Re: ESCAPING ARAB FAILURE
I keep returning to Peters article because some things in it niggle at me.
Peters is not getting to the nub of the matter. He writes
In the United States, campus-generated political correctness was never more than a joke - capable of turning somber conservatives purple but unable to alter anything that matters. The far more dangerous form of political correctness is that which prevails in the dream-world of diplomacy: We pretend that all civilizations have equal merit.
But they don't. It's time to face up to the functional and moral collapse of the Arab world - if we can't describe the problem honestly, we shall never deal with it effectively.
Arab civilization has failed.
Yes, it has, but he hasn't described what has made it fail. It has failed because it's primitive, pre-enlightenment, or pre-modern. Use whatever term you wish, they are about equivalent.
In pre-modern places people make the Faustian deal with rulers for protection from robbery and murder. Unfortunately, the terms and consequences of that deal aren't looked at carefully enough because they are at the root of difficulties in Iraq, and the Middle East generally.
The actual terms are more along these lines: the people would obey the ruler if he limits his own depredations to less than those of his competitors - be a "good king." But eventually, history shows, the rulers become increasingly rapacious and tyranical, get less support from the people, and are eventually overthrown in favour of less greedy competitors, or are replaced by even more ruthless competitors, or by invading rulers.
War is waged on the basis of agrandizement and soldiers were rewarded with loot and captives, mostly female.
Repeat for centuries. Cycles of repeating despotism.
Iraq, until recently, most closely and extremely, follows this model. (As do Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, and Egypt).This is why Peters is absolutely correct when he says,
The Arab Middle East has become the world's first entirely parasitical culture; all it does is to imitate poorly, consume voraciously, spit hatred, export death and create nothing.
Arab civilization offers its people no promising future, only rhetoric about a past whose achievements have been as exaggerated as they were impermanent. The present is a bloody, heartless muddle.
but he is wrong to say "Arab civilization has degenerated" because it never developed enough to degenerate the way (eg) Germany did between 1920 and 1945. It's an archaic leftover with an outrageous birthrate, with political principles predicated on robbery and murder, with ideologies growing from those principles, with access to the modern world's technologies, and with accesst to its institutions but with no positive investment in them.
Here is what turned my crank in Peters's article. He's better than this:
...that the psychological premises of an entire civilization might be dysfunctional. Arab failure isn't about that which has been done to the Middle East, but that which the Middle East has done to itself
What the hell can you do about a "psychological premise" as it applies to a whole civilization? Give it psychotherapy? Obviously not, but you can do something about the continued practice of robbery and murder as personal and governmental instruments that makes it so dangerous to the modern world. The modern world dealt with the Japanese and Germans on this basis in the last century.
In any case, not everyone (probably a majority, if the Iraq polls are a reliable indication) living in the Middle East, or in Iraq particularly, likes or participates in, or wants to participate, in the robbery and murder way of politics. They want to be modern, but for decades, if not centuries, those who have been obviously modern in inclination, have been constantly jailed, tortured and murdered by those in power, as the mass graves in Iraq testify. It's no wonder at all they've become timorous.
The article found at this URL
iraqpress.org\00rdata\9911.htm is a short, recent history of corruption (a euphimism for robbery and murder) in Iraq. The author's conclusions are correct: The repeating despot cycle can only be overcome by imposition of rule of law and democracy.
Modern places changed this cycle by replacing the rulers with self rule. And by making a lot of rules, penalties and procedures limiting the amount of agrandizement, murder and robbery elected representatives and governments could do.
(The only two places in the Middle East where this has happened are Turkey and Israel where enough of the population believes in the primacy of self rule and reason and has the power to enforce it.)
There is not an alternative. An "enlightened despotism" partakes too much of the pre-modern structure. It looks like the beginning of a new despotic cycle, and given what the Coalition wants to achieve, appears as an admission of failure, and thus as an encouragement to continue in the old ways of robbery and murder. Rubbishy talk of a "Saddam lite" is just that - he will become a "Saddam heavy".
Modernity, which means democracy and reason, can only be forced in place by sidelining, discrediting, jailing, and/or killing those who act against it. There should be no ethical problem doing this since those against it are for robbery and murder.
The Coalition has been doing this but with not quite enough gusto. This is why there is the present upsurge in local warfare. Those who still aspire to the old way of doing things still see some hope of continuance, if they can just discourage the majority of Iraqis, and the US, from fighting fiercely enough for the modern way.
It is absolutely necessary, if the more modern citizens of Fallujah can't deliver the terrorists, and if the mainstream Shiite clergy can't deliver Sadr, that the coalition take them. Centuries of murder, robbery and terror leave their mark, and if the murderers, robbers and terrorists are not seen to be destroyed, then they will be perceived as winning - because they always have won - no matter how few their numbers, how little their real power, or how great the hatred against them.
This is the "psychological premise" Peters mentions but doesn't describe. It has a corrollary. The more energetically the Coalition and its Iraqi allies attack and destroy the robbers and murderers, the more support it and its allies will get from Iraqis. |
