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07/20/2004:

"Why Tyrants Rule Arabs"

by Gwynne Dyer Toronto Star
For 60 years, the West has propped up Arab despots, creating poverty and illiteracy where education once thrived.

It was just a random statistic, but a telling one: Only 300 books were translated into Arabic last year. That is about one foreign title per million Arabs. For comparison's sake, Greece translated 1,500 foreign-language books, or about 150 titles per million Greeks. Why is the Arab world so far behind, not only in this but in practically all the arts and sciences?

The first-order answer is poverty and lack of education: Almost half of Arabic-speaking women are illiterate.

But the Arab world used to be the most literate part of the planet; what went wrong? Tyranny and economic failure, obviously. But why is tyranny such a problem in the Arab world? That brings us to the nub of the matter.

In a speech in November, 2003, President George W. Bush revisited his familiar refrain about how the West has to remake the Arab world in its own image in order to stop the terrorism: "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe ... because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty" — as if the Arab world had wilfully chosen to be ruled by these corrupt and incompetent tyrannies.

But the West didn't just "excuse and accommodate" these regimes. It created them, in order to protect its own interests — and it spent the latter half of the 20th century keeping them in power for the same reason.full article