Much of Europe is alarmed by the change, but then, it would be. American troops in Saudi Arabia guaranteed the flow of oil while turning the United States (along with Israel) into the scapegoat of choice for millions of angry Muslims, some of whom live in Europe. From Paris's or Amsterdam's or Bremen's point of view, what's not to like about that deal? Why must Washington go and stir everything up?
Not long before the Iraq war began, the Heinrich Böll Foundation sponsored a debate in Washington between Richard Perle and Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Perle, of course, is a hawkish American neoconservative who supported the Iraq war. Cohn-Bendit, a Frenchman, leads the Green faction of the European Parliament, but is perhaps better known as "Danny the Red" for leading student uprisings in France in the 1960s. In a telling moment, Cohn-Bendit blurted out that Perle, the conservative, was now the revolutionary, trying to reform the whole Arab world—whereas Cohn-Bendit, the former radical, was now the conservative.
"Suddenly you want to bring democracy to the world," Cohn-Bendit said. "Recently, your government has been behaving like the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. You want to change the whole world. Like them, you claim that history will show that truth is on your side." Savoring the irony, Danny the Red accused America of "revolutionary hubris."
He was right about "revolutionary," though the administration would prefer a gradual revolution. But "hubris"? Not exactly. The effort to reshape the Arab world would indeed seem hopelessly overweening but for the fact that the old policy had already collapsed beneath America's feet. It had also collapsed beneath the Arab world's feet. The question is whether the fall of Baghdad might be the sort of wake-up call for Arabs that September 11 was for Americans.
On April 14, The Washington Post rounded up some examples of what it aptly called "fear and rethinking in the Middle East"—there being plenty of both. "With the fall of Baghdad," wrote Shafeeq Ghabra, the president of the American University of Kuwait, in Lebanon's online Daily Star, "Arab thought as we knew it since the 1967 defeat collapsed. The nationalism that misled Saddam and our peoples has also collapsed, as well as a pattern of Arabism many of us exploited in favor of autocracy, oppression, dictatorship, and the confiscation of other people's rights."
Abdul Hamid Ahmad, the editor of a United Arab Emirates-based Web site called Gulf News, wrote, "With the stunning and shameful collapse of the Iraqi regime and its Baathist reign, another Arab era has vanished.... And a stark reality was revealed: that these institutions were virtual phantoms as far as the people were concerned." Single-party monopolies "only lead to the suffocation of people, politically and socially."
Just straws in the breeze, those opinions; but at least now there is a breeze. Spending the world's goodwill on reform in the Arab world is the most dangerous course the Bush administration could have set, except for all the others.
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