5/13/03
 isratech@netvision.net.il

Looking At the Middle East Through Arab Eyes

By: Joel Bainerman

Zichron Yaacov, Israel--It is ironic that in the entire history of
the Middle East conflict it has always been the claim of the pro-
Israel camp that, "the Arabs view their history as one long
conspiracy against them", when in fact- such a view is completely
accurate and the view that the Israeli side receives- is not at all
realistic.

Unlike Israelis- Arab intellectuals aren't swayed by the propaganda
of their own national leaders. If Arab intellectuals complain of
exploitation and colonialism at the hand of the foreigners - this
isn't because of some "wild conspiracy theory that all Arabs have of
foreigners" but because it is the truth. Israelis would do
themselves a favor by stop arrogantly thinking their political
culture is so much further advanced than the "primitive Arabs" and
realized that their perceptive and perception of the history of the
Arab-Israeli conflict is not accurate.

So if one is dive into the history of the Arab world - and leave the
Arab-Israeli conflict aside for the moment - it would be helpful to
accept the Arab perception of reality.

That reality is based on one simple principle: legitimate Arabs
leaders were never allowed to develop or surface because unless an
Arab national leader did what the foreigners wanted them to do - they
found themselves victim to a coup concocted by foreign elements - or
branded as a "radical Arab dictator" and thus a "threat to regional
security." As a "radical Arab threat" this served to bolster the
Israeli government's claim that "radical Arab leaders/nations
threaten the continued existence of the Jewish state.

There have been about thirty-five coups and coup attempts in the
Middle East in the past 50 years. Only one of them came into being
without Western involvement. The absence of a system or an acceptable
governing group made it easy for the pro-American and pro-British
army colonels to do what they did- covertly. .

Any proper review of modern Middle East history reveals that except
for Egypt, the boundaries of every state which emerged after the
First World War were drawn by European powers. Indeed, every Arab
state of the time was run by what Desmond Stewart (The Temple of
Janus, p. 166) calls as "client dynasty" or under the direct control
of the West.

Says Middle East scholar, Dr. Mohammed Daud Miraki : "Most of the
time, the elite controlling the governments of Muslim states views
their survival parallel to the interests of the elite in the United
States and her allies, and view the continuation of their hold on
power in their submission to the will of the United States." (essay
January 28th, 2003)

In Richard Becker's October 2002 article: The Battle For Iraqi Oil:
US Corporate Skullduggery Since WW1, we learn about the real history
of the foreigners' involvement in the Arab Middle East:

"In February 1919, Sir Arthur Hirtzel, a top British colonial
official, warned his associates: "It should be Bourne in mind that
the Standard Oil Company is very anxious to take over Iraq." (Quoted
in Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, 1914-32, London, 1974)

Becker continues: "In 1927, major oil exploration got underway Huge
deposits were discovered in Iraq and the Iraqi Petroleum Company was
created by Anglo-Iranian (today British Petroleum), Shell, Mobil and
Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon)- was set up. Within a few years it
had totally monopolized Iraqi oil production.

During that same period the al-Saud family, with Washington's
backing, conquered much of the neighboring Arabian Peninsula. Saudi
Arabia came into being in the 1930s as a neocolonial of the United
States. The US embassy in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, was located in
the Armco (Arab American Oil Company) building. But the US oil
companies and their government in Washington weren't satisfied. They
wanted complete control of the Middle East oil, just as they had a
near monopoly of the Western hemisphere's petroleum reserves. This
meant displacing the British, who were still top dog in the region."

In 1953, after the CIA coup that put the Shah in power, the United
States took control of Iran. By the mid-1950s, Iraq was jointly
controlled by the United States and Britain. Washington set up the
Baghdad pact- which included its client regimes in Pakistan, Iran,
Turkey and Iraq, along with Britain, in 1955. The purpose of The
Baghdad Pact was to oppose the rise of Arab and other liberation
movements in the Middle East."

Rami Khouri, a syndicated columnist for The Daily Star in Beirut,
offers this view of the history of the Arab elite's ties to foreign
elements:

"We Middle Easterners (Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Israelis, Kurds, and
others) have a long track record of both arranging others, national
configurations and having our own rearranged by others. The modern
Middle East was largely configured by British and French who sought
to ensure their own colonial interests; they created new countries
whose fundamental assets and attributes often make little logical
sense. One of the problems we suffered after our last reconfiguration
by the British and the French around 1920 was that most of the Arab
countries had closer relations with London and Paris than they did
with each other. The scheduled flights of our national airlines went
to Paris and London more frequently than they went to other Arab
capitals. This indicated that political and economic ties with the
former colonial powers were more important for the nascent Arab
ruling political powers than relations with other Arabs".

Khouri contends there is nothing inherently wrong with being
rearranged; peoples, societies, and states do it all the time, to
themselves and to others. "However our experience in the Arab world
indicates that if the people being reconfigured have a say in the
process, and their new national map corresponds to their identities
and aspirations, the resulting reconfigured region may prove both
satisfying to its citizens and state within the global context," he
argues. "The British and the French did not do this around 1920, and
left behind a mess of fragile, often violent, states. That episode
resulted in unsatisfactory, intemperate Arab statehood in many cases,
a terrible modern legacy of security states, and tensions that
finally exploded into political terror in the 1990s and beyond."
(February 13th, 2003)"

If one really wants to understand how the Arabs view the west, they
should read "A Brutal Friendship" (St. Martin's Press, New York,
1997) by the well-known Arab journalist, Said Aburish.

Aburish claims there are no legitimate regimes in the Arab Middle
East. The House of Saud, King Hussein of Jordan, Presidents Husni
Mubarak, Saddam Hussein, Hafez al-Assad, Yaser Arafat and the
remaining minor Arab heads of state run various types of
dictatorships. They depend on phony claims to legitimacy while
representing small special interest groups- minorities whose members
owe their allegiance to them rather than the state as the
representative and guardian of the interests of the people.

The result is religious, tribal, army-based or hybrid ruling cliques
and leaders who have one thing in common: they are opposed to the
desire of the majority of the Arab people to develop legitimate
governments. By overlooking the absence of legitimacy and affording
dictatorships unqualified recognition, the foreign powers directly
and indirectly, supports the paramount of individual leaders, army
groups, sects, clans and families who run the Middle East and
determine its shape and direction. Aburish claims that perpetuating
Western political hegemony and protecting economic interests from
real or imagined threats take precedence over considerations of
legitimacy.

Aburish believes that it isn't Islam the West is battling, but the
notion of populist, popular political movements which represent a
threat to the West's clients and interests. The bad image the West
creates for them isn't meant to explain them; it is meant to justify
declaring war on them.

He explains: "The ruling groups in the Middle East use income from
oil and their armed forces (including the security forces) to stay in
power. Because the West controls or influences the acquisition of
arms which make the armed forces effective and because it manipulates
the oil market through oil companies which decide where to buy,
refine, distribute and use the income generated from oil, it relies
on both tools to determine the policies of these countries. This is
why the West, in cooperation with friendly regimes and against the
wishes of the unfriendly ones, seeks to perpetuate its monopoly of
both businesses. The rich Arab states were discouraged from
developing their petrochemical industries, moving into refining and
distribution, investing in the industries of the West or any moves
towards a more equitable distribution of wealth."

On the subject of what the rich oil states did with their newfound
wealth, Aburish explains: "The surplus from oil was linked to the
world capital market controlled by US, British and French banks.
Placing the surpluses in Western banks ensured the continued use of
money to fuel Western economies, to act as the primary lenders in the
world financial market, and meant that the depositor countries
realized less benefit than is available through different routes.
There was no attempt to use the surpluses to develop the Middle East
and whatever small money trickled through towards regional
development was comparatively small."

Regardless of how the mainstream media ignores the role oil plays in
the conflict in the Middle East, the fact is if the Middle East had
no oil reserves- there probably never would have been a Middle East
conflict for the past 75 years.

As to where this policy of the British (and later the Americans)
originated, we needn't look further than a series of meetings held in
Britain starting in 1905 headed by Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-
Bannerman. From this, a High Committee was formed. It specialized in
matters of colonialism consisting of members from the participating
states, of leading historians, social, economic and agricultural
analysts, scholars, geologists and experts in oil and gas. The
members of this committee met in London in 1907. The final decisions
made by the conference were threefold:

1) Separating the Muslim lands in the East from those in the West,
making their unity more difficult.

2) - Planting a new enemy for the Muslims on their lands, in the
first Qiblah and the third of the Holiest Mosques. This would draw
their attention to a new enemy, focusing all their energies on
defeating him and in turn weakening their capability of resisting
Western aggression, causing them to forget what occurred during the
days of the Crusades.

3) Establishing an advanced base for the disbelieving colonialists,
at the head of them Britain, to protect their interests, implement
their plans and schemes and ensuring the outflow of natural resources
from the region, as well as the import of their goods and products
into the markets of the region

The goal of the colonialist powers- then and now- is to keep Arab
peoples backwards by not enabling them to elect popular leaders- and
to control the vast mineral wealth that the Arabs were fortune enough
to possess.
--------------------------
Joel Bainerman writes on Middle East political and economic issues
from Israel. He can be reached at  isratech@netvision.net.il and his
published archive of articles and essays can be viewed at:

 http://www.joelbainerman.com/




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