War against terror or war on the Arabs? America's Middle East policy after 11 September is pushing the region towards disaster, writes David Hirst, and a US colonial order There is no better place to take the pulse of Arab and Muslim sentiment than Cairo, historic Mother of the World, pioneer or hub of the two great movements that swept the region in recent times, the pan-Arab secular nationalism of which President Nasser was the champion, the "political Islam" that came into its own with Nasserism's failure and decline. Today, from air-conditioned think tanks on the banks of the Nile to the sweltering alleyways of the splendid but dilapidated mediaeval city, the preoccupation with the two things, the Israeli-Palestinian struggle and US plans for possible war on Iraq, that seem most fateful for the future, is overwhelming. "Bin Laden may have lost a lot of his appeal," said Diaa Rashwan, an expert on Islamic fundamentalism, "but that doesn't mean the US isn't hated; it is, more than ever, and more, now, from an Arab than an Islamic standpoint." In a workshop in the City of the Dead, hard by the elaborate, 15-century tomb of Sultan Qaitbai, Mohamed Ahmed carries on the ancient, glass-blowing craft of his forefathers on a day when, even without the additional heat of his furnace, the temperature stands at 45 centigrade. "What makes you think that Bin Laden really did it?" he asks, giving voice to a still widespread popular suspicion, "Bush is just using him to put us down.'' The future is dark, he added. Indeed, much darker, for most Arabs, than might have appeared in the immediate aftermath of that apocalyptic atrocity, because, one year on, it seems clearer to them in its consequences. It is a momentous, double crisis, an external and an internal one, of which they are almost everywhere taking cognisance. The two are inextricably intertwined. Long maturing, Bin Laden, in fact, brought both to a head. As they see it, the US's post-11 September "war on terror" now boils down, essentially, to an assault on themselves. For in the Bush universe of good versus evil, it is essentially they, with Iran thrown in, who are the evil ones. In the collision to come, the Arabs risk further massive blows to all those ideals and aspirations - independence, dignity, the unity and collective purpose of the greater Arab "nation" -- which, after centuries of foreign conquest and control, the pan-Arabism of Nasser so triumphantly, if defectively, embodied; a reversion to quasi-colonial subjugation of old. Internally, they are dismally ill- equipped to meet the external challenge, racked as they are by all manner of social, economic, cultural and institutional sicknesses. These, the US says, are the very conditions which threw up Bin Ladenism. Few Arab opinion-makers would dispute it, or doubt their societies' desperate need of root-and-branch reforms, ushering in democracy, human rights, accountability. There is no more compelling measure of that than the UN's newly released Arab Human Development Report. It describes a Third World region which has fallen behind all others, including sub- Saharan Africa, in most of the main indices of progress and development; whose 280 million inhabitants, despite vast oil wealth, have a lower GNP than Spain; whose annual translation of foreign books is one fifth of Greece's; 51 per cent of whose young people would emigrate if they could. A prime cause of this backwardness, say the report's exclusively Arab authors, is that the peoples of the region are the world's least free, with the lowest levels of popular participation in government. "Those who wonder why Afghanistan became a lure for some young Arabs and Muslims," wrote Jordanian columnist Yasser Abu Hilala, "need only read this report, which explains the phenomenon of alienation in our societies and shows how those who feel they have no stake in them can turn to violence." Yet most Arab regimes have ignored this damning verdict on themselves. "The fact is," said Nader Fergani, the report's Egyptian lead author, "that governments that were repressive in the first place have in the past year become more so. They have not learned the lesson of 11 September -- but neither has the US." In what measure are foreigners, or Arabs themselves, responsible for their condition? Bin Laden has greatly sharpened that perennial Arab debate. Insofar as it is the West, its sins are deemed to have begun with the European carve-up of the region after World War I and the creation of Israel; these betrayals and humiliations continued with US-led support of repressive, corrupt or reactionary regimes enlisted as bulwarks against communism or accomplices in the quest for an impossible, because unjust, settlement of the Palestine conflict. "For us," said Mohamed El-Sayed Said, a columnist of Egypt's leading newspaper Al-Ahram, "the West always preferred control to democracy. Now, 90 per cent of the problem flows from the Arab-Israeli conflict, that continuous reminder of our colonised past." Never, in Arab eyes, has the US acted so blatantly, so subserviently, in favour of its Israeli protégé, and for domestic reasons -- the triple alliance of Jewish lobby, neo-conservative ideologues, and Christian fundamentalist right -- that take little or no stock of rights or wrongs on the ground. For Makram Mohamed Ahmed, editor of Al- Musawar magazine and confidant of President Mubarak, this amounts to a sickness liable to be at least as catastrophic as the Arabs' own. "It's terrible that a weak and ignorant man like Bush can be used this way -- you might expect it from Third World countries, but from the world's only superpower!" In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Arabs say, the US did -- with its talk of a Palestine state -- seem to have learned something, did begin to distance itself from those cumulative Western policies of which Bin Ladenism was the ultimate, evil fruit. "Palestine is not only crucial in itself," said Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, another Al-Ahram commentator, "it is symbolic of US intentions everywhere. Through Palestine, you can now see that the US just doesn't care to look for root causes anywhere. It has adopted the Israeli definition of terror, and that shapes its policies for the whole region." These policies are now so detested, the argument continues, that they have raised the potential threat to US interests to unprecedented levels. To retain its Middle East dominance it has to invest resources commensurate with the threat. It can no longer rely on friendly regimes, like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, for they themselves will be undermined by their connivance with it, nor on the mere "containment" of enemies such as Saddam. So the Arab world, says Said, now risks being "subjected to direct or indirect colonialism". And the very "backwardness of the Arab order makes the pursuit of such imperial designs possible". For Arab societies are seen as "incapable of modernising on their own, thus providing a natural gateway to colonisation and empire building". Such neo-colonialism involves "regime change" by force for those the US deems beyond the pale, the imposing of reforms in broad areas -- from school curricula to their position on Palestine -- of public policy on those who -- for the time being at least -- remain within it. Of the two, explicit candidates for "regime change", Iraq now has priority over Palestine. Indeed it has now clearly emerged as the key arena where the decisive battle between good and evil will be joined. The idea, says Said, is to "terminate" the Palestine question by war at the expense of the Arabs as a national group. With the overthrow of Saddam, the US hopes to make this richly endowed, pivotal country the lynchpin of a whole new, pro-American geopolitical order. Witnessing such an overwhelming demonstration of US will and power, other regimes would either have to bend to US purposes or suffer the same fate, be they such traditional, overtly "terrorist- sponsoring" opponents such as Syria, or traditional friends, such as Saudi Arabia, held to spawn terrorism through their misrule or a general "culture" of religious extremism. For individual Gulf states that do not submit, says Said, "there will be nothing to stop regimes from being changed or political successions being manipulated in the way the English used to do in the 19th century." There is a wall of almost universal Arab hostility to a US assault on Iraq. But there is also a single, very telling breach in it. However fractious, opportunist or incompetent some, at least, of the exiled, US-backed Iraqi opposition may be, they cannot be dismissed as unrepresentative of the Iraqi people, who -- unlike other Iraqis -- suffer directly beneath Saddam's monstrous tyranny. It is an embarrassing moral dilemma. The US hawks have tried in vain to establish Saddam's complicity with Bin Laden and 9/ 11. But that failure cannot disguise another, much deeper affinity between the two: for, after Bin Laden, what more disastrous personification of the internal Arab sickness that all right-thinking Arabs yearn to cure than Saddam, what country in direr need of democratic reform than Iraq? Egyptian analyst Wahid Abdel-Meguid laments that Arab objections to a US assault "amount to solidarity with Saddam against his own people". If it were just the Arab regimes it wouldn't be so bad, but the truth is that the objections also come from Arabs who oppose their own, albeit less brutally despotic regimes, for essentially the same reasons as the Iraqis do theirs. Doubtless, if Arabs really believed that, in removing Saddam, the US were genuinely bent on promoting a democratic order in his place, they would be readier to join the Iraqi opposition or tolerating it at least. But they don't. They point out that even if the expected campaign does, in principle, incorporate some reformist good intentions, so did those earlier Western subjugations of the region from whose consequences they suffer till today. They will see it, primarily, as an act of external aggression aimed not just at Iraq, but, in effect, at the whole Arab world; and what will make it supremely intolerable is that it will be done largely on behalf of an enemy, Israel, whose acquisition of a large arsenal of weapons of mass destruction seems to be as permissible as theirs, or Iran's, is an abomination. Their fear is not only that Israel will become -- with the possible exception of Britain -- the only country to join a US onslaught, but that General Sharon will exploit it to kill two birds with one stone. He will combine the completion of the Israeli "war on terror", which since 9/11 he has insinuated into the larger American one, with another great breakthrough in Zionism's still unfinished grand design, another mass expulsion of Palestinians of which much of the Israeli right has long dreamed. Destroying Saddam, like destroying the Taliban, could be one thing, though nothing like so simple; managing what comes after could be another. For most Arabs, the overall conditions, largely of its own, now unprecedentedly partisan, pro-Israeli making, in which the US embarks on such an enterprise would seem to all but guarantee its failure -- and consequent success of sorts for Bin Laden. After all, he was always something more than just the crazed, archaic Islamic visionary; Iraq, Palestine -- and US conduct towards them -- always ranked high on his very contemporary anti-colonial, political and nationalist agenda; and that is why -- says Palestinian commentator Abdul- Jabbar Adwan -- he now "owes an enormous debt of gratitude to George W Bush. for the 'political services' he has rendered him since 9/11; far outstripping any commercial ones in the days when the Bushes and the Bin Ladens did oil business together." The price of failure, in so strategic, complex and volatile a region, would make the post-war falterings in Afghanistan pale into insignificance, vastly exacerbating as it would both the Arabs' internal crisis and its external, Bin Laden-type consequences. But the Arabs might not be the only ones to pay the price. "The US may be preparing a big surprise for the region," warns Lebanese commentator Saad Mehio, "but the Middle East may be preparing an equally big one for the Americans. At any rate, no one should forget that it has been the most renowned source of surprises through the ages." Related articles: 9/11 Supplement -- 12 - 18 September 2002 9-11 - WAR COVERAGE -- Archives
