The Long Malaise

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 22, 2001 | by Rex Roberts

The Middle East always has been a roiling cauldron of clashing cultures, internecine rivalries and conflicting interests, with Islam the essential ingredient throughout the ages.

During his address to the nation following the attacks on the United States, President George W. Bush tried to explain the enmity Islamists feel toward America, pointing to Congress as an example of the freedoms we cherish and they abhor. Indeed, fundamentalist Muslims reject the tenets underlying Western liberalism. For them, politics and religion are inseparable, not separate, and notions of individualism and equality are antipodal to community and devotion.

But the hatred Islamists have for Americans is visceral, not intellectual, and rooted in a century of failure and frustration, envy and blame. Arab nationalists had hoped the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I would signal an era of independence for the Middle East, but instead they watched helplessly as Britain and France carved up territories formally ruled by the Turks. The newly created states of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and, eventually, Israel -- were "awkward creations," writes Michael Fields in Inside the Arab World, an informative history of the region published in 1994. Europeans didn't view Arabs as one people (nor did the Arabs themselves, although they were bound by a shared language, a deep sense of history and Islam); moreover, they doubted Arabs' ability for self-government and feared expansion into the region by the emerging Soviet Union. The West was more interested in geopolitics at this point; oil wouldn't be discovered until 1927 (the huge fields in Saudi Arabia not until 1938).

The French and British each left its legacy on the Middle East. The French, ardent colonialists who attempted to impose their culture on Beirut and Damascus, prevented the creation of a "Greater Syria" which might have emerged as "a single united state at the heart of the Arab world," writes Fields, the primary aim of Arab nationalists. The British viewed their interests in Egypt, Iraq and other areas with less resolution, having begun to question the costs of empire-building, but they actively supported Jews in their efforts to establish a home in Palestine -- in part because they naively saw Zionist and Islamist movements as compatible, in part because they felt Jews would bring Western knowledge and values to the region and in part because they suspected a global Zionist conspiracy that could be monitored if Jews had their own state.

The violent birth of Israel in 1948, supported by the United States, scattered 400,000 Palestinians across the Arab world as battle-ready Jews defeated five incompetent Arab armies. "Had it not been for what happened in Palestine, the post-Second World War years might have been the beginning of a period of happiness and prosperity for the Arabs," writes Field. "It was a time when they were starting to gain their independence and earn some oil revenue." From the 1930s into the 1950s, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and other nations enjoyed a "liberal age" in which Arabs traveled freely, welcomed foreigners and encouraged civil society. In Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser staged a coup and seized the Suez Canal (the final blow to the British empire), and then initiated an ambitious program of land reform, nationalization and pan-Arabism.

Unfortunately, Nasser's socialist state suffered the same fate as its communist counterparts in Eastern Europe. Rather than encouraging enterprise and initiative, it fostered corruption and indolence. Likewise, despite $2 trillion in oil revenues garnered during the 1970s and 1980s, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states failed to develop a viable industrial and commercial base that would function as an economic engine for the region; oil dollars stimulated consumption, not production, and led, again, to corruption and stagnation.

Far more discouraging for Arabs -- and far more infuriating -- were the humiliating defeats they suffered in two crucial military campaigns. The ease with which Israel routed Egypt during the Six-Day War in 1967 further wounded Arab pride, which had not recovered from defeat two decades ago. Iraq's inept performance during the 1991 Persian Gulf War provoked immense resentment toward the United States, which since World War II had become the dominant force in the Middle East and the patron of Israel.

In the last 100 years, then, Arab governments and kingdoms have proved themselves inadequate to the task of modernizing their societies and economies, while Arab armies have appeared impotent except when suppressing dissent among their own citizens. Islamic clerics and Muslim leaders, on the other hand, have been successful at exploiting discontent among the poor and middle class of these increasingly bankrupt and repressive regimes. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Cairo in 1929 as an impetus to religious revival, quickly turned political and violent. But throughout its 1,300-year history, Islam has always been so, writes Judith Miller in God Has Ninety-Nine Names, an analysis of militant Islam published in 1996.