“Good,” say many young Arabs, and not just the firebrands. For them the question is not if their stagnant, stifling regimes can survive a war in Iraq, but whether they should. “America invades and everything falls apart? So what?” says a successful entrepreneur in Jordan, which is Iraq’s most vulnerable neighbor. “Maybe things would be worse, but at least they’d be different.”
This is not to say that President George W. Bush really hopes for dramatic change. He talks about reform for the Arab world, but like his father he’s basically a sucker for the status quo. Although his administration is hosting seminars meant to foster more democratic government “The Day After” in Baghdad, all bets are off if there’s a pre-invasion coup. Almost any other dictator, any un-Saddam, would be recognized “in a heartbeat,” says one U.S. official.
Still, the cards may yet be thrown in the air. “I think the shaky regimes are going to go,” Jordan’s Prince Hassan bin Talal told NEWSWEEK even before the buildup for war with Iraq had begun. “I think we’re on the eve of a new map of the region. Is it going to be a state system? Ethnic? Or tribal? Balkanization? Something outside international norms?” What is certain, said the onetime heir to Jordan’s throne, is that “Arabs have been humiliated and marginalized by their own governments.” The regimes have tended to make and break laws to suit their interests, even their whims. And democracy? “Everything is ad-hocracy,” said Hassan.
If the tremors of change begin in earnest, there’s little to hold Arab regimes together. From Algeria to Egypt to Saudi Arabia, the pillars of authority are much the same: a remorseless security apparatus, Muslim preachers who are pliable (or on the government payroll) and narrow tribal loyalties. The sum of these parts is not a modern state; it’s a dysfunctional dictatorship, rotten at the core. Thus, for instance, the rule of law is replaced by the paranoid obsessions of secret police. “Political development is confused with political dissent,” says Mustafa Hamarneh, director of the Center for Strategic Studies at Jordan University. Stagnation equals security. Religious conservatism often paralyzes well-intentioned reforms. Morocco’s first free and fair parliamentary elections, held last week, wound up favoring candidates who defend the country’s notorious code repressing women. And more than once, Islam has proved a refuge for scoundrels. “Dictators find it is the best tool for legitimizing a regime,” says Radwan Abdallah, another Jordanian political scientist. The classic example: Saddam Hussein, who persecuted religious scholars throughout the first decade of his presidency, then slapped the motto allah akbar–“God is great”–on the Iraqi flag when he faced the Mother of All Battles against the United States.
Tahsin Bashir, one of Egypt’s most respected diplomats, once famously described Arab countries as little more than “tribes with flags.” The so-called states were created by the colonizers. “You made a map and then you started to make a nation,” says Adnan Abu Odeh, formerly a close adviser to King Hussein. But the lines on the map didn’t fit the societies on the ground after independence, and the regimes had little or no legitimacy. “The military coups began,” says Abu Odeh. “People accepted violence as a means of change.” Then even that avenue was closed to them. “Repression has been so successful in the Arab world that it has become genetic,” Abu Odeh continues. Presidents automatically groom their sons to succeed them. Nationalism, Baathism, Islamism–all give way to nepotism. “What we are left with are the wrecks of modern states,” says Abu Odeh.
To put the mosaic back together, or just to keep it from falling apart, a new kind of glue is needed for Arab societies, something other than coercion, deception and stultifying tradition–something called opportunity, with economic progress and a model of Islam that actually works in the modern world. That’s what Arabs are looking for. Their tragedy is that neither their many wars nor their rare moments of peace have ever been able to assure it.
