One year after Saddam Hussein`s attempt to swallow Kuwait, all of the old ills that plagued the Middle East still fester-but they have grown worse, or at least more urgent.
The Iraqi invasion has loosed all of the pent-up demons that have tortured the Arab world`s collective psyche since the end of World War I, when the great powers of Europe tried to impose their vision of order on the region.
Frustrated dreams of Arab unity, the failure to find an honor-saving solution to the Palestinian question, the growing gap between rich and poor Arab nations, mistrust of the West-all of these furies were skillfully manipulated by Hussein to justify his actions to the Arab masses.
”The terrible war that Saddam inflicted upon us has only intensified our problems,” says Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate.
”It has exposed the weakness and impotence of all the Arabs. It has exposed the conflict between the people and the state, and it has increased our longing for democracy.”
Perhaps the most telling outcome of Hussein`s invasion of Kuwait last Aug. 2, and the war it triggered, is that he managed to survive it all. And the longer he lasts, the more the American-led military victory is diminished, underscoring the futility of military solutions to the region`s deep-seated problems.
”The Persian Gulf war was really an Arab civil war on the margins of an international war,” says Mohammed Sayed Said, a senior analyst at Cairo`s Center for Political and Strategic Studies.
”Unfortunately, it resolved nothing. The extreme tension of the war is gone, but one finds in its place feelings of despair, regret and
incompetence.”
The Arab regimes that joined the anti-Iraq coalition feel that the U.S. erred in allowing Hussein to survive. And given the region`s penchant for conspiracy theories, many now believe that the U.S. must have some hidden reason for keeping the Iraqi leader around.
”It would have been so easy,” lamented Mourad Desouky, Egypt`s leading military analyst. ”If the Americans had taken one step in the direction of Baghdad, Saddam would have collapsed. Now the opportunity is lost, and the coalition has failed in one of the main objectives of the war.”
Others are not so sure.
”Finish off Saddam? Then what would you do with Iraq? The Americans would have had to stay there and administer the country or else it would have broken into pieces. It would be a mess,” said Saudi businessman Yasin Alireza.
Restoring the al-Sabah family to power in Kuwait also has turned out to be a messy proposition. Reforms that were promised have yet to materialize, while the family`s vindictive attitude toward its enemies and its indolent approach to rebuilding the country have become embarrassments to the entire Arab world.
At the same time, Hussein`s unerring capacity for misreading the most obvious warning signals and leading his country into catastrophic wars reflects the complete absence of democracy or political accountability that typifies Arab politics.
When Hussein turned on ”brotherly” Kuwait, many analysts in the West as well as in the Arab world polished up their political obituaries for Arab unity. It proved to be a premature exercise.
The dream of Arab unity, or pan-Arabism, has turned out to be amazingly durable. Even amid the wreckage of the gulf war, the notion that the Arabs form a single nation with a shared destiny remains the driving force behind most Arab political thinking despite its failure to produce any noticeable benefits for the region.
”It`s like some incurable disease,” said an Arab diplomat, describing pan-Arabism as a kind of political narcosis that weakens the evolution of individual Arab states while giving the illusion of collective strength.
Undoubtedly the kookiest practitioner of pan-Arabism is Libya`s Moammar Gadhafi, who last month declared that citizens of neighboring Egypt were entitled to full participation in all aspects of Libyan political life.
Egyptians rolled their eyes. Yet even for Egyptian sophisticates, it was a point of immense national pride and prestige when the Arab League, an organization that has come to epitomize the bankruptcy of Arab unity, earlier this year restored its headquarters to Cairo.
The glue that binds the disparate shards of Arab unity is the Palestinian question. Although most Arabs say they have become reconciled to Israel`s existence, they perceive the Jewish state as an affront to Arab honor that must be redressed.
Just how much of an affront became apparent 10 days after Iraq`s invasion of Kuwait, when the real crisis began in the Arab world.
”It was Aug. 12 that the regime of Iraq decided to offer a new explanation for the aggression: `We have done this to force the withdrawal of Israel from Arab lands.` This linkage has had a terrible impact all over the Arab world,” said Boutros Boutros Ghali, Egypt`s minister of state for foreign affairs.
”There is a difference (between Israel`s occupation of Arab lands and Iraq`s occupation of Kuwait),” said the veteran diplomat. ”But public opinion in the Arab world and in the Third World cannot enter into all of the nuances. To them it is a double standard.”
”Double standard,” then, became the Arab refrain throughout the gulf crisis. Would the U.S. enforce United Nations resolutions condemning Israel`s occupation of territories captured in 1967 with the same vigor it was enforcing the UN mandate against Iraq? The two situations are hardly analogous. Israel captured Arab lands in what was fundamentally a defensive war, but the linkage became gospel.
”If we don`t find a solution to the peace process, then we`re going to be stuck with this double standard tag. That`s the one thing the Arabs are telling us all the time,” said an American diplomat with long experience in the region. ”The grossly oversimplified Arab view is that we can deliver a solution just by snapping our fingers.”
Secretary of State James A. Baker III`s shuttle diplomacy has been aimed at convening direct Arab-Israeli talks, which last week seemed near fruition. Baker`s efforts have won the guarded support of the Arab world, but even in this there is a danger that expectations may have risen too high. If the peace process collapses, it is unlikely the Arabs will blame themselves.
For most Arabs, even those whose governments sided with the U.S., the gulf war was yet another humiliating encounter with West, yet another blot on Arab honor.
The U.S.-led coalition`s crushing defeat of Iraq`s army has given the Bush administration a certain prestige in the region, but it has also sown the seeds for future problems.
Already, the conspiracy theories have taken root.
One theory that is heard often, even in the most sophisticated circles, is that the U.S. somehow tricked Hussein into invading Kuwait so that it would have an excuse to come into the region, cut Iraq down to size and take control of Arab oil.
The second part of the theory is that the U.S. now is keeping Hussein in power as a pretext for keeping American forces in the region.
”Americans are really foreigners in the Middle East. They don`t understand the people,” said Abdul Latif Abu Hijli, a senior official at Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters in Tunisia.
”They came in and they conquered Iraq. It was a cheap victory, but later I think they will find the price very high,” he said.
This could be dismissed as sour grapes from the PLO, which cast its lot with Iraq. But even Saudi Arabia`s King Fahd can scarcely bring himself to utter the words ”United States” when he talks about the international forces that he summoned to protect his kingdom from Hussein`s forces.
Many Arab progressives hoped that the gulf war and the presence of the U.S. in the region would be a catalyst for democratic reform in the region, along the lines of what is now occurring in Eastern Europe. Thus far, they have been disappointed.
From the iron-handed regimes in Baghdad and Damascus to the more benign forms of authoritarian rule in Riyadh and Cairo, political power in the Arab world remains in the hands of the unelected few.
Even governments that began testing the waters of democratic reform a year or so before the crisis-namely Jordan and Algeria-have pulled back, mainly out of fear that militant Islamic fundamentalists would take advantage of the opening to impose their vision of rigid social order.
”We have a saying in Islam: As you are, you are led,” said Maher Abdul Rahman, a Tunisian journalist. ”In Kuwait they have the emir because they deserve him. In Libya they have Gadhafi because they deserve him. Perhaps we all have what we deserve.
”But you can`t bring democracy if people don`t understand what it is, and you can`t bring it if people are poor and hungry.”
Liberated Kuwait would seem fertile ground for democratic reform, but what has happened so far is not encouraging.
”When people speak about democracy in Kuwait, they don`t know what they are talking about,” a Western diplomat said.
”The Kuwaitis don`t want a British parliament. The question is who will control the oil wealth-the al-Sabah family or the traditional merchant families? It`s more like Venice in the 15th Century. They are not yet at 1776 or 1789,” he said.
Kuwait and the other gulf states have come to epitomize the growing gap between the Arab haves and the have-nots.
The gulf states account for less than 8 percent of the Arab world`s population but control more than 50 percent of its aggregate gross national product. Meanwhile, about 90 percent of the region`s 140 million inhabitants live in poverty.
”After the war, people talked about sharing the wealth. They talked about democracy,” said Desouky, the Egyptian analyst. ”These are the things that made Saddam popular. And we see now that these are the things that frighten the gulf states.”
Although Saudi Arabia and its gulf neighbors have talked about using their vast wealth as an instrument of foreign policy, the mood now is to turn inward and disengage from the problems of the larger Arab world.
Already the gulf states have started to back away from the security agreement they signed with Egypt and Syria in March that would have provided a mechanism for the gulf states to share some petro-dollars with their larger but poorer Arab brothers.
”Why should we share our wealth? I lived in Saudi Arabia before the oil boom. There were times when we couldn`t find anything to eat. At that time, Egypt and Syria were the richest Arab countries and they never gave us anything. We were licking dust and they laughed at us,” said Mahmoud Nashar, a Saudi businessman.
The gulf war was supposed to produce a ”new Arab order” that would go hand-in-hand with America`s vision of a ”new world order.”
But the new Arab order looks suspiciously like the old one-same faces, same problems, same enemies.
NEXT: The impact of Desert Storm on Saudi Arabia.
