Christiaan
22-12-04, 12:54
Forget, Hell!
The next two decades could bring more prosperity, self-respect and democracy to the Middle East. But first, we must all address the power of collective memory
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Christopher Dickey
Paris Bureau Chief, Middle East Regional Editor
Newsweek
Updated: 3:27 p.m. ET Dec. 21, 2004
Nov. 18 - One of the more unusual souvenirs brought home from Iraq this year is a shoulder patch bought in the embattled Green Zone, where thousands of Americans (and the government they support) are holed up in the heart of Baghdad. A lot of the T-shirts and trinkets there have American eagles and American flags and fighting slogans, the usual pumped-up, hoo-ha stuff peddled to soldiers. But this is a little different. It shows the Confederate battle flag from the American Civil War modified, weirdly, for the Iraqi Civil War. On one diagonal is the English phrase “In God we trust.” On the other diagonal, written in Arabic, is “Allah Akbar,” God is great, just as Saddam Hussein put it on the Iraqi flag during the 1990s.
Now, I don’t know who comes up with these things, or what they’re thinking. But as I look at this patch pinned to my bulletin board, it’s a potent reminder of the most enormous obstacle between the Middle East and the future. Put simply: memory.
The Middle East and the American South have this one thing in common: they’re not parts of the world where people just turn the page. To this day, many Americans in the southern United States recall—not always clearly or accurately, but emotionally, bitterly, viscerally—what it was like to be conquered and occupied by Union troops 140 years ago. And there’s no end of folks who, when you tell them they should just put that ancient history behind them, answer with a two-word response that ends all argument: “Forget, Hell!”
If you try to look ahead to what the Middle East may be like 15—or for that matter, 150—years from now, keep that in mind. This is a region where the wounds of defeat and the humiliations of occupation in the last several centuries have never once had the chance to heal before there were new defeats and new occupations. Peace accords, economic growth and the blessings of technology do not erase the sense of historical grievance. At best, they only help people to live with it. Borders may be redrawn, oil wealth redistributed, men and women educated, but the injury experienced by Muslims, internalized by them as a result of their experience in Palestine and now Iraq, will continue to shape the future of the region long after all of us are gone.
So, er, what’s the good news that I mentioned in last week’s Shadowland (“The Cassandra Quotient.”)
Well, the Middle East of 2020 will look very different than the Middle East of today. That much, I think, we can say with certainty. And while not all the changes will bring glad tidings for Washington, they could bring some self-respect and widening prosperity to a region that’s lacked both for a long time. That would be bad news for once-and-future Bin Ladens.
Consider the surge in oil prices over the last year. Revenues are hundreds of billions of dollars higher than expected, and a lot of that cash, instead of going straight back to the United States or Europe as it did in the past, is staying in the Middle East. “The whole region is booming and we are on the receiving end,” a businessman friend wrote me in an e-mail from Beirut this morning. His own corporation’s revenues were up more than 25 per cent last quarter. “Last month there was in IPO of a real-estate company in Dubai that was 400 times over-subscribed,” he tells me, “raising over 400 billion dirhams [$109 billion].” If this speculative wealth starts spreading out to the general population it can blunt the edge of Islamic fundamentalism - or be used to stifle any real reform at all. But Osama bin Laden clearly is worried. His unprecedented 70-minute musing on the Web last week was a call on his followers to attack the sources of this windfall oil wealth. Irony of ironies: every attack will send prices higher.
Another positive trend is toward serious autonomy, if not outright independence, for many of the peoples thrown together into untenable “nation-states” last century by Europe’s colonial cartographers. In what a discussion paper from the CIA-affiliated National Intelligence Council has called a “doomsday scenario,” we could see unbridled Balkan-style chaos, fragmentation, ethnic cleansing and the spawning of many new “failed or failing states.” But the American occupation of Iraq also has opened the way for a loose federalism that could actually serve as a model for the region. In any case, the era when one favored colonial client could lord it over every other group in a country (with the backing of Britain, France or the United States) is at last drawing to a close.
Indeed, the era of absolute American domination, if it ever existed, is waning pretty fast. Up through the 1980s, the presidents, emirs and mullahs of the Middle East played the Soviet Union off against the United States. The rivalry they’ll exploit over the next several years will be the one between the United States and China. Just for instance: in October, China cut a $100 billion deal with Iran for long-term oil supplies. The mullahs, in the process, won a powerful long-term friend on the United Nations Security Council. They may get from China the international cover they need to keep the whole world guessing for years to come about when and how and whether Iran will join the nuclear club.
The information revolution has not gone quite the way most of us predicted, hopefully, back in 1990. Satellite television and the Internet have proved to be more effective propaganda tools for radical fundamentalists than pro-Western free-thinkers. Memories of past wrongs—pervasive feelings of historical injustice—give them their best ideological ammunition. But just because the Bush administration is so woefully inept at the global war of ideas doesn’t mean the fight is lost forever.
One of the great battlegrounds for the future may be, as it were, in the bedroom. Women throughout the Muslim world represent a separate-and-unequal majority with rising levels of education and a growing desire to assert their rights. Political and economic power remain far out of reach for most of them at the moment, but their aspirations cannot be contained forever—probably not even for the next 15 years.
Democratization, it’s clear, will be a very slow process. But there is more of a foundation for it than many pundits would lead you to believe. Egypt, the demographic and cultural powerhouse of the Arab world, has been experimenting with parliamentary institutions since the mid-19th century. They have atrophied in the last 50 years, but they haven’t died altogether. Unlike Saudi Arabia, which never had the slightest experience of democracy, Egypt doesn’t have to start from scratch. There’s a dim glimmer of hope in the fact that a new secular opposition party, the first in more than two decades, was able to battle through the courts and win legal recognition this year.
As I write all this, I’m actually starting to feel a little optimistic. And then I look up at that weird flag from Confederate Baghdad, and I realize none of these incipient trends will amount to much if we don’t address the power of memory head-on. We can’t make Arabs and Muslims forget the dislocation and humiliation of the Palestinians by holding up an out-of-date “Road Map” for peace (while handing the car-keys to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon). We can’t convince them our occupation of Iraq is really a liberation while leveling insurgent cities, and relying on the British—their occupiers in the last century—to give us lessons on colonial administration. (British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who popped up in Baghdad today, is the last person the Iraqis want or need to teach them the value of democracy.)
The only way even to start healing the memories of an occupation, in fact, is to end the occupation. I don’t see that happening soon in Iraq, the West Bank, or even Gaza. But until it does, one way or the other, every bright shining initiative for the region will come up against the corrosive anger that occupation creates. We cannot and must not forget that, unless we want hell to pay for decades to come.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
The next two decades could bring more prosperity, self-respect and democracy to the Middle East. But first, we must all address the power of collective memory
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Christopher Dickey
Paris Bureau Chief, Middle East Regional Editor
Newsweek
Updated: 3:27 p.m. ET Dec. 21, 2004
Nov. 18 - One of the more unusual souvenirs brought home from Iraq this year is a shoulder patch bought in the embattled Green Zone, where thousands of Americans (and the government they support) are holed up in the heart of Baghdad. A lot of the T-shirts and trinkets there have American eagles and American flags and fighting slogans, the usual pumped-up, hoo-ha stuff peddled to soldiers. But this is a little different. It shows the Confederate battle flag from the American Civil War modified, weirdly, for the Iraqi Civil War. On one diagonal is the English phrase “In God we trust.” On the other diagonal, written in Arabic, is “Allah Akbar,” God is great, just as Saddam Hussein put it on the Iraqi flag during the 1990s.
Now, I don’t know who comes up with these things, or what they’re thinking. But as I look at this patch pinned to my bulletin board, it’s a potent reminder of the most enormous obstacle between the Middle East and the future. Put simply: memory.
The Middle East and the American South have this one thing in common: they’re not parts of the world where people just turn the page. To this day, many Americans in the southern United States recall—not always clearly or accurately, but emotionally, bitterly, viscerally—what it was like to be conquered and occupied by Union troops 140 years ago. And there’s no end of folks who, when you tell them they should just put that ancient history behind them, answer with a two-word response that ends all argument: “Forget, Hell!”
If you try to look ahead to what the Middle East may be like 15—or for that matter, 150—years from now, keep that in mind. This is a region where the wounds of defeat and the humiliations of occupation in the last several centuries have never once had the chance to heal before there were new defeats and new occupations. Peace accords, economic growth and the blessings of technology do not erase the sense of historical grievance. At best, they only help people to live with it. Borders may be redrawn, oil wealth redistributed, men and women educated, but the injury experienced by Muslims, internalized by them as a result of their experience in Palestine and now Iraq, will continue to shape the future of the region long after all of us are gone.
So, er, what’s the good news that I mentioned in last week’s Shadowland (“The Cassandra Quotient.”)
Well, the Middle East of 2020 will look very different than the Middle East of today. That much, I think, we can say with certainty. And while not all the changes will bring glad tidings for Washington, they could bring some self-respect and widening prosperity to a region that’s lacked both for a long time. That would be bad news for once-and-future Bin Ladens.
Consider the surge in oil prices over the last year. Revenues are hundreds of billions of dollars higher than expected, and a lot of that cash, instead of going straight back to the United States or Europe as it did in the past, is staying in the Middle East. “The whole region is booming and we are on the receiving end,” a businessman friend wrote me in an e-mail from Beirut this morning. His own corporation’s revenues were up more than 25 per cent last quarter. “Last month there was in IPO of a real-estate company in Dubai that was 400 times over-subscribed,” he tells me, “raising over 400 billion dirhams [$109 billion].” If this speculative wealth starts spreading out to the general population it can blunt the edge of Islamic fundamentalism - or be used to stifle any real reform at all. But Osama bin Laden clearly is worried. His unprecedented 70-minute musing on the Web last week was a call on his followers to attack the sources of this windfall oil wealth. Irony of ironies: every attack will send prices higher.
Another positive trend is toward serious autonomy, if not outright independence, for many of the peoples thrown together into untenable “nation-states” last century by Europe’s colonial cartographers. In what a discussion paper from the CIA-affiliated National Intelligence Council has called a “doomsday scenario,” we could see unbridled Balkan-style chaos, fragmentation, ethnic cleansing and the spawning of many new “failed or failing states.” But the American occupation of Iraq also has opened the way for a loose federalism that could actually serve as a model for the region. In any case, the era when one favored colonial client could lord it over every other group in a country (with the backing of Britain, France or the United States) is at last drawing to a close.
Indeed, the era of absolute American domination, if it ever existed, is waning pretty fast. Up through the 1980s, the presidents, emirs and mullahs of the Middle East played the Soviet Union off against the United States. The rivalry they’ll exploit over the next several years will be the one between the United States and China. Just for instance: in October, China cut a $100 billion deal with Iran for long-term oil supplies. The mullahs, in the process, won a powerful long-term friend on the United Nations Security Council. They may get from China the international cover they need to keep the whole world guessing for years to come about when and how and whether Iran will join the nuclear club.
The information revolution has not gone quite the way most of us predicted, hopefully, back in 1990. Satellite television and the Internet have proved to be more effective propaganda tools for radical fundamentalists than pro-Western free-thinkers. Memories of past wrongs—pervasive feelings of historical injustice—give them their best ideological ammunition. But just because the Bush administration is so woefully inept at the global war of ideas doesn’t mean the fight is lost forever.
One of the great battlegrounds for the future may be, as it were, in the bedroom. Women throughout the Muslim world represent a separate-and-unequal majority with rising levels of education and a growing desire to assert their rights. Political and economic power remain far out of reach for most of them at the moment, but their aspirations cannot be contained forever—probably not even for the next 15 years.
Democratization, it’s clear, will be a very slow process. But there is more of a foundation for it than many pundits would lead you to believe. Egypt, the demographic and cultural powerhouse of the Arab world, has been experimenting with parliamentary institutions since the mid-19th century. They have atrophied in the last 50 years, but they haven’t died altogether. Unlike Saudi Arabia, which never had the slightest experience of democracy, Egypt doesn’t have to start from scratch. There’s a dim glimmer of hope in the fact that a new secular opposition party, the first in more than two decades, was able to battle through the courts and win legal recognition this year.
As I write all this, I’m actually starting to feel a little optimistic. And then I look up at that weird flag from Confederate Baghdad, and I realize none of these incipient trends will amount to much if we don’t address the power of memory head-on. We can’t make Arabs and Muslims forget the dislocation and humiliation of the Palestinians by holding up an out-of-date “Road Map” for peace (while handing the car-keys to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon). We can’t convince them our occupation of Iraq is really a liberation while leveling insurgent cities, and relying on the British—their occupiers in the last century—to give us lessons on colonial administration. (British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who popped up in Baghdad today, is the last person the Iraqis want or need to teach them the value of democracy.)
The only way even to start healing the memories of an occupation, in fact, is to end the occupation. I don’t see that happening soon in Iraq, the West Bank, or even Gaza. But until it does, one way or the other, every bright shining initiative for the region will come up against the corrosive anger that occupation creates. We cannot and must not forget that, unless we want hell to pay for decades to come.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.