Sultan Knish
The Muslim Middle East has three types of governments. Military, Tribal
and Ideological. A military government is formed when senior officers
take power. A tribal government is based around a group of prominent
families. An ideological government is based around a party, whether
secular or Islamist. All these governments are tyrannies, though they
may occasionally hold elections, they never open up the system. The
elections serve as a means for passing from one tyranny to the next.
While these types of governments are different in some ways, they are not exclusive. Most overlap in a number of ways.
Military and ideological governments will become tribal as a few
officers, leaders or Ayatollahs use their control of the economy to
enrich themselves and their families. That is what happened in Egypt and
in Iran. The Muslim Brotherhood differs from Mubarak in any number of
political ways, but on a personal level, its leaders share his goal of
enriching their families.
Whether a new government starts out as Islamist, Fascist or Socialist;
these facades inevitably revert to the tribal. That is the fate of all
governments in the Muslim Middle East, which do not evolve, but devolve.
Every Muslim leader, beginning with Mohammed borrowed ideas brought in
from outside to form a new system that became identical with the old.
Mohammed borrowed from Judaism and Christianity to create the religious
structure for yet another tribal government controlled by his
father-in-law. In the 20th Century the Muslim Middle-East borrowed from
the British Empire, France, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the USSR and
the United States, to create hybrid systems that were either overthrown
or devolved into tribalism with an ideological facade. Like Mohammed,
the bright new ideology ends up with a bunch of relatives in charge of
the loot.
Muslim countries are forever at war with themselves. Military
governments fear popular protests organized by ideological movements to
seize power. And the ideological governments fear military coups. Tribal
governments fear everyone and cripple their own military and bribe
their own people to avoid being overthrown by officers or ideologues.
Every government is only a few bad months away from losing power and so
every government fears being overthrown by its enemies and implements a
regime of secret police and prisons. No sooner do the revolutionaries
step out of prison to usher in a new era, than the same thugs are
rehired to torture enemies of the new regime.
The victors of the Arab Spring know that another few bad months could
toss them out of power as easily as the bad months put them into power.
Like every other regime in the Muslim Middle East, their main priority
is staying in power by making it impossible for others to do to them
what they did to their predecessors.That leads to a cycle of repression,
broken by temporary liberalization as alliances with the opposition are
explored and then abandoned, because the opposition cannot be trusted
not to seize power for themselves.
Everyone in the region is playing rock-paper-scissors all the time which
leads to total regional paranoia and conspiracy theories. Everyone
distrusts everyone else by necessity and keeps trying to guess how many
fingers their rivals will put out while defending against their own
weaknesses by preemptively attacking everyone else.
Military governments persecute ideologues. Ideologues imprison top
officers. Tribals seek out military protectors-- and then undermine them
by backing their ideological enemies so as to stay in control of the
relationship.
That is what happened to us and the Saudis, who, along with the other
Gulfies, depend on our protection, but undermine us by supporting
terrorism and Islamization to gain the upper hand. Paradoxically, the
more that the Saudis need us, the more they undermine us, much as any
feral population that is dependent on the charitable welfare of the
majority lashes out against that majority to the exact degree that it is
dependent on it.
The borders of Muslim nations are artificial and fluid. Their
nationalism has no depth no matter how often Socialist ideologues borrow
from European nationalism to proclaim the glories of the nation. The
Muslim Middle East is not purely nomadic, but it is nomadic enough that
large families stretch out across different nations and their tribal
allegiances stretch with them. Ethnic groups like the Kurds cross
national borders carrying with them the dream of an ethnostate carved
out of the Sunni states that dot the desert.
The Palestinians are a fraud, but so are the Jordanians, and to a lesser
degree, the Egyptians and the Syrians. Every nation is an artificial
entity ruled over by powerful families or old soldiers who are keeping
the whole thing together with guns and bribes, not to mention imported
bread and circuses.
The British treated the region as a grab-bag of clans, and backed any
powerful family willing to throw in with them. That is how the Hashemite
kings and the Arab-Israeli wars came to be. Unlike the Brits, the
United States was not interested in an empire, just in oil rights, which
is how we got in bed with one of the most powerful families in the
region, who became far more powerful thanks to their association with
us. And who repaid us by trying to conquer us in their own way.
At some point we forgot that the Saudis, the King of Jordan, the
Palestinian Authority and most of our so-called allies, are just
powerful families with territorial claims based on that power. And even
slightly more civilized countries such as Egypt, aren't really any
better, the invaders who overran them just absorbed more culture and
civilization from their conquests and their proximity to more civilized
parts of the world.
Mostly they're feudal states with skyscrapers planned by foreign
architects and built by foreign labor and if you can imagine Dark Ages
Europe striking oil and selling it to industrial Incan mercantile
democracies, with the barons plotting to settle and invade the new land,
in between cutting each other's throats over rights of succession, then
you have a good picture of the Muslim Middle East.
No sudden Arab Spring will transform the Muslim Middle East. Uprisings
can change governments but they cannot bring civilization. The Muslim
world has access to Western learning, just as it had access to Indian,
Roman and Greek learning. It made use of some of those ideas in a
slapdash fashion just as it made use of Judaism, Christianity, Socialism
and Democracy, in a similar fashion.
A primitive society confronted with an advanced civilization does not
become civilized, it adopts some of the habits and facades of
civilization in cargo cult fashion, it uses some of its tools, and
hybridizes some of its ideas, but all this is done in pursuit of its
existing goals. Everything that the Muslim Middle East has taken in from
the civilized world has been used to pursue the same goals that it was
pursuing a thousand years ago.
Imagine savages buying advanced steel knives, designed with space age
technology, manufactured to never rust or grow dull, then shipped by jet
plane to their island, where they are used to perform ritual human
sacrifices so that the crops may grow. That in a nutshell is the
relationship between the civilized world and the Muslim Middle East--
except that the savages are not content to stay on their island and
perform their human sacrifices only on their own tribe.
The Muslim leader of today may call himself a president or prime
minister, more honestly he may call himself king, but whatever he calls
himself, he is much the same figure that he was a thousand years ago.
The only place that the Muslim Middle East ever goes is backward. The
great achievement of the Arab Spring was to hand over power in Egypt to
Mohammed Morsi, a man who not only carries the same name as a 7th
century warlord, but whose party is based on restoring Egypt to the
values of that 7th century warlord as a cure for the damaging modernism
of civilization. And those values are tribal power, ownership of women,
repression of outsiders, and Muslim power under a Caliph-god whose
fondest wish is that Muslims will one day get around to conquering the
world in his name.
The true Allah of course is Mohammed Morsi, as it was once Mohammed, as
it was Saddam, the Ayatollah Khomeini and a thousand other clerics,
warlords, presidents, prime ministers, imams and great men of endless
titles. Allah is whoever is at the top. Whoever tells the clerics what
to say. Until he is toppled by the soldiers, clerics, merchants,
terrorists, socialists, dissidents, old guardists, or some combination
of all of them-- and then there will be a new Caliph-god. A new Allah.
Since all Middle Eastern Muslim power structures devolve to the tribal,
personal power is the only power that matters. And personal power is a
zero sum game. No one can trust anyone else, because the only rule that
counts is that the one with the most toys wins. That instability has led
to a great deal of tyranny and misery, but it has also made it
difficult for Islamic power to extend itself all that far.
Personal power is limited to a single tyrant and his feudal underlings. A
highly effective conqueror can push his borders outward, but the whole
thing inevitably collapses into broken emirates and then into
backwardness and decay. The conquest may impose Islam on a population,
but that just dooms the people under the yoke of the Koran to be less
competent, less innovative and more backward than their neighbors.
A Muslim conqueror may begin by raiding infidels for plunder and glory,
but usually ends by turning on his rivals in a conflict that creates
deep fractures and divisions, some of which like Sunni and Shiite, last
to this day. Despite all the professions of faith, the Jihad devolves
into tribal power, and Muslim kills Muslim for a chance at the golden
throne.
Feral populations invariably do more harm to each other, than to their
enemies. This is small comfort to those who fall prey to them, but it is
a reminder of the innate limitations of human evil. Evil can wield a
great deal of power temporarily, but the exercise of that power also
devolves and destroys it. Islam is a sharp sword, but the hand that
wields it is weak and the sword turns and cut its bearer. A feral
population can topple great cities and civilizations, but it cannot
replicate their achievements until it leaves behind its barbarism and
becomes civilized.
In the desert nothing really changes. One day turns into another. The
footprints of the past are buried by the next sandstorm and tomorrow's
traveler arrives to marvel that his feet were the first to mark a path
that lies buried just beneath his feet.
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