If It Wasn't for the Damned Oil!

For most of us the Middle East is a genuine enigma. It's a place that seems to defy all efforts at political, social and economic reform. The harder the West tries to change realities on the ground, the more they stay firmly rooted in the past. What to do, what to do?

Edward Luttwak, writing in the May issue of Prospect magazine, says we need to shed our illusions of the importance of the Middle East and our ability to shape it in our own image. He argues that we need to see even the Arab/Israeli conflict with historical clarity:

What actually happens at each of these "moments of truth" - and we may be approaching another one - is nothing much; only the same old cyclical conflict that always restarts when peace is about to break out and always dampens down when the violence becomes intense enough. ...humanitarians should note that the dead from Jewish-Arab fighting since 1921 amounts to fewer than 130,000 - about as many as are killed in a season of conflict in Darfur.

Luttwak argues that concerns over Israel and Arab oil supply are overstated:

For decades now, the largest Arab oil producers have publicly forsworn any linkage between politics and pricing, and an embargo would be a disaster for their oil-revenue-dependent economies.

As for the military threats posed by Middle Eastern states, Luttwak dissects our habit of overstating problems:

The next oft-repeated mistake is the Mussolini syndrome. Contemporary documents prove [that] British and French military chiefs, accepted Mussolini's claims to great power status because they believed he had formidable armed forces at his command. ...Having conceded Ethiopia to win over Mussolini, only to lose him to Hitler as soon as the fighting started, the British discovered that the Italian forces quickly crumbled in combat.

The fraternity of Middle East experts similarly and persistently attributes real military strength to backward societies whose populations can sustain excellent insurgencies but not modern military forces.

He draws as an example, the 1990 defeat of Saddam's forces in Kuwait:

In the months before the Gulf War, there was anxious speculation about the size of the Iraqi army - again the divisions and regiments were dutifully counted as if they were German divisions on the eve of D-Day, with a separate count of the "elite" Republican Guard.

That much of this was believed at some level we know from the magnitude of the coalition armies that were laboriously assembled, including more than half a million U.S. troops, as well as tens of thousands of British, French and Canadians. ...In the event, two weeks of precision bombing were enough to paralyze Saddam's entire war machine, which scarcely tried to resist the ponderous ground offensive when it came. ...A real army would have continued to resist for weeks or months in the dug-in positions in Kuwait, even without air cover, but Saddam's army was the usual Middle Eastern facade without fighting substance.

Now the Mussolini syndrome is at work over Iran. All the symptoms are present, including tabulated lists of Iran's warships, despite the fact that most are over thirty years old; of combat aircraft, many of which (F-4s, Mirages, F-5s, F-14s) have not flown in years for lack of spare parts; and of divisions and brigades that are so only in name. There are awed descriptions of the Pasdaran Revolutionary Guard, inevitably described as "elite", who do indeed strut around as if they have won many a war but who have actually fought only one - against Iraq, which they lost.

Finally Luttwak turns to our penchant for believing we can reshape the Middle East:

The third and greatest error repeated by Arabolphiles and Arabophobes alike, by Turcologists and Iranists, is the simplest to define. It is the odd belief that these ancient nations are highly malleable. Hardliners keep suggesting that with a bit of well-aimed violence compliance will be obtained. Yet what happens every time is an increase in hostility; defeat is followed not by collaboration but by sullen noncooperation and active resistance too. It is not hard to defeat Arab countries, but it is mostly useless. Violence can work to destroy dangerous weapons but not to induce desired changes in behaviour.

Softliners make exactly the same mistake in reverse. ...even the most thinly qualified of Middle East experts must know that Islam, as with any other civilization, comprehends the sum total of human life, and that unlike some others it promises superiority in all things for its believers, so that the scientific and technological and cultural backwardness of the lands of Islam generates a constantly renewed sense of humiliation and civilizational defeat.

The operational mistake that Middle Eastern experts keep making is the failure to recognize that backward societies must be left alone, as the French now wisely leave Corsica to its own devices, as the Italians quietly learned to do in Sicily... 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 Eastern 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...

The Middle East was once the world's most advanced region. These days its biggest industries are extravagant consumption and the venting or resentment.