Perhaps the best advice these days for Arabs — and especially Saudis — is to immediately stop reading Arabic papers and watching Arabic satellite TV stations. Not doing either will protect them from the jargon and cant of so-called experts. What these individuals, who are first to style themselves experts, provide the public is allegations, twisted facts and naive observations. They have adopted the policy of “no” to this and “no” to that without offering any alternatives. This has been the very policy over the past few decades which has prevented progress in the Arab world.
The Arab public must surely realize that they are being fed the same baseless stories and babble which was common during Gamal Abdel Nasser’s time in Egypt and during Baathist days in Iraq. Those stories and babble were meant to appeal to sentiments rather than minds. All the ideas and slogans have been proven wrong but this has been recognized only after we all paid heavy prices and suffered successive defeats. Even after the October 1973 war in which the Arabs achieved partial victory, things did not change as hoped. A substantial part of the tumor was removed but the Arab body still suffers from cancer with the same rhetorical flourishes being repeated.
Those intellectuals who now shed tears over the demise of Saddam Hussein’s regime and fear for the fate of the Iraqi people still refuse to admit that it was only after military intervention that Saddam’s nightmare came to an end. Otherwise, the Iraqis would have continued to suffer more from an army prepared only to fight its own people. The fact is that Saddam’s regime collapsed without much resistance and with minimum casualties among the Iraqi people.
What is happening on the ground, including the looting, burning and other indications of chaos, is proof of the barbarity of the regime and the crimes it committed against people who have been starved and denied the right to develop and progress. A people suppressed totally would react the way they have done. What happened in Iraqi cities and towns is the fault of the regime and nobody else.
When Berlin and Tokyo fell during World War II, their people did not loot museums or destroy public property or turn their anger on others. It was because they were civilized people, raised to love their country and continued to do even in times of defeat and destitution.
Arab News From the Local Press 22 April 2003
