The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (16 page)

 M
any decades ago, Western officials, analysts, and researchers were convinced that the future of the Muslim Middle East would consist of various forms of “secular” nationalisms that would eventually adopt more or less Western political norms. They were caught off guard by Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution. The revolution was an epochal event, a real revolution that, like all revolutions, changed the world—but it had scarcely any effect on how most Western experts looked at the region.

Even after the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, many in the Carter administration believed that because there seemed to be competing centers of power in the Iranian leadership, and because liberal and leftist secularists were part of the revolution as well, Washington could do business with the Iranians. Later, the Iran-contra scandal was premised on the idea that the Reagan administration had identified Iranian moderates that it could deal with. The notion that Iran could be engaged, provided that sufficient diplomatic energies were applied and the United States was willing to proffer incentives and show contrition for past indignities, has survived four U.S. administrations, from Reagan to Bush II; it was the major plank of President Obama’s foreign policy platform. Thus on both sides of the aisle, policy makers and analysts refused to recognize the nature of the regime, and believed that Islamism was just a passing social movement, that no one could be that serious about religion and govern a modern state at the same time, that the corruption and self-interest of these carpet weavers turned statesmen would eventually bring them to the bargaining table, as pragmatists. Over time, the
thinking went, once the Americans got their hooks into them, the Islamists would have little choice but to become free-market liberals.

All this was gospel for the same reason that a former State Department policy maker named Francis Fukuyama looked at the fall of the Soviet Union and decided that history had come to an end and liberal democracy had conclusively triumphed. For good reasons and bad ones, the American policy elite cherishes stability above all other values, and so it is apt to see stability on the verge of breaking out even in the unlikeliest of places. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is not always cooperative, nor does it agree that democracy is the highest and final stage in political organization.

Many Islamists, like Ayatollah Khomeini himself and the Muslim Brotherhood, were plainly contemptuous of Western forms of government and all efforts to co-opt the Islamic movement. Indeed, the Brotherhood’s motto “The Quran is our constitution” underscores the irreconcilable contradiction between democracy and Islamism.
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Democracy holds that the people are the source of political sovereignty, whereas the Islamists believe that any governance that does not make God the source of political sovereignty is an abomination and a recipe for disaster.

To be sure, there are other Islamists, like Hassan al-Turabi, bin Laden’s onetime host in Khartoum, who have been happy to indulge Western fantasies about democratic Islamism.
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And this had led Western analysts to try to distinguish between Islamist extremists and Islamist moderates, with the latter usually defined as such based on their willingness to submit their program to a popular referendum, as Islamists did in Algeria with great success at the polls in 1992. When the Algerian government nullified this victory, it touched off a civil war that lasted throughout the 1990s, leaving more than 150,000 dead. During the war years, the Clinton State Department pushed the regime to reconcile with the Islamists, arguing that if the government couldn’t find ready-made moderate Islamists to dialogue with, it needed to create them through the political process.
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Ideally, analysis shapes policy, and in the case of Algeria the carnage left in the war’s bloody wake should have shown to U.S. policy makers that a party that goes to war to protest an election result is at the very least no more likely to rule democratically than the government that canceled the results. Indeed, the analysis was shaped by an American policy that counseled rapprochement between the regime and the Islamists. And since describing the Islamists as well-armed cadres willing to kill and die for God could not lead to a policy of reconciliation, policy makers had to come up with an explanation of how Islamists might in time become more moderate.

As a result, Washington was flush with advocates of Islamist pluralism who found evidence of nascent democracy scattered throughout the Islamic canon—though admittedly none of this consensual governance had ever been practiced in the actual course of Muslim politics over the last fourteen hundred years.
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The case for Islamist democracy was hypothetical: Might the Islamists govern justly and prudently the Arab societies that they had previously made war against? Sure, the Islamists might well become democrats—and in any case, what do
we
have to lose if they don’t?

Looking at Algeria, some of the sharper American policy makers understood that once Islamists came to power at the polls, they would not likely be willing to cede authority in a subsequent round of elections—or, as the former assistant secretary of state Edward Djerejian put it, Islamist democracy means “one vote, one man, one time.” In other words, the strong horse takes power in any way possible and keeps it by all means available. The fundamental problem with Arab democracy isn’t Islam or Islamism but the norms of Arab politics and governance, of which Islamist politics is merely an aspect. The problem is systemic, organic.

In effect, the Bush administration’s top-down approach toward regional transformation conceived of Arab reform as a debugging program that would go through and clean all the problems out of a flawed but basically sound piece of equipment. The White House proceeded
as though democracy were a kind of technology, like the Internet, cell phones, or satellite TV, opening up new vistas, possibilities, and arrangements unimaginable to the tradition-bound Arab elders, but which the rising generation, Arab youth, would find so appealing that it could not help but be seduced by the Western way of life, utterly transforming the region, whether anyone willed it so or not.

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he Bush administration’s faith that it could turn Iraq into a beacon of democracy seemed to assume that once it brought the trappings of modernity and liberalism to Baghdad, the substance of these things would soon follow. And the fact that we had put American lives at risk in order to topple a dictator and support a nascent democracy, meanwhile, would help defuse anti-American hostility and demonstrate our bona fides in the region. The reality of the situation turned out to be very different: Iraqis may have welcomed the toppling of Saddam, but they despised the United States for invading their country. They turned out in throngs to vote, and yet seemed to see democracy as primarily a matter of legitimizing the rule of one sect over another. They wanted the Americans to leave, but they also thought that if the Americans left, the country would descend into chaos. America’s intervention, in other words, produced a kind of schizophrenia among Iraqis. This should not have been surprising. After all, schizophrenia is the default condition of most of the Middle East.

Consider that Saddam Hussein had once seemed poised to overrun Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab Gulf states after his 1990
invasion of Kuwait; but with the Islamic Republic of Iran recuperating from its decadelong war with Iraq and ascendant throughout the region, the Arab states once again turned to Saddam as a stalwart defender of Sunni power. The Sunnis’ other way to deter Tehran was to back the same militant organization that threatened to topple Arab regimes, Al Qaeda. Once the Americans deposed Saddam and dealt a withering blow to Al Qaeda in Iraq, the Arabs had lost both their local security pillars, and the Saudis and the Egyptians found they had no choice but to leave their fate in the hands of Israel—the Zionist entity that they had warred against for sixty years—to protect them from Iran.

But nowhere does Arab schizophrenia manifest itself more clearly than in the Sunnis’ alliance with the United States. The relationship penetrates every aspect of the Arabs’ lives, especially in the Gulf states, where the United States has basing rights in all six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries—Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman—in order to protect the oil that ensures the stability of the global economy. The Arabs are incapable of defending for themselves the resource that has made them rich, a wealth that has given them access to all of the most glamorous products of a world that they played no part in creating. Their dependency on the West extends beyond the military and political spheres even into culture, a fact that becomes evident strolling through any mall in the Arab Gulf states, where teenage boys in bright white dishdashas, baseball caps, and Converse All Stars wait in line for first-run Hollywood action movies, while their teenage sisters in black burqas and designer sunglasses balance arm-fuls of shopping bags from American retail outlets while chatting on their iPhones.

It is hard not to be charmed by an ice-skating rink in a Qatari mall, or admire the daffy ambition in building the world’s largest indoor ski slope in Dubai. However, the Gulf interpretation of American pop has a seamier side to it, like the hotel lounge tricked out to
look just like a college-town sports bar, with beer and burgers and ESPN on four large-screen TVs at the bar, where I was watching two preppy-looking couples playing eight ball and sharing a pitcher of beer—until I saw in the bright yellow light hanging over the pool table that they weren’t flirtatious undergrads but two Saudi teenagers and a pair of thirtysomething Russian call girls.

It is hardly surprising the Arabs are deeply confused about the United States and their own feelings toward a civilization that has the wherewithal to enjoin good and forbid evil, as the
umma
once did. Their obsession on the one hand with the ornamental baubles of the American lifestyle as emblems of the values and ideals they say they admire, and their loud hatred on the other hand of the policies that protect and advance the interests of the country that makes those products, are the schizophrenic symptoms of a society exposed and vulnerable to the modern world to which it has mainly contributed two things: the fossil fuel that lies below its land and, of late, jihad. It is the vast wealth of the Arabs of the Persian Gulf that makes them especially susceptible to this bifurcating disorder: with access to everything America makes, they are afforded the luxury of believing that it is possible to distinguish between a culture’s products and its policies, its technological prowess and the secular worldview underpinning the scientific method. But these items cannot be separated out, for no matter how diffuse and various are the individuals and institutions that make up a culture, a society is a coherent, holistic organism that reflects its values, contradictions, and convictions from every prism.

Of course a large number of Westerners as well as Arabs see it differently. One of globalization’s articles of faith is that technology and consumer goods will bridge the gaps between different societies, including the West and the Arabic-speaking Middle East—as if a shelfful of DVDs, sitting behind the wheel of an SUV, or facility with a BlackBerry were the entry fee to the modern world. But because so many take the shiny surface of our society as the thing in itself,
because they see no necessary relationship between the technological dynamism and productivity of our society and the ideas and values underlying our American gloss, it is likewise impossible for them to register the density of Arab culture. To the apostles of globalization it is inconceivable that an Arab, perhaps educated in the West, speaking Western languages, and doing business with Westerners, would hesitate to swap the values that have distinguished his society for generations in exchange for a ticket in the globalization sweepstakes. This ethnocentric fallacy that everyone wants our way of life just because they desire our consumer goods has led to the untenable conclusion that goods like the Internet, cell phones, and satellite TV are capable of transforming fundamental values and ideas. And so for the technology-is-social-progress crowd, the mix-and-match fashion bricolage of the Gulf Arab mall rat is not the armor of uncertain identity but the style paradigm for the one-world-brotherhood-and-security-in-globalization generation. This is the brave new Arab world where Islam commingles easily with the West, and its red-hot center is Dubai, where, as Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the ruler of this small Gulf emirate, says, “If you dream it, you can build it.”

But that optimism reigned before the financial crisis hit Dubai full force in the winter of 2009, requiring Abu Dhabi, the largest and richest of the seven city-states that make up the UAE, to bail out its more visionary sister emirate. Dubai’s population had surged from 30,000 to 1.4 million since the 1971 founding of the UAE, but with foreign labor, from Baluchi construction workers to British lawyers, forced to leave in droves, it’s unclear where the numbers will settle once the dust clears. The construction cranes that dot the skyline more than minarets or date palms are mostly idle, and the future of many of the emirate’s more audacious projects—like the amusement park under construction called Dubailand that was to double the size of Dubai itself, and the man-made islands where luxury condominiums were bought in advance by European celebrities like the soccer star David Beckham—is unclear.

Still, it’s unlikely that Dubai will be forced to return to its origins as a small port village that depended on the pearl trade and commerce with India and Iran. In 1966 the emirate known as the pearl of the Persian Gulf struck oil, but its ruler at the time, Sheikh Rashid, understood that his oil had a shelf date and it was best used to bankroll other projects, like shipping, tourism, and finance, varied sources of income that earned the emirate high ratings from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund for economic diversification. What Sheikh Rashid sowed, his third son, Sheikh Mohammed, reinvested in ports, hotels, and several large industrial-park-type free zones not subject to UAE laws or tariffs, like Internet City, Medical Village, and Media City, which attracted regional and international tenants. The emirate’s Arab critics—many of whom actually work in Dubai—said it has no authentic culture or history, unlike Damascus, Cairo, Beirut, or Baghdad. But to Dubai’s admirers, that was the key to its success—the absence of history. Distance from the rest of the region and its problems made the Emiratis more flexible and adaptable than the ideological Arabs of the Levant.