# Posted 9:00 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

HORNET'S NEST: "Why must the United States attack Saddam Hussein if that will only anger much of the Islamic world?"

The WaPo has one answer to this question: that the United States unwillingness to back a decisive intervention in the Middle East is precisely the reason why lesser attacks such as the first WTC bombing, the Khobar towers explosion, the twin embassy explosions and the attack on the USS Cole led to the climactic terrorist assault on 9/11.

Rather than offer a second answer, I'd like to challenge the question's premise, i.e. that an American invasion of Iraq will provoke a harsh fundamentalist response. This premise rests on twin assumptions that fundamentally contradict one another.

The first is that the Arab man-in-the-street is so firmly anti-American that he will be confuse the liberation of Iraq with the reimposition of Western imperial rule. The second is that the Arab man-in-the-street is not so firm in his anti-American convinctions, but that American agression against the Arab world will provoke him to violence.

You can't have it both ways. Naturally, there are different degrees of anti-Americanism in the Arab world, and it is hard to know exactly what different subsets of the Arab population believe. As such, it is hard to provide a definite answer to the question of how a US-Allied invasion of Iraq will affect public sentiment in the Arab world. Nonetheless, I'd like to make some tentative observations.

First, I believe that most Arabs are open-minded enough not to rush to judgment immediately. No doubt, even those who are not firmly anti-American will be deeply suspicious of American motives. Thus, there may well be riots or other disturbances. However, if it becomes clear that the West has replaced Saddam with a government more democratic than any other in the Middle East, the initial outburst of anti-Americansim will abate. While the Arab may be able to tell whatever lies it wants about the Zionist entity, it will be much harder to deceive the public about the true nature of postwar Iraq, about which they will learn from fellow Arabs and Muslims.

If my scenario provides a ballpark estimation of Arab reaction to the invasion, then there is little reason to fear that forceful US intervention will provoke a mad rush of enlistments at Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas headquarters. While these organizations will no doubt take advantage of the initial chaos to launch attacks and win political and financial support, their gains will pale in comparison to the credibility that the US wins if, and that is a very definite if, the US wholeheartedly commits itself to rebuilding a democratic Iraq.

Now what if I am wrong? What if most Arabs already are so firmly anti-American that even the sudden establishment of a Norway on the Euphrates will not disabuse them of their anti-imperialist sentiments? If that's the case, then their support for terrorist organizations and willingness to overthrow conservative dictatorships is probably already at a maximum. It's hardly something that could be made worse.

And what if Arabs are more open-minded than I project? Then there isn't all that much reason to fear a sudden and devastating turn to fundamentalism, since such Arabs will be open-minded enough to judge the American occupation of Iraq on the merits, albeit from a suspicious vantage point.

As a final bit of support for my view of the Arab street as more open-minded than that derogatory term makes it out to be, I'd like to cite a couple of facts I picked up from Stephen Schwartz's book The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud From Tradition to Terror. (Btw, big shout out to Doubleday for sending me a complementary copy.)

Even though I have serious reservations about Schwartz's credibility as an author, there is the occasional bit of prose that seems well-documents. The one that impressed me was Schwartz's description of the reaction of Balkan Muslims to the American war effort in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Naturally, one might expect the direct beneficiaries of American intervention to have kinds words for it. (This implies, of course, that liberated Iraqis will be well able to recognize that American intervention has changed their lives dramatically for the better.) Even so, the degree of Bosnian and Kosovar enthusiasm for the US was surprising. Here are some samples:

"The world has split into a modern civilization and one of barbarism and terrorism. Bosnia-Hercegovina has chosen to ally itself with the civilized world. It has decided to part of the solution, not part of the problem." -- Bosnian Foreign Minister Zlatko Lagumdzija

While the Saudis have also offered similar (if far more equivocal) endorsements of US policy, the Bosnians have backed up their rhetoric by aggressively routing out Al Qaeda affiliates in their own backyard. In March 2002, for example, government raids in Sarajevo produced evidence that helped tie the Chicago-based head of a major Islamic charity to Osama bin Laden.

"Every Albanian in Kosovo knows that without the help of the United States we would have been devastated by Serbian imperialism." -- Daut Dauti, Kosovar journalist.

Despite occasional descriptions of the Kosovar KLA as Muslim terrorists, both the KLA and the Kosovar religious leaderships have taken the American side in the aftermath of 9/11. And there are indications that Turkish Muslims know where there interests lie as well. According to one journalist and former diplomat,

"The United States, [after] it could not convince our European friends, stopped the Serbian aggressors with a military-intervention in Bosnia-Hercegovina.

Now, mind you that neither Balkan nor Turkish Muslims are Arabs, who have a political history and culture that is much more conducive to anti-American fundamentalism. Even so, there is hope that the Islamic ties between these nations will foster a recognition that the US may be in the process of doing more for the cause of Arab freedom than any Arab leader has ever done.




(0) opinions -- Add your opinion