Tom Friedman makes a good point in today’s NYTimes. While I am at it, let me also suggest his latest book “Longitudes and Attitudes”. An excellent read. Friedman is perhaps the most expert voice on the mideast.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/23/opinion/23FRIE.html?todaysheadlines
Under the Arab Street
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
DOHA, Qatar
At a seminar here this week on relations between America and Islam, one of the questions discussed by American and Muslim scholars was that elusive issue: Where is the Arab street and how might it respond to a U.S. invasion of Iraq? For my money, the most helpful answer was provided by the Jordanian columnist Rami Khouri, who said that “what’s really important today is not the Arab street, but the Arab basement.”
This is an important distinction. The “Arab street” is the broad mass of public opinion, which is largely passive and nonviolent. The “Arab basement” is where small groups of hard-core ideologues, such as Osama bin Laden and his gang, have retreated and where they are mixing fertilizer, C-4 plastic explosives and gasoline to make the bombs that have killed Westerners all over the world.
Over the years, Arab leaders have become adept at coping with the Arab street, which is why not a single one of them has ever been toppled by it. They know how to buy off, or seal off, its anger and how to deflect its attention onto Israel. They also know that the street’s wrath can be defused by progress on the Arab-Israeli front or elections at home.
The Arab basement, though, is a new and much more dangerous phenomenon. These are small groups of super-empowered angry men who have slipped away from the street into underground cells, but with global reach and ambitions. While issues like Israeli and U.S. policy clearly motivate them, what most fuels their anger are domestic indignities — the sense that their repressive societies are deeply failing, or being left behind by the world, and that with a big bang they can wake them up and win the respect of the world.
“These guys started in their living rooms,” said Mr. Khouri, “then they went out into the streets, got pushed back, and now they have retreated to the basements.” Unlike the Arab street, no diplomacy can defuse the Arab basement. It doesn’t want a smaller Israel, it wants no Israel; it doesn’t want a reformed Saudi monarchy, it wants no Saudi monarchy.
So what to do? The only sensible response is to defeat those in the Arab basement, who are beyond politics and diplomacy, while at the same time working to alleviate the grievances, unemployment and sense of humiliation that is felt on the Arab street, so that fewer young people will leave the street for the basement, or sympathize with those down there — as millions of Arabs do today.
There is no question that America can help by making a more energetic effort to defuse the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and by speaking out for the values that America has advocated everywhere in the world — except in the Arab world: namely democracy. I met yesterday with 50 students from an elite Qatari high school and the new Cornell Medical College in Doha. They were so hungry to talk, to have their voices heard; and what you heard when you listened was how much they still looked up to America, but how much they thought America looked down on them.
But the Arab states have a huge role to play too. You cannot seal the door between the Arab street and the Arab basement without addressing the reasons for Arabs’ backwardness and humiliation cited in the U.N.'s Arab Human Development Report, which are their deficit of freedom, their deficit of women’s empowerment and their deficit of modern education.
“It takes many years of political, social, economic and human degradation to create a terrorist,” notes Mr. Khouri. “So fighting terror can only succeed by rehumanizing degraded societies, by undoing, one by one, the many individual acts of repression, obstruction, denial, marginalization and autocracy that cumulatively turned wholesome developing societies into freak nations, and decent, God-fearing people into animals that kill with terror.”
My guess is that the only way to stop the drift of young Arabs from the street to the basement is by administering some shock therapy to this whole region. Could replacing Saddam Hussein with a progressive Iraqi regime be such a positive shock? I don’t know. I don’t know if the Bush team really wants to do that, or if the American people want to pay for it. But I do know this: If America made clear that it was going into Iraq, not just to disarm Iraq but to empower Iraq’s people to implement the Arab Human Development Report, well, the Arab basement still wouldn’t be with us, but the Arab street just might.