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The Bush team should tell our Arab partners: Look, we don't need your bases or armies. We just need you to open your societies so the voices of those who want a different Arab future can really be heard. We'll take care of bin Laden — but you have to take care of bin Ladenism. It won't work. The reason those societies are closed is because their governments are incompetent. The reason their (state-controlled) media try to blame outsiders for everything is that if they didn't the blame would land on their own governments. Hosni Mubarek holds the title of "President", and Egypt holds elections at which he is routinely re-elected. But those elections are no more free than were the ones held in the USSR in the 1960's and 1970's. Egypt is a police state and Mubarek is a dictator, and the only reason he's our friend is that the US buys him off with a multi-billion-dollar bribe every year. (Egypt receives more foreign aid from the US than any other nation besides Israel.) If Mubarek were to open Egyptian society so that "voices of those who want a different Arab future can really be heard" then it would be very good for Egypt -- but very bad for Hosni Mubarek, and he knows it. So it's not going to happen. And if that's true for Mubarek, it is even more true for the Saud dynasty. They're getting upset over US press coverage of their corruption, their tolerance of private support for al Qaeda, their lack of cooperation in the investigation, and their unwillingness to publicly and forthrightly support us in this -- and they don't like it. (Tough.) But by some reports the Saud monarchy's grip on power is weakening. If they were to open the flood gates of public opinion the result would probably be revolution. In the long run (perhaps a century from now) this would result in a better place to live, though it might take a fifty-year trip through horror to get there. But in the short run the result would be several thousand Saud Princes with no nation to rule or loot. That is not a prospect which appeals to them. Friedman's proposal presumes that the leaders of the Arab nations actually have the best interests of those nations at heart. That's rather naive. (discuss) Update: Matt Welch does a good job describing the sheer hypocrisy of the Saudi government. |
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