September 26, 2014
In
classic American Western movies, a common theme is the brave sheriff of a small
town whose task to maintain law and order often finds him in need of assistance
to capture a really dangerous threat, usually a gang of criminals led by a
tough guy. When the sheriff is unable single-handedly to apprehend the outlaws,
and needs more armed men, he puts together a posse of local volunteers whom he
temporarily deputizes to give them the legal authority to participate in
tracking down and arresting or killing the criminals.
What we have coming together in the “coalition”
led by the United States to defeat the “Islamic State” (IS) in Syria-Iraq is
the modern equivalent of a posse in Western movies. One of the common features
of a posse is that its members sometimes are reluctant volunteers, because they
are not trained fighters and often are scared of being hurt or killed. They
come together with a sense of protection from two sources — their collective
number when a dozen or more posse members stand together, and their leadership
by the brave sheriff who is always out front leading the battle. They often do
little fighting themselves, but assist in logistics that support the sheriff,
like tying up and bringing to jail the captured bad guys, providing cover fire
without endangering themselves, or blocking the bad guys’ escape routes.
The United States’ taking the lead to harness
regional and global assets to defeat IS is impressive, but also telling of
several troubling trends. The most important one is the startling reality that
Arab governments and societies whose practices allowed dangerous phenomena like
Al-Qaeda and IS to grow seem unable or unwilling to take decisive action to
protect themselves when the moment of reckoning arrives — as it has now. In three
domains in particular, Arab governments generally have proven negligent or
totally incompetent in addressing the root causes of the birth and rise of the
sort of Salafist-takfiri militancy that defines Al-Qaeda and IS, which is why
these governments seem handcuffed now in responding more forcefully.
The three ‘negligent or totally incompetent
things’ that explain the birth and spread of these extremist movements and also
the reluctance of Arab states to fight IS seem to me to be:
• the provision of socio-economic development
patterns that respond to citizens’ basic needs, including a sense of social
justice in society;
• the shaping of a public political space in
which ordinary citizens have an opportunity to express their views, hold power
accountable, and somehow share in decision-making, even at the most rudimentary
and symbolic levels; and,
• harnessing plentiful security resources to
defend national sovereignty against foreign threats, whether primarily from
Israel or Western armies that invade Arab lands with dizzying regularity, or
from foreign involvements in Arab affairs by Russia or Iran.
Most Arab governments seem logistically unable
to play a direct role in attacking IS, or find it politically damaging to them
with their own publics to be seen working closely with the United States in yet
another assault on an Arab target. Arab power elites also have learned by
experience that if they wait long enough, the United States will step in and
protect them from the dangers they generated by their own practices.
The key lesson to me from this sad state of
things is not really about radical Islam and its discontents, as confused
political hucksters and money-minded carpetbaggers like Tony Blair would have
us believe. It is rather about the cruel reality of modern Arab statehood and
governance — the modern Arab security state that has dominated and defined our
entire region both creates monsters like mass corruption, terrorism and
Al-Qaeda-IS, and simultaneously is unable to fight them when they grow and
expand.
It is not surprising that when the threat
becomes really serious, Arab leaders wait for the United States to save their
skins. After all, British and French bureaucrats once created many of our
countries, so perhaps reliance on Western support is in our political
chromosomes (or reliance on Iran, in the case of Arabs like Hizbullah, the
Syrian regime, or some major Iraqi groups). IS, Al-Qaeda, the Mahdi Army in
Iran, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Palestine, Hizbullah in Lebanon, half a
dozen militias in Libya, and dozens of other armed groups that now strut on the
battered stage of modern Arab statehood clarify that the most serious
underlying threat to most Arab countries is not primarily an itinerant
reactionary movement of misfits like IS; rather, it is the dysfunctional,
paternalistic, often corrupt and largely amateurish nature of statehood and
governance that our Arab elites have practiced for half a century now.
If a coalition to fight IS does not
simultaneously acknowledge and start to address this fact, the sheriff and the
posses of our modern Middle East will be busy for many decades.
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and director
of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the
American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. On Twitter: @ramikhouri.
Copyright
© 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global