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05/17/2007
Ignore the Middle East
[Next column...May 31...]
From time to time I try and give you something that doesn’t just
enlighten, but perhaps causes you to rethink your currently held
beliefs. I know the following, by Edward Luttwak, gave me
something to ponder while on one of my jogs.
Dr. Luttwak is senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington. When I was a student at
Wake Forest University in the late 1970s, I remember him giving
a lecture to one of my political science classes there.
Following are excerpts from an essay of his I first saw in The
Daily Star of Lebanon, though it initially appeared in the
British magazine Prospect.
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“We Devote too much attention to a mostly stagnant Middle
East”
Why are Middle East experts so unfailingly wrong? The lesson
of history is that men never learn from history, but Middle East
experts, like the rest of us, should at least learn from their past
mistakes. Instead, they just keep repeating them. The first
mistake is ‘five minutes to midnight’ catastrophism. The late
King Hussein of Jordan was the undisputed master of this genre.
Wearing his gravest aspect, he would warn us that with patience
finally exhausted the Arab-Israeli conflict was about to explode,
that all past conflicts would be dwarfed by what was about to
happen unless, unless And then came the remedy – usually
something rather tame when compared with the immense
catastrophe predicted, such as resuming this or that stalled
negotiation, or getting an American envoy to the scene to make
the usual promises to the Palestinians and apply the usual
preferences on Israel. We read versions of the standard King
Hussein speech in countless newspaper columns, hear identical
invocations in the grindingly repetitive radio and television
appearances of the usual Middle East experts, and are now faced
with Hussein’s son Abdullah periodically repeating his father’s
speech almost verbatim.
What actually happens at each of these ‘moments of truth’ – and
we may be approaching another one – is nothing much; only the
same old cynical conflict which always restarts when peace is
about to break out, and always dampens down when the violence
becomes intense enough. The ease of filming and reporting out
of safe and comfortable Israeli hotels inflates the media coverage
of every minor affray. But humanitarians should note that the
dead from Jewish-Palestinian fighting since 1921 amount to
fewer than 100,000 – about as many as are killed in a season of
conflict in Darfur.
Strategically, the Arab-Israeli conflict has been almost irrelevant
since the end of the Cold War. And as for the impact of the
conflict on oil prices, it was powerful in 1973 when the Saudis
declared embargoes and cut production, but that was the first and
last time that the ‘oil weapon’ was wielded. For decades now,
the largest Arab oil producers have publicly forsworn any
linkage between politics and pricing, and an embargo would be a
disaster for their oil-revenue dependent economies ..
Yes, it would be nice if Israelis and Palestinians could settle their
differences, but it would do little or nothing to calm the other
conflicts in the Middle East from Algeria to Iraq, or to stop
Muslim-Hindu violence in Kashmir, Muslim-Christian violence
in Indonesia and the Philippines, Muslim-Buddhist violence in
Thailand, Muslim-animist violence in Sudan, Muslim-Igbo
violence in Nigeria, Muslim-Muscovite violence in Chechnya, or
the different varieties of inter-Muslim violence between
traditionalists and Islamists, and between Sunnis and Shiites, nor
would it assuage the perfectly understandable hostility of
convinced Islamists toward the transgressive West that
relentlessly invades their minds, and sometimes their countries.
Arab-Israeli catastrophism is wrong twice over, first because the
conflict is contained within rather narrow boundaries, and second
because the Levant is just not that important any more.
The second repeated mistake is the Mussolini syndrome.
Contemporary documents prove beyond any doubt what is now
hard to credit: Serious people, including British and French
military chiefs, accepted Mussolini’s claims to great power status
because they believed that he had serious armed forces at his
command. His army divisions, battleships and air squadrons
were dutifully counted to assess Italian military power, making
some allowances for their lack of the most modern weapons but
not for their more fundamental refusal to fight in earnest.
Having conceded Ethiopia to win over Mussolini, only to lose
him to Hitler as soon as the fighting started, the British
discovered that the Italian forces quickly crumbled in combat. It
could not be otherwise, because most Italian soldiers were
unwilling conscripts from the one-mule peasantry of the south or
the almost equally miserable sharecropping villages of the north.
Exactly the same mistake keeps being made by the fraternity of
Middle East experts. They persistently attribute real military
strength to backward societies whose populations can sustain
excellent insurgencies but not modern military forces.
In the 1960s, it was Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt that was
mistaken for a real military power just because it had received
many aircraft, tanks and guns from the Soviet Union, and had
many army divisions and air squadrons .
In 1990, it was the turn of Iraq to be hugely overestimated as a
military power. Saddam Hussein had more equipment than
Nasser ever accumulated, and could boast of having defeated
much more populous Iran after eight years of war. In the months
before the Gulf war, there was much anxious speculation about
the size of the Iraqi Army – again, the divisions and regiments
were dutifully counted as if they were German divisions on the
eve of D-Day, with a separate count of the ‘elite’ Republican
Guard, not to mention the ‘super-elite’ Special Republican Guard
– and it was feared that Iraq’s bombproof aircraft shelters and
deep bunkers would survive any air attack .
In the event, two weeks of precision bombing were enough to
paralyze Saddam’s entire war machine, which scarcely tried to
resist the ponderous ground offensive when it came. At no point
did the Iraqi Air Force try to fight, and all those tanks that were
painstakingly counted served mostly for target practice. A real
army would have continued to resist for weeks or months in the
dug-in positions in Kuwait, even without air cover, but Saddam’s
army was the usual Middle Eastern fa ade without fighting
substance.
Now the Mussolini syndrome is at work over Iran. All the
symptoms are present, including tabulated lists of Iran’s
warships, despite the fact that most are over 30 years old; of
combat aircraft, many of which (F-4s, Mirages, F-5s, F-14s) have
not flown in years for lack of spare parts; and of divisions and
brigades that are so only in name. There are awed descriptions
of the Revolutionary Guards, inevitably described as ‘elite,’ who
do indeed strut around as if they have won many a war, but who
actually fought only one – against Iraq, which they lost. As for
Iran’s claim to have defeated Israel by Hizbullah proxy in last
year’s affray, the publicity was excellent but the substance went
the other way, with roughly 25 percent of the best-trained men
dead, which explains the tomb-like silence and immobility of the
once rambunctious Hizbullah ever since the ceasefire.
Then there is the new light cavalry of Iranian terrorism that is
invoked to frighten us if all else fails. The usual Middle East
experts now explain that if we annoy the ayatollahs, they will
unleash terrorists who will devastate our lives, even thought 30
years of “death to America” invocations and vast sums spent on
maintaining a special international terrorism department have
produced only one major bombing in Saudi Arabia, in 1996, and
two in the most permissive environment of Buenos Aires, in
1992 and 1994, along with some assassinations of exiles in
Europe.
It is true enough that if Iran’s nuclear installations are bombed in
some overnight raid, there is likely to be some retaliation, but we
live in fortunate times in which we have only the irritant of
terrorism instead of world wars to worry about – and Iran’s
added contribution is not likely to leave much of an impression.
There may be good reasons for not attacking Iran’s nuclear sites
– including the very slow and uncertain progress of its uranium
enrichment effort – but its ability to strike back is not one of
them. Even the seemingly fragile tanker traffic down the Gulf
and through the Straits of Hormuz is not as vulnerable as it
seems – Iran and Iraq have both tried to attack it many times
without much success, and this time the U.S. Navy stands ready
to destroy any airstrip or jetty from which attacks are
launched .
The third and greatest error repeated by Middle East experts of
all persuasions, by Arabophiles and Arabophobes alike, by
Turcologists and by Iranists, is also the simplest to define. It is
the very odd belief that these ancient nations are highly
malleable. Hard-liners keep suggesting that with a bit of well-
aimed violence (‘the Arabs only understand force’) compliance
will be obtained. But what happens every time is an increase in
hostility; defeat is followed not by collaboration, but by sullen
non-cooperation and active resistance too. It is not hard to defeat
Arab countries, but it is mostly useless. Violence can work to
destroy dangerous weapons but not to induce desired changes in
behavior.
Soft-liners make exactly the same mistake in reverse. They keep
arguing that if only this or that concession were made, if only
their policies were followed through to the end and respect
shown, or simulated, hostility would cease and a warm
Mediterranean amity would emerge. Yet even the most thinly
qualified of Middle East experts must know that Islam, as with
any other civilization, comprehends the sum total of human life,
and that unlike some others it promises superiority in all things
for its believers, so that the scientific and technological and
cultural backwardness of the lands of Islam generates a
constantly renewed sense of humiliation and of civilizational
defeat. That fully explains the ubiquity of Muslim violence, and
reveals the futility of the palliatives urged by the soft-liners.
The operational mistake that Middle East experts keep making is
the failure to recognize that backward societies must be left
alone, as the French now wisely leave Corsica to its own devices,
as the Italians quietly learned to do in Sicily, once they
recognized that maxi-trials merely handed over control to a
newer and smarter mafia of doctors and lawyers. With neither
invasions nor friendly engagements, the peoples of the Middle
East should finally be allowed to have their own history – the
one thing that Middle East experts of all stripes seem determined
to deny them.
That brings us to the mistake that the rest of us make. We devote
far too much attention to the Middle East, a most stagnant region
where almost nothing is created in science or the arts – excluding
Israel, per capita patent production of countries in the Middle
East is one fifth that of sub-Saharan Africa. The people of the
Middle East (only about 5 percent of the world’s population) are
remarkably unproductive, with a high proportion not in the labor
force at all. Not many of us would care to work if we were
citizens of Abu Dhabi, with lots of oil money for very few
citizens. But Saudi Arabia’s 27 million inhabitants also live
largely off the oil revenues that trickle down to them, leaving
most of the work to foreign technicians and laborers: Even with
high oil prices, Saudi Arabia’s annual per capita income, at
$14,000, is only about half that of oil-free Israel .
The Middle East was once the world’s most advanced region, but
these days its biggest industries are extravagant consumption and
the venting of resentment. According to the United Nations’
2004 Arab Human Development Report, the region boasts the
second lowest adult literacy rate in the world (after sub-Saharan
Africa) at just 63 percent. Its dependence on oil means that
manufactured goods account for just 17 percent of exports,
compared to a global average of 78 percent. Moreover, despite
its oil wealth, the entire Middle East generated under 4 percent of
global GDP in 2006 – less than Germany.
Unless compelled by immediate danger, we should therefore
focus on the old and new lands of creation in Europe and
America, in India and East Asia – places where hard-working
populations are looking ahead instead of dreaming of the past.
---
Hott Spotts will return in two weeks.
Brian Trumbore
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