Whatever the precipitating cause of our current “anti-terrorism” imbroglio, two things are becoming clear. First, the emerging winner after nearly four years of Bush’s crusade is none other than our ally Israel. And, secondly, Bush and his allies in London and Tel Aviv are poised for a historic victory, however Pyrrhic it may eventually prove to be.
Why did we go to war in the first place.? There were doubtless numerous reasons, ranging from China’s growing thirst for oil to the domestic political needs of the Republican party, but the major cause I think was the need felt in important quarters to make the world safe for Israel.
Saddam Hussein, for all his many sins, rode tall among the occupied and friendless Palestinians. He was for all intents and purposes the chief financier and patron of the Palestinian intifada. I mean, this guy gave a small fortune to the economies of the West Bank and Gaza when the rest of the Arab world wouldn’t give the Palestinian resistance the time of day. $25,000 was given to the families of each suicide bomber. Along with it came much material support to both extended family and the community. The UN’s Oil for Food Program was supposed to be a sop to the Israeli Lobby; the allies would leave the Baathist regime alone for now and would try to stop the flow of Iraqi cash to the Palestinians.
The Oil for Food Program went south and the cash kept flowing into the Palestinian economy.
The Israelis, for their part. never liked leaving Saddam Hussein in power. They were determined to plow him under and were increasingly anxous about doing so. The only question was when. Translated to mean: when could the Americans be talked into giving Saddam the boot?
After 9/11 and with the Bush regime in power, it became only a matter of time. Bush at the very minimum wanted regime change in Baghdad. Too, he and Karl Rove wanted to effect a major realignment by bringing American Jews en masse into the Republican party. A complicit media or at least one muted and docile would come in handy when “reforms” in social security, education, and taxes really started to bite.
Then, there were the Christian apocalyptic prophesies, promoted by many party-connected hucksters and aimed at an important component of the Republican social base, the emotionally impoverished, many of whom were already beset by cruel economies and corrupted priorities. The stage was being set.
Now, four years later, we have witnessed the denouement; its sequel will be played out in Damascus and Tehren and perhaps elswhere. Why is this happening, and why will the scenario continue to be played out until the intransigent (“rejectionsit”) Arab world is brought to heel, regardless of the cost?
First of all, there is for the moment no credible alternative. Not to the really bad way that the Arabs have treated their own people (true the West was complicit in this to the extent they cajoled and corrupted various governments, but did those governments really need all that much corrupting?). Nor to the model of development contemplated by the West waiting to be implemented in the newly “liberated” realms of Islam. The Soviet Union and the visions of a just, equitable socialist society is for the moment gone. The Americans and their allies have inherited a vast ideological vacuum into which they are rushing precipitously (with a Leninist zeal) to both fill and remake in their own image. The Arab world is very much like Spain at the end of the nineteenth century when a nascent American imperialism seized with little effort the remains of a tattered empire in Cuba and in the Philippines.
Arab “government” has evolved into a syphillitic, decaying near-cadaver rotting away before the very eyes of its stewards, its customs and religions choking its own people into a kind of stupefied ennui. The bewildered Arab “street” can only look on in impotent rage as defeat after defeat, compromise after compromise inexorably rots away its sense of initiative and self-respect.
Further, “solutions” to this connundrum will come not from within Arab society but in all likelihood will arrive as a seres of profound outside influences, first from the Anglo/American/Israeli axis of power and then and more decisively from Asia and a resurgent Russia. But, by that time the structure of Islamic society in the Middle East will have changed beyond recognition and it will fall to a new generation to skillfully adapt to the new realities of a changed world, something its predecessors, suffering from centuries of tradition and superstitious obstinancy, failed to do.
Condorcet, while in prison awaiting the guillotine, rejected the consolations of religion in favor of those of history and wrote The Outline of a Table of Progress of the Human Spirit, in which history was seen for the first time as a progressive advance towards a future utopia. Perhaps the awakened Arab masses, similarly rejecting the suffocating superstitions of faith and tradition, will turn to history and find a sense of future that at long last serves the people instead of a succession of unworthy rulers, foreign and domestic.
Now, that’s the kind of middle eastern “democracy” I’d really like to see…