History does not progress in a straight line for people from whichever point they set forth to their desired end.
This illusion is served by retrospective view, and then deviations explained as results of people’s ignorance or the caprice or duplicity of leaders as those today on the liberal-left—those on the right in their time displayed the same tendency—mindlessly repeat the silly phrase “Bush lies and people die.”
The politics of the Arab Mideast show how improbable is the idea of history’s linear progress in the region.
More than 500 years of Turkish rule of this region ended not as a result of the indigenous peoples’ capacity to gain their own independence. It was won for the Arabs by Britain with soldiers from its empire, men bearing arms from India, Australia and New Zealand, in the war of 1914-18.
The story of the Arab Revolt as told by the Englishman T.E. Lawrence in his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a magnificent record of the effort invested on behalf of a people, the desert Arabs (Bedouins), so they may have a claim on their history that was being shaped by forces from outside of their lives.
This effort continues with all its various meanderings as witnessed this week at Annapolis, Md., to make the Arab states grapple with their shortcomings, to turn the page on the politics of resentment and grievances against each other and outsiders, to take responsibility for their failings as an essential requirement to become alert in defending their own interests.
The practicality of politics lies in the capacity to distinguish between all that is desired and what is possible, and make it happen. This is also the lesson of the Jews to the Arabs in making Israel happen from what was the least desirable held out to them.
U.S. President George W. Bush, unlike any of his predecessors, has gone the furthest in committing the United States to support the establishment of the Palestinian state. Like Lawrence with the desert Arabs, Bush has leaned forward to save the Palestinians from themselves and their past folly of repeatedly snatching defeat from the jaws of sanity.
But the desert Arabs—Palestinians among them—are, as Lawrence described them, “a people of starts, for whom the abstract was the strongest motive, the process of infinite courage and variety, and the end nothing.”
It was men like Lawrence, and General Sir Edmund Allenby in command of the British forces in the Mideast most of all, who were responsible for returning history and independence to the Arabs after 500 years of their slumbering in the shadows of Turkish rule.
Then, 90 years later, it is Bush investing the resources of the United States to turn the Arab states around against their self-defeating instinct and squander another century in recrimination.
There is urgency for the Arab states to recognize how their interests are being undermined by Iran and its clients, Hamas and Hezbollah. This was the subtext of the Annapolis meeting.
The Arab states led by Saudi Arabia have a choice to make.
They can either settle with Israel and join the United States in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapon capability, or let their disunity work in favour of Tehran’s ambition to become the dominant power in the Mideast as once were the Turks.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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