Thursday, April 12, 2012

Intro to the Middle East




Intro to the Middle East

Yoram Ettinger

In the pursuit of peace, alliances and interests, Western policy-makers have tended to sacrifice the perplexing realities of the Middle East on the altar of oversimplification and wishful-thinking. Yet their attempts to implement unsubstantiated policies often have served to inflame rather than extinguish regional fires.

Lebanese-born professor Fouad Ajami, the distinguished historian and former director of Middle East Studies at John Hopkins University, asserted that realities in the region constitute “a chronicle of illusions and despair and of politics repeatedly degenerating into bloodletting (The Arab Predicament, Cambridge University Press, 1990).”

Western policy-makers and shapers of public-opinion would benefit from studying writings by some key historians and scientists, whose research reaffirms that fundamentals in the Middle East have remained largely intact for the last 14 centuries.

For example, the late Iraqi-born professor and leading historian of the Middle East Eli Kedourie, from the London School of Economics, wrote in Islam in the Modern World (Mansell publishing, 1980): “The fact that political terrorism originating in the Muslim and Arab world is constantly in the headlines must not obscure the more significant fact that this terrorism has a somewhat old history…which would not be easy to eradicate from the world of Islam.”

Meanwhile, the late Egyptian-born professor P. J. Vatikiotis, from the London University School of Oriental and African Studies, another preeminent Middle East historian, wrote in Arab and Regional Politics in the Middle East (Croom and Helm, 1984): “The use of terrorism by [Arab] states or rulers…has been for domestic, regional and international political purposes.… Rulers of this provenance and background are hegemonists of power.… If Islam and those who claim to represent it and wish to implement its law and rule over man, society and the polity reject all other human forms of law and rule…then clearly there is an unbridgeable gap between them and all other social and political arrangements.… The dichotomy between the Islamic and all other systems of earthy government and order is clear, sharp and permanent; it is also hostile.”

The assumption that the stormy Arab winter of 2011 is a temporary glitch that can be cured by a constitutional panacea is detached from long-standing realities in the region. Moreover, most Arab rage has been directed toward Arabs, and was expressed long before the 2011 turmoil and butchery gripped the Arab street. In the 1970s and '80s, some 200,000 Lebanese were killed in internal violence; in 1982, Hafez Assad slaughtered tens of thousands Syrians; Saddam Hussein murdered some 200,000 Iraqis while an additional 300,000 Iraqis were killed during the 1980-1986 war against Iran; about 2 million Sudanese were killed, and 4 million were displaced, during the 1983-2011 civil war; public executions and decapitations are regularly held in Saudi Arabia, and those are just several examples.

The deep roots of contemporary Islamic violence are highlighted by professor Efraim Karsh, head of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at London’s King's College, editor of the Middle East Quarterly and author of Islamic Imperialism: A History (Yale University Press, 2006): “In the long history of the Islamic empire, the wide gap between delusions of grandeur and the forces of localism would be bridged time and again by force of arms, making violence a key element of Islamic political culture.... Arab rulers systematically convinced their peoples to think that the independent existence of their respective states was a temporary aberration. The result was a legacy of oppressive violence that has haunted the Middle East [from the seventh century] into the 21st century.… It is doubtful whether Middle East societies will be able…to transcend their imperial legacy and embrace the Western-type liberal democracy that has taken European nations centuries to achieve…”

The aforementioned Professor Vatikiotis delivered a key lesson to U.S. policy-makers: “Inter-Arab relations cannot be placed on a spectrum of linear development, moving from hell to paradise or vice versa. Rather, their course is partly cyclical, partly jerkily spiral, and always resting occasionally at some ‘grey’ area. Secondly, American choices must be made on the assumption that what the Arabs want or desire is not always – if ever – what Americans desire; in fact, the two desires may be diametrically opposed and radically different.”

Western interests and the pursuit of peace would be dramatically enhanced if Western policy-making were based on the knowledge of these deans of Middle East history. Learning from history means avoiding – rather than constantly repeating – costly errors.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1136

No comments:

Post a Comment