Dear Mark,
I find it odd that you’d see a secular protest of millions of Egyptians against a tyrant to be “dark.” This is what America stands for — our ideals are winning. The Islamic extremists have not caught on with the Arab youth.
Moreover, these changes are inevitable. Half the Arab population is below 24. They see on al jazeera how corrupt their governments are, and how life is in the West. They are becoming modern. They will not submit to dictators. We can either stand for our principles and embrace change, or we can cling to tyrants and make it more likely that a deep anti-western bias will define the change that the youth will inevitably bring to the Arab world. It won’t be easy, but it should be welcomed.
Sincerely,
Scott Erb
Okay, I’ll bite – if only because Mr Erb’s sentiment is near universal, at least in the media. Let’s go through this bit by bit. For a start, I have never “clung to tyrants”. A big part of the argument of America Alone is against the deluded “stability” fetishists of “American foreign policy’s faith in unreal realpolitik – the system embodied in the cynical line that so-and-so may be a sonofabitch but he’s our sonofabitch”:
In the case of Mubarak, the House of Saud and many others, the obverse is more to the point: he may be our sonofabitch but in the end he’s a sonofabitch. Even if it wasn’t licensing anti-Americanism as a safety valve for what might otherwise be more locally directed grievances, the Egyptian government would not be a meaningful friend. There’s a huge difference between having a regime as an ally and having a nation as one, the difference being Mohammed Atta and 15 Saudi citizens flying through the windows of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon – which suggests considerable limitations to the theory that, as long as America gets along fine with President Mubarak and key Saudi princes, it doesn’t matter if everyone else in Egypt and Saudi Arabia is shouting “Death to the Great Satan!”
Page 173. On page 132 I write:
As President Reagan liked to say, “status quo” is Latin for “the mess we’re in”. When Amr Moussa, Secretary-General of the Arab League, warns (as he did before the Iraq war) that America is threatening “the whole stability of the Middle East”, it’s important to remember that “stability” is Arabic for “the mess we’re in”.
Who’s Amr Moussa? Well, the long-time dictators’ shill is now in the running to become president of the new “democratic” Egypt. Fancy that!
I’ve said before that “you can’t buck demography”. It’s not technically true. You can. But it gets harder and harder to do as it moves against you. For three decades, Washington gave Mubarak a couple billion a year and told itself it was getting “stability” in return. He bulked up his Zurich and London bank accounts, and, under Mubarak’s so-called “stability”, Egypt utterly transformed. The country’s population has doubled since Mubarak took office, and quadrupled since the military revolt of his predecessors against King Farouk in 1952. Back then, Egypt’s per capita income was more or less identical to South Korea’s. By the beginning of the 21st century, it was less than a sixth’s. Egypt On Two Dollars A Day? That’s not a travel guide: millions and millions of Egyptians live it every single day of their lives. When your riches are more concentrated than in Farouk’s time but you’re adding more and more poor people every week, eventually something has to give.
However, when it does give, is what follows necessarily the triumph of “our ideals”? Mr Erb confidently declares:
These changes are inevitable.
Really? Wow. Isn’t that convenient? “Inevitable”, eh? So all we have to do is sit back and it’ll just happen. No further effort is required. “Inevitablism” is the most appealing thesis to western complaceniks because it asks least of us. But I wonder if it seems so inevitable to those on the receiving end: Mr Erb might like to ask a Jew in Malmö – if he can find one. In “the most tolerant country in Europe”, anti-Semitism is rampant. He might like to ask a homosexual in Amsterdam – before all the gay bars close. In the other “most tolerant country in Europe”, the gay moment is already fading. Yet lazy inevitablists continue to make the same dreary argument.
So much for inevitablism in Europe. How will it play out in Egypt? Oh, well, nothing to worry about. Egyptians see “how life is in the west” and “they are becoming modern”. Really? Ninety-one per cent of Egyptian women have undergone female genital mutilation. Is a clitoris-free zone an obvious sign of “modernity”?
Mr Erb seems to assume that simply because “half the Arab population is under 24” that means they’re “modern”. But look at these four photographs: The female graduating class of Cairo University in 1959, 1978, 1995 and 2004. The young women of the Fifties and Seventies are little different from their counterparts at Brown or Brandeis. The 2004 group shot shows a wholly transformed culture: True, it’s more “modern” than Take Your Child Bride To Work Day in Kandahar, but that’s about it. As I wrote three years ago:
The other night at dinner, I found myself sitting next to a Middle Eastern Muslim lady of a certain age. And the conversation went as it often does when you’re with Muslim women who were at college in the Sixties, Seventies or Eighties. In this case, my dining companion had just been at a conference on “women’s issues,” of which there are many in the Muslim world, and she was struck by the phrase used by the “moderate Muslim” chair of the meeting: “authentic women” — by which she meant women wearing hijabs. And my friend pointed out that when she and her unveiled pals had been in their 20s they were the “authentic women”: the covering routine was for old village biddies, the Islamic equivalent of gnarled Russian babushkas. It would never have occurred to her that the assumptions of her generation would prove to be off by 180 degrees — that in middle age she would see young Muslim women wearing a garb largely alien to their tradition not just in the Middle East but in Brussels and London and Montreal.
Whenever I speak about Islam, some or other inevitablist always says, “Oh, but they haven’t had time to westernize. Just you wait and see. Give it another 20 years, and the siren song of westernization will work its magic.” This argument isn’t merely speculative, it’s already been proved wrong by what’s happened over the last 30 years. Huge majorities of Egyptians are in favor of stoning for adulterous women and of execution for apostasy. Run the numbers, and then see if you can recite your inevitablist theories of social evolution with a straight face. The idea that social progress is like the wheel or the iPhone — once invented, it can never be uninvented — is one of the laziest assumptions of the western left.
Many years ago, I wrote a book with Edward Behr, a distinguished foreign correspondent for Newsweek. And, in the course of getting to know each other, he gave me a copy of his memoirs. It was called (in its London edition) Anyone Here Been Raped And Speaks English? – which, naturally, the halfwit American publisher changed to the somnolently portentous Bearings: A Foreign Correspondent’s Life Behind The Lines. Ed’s original title distills the cynicism of old-school newsmen: You fly in to the war zone, you know what you need, you cut to the chase. Today, America’s dying media are less cynical but just as distorting: Anyone Here Want To Coo About How All They Want Is Democracy And Speaks English? So, yes, it’s awfully heartwarming to see Anderson Cooper talking to photogenic youthful idealists, but I wonder how many of those 91 per cent of Egyptian women are on the streets: Anyone Here Been Genitally-Mutilated And Speaks English? Doesn’t quite fit the “modernist” narrative? Oh, dear. Let’s stick with “Cruising For Gay Sex And Democracy In Tahrir Square“.
As I said, Egypt and South Korea had comparable economies 60 years ago. In Seoul, they saw how “life is in the west”, and decided to get a piece of the action. Access to western markets gave South Korea a western lifestyle, complete with western-sized families: Now, like many of the so-called “Asian tigers”, they have one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Like the Germans, they’re tigers without cubs. Like the Swedes, they’re incapable of defending their wealth – which is why, every so often, the one-man psycho-state to the north lobs a missile onto their territory and kills a few of their citizens with complete impunity.
Whereas Egypt, like most of the Muslim world, stayed mired in poverty but underwent a demographic boom that helped export its surplus population and many pre-“modern” pathologies to the west. The contradictions between these two models – Cairo’s and Seoul’s – will resolve themselves in the years ahead.
But don’t worry, just keep telling yourself:
Moreover, these changes are inevitable.
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