Every Arab Government is Corrupt. Arab People Are Nice and They Make Good Food
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The Arab world is Medieval,
Like Europe under Christianity.
Royal families
Getting all the money.
No democracy, no free speech,
No Science, no Internet.
No Human Rights
Iraq is progress. (re: Thomas Friedman)
October 19, 2003
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Courageous Arab Thinkers
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
should have known something was up when a Saudi diplomat recently asked me, “Do you know what kind of woman is most sought after as a wife by Saudi men today?” No, I said, what kind? “A woman with a job.”
I thought of that when I read last week’s announcement that within a year Saudi Arabia would conduct its first real elections — for municipal councils. Most people thought it would snow in Saudi Arabia before there would be elections. So what’s up?
What’s up are three big shocks hammering the Arab system. First, with oil revenues flat, there isn’t enough money anymore to buy off, or provide jobs to, the exploding Arab populations. Hence the growing need for wives with work. The second is the Iraq war shock. Even with all the problems in Baghdad now, virtually every autocratic Arab regime is starting to prepare for the uncomfortable possibility that by 2005 Iraq will hold a free election, which will shame all those who never have. As Lawrence Summers, Harvard’s president, likes to say, “One good example is worth a thousand theories.” Iraq — maybe — could be that example.
But there is another tremor shaking the Arab world. This one is being set off by a group of courageous Arab social scientists, who decided, with the help of the United Nations, to begin fighting the war of ideas for the Arab future by detailing just how far the Arab world has fallen behind and by laying out a progressive pathway forward. Their first publication, the Arab Human Development Report 2002, explained how the deficits of freedom, education and women’s empowerment in the Arab world have left the region so behind that the combined G.D.P. of the 22 Arab states was less than that of a single country — Spain. Even with limited Internet access in the Arab world, one million copies of this report were downloaded, sparking internal debates.
Tomorrow, in Amman, Jordan, these Arab thinkers will unveil their second Arab Human Development Report, which focuses on the need to rebuild Arab “knowledge societies.” The report is embargoed until then, but from talking with the authors I sense it will be another bombshell.
Those who worked on this report do not believe in the Iraq-war model of political change. They prefer evolution from within. But they believe there must be serious change. They are convinced that Islam has a long history of absorbing knowledge. But in the modern era an unholy alliance between repressive Arab regimes and certain conservative Muslim scholars has led to the domination of certain interpretations of Islam that serve the governments but are hostile to human development — particularly freedom of thought, women’s empowerment and the accountability of governments to their people.
The result? There are just 18 computers per 1,000 people in the Arab region today, compared with the global average of 78.3 per 1,000, and only 1.6 percent of the Arab population has Internet access. In 1995-96 alone, 25 percent of all graduates from Arab universities with B.A. degrees emigrated, while 15,000 medical doctors left the Arab world from 1998 to 2000.
The number of scientists and engineers working in R.&D. in the Arab region is 371 per million citizens, compared with a global rate of 979 per million. Although the Arab region represents 5 percent of world population, it produces only 1.1 percent of the books in the world. There is an abundance of religious books published in the Arab region — more than triple the world average — but a paucity of literary and artistic works. Tons of foreign technology is imported, but it’s never really internalized or supplanted by Arab innovations.
The authors are convinced of something any visitor to the region can feel: that there is abundant Arab human capital to reclaim Arab knowledge — just note how many Arabs thrive as doctors and scientists when they come to the West. But this rebirth requires a massive investment in education, to move it away from uncritical repetition, and steps by the insular Arab states to encourage greater interaction with other nations and cultures and an easing of their social and political restrictions on criticism, the press and importing of ideas from abroad.
What should America’s response to all this be? We should stop talking about “terrorism” and W.M.D. and make clear that we’re in Iraq for one reason: to help Iraqis implement the Arab Human Development Reports, so the war of ideas can be fought from within. Then we should get out of the way. Just one good model — one good Arab model that works — and you will see more than just municipal elections in Saudi Arabia.
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MAN WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT??? EVERY GOVERNMET IS CORRUPT NO MATTER WHAT COUNTRY. IRAQ IS NOT A GOOD PROGRESS. IF AMERICA THINKS IT HAS FREEDOM NOT ONLY IS IT NAIVE BUT IGNORANT. BUSH=HITLER Jr. AMERICA=NAZI GERMANY FUCK WORLD POLITICS AND CAPITALISM IT WILL KILL US ALL OR PUT US ALL INTO SLAVERY. PEROPLE NEED TO STOP VOTING AND START DOING THINGS BY THEM SELVES. COMMUNITIES NEED TO ORGANIZE AND OVERTHROW ALL GOVERNMENTS AS THEY DO NO GOOD EXCEPT FOR THE FEW RICH WHO FUND THEM
Wow…that was beautiful, what you said is 100% true.
I stood on the sidewalk in London the other day and watched thousands of antiwar, anti-George Bush, anti-Tony Blair protesters pass by. They chanted every antiwar slogan you could imagine and many you couldn’t print. It was entertaining — but also depressing, because it was so disconnected from the day’s other news.
Just a few hours earlier, terrorists in Istanbul had blown up a British-owned bank and the British consulate, killing or wounding scores of British and Turkish civilians. Yet nowhere could I find a single sign in London reading, “Osama, How Many Innocents Did You Kill Today?” or “Baathists — Hands Off the U.N. and the Red Cross in Iraq.” Hey, I would have settled for “Bush and Blair Equal Bin Laden and Saddam” — something, anything, that acknowledged that the threats to global peace today weren’t just coming from the White House and Downing Street.
Sorry, but there is something morally obtuse about holding an antiwar rally on a day when your own people have been murdered — and not even mentioning it or those who perpetrated it. Watching this scene, I couldn’t help but wonder whether George Bush had made the liberal left crazy. It can’t see anything else in the world today, other than the Bush-Blair original sin of launching the Iraq war, without U.N. approval or proof of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Believe me, being a liberal on every issue other than this war, I have great sympathy for where the left is coming from. And if I didn’t, my wife would remind me. It would be a lot easier for the left to engage in a little postwar reconsideration if it saw even an ounce of reflection, contrition or self-criticism coming from the conservatives, such as Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, who drove this war, yet so bungled its aftermath and so misjudged the complexity of postwar Iraq. Moreover, the Bush team is such a partisan, ideological, nonhealing administration that many liberals just want to punch its lights out — which is what the Howard Dean phenomenon is all about.
But here’s why the left needs to get beyond its opposition to the war and start pitching in with its own ideas and moral support to try to make lemons into lemonade in Baghdad:
First, even though the Bush team came to this theme late in the day, this war is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan. The primary focus of U.S. forces in Iraq today is erecting a decent, legitimate, tolerant, pluralistic representative government from the ground up. I don’t know if we can pull this off. We got off to an unnecessarily bad start. But it is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad and it is a moral and strategic imperative that we give it our best shot.
Unless we begin the long process of partnering with the Arab world to dig it out of the developmental hole it’s in, this angry, frustrated region is going to spew out threats to world peace forever. The next six months in Iraq — which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there — are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time. And it is way too important to leave it to the Bush team alone.
On Iraq, there has to be more to the left than anti-Bushism. The senior Democrat who understands that best is the one not running for president — Senator Joe Biden. He understands that the liberal opposition to the Bush team should be from the right — to demand that we send more troops to Iraq, and more committed democracy builders, to do the job better and smarter than the Bush team has.
Second, we are seeing — from Bali to Istanbul — the birth of a virulent, nihilistic form of terrorism that seeks to kill any advocates of modernism and pluralism, be they Muslims, Christians or Jews. This terrorism started even before 9/11, and is growing in the darkest corners of the Muslim world. It is the most serious threat to open societies, because one more 9/11 and we’ll really see an erosion of our civil liberties. Ultimately, only Arabs and Muslims can root out this threat, but they will do that only when they have ownership over their own lives and societies. Nurturing that is our real goal in Iraq.
“In general,” says Robert Wright, author of “Nonzero,” “too few who opposed the war understand the gravity of the terrorism problem, and too few who favored it understand the subtlety of the problem.”
For my money, the right liberal approach to Iraq is to say: We can do it better. Which is why the sign I most hungered to see in London was, “Thanks, Mr. Bush. We’ll take it from here.”