The False Allure of "Stability"
BOOT, MAX
The False Allure of "Stability" It's neither good nor bad, it depends on what the alternatives are. BY MAX BOOT Of the many silly reasons propounded for leaving Saddam Hussein on his bloodstained...
...Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Eygptian leader of al Qae-da, writes: "The Jewish-crusader alliance, led by the United States, will not allow any Muslim force to reach power in the Islamic countries...
...The longevity of Arab rulers, whether styled as presidents, emirs, kings, or prime ministers, recalls that of the Sun King...
...This cynical calculation has bought us security cooperation from a number of Middle Eastern regimes, such as Jordan and Egypt, which are able to torture and execute terrorists in ways that we dare not (yet...
...If his track record is anything to go by, leaving him in power—not removing him—would be more likely to lead to wider conflict...
...Liberalization is occurring in a few spots like Qatar, Bahrain, and Morocco, but it is a slow and gradual process that has yet to threaten the mon-archs' hold on power...
...Mubarak and the Saudi royals are perfectly capable of oppressing their own people without any help from the United States...
...The U.N...
...Recall President Bush's infamous "Chicken Kiev" speech in 1991 urging Ukraine not to secede—just before it did...
...Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 13 years...
...probably pretty much what the peoples of Communist Russia and Communist Eastern Europe thought of it, which wasn't much...
...This "stability above all" policy is not just perverse...
...How would another war in Iraq impact the civilian population, in the short- and long-term...
...Saddam has spent decades using extreme repression to put down Shiite and Kurdish rebellions...
...On the stability spectrum, the Middle East is closer to the old Soviet Union than to Italy...
...All this want comes amid plenty—plenty of oil, that is...
...they live with bad governments every day...
...But it seems farcical to raise these questions about Iraq, a state ruled by a megalomaniac who stockpiles weapons of mass destruction, invades his neighbors, and uses poison gas on his own people...
...Unfortunately, in the case of our friends in Saudi Arabia, U.S...
...Hosni Mubarak is doing the same with his kid, Gamal...
...Which may seem odd since, in the popular mind, the Middle East is wracked by instability...
...Baathist rule has led an estimated 3 million Iraqis—out of a current population of 23 mil-lion—to flee their country...
...Saddam is paying a $25,000 bounty to families of Palestinian suicide bombers...
...The elder Bush was also anxious not to give any encouragement to the Chinese student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square who quoted Jefferson and built a replica of the Statue of Liberty...
...The United Nations recently issued an Arab Human Development Report compiled by a group of Arab scholars...
...Zine el-Abidine ben Ali of Tunisia, 15 years...
...strength...
...It would be interesting to know what the Iraqi people think of "stability...
...It's possible Saddam might torch some oil wells on his way out, but Iraqi production would quickly rise with the lifting of sanctions...
...There is one fear not raised by Bishop Gregory that is often cited by critics who like to think of themselves as more hardheaded: that instability will lead to the loss of oil supplies...
...It is run by evil Muslims, or, at best, corrupt and inefficient Muslims...
...stopping them is American sanctions, which these regimes want to get lifted...
...one ruler stayed in power for almost 30 years, and anyone who threatened public order was shot or shipped off to the gulag...
...This hatred has already cost us well over 3,000 American lives, which seems a lot to pay for stability...
...weakness (e.g., the pullout from Beirut in 1984 and from Somalia in 1993), not by U.S...
...which is now in the midst of yet another election campaign...
...The Arab world has seen no shortage of stability and it has resulted in stagnation and worse...
...Muammar Qaddafi has ruled without interruption for 33 years...
...It will mobilize all its power to hit it and remove it from power...
...Luckily, one of the superpowers of the day— France—was willing to help American rebels instead of supporting British repression in the name of stability...
...Therefore, Islamic radicals reason, they must first bring down the United States before they can bring down their own governments...
...Stability is not inherently good or bad...
...The most positive of all is that deposing the Butcher of Baghdad might send dominos toppling, leading to more freedom in the most oppressed region in the world...
...The people of the Middle East know the problem intimately...
...But ample natural resources have not prevented the Arab world from sinking in many categories to the level of sub-Saharan Africa...
...interests well if it means keeping in place hostile regimes...
...War against Iraq would provoke moire terrorist threats and attacks...
...In any case this fear was also raised before the 1991 Gulf War and the 2001 campaign in Afghanistan, and in neither case has it come true...
...How many more innocent people would suffer and die, or be left without homes, without basic necessities, without work...
...Stalinist Russia was very stable...
...What accounts for this backwardness...
...Conference of Catholic Bishops, sent to President Bush on September 13: War against Iraq could have unpredictable consequences not only for Iraq but for peace and stability elsewhere in the Middle East...
...Instead it is greeted with trepidation among many of the same people who also feared the consequences of the Soviet Union breaking up...
...And if they still wanted to break apart, the presence of international peacekeepers could ensure a peaceful divorce—along the lines of Czechoslovakia, not Yugoslavia...
...He has committed more aggression against more neighbors than probably any other reigning ruler in the world...
...The same pattern holds throughout the Arab world...
...Saddam has already killed countless hundreds of thousands...
...More likely, Iraq's various ethnic groups would be reconciled to a less heavy-handed central government that ruled on a federalist model...
...Indeed, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict generates horrific images of violence for our TV screens on a daily basis...
...Even if a U.S...
...It depends on what kind you're talking about, and what the alternatives are...
...It painted a depressing picture of a region marked by poverty, illiteracy, poor public health, lack of a free press, and little access to the Internet...
...But even if Israeli occupation were worse for the West Bank and Gaza Strip than PLO occupation (and the record indicates otherwise), Israel is only a small sliver of the Middle East...
...The odds of Iran taking advantage of the situation to annex the Arab Shiites next door are no greater than the prospect of Albania annexing neighboring ethnic Albanians, an unfounded fear often raised before the U.S...
...His record is the worst in the region, which is saying something...
...It's hard to imagine how the alternative could possibly be worse...
...stood by while Saddam slaughtered Kurds and Shiites who rose up in rebellion...
...There was a brief period of instability in the Middle East—of coups and revolutions—following the end of colonial rule after World War II...
...It is impossible to say, of course, whether instability would be better than the status quo, but in the case of Iraq, at least, the dangers suggested by the worry-warts seem grossly exaggerated...
...Yet look behind the headlines...
...Human Rights Watch says that he is guilty of genocide...
...Some suggest that strong American action against Saddam will bring to power terrorist-sponsoring Islamists in Pakistan, Jordan, the Gulf states, Egypt, Saudi . . . oops, the Islamists are already in power there...
...one ruler stayed in power for almost 30 years, and anyone who threatened public order was shot...
...policymakers with joy...
...But an unwavering attachment to stability does not serve U.S...
...Naturally they feel great anger towards their rulers, but they have no way to achieve peaceful regime change...
...But since the 1960s the political scene has been all but set in amber...
...It is striking that, even today, America's leading enemies in the region—Iran, Iraq, and Libya—are all eager to sell us oil...
...The rest of the region is not run by evil Christians or Jews...
...So much for the doomsday scenarios...
...Such worries might be appropriate if we were about to invade and kick out the rulers of Egypt or Saudi Arabia...
...Would the use of military force lead to wider conflict and instability...
...The only thing An unwavering attachment to stability does not serve U.S...
...BY MAX BOOT Of the many silly reasons propounded for leaving Saddam Hussein on his bloodstained throne, the silliest has to be the suggestion that to remove him would promote "instability...
...There are legitimate reasons to fear instability, especially if it threatens key American allies such as Pakistan...
...support buys rather less...
...Iraqis are already suffering because of sanctions designed to contain their dictator...
...King Fahd, 20 years...
...In those cases it is possible that any future tyrants—if they are in the Osama bin Laden mold—would be more threatening to America than the existing ones...
...It is easier to imagine positive consequences to removing Saddam Hussein...
...But al-Zawahiri does have a point: The United States backs Mubarak and the Saudis because Washington thinks the devil we know is better than the one who may take power afterward...
...It is a favor that we should be more anxious to perform for other peoples yearning to be free...
...Embargoes have been tried before, but ultimately could not be sustained...
...As a guiding philosophy for policy-making, the mantra of "instability bad, stability good"—endlessly repeated by foreign policy mandarins—is about as useful as "Great taste, less filling...
...The case for concern was well summarized in a letter that Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, president of the U.S...
...When a potentate does pop off, his successor is likely to be his son—a pattern that holds in both monarchies like Jordan (where Abdullah II succeeded Hussein) and thugocracies like Syria (where Bashir Assad succeeded dear old Hafez...
...They are probably mistaken...
...report's authors make a halfhearted attempt to blame the Jews: "Israel's illegal occupation of Arab lands is one of the most pervasive obstacles to security and progression in the region," they write...
...Whatever the short-term security gains from cooperating with illiberal Middle Eastern regimes, America pays a heavy long-term price by incurring the enmity of their peoples...
...The Council on Foreign Relations recently took the Saudis to task in a report for failing to cooperate adequately in shutting off terrorist financing...
...This prospect should fill U.S...
...invasion were to set off a chain reaction that somehow led to the rise of more Islamist regimes (and it's not at all clear how this would happen), those governments would still need to sell oil to survive...
...On the surface, Israel looks pretty unstable...
...Hosni Mubarak, 21 years...
...More civil conflict and repression...
...Saddam Hussein, 23 years...
...governments seem to change as often as hemlines...
...interests well if it means keeping in place hostile regimes, whether in Moscow, Beijing, Baghdad, Tehran, Damascus, or Tripoli...
...Roughly a million people are internally displaced refugees...
...This security arrangement is not to be gainsaid, even if the regimes aren't especially scrupulous in separating genuine terrorists from mere dissidents...
...This seems especially likely next door, in Iran, which has lately been rocked by anti-mullah student demonstrations...
...Saddam is grooming his two bad-boy sons, Uday and Qusay, to take over the family business...
...By contrast, postwar Italy has not been terribly stable...
...One of the few indices where the region scores high is—you guessed it—"political stability...
...Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, 24 years...
...Would the United States and the international community commit to the arduous long-term task of ensuring a just peace or would a post-Saddam Iraq continue to be plagued by civil conflict and repression, and continue to serve as a destabilizing force in the region...
...Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are already trying as hard as possible to kill as many Americans as they can...
...The United States of America, after all, is a country that was founded amidst great turmoil...
...Stalinist Russia was very stable...
...Before being penned in by a U.S.-led alliance, Saddam had attacked Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Israel—all in the first dozen years of his dictatorship...
...More innocent people dying...
...Only the Grim Reaper is able to change rulers with any regularity...
...Certainly extreme instability, of the kind that gripped Lebanon during its civil war, is a bad thing—indeed, worse than the grim Syrian repression that now pervades what was once the freest country in the Middle East...
...But where would you rather live—in Russia in the 1930s or Italy since World War II...
...It's downright anti-American...
...Israel's enemies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, on the other hand, are models of stability: They have been led by one man, Yasser Arafat, for more than 30 years...
...Finally, would war lead to wider conflict...
...Worst of all, he refused to go to Baghdad in 1991, largely for fear of the instability that would result...
...Would preventive or preemptive force succeed in thwarting serious threats, or, instead, provoke the very kind of attacks that it is intended to prevent...
...Instead the U.S...
...Perhaps the Saudis are too busy spewing anti-American propaganda so vitriolic it would make Goebbels blush...
...The only country in the entire region that sees regular changes of government is Israel, Max Boot, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the Olin senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power...
...Islamists are emboldened by U.S...
...intervention in Kosovo in 1999...
...The example of Afghanistan suggests that many would be likely to return to their homes if a more civil ruler took power in Baghdad...
...More people denied basic necessities or left without homes...
...In their frustration, many Arabs cast blame on the United States, which, rightly or wrongly, is seen as the guarantor of corrupt governments in Cairo, Riyadh, and beyond...
Vol. 8 • December 2002 • No. 13
