Sunday, April 13, 2003
The Sand Wall - NY Times
Thomas Friedman gives us a mostly interesting piece today concerning the need to use the fall of Saddam to re-shape Arab thinking. The sand wall he talks about may as well be the sand between the ears of a lot of the "Saddamite" Arab world.
[...]Throughout this war, Saddamism was peddled by Al Jazeera television, Arab intellectuals and the Arab League. You cannot imagine how much distress there is among certain Arab elites that the people of Iraq preferred liberation by America to more defiance under Saddam. The morning after Baghdad was liberated, Abdul Hamid Ahmad, editor of The Gulf News, wrote, like so many of his colleagues: "This is a heartbreaking moment for any Arab, seeing marines roaming the streets of Baghdad."
The wall of Saddamism, which helped bad leaders stay in power and young Arabs remain backward and angry, was as dangerous as Saddam. "The social, political, cultural and economic malaise in this part of the world had become a threat to American security — it produced 9/11," said Shafeeq Ghabra, president of the American University of Kuwait. "This war was a challenge to the entire Arab system, which is why so many Arabs opposed it. The war to liberate Kuwait from Iraq [in 1991] was outpatient surgery. This war was open-heart surgery."[...]
The wall of Saddamism, which helped bad leaders stay in power and young Arabs remain backward and angry, was as dangerous as Saddam. "The social, political, cultural and economic malaise in this part of the world had become a threat to American security — it produced 9/11," said Shafeeq Ghabra, president of the American University of Kuwait. "This war was a challenge to the entire Arab system, which is why so many Arabs opposed it. The war to liberate Kuwait from Iraq [in 1991] was outpatient surgery. This war was open-heart surgery."[...]
I was going right along with it, agreeing with his points and nodding when he said that now was a chance to re-build Iraq and do some over-arching good. Then we get to this bit:
[...]The moment reminded me of something the Arab columnist Rami Khouri liked to say, that Arabs for too long have seen the strength of America, but not the "goodness" of America. Partly that's because their media willfully distorted what we did, and partly it's because America has used its power out here more to defend oil and Israel than democracy. This war in Iraq was meant to bring the idealistic side of U.S. power into the Arab world.
See, now this is why some people don't like you, Tom. You're so obsessed with appearing "even-handed" that you wind up saying silly things.
Note that he does not say that "it is perceived that we use our power more for Israel than democracy." He says we do use it so. TOM! We defend Israel because it is a democracy. Our defence of Israel is our idealistic side, otherwise we would long ago have gone to pandering to the Arabs like much of Europe and Russia. That's the problem. Too many people are more interested in appearances than telling the simple truth - we often come down on the side of Israel against the Arab mob because it's the right thing to do.
One thing that the Bush doctrine has brought with it - the idea that American policy will be dictated not by surface appearances (we did one thing for the Israelis, so that means we need to do one thing for the Palestinians) but by facts and merit.
No longer, we hope, is America going to pander to the demagogues of the Arab street. We are now in the process of laying the groundwork to enable the positive forces in the Arab world to prosper, so that we can see the "goodness" of the arab world, and move forward on a concrete foundation built on real principles.
As we move forward, it will be essential to stand firm to principle, and one of those principles will be knowing who our friends are, and letting the world know what is required in being our friend. Only then will leaders know what is required of them in order to join our train into the 21st century. With luck and perseverence, that train will include Iraq as well as Israel.
