The Arab Condition

My impression is that many Arabs today feel that what has been taking place in Iraq over the last twomonths is little short of a catastrophe. True, Saddam Hussein's regime was a despicable one in every way andit deserved to be removed. Also true is the sense of anger many feel at how outlandishly cruel and despoticthat regime was, and how dreadful has been the suffering of Iraq's people.

There seems little doubt that far too many other governments and individuals connived to keep SaddamHussein in power, looking the other way as they went about their business as usual. Nevertheless, the onlything that gave the US license to bomb the country and destroy its government was neither a moral right nor arational argument but sheer military power. Having for years supported Ba'athist Iraq and Saddam Husseinhimself, the US and Britain arrogated to themselves the right to negate their own complicity in his despotism,and then to state that they were liberating Iraq from his hated tyranny.

And what now seems to be emerging in the country both during and after the illegal Anglo-American waragainst the people and civilisation that is the essence of Iraq represents a very grave threat to the Arabpeople as a whole.

It is of the utmost importance that we recall in the first instance that, despite their many divisions anddisputes, the Arabs are in fact a people, not a collection of random countries passively available for outsideintervention and rule. There is a clear line of imperial continuity that begins with Ottoman rule over theArabs in the 16th century until our own time. After the Ottomans in World War One came the British and theFrench, and after them, in the period following World War Two, came America and Israel.

One of the most insidiously influential strands of thought in recent American and Israeli Orientalism, andevident in American and Israeli policy since the late 1940s, is a virulent, extremely deep-seated hostility toArab nationalism and a political will to oppose and fight it in every possible way. The basic premise of Arabnationalism in the broad sense is that, with all their diversity and pluralism of substance and style, thepeople whose language and culture are Arab and Muslim (call them the Arab-speaking peoples, as Albert Houranidid in his last book) constitute a nation and not just a collection of states scattered between North Africaand the western boundaries of Iran.

Any independent articulation of that premise was openly attacked, as in the 1956 Suez War, the Frenchcolonial war against Algeria, the Israeli wars of occupation and dispossession, and the campaign against Iraq,a war the stated purpose of which was to topple a specific regime but the real goal of which was thedevastation of the most powerful Arab country. And just as the French, British, Israeli and American campaignagainst Abdel-Nasser was designed to bring down a force that openly stated as its ambition the unification ofthe Arabs into a powerful independent political force, the American goal today is to redraw the map of theArab world to suit American, and not Arab, interests. US policy thrives on Arab fragmentation, collectiveinaction, and military and economic weakness.

One would have to be foolish to argue that the nationalism and doctrinaire separateness of individual Arabstates, whether the state is Egypt, Syria, Kuwait or Jordan, is a better thing, a more useful politicalactuality than some scheme of inter-Arab cooperation in economic, political and cultural spheres. Certainly Isee no need for total integration, but any form of useful cooperation and planning would be better than thedisgraceful summits that have disfigured our national life, say, during the Iraq crisis. Every Arab asks thequestion, as does every foreigner: why do the Arabs never pool their resources to fight for the causes whichofficially, at least, they claim to support, and which, in the case of the Palestinians, their peopleactively, indeed passionately believe in?

I will not spend time arguing that everything that has been done to promote Arab nationalism can be excusedfor its abuses, its short-sightedness, its wastefulness, repression and folly. The record is not a good one.But I do want to state categorically that, since the early 20th century, the Arabs have never been able toachieve their collective independence as a whole or in part exactly because of the designs on the strategicand cultural importance of their lands by outside powers.

Today, no Arab state is free to dispose of its resources as it wishes, nor to take positions that representthat individual state's interests, especially if those interests seem to threaten US policies. In the morethan 50 years since America assumed world dominance, and more so after the end of the Cold War, it has run itsMiddle Eastern policy based on two principles, and two principles alone: the defence of Israel and the freeflow of Arab oil, both of which involved direct opposition to Arab nationalism. In all significant ways, withfew exceptions, American policy has been contemptuous of and openly hostile to the aspirations of the Arabpeople, although with surprising success since Nasser's demise it has had few challengers among the Arabrulers who have gone along with everything required of them.

During periods of the most extreme pressure on one or other of them (e.g. the Israeli invasion of Lebanonin 1982, or the sanctions against Iraq that were designed to weaken the people and the state as a whole, thebombings of Libya and Sudan, the threats against Syria, the pressure on Saudi Arabia), the collective weaknesshas been little short of stunning. Neither their enormous collective economic power nor the will of theirpeople has moved the Arab states to even the slightest gesture of defiance.

The imperial policy of divide and rule has reigned supreme, since each government seems to fear thepossibility that it might damage its bilateral relationship with America. That consideration has takenprecedence over any contingency, no matter how urgent. Some countries rely on American economic aid, others onAmerican military protection. All, however, have decided that they do not trust each other any more than theycare strongly for the welfare of their own people (which is to say they care very little), preferring thehauteur and contempt of the Americans who have gotten progressively worse in their dealings with the Arabstates as the only superpower's arrogance has developed over time. Indeed, it is remarkable that the Arabcountries have fought each other far more readily than they have the real aggressors from the outside.

The result today, after the invasion of Iraq, is an Arab nation that is badly demoralised, crushed andbeaten down, less able to do anything except acquiesce in announced American plans to redraw the Middle Eastmap to suit American and obviously Israeli interests. Even this extraordinarily grandiose scheme has yet toreceive the vaguest collective answer from Arab states who seem to be hanging around waiting for something newto happen as Bush, Rumsfeld, Powell and the others lurch from threat to plan to visit to snub to bombing tounilateral announcement.

What makes the whole business especially galling is that whereas the Arabs have totally accepted theAmerican (or Quartet) roadmap that seems to have emerged from George Bush's waking dream, the Israelis havecoolly withheld any such acceptance. How does it feel for a Palestinian to watch a second-rank leader like AbuMazen, who has always been Arafat's faithful subordinate, embrace Colin Powell and the Americans when it isclear to the youngest child that the roadmap is designed a) to stimulate a Palestinian civil war and b) tooffer Palestinian compliance with Israeli-American demands for "reform" in return for nothing muchat all. How much further can we sink?

And as for American plans in Iraq, it is now absolutely clear that what is going to happen is nothing lessthan an old-fashioned colonial occupation rather like Israel's since 1967. The idea of bringing inAmerican-style democracy to Iraq means basically aligning the country with US policy, i.e. a peace treaty withIsrael, oil markets for American profit, and civil order kept to a minimum that neither permits realopposition nor real institution building. Perhaps even the idea is to turn Iraq into civil war Lebanon. I amnot certain. But take one small example of the kind of planning that is being undertaken.

It was recently announced in the US press that a 32-year-old assistant professor of law, Noah Feldman, atNew York University, would be responsible for producing a new Iraqi constitution. It was mentioned in all themedia accounts of this major appointment that Feldman was an extraordinarily brilliant expert in Islamic law,had studied Arabic since he was 15, and grew up as an Orthodox Jew. But he has never practiced law in the Arabworld, never been to Iraq, and seems to have no real practical background in the problems of post-war Iraq.What an open-faced snub not only to Iraq itself, but also to the legions of Arab and Muslim legal minds whocould have done a perfectly acceptable job in the service of Iraq's future. But no, America wants it done by afresh young fellow, so as to be able to say, "we have given Iraq its new democracy". The contempt isthick enough to cut with a knife.

The seeming powerlessness of the Arabs in the face of all this is what is so discouraging, and not onlybecause no real effort has been expended on fashioning a collective response to it. To someone who reflects onthe situation from the outside as I do, it is amazing that in this moment of crisis there has been no evidenceof any sort of appeal from the rulers to their people for support in what needs to be seen as a collectivenational threat. American military planners have made no secret of the fact that what they plan is radicalchange for the Arab world, a change that they can impose by force of arms and because there is little thatopposes them. Moreover, the idea behind the effort seems to be nothing less than destroying the underlyingunity of the Arab people once and for all, changing the bases of their lives and aspirations irremediably.

To such a display of power I would have thought that an unprecedented alliance between Arab rulers andpeople represented the only possible deterrence. But that, clearly, would require an undertaking by every Arabgovernment to open its society to its people, bring them in so to speak, remove all the repressive securitymeasures in order to provide an organised opposition to the new imperialism.

A people coerced into war, or a people silenced and repressed will never rise to such an occasion. What wemust have are Arab societies released finally from their self-imposed state of siege between ruler and ruled.Why not instead welcome democracy in the defence of freedom and self- determination? Why not say, we want eachand every citizen willing to be mobilised in a common front against a common enemy? We need every intellectualand every political force to pull together with us against the imperial scheme to redesign our lives withoutour consent. Why must resistance be left to extremism and desperate suicide bombers?

As a digression, I might mention here that when I read last year's United Nations Human Development Reporton the Arab World, I was struck by how little appreciation there was in it for imperialist intervention in theArab world, and how deep and long-standing its effect has been. I certainly don't think that all our problemscome from the outside, but I wouldn't want to say that all our problems were of our own making. Historicalcontext and the problems of political fragmentation play a very great role, which the Report itself payslittle attention to.

The absence of democracy is partially the result of alliances made between Western powers on the one hand,and minority ruling regimes or parties on the other, not because the Arabs have no interest in democracy butbecause democracy has been seen as a threat by several actors in the drama. Besides, why adopt the Americanformula for democracy (usually a euphemism for the free market and little attention paid to human entitlementand social services) as the only one? This is a subject that needs considerably more debate than I have timefor here. So let me return to my main point.

Consider how much more effective today the Palestinian position might have been under the US-Israelionslaught had there been a common show of unity instead of an unseemly scramble for positions on thedelegation to see Colin Powell. I have not understood over the years why it is that Palestinian leaders havebeen unable to develop a common unified strategy for opposing the occupation and not getting diverted into oneor another Mitchell, Tenet, or Quartet plan. Why not say to all Palestinians, we face one enemy whose designon our lands and lives is well-known and must be fought by us all together?

The root problem everywhere, and not just in Palestine, is the fundamental rift between ruler and ruledthat is one of the distorted offshoots of imperialism, this basic fear of democratic participation, as if toomuch freedom might lose the governing colonial elite some favour with the imperial authority. The result, ofcourse, is not only the absence of real mobilisation of everyone in the common struggle, but the perpetuationof fragmentation and petty factionalism. As things now stand, there are too many uninvolved, non-participating Arab citizens in the world today.

Whether they want to or not, the Arab people today face a wholesale attack on their future by an imperialpower, America, that acts in concert with Israel, to pacify, subdue, and finally reduce us to a bunch ofwarring fiefdoms whose first loyalty is not to their people but to the great superpower (and its localsurrogate) itself. Not to understand that this is the conflict that will shape our area for decades to come iswillingly to blind oneself.

What is now needed is a breaking of the iron bands that tie Arab societies into sullen knots of disaffectedpeople, insecure leaders, and alienated intellectuals. This is an unprecedented crisis. Unprecedented meansare therefore required to confront it. The first step then is to realise the scope of the problem, and then goon to overcome what reduces us to helpless rage and marginalised reaction, a condition by no means to beaccepted willingly. The alternative to such an unattractive condition promises a great deal more hope.