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January 07, 2007
Essential rules for understanding the Middle East
It's fascinating that for all the talk of "celebrating diversity" I hear from the we-are-the-world peaceniks, the multi-culti crowd seems incapable of reconciling their belief that all cultures are equally valid with their antipathy to the idea that people are truly different.
Take, for instance, the Middle East. The striped-pants set at the State Department love to point to remarkably moderate-sounding statements from conciliatory spokesmen for terror groups as proof that we can resolve all our differences through diplomacy.
But organizations like MEMRI provide English-language translations of what the killers are telling their own people in Arabic, when they think the West isn't listening.
It's often -- ahem -- far less peaceful than what they say to our faces.
Which brings us to 15 rules for understanding the Middle East, from a reporter who learned first-hand that nothing is quite what it seems when dealing with Byzantine mindset of the Arab world.
Here are a few of my favorites.
Rule 1: What people tell you in private in the Middle East is irrelevant. All that matters is what they will defend in public in their own language. Anything said to you in English, in private, doesn't count. In Washington, officials lie in public and tell the truth off the record. In the Mideast, officials say what they really believe in public and tell you what you want to hear in private.
Rule 2: Any reporter or U.S. Army officer wanting to serve in Iraq should have to take a test, consisting of one question: "Do you think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?" If you answer yes, you can't go to Iraq. You can serve in Japan, Korea or Germany -- not Iraq.
[...]
Rule 8: Civil wars in the Arab world are rarely about ideas -- like liberalism vs. communism. They are about which tribe gets to rule. So, yes, Iraq is having a civil war as we once did. But there is no Abe Lincoln in this war. It's the South vs. the South.
Rule 9: In Middle East tribal politics there is rarely a happy medium. When one side is weak, it will tell you, "I'm weak, how can I compromise?" And when it's strong, it will tell you, "I'm strong, why should I compromise?"
[...]
Rule 11: The most underestimated emotion in Arab politics is humiliation. The Israeli-Arab conflict, for instance, is not just about borders. Israel's mere existence is a daily humiliation to Muslims, who can't understand how, if they have the superior religion, Israel can be so powerful. Al Jazeera's editor, Ahmed Sheikh, said it best when he recently told the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche: "It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about 7 million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation with its 350 million. That hurts our collective ego. The Palestinian problem is in the genes of every Arab. The West's problem is that it does not understand this."
Rule 12: Thus, the Israelis will always win, and the Palestinians will always make sure they never enjoy it. Everything else is just commentary.
Rule 15: Whether it is Arab-Israeli peace or democracy in Iraq, you can't want it more than they do.
We cannot succeed if we insist on pretending that our enemies are Americans in mufti; they're not like us, and we'll earn nothing but their contempt and much bloodshed if we fail to act accordingly.
Posted by Mike Lief at January 7, 2007 09:51 PM
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