Sudanese Memory: How Sudan Dealt With the Illusions of Arab National Security

Mohamed El Sheikh Hussein
Since the establishment of the Arab League in 1945, the concept of Arab national security has oscillated between difficult-to-realise nationalist aspirations and events that have shown its absence in practice.
Many events since the Tripartite Aggression against Suez in 1956 have exposed the inability of Arab states to formulate an integrated vision of security and regional order. This has led many generations to take seriously a famous idea advanced by Miles Copeland, author of The Game of Nations: namely, that the importance of “Arabism” lies precisely in the fact that it is a myth rather than a reality.

Yet Dr Mustafa Osman Ismail, Sudan’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs and former adviser to the President of the Republic, challenges this entire legacy, with all its illusions, in a powerful and coherent book entitled Arab National Security.
The book contains three forewords and eight chapters, plus appendices, references, and photographs, across 175 medium-sized pages. The late Madbouly, the doyen of Arab publishers, published it in Cairo.
What is new about this book is its willingness to move beyond a bitter reality surrounding the concept of Arab national security, which has often been closer, in theory, to myth and, in practice, to an emotional song that takes one’s breath away.
In the Arab region, it had long been understood that no genuine “security system” united the states. What existed in reality was merely a theory bearing the name “Arab national security”, expressing what ought to be rather than what actually was. Nevertheless, many treated it as though it were a set of binding principles to which states were required to conform, lest they be regarded as Arab “outlaws”.
Perhaps Dr Mustafa’s success in this field stems from what the late Sayed Sadiq Al-Mahdi observed in the book’s first foreword:
“The distinguishing feature of the author of this book is that he has combined the worlds of theory and practice, presenting us with the essence of his thinking and experience, following in the footsteps of those who preceded him in this field, such as Ibn Rushd and Ibn Khaldun.”
Before one is taken aback by Al-Mahdi’s comparison, which elevates Dr Mustafa to the company of Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Rushd, the author of the second foreword, Dr Ahmed Al-Guwaily, former Secretary-General of the Arab Economic Unity Council, states with great clarity:
“The author of this book is one of the Arab thinkers with broad and profound experience in Arab affairs.”
Although the book concludes with an optimistic view of the future of national security, based on specific strategic visions, this did not prevent the late Dr Al-Tayeb Zain Al-Abideen, author of the third foreword, from concluding:
“The author deserves credit for this qualitative contribution to the issues of security and politics in the Arab countries, which he has addressed with a boldness uncommon among official politicians.”
It appears that all the qualities attributed to the author are justified, for he has grasped the issue firmly and begun laying its foundations one brick at a time, with great patience, neither tiring nor rushing towards conclusions.
This capacity for patiently gathering together the scattered elements of an issue may perhaps be traced back to Dr Mustafa’s early upbringing. Professor Abdullatif Ashmeig, his classmate in primary school, recalls that he and Dr Mustafa used to work in agriculture after school to help their families in the fields.
Professor Ashmeig adds that Dr Mustafa loved agriculture to such an extent that his ambitions in life were limited to becoming either a doctor or a farmer. This matters because agriculture teaches patience: patience with the hardship of work and the painstaking details inherent in it.
Without dwelling at length on the details, the book addresses what occurred on 2 August 1990, when Iraqi forces under the leadership of the late President Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and occupied it completely. Before highlighting the book’s new contribution, however, it is important to acknowledge that the region experienced a terrifying Arab catastrophe. One Arab state had occupied another, causing one of the pillars of Arab security theory to collapse: the assumption that threats came from outside. International forces, long regarded theoretically as a form of “foreign presence”, then began arriving in the region.
The cracks in the Arab system widened further with the beginning of the peaceful settlement process in the Arab–Israeli conflict in 1991, causing the theory to lose its defensive framework. The conclusion was clear: the concept of Arab security had fractured and required reconstruction on new foundations.
The book’s distinctive contribution, however, is that its author advances realistic ideas stressing the need to base any new security arrangements on the national interests of individual states. He also presents new ideas emphasising that Arabs must adopt a practical approach to security by moving towards functional cooperation as the foundation for establishing a new Arab security system.
The author favours keeping such functional cooperation away from the nationalist wave, with its concepts and strategies, which, if revived, might once again cripple these ideas.
The book also adopts a broad concept of security, extending from military security to food security, reflecting the Qur’anic principle:
“Let them worship the Lord of this House, Who has fed them against hunger and made them safe from fear.”
This approach is supported by the assertion that the permanent enemy is Israel, while neighbouring states are regarded as potential sources of threat. It also stresses what the author describes as foreign ambitions and calls for the development of an autonomous Arab military capability, based on the vision that the foundations of the desired security system should be purely Arab.
The author presents this approach with considerable optimism, even though concepts of cooperative regional security, such as collective security and common security, have remained outside the sphere of collective Arab thinking. Yet this approach does not overlook the fact that the Arab world has, in practical terms, become part of a heavily internationalised Middle East.
A different picture of the Arab world emerged following the American war on Iraq, sweeping away everything before it. This time, the collapse went beyond the theory of Arab national security to encompass the Arab regional system itself. Arab states were unable to manage the crisis, prevent the war, participate directly in it or influence what subsequently took place inside Iraq. The Arab summit was convened only with difficulty, before violent disagreements erupted within it.
What is now at issue in the Arab arena is no longer simply how to construct a security system for Arab states, but rather how the Arab regional system itself can be re-established from the ground up.
Faced with this different picture, however, Dr Mustafa Osman Ismail — a professor of dentistry and holder of a doctorate in international relations — returns, metaphorically, to his original profession as a doctor. He takes on the task of resuscitating Arab security and seeking to bring it into existence, arguing for the application of Arab security in a unified manner that transcends the narrow and sometimes conflicting interests of regimes and individual states. At the conclusion of his book, he offers a ten-point prescription.
Dr Mustafa’s ten points are directed towards countering what he sees as the advancing American–Zionist threat to the Arab states, which seeks to:
– expand and deepen the plundering of their resources;
– fragment the Arab states along ethnic and sectarian lines;
– place them under security siege, whether from within or beyond the Arab region; and
– exert political, cultural and educational pressure in order to deepen civilisational alienation.
Perhaps all this encourages us to share Dr Mustafa Osman Ismail’s optimism. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, national security means protecting a nation from the danger of subjugation by a foreign power.
According to Henry Kissinger, the former United States Secretary of State, it refers to any actions through which a society seeks to preserve its right to survival.
The concept of Arab national security commonly held among experts and specialists, meanwhile, is a set of measures undertaken collectively by Arab states, within the limits of their capacities and capabilities, to preserve their existence and supreme interests in the present and the future, while taking account of the local, regional and international changes they face, with the aim of achieving a state of reassurance and security for Arab society.
We must acknowledge, along with Arab specialists, that Arab national security remains a fluid concept in terms of agreement over its definition, identification and precise contours. Its relationship with the security of individual nation-states also remains vague and unclear. Nevertheless, national security has always been, and remains, a matter that preoccupies nations and governments, regardless of the size or nature of the power at their disposal.
The provision of security, relative though it may be, indicates the success of a state’s foreign policy and the ability of its specialised institutions to achieve their stated objectives, since foreign political objectives are determined in accordance with considerations of national security.
In reality, talk of an Arab national security system remains talk of a form of security that must still be sought and created, and for which pioneers of Arab national consciousness continue to struggle.
The discussion may therefore be a mixture of reality and hope, containing facts and aspirations, fears and ambitions.
This is what Dr Mustafa Osman Ismail has sought and endeavoured to achieve in his book on Arab national security, despite the many questions raised by the very concept of Arab national security — particularly regarding the possibility of realising it as an abstract concept associated with nation-states possessing a single political system and complete, undivided sovereignty.
In conclusion, Arab National Security, by Dr Mustafa Osman Ismail, is a book well worth reading and acquiring.

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