Bernard Lewis

To speak of dictatorship as being the immemorial way of doing things in the Middle East is simply untrue. It shows ignorance of the Arab past, contempt for the Arab present, and lack of concern for the Arab future. Creating a democratic political and social order in Iraq or elsewhere in the region will not be easy. But it is possible, and there are increasing signs that it has already begun.

A little-noticed declaration of jihad by Usama bin Ladin in an Arabic newspaper underscores the Islamist's main grievance: infidel U.S. troops in Arabia.

The Middle East has probably been debating Western modernity longer than anywhere else, as many try to become modern without becoming Western. Since the sixteenth century, when British ships and trading companies sailed in, the region has become all too aware of Western superiority on the battlefield and in the marketplace. Middle Easterners have busily adopted or rejected Western innovations, trying to catch up or blaming the West for their predicament, or both. Meanwhile, their glorious history and their forebears' contribution to Western civilization is often buried and forgotten. In every age the dominant civilization defines modernity and claims the credit. Once it was Islam, now it is the West.

The Gulf War has affected regional political consciousness and undermined traditional percpetions, e.g. of pan-Arab unity and of the effectiveness of oil as a weapon. Its chief impact will be to force the countries of the Middle East into realizing that they must start to define their own security interests

During the months that followed the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967, the view gradually gained ground in the West that the Arab defeat represented a considerable Russian victory. Some more imaginative observers argued that the Russians had deliberately engineered both the war and the defeat in order to achieve this result; others, without going as far as to ascribe conscious purpose, nevertheless agreed that, by increasing the hostility of the Arabs to the West and their dependence on the Soviet Union, the crisis, the war and their aftermath had greatly strengthened the Soviet political and strategic position in the Middle East and correspondingly weakened that of the United States. Observers and commentators spoke with mounting anxiety about the growth of Soviet influence in the area and the threat which it offered to the interests of the free world.