Arab Voice (Friedman)

April 7, 2005

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Arabs Lift Their Voices

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Until the recent elections in Iraq and among the Palestinians, the modern Arab world was largely immune to the winds of democracy that have blown everywhere else in the world. Why? That's a pretty important question. For years, though, it was avoided in both the East and the West.

In the West it was avoided because a toxic political correctness infected the academic field of Middle Eastern studies - to such a degree that anyone focusing on the absence of freedom in the Arab world ran the risk of being labeled an "Orientalist" or an "essentialist." It was also avoided because Western governments basically told Arab leaders that all they needed to do was keep their oil pumps open and their prices low and be nice to Israel. If they did all that, they could deny their own people the freedom America advocated everywhere else.

Meanwhile, the Arab peoples were told by their own leaders and state-owned intellectuals that democracy had to come later - after the nationalist struggle against colonialism or the liberation of Palestine or the creation of an Islamic state.

Well, the combination of 9/11, the Bush policies and the flattening of the world, whereby everyone can increasingly see how everyone else is living, changed all that - as evidenced this week with the publication of the third Arab Human Development Report, written by a courageous group of Arab social scientists under the auspices of the United Nations Development Program. This is one of the finest U.N. products under Kofi Annan.

The first report, in 2002, was about the poor state of Arab human development. The second, in 2003, was about the poor state of Arab education and science. The new one focuses on "the acute deficit of freedom and good governance" in the Arab world. It underscores how much Arab peoples crave, and need, freedom and good government - as much any other people. With the great news that Iraqis are finally forming a new government, it couldn't appear at a better time.

The report notes that most Arab states today resemble "a 'black hole,' which converts its surrounding social environment into a setting in which nothing moves and from which nothing escapes." All political parties, institutions, courts, intelligence services, police and media are centralized in the hands of the Arab leader - that's why the "modern-day Arab state is frequently dubbed 'the intelligence state.' " What all these states have in common, the report says, "is that power is concentrated at the tip of the executive pyramid and that the margin of freedom permitted (which can be swiftly reduced) has no effect on the state's firm and absolute grip on power." But without a majority of people behind them, all of these Arab regimes lack legitimacy.

Arab societal structures tend to reinforce these autocratic trends, the report says: "The family, the primary unit of Arab society, is based on clannism, which implants submission, and is considered the enemy of personal independence, intellectual daring and the flowering of a unique and authentic human entity. Once children enter school, they find an educational institution, curricula, teaching and evaluation methods which tend to rely on dictation and instill submissiveness. This learning environment ... does not open the doors to freedom of thought and criticism."

The chain constricting freedom, the report notes, "completes its circle in the political realm, squeezing Arab public life into a small and constricted space. ... This complicated process has led Arab citizens, including some among the intelligentsia, to a state of submission fed by fear and marked by denial of their subjugation."

The report's authors conclude with their hope for a broad, peaceful redistribution of power in the Arab world, their fear that nothing will change - which they predict could lead to "chaotic upheavals" - and their expectation of some externally induced change and muddling through.

But the important thing about this report is that political reform is now being put on the Arab agenda by Arabs. Yes, it's scathing about the Western and Israeli roles in retarding Arab democratization, but it's equally scathing about what Arabs have done to themselves and how they must change - people don't change when you tell them they should, but when they tell themselves they must. Read this report and you'll also understand why part of every Arab hates the U.S. invasion of Iraq - and why another part is praying that it succeeds.