Revolution in the Arab World - Observation of a lost soul Blog

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June 2010: The Hollow Arab Core
By Marc Lynch
“So the Arab core grows hollow,” laments former Bush administration
Middle East advisor Elliott Abrams in the Weekly Standard. Most of the
essay is an unexceptional restatement of neoconservative tropes: Obama is
weak, Arabs only respect power, Turkey has become a radical Islamist enemy
… you can fill in the rest of the blanks. But the lament about the hollowness
of the Arab core deserves more careful attention. Why has the Arab
core grown so hollow After all, the Arab core—in his definition, mostly
Egypt and Saudi Arabia—has been closely aligned with the United States for
many decades, and its leaders cooperated very closely with the Bush administration
on virtually every issue. This points to a contradiction at the core
of Abrams’s approach. The cooperation by these Arab leaders, in the face
of widespread and deep hostility toward those policies among much of the
Arab public, contributed immensely toward stripping away their legitimacy
and driving them into ever greater repression. The approach outlined so
ably by Abrams isn’t the solution to the problem of this “hollow Arab core.”
It is one of its causes. And the problem with the Obama administration’s
regional diplomacy thus far has been that it has changed too little … not
that it has changed too much.
To explain the feebleness of the Arab core compared to Turkey and Iran,
Abrams focuses primarily on the advancing age of Hosni Mubarak and
Saud al-Faisal. Twenty years ago, he argues, these were men to be feared.
But now they are unable to muster the same persuasive powers and have no
obvious replacements. As a result of their dwindling powers, he suggests,
Qatar’s relatively young foreign minister and “clever, unprincipled, energetic
actors” such as Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Erdogan and Foreign
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