September
5, 2002, 10:45 a.m. Which
Muslims, Mr. Scowcroft?
W.’s Mideast
Vision.
By Barbara
Lerner
Memo to the president:
"Armegeddon" looms in the Mideast because you are deviating
from the true path. Repent. Return to the old ways.
hat's
basically Bush I veteran Brent Scowcroft's message warning Bush II that
if he abandons his father's policy and acts on his own "democracy-first"
vision, he'll end up "unleashing an Armageddon in the Middle East."
W. has a new Mideast
vision. He plans to protect us from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction
and to enfeeble terrorists everywhere by liberating Iraq now, and by encouraging
the surging liberation movement in Iran, creating a great arc of freedom,
stretching across the whole northern span of the Mideast from Turkey to
Iran. Scowcroft says that's the road to Armageddon, because if we liberate
Iraq before we meet Muslim demands for a Palestinian state, there will
be "an explosion of outrage against us" throughout the Mideast.
Why? Because in "the Muslim world," the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict is seen as "a key interest;" Iraq as only "a narrow
American interest."
Sound familiar? It
should. It's the standard Saudi line, echoed by the rulers of Egypt, Syria,
and Jordan. Call them the southern rulers. They hold sway over 100 million
Arabs. With rare exceptions, these Arabs have no freedom, no personal
security, and no future, but few blame this squarely on their rulers.
They don't see gross, homegrown tyranny and corruption as the primary
cause of their misery. Southern rulers control the press, schools, and
mosques and together, they pound home the message, day after day, morning
to night, birth to death: "Israel is our biggest problem; Israel,
America, and the arrogant West. They've usurped our rightful place in
the world, taken what is ours. Forget jobs; forget bread. Fill your bellies
with hate. Our righteous rage will triumph in the end, and we'll all live
in Paradise." Call that the southern strategy — it works well
in that part of the Mideast. Most southern Arabs buy the myth, in one
form or other. Tyrants who sell it have genuine popular support. An ugly
business, but we have no choice, Mr. Scowcroft tells us. That's reality
in "the Muslim world;" we must accept it, and play along, to
advance American interests.
Call that the myth
of Muslim unity, because it ignores 160 million northern Muslims who don't
play along, 160 million Turks, Arabs, Persians, Kurds, and Turkomans who
don't buy the southern strategy, don't see the fate of two million Arabs
in what the Romans called Palestine as their "key interest."
The Turks — 70 million strong — never did. Turks don't buy pie-in-the-sky,
and they don't like excuses. They have a long history of taking responsibility
for their own errors and misdeeds and correcting them, vigorously. A history
of taking the best the West has to offer and making it their own. Turkey
is no paradise, but it's the only Muslim democracy in the region, the
only country with free, educated, and industrious citizens, and a viable
economy that isn't dependent on the dumb luck of oil. Turkey sees Israel
as her key regional ally; the U.S. as her key world ally.
Iraq and Iran are
different, but masses there yearn to be less so. Many of the 23 million
Arabs in Iraq and the 66 million Persians in Iran did buy the southern
myth, in part, in decades past, but it wasn't a ubiquitous obsession there.
When the Hashemite and Pahlevi dynasties ruled these lands, there were
competing ideas. Both countries were relatively open and prosperous then,
with lively commercial cultures and growing middle classes. Now, the savage
follies of their current rulers have reduced them to the penury of the
south. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein decimated the population as well as the
economy, gassing thousands of Kurds and sending a million Iraqis to their
deaths in the losing wars he initiated against Iran and Kuwait. Of course,
he trumpets the southern line — Israel and America are responsible
for Iraq's misery — but Iraqis remember life before he turned the
country into a prison; they understand that to make life better, they
must defeat him, not us. Many Kurds never bought the southern myth; many
Sunni and Shia Arabs who did lived to regret it. Troubling differences
within and between Iraqi groups remain, but the thing that makes a dissident
umbrella group like the Iraqi National Congress possible is their shared
conviction that getting rid of Saddam is not "a narrow American interest;"
it's priority one. And when our men succeed, Baghdad's joy will make post-Taliban
Kabul look funereal.
Saddam seized power
by force; Iran's vicious, medieval mullahs were put in power by the people
of Iran who staged massive popular demonstrations against their Shah.
Reza Pahlevi was no democrat — he said he'd "love to rule like
a Scandinavian king, if only he had Scandinavians to rule" —
but he was a serious, pro-Western modernizer, friendly to America and
Israel, and he brought prosperity and expanded educational opportunity
to his countrymen. Sadly, it was those newly educated and radicalized
young Iranians who took the lead in toppling him, replacing him with a
gang of virulently anti-Western ayatollahs. Now, after years of fanatic
Islamic misrule, Iranians are much poorer and less free, and growing numbers
of their young are marching again. No small thing, in a land where 70
percent of the people are under 25. But this time, they're not crying
"death to America," so our press can't hear them. Thanks to
Michael
Ledeen and a few others, we know that today, they're not burning our
flag; they're waving it in sympathy for us, as they did in moving candlelight
marches, after September 11. And they're calling for the mullahs and the
fake "moderates" to step down. Iranian forces beat them back,
but they keep coming, and local men are reluctant to take the increasingly
violent actions needed to stop them. The mullahs are coping, for now,
by bringing in foreign enforcers. Many are Palestinians. The southern
strategy is their raison d'etre, and they enforce it wherever they can.
But Iranian numbers are overwhelming, and our victory in neighboring Iraq
will give them a big boost. With a little help, they can bring down the
mullahs, discard the southern strategy, and reach for something better.
Of course, "Democracy-first"
is not instant democracy. Democracy needs fertile soil, and it grows slowly.
But making a start at building something less brutal and destructive,
something freer, safer, and more hopeful, will be easier in Iraq than
in Afghanistan, easier still in Iran. Any "explosion of outrage against
us" in the south will subside quickly, as it did when we routed the
Taliban. Southern Arabs respect unapologetic power. Act on your vision,
Mr. President. The Mideast needs a new vision, and so do we.
—
Barbara Lerner is a freelance writer in Chicago.
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hat's
basically Bush I veteran Brent Scowcroft's message warning Bush II that
if he abandons his father's policy and acts on his own "democracy-first"
vision, he'll end up "unleashing an Armageddon in the Middle East."
