On the Way to Market
Arab Economics After the Gulf War
On February 6, 1991, Secretary of State James Baker admitted before the House of Foreign Affairs Committee that economic factors, particularly widespread Arab resentment that oil wealth was not more equitably distributed, had played a role in the dynamics leading to the Gulf war and would remain one of the primary “sources of conflict” in the region. To ease these tensions, he proposed the creation of an economic organization through which oil-rich states could fund the reconstruction and development of their poorer neighbors. [1] The following day, Baker advocated the creation of a multinational “Middle East Development Bank” to attain these objectives. [2]
From the Editors
Parsa, Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution
Misagh Parsa, Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution (Rutgers, 1989).
Misagh Parsa’s work successfully lays out the essential factors behind the Iranian revolution and the subsequent triumph of the clergy in establishing a consolidated Islamic state. His text provides a sharp analysis of the social factors involved and does an outstanding job of integrating primary sources and scholarship.
Choueiri, Arab History and the Nation-State
Marxism in the United States developed on the margin of society. Shunned by organized labor, it has confronted this society as an outsider. Until the 1970s, the most successful American Marxist works of scholarship were macro studies by economists, written as if from a distance and emphasizing economic more than political and cultural aspects of rule and resistance to rule. Then the tableau in political economy began to widen. The writings of Eugene Genovese were an important part of this process. Politics was returning.
Egyptian Political Economy
Robert Bianchi, Unruly Corporatism: Associational Life in Twentieth-Century Egypt (Oxford, 1989.)
Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton, 1988).
These two important new books address some of the central questions concerning state/society relations in a Middle Eastern and, more widely, a Third World context. Both are written from the statist perspective found in most contemporary political science, but manage to ask new questions of relatively familiar material.
Al Miskin
After reporting for years from Beirut and Jerusalem for the New York Times, Thomas Friedman is now featured as that newspaper’s diplomatic correspondent and resident expert on the Middle East, his status enhanced by a cozy tennis court relationship with Secretary of State James Baker. An article in the Times of October 28, 1990, gives us some insight into Friedman’s thinking — and should make us worry even more about how elite policymakers and their buddies in the media think about the Middle East.
Rai Tide Rising
Two Algerian rai tunes make the top ten of the Village Voice music critics’s poll in 1989. Rai is now heard daily on college radio from the University of Pennsylvania to Oregon State. Urban dance clubs with “world music” nights feature rai discs along with their usual mix of reggae, salsa, zouk and ju-ju. Tower Records stocks rai cassettes and CDs in its nationwide outlets. What, in the words of Marvin Gaye, is goin’ on? Why are post-liberation Algerian pop singers winning a wide Western audience while an earlier generation of popular Arab singers like Umm Kulthoum, Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab and Fairouz never did?
New Soviet Thinking on the Middle East
Grigorii Grigorevich Kosach teaches at the Academy of Social Sciences in Moscow. Some of his works translated into English include The Comintern and the East (Moscow, 1981), and “Formation of Communist Movements in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon in the 1920s and 1930s, ” in The Revolutionary Process in the East: Past and Present (Moscow, 1985). His latest work, on the formation of the Communist Party of Palestine, will be published shortly by Hauka Press in Moscow. Kosach has lived and worked in various countries in the Arab world, including Kuwait, Syria and Algeria. Garay Menicucci, who spent the 1989-1990 academic year in Leningrad and Moscow conducting dissertation research, interviewed Kosach in June 1990 and translated the interview from Russian.
America’s Egypt
Open almost any study of Egypt produced by an American or an international development agency and you are likely to find it starting with the same simple image. The question of Egypt’s economic development is almost invariably introduced as a problem of geography versus demography, pictured by describing the narrow valley of the Nile River, surrounded by desert, crowded with rapidly multiplying millions of inhabitants.
A 1980 World Bank report on Egypt provides a typical example. “The geographical and demographic characteristics of Egypt delineate its basic economic problem,” the book begins:
After the Cold War, Economic War?
If the Cold War can be said to have had any virtues, at least it kept the major capitalist powers from each others’ throats. Of course, this peace came at some cost — repression and manipulation of client states, proxy wars in the Third World, squandering money on weapons of unimaginable horror, and a constant if subliminal fear of universal annihilation. But given centuries of history during which economic and political rivalries were resolved through increasingly bloody wars, five decades of relative peace is no mean achievement.
Report from Baghdad
“Eventually There Can Only Be an Arab Solution”
Amb. ‘Abdallah al-Ashtal is Yemen’s representative to the United Nations. He served as ambassador for the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen from 1971 until May 1990, when he became the representative of the newly unified Republic of Yemen. In March and December 1990, he chaired the UN Security Council. James Paul interviewed him in New York City on December 26, 1990.
How would you assess the role of the United Nations in the Gulf crisis?
Even before the crisis, the UN had begun to work differently. One could sense a spirit of accommodation between the superpowers. The Security Council was no longer a forum for rhetoric but a place to lay out possibilities and try to come to a common position.
The Use and Abuse of the UN in the Gulf Crisis
Is the United Nations at “a new threshold” in its history as a result of the Security Council actions in the Gulf crisis? This needs careful assessment. There has long been a tendency to veer from indifference to short-term exploitation of the UN and then, if this does not turn out well for the United States, to fall back to UN bashing.
There is one basic fact. The government of Iraq committed an act of aggression under international law and the UN Charter’s Article 2.4: It used force against the territorial integrity and the political independence of a state recognized in the community of nations.
Calculating “Collateral Damage”
Early reports of casualties in Iraq provided only a scattershot picture of damage to residential areas and loss of civilian life, not a clear sense of scope or scale. Only on February 11, after four weeks of intense bombing, did Iraqi officials acknowledge that civilian deaths were in the range of 5,000-7,000. Then, on February 13, two US “smart bombs” smashed into a Baghdad bomb shelter, incinerating hundreds of women and children gathered there.
Abu Iyad
The assassination of Abu Iyad (Salah Khalaf), together with two others, in Tunis in mid-January, was unquestionably an event of great moment for the PLO and for the historic leadership of Fatah which has dominated the organization for over two decades. Abu Iyad was the fifth of the 15 members of Fatah’s Central Committee elected in 1980 to be assassinated — the others being Abu Jihad (Khalil al-Wazir), Majid Abu Shahrar, Brig. Abu al-Walid (Saad Sayil), and Abu al-Hawl (Hayil ‘Abd al-Hamid), who was killed together with Abu Iyad.
From the Editors
Message of National Churches of Christ on Gulf Crisis
A Message of National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA on the Gulf and Middle East Crisis, November 14-16, 1990
[Excerpts]
We stand at a unique moment in human history, when all around us seemingly impregnable walls are being broken down and deep historical enmities are being healed. And yet, ironically, at such a moment, our own nation seems to be poised at the brink of war in the Middle East. “What then are we to say about these things?” (Romans 8:31)….
Cooke, War’s Other Voices
Miriam Cooke, War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (Cambridge, 1988).
Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile
Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882-1954 (Princeton, 1987).
