This Week's Lesson in Arab Political History

BEIRUT -- If you want a condensed lesson in Arab political history that captures the main causes of our region’s turbulence and its underlying weaknesses, this week several simultaneous developments around the region provide it in succinct and ugly ways. Among the most dramatic:

• Sudan is on the verge of splitting into two countries through a peaceful referendum;
• Iraq continues its quest for stable, unified statehood as the American army slowly withdraws;
• demonstrations and some deaths in Algeria and Tunisia follow tensions related to economic stress and top-heavy political systems;
• Christians in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and other Arab lands are increasingly concerned about their future in the Muslim-majority region;
• Saudi Arabia issued arrest warrants for dozens of its citizens who it believes are planning terror attacks; and,
• Israel continues to kill Palestinians and demolish their homes and public buildings in order to expand Jewish colonies and settlements.

An important question is whether, and to what extent, there is any common link among these situations that reflect local, regional and international tensions. These and other developments capture six primary sources of problems and conflicts throughout the Middle East:

• the presence and impact of foreign armies;
• the legacy of Western colonialism and its manufactured Arab states;
• the impact of the Arab-Israeli conflict over more than six decades;
• the homegrown tradition of autocratic Arab governance dominated by military and security sectors that weaken the rule of law and human rights;
• economic stress that manifests itself in intense pressures at the family level; and,
• weaknesses in achieving sectarian coexistence in the context of the modern Arab state.

These are core, underlying reasons for the unstable conditions in the Arab world, but not the only ones. Others include environmental problems, population pressures, corruption, the marginalization of women, and the negative consequences of mass migration by many of the most talented youth.

To see these dynamics manifest themselves simultaneously this week across the entire Arab world is painful, but not surprising. The challenge facing the region and the world is not merely to diagnose our problems, but to identify a realistic means to overcome them and move the Arab world onto a path of sustained, equitable, law-based development.

This concerns the world beyond the Arabs for two main reasons: Foreign factors have played a major role in bringing us to this problematic condition; and the deviant behavior that results from prolonged dysfunctionality, such as terrorism, directly threatens the world beyond the Middle East.

The simultaneity of violence or confrontational tensions this week in Sudan, Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, and Iraq suggests that we are dealing with more than isolated incidents or purely local conflicts. The widespread and recurring nature of such tensions hints that structural, rather than episodic, issues are at play here. The local, regional and international dimensions of this problematic Arab condition are also deeply intertwined, making it more difficult to define a starting place for remedial action to improve things.

For example, foreign support for Israeli policies, or just sustained acquiescence in Israeli criminality such as continued Zionist colonization, provides an important impetus for opposition movements in Arab countries that seek to resist Israel and its Western backers. (Islamist movements, the leading opposition forces in the Arab world, tellingly direct their criticisms equally against Arab governments, Israel and the United States and other Western powers). This causes domestic tensions that have seen most Arab countries move towards military-minded autocracies if not outright dictatorships, which in turn usually result in widespread corruption, misallocation of economic resources, and under-utilization of human capital because most Arab citizens, with very few exceptions, are not allowed or encouraged by their governments to use all their energies, knowledge and creativity. This cycle must be appreciated as a cycle of interlocking forces that feed each other, rather than a linear dynamic with a single actor triggering all the problems we suffer.

We end up with a situation in which it becomes easy for Arabs to blame Israel and the Western powers for the problems of our region, and foreign critics similarly say this is mere evasion and the real problems are to be found within Arab behavior or values, rather than among foreign scapegoats.

I suspect the truth is in between, with Arab, Israel and Western actors all having to share the blame for contributing to the distressing conditions that define the Arab region today. Allocating blame, however, is not a very productive or useful exercise in itself, unless it is coupled with realistic analysis of how we overcome the problems and constraints that we have identified. It is striking -- as events across the region this week remind us -- that not a single Arab country has found the means to start making this transition from dysfunction and strife to sustained, equitable development and stability anchored in the rule of law.