Few Americans were not overjoyed at the capture of Saddam Hussein and we naively expect other peoples to feel the same.
But what about the internal psychic and spiritual world of the Arab peoples? As it happened, my old friend Clovis Maksoud was in Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East during the capture and, as one of today’s finest Arab diplomats and scholars, he had some perceptive things to say about that inner world of Arab thought, faced with this new level of historic experience.
“First, there is this deep sense of shame in the Arab world,” he began. “Most people are very pleased that he is out, but they are embarrassed that they didn’t do it and that, rather, it was done `for them.’
“As for the Americans, the problem in the Arab world is the feeling that they talk at them about `democracy,’ rather than to them. That gives them a double sense of humility, the idea that `We have come to liberate you!’ Then, because they have become so vulnerable, the tonality of some of the American statements makes it all even worse. And those feelings are then compounded by the Americans’ never restraining Israel from the attacks on the Palestinians.”
Were the other retrogressive Arab governments responding in any real way to the Iraq experience?
“They are really worried about the frustration in their populations,” he went on, “and they want to diminish the levels of disenfranchisement. Meanwhile, the people are asking more questions, and they’re bolder now. In short, there are signs of vitality, but there is not a sense of direction there yet.”
Even as I talked with Maksoud–he was for many years the Arab League’s ambassador to the UN and more recently was one of the authors of the daring Arab Human Development Report, urging widespread change in the Arab world–stories were pouring out of Iraq confirming exactly what he said.
Iraqis were overjoyed that the tyrant had fallen, but they were humiliated by the fact that 1) he was overthrown by strangers, and 2) that Hussein had not even tried to defend himself.
For all their technical aptness, one suspects the American officials on the spot little understand the degree to which Iraqis–and other Arabs in the spiritual “Arab Nation” –will have to live with the haunting realization that they were ruled by–and under the spell of–a man who was not only a brute, but also a coward.
So this is going to be just as difficult a journey of personal shame and collective guilt as the one the Russians, East Germans and Romanians went through after communism fell. “Iraq now faces the task of creating a new vision for itself–in fact, a whole new cultural and political identity to replace the old Arab nationalist ideal,” Phebe Marr, probably the finest historian studying Iraq, wrote in a brilliant piece last week in The New York Times. “This will not be easy … There should be few illusions. Desirable as the goal may be, it will take years to achieve, and the outcome will depend not only on Iraqis, but on American skill, understanding and staying power.
“Otherwise, the capture of Saddam Hussein may be little more than the latest chapter of a long-running tragedy.”
The final hope lies in Clovis Maksoud’s perception that the Arabs are asking ever “bolder questions.” The Arab Human Development Report that he and a group of Arab intellectuals crafted for the UN to warn of the failures of the Arab world–and what to do about them–is beginning to have a modest but real resonance in the region.
But there still are mountains of guilt to climb and rivers of shame and rage to ford before such rational exercises can ever become reality.
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