Walker's World: The Arab shock wave
By Martin Walker, UPI Chief International Correspondent
KUWAIT CITY (UPI) The shocks from the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, and from the looting and Hobbesian anarchy that ensued, are a double reminder to all Arab regimes of the brittle nature of their rule and of the undisciplined chaos that lies in wait once that rule cracks.
Throughout the Arab world, the old order
is discredited and nervous and uncertain that it can cling to
power; the new order of reform and representative government that
the Bush administration wants to nurture is too fragile and disorganized
to succeed it.
Beneath the authoritarian surface, today's Arab world is like
Iran writ large. Iran, which has been in a state of incipient
civil war for the last five years, is simply the extreme form
of a cultural syndrome. On the one side stands the elected government
of "moderate" reformers led by President Mohamed Khatami
who run the parliament and the ministries. On the other stand
the fundamentalist ayatollahs who control the courts, the Revolutionary
Guards, the secret police and the real power.
That same tension, between reform and reaction, between order and progress, defines the Arab world that stretches from Morocco through North Africa to the Iranian border. It also applies to much of the broader Islamic world that stretches beyond it all the way to Indonesia. And with their crushing defeat of Iraq, the United States and Britain have just tossed a stun grenade into this deeply unstable system. For the moment they are shocked, frozen into immobility, but already their future is rushing upon them.
Iran's ayatollahs and their Sunni counterparts elsewhere in the Arab world are hoping the Americans will be clumsy enough in their military rule to band the Iraqi people into a patriotic union against "the invaders."
They also hope that American arrogance will put such pressure on Iran, possibly by pre-emptive strikes against Iran's nuclear sites, that the Iranian people will rally patriotically behind the ayatollahs and isolate and evict Khatami's reformist government. President Khatami just hopes that his friends in Tony Blair's London can restrain the Americans from doing anything too provocative or foolish.
America's few friends in the region are also nervous. Kuwait, the essential base for the war against Iraq and a model of what a free and prosperous Arab world could become, is just starting to think through the implications of Saddam's fall. Few of them are good.
Kuwaiti officials say privately that their society has been held together, and tensions between Islamists and secular reformers controlled, by the constant fear of Iraq and Saddam. Just as the European NATO allies began to edge away from the Atlantic alliance once the fear of the Soviet Union had gone, thoughtful Kuwaitis worry that the potential cleavages in their own country could now widen fast between Sunni and Shia, and between the native-born Kuwaiti minority and the majority of foreigners who do most of the work.
Like the Saudis, the Kuwaitis also worry what the Americans and the future Iraqi government will do with what appear to be the world's second-largest oil reserves. If they chose, the Americans could probably bust the OPEC oil cartel wide open, and drive down the oil price to $15 a barrel or less. The United States and Britain are probably too smart to do so. But the balance of power that has prevailed for the last 30 years between the Arab governments that took control by nationalizing their oil reserves and the expropriated Western oil giants is likely to shift sharply in favor of the oil companies.
There is a wider Arab fear, the one that Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa calls "the domino effect." Moussa claims that having toppled Baghdad, the Bush administration now has its sights on Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Libya and other Arab countries. (What Moussa does not say is that these are the states that have helped or harbored terrorist groups.)
There is a vast conspiracy theory abroad in the Middle East, that a handful of pro-Israeli neo-conservatives in Washington have a master plan to re-order the Arab world in order to make it safe for Israel, Exxon and US military bases. Beyond this, they fear a deeper American cultural plot to impose a Reformation on Islam in order to make it safe for Christians, Jews and secular infidels.