M.G Chaos is the new ’status quo’ in the Middle East

For Israel, chaos is ultimately a good thing. It means that the Islamists and other hostile forces will be too distracted by infighting to focus any attention on fighting Israel.One year after the ousting of Hosni Mubarak as president of Egypt, what conclusions can we draw regarding the ongoing wave of unrest in the Middle East and North Africa?

Around this time last year at the Herzliya Conference, the Israeli historian Prof. Martin Kramer lambasted the Obama administration for taking the view that the “status quo” in the region was no longer sustainable, and even went so far as to accuse the U.S. government of “throwing Mubarak under the bus.”

Yet Kramer’s critique was off the mark even then, for the fact is that the “status quo” - that is, the apparently stable order imposed by strongmen that prevailed in the Middle East and North Africa prior to the outbreak of the so-called “Arab Spring” - was never sustainable. The unrest that has come upon and now characterizes the region can be compared to a tidal wave: It is simply unstoppable.

The United States could no more have saved Mubarak than President Nicolas Sarkozy could have saved the former Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, whom the French government was eager to see retain power even as mass protests erupted in Tunisia. By promulgating the notion that the Obama administration threw Mubarak “under the bus,” Kramer was inadvertently echoing the thoughts and intellectual legacy of a scholar whom he rightly took to task in his book “Ivory Towers on Sand”: Edward Said.

The writings of Said - especially his best-known book, “Orientalism” - have unfortunately disseminated a patronizing view that in the Arab world, responsibility both for what goes wrong and for setting things right rests on the shoulders of Western powers.

What led to Mubarak’s resignation in Egypt was not that the U.S. government had somehow abandoned him, but rather that the military, feeling the heat of mass protests, carried out a de facto coup. The same is true of Ben Ali in Tunisia, although there the military has now chosen to withdraw from politics.

In any case, a widespread problem with analysis of current developments in the Arab world is a tendency to impose false dichotomies. For instance, on the subject of Egypt’s future, too much ink has been wasted on asking whether that country will emerge as a full-blown Islamist state or a healthy democracy. In fact, it is time to appreciate that a new norm will be dominating the region: chaos. Too often, commentators overlook demography, economy, tribal affiliations and climate change in their assessments of current and likely future trends.

For example, in Egypt, the ongoing protests in Tahrir Square have brought the economy to a grinding halt. Besides considerable decreases in tourism revenue and deleterious labor strikes, Bedouin tribes are stirring up trouble in Sinai, having taken over the Aqua Sun holiday resort - once a favorite destination for Israelis - at the end of last month with demands for a ransom of $660,000.

This entry was posted on 19. February 2012 at 05:36 and is filed under Introduction to Sociology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.