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50.0%ANMag Issue 24 Personal Maintenance
A Year of Woe
By Mohamad Sobh, Staff Editor
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia – Another year has passed, and the woes of the world have not only increased in volume, but also in lethality. Pyongyang's nuclear program may be the only issue resolved in the year past, but several other tribulations have sprung up.
This year of woe has shown us some very peculiar contradictions and paradoxes. We have seen a hundred people grow richer, juxtaposed against millions who've gone under the poverty line, we've seen famines develop into mass deaths and we've seen people dine on exquisite cuisines; left untouched by the end of their lavish parties. We have seen the good, the bad and the ugly as they say; nonetheless the bad and the ugly far outstrip the good in the race to the finish line. When will it end, you may ask? I answer with a micro-social discourse.
Core Values
Families are the pillars of society, at least in our Arab reality. But nowadays, families are falling apart, brothers are dire enemies and divorces are becoming more common by the minute. If we do not try and mend this particular sociological virus, we will certainly end up as dysfunctional as families in the so-called West. Going on a tangent here, I would like to state for the record that if this West's idea of liberalism, freedom and democracy is the annihilation of the most fundamental of units in society, then I will take the lesser of the two evils, be it a constitutional monarchy, socialist republic or whichever state system that protects and propagates core values. I stress the word "core", since it would be infeasible to disseminate complex manuscripts such as Plato's "The Republic" and expect the masses to decipher them on their own, for if that were to happen, severe polarization would occur and factions would start appearing within the ostensibly united nation. The Lebanese Constitution is a prime example of why ambiguous texts should not exist, look at England for God's sake, they don't even have a constitution! Point being, observing how the Constitution has become a sort of Homeric epic where every "professor" infers and deduces at his/her leisure, we should let the nation's greater interests guide us, and not some silly interpretation aimed at extracting only the points benefiting the interpreter at the time. Am I hinting at cultural hegemony? No I am not, the idea boils down to giving the people a push in the right direction, but then again, it is the author of this article, my dear self, who thinks that this may be the right direction, as a matter of fact by the time we congregate how many "right direction"-discourses spring out, we'll sure to have covered the whole compass!
The idea is to have these values direct the individual towards developing healthy relationships, and as a result ingraining within him/her the traits necessary which will allow him/her to identify with the nation as a whole. Thus it is our belief that this step will help develop the nationalist personality, and although we do not encourage extremism under any circumstances, we have been led to deduce that certain types of extremism must take precedence over others, because extremism will continue to exist far after we are gone. This idea developed after watching, with mounting disgust, the ping pong matches across Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq. Political and sectarian allegiances have segregated the aforementioned countries, with clear cut cantons springing up in each. Gaza versus the West Bank in Palestine, Sunni versus Shiite versus Kurd districts in Iraq and one street block versus the other in Lebanon.
Is the region unconsciously asking for a revised Sykes-Picot, but that is assuming that the Brits, Russians and French did us justice in the first place in 1915, which they did not by the way.
Our Affliction
A few weeks back I heard an Arab proverb, roughly translated as such; discontent kills opinion. Again I am humbled by this age-old Arab wisdom, but saddened by reality. The Arabs have the potential to rival the most powerful of economic powers in the world nowadays; we have the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) and the Arab League as established bodies representing countries of the Gulf and the Arabs as a whole respectively. Recently, December 10, Saudi Arabia released its budget for the year 2008, and dear Lord was it not something to be proud of. Revenues were projected at SR450 billion ($120 billion) and spending at SR410 billion ($109 billion), never forgetting that the Saudi government has historically used conservative oil prices in its estimates, evident in 2007's revenues of SR621.5 billion ($165.7 billion).
Nonetheless it is not all white and rosy as they say. Our Arab nations have failed to agree on tangible and strategic decisions, with the exception of the 2002 Arab Summit in Beirut where we launched the Arab Peace Initiative, a legendary proposal which gave us the upper hand against Israel, a country that has launched offensives against all countries bordering it, making it a rather unwanted neighbor, unless it starts exhibiting actions that can be classified as non-hostile. But it seems Arab consensus ends here, as if they are waiting for the Peace Initiative to take effect to decide whether it is worth it to reach a consensus on a new issue.
In the Middle East we are sitting on around 50% of the world's proven oil reserves (around 40% if we discount Iraq), thus think about our potential ladies and gentlemen, of where we can reach, and where we should have reached a long time ago.
The Good
The Noble Prize for Medicine was awarded to Mario R. Capecchi, 70, of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City; Oliver Smithies, 82, of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill; and Sir Martin J. Evans, 66, of Cardiff University in Wales who had gone a long way in identifying and targeting genes that trigger the development of lethal diseases such as Alzheimer and cancer, to name a few. This will allow us mere mortals to eliminate these rather undesirable genes, not soon, but soon enough, while opening the door to producing something much more controversial, the perfect human specimen. Again human greed will surely lead us down a filthy corridor, turning a discovery that is simply beautiful and outstanding into something reminiscent of Hitler's lust for the Aryan race. Have I lost my faith in humanity? Sadly it is history that has taught me this lesson, and not laborious deductive reasoning.
Digressing into animal diseases, reports about H5N1, or Bird Flu as commonly labeled, still made headlines during 2007, but seemingly on a lesser scale than in 2006. Of course, as is the case with the most important of issues, we have heard only half the story on a very miniscule scale. For we have come to expect news to be distorted, half-true or in the extreme cases, completely fictitious. As when the Allies entered Berlin, the father of Nazi propaganda Joseph Goebbels proclaimed that victory was still attainable, or when Iraqi information minister Sahhaf fearlessly stated that "Baghdad will be a cemetery for these infidels!" As we know, Baghdad fell a few short days after this bold declaration.
We have heard U.S. intelligence reports stating that Iran had discontinued all war-related nuclear operations starting 2003, but why do we hear of a new round of talks commencing between U.N. veto-holders to implement a third set of sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran? Is this new charade too similar for comfort to the WMD pretext-scenario in Iraq? Speaking of Iraq, a Pentagon report also reported a 62% decrease in terrorist attacks as compared to March. That is definitely something encouraging, but Iraq's progress should not be measured by how much terrorist attacks have decreased, but rather, by a much more intricate and intangible means, in reference to the sectarian virus, and by how much has that escalated since the start of the invasion. A possible means of measuring success in Iraq would be by using a cost-benefit analysis model, by seeing how much we (speaking from the U.S. government point of view) have benefited the Iraqi people versus how much we have caused them in misery, instability, human capital leakage through death and migration, and so on and so forth. The list can go on for rolls and rolls of parchment, but is my efforts to be objective; I also need to identify the benefits instilled upon the Iraqi's through the invasion. Yes, democracy is now the foundation of the Iraqi political system, but funny how the vast majority of the elected officials are pro-U.S.A. Yes, the massacres performed by Saddam's regime are long gone, but on aggregate, aren't the casualties of the invasion chillingly higher to the number of people who perished under Saddam's reign? According to the Iraqi Red Crescent, widows total one million, orphans five million and so far, 3000 U.S. soldiers have died.
I named this section "The Good" with the aim of writing about just that, but sadly the section's topics evolved on their own to blow the whistle on the evil beneath. The names of Iran and Iraq have come to be connoted with the tidings of war, thus even when positive news comes to surface, propaganda and/or reality has programmed us to become skeptics.
∑ Sigma ∑
We would have liked to digress into the Lebanese situation with intricate detail, but to give 2007 justice, we will only paint the broad strokes of the Lebanese scene, because our main concern is with the Middle East, a volatile region of ever changing alliances, under-the-table deals and deceptions.
It seems Lebanon will remain headless (as the media have dubbed our calamity) until the coming Arab summit in Damascus sometime in March, which will feature a Saudi-Syrian "reconciliation" of the sorts. The Lebanese Central Bank recently announced a $95 million decrease in foreign currency reserves, a troubling indicator, and very much real. Nonetheless we need not worry, the Saudi’s, much thanked, recently deposited $1 billion dollars in our Central Bank, as an illustration of how Arab countries should actually support each other without infringing upon other nations' sovereignty and autonomy. How much more can the Lebanese economy withstand, remains a matter of utmost speculation, but they have been saying for the past three years that it needs to get worse before it gets better, but by how much worse? A farce it is indeed, with fourteen consecutive parliamentary sessions postponed.
Nobody better than Edwin Brock who summed up our era in a short poem called "Five ways to kill a man." He goes about reflecting on how far man has evolved in terms of how to murder others, starting off from the Middle Ages and passing through Hiroshima in World War II. He caps his poem off by saying: "These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, and leave him there"
It is a year in which skirts have grown shorter, hopefully this trend will be sustained in subsequent years, and eyes narrower, used in its implicit and explicit meanings, as eyes are blinded by greed, and as the percentage of people with narrow eyes has increased (with reference of course to our Mandarin-speaking next of kin, the Chinese, who now exceed 1.3 billion humans, or around 22% of the Earth's population).
In summation, on an individual basis we should reflect if we have walked that step forward, or those three steps backwards, because it is far easier to retreat than to go forward. Thus if our total steps forward exceed those that we walked backwards, only then would we attain development and prosperity on a national level. Only then would we achieve our unique version of the Renaissance, a solid and formidable force revered by countries worldwide, respected because our presence alone demands respect, and not because of how much oil our region holds.