BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Monday, February 25, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST
Since September 11, we have heard mostly slander and lies about
the West from radical Islamic fundamentalists in their defense
of the terrorists. But the Middle Eastern mainstream--diplomats,
intellectuals and journalists--has also bombarded the American
public with an array of unflattering images and texts,
suggesting that the extremists' anti-Americanism may not be an
eccentricity of the ignorant but rather a representative slice
of the views of millions.
Egyptian Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz reportedly
announced from his Cairo home that America's bombing of the
Taliban was "just as despicable a crime" as the September 11
attacks--as if the terrorists' unprovoked mass murder of
civilians were the moral equivalent of selected air strikes
against enemy soldiers in wartime. Americans, reluctant to
answer back their Middle Eastern critics for fear of charges
of "Islamophobia" or "Arab smearing," have let such accusations
go largely unchecked.
Two striking themes--one overt, one implied--characterize most
Arab invective: first, that there is some sort of equivalence--
political, cultural and military--between the West and the
Muslim world; and second, that America has been exceptionally
unkind toward the Middle East. Both premises are false and
reveal that the temple of anti-Americanism is supported by
pillars of utter ignorance.
Few in the Middle East have a clue about the nature, origins or
history of democracy, a word that, along with its family
(constitution, freedom and citizen), has no history in the Arab
vocabulary, or indeed any philological pedigree in any language
other than Greek and Latin and their modern European offspring.
Consensual government is not the norm of human politics but a
rare and precious idea, not imposed or bequeathed but usually
purchased with the blood of heroes and patriots, whether in
classical Athens, revolutionary America or more recently Eastern
Europe. Democracy's lifeblood is secularism and religious
tolerance, coupled with free speech and economic liberty.
Afghan tribal councils, without written constitutions, are
better than tyranny, surely; but they do not make consensual
government. Nor do the Palestinian parliament and advisory
bodies in Kuwait. None of these faux assemblies are elected by
an unbound citizenry, free to criticize (much less recall,
impeach or depose) their heads of state by legal means, or even
to speak openly to journalists about the failings of their own
government. Plato remarked of such superficial government-by-
deliberation that even thieves divvy up the loot by give-and-
take, suggesting that the human tendency to parley is natural
but is not the same as the formal machinery of democratic
government.
Our own cultural elites, either out of timidity or sometimes
ignorance of the uniqueness of our own political institutions,
seldom make such distinctions. But the differences are critical,
because they lie unnoticed at the heart of the crisis in the
Muslim world, and they explain our own tenuous relations with
the regimes in the Gulf and the Middle East. Israel does not
really know to what degree the Palestinian authorities have a
real constituency, because the people of the West Bank
themselves do not know either--inasmuch as they cannot debate
one another on domestic television or campaign on the streets
for alternate policies. Yasser Arafat assumed power by Western
fiat; when he finally was allowed to hold real and periodic
elections in his homeland, he simply perpetuated autocracy--as
corrupt as it is brutal.
By the same token, we are surprised at the duplicity of the Gulf
States in defusing internal dissent by redirecting it against
Americans, forgetting that such is the way of all dictators,
who, should they lose office, do not face the golden years of
Jimmy Carter's busy house-building or Bill Clinton's self-
absorbed angst. Either they dodge the mob's bullets or scurry to
a fortified compound on the French coast a day ahead of the
posse. The royal family of Saudi Arabia cannot act out of
principle, because no principle other than force put and keeps
them in power. All the official jets, snazzy embassies and
expensive press agents cannot hide that these illegitimate
rulers are not in the political sense Western at all.
How sad that intellectuals of the Arab world--themselves given
freedom only when they emigrate to the United States or Europe--
profess support for democratic reform from Berkeley or Cambridge
but secretly fear that, back home, truly free elections would
usher in folk like the Iranian imams, who, in the manner of the
Nazis in 1933, would thereupon destroy the very machinery that
elected them. The fact is that democracy does not spring fully
formed from the head of Zeus but rather is an epiphenomenon--the
formal icing on a pre-existing cake of egalitarianism, economic
opportunity, religious tolerance and constant self-criticism.
The former cannot appear in the Muslim world until gallant men
and women insist upon the latter--and therein demolish the
antidemocratic and medieval forces of tribalism, authoritarian
traditionalism and Islamic fundamentalism.
How much easier for nonvoters of the Arab world to vent
frustration at the West, as if, in some Machiavellian plot, a
democratic America, Israel and Europe have conspired to prevent
Muslims from adopting the Western invention of democracy!
Democracy is hardly a Western secret to be closely guarded and
kept from the mujahideen. Islam is welcome to it, with the
blessing and subsidy of the West. Yes, we must promote democracy
abroad in the Muslim world; but only they, not we, can ensure
its success.
The catastrophe of the Muslim world is also explicable in its
failure to grasp the nature of Western success, which springs
neither from luck nor resources, genes nor geography. Like Third
World Marxists of the 1960s, who put blame for their own self-
inflicted misery upon corporations, colonialism and racism--
anything other than the absence of real markets and a free
society--the Islamic intelligentsia recognizes the Muslim
world's inferiority vis- -vis the West, but it then seeks to
fault others for its own self-created fiasco. Government
spokesmen in the Middle East should ignore the nonsense of the
cultural relativists and discredited Marxists and have the
courage to say that they are poor because their populations are
nearly half illiterate, that their governments are not free,
that their economies are not open, and that their
fundamentalists impede scientific inquiry, unpopular expression
and cultural exchange.
Tragically, the immediate prospects for improvement are dismal,
inasmuch as the war against terrorism has further isolated the
Middle East. Travel, foreign education and academic exchanges--
the only sources of future hope for the Arab world--have
screeched to a halt. All the conferences in Cairo about Western
bias and media distortion cannot hide this self-inflicted
catastrophe--and the growing ostracism and suspicion of Middle
Easterners in the West.
But blaming the West, and Israel, for the unendurable reality is
easier for millions of Muslims than admitting the truth.
Billions of barrels of oil, large populations, the Suez Canal,
the fertility of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates valleys,
invaluable geopolitical locations and a host of other natural
advantages that helped create wealthy civilizations in the past
now yield an excess of misery, rather than the riches of
resource-poor Hong Kong or Switzerland. How could it be
otherwise, when it takes bribes and decades to obtain a building
permit in Cairo, when habeas corpus is a cruel joke in Baghdad,
and when Saudi Arabia turns out more graduates in Islamic
studies than in medicine or engineering?
To tackle illiteracy, gratuitous state-sanctioned killing, and
the economic sclerosis that comes from corruption and state
control would require the courage and self-examination of
Eastern Europe, Russia, South America, even of China. Instead,
wedded to the old bromides that the West causes their misery,
that fundamentalist Islam and crackpot mullahs have had no role
in their disasters, that the subjugation of women is
a "different" rather than a foul (and economically foolish)
custom, Muslim intellectuals have railed these past few months
about the creation of Israel half a century ago, and they have
sat either silent or amused while the mob in their streets
chants in praise of a mass murderer. Meanwhile millions of
Muslims tragically stay sick and hungry in silence.
Has the Muslim world gone mad in its threats and ultimatums?
Throughout this war, Muslims have saturated us with overt and
with insidious warnings. If America retaliated to the mass
murder of its citizens, the Arab world would turn on us; if we
bombed during Ramadan, we would incur lasting hatred; if we
continued in our mission to avenge our dead, not an American
would be safe in the Middle East.
More disturbing even than the screaming street demonstrations
have been the polite admonitions of corrupt grandees like Crown
Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia or editor Abdul Rahman al Rashed
of Saudi Arabia's state-owned Al Sharq al Awsat. Don't they see
the impotence and absurdity of their veiled threats, backed
neither by military force nor cultural dynamism? Don't they
realize that nothing is more fatal to the security of a state
than the divide between what it threatens and what it can
deliver?
There is an abyss between such rhetoric and the world we
actually live in, an abyss called power. Out of politeness, we
needn't crow over the relative military capability of one
billion Muslims and 300 million Americans; but we should
remember that the lethal, 2,500-year Western way of war is the
reflection of very different ideas about personal freedom, civic
militarism, individuality on the battlefield, military
technology, logistics, decisive battle, group discipline,
civilian audit and the dissemination and proliferation of
knowledge.
Values and traditions--not guns, germs and steel--explain why a
tiny Greece of 50,000 square miles crushed a Persia 20 times
larger; why Rome, not Carthage, created world government; why
Cort s was in Tenochtitl n, and Montezuma not in Barcelona; why
gunpowder in its home in China was a pastime for the elite
while, when stolen and brought to Europe, it became a deadly and
ever evolving weapon of the masses. Even at the nadir of Western
power in the medieval ages, a Europe divided by religion and
fragmented into feudal states could still send thousands of
thugs into the Holy Land, while a supposedly ascendant Islam had
neither the ships nor the skill nor the logistics to wage jihad
in Scotland or Brittany.
Much is made of 500 years of Ottoman dominance over a feuding
Orthodox, Christian and Protestant West; but the sultans were
powerful largely to the degree that they crafted alliances with
a distrustful France and the warring Italian city-states, copied
the Arsenal at Venice, turned out replicas of Italian and German
canon, and moved their capital to European Constantinople.
Moreover, their "dominance" amounted only to a rough naval
parity with the West on the old Roman Mediterranean; they never
came close to the conquest of the heart of Western Europe.
Europeans, not Ottomans, colonized central and southern Africa,
Asia and the Pacific and the Americas--and not merely because of
their Atlantic ports or ocean ships but rather because of their
longstanding attitudes and traditions about scientific inquiry,
secular thought, free markets and individual ingenuity and
spontaneity. To be sure, military power is not a referendum on
morality--Pizarro's record in Peru makes as grim reading as the
Germans' in central Africa; it is, rather, a reflection of the
amoral dynamism that fuels ships and soldiers.
We are militarily strong, and the Arab world abjectly weak, not
because of greater courage, superior numbers, higher IQs, more
ores or better weather, but because of our culture. When it
comes to war, one billion people and the world's oil are not
nearly as valuable military assets as MIT, West Point, the House
of Representatives, C-Span, Bill O'Rilley and the G.I. Bill.
Between Xerxes on his peacock throne overlooking Salamis and
Saddam on his balcony reviewing his troops, between the Greeks
arguing and debating before they rowed out with Themistocles and
the Americans haranguing one another on the eve of the Gulf War,
lies a 2,500-year cultural tradition that explains why the rest
of the world copies its weapons, uniforms and military
organization from us, not vice versa.
Many Middle Easterners have performed a great media charade
throughout this war. They publish newspapers and televise the
news, and thereby give the appearance of being modern and
Western. But their reporters and anchormen are by no means
journalists by Western standards of free and truthful inquiry.
Whereas CNN makes a point of talking to the victims of
collateral damage in Kabul, al-Jazeera would never interview the
mothers of Israeli teenagers blown apart by Palestinian bombs.
Nor does any Egyptian or Syrian tele
