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Stardate
20030424.1728 (Captain's log): A reader (who gave no first name) writes:
I was directed here, like many others are I'm sure, by a link from a message board hoping to use your ideas to better clarify someone else's prior post. Regardless, I wanted to comment on your Arab failure article briefly, and then read your reply. While I do see Arab culture struggling against the modern world, what of the late 19th century Ottoman Empire? Wasn't their push towards European style secularism and militarism also a failure? Weren't the mandate ran democracies also a failure? To me, much of the current Arab culture is a direct result of those two failures. As such, any attempt a modern revival only 50 years since the rise of nationalism, which was then followed by the era of dictators, seems doomed to be met with resentment, partially based on a perceived precedent of failure. What do you think?
Turkey isn't Arab. Nor was the Ottoman empire. In fact, as part of WWI, the British inspired an Arab revolt against Ottoman rule. (T.E. Lawrence made a massive contribution to that effort, and actually led a large Arab force which advanced north from Egypt to Damascus along side the British.) The Arabs were ultimately willing to revolt against the Ottoman Turks because they were viewed as foreign oppressors.
Also, the Ottoman Sultanate did not "push towards European style secularism etc." It was pretty much a monarchy right up until the end, though one with something akin to a modern army. But in that same war, Russia (under the Tzar) and Germany (under the Kaiser) were also monarchies ruling industrialized states with modern armies. (Indeed, so was the Austro-Hungarian empire.)
I'm afraid that this reader's characterization of that entire period of history and its participants is pretty seriously wrong. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk lead a political reform in Turkey in the 1920's, and, in fact, the modern nation takes its name from him. Atatürk was one of the great men of the 20th century, and like nearly all of them combined vision and ruthlessness. He rose to fame by commanding the Turkish military defense at Gallipoli, and used his prestige to lead the movement which ended the Ottoman empire and established what we think of as modern Turkey. It's not correct to think of the modern Turkish democracy as being an evolutionary descendant of the Ottoman empire; it rather was a replacement for it. (And there was an armed revolt as part of the process of establishing it, as well as a war against Greece, in both of which Atatürk led the Turkish forces.)
As such things go, the secular democracy established in Turkey by Atatürk has actually done very well, and has lasted a long time. It is far from perfect but it has to be considered a qualified success, especially by the standards of the region. They have elections there, and they have multiple parties who struggle for power, and the outcome of the election is not fore-ordained. Elections there are real and important; they're not show-pieces.
And in any case, Turkey isn't Arab.
As to the diseased aspects of the current Arab culture there's good reason to believe that the beginning of the modern problem largely dates to the latter part of the 19th century, as a result of the founding of Wahhabism, plus the embrace of it by certain rulers in the region as a way of solidifying their power. Historically speaking, Islam hasn't usually been this radical (and many Muslim sects today are not that radical). By the time of the "mandated democracies" of which you speak (which weren't really democracies in the sense of the elections actually making any difference) the disease was already fully established. There's no reason of which I'm aware to blame the disease on those colonial efforts, though they certainly exacerbated it.
Regarding previous failures to establish democracies in that region, the fact that others in the past have failed in something doesn't mean that we are foreordained to also fail. It does mean we have to look at what they did, and figure out what they did wrong, and try to figure out a better way which has a better chance of success.
This kind of argument (no one else has ever succeeded, so you'll fail, too) has been getting tossed around a lot in various forms during the political debate about this war. For instance, it was also used just before we began fighting in Afghanistan. Remember? Afghanistan was the swallower of western armies. It was the nation which defeated the British and in which the Russians were bogged down in bloody stalemate for ten years. The terrain was terrible, the winter was worse, the fighters were tenacious, and it would become a quagmire, another Viet Nam. America has no more hope there than the British or Russians.
Only problem is that we had largely won in less than 2 months what the Russians couldn't win in ten years. But that's because we're not the Russians, and we didn't fight the way the Russians did.
And it was especially because we didn't try to accomplish the same thing that the British and Russians tried to accomplish. Our goal was much different. It turned out that the dire Santayana-like warnings which made reference to the "Russian-experience" were deeply deceptive, because the differences between them and us were far more important than the similarities.
The same may be true here. When the French and British tried to create something like democracies in the Arab nations, it was mainly as a way of trying to pacify members of colonial empires, so as to c
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