|
I've always feared that people who talk about
the thinking of an entire demographic - in the case of the articles cited below,
the "Arab mind" - ran some significant risks. It's dangerous to think that a
group of individual people, all of them richly variegated in experience and
environment could somehow form a coherent and undifferentiated aggregate, and
that this "mind" could be usefully described. This kind of thinking runs the
risk of tiptoeing up to, and perhaps tripping over the edge of the precipice of
racism. After all, with the political divisions in this country, not to mention
the West at large, any discussion of the "Western Mind" is bound to cover a very
great deal of ground - so very much so as to make the description nearly useless
in practice. And what's sauce for the Western goose, the idea that, even in
aggregation, we remain individuals that are too complex and differentiated to be
broadly categorized or neatly pigeonholed, should probably also be sauce for the
Arab gander. Not to mention south Asians or east Asians or Orthodox Christianity
for that matter.
With all that said,
it's probably nevertheless true that cultures and civilizations can be
distinguished one from the other by the differing foundational truths which
color their perceptions of the world around them, their civilizational
self-identification, in other words. We do things this way, the other does them
that way - they are therefore different.
|
|
Take democracy: Part of what has come to be
called the "neo-con" agenda for forced change in the Middle East is that much of
the Arab world's violent dissatisfaction with the West is an other-directed
response to the inherently illiberal repression of domestic popular will.
Thinking like this is a function of the fact that we in the West tend to take
representative democracy as given, a natural right, as simultaneously the
highest end and natural steady state of political life. We look at other forms
of government; theological, oligarchical, despotic, collectivist or fascistic as
inherently suspicious. The "Rights of Man " may have been a bold statement
back in Thomas Paine's time, but we've all pretty much internalized his
arguments by now. Some of us, either consciously or otherwise, extend that
à
priori philosophical understanding into the
hopeful assumption that other folks would be like us, if only they could - if
only, in other words, their tyrannical governments would take the boot from
their necks. We'd like to believe this because we nobly hope that it is true,
but also for selfish reasons as well: Because a free people, given a choice,
prefer the fruits of peace to the labors of war, and because we share a common
understanding that democracies do not make war on one
another.The greatest development in
Western civilization since the Reformation (and one that still distinguishes us
from the civilization to our east) was the acceptance during the Renaissance
period of the Scientific Method - the idea that truths, whether we call them
scientific principles or laws of nature, in order to have any meaning at all,
ought to be testable - that experiments can and should be designed to verify
them. Even today, the argument against the theory of intelligent design rests
for many on the basis of scientific utility: None of its precepts are testable,
and as a theory to describe the world scientifically, it therefore fails in this
essential requirement. And it's also important to understand that test outcomes,
or experiment results if you prefer, are not biased by the color of language
like "success" or "failure." A true scientist would never say that "the
experiment failed," because that's not what experiments do. Rather, experiments
merely provide new data, which is used in the context of what has been
previously proven to add to the store of human knowledge.
This brings us to the experiment
playing out in Iraq's Sunni Triangle, and what we discover from that experiment,
keeping in mind that there are no "failures" or "successes" in experiments -
only gains in knowledge. Because what we discover, both about the Arabs and
their willingness to self-govern and ourselves, and our willingness to help
them, will ultimately inform the next few generations of Islam's interaction
with the West, and vice-versa, much as the overwhelming imbalance of military
power in favor of the West informed the last two and half centuries of our 1400
year-old association. What if we
truly discover that democracy is not for Arabs? Or that, to look at the other,
and in my view, much more likely side of the coin, that we in the West are
incapable of making the sacrifices required to enable that democratization? What
if we truly come to believe that they are, as a people, better suited to be
ground under the heel of domestic repression? Or that even if they are not, then
relieving them from the pressure of that boot is none of our affair?
We must do this while simultaneously
being conscious of the fact that in a tyranny, eventually the reins of power
devolve not to the most noble, nor to the most organized, but instead eventually
to the most brutal and psychopathic. We must condemn the Iraqi people over the
short term to an awful fate, a continuation, even expansion of the ritual and
orgiastic bloodbath. We must leave them to the tender mercies of the very worst
kinds of people until the exhausted populace, bled almost to death and all the
way to apathy falls prostrate again beneath the kind of tyranny that none of us
can fully comprehend, gifted as we are, and for no better merit of our own than
the good fortune of having been born here, rather than there.
We must do this while keeping in
mind the shrinking size of the world we live in and the democratization of
technology, if not of politics. And all this In an era when biological and
chemical weapons capable of killing tens of thousand can be made in a bathtub,
and designs for nuclear weaponry can be downloaded from the internet - even if
it were not possible to buy complete systems from rogue nations or underground
organizations in failed or failing
states.We will have to evaluate the
security of our civilization carefully in such a context. I wonder what we will
conclude?Well, we will at least want
to know what it is that is on the Arab
mind.It is with that frame of
reference in mind that I read this article by David Adesnik (of Oxblog) on the blog
"Democracy Arsenal." In it, Adesnik notes the difference between two camps of
thought. First, there are those like Michael Scott Doran who, colored by Western
philosophical à
priori, presume that tyrannical Arab
governments are themselves the source their people's resentment - both that
externally channeled by the regimes themselves against the West (especially
America, for it's cultural dominance of the West as well as it's support for the
state of Israel) and also that used by political movements inside the Arab
countries as a weapon to wield against internal opposition. He contrasts that
view with Democracy Arsenal contributor Michael Kraig who says (in
part):-
I find on Democracy Arsenal (and
other blogs) a certain amount of agreement with the status quo policy conception
that the anger in the Middle East is due to internal, domestic
repression/oppression/injustice under autocratic governments, and that the anger
toward Israel, the West, the US, and the globalizing world order is a byproduct
of this, or an escape valve for this. Indeed, I've heard this from
numerous US officials and non-officials throughout my work for the Stanley
Foundation; you could almost call it a standing epistemic agreement in the US
policy community.
-
Unfortunately, it's wrong -- or at
least, half-wrong. There is of course an "escape valve" factor at work
here. But after traveling to the Near East and the Persian Gulf for a
combined total of two months this year (in a cross-country outreach tour for a
Stanley product translated into Arabic), what I found was nearly everyone saying
that "democracy" is not just about internal practices -- there is also an
international dimension to justice, development, and democracy. And this
is where anger toward perceived neo-colonialist aggression, not too different
from the British mandate in Egypt and the French mandate in Lebanon and Syria,
comes in. The truth is that people feel oppressed at one in and the same
time by their own governments (internally) AND by perceived anti-Islamic,
anti-Arab forces at the international or global level (externally), and neither
of these exists in a vacuum apart from the other. There is a palpable
feeling throughout the Middle East that their values and way of life are
potentially or actually under assault by hostile attempts to subvert true
Arabism and Islamism and turn it into a Western template. Israel's actions
fall under this umbrella, but by no means is it just Israel alone; Israel is
just sort of the lead "indicator", if you will, of overall Western intentions,
especially US
intentions.
-
Put
aside for the moment the curious notion that there can be such a thing as an
"international democracy" when certain of those who would be voting members have
shot their way to power, and from a carrion perch above their enslaved
populations hope to assert a moral parity with the established democratic
states. Kraig appears to submit that the Arab "Street" is both justifiably angry
about their internal political repression and simultaneously nurturing what they
sincerely hold to be legitimate international grievances (it all comes back to
Israel and Palestine) and that all of this is combining in a toxic witch's brew
which is causing the West so much trouble these days.
Hmm.
I wonder. It's useful at this
point to remember, as Adesnik himself does, that while Usama bin Laden no doubt
harbored little love for the state of Israel before 9/11, nothing about the
Palestinian issue colored any of his extensive anti-Western diatribe until
after
that date. If Israel's existence formed any part of the global jihad's
justification for 9/11, it only did so retroactively. Up until that point, bin
Laden's outrage was directed against the Saudi regime itself, which was allowing
the infidel West to park American soldiers on the holy homeland of Mecca and
Medina. These two cities constitute the sacred soul of Islam, and their
protection is the only source of the House of Saud's legitimacy in the Arab
world. Permitting foreign troops to be stationed there was deeply offensive to
bin Laden, whose ability to take offense was no doubt enlarged somewhat by the
knowledge of the fact that those US troops were a demonstration of American
political support for the same Saudi regime that had declared him
persona non
grata in the Kingdom. American support for
the Sauds, however reluctant, was based on the
realpolitik
presumption that their lamentable Wahhabist philosophy was, in the short term
anyway, the least worst option available -
especially when contrasted against bin Laden's brand of messianic theocratic
revanchism - his lowing over the lost lands of
al
Andalus, for example, not to mention his ideal
of the universal caliphate. All of that would start from the jihadist seizure of
the Saudi peninsula: With control of the holy cities (and profits from Arabian
oil fields), he would have not just Islam's soul in his clutches, but also its
purse. With those two advantages, his jihad could recommence its stalled march
on the decadent West, bringing us not freedom, but rather submission. Getting
past the gates of Vienna has always been the goal, and Israel is only a pawn on
the corner of the jihadist chess board, to be swept aside almost as an
afterthought.
Who stood in bin Laden's
way of capturing the reins of political power in the Arabian peninsula? The US
government, of course, and US troops. Why were the troops in Saudi? Because of
Saddam Hussein, and the threat that he presented to one element of the world's
economic lifeblood. Saddam himself is gone from power now, soon to be tried and
if he is found guilty, as he almost certainly must, then he will very likely
hang and few men will have deserved it more. But while the US soldiers have
departed Saudi for points north and south, and bin Laden himself hides in some
filthy cave somewhere on the Afghan/Pakistan border the war smolders on, much as
it has through fits and starts for the last 1400 years. The only difference now
is that America, fighting for the Western ideals of freedom and democracy is
trying not to defeat the Arab mind so much as to liberate
it.
This is deadly serious, this
experiment. It is the work of our time, our age. So very much relies on what we
discover here.
|
