Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The broadest aspects of the Near East’s problems must be reserved to a later discussion dealing with the general problems of the Buffer Fringe and the underdeveloped areas. At the moment we must concentrate on the two most acute and immediate problems of the area. These are Israel and Egypt.

These two problems are working within a background of five significant factors. First is the continuing Soviet-American rivalry, which benefits no one in the Near East. Second is the sordid and grinding poverty of Near Eastern life, a poverty made up, in almost equal parts, of poor natural resources (especially water shortages), wasteful and irrational social organization, and hopelessly uncooperative and spiteful personality patterns. Third is the shifting but perpetual dynastic and political rivalries of the area among the Arab countries themselves. Fourth is the almost incredibly misdirected interferences from the Western Powers, especially the United States. And fifth is the dominant role played by the armed forces in Near Eastern life.

Of these five background factors, only the last requires any amplification here. Wherever a modern state structure appears in an impoverished environment, the possession of arms is restricted to a small group and tends to bring control of the whole society under the influence of those who possess the arms. This problem becomes particularly acute in areas where other countervailing factors, such as religion, family influence, or traditional organizations are weak and where the social values of the society place a high esteem on military prowess or violence. The Arabs had always been warlike; by adopting Islam in the seventh century, they acquired a religion which intensified this tendency. This was clearly shown in the Saracen conquests of the Near East, North Africa, and southwestern Europe within a century of Muhammad’s death. Certain restraints, however, were placed upon this militarism by other factors, such as the religious elements in Islam and the powerful influence of family and tribal loyalties. By the twentieth century the steady dwindling of these alternative influences and finally the total disintegration of Islamic society left militarism in a much more dominant position. This situation is evident wherever Arabic influence spread, including North Africa, Spain, and Latin America, so that today the army is the chief political force all the way from the Persian Gulf to Peru. We have already seen the chief example of this in Spain.

The situation is roughly the same throughout the Arabic Near East. This dominance by the armed forces would not be so objectionable were it not that their leaders are (1) ignorant, (2) selfish, (3) outstanding obstacles to any progressive reorganization of the community, especially by their diversion of the limited wealth available for social or economic investment, and (4) are so lacking in military morale or competence that they provide almost no protection for the areas which they are presumably supposed to defend. Certainly any area needs some organized force of arms-bearing persons to maintain public order and to protect the area from external interference, but the incompetence of the existing armed forces from Kuwait to Bolivia is so great that a superior degree of public order and defense could have been achieved with a greater degree of stability from a simple gendarmerie equipped with motorcars and hand guns than from the expensive arrays of complicated and misused equipment which have been provided for, or forced upon, the armies of this great area from the United States, the West European Powers, or (since 1955) the Communist bloc.

Although parliamentary regimes, in imitation of Britain and France, had been established throughout the Near East, as in much of the world, they never functioned as democratic or even constitutional systems because of the lack of organized political parties and of any traditions of civil and personal rights. Political parties remained largely personal followings or blocs, and political power, based on the arbitrary autocracy of Semitic patriarchal family life, was also personal, and never took on the impersonal characteristics associated with Western rule of law and con-situtional practices. The weakness of any conception of rules, and of the material benefits which help rules to survive, made it impossible for the Near East to grasp the conventions associated with cooperation in opposition found in the Western two-party system, parliamentary practices, and sports.

The whole range of human and universal relations of the Arabs was monistic, personal, and extralegal, in contrast to that of the West, which was pluralistic, impersonal, and subject to rules. As a result, constitutional and two-party politics were incomprehensible to the Near East, and the parliamentary system, where it existed, was only a facade for an autocratic system of personal intrigues. It is no accident that two-party politics functioned in the Near East only briefly and in two non-Arabic, if Muslim, countries: Turkey and the Sudan. It is also no accident that in most of the Near East, the chief method for changing a government was by assassination and that such actions usually took place in the most cowardly fashion (to Western eyes) such as shooting in the back.

The growth of militarism in the Near East modified these political practices to some extent but without changing them in any fundamental way. The parliament was ignored or abolished, political groups and blocs were eliminated or outlawed, often being replaced by a single amorphous and meaningless party whose sole purpose was propaganda; and military administration generally replaced civil parliamentary government. Most obviously, perhaps, changes of regime now take place by military coups instead of by rigged elections or by assassinations. Even the Sudan and Turkey had their two-party parliamentary regimes overturned by military coups d’état in 1958 and in 1960. Elsewhere factions within the officers’ corps have replaced parliamentary political parties as the significant units of political conflict. Thus Iraq had military coups in 1936, 1941, 1958, and 1963. Similar events were frequent in Syria, notably in 1949, 1951, 1961, and 1962.

That the poverty, chaos, and disunity of the Arab world was a consequence of organizational and morale factors rather than of such objective obstacles as limited natural resources is clear from the case of Israel. There, in less than eight thousand square miles with no significant resources and hampered by endless external obstacles, the Zionist movement has constructed the strongest, most stable, most progressive, most democratic, and most hopeful state in the Near East. This was possible because of the morale of the Israeli, which was based on outlooks antithetical to the attitudes of the Arabs. The Israeli were full of self-sacrifice, self-discipline, social solidarity, readiness to work, cooperation, and hopes for the future. Their ideology was largely Western, with a devotion to science, democracy, individual respect, technology, and the future which could match or exceed the best periods of the Western past. All these things made them anathema to the Arabs, whose hysterical hatred was not really aimed at the loss of Palestine as a land but at the presence of the Israeli, whose qualities were a refutation of generations of Arab self-deceptions and pretenses.

The precarious balance the British had tried to keep in Palestine between their promises to the Zionists and their efforts to placate the Arabs were destroyed by Hitler’s determination to annihilate the Jews of Europe and the conditions of World War II which made it seem that he would be successful. The Jews, their supporters, and allies tried to smuggle in any Jews who could be saved from Europe. Since there was nowhere else they could go, many were smuggled into Palestine. British efforts to prevent this, in fulfillment of their obligations to the Arabs under the League of Nations Mandate, led to a kind of guerrilla warfare between Jews and British, with the Arabs attacking the former intermittently. This problem reached acute form when the conquest of Germany opened the doors for surviving Jews to escape from the horrors of Nazism. In August 1945, President Truman asked British permission to admit 100,000 European Jews into Palestine, but his repeated requests were refused. Ignoring such permission, large-scale efforts were made to smuggle Jewish refugees into Palestine, where they could be cared for by Jewish groups. Many of these were transported under frightful conditions in overcrowded, leaky ships, which were often intercepted by the British, who took their passengers to concentration camps in Cyprus. From such actions came reprisals and counter-reprisals.