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THE ROVING EYE
Arab impotence in the face
of war
By Pepe Escobar
CAIRO
- The absolute majority of world opinion is now against
a war in Iraq. Mass anti-war demonstrations in Western
and Arab capitals are bound to increase. There seems to
be no smoking or non-smoking gun about to be produced by
UN inspectors inside Iraq . Political careers in the
Western and Arab worlds inevitably will be broken on the
basis of key decisions to be made in the next few
crucial weeks.
In the backstages of the Arab
world, many keep urging the lost-in-space leaders of the
other 21 members of the Arab League (apart from Iraq) to
immediately convene an emergency session and then
personally deliver the message to Saddam Hussein: he has
to go and so spare the long-suffering Iraqi population a
new apocalypse.
Still, everyone knows that
Saddam will never take the sad, long and winding road
already chosen by the Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos and
Idi Amin. Rumors disseminated by American allies still
persist: Saddam has been sending fortunes to self-styled
African leader of the future, Muammar Gaddafi; but a
Libyan exile would never fit Saddam's control-freak
personality, considering the extreme volatility of
Gaddafi's alliances.
The Arab street - and also
souq, mall and ahwa (coffeehouse) -
perspective is that the so-called war against terrorism
is nothing but a war to impose US imperial power. Arab
US allies like Egypt and Jordan are caught in a swamp of
impotence - something very visible in constant remarks
by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak when he says that
the US can launch a war any time they want and there's
nothing anybody can do to stop them. Mubarak may keep
denying there is no joint Saudi-Turkish-Egyptian
initiative desperately trying to find a solution other
than war. But the joint initiative de facto exists, even
though these governments are well aware of their
extremely limited capacity to influence events that will
terribly affect their whole future.
Cairo is
taking for granted that Ariel Sharon will win the
Israeli elections. It's not an after-effect of too much
sheesha (water pipe) smoking, but everyone's
deepest fear is that Sharon will profit from the
smokescreen of a war in Iraq to further drive the
Palestinians away from the West Bank and Gaza and into
Jordan. Israelis call the probable mass expulsion
"transfer" - a surgical way to dramatically alter the
demography of the occupied territories and so annex them
into so-called Eretz Israel. The "transfer" will
certainly be enforced with American-made hardware:
Israel has asked Washington for US$14 billion in
additional loan guarantees and military aid - and no one
is betting it won't get the total package.
Officially, Mubarak in Egypt, King Abdullah in
Jordan and Crown Prince Abdullah in Saudi Arabia know
and say whenever they have the chance that the
resolution of the Palestinian tragedy is the only way
out to dissipate the extreme anger of their populations
- and consequently deal a death blow to the appeal of
al-Qaeda's radical, confrontational strategy. Mubarak
and Crown Prince Abdullah are visibly, actively involved
in trying to find a peaceful solution for Iraq, but the
role of King Abdullah in Jordan is murkier: the king is
a very vocal supporter of the war against terrorism as
enunciated by Washington - but he knows very well that
his fragile Hashemite kingdom has everything to lose if
Israelis and Palestinians are further radicalized. The
final destination of the Israeli "transfer" of maybe
hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will obviously be
Jordan.
In a masterful, sad
and angry piece published by Al Ahram, Egypt's leading
newspaper, prominent Palestinian writer and thinker Edward
Said compares the "generalized indifference" greeting
Washington's war plans against Iraq to the "strangely
ineffective" Washington response to North Korea's
nuclear blackmail. Said links American efforts to redraw
the map of the whole Middle East starting from Iraq with
the fact that "the United Nations stand by, looking on
as its resolutions are flouted on a hourly basis" by
Israel. And he draws the inevitable conclusion, also
shared by the Arab street: "In this entire panorama of
desolation, what catches the eye is the utter passivity
and helplessness of the Arab world as a whole."
When Said writes that "the Arabs individually
and collectively can barely muster a bland refusal (at
most they say, no, you cannot use military bases in our
territory) only to reverse themselves a few days later",
it's like he's mimicking not only Mubarak, but also
Turkey's Prime Minister Abdullah Gul and the Saudis, the
same Egyptian-Turkish-Saudi alliance which is ultimately
trying by all means to maintain the status quo - because
they know that they have everything to lose from the
imminent cataclysm. Said also echoes widespread Arab
feelings when he says that "millions of people will be
affected. America contemptuously plans for their future
without consultation. Do we deserve such racist
derision?"
Arab populations everywhere know that
they are basically repressed and in most cases
devastatingly misruled. The triumph-of-the-human-spirit
part is how they manage to go on surviving in such
adverse circumstances - something that can be attested
in the ultra-noisy, ultra-polluted streets and slums of
Cairo. "Arab street" may be an empty slogan concocted by
mediocre Orientalists, but the street knows all about
the silence and impotence of their governments, and the
deep, terrible ramifications of the impeding "barbarians
at the gate" blitzkrieg in the region, as a Cairo
political scientist put it.
If one visits these
streets, souks, malls and ahwas in teeming
Cairo, one inevitably hears how the likely invasion of
Iraq is in everyone's minds inextricably linked with the
suffering of the Palestinians, as much as the Bush
administration spins and spins to delink both issues.
There's an overall feeling the Israeli elections will
not change a thing - even considering the unlikely
scenario of a victory by Labor "peace" candidate Amram
Mitzna.
Two themes are pervasive everywhere in
Cairo: the need for Arab unity, and a belligerent mood
borne out of frustration. Fathi, for instance, believes
that negotiations with Israel would only be effective
"if all Arab countries unite, creating one solid Arab
nation led by one ruler". Muhamad says "it is time for
Arab countries to make a collective choice - either to
go to war or stick to peaceful resistance by boycotting
the Israeli economy". Said says "the Jews are obsessed
by the dream of extending their state from the Nile to
the Euphrates. We should back Palestinians tangibly and
not literally, which means that we should wage a war on
Israelis before they attack us."
These opinions
couldn't contrast more with Mahmoud's. Mahmoud, 25, is
the typical Westernized Egyptian: LA Lakers jacket,
cutting-edge Nikes, glowing cellphone, hedonist dreams,
and scheming to immigrate to Australia, even though his
family runs a successful Thousand and One Nights Parfum
Palace. He is totally apolitical: he only talks about
money and brands.
Hassan al-Banna, the founder
of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, already felt
at that time the danger of a Westernization that went
beyond political notions. He used to talk a lot about a
form of colonialism that was a sort of dispossession of
selfhood, of being and of language. He insisted it was
paramount for Egyptians to engage in "internal
decolonization". Twenty years after he found the Muslim
Brotherhood, at the end of the 1940s, the party of god
already had more than 1.5 million members. They demanded
independence from the British since the beginning - but
at the same time were investing heavily in education.
For the Muslim Brotherhood, to educate was to decolonize
the minds of Egyptians.
President Nasser - a
quintessential nationalist - only kicked out the British
in the 1950s. For al-Banna, nationalism was an idea
imported from Europe, just like the beautiful early 20th
century cafes of downtown Cairo. He thought nationalism
was a sort of racism - far away from the universal
character of Islam. Nasser flourished as a nationalist,
but at the same time repressing the Muslim Brotherhood -
and that's why he became so popular in the West. The
British preferred to deal with a nationalist rather than
a religious party. There was a time when the Muslim
Brotherhood suggested the multi-party system be
dissolved - not in favor of the one-party state of
Nasser, but in favor of their own "party of god". This
tension between nationalists and Islamists remains very
much alive in Egypt today.
Nationalists are
frustrated with the impotence and disunity of the Arab
world, and dream of a political union. Islamists abhor
the West, and dream of a religious union, a new
caliphate. Meanwhile, the latest Global Development
Network (GDN) annual meeting has just taken place in
Cairo. The GDN was a World Bank initiative that became
independent. The meeting this year debated
globalization: who profits, who suffers from it, who is
left behind, how societies are being homogenized. And as
far as the Arab world is concerned, the inevitable
theme, once again, is impotence.
Three recent
reports have put the Arab world under the spotlight. A
United Nations Development Program report blamed the
region for a deficit of freedom, a deficit of knowledge
and a deficit in terms of women's rights. A World
Economic Forum report stressed Arab economies were
growing at an annual rate of only 0.5 percent per capita
- the second slowest in the world. And an UNCTAD report
showed foreign investment flowing to 22 Arab countries
(with more than 280 million people in 14.8 million
square kilometers) is less than what flows into the tiny
city-state of Singapore (less than 4 million people in
less than 600 square kilometers).
Abdul Latif
al-Hamad, director general of the Arab Fund for Economic
and Social Development, said at the beginning of the
meeting, "The fact that the Arab countries are in danger
of being marginalized in this world environment should
stimulate them to make the necessary reforms and
implement the right policies to avoid losing their share
in the benefits of growth in the world economy. This is
the real challenge to the leadership in this region."
If this sounds like an economic revolution
supported by Washington, that's exactly what it is.
Al-Hamad goes further, "Most observers concede that is
is narrow nationalism and state monopoly and not Islamic
heritage that brought about dictatorship in the Arab
countries, and destroyed individual rights and freedom.
No doubt that liberalization will find fertile grounds
in the Arab countries, if their citizens are empowered
to mould their own destiny".
So the recipe is
there. Now "empowered Arab citizens" just have to get
rid of the Saddams - and the Mubaraks, the Abdullahs,
the al-Sabahs and the Arafats - so that the whole Arab
world may happily abandon its pervasive impotence.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
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