pft, words and stuff by Kenneth M. Pollack
The Middle East is in a great deal of difficulty right now,
after Saddam Hussein and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Not only
do we have a mess in Iraq to fix, but there is an even
bigger mess out there in the larger Middle East. We're going
to need to deal with that mess, too, if we are going to be
able to defend our interests and our own security from the
threats we now face in the region.
The Arab states are broken. They are absolutely stagnant,
politically, economically, and socially. And their people
know it. Arabs are deeply angry and frustrated with the
situation they find themselves in because of the stagnation
of the Arab world. We hear about how angry the "Arab street"
is, but I don't think most people realize what is really
wrong in the Arab world.
EDUCATION
It all starts with education. Arab educational systems are
by and large very poor. The vast majority of Arab schools
don't teach anything useful to their students. They see
knowledge as a set body of facts that students are supposed
to memorize and simply regurgitate on set tests. And it's
always the same, there's no effort to bring out the
ingenuity, the creativity, of students.
These schools don't produce students who have useful job
skills. Most of the students specialize in humanities, many
of them aspire to be lawyers and Islamic scholars: two
thirds of all of the Ph.D.s issued in Saudi Arabia every
year are in Islamic studies. The scientists, engineers, and
computer programmers come to the U.S. because they can't get
a decent education in those sciences at home. So there's a
brain drain. The best and brightest leave their countries,
generally, and come here., where they contribute to our
economy and progress.
As a result, you have an enormous group of people in Egypt,
for instance, crop after crop of young, smart, educated
middle-class students coming out of Egyptian universities
who have degrees that have taught them nothing useful. No
one will hire them. You can imagine what it does to a bright
young person who believes that he should be part of that
country's elite when he can't even get a job because no one
has taught him anything useful.
It used to be the case that the Egyptian bureaucracy would
scoop all these young people up. It's one of the reasons you
have such bloated bureaucracies in the Arab world,
particularly in Egypt. But the demographics have gotten so
bad that even the massive Egyptian bureaucracy can no longer
soak up these enormous pools of smart, ambitious young
people.
LEGAL SYSTEM
The legal system in all the Arab countries is a disaster,
which is one reason so few American companies invest there,
except for the oil firms. In many of these countries rule of
law is meaningless. The law is entirely arbitrary.
Investment laws are set up to siphon money away from
multinationals and to the central government. No one can
count on what the central government is going to decide from
one moment to the next.
For example, there are nearly 500 princes in the Saudi royal
family, all of whom believe that they are entitled to live
like princes. Even the Saudi royal family can't accommodate
all of them, so the princes use their positions of power to
work around the legal system to make additional money.
They'll push a government contract to a certain place, or
they'll find out early where the government has decided to
build a school, a road, a bridge. Because Saudi Arabia is a
rather new country and was made up originally of a lot of
semi-literate Bedouins or recently settled townspeople, the
deed system in Saudi Arabia isn't terrific. The princes find
out where a new project is going to be built and have a deed
for the land drawn up. When the rightful owner comes forward
and takes the matter to court, the prince intercedes to get
the judge to rule in his favor.
ECONOMY
All of these different problems contribute to larger
economic problems. The economies of the Arab states are more
or less broken. They tend to fall into two categories.
For many years the oil states lived high off the hog. Even
to this day Kuwaitis and UAE are doing well, the Bahrainis
and Omanis are getting by, but the Saudis are having a real
problem because in the 1960s-70s, when they had massive oil
revenues, they created a cradle-to-grave welfare system. But
the decrease in global oil prices, coupled with a massive
rise in Saudi population, has reversed its affluence. Now,
the Saudis are running deficits. They can no longer live or
support their people the way they once did. But after 40
years of no one's having to work, there is almost no work
ethic left in Saudi Arabia.
The oil states are all decrepit command economies. In the
1950s and '60s, they put in place a form of socialism, but
they never ran it as well as the Soviets did. The Arab
states put it in place not because they necessarily thought
socialism was great, but because these kind of command
economies put all the economic resources of the state
tightly into the hands of the autocrats. It was another way
for them to control their societies. Today, they're paying
for it. None of them have industries that produce anything
that anyone wants to buy.
So some of the Gulf oil states are still doing reasonably
well, but the big state that matters, Saudi Arabia, is doing
very poorly. And for the rest of the Arab world, there
really isn't an economy to speak of. There isn't any kind of
a cash crop like oil that they can use to subsidize these
massive populations.
And of course all of this comes home to roost in the
political situation because the people of the region are
deeply frustrated. They understand that the rest of the
world has taken off with globalization, even places like
East Asia, which forty or fifty years ago was poor and worse
off than they were. How did East Asia go from being behind
them to being so far ahead of them? In every other part of
the world, even in Africa, they see states that seem to be
doing better than them. And they're deeply angry and
frustrated. They can't find jobs, they can't make a living,
and they've got no political recourse. Their governments
aren't interested in their problems. The governments just
feed them a steady diet of anti-Semitism and anti-
Americanism, creating an intellectual class that blames its
problems on us. The people are told that if they can't get a
job, it's "because we have to stay mobilized to go to war
against the Israelis." Or "it's because the Americans are
manipulating our economy."
The only alternative out there is even worse: the Islamists.
The Islamists at least stand up, and because they live in
the mosque, the states have been very wary of going after
them. The Islamists are willing to challenge the government.
They tell the people "We know how bad your lives are. We
know how unhappy you are. We have the answer: sharia. We
need to go back to the 12th century and recreate the Islamic
paradise that existed before the Mongols sacked Baghdad."
IRAQ
There's another important development going on out there,
and that's what's happening in Iraq, Iraq really matters,
for a variety of reasons.
First, if we get Iraq wrong and create a mess there, we will
create chaos in the entire region. Iraq is a very important
country. We've learned that if you allow a country to slide
into chaos, to become a failed state, that chaos never stays
within its borders. Remember Lebanon in the 1980s? The chaos
there destabilized Syria and Israel. Many of the problems
Israel has today stem from its involvement in Lebanon, which
it was basically drawn into because of the instability
there. Look at Afghanistan and how it destabilized Pakistan
and started to destabilize Iran and some of the Central
Asian states. Or the Congo. The Congo is a massive pit in
the middle of Africa. It is nothing but death and chaos, and
it has destabilized every single country around it.
And Iraq is important in and of itself, because it is the
source of the second largest proven oil reserves in the
world and because of the countries it borders: Turkey, Iran,
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Syria, and Jordan. If the chaos
spreads to them, things could get very unpleasant. A lot of
these states are tinderboxes right now. Saudi Arabia
probably isn't going to blow up tomorrow, but I wouldn't
make a bet as to whether it's still in its current state ten
years from now, if it continues down the same road that it's
been on for the last twenty years. And if it starts getting
a push from chaos in Iraq, things could unravel there much
faster.
In Jordan, there is the beloved King Abdullah. But King
Abdullah does not sit easily on his throne. He presides over
a population that's two thirds Palestinian, and those people
are very unhappy with their lot in life. And they would like
nothing better than to be able to control the levers of
power inside Jordan. Add Syria, Turkey and Iran, and there
aren't too many stable states neighboring Iraq.
The Middle East is in a great deal of difficulty right now,
after Saddam Hussein and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Not only
do we have a mess in Iraq to fix, but there is an even
bigger mess out there in the larger Middle East. We're going
to need to deal with that mess, too, if we are going to be
able to defend our interests and our own security from the
threats we now face in the region.
The Arab states are broken. They are absolutely stagnant,
politically, economically, and socially. And their people
know it. Arabs are deeply angry and frustrated with the
situation they find themselves in because of the stagnation
of the Arab world. We hear about how angry the "Arab street"
is, but I don't think most people realize what is really
wrong in the Arab world.
EDUCATION
It all starts with education. Arab educational systems are
by and large very poor. The vast majority of Arab schools
don't teach anything useful to their students. They see
knowledge as a set body of facts that students are supposed
to memorize and simply regurgitate on set tests. And it's
always the same, there's no effort to bring out the
ingenuity, the creativity, of students.
These schools don't produce students who have useful job
skills. Most of the students specialize in humanities, many
of them aspire to be lawyers and Islamic scholars: two
thirds of all of the Ph.D.s issued in Saudi Arabia every
year are in Islamic studies. The scientists, engineers, and
computer programmers come to the U.S. because they can't get
a decent education in those sciences at home. So there's a
brain drain. The best and brightest leave their countries,
generally, and come here., where they contribute to our
economy and progress.
As a result, you have an enormous group of people in Egypt,
for instance, crop after crop of young, smart, educated
middle-class students coming out of Egyptian universities
who have degrees that have taught them nothing useful. No
one will hire them. You can imagine what it does to a bright
young person who believes that he should be part of that
country's elite when he can't even get a job because no one
has taught him anything useful.
It used to be the case that the Egyptian bureaucracy would
scoop all these young people up. It's one of the reasons you
have such bloated bureaucracies in the Arab world,
particularly in Egypt. But the demographics have gotten so
bad that even the massive Egyptian bureaucracy can no longer
soak up these enormous pools of smart, ambitious young
people.
LEGAL SYSTEM
The legal system in all the Arab countries is a disaster,
which is one reason so few American companies invest there,
except for the oil firms. In many of these countries rule of
law is meaningless. The law is entirely arbitrary.
Investment laws are set up to siphon money away from
multinationals and to the central government. No one can
count on what the central government is going to decide from
one moment to the next.
For example, there are nearly 500 princes in the Saudi royal
family, all of whom believe that they are entitled to live
like princes. Even the Saudi royal family can't accommodate
all of them, so the princes use their positions of power to
work around the legal system to make additional money.
They'll push a government contract to a certain place, or
they'll find out early where the government has decided to
build a school, a road, a bridge. Because Saudi Arabia is a
rather new country and was made up originally of a lot of
semi-literate Bedouins or recently settled townspeople, the
deed system in Saudi Arabia isn't terrific. The princes find
out where a new project is going to be built and have a deed
for the land drawn up. When the rightful owner comes forward
and takes the matter to court, the prince intercedes to get
the judge to rule in his favor.
ECONOMY
All of these different problems contribute to larger
economic problems. The economies of the Arab states are more
or less broken. They tend to fall into two categories.
For many years the oil states lived high off the hog. Even
to this day Kuwaitis and UAE are doing well, the Bahrainis
and Omanis are getting by, but the Saudis are having a real
problem because in the 1960s-70s, when they had massive oil
revenues, they created a cradle-to-grave welfare system. But
the decrease in global oil prices, coupled with a massive
rise in Saudi population, has reversed its affluence. Now,
the Saudis are running deficits. They can no longer live or
support their people the way they once did. But after 40
years of no one's having to work, there is almost no work
ethic left in Saudi Arabia.
The oil states are all decrepit command economies. In the
1950s and '60s, they put in place a form of socialism, but
they never ran it as well as the Soviets did. The Arab
states put it in place not because they necessarily thought
socialism was great, but because these kind of command
economies put all the economic resources of the state
tightly into the hands of the autocrats. It was another way
for them to control their societies. Today, they're paying
for it. None of them have industries that produce anything
that anyone wants to buy.
So some of the Gulf oil states are still doing reasonably
well, but the big state that matters, Saudi Arabia, is doing
very poorly. And for the rest of the Arab world, there
really isn't an economy to speak of. There isn't any kind of
a cash crop like oil that they can use to subsidize these
massive populations.
And of course all of this comes home to roost in the
political situation because the people of the region are
deeply frustrated. They understand that the rest of the
world has taken off with globalization, even places like
East Asia, which forty or fifty years ago was poor and worse
off than they were. How did East Asia go from being behind
them to being so far ahead of them? In every other part of
the world, even in Africa, they see states that seem to be
doing better than them. And they're deeply angry and
frustrated. They can't find jobs, they can't make a living,
and they've got no political recourse. Their governments
aren't interested in their problems. The governments just
feed them a steady diet of anti-Semitism and anti-
Americanism, creating an intellectual class that blames its
problems on us. The people are told that if they can't get a
job, it's "because we have to stay mobilized to go to war
against the Israelis." Or "it's because the Americans are
manipulating our economy."
The only alternative out there is even worse: the Islamists.
The Islamists at least stand up, and because they live in
the mosque, the states have been very wary of going after
them. The Islamists are willing to challenge the government.
They tell the people "We know how bad your lives are. We
know how unhappy you are. We have the answer: sharia. We
need to go back to the 12th century and recreate the Islamic
paradise that existed before the Mongols sacked Baghdad."
IRAQ
There's another important development going on out there,
and that's what's happening in Iraq, Iraq really matters,
for a variety of reasons.
First, if we get Iraq wrong and create a mess there, we will
create chaos in the entire region. Iraq is a very important
country. We've learned that if you allow a country to slide
into chaos, to become a failed state, that chaos never stays
within its borders. Remember Lebanon in the 1980s? The chaos
there destabilized Syria and Israel. Many of the problems
Israel has today stem from its involvement in Lebanon, which
it was basically drawn into because of the instability
there. Look at Afghanistan and how it destabilized Pakistan
and started to destabilize Iran and some of the Central
Asian states. Or the Congo. The Congo is a massive pit in
the middle of Africa. It is nothing but death and chaos, and
it has destabilized every single country around it.
And Iraq is important in and of itself, because it is the
source of the second largest proven oil reserves in the
world and because of the countries it borders: Turkey, Iran,
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Syria, and Jordan. If the chaos
spreads to them, things could get very unpleasant. A lot of
these states are tinderboxes right now. Saudi Arabia
probably isn't going to blow up tomorrow, but I wouldn't
make a bet as to whether it's still in its current state ten
years from now, if it continues down the same road that it's
been on for the last twenty years. And if it starts getting
a push from chaos in Iraq, things could unravel there much
faster.
In Jordan, there is the beloved King Abdullah. But King
Abdullah does not sit easily on his throne. He presides over
a population that's two thirds Palestinian, and those people
are very unhappy with their lot in life. And they would like
nothing better than to be able to control the levers of
power inside Jordan. Add Syria, Turkey and Iran, and there
aren't too many stable states neighboring Iraq.
