April 13, 2003
"HI, I'M ISLAM AND I'M AN ADDICT":
The Sand Wall (THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, April 13, 2003, NY Times)Throughout this war, Saddamism was peddled by Al Jazeera television, Arab intellectuals and the Arab League. You cannot imagine how much distress there is among certain Arab elites that the people of Iraq preferred liberation by America to more defiance under Saddam. The morning after Baghdad was liberated, Abdul Hamid Ahmad, editor of The Gulf News, wrote, like so many of his colleagues: "This is a heartbreaking moment for any Arab, seeing marines roaming the streets of Baghdad."The wall of Saddamism, which helped bad leaders stay in power and young Arabs remain backward and angry, was as dangerous as Saddam. "The social, political, cultural and economic malaise in this part of the world had become a threat to American security — it produced 9/11," said Shafeeq Ghabra, president of the American University of Kuwait. "This war was a challenge to the entire Arab system, which is why so many Arabs opposed it. The war to liberate Kuwait from Iraq [in 1991] was outpatient surgery. This war was open-heart surgery."
But this open-heart surgery will succeed in toppling both Saddam and Saddamism only if we are successful in creating a healthy Iraq — an Arab state where people can find dignity, not just by saying no to the West, but by building a decent, tolerant, modernizing society that they can be proud of, an Arab state where people can speak the truth and that other Arabs would want to emulate. The widespread looting that has followed the fall of Saddam tells me just how hard that will be. So far, all that we have unleashed in Iraq is chaos, not freedom. There is no civil society here. We are starting from scratch.
And then we must also take down the third wall — the wall of cement, fear and barbed wire being erected between Israelis and Palestinians. We must defuse this conflict. If we let this Israeli-Palestinian wall stand, it will reinforce the wall of Saddamism. Arab dictators will hide behind this conflict as an excuse not to change, Arab intellectuals will use it to delegitimize U.S. power out here, and the enemies of the new leaders in Iraq will use it to embarrass them for working with us.
If we might borrow, and correct, Mr. Friedman’s medical metaphor, this war was less surgery and more of an "intervention". As the very existence of "Saddamism" shows, the Arab world has, not a heart problem but, an addiction. They are drunk on self-destructive ideas like Saddamism, Islamicism, pan-Arabism, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, etc. The unusual problem with addiction is that, unlike a mere physical problem that can be treated by a doctor, addicts have to want to be cured.
Posted by Orrin Judd at April 13, 2003 2:04 PM
The thing that I don't understand is how so-called Arab intellectuals can be so xenophobic regarding traditional western culture. There is either a huge inferiority complex involved or it is plain "racism", for lack of a better word. Maybe a combination of the two.
The ideas fostered and consumed by the Arab intellectuals and clerics, thus "enabling"the rabid rank and file, are pure humbug, divorced from any tolerant tradition and will lead to nowhere other than to death and destruction.
There is a connection or an attraction in the Arab world, I suppose, to the statist ideologies spawned by "intellectuals" of the west and put into practice during the 20th century, especially the nationalist / socialist varieties. What other reason can there be for the nearly consistent reign of tyranny in that part of the world? If history has any meaning at all, the Arab world would hopefully learn from those errors instead of repeating them. The mayhem unleashed on the Christian west during that period should serve as a lesson for Arabs. Possibly that is where the attraction lies. I hope not, for their sake.
A complex topic, to be sure.
I've been thinking about the role of mythologies in the health of a nation or culture (nothing new here...). All nations and cultures have their mythologies (in the sense of national or group stories rather than "untruths"), and I imagine that there are some that are constructive and forward looking and others that are destructive and lock a group or culture into a past from which it is difficult to emerge, or difficult to be forward looking.
Might it be possible to isolate such mythologies into "useful" (constructive) and "unuseful" (destructive) ones so as to figure out a way to find a better path.
Or is that too pragmatic? Or unrealistic?
Can one even choose one's mythologies?....
Bernard Lewis, among I suppose others, has argued that one of Islam's great problems is that it was a religion of political power pretty much from its birth. Where Judaism and Christianity were slave/lower class religions and therefore make no claim to control the State, Islam ran the State and developed an ethos that it must run the State (and every other facet of life). It is, in effect, totalitarian because it controlled the totality, while Judeo-Christianity accepts separation of religion from other parts of life because the religions in fact controlled so little.
Posted by: oj at April 13, 2003 9:09 PMUp until 313 AD, anyhow.
Barry, I am now reading "The Challenge of
Fundamentalism" by Bassam Tibi, who has
been promoting what you are talking about.
He calls it "cross-cultural morality."
As Tibi admits, the situation has gotten worse,
not better, since he began preaching in the
'70s.
I prefer an entirely different interpretation.
Unlike Muslim moderates like Tibi, who perforce
have to local Islamic fundamentalism in
something recent (so they can call back to
a better Islam in the distant past), what if
Islam has simply not moved while the rest
of the world did.
And it did not fail to move because it did not
comprehend the advantages of modernism,
but because it did not and does not see them
as advantages.
oj, I find your likening of the Bush Doctrine as a kind of 12-step program rather apt.
Except that for such programs to work, the addict has to attend meetings (after making that all-so-difficult self-confession).
Problem is, there doesn't seem to be any chance of that happening.
But if so, are we prepared to say, "We love ya, Syria," We love ya Libya," "We're with you 100% Yemen," etc.?
Barry:
We have to be. Arabs are no different than the rest of us, if they're willing to liberalize their societies we have to be there to help any way we can.