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Much will be said about Benazir Bhutto's assassination; little will be understood about what it truly means. I'm not speaking here about Pakistan, of course, as important as that country is, but rather the lesson - as if we needed any more - for that broad Middle East which begins in Pakistan and ends on the Atlantic Ocean coast.The following is a true story. Back in 1946, an American diplomat asked an Iranian editor why his newspaper angrily criticized the United States but never the Soviet Union. The Iranian said it was obvious. "The Russians," he said, "they kill people."A dozen years earlier, in 1933, Iraqi official Sami Shawkat gave a talk which became one of the most famous texts of Arab nationalism. "There is something more important than money and learning for preserving the honor of a nation and for keeping humiliation at bay," he stated. "That is strength... strength, as I use the word here, means to excel in the Profession of Death."What, you might ask, was Shawkat's own profession? He was director-general of Iraq's Ministry of Education. This was how young people were to be taught and directed; this is where Saddam Hussein came from. Seventy-five years later, the subsequent history of Iraq and the rest of the Arab world shows just how well Shawkat did his job.September 11 in the United States; the Bali bombing for Australia; the tube bombing for Britain; the commuter train bombing for Spain, these were all merely byproducts of this pathology. The pathology in question is not Western policy toward the Middle East but rather Middle Eastern policy toward the Middle East.WHEN I read Shawkat's words as a student, the phrase "profession of death," which gave his article its title, struck me as a pun. On one hand, the word "profession" meant "career." To be a killer - note well that Shawkat was not talking specifically about soldiers, those who fight, but rather those who murder - was the highest calling of all. It was more important than being a teacher, who forms character; more important than being a businessperson, who enriches his country; more important than being a doctor who preserves the life of fellow-citizens.Destruction was a higher calling than construction. And, for sure, in the Arabic-speaking world what has been reaped is what has been sowed.But, also, the word "profession" here reminds me of "to profess," or "to preach." When the greatest value for an educator is to preach and glorify death, what kind of ideology, what kind of society, what kind of values, does such a priority produce? Look and see.LIKE CHILDREN playing with dynamite, Western intellectuals, journalists and diplomats fantasize that they are achieving results in the Middle East with their words, promises, apologies, money and concessions. Yet how can such innocents cope despite - or perhaps because of - all their good intentions with polities and societies whose basic ruling ethos is that of the serial killer?By BARRY RUBIN
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As in the days of Noah....
