The Arab Underworld
Feith, Douglas J .
BOOKS The Arab Underworld Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World Kanan Makiya W W. Norton & Co., 1993. 367 pp.. S22.95 Reviewed by Douglas J. Feith Makiya, an Iraqi...
...He offers tales of suffering, but also speculations on the fears, rationalizations, passions, brazen-ness and shame of the perpetrators of cruelty...
...Makiya concludes: "In the absence of...acceptance of the multiple, frail, non-ideological nature of die human condition, a continuing and increasingly morbid hatred of the West and Israel is going to remain the focus onto which increasingly degraded notions of 'Arabness' or 'Islamic identity' are pinned....In the end, it doesn't matter what local coloring that hatred takes (anti-imperialism, Arab nationalism, Palestinian nationalism, religious fundamentalism...
...In such choices, the failings of an entire generation are summed up...
...On this premise, Makiya builds his case against the intellectuals who, in the name of Arab unity against Western or Zionist imperialism or aggression, use their education and prestige to defend and apologize for Saddam and his fellow Arab malefactors...
...Makiya demonstrates the antidote to a culture of cruelty: recognition that everyone—even a bad person, even a person one hates—is a human being, with a soul and with rights...
...Makiya then writes: "These are, I submit, false, self-destructive, and ultimately cruel sentiments...
...The important point is that today all these ideologies are being boiled down into pure unadulterated hate...
...Douglas J. Feith, a Washington, D.C attorney, served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and a Middle East specialist on the National Security Council staff during the Reagan administration...
...S22.95 Reviewed by Douglas J. Feith Makiya, an Iraqi Shiite exile, exposes and condemns two types of political immorality in the Arab world...
...Cruelty" refers to the systematic, large-scale reliance on thuggery, torture, murder and sometimes even genocide by the political leadership in much of the Arab world, especially Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party in Iraq...
...Dangerous because it takes place at the expense of life as it is really lived, and finally at the expense of the real lives of people...
...Makiya's critique of political culture in the Arab world should help sober up excited celebrants of the recent Arab-Israeli diplomatic breakthroughs who take at face value professions of sincerity, moderation and peaceful intent from Arafat, Assad and others...
...Makiya likewise cauterizes the swelling narcissism and bigotry of other leading Arab intellectuals, in particular Edward Said, Abu Deeb's Columbia colleague...
...One can quarrel with certain of Makiya's judgments, but if its essential message is heeded, Cruelly and Silence, a brave, humane and gripping book, can do the Arab world and the rest of us much good...
...Though Makiya's work deals with religions, nationalities and parties, his primary interest is not in groups or types, but individuals...
...And suffering evil provides no moral license for doing evil...
...Under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil, Makiya also wrote Republic of Fear (1989), a dissection of Saddam Hussein's police state...
...Silence" is the sin of complicity and corruption on the part of the writers and poets whom Makiya scorns as "that community of Arab and self-proclaimed 'pro-Arab' intellectuals...
...He cites a section of a poetic work published after the Gulf War by Kamal Abu Deeb, a Columbia University professor of literature: "The nation may be the cave of our disillusionment, or the slaughter-house of our sweet dreams, or the grave of our freedom and honor....And the nation may be a thousand worse and even more terrible things...
...In light of the recent rehabilitation of Yasser Arafat, it is worth noting the comments on the PLO chairman offered by Makiya, who is in general highly critical of Israel: "At a time when South Africa was producing a Nelson Mandela, Czechoslovakia a Vaclav Havel, and Poland a Lech Walesa, Palestinian intellectuals stuck to 'their' Yasser Arafat...
...Are such a gifted people as the Palestinians— with the largest, most cosmopolitan, and best-educated intelligentsia in the Arab world—unable to improve on Yasser Arafat as their leader in all these years of organized political activity...
...Still, we cannot but be with the nation...
...Graphically, furiously, often in the gut-wrenching words of the victims interviewed by the author, Cruelty and Silence recounts Iraq's sack of Kuwait, the Iraqi Republican Guard's massacre of Shiites after Desert Storm, the ordeal of political prisoners in a Baghdad prison and Saddam's 1988 butchery of thousands of Iraqi Kurds...
...It is as if...all the flesh-and-blood individuals that I have quoted...do not exist, or have been turned into a theoretical abstraction...
...The corollary, Makiya insists, is that everyone is morally culpable for evil he commits or abets...
...They are false because they are so obviously grounded in a lie, a lie that was being proved to be one at the very moment of writing by the actions of...the people of Iraq...who, unlike Abu Deeb, were obliged to be in or 'with the nation.' "Even more important, it is very dangerous...
Vol. 18 • December 1993 • No. 6
