The Costs of Withdrawal -- A View from Beirut

Michael Young writing in the WSJ notes the costs of American withdrawal in Iraq for the Arab world.

American failure in Iraq will, he asserts, mean the death of the democratic dream throughout the region. It will,

at the very least, push democracy to a far lower rung of regional priorities. This will be a boon to the security-minded Arab regimes that most feared a regional democratic transformation in the first place.

It will also encourage those in the United States who prefer the steadiness of tyrants to the wishy-washiness of Arab societies that seem to hate the U.S. far more dependably than they do their own lack of liberty.

Not only the dream of democracy, but also that of Arab nationalism will die.

As Iraqis have fallen back on sect, tribe or ethnic loyalties, they have further demolished the myth of an all-encompassing Arab identity that, everywhere in the region, must dissolve primary identities. What the critics won't admit is that Iraq is yet another graveyard of Arab nationalism, not its avatar.

Most pernicious has been the myth of neo-colonialism.

Western academics and Arab intellectuals have both opposed American intervention in Iraq by indulging themselves anti-colonialist rhetoric. Hoping for American failure they ignore the real damage such failure would entail for the peoples of the region. More importantly adherence to anti-colonialist ideology has blinded them to the real problems that have long plagued the Arab world. In many cases intellectuals would have preferred continuation of Saddam’s brutality than his being deposed by a western power.

The "humiliation" of seeing an Arab leader toppled by Western armies far outweighed that of seeing one of the most talented of Arab societies, the Middle East's Germany, subjected to a ferocious despotism responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. Nor was there much interest regionally in the discovery of the Baath's mass graves. One reason was the secondary concern that many Arab societies have for Saddam's foremost victims--the Shiites and Kurds; but the main cause of indifference was that Saddam's crimes, if acknowledged, threatened to imply the Arabs' inability to responsibly manage their own emancipation.

Yet that inability was manifest. Arab intellectuals insist that real change must come “from within” but it is quite clear that,

Arab societies must indeed open up from inside, but absent an echo, sometimes a determining one, from outside--including the option of foreign military action--little will change.

….

How the U.S. adventure in Iraq ends is anybody's guess. However, its repercussions will be felt, first, by the Arabs themselves. By refusing to profit from the prospective democratic upheaval that Saddam's removal ushered in; by never looking beyond the American messenger in Iraq to the message itself; by lamenting external hegemony while doing nothing to render it pointless, Arabs merely affirmed their impotence. The self-pitying Arab reaction to the Iraq war showed the terrible sway of the status quo in the Middle East. An inability to marshal change for one's benefit is the stuff of captive minds.

Young’s perspective is a valuable one. He is Lebanese, editor of Beirut’s Daily Star, and has seen in his own country the practical effect of democratic aspirations raised by the toppling of Saddam’s regime in Iraq. The obstinate idiocy of intellectual establishments both in the west and the Middle East, their desperate clinging to ideologies of the past, and their refusal to come to terms with the realities of the present is one of the great tragedies of our day.

Read the whole thing here.