Fear and Rethinking in the Middle East

[Dreamer128]

Fear and Rethinking in the Middle East

By Jefferson Morley
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Monday, April 14, 2003; 7:13 AM

As Iraq struggles to escape from the lawlessness that followed the fall of Saddam Hussein's government, both new thinking and old fears are being heard in the international online media.

One of the goals of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to advocates in Washington, was to change the political psychology of the Arab world, to create a sense of new possibilities. This goal is being fulfilled daily in the online media. At the same time, there is fear that a whirlwind has been unleashed that no one, not even the mighty United States, can control.

"These fateful days have revealed the degree of cultural degradation in our region," writes Shafeeq Ghabra, the president of the American University of Kuwait, in the Daily Star in Beirut, Lebanon, perhaps the most important English-language news site in Arabic world.

Arabs, he says, are in "harmony with chaos," afflicted with the "inability to comprehend the language of interests, calculations and balances of power. With the collapse of Baghdad, Arabs . . . fell from a throne they built in their imagination."

"With the fall of Baghdad, Arab thought as we knew it since the 1967 defeat collapsed. The nationalism that misled Saddam and our peoples has also collapsed, as well as a pattern of Arabism many of us exploited in favor of autocracy, oppression, dictatorship and the confiscation of other people’s rights. With the fall of Baghdad, the whole system prevailing in Arab countries and their culture has collapsed."

"With the stunning and shameful collapse of the Iraqi regime and its Baathist reign, another Arab era has vanished," writes Abdul Hamid Ahmad, editor of the Gulf News, an English-language news site based in the United Arab Emirates.

"It was not only the regime that came tumbling down, but all the institutions as well. And a stark reality was revealed: that these institutions were virtual phantoms as far as the people were concerned. They were under the complete command of the regime. The people were not allowed to participate in the establishment and running of these institutions."

The entire region has to learn the lesson of Baghdad, he says. Single party monopolies "only lead to the suffocation of people, politically and socially. Political and social turmoil reach a boiling point - a pressure cooker waiting to burst."

The Arabs' main grievance with the United States, the plight of the Palestinians, he says, "is just an excuse for these regimes to justify the repression of their people and their monopoly of power."

"What matters now is that Arab regimes which have monopolised power and marginalised their people for years must awaken to the challenges of today's age which they have to face. The first priority on the list of challenges is the need to undertake immediate reforms towards democracy to ensure that all citizens can take part in the running of their affairs."

In Saudi Arabia, columnist Raid Quisti wrote in yesterday’s Arab News that many people feel betrayed by al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV, the two most popular news channels in the country.

The two channels, he noted, reported right up to the end that "pockets of resistance were giving the invading forces a hard fight and that Iraqis had not given up their positions in the city. This claim was the opposite to what Western media channels were saying from the reports of their embedded journalists with American and British forces. Many Saudis are now thinking that they were following a mirage. The closer they thought they were getting to the truth, the further they were from reality."

Nonetheless, suspicions of American motives remain widespread. "We know that the American forces have done everything possible to destroy the country," writes columnist Qenan Al-Ghamdi in Al Watan, an Arabic language newspaper, translated in the Arab News. "The reconstruction cake was promised long before the war began — with, and this is no surprise, American companies handling the bulk of the reconstruction."

In Iran, satisfaction at the end of Saddam Hussein’s government was balanced by apprehension about the arrival of American power. The reformist Tehran Times reported yesterday on a speech in which Iranian President Mohammed Khatami said there were no winners in the Iraq war.

"The first loser of the war," Khatami was quoted as saying, "was the dictatorial and belligerent regime of Saddam, who ruled the noble and oppressed Iraqi nation for about a quarter of a century and inflicted heavy damages on Iraqi people and regional nation. The next losers in the war were the invading forces" because of civilian casualties.

The American people, he said, "should know that present policies of their policymakers would initially and in the long-run not be in their favor. It is not yet late for the U.S. and Britain; they can get out of Iraq quickly and make up for their mistakes and blunders to some extent by preparing the ground for establishment of a popular government in the country."

In Turkey, the Turkish Daily News features an unprecedented front page editorial calling for a "joint peacekeeping force between the Iraqi Kurdish fighters (the peshmergas) and Turkish troops, probably under U.S. command, that will set up a peacekeeping or police force with a clear mandate and at least maintain law and order in Kirkuk and Mosul."

The goal is less ambitious than dismantling Arab autocracy but perhaps more practical: to spare Kirkuk and Mosul "the collapse of law and order that has reached disastrous proportions and has inflicted more destruction and suffering in Iraq than the war itself."

[Timber Loftis]

Very informative. LIke most people living through an event, he inflates it's importance too much ("the end of an Arab era"), but still some interesting stuff.