In the pursuit of peace, alliances and interests, western
policy-makers tend to sacrifice perplexing Mid-East realities on the
altar of oversimplification and wishful-thinking. However, their
attempts to implement unsubstantiated policies tend to inflame rather
than extinguish regional fires.
The distinquished Mid-East
historian and former Director of Mid-East Studies at Johns Hopkins
University, Lebanese-born Prof. Fouad Ajami, asserted that Mid-East
realities 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 public opinion molders would benefit from studying the
writings of some of the key Mid-East historians and scientists, whose
research reaffirms that Mid-East fundamentals have remained largely
intact for the last 14 centuries.
For example, the late Iraqi-born
Prof. Eli Kedourie, from the London School of Economics, who was the
leading Mid-East historian, 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."
The
late Egyptian-born Prof. P. J. Vatikiotis, from the London University
School of Oriental and African Studies, another icon of Mid-East
history, 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 mishap,
which could be cured by a constitutional panacea, is detached from
Mid-East reality. Moreover, most Arab rage has been directed toward
Arabs, and was introduced long before the 2011 turmoil and butchery on
the Arab Street startled. For instance, some 200,000 Lebanese were
killed in internal violence during the 1970s and 1980s; tens of
thousands Syrians were slaughtered by Hafiz Assad in 1982; some 200,000
Iraqis were murdered by Saddam and 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;
etc.
The deep roots of contemporary Mid-East Islamic violence are
highlighted by Prof. 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..."
A key lesson to US policy-makers was delivered by
Prof. Vatikiotis (ibid): "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,
should Western policy-making be based on the knowledge of the deans of
Mid-East studies, thus learning from history by avoiding - rather than
by constantly repeating - costly errors.
Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger
The Ettinger Report
"Second Thought: A US-Israel Initiative"
First published in "Israel Hayom" newsletter January
