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Arab-American relations: A new
perspective
By Khalid S Al-Khater
To
understand properly Arab-American relations requires a
complex analysis that is contrary to the traditionalist
belief and its reliance on slogans and illusions. Those
who embrace it are forced to swim against the current
and bear harsh criticism.
For Arabs, considering
this issue requires also confronting a number of other
issues. Interpretation depends on the intellectual
background of the interpreter, as Immanuel Kant pointed
out long ago. More recently, Professor Fouad Ajami, a
Lebanese-American who is director of the Center for
Middle Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University
School of Advanced International Studies, emphasized
that the Arab dilemma, regarding this and other
questions, depends primarily on an intellectual and
cultural mode of thinking.(1)
There are many in
the Arab world who understand this challenge to find a
new way of thinking, like the Lebanese writer Ali Harb
when he said, "If the crisis is the exhaustion of the
conceptual framework and work methods, and the
confrontation of the challenges and problems, the first
task of whoever takes the intellectual concern and
epistemological fate is to deeply review the employed
intellectual tools for managing identities, merits, the
construction of life and the production of facts. He who
confronts such a task does not have any option other
than to swim against the current, by stripping the
priorities that engage his mind and by adopting
ontological ventures, in order to practice his free
criticism of axioms. Alternatively, he must think
differently from what is pervading and dominating the
way of viewing and contemplating occurrences and
destinies. Without that, there is no way for us to
understand and diagnose crises or to mind and manage the
defeats and debacles in the Arab world or worldwide."(2)
Those who reject a rethinking about Arab views
regarding the US, like Professor Hassan Naf'a, head of
the political science department at the faculty of
economics and political science of Cairo University,
often take the historical relationship between the two
parties out of context.(3) Such argumentation, which
dominates Arab discourse about this issue, confirms the
statement of French philosopher Jean Francois Revel,
"The ideologist twists the neck of reality to suit his
ideologies, whilst the seeker of truth gives up his
ideologies to understand reality."
To understand
this phenomenon better, I have coined the word
"sloganist" to describe someone who believes and repeats
what has always been said, and is popular among the
Arabs, without examining the evidence or distorting it
to a remarkable degree. Illusions thus come to dominate
reality, an approach which fits with the slogans and
ideologies such as those that have been used by Arab
governments and some organized nationalist and religious
fundamentalist organizations for the past half-century
in order to blind the Arab people from seeing their
internal problems.
Archaic slogans and illusions
have made the Arabs live daydreams of their own making.
These cocoons, which take different masks in the forms
of Arab nationalism, one Arab nation, Arab unity, and
Palestine being the first cause among Arabs, have little
basis or occurrence in reality. Despite being the
aspirations of all Arabs, they are closer to dreams than
reality. One can liken them to the ambition of someone
who is trying to build a pyramid starting from its
summit, against the laws of physics. Those aspirations
turned to dreams because of the Arabs' inverted schedule
of priorities, tending to accept slogans and symbols,
despite their terrible consequences.
The slogan
of Palestine being the priority cause among Arabs has
distracted them from their internal issues and problems.
This practice has become harmful to the Palestinians
themselves because they are deluded by it into believing
that the Arab nation - which, as previously stated, is
itself an illusion - is standing with them in deed and
word despite a half-century of only words and no deeds.
The United Nations Development Program's Arab
Human Development Report for 2002, which was prepared by
a team of top Arab intellectuals, shows without a doubt
that the Arabs are no better off than are the
Palestinians. The only difference is that the
Palestinians are resisting oppression, deprivation, and
injustice, and as a price for their resistance, are
being trampled by Israel's tanks and their houses
demolished by his bulldozers.
Poverty,
deprivation, illiteracy, lack of freedom, injustice,
female oppression and disregard for human rights are
predominant in the entire Arab world. These problems are
imposed on the Arab world by its own tyrannical and
oppressive governments. Were they to resist, it would
result in the same fate as that of the Palestinians,
except the actions would be carried out by the tanks and
bulldozers of the Arabs' own despots.
The
examples are plenty. For instance, there was the
demonstration of almost 100,000 people in Cairo stadium
two weeks before the war with Iraq began. This was
arranged by sloganists, chanting anti-war in Iraq
slogans and pro-Palestine slogans; yet they remained
silent about the extension of Egypt's emergency law by
three years. This despite the law having already been
imposed for the last 22 years, and despite the tyranny,
abuse, indignity and disrespect for their human rights
which the Egyptian people have suffered as a result.
These abuses are detailed by Dr Mohammed Abbas in his
book I See the King Naked,(4) a book whose
contents are extremely depressing. Or one could cite the
recent incident in which the Tunisian police attacked
authorized demonstrators because their chants changed
from authorized slogans to a cry for genuine domestic
reform.
As if Arab nationalism, one Arab nation,
and united Arabs slogans were not enough for sloganists,
they constantly espouse new slogans that are even more
mythical than the previous ones. Specifically, the
Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) and the phantom
scheme of one Islamic nation and one Islamic world.
These slogans suppose that Muslims are united under one
sect of Islam and possess any of the common attributes
that other peoples share in order to achieve prosperity,
development, freedom and dignity.
In line with
my previous statements, I will follow Ali Harb's
recommendations and swim against the current by
introducing a new intellectual platform which is more
realistic and does not depend on archaic slogans or
illusions but rather on the logic of an epistemological
understanding of reality as elucidated by the present
signs and indicators. It is an interpretation which
hopefully will not be taken as being biased toward
America in particular, or the West in general, but as a
personal endeavor to swim against the current and to
think outside the box.
The intellectual
foundations that I intend to lean upon comprise three
major concepts that have shaped my view:
First, the way in which we view history.
History can be viewed in two different ways. One is the
classical view that considers daily events and news as
history. The second is the view of history that
encompasses a much longer and wider series of events.
The great Arab philosopher and scholar Ibn Khaldun
discusses this view of history in his al-Muqaddimmah (an
introduction to the philosophy of history), where he
refers to this as "trends".(5)
These two
different ways of viewing history give us completely
different interpretations. The first way, which looks at
and takes daily events and news as history, does not
reflect the whole picture of what is taking place in the
world. It only reflects a fragmented and simplified
picture that is limited by space and time. Relying on
such a view always leads to wrong conclusions and
negative reactions. It is similar to the old classical
Newtonian scientific view that considers the universe as
being a giant machine made up of small parts. To
understand it requires taking it apart and studying the
parts in isolation, independent of each other, and
without any regard to their environment. That view,
which has been proven a failure, has caused many of the
world's environmental, social, and economic problems.
This classical view has been replaced by an
inclusive and holistic view, which considers everything
in the universe as interrelated and entangled systems
which cannot be understood unless looked at
holistically. This new view, when applied to history,
considers daily events and news as parts of the
historical processes that either support or oppose the
trend of history; affecting it positively or negatively,
being part of the process that systems tend to go
through in order to be holistic. They are the
constituents of the soup but not the soup.
Second, the way in which we look at
ourselves. It is my deep belief that I am a human first,
Qatari second, a Gulf citizen third, and an Arab last -
contrary to what the sloganists would have us believe.
It also leans on my desire to live with the world and
not only in the world. Only animals have no choice but
to live in the world and not with the world.
Third, the System Theory view of the
world. This, with overwhelming evidence, has shown that
everything in this universe should be looked at and
viewed as a system or a combination of systems, from the
smallest quarks to super-clusters of galaxies. These
systems, from the big bang to the present and into the
future, have been evolving by amalgamating and combining
to form bigger and more complex systems, moving to unity
but not uniformity.
In my analysis of
Arab-American relations, I will use these three concepts
as the platform and background of my intellectual
interpretations by considering that relationship from
the following three perspectives:
1 The dominant
trend that is conquering the world, its structure and
constituents, is global, but with a Western flavor. Yet
globalization still torments and alienates Westerners as
much as everyone else in the world.
2 The
non-viability of domination and empire-building in
today's world.
3 The nature of current and future
conflicts in the world.
This analysis requires,
in addition to the new intellectual platform mentioned
above, getting rid of the xenophobia that has been used
by Arabs in general and intellectuals in particular, as
a hanger on which to put all their problems and
backwardness. Arab intellectuals, during the last
half-century, have found it easier to believe in slogans
and to use xenophobia. The motives may include personal
interest and blowing off steam without annoying or
clashing with their despots - thus avoiding their prison
cells and whips - instead of coming forth with the
truth. Even though I genuinely realize the difficulty in
getting rid of this complex, I could not proceed without
making it a condition for understanding my analysis,
since it blinds the vision and constrains the mind from
understanding any new interpretation.
1 The
dominant trend that is conquering the
world
Today, the trend that is dominating the
world is what Professor Michael Mandelbaum, in his
latest book The Ideas that Conquered the World
has called "The Liberal Theory of History (LTH)."(6)
This theory has three pillars: free trade, peace and
democracy. These three pillars are the same ideas that
US president Woodrow Wilson called for at the 1919 Paris
conference, subsequently becoming known as
"Wilsonianism", though they were rejected by the US
Congress at that time and have sometimes been ridiculed
since then.
These three pillars of LTH are
interconnected and constantly affect each other. Free
trade requires peace, and peace in turn requires
democracy, since democratic countries do not go to war,
as the historical record shows.(7) The dominant power of
this trend asserted itself through the collapse of the
Soviet Union without a single shot being fired. It
gained further momentum afterward and has become evident
in many areas.
For example, from the perspective
of free trade: there was the establishment of the World
Trade Organization (WTO), the boom in world markets, and
75 percent growth in the gross domestic products (GDP)
of countries across the world. On the peace front there
has been the spread of regional agreements which have
worked to prevent war among European, East Asian, and
Latin American countries in areas once beset by
unrestrained conflict and violence. From a democratic
perspective: in 1900 there was not a single country in
the world with unrestricted democracy, but by the
mid-20th century there were 22 democratic countries with
31 percent of the world population, and by the end of
that century there were 119 democracies, containing 58.2
percent of the world population, out of 192 existing
countries. At least 85 of those countries, representing
38 percent of the global population, are regarded as
having democratic policies that respect basic human
rights and the rule of law.(8) It is really sad and
shameful that not one Arab country is among those.
To understand what is taking place in the world,
we should proceed by grasping this theory and this
trend. Yet even today most people still think
traditionally and view events only through the veil that
has been placed over their eyes during war and
conflict-filled centuries, as tools for domination and
influence, to satisfy greed.
People do not
realize that the conflict is mostly within them, between
their conscious and unconscious wants and desires,
between the local and the global, between progress and
regression, between development and stagnation, between
changing and joining the dominant and beneficial trend
or stagnating and keeping the status quo. They are
afraid of losing the particular characteristics of their
identities if they become part of progress in the world
and do not realize that their fear is not warranted or
justified, as can be seen by what has happened elsewhere
in the world and is explained by System Theory.
Oxygen and hydrogen do not lose their
characteristics when they combine to make water. A man
does not lose his identity when he gets married and has
family or when a citizen becomes part of a society.(9)
Similarly, by making beneficial changes and joining an
international system which is interactive and not
dominating, Arabs and Muslims would not lose their
identity or special characteristics either.
But
most of them reject this trend because of the following:
Its feared effects on their culture, traditions and
customs and their unjustified worry about losing them.
The conflict of the requirements of this trend, such as
freedom of religion, pluralism, individualism, women's
freedom and a reduced role for the state, with the
status quo. This trend's real negative aspects; for
example, the triumph of the global market and its free
trade pillar often brings excessive consumption and
corporate greed, which harms the environment and
degrades human values which evolved throughout
centuries.
Religious revivalism among the people
of the world is an important aspect of this conflict
from within. It is the only truly individualistic form
of resistance available to those wishing to fight the
negative aspects of this trend. If viewed dialectically,
the LTH trend can be considered the thesis and religious
revivalism as the antithesis. In other words, the world
does not inevitably have to be stuck in this phase. On
the contrary, a turbulent transition period eventually
will produce a synthesis that will lead to a better
world. But currently, of course, the world is going
through a difficult and agonizing "rebirth" because of
this process.
This resentment of (and conflict
with) the trend from within has been reinforced by the
ambivalent policies of the current US administration.
The administration appears to have no clear vision on
how to reinforce it, even though the Americans
themselves initiated it and - as the most economically
and militarily powerful nation in the world - are the
most capable to strengthen and sustain it. The
isolationist and parochial policy which the Bush
administration adopted before September 11, 2001, was
reflected in its withdrawal from the Kyoto protocol and
Anit-Ballistic Missile treaty, its imposition of trade
barriers to protect several US products, and its
post-September 11 arrogant behavior, as lucidly
explained by Fareed Zakaria in his Newsweek special
report "Why America Scares the World and What to Do
About it."(10)
However, it is important to keep
in mind that America is democratic and the next
administration might follow a different path and adopt a
different attitude, one which supports this trend with a
clear vision, as the Clinton administration almost did.
It is also important to understand the values that
underpin the American strategic policy, which was best
demonstrated by the answer president Harry Truman gave
when Henry Kissinger asked him how he wished to be
remembered. Truman answered, "We completely defeated our
enemies and made them surrender. Then we helped them to
recover, to become democratic, and to rejoin the
community of nations. Only America could have done
that."(11)
Naturally, these dramatic changes are
not mere products of American will and policy but are
products of far broader and longer-term trends. Many of
these are involved with shifts in technology. The
digital revolution, which is the third major human
revolution (after the agricultural and industrial ones),
requires new political, economic, and social
arrangements, as did the previous two, in order to
better foster human progress and avoid a breakdown phase
of this human revolution. These revolutions are really
macroshifts in human development. Historically, such
shifts in technology and human society have shared
common characteristics. They go through four phases,
with each one shorter than its predecessor. These phases
are:
1. The Trigger Phase: Innovations in
"hard" technologies (tools, machines, operational
systems) bring about greater efficiency in the
manipulation of nature for human ends.
2. The
Transformation Phase: Hard technology innovations
irreversibly change social and environmental relations
and bring about, successively:
A higher level of resource production
A faster growth of population
A greater social complexity, and
A growing impact on the social and the natural
environments.
3. The Critical (or "Chaos")
Phase: Changed social and environmental relations
put pressure on the established culture, putting into
question time-honored values and worldviews and the
ethics and ambitions associated with them. Society
becomes chaotic in the Chaos Theory sense of the term.
Society does not lack order but exhibits a subtle order
that is extremely sensitive to fluctuations. The
evolution of the dominant culture and consciousness -
the way people's values and ethics respond and change -
determines the outcome of the system's chaos leap (the
way its development trajectory forks off).
4A.
The Possible Breakdown Phase: At first, the
values, worldviews and ethics of a critical mass of
people in society are resistant to change, or change too
slowly, and the established institutions are too rigid
to allow for timely transformation. Social complexity,
coupled with a degenerating environment, creates
unmanageable stresses. The social order is exposed to a
series of crises that degenerate into conflict and
violence.
4B. The Possible Breakdown
Phase: The mindset of a critical mass of people
evolves over time, shifting the culture of society
towards a better-adapted mode. As these changes take
hold, the improved social order - governed by more
adapted values, worldviews, and associated ethics -
establishes itself. The social system stabilizes itself
in its changed conditions.(12)
Most people in
the world are still struggling with Phase 3, and some
are either beginning to go through Phase 4B, or fighting
to avoid Phase 4A. There is no doubt that this trend is
a major part of that macroshift, because most people
desire it, consciously or unconsciously. They all surely
desire peace, democracy, and the ability to prosper
through a free trade that is just and is controlled by
the rules of law, as represented by globalization.
But transitional resistance is sparked by the
fact, for example, that free trade does not seem to be
fair or just and is biased towards the rich countries of
the world as a consequence of the greed and domination
of market fundamentalists and the temptation of power.
This domination will eventually be ended by the people
of the world, supported by their values - including a
genuine belief in the essence of religion, and not
merely in dogma - which will undercut the materialistic
nature of globalization. The rising number of local and
global NGOs will surely be one factor that plays a big
role in reducing the injustice of globalization.
The Arabs, especially after the war in Iraq, are
at the bifurcation point of Phase 4. Either they can
take advantage of this turning point in history and
break through, or reject it and break down. Deciding to
travel one of these roads or the other is very important
at this time, especially for the Palestinians.
If the Palestinians had understood this trend
and abandoned the one Arab nation, Arab nationalism, and
Palestine the first Arab cause slogans, especially after
Oslo, they would not have fallen into Ariel Sharon's
trap when he visited the al-Aqsa mosque, igniting the
second intifada, which unified the Israelis against
peace. Sharon was well aware that Israel would
disintegrate because its nature is such that it does not
concord with this trend. Israel, although democratic, is
a state built on ethnic and religious principals, which
surely make it a racist and a bigoted state. And unless
it changes its principles to coincide with LTH, it
surely will not be able to survive its forces.
2 The non-viability of domination and empire
building
In this age, domination and empire
building are no longer pursued for many reasons. As
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, "Beware of
listening to the imposter. You are lost if you forget
that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone and that
the earth itself belongs to no one!"(13)
These
traditional concepts of domination and empire building
go against the pillars of this new trend of history.
Free trade requires peace, and peace in turn requires
freedom and democracy. It provides a more viable way of
achieving common and mutual interest than seizing
resources from other countries. Adopting a win-win
strategy is less costly in terms of loss of human lives
and material costs. This is especially true at this time
and age from the perspective of the West in general, and
America in particular, when one considers their advances
in technologies, efficient management, and other tools
for gaining competitive advantage.
This strategy
can guarantee sustainable common interests while
domination cannot. Japan and Germany are the best
examples from the past, and Qatar and Kuwait from the
present. The traditionalists conclude that since America
has established military bases in these countries, the
intention is domination and control of their resources,
while reality reflects exactly the opposite and confirms
at least a partial application of the Liberal Theory of
History.
In Qatar's case, the Americans do not
have a monopoly over Qatar's most important resources,
oil and gas. There are other non-American companies
working in that field in Qatar, such as Maersk (Danish),
TotalFinaElf (French), Philips (Dutch), and, in the near
future, Shell and other companies from Canada and
Australia.
Qatar also has the Japanese and
others as partners for developing its huge gas reserve.
The same applies to Qatar's capital projects. Although
Qatar has allocated more than 10 billion riyals ($2.75
billion) for capital projects for the year 2003, the
American share of that is nil because of the absence of
their companies in that field. The same could be said
about trade. The amount of trade between Qatar and the
US is not the highest on Qatar's trade chart.
In
the case of Kuwait, despite the presence of American
military forces since liberation, and the special
relations that have existed since that time, America has
not gained any favorable economic status. On the
contrary, the Kuwaiti parliament refused to grant any
oil production concessions for its northern oil fields
to any foreign companies, including Americans, or sign
any production sharing agreements as Qatar did. The same
applies to the Kuwaiti market for power generation and
equipment, which is mainly controlled by Japanese and
European firms.
For whom would a president, who
is democratically elected for only a limited period,
build an empire? This illusion stems from our mistaken
view of history and our belief in the immortality of our
oppressors. Empire-building requires an oppressor who
can conscript whomsoever he wishes to fight for him in
order to increase his wealth and satisfy his greed.
Democratically ruled countries do not sacrifice their
sons for the sake of their president's ambitions or
ideologies, as the protests that ultimately forced the
US withdrawal from Vietnam showed.
The American
"empire" already exists and the sun does not set over
it. It is a new kind of empire that is represented by
companies like McDonald's, Microsoft, General Motors and
similar ones, none of which require military dominance
for their growth and sustainability. These companies
also welcome and thrive on competition, contrary to the
belief of traditionalists who perceive competition as a
reason for domination.
The danger of the
terrorism that is used nowadays to fight and oppose
dominations is that it is too high a price to pay.
Terrorist acts such as that of September 11 and other
incidents around the world prove beyond any doubt that
terrorism is very difficult to predict or fight. It is
also worth noting that terrorism is no longer restricted
to acts of violence. A computer hacker sitting in front
of his home computer a world away could create havoc in
another country's military or financial systems,
especially in a country highly dependent on the digital
revolution to run its systems like the United States.
The rest of the world owns $6.5 trillion worth
of American companies, which, based on traditional
thinking, are supposed to be the hidden hands behind
America's desire for "domination" and "empire building".
This is surely paradoxical since American companies have
become multinationals which would not belong to a single
empire even if such an empire existed.
Advanced
economies no longer depend on the raw materials which
were once the main object for domination, imperialism
and empire building. Advanced economies such as
America's depend mostly on the service sectors, which
constitute up to 80 percent of their GDPs. Companies
like Microsoft, Sun and McDonald's are the main
constituents of the American economy. Raw material is no
longer the biggest share of the value of manufactured
goods as before. The raw material value of a car such as
a BMW is very small indeed. Its value is mainly in its
engineering, which requires more brains and technology
than material: brains and technology that do not require
military domination.
It follows that advanced
capitalist economies desire and opt for bigger markets
with strong purchasing powers to help them grow and
prosper. It is in their interest to see the rest of the
world's economies become healthier and not dependent on
aid that comes mainly from those advanced economies
themselves. This attitude is in alignment with the
spirit of capitalism and not against it.
3
The nature of current and future conflicts
Many
theories and scenarios show unawareness of the extent to
which the current conflict is played out along
ontological and epistemological lines within the
individual, be he Westerner or Easterner, poor or rich,
Christian or Muslim, or of any other religion or ethnic
origin. The world has become a small village where
everyone can reach, influence, and communicate with
everyone else. As a result, everyone is faced with an
internal conflict to find one's identity, which has been
torn apart by the speed and shock of change of the
digital revolution, the entanglement and mixing of
cultures and traditions, and shortened distances.
In this context, most Arab intellectuals and
analysts rely on their perceptions of an outdated,
classical, traditional intellectual platform and shabby
culture (politically, economically, and socially) when
analyzing Arab-American relations or their relations
with each other or with the rest of the world. Because
of that outdated mode of thinking, they invariably
conclude, incorrectly, that the objective of the
Americans is domination, control, neo-imperialism, and
empire-building. Hence, they have only taken, out of all
of the many theories developed regarding the present
situation, Samuel Huntington's theory of the clash of
civilizations and upgraded it into a prophecy. They have
accepted it, believe in it, and work hard to convince
their people to see the West through it.
If
there were to be any serious conflict, it would surely
not be between the strong Americans and the weak Arabs
or Muslims, because the weak cannot threaten or compete
with the strong. Muslims in general and Arabs in
particular are weak politically, economically,
technologically, socially, and most important,
militarily. Rather, it would be between America and
other rising power centers such as Europe and China. It
is highly logical to conclude that it is in no one's
interest for the Arab or Muslim worlds to be backward
and left behind, contaminated by repression, poverty,
and illiteracy for the following reasons: Poverty,
ignorance and repression give birth to terrorism,
especially among those infected with xenophobia.
Migration to search for food and freedom is an
enormous problem facing the West and which can only be
stopped if people's conditions are improved in their own
localities. No country wants 300 million poor and
impoverished people as its neighbors or as additional
residents. It is in the spirit of capitalism, which
depends on creating and sustaining consumer societies
with strong purchasing powers, to make them grow instead
of allowing them to become needy societies, always
dependent on aid and charities.
Instead of the
Arabs ridding themselves of that outdated way of
thinking which is only making them fall behind in
progress and development, we still find them twisting
the neck of truth to suit their ideologies and slogans.
At the same time, they tend to accuse whoever tries to
forget his ideologies in order to understand the truth
and live with reality, as a traitor or a servant of the
American prince.
It is not then difficult to
understand the cause of those who harshly attack the
smaller countries of the Gulf for having American
military bases on their soil. Those countries relied on
Saudi Arabia for a long time to defend them and
discovered the fallacy of that belief after Saddam
invaded Kuwait. This discovery made them turn,
logically, to the strong to help them defend themselves
against aggression from neighbors who either already
have weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or strive to have
them. These countries realized that their oil and gas
wealth makes them vulnerable and a focus of greed. They
face demographic problems as a result of that wealth,
and they cannot build strong military forces even if
they unite. They are very wise not to listen to or
accept the sloganists' call to rely on slogans and myth.
The sloganists' claim that the West hates Arabs
and Muslims has no foundation whatsoever. If that were
the case, France would not have over 1,500 mosques,
Britain over 2,000, and a similar number in America. The
West would not have established so many centers
specializing in Middle Eastern studies, in an effort to
understand its people's problems and help them find
solutions. It is also worth mentioning that the first
and strongest opposition to a war against Iraq came from
the Catholic Church and the Church of England.
Based on all the above ideas, I strongly believe
that the American intention beyond invading Iraq and
freeing its people from Saddam's repression is to bring
peace, stability, and prosperity to the area. However, I
do have my doubts that they can bring democracy to the
area because democracy is a human value that can only
flourish if the people embrace it. Nevertheless, there
is no doubt that the Americans can initiate the right
environment for it.
I view the war with Iraq as
a coin, both faces of which are for the good of the
Iraqis. One face can be seen to reflect Americans as
liberators. The other face reflects Americans as
occupiers - a situation which would be easier for the
Iraqis to resist and defeat later. It is always easier
to fight a foreign enemy than to fight an enemy that is
from within. A man can fight a vicious tiger but he is
incapable of fighting even the smallest cancer from
within. This metaphor can also be used to illustrate my
belief that the entire Arab world has become so weak and
sickly because of those tumors from within that it is no
longer able to help itself.
The United States is
in tune with many of the requirements of the
contemporary world, and if there is going to be any
leading power at all, it is the best qualified to play
that role. Any such state must be democratic,
law-abiding and sometimes needs to utilize force to
implement that law. Only the United States with its
strong economy, technology, and military power has that
capability and the will to sacrifice.
By the
same token, though, it is the task of others as members
of the world society to make sure that it follows and
applies democratic process, not only from within but
also internationally, and to restrict it from
unilateralism. We have to reinforce the principles of
common interests and common securities by offering our
support to that leader instead of resenting it. To
encourage the United States to be isolationist or
unilateralist, as some traditionalists inside and
outside America preach, would be a heinous act. A
bipolar or multi-polar world will only lead to more
conflicts that are more dangerous and could have a
critical impact on the survival of humanity. The
twentieth century stands as witness to the horror of
that kind of world.
It is time for us to trust
the world and learn how to live with it and not only in
it. It is also time to give those who are trying to help
us a chance and deal with them not on the presumption of
"Everyone is guilty until proven innocent," as we
presume when we deal with each other within the Arab
world and beyond. We have to change our own minds and
societies and open them up, because as long as they
remain closed they will decay. This is in accordance
with the universal second law of thermodynamics, which
says that every closed system will eventually decay.
Our civilization reached its apex when it opened
its doors to other cultures, translated their books, and
took the benefit from their intellect and philosophy. It
flourished by participating in the development and
progress of humanity and not by rejecting new ideas
because they did not come from us. We should not reject
everything that is not originally Arabic or try to twist
it to look or sound Arabic as the Moroccan philosopher
Taha Abdurrahman did when he claimed that Descartes'
famous conclusion "I think, therefore I am" came from
the Arab saying "Look and you shall find". This sort of
attitude does not help us participate in the human
voyage of progress and development as did some of our
great scholars such as Averroes, Avicenna, Ibn Khaldun,
al-Farabi, and many others; those for whom the West has
great respect and whose part in history it does not deny
- as we do their ideas and values.
Notes
(1) Fouad Ajami, "Iraq
and the Arabs' Future", Foreign Affairs,
January/February 2003.
(2) Ali Harb, The World
and its Plight: The Logic of Conflict and the Language
of Dialogue, (Beirut: Arab Cultural Center, 2002), p.
11.
(3) Hassan Naf'a, "The Intellectual Arab and
the American Prince: Fouad Ajami as an Exemplar,"
al-Mustaqbal al-Arabi (The Arab Future), No. 289, March
2003. Also, published in Wojhat Nadher al-Kotob, March
2003 issue.
(4) Mohammed Abbas, I See the
King Naked (Cairo: Madbooli, 1999).
(5)Ibn
Khaldun, Al-Muqaddimmah (Beirut, Dar al-Fikr al-Arabi,
First Printing: 1997)
(6) Michael Mandelbaum,
The Ideas that Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy,
and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century (Oxford:
Public Affairs, a member of the Perseus Group, 2002).
(7) See for example, Bruce Russett. Grasping
the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War
World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1993).
(8) Freedom House
(9) Ervin
Laszlo, The Systems View of the World: A Holistic
Vision for Our Time (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press,
Fourth printing, 2002).
(10) Fareed Zakaria,
"Why America Scares the World and What to Do About It,"
Newsweek, March 24, 2003.
(11) Quoted in Henry
Kissinger's Diplomacy (New York, 1994), p. 425.
(12) Ervin Laszlo, Macroshift: Navigating the
Transformation to a Sustainable World (San
Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Inc., 2001).
(13) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the
Origin of Inequality.
Khalid S
al-Khater is a Qatari writer, Fellow of the American
Society of Civil Engineers. This essay has its origin in
a March 2003 debate sponsored by Qatar's National
Council for Culture and Heritage on Arab-American
relations as part of the second Doha Cultural Festival.
Tojan Faisal, an ex-member of the Jordanian parliament,
was the other participant in the debate, representing
the traditional Arab view.
This article is
reprinted from Middle East Review of International
Affairs (MERIA) Journal [vol 7, no 2, 2002]. Copyright
MERIA. For a free subscription, e-mail MERIA at
gloria@idc.ac.il. Or visit all MERIA
publications. To see the work of MERIA's
publisher, visit the Global Research in International Affairs
(GLORIA) Center.
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