Tony Abbott was mocked for saying that
Syria's civil war was a case of "baddies versus baddies" during the
election campaign in September last year.
"We've got a civil war going on in that benighted country between two
pretty unsavoury sides," said Abbott. "It's not goodies versus
baddies - it's baddies versus baddies."
The regimes that repressed the Arab world for so long were "the hothouse in which the current bitter tree grew," says Basharat, an Israeli Arab. And those violently oppressive regimes were the just the latest in a long line of repressive forces stifling the Arab world.
Four hundred years of Turkish rule was followed by decades
of western European colonialism.
Then the superpowers of the Cold War followed up by
sponsoring autocratic rulers across the Arab homeland. The oppressors of the
Arabs were tremendously successful in their primary goal of holding power. They
stifled dissent and crushed the hopes of new generations. They infantilised the
Arab peoples.
One measure of their success was that while the number of
democracies in the world trebled in the 30 years to 2005, none of the new
democracies was in the Middle East, according to Freedom House.
Democracy flowered around the world but only a bitter tree
of frustration and disenchantment grew in the Arab world.
And economic opportunity for ordinary people was stunted in
most Arab states. The imposed backwardness of the Arab condition inspired a
group of Arab intellectuals to write the Arab Human Development Report
in 2002 setting out an agenda for a civilisational renaissance
The report distilled three debilitating deficits that needed to be overcome: a freedom deficit; a knowledge deficit, where education systems ill-prepared the young for the modern business world; and a deficit of women's empowerment. Those deficits are deeper and starker than ever.
The US and its allies have helped remove the dictators of
the key former Soviet client states of Iraq and Libya. Chaos ensued. The
excited aspirations of other Arab peoples led them to rise up in a hopeful
moment briefly known as the Arab Spring, but chaos and new repressions have
been the wintry outcome for most.
The extremist Islamists who stalk the counterterrorism
assessments of the Western world today grew directly from this long repression.
The point of origin for so-called Islamic State was the
Muslim Brotherhood movement founded in Egypt in 1928, invigorated by Sayyid
Qutb in the 1950s and '60s, metamorphosing into the al-Qaeda group, which
branched off into the Islamic State in 2004.
It is, at core, a resistance movement to fight back against
the long stagnation and repression of Arabs. An Oxford historian of the Arab
world, Eugene Rogan, has described the philosophy of the movement's
intellectual giant, Qutb, as "a true liberation theology."
Abbott has set aside the cautiousness of his earlier
stance. His gritty realism has turned now to soaring idealism. As he sends
Australian forces to fight one set of baddies, he has conjured a golden future
for the Arab world:
"Over time, I would hope to see a world where the
golden ethical rule, "Do to others as you would have them do to you",
is better accepted. I would like to see, over time, an understanding by all
people, and cultures, and religions, that there should be separation of church
and state, that there is a sense of rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's and
to God what is God's," he told ABC radio on Monday.
Ridiculous? It's actually very close to Basharat's
prescription and the vision of most enlightened Arab intellectuals: "The
challenge of the Arab world is to dry up the swamps that produce these
sicknesses, by introducing social justice, democracy and human rights."
But approaching this halcyon vision would require wholesale
revolution in the Arab world. The barbarians of IS must be defeated; the Arab
regimes understand the threat and are moving to act under US leadership.
But going beyond to find a real solution will demand a
maturity and enlightened leadership that these regimes have never managed. The
Arab world has big deficits to address, and they are not the kind that can be
paid for in oil.
Peter Hartcher is the
international editor.
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