Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East Read Online Free Page A

in 1945 the European empires went into retreat, and during the 1950s and 1960s every Arab country got its independence (although some of them had to fight quite hard for it). The post-independence priority everywhere was not democracy but “modernization.” These countries hungered desperately for prosperity and respect, and both seemed to be most readily attainable by following the Eastern European/Soviet model of rapid industrialization and educational uplift, which was doing quite well economically at the time. (Economic growth inSoviet-bloc countries did not fall behind the capitalist/democratic model until the later 1960s.) So a flock of young Arab military officers seized power from the kings and parliaments left behind by the departing imperial powers—Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Hafez al Assad in Syria, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and so on—promising to deliver a rapid rise in both national power and individual living standards. They also promised to put an end to the Israeli state, which had fought its way into existence in the very heart of the Arab world, with much Western support, in 1948.
    The new leaders failed everywhere. They failed militarily, losing further wars to Israel in 1956, 1967 and 1973, mainly because they lacked the organizational ability to take advantage of their vastly superior numbers: in every war from 1956 onwards, the Israelis actually had more troops on the battlefield than their Arab opponents (plus, of course, strong support from Britain and France, and later from the United States as well). They failed economically because they were military officers whose training had not prepared them in any way to run countries and manage economies. And even if they had had the right skills, the development model they adopted, which in the end did not work that well even in the “socialist” countries of Eastern Europe, was hopelessly inappropriate for countries with low literacy, low urbanization, almost no industrial or scientific establishment, strong tribal and clan identities, and deeply rooted patriarchal values. At anyrate, they failed, and by the late 1970s it was clear to everybody that they had failed.
    A six-paragraph tale of woe spanning almost a millennium, but it does explain why Arabs are so angry. They feel cheated by the West, by their own governments, by history. Even today there is little modern industry and almost no serious scientific research happening in the Arab countries. Average incomes (except in the few oil-rich states) are lower than in any other region of the world except sub-Saharan Africa—and on current trend lines will fall even below Africa’s in another ten or fifteen years. Half the women in the Arab world are illiterate.
    As for the military rulers who had presided over this full-spectrum failure, they did not retire from power in disgrace; they clung fiercely to power despite their failures, and as their popularity declined their regimes compensated by becoming more brutally oppressive. And they (or their lineages) survived a very long time: Gaddafi lasted forty-two years, Bashar al Assad is still in power forty-five years after his father took power in Syria, and General Abdel Fattah al Sisi is the fourth general to rule Egypt in unbroken succession (apart from the brief democratic experiment in 2011–13) since 1954. The surviving monarchies, like Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, have likewise changed little over the decades.
    And so, naturally enough, many young Arabs who came to adulthood in the 1970s, trapped in the dead end of the generals’ failed “modernization” projects, were drivento consider revolution as a way out. But a revolution needs an ideology, and in practice will not thrive if the ideology on offer is simply a warmed-over version of the one the revolutionaries are seeking to overthrow—“We will carry out the same modernization project, based on Soviet-style crash industrialization, but we will do it more efficiently than the