Peace in the Middle East?
November 5, 2008
The Bush Administration has claimed that progress is being made in Iraq. That optimism is not shared by everyone. Indeed in the lead up to the fifth anniversary of the March 2003 invasion, it seems that the entire sorry saga is one of missed opportunities. The Middle East remains the poorest, most populous and most dangerous zone in the world.
Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan was recently interviewed by a leading US news magazine. He is a unique person in the tortured world of Middle East politics. The magazine described him as a “deep thinker, prolific author and speaker”.
It also noted that he was a rarity in the Arab world: someone who left office before dying or being overthrown in a coup or war. He had been the Crown Prince under his late brother King Hussein and so helped run the country during the king’s illness and in readiness for the king’s son to take over.
I have known the prince for many years through The Club of Rome (of which he was president). I think that he is one of the region’s best commentators on world affairs.
Despite the opportunity simply to take the royal life easy, he is very active in good causes. He is one of the world’s most active princes. Therefore he is both a critic of some current developments and a creative thinker looking for alternatives.
He is critical of some of the region’s leaders. They are too focussed on oil and weapons. The World Bank has estimated that 100 million new jobs need to be created by 2015 to cater for all the young people entering the Middle East workforce.
The prince has long advocated some sort of Marshall Plan for the region. The visionary US foreign aid Marshall Plan enabled the rebuilding of Western Europe after World War II. Despite the financial burden of having fought the war, the US Government decided that it would continue to spend big – namely by providing this foreign aid. No other government in world history has ever given (as a percentage of its gross national product (GNP) the amount of money that the US did in the late 1940s.
It was a brilliantly successful project. It was a win-win activity: the US provided each year 2 per cent of its GNP as foreign aid – and eventually a rebuilt Western Europe was able to afford to buy US goods and services and so there was expansion of the US economy.
We could have done the same today. There is no shortage of money in the Middle East region (especially given all the oil wealth) but there is a lack of political leadership.
Meanwhile, the US operation in Iraq is also very expensive. Given all the billions spent on that inconclusive war, that same amount of money could have kept 400 million people fed for 13 years. We can find money for war – but not for peace.
In 1988 the prince was a leader of an international initiative calling for a “new humanitarian order” (former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara was also a member of the project).
This was another visionary activity – but there has been little support for it at the government level. The temper of the times had changed. The generation that won World War II was able to think in visionary terms – hence the Marshall Plan.
But the later political generation evidently did not have the same ambitious appetite to make the world a better place. We will never know how the 1988 ideas for a “new humanitarian order” could have transformed the world if there had been the political courage to implement them. The world today would probably be a much better place.