HISTORY GONE WRONG? 409Like the Spain of yesteryear, they've purchased the skills and services
of others rather than learned to do things for themselves. "What is
rich?" asks a merchant banker of the Persian Gulf:Rich is education ... expertise... technology. Rich is knowing. We have
money, yes. But we are not rich. We are like the child who inherits money
from the father he never knew. He has not been brought up to spend it. He
has it in his hands; he doesn't know how to use it. If you do not know how
to spend money, you are not rich. We are not rich.
Without this knowledge, this understanding, we are nothing. We import
everything. The bricks to make houses, we import. The men who build
them, we import. You go to the market, what is there that is made by
Arabs? Nothing. It is Chinese, French, American ... it is not Arab. Is a
country rich that cannot make a brick, or a motorcar, or a book? It is not
rich, I think.^20True, but why? Data on income or product per head show a high
standard of living for some Arab countries—in some years higher even
than that of advanced industrial nations. But this oily gain is precari-
ous and in the long run evanescent. For one thing, petroleum is a
wasting asset (it will not last forever); for another, wealth-cum-fragility
invites opportunists and predators, private and public. So we have
breaches of cartel agreements, and oil prices tumble;^21 or the vultures
gather, especially relatives of the ruling family, to soak up the black
gravy and waste it on high living;* or we have naked land grabs, as Iraq
in Kuwaiti (Kuwait, of course, was just the stepping stone to the Gulf
sheikhdoms and, beyond, to the huge Saudi reserves.)
Besides, not everyone has petroleum. The Muslim countries of the
- European and American university towns are a chosen mecca for student high fly-
ers from the Middle East. In theory, they are going to school; what better? In fact, they
support the local clubs, dens, dives, casinos. See Michèle McPhee, "The Euro-Brats of
Boston," Boston Globe, 20 September 1995, p. 77. To judge from the contents, the tide
is a misnomer; but it is "politically correct."
î Not everyone would agree that Iraq was the predator in invading Kuwait. Some
scholars, both Arab and Western apologists for the Iraqi position, have argued that Sad-
dam Hussein was lured in (Samir Amin), or "almost invited in" (Edward Said); or that
the attack was justified in the higher cause of Arab unity, or of the mobilization against
Zionism (Saddam as Bismarck or Saladin); or, implicitly, that this was a not unreason-
able way to raise issues of international disagreement (Noam Chomsky). Such argu-
ments tell volumes about the appeal and immanence of violence in the Arab world
(even if Israel did not exist, they would be at one another's throats)—more on this
below; and about the debasement and corruption of truth and intellectual argument
in the higher cause of nationalism and anti-Westernism (anti-Americanism). The best
source is Makiya, Cruelty and Silence, ch. 8: "New Nationalist Myths."