The Crisis of Competence in the Middle East: Half a Century of Humiliations
A learned friend of mine asked me a
question: “Is this the lowest point in history for Muslims or was it the Mongol
devastation of Baghdad?” To me the question was perhaps improperly phrased
because we, as people are a part of history at this point of time and are
actors in the drama which is being played out. So, are we any better or worse
than the people who lived in Baghdad at that time? Let me leave the answer to
the readers.
You can divide the modern history of
the Middle East into five parts:
1.
The
colonial period
2.
The
Nasser Era
3.
The
post-six-day war era
4.
The
post-nine-eleven era
5.
The
post-Arab Spring era
I see three common elements in the
dynamics of all the five parts:
a. Arab
(Muslim) incompetence
b. The
hostility of the Christian world spearheaded by the United States of America
c. Israel
supported by the World Jewry.
All the three factors have contributed to the
catastrophes that have occurred. So would it not be logical to assume that a
change in any one of the three elements should alter the equilibrium and
inflection in any two forces should reverse the dynamics? If the answer is in
the affirmative then let us proceed in the analysis of the topic.
The Colonial
Period:
This period was the one in which the
modern atlas of the Arab world took shape. Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan,
Palestine, (Saudi) Arabia and Egypt, snatched out from the Ottoman dominions
were made “countries”. The British and the French arm chair politicians and
generals, over pegs of whisky and brandy, drew lines on maps like they did
further east in the Indian subcontinent (McMahan Line and the Durand Line) and
divided the Arab people into the British and the French areas of influence. The
British appointed kings from the progeny of Sharif Husain in their areas and
the French instituted “republics” in the areas under their mandate; they even
wrote a sectarian trilateral constitution for Lebanon, which the Americans
imitated five decades later in Iraq, a prelude to disaster as it turned out.
Make note of the machinations of the British, the French and recently the
Americans who are primarily responsible for the carnage in the Middle East.
Since they have done it with their eyes on their prize, you cannot appeal to
their conscience or try to teach them morality. It is your morality which
should be under focus.
The Nasser Era:
The first semblance of an awakening
was the secular bourgeois movements among the urban population, initiated by the western educated elite such as Zaghlol
Pasha in Egypt, who sought to replace the colonial rule by their own. This was
followed by a period of military coups by highly motivated young officers, who
were not only rebelling against imperialism of the West but were attempting to
change the systems. The harbinger of this change was Jamal Abdel Nasser. The
nationalization of the Suez Canal, taking a cue from Mohammad Musaddeq of Iran
was a landmark in history. Nasser joined hands in his anti-imperialist zeal
with the leaders of the non-aligned countries: Nehru, Sukarno, Tito and
Nkrumah, which boosted his prestige
worldwide, while at the same time accepting military and economic aid from the
Soviet Union.
Arab nationalism appeared on the
horizon, given impetus by Nasser and the Baathists in Syria (Michel Aflak),
which became the main driving force of politics in that region at that time.
When Shukri al-Quwatli, the elected president of Syria, at his own initiative
united his country with Egypt forming the United Arab Republic, it appeared as
though the process of Arab unification had begun. When the six day war
occurred, all the dreams of the anti-imperialists and the Arabists were
shattered. Although Nasser was a great visionary, he was a poor military
strategist. He and his sleepy generals had no idea what the post-WW1 military
operations entailed. The humiliating defeat suffered by Egypt, Syria and Jordan
changed the military equation forever and the Arab (Muslim) world sank into
deep depression --- the first of the two deep depressions of modern times.
The
post-six-day war era:
Realizing the inability of the Arab
armies to liberate Palestine --- after all it was the Arab governments which
had exhorted the Palestinians to leave their homeland before quixotically
attempting to march into it --- the Palestinians took their destiny into their
own hands. The PLO was born. Although the Fatah, led by Yasser Arafat was the
main constituent in it, it was a secular organization with Christians like
George Habash and Leila Khalid playing significant roles in successful anti-Israel
operations. The high jacking of airliners and the Munich operations occurred.
The PLO became a deciding factor in the politics of Jordan and Lebanon. Israel’s
invasion of Lebanon took place. This was the time when all the Palestinians had
to do was to say peace and Israel would have agreed to their main demands based
on two states solution. Sadat and King Husain dropped out of belligerence and
separated themselves from the Palestinian issue on the promise of American aid.
With Yitzhak Rabin as Prime Minister of Israel, overtures for peace began and
Yasser Arafat was allowed back in Ramallah to manage the Palestinian municipalities.
In the meantime however, the Israelis stumbled upon an exciting discovery. The
Palestinians, they found out, were orphaned and had nowhere to go and therefore
there was no compelling reason to accede to their demands; the Jews did not
have to part with an inch of Palestine. Peace talks were good for Israel’s
image. If they made any offers in the “peace talks” whether in Camp David,
Madrid or Oslo, all they had to do was to go back, shell a refugee camp, change
their government, bring the cursor back to zero and wipe the slate clean, a
repetitive act in the play. They could also continue building new settlements
on the occupied territories with the American
veto in the U.N. at hand to realize the dream of “Greater Israel”.
While this was going on, the Muslim
world was witnessing a sea change in its outlook. A Shia cleric by the name of
Ruhollah Khomeini had stirred an Islamic
revolution in Iran and Muslims all around the world were fascinated with it.
Exasperated by the fruitlessness of secular politics, Palestinians also turned
to Islamism as the solution to their problems and Hamas was born, overshadowing
Fatah and other Palestinian organizations.
The Soviet Union collapsed, bringing
the Soviet aid to the oppressed nations of the world to an abrupt end, leaving
them at the mercy of the hegemonists. George
H. W. Bush took almost all the Arab countries to war against Saddam Hussein,
promising them a “New World Order” in which justice will prevail. In fact, what
followed would be injustice all around and a total betrayal. This was the
background in which Nine-eleven took place. To my mind, given the background,
nine-eleven was destined to happen. If
you trace the line of causality backwards, there is no single event at which
you can stop your finger and say: this is what did it.
Post-nine-eleven
era:
The attack on World Trade Center,
gave George W. Bush an opportunity to go back to Iraq to finish the job his
father had left incomplete and also topple the Taliban government in Afghanistan,
with Tony Blair as his second fiddle. In doing so, he converted three
countries: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan into an arena of stubborn political
chaos from which there would be no respite in the foreseeable future. Was this
a punitive act against the atrocity or an ethno-religiously motivated contemptuous
act of a born-again Christian is anybody’s
guess?
In December 2010 in Tunisia, a
street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi died by self-immolation on a street of Tunis in
protest against official harassment. This provided the spark for revolutionary
uprisings in most of the Arab World. The regimes in Tunisia and Libya were
overthrown. Bahrain was in turmoil. The kings and the Sheikhs from North Africa
to the Persian Gulf panicked and offered the civil servants and workers hefty
pay increases to stem the tide of unrest.
However, in Syria the regime decided to fight back rather than give in to
demands with help from Russia, China, Iran and Hezbollah. The conflict still
continues with most of the country converted into a demolition site, a smear on the map
which is spreading to blot out civilization in much of the Middle East. In
Egypt, protests in Tahrir Square organized by the student elite forced the
dictatorship to quit. Elections, which followed, brought Mohamed Morsi and the
Muslim Brotherhood to power. This was not acceptable to the secular bureaucracy
and the military-appointed judiciary nor was it acceptable to the U.S./Israeli
interests. A massive amount of money and intrigues went into play, reminiscent
of the dismissal of Musaddeq in 1953 by an M16-CIA operation. Morsi was deposed
and a new military dictatorship friendly to Israel came into power. This marked
the end of the Arab Spring and plunged the Arab/Muslim world into the second
era of deep depression.
The post-Arab
spring era:
In the aftermath of the demise of
the Arab Spring the world is awakened to a few hard realities:
·
There
is no such thing as an Arab nation. The dream of Quwatli, Aflak and Nasser has
been shattered.
·
Sectarian
schism within Islam is a potent destroyer; even such revolutionary regimes as Iran can easily fall
back to the old ways of the Safawis. Iran and Hezbollah’s role in fighting to
prop up a dictatorial regime in Syria, instead of facilitating a smooth
transition to the people’s rule has disappointed even their most ardent
supporters.
·
The
Salafi/Takfiri groups are the Nihilists of modern times.
·
Israel
exists because the West wants it to as a proxy to its “interests”, whatever
they may be! Judaism is not an issue; it is geo-politics. The West, in order to
project its power onto the three other “barbaric” continents, needs to establish
vice regencies on site --- a prospective additional candidate is Kurdistan.
·
The
U.S. and Israel have a clear strategy: keep conflicts alive wherever they are
raging in the Muslim World; keep Egypt and Jordan thoroughly neutralized; keep the Gulf princes
maintain their debauched lifestyle and direct them to the casinos and act
swiftly when any force emerges which could pose a threat to Israel or any other
vicegerent such as the Kurds.
·
In
order to conquer the East, the most potent weapon the U.S.A. could use was
bribery. This worked wonders in Afghanistan and changed defeat into victory in
Iraq. It saved trillions of dollars in military expenditures and thousands of
G.I. lives.
How to Counter
the West’s strategy:
As I have said in the beginning,
there are three elements in the dynamics which could be inflected. The question
of competence is difficult but not impossible. Although we disagree with their
dogmatic stances and the methodology of cruelty, the Taliban and recently the
ISIS have demonstrated that there is a capability out there of highly effective
centralized organization. It is not known if it will remain as effective if you
subtract the highly objectionable dogmas from their mode of operation but it is
obvious that if they insist on adhering to them and resort to cruelty, they
have no future in the political arena. Even if they come to power somehow, people
will sooner or later reject the doctrines they impose.
One phenomenon, which is difficult
to digest, is the apparent monolithic ideology of the ISIS. If what is being
said of them is true, the group has among its cadres many youth from the
Western countries, who are educated under the western educational systems and
are used to the western lifestyles. It is also alleged that the group consists
of many former Baathists and members of
the Iraqi army. How then can such diversity create the alleged doctrinal
rigidity?
The establishment in Iran is
diverted from the track laid by the fathers of the Revolution. A sectarian
civil war in Islam is in nobody’s interest. Iran had in the past supported the oppressed Muslim peoples in Kashmir,
Palestine, Bosnia and Kosovo and had won admiration of all the Muslims on
earth. However, its support of the dictatorship against the people of Syria,
who fought the regime under the leadership of such non-sectarian organizations
as the Brotherhood, has dismayed people and when Iran was joined by Hezbollah
and the Shia volunteers from Iraq it became a sectarian conflict by strengthening
the Takfiri elements in the opposition, who until then were minor players.
Nobody needs to be told that the House of Saud
is not exactly what we want to see as
“protectors of the Haramain”. Their money, invested in madrasas all over the world, including
Europe and America has turned out clerics and students who have spurned reason
and logic and laid obstacles in the
acquisition of knowledge and scientific progress, an affront to the instruction
of the Prophet (S). Hence, both Iran and Saudi Arabia must exit playing
politics in the Muslim World.
When the dust of the Gaza conflict
settles, there will emerge road signs in the region for both the Jews and the
Palestinians. For Seventy years the Jews have managed to hold the whole world
hostage reminding it of the Holocaust and extracting sympathy and support from
the guilt-ridden Europeans. The effect is now wearing off and they are being
judged by what they are doing to others. Research shows that the public opinion
in Europe is turning against them. In America a majority of young people is
becoming pro-Palestinian. The day will come when the public opinion in America
will force the politicians on Capitol Hill to think that the vote bank in
Brooklyn is a liability rather than an asset. However, this will not happen
without a concerted effort on the part of Palestinians and their supporters. In
various cities in North America and Europe, people who demonstrated in favor of
the victims of Gaza were mainly non-Arab and non-Palestinian. This is a window
of opportunity for all. We will miss this to our peril. The Jewish
organizations in America are spending billions of dollars to counter this trend
in public opinion.
This author has been, for years,
advocating that the Palestinians form a “rainbow coalition” with other ethnic
groups such as Blacks and Hispanics but the appeal has fallen on deaf ears.
Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular have highly insular
attitudes, which have given them a bad reputation among Blacks and other
minorities. They should realize that the days of Arab nationalism are gone.
They are alone in the Middle East. Their only chance is to unite with people
across the whole spectrum. If they expect other people to support their just
cause, they should show reciprocity and support the cause of all the oppressed
people on earth and must be seen to be
doing so.
Waheeduddin Ahmed
August 2014
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