Page 225 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

222 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

ideological origins, or appreciate its doctrinal distinctions, its crude simp­
licities nevertheless hold some appeal for them, as they would for many men in
similar depressed economic circumstances.
They would be mistaken, however, if they believed that the installation of
republican regimes, of whatever variety, in the Gulf states would release them
from their present subjection and exploitation. Radical Arab regimes are
nowhere noted for their benevolence and magnanimity towards foreigners, or
non-Arabs in general. Traditional regimes, in fact, display greater tolerance.
Nor would the cause of political freedom prosper if the present malcontents
and conspirators among the Gulf and emigre Arabs were to emerge into the
daylight and occupy the Capitol. For their beau ideal of government is not the
gentle and noble vision attributed to them by credulous Westerners, of popu­
larly elected legislatures graced by the grave and dignified figures of so many
Oriental Ciceros, Scipios and Gracchi. On the contrary, their paragons of
political virtue are the self-perpetuating oligarchies and politburos of the kind
that rule in Baghdad, Tripoli and Aden, composed of men of flinty and vulpine
visage, backed by the apparatus of the thumbscrew and the rack, and animated
by a virulent mixture of Marxist bigotry and Muslim fanaticism - the contem­
porary expression, in short, of age-old Oriental despotism.
The key to the survival or subversion of the shaikhly system of government
would seem to lie with the northern Arab emigres and the new effendi class
among the Gulf Arabs. Should the latter attempt a coup d’etat in one or more of
the shaikhdoms (backed either by a ‘street’ or by the local defence force or by
both), they will, whether they fully realize it or not, be acting upon directions
and to a script supplied by their northern Arab mentors, and drawn up long
before by men of whom they know nothing, not even perhaps their very
existence. For this reason alone the ultimate consequences of their actions may
be far removed from those they envisage; for revolutions do not stand still and
their initiators all too often become their victims. The revolutionaries among

the Gulf Arabs, in other words, if they ally themselves with the northern
Arabs, are apt to find that they have exchanged one set of masters for another.
For the northern Arab emigres, as remarked previously, are by and large
uninterested in the Gulf states from which they at present derive their liveli­
hoods, they are disdainful of both the native and the non-Arab inhabitants of
these states, and they care not a jot about the true welfare of either. They are, in
short, true emigres, whose intellectual and emotional energies are consumed by
the intricacies of Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese or Iraqi politics, the multifarious
twists and turns of the Arab-Israeli dispute, and the ceaseless wranglings of the
various factions of the Palestinian movement. The current superfluity of
wealth in these small states, together with its prodigal consumption, must
present them with a constant and powerful temptation to take steps to approp­
riate this wealth to themselves, and to employ it, and the oil reserves which
have generated it, in the service of their own countries and causes. The