Let's
examine claims from the radical academia currently hegemonic in North
America and Europe. What is fascinating is that a
well-informed observer can easily demolish such claims. That's
precisely why such people are not being trained today and those who do
exist must be discredited or ignored to keep students (and the general
public) relatively ignorant.
To paraphrase George Santayana’s famous statement, those who fail to learn from history make fun of those who do.
I
know that the situation has become far worse in recent years, having
vivid memories of how my two main Middle East studies professors—both
Arabs, both anti-Israel, and one of them a self-professed Marxist—had
contempt for Edward Said and the then new, radical approach to the
subject. At one graduate seminar, the students--every single one of
them hostile to Israel but not, as today is often the case, toward
America--literally broke up in laughter pointing out the fallacies in
Said’s Orientalism. Today, no one would dare talk that way, it would be almost heresy.
Let
me now take a single example of the radical approach so common today
and briefly explain how off-base it is. I won’t provide detailed
documentation here but could easily do so.
The
question is: Who in the Middle East was the tool of imperialism? Most
likely the professors and their students, at least their graduate
student acolytes, would respond: Israel. Not at
all.
--Before
and During World War One era. It can be easily documented that the
French subsidized and encouraged Arab nationalism before the war and
during it the British took over, sponsoring the Arab nationalist revolt
against the Ottoman Empire. Before the war, Islamism was sponsored by
the Ottoman Empire in order to keep control over the region and battle
Arab nationalism. For their part, the Germans sided with the Ottomans
and encouraged Islamism.
What
about Zionism? The British did not issue the Balfour Declaration,
supporting a Jewish national home, because they saw Zionism as a useful
tool in their long-term Middle
East policy. In fact, they were interested in the wartime mobilizing
Jewish support elsewhere, specifically to get American Jews to support
the United States entering the war on Britain’s side and Russian Jews in
keeping that country in the war. Both efforts did not have much effect.
At any rate, long-term British policy always saw maximizing Arab
support as its priority.
--Post-WW1
While
having promised Jews a national home, British policy soon turned away
from supporting Zionism and certainly from backing a Jewish state, even
by the early 1920s, realizing that having the Arabs as clients was a far
more valuable prize. It was through local Arab elites that the British
built their imperial
position in the region. The French toyed a bit with Arab nationalism as
a way to undermine British rule but also backed Arab elites. The new
Soviet Union actually sponsored Islamism for several years as a way of
undermining both British and French in the region.
The
only exception was T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) and a few other
visionaries who thought that both Arab nationalism and Zionism could
co-exist under British sponsorship. That concept didn’t last very long
and had no policy influence beyond the early 1920s at most.
--Before and During World War Two
Realizing
that it needed Arab support to fight in the coming war, the British
followed an appeasement policy that was quite willing to sacrifice the
Jews for Arab help—or at least non-interference—in the battle. If the
Arab side had cooperated with these pre-war plans, Arab Palestine might
have emerged in 1948, with the Jews driven out or massacred shortly
after.
Instead,
the radical Arabs—both nationalists and Islamists—made a deal with the
Axis. Germany and Italy supported these forces in order to destroy the
British and French position in the region, just as the Germans had done
in World War One.
While
the
British worked with the Zionists during the war on common endeavors,
there was never any notion that a Jewish state would aid British
interests in the region. Quite the opposite. The British focused on
moderate Egyptian and Iraqi politicians plus the kings of Saudi Arabia
and Jordan.
--After World War Two
The
British quickly sought to use moderate Arab forces to ensure their
position. That's why they were the real founders of the Arab League. The
Zionists fought the British. The United States supported partition of
the Palestine mandate and the creation of Israel but with no strategy of
using Israel as a tool in Middle East
policy. Indeed, the United States had no ambitions in the region at the
time. Israel was largely ignored by the United States during its first
two decades of existence
The
sole exception to the general pattern emerging was that the French did
cooperate with Israel during several years of the 1950s, and the British
for a briefer period at that time, to counter a radical Egyptian
government (the Suez Affair of 1956) but in the British case that period
lasted for a few months and ended decisively before the end of the
year.
The
U.S. government at first adapted the too-clever-by-half attitude that
it could use the Arab armies as a modernizing force that would be
simultaneously anti-Communist
and opposed to the corrupt old system. Then it thought perhaps Islamism
would make a useful anti-Communist force. It helped stage a coup (or
counter-coup) in Iran when it feared--with reason--that the Communists
were becoming too strong. Mostly, though, it tried to use Iran, Turkey,
and some moderate Arab forces (but not Israel) to counter the
pro-Soviet Arab camp.
--The Recent Era
Only
after 1970, did the United States start to support Israel as part of
the Cold War fight against the USSR and its local Arab allies. During
the following decades, American policy also backed a number of Arab
states which, for their own
survival, also needed to ensure the Soviets and their allies didn’t
triumph. At any rate, this was a defensive measure and if you believe
that the Cold War struggle against Communism was a Western imperialist
action then…you are probably a university professor.
The
idea in U.S. policy regarding Israel was that the country effectively
combated radical, pro-Soviet clients to prevent the USSR and its allies
from taking over the region. Israel was useless, however, regarding the
oil-rich Persian Gulf. It is important to stress the point that the
United States wanted Israel to defeat pro-Soviet Egypt and Syria. The
idea, of course, was to resolve all of the contradictions by brokering
an Arab-Israeli peace agreement so the United States could be allies
with both sides at once and undercut the appeal or usefulness of the
Soviet Union. This was the basis for American policymakers pushing
Israel to make more concessions in the hope of achieving peace or at
least of easing tensions. In Washington, or at least in the State
Department, Israel was viewed as a liability because--parallel to the
pre-1948 British view--it made it harder to gain and enjoy total
cooperation from Arab clients. From a radical perspective, then, the
truth is that Israel impeded rather than furthered "American
imperialism."
A
lot more can be written on this subject but historically inasmuch as
there was any European or American “imperialism” it made use of Arab
political factors along with, at times, Turkey. One major reason why the
State Department generally opposed a pro-Israel policy is precisely
because it interfered with their perceived need for Arab backing
against the USSR and radical forces in the region. While various
presidents and White House officials—beginning with Richard Nixon and
Henry Kissinger—saw Israel as a useful ally in the Cold War (that’s when
the aid and military sales originated), the goal in that context wasn’t
building an empire but defending freedom from expansionist Communism
and its allies.
Oh,
yes, and the French thought they could use Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
in 1979 (as they once thought, in 1946, to use Palestine Arab leader and
then-recent Nazi collaborator Amin al-Hussaini) to take over Iran and
be nice to Paris. In neither case did things work out too well.
Of
course, the debate today is so
structured as to leave out the fact that local countries can also be
imperialistic in that they seek to take over the entire region or most
of it. The modern history of the Middle East has been characterized by a
battle between Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi imperialism seeking to
gobble up Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinians, the Gulf
monarchies, and each other. Today, the nationalist motives have simply
been replaced by an Islamist-driven drive to gain hegemony in the region
with Iran and Turkey added to the mix. There's a long-term dream of
reestablishing a caliphate. But the more realistic goal is that of
old-fashioned imperialism, hegemony, and creating a sphere of influence
for the country and regime involved.
Ironically,
the Obama Administration pro-Islamist policy is in the tradition of the
view that
“more moderate” Arab forces can be used against radical threats. In
this case, unfortunately, the purported moderates are “mainstream”
Islamist forces like the Muslim Brotherhood who will supposedly combat
al-Qaida and other Salafists. The point is that all this cleverness of
using radical ideological movements almost always failed or even
backfired.
This
approach puts Obama into the strange company of a disastrously failed
German policy that thought it could manipulate Islamists against the
British and French, the French strategy of using radicals against the
British and Americans, or the Eisenhower Administration that thought for
a few years (1953-1956) it could help radical nationalists—notably
Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser—and then Islamists against pro-Soviet
leftists. Of course, Nasser soon emerged as
the main pro-Soviet leader, just as the Islamists will soon emerge as
the main anti-American force in the region.
In
fact, we've reached the point where--from a radical Arab point of
view--one could say that the United States is trying to make Islamism a
tool of Western imperialism! After all, isn't the U.S. government
backing a local ideology's regimes and movements because it [albeit
wrongly] believes that this is the best choice to secure its own
objectives in the region? And the Obama Administration has also been
trying to do so alongside distancing itself from Israel somewhat. Those
two factors matches the classic, historic British and French imperial
strategy in the region. This wouldn't be the first time that a Western
country backed a supposed puppet that turned out to be a
puppeteer-eating one.
Professor Barry Rubin, Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://www.gloria-center.org
The Rubin Report blog http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/
He is a featured columnist at PJM http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/.
Editor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal http://www.gloria-center.org
Editor Turkish Studies,http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=t713636933%22
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