Reflections:
United we fall
By
Hani Shukrallah
Arab leaders, meeting at summit level this Saturday; presumably in a final bid to prevent a disastrous war against Iraq, are faced with an insurmountable dilemma: to convince Bush Jr and his band of global thugs that an American invasion of Iraq will impact disastrously on regional stability, opening a Pandora's box for America's many Arab friends. This, after all, is the Arabs' only bargaining card vis-à-vis the US. In their weakness is their strength. And God forbid that the Arab regimes' warnings to Washington involve any suggestion that they would themselves act against it if it goes ahead with its invasion and military occupation of Iraq.
Oil, and other similar weapons, are things of the remote and much repented past. Increasing oil production so as to offset the effects of the American-inspired capital strike against Chavez in Venezuela, so as to save the American economy from the recessionary effects of an oil price rise caused by the American administration's concerted attempt to overthrow a democratically elected government in Latin America -- that is much more our style these days. Only after doing so, only after swearing eternal fealty to American interests in the region and everywhere else, do we whimperingly warn that our very future is at stake. The only threat the Arab regimes' can make to Washington concerns fears for their survival. Their message is that American actions will bring about their collapse.
But as the regimes are beginning to realise with increasing alarm the current US administration has a more than cavalier attitude towards the survival, let alone stability, of its Arab friends.
The "weakness weapon" is flawed in a much more fundamental sense, however -- irrespective of how much regime change the US administration's "chicken hawks" (as Edward Said so aptly calls them) would like to see in the Middle East. This is due to a very simple and starkly obvious fact: the Arab regimes have a vested interest in rendering the only effective weapon they are able to deploy against US (and Israeli) hooliganism in the region ineffectual. Hitherto they have met with remarkable success in doing so. During the past couple of weeks the whole world has risen up in opposition to the war in Iraq. Millions took to the street, from Los Angeles to Seoul -- everywhere, that is, except the Arab world. None put it as bitterly and as succinctly as the Independent's Robert Fisk: "One million demonstrate in London, but the Arabs, faced with disaster, are like mice."
The paradox is deeply ironic, for the regimes' fear of the effects of an American invasion of Iraq upon their peoples has ensured that they adopt iron fist tactics against any mass movement opposed to that invasion; meanwhile, the success of their repressive measures undermines their howls of protest directed to the US and the international community, warning of the dire consequences to themselves, and hence, to regional stability, of such an invasion.
Ultimately, however, Washington's contempt for the Arab masses is not very different from that which Arab regimes seem to have for their own citizens. The experience of the past quarter of a century has apparently convinced them that Arabs will accept just about anything: authoritarianism, eternally stalled political reform, the institutionalisation of torture and a host of other human rights abuses, economic failure, attacks on economic and social rights, rampant corruption, impoverishment, oppression -- you name it, and it's on offer. The list goes on and on. Why then should these very same masses be expected to rise up now, especially when all the evidence seems to indicate that they have no intention of doing so? Indeed, to all appearances, Arabs are just as a frustrated and angry Fisk described them: mice.
And, sorry, I don't buy the repression excuse. It begs the question why people, in the Arab world and elsewhere, have risen up in the past against repression. It also gives too much credit to Arab regimes to solely credit them for today's sorry state of the Arab masses. Why should they have succeeded with such apparent finality when other, more violently authoritarian regimes, (e.g. Latin America's many military juntas) have failed?
There is, I believe, an even greater irony in store for us. I would suggest that the fundamental reason behind the Arabs' abject failure to confront the most humiliating national oppression in their history (to be instituted and symbolised by American military rule in Baghdad even as Sharon continues his butchery in Palestine) is a function of their having put nationalism above every other aspect of their political and social lives for more than half a century.
Three million Italians came out on the streets of Rome to protest the American-led war on Iraq. But millions of Italians had earlier taken part in a general strike and mass demonstrations throughout the country against a new labour law detrimental to workers rights. It is because they were able to do the one that they were able to do the other.
