Ramblings

Allan C. Brownfeld

Allan C. Brownfeld is our correspondent covering Washington D.C.

To Prevent future Taliban Regimes and Terrorists, U.S. Must Promote Real Reform in the Middle East

As the war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorists winds down, policymakers in Washington must pursue policies to prevent the creation of similar regimes and groups in the future.

For too long, the U.S. has hesitated to push for economic and political reforms in countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia for fear of what would come next. As a result, we have turned a blind eye to the fact that Islamic extremism has been financed and promoted by the Saudi regime.

Jean Charles Brisard, a French security expert and co-author of the recently released book, Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth, said the American addiction to Saudi oil and arms money threatens to undermine national security in the West.

“We have to have a critical look at fifty years of foreign policy,” states Brisard. “We’ve had to close our eyes to the support (from Saudi Arabia) of the radical fundamentalists.”

Ralph Peters, a retired Army officer and author of the book, Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph?, reports that

By funding religious extremists from Michigan to Mindanao, the Saudis have done their best to destroy democracies, turn back the clock on human rights and deny religious freedom to Islamic and other populations-while the U.S. guarantees Saudi security. . . . In Indonesia, a state whose only hope of survival rests on religious tolerance, the Saudis have funded and encouraged the most extreme Muslim groups. . . . The easygoing version of Islam that long prevailed in most of Indonesia is anathema to the Saudi Wahhabi vision of religion. . . . Pakistan, seduced by Saudi money, has sown the wind and is reaping the whirlwind. Saudi religious schools, mosques and bribes encouraged fundamentalist movements that have supported terror against the U.S., India and the more liberal elements of Pakistani society. The Saudi vision of anti-Western crusading Islam essentially took over Pakistan’s intelligence services and infiltrated the military, with the result that Pakistani support not only for the Taliban, but for al Qaeda, plunged the world toward September 11.

Defenders of our refusal to promote change and reform in autocratic Middle East regimes point out that while U.S. allies in the region are corrupt and dictatorial, they are still more tolerant and pluralistic than the Islamic fundamentalists who might replace them. While there is some truth in this assessment, the results of such a policy have produced a region in which-contrary to what is happening elsewhere in the world-freedom and democracy have hardly made a showing. In its latest annual survey, released in December, New York’s Freedom House finds that seventy-five percent of the world’s countries are currently “free” or “partly free.” Only twenty-eight percent of Middle East countries could be described in these terms, a percentage that has fallen during the last twenty years.

Commentator Fareed Zakaria believes that the defeat of the Taliban provides an opportunity to move the Middle East toward modernity:

Having destroyed bin Laden’s aura of success, the U.S. now has a unique opportunity to press its victory and “drain the swamp” of Islamic extremism. This means taking the battle to its real source, which is not Afghanistan but Arabia. Washington cannot walk away from that region. Oil, strategic ties, and history will ensure our ongoing involvement. We will continue to aid the Egyptian regime, we will continue to protect the Saudi monarchy, we will continue to broker negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. The question really is, shouldn’t we ask for something in return? By not pushing these regimes, the U.S. would be making a conscious decision to let things stay as they are-to once again opt for “stability.” But it is blindingly clear that the current situation is highly unstable. . . . It is in America’s immediate security interests to try to make the regimes of the Middle East less prone to breed fanaticism and terror. And the only way to do this is to make these regimes more legitimate in the eyes of their people.

Rather than speaking of creating democratic regimes in the region, what is really needed, observers point out, are the preconditions for democracy: the rule of law, individual rights, private property, independent courts, the separation of church and state. The Saudi monarchy, for example, should be persuaded to review its funding of extremist Islam-both in its country and abroad-and to rein in its religious and educational leaders. In Egypt, President Mubarak should be told that anti-American and anti-Semitic diatribes in the state-owned press are not acceptable, nor is the media’s glorification of suicide bombers.

The Middle East today remains mired in feudalism, not capitalism, and its political life reflects this reality. What would help to move the region to modernity would be an entrepreneurial class that would be a force for change.

Professor Alan Schwartz of Yale notes that,

. . . the absence of competition in a business leads to inefficiency, but monopolies also sustain an elite class that may block new technology and new industries . . . as it guards its own power and wealth. In some Arab countries, state-protected monopolies distribute part of their profit to people in the government, creating a powerful coalition against change. Some Muslim and Arab countries also fail to provide the basic certainties that investors receive from the rule of law. Without an independent, non-corrupt judiciary and transparent law, the ability of an investor to reap the rewards of a good idea turns on the discretion of the ruler and his favorites for the moment. Where whims rule, investors vanish.

Beyond this is the question of trade. Generally, income for each citizen grows by 0.5 percent to 2 percent whenever the amount of a total national income that comes from trade grows by 1 per cent. Yet many Muslim nations discourage trade with import duties, as well as their broader economic policies.

In September, the U.S. Senate passed a bill approving a free trade agreement with Jordan, the first of its kind with an Arab nation. Jordan has also become a member of the World Trade Organization. “We need to resist the idea that the Islamic world is somehow culturally incapable of development,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, a development expert at Harvard. “There’s a tremendous opportunity to bring globalization to places that have not seen much of it.”

Islamic fundamentalism’s greatest power comes from its offering of an alternative to the poverty and hopelessness under which most people live in the Middle East. Providing a different alternative-one that would promote prosperity, trade and human rights, if not Western-style democracy, may be the best way to stem the growing tide of Islamic extremism in the region.

Timur Kuran of the University of Southern California, who studies Muslim economies, said

The West in general and Europe in particular has made a major mistake over the past fifteen years in sending signals that Islamic countries are not really part of their world. . . . The West has to do more to encourage those people-really the majority in many countries-who want to integrate, not turn their backs.

In the end, only easing the frustrations of ordinary Arabs will eliminate the appeal of Osama bin Laden and his colleagues. It is to that task that Western governments would do well to turn their attention.

Melting Pot Philosophy Is Essential for Our Demographically Changing Society

The American society is undergoing dramatic change as immigration, both legal and illegal, grows while the domestic birth rate declines. By the year 2050, it is predicted, the population will be more than fifty percent non-European ancestry.

It is possible, of course, that fears about the future American population are overblown. At the beginning of the twentieth century, many native-born Americans worried about the consequences of their own declining fertility compared with that of the European immigrants then entering the country. Lothrop Stoddard, a leader of the Immigration Restriction League, warned that Anglo-Saxons were committing “race suicide.” According to his calculations, after 200 years, 1,000 Harvard men would have left only 50 descendants, while 1,000 Romanian immigrants would have produced 100,000.

Stephen Thernstrom, Winthrop Professor of History at Harvard, notes that

There was nothing wrong with Stoddar’s math. The problem lay with his straight-line projection of the fertility differentials of his day two hundred years into the future. He failed to comprehend that in the second and third generations Romanian Americans would adjust their fertility patterns to the American norm and would produce many fewer children than did the immigrant generation. The process of assimilation to the prevailing national fertility norm continues to operate today.

Beyond this, Dr. Thernstrom points out,

Stoddard also erred in his implicit assumption that Romanian immigrants and their children would keep marrying within the group, perpetuating the cultural patterns of their country of origin. Quite the opposite happened. Romanians, like most other immigrants, often married non-Romanians, with the probability rising the longer they lived in the United States. Ethnic intermarriage complicates ethnic identification. Are you still a Romanian American if just one of your four grandparents was Romanian? What if two of the four were? The immigrants of the early twentieth century, like their nineteenth century predecessors, usually chose mates of the same ethnic background, but many of their children and a great many of their grandchildren did not. The population derived from the great waves of European immigration is by now so thoroughly interbred that its ethnic origins are difficult to disentangle and of little consequence. Assimilation via the “marital melting pot” has also occurred at a rapid pace among the immigrants of the post-World War II era. If intermarriage continues at such high levels, a very large proportion of all Americans in 2050 and even sooner will have some Hispanic, Asian or African “blood.” But it does not follow that all or even most of these individuals will identify more with their own Hispanic, Asian or African-American ancestor than with those who were non-Hispanic whites.

Still, whatever demographic changes occur in the future, assimilation can hardly be taken for granted. The melting-pot ideal of the past has been largely displaced by the idea of multiculturalism, which implies that racial and ethnic divisions should be permanent. By rejecting the idea that a common American culture binds us together, multiculturalism threatens to Balkanize our increasingly diverse society.

According to new figures released by the Census Bureau, there are 255 million people in the U.S. over the age of five. Of these, 44.9 million (17.6 percent) do not speak English at home.

Many American cities have seen an absolute decline in the use of English. Consider Jersey City. Recently The Washington Post reported that,

The Jersey Journal, the voice of plebeian Hudson County for well over a century, is dying because it’s written in English. The Journal’s publisher announced . . . that the paper, the sole surviving daily in the state’s most densely populated county, was on the critical list. . . . Declining circulation is the symptom-but language is the newspaper’s problem. English holds no special sway in these immigrant working-class cities edging the Hudson River waterfront. . . . Public school children speak fifty-two languages.

How well is New Jersey doing in transmitting American history, culture and values? An indication of the enormity of the problem we face can be seen in the revised version of the New Jersey Department of Education history standards announced in January. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin are not included-nor are the Pilgrims and the Mayflower. “This is what you call a historical irresponsibility,” said David Saxe, a Penn State University education professor who reviews state history standards nationwide for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in Washington.

When the melting pot philosophy was alive-when we sought to make Americans of those who immigrated to the U.S.-we succeeded dramatically. Those immigrants entered in an America that had self-confidence and believed in its own culture, history and values and was determined to transmit them to the newcomers. And the immigrants themselves wanted to become Americans. They did not claim the “right” to be taught in the public schools in Italian or Greek or Polish or Yiddish. They were determined to learn English. The belief in the melting pot was strong and widespread-and the melting pot worked.

Now, however, an immigration as massive as that of the nineteenth century is bringing to our shores an immigrant far different from those of the past, not only in race and ethnic background, but also in manner of relating to the American society. At the same time, American society no longer speaks of a “melting pot” but of a “mosaic” or “salad bowl,” in which differences will persist and be cultivated. If we follow such a course, we are setting the stage for the future Balkanization of our society. One need only look at the ethnic strife in other countries to see where such a philosophy can lead.

Discussing the current immigration to America, The Economist of London provided this assessment:

Some Americans are forsaking the familiar concept of the great American melting pot for a new one-the mosaic. They argue that Americans, especially new immigrants and blacks, are expected to conform too closely to a social model built by white Europeans. As America grows more diverse, they say, so it should learn to become a society that reflects cultures rather than absorbs them. Precisely the opposite lesson should be drawn. Growing diversity makes it all the more important that America should strive to mold one citizenry from many peoples. This molding, more than anything else, is what will allow the country to remain relatively open to outsiders. America’s diversity is indeed worth cherishing. But there is a difference between (a) celebrating variety and (b) deliberately promoting or entrenching divisions along ethnic lines.

In The Economist’s view,

America’s traditional response to the problem of assimilation was to treat each immigrant as an individual. . . . The essential American promise is that individuals will rise or fall on their own merits. . . . Waving the banner of diversity, opponents of the melting pot are in danger of promoting ethnic division as a matter of public policy. . . . The government should not only oppose legal distinctions between ethnic groups; it should also do more to build a common American culture through education. It is reasonable for blacks and Hispanics to want their children to be taught the history of their forefathers. But it is also essential that American schools go on providing children with a core of common knowledge about the nation they live in. If children are taught to see themselves as members of an ethnic group, rather than as Americans, the U.S. will rapidly become disunited.

According to the multiculturalist world-view, Linda Chavez points out,

African-Americans, Puerto Ricans or Chinese-Americans living in New York City have more in common with persons of their ancestral group living in Lagos or San Juan or Hong Kong than they do with other New Yorkers who are white. Culture becomes a fixed entity, transmitted, as it were, in the genes, rather than through experience.

Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. says,

Multiculturalists would have our educational system reinforce, promote and perpetuate separate ethnic communities and do so at the expense of the idea of a common culture and a common national identity.

By coming to the U.S., immigrants are voting with their feet for our system and our way of life. We should help them to assimilate into our society, not to recreate here the very systems they have escaped at such high cost. If ever the melting pot philosophy was needed, it is at this time of dramatic demographic change. If we do not learn the very real lessons of our own history, future generations will pay a high price for what appears to be our society’s rejection of the very things that draw immigrants to our shores.