The Impending Collapse of Arab CivilizationLieutenant Colonel Lacey talks a little bit more about the books and then delivers this:
By Lieutenant Colonel James G. Lacey, U.S. Army Reserve
Proceedings, September 2005
If a country wants to be on the winning side of history it first and foremost must get its grand strategy right. With that done, it can make any number of operational mistakes and weather many a setback and still walk away a winner. In the Cold War, our grand strategy of containing the Soviet Union eventually won the day despite many tribulations over the fifty years it was in place. Diplomat George Kennan's famous "X Article," anonymously published in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1947, became the conceptual pillar of Cold War strategy and withstood a decades-long assault by critics until eventually vindicated by the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Was the containment theory hurt by the vitriol of its critics? I would argue the opposite is true. Criticism forced the supporters of containment theory to examine and hone their arguments. In order to properly answer their critics, supporters of containment were forced to continually evaluate their strategic models under regularly changing conditions. The end result was a strategy that proved adaptable to shifting circumstances and able to garner the support of the bulk of public opinion.
Today, however, more and more of our strategic judgments are being built upon the untested edifice of two books: Bernard Lewis' The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror and Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order . While there have been a few critical reviews of both works, for the most part they have become the basic canon of 21st century strategic thought with very little serious negative commentary. In military publications and briefings these works are now cited repeatedly and uncritically as authoritative support for developing strategic concepts.
Both books paint a dismal global picture. Huntington argues that for centuries civilizations have been kept apart by distance and serious geographical obstacles. However, modern technologies are eroding these obstacles and as civilizations begin to interact on a more regular basis they will find each other so repugnant they will be unable to resist trying to slaughter one another. Bernard Lewis is not as pessimistic about the global environment. Rather, he focuses his dire warnings on just the Muslim world, which appears to him on an irreversible road to doom.
A more accurate understanding of events leads to the conclusion that Arab, not Muslim, civilization is in a state of collapse, and it just happens that most Arabs are Muslims. In this regard, the fall of the Western Roman Empire was a collapse of Western Europe and not a crisis of Christianity. The next question is, how could the world have missed an entire civilization collapsing before its eyes? The simple answer is that no one alive today has ever seen it happen before. Well within living memory we have seen empires collapse and nation-state failure has become a regular occurrence, but no one in the West has witnessed the collapse of a civilization since the Dark Ages. Civilizational collapses take a long time to unfold and are easy to miss in the welter of daily events.He follows up with these statistics about life in the Arab world (numbers from a United Nations Human Development Report):
Interestingly, on the Arab League's website there is a paper that details all of the contributions made by Arab civilization. It is a long and impressive list, which unfortunately marks 1406 as the last year a significant contribution was made. That makes next year the 600th anniversary of the beginning of a prolonged stagnation, which began a dive into the abyss with the end of the Ottoman Empire. Final collapse has been staved off only by the cash coming in from a sea of oil and because of a few bright spots of modernity that have resisted the general failure.
There are 18 computers per 1000 citizens compared to a global average of 78.3.He closes with three options and an explanation of why #3 is the one to take:
Only 1.6% of the population has Internet access.
Less than one book a year is translated into Arabic per million people, compared to over 1000 per million for developed countries.
Arabs publish only 1.1% of books globally, despite making up over 5% of global population, with religious books dominating the market.
Average R&D expenditures on a per capita basis is one-sixth of Cuba's and less than one-fifteenth of Japan's.
The Arab world is embarking upon the new century burdened by 60 million illiterate adults (the majority are women) and a declining education system, which is failing to properly prepare regional youth for the challenges of a globalized economy. Educational quality is also being eroded by the growing pervasiveness of religion at all levels of the system. In Saudi Arabia over a quarter of all university degrees are in Islamic studies. In many other nations primary education is accomplished through Saudi-financed madrassas, which have filled the void left by government's abdication of its duty to educate the young.
In economic terms we have already commented that the combined weight of the Arab states is less than that of Spain. Strip oil out of Mideast exports and the entire region exports less than Finland. According to the transnational Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), regional economic growth is burdened by declining rates of investment in fixed capital structure, an inability to attract substantial foreign direct investment, and declining productivity — the economic trinity of disaster.
Economic stagnation coupled with rapid population growth is reducing living standards throughout the region, both comparatively and in real terms. In the heady days of the late 1970s oil boom, annual per-capita GDP growth of over 5% fueled high levels of expectations. GDP per-capita grew from $1,845 to $2,300. Today, after adjusting for inflation, it stands at $1,500, reflecting an overall decline in living standards over 30 years. Only sub-Saharan Africa has done worse. If oil wealth is subtracted from the calculations the economic picture for the mass of Arab citizens becomes dire.
Things are indeed bad in the Arab world and will get much worse.
By accepting that we need to contain the effects of a failing Arab civilization we are then free to adopt one of three basic approaches:I have excerpted about 50% of the essay -- if you are interested in this subject, you might want to read the entire thing as Lieutenant Colonel Lacey fleshes out a lot of his statements with facts. A viewpoint that I had not thought about before but it makes a lot of sense. The Islamic culture is so tied to the Arab Civilization that we Westerners fail to separate the two. As I have said before, I have zero problem with Islamic spiritual practices -- my first wife and I were Sufis for a long time and we met some amazingly wonderful people. My problem begins when Islam gets perverted by the corrupt ham-eating sons of monkeys who are making trouble in Syria, Iran, Iraq and the so-called "palestinians" (cough*Jordan*cough)... Posted by DaveH at December 5, 2005 9:19 PMFor a number of ethical and practical reasons the third choice is the one that should and is most likely to be adopted, keeping in mind that resisting the macro-forces of historical change will not be easy.
- Attempt to accelerate the collapse and pick up the pieces, akin to letting an alcoholic hit bottom.
- To contain the effects, but not to interfere with the fall for good or bad.
- Reverse the tide when and where we can.
By adopting the third option we can craft policies to improve economic conditions and help specific regions within the Arab world adapt to encroaching modernity. The United States must be able to spot shining lights in the Arab world and work to protect them even as we help to expand their influence. Discarding the theories of two men as eminent as Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis is not a matter to take lightly. History may even prove both men right and my analysis to be well off the mark. However, the almost blind acceptance now being given to these men's ideas is a dangerous trend. As military leaders build the strategic plans and policies that will guide our forces for a generation or more it is best to be skeptical of all underlying assumptions. This article is designed to strike at the foundation of the two most widely accepted arguments in the current forum of ideas. If they are correct and sturdy then my position will not topple them. In fact, like Kennan's X article they will be made stronger by having to defend themselves against criticism. If they are weak, then it is best to discard them now.
For sure, we can't determine nation by the deeds of its minority. Today, the question of Iraq is so complex, that sometimes it is hard to say who are our enemies and who are our friends.
As the proverb says: tastes differ, and people differ. We need not to forget about it.
From the Darwinian point of view (sorry, GOP), the more successful viral infections don't kill the host, but rather leave them just debilitated enough so that they are mobile and infectious. I think the analogy holds here, and I see no reason to believe that Arab civilization will therefore collapse. Historically, that civilization has existed in a state of more or less failure for 1,300 years.
Posted by: Don McArthur at December 6, 2005 5:23 AM