Opinion, May 2003, Al-Jazeerah.info
Human Price of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine
Israeli daily aggression on the Palestinian people
Mission and meaning of Al-Jazeerah
Cities, localities, and tourist attractions
What the Iraq war tells us about the Arab condition,
Adnan Abu Odeh
The Daily Star, 5/27/03
We are still living the aftermath of the
recent events in Iraq, still trying to fathom what happened and to where
it will lead us. How should we describe what took place? An earthquake,
which entails only dealing with its aftermath? A liberation, as some
Iraqis see it, which should please us? Just a setback, in which case we
would be deluding ourselves? Another national tragedy to add to the
already long list? Or a new beginning imposed from outside? I reject all
of the above in favor of seeing what happened in Iraq as akin to a
sociopolitical “excavation” whose analysis can clarify the past and
clarify the future. The second fall of Baghdad was not the first such
opportunity for analysis. There were other sociopolitical
“excavations” that we chose to disregard and to misread.
One of the defeated countries chose to name the debacle suffered in June
1967 as the “setback.” The Arab government-owned media
enthusiastically adopted that description as an act of self-delusion that
cushioned the impact of defeat on the Arab people (they were a real people
then), and kept alive the hope that it could be reversed. Western
researchers, analysts and media called it a political earthquake, and time
proved them right for this overwhelming defeat marked the beginning of
change in the Arabs’ political and psychological landscape.
The adoption of the term “setback” prevented us from finding out
whether in the last 50 years since independence, the state, the community,
and national and popular security had developed in a manner to best suit
the interests of the Arab nation. The term “earthquake,” on the other
hand, chosen by countries dealing with the Arab world (including Israel)
to describe the June 1967 defeat, mainly reflected their own perceptions
of the region. Central to this perception is the fixation of Arab official
thinking on maintaining bilateral relations with the US, especially after
the fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing Arab political regression.
This regression further squeezed paternalistic and autocratic Arab regimes
into the role of recipient states.
Added to the above was the rise in oil prices and the consequent spending
boom in the Arab world. Many Arabs became inward looking; they allowed
themselves to become totally wrapped up in their personal concerns, which
overrode their concern for the well-being of their nation. The Arab
individual was no longer a citizen of his or her country but rather a
resident in it.
Arab regimes contributed to this state of affairs when they closed the
door to real public participation and adopted a strange understanding of
the concept of national security. This understanding makes national
security strictly synonymous with regime security, and precludes the
community as a whole (political systems in democratic countries, on the
other hand, strike a balance between political and social establishments,
and between internal and external security). Due to this faulty
interpretation of national security, paternalistic Arab regimes made
reform-minded criticism an offense punishable by law, and its
practitioners outlaws pursued by the security systems. These systems
thrived under such conditions and often became the public image of the
regimes, as a concomitant fear of authority took root in the soul of each
citizen and made him or her exercise self-censorship.
People sought personal safety above all else, stayed away from partisan
politics, and opted instead for civil society organizations, clubs, unions
and the like, with the hope that these would give them a chance to express
themselves on matters of national concern. The overwhelming majority
totally shunned public activism, and concentrated instead on taking care
of themselves and their families: securing jobs became the main concern
for low-income families, while upper-income families focused on ensuring
their electricity, gas, and water supplies, garbage collection, and their
children achieving high enough test scores to be admitted into state
universities. Other common concerns included finding a personal contact
senior enough in the government hierarchy to expedite bureaucratic
transactions with the state, or obtaining American, Canadian, or
Australian citizenship.
One could reasonably ask: Aren’t these personal concerns legitimate, and
similar to the concerns of citizens in democratic and industrialized
countries? The answer to both these questions is yes, but with a big
fundamental difference. In Arab society, personal concerns dominate
one’s life; only a few people still express some public concerns. In
democratic countries, however, a citizen’s life is made up of two
concentric circles comprising personal and public concerns, the latter
taking root and growing thanks to political participation that is the core
of democracy. For citizens of democratic countries, personal concerns do
not negate public ones, as is the case in the Arab world that is defined
by regimes that range from paternalism to autocracy (depending on their
historical evolution and wealth). Democratic countries have separate
concepts of nations, nationhood, citizens, state and motherland; the Arab
world comprises residents, places of residence, and a state but no
motherland.
Since the Arab League is a creation of the Arab states, it is only natural
that its decisions do not reflect the will and interests of the people, as
its name indicates, but rather that of their rulers. When we add to that
the absence of political participation and the resulting gap between the
rulers and their citizens, the concomitant outlandish concepts of the
rights and duties of citizens, the internally and externally imposed
senseless wars that squander Arab wealth, the faulty highly centralized
economic planning that knows neither transparency nor accountability, and
the educational chaos that does not know how to adequately develop local
human resources, only then will we start to understand why are poverty and
unemployment so rampant in our part of the world in spite of the fact that
it owns on the largest reserves of the most sought after commodity in the
modern world, and why it is only second to sub-Saharan Africa in terms of
stunted development.
In short, Arab efforts at state building in the past 50 years, and since
independence, have failed, or at best have hit a snag. Here are some
indicators:
1) The absence of all forms of political participation; 2)The absence of
the rule of law in some countries, and the selectivity in applying it in
others; 3) Substituting form for content in institution building; 4) The
absence of critical thinking from education; 5) If the concept of
citizenship sparsely exists in Arab constitutions, it does not at all in
practice and application.
Failure in modern Arab state-building also extended to the unattained big
dream of Arab unity. Arab politics became stuck between these two
failures. Some Arab countries found non-Arab allies to protect them, while
others remained mired in this situation and sought to achieve some
tactical gains that proved in recent years to be more of a burden than an
asset. As a result, the Arab world became ripe for foreign interference
and conquest, in the name of security cooperation or fighting terrorism.
The Arab environment became fertile for the growth of extremism, despite
material and infrastructural achievements by some countries.
In this context, coalition forces launched a war on Iraq that lasted three
weeks. The war ended with the total collapse of the state and its
institutions, and the total disappearance of the Republican Guard; what
had been the regime’s strongest and most loyal force melted away,
leaving behind not even one of its formations to sign the surrender treaty
that usually signals the end of war.
What else should we have expected from a paternalistic and autocratic
regime that plotted against its own people, and built its security and
defense policies on the understanding that national security only means
security of the regime, an interpretation that allows it to protect itself
from its own sons and stay in power forever?
But isn’t plotting against one’s own people the prevalent mode for
most regimes in the Arab world? Should we deduce consequently that what
happened in Iraq could, given the same circumstances, happen in other Arab
countries? I do not know the answer. I see, though, that the general Arab
condition remains as it was before the war, except for a handful of new
signs.
Adnan Abu Odeh, a former Jordanian ambassador, information minister and chief of the royal court, is a regular contributor to THE DAILY STAR. This is Part 1 of a two-part commentary. Part 2 will be published tomorrow
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |