Seize the Moment

by Richard Nixon

  This nightmare scenario will never materialize. The Muslim world is too large and too diverse to march to the beat of a single drummer. Many mistakenly assume that the Muslim world is equivalent to the Middle East. But more than 850 million people—one-sixth of humanity—live in the thirty-seven countries of the Muslim world. These nations have 190 ethnic groups who speak hundreds of distinct languages and dialects and who belong to three main religious sects—the Sunnis, the Shias, and the Sufis—and dozens of minor ones. They cover a 10,000-mile-long swath of territory extending from Morocco to Yugoslavia, from Turkey to Pakistan, from the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union to the tropics of Indonesia. More Muslims live in China than on the Arabian peninsula, and more live in Indonesia than in the entire Middle East. The former Soviet Union, with over 50 million Muslims, has more than any Middle Eastern country except Turkey. At current birth rates, there will be more Muslims than Russians in the former Soviet Union in the next century.

  Only two common elements exist in the Muslim world: the faith of Islam and the problems of political turbulence. Islam is not only a religion but also the foundation of a major civilization. We speak of the “Muslim world” as a single entity not because of any Islamic politburo guiding its policies but because individual nations share common political and cultural currents with the entire Muslim civilization. The same political rhythms are played throughout the Muslim world, regardless of the differences between the individual countries. Just as all Western countries have parties that advocate the free market, the welfare state, and socialism, the Islamic countries have groups that subscribe to the main political currents of the Muslim world—fundamentalism, radicalism, and modernism. This commonalty of faith and politics breeds a loose but real solidarity: when a major event occurs in one part of the Muslim world, it inevitably reverberates in the others.

  The rivalries in the Muslim world have made it a caldron of conflict. The short list of these conflicts includes Morocco versus Algeria; Libya versus Algeria; Libya versus Chad; the Arab world against Israel; Jordan versus Saudi Arabia; Syria versus Jordan; Syria versus Lebanon; Saudi Arabia versus the small Gulf states; Saudi Arabia versus Yemen; Iraq versus Syria; Iraq versus Kuwait and Saudi Arabia; Iraq versus Iran; the Arab Gulf states versus Iran; Pakistan versus Afghanistan; India versus Pakistan and Bangladesh; and Indonesia versus Malaysia and New Guinea. Since many countries are artificial composites of several nations or ethnic groups, potential internal strife pervades the region. Many states in the Muslim world are future Lebanons waiting to happen.

  Demographic, economic, and political trends make conflict increasingly inevitable. The global population explosion centers in the Muslim world. The population of the Middle East alone will double by the year 2010. At the same time, the economies of the region will not grow sufficiently to prevent a drop in living standards, thereby undercutting the meager ability of governments to buy off threats to stability and peace. In many areas, basic resources—such as water—will become ever more scarce, prompting disputes or even wars over their control. National borders, many of which are artificial creations of the European colonial powers, have increasingly been challenged, both between countries and from minorities within countries. Brittle political regimes, mostly authoritarian dictatorships or traditional monarchies, depend on their monopoly of force rather than support of their people to stay in power. Political liberalization has led more often to fragmentation than to democracy.

  All of these conflicts and problems have unfolded in the most militarized region of the underdeveloped world. In 1990, the countries of the Muslim world spent a total of over 8 percent of their GNP on the military, while the Western figure was less than 5 percent. Iraq allocated over 8 percent of its GNP to the military; Syria, 11 percent; Saudi Arabia, 17 percent; Egypt, 8 percent; and Pakistan, 7 percent. More ominously, the area has become the focal point of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. Some of its most aggressive states—Iraq, Syria, and Libya—already have the capacity to build chemical weapons. Of the fifteen developing countries armed with ballistic missiles, nine are part of the Muslim world. Iraq and Pakistan have made great strides toward developing their own nuclear weapons, and Algeria has embarked on a similar program. The two most perilous nuclear flash points—Israel versus its Arab neighbors and Pakistan versus India—involve countries of the Muslim world.

  I have visited thirteen of the thirty-seven Muslim countries over the past thirty-eight years—Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Sudan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Egypt, Afghanistan, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, and Syria. I have also traveled to the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Their leaders and people are proud of their heritage. Most of them have staunchly opposed communism. Whittaker Chambers once observed, “Communism is never stronger than the failure of other faiths.” Islam has stood up to that test in many ways better than Christianity has. Except for the former South Yemen, Soviet influence in the Muslim world was based not on the appeal of Communist ideas but on the persuasive power of Soviet arms sales to such countries as Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Somalia, and to Egypt before 1973. More often, religious opposition to the ideology of communism was an insurmountable obstacle to Soviet expansionism in the Muslim world.

  Few Americans are aware of the rich heritage of the Islamic world. They remember only that the sword of Muhammad and his followers advanced the Muslim faith into Asia, Africa, and even Europe and look condescendingly on the religious wars of the region. They overlook the fact that Islam has no doctrine of terrorism and that only three centuries have passed since Christians engaged in religious wars in Europe.

  While Europe languished in the Middle Ages, the Islamic civilization enjoyed its golden age. The Muslim world made enormous contributions to science, medicine, and philosophy. In his book The Age of Faith, Will Durant observed that key advances in virtually all fields were achieved by Muslims in this period. Avicenna was the greatest writer on medicine, al-Razi the greatest physician, al-Biruni the greatest geographer, al-Haitham the greatest optician, Jabir the greatest chemist, and Averroës one of the greatest philosophers. Arab scholars were instrumental in developing the scientific method. As Durant commented, “When Roger Bacon proclaimed that method to Europe, five hundred years after Jabir, he owed his illumination to the Moors of Spain, whose light had come from the Moslem East.” When the great figures of the European Renaissance pushed forward the frontier of knowledge, they saw further because they stood on the shoulders of the giants of the Muslim world.

  Those achievements represent what the Muslim world has been in the past. They also point to what it could become in the future, if the deadly cycles of war and political instability can be arrested. We should adopt policies to channel the long-term historical evolution of the Muslim world in constructive directions. At the same time, we should tackle the immediate problems—such as Persian Gulf security and the Arab-Israeli conflict—that threaten to trigger further bloodshed. Unless we succeed in meeting these challenges, the cradle of civilization could become its grave.

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  The Muslim world is a vital civilization searching for its historical identity. In the 1950s and 1960s, it escaped the bonds of colonialism. It subsequently drove down the ideological blind alleys of nonalignment, pan-Arabism, and reactionary fundamentalism. In the 1990s and beyond, these countries will renew the search for their place in the world. The United States needs an active policy to affect that evolution in constructive ways.

  The greatest stumbling block to developing such policies has been the tendency to lump all these countries into one category. Many Americans, weary of the endless array of fanatics chanting anti-Western slogans in the streets, tend to view all Muslim nations as adversaries. The Muslim faith represents a thread of unity that binds the politics of these countries together, but it does not weave them into a cohesive bloc. The policies of each country in the Muslim world have less to do with Islam than with how Islam ha
s interacted with its national culture and traditions.

  Some political solidarity does exist among Muslim nations. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Moscow’s relations with Muslim countries from Morocco to Indonesia chilled, and those with states such as Saudi Arabia went into the deep freeze. The perception that the United States backs Israel uncritically—providing billions of dollars in aid but not demanding action on the Palestinian issue—has been a major impediment to closer U.S. ties with all Muslim countries. Generally, however, while Islam provides these nations with a common worldview, it does not come with a ready-made political platform.

  Islam is not monolithic politically. Every great faith is susceptible to multiple interpretations that support multiple political approaches or orientations. In the West, Christianity once blessed monarchies through the belief in the divine right of kings and now provides a key pillar of democratic thought through the belief in the fundamental dignity of the individual. The reinterpretation of the Christian political tradition accompanied the transformation of the dominant form of Western government. Islam is also susceptible to varied interpretations and evolutionary change, as made evident by the fact that such disparate figures as Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, Anwar Sadat, and Zia ul-Haq have all claimed its mandate for their rule.

  To operate in the Muslim world, U.S. policymakers must maneuver within a snake pit of venomous ideological conflicts and national rivalries. Even among fundamentalists, doctrinal clashes are sharp and sometimes violent. In tiny Lebanon, fundamentalist terrorists were unified only in the loosest sense, with virtually every cell differing with the others over doctrine. We should recognize that the Muslim world’s diverse political movements fall within three basic currents of thought:

  Fundamentalism. Painfully familiar televised images—blind-folded U.S. hostages paraded before our embassy in Teheran, 241 Marines killed in the truck bombing of their barracks in Beirut, and the ghostly figures of Americans kidnapped and held prisoner in southern Lebanon—sum up the political thrust of extreme Islamic fundamentalists on the world scene. They are motivated by a consuming hatred of the West and a determination to restore the superiority of Islamic civilization by resuscitating the past. They seek to impose the shari‘a, the code of law based on the Koran that recognizes no separation of church and state. Though they look to the past as a guide for the future, they are not conservatives but revolutionaries. Before they build the new, they intend to destroy the old.

  Radicalism. Dictators and one-party states—legitimized by radical nationalistic ideologies—control several of the countries in the Muslim world. Some, such as Libya’s Qaddafi, resemble Mussolini’s dictatorship. Others, such as Syria’s Hafiz Assad and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, command brutal totalitarian regimes that would have made Stalin proud. Just as hostile to the West as the fundamentalists, the radicals trade on their opposition to “imperialism” to mobilize support among the people and often made common cause with the Soviet Union to undermine the United States and its allies. Their power rests not on the charisma of their leaders, but on the ruthless efficiency of their police and security apparatus. In the town of Hama in 1982, for example, Assad brutally slaughtered twenty thousand men, women, and children who dared to oppose his rule.

  Modernism. Most prominent but least visible, the modernist political current seeks to integrate the countries of the Muslim world into the modern world, both economically and politically. Tolerance marks the key thrust of modernist Islam, with the nations of the West not condemned as “unbelievers” but embraced as other peoples “of the book.” Some modernist states, such as Turkey and Pakistan, are democracies. Others, such as Egypt and Indonesia, are relatively open societies but fall short of Western democratic standards. The ballot box, however, is the recognized source of political legitimacy. The central message of modernist political leaders is that their countries must combine the best of the West with their own nations’ cultures and social mores.

  We should never equate the actions of Islamic extremists with the faith of Islam. The extreme fundamentalists are highly visible, but their electoral appeal is weak. Though their numbers have grown in Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Algeria in recent years, they have taken power only in Iran, where they have been discredited by a decade of thuggery and pointless carnage in the Iran-Iraq war. Fundamentalists can fill the streets in the Muslim world with vocal demonstrators, but they cannot yet take power through the polls.

  The people of the Muslim world are candidates for revolution. They are young: over 60 percent are under twenty-five years of age. They are poor: their average per capita income, including the oil-rich Gulf states, is only $1,600 a year compared with $21,000 in the United States. Most have no voice in their government: only 27 percent of the people in the Muslim world live in democratic countries. Muslim fundamentalists appeal to the people less for what they stand for than for what they stand against—the status quo, which provides no relief from the present and no hope for the future, and the empty materialist ideologies of Soviet communism and Western consumerism.

  We should support the modernists in the Muslim world, in their interest and in ours. They need to give their people a positive alternative to the ideologies of extreme fundamentalism and radical secularism. The refusal of the Kuwaiti royal family to adopt meaningful democratic reforms after the liberation of their country from Saddam Hussein is a shocking example of the insensitivity of too many nonelected authoritarian rulers in the Muslim world. In supporting a friendly but nondemocratic ruler, we should make it clear that we do not support government systems that give no voice to the people over whom they rule.

  In charting our course, we must know who are our friends and who are our enemies. Though this might sound like a truism, U.S. policymakers have repeatedly honored this basic principle in the breach. Trading arms for hostages with the extreme fundamentalist regime in Iran and selling billions of dollars of arms to the radical leaders of Iraq are just two recent examples of the United States viewing its sworn enemies through rose-colored glasses. Those who would praise Syria and Iran for winning the release of some Western hostages in Lebanon would repeat the error. You do not praise a kidnapper for releasing his captives. Damascus and Teheran should not derive any benefits for doing today what they should have done seven years ago. It is unlikely that the Assads, Rafsanjanis, and Qaddafis of the Islamic world will choose to become Muslim Havels.

  The key to a U.S. policy of discriminating engagement is to undertake strategic cooperation only with modernist regimes and to limit our ties with extreme fundamentalist and radical regimes to tactical cooperation. Because we share common goals with the modernists, our cooperation should cover the full range of economic and security issues. Because our values and interests clash with those of the extreme fundamentalists and radicals, our links with them should not move beyond the requirements of the moment. We should work with them when their power earns them a place at the table, but we should not enter a wide-ranging partnership with them. We should not completely isolate the radicals and fundamentalists through trade embargoes and similar policies, but we should not naively try to search out “moderates” in regimes such as Iran’s or to court leaders such as Iraq’s by taking no position on their border disputes with their neighbors. While we should not cut them off, we should certainly not build them up. We should adopt a hardheaded policy of quid pro quo cooperation on a case-by-case basis.

  Many observers in retrospect condemn U.S. policy during the Iran-Iraq war. They express shock that we alternately helped one side and then the other depending on the tide of battle. They are only partly right. Our interests demanded that neither side emerge as a clear-cut victor, and the Reagan administration acted correctly in playing both sides. In allowing arms sales to Iraq, the mistake was to exceed the amounts needed to check Iran’s offensive capabilities, thereby enabling Saddam Hussein to become a military menace after the war. We should maintain a deliberate distance when engaging in unavoidable ta
ctical cooperation with such regimes. The hard lesson of our experience with Iraq is that today’s tacit friend can become tomorrow’s mortal enemy. In the case of Saddam Hussein, it cost $100 billion and 148 American lives to reverse the error.

  Today, many analysts contend that a “window of opportunity” exists to developing cooperative relations with President Assad of Syria. Prudence argues otherwise. We should have no illusions in dealing with Assad. He did not join the U.S.-led coalition against Iraq because of a change of heart. Instead, he saw the chance to knock his rival, Saddam Hussein, out of contention for the title of champion of the radical Arab world. Syria also won a free hand in Lebanon and cashed in with a $3-billion aid package from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. We must remember that Assad still seeks to advance his geopolitical goals through military might and remains one of the principal supporters of international terrorism.

  To affect the historical evolution of the Muslim world, we should not fashion a grand “Muslimpolitik” that applies one policy to all these countries. Instead, we should identify key pivot points for our presence. We should cultivate partnerships with select modernist countries that share common interests or parallel agendas and that carry real weight in the region. By working with them on political and security issues and by providing advice and assistance to further their economic development, their gradual emergence as success stories within the Muslim world will enhance the prospects for modernist forces throughout the region. Over one or two decades, they could become economic and political magnets, poles of attraction moving the entire region in a positive direction through peaceful change.