Remembering Elie Kedourie: How One Analyst Spoke Truth to Power in the Middle East
Elie Kedourie's merciless precision as a slayer of cant and formulaic thinking constitutes much more than a switchblade attack on polite, conventional wisdom about the Middle East.
EVER SINCE the nineteenth century, when so-called reforms were initiated in the Ottoman Empire, there have not been wanting western ministers and diplomats to look on middle eastern politics with hope and expectancy. It is quite common knowledge that in the last hundred years the middle east has seen no quiet, that disturbance has succeeded disturbance … It might therefore seem more prudent to assume that the distemper of the modern east is not a passing one, that its political instability is rather the outcome of a deep social … crisis which the schemes of the reformer … can scarcely assuage or mollify. And yet … [t]he prevalent fashion has been to proclaim the latest revolution as the herald of a new day…
It goes on like that for almost four hundred more pages, in which every detail of political turmoil in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, and every Western failure there since the late Ottoman Empire to the middle-Cold War years, is excruciatingly recounted, almost day by day, with virtually every large-scale cruelty established, with little respite, so that all the violence and turbulence achieves a thick, undeniable reality that no idealism or social science theory can ameliorate; with the only solution to anarchy appearing to be strong, no-nonsense rule: whether by a local dictator or by an imperial power. The writer, Elie Kedourie, who passed away in 1992, published The Chatham House Version and Other Middle-Eastern Studies—perhaps the most challenging, dissident work of area studies in the twentieth century—exactly fifty years ago. Chatham House, or the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and its director of studies for three decades, Arnold Toynbee, become in Kedourie’s book illustrative of an elitist British sentimentality toward the cultures of the Middle East (and to Arab nationalism in particular) that hid from, rather than faced up to, the impure, realist requirements of politics and necessary force.
But Elie Kedourie’s merciless precision as a slayer of cant and formulaic thinking constitutes much more than a switchblade attack on polite, conventional wisdom about the Middle East. Kedourie, who spoke English, French, and Arabic, was an area specialist to compare with the greatest Arabists and foreign correspondents. But unlike most area specialists, he wrote without sympathy for his subjects, and deliberately so, and at the same time intuitively grasped the subtleties and abstractions of intellectual argument which his writing ignited. Kedourie was an intellectual with a deep historical memory. He forgot nothing. He was equipped with the knowledge base of a reporter—that is, he revered facts on the ground going back decades as a way to refute all theory. This combination of skills, as we shall see, gave him the clairvoyance of a Samuel Huntington. Most significantly, he had an old world integrity that is awe-inspiring in this age of rampant credentialism. At twenty-eight, in 1954, he turned down a doctorate from St. Antony’s College, Oxford, because he would not make changes about a Mesopotamian revolt in his thesis to appease one of his examiners, the legendary Orientalist Sir Hamilton Gibb.
Kedourie was a shy, retiring man with backbone. “A short, wintry smile from him was the equivalent of a warm embrace or a slap on the back from many others,” recalls Martin Sieff, former chief news analyst for United Press International. He didn’t socialize with his students at the London School of Economics. In an age of sly operators with media strategies, who appear on television and master the art of soundbites, he communicated almost exclusively through text. Only by reading him at length could one know how he has politely decimated, with a “potent and lucid” style, all manner of “leftist theory” and social science belief about the Middle East, writes Martin Kramer, founding president of the Shalem College in Jerusalem.
Elie Kedourie grew up in a wealthy Jewish family in Baghdad, and as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy witnessed close-up the June 1941 pogrom, known as the Farhud (“Looting”), in which the Iraqi army and police murdered over 180 Jewish men, women, and children, and raped countless Jewish women. The Farhud came after the British Army had put down a local military coup that sought to align Iraq with Nazi Germany. The British, in order to appease the Arab population afterwards, let the Iraqi army and police vent their frustration by going wild for several days. Kedourie, in The Chatham House Version, blames the British authorities for failing to protect the Jews, despite having taken over responsibility for Mesopotamia from the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I. He writes that the Jews could “cheerfully acknowledge” the “right of conquest,” whether exercised by the Ottomans or by the British, because “their history had taught them that there lay safety.” But the British failure to enforce the law and provide imperial order was the kind of transgression that religious and ethnic minorities could ill afford, he goes on. After all, the multiethnic Ottoman and Habsburg empires, with their deeply rooted cosmopolitanism, had protected minorities much better than the uni-ethnic states and democracies that replaced them. Kedourie thus—in this particular case—argued for more imperialism; not less.
Kedourie’s essential diagnosis of Great Britain’s Arab policy in his lifetime was that the British Foreign Office’s awe of an exotic culture, combined with the “snare” of a misunderstood familiarity towards English-speaking Arabs—who used the same words, but meant very different things when discussing such issues as rule-of-law and constitutions—led to a profound lapse of policy judgment: towards which, one must add guilt regarding the post-World War I border arrangements that allowed for, among other things, a Jewish national home in Palestine. In the minds of this naïve generation of British officials, once Zionism and imperialism could be done away with, the Arabs would enjoy peaceful and stable institutions.
Fifty years ago, Kedourie countered with what in recent decades has since become a commonplace: that neither imperialism nor Zionism were the problems. As he put it, it is only a “fashionable western sentimentality which holds that Great Powers are nasty and small Powers virtuous.” In any case, he continues, even without imperialism and Zionism other outside powers would naturally work to involve themselves in this vast, energy-rich region as part of the normal course of history. The West was a problem, certainly, but in a different way than late British colonial officialdom and some of their American Cold War successor-acolytes had imagined it: Westernization and modernization were only amplifying the coercive, illiberal power of newly independent Arab regimes themselves. Consequently, the nascent Arab middle classes were even more dependent on the goodwill of those vicious new regimes than they had been on the colonial powers. Indeed, everything from import licenses to securing jobs to school admissions required a silent pact with the authorities. And when oil wealth was suddenly added to the sociological fire of a falsely Westernizing Arab world, as Fouad Ajami (echoing V.S. Naipaul) explained: inhabitants of the great cities of the Middle East began experiencing the West only as “things” and not as “process,” importing the “fruits of science” without, as societies, producing them themselves. The results were sophisticated milieus, West Beirut being one for a time, of “Western airs and anti-Western politics.” The Arab youth were especially dangerous, Kedourie unsentimentally observes: full of “passion and presumption,” they possessed the techniques of Europe without intuiting the cultural processes that had made Europe what it was. They hated their fathers’ world, and saw utopia rather than civil society with all of its messy backtracking, compromises, and checks-and-balances; thus, they paved the way for replacing Arab nationalism with Islamic fundamentalism—a phenomenon of a rapidly urbanizing Middle East, where the traditions of the village have been weakened and must be fortified anew in more abstract and ideological form.
THE DESPAIR with which the class of Middle East experts in Washington now view the region is one that Kedourie arrived at long ago, and not cynically. Rather, it came about through painstaking historical research. In The Chatham House Version and a companion volume, Democracy and Arab Political Culture, Kedourie narrates the intricate daily political maneuvering over the course of a century in several Arab regions, exposing a politics unequalled in its unceasing and often violent disorder: a world in which the Ottoman Empire with its caliphate crumbled, leaving an Islamic civilization without a recognized religious authority. The result was various groups and factions and ideologies that competed for which one could be the most pure; that is, the most extreme. Today’s problems are old problems, going back to the decades of Ottoman decline, with the realization that the Middle East, from Algeria to Iraq, has still not found a solution to the final collapse of the Turkish sultanate in 1922.
Constitutionalism was variously and continuously attempted in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt. The de facto British rulers welcomed this, wanting to lessen the burden of daily government on themselves. For decades they tried, but they could rarely make it work. The modernizing Khedive Ismail in 1868 had set up a parliamentary assembly in Cairo. But such stillborn attempts at Westernization ultimately ran up against a blunt fact that still persists, albeit in far more subtle form, almost 150 years later during the Arab Spring of 2011: the vast gap between a peasantry and barely literate downtrodden underclass at the edge of the cities and a Westernized class of enlightened would-be reformers. The mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square against the regime of Hosni Mubarak were “1848” all over again: that year of hope-filled liberal risings in Europe that ultimately failed because the educated classes demanding change were just not quite large enough and not quite secure enough to carry the day.
All of this is inferred in Kedourie’s book, Democracy and Arab Political Culture, published in 1992 by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (one of the rare occasions when a think tank produces an enduring work of not merely policy, but intellectual, merit). This small, densely argued, and deeply researched book presents a debilitating saga of regional, sectarian, and ethnic divisions that combine with feudalism, tribal conflicts, and illiteracy to make orderly constitutional progress in Egypt and the artificial states of the Fertile Crescent impossible—all of them being rough equivalents of Lebanon with its on-again, off-again violence, in which democracy for too long has reflected, rather than alleviated, the region’s bloody communal divides.
THE PAN-ISLAMISM of the Ottoman Empire would in part give way to the pan-Arabism of the twentieth century, both being attempts at regional unity. Arnold Toynbee, in a book that Kedourie actually praised somewhat, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, notes the fact that the Ottoman Empire “keeps a celebrated Christian cathedral as her principal mosque and a famous European city as her capital, lends an appearance of dominion which is gratifying to Middle Eastern populations…” Because the Arab world was largely united under the Ottomans, and then divided under the Europeans, it lent a hazy and superficial logic to Arab nationalism and concomitant attempts at Arab unity; even as Arab disenchantment and revolts against the late Ottoman Empire had been incessant. The problem though is that while the history of the Middle East has occurred largely under the melding force of great empires—Greek Hellenes, Romans, Byzantines, Achaemenid and Sassanid Persians, Ottomans, British, French, Soviets, and Americans—the Arabs are a people which, for reasons including sect and geography, left to their own devices, have usually exhibited more disunity than unity. Even the Oxford Orientalist Gibb announced: “The Arab nation … like all other nations, is not an entity of geographical or historical association, but the function of an act of will.”
This “will” had originally been the creature of disaffected Ottoman officers and others, of Arab extraction, who, once the Empire crumbled, suddenly found themselves able to pursue what had previously been only a dream. As Kedourie sardonically explains, “They came to politics not through consideration of concrete difficulties or the grind of pressing affairs or daily responsibility, but by way of a doctrine.” Their doctrine,” he goes on, “was compounded of certain European principles which made language and nationality synonymous, of a faith in sedition and violence, and of contempt for moderation.”
This is mean language, but follow his point:
When, therefore, the miraculous circumstances [of British and French victories in World War I, and the establishment of mandated territories] gave them suddenly a country to govern, it was not gratitude to fate and their patrons that they felt, but rather that they were cheated of their dream. They had desired an Arab country and an Arab state, and they got Iraq
with its wholly invented, Frankenstein monster of a geography. The new gridwork of states cleaved the Arab nation at the same time that the end of the Caliphate had done likewise. Subsequently, these newly minted Arab nationalists denounced the imperialist dismemberment of the Arab nation and the creation of such “arbitrary and artificial” boundaries. “This was indeed true,” Kedourie wryly states, “for what otherwise can boundaries be when they spring up where none had existed before?”
Because the borderless Arab polity that these Arab nationalists aspired to was simply impossible to establish, any attempt at borders to carve up the vast desert tracts of the defunct Ottoman Empire were bound to be artificial. Thus, the whole Arab nationalist enterprise was compromised from the start. In both The Chatham House Version and Democracy and Arab Political Culture, Kedourie details the dysfunction of Iraq politics lasting almost four decades from 1921 to 1958, with its British-backed monarch imported from the Hejaz, ministerial intrigues, and tribal rebellions, further undermined by ethnic and sectarian differences, featuring massacres of Assyrians, Yazidis, and others. In all, there had been fifty-seven cabinets installed in Baghdad during this period. However, Kedourie’s is not the only point of view. Miami University Professor Adeed Dawisha, also born in Baghdad, presents in his 2009 book, Iraq: A Political History from Independence to Occupation, an equally detailed picture of those four decades in Iraq as sustaining a feisty, if tumultuous, democracy and a freewheeling press. The fact that Dawisha was born in 1944, eighteen years after Kedourie, and is Christian rather than Jewish, may partially explain his more benign view of Iraq in those decades. But we can all agree that Iraq’s experiment with democracy was for a long period of the twentieth century a close-run thing—something that should have sobered rather than inspired those calling for immediate elections in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of 2003. (Though I supported the invasion, to the detriment of my peace of mind ever since, I did warn beforehand that, “the removal of Saddam [Hussein] would threaten to disintegrate the entire ethnically riven country if we weren’t to act fast and pragmatically install people who could actually govern.”)
This long-running and tenuous experiment with limited democracy in Iraq, lauded for years in the middle of the twentieth century by respectable journalists and enthusiastic international statesmen, came crashing down at dawn, July 14, 1958. On that day, Sunni Arab nationalists, inspired by the pan-Arab coup in Egypt six years before and led by Iraqi Army colonels Abdel Karim Kassem and Abdul Salam Arif, murdered the prime minister, Nuri Al-Said, and practically the entire Hashemite royal family—a young king, his aged grandmother, aunt, servants, and so on—and handed some of the bodies over to the mob for public mutilation. “Regicide,” Kedourie says, is “peculiarly heinous and impious,” since kingship, “a storehouse of devotion and loyalty,” is a “dyke against bestiality.” More than that, the murder of the royal family in Iraq was one of the great seminal crimes of the twentieth century, like the murder of the Romanov royal family in Russia, exactly forty years earlier in July, 1918. Just as that earlier crime presaged seven horrific decades of Bolshevik rule, the 1958 coup in Baghdad presaged a series of military regimes, as one coup followed another, in the course of which Baathism was adopted, culminating in the coming to power in 1968 of Hassan al-Bakr and his powerful internal security chief, Saddam Hussein—who would prove to be Iraq’s ultimate Hobbesian nemesis. Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait revealed Arab nationalism for what it had always been: a matter of blood and iron rather than unity.
Marching on Kuwait and persecuting the Shi’ites, policies alive in the minds of the interwar Iraqi politicians, and rooted far back in Ottoman realities and inclinations, took on an added urgency under the Sunni army officers who ruled as Arab nationalists after 1958. In Kedourie’s telling, this was all an old Iraqi story. The Baghdad regime of Saddam Hussein, as well as the Baathist one next door in Damascus ruled by Hafez al-Assad, pursued a virulent pan-Arabism as a salve to their own internal contradictions. Their borders being artificial, they obtained legitimacy only from the dream of unity across all Arab frontiers. And it naturally followed that the more artificial the state, the more anti-Zionist it was. Sunni Arabs in Iraq especially, writes Kedourie, dreamed of being “the Prussia or Piedmont of a new Arab empire.” Whenever I traveled to Baghdad and Damascus in the 1980s, I was told that I was inside “the throbbing heart of Arabism.”
Syria, too, in the early- and middle-decades of the twentieth century, proved in terms of ethnicity, sect, and geography, irreconcilable to constitutional development, with frequent clashes and National Assembly chaos. There was a “lack of any traditional political bonds between Damascus and Aleppo,” Kedourie writes. “The three coups d’état of 1949 were the prelude to successive … interventions by army officers which put paid … to any possibility of Syria being governed through parliamentary and representative institutions.” Between 1947 and 1954, Syria had three national elections that all broke down according to regional, sectarian, and other differences. In February 1993, I laid this out in an argument in The Atlantic predicting that the elder “Assad’s passing may herald more chaos than a chaotic region has seen in decades.” It was precisely because Syria was ungovernable except by the most brutal means that army officers, terrified for the country’s future, bonded with Egypt to form the United Arab Republic between 1958 and 1961. But that desperate attempt of Arab unity proved short-lived because neither the Egyptians nor the Syrians could decide who would really be in charge. Syria, rather than enjoy a history of a state or empire like Iran, had always been a mere vague geographical expression between the rugged plateau of Anatolia in the north and the scorching sands of Arabia to the south. Its inhabitants had always thought of themselves as either Sunnis, Shi’ites, Druze, Greek Orthodox, Maronites, or Jews. Though they all spoke Arabic, this was of little political significance until following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. The post-World War I borders drawn by the British and French, though denounced for a hundred years now by historians, journalists, and other experts, are treated with much more detachment by Kedourie. The new borders “would of necessity be in the nature of a compromise. It is inappropriate to demand that political settlements should be ‘natural’ or ‘logical.’ Politics is neither like a geometrical theorem, nor like the mating instinct.”
Kedourie is clearly without sympathy. But this does not make him wrong.
AS I have written previously, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 and the result was chaos; the United States did not intervene in Syria in 2011 and the result was also chaos. While the media blames U.S. policy for what transpired, the deeper reason is the legacy of Baathism—a toxic mix of Arab nationalism and East Bloc-style socialism, hammered out in fascist-trending 1930s Europe by two members of the Damascene middle class, one Christian and the other Muslim: Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din Bitar. Because Saddam’s aging Baathist regime in Iraq either would not have survived the Arab Spring or would have ignited mass killing in an attempt at survival, the result there, even if George W. Bush had not invaded, might well have been chaos. Indeed, it was only the empty shell of Baathism that lay between the richly developed civilization of Iran and the Mediterranean Sea, making Iran’s empire of proxy militias inevitable. Smarter American policy might well have ameliorated the result, but that would have required a worldview similar to Kedourie’s.
Baathism, writes Kedourie, was built on “annihilation.” Because it was a rickety edifice of utopian principles, in practice it was all about whatever tribe and clan happened to wield power. In Syria, the ruling, Shia-trending Alawites oppressed the Sunnis; and in Iraq, the Sunnis oppressed the Shia. In the 1970s and 1980s, it made, in Ajami’s words, Syria and Iraq “prisons,” even as Lebanon writhed in “anarchy.” Whenever I was in Iraq under Saddam, I compared it in my mind to Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania, where I also went repeatedly in the 1980s, and which was the most pulverizing tyranny in the East Bloc. Syria was actually less extreme. You could have conversations there, ride buses alone throughout the country, and file dispatches from the telex machine at any post office. But in both Iraq and to a lesser extent in Syria, I always sensed a terrifying emptiness and extremity: anarchy hidden under the carapace of tyranny. Baathism, like Nasserism in Egypt, was a dead end. Such was the sum-total of Britain’s and France’s colonial experiment in the Fertile Crescent. Bitter, no doubt, at his own childhood memory of the Farhud, Kedourie writes, “it is the British themselves who cheerfully led the way into these wastes.”
The British in Iraq had championed the Sunnis, “tamed the Shi’ites and Kurds and made it clear to the Jews, the Assyrians and the other groups that they had to look to Faisal [the Hashemite monarch] and his men for their protection and welfare.” The new constitution, meanwhile, denied any safeguards for these communities. Kedourie rails against “the hysterical mendacity of Colonel [T. E.] Lawrence” and “the brittle cleverness and sentimental enthusiasm of Miss [Gertrude] Bell,” both of whom Hollywood has made such heroes. He accuses Lawrence of, among other things, lying about the capture of Damascus in 1918 and afterwards becoming obsessed with finding a country in the Fertile Crescent for his beloved Sharifian dynasty to rule. Unsurprisingly, he considers Lawrence’s epic, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), bad history, “full of advocacy and rhetoric.” As for Miss Bell, she demonstrates little more than a “fond foolishness … thinking to stand godmother to a new Abbasid empire.” This is all vanished history now, part of a lost world. But Kedourie brings it alive with his biting, sustained, and righteous passion. Of course, what burns in his memory is the Farhud, whose antecedents included the naivete and dishonesty of British policy in the Middle East since the end of World War I. Because The Chatham House Version depends for its emotional ballast so much on a singular human rights atrocity, it constitutes moral history.
It is important to underline why again Kedourie hates the British in the Middle East so much. It is not because of imperialism or illogical borders or the other fashionable things historians and journalists now chirp about. It is because he demands a Leviathan to protect men from other men. He understands a hard, sometimes unpalatable truth: that Thomas Hobbes was a moral philosopher, who wrote that without the coercive power of some authority monopolizing the use of violence, the weak cannot be protected from the strong. The Jews of Baghdad required a Leviathan to protect them, and the British failed in their responsibility to do so. Under the Ottoman Empire, the Jews at least enjoyed “communal standing and self-government.” Kedourie, with his defense of imperialism, is a reactionary with decades of evidence to back him up, and is therefore hard to dismiss.
To be fair, the illogic of British policy was driven by the realization that they were determined to leave Iraq, and therefore told themselves that the situation there was improving even if it was not. Their rush to leave robbed them of the illusion of permanence which is the essence of successful imperialism.
THIS ALL ends up at Chatham House, intellectually presided over for so many years by Arnold Toynbee, the author of the formidable twelve-volume Study of History, recording twenty-six world civilizations, and published between 1946 and 1957. The Chatham House Version is the term used by Kedourie to encompass “assumptions, attitudes, and a whole intellectual style” that roughly justified and ran parallel to the worldview of the likes of Col. Lawrence and Miss Bell. I have always found Toynbee’s great life work, as unwieldy as it is, to be quite useful and entertaining. His very emphasis on geography, history, and civilizations is a remedy to the way that policy studies have been sterilized by too much political science. Toynbee is just so creatively illuminating on so many topics. For example, his understanding of how in the Middle East there has been a vague historical alliance between the Arabs, Greek Orthodox, and Armenians against the Jews, Turks, and Persians (something that the ayatollahs have obviously upset); how overly militarized empires like Assyria have virtually disappeared from history; how history is a repetition of hubris and downfall; and so much else. Nevertheless, Kedourie is of a different view. He doesn’t deliver merely one of literature’s most brilliant hatchet jobs on Toynbee—a genre that can often be cruel more to the purpose of entertainment than to elucidation. Rather, he patiently explains how Toynbee’s interpretation of the Middle East—and of the Arab world in particular—does not hold up to the record of what has actually happened there since the nineteenth century.
Toynbee’s entire worldview is wanting, according to Kedourie. Toynbee places too little emphasis on economics and institution-building, or the lack thereof, in a region. Toynbee extolls culture and despises politics, even as it is politics that must be engaged in to make the world livable. Toynbee’s “dogmatic and insistent moralism … refuses to concede what common experience teaches, namely that the wicked do quite often flourish like the green bay tree, that in human affairs force and violence are occasionally decisive…” And, as you might expect, there is the issue of the Jews. Running throughout Toynbee’s voluminous work is a profound note of hostility, laced with an indeterminate lack of sympathy and context, for them. Toynbee contrasts the “gentle ethos” of Christianity and Manichaeism with the “violent ethos” of Maccabean Judaism and Sasanian Zoroastrianism. He was a tried-and-true appeaser who met with Alfred Rosenberg and Adolf Hitler in 1934 and 1936 in Germany. He believed that Gandhi’s and Tolstoy’s effect on human history would, in any case, be greater than that of Hitler and Stalin, since all politics is “tainted with cynicism.” To wit, he persisted throughout his lifetime in believing that Palestine had been promised wholly to the Arabs.
Whereas Kedourie lives in the world of life and death of real people, Toynbee seems to inhabit a more beautiful, ethereal world of ideas and aesthetics. Kedourie respects the Ottoman Empire because it was cosmopolitan and afforded relative safety to minorities like the Jews. Toynbee has little use for the Ottoman Empire for thereabouts the same reason: it was a universal state that sought dominion over several cultures and civilizations, undermining their purity. Toynbee sees universal states as the mechanism for global decline, robbing as they do indigenous groups of their richness and distinctiveness. It is an interesting argument, since it would have made Toynbee, who died in 1975, a powerful intellectual opponent of globalization.
As for the Arabs, in Toynbee’s view they are the victims of the living death of Ottoman rule. He thus defends Arab nationalism as representative of a pure civilization, and accepts at face-value the pan-Arab ideal for political unity. Early in his career, Toynbee nurtured the attitude that the Arabs had been the victims of Britain’s and France’s double-dealing with them. This puts Toynbee somewhat at odds with the likes of Lawrence and Miss Bell who were variously complicit, however guiltily, in all this. Though they, like Toynbee, are far more similar than different because of their general sympathy and—Kedourie would allege—naivete towards the Arabs.
Behind the psychology of such Britons was the assumption, in Kedourie’s words, “that the world and its ways – the existence of unequal relations ‘resting ultimately on force’ – may be conjured away with high-minded covenants and pious, elevated declarations.”
Thus Kedourie, the Jew on the ground in a murderous, unstable Arab region, undermines the lofty and guilt-ridden judgment of a British luminary, Arnold Toynbee, who sees the same region through a redemptive moralism. Kedourie’s realism not only puts him in a category with such great thinkers of the genre as Hans Morgenthau, Robert Strausz-Hupe, and Henry Kissinger, but he actually adds a vital layer to their worldview by, again, anchoring his extended argument in a human rights tragedy interwoven with obscure events, that he personally witnessed.
THE FACT that pan-Arabism has in recent decades been replaced by Islamism is not a contradiction but, once more, part of the same old story, according to Kedourie. Pan-Islamism was employed by the Ottomans to justify their empire in the Middle East. And given that the Arab world is the cradle of Islam, Islamism is conceived by the Arabs as a force of unity, just as Arab nationalism formerly was. The fact that one movement is religious and the other secular is of secondary importance, especially since secularism is a Western construct, even as religion has always infused the Arab world to a degree that the West has not known since the days when it was called Christendom.
This brings us to another unpleasant realization of Kedourie’s: the fact that whereas Western liberal thought is more at home defining conflicts abroad as between good guys and bad guys, the Middle East features contests where it is often bad guys versus bad guys. As Kissinger quipped about the 1980s’ Iran-Iraq War, “it’s a pity both sides can’t lose.” Whereas the elder Assad’s killing of 20,000 people with troops, airplanes, and tanks in the Syrian city of Hama in February 1982 was a great tragedy, had the secular Arab nationalist Assad been defeated there, with the Sunni Moslem Brothers emerging victorious, “they would have wreaked as great a destruction” on Syria as Assad’s Baath party had done. “Here,” writes Kedourie, “were two absolutist ideologies in confrontation, and between them no space was left at all for constitutional government even to breathe.”
Alas, the Arab world since independence following World War II has journeyed from pan-Arab nationalism to an interlude of revolutionary Marxism in the late 1960s (enthralled to certain radical Palestinian groups) and finally to religious fundamentalism. It all broke down in the streets of civil war-torn Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, and more recently in the genocidal terror and communalism of Iraq and Syria in the early twenty-first century—which the essence of Kedourie’s scholarship saw coming. The Americans not only created the havoc in Iraq after 2003, they also exposed what was lurking there all along. The very extremity of Saddam’s methodical murder machine was partially a function of the society he had to keep under control. Had Kedourie lived a decade longer he might have given Bush the younger better council than he got before invading Iraq. True, Kedourie might have championed the urge of imperialism on the part of the Americans. But more to the point, he would have delivered pitiless, unvarnished advice on the nature of Iraqi politics and society throughout the twentieth century, warning the president that to invade was to govern, and to govern such a place required no illusions about the nature of human perversity. “Good luck, and expect the worst,” he might have said to Bush.
But will Kedourie always be proven right? At the end of Democracy and Arab Political Culture, he notes that democracy had been tried for decades in Arab countries and “uniformly failed.” Arab regimes may have been despotic, but their methods “were understood and accepted” by the populations themselves. Yet the spread of Western ideas into the Middle East has complicated that thesis, he admits. How far have such ideas gone? Even the Arab Spring, as I’ve said, came along too early. Yet, the spread of ideas through technology is inexorable in a more urbanized and claustrophobic world. The mass eruptions of hope for a more liberal society in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, beautifully evoked in Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif’s memoir, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, constituted a veritable festival of ideas and inspiration, based on the belief that young Egyptians could, in fact, “change the world.” But now, in 2020, we know that all that happened was the resumption of the dynasty of despotic, Nasserite pharaohs, with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi proving to be more bloody and ruthless than Mubarak even. Others will try though, and in the end may yet prove Kedourie wrong.
But it could well be a long process, in which protesters will have to adhere to that tough measurement set by Albert Camus, who, in The Rebel (1951), declared that those who rise up against central authority must lay out a better regime with which to replace it, or else they, too, are morally inadequate. Kedourie in his lifetime never saw Camus’ standard met in the Middle East. Only in 1979 in Iran was a regime toppled and an equally developed framework of authority quickly put in its place. The Iranian Revolution, as repugnant as it has been, was the product of an age-old state and civilization harking back to antiquity, with a penchant for philosophy and abstractions. Few places in the Arab world evince the sophistication of Iran. The Iranian Revolution was a true world-historical event, unlike the coups in the Arab world. Meanwhile, we still wait, even as flash mobs in Iraq, which have no realistic alternative in mind, roil the Baghdad government. And so the Middle East as it still exists, with some exceptions, is the same one that Kedourie describes in his historical analyses. Uncomfortable, unappealing to many as his work may be, the searing quality of his analysis is such that we can only label it as timeless.
Robert D. Kaplan is a senior adviser at Eurasia Group. He is the author of nineteen books, including, The Good American: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government’s Greatest Humanitarian, to be published in October by Random House.
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