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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (46779)	9/24/2002 9:41:17 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

Good points, Hawk. Here is an interesting article by the editor of Arabic Newsweek, who says that the fall of Saddam will provide shock therapy to wake the Arabs from their political dreamworld. Yes, "political dreamworld" describes the Arab regimes' disfunction very well. ______________________________________________________ Shock Therapy Why a U.S. attack against Iraq could launch an era of pragmatism in the region By Mohammed Al-Jassem NEWSWEEK IN ARABIC Sept. 30 issue — Even if the United States launched a full-scale propaganda blitz, it couldn’t convince the Arab “street”—or general public—that overthrowing Saddam Hussein is a just and logical thing to do. SOME ARABS ARE PROUD of Saddam’s development and possession of weapons of mass destruction. The more the Bush administration tries to prove that Saddam possesses those weapons, the further it gets from achieving its goal of winning converts to its cause. But the irony is that only an actual invasion of Iraq and the overthrowing of Saddam would produce a radical shift in public opinion, changing the terms of the reference of the public debate. For now, the rhetoric used to convince American public opinion does not work at all to convince Arab public opinion. In fact, this rhetoric has become a source of inspiration for Arab sloganeering. This is in part the result of widespread anti-Americanism. But, more importantly, it’s a result of the fact that the Arabs are living part of their daily lives in a dream world. They sink into a political dream world, fed by the backlash to American rhetoric that is eagerly seized upon and spiced up by Arab intellectuals. The leaders of the Arab world are afraid to dispel or challenge those dreams, since they have no way to justify their own ineffective governments. As they see it, they have to employ doublespeak. In terms of the current crisis, this means publicly rejecting a strike against Iraq, while privately insisting that it should be a painful and final blow to a ruler and regime they all despise. The Arabs need shock therapy, some kind of tremor that would bring them back to reality and away from their political dreamscape. Egypt’s loss in the 1967 war against Israel was the sort of shock that did away with the nationalist slogans prevalent since the July 1952 revolution carried out by Gen. Gamal Abdul Nasser. If the 1967 shock laid the ground for the spread of Islamism as an alternative to the nationalism, the “Saddam Shock” might be what is needed to launch the era of pragmatism. The Islamist mantra has not been dropped yet, but it was tested in the Afghan war and did nothing for its supporters except spark a few demonstrations here and there, which soon died out. Then the Islamic movements across the Arab world got busy trying to clean up their image and prove that they were in no way connected to terrorism. Some even tried to condemn the terrorist attack on the United States, and wanted that condemnation to serve as a certificate of innocence. The Islamic movements also raced to present their approach to Islamic thought as “moderate” in an attempt to escape any connection to extremism. This has resulted in a loss of self-respect among Islamic movements. But if the Afghanistan war has embarrassed the Islamic movements, there are at least two things that have prevented the collapse of the Islamic credo. The first is that, in purely operational terms, Osama bin Laden’s attack against the United States was successful and very painful, and it changed the face of America. The second is the uncertainty about the fate of bin Laden, the lack of clear-cut evidence that he was killed by American firepower. The mystery surrounding bin Laden’s fate has given the Islamic movements a chance to regain their balance. The fall of the Taliban was not a major coup for America, but the uncertainty about what happened to bin Laden is considered a coup for his supporters. Nonetheless, the American war on terrorism will continue to weaken the Islamic movements. Most Arab regimes are only too happy to use this opportunity to further diminish their influence. I believe that the Islamic movements realize that it would be a mistake to support Saddam Hussein at this stage, and that they will not repeat the mistake they made when they supported him after the invasion of Kuwait. Saddam’s fall will cause the Arabs to be shattered psychologically. Political depression will set in. I do not rule out the possibility that some Arab regimes will suffer from domestic unrest, triggered by public outrage. Those regimes will find themselves face to face with their people, forced to deal with domestic issues after the United States succeeds in shutting down the last despot who maintained the illusion that Arab slogans can nurture a people. If Washington should also succeed in making the Arab countries mediators in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather than parties to a broader Arab-Israeli endless war, then the region will really be transformed. The Saddam shock will end an Arab era that has spanned more than five decades, beginning with the war of 1948 against the newly-created state of Israel. The Arabs have tried all sorts of political slogans during this era. The nationalists had the dream of pan-Arab unity. The Islamists had the dream of an Islamic state. I don’t see any new dreams in the works these days. But after Saddam’s fall, the dismantling of the extremist Islamic parties and the containment of the Palestinian issue, most Arab rulers will no longer be able to hide from their people by invoking the dangers of “external threats.” The Arab leaders will lose the rationalization for the use of “crisis logic,” a phrase coined by political scientist Mohammed Jaber Al-Ansari to denote the way the Arabs handle politics, as opposed to the logic of a normal state of affairs. The next stage in Arab history will be one of internal domestic confrontations. After Saddam, not one Arab regime, including Syria and Libya, will dare oppose the United States, and most Arab regimes will be forced to pledge themselves to slogans like “renewal, reform and change” as a way of keeping their frustrated masses at bay. In this era, the United States will have to find ways to befriend the Arab masses, not the beleaguered regimes. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mohammed Al-Jassem is the editor-in-chief of Newsweek in Arabic msnbc.com