A Brutal Friendship: The West and The Arab Elite
by Said K. Aburish
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Book Summary Information
Author: Said K. AburishEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1998-07-15
ISBN: 031218543X
Number of pages: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Book Reviews of A Brutal Friendship: The West and The Arab Elite
Book Review: Several reviews of the book
Summary: 5 Stars
The Independent (London), August 2, 1997
Middle Eastern reigns of error; Lawrence Joffe wonders why the West always backs crooks and creeps in the Arab world;A Brutal Friendship: the West and the Arab elite by Said K Aburish
From the opening sentence of A Brutal Friendship, it is clear that Said Aburish intends to be the Emile Zola of Araby. "There are no legitimate regimes in the Arab Middle East", he states; and few escape his ire. He spares neither Whitehall mandarins, nor mendacious arms dealers, nor Israeli-sponsored think-tanks, nor wheeler-dealer CIA agents, nor well-tailored Arabs in London's "Beirut-on-Thames". Not even that perennial British favourite, "plucky little" King Hussein of Jordan, emerges unscathed. As if to clinch the point, the gruesome dustjacket shows two hands shaking, one smeared in oil, the other in blood.
Yet throughout its 360 exhaustive pages, A Brutal Friendship is informative, engrossing and entertaining. Aburish, a Palestinian writer whose book attacking the House of Saud established him as a leading Arab dissident, now extends his offensive to all "pro-West" regimes. His thesis seems obvious. Arab people deserve as much dignity and liberty as anyone else. For Aburish, this alone is the litmus test for a government's legitimacy. The "street", he implies, is always right, and whichever leader it adopts is therefore legitimate. Even bogey figures such as Saddam Hussein do better than King Fahd when it comes to spending on education or economic development.
Aburish accuses the West of moulding the Arab world to further its own interests, handpicking minority elements and criminals as leaders while denying Arab people their basic rights. From Britain encouraging the slaying of popular King Ghazi of Iraq in 1938 to the CIA instigating coup after coup in Syria, such interventions "almost became a bad habit". Then comes another, somewhat paradoxical argument: apart from being immoral, to mollycoddle dictators is to endanger long-term Western interests. Now that London has become "the new capital of the Middle East", Arab corruption has started "infecting the hosts" - witness Jonathan Aitken. And the Arab-Israeli peace process, Aburish warns, is doomed unless and until the parties heed the voices of ordinary people.
"Arming friends" - such as Britain's multi-billion weapons supply to Saudi Arabia - is equally short-sighted. The average Saudi soldier costs five times as much to maintain as his US equivalent, but poor training renders him useless in battle. The most obvious example is Saddam himself, who eventually bit the Western hand that had fed him with arms. Aburish unveils an entire hidden history of mendacity, as the CIA nurtured the young thug in the Sixties as their secret weapon against the anti-Western Iraqi leader Kassem.
Curiously enough, Western powers follow no Machiavellian master-plan, but rely on the improvisations of field officers and PR agents. Thus Britain's Harry Philby and the CIA's Miles Copeland could change history merely by exploiting personal ties with their Arab "pets". Given this accidental quality, Arab acquiescence seems all the more shameful.
Aburish may be quirky - having condemned "commission-skimming" arms-brokers, he suddenly reveals himself as one of their number - yet it is his keen eye for personal foibles, and the psychological background to political developments, which brings the book to life. His rogues' gallery includes "the gun-toting, whiskey-swigging, skirt-chasing" PLO agent, Hassan Ali Salameh; and the roving Orientalist, Gertrude Bell. She dined off the finest silverware in her desert tent and made blunder after blunder, yet created the State of Iraq from nothing. Meanwhile, Lebanese delegates to France wore an assortment of fezzes, baggy trousers, turbans and lounge suits to express their ethnic diversity, prompting Aburish to comment that "Prime Minister Clemenceau must have thought he was facing a collection of circus performers".
Aburish incisively queries received wisdom. For instance, King Hussein's historic peace "breakthrough" with Israel in 1994 merely concluded a process which began in secret decades earlier. Britain and the US may bewail the danger of Islamic fundamentalism, but it was they who nurtured the zealots in order to undermine Nasser's nationalists and his Soviet ally. And, in noting that Egypt's 1967 war against Israel coincided with her sponsorship of rebels in Saudi-backed Yemen, Aburish deduces: "Fighting Israel and Islam at the same time defeated Nasser and broke the back of the Arab nationalist movement."
Too often, though, Aburish tries to shoehorn the facts to fit his thesis. He maintains that Maronites still run Lebanon - despite intracommunal murders, the disarmed militias and boycotted elections, the erosion of Christian presidential powers, and Syria's displacement of France as Lebanon's mentor. Likewise, Aburish wants to portray Arafat and King Hussein as archetypal Arab dictators. But what of Arafat's convincing electoral mandate in January 1996, or Hussein's own attempts, albeit halting, to introduce multi-party democracy in his kingdom?
Two nagging questions remain. Are Arab governments illegitimate because they are in cahoots with a corrupting West; or is the West corrupt because it is in cahoots with illegitimate governments? Aburish's answer seems to be: guilty on both counts.
Accepting that A Brutal Friendship is polemic, we can learn much about the Middle East from it - and enjoy a good read. Aburish is either brave or foolhardy (perhaps a bit of both). (...)
---
A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite; book reviews Commentary September, 1998
"There are no legitimate regimes in the Arab Middle East." With this eye-opening first line, Said Aburish, an independent-minded Palestinian writer long resident in London, promises something fresh: an insider's expose of the tyrannical governments that dominate his region. Aburish is, indeed, in a good position to document a sordid political history that harks back to World War I, and he is also no stranger to the form: his previous book, The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud (1994), was an important if over-the-top denunciation of the Saudi ruling family.
In A Brutal Friendship, Aburish sets out to deliver on his promise by offering biting assessments of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, plus Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority. But, alas, his indictment is brief and superficial, consisting mostly of criticisms of the region's rulers for not following their real interests. And that sets the stage for Aburish's true topic, which is to find a scapegoat for this dismal state of affairs.
Here, to put it charitably, he is less than enlightening. His explanation for Arab tyranny dwells not on the foibles of culture in Arabic-speaking countries; not on their premodern legacy of dictatorship; and not on the winner-take-all atmosphere that dominates their politics. In fact, Aburish has almost nothing to say about the motor forces of Arab life; his attention is focused outward.
What emerges from Aburish's pages, in a nutshell, is that nearly all the problems of the Middle East are due to a vast British and American conspiracy that aims to perpetuate "Western political hegemony" in the regime. The British and American governments are not alone in pursuing their greedy goals; oil companies, too, are complicit, and are blamed by Aburish for, in particular, the "moral degradation" of Arab leaders. As for the citizens of Western countries, they have been too thoroughly brainwashed to resist the corrupt imperialism of their rulers. The only Westerners identified by Aburish as seeing through the vast deception are Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, two stars in the firmament of the conspiracist Left.
In pursuit of its aims, the West does not rely on anything so crude or transparent as direct rule. Instead, writes Aburish, the Anglo powers get Arab stooges to do their work for them, teaching them how to "suppress their people to stay in power and use their control of their countries to provide a stability which serves Western political and economic interests." By this means, generations of Arab elites have become nothing more than "deputy sheriffs," or, more pungently, the losing partners in a "master-slave relationship."
Blaming the West leads Aburish into some strange byways. In order to differentiate among Arab leaders, for instance, he constructs a topsy-turvy moral calculus. Those who have explicitly aligned themselves with the West--King Hussein of Jordan, various Egyptian governments, and the like--he castigates as "hideous" and "abominable"; even Yasir Arafat is put down as "a tool" of Western power. By contrast, Saddam Hussein is praised for his "eradication of illiteracy, his health-care programs, and his championing of women's rights," while the fundamentalist Muslim movements are designated the Arabs' one remaining hope. As for Israel, that country. all but disappears from the Middle East picture as Aburish draws it. However much he may loathe the Jewish state, he sees it as only another client of the West and therefore not a power in its own right.
To anyone not versed in matters Middle Eastern, the extremist bent of A Brutal Friendship might make it seem like the slightly deranged musings of one out-of-touch intellectual. Unhappily, its outlook cannot be so easily dismissed. Outlandish as it may be, the book represents a main line of Arab thinking, one that (as Fouad Ajami has noted in his recent book, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, which I reviewed in the March 1998 Commentary) is embraced as well by any number of leading politicians, military officers, religious authorities, journalists, and academics. Moreover, the principal points made
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