A Brutal Friendship: The West and The Arab Elite Paperback – July 15, 1998

Great book!

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). (...)

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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

Said Aburish's book does a number of tasks. It exposes Britain and the USA's complicity in the current state of affairs in the Middle East more clearly than any other book I have read, (perhaps with the exception of Chomsky's World Orders Old and New.) At the same time, he brings out the truth, (or what appears to be the truth,)about the various coups in the region. In addition to this, his analysis of the situation in the Lebanon is masterly; but it was his exposure of the Saudi Regime for what it really is, which shocked me. Aburish's analysis of the progressive leaders of the Gulf, (Nasser and Kassem in particular,) is also very rewarding. He goes on to analyze the behaviour and attitude of the main Orientalists as well. But perhaps the two most important messages of Aburish's book are these: 1.) With the undermining of Arab nationalism and socialism in the Middle East, the final radical force left in the area is Islamic fundamentalism, and this is the one force which the region's rulers cannot overcome. They and the West nurtured it, and now will suffer for it. 2.) The Arab 'elite' (i.e. the Beirut on the Thames,) is so distant from the Arab population, that it is simply unfit to rule it. One senses a strong element of class warfare between the Westernized, hedonistic elites, and the radicalized, puritanical, masses. The former, in countries like Saudi Arabia use Islam to justify their corrupt rule - but it is the latter who are truly Islamic. Given its vast survey of the situation in the Middle East and its origins, I can only conclude that Aburish's book is well worth reading, and is a sharp guide not just to the Middle East, but to the Western powers who must share responsibility for the mess it's in.

This book seeks to critique the west for its support of Arab regimes who have frequently abused human rights. Aburish draws a parallel between American support for radical Islamic fundamentalists and minority leaders against the `masses' who would have selected someone else. Several nations are picked out for criticism among them Lebanon's Maronites, Syria's Alewite Asad, Saudis Wahabis, Iraq's Sunni Saddam and Jordan's King Hussien and even Arafat. While true that all these leaders were corrupt and probably didn't have the average Arab in his best interest it is a cliché to simply blame the west.
The reality is the House of Saud established itself, without western support, in the 1920s. The Jordanian Hashemite King was installed by the British but the majority of Jordanians are Palestinians. Is the argument that Jordan should become a Palestinian state? Wouldn't this mean that the Palestinians would no longer be able to complain that they were `stateless' and `refugees'? Although the Sunni's of Iraq are the minority it was Sunni wealth and traditions of governance that brought them, rather then the mountain Kurds or `Swamp' Shia Arabs to power. The West actually supported King Faisal in Iraq only to see him overthrown by the Sunni Ba'athists. In Lebanon it is true the West supported the Maronites but it is also true the west abandoned the Maronites during the Lebanese Civil War. In Syria the west played almost no role in putting Asad, an Alewite, into power. And the west certainly played no role in choosing Arafat as leader of the PLO.
So this book is a wonderful study. The character assassinations and descriptions of fumbling, barbaric Arab leaders and strongmen is refreshing from the usual hum-drum academic works on these regimes. The text is lively and fast paced, but unlike most Aburish books, the critiques have been heard before and most of them don't entirely stand up to scrutiny. In the end the West did support Saddam and the Saudis, but this was only after most of these strongmen had already put themselves into power, rather then the west conspiring to suppress the Arab majorities. With the obvious exception of Jordan's King Hussien, who actually runs one of the more free and open Arab countries, so in reality the west has helped those Arab masses. Also not touched on is the fact that the Western support for Islamic fundamentalism against communism has recently backfired in the rise of Osama and anti-western fundamentalism. Here the book shows that it is outdated. And probably the book is also flawed in not acknowledging that the west cleared retreated and failed to install its leaders in Lebanon, despite intervention in the 50s and 80s.
Seth J. Frantzman