Editor’s Note: Jay Nordlinger attended the World Economic Forum on the Middle East last week. It took place by the Dead Sea in Jordan. Below is the third installment of his journal. For the first two, go here and here.
It can be a wondrous thing to hear Arab elites talk behind closed doors. They can be bracingly, sometimes thrillingly, candid. They recognize the problems of Arab society; they are eager to confront and surmount them.
At a lunch, I hear things like, “We Arabs are at the bottom of everything — at the bottom of every index: literacy, capitalism, the rights of women. Everything. In our countries, we have cults of personality, dictatorships, dynasties . . . Where is democracy? Where is rotation in office?
“In the past, extremist Islam was unusual; now it is usual. In the Soviet Union, South Africa, South Korea, there was restructuring. But not in our region. We have no Gorbachev, we have no de Klerk, we have no Kim Dae-jung. The vast majority of our people are chromosomally reasonable and moderate. And the human spirit must be unleashed here.”
How touching it is, too, to hear a Syrian woman plead for human rights. Many of her countrymen — many of her best ones — are in cells.
I wish the whole world could hear what I have heard at this lunch.
But you also hear the old voices — the Old Guard, as I call them. And, as always, they are depressing. They cannot speak without fingering Israel and the United States. In their eyes, everything bad stems from Israel and the United States. And no progress can be made until Israel ceases to occupy the West Bank. (They’re now out of Gaza, of course. Fat lot of good that did.)
Arab countries can’t drop crippling socialism until Israel leaves the West Bank. Nepotism must continue until Israel leaves the West Bank. Women cannot drive until Israel leaves — and “honor killings” must go on. Corruption must prevail in Arab countries as long as Israel occupies the West Bank.
Etc., etc. This attitude is not only insane — it is harmful to the point of destructiveness.
As a rule, I encounter two types of Arab elite: those who recognize Arab problems, and are willing to tackle them; and those who fixate on Israel and America. Members of the former group are so refreshing, you want to hug them; members of the latter group are not just lamentable, but despicable. They are the excuse-makers. And they hold the entire region back.
The excuse-makers, sad to say, occupy positions of power. The other people — the problem-recognizers, and reformers — are on the sidelines. Or quashed by the excuse-makers. (I am speaking in generalities here, of course. It is largely unavoidable. But I ask your pardon all the same.)
There are major Arab excuse-makers here by the Dead Sea — and the leading one, I would say, is Amr Moussa, the longtime secretary-general of the Arab League. He is the epitome, the purest representative, of the Old Guard. But you know who most of the excuse-makers are? Americans and Europeans. Middle Easterners themselves are far more likely to be candid and clear-eyed.
They’re the ones who have to live with these problems. They’re the ones who have to live with a lack of progress. Americans and Europeans can sit in their free societies, fat and happy, and say, “Damn those Israelis, and damn us meddling, injurious Westerners.”
Here is one of the most interesting things I will hear all conference long. An Arab intellectual says, “In our region, we have those who are hardliners for reform and those who are against reform; and we have hardliners against peace and those who are willing at least to consider peace. Unfortunately, the hardliners for reform are also the hardliners against peace.” In other words, these are Islamists — as I understand it — who want to shake up entrenched regimes and make government more accountable to the people. They also, of course, want to make war.
The intellectual says, “Those who are both hardline for reform and hardline for peace are in a tiny, tiny minority.”
There is much to think about in those few lines.
In these journals past — from the Middle East and from Davos — I have remarked on the anti-Americanism of the Americans. It is always strutting about. An Arab says that his country must liberate itself from illiteracy and ignorance, in order to make progress politically. An American woman says, chortling to her companion, “We need to do that in America.”
Keep laughin’, lady.
In my Davos in the Desert journal last year, I wrote the following, after a speech by President Bush:
In the next hours, I hear many reviews of Bush’s performance, and they are not good, to put it mildly. And I will tell you about a conversation I overhear — an American woman is talking to some Middle Easterners in a lounge. I am typing this column.
A man asks the woman, hesitantly, “What did you think of Bush’s speech?” “Oh, I hate Bush,” she says. That is a jarring sentence to hear: “I hate Bush.”
And she goes on. Some of her choice sentences: “Democracy is overrated.” “All of us Americans in the audience, we were like, ‘Do we applaud or what?’” “His approval rating is 18 percent. No one cares about him anymore; everybody hates him.”
She allows that the First Lady, Laura Bush, “seems nice.” But then she drops this: “The rumor is he hits her, you know. Sometimes I see her on television, and I’m thinking, ‘Poor woman.’” Then our American seems to have a prick of conscience: “But I don’t know — maybe they have a great relationship.”
Here is a theme I have sounded many, many times, and will again: The American abroad can be tough to digest. For decades, people have denounced the “ugly American” — the ugly American abroad. They mean conservative ignoramuses or loudmouths or bigots in Hawaiian shirts and shorts. But my idea of the “ugly American” is something else.
(For the relevant installment of that journal, go here.)
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