The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (29 page)

Conclusion

 

  I
t was more than a year after the July 2006 war that I returned to Beirut. For the destruction and death Hezbollah had brought them, the Lebanese seemed angrier at the Party of God than ever; and they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do a thing about it. Hezbollah and its allies had occupied the downtown area, turning it into a squatters’ village and further burdening an already fragile economy by closing down dozens of businesses, shops, and restaurants. But life goes on in Lebanon. Cash continued to pour in from the Gulf states, much of it earmarked for real estate; most of it went for luxury high-rises by the water, while some more was detailed for rebuilding the Shia areas turned to rubble in the war (the Arabs, as well as the Americans, vainly imagined these goodwill gestures might separate the Hezbollah-dependent Shia from their Iranian sponsors). Gemmayze was packed with more bars and restaurants than before—some of the establishments that had closed downtown simply moved over to the relatively secure East Beirut neighborhood—for the Lebanese, in spite of their trials, or because of them, would not forgo their nightlife. And Fawaz was engaged to be married. Maybe his son, named after Fawaz’s father, or his son’s son,
who would invariably be named after Fawaz himself, would get to see a peaceful, flourishing Lebanon. Or maybe Lebanon would just keep going through these seemingly endless seasons of violence one year and peace and prosperity the next. For the Arabic-speaking Middle East, that was a kind of stability after all.

The Arabs are a feuding people, as the historian Kamal Salibi remarked to me in Beirut, but they are not a warlike people. Of course, even in this century alone the Arabs have gone to war among themselves repeatedly—as the previous chapters show—but they have no taste for all-out conflagration, or the kind of total war that Arab nationalism, as a tribal pact, tends to preclude. Perhaps the more serious concern is that the Arabs will
not
fight each other, and choose instead to bind together, such as it were, or be bound by others, in a regional pact in order to focus their energies elsewhere, like against the United States, again. That is one feud they cannot afford to continue. Another 9/11, or even a series of attacks, would not represent an existential threat to the United States, even if weapons of mass destruction were employed. But American retaliation against such attacks could very well constitute an existential danger to the Arabs.

The British historian Arnold Toynbee noted that most civilizations die by their own hand, a lesson that originates with Ibn Khaldun, whose cyclical theory of history explains that civilizations in their final stages are incapable of defending themselves—in other words, they lose their will to live. The issue with the Arabs is not that they will not fight, but their appetite for warfare disguises the fact that the Arabs are losing their will to live. Never before in the annals of history has suicide played such a large role as it has in the last quarter century of Arab warfare.

Hezbollah laid the groundwork for 9/11, which was simply a suicide car bombing raised to the next level. In November 1982, the first car-bomb “martyrdom operation” killed seventy-four Israeli soldiers and fourteen others, the first in a series of spectacular Hezbollah attacks, culminating in the 1983 Marine barracks bombing. Amal,
another Shia organization, saw that Hezbollah’s martyrdom operations were winning it prestige and power, and so it had no choice but to match its rival. Amal’s first suicide car bombing came in June 1984.
¹

With Lebanon’s Shia community in competition for young men willing to sacrifice themselves to defeat the foreign (Israeli or American or French) occupiers, clerical authorities delivered rulings muddying the distinction between dying at the hands of others and dying by one’s own hands. From the very beginning the Shia clerics understood they were walking a fine line between martyrdom and suicide.

It is in the nature of religion to forbid suicide. The world, religion tells us, is not meaningless but the divine order of an almighty creator who gives life and takes it away—and only he gives it and takes it away. Therefore, specific religious prohibitions against suicide are superfluous, except as reminders that despair and existential boredom have been significant concerns for every society from the beginning of time, or else there would be no need for measures to keep those inclined to take their own lives from doing so.

With the increasing secularization of the postindustrial Christian West, the prospect of eternal damnation has become less of a deterrent to suicide at the same time that the temporal realm has become more appealing, with the result that man may be less desirous of leaving it. Our lives are filled with pleasant, beautiful distractions, including consumer goods and entertainments, and, for parts of the professional class anyway, there is spirituality in work, a self-creation begetting meaning. The Arabic-speaking Middle East has not become more secular, and in contrast to the West it perceives the temporal realm as having gotten not better but worse, always worse, at least according to the region’s own account of itself. Worse since the founding of Israel, worse since the period of European colonialism, worse since the Ottomans, worse since the Mongols overran Baghdad, worse since the Abbasids replaced the Umayyads, worse since the death of Hussein, worse since Ali’s defeat at the hands of
Mu‘awiya, and much worse since the death of the Prophet of Islam. If the Arabs are humiliated and desperate, it is not because of the West but because of their own historical narrative of decline and decadence, a story about a God who has turned his back on the Arabs and allowed them to be humiliated. To explain the self-inflicted deaths of Arab youths in terms of their despair and humiliation is not a rationale for martyrdom, but a suicide note scribbled across the pages of a fourteen-hundred-year-old history.

As Hezbollah and Amal fed the resistance with the bodies of their young men, their struggle was now waged on two fronts, against the foreign enemy and against each other. With their competition for martyrs escalating, more and more were being sent out on ill-conceived operations that failed to kill any of the enemy’s numbers and only accomplished the deaths of the martyrs, whose suicides were tactically futile, but useful in demonstrating the commitment of their fighters. The clerics tried to reimpose limits.

“We believe that self-martyring operations should only be carried out if they can bring about a political or military change in proportion to the passions that incite a person to make of his body an explosive bomb,” wrote Hussein Fadlallah in 1985. Fadlallah had at one time been Hezbollah’s spiritual adviser, until his unrivaled religious authority among Lebanon’s Shia community antagonized the Party of God’s Iranian sponsor. “The self-martyring operation is not permitted unless it can convulse the enemy. The believer cannot blow himself up unless the results will equal or exceed the [loss of the] soul of the believer. Self-martyring operations are not fatal accidents but legal obligations governed by rules, and the believers cannot transgress the rules of God.”

It was the elders themselves who had overridden the defense mechanisms against self-annihilation, and when they realized the mistake they’d made, it was already too late. When the martyrdom operations stopped, Hezbollah and Amal turned on each other, and then fratricidal war tore apart families and villages. Where once suicide
had destroyed only the individual body, now it ravaged the corporate one.

The Lebanese wars reprised the history of the Arabic-speaking Middle East: terror as a political instrument; terror in the name of Islam; sectarian violence; wars within wars; Arab rulers interfering in another domain to advance their strategic interests abroad and secure the realm at home; the murder of innocents. And the wars were also a preview of what was to come in the region, like suicide, for that was new.

Hezbollah’s war in the summer of 2006, and Hamas’s war in the winter of 2008–2009, marked the birth of the suicide nation. Where once the martyrdom operation was a matter of one man, or a cadre, going after the enemy and dying, now an entire society would stand and absorb the blows as a whole, sacrificing itself in large numbers—from suicide bomber to a society of suicide. The paradox is that for the culture of suicide to win, someone had to be left standing. “We are going to win because they love life,” said Hassan Nasrallah, “and we love death.”

“He mocks those who love life,” said Fawaz, as we were walking through the cool night in the mountains overlooking Beirut. It was New Year’s Eve, and the city below was sparkling in the bay. “But the party of life will fight to keep it.”

And a culture that loves death will also ultimately win what it prizes most, death.

In short, Arab violence should not be confused with Arab strength. Indeed, the war in Iraq and its aftermath have exposed all the fault lines in the region—sectarian, political, cultural, and so on—and have left the Arabs more fragile than at any time since the Western powers liberated them from the Ottomans. So what role, if any, should the United States play in the Arabic-speaking Middle East? Or, where do Arab interests and those of America converge?

First of all, let’s do away with the notion of a return to the pre-9/11 status quo. For all the mistakes of the Bush administration, one
of the things we have learned the last several years is that it is dangerous to entrust American interests to our Sunni allies. For Arab regimes, regional stability means exclusively their own stability, which almost always comes at the expense of someone else’s security, which is how we got 9/11. The Sunni regimes cannot protect our interests, and, as we saw when the United States had to protect the Gulf states from Saddam, and when Israel campaigned against Hezbollah and Hamas, they are not even capable of fighting for themselves.

We share with our Arab allies two interests alone—energy and nonproliferation. As such, our greatest concern in the region is that of our allies—the Iranian nuclear program. Getting the bomb would turn Tehran into a regional hegemon capable of setting the political, cultural, and economic tempo of the Middle East, and touch off a proliferation nightmare in a region as volatile as this one. Moreover, it would push Iran’s regional assets into even deadlier conflicts with Israel and other regional powers, like Egypt, which considers Hamas an enemy, and the Arab states where Hezbollah has established a beachhead outside of Lebanon, including Iraq and the Arab Gulf states. If Washington is not prepared to do everything to bring a halt to Iran’s nuclear program, including military action, then our regional partners will seek other solutions. The Israelis are very likely to take matters into their own hands, which may let the Arabs breathe easily for a while, but in time they, too, will go their own way separate from Washington.

Whether or not the United States is sufficiently determined to stop the Iranians raises the issue of American resolve, or the lack of it—that is to say, American weakness. After all, a broad consensus of American opinion makers, including the policy establishment, academics, and journalists, maintain that the United States’ position throughout the Middle East has been weakened, diplomatically, politically, morally, and militarily, largely because of the war in Iraq. Let me offer a different perspective.

Between October 2001 and April 2003, American armed forces invaded and occupied two Muslim states and sent their leaders scurrying for cover. Unlike Middle Eastern rulers who would have scorched the land of their vanquished foes as an enduring lesson to anyone else thinking of trying to attack their citizens, interests, and allies, the United States decided to democratize them instead. It did this for the sake of those two countries’ men and women, in the hope that Iraq and Afghanistan might be beacons of democracy for their neighbors, and because good governance in lands many thousands of miles away was a vital interest of the United States as well as that of the entire international community.

These were the actions not of a weakling but of a country so confident, or haughty, that even as it was recovering from a spectacular national tragedy, it thought it could turn an untested political theory—the democratization of the Middle East, a region with no history of democracy—into a national security strategy. And despite the setbacks in Iraq, the reality is that American power is as great as it ever was. The question is whether we will recognize this, for if instead we perceive ourselves to be uncertain or weak, the region will act as if we were. Perception will become reality. The only power capable of dislodging us from our position in the region is our own.

It is still far too early to know how Iraq will turn out, and while it touched off a number of political, social, and cultural upheavals perhaps comparable, as some commentators noted, to Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt, the uncertainty in Iraq and Lebanon makes it clear that democracy is not going to catch on anytime soon in the Arabic-speaking Middle East. Nonetheless, just as the Reagan administration pushed the Carter White House’s human rights agenda, albeit to a different degree and with its own emphases, it is unlikely future administrations will be willing to wholly cashier the Bush team’s freedom agenda, or capable of doing so.

It is in the nature of U.S. foreign policy to promote democracy because it is in the character of our people to believe, incorrectly I
would argue, that what we have accomplished is not extraordinary and others, too, are capable of it. Perhaps it is partly the minority-rich composition of the Middle East that has led American observers to believe that by bearing a passing resemblance to our multiethnic, multiracial immigrant nation, the region may not be more ready for democracy than others but certainly has more need of it. In any case, our actions among the Arabs have long had a missionary quality, and our enthusiasm for spreading the gospel of the American civic religion is unlikely to subside too much now. The temperament of our society is no more susceptible to immediate about-faces than that of the Arabs.