AMERICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST AFTER SADDAM
by Kenneth M. Pollack
 

Volume 12, Number 1
January 2004
 

Dr. Pollack  served on  the staff  of the  National Security
Council as Director for Persian Gulf Affairs (1999-2001) and
Director for  Near East  and South  Asian Affairs (1995-96).
He was  also the  CIA's Iraq-Iran military analyst (1988-95)
and is  now Director  of Research  for the  Saban Center for
Middle Eastern  Studies at  the Brookings Institution. 
 

          AMERICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST AFTER SADDAM
         Keynote Address At The FPRI Annual Dinner

                   by Kenneth M. Pollack

The Middle  East is in a great deal of difficulty right now,
after Saddam Hussein and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Not only
do we  have a  mess in  Iraq to  fix, but  there is  an even
bigger mess out there in the larger Middle East. We're going
to need  to deal  with that mess, too, if we are going to be
able to  defend our  interests and our own security from the
threats we now face in the region.

The Arab  states are  broken. They  are absolutely stagnant,
politically, economically,  and socially.  And their  people
know it.  Arabs are  deeply angry  and frustrated  with  the
situation they  find themselves in because of the stagnation
of the Arab world. We hear about how angry the "Arab street"
is, but  I don't  think most  people realize  what is really
wrong in the Arab world.

EDUCATION
It all  starts with  education. Arab educational systems are
by and  large very  poor. The  vast majority of Arab schools
don't teach  anything useful  to their  students.  They  see
knowledge as  a set body of facts that students are supposed
to memorize  and simply  regurgitate on  set tests. And it's
always  the  same,  there's  no  effort  to  bring  out  the
ingenuity, the creativity, of students.

These schools  don't produce  students who  have useful  job
skills. Most  of the students specialize in humanities, many
of them  aspire to  be lawyers  and  Islamic  scholars:  two
thirds of  all of  the Ph.D.s  issued in  Saudi Arabia every
year are  in Islamic studies. The scientists, engineers, and
computer programmers come to the U.S. because they can't get
a decent  education in  those sciences at home. So there's a
brain drain.  The best  and brightest leave their countries,
generally, and  come here.,  where they  contribute  to  our
economy and progress.

As a  result, you have an enormous group of people in Egypt,
for instance,  crop after  crop of  young,  smart,  educated
middle-class students  coming out  of Egyptian  universities
who have  degrees that  have taught  them nothing useful. No
one will hire them. You can imagine what it does to a bright
young person  who believes  that he  should be  part of that
country's elite  when he can't even get a job because no one
has taught him anything useful.

It used  to be  the case that the Egyptian bureaucracy would
scoop all these young people up. It's one of the reasons you
have  such   bloated  bureaucracies   in  the   Arab  world,
particularly in  Egypt. But  the demographics have gotten so
bad that even the massive Egyptian bureaucracy can no longer
soak up  these enormous  pools  of  smart,  ambitious  young
people.

LEGAL SYSTEM
The legal  system in  all the  Arab countries is a disaster,
which is  one reason so few American companies invest there,
except for the oil firms. In many of these countries rule of
law  is   meaningless.  The   law  is   entirely  arbitrary.
Investment laws  are  set  up  to  siphon  money  away  from
multinationals and  to the  central government.  No one  can
count on what the central government is going to decide from
one moment to the next.

For example, there are nearly 500 princes in the Saudi royal
family, all  of whom  believe that they are entitled to live
like princes.  Even the Saudi royal family can't accommodate
all of  them, so the princes use their positions of power to
work around  the legal  system  to  make  additional  money.
They'll push  a government  contract to a certain place, or
they'll find out early  where the government has decided to
build a  school, a road, a bridge. Because Saudi Arabia is a
rather new country and was made up originally of a lot of
semi-literate Bedouins  or recently settled townspeople, the
deed system in Saudi Arabia isn't terrific. The princes find
out where a new project is going to be built and have a deed
for the land drawn up. When the rightful owner comes forward
and takes  the matter to court, the prince intercedes to get
the judge to rule in his favor.

ECONOMY
All  of   these  different  problems  contribute  to  larger
economic problems. The economies of the Arab states are more
or less broken. They tend to fall into two categories.
For many  years the  oil states lived high off the hog. Even
to this  day Kuwaitis  and UAE are doing well, the Bahrainis
and Omanis  are getting by, but the Saudis are having a real
problem because  in the 1960s-70s, when they had massive oil
revenues, they created a cradle-to-grave welfare system. But
the decrease  in global  oil prices,  coupled with a massive
rise in  Saudi population,  has reversed its affluence. Now,
the Saudis  are running deficits. They can no longer live or
support their  people the  way they  once did.  But after 40
years of  no one's  having to  work, there is almost no work
ethic left in Saudi Arabia.

The oil  states are  all decrepit  command economies. In the
1950s and  '60s, they  put in place a form of socialism, but
they never  ran it  as well  as the  Soviets did.  The  Arab
states put  it in place not because they necessarily thought
socialism was  great, but  because  these  kind  of  command
economies put  all  the  economic  resources  of  the  state
tightly into  the hands of the autocrats. It was another way
for them  to control  their societies. Today, they're paying
for it.  None of  them have industries that produce anything
that anyone wants to buy.

So some  of the  Gulf oil  states are still doing reasonably
well, but the big state that matters, Saudi Arabia, is doing
very poorly.  And for  the rest  of the  Arab  world,  there
really isn't an economy to speak of. There isn't any kind of
a cash  crop like oil that  they can use to subsidize these
massive populations.

And of  course all  of this  comes  home  to  roost  in  the
political situation  because the  people of  the region  are
deeply frustrated.  They understand  that the rest of the
world has  taken off  with globalization, even places like
East Asia, which forty or fifty years ago was poor and worse
off than  they were.  How did East Asia go from being behind
them to  being so  far ahead of them?  In every other part of
the world, even in Africa, they see states that seem to be
doing  better  than  them.  And  they're  deeply  angry  and
frustrated. They  can't find jobs, they can't make a living,
and they've  got no  political recourse.  Their  governments
aren't interested  in their  problems. The  governments just
feed them  a steady diet of anti-Semitism  and  anti-
Americanism, creating  an intellectual class that blames its
problems on us. The people are told that if they can't get a
job, it's "because we have to stay mobilized to go to war
against the  Israelis." Or "it's because the Americans are
manipulating our economy."

The only alternative out there is even worse: the Islamists.
The Islamists  at least  stand up,  and because they live in
the mosque,  the states  have been  very wary of going after
them. The Islamists are willing to challenge the government.
They tell  the people  "We know  how bad  your lives are. We
know how  unhappy you  are. We  have the  answer: sharia. We
need to go back to the 12th century and recreate the Islamic
paradise that existed before the Mongols sacked Baghdad."

IRAQ
There's another  important development  going on  out there,
and that's  what's happening  in Iraq,  Iraq really matters,
for a variety of reasons.

First, if we get Iraq wrong and create a mess there, we will
create chaos  in the entire region. Iraq is a very important
country. We've  learned that if you allow a country to slide
into chaos, to become a failed state, that chaos never stays
within its borders. Remember Lebanon in the 1980s? The chaos
there destabilized  Syria and  Israel. Many of the problems
Israel has today stem from its involvement in Lebanon, which
it was  basically drawn  into  because  of  the  instability
there. Look  at Afghanistan and how it destabilized Pakistan
and started  to destabilize  Iran and some of  the Central
Asian states.  Or the Congo. The Congo is a massive pit in
the middle of Africa. It is nothing but death and chaos, and
it has destabilized every single country around it.

And Iraq  is important  in and  of itself, because it is the
source of  the second  largest proven  oil reserves  in  the
world and because of the countries it borders: Turkey, Iran,
Saudi Arabia,  Kuwait,  Syria,  and  Jordan.  If  the  chaos
spreads to  them, things could get very unpleasant. A lot of
these  states   are  tinderboxes  right  now.  Saudi  Arabia
probably isn't  going to  blow up  tomorrow, but  I wouldn't
make a bet as to whether it's still in its current state ten
years from now, if it continues down the same road that it's
been on  for the last twenty years. And if it starts getting
a push  from chaos  in Iraq, things could unravel there much
faster.

In Jordan, there is the beloved  King Abdullah.  But King
Abdullah does not sit easily on his throne. He presides over
a population that's two thirds Palestinian, and those people
are very unhappy with their lot in life. And they would like
nothing better  than to  be able  to control  the levers  of
power inside  Jordan. Add Syria, Turkey and Iran, and there
aren't too many stable states neighboring Iraq.

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY
But Iraq is also important because of this larger issue of
the region.  Right now, there have traditionally been only
two visions out there in the Arab world. There's the vision
offered by the state autocrats, which basically says "Our
political system's  fine. The only problem is the Americans
and Israelis. If  Washington would  just  fix  the peace
process, everything  would be  beautiful." The only voice of
opposition with  any strength  is the Islamists, who offer
their own vision of an alternative.

But in the last ten or fifteen years, another voice has been
developing in  the Middle  East. It's still very  small and
weak, but  it's the voice that we should all be supporting.
That's a group of liberal democratic Arabs who have been
standing up and saying  "These two alternatives are both
equally bankrupt.  Our choice should not be Mubarak's Egypt
or the Ayatollah's Iran. Why can't we do what 140, 150 other
countries around the world have done and start to
democratize, open  up our economies, and build a free-market
economy and  a democratic  system? We can build a democratic
system that  is perfectly compatible with Islam and with
traditional Arab values."

It's a  small, still  voice right  now, and  if we  get Iraq
wrong, that voice is going to die. Because right now, as far
as the  Arabs are  concerned, what  we're doing  in Iraq  is
embarking on  a grand  social-science experiment  to try  to
build a  democratic free-market  society in  an Arab  state.
Iraq is  a pretty  good Arab  state. The Arabs know that the
Iraqi population  is among  the most secular, best educated,
most progressive,  and most  industrious in  the Arab world.
The Arabs  say, "If  you want  to  try  to  build  democracy
somewhere, Iraq  is probably a pretty good place to try it."
If democracy  fails in  Iraq, it won't matter how we explain
why the effort failed. To the Arabs, all that will matter is
"The U.S. tried to build democracy and free-market economics
in Iraq,  threw 130,000  troops and  $100 billion at it, and
failed."  And   all  the   autocrats  and  all  the  Islamic
fundamentalists are going to say, "If the Americans couldn't
do it  in Iraq,  then it  can't work  anywhere in  the  Arab
world. So  the only  alternatives you have are us." That's a
lot at stake.

NATION-BUILDING
To get  Iraq right requires us to do some hard things. We'll
have to  bring in  the international community in a way that
we haven't  been willing to do yet. Not just its troops, but
the skills  that we  don't have.  The last countries that we
tried to  build as  democracies, really,  were  Germany  and
Japan (and Panama, of course, but that was a tiny and unique
case).  Over   the  last  15  years,  though,  the  UN,  and
particularly the  UN Development Program, has reached out to
a  whole   group  of  people  who  have  embarked  on  these
enterprises in Cambodia, Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and
East Timor.  Not all  of these  were  successes,  but  these
people were  there doing it, and they learned and got better
each time  they did  it. They were stunned when they weren't
allowed to  apply what they learned in Afghanistan. The same
has been  true in  Iraq. We  need to reach out to the UN and
NGOs, who  have the  skills that  we lack.  They have Arabic
speakers, they have people who understand how to go out into
villages and  teach people about democracy and organize them
and build  from the ground up, which we've found is the best
way to do this.

We're also going to have to come to grips with our goals. We
hear every day that this administration  is deeply divided
over what  it wants in Iraq.  One group believes in the idea
of nation-building,  looks at the things that were done in
the 1980s  and 1990s  and says "We know how to do this. It's
going to be hard, but it can be done if you do it the right
way." Then another group says "Why bother? We got rid of the
bad guy,  if the  place falls  into chaos, who cares?" Still
another group  says "We've  got our  guy, his  name is Ahmed
Chalaby, we're  going to put him in charge. He'll be an SOB,
but he'll be our SOB."

These three  groups fight  over everything.  Every  decision
about Iraq comes down to this question of what kind of an
Iraq we want. This makes it impossible for the people out in
the field to figure out what they're doing on a day-to-day
basis. That's one of  the reasons  why Jerry  Bremer has to
keep coming back to Washington, to try to force them to sort
this out.  He's saying  "I can do this. It'll be hard, it'll
cost us,  but I  know how  to do  this if  you will let me."
Until Washington  sorts itself out and lets him do it, I
don't think we're ever going to get there.

But the situation in Iraq is entirely salvageable. There is a lot of good  raw material in Iraq. Since we've been there we've seen  that there are a  lot of  positives. Our troops have done  a magnificent job. They went into Iraq, took over the whole  country, and  basically after the fall of Baghdad for about  six weeks  they sat  on their  hands, hoping that somewhere there  was a  plan and someone who would tell them what to do. After six weeks, they figured out like the rest of us that there wasn't a plan. They rose to this and said "OK, we'll do it ourselves."

And that's  what they've  been doing. They've been out there making it  up as  they go: getting villages' water and power turned on,  forming councils.  There  have  been  tremendous local successes  all across  Iraq, as  both the soldiers and the Iraqis  will tell  you. But we're not building on these, because nobody  in Baghdad or Washington has yet figured out what to do. If we can build on the positive developments, if we can  get to  a position  where maybe five, ten or fifteen years down  the road  Iraq is a stable pluralist state, then you will start to see a lot of changes in the region.

It's not  a  matter  of  dominoes  falling,  it's  something
somewhat different.  For the  first time  ever Arabs will be
able to  look at  Iraq and see an Arab democracy. Often when
we say  democracy, Arabs  hear Britney Spears, sex on TV,
same-sex marriages and hip-hugger blue jeans. They know they
don't want  any  of  that.  But  once  you  get  that  first
democracy  formed   in  a   region,  it   has  a  remarkable
transformative  effect.   This  is   what  the   East  Asian
historians say  about Japan. Fifteen, twenty years after the
occupation of  Japan was  over, when  there was a functional
democracy  in   Japan,  it  changed  a  lot  of  perceptions
throughout East  Asia. For  the first time East Asians could
look at Japan and say "That's the kind of state that I could
imagine living in."

Before Japan,  East Asians  thought about democracy the same
way that  Arabs do  now. They  thought of  it  as  being  an
American or  a European  thing. Those were the only examples
they had,  and they  knew they  didn't want  that. But  then
Japan came along and proved that you could build a democracy
that was  very different  from a Western-style democracy. To
me, Japan is more dissimilar from our form of democracy than
Hosni Mubarak's  Egypt is  from our  democracy. But  it is a
functional democracy that is consistent with Japan's values,
traditions and  history. And if we get it right in Iraq, for
the first  time there will be a democratic Arab state with a
free-market economic  system that  will be  consistent  with
Arab values, traditions and history.

And once that is out there, those small, still voices in the
Arab world  who are saying that there is an alternative will
be tremendously  reinforced. This  is the challenge we face.
In his  speech to  the National  Endowment for  Democracy on
November 6, President Bush said a lot of what I just said. I
hope he  means it,  though I'm  a little  skeptical at  this
point  in   time.  I've   heard   this   speech   from   his
administration before.  Richard Haass,  then head  of policy
planning, gave it in 2001, Colin Powell gave it in 2002, and
Condi Rice  wrote an  op-ed in the Washington Post this past
summer saying the exact same thing.

After each  one of  these speeches,  the administration  did
nothing.  Arabs   ask,  "If   you're  really  serious  about
democracy, how  about telling your friend Hosni Mubarak 'You
get $2.1 billion a year from us. Well, next year, unless you
start making  some democratic  changes, you're  going to get
less. And  if you  do make  those changes, you'll get more.'
And how  about telling  U.S. defense contractors, 'Next time
you want to get the Saudis to buy $4 billion worth of planes
that they  won't be  able to fly, you can't. Because we need
the  Saudis  to  be  able  to  put  that  money  into  their
educational system,  not  into  another  60  F-15s  that  do
nothing but  sit and  bake in the sun.'" Until the president
is willing to make some hard diplomatic and economic choices
and tell  the American  people "I'm  going to  cut your  tax
rebate because  we need  to increase  our foreign aid budget
because we've  got a  real problem  out there  in the Middle
East," no  one in  the Middle  East  is  going  to  take  it
seriously. This isn't all abstract. This is stuff that comes
home to  roost. These deeper economic and political problems
are what motivate the terrorists.

TERRORISM
We know  a lot  about terrorist  recruiting. Hezbollah  goes
after the  third and  fourth and  fifth sons  of families in
Lebanon. These  are youth  who have  no prospects. The first
son gets  the land.  The second  son gets  all the  family's
clout to  get him  some kind  of job  in  the  army  or  the
bureaucracy. The  third son  has nothing:  no education,  no
skills, no  land; he  probably can't get married as a result
of all  this. He  is nothing  but a  burden on  his  family.
Hezbollah goes  to those  boys and says "We're going to give
you a  chance. You  martyr yourself for us, and we will take
care of  your family  forever.  Forever we will be there
helping  them  economically.  This  is  your chance to do
something for  your family." And since there is nothing else
for these  kids, a lot of them do take Hezbollah up on their
offer.

And we  know a lot about how Al Qaeda recruits, too. It goes
after the  intellectuals, the  sons of the middle class, the
young men  in Egypt  who are smart, educated, well versed in
Islamic studies,  who believe  that they  are entitled  to a
decent job  and a respectable life but can't get one because
of the  poverty of their education, because of the crippling
corruption and  poor legal  systems in  their societies.  Al
Qaeda goes  after them  and says "We know who's responsible.
It's the Americans, the Mubarak regime, the Saudi regime. We
will help  you take  out your frustration on them. We have a
channel for  your rage.  Help us  and we  will overturn this
unjust system." The nineteen 9/11 hijackers weren't the poor
downtrodden, these  were the  sons of  the middle  class  of
Egypt and  Saudi  Arabia.  And  this  is  why  the  regions'
problems are  more than  just abstractions.  You talk  about
draining the swamp? This is what draining the swamp means.