Think-Israel

THINK-ISRAEL

MIDDLE ISRAEL: WHAT BURIED ARABIA?

by Amotz Asa-El

It takes no historian, economist, or fortune-teller to predict the shocks and tremors that will accompany the rapidly approaching downfall of the Saudi royal house.

What will begin with panic in the energy markets will likely proceed to other commodity markets, from precious metals to food staples, and from there the road will be short to mayhem across the major stock, currency, bond, and derivatives markets.

Other side effects - like the inability to sell jets, tanks, and vessels to a newly anti-American Riyadh - may initially win less attention, until it emerges that those alone will cost thousands of American jobs.

Fortunately, some people - including George W. Bush - do get the imminence and gravity of this nightmare scenario. Unfortunately, even they, and even now, still think that the root of the Saudi malaise is in that vast country's politics. In fact, that is merely the symptom: The root of the problem - there as elsewhere in the totalitarian Middle East - lies in its sociology.

In Saudi Arabia, the regime has skillfully kept the people at arm's length, throwing in their direction crumbs from the massive wealth with which Allah blessed the country that is the center of His worship, while clutching the lion's share to their own princely bosoms.

Yes, during those increasingly distant years when the local per-capita income was higher than $20,000 (it is now well under half that level, and still declining) the government generously offered free health-care and education. In reality, however, life expectancy (63) and the per-capita number of doctors remained low even by Middle Eastern standards, while infant mortality remained high.

The reason is simple: While Riyadh abolished tuition, it never instituted what the Jews decreed already 2,000 years ago: compulsory education. And when people are not raised to value self-development nor led to actively seek enlightenment, they indeed avoid them. The result is a catastrophic rate of illiteracy (40 percent according to the Encyclopedia Britannica) and a widespread lack of basic tools with which to accomplish social mobility and personal fulfillment.

The royal house will hopefully forgive us for suspecting that this policy was neither coincidence nor miscalculation; rather, it was, and remains, part of a cynical ploy aimed at shackling those with humble origins, much the way serfdom served that purpose for medieval Europe's feudal nobility.

THE DESIRE to freeze the anti-meritocratic social order so that a family of several thousand princes can perpetuate its grip on power was applied even more sinisterly in the labor markets.

There, the royal house engineered a system whereby 70% of the economy's jobs are handed to foreign workers, mainly ones from beyond the nearby Indian Ocean, who in turn are evicted within three years of their arrival.

As would befit the outlook of a regime for whom social paralysis has become an article of faith, the financial and industrial systems have also been structured in ways that were expedient for the select few, and catastrophic for the rest. That is why the local stock market was sealed for foreigners, while the industrial sector was chained to the oil industry.

Sadly, no single mineral or crop can, in the long run, sustain an entire nation. Cuba has learned that about its sugar, Zambia has learned that about its copper, and the US Confederacy learned that about its cotton. Mexico, by contrast, was wise enough to industrialize and diversify its oil-rich economy, ultimately offering more future with less crude to a population more than four times the size of Saudi Arabia's.

The Saudis, of course, knew better, and thought the riches they found under their feet without even shedding a drop of sweat to mine them, would generate them fortunes endlessly, even as they squandered every third petrodollar on arms and much of the remainder on princely hedonism, while repressing their subjects and funding troublemakers the world over.

One is at a loss to seek throughout history a comparably brazen, stupid, and criminal combination of theft, waste, oppression, obscurantism, hypocrisy and belligerency. Morally, economically, and socially - it is predestined to collapse.

Sadly, the kingdom's recent toying with reform - like the much-heralded live broadcasts from the king's rubber-stamp "consultative council" of royally appointed political eunuchs, and the pathetic plan to hand over the labor market to the local population - are too little and way too late.

To be effective, Saudi Arabia's heavily unemployed workforce (an estimated 40%) would have had to be educated decades ago, and allowed economic access to the country's riches.

Similarly, the kingdom should have fashioned itself as a modern immigrant state, by welcoming and quickly naturalizing newcomers from nearby, overpopulated and fellow Sunni Muslim Egypt.

Yet to do that the Saudis would have had to cease being the selfish anti-developers that they so tragically were, and remain.

For their part, however, Westerners seeking Mideastern emancipation must understand that before they can participate in democratic elections, the region's masses must first be educated and employed, albeit nominally. The people who toppled communism were such. That is exactly why the people who currently oppress the Middle East are so loath to spread enlightenment and prosperity: from their viewpoint, those are bad for business.

Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the Saudi kingdom will reflect a widespread sense of disgust with a morally bankrupt regime. Yet, unlike the fall of the Wall, which offered the West moral vindication and strategic breakthrough, the fall of the house of Saud will generate geopolitical chaos and moral perplexity.

Hopefully, the next time it recruits allies, Washington will evince interest not only in what their leaders do for America, but also in what they do for their subjects.

This article appeared in the Jerusalem Post, November 13, 2003 and is archived at http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1068697367276