MIDDLE EAST: The Arab World: Oil, Power, Violence

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Strife. In his oratory, Gaddafi often betrays a sort of messianic despair. "The Arabs are engulfed in torpor and darkness," he told his people last year. "The Arabs have lost direction." What he might better have said is that the so-called "Arab nation"—that congeries of 24 republics, monarchies, sheikdoms and otherwise organized anomalies—is, as usual, in a state of fratricidal strife.

Kuwait and Iraq were engaged in border skirmishes last week over a stretch of Kuwaiti oil land that Iraq claims as its own; in fact, the Iraqis claim all of Kuwait, not only for its oil but also for its wider access to the Persian Gulf. Both Jordan's King Hussein and Sudan's President Jaafar Numeiry were troubled by the Palestinian Black September terrorists in their jails: Hussein decided to commute the death sentences of 16 guerrillas but to hold them in prison, while Numeiry proceeded with plans to try eight Black Septembrists for the murder of the American and Belgian diplomats last month.

By any standard, the Arabs seem hopelessly divided, ranging from the reactionary monarchy of Saudi Arabia's King Feisal to the quasi-Maoist regime of South Yemen. The extent of their differences can also be measured by their varying attitudes toward Israel. The military dictatorships of Libya and Iraq profess undying enmity for Israel and call for its extinction. The smaller states of Jordan and Lebanon, which border on Israeli power, favor a quick and peaceful resolution of differences. Egypt, under Anwar Sadat, agonizes over its past humiliations but has no wish to resume fighting, and this is largely true of Syria as well. Whatever their views, all the Arab regimes seem to share the same sense of anger and frustration about their common enemy.

The disillusionment now widespread in the Arab world is traced by some scholars to the false hopes raised by Gamal Abdel Nasser in the late 1950s and early 1960s. All Arabists agree that the Six-Day War of 1967 was a pivotal event in the history of the region. Says Shimon Shamir, Arab specialist at the Shiloah Institute in Tel Aviv: "The conflict with—and defeat by —Israel was a microcosm of the whole Arab experience with the West." He means that ever since the Renaissance, the whole power of Arab ideology, or political Islam, has been in conflict with the power of Western technology and political capitalism—and that the Arabs have lost in nearly every conflict.

Despair. Small wonder then that Gaddafi romanticizes a return to an Islamic purity of the past, or that his call brings forth such emotion from his audiences. He looks back to the 8th century, when Arab power extended from Persia to southern France, and concludes that the Western governments have used Israel to divide and subvert the Arab nation. This kind of romanticism can lead, however, to a new cycle of despair. As Arnold Hottinger, a Swiss expert on Arab affairs, has written, "Radical discontent with the political situation as it is can lead to a fixation on goals incapable of attainment. And the ensuing frustration due to unfulfilled aims can lead in turn to the establishment of even more 'revolutionary' goals, even less susceptible of attainment."