The anniversary of Sept. 11 and
what it means to peoples and governments in Middle East
There is no better place to take the pulse of Arab
and Muslim sentiment than Cairo, historic mother of the world,
pioneer or hub of the two great movements that swept the region in
recent times: the pan-Arab secular nationalism of which President
Nasser was the champion, and the “political Islam” that came
into its own with Nasserism’s failure and decline.
Today, from air-conditioned think tanks on the banks of the Nile
to the sweltering alleyways of the splendid but dilapidated
medieval city, the preoccupation with is overwhelming with two
things that seem most fateful for the future: the
Israeli-Palestinian struggle and US plans for possible war on
Iraq.
“Bin Laden may have lost a lot of his appeal,” said Dia
Rashwan, an expert on Islamic fundamentalism, “but that
doesn’t mean the US isn’t hated it is, more than ever, and
more, now, from an Arab than an Islamic standpoint.”
In a workshop in the City of the Dead, hard by the elaborate,
15th-century tomb of Sultan Qutbai, Mohammed Ahmed carries on the
ancient, glass-blowing craft of his forefathers on a day when the
temperature is 45C.
“What makes you think bin Laden really did it?,” he asks,
voicing a still popular suspicion. “Bush is just using him to
put us down.
“The future is dark,” he adds.
Indeed, much darker for most Arabs than might have appeared in the
immediate aftermath of that apocalyptic atrocity. One year on, it
seems clearer to them in its consequences. It is a momentous,
double crisis, an external and an internal one, of which they are
almost everywhere taking cognizance. The two are inextricably
intertwined. Long maturing, bin Laden, in fact, brought both
to a head.
As they see it, the US post-Sept. 11 “war on terror” now boils
down essentially to an assault on themselves. For in the Bush
universe of good versus evil, it is essentially they, with Iran
thrown in, who are the evil ones. In the collision to come, the
Arabs risk further blows to all those ideals and aspirations
independence, dignity, the unity and collective purpose of the
greater “Arab nation” which, after centuries of foreign
conquest and control, the pan-Arabism of Nasser so triumphantly,
if defectively, embodied; a reversion to quasi-colonial
subjugation.
Internally, they are dismally ill-equipped to meet the external
challenge, racked as they are by all manner of social, economic,
cultural and institutional sicknesses. These, the US says, are the
very conditions which threw up bin Ladenism. Few Arab
opinion-makers would dispute it, or doubt their societies’
desperate need of reforms, ushering in democracy, human rights,
accountability.
There is no more compelling measure of that than the UN’s newly
released Arab Human Development Report. It describes a Third World
region which has fallen behind all others, including sub-Saharan
Africa, in most of the main indices of progress and development;
whose 280 million inhabitants, despite vast oil wealth, have a
lower GNP than Spain; whose annual translation of foreign books is
one-fifth of Greece’s; 51 percent of whose young people would
emigrate if they could.
A prime cause of this backwardness, say the report’s exclusively
Arab authors, is that the region’s peoples are the world’s
least free, with the lowest levels of popular participation in
government.
“Those who wonder why Afghanistan became a lure for some young
Arabs and Muslims,” wrote Jordanian columnist Yasser Abu-Hilala,
“need only read this report, which explains the phenomenon
of alienation in our societies and shows how those who feel they
have no stake in them can turn to violence.”
Yet most Arab regimes have ignored this damning verdict on
themselves. “The fact is,” said Nader Fergany, the report’s
Egyptian lead author, “that repressive governments have, in the
past year, become more so. They have not learned the lesson of
Sept.11 but neither has the US.” In what measure are
foreigners, or Arabs themselves, responsible for their condition?
Bin Laden has greatly sharpened that Arab debate.
Insofar as it is the West, its sins are deemed to have begun with
the European carve-up of the region after World War I and the
creation of Israel. These betrayals and humiliations continued
with US-led support of repressive, corrupt or reactionary regimes
enlisted as bulwarks against communism or accomplices in the quest
for an impossible, unjust settlement of the Palestine conflict.
“For us,” said Mohammed Said, columnist for Egypt’s Al-Ahram
newspaper, “the West always preferred control to democracy. Now,
90 percent of the problem flows from the Arab-Israeli conflict,
that reminder of our colonized past.”
Never, in Arab eyes, has the US acted so blatantly, so
subserviently, in favor of its Israeli protege, and for domestic
reasons the triple alliance of Jewish lobby, neoconservative
ideologues, and Christian fundamentalist right that take little
or no stock of rights or wrongs on the ground.
For Makram Mohammed Ahmed, editor of Al-Musawar and confidant of
President Hosni Mubarak, this amounts to a sickness liable to be
at least as catastrophic as the Arabs” own. “It’s terrible
that a weak and ignorant man like Bush can be used this way you
might expect it from Third World countries, but from the world’s
only superpower!”
In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, Arabs say, the US did
with its talk of a Palestine state seem to have learned
something, and began to distance itself from those Western
policies of which bin Ladenism was the ultimate fruit.
“Palestine is not only crucial in itself,” said Mohammed
Sid-Ahmed, another Al-Ahram commentator. “It is symbolic of US
intentions everywhere. Through Palestine, you can now see that the
US just doesn’t care to look for root causes anywhere. It has
adopted the Israeli definition of terror, and that shapes its
policies for the whole region.”
These policies are now so detested, goes the argument, they have
raised the potential threat to US interests to unprecedented
levels. To retain its Middle East dominance it has to invest
resources commensurate with the threat. It can no longer rely on
friendly proxies like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, for they
themselves will be undermined by their connivance with it, nor on
the mere “containment” of enemies such as Saddam. So the Arab
world, says Said, now risks being “subjected to direct or
indirect colonialism.” And the very “backwardness of the Arab
order makes the pursuit of such imperial designs possible.”
For Arab societies are seen as “incapable of modernizing on
their own, thus providing a natural gateway to colonization and
empire building.” Such neocolonialism involves “regime
change” by force for those the US deems beyond the pale, the
imposing of reforms in broad areas from school curricula to
their position on Palestine of public policy on those who, for
the time being, remain within it.
Of the two explicit candidates for “regime change,” Iraq now
has priority over Palestine. Indeed, it has now clearly emerged as
the key arena wherein the decisive battle between good and evil
will be joined. The idea, says Said, is to “terminate” the
Palestine question by war at the expense of the Arabs as a
national group. With Saddam’s overthrow, the US hopes to make
this richly endowed, pivotal country the lynchpin of a whole new,
pro-American geopolitical order.
Witnessing such an overwhelming demonstration of US will and
power, other regimes would either have to bend to US purposes or
suffer the same fate, be they such traditional, overtly
“terrorist-sponsoring” opponents such as Syria, or traditional
friends, such as Saudi Arabia, held to spawn terrorism through
their misrule or a general “culture” of religious extremism.
For individual Gulf states that do not submit, says Said, “there
will be nothing to stop regimes from being changed or political
successions being manipulated in the way the English used to do in
the 19th century.”
There is a wall of almost universal Arab hostility to a US assault
on Iraq. But there is also a single, very telling breach in it.
However fractious, opportunist or incompetent some, at least, of
the exiled, US-backed Iraqi opposition may be, they cannot be
dismissed as unrepresentative of the Iraqi people, who unlike
other Arabs suffer directly beneath Saddam’s monstrous
tyranny. It is an embarrassing moral dilemma.
The US hawks have tried in vain to establish Saddam’s complicity
with bin Laden and Sept. 11.
But that failure cannot disguise another, much deeper affinity
between the two: for, after bin Laden, what more disastrous
personification of the internal Arab sickness that all
right-thinking Arabs yearn to cure than Saddam, what country in
direr need of democratic reform than Iraq?
Egyptian analyst Wahid Abdul-Meguid laments that Arab objections
to a US assault “amount to solidarity with Saddam against his
own people.”
If it were just the Arab regimes it wouldn’t be so bad, but the
truth is that the objections also come from Arabs who oppose their
own, albeit less brutally despotic regimes, for essentially the
same reasons as the Iraqis do theirs.
Doubtless, if Arabs really believed that, in removing Saddam, the
US were genuinely bent on promoting a democratic order in his
place, they would be readier to join the Iraqi opposition in
tolerating it at least. But they don’t. They point out that even
if the expected campaign does, in principle, incorporate some
reformist good intentions, so did those earlier Western
subjugations of the region from whose consequences they suffer
till today.
They will see it, primarily, as an act of external aggression
aimed not just at Iraq, but aimed, in effect, at the whole Arab
world; and what will make this supremely intolerable is that this
campaign will be carried out largely on behalf of an enemy,
Israel, whose acquisition of a large arsenal of weapons of mass
destruction seems to be as permissible as theirs, or Iran’s, is
an abomination.
Their fear is not only that Israel will become with the
possible exception of Britain the only country to join a US
onslaught, but that General Ariel Sharon will exploit it to kill
two birds with one stone. He will combine the completion of the
Israeli war on terror, which since Sept. 11 he has insinuated into
the larger American one, with another great breakthrough in
Zionism’s still unfinished grand design another mass
expulsion of Palestinians of which much of the Israeli right has
long dreamed.
Destroying Saddam, like destroying the Taleban, could be one
thing, though nothing like so simple; managing what comes after
could be another. For most Arabs, the overall conditions, largely
of its own, now unprecedentedly partisan, pro-Israeli making, in
which the US embarks on such an enterprise would seem to all but
guarantee its failure and consequent success of sorts for bin
Laden. After all, he was always something more than just the
crazed, archaic Islamic visionary; Iraq, Palestine and US
conduct toward them always ranked high on his very contemporary
anti-colonial, political and nationalist agenda. That is why, says
Palestinian commentator Abdul Jabbar Adwan, he now “owes an
enormous debt of gratitude to George W. Bush ‘ for the
‘political services’ he has rendered him since Sept. 11; far
outstripping any commercial ones in the days when the Bushes and
the bin Ladens’ did oil business together.”
The price of failure, in so strategic, complex and volatile a
region, would make the post-war falterings in Afghanistan pale
into insignificance, vastly exacerbating as it would both the
Arab’s internal crisis and its external, bin Laden-type
consequences. But the Arabs might not be the only ones to pay the
price.
“The US may be preparing a big surprise for the region,” warns
Lebanese commentator Saad Mehio, “but the Middle East may be
preparing an equally big one for the Americans. At any rate, no
one should forget that it has been the most renowned source of
surprises through the ages.”
David Hirst a veteran Middle East
correspondent, wrote this commentary for The Daily Star |