The Loom of Time, page 31
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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 Colonel Lawrence and Miss Bell. I have always found Toynbee’s great lifework, 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 merely deliver one of literature’s most brilliant hatchet jobs on Toynbee—a genre that can often be cruel more to the purpose of perverse entertainment rather 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 extols 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 Sassanid Zoroastrianism. Toynbee was a tried-and-true appeaser who met with Alfred Rosenberg and Adolf Hitler in 1934 and again in 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.”[32] And crucially, he persisted throughout his lifetime in believing that Palestine had been promised wholly and unambiguously to the Arabs.
Whereas Kedourie lives in the world of life and death of real people on the ground, 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 about 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 American-style 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 of this—though, they, like Toynbee, are far more similar than different because of their general sympathy and—Kedourie would allege—naivete toward 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.”[33] But, again, to be fair to the likes of Lawrence and Miss Bell, they labored under the severe limitation that complete withdrawal from Mesopotamia was irresponsible and total and direct imperial rule impossible. They could only make the best of the narrow space of political action afforded them. And they did this by partially engaging in illusions.
As for Kedourie, he remains the Jew on the ground in a murderous, unstable Arab region, undermining the lofty and guilt-ridden judgment of a British luminary, Arnold Toynbee, who sees the same region through a redemptive moralism. Kedourie’s realism, even with its blind spots, not only puts him in a category with such great thinkers of the genre as Hans Morgenthau, Robert Strausz-Hupé, 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 as an impressionable youth.
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The fact that pan-Arabism was in recent decades 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 was 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 heroes and villains, the Middle East features contests where it is often villains versus other villains. 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 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 Muslim Brothers emerging victorious, “they would have wreaked as great a destruction” on Syria as Assad’s Ba‘ath 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.”[34]
Alas, the Arab world in the Fertile Crescent since independence following World War II has journeyed from pan-Arab nationalism to an interlude of revolutionary Marxism in the late 1960s (when in thrall to certain radical Palestinian groups) and finally to fundamentalism (which now itself might be passing). 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, though it cannot be excused, was partially a function of the society he had to keep under control. Had Kedourie lived a decade longer he might have given the younger Bush better counsel 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. Of course, this was something successful empires knew only too well. Good luck, and expect the worst, Kedourie might have said to Bush.
But will Kedourie always be proved right? That is the question. At the end of Democracy and Arab Political Culture, he notes that democracy had been tried for decades in Arab countries and “uniformly failed.”[35] 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 admitted just before his death. 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.”[36] But now in 2023, we know that all that happened was the resumption of the dynasty of despotic, Nasserite pharaohs, with President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi proving to be more bloody and ruthless than Mubarak even. Others will try though, and in the end may yet prove Kedourie wrong. That is the hope.
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’s standard met in the Middle East. Though one could argue that Saudi Arabia, a major regional power, has found a way toward replacing a closed, taboo-laden society with a more open and tolerant one, without undergoing an experiment with democracy. Kedourie did not disparage Arabs so much as he disparaged their experiments with democracy. Thus, the experience of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikhdoms in recent years has somewhat proved his point.
Of course, in 1979, in Iran, a regime was 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 Persian empires of antiquity, with a penchant for philosophy and abstractions. Relatively few places in the Arab world have evinced the organizational sophistication of Iran. The Iranian Revolution was a true world-historical event, unlike the coups in the Arab world. And so the Middle East as it still exists, with some notable exceptions, is the same one that Kedourie describes in his historical writings. It was Kedourie, remember, the Zionist Jew, who had appreciated the rule of Hafez al-Assad, comprehending more than a third of a century ago that the alternative to the elder Assad would have been sheer chaos. Uncomfortable, unappealing to many as Kedourie’s work may be, the searing quality of his analysis is such that we can only label it as timeless. And therefore his wisdom, as flawed as it is in parts, is a thread that I must never let go of.
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When it comes to Hobbesian tyrants, the United States under the administration of George W. Bush achieved the near impossible. It replaced the blood-soaked totalitarianism of Saddam Hussein with a situation in Iraq that was equally bloody—perhaps more so, depending upon which statistics you believe. Saddam, as we know, murdered a quarter of a million people not counting the near-million deaths in the Iran-Iraq War, which he did much more than the Ayatollah Khomeini to initiate. But the U.S. invasion of Iraq ignited a war that killed between 150,000 and 600,000 Iraqis, again, depending upon the survey you choose.[*8] This was not counting nearly 4,500 American military deaths. War planners could clearly have benefited from Kedourie’s absolute pessimism about Iraq, had he still been alive. It might well have saved innumerable lives.
The wounds of the Iraq War will never heal, not only for individual Iraqis and American military families, but for myself as well, as I have often recounted.
I was traumatized by my own experiences in Iraq under Saddam and at the incomparable suffocating air of repression I felt during two visits there in the 1980s, when I had my passport confiscated by Iraqi security agents on one occasion and not returned for ten days until the morning I left the country. I was in any case never successful in getting any Iraqis to talk to me outside of staged official interviews. I came to the conclusion that it was impossible to imagine a situation worse for the country than Saddam’s rule. Nobody genuinely smiled or seemed to genuinely smile, ever. Behind everyone’s face in any indoor setting were photographs of Saddam hanging from the walls. The country was like a vast prison yard lit by high-wattage lamps. Thus, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I helped draft a report, assisted by about a dozen others, recommending among other things that the younger Bush administration topple Saddam’s regime.[37] I had never believed that Saddam was implicated in 9/11. I also never believed that Iraq was prepared for democracy.[*9] Rather, I felt that the United States could use the opportunity afforded by 9/11 to install a better dictatorship in Iraq, something along the lines of the Egyptian and Pakistani varieties (under the military men Hosni Mubarak and Pervez Musharraf), which by providing both stability and a more enlightened authoritarianism, could have immeasurably improved both the human rights situation inside Iraq and America’s strategic position in the region. I certainly knew this wouldn’t be easy, as I had myself warned of anarchy in Iraq in a post-Saddam era in The New York Times some years earlier.[38]
I was wrong. I failed my own test as a realist. Because in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I had rationalized to myself that regime change might actually be possible without the country falling apart, I failed to sufficiently calculate the advantage to Iran should Iraq begin to crumble, a distinct possibility if we were to start to play god with the country. My reasoning was doubly flawed because I was basing my judgment on my experience inside Iraq in the 1980s, before the economic sanctions of the 1990s had pivotally weakened and impoverished institutions and the society, making Iraq even more susceptible to implosion. I simply did not at the time think through the issue of military intervention properly, overwhelmed as I was by my own dark memories of Iraq. Iraq had been such a radical experience for me: a place where one Western diplomat warned me soon after I arrived, “If the security services here become suspicious of you, there is nothing any of us in any of the embassies can do.” It was as though the foreign diplomats, too, along with the Iraqi population, were hostages of the regime. I never experienced fear like I did in Saddam’s Iraq. In short, I was a journalist who had gotten too close to my story.
I returned to Iraq in the spring of 2004, embedded as a reporter with ⅕, the 1st Battalion of the 5th Marines, which put me in the thick of street fighting for several days during the First Battle of Fallujah that April.[*10] That, in addition to other harrowing experiences in post-Saddam Iraq in 2004 and again in 2005, when I experienced fighting and security operations around Mosul, completely devastated me. It wasn’t fear for my life—like anyone who has experienced war and is truthful about it, I was continually terrified in the pit of my stomach—rather, I was devastated by the sickening knowledge that I had been wrong to support the war, again, especially as a realist.
As overpowering as the experience of totalitarianism is firsthand, the experience of anarchy firsthand is more intense still. Totalitarianism at least has rules to follow for the average person; anarchy has no rules. Roving armed gangs and abductions at street corners, mixed with wayward rocket attacks, are worse than even a dictator’s grim visage and the long arm of the security services. Alas, any kind of a state is almost always better than no state at all. The great philosophers have dealt with this dismal issue for millennia, but to learn about it through vivid, actual experience is life-changing.[*11] Though I played merely a bit part in the buildup to the Iraq War, as the American-led invasion dissolved into anarchy in 2006, I fell into a depression that lasted several years and required medical help.
I plowed through my depression. You deal with such a thing, you rarely cure it, whatever the doctors may claim. I decided in 2006 to begin researching a book about what I labeled the “Greater Indian Ocean” (now called the Indo-Pacific) that required deep reporting for years on end in several Muslim countries from Oman to Bangladesh to Indonesia, where I daily experienced anger at the U.S. invasion of Iraq close-up. I didn’t avoid such voices. I wanted to hear them all. I certainly didn’t hide within a solidarity group like some in Washington, rationalizing to one another the rightness of their cause. The result of my purgatory in the Muslim world of the Greater Indian Ocean was not to gravitate to extremes, self-serving or otherwise. I did not become an apologist for the Iraq War, justifying my mistake and blaming the Bush administration and its Defense Department for poor execution of what was in theory a good idea; nor did I become an isolationist opposed to wars and military involvement overseas altogether. Instead, I vowed to remain in the philosophical center and be a better realist. I vowed to double down on believing in granular, ground-level knowledge from the field in place of lofty concepts and causes that have often been the curse of Washington. I would not give up on reporting just because I had gotten too close to a story. I vowed to be both more empathetic and at the same time more distant regarding my subject matter—to consider both heartrending situations in far-off countries and American national interests—if that were at all possible: and to continue exploring the most difficult and unappealing of truths. There would be no easy way out for my worst error; no solution, no epiphany afforded me. I would have to live with it, that’s all. Wisdom, in any case, even a little bit of it, must be painfully acquired. As the great philosopher José Ortega y Gasset said, “Man’s real treasure is the treasure of his mistakes.”[39] That is my solace.
