Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and History: Mideast regimes under pressure
December 5, 2003

“Under Pressure to Change, Saudis Debate Their Future,” runs the New York Times headline. “Syrian leader under pressure to reform,” goes another. Agence France-Press proclaims, “Iranian government under pressure to deepen reform.” What are these pressures they speak of? There is little way to describe it other than the pressure of history itself: in the year 2003, tribal-based absolutist monarchies, fascist dictatorships and modernity-rejecting theocracies are no longer considered legitimate forms of government – never mind desirable – and just about everybody knows it. The disaffected populations of each of these countries are chafing under tyranny, and are increasingly unwilling to accept the diktats of septuagenarian sheiks, wealthy and hidden mafia-elites or hoary theologians. In the coming ten, twenty years, each of these regimes is sure to face a fundamental crisis of legitimacy. Their days are numbered, and they changes that happen will affect the landscape of the Middle East in favor of moderation and democracy.
 
Saudi Arabia
 
A Saudi Arabian textbook instructed that Muslims living among foreigners “must feel, deeply inside, hatred for them, their religion and everything they represent.” That passage was edited out this fall after some Saudi expatriates seemed to be taking the idea too seriously, but there remains this charming warning: anyone supporting Western-style government will receive “excommunication from God’s mercy, from Islam.” No Western-style government would seem to mean no liberal democratic values, which would seem to me like playing chicken with the Hegelian dialectic. Nearly half the Saudi population is under 20, and they are maturing under a government that is unable to provide them with meaningful opportunities for work, free expression or a social life that isn’t suffocated by prohibitions on dating, drinking and music. 
 
Last month, some Saudis organized a series of small demonstrations against the crown (less than a hundred people), and the powers that be panicked: now it is a “sin” to protest. But how long do they really think making protests a “sin” will keep discontent under wraps? Certainly not forever. The great concern, which the Saudis invoke in defense for not allowing democracy, is that the youths protesting aren’t Campus Democrats, but Campus Islamists: nearly 95% of Saudi young males polled by the government expressed admiration for Osama bin Laden. It could very well be that the fundamentalists are beating out the democrats.  
 
Syria
 
The Reform Party of Syria was established after 9/11 to bring down the fascist Assad regime. It comprises Arab and Kurdish Syrians from around the world – led by doctors, lawyers, engineers, students, writers, professors and businessmen, the real freedom fighters – all of whom have been meeting in Washington to gather support to defeat the blood-soaked grip of Syria’s Alawite elite. “I truly believe that the (Syrian) regime today is extremely nervous about what going on,” says one of their leaders. And for good reason: not only are movements like the Reform Party of Syria seeking fundamental change, but the prospect of U.S.-led democratic change in Iraq – their former Baathist “brother” – will not make Syrians any happier about remaining stuck in their prison-like environment. In Lebanon, which Syria currently occupies, there is increasing anti-Syrian resentment. Then at the beginning of October came Israel’s warning strike on the Ain Saheb camp in response to three decades of Syrian state sponsorship of terrorism, which scared the bejesus out the Syrian leadership. Finally, this has all been backed by the U.S. Congress, probably the most fearsome body of all to the world’s dictators, with its passage of the Syrian Accountability Act. The President now has authorization to impose sanctions on Syria in response to their allowing militants to cross into Iraq, illegally developing chemical and biological weapons and supporting dozens of terror groups. If you want more evidence of Syrian leaders’ concern about their fate, witness their recent out of the blue “call for negotiations” with Israel on the Golan, a red herring if there ever was one.
 
Iran
 
After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iranian revolutionaries handed over the Israeli embassy to the PLO (Israel had good relations with the Shah), and soon every Iranian city had a Palestine Street or a Palestine Square. This summer, tens of thousands of Iranian youths marched at universities against the mullahs, and one of their chants was “Forget about Palestine! Think of us!” These students are far more interested in listening to Eminem or their own pop star Mansour than some fire-mouthed mullah screeching about Jewish swine and the need to destroy “cross-worshiping American infidels.” Abdullah Nouri, a former Interior minister and close confidant of Ayatollah Khomeini, lambasted the mullahs for acting “more Palestinian than the Palestinians,” and a poll done by the moderates revealed that 91% of Iranians were opposed to the regime, while nearly 45% welcomed U.S. hostility towards it. Finally, there is this: Ayatollah Khomeini’s very own grandson has denounced the Islamic Republic as a “greater and more ruthless dictatorship” than the Shah, and has called, believe it or not, for the 82nd airborne to drop into downtown Tehran. (For a similar commentary on the Palestiniazation of Arab foreign policy, see Michael Young’s piece in the New York Times on Friday.)
 
Profound political and economic failures are the source of pressure
 
The source of the pressure that weighs on tyrannical Muslim states result from its pathological political and economic failures. The three basic problems as identified by the hugely influential the United Nations’ 2002 Arab Development report: gaps in knowledge, political freedom and women’s empowerment. Obscurantism has become so endemic, the report was able to include this stunning figure: 280 million Arabs have translated fewer books in the last 1,000 years than Spain with 40 million does each year. Understand this, and the fact that only 0.6% of the population uses the Internet and that nearly 60 percent of the world’s Muslim population is illiterate, it soon becomes clear how it is possible that 60% of people in ten Muslim countries polled by Gallup in February 2002 did not believe Arabs were responsible for September 11th. 
 
These political and social failings – weak institutions, non-existent civil society, a high concentration of power and wealth – translate into severe economic deficiencies. Take Iran: seventy million people live there. Six million live in Israel. So why is Iran’s economy only four times larger than Israel’s? One explanation is that mullahs don’t make for good economists and radical foreign policies like Iran’s leave you isolated from trade and foreign investment. High oil prices have generated billions in foreign exchange reserves that help keep Iran afloat, but they won’t resolve Iran’s deep structural problems that have led to a sinking standard of living, pervasive corruption, high unemployment and inflation. The Iranian conservatives understand this, too, for their own sake: if they aren’t able to create an economy capable of absorbing the hundreds of thousands of job-seeking youths in the coming years, the youths will turn on them in a maelstrom of irrepressible social turmoil.
 
In socioeconomic terms, corrupt Middle East regimes face the dual pressures of:
 
1) internal restlessness as their increasingly alienated populations clamor ever more vigorously for democratic rights, and whose youth finds itself lacking opportunities for gainful employment in a region where unemployment in Arab countries runs around 20-30%;
 
2) external strains from a globalizing world economy, as these inefficient and mismanaged economies find themselves falling further and further behind the rest of the world due to a lack of basic property rights, free market competition and sound legal, judicial, political and financial institutions. They are missing out on growing international trade, rapid increases in productivity and efficiency, and influxes of capital and technology, which are, after all, the only known paths to peace and prosperity. 
 
The irresolvable problems of being a political anachronism (contrasted to their neighbor and enemy, Israel)
 
Other than Israel, the countries of the Middle East are among the world’s leading exemplars of crony despotism, ruled by cliques interested only in enriching themselves, in the world’s most unfree region. Nearly all are avatars from centuries past – police-states, tribal monarchies, military dictatorships, theocracies – all illegitimate, corrupt to the core and on their way out. In today’s world, tyranny, hardliner foreign policies and sponsorship of international terror are fast becoming as frowned upon as piracy and slavery.
 
Israel, on the other hand, is a stable, institutionalized democracy that has become a world leader in medical, biotech and computer technology, and has a modern, knowledge-based economy that is predicted to grow next quarter. Like Finland, Denmark, Hungary and the Czech Republic, Israel has embraced globalization, and now boasts the world’s thirty-third largest economy, larger than Argentina and South Africa, whose populations number 39 million and 42 million respectively. It is one of the few countries outside of Western Europe, Japan and the United States and Canada to have achieved the sacred quest of bringing its society up to Western standards of living. 
 
All this, despite being a semiparched country the size of New Jersey with negligible natural resources, which in its brief fifty-year history it has faced five wars against combined Arab armies and one of history’s most sustained and brutal campaigns of terrorism. Should Arab resentment and envy be all that surprising with this in mind? No, and for the same reason it’s not surprising that the vast majority of Palestinians living in Israel say in poll after poll that they will refuse to move to the future state of Palestine: after all, who would choose to live in countries plagued by rampant illiteracy, economic backwardness, lack of women’s rights, despotism, corruption and nepotism?  In Israel, Palestinians live longer, healthier, freer and wealthier. (For more on this, see Efraim Karsh’s latest article in Commentary).
 
The U.S. effort to refashion Iraq into a consensual society based on a loose federalism and a competitive free market economy could well turn out to be the chief engine of change in the Middle East. Most countries have adopted the liberal values universally acknowledged to be just and desirable, which all but a few Middle East holdouts mentioned and their fellow anachronisms in Castro’s Cuba, Kim Jong Il’s Stalinist nightmare, Burma and Zimbabwe, among others, haven’t made progress towards adopting. It is not the fate of those countries based on principles of the rule of law, democracy and secularism that are up in the air, but rather those of its most implacable enemies.
 

Read "Tehran Dispatch: Change Up," by Afshin Molavi & Karim Sadjadpour in The New Republic Online, November 3, 2003.