An
intellectually formidable friend and I were
discussing everything under the sun at a qahwa (coffee
shop) in Cairo, fairly late at night and dead in the
middle of winter. I brought up Greg Palast’s account of
the Iraq war and the squabbles between the two main
advocates of the war – the neo-cons and the oil lobby –
and speculated as to who in the West we Arabs can work
with, how and on what issues. This hooked into a
long-running debate I’d been having with my friend over
one of his major contributions to the whole debate about
the ‘debate’ between civilizations. That is, who exactly
is supposed to be talking to whom?
Our
conversation continued late into the night by telephone
with my friend filling me in on the cultural details of
the otherwise dry political, economic and institutional
thrust of my argument. He would offer an intriguing idea
or a sentence, usually in Arabic, and I’d rush over to
my laptop and type it up, leaving him with an oversized
phone bill while I had the electricity charges to worry
about.
Taking Stock: The
Banality of Evil
But
first things first. Greg Palast’s Armed Madhouse
revealed through documents and taped interviews, that
the neo-conservatives and the oil lobby had very
different military, administrative and even economic
plans, with the neo-con plan taking ultimate precedence
in the invasion and occupation, except when it came to
the sensitive topic of oil. Both plans predate September
11 and represent diverging agendas, interests and
conceptions of ‘the’ national interest and how the
Arabs, Muslims and Israelis fit into it. The pathetic
story of post-war Iraq and US foreign policy in the
region since the fall of Saddam is really a grisly
comedy of errors driven by an endless push and pull
between the oil lobby and the neo-cons, jockeying
between their respective power centers in the Bush
administration and the new Iraqi power structure.
In the
process Iraqi society and, crucially, the economy have
been torn apart, aggravating the violence, which was bad
enough to begin with. Regarding Sunni resistance it is
true that the cannon fodder are religious fanatics, but
their commanders, who are ultimately steering the civil
war, are remnants of the Saddamist ‘secular’ Arab
nationalist regime. They only turned into resistance
fighters when the neo-con ideologues took up the mantle
of de-Ba'athification, suggested to them by the likes of
Ahmed Chalabi, to pave the way for democratization.
Under the rather biased guidance of America’s Shiite and
Kurdish ‘allies’ this process began, and apparently
ended, with de-Sunnification. Many people targeted
ironically were the very same Iraqi Army and Republican
Guard commanders who had been recruited by the CIA to
order their troops to stand down in the face of the
invaders. To avoid capture and possible execution they
turned to their sectarian next of kin, the Iraqi Sunni
extremists and the Arab volunteers.
Even
the Qaeda-related terrorists among the wider Sunni
resistance are really quite an economically motivated
and rational bunch. A confidential National Security
Council report, leaked to the New York Times, discovered
that the Iraqi resistance is financially
self-sustaining, raising tens of millions of dollars
without any foreign help from the caves of the Hindu
Kush or the coffers of puritanical Gulf oil sheikhs.[1]
They make anywhere between $70 to $200 million by
smuggling Iraqi oil and, in 2005, made an estimated $30
million from ransom money alone. The Islamic radicals,
in this regard, fit the same mold as nominally Marxist
rebels of south America who fund their revolutionary
activities through kidnapping foreigners (tourists,
executives, investors) and via drugs trafficking.
As for
the Iraqi attacks on oil pipelines, they usually aren’t
religious fanatics or diehard patriots but, like their
counterparts in Nigeria, disgruntled ex-oil employees
striking at their former source of livelihood in the
‘good old days’ of Baathism. Where did this economic
desperation come from? The neo-cons, in their attempt to
make Iraq into a (neo-)liberal democratic example for
the Middle East, relied on corporate lobbyists to devise
the economic core of their plans for Iraq. One of the
most prominent, Grover Norquist, explained that the
economic agenda was modeled on Pinochet’s experience in
Chile that involved a prioritization of free market
economics over democratization: “The right to trade,
property rights, these things are not to be determined
by some democratic election.”
The
upshot is that all these property rights were
‘determined’ undemocratically, by the Coalition
Provisional Authority, under the unelected Paul Bremer
who enacted numerous orders in this regard. Worse than
mere privatization and copyright laws that bestowed
royalties on foreign products of up to 50 years (Order
83), was the application of complete free trade, an
absolute ban on tariff and non-tariff barriers – ‘Order
12’ – even in the face of foreign ‘dumping’.[2]
As a result Iraq is awash with Chinese goods, more than
any other (non-occupied, non-decimated) country in the
Middle East. Iraqi agriculture was crippled too as US
grain suppliers took advantage of the presence of
corporate-friendly officials in the occupation
authority. Businesses going bust means unemployment and
desperation, which means, in a country like Iraq,
political violence. And with Order 37, which forbids any
future Iraqi government from reversing any of these
laws, this chaos seems set to go on indefinitely.
But
none of this had to happen or was even meant to in the
early days of planning the war. The original heir
apparent for post-Saddam Iraq, General Jay Garner,
placed political concerns before economic ones. The
order of the day for Garner was getting essential
services back on track immediately and getting the
various ethnic and sectarian factions to sit together
and agree on holding elections as soon as possible, and
that meant letting the Iraqis decide their own economic
policy. That didn’t set well with the neo-cons so they
got then Defence Secretary Rumsfeld to have him removed
and bring Bremer in. Another sticking point with Garner
concerned privatizing Iraqi oil fields, which he rightly
saw as a controversial issue that would insult and
inflame the Iraqis. But even though Garner vacated the
premises the oil lobby made sure that Bremer couldn’t
privatize this strategic asset.
The oil
lobby quite literally shipped in a firefighter to put
out the neo-cons’ raging free market plans in the form
of Shell Oil USA’s ex-CEO, Philip Carroll, flown into
Baghdad on a C-17, and from Houston no less.[3]
Not that the oil lobby was any less neo-colonial than
the neo-cons. Their alternative scheme involved locking
a state-owned Iraqi oil company into ‘profit-sharing
agreements’ with IOCs (International Oil Companies).
I will
go into the exact nature of the standoff between the
neo-cons and oil lobby over privatizing Iraqi oil later
but the point to be made here is that there is nothing
technically conspiratorial about most of this. The
neo-cons have been advocating the unseating of Saddam as
the key to remaking the Middle East since the early
1990s, and done so quite openly as anyone who has
visited their many, many websites will attest. As for
the oil lobby, they’re a shadier bunch, but the secrecy
only really resulted because they had only got their act
together in the early days of the Bush administration,
with news leaking out soon after. The only real crime we
detect here is the Arab weakness that has opened the
Arab world to violation. The only real conspiracy lies
among the various Arab parties that were complicit in
these violations, with the self-interested suggestions
of Arab parties garnishing many of these foreign plans.
The
Arab Angle
Now
this diagnosis links up with the implicit agenda
contained in Dr Hazem’s widely circulated works on the
Arab condition: describing how the Arab masses are
enslaved culturally – ‘alienated’, as he puts it – by
the Arab elites.[4]
The Arab Self is alienated and the agent of alienation
is none other the Arab Other that uses culture and
religion to maintain its stranglehold on the Arab Self.
This
view goes beyond strict economic and political
conceptualizations of class conflict and elite-mass
relations and antagonisms because it puts the onus on
culture – portraying Arabs as not just any normal group
of oppressed Third Worlders. They belong to an extended
family that they identity with - the Arab ‘nation’ and
Muslim umma - and their elites use these abstract
notions as political tools to deny them their cultural
and intellectual rights. That is, the rights to avail of
Western modernity and allow them to think for
themselves, decide what their opinion is on matters as
diverse and critical as Islam, constitutions, human and
women’s rights, Arab sovereignty and human rights
supervision, cultural globalization, capitalism,
republics vs. monarchies, etc. etc.
It was
the Arab Other who aided and abetted the Americans,
whether the neo-cons or the oil lobby, to the detriment
of the Arab Self. More to the point, what Palast’s work
makes clear is that Arab reformers and revolutionaries,
the genuine ones, are stuck between a rock and a hard
place. On the one hand the neo-cons actually want to
liberate them from their oppressive regimes (for
whatever reasons) yet are the same people who will
certainly wreck their economies. On the other hand, the
oil lobby, which is comfortable enough with oppressive
regimes, is willing to share the economic cake with the
common-folk, even bolstering the anti-American
ideological cushion that helps prop up these regimes,
giving the masses some sense of identity and
authenticity in a world awash with American-dominated
cultural signifiers.
As Rose
documents in Israel: The Hijack State (1986), the US
government has always been torn between supporting
Israel as its most reliable ally in the region and
supporting the Saudi Kingdom for its oil: “that
stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the
greatest material prizes in world history.”[5]
The existence of one key point of US strategy, Israel,
created problems for the other, the religious props upon
which the Saudi kingdom rests, its status as the
supposed custodian of (Sunni) Islam. The eventual answer
was not to bother to reconcile these two conflictual
aspects of American national security. Whether the
Saudis understood this is unclear but the Israelis, more
reliable allies, certainly did, as came to light in
declassifled State Department documents
As Rose
explains, the American government left its oil companies
to their own devices in the Saudi context. The
US-dominated consortium ARAMCO “was left deliberately
‘free’ to be as ‘pro-Arab’ as it wished.” This meant
supporting the brand of religious conservatism used to
legitimize the regime in Saudi desert nomad eyes,
namely, Wahabbism. And given the porous nature of the
American decision-making process, this schizophrenic
stance fed backwards into the US power setup itself with
two uneasy power centers collecting round these
divergent policies: namely, the oil lobby vis-à-vis the
Israel lobby – and the rest is history.
The oil
lobby, then, is the dominant US contingent of what
former Indian ambassador K Gajendra Singh calls the
‘US-Saud-Wahab nexus’. US oil interests, and their
allies in the US government, are directly locked into an
alliance with the Ibn Saud family which has its own
alliance with the Wahabis. (They run the Ministry of
Religious Endowments, the mosques – which they also
police – and are in charge of religious missions abroad,
including the infamous madrassas). The oil lobby’s
pro-Arab stance has translated itself, in the long-run,
into an unholy alliance between the US and Muslims
extremists stretching from the Saudi regime to bin Laden
and the Taliban. As Gajendra Singh also reveals, it was
the persistence of these links that blunted efforts to
apprehend bin Laden in the 1990s, when in Sudan then
Afghanistan, because there was active cooperation with
Islamist, Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in Bosnia.[6]
Bush
Jr.’s forays with the Taliban in the early days of his
presidency for the sake of Unicol’s Central Asian/Capsien
oil pipeline are now the stuff of legend, and according
to Greg Palast’s sources there was active cooperation
with Islamists in Central Asia to stave off Russian
domination and Iranian penetration. Wahabbbism is
anti-everything unIslamic and anti-many things that are
Islamic in an unWahabi way but, since the first Afghani
war and the collapse of Communism, this puritanical
hostility has been increasingly directed towards the US
and its chief ally in the region, Israel. The neo-cons,
being utterly pro-Israeli, can’t stand this and, more
generally, in the post-9/11 context have been trying to
stamp out the legitimization strategies of the Arab
regimes that all depend on some measure of
anti-Americanism.[7]
‘America’, deliberately, is used to vent people’s
frustrations, as is Israel – the ‘external threat’, the
‘foreign conspiracy’, ‘imperialist intervention’ in
domestic affairs, etc.[8]
And this is precisely why the neo-cons advocated the
privatization of Iraqi oil as the centerpiece of their
plan – targeting the ‘Arab’ oil weapon. Their plan for
Iraq called for the privatization of oil with the
express intent of pushing Iraqi oil production way above
OPEC quotas to push oil prices down and so destroy the
OPEC cartel’s ability to determine production and prices
once and for all. Apart from using the oil weapon
against its very originators it was meant more
specifically to dislodge Saudi Arabia from the economic
foundation of its power. That was the Heritage
Foundation’s – Ariel Cohen specifically – take on the
plan, pushing up Iraqi production to six million barrels
a day to drive a permanent wedge between OPEC members
and deny Saudi Arabia its ‘swing producer’ status.
What
they didn’t acknowledge was that the Arab oil weapon was
never Arab to begin with. Saudi Arabia enjoyed its
swing producer status because many in the US would
rather put up with an extremist autocracy, provided it’s
a pliant client state, than a progressive democracy like
Venezuela, for instance. The State Department’s plan for
Iraqi oil stated that a state-owned oil sector –
prohibitively contracted to IOC’s – would “enhance the
[Iraqi] government’s relationship with OPEC.”[9]
So much for OPEC being the legendary enemy of the
capitalist-imperialist West and for how one US
administration after another desperately sought ways of
punishing or dismembering the cartel. Ownership of
oilfields as such isn’t as important as controlling the
price of the resulting oil, which is what determines
profits, as one oilman told Palast:”[10]
And one objective is making sure that oil prices never
go too low to threaten the profits of the oil companies.
So the oil privatization plan was quietly killed while
the neo-con agenda continued everywhere else, with
repeated attempts by the neo-cons to muscle in on the
oil sector with the oil lobby responding in kind,
relying on their respective Iraqi constituencies. Again,
more banal evil doings went on as the Iraqi people were
trampled.
But to
be fair to those Iraqis allied to the neo-cons, quite a
few went along with the American invasion so as to
unseat Saudi Arabia from its privileged status in OPEC
and so beef up Iraq’s oil quota, which would be a good
thing for everyone, save the Wahabis. So, the people to
talk to are the neo-cons. It may seem odd for an Arab to
advocate face-to-face negotiations with the neo-cons,
supposedly all imperialists and all mad pro-Israelis.
Not so.
The
Western ‘Other’ too needs to be dissected and
differentiated into its warring factions and these
groups understood for who and what they are, ferreting
out the one or two crucial common interests we have.
Palast’s and Rose’s revelations confirm the
Nitzan-Bichler thesis that sees US foreign policy, at
least in the post-Vietnam era, to be determined by the
‘Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition,’ which consists of
the large oil companies, armament contractors and OPEC
member states. What fuels this coalition are high oil
prices that are in turn maintained through periodic
conflicts in the region – whenever oil prices sink too
low and threaten the profits of the oil barons.[11]
This
was Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshom Bichler’s prediction,
long before the Iraq War, that oil prices would
paradoxically go up once the Americans gained control of
Iraq’s oil fields, dashing in one stroke the
expectations of both liberal economists and neo-Marxist
thinkers.[12]
My only qualm with this thesis was how the neo-cons fit
into it. Nitzan and Bichler saw them as the ideological
shock troops of the vested interests – arms producers
and the oil sector – that got Bush elected on a platform
of preemptive wars and beefed-up defense expenditures.[13]
This clearly isn’t the case. The oil lobby is all for
instability in the Middle East if it means armed
conflicts that generate arms sales and cause a rush in
the oil market (higher prices), provided that client
states remain internally stable.[14]
The
neo-cons build their agenda on ‘creative destruction’
(or, more oxymoronically, ‘positive instability’), and
wish to extend this doctrine into US client states in
the region, provided they create problems for Israel.
Moreover, intra-coalition feuds extend into the realm of
the OPEC members too (the standoff between Iraq and
Saudi Arabia, as Palast ably documented).[15]
As the term itself indicates, this is not a true class
alliance, as Antonio Gramsci would envision it,
but a ‘coalition of the willing’ plagued by violent
conflicts and small conspiracies, if we can use the
term, over the slightest differences in means and ends.
Therefore, there are some neocons that really do have
Arabs’ best interests at heart and consequently it is in
our advantage to talk to. One prominent example is none
other than the dearly departed Paul Wolfowitz, the man
who almost single-handedly persuaded Bush to invade Iraq
after September 11.[16]
However, Wolfowitz had a long-standing love affair with
‘moderate’ Islam ever since President Anwar el-Sadat’s
trip to Jerusalem. He taught himself passable Arabic to
have the pleasure of listening to Sadat’s speech in
front of the Knesset, then learned passable Indonesian
while the ambassador there, hoping to increase the
number of moderate Muslims regimes in the Islamic world.
According to Stephen Sestanovich, “as a ‘moral man’,
Wolfowitz might have found Israel the heart of the
Middle East story… But as a policy maker, Turkey and the
gulf and Egypt didn't loom any less large for him.”[17]
Needless to say I have reservations over what he means
by ‘moderate’ but it is the case that he supported the
sale of AWACs to Saudi Arabia, fought against tooth and
claw by the Israel lobby. In fact, Wolfowitz also helped
convince the Israelis not to retaliate to Saddam’s Scuds
during the First Gulf War. Therefore, Wolfowitz’s
drawbacks are almost strictly intellectual as far as we
are concerned – his naïveté and over-enthusiasm, the
latest in a long line of Graham Greene Quiet Americans.
And it’s not as if Arab intellectuals took the
opportunity to fill in the gaps in his knowledge.
Hopefully, in the process of talking to people like
Wolfowitz we can make Western elites understand who ‘we’
are – Self and Other – and so what is really called for
over here and who they should really be dealing over
what and how. But we can’t expect them to do that for
us.
We have
to inform them of what is wrong with us and, therefore,
who they likewise should focus their efforts upon. The
Arab Other needs pressing while the Arab Self needs
‘de-alienating,’ encouraged to take charge of itself by
being given the intellectual tools for
self-determination. And as for what we Arabs should
negotiate with while we’re having this conversation with
them, the answer obviously is – oil. I’m talking about
oil as a negotiating chip, something that will give the
neo-cons what they need to counteract the power of the
oil lobby and their benefactors in the Arab world. But
in exchange for this we have to tip their ideological
agenda on its head.
An
Agenda for Change: Politics First,
then Socially Conscious Economic ‘Reform’
The
whole problem with the ‘economics first’ approach,
leaving aside its lack of economic sense as amply
illustrated by the Iraqi disaster, is that entrenched
political and bureaucratic elites have always been able
to get around liberalizing reforms. They do this through
co-opting the rising bourgeoisie (crony capitalism) to
make sure it no longer has an interest in checking the
power of the state and moving to a genuine rule of law
system.[18]
It is not in the interest of undemocratic regimes to
liberalize and privatize because these mean handing the
reigns of power to a faceless marketplace. The
livelihoods of people no longer get tied to the all
seeing, all-benevolent, identifiable person of Big
Brother.
Economic reform creates rival centers of power:
businessmen outside the loop who have a vested interest
in keeping the state in check and who easily transform
money into political leverage. The survival strategy of
an authoritarian regime is to grant monopoly rights to
selected, ‘safe’ businessmen, killing off efficiency
gains and independent power centers through appealing to
their rent-seeking instincts.
These
regimes also maintain a stranglehold on political life
by legitimizing themselves through the remaining
vestiges of the rentier state (low tax rates, subsidies
on essential goods), not to mention holding the
bourgeoisie at bay by threatening to unleash the
encouraged-to-be-envious masses.[19]
The problem is actually worse in the wealthier parts of
the Arab world. Throughout the 1990s the Gulf states
fell into economic disrepute as growth rates declined,
plans to industrialize fizzled and one government after
the next fell into debt. The largest oil producer, Saudi
Arabia, until recently had a total debt worth 107% of
its GDP; $ 171 billion in domestic loans, $35 billion in
foreign credit.[20]
The
soaring price of oil since the Iraq War has eased the
financial pressures placed on these regimes – they all
now have budget surpluses with excess cash going in wild
real estate speculation – and therefore have no
incentive to liberalize along IMF-World Bank guidelines.
(Nobody’s advocating privatization and liberalization
just for the sake of privatization and liberalization,
least of all a lefty like me, but if done right it can
place constraint on the power of the state to the
benefit of all). This is a privilege that countries like
Egypt and Tunisia don’t enjoy. We can blame the oil
lobby but we can’t side with the neo-cons either because
the political consequences of their economic agenda are
scarcely any better, if not a whole lot worse. What is
called for is a halfway house, some good old-fashioned
‘embedded liberalism’ of the kind that existed under the
Bretton Woods order.
Surprisingly this actually fits the neo-con agenda, in
spite of their liberalizing credentials, as they are
great believers in capital controls (that is,
restrictions on the flow of international finances to
keep track of terror financing). And even in today’s
globalized world some countries have successfully
employed them, such as democratic if not terribly
pro-American Malaysia. More importantly, resurrecting
embedded liberalism is something the neo-cons would
adore because it would become a tool against the oil
lobby.
Keynesianism, believe it or not, operates to the
detriment of the oil lobby because growth induced
full-employment economies depend, just as they did in
the days of the post-war boom, on cheap oil. Low oil
prices may not be to our immediate advantage as Arabs
but, then again, high oil prices aren’t to our long-term
advantage either. Some economic pain is called for. We
can’t keep pushing back the reckoning day forever,
sinking deeper and deeper into the debt spiral while we
fail to industrialize, modernize our agriculture and
invest in human development. (This is the ‘Dutch
Disease’).[21]
Admittedly this is all overly ambitious and calls for a
complete overhaul of the international economic order,
beginning with the still very neo-liberal US, but more
limited solutions can be implemented quite readily in
the Arab context. Here we are talking about closed
economies where a great many have fixed currencies or
highly stable currencies backed by oil. And I’m quite
confident that the European states would be happy to
sanction some modicum of deficit spending in the Arab
world if only because soaking up the unemployed means
drying up the pools of legal and illegal migrant labor.
The even more attractive prospect for the Europeans will
be cheap oil, allowing them to resume their aborted
post-war boom once again. (And Europe was more
hospitable to readily employable immigrants back then,
and the employed Muslim immigrants more well-behaved
too).
Curing
unemployment in the Arab world is a must for cultural
reasons too, taking up the slack of all those
disgruntled, college educated Arab youths who are all
potential ticking time-bombs. Economically enabling
people also means allowing them to do something other
that eke out a living, have the time and job security to
do a little thinking for a change. (There’s a lot of
this in the US-Middle East Partnership Initiative,
incidentally).[22]
But that in itself won’t work unless there are
thoughtful people whose slack needs to be taken up, the
final topic I move to now.
The Missing Link: A Cultural
Revolution
What
I’ve proposed, of course, presupposes enabling the Arab
Self to elect its own spokesmen, something that should
follow naturally from political reform. This way we can
avoid the mistake made by the Americans in Iraq whereby
they displaced, if not destroyed, one group of Arab
Others only to replace them with another, neglecting in
both cases the Alienated Arab Self. Hence, having the
same old song sung, just with a new singer.
The
West as a whole, and not just the US, needs to build
credibility with the Arab Self, prove to Arabs that they
removed Saddam because he was a tyrant, not just to
replace him with a compliant Arab Other. Owning up to
past mistakes is a cheap price to pay for stability;
stability rooted in the substantive legitimacy of
representative Arab regimes and by extension stability
for the West. Their interests in the region and the
security of their homelands from our chief export after
oil – terrorism. In the long run this would spare the
West another September 11th attack. Cultural
alienation is the real barrier inhibiting a healthy
dialogue between the Arabs and the West. That is, the
Arab Self and the Western Other. When one talks of
cross-cultural or ‘civizational’ dialogue, one must ask
how ‘representative’ the speakers are of respective
communities, after all. Moreover, the West must
understand that the last shelter, last bullet, of the
Arab Other are the ulema, the experts in religion – the
experts in religious excuse making, that is. This could
have disastrous consequences, as we’ve seen in
Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, now in Iraq
with the Arab volunteers, and again (possibly) as Iran
and Saudi Arabia square up for a confrontation over the
Iraqi carcass.
A
face-to-face approach is something that should be
facilitated by the globalizing communications revolution
allowing direct conversations with that portion of
intellectuals who aren’t co-opted by the state. In fact,
what we want is not only intellectuals, to avoid
constructing, ipso facto, a new intellectual elite. We
want just representatives of the Self, the common man,
the poet, the singer, the civil servant, the seller on
the street, the peasant, etc. The medium of television
is important because it transcends the
literate/illiterate divide, yet another problem in the
Arab world. Such conduits – including Al-Jazeera,
English and Arabic – would come in handy in this regard,
official American reservations notwithstanding.
Internet connectivity is already an instrument of
transparency and accountability while blogs and chatting
increase communication and exchange of ideas and
attitudes. All this will help facilitate mass
psychological rehabilitation, getting people out of the
prison cell they’ve become all too used to. It would be
unfair to ask the Arab Self to all of a sudden to take
responsibility of itself and make its own choices. Not
that economics is far away from this since a key
requirement to overcoming informational barriers
involves breaking informational ‘monopolies’, on PCs,
software, internet servers and mobile phones.
Moreover, we don’t want top-down reform but a
grass-roots intellectual revolution, with a special
focus on the cultural industries. Institutional reform
is called for here in several areas, such as making
religious institutions both more independent of the
state and less independent of society (subjecting it to
popular accountability through increased transparency).
Without this all you will get is a new song with an old
singer, preaching from the bully pulpit about
‘moderation’ in the most immoderate way possible,
transforming tolerance into a new dogma whose adherents
alone will go to heaven while the extremist will be
consigned to hell.
Absolute musts in this regard include legislation that
encourages think-tanks and research centers, even if
funded from abroad or established by foreigners. These
are the veritable brains trust that will both employ the
unemployed certificate holders – who are the chief
recruits of Islamists – and help people here figure out
what’s wrong with the economy and polity and help get it
fixed. Another must involves getting the publishing
industry out of its current fix. The impossibility of
making a living from writing is chocking the life out of
high culture in the Arab world. Nothing sells except
sensationalism (celebrities and sex scandals),
cookbooks, archaic religious and literary texts and
books on fortune telling, not to forget conspiracy trash
about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
We
should also be open minded and merciful, giving the Arab
Other the chance to reintegrate itself with the Self
but, bearing in mind that if it refuses, then it is up
to the foreign Other, who helped put these people in
power in the first place, to clean up their own mess. We
don’t want another repeat of the Saddam execution, about
whose ‘vengeful’ character even George W. Bush was
forced to express reservations, (despite his record as
governor of Texas). Thanks to the transparently
sectarian motives of the executioners, and the timing of
the lynching, Saddam’s ghost may haunt us as he goes
down in Arab history as a Sunni martyr. As my friend
suggested to me, Saddam should have been kept alive to
be subjected to a battery of psychological texts, used
as a case study of Arab dictatorship: ‘Otherness’.
Ultimately a great deal of this depends on a return to
interventionist Keynesian economics. While this may seem
unfeasible in the near future, given the hold of
neo-liberalism in Western power centers and globally, it
is quite feasible in the Arab world. Ideally, one should
be talking to everyone in the West, chiefly the West’s
own alienated Self – opposition parties, unions,
minority groups, human rights organizations, charities,
academics, NGOs, etc. – but as dialogues with the
Vatican have demonstrated in the past, it is equally
important to talk to the decision-makers too. They hold
the key to economic decision-making, after all!
Special thanks to Dr Hazem Khairy for providing much of
the cultural content of this article, Jonathan Nitzan
for his political economics of Mideast tolerance and K
Gajendra Singh for forwarding highly relevant material
on past and present petro-political controversies.
