Summer 1992
OIL -THE BANE OF THE ARABS
Oil underneath the hot sands of the Middle East has proved a bonanza for a few people, but no true blessing to
the Arab nation as a whole. Found and produced in prodigious quality and quantity in its territory (larger than that
of the U.S.A.) oil has sharply divided the Arabs into haves and have-nots, into poor and rich countries. Saudi Arabia and Persian Gulf states, called Emirates, Iraq and Libya are Fortune's favourites, have relatively high per capita income thanks to oil exports and small populations. Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Jordan, Yemen and others have relatively large populations, little or no oil and few other natural resources, and small incomes per head. All Arab countries, rich and poor, are technologically and industrially lagging far behind those of the West and Southeast Asia.
Some rulers in both groups have strong political ambitions and become aggressive when they believe
the situation suits them. Saddam Hussein, Colonel Ghaddafi, President Hafez Assad of Syria are examples.
All Arab countries, haves and have-nots, are governed more or less despotically by dictators, kings, emirs presidents. Some of these men were (or still are) outright dangerous to their neighbours, though these are Arabs too. Nasser of Egypt in his time, Ghaddafi of Libya, Assad of Syria, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, spent (and are still spending) much of their countries' wealth on their armed forces and on wars. They attacked without provocation their respective neighbours: Iran, Yemen, Kuwait, Jordan, Israel, Chad. The attacks failed, because of strong resistance or intervention of third parties.
In all Arab oil producing countries the rich have grown still richer, the poor gained too, but only slightly. So
far, oil has stirred little social unrest. It does not look like causing any very soon. Some social or political tensions exist, but have not yet risen to the surface. Iran's fabulous oil revenues turned the head of the Shah who, in the grip of a Western outlook, believed he could use them to modernize his backward (non-Arab) country quickly, possibly within his own lifetime, regardless of the hold of tradition and Islam on his people. The error cost him his throne, many of his helpers their lives, unsuspecting foreign investors their capital - and the U.S. a trusted ally. Iraq's power-drunk, ambitious, shrewd dictator, spent much of his country's huge oil revenues on military adventures. They failed due to poor judgment of what he could get away with. In Libya, Ghaddafi, sly, odd and erratic, made war against Chad and backed international terrorism against “the wicked West”. The French sent troops to save Chad, the U.S. war planes that bombed Libyan targets. That is restraining him, at least from more terrorism against passenger planes.
No major unrest has yet occurred in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates. In the religious and social climate of the Middle East political convulsions have so far been restricted to power rivalries, usually violent, of ambitious individuals or groups. With the exception of various terrorist groups, some fanatically Muslim, populations remain passive onlookers and sometimes even victims (as now in Algeria). No European-style political-social revolution has yet occurred in Arab history and none is likely soon. Violent demonstrations occur now and then when food or fuel prices rise too steeply. But these are rare events. Strong social fatalism encouraged by harsh dictatorships keeps the Oriental public subdued, resigned and passive.
The oil wells in the Middle East are the most prolific on earth, their flow the most cheaply produced. One would expect the wealth they create to mean good fortune to any wisely governed country as they do, for instance, to Norway and Britain. Oil has hardly proved a blessing to the Arabs. Why not? Some of the blame must be laid at the doors of those who shaped recent and not-so-recent Arab history. Until 1917 the vast territory of the Middle East was 400 years under Ottoman-Turkish dominion. The Arabs enjoyed no sovereignty. Their autocratic ruler was the Sultan in Istanbul (Constantinople), represented by provincial governors. The only things common to harsh Turkish rulers and their submissive Arab subjects were Islam, the Koran as the source of their legal system, and the Arabic script. In 1917 the long moribund Ottoman empire crumbled in the course of World War 1 in which the Turkish government had joined the German-Austrian side. When victory was in sight, Britain and France set up a commission in 1916 to divide the Middle East between them as the future masters of the vast territory.
The situation of the Arabs under Turkish rule resembled in some respects that of North America under British dominion before July 4, 1776. But unlike the Americans the Arabs, with very few local and temporary exceptions, never rose collectively against their Turkish masters. They put up with their subjection by non-Arab Muslims for over 800 years. That long period conditioned the Arab people as a whole and lamed initiative for insurrection and self-government. Turkish rule was harsh in some places, lax in others. When nationalist Arab agitators provoked the nearest Turkish governor too much, they were hanged in public places or exiled to warn others. Political consciousness, debate, literature, culture and modern civic institutions were never free to grow wherever Arabic, Turkish or any other Oriental language was spoken. Debates on political, religious, social issues of the kind that in French society preceded the revolution of 1789, were confined to very small intellectual circles that could meet only in secret and are at risk even today. The more energetic and active individuals went into voluntary exile and tried from afar to stir up revolt against the Sultan in Istanbul – with little visible success.
Towards the end of World War 1 the Arabs were liberated from the Turkish yoke not by their own initiative, but as a result of the British campaign led by Gen. Allenby. His forces moved north from their base in Egypt in 1916 and gradually drove the Turkish troops out of Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. Apart from the role played by Bedouin raiders (which Lawrence of Arabia dramatized and exaggerated), liberation came to the Arabs as a gift, just as later oil was brought into their life by foreign exploration, technology and capital.
Another major calamity for the Arab nation as a whole was Anglo-French rivalry in securing power and influence in the Middle East. It began when the collapse of the Ottoman empire was in sight. British and French officials regarded it as an invitation to satisfy their governments' claims for the spoils of war. They accomplished their task, after some haggling, by dividing the Middle East into “areas of influence”. The seams of their political haute couture were bizarre borders for new "Arab states" designed to meet the two powers' imperial interests, with little regard, if any, for the needs of the local populations. Some were arbitrarily drawn with a ruler to make sure they were straight to suit future oil pipelines from the wells of Iraq to the Mediterranean.
The Arab nation as a whole remained passive, complacent and resigned in the face of such new foreign intervention, this time not even Muslim. Only their leaders protested. For the common people it meant the substitution of Ottoman by British or French dominion. Instead of "sanjak", the Turkish term for a province and its administration, the newly tailored units of territory were called Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, etc. Only Saudi Arabia became independent about the mid-twenties, thanks to the energy and bellicosity of a bold tribal desert sheik called Ibn Sa'oud. He was allowed to act without outside interference because no one thought that the huge, poor and rather barren cradle of Islam had any value worth fighting for, unlike the Near and Middle East. The newly created “states" were dressed up as "mandated territories" granted to Britain and France as trustees on behalf of another Western post-war creation, the League of Nations. The Arabs were denied the sovereignty they had hoped for, their local representatives were appointees of the Mandatory powers if they could be trusted to “cooperate” with the decision makers in London and Paris.
True sovereignty came to the bulk of the Arab nation only after World War II (to Iraq in 1932), but the borders drafted Britain and France in 1916 remained in place, with the exception of Palestine which was divided to make room for another Arab state called Transjordan. Left to themselves since mid-century the Arab states, had they wished it, could have wiped out the imposed heritage of their colonial borders. They could have formed another USA - the United States of Arabia - or at least a Common Arab Market. No such development took place, none is on the horizon. By now each ruler, or ruling clique, is well dug in, jealous of his or its position of power and unwilling to part with it, as any form of union would require. Regional politics in the Middle East has become a web of shifting alliances, intriguing politics, threats, violence, aggression, corruption - a barren ground for any kind of democratic institutions.
Saddam Hussein of oil-rich Iraq, is a typical example of a Middle East leader. He sent his army into Kuwait in August 1990 on the plea that Kuwait had always been united with what had been a single Turkish province until 1917 - as indeed it was. He could with equal justice have claimed much more of the Middle East for Iraq. But the leader of any other Arab country fashioned from the former Ottoman province could have made the same claim on similar grounds. Assad of Syria claims his neighbors' territory for Greater Syria. No wonder that the two are not fond of each other. The idea of a single Arab state sometimes fires the imagination of ethnocentric and unworldly wellwishers in the West who are not familiar with the East, but never the Arab masses themselves. When the British still had some remnant of influence in the Middle East over half a century ago, they helped the creation of the “Arab League”. But that body hs remained little more than an impotent debating society for aging politicians and a forum for florid Oriental oratory. The League generated some agreement at the time on an economic boycott of Israel, the common enemy of the Arab states since its establishment in 1948. It has remained the only item on the League's agenda on which there is general agreement. (Israeli economists say the Arab boycott was compelling them to raise their economic efficiency to a level competitive with that of the West).
As the history of Europe in the past 50 years shows drastic, yet peaceful political changes can take place only in democratic societies. Since the dawn of recorded history the Middle East peoples have been governed by autocratic regimes. (Modern Turkey is the only exception. But even there democracy was not created by the people, but imposed from above, by a single strong and brilliant political and military personality, Kemal Ata Turk who disowned the supremacy of Islam). To expect a quick change in the region is to ignore the hold the past has on the Arabs, and also the fact that it has taken Europe about fourteen centuries for democracy to emerge. A "New Middle East" in our time is a Western fallacy. And not the only one.
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