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Austin Bay of StrategyPage has an interesting take on the Middle East: that it's basically a problem of wealth. (Bay says "money"; I'm confident that my readers know the difference, but I wish to reassure them that I too know the difference). Let economic improvement occur in the Middle East, he suggests, and there will then be real peace; with the exception of a few bin Laden-type fanatics (who, he agrees, must be uprooted by violence), everyone will be too making money to make war. Well, yes, I'll agree. However, that's rather like the standard leftist "solution" to the problem of war: let everyone put down their guns and get along, and there'll be peace. Very true, but it doesn't tell us how to get from here to there. Let us dispel the notion that the very real poverty in the Middle East is the result of the Evul Kapitalist Konspiracy or some such. Enough oil money from the West has vanished into the sands of the Persian Gulf that the inhabitants ought to be wiping their asses with hundred-dollar bills. But, you say, that was then, this is now. Things have, obviously been done wrong in the past, but let them be done correctly in the future. But, I reply, why should they be done correctly in the future, when the same tyrants who messed things up in the past -- and, more importantly, the same ideologies -- are in control? Bay offers a telling anecdote, although I do not think that it tells what he wants it to:
Several years ago in Amman, an adviser to King Hussein and I discussed the money process over a long, not for attribution cup of tea. "Economic improvement is the key to escaping our bad situation," he said. And by bad situation he didn't mean simply Jordan and Palestine, but what he saw as the pan-Arab economic failure. "Fine, we keep political structures as they are, but open the borders to trade, to business. Economic liberalization. If we make life better economically for people, that lays the basis for change. In time, the confrontation with Israel will fade." The question instantly arises: why doesn't the Assad clan then economically liberalize? Because they fear that such liberalization would weaken their hold? Or because the mere notion of economic intercourse with the West -- regardless of the actual consequences on the ground -- is enough to inspire jihad against them? Let us consider China: a nation ruled by vicious gerontocrats who apparently hope that their age will cause them to die of natural causes before they can be bumped off by the next layer down in the nomenklatura. Nonetheless, they decided that China should have something approximating an actual economy, not a command system that produces one billion left shoes for snakes. They have probably succeeded as well as any non-democratic system could (which is not all that well on an absolute basis). Why couldn't the Assads do the same? No dictator, however nominally absolute, can order his subjects to worship one day what they execrated the previous day -- such fanciful notions should remain where they belong, amidst the ranks of fairy tales. The tyrants of the Arab world have committed themselves to confrontation, not co-operation, with the West. The al-Sa'uds, the Assads, the Arafats, can no more proclaim the economic liberalization of their countries than they could announce their conversions of Mormonism -- and hope to survive. Among Muslims, only someone of the stature of an Atatürk could even try -- and it is persuasive argued that he succeeded to the extent that he did by ignoring his people's history, and the history of their predecessors, all the way back to Constantine I, and annexing the new Turkey to the West. No one has ever died for a standard of living, let alone someone else's standard of living. Economical liberalization is contingent on the destruction of the anti-Western Islamicist ideology, not vice versa. John "Akatsukami" Braue Thursday, May 09, 2002 |
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