Attritional Colonialism

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

The questions surrounding the state of the Arab arena, past and present, are countless, and many of them find no answer. Where is the Arab homeland headed? Can the Arabs ever unite and become contributors to human civilization? Can they ever become capable of defending themselves, or preserving their wealth, or eating from the sweat of their own brow?

What would have happened had the Arab subsoil held no oil? Is oil a curse or a blessing? And why has all that money been squandered without contributing to the nation’s rise, and its escape from its impasses and its repeated defeats across the various fields of life?

Some intellectuals and thinkers may have been able to answer this in past decades, but the condition of the nation has grown so enormously complicated that no intellectual capacity remains capable of grasping what is happening, or what complications, burdens, and challenges may yet emerge from it.

“Attritional colonialism does not negate the other forms of colonialism, but focuses on keeping the nation in a state of continuous internal and external conflict that drains its energies and capacities, so that it can never escape its dependency on others or preserve a free political will.”

In this article I attempt to offer part of an answer, based on a term I use: the attritional colonialism of the Arab nation and the Arab homeland. Could this form of colonialism be a powerful cause of the Arabs’ continuous stumbling, and their frequent collapse? Perhaps.

Types of Colonialism

The world has, until now, recognized two types of colonialism: traditional colonialism, resting on military conquest and the plunder of wealth, and modern colonialism, termed “global imperialism” by those who adopted Marxist thought, meaning economic domination over nations without military conquest.

Here I add two further types of colonialism. The first is cultural colonialism, which took clear shape amid the surge of American dominance following the collapse of the Soviet Union, meaning cultural and intellectual domination over nations with the aim of re-educating the coming generations in a way that aligns them with American culture and thought, so that a person becomes colonized in culture and thought without any need to employ the economic and military tools of colonialism. This is educational colonialism, which turns a person into a tool in the hand of the colonizing state without pressure, and without any sense of domination or dependency.

Attritional colonialism, for its part, does not negate the other forms of colonialism, but focuses on keeping the nation in a state of continuous internal and external conflict that drains its energies and capacities, so that it can never escape its dependency on others or preserve a free political will. Here I try to sketch a picture of this attrition, which has taken many forms and shapes, and to which the Arabs, possessing only a meager measure of shrewdness, have been drawn, destroying themselves with their own hands.

The Political Roots of Governance

Western colonialism never left our lands; it still nests among us, driving us like cattle toward serving its interests and satisfying its greed for Arab wealth. Before its military withdrawal from the Arab countries, colonialism made sure to install rulers loyal to it, since their remaining in power depended on its own will, not on the free will of the Arab peoples. For this reason the Arab homeland was broken into fiefdoms, with a fiefdom granted to every tribe the colonizers trusted, whether in the Arab East or the Maghreb.

Colonialism installed rulers so ignorant they could not even use the Arabic language properly, marked by an excessive sensuality that stood between them and any thought of building the nation. Watching over the nation’s construction, progress, and rise was never a priority for most Arab rulers; the priority instead was those pleasures and indulgences that turn a person into a slave of whoever supplies him the means and methods of gluttonous appetite.

Colonialism was never stingy toward Arab rulers in charting a life of indulgence and sensuality that pushed them, relentlessly, toward contempt for the interests of the nation. And beyond the fact that these rulers remained in the grip of the colonial states dominating the security of the Arab fiefdoms, colonialism reinforced this grip by capturing many Arab rulers sensually, controlling them through moral failings and behaviors that could constitute scandals to make the brow sweat with shame. This moral theater was not confined to the colonial states — Israel, too, took part in building its stage, having, according to Livni’s own statements, brought down a number of Arab leaders sexually.

What matters is that sensual rule pays no attention to managing the affairs of state, and instead immerses itself in squandering money and distributing comforts, indulgences, theft, and embezzlement of public funds, and Arab public budgets have remained, to a large degree, a playground for the ruler and his fallen henchmen, who took on the character of their master, the ruler. So where has all the Arab money gone? Some of it was spent legitimately — building roads, ports, and airports — but a large part of it found its way to the gambling tables of Las Vegas and the bars of Europe, and to Western centers of indulgence, and a large part of it also found its way into the pockets of these rulers and their lackeys.

Inter-Arab Wars

The geographic partitioning of the Arab homeland, and the installation of ruling regimes loyal to the Western states, produced a great many Arab disputes and rifts, and at times inter-Arab wars. Anyone who follows Arab media from the 1950s to the present will find that the Arabs have been deeply preoccupied with their internal conflicts, devoting enormous efforts and vast sums of money to mutual weakening, plotting conspiracies against one another, establishing dedicated intelligence services to manufacture internal strife, and scheming by day and by night to bring one another down and install a friendly ruling regime instead.

Arab media in the 1950s and 1960s was little more than an unceasing chorus of insults and abuse, working to distort and undermine other parties, and this media persists to this day, even though the fervor of its invective has somewhat cooled.

Worst of all, the Arabs drained a great deal of their material and moral energies in their inter-Arab wars, each side trying to convince the nation it alone was in the right. A war broke out between Saudi Arabia and Egypt in Yemen that claimed large numbers of Arab lives and drained both the Egyptian and Saudi treasuries, and instead of that money being spent on education, health, and scientific development, it was spent on hatred, animosity, and the spreading of black poison among the sons of the nation.

Against the backdrop of the Western Sahara dispute, a continuous conflict broke out between Algeria and Morocco, whose treasuries have long suffered from a shortage of funds. The Jordanian army, meanwhile, confronted Palestinian fedayeen in 1970, and a fierce military confrontation took place between the Syrian and Jordanian armies against the backdrop of this Palestinian-Jordanian crisis.

The Iraqi army, for its part, was forced to withdraw from Kuwait under pressure from non-Arab armies — the very same armies that had lured the Iraqi president into invading Kuwait in the first place. Military tension has prevailed among a number of Arab states, costing us an attrition that has left us incapable of proceeding through ordinary life, as other nations do.

The Wars with Israel

The people of the West were never stingy with us when it came to an overflowing spring of wars, once they had made Israel. Wars have been continuous in our Arab region since Israel’s founding, and will remain continuous as long as Israel exists — every time an Arab state stands on its own feet, and the possibility arises of it meeting its enemies and repelling their aggression, or shows any sign heralding a scientific and technological awakening, Israel, together with the people of the West standing behind it, carry out preemptive strikes of every kind to push that state back into its former state of weakness and abasement.

Arabs are forbidden from being strong, forbidden from developing a scientific and technological base that would enable them to develop independently and challenge external aggression. We spend vast sums of money on armament and preparation and readiness, only for Israeli planes to come afterward and destroy what we possess, kill our sons, and demolish our homes. This is what Israel did to Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, to the point that these states turned against the Palestinian cause and began supporting Israel against Arab resistance.

The Arabs committed a great crime when they waged war on Iran at the start of the 1980s, and the Iranians committed a shameful act when they refused to stop the war. America, together with Arab regimes loyal to it, pushed Iraq to attack Iran, and a grinding, brutal war raged between the two states, sparing neither green nor dry. Sons of Arabs and Iranians were being killed, the institutions of Iraq and Iran were being destroyed, wealth was being squandered, and the people of the West and Israel watched our folly from the sidelines.

We fought a proxy war whose goal was to drain both Iraq and Iran so that neither state could stand on its own feet. Why was that war fought? For whose sake? The years have passed, and we still do not know for which devil we gambled away our sons and our wealth. Beyond that, the Americans, in 1979, in cooperation with Arab regimes, stoked a sectarian strife whose corruption has recently fermented in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. We do not deny the regimes’ responsibility for this strife, but there still remain, in the Arab arena, those who try to bring reason back into politics.

As for the internal Arab wars and conflicts, there is no end to what could be said. In the late 1940s and the 1950s, we felt we were one nation, driven by the ambition that we were the sons of a great nation who must work together to restore our former glories.

Now the Arab hides from himself, because all those dreams have evaporated, and every ambition has turned to illusion. We were once one family, held back from development and the acquisition of strength by our own Arab regimes; now, the Arab regimes, Israel, and the people of the West rest entirely at ease, because we have taken over from them every task of fragmentation, tearing apart, and attrition.

We have become so preoccupied with our internal disputes that talk of unity, of acquiring strength, and of walking the path of science and technology has lost all meaning. We have grown so accustomed to defeat that we no longer need anyone to show us the way to it. We now know how to be defeated, and how to preserve our own backwardness. We have split into all these sects, denominations, parties, and grudges that the Arab feels at every moment, in every single news bulletin.

Since the end of the Second World War, the West has worked to keep the Arabs weak, poor, and ignorant, in order to guarantee that no strong Arab state ever emerges in Europe’s neighborhood, and most Arab leaders have adopted this very strategy themselves, so that no one might challenge their rule, their plunder of the nation’s wealth, and their pursuit of their own desires.

For this reason, the policy of material and moral attrition has remained the best means of boxing the Arabs into a corner from which they can do nothing but rush, panting, to the United Nations to weep and wail. We have turned into a farce on the international stage because of our flood of complaints, and we have been a primary reason the United Nations remains occupied with the tears of the weak, all without our gaining anything tangible in return.

Arab wealth belongs to the nation, not to a ruler or a tyrant, and instead of being preoccupied with the internal strife that ruins our lives, we ought to be preoccupied with how to free ourselves from this attritional enslavement.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “الاستعمار الاستنزافي” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.