Having deeply immersed myself over the last years in the internal rivalries of Arab politics, I have discovered a basis for hoping that Israel can secure herself comfortably over the next decade or two. The politics of much of the Arab world, which is largely tyrannical, have devastated it and left it limping.
Angry ideas imported from Europe peddling the virtues of upheaval have bedeviled Arab politics for most of this century. These ideas battered Europe for the last two centuries and reduced it to a shadow of its former cultural and intellectual greatness. For example, France, an intellectual wellspring which hosted half of Europe's population and even a larger portion of its economy in 1789, embraced broad social, cultural, and economic revolution as a virtue more than any other of its neighbors. By 1871, France was little of what it had once been -- so much so that Germany alone was more populous, wealthy and intellectually active.
This upheaval has spread to Arab politics, producing a similar effect. The tide of revolutionary anger and enchantment with social experimentation signaled an assault on political humility, a qualification demanded of those who claim good governance. Instead of accepting the importance of restraint in exerting power into areas into which politicians should never venture and understanding the limits of what they have a right to play with in society, many Arab rulers hold their own populations in such contempt as to reduce them to little more than vehicles to pursue their personal, factional and ideological ambitions, and like their European counterparts, expanded state power and leveled barriers to unrestrained power. Surrendering to arrogance and wild ambition, they distorted the proper relationship between a ruler and those ruled.
In the Arab world, this arrogance first assumed a secular form -- Nasserism and Baathism -- as those who sought a revolutionary break from the past -- a destruction of all that once was -- took power. The Egyptian Nobel laureate, Naguib Mahfouz, recently described how this secular religion and cult of personality burdened Egyptian society. He could be talking of the whole Arab world as we witness the slow death of Iraq under Saddam's cruel hand, the mass murder of cities under Assad's tyranny in Syria, or the impoverishment of Palestinian Arabs under Arafat's corruption.
As the secular delirium crumbled, a new arrogance wearing religious garb emerged. Appearing first in Persian lands, the proponents of this new arrogance --equally eager to level all barriers to absolute power, transform society and chase utopian delusions--sought to throw Muslim society back into the stagnant habits and familiarities of a long-gone, and to some extent imaginary past. These medieval minds, pursuing Islam's inquisition, devastate every society they touch, like their secular counterparts.
Despite the devastation, these governments have been shielded from the misery they caused by the Cold War, oil and the Arab-Israeli dispute. Until recently, the USSR provided aid, military equipment, political support and expertise in repression which helped the most egregious Arab despots survive and threaten the neighborhood. Oil endowed governments with resources far beyond the economic capabilities of their societies, which remained undeveloped, stagnant and even sapped. Oil also allowed some non-oil producing nations to rely on remittances from expatriate workers in oil-producing countries. Seeing Zionist conspiracies behind every event allowed rulers to shift blame for the painful effects of their failures to unseen outsiders. The war on Israel, and its attending military mobilization of society, became a legitimate vehicle for despots to limit political freedoms and subjugate unwieldy citizens.
But the Soviet Union and oil prices both collapsed in the 1990s. The Arab world was stripped of softening external interventions. This should have a profound effect on U.S. policy. American policy toward the Middle East has long been predicated on two complementary assumptions: that U.S. economic interests in the Middle East are anchored primarily to the Arabian peninsula oil, and that oil revenues of peninsular oil-producing countries provide the internal stability necessary to anchor an American security architecture. Hence, Saudi Arabia's political stability and military power has stood at the center of the United States' security interest in the Middle East, while close American relations with Israel and Turkey were peripheral. This analysis is obsolete and largely inaccurate.
First, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and its challenge to Saudi Arabia showed that only American military, not indigenous military capabilities of the oil producing states, can secure these nations from their neighboring adversaries. Thus, reliance on any indigenous Saudi Arabian military contributions to securing American interests is dubious.
Second, oil prices are now far below where they were when these assumptions were institutionalized. Using 1996 dollars, the price of oil in the early 1980s reached $50 or more per barrel, while current prices hover around the $12 per barrel level. The dependency of the producers' economic well-being on oil revenues
(Continued on p.7)
Outpost - 6 - May 1999