The quest towards futility

Arab Politics: Back to Futility -Barry Rubin

The possibility of a negotiated Arab-Israeli peace and widespread Arab progress is dead...

Consistent across decades has been the [Arab] search for the charismatic leader who can produce victory. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was [Egyptian president Gamal Abdel] Nasser; in the 1970s, Arafat and Syrian president Hafez al-Assad; in the 1980s and 1990s, it was Saddam Hussein, then Osama bin Laden, and, perhaps now, Ahmadinejad. All failed; all were defeated. The outcome, however, has not been to reject this spurious hope but rather simply to seek another candidate.

[Islamists] cite many precedents to argue that resistance will triumph over the United States. The Chinese "people's war" alongside the Cuban and Vietnamese "heroic guerrillas" live on in the Arab world as if in a time capsule. Many Arabs compare Nasrallah now—as they once did Arafat—to Che Guevera. Like the failed Latin American revolutionary leader, Nasrallah did not overthrow governments but was a boon to the T-shirt industry.

History is full of examples of high-spirited, ideologically-motivated states that simply could not overcome the odds of reality. The United States defeated Japan in World War II despite the ideological fervor of Japanese troops and their kamikaze pilots.

[Islamists] argue that the Arabs made no mistakes but simply did not struggle with sufficient fervor nor follow the proper ideology.
Imagination is never enough to produce military victories.
[Middle East Quarterly]