SPENGLER Egypt, Syria - it's just the end of them
By Spengler
The unthinkable is happening in the Arab
world, and it's not as awful as advertised, unless
you have the misfortune to live there. Two years
and 60,000 casualties into Syria's civil war, the
foreign ministries of the West have nothing to
show for their peacemaking efforts except a wad of
airline and hotel receipts.
Egypt is
proceeding with grim inevitability towards
financial exhaustion, and the government has just
announced a three-
pita-per-day bread ration.
Libya has disintegrated, and Tunisia, the
poster-child for moderate Islamism, looks ugly
after the murder earlier this month of opposition
leader Chokri Belaid. Yet the global consequences
are negligible.
Excluding the Gulf States, the
combined gross domestic product of the major Arab
countries is a bit over US$600 billion, about the
same as Switzerland's.
The disintegration of the Arab world is a
great human tragedy but a minor economic nuisance.
Two years after I warned that the
so-called Arab Spring arose from economic failure
and portended future disasters, a warning I
reiterated in 15 subsequent essays for this
publication, it has come to the attention of the
foreign policy community that Egypt's economy is
in a tailspin.
At the Council on Foreign
relations blog, Elliot Abrams and Steven Cook
recently warned about the country's economic
freefall. Dr Cook accused me of "wanting Egypt to
fail", blaming the messenger for the ill-tidings.
That is a paltering misrepresentation; I do not
want Egypt to fail (although I am gratified to see
Steven Cook fail). Similar commentaries came from
Felix Imonti at the National Interest February 7,
and Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy on January 31.
Yet the tone of these dire warnings is
more elegiac than exhortative. The foreign policy
community appears numb, like the Titanic
passengers listening to the band play Abide
With Me in the ship's final moments. At the
May 2011 Group of Eight summit meeting in
Deauville in France, Western leaders spoke of a
$20 billion aid package for Egypt and Tunisia, and
then French president Nicholas Sarkozy told the
press that the amount might double.
As
Egypt's foreign exchange reserves run out and
subsidized bread becomes scarce in the streets,
though, the foreign policy punditeska is
offering no emergency programs, no calls for
international conferences. Instead of Sarkozy's
$20 or $40 billion, the International Monetary
Fund is dickering with Egypt's President Mohamed
Morsi for a mere $4.8 billion - barely two months'
financing requirements for Egypt - and demanding
in return drastic cuts in the subsidies that keep
body and soul together for the poorer half of the
population.
Egypt's Islamist government
has nothing to offer its people but hunger - not
belt-tightening, but malnutrition. The country's
Minister of Supply, Bassem Auda, told a press
conference February 10 that the bread subsidy
would be cut to three pita loaves per capita
(perhaps 400 calories), the Egypt Daily News
reported. Half of the $3 billion annual bread
subsidy is wasted on the black market, Auda said.
The trouble is that millions of Egyptians subsist
on the half that isn't wasted. The newspaper
interviewed some ordinary Egyptians after Auda's
announcement:
"Three loaves per person is not
enough," a middle-aged woman who preferred to
remain anonymous said. "I can be content with
three loaves; I have diabetes, yet my children
each eat at least five loaves per day." Managing
a family which consists of seven members, the
woman said she pays 150 piastres [22 US cents]
per day, the worth of 30 loaves of bread. "A
co-worker in the hospital I work in eats around
10 loaves per day," the woman said.
"Three loaves of bread would've been
enough back in the day when the loaf was large
and well-baked," said Ahmed Al-Gazzar, a
middle-aged street vendor. "Now what they sell
us isn't bread; it's more like biscuits. I eat
over six loaves per day and remain hungry."
Al-Gazzar said that his two children eat around
eight loaves of bread per day. "The stomach is
never thankful," Al-Gazzar said, citing a
popular expression. "If they determine bread
rations, people will go mad! They want to share
even our food? Are we animals so that they
determine our food rations?"
Most
alarming is the emergence of a black market in
Egyptian pounds, with a street rate February 10 of
6.95 pounds to the US dollar, against an official
rate of 6.72. Reuters reported February 10, "A run
on Egypt's pound has left foreign currency in
short supply and driven some dealers into the
streets in search of people with US dollars to
sell, spawning a new black market." Currency
deflation (by nearly 15% since the beginning of
this year) will translate quickly into higher
prices for imported goods, including half of the
country's food supply.
The
punditeska has duly taken note of Egypt's
unfolding economic disaster, but has proposed
nothing. Morsi visited Germany in late January and
came away empty-handed. Germany's government
deplored the Egyptian president's characterization
of Jews as "the descendants of apes and pigs". The
Germans know just what that means and cannot
ignore it. United States President Barack Obama
has asked congress to renew Egypt's $1.8 billion
in annual aid, but two-thirds of that is military
assistance. After a 2010 video of Morsi's
Jew-hating rant surfaced, the US Congress is less
willing than ever to fund Egypt.
Even if
the White House wanted more aid, it could not get
it. With the fiscal crises that nearly took down
the European Community last year and that remain
the subject of bitter wrangling in the United
States, no-one wants to hear about
multi-billion-dollar donations to Egypt.
We have gone from "Shock and Awe" to "aw,
shucks", in the bon mot of blogger Ruth
King. What the foreign policy community considered
unthinkable - state failure in Egypt and Syria -
is proceeding unimpeded by any helpful
suggestions, let alone action, from the world
community. The only leader to offer aid to Egypt
recently was Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad,
who visited Cairo on February 5 and promised a
"big credit line" on condition that Sunni Egypt
ally with Shi'ite Iran against the West. The man
has a sense of humor. Ahmadinejad's visit,
moreover, underscores the reluctance of the Sunni
Gulf monarchies to aid a Muslim Brotherhood regime
that they consider a danger to their own
longevity.
There will be consequences, but
they will be inconvenient rather than intractable.
Greece and Italy might be flooded with economic
refugees. Egypt might try to annex Libyan oil.
Sophisticated Egyptian arms might find their way
to Gaza. Syria's chemical arsenal might get into
the wrong hands (although the United States,
Israel and Russia seem able to collaborate on
containing this particular threat).
What about Iran? Sometime this
year, I believe, either the United States or
Israel will attack Iran's nuclear weapons program,
and the ripple effects in the region will be
minor. After Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khameini rejected the American offer of direct
talks on the country's nuclear ambitions, a
successful Israeli strike (let alone a more
devastating American attack) would humiliate the
Tehran regime. Nothing fails in the Middle East
like failure, and Iran's capacity to retaliate
will be far weaker than feared.
There is
nothing the Obama administration would like less
than a military solution to the Iranian nuclear
problem. After Khameini's confrontational
statement, though, it is harder for the White
House to stop the Israelis from acting (unless, of
course, the US acts first). The White House and
all its appointees, including incoming Secretary
of State John Kerry, never have deviated from a
policy of prevention as opposed to containment.
The world community as represented by the
International Atomic Energy Agency notes as a
matter of record Iran's plans to speed up uranium
enrichment.
Iran's ability to retaliate
against a raid on its nuclear capacity, though, is
limited. Hezbollah will fire some rockets at
northern Israel but will refrain from an all-out
assault because it knows that this time the
Israelis would do their utmost to annihilate the
Iranian-allied militia. Iran might close the
Straits of Hormuz by mining the entrance, but that
would draw the United States into the conflict.
The Pentagon's contingency plans for neutralizing
an Iranian nuclear threat go far beyond air
strikes against Iranian enrichment facilities, and
include the destruction of Revolutionary Guard
bases and oil refineries.
Iranian cat's
paws would commit a few terrorist atrocities, to
be sure. But the Tehran government is well aware
of Machiavelli's advice that if you set out to
harm your enemy, make sure to harm him so severely
that he cannot avenge himself. There is nothing
Tehran can do to inflict serious harm on the West,
but a great deal that the West can do to inflict
catastrophic harm on Iran. In the worst case,
other oil producers could replace most of its oil
output in a short period of time. Were Iran to be
shut out of the world market, the price of oil
would jump to the detriment of the world economy,
but Iran itself would starve.
Oil prices
would jump if either Israel or the US attacked any
Iranian target, but the long-term effect on energy
prices is likely to be small.
Western
governments should be drawing up plans for
emergency humanitarian aid for Egypt and Syria,
anticipating the flight of economic refugees to
Europe. It seems odd for the United States to
supply Egypt with updated F-16's, which only have
trophy value for its military; Egypt cannot hope
to win a war against Israel, and it doesn't (or
shouldn't) have to fight its neighbors Libya and
Sudan. Wheat would be a more appropriate American
contribution. If the West cannot forestall state
failure in Egypt, it should at least help to
ameliorate the worst humanitarian consequences.
Whatever the West decides to do, however,
the Arab world will decline in importance in world
affairs. The foreign policy establishment's
disappointment at the failure of the Arab Spring
has made it possible to question the long-term
viability of the Muslim world. Washington Post
columnist David Ignatius, for example, reported on
February 11 on the American Enterprise Institute's
Nicholas Eberstadt work on Muslim fertility, a
year after Eberstadt published a widely-noted
paper. Ignatius wrote:
The Arab world may be experiencing a
youth bulge now, fueling popular uprisings in
Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. But as Eberstadt
notes, what's ahead over the next generation
will probably be declines in the number of
working-age adults and rapidly aging
populations. The Arab countries are now
struggling with what Eberstadt calls their
"youthquake." But the coming dilemma, he notes,
is "how these societies will meet the needs of
their graying populations on relatively low
income levels."
Of course, the
fertility collapse in the Muslim world has been
there for a decade and available to any casual
browser of the United Nations population database.
Phillip Longman noted in his 2004 book The
Empty Cradle that Muslim fertility was falling
faster than any other part of the world
population. In September 2005 I argued in this
space that the Muslim world was heading towards a
demographic catastrophe:
By 2050, elderly dependents will
comprise nearly a third of the population of
some Muslim nations, notably Iran - converging
on America's dependency ratio at mid-century.
But it is one thing to face such a problem with
America's per capita gross domestic product
(GDP) of $40,000, and quite another to face it
with Iran's per capita GDP of $7,000 -
especially given that Iran will stop exporting
oil before the population crisis hits. The
industrial nations face the prospective failure
of their pension systems. But what will happen
to countries that have no pension system, where
traditional society assumes the care of the aged
and infirm? In these cases it is traditional
society that will break down, horribly and
irretrievably so. (See Demographics
and Iran's imperial design, Asia Times
Online, September 13, 2005.)
The path
to ruin in Muslim countries takes different forms:
Semper idem, sed non eodem modo (always the
same, but never in the same way), as Heinrich
Schenker liked to say. The Muslim world is divided
between backward and extensively illiterate
countries like Egypt who cannot feed their
children, and literate countries like Iran and
Turkey where there are few children to feed.
Cultures that do not wish to exist cannot be
dissuaded from destroying themselves. The best
thing one can do for doomed cultures is not to
belong to them.
Spengler is channeled
by David P Goldman. His book How
Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too)
was published by Regnery Press in September
2011. A volume of his essays on culture, religion
and economics, It's Not the End of the World -
It's Just the End of You, also appeared last
fall, from Van Praag Press.
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