the crisis of the structure of Arab society was of absolutely no SPRING • 1991 • 151 Comments and Opinions, interest whatsoever...

...The fear that the non-solution of the Palestinian problem is a factor in regional instability is also correct and justified...

...For the last hundred years, in the process of its failed modernization, Arab society has taken from the Western world all forms of government that it wanted to adopt...

...These were the only problems that seemed important to the West...

...What does he find in reality...

...But most of the countries where there is oil—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Gulf Emirates—are underpopulated and have leapt within less than a generation from the standard of life of Bedouin tribes into one of the most astounding accumulations of wealth in the world...

...and the latest developments in Jordan and Algeria, responding to the demands of democracy, have also paradoxically promoted the forces of Islamic fundamentalism in both these divergent instances...

...First, as in another case of an amassing of wealth not originating in production (Spain and Portugal, which plundered their colonies in America over hundreds of years), this accumulation did not create a base for local industrial and economic development...

...An Arab politics of deceit...

...We will try for a time to absorb the extra cost without raising the price of Dissent, but because we already run at a loss we can't say for how long...

...Movements influenced by fascism and nazism emerged on the periphery of Arab society and produced such widely diverse phenomena as the Lebanese Phalangist movement and the Syrian and Iraqi branches of the Ba'ath party...

...For two hundred years, ever since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, this world has been coping with the West and its culture...

...Atomic reactors for Iraq—fine...

...The challenge after the war will be the creation of a more just and equal Arab society in the Middle East, a goal that Western imperviousness and greed, Soviet aggressive interests, and Arab social gaps and the frustrations that grew out of them have not yet been able to achieve...

...hence, his personal disappearance—and it is hard to see how he will get out of this war alive—will not solve it...

...If Saddam is indeed only the symptom and not the disease, after the symptom disappears the disease must still be cured...

...Industrialization is created only by hard work, as in the West (and today in Japan, Korea, and other areas of the Far East...

...Kuwait, which was merely a group of clans of marginal tribes up to the time of British control just before World War I, has become one of the richest countries in the world and a central investor in the money markets...

...Linear thinking, which sees the future as a direct continuation of what existed prior to the crisis, does not grasp how profound is the shakeup Saddam has given the Middle East and the entire world...

...Perhaps the Allies do not yet understand that, but the war against Saddam, if it succeeds, will have to be a total war...

...But what did not interest Western society was who ruled the Arab world...

...Ultimately, it was this status quo that created the problem and promoted Saddam...

...Now Iraq and the entire area have been pushed into a major war...

...On the one hand, this legacy is a cause of pride and high expectations...

...THE EDITORS 152 • DISSENT...

...there is not a single Arab leader who has not raised the problem of Palestine to the top of his list of rhetorical concerns, but the practical willingness of Arab rulers for sacrifice—especially the conservative oil princes but also leaders like Assad and ultimately also Sadat and Mubarak—is limited and marginal...

...It is the nature of wealth that does not originate in production to result only in consumption...

...Imagine an average Arab intellectual who wants to see the progress of the entire Arab nation in terms of political unity and economic development—a goal that, in itself, is certainly decent and hard to oppose...

...The elite of the German intelligentsia, a considerable part of its aristocrats, industrialists, and academics did indeed detest the miserable Austrian nonentity but nevertheless saw him as someone who would rescue Germany from her distress, which the frail Weimar democracy did not succeed in coping with...

...but at the same time it has also enabled the construction of the Iraqi war machine and involvement in the war against Iran...

...But anyone who thinks of the postwar Middle East in prewar concepts is like those Bourbon princes who returned to Paris in 1815, clearly not having learned anything and not having forgotten anything...

...For good or for bad, the culture of Western civilization as we know it relies on this oil, and a considerable part of it comes from the Middle East...

...Arab wealth, which, if not squandered on conspicuous consumption in the West, is well invested in the stock markets of the West...

...Translated from the Hebrew by BARBARA HARSHAVEI Oh, Oh...

...and while some of those dynasties, as in Kuwait, managed to carry on a relatively enlightened policy of social investment, control and supervision of resources remained in the hands of the traditional rulers...

...and without the genuine and profound frustrations of the Arab world, Saddam would not have risen either...

...Such a regime cannot be imposed from outside, but it will by no means be achieved merely by a return to the status quo prior to August 2. It is also conceivable that a considerable part of that status quo will be eroded and destroyed in the war...