Iraq and the Arabs' Future cont'd III
Fouad Ajami
foreignaffairs.org.
[continued...]
The first option would hark back to Desert Storm. After a campaign imbued with high moral purpose came reticence. There was no incentive to push deeper into Iraq or into Arab politics. The balance of power had been restored, and the internal order of the Arab states did not concern George H.W. Bush. Indeed, Bush appeared to have a kind of benign affection for the Arab monarchies. His attitude toward the gulf states resembled what the British took to distant realms of their empire before "reform" caught up: love of pageantry, a fascination with exotic style, and a tolerance for time-honored traditions of rule.
The authority that the United States gained in the aftermath of Desert Storm was used to bring together Arabs and Israelis at Madrid in 1991. George H.W. Bush had resisted "linkage" between the Persian Gulf and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but he was to make it the cornerstone of U.S. strategy after the guns had fallen silent. The internal order of the House of Saud and the governance of Kuwait were left to the rulers of those lands. True, some liberal secularists there had thought that the United States would press for internal reforms -- in Kuwait in particular. But democracy is not a foreigner's gift, nor was its export a prospect that Bush ever entertained.
For Iraq itself, there was to be no Wilsonian redemption. Bush had called upon the Iraqis to "take matters into their own hands." His call had been answered in the hills of Kurdistan and in the southern part of the country, where rebellion erupted in Basra, then spreading into the Shi`ite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. For a brief moment, the mastery of the regime cracked as prisons were emptied, and the insurgents were joined by soldiers straggling in from the front. But with the help of the regime's helicopter gunships, the rebellions were crushed with unspeakable cruelty.
Some key players within the Bush administration were eager for a "clean break" from the war. This was particularly true of the then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell. "Neither revolt had a chance," Powell would later write of the Kurdish and Shi`a rebellions. "Nor, frankly, was their success a goal of our policy." It was a cruel ending for a campaign billed as the opening act of a new international order. The reordering of Iraq had not been a goal of the war.
In the intervening years, however, the ground has shifted in the Arab world, and the stakes for the United States have risen. The Iraqi dictator has hung on, outlasting and mocking his countless obituaries. And the familiar balance of power in the region sent America's way the terror of September 11. The United States has been caught in the crossfire between the regimes in the saddle and the Islamic insurgents. These insurgents could not win in Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, or Syria, or on the Arabian Peninsula. So they took to the road and targeted the United States, and they were brutally candid about their motives. They did not strike at America because it was a patron of Israel; rather, they drew a distinction between the "near enemy" (their own rulers) and the "far enemy," the United States.
Those entrenched regimes could not be beaten at home. Their power, as well as their people's resigned acceptance that their rulers' sins would be dwarfed by the terrors that Islamists would unleash were they to prevail, had settled the fight in favor of the rulers. The targeting of America came out of this terrible political culture of Arab lands. If the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the physician Ayman al-Zawahiri, could not avenge himself against the military regime of Hosni Mubarak for the torture he endured at the hands of his country's security services, why not target Mubarak's U.S. patrons?
A similar motivation propelled the Saudi members of al Qaeda. These men could not sack the House of Saud. The dynasty's wealth, its political primacy, and the conservative religious establishment gave the rulers a decided edge in their struggle with the Islamists; the war against America was the next best thing. The great power was an easier target: it was more open, more trusting, and its liberties more easily subverted by a band of jihadists. The jihadists and their leader, bin Laden, aimed at the dynasty's carefully nurtured self-image. The children of Arabia who had boarded those planes on September 11 and the countless young men held at the Guantanamo Bay military base could not be disowned. Bin Laden got the crisis in Saudi-American relations he aimed for. Those 15 young Saudis were put on those planes to challenge the old notions about the stability of the monarchy. Grant the devil his due: bin Laden knew the premium the dynasty placed on its privileged relationship with the United States. He had an exquisite feel for the regime's cultural style, its dread of open disagreements and of scrutiny. He treated the House of Saud to its worst nightmare, puncturing the official narrative of a realm at peace.
That veneer of Saudi-American harmony was destined to crack. The Saudi population had changed; it was younger, poorer, and more disgruntled. Its airwaves crackled with bitter anti-Americanism, and a younger breed of radicalized preachers had challenged the standard Wahhabi doctrine of obedience to the rulers. As the winds of anti-Americanism and antimodernism blew at will, the rulers stepped aside. The royal family was cautious: it rode with America but let the anti-Americanism have its play.
CASUS BELLI
The case for war must rest in part on the kind of vision the United States has for Iraq. The dread of "nation-building" must be cast aside. It is too late in the annals of nations for outright foreign rule. But there will have to be a sustained American presence if the new order is to hold and take root. Iraq is a society with substantial social capital and the region's second-largest reserves of oil. It has traditions of literacy, learning, and technical competence. It can draw on the skills of a vast diaspora of means and sophistication, waves of people who fled the country's turbulent politics and the heavy hand of its rulers. If Iraq's pain has been great in the modern era, so too, has been its betrayed promise. There were skills and hope that the polity could be made right, that the abundance of oil and water and the relative freedom from an overbearing religious tradition would pave the way toward modernity and development. |
