Stop Paying Attention to the Middle East
In a recent article in Prospect Magazine Edward Luttwak has some interesting things to say about the West’s bête noire, or better, black beast, the Middle East. Is he right? If he is why are we presently sinking so much of our wealth and sacrificing so many of our people in that area of the world?
Luttwak would persuade us that the whole world and in particular the United States would benefit if the Middle East were simply ignored, removed from its now nearly 100 year long position on the front burner of the world’s trouble spots.
Here follows a summary of what he has to say. To read Luttwak himself, click Here.
First is the Arab-Israeli conflict. There are those who, like the late King Hussein of Jordan, and now his son, Abdullah, constantly promote a “five minutes to midnight” catastrophism. The King was always warning us that the Arab-Israeli conflict was about to explode, involve the whole world, “unless…”
But of course the explosion never took place. In fact, “the dead from Jewish-Palestinian fighting since 1921 amount to fewer than 100,000—about as many as are killed in a season of conflict in Darfur.” Luttwak says that “strategically, the Arab-Israeli conflict has been almost irrelevant since the end of the cold war.”
Then there is the oil. What has been the impact of the Arab-Israeli conflict and of the Middle East conflicts in general on oil prices? Only in 1973, following the Yom Kippur/Ramadan War, was the impact even felt when the Saudis declared embargoes and cut production, but that was the first and only time the “oil weapon" was wielded.
“For decades now,”Luttwak writes, “the largest Arab oil producers have publicly foresworn any linkage between politics and pricing, and an embargo would be a disaster for their oil-revenue dependent economies.”
Furthermore, he says, “the relationship between turmoil in the middle east and oil prices is far from straightforward. During the period, 1981-1999, when Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war within view of oil and gas installations, when the Gulf war came and went, when the first Palestinian intifadah raged—oil prices, adjusted for inflation, actually fell.”
Today global dependence on middle eastern oil is declining, that region producing 30% of the world’s crude oil supply at the present time as compared to almost 40 per cent in 1974-75. In 2005 17 per cent of American oil imports came from the Gulf, compared to 28 per cent in 1975.
Even if the Israelis and Palestinians could settle their differences,”it would do little or nothing to calm the other conflicts in the middle east from Algeria to Iraq, or to stop Muslim-Hindu violence in Kashmir, Muslim-Christian violence in Indonesia and the Philippines, Muslim-Buddhist violence in Thailand, Muslim-animist violence in Sudan, Muslim-Igbo violence in Nigeria, Muslim-Muscovite violence in Chechnya, or the different varieties of inter-Muslim violence between traditionalists and Islamists, and between Sunnis and Shia,” let alone push the Islamists to abandon their particularly severe hostility towards the West.
Just as mistaken as the importance given the Arab-Israeli conflict is what Luttwak calls the “Mussolini syndrome.” Serious people, including British and French military leaders, accepted on their face Mussolini’s claims to great power status because “they believed that he had serious armed forces at his command”….only to later discover that “his forces quickly crumbled in combat,” and that “it could not be otherwise, because most Italian soldiers were unwilling conscripts from the one-mule peasantry of the south or the almost equally miserable sharecropping villages of the north.”
The same mistaken Mussolini syndrome is now applied by the so-called middle east experts to the countries of the Middle East. “They persistently attribute real military strength to backward societies whose populations can sustain excellent insurgencies but not modern military forces.”
First of all in the 1960s there was the supposed strength of Nasser’s military. The strength, of course, wasn’t there as the war of 1973 demonstrated.
Then in 1990 it was the turn of Iraq to be hugely overestimated as a military power. Whereas it took the allies just two weeks of precision bombing to paralyse Saddam’s entire war machine, so that it scarcely tried to resist the allies’ ground offensive when it did come. Saddam’s army was the usual middle eastern façade without fighting substance.
Now it’s in Iran’s turn to be subject to the Mussolini syndrome. For example we are given awed descriptions of the Pasdaran revolutionary guards, those same guards who fought only one war, against Iraq, and lost. Now we are warned by the experts that Iran, if thwarted in its nuclear intentions by the West will unleash a devastating reign of terror on us all.
But 30 years of “death to American” has produced little in the way of international terrorism. As for the claim that the Iranians are united in their pursuit of a nuclear bomb, or in anything else, the truth is that of “Iran’s population of 70m or so, 51 per cent are ethnically Persian, 24 per cent are Turks, with other minorities comprising the remaining quarter. Many of Iran’s 16-17m Turks are in revolt against Persian cultural imperialism; its 5-6m Kurds have started a serious insurgency; the Arab minority detonates bombs in Ahvaz; and Baluch tribesmen attack gendarmes and revolutionary guards.”
After the Arab-Israeli conflict, the oil, and the Mussolini syndrome, perhaps the greatest error repeated by middle east experts of all persuasions, by Arabophiles and Arabophobes alike, is “the very odd belief that these ancient nations are highly malleable.” Whereas “it is not hard to defeat Arab armies, it is mostly useless.” For although force can destroy dangerous weapons "it cannot bring about desired behavioral changes.”
The experts also make the opposite mistake. They keep arguing that if only this or that concession were made, if only their "soft" policies were followed through to the end and respect shown, real behavioral changes would result. Hostility would cease and a warm Mediterranean amity would emerge.
But the real condition of these lands and peoples is something else. Their scientific and technological and cultural backwardness generates a constantly renewed sense of humiliation and of civilisational defeat. It is this that fully explains the ubiquity of Muslim violence embodying Muslim resistance to policies of the West, be these concessions or the force of men and arms.
“The operational mistake that middle east experts keep making is the failure to recognise that backward societies must be left alone…. With neither invasions nor friendly engagements, the peoples of the middle east should finally be allowed to have their own history—the one thing that middle east experts of all stripes seem determined to deny them.”
“We devote far too much attention to the middle east, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created in science or the arts—excluding Israel, per capita patent production of countries in the Middle East is one fifth that of sub-Saharan Africa. The people of the middle east (only about five per cent of the world’s population) are remarkably unproductive, with a high proportion not in the labour force at all.”
“The middle east was once the world’s most advanced region, but these days its biggest industries are extravagant consumption and the venting of resentment….”
“Unless compelled by immediate danger, we should therefore focus on the old and new lands of creation in Europe and America, in India and east Asia—places where hard-working populations are looking ahead instead of dreaming of the past.”
