Quote:
Originally posted by Guy
Roger that Jimbo. So is Kuwait and Jordan. Since the King of Jordan married an American she has had some influence over the direction Jordan is heading.
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Queen Rania is a Jordanian of Palestinian origin. It was King Abdullah's father, the late King Hussein, whose wife was American. Queen Noor,
née Lisa Halaby, is the daughter of the late Najeeb Halaby, who was a Navy test pilot, CEO of Pan Am and FAA Administrator under JFK and LBJ.
Hussein's generally pro-Western orientation was probably as much due to his UK connections and the balancing act the Arab monarchies have always had to play in the face of Arab socialists and Islamists, as it was to his wife's US connections. Also, a majority of Jordan's population is Palestinian, so keeping control over them has been the monarchy's main goal.
Also, the Gulf states' steps toward democracy are tentative at best. Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE are all wealthy oil states with small populations. Most of the shit-work is done by South Asians and Filipinos, who enjoy no citizenship rights. As long as the actual Arab citizens are wealthy and content, and don't have to work that hard for a living, the emirs see no great problem in granting them certain additional rights.
In Saudi Arabia, though, we are seeing the consequences if that compromise breaks down. The Saudi population explosion of the last 20-30 years has resulted in a generation of young Saudis who grew up expecting the easy life their parents enjoyed, but now find themselves with few opportunities and little inclination to get their hands dirty doing jobs fit only for Filipinos, Bangladeshis and Yemenis. It is among these alienated young people that the Islamists have their best recruiting success (hence the 15 of 19 9-11 hijackers of Saudi origin).
On a tangent, that is one reason why I am tired of the "root cause" types who blame terrorism on poverty and ignorance/lack of education among the Arab masses. The core of al-Qa'ida terrorists are not poor or uneducated. They have more in common with the Columbine shooters and the Baader-Meinhof and SLA types and other alientated rich kids than they do with the people on the so-called "Arab street".
In that sense and several others, Iraq is a much better place to start and to look for the seeds of Arab democracy than the Gulf. Iraq has a functioning middle class and most Iraqis generally don't find certain jobs - from military service to pumping gas - to be "beneath" them. Iraqis also have a great deal of national pride - they see themselves as having been at the forefront of defending and advancing Arab civilization from the early Baghdad caliphates to the Iran-Iraq War - which may help overcome some of the tribal and sectarian problems.
The non-Arab Kurds are outside of this, however. This remains potentially the biggest regional problem. In a sense, Kurdish tribalism helps regional stability. Iraqi Kurds have been more interested in building their local communities than in caring what happens to Iranian, Turkish and Syrian Kurds. The Iraqi Kurds routinely cooperated with the Turks against the PKK, seeing that group as Marxist terrorists with more in common with the Ba'ath than with their fellow Kurds. But in the long run, the Kurdish problem remains. And, as was seen by recent developments in Syria, the Iraqi Kurds are beginning to care more about their ethnic brothers. How Turkey deals with this, and how we deal with Turkey over this, is one of the most important issues in seeing if this Iraq experiment succeeds and the dominoes fall elsewhere.
But in the larger sense, the future of democracy and Islam doesn't lie in the Arab world. Just as the influence of Germanic peoples changed Christianity in myriad ways, any future of Islam as compatible with democracy will likely result from the efforts of non-Arab Muslims bringing a different approach. The majority of Muslims, after all, are not Arabs. The demographic center of gravity of the Muslim world is in South and Southeast Asia, not the Middle East. In the long run, whether Islam finds some compatibility with democracy depends more on how the relationship between religion and politics is defined in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia than in Iraq, Jordan or Saudi Arabia. Add a few other non-Arab Muslim states on the Middle Eastern periphery - Turkey, Iran, Albania, Nigeria - as well. The Saudi Wahhabis and Iranian mullahs certainly are aware of this, and have spent lots of time and money trying to radicalize the peoples of these countries to their approaches to the religion/state question. Westerners and moderate Muslims have been lax in responding to this (and by lumping all Muslim peoples in with the radical Islamists in places like Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, Westerners have to some extent made it a self-fulfilling prophecy; most Bosnian Muslims saw themselves as Europeans first, until too many Europeans made it clear that they didn't see it that way).
Things are in some cases better than they are portrayed in the Western media, but in other cases they are worse (the willful blindness to the threat of Islamist radicals among Muslim populations in the West and the periphery regions is the most important). In the long-run, I think the prospects are good, but some backsliding is likely (the advance of democracy in Latin America, one of the greatest legacies of the Reagan years, has suffered backsliding in the past couple years in several places, most dangerously Venezuela).