Since 9/11 and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Americans and Arabs have at least one thing in common: They look at each other through a veil of deep mistrust extending in many cases to mutual hatred.
The seeds of antagonism go back many years, and the explanation for this lies only partly in different customs, religions and political systems.
Until recently, Arab antipathy to the U.S. arose primarily from the perception that the U.S. has shown a consistent bias in favor of Israel at the expense of Palestinians. Many Americans, of course, look at this conflict and see simply an Arab society permeated by violent anti-Semitism and fanaticism. Since 9/11, antipathy on the American side toward Arabs has been greater than at any time in history. Following the invasion of Iraq, the same can be said of Arab attitudes toward the U.S.
So just what was President Bush thinking when he began proclaiming an American “mission” to bring democracy to the Middle East?
To succeed, any such mission surely would require an effort to persuade Arab governments to change and to win the hearts and minds of their people. But the Bush years have produced a catalog of mistakes that have fanned the flames of fanaticism in the Muslim world and convinced many moderate Arabs that America is their enemy, and the enemy of Islam. It is a dangerous perception that may not be overcome in this generation.
The mistakes range from Bush’s failure to rebuke his clerical followers on the right, who have stoked the fires of religious hatred with denunciations of Islam bristling with ignorance and intolerance, to the manifold failures to prepare for postwar turmoil in Iraq, and the torture and humiliation of Arab prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, widely seen in the Arab world as a reflection of U.S. policy.
Bush further alienated Arabs by abandoning the so-called road map for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. In embracing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to hold on to and expand Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, he undertook a radical departure from U.S. policy of the past 37 years and in effect ceded control of policy to Sharon.
These developments led many Arabs to conclude that a country that preaches human rights to the world shows little regard for the human rights of Arabs, revealing its hypocrisy and racial bias. There is also a widespread conviction among Arabs that the U.S. went to Iraq to seize its oil and to make the region safe for its ally, Israel.
No one can reasonably dispute that the Arab world is sorely in need of a political transformation. The 22 nations of the Arab League, far from rolling in oil wealth as many imagine, have a combined gross national product that is barely more than that of Spain and only about 44 percent of Italy’s. On a number of economic indices, they rank collectively among the poorest nations, barely ahead of sub-Saharan Africa. They are not participants in globalization and the march of human development; they are passive spectators, pushed ever more toward the poorest seats in the house.
Their access to digital media is among the lowest in the world: Just 1.6 percent of the population has access to the Internet. They have fewer newspapers per capita than almost any developing region, and they produce just 1.1 percent of the world’s books. Their output of high-tech exports and manufactured exports is the lowest in the world.
Most experts agree that the primary reasons for failure include the following:
– Authoritarian rule by monarchs and dictators who view reform as a threat to their political survival.
– Reliance on a vast security apparatus that in some countries uses torture, imprisonment and killings to suppress political opposition.
– A failed educational system, particularly in science and technology, that prevents Arabs from keeping pace with the technological changes sweeping the world.
– State control of the economy, and policies that focus on expensive white elephants and on importing Western technology that becomes rapidly outdated rather than investing in technology creation.
– Endemic corruption that drains wealth creation into a few hands, leaving the great mass of people backward, impoverished and resentful.
– A growing Islamist movement that sometimes pays lip service to democracy but is largely resistant to it and has powerful influence over public policy.
– Resistance to the empowerment of women, so that almost half the Arab population remains economically unproductive and an alarmingly large number of Arabs lack even basic literacy.
– One of the world’s highest population growth rates, resulting in staggering levels of unemployment that are projected to grow steadily for many years.
– Wasteful spending on armaments, encouraged by the U.S. and other Western suppliers to enhance their own economies.
These failings have been spelled out in stark detail since 2002 in two remarkable book-length reports prepared by Arab scholars working under the aegis of the United Nations Development Program. Their warnings have been either ignored or greeted with largely cosmetic reforms by Arab rulers. All Arab countries stop short of allowing genuinely free elections, permitting parliaments to oppose government policy or allowing the media to operate freely. Some continue to prohibit political parties.
As the reports note, Arabs remain in a paralytic state of glorifying the past and/or blaming outsiders for their troubles rather than coming to grips with a harsh reality. The reaction of many educated Arabs who see their hopes for a better life thwarted has been not to rise in rebellion but to escape to the greener pastures of the West, further impoverishing their own societies.
Arab scholars agree that change is imperative and must come from within. Least of all is the U.S. in a position to determine the course of events. Because of its tragic mistakes, and its misunderstanding of the nature of the Arab world, the U.S. has become an impediment to reform, not a catalyst. Its future standing in the region is in the balance, and its initiatives in promoting democracy are being rejected not on merit but precisely because they come from the United States. Many Arab leaders see democratization as a code word for regime change.
But surveys show that the same Arab masses that spurn the U.S. yearn for greater freedom. With internal pressures for change mounting steadily, the choice may not be between status quo and democracy but between Islamic theocracy and democracy.
In almost every country in which they are allowed to participate in political affairs, Islamic parties are better organized than any other opposition group, and they might well emerge as winners in democratic elections. Arab regimes are wholly cognizant of this and have seized on it as an excuse to not implement genuine reform. In fact, they have used 9/11 as an excuse to adopt strict new security measures that further impinge on political freedom.
The U.S. will never admit this publicly, but it may conclude, as some in the Bush administration have privately, that it cannot afford the risks of pushing for full democratization. Perhaps the best it can hope to do is influence Arab governments to make life more bearable for their people and hope this will lead to more concessions over time. But that could take years. Meanwhile, internal pressures could lead not to gradual change but to revolutions similar to that which overthrew the Shah of Iran in 1979.
In January, Bush proclaimed that Afghanistan and Iraq would “light the way for others and help transform a troubled part of the world.” So far, those two countries, far from serving as beacons of progress, have only illuminated the difficulties of establishing democracy in a region that has never known it.
