The Captive Arab Mind
Any time I see a head line such as this "The Captive Arab Mind" I recognize that I will be diving into a world with very few real world referents. The writer is going to try an get me to drink, and pay for the swill he is about to try to get me to swallow. PEOPLE: There is no such thing as an "Arab Mind" any more than there is an "American Mind."
Published: December 20, 2010
LONDON — At this point it is clear enough who invaded Iraq. Contrary to general opinion, it was Iran. After all, applying the Roman principle of cui bono — “to whose benefit?” — there can be no question that Iran, the greatest beneficiary of the ousting of its enemy Saddam Hussein and the rise to power of Shiites in Baghdad, must have done it.
I would have thought we Americans with the coalition of the billing did the invading, but maybe that is because I watched it all happen on MSNBC. For the purpose of humoring the author (who, having been paid, is probably already humored enough) I shall play along and read some more.
I know it appears that the United States was behind the invasion. What about “shock and awe” and all that? Hah! It is true that the deception was elaborate. But consider the facts: The invasion of Iraq has weakened the United States, Iran’s old enemy, and so it can only be — quod erat demonstrandum — that Tehran was the devious mastermind.
This would not be the first invasion that weakened the invading country. In our own history, we could count Viet Nam, and the Phillipines.
This mocking “analysis” is often deployed deadpan by my colleague, Robert Worth, the New York Times correspondent in Beirut. After three years living in Lebanon and crisscrossing the Arab world, he uses this “theory” to express his frustration with the epidemic of cui bono thinking in the region.
I say “thinking,” but that’s generous. What we are dealing with here is the paltry harvest of captive minds. Such minds resort to conspiracy theory because it is the ultimate refuge of the powerless. If you cannot change your own life, it must be that some greater force controls the world.
If you cannot change your own life, you are either living under a very repressive political regime, or, you are not trying particularly effectively.
While I was in Beirut this month, the conspiratorial world view was in overdrive, driven by WikiLeaks and by the imminence of an indictment from an international tribunal investigating the 2005 assassination of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri: more on that later.
The notion was actually doing the rounds that recent shark attacks at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el Sheik were the work of Mossad, the Israeli secret service. Hadn’t someone seen an electronic device attached to a shark being directed from Tel Aviv, video-game style, to devour a Russian tourist’s leg?
Recent evidence has been uncovered that the US let genetically modified mosquitoes rage upon the public. The electronically deviced shark directed from Tel Aviv does not seem so outrageous.
One Egyptian government official suggested the theory was plausible enough. After all, damage to the Egyptian tourist industry could only please Israel. Cui bono ?
At this juncture, the "Arab mind" is indeed a singular, solitary thing: the mind of one (unnamed) Egyptian government official and we are not even told where this official suggested the plausibility of the theory. If such an official exists (and the NYT has had writers who make sh#t up) he might have a history of making such statements, either for outrageous effect, or out of sincerity.
In his seminal collection of essays, “The Captive Mind,” Czeslaw Milosz described the intellectual’s relationship to Stalinist totalitarianism: “His chief characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself.”
But Milosz's intellectual is not an Arab ... he is a Russian. So, while it might make for a nice idea, it cannot count towards "the Arab mind."
Lebanon is a freewheeling delight on the surface — as far from Soviet gloom as can be imagined — but it betrays the servile mind-set of powerless people convinced that they are ultimately but puppets. This playground of sectarian interests, where each community has its external backer, may be the perfect incubator of conspiracy theories.
Then again, it may NOT be the perfect incubator of conspiracy theories. Statistically speaking, there may not even BE a perfect incubator of conspiracy theories, because if there were, EVERYBODY would believe one conspiracy theory or another.
But Lebanon is only an extreme case in an Arab world, where the Internet and new media outlets have not prised open minds conditioned by decades of repression and weakness.
So then perhaps, Lebanon is not such a good example of "the Arab mind."
Hariri, who was pro-Western and anti-Syrian, was assassinated in downtown Beirut. Suspicion fell on Syrian agents. A United Nations tribunal was set up to investigate — itself a reflection of Lebanon’s weakness in that the country’s own institutions were deemed inadequate.
W E L L ... in the U.S., the so-called bi-partisan committee's that get formed to investigate stuff are SO politicized, that the results of their findings are hidden for decades. Makes sense to have an independent tribunal with no loyalties to local politicians.
Five years later, I found the investigation irrevocably infected by cui bono fever. “Who took advantage of the killing?” Talal Atrissi, a political analyst, asked me. “Not the Syrians, they left Lebanon afterward. It was the United States that benefited.” Hah!
Ali Fayyad, a Hezbollah member of Parliament, told me: “The tribunal is entirely politicized, an illegal entity used by the United States as one of the tools of regional conflict against Syria and the resistance.”
So, the tribunal is not really representative of "the Arab mind."
Theories abound that Israel penetrated the Lebanese cellphone system to coordinate an assassination portrayed as providing the pretext for a failed anti-Syrian putsch by the West (much as 9/11 is grotesquely perceived in the Arab world as a self-inflicted pretext for the United States to wage war against Muslims).
Why, it is asked, was an international tribunal set up for Hariri but not for Benazir Bhutto’s killing? Why has the C.I.A. not been interrogated? Such questions now have such a hold on Lebanon that I have reluctantly concluded that justice and truth in the Hariri case are impossible, victims of the captive Arab mind.
Why has the CIA not been interrogated? A most excellent question. The CIA assassinates politcal leaders around the world, with impunity. Such questions ought to have a hold on Lebanon. If "justice and truth in the Hariri case are impossible" it is most surely NOT because of the Arab mind, but because of the larger geo-political forces denying a full, exhaustive, extensive investigation into the matter. Hardly victims of the captive Arab mind.
In the cui bono universe there can be no closure because events stream on endlessly, opening up boundless possibilities for ex post facto theorizing.
In all worlds, events stream on endlessly, and there are boundless possibilities for ex post facto theorizing, especially when the bodies legally responsible for a full, impartial investigation seem either to be willfully not doing their work, or because the hands of external forces are calling the shots.
Of course, the saga of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange and the leak of a quarter million secret U.S. diplomatic cables are also viewed as part of some grand conspiracy. They reflect the decline of America and the revolt of its vast federal bureaucracy! No, they demonstrate America’s enduring power, recruiting female Swedish agents to accuse Assange of sex crimes!
The truth is more banal. The WikiLeaks cables reveal autocratic but powerless Sunni Arab governments calling on the United States to do everything they are unable to do themselves — from decapitating Iran to coordinating a Sunni attack on an ascendant Hezbollah in Lebanon. Such fecklessness, and the endless conspiracy theories that go with it, suggest an Arab world still gripped by illusion.
Milosz wrote powerfully of the “solace of reverie” in worlds of oppression. I found much solace in Lebanon but little evidence that the Middle East is ready to exchange conspiratorial victimhood for self-empowerment — and so move forward.
W E L L ... if they are not given the opportunity for self-empowerment, then one must expect that the price paid will be conspiratorial victimhood.
This man gets paid HOW much money to write for the NYT?
Roger CohenI know it appears that the United States was behind the invasion. What about “shock and awe” and all that? Hah! It is true that the deception was elaborate. But consider the facts: The invasion of Iraq has weakened the United States, Iran’s old enemy, and so it can only be — quod erat demonstrandum — that Tehran was the devious mastermind.
