The Arab Impasse
By J. Millard Burr*
The Arab Spring has failed. The Sunni Renaissance has floundered. And all in the space of three years. In a review of Arab history, one searches in vain for a comparable epoch of chaos and confusion.
Egypt under Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimun) is a mess. So too is Libya. And Tunisia under the Muslim Brothers and eminence gris Rachid Ghannouchi is not much better. The Khartoum government, yet another Ikhwan outpost, is a state whose riverain core is under attack by its periphery. The Sudanese remain as they always have been–bogus genealogies to the contrary–more African than Arab. Ditto, Mauretania. Algeria will remain a military dictatorship for the foreseeable future, while the Moroccan throne totters.
The Arabian Peninsula survives on oil and enforced tourism while its youthful population daily becomes more restless. And the Emirates, the modern equivalent of the ancient entrepots of Bukhara and Samarkand, live on borrowed time. Finally, despite its wealth the Kuwait-Qatar-Bahrain triad, and the forgettable Oman-Yemen diad, are failed states waiting to happen.
In the Levant, Palestine is a sad story: Britain’s pipedream has left an almighty hangover. Thanks to an urban-rural divide, Jordan’s royal family survives on borrowed time. Lebanon is ineluctably fractured, and Syria is now the sort of mad autocracy one recalls from the tales of early Islam. With all the promise in the world, the Sunni-Shia divide in Iraq seems impossible to bridge while the Kurds manage to prove that, absent the Arabs, peace, economic development, and prosperity are all possible .
Yes, indeed, the Arab Spring has failed; the Sunni Renaissance has failed. And it all happened in less than three years!
The melding of Arab Sunni and Shia in a cause, as once proposed by Arabs such as Hasan al-Turabi, Rachid Ghannouchi and, yes, Osama Bin Laden, has failed to materialize. The unity of Muslim Brother and atavistic Salafist movements is daily becoming more problematic. And Arabs of every stripe have proven once again that bigotry is an essential but unspoken pillar of Islam. Everywhere in the Arab World Christians are under attack.
As for Jews, they are mostly attacked in the abstract these days, as most left the region long ago. Though anti-Semitic/Israeli propaganda, which has nothing to do with the Autocratic regimes, is everywhere.
Ironically, the Arab Sufi brotherhoods and their places of worship and sites they venerate are also under assault. And, in every Arab polity, the educated and so-called “secular” Arab leadership is lashed by Muslim imams who take their cue from theologians like the octogenarian Muslim Brother spokesman, Yusuf Qaradawi.
The educated intellectual stratum created over the last half century was never very large, and the remnant is threatened by a socially immobile generation.
In the 20th century, post-colonial Arabism failed, and in the 21st the Islamist flame could soon gutter out. In sum, the Arab lands now appear to be a very large collection of states without a destiny.
That being said, it seems possible that secularism is once again on the rise. And the key to the future of the Arab world can be found in the triangle of states that impact the Arab world: Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. If the Islamist governments in Turkey and Egypt, which are presently under threat, disintegrate, and if the royal authority in Saudi Arabia introduces liberal social and economic policies, which it appears poised to do, the future of the Arab World could, as the saying goes, “change on a dime.”
*J. Millard Burr is a senior fellow with the American Center for Democracy.
Syria and Egypt can’t be fixed
By Spengler*
Syria and Egypt are dying. They were dying before the Syrian civil war broke out and before the Muslim Brotherhood took power in Cairo. Syria has an insoluble civil war and Egypt has an insoluble crisis because they are dying. They are dying because they chose not to do what China did: move the better part of a billion people from rural backwardness to a modern urban economy within a generation. Mexico would have died as well, without the option to send its rural poor – fully one-fifth of its population – to the United States.
It was obvious to anyone who troubled to examine the data that Egypt could not maintain a bottomless pit in its balance of payments, created by a 50% dependency on imported food, not to mention an energy bill fed by subsidies that consumed a quarter of the national budget. It was obvious to Israeli analysts that the Syrian regime’s belated attempt to modernize its agricultural sector would create a crisis as hundreds of thousands of displaced farmers gathered in slums on the outskirts of its cities. These facts were in evidence early in 2011 when Hosni Mubarak fell and the Syrian rebellion broke out. Paul Rivlin of Israel’s Moshe Dayan Center published a devastating profile of Syria’s economic failure in April 2011. [1]
Sometimes countries dig themselves into a hole from which they cannot extricate themselves. Third World dictators typically keep their rural population poor, isolated and illiterate, the better to maintain control. That was the policy of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party from the 1930s, which warehoused the rural poor in Stalin-modeled collective farms called ejidos occupying most of the national territory. That was also the intent of the Arab nationalist dictatorships in Egypt and Syria. The policy worked until it didn’t. In Mexico, it stopped working during the debt crisis of the early 1980s, and Mexico’s poor became America’s problem. In Egypt and Syria, it stopped working in 2011. There is nowhere for Egyptians and Syrians to go.
It is cheap to assuage Western consciences by sending some surplus arms to the Syrian Sunnis. No-one has proposed a way to find the more than US$20 billion a year that Egypt requires to stay afloat. In June 2011, then French president Nicholas Sarkozy talked about a Group of Eight support program of that order of magnitude. No Western (or Gulf State) government, though, is willing to pour that sort of money down an Egyptian sinkhole.
Egypt remains a pre-modern society, with nearly 50% illiteracy, a 30% rate of consanguineal marriage, a 90% rate of female genital mutilation, and an un- or underemployment rate over 40%. Syria has neither enough oil nor water to maintain the bazaar economy dominated by the Assad family.
Both were disasters waiting to happen. Economics, to be sure, set the stage but did not give the cues: Syria’s radical Sunnis revolted in part out of enthusiasm for the ascendancy of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and partly in fear of Iran’s ambition to foster Shi’ite ascendancy in the region.
It took nearly two years for the chattering classes to take stock of Egypt’s economic disaster. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, the benchmark for liberal opinion on foreign policy, gushed like an adolescent about the tech-savvy activists of Tahrir Square in early 2011. Last week he visited a Cairo bakery and watched the Egyptian poor jostling for subsidized bread. Some left hungry. [2] As malnutrition afflicts roughly a quarter of Egyptians in the World Health Organization’s estimate, and the Muslim Brotherhood government waits for a bumper wheat crop that never will come, Egypt is slowly dying. Emergency loans from Qatar and Libya slowed the national necrosis but did not stop it.
This background lends an air of absurdity to the present debate over whether the West should arm Syria’s Sunni rebels. American hawks like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, to be sure, argue for sending arms to the Sunnis because they think it politically unwise to propose an attack on the Assad regime’s master, namely Iran. The Obama administration has agreed to arm the Sunnis because it costs nothing to pre-empt Republican criticism. We have a repetition of the “dumb and dumber” consensus that prevailed during early 2011, when the Republican hawks called for intervention in Libya and the Obama administration obliged. Call it the foreign policy version of the sequel, “Dumb and Dumberer”.
Even if the Sunnis could eject the Assad family from Damascus and establish a new government – which I doubt – the best case scenario would be another Egypt: a Muslim Brotherhood government presiding over a collapsed economy and sliding inevitably towards state failure. It is too late even for this kind of arrangement. Equalizing the military position of the two sides will merely increase the body count. The only humane thing to do is to partition the country on the Yugoslav model, but that does not appear to be on the agenda of any government.
Notes:
1. See Israel the winner in the Arab revolts, Asia Times Online, April 12, 2011.
2. Egypt’s Perilous Drift, New York Times, June 15, 2013.
*Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman. His book How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too) was published by Regnery Press in September 2011. A volume of his essays on culture, religion and economics, It’s Not the End of the World – It’s Just the End of You, also appeared last fall from Van Praag Press.