BEIRUT, 23 March 2003 — To Washington and London, this week’s attack against Iraq is part of a historical process to promote Arab peace, liberty and democracy. To most Arabs, it is a cruel reappearance of demons that have haunted them for centuries.
For many Arabs, this revives historical ghosts from 1915-22, when British and French armies brazenly rearranged our region into strange-shaped countries with Euro-made power structures. The Arab view is that this was done mainly to protect Western colonial interests, divide up local spoils and promote Zionist national goals, largely ignoring indigenous Arab, Kurdish and other local interests. The consequences have been catastrophic: Nearly a century of chronic wars and insurrections, unstable frontiers, underachieving and distorted economies, and the most persistent modern legacy of political autocracy anywhere on the planet.
This attack on Iraq may be novel and noble for Americans, but for many Arabs it is seen as yet another return of the Western armies that have regularly marched into our lands over the last two centuries to establish a political-economic order that is unsatisfactory to most of us, or to create a new political order aiming mainly to serve the interests of the United States, Israel or the tiny elite of Western-created Arab wielders of power and amassers of wealth.
As we watch this war on television, most of us in the Arab world see just another Arab power being sacked by another Western armada; Arab armies and rich states watching helplessly or assisting the attackers; a US-backed Israel again battering Palestinians and taking more of their land; mass Arab anger and humiliation welling up, only to be suppressed by US-backed Arab regimes; and a hapless UN and its spirit of the rule of law expediently used, then discarded, by Washington.
This is the recurring historical horror show that most Arabs see. This terrible and haunting saga of Arab weakness, failure, vulnerability and chronic humiliation cumulatively has led to mass degradation and dehumanization that leaves most Arabs numb in disbelief. We desperately want change, reform, democracy, prosperity and modernity, but few of us believe that this will come through the barrels of Western guns. Those guns have been firing at us for centuries, and all we have is continuing failure.
(Khouri is executive editor of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper.)
