East is East and West is West: Where can the Twain Ever Meet?

There are problems about the US Middle East situation that are difficult to convey to most Americans. Read the prologue to Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TELawrence where he describes the Arabs as high-minded, generous, poetic and yet at the same time highly volatile and extremely prone to the most outlandish conpiratorial thinking.

Ditto for a lot of Islamic countries, which have allowed the Arab ethos
embedded in the Quran to I'm reading Sir Olaf Caroe's book The Pathansabout
North Waziristan, where ObL may be making his home, and discover that these hyper-Aryan mountaineers [Hitler tried to recruit these incredible Pushtun-speaking warriors by using the Grand Mufti and his Gillani allies back in 1940---these Pathans were even involved in Raschid Ali's insurrection in Baghdad in 1941!] are of the same Hanafi Islamist school as the Arabs, believe in a Baghdad caliphate over the entire world, and have a strict tribal honor system called "nizat" which has resisted penetration by the Brits for a hundred years and by the Paks for the last sixty after that.

But ObL, I would wager, has now married into these Waziri and Masmud tribal
units a la King Abdul-Aziz, who married at least one woman from each of Saudi
Arabia's forty-odd tribes [except the Harb, who retaliated by taking over the
Mecca Mosque in 1979!]!

Sorry about conveying too much information and for a couple of years at State, I was the institutional memory of sorts on Saudi Arabian lore---April Glaspie and Barbara Bodine used to consult me! And that's why I got a stint at CSIS.

What I started to say is that there is no way for the US or any western nation
or organization [even the UN] to penetrate the incessant feuding and almost non-stop
assassinations [Bashar Al-Assad killing Rafiq Hariri is just a recent example] that
have characterized the way power changes hands over there.

Americans seem to be acting on the "rational actor" hypothesis conferring all sides
with bona fides and assuming that both sides in the confrontation in the Middle East want to come out of the confrontation alive and well. Twelver Shi'ism is not
"rational" and makes Catholic hagiography and mythology look positively scientific by comparison. When Ahmadinejad of Iran says he felt a halo around himself as he addressed the UN, that he communes with the Twelfth Imam who disappeared down a well in the 10th century, and that he believes that a nuclear war destroying Israel will bring about the resurrection of said Imam from his "occultation," AHMEDINEJAD BELIEVES WHAT HE SAYS!

What Arabs and Muslims are afraid of on many levels is that their own
passivity, punctuated by violent outbursts of frantic activity, will not pass
muster in a somewhat Darwinian globalized economic and political environment.
In multicultural environments in a modern and modernizing context, the submissiveness demanded by Islam to an implacable and unchangeable Quranic-inspired patriarchy will not do well under competitive environments. Plus abandoning their patriarchal manhood by conferring equal rights to women will reduce Arab and Muslim men to just another specimen of anthropological variety---not their own narrative of world-conquering heroes of a near-mythic past. Their grandiosity
will be stripped and like the Wizard of Oz, the opened curtain will reveal
nothing special.

A reader writes: "For example, just what are we doing on the diplomatic front to try to bring the rest of the Islamic world over to our side of the table? If not actively on our side, at least not passively on the side of the terrorists? Is that a completely impossible goal?"

First, under Condi Rice, the State Dept has become numero unofor the first time in a while in some ways, or at least competitive. This in spite of the fact that Elliot Abrams acting as neo-con rep under Cheney's dead hand continues to obstruct Rice's efforts at engendering a more comprehensive US horizon of political bilateral contacts than was attempted before by the severely-tight leash that Colin Powell was restrained by.

Under Rice, Nick Burns [former Ambassador to Jordan] and my old buddy David Welch is chief negotiator [I went to Oriole games and Redskin TV with DW, Marilyn sold him and wife Gretchen a house!] in the Arab/Israel post-Lebanon situation. Rice is the only diplomat the Israelis will listen to. Plus Rice is still admired by the secular Arab regimes who realize that GWB is holding her back from wider contacts at Cheney's behest.

But the overarching problem lies in the western media's anti-Bush crusade which
actually encourages the wildest fringe wackos---always delusional and hyper-
inflated as to their own importance [the Iranian Chief Ayatollah actually
predicted that Iran will surpass Detroit "in a few years" after Iran's first
car came off the assembly line, and there are countless other examples I wish I
could put onto my blog] and the common Middle East trait of slipping into a delusional grandiosity that makes French passion for sniffing its own flatulence pale in comparison!

These whack-jobs will multiply no matter what happens and will attempt to
overthrow their own govts if thrown off the scent of hating the US---that is
why the Saudis are secretly happy their jihadi kids are sneaking off to
Baghdad---with the help of Saudi Interior Minister Prince Naif whom I actually
met [one of few Americans, whom he detests, to ever do so] way back in the
day---to explode themselves somewhere else. Other Arab govts secretly are
happy the US is the whipping boy, and will subtlely encourage this if the
jihadis begin to agitate in their homelands.

And Bernard Lewis was the first scholar to note that the Wahhabi movement in the 1740s back in the first days of the Saudi dynasty was the VERY FIRST ANTI-COLONIAL UPRISING WITH SOME MEASURE OF SUCCESS anywhere in the world, when the Saudis pushed the suzerainty of the Cairo-based wazirs of the Ottoman hyperpower out of the peninsula. By the early 1800s, the Wahhabi warriors were besieging Damascus and Baghdad in the same year [1805] which sparked a huge Egyptian expeditionary force under Mohammed Ali which destroyed the Saudi capital of Diriyah still in ruins outside of Riyadh.

Yes, the Saudis are easy to ridicule, and certain elements like Prince Naif are resolute haters of America. But their radical Salafost version of Islam captivates hyperactive Arab "hittistes" who are unemployed and virtually unemployable, but tempted by the inbred Islamic hostility toward the west to join the ranks of "martyrs" in the new heresy spawned by Sayyed Qutb and metasthesizing throughout the Islamic world.

To answer the last part of my reader's question, the US must at least support in some fashion the unfashionable and unattractive regime of Bashar "Stick-Insect" Assad in Syria. Unattractive as it may be, it beats the alternative since there is no secular replacement alternative in Syria, and the Alawite ascendency is probably as good as it can get.

Second, the US must begin to distance itself from Israel in some elements of its foreign policy in the region, at least more than symbolically, in order to regain the "indispensable" role it once had in the region. But that said, allowing Hamas to participate in the PA elections, contrary to Israeli advice, and at the urging of Rice, was in hindsight a terrible mistake.

We must finally come to the conclusion, first brought to my attention by the CIA station chief in Jidda, Ray Close, in the mid-70's, that free elections untrammelled by military elites will inevitably lead to Islamic religious hysterics' taking office. Ray told me this three years before the Islamic revolution in Iran, which was largely enabled by Jimmy Carter's projection of weakness and his indecisive swerves between dialogue and force. [A State Dept female functionary, ala Barbara Bodine in the Path to 911 film, threw a hissy fit and nixed rubber bullets for the Shah's police with her lipstick---according to Bill Maynes. Hundreds of students were slaughtered a year later when the Shah's police used live ammunition, sparking the chain of events leading to the US Embassy takeover and the Ayatollah's return.] Afghanistan was another problem instigated by the perception of American indecisive jitteryness. [The USSR might still be around today had Carter been reelected in '80]

So some sort of truce in the Democratization rhetoric should be called. And someone more competent and internationally seasoned than Karen Hughes should represent the face of America in the Middle East. Perhaps George Mitchell could be persuaded, although having him work with the Gang That Can't Shoot Straight in the WH/Pentagon nexus under GWB would be almost unimaginable.

Realpolitik of some sort might produce an antidote to the venomous toxic-waste emanating westward from Southwest Asia. But abandoning Iraq, as much as it has been mismanaged by TGTCSS, cannot help but make the situation ten times worse.

It is a Hobson's Choice, but Iraq has two more years to make a go of Democracy. After that, it's anybody's bet.