The End of an
Arab Era Gives Israel
its Last Chance
By JONATHAN
POWER
Feb. 17, 1999
LONDON- Two weeks on, the sentiments of the moment
somewhat subsided, it's now very clear that the death of
King Hussein of Jordan ushered in a new and perhaps painful
era in the Middle East. Fifty heads of government may have
made the pilgrimage to the funeral in Amman out of respect,
but more likely the real compulsion--and in President Boris
Yeltsin's case, a sheer act of will power--was a worry,
verging on paranoia, that if the present dispensation of
military and dynastic strongmen in the Arab Middle East
disappears before a full peace is made with Israel there
will be chaos, war-- and who knows what that may
bring?
Everybody there knew that King Hussein's efforts to
introduce a larger role for an elected parliament foundered
on rank and file hostility to making peace with Israel. When
King Hussein's coffin entered the ground, all that was left
on the surface was a populist tinderbox--and the 50 grey
men, from around the world, perhaps excepting Israel's
Binyamin Netanyahu, did not need to be told.
The military and military-backed dynastic rule of the
dying off generation (leaving on one side the special case
of the younger Saddam Hussein)--King Hussein, Palestinian
leader Yassir Arafat, Syrian Hafez al-Assad, the Saudi King
Fahd, all sick men, and even Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, although
a robust 70, is drawing to its inevitable close. In
retrospect we now see it was an era of unusual
stability.
On attaining their independence, soon after the close of
World War 2, the new Arab states were swept by coups. Until
Assad took over in Syria in 1970 there were 14 serious
attempts of a military take over. In 1952 the monarchy was
ousted in Egypt and in Iraq six years later. Between 1961
and 1969 twenty-seven coups and attempted coups took place
in the Arab world. Yet since 1970 successful coups have been
virtually non-existent.
The secret of these men's enduring success has been
management of the military. The recipe varies from country
to country but the essentials are: careful cultivation of
the officer corps, enhancing its privileges, appointing
members of specific groups, often minorities, to key posts
and rotating commands rapidly to ensure that plots have no
time to mature, not to mention the adept use of special
security forces reporting directly to the head of state,
combined with regular purges.
But this has been at a price: the ability of the armed
forces to function well in combat. Despite possessing many
of the world's largest and most expensive militaries they
have rarely realized their potential on the battlefield. In
1948 Arab armies fared poorly against Israeli forces. In the
1967 Arab-Israel war the coalition of Jordanian, Syrian and
Egyptian forces failed to turn its substantial numbers of
men and arms to its advantage. In the October 1973 war Egypt
squandered its initial strong position. Again, Iraq's great
defeat in 1991 revealed the gap between arms and
capabilities.
The main impediment in all these cases was poor command.
The Egyptian command structure was once aptly described as a
tower with a pyramid on top . Over-centralization of command
makes war-fighting too rigid, depriving lower ranks of
autonomy and flexibility. Often, politically convoluted
lines of command, constructed to make a coup difficult, make
this formalised rigidity even worse.
But these military regimes, not much capable on the
battlefield, are the best interlocutors for peace that the
Israelis could have hoped for. Having been vanquished on the
battlefield and having no prospect of ever re-gaining the
military upper hand, given Israel's vast superiority, not
least in nuclear arms where it now has a second-strike
capability, they really have no alternative but to allow the
peace process to go forward more or less unhindered. That
Netanyahu has not realized, as Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon
Perez did before him, that this is Israel's best moment is
probably a mistake of historic proportions.
The Israeli general elections in May will determine
whether Israeli public opinion understands its country's
predicament better than its present prime minister.
There is no good reason to think this unusual state of
affairs of the last 30 years will continue. Successors to
these present day Arab regimes cannot hope to possess the
stature of the old war horses--as is already clear with the
passing of King Hussein and the proclamation as heir of
Prince Abdullah. A more educated and larger middle class
will not tolerate for much longer an Arab world singularly
immune from the tides of democracy that have now reached
every other corner of the world, bar China.
Yet a more vociferous and articulate public opinion will
be less patient with Israel and less accommodating to
Western oil interests, (which only recently have started to
win back their old freedom to explore and exploit oil
themselves in countries that are belatedly shedding their
old suspicions of the Western oil giants).
This is the soon-to-change Arab world that the Israeli
electorate, momentarily perhaps, has it in its hands to make
a final, sustainable, peace with. If it chooses to miss it
no one who is honest can tell if there'll ever again be such
an opportunity in our lifetime.
Copyright © 1999 By JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and e-mail:
JonatPower@aol.com
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