Before Egyptian President Anwar Sadat set off for his journey to Jerusalem in 1977, he announced to the world that he did not intend to live “among the pygmies”. This was tough on pygmies but there was no doubt what it revealed about Sadat. He thought he was a great man. History suggests he was wrong. His 1978 Camp David agreement with Menachem Begin of Israel brought the Sinai back under Egyptian control, but it locked Sadat’s country into a cold peace and near-bankrupt isolation.
The Middle East, of course, is awash with kings and dictators who are called — or like to imagine themselves — great men. Saddam Hussein thought he was Stalin — evil, unfortunately, is also for some a quality of greatness — while George Bush Sr. thought Saddam was Hitler. Eden claimed that Nasser, when he nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, was the Mussolini of the Nile (though Mussolini was not Great, he thought he was). Yasser Arafat claimed that Hashemite King Hussein of Jordan, when he died, was Saladin, the warrior who drove the Crusaders out of Palestine. The truth was that the Israelis had driven the Hashemites from Palestine. But Hussein was on “our” side and the king, when he died of cancer in 1999, was immortalized by President Clinton who said he was “already in heaven”, a feat that went unequalled until Pope John Paul II made it to the same location before his funeral this month.
I listened to much of the tosh uttered about this hopelessly right-wing pontiff when he was dying, and read a good deal of the vitriol that was splashed on him a few days later. I agree with much of the latter. But he was the one prominent world figure who stood up against President Bush’s insane invasion of Iraq. With absolute resolution, he condemned and recondemned the illegality of the assault on Iraq in a way that no other prominent churchman did.
But a great man? In truth, our world seems full of little men. Not just Sadat’s “pygmies”. Qaddafi may be a “statesman” in the eyes of our Trot of a foreign secretary — this was just before the Libyan dictator was found to be plotting the assassination of Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia — but anyone who can seriously suggest that a joint Israeli-Palestinian state might be called “Israeltine” is clearly a candidate for the men in white coats.
Indeed, it raises the question: Are there any great men in the Middle East? And, are there any great men in the world today? Where — this is a question I’ve been asked by several readers recently — are the Churchills, the Roosevelts, the Trumans, the Eisenhowers, the Titos, the Lloyd Georges, the Woodrow Wilsons, the de Gaulles and Clemenceaus? Our present band of poseur presidents and prime ministers cannot come close. Bush may think he is Churchill — remember all that condemnation of Chamberlain’s 1938 appeasement we had to suffer before we invaded Iraq? — but he cannot really compare himself to his dad, let alone our Winston. Bush Jr. looks like a nerd while his friends — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest — actually look disreputable. Chirac would like to be a great man but his problem is that he can be mocked — see France’s equivalent of Spitting Image. Blair has a worse impediment. He has become a mockery of himself, slowly assuming the role of his clergyman namesake in Private Eye — to the point where the latter simply became no longer funny.
Sacrifice obviously has something to do with it. To get bumped off for your good deeds — preferably “making peace”, although many of those at work on the “peace” project seem to have spent a lot of time making war — is clearly a possible path to greatness. Thus Sadat does have a chance. So does Yitzhak Rabin of Israel. And so, through sickness, King Hussein and — in more theatrical form — the last pope. Those who successfully fight their countries’ occupiers get a look in; de Gaulle again, Tito again, maybe Ho Chi Minh but not, apparently, the leaders of the Algerian FLN and most definitely not the lads from the Lebanese Hezbollah. And we all know how Arafat went from being superterrorist to superstatesman and back to superterrorist again.
In the Middle East, I do have a soft spot for President Khatami of Iran. A truly decent, philosophical, morally good man, he was crushed by the political power of his clerical enemies set up by Ayatollah Khomeini. Khatami’s “civil society” never materialized; had it blossomed, he might have been a great man. Instead, his life seems to be a tragedy of withered hope. I mention Khomeini and I fear we have to put him in the list. He lived the poverty of Gandhi, overthrew a vicious dictatorship and changed the history of the Middle East. That his country is now a necrocracy — government ruled by and for the dead — does not, sadly, change this.
Yet this raises another dark question? Why do we stop only a generation or two ago? Why stop at World War I? Where now, we might ask, are the Duke of Wellingtons and the Napoleons, the Queen Elizabeths, the Richard the Lionhearts, and yes, the Saladins and the Caesars and the Genghis Khans? Oddly, the list of great men doesn’t usually include Gandhi, whom I would think an obvious candidate for all the right reasons. He was palpably a good man, a peaceful man, and freed his country from imperial rule and was assassinated.
Nelson Mandela would be among my candidates for all the obvious reasons (his objections to Bush not being the least of them). Nurse Edith Cavell — “patriotism is not enough” — who was shot by the Germans in World War I, and Margaret Hassan, the supremely brave and selfless charity worker butchered in Iraq, must be in my list — proving, of course, that we should also ask: Where are the Great Women of our age? Rachel Corrie, I’d say, the American girl who was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer as she stood in its path to protect Palestinian homes in Gaza. And how about Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear whistleblower? And yes, all the humble folk — little people, if you like — who did what they did, whatever the cost, not because they sought greatness, but because they believed it was the right thing to do.
