Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.
Tags:
Ed Ou for The New York TimesAnti-Mubarak protesters, foreground, confront Mubarak supporters, background, near Tahrir Square.
Breathtaking, these last few days in Egypt. What started with a scent of jasmine, the world’s biggest Arab country trying to chase out a dictator, is now devolving into violent chaos and police-state terror. Smiling families one day, thugs on camelback the next.
The brutal truth is this: where it ends in the cradle of civilization will not be America’s call. The particles of political energy are scrambled; to presume to know where they will re-align is to think the sun can be kept from rising on a given day.
But what we have in Egypt now, Tunisia last month, and perhaps Yemen in the days to come, is a fascinating real-time history lesson. “Stuff happens,” as the negligently glib former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously said, but it doesn’t happen in that part of the world because of American muscle. At least, not according to script.
Egypt gets $1.3 billion a year in United States tax dollars to behave in a certain way. It’s an easy relationship when it’s all about tanks and fighter jets. But when pressed by its own people for a thimble of self-respect, the leadership sends out goon squads to crack the heads of journalists and everyday citizens practicing the most powerful of American values.
Egypt gets $1.3 billion a year in United States tax dollars to behave in a certain way. It’s an easy relationship when it’s all about tanks and fighter jets. But when pressed by its own people for a thimble of self-respect, the leadership sends out goon squads to crack the heads of journalists and everyday citizens practicing the most powerful of American values.
President Obama was right in his 2009 speech in Cairo, when he said, “Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away.”
And President George W. Bush was right to deride those who assumed that a big part of the world could never change. As he mused in his 2003 call to seeding the Muslim world with democracy: “Are the people of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty?”
The mistake, which still emanates from think tanks stocked with neoconservatives, is assuming that democracy can come at the end of sword – or that it can be purchased. “A liberated Iraq,” Bush said, “can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region.”
Not even close. The dictator was toppled, tried and executed, but the dominoes never fell, after a trillion-dollar war. Through it all, American money continued to flow into regimes that jailed their dissidents and tortured people trying to act on Thomas Jefferson’s ideals. Cognitive dissonance as foreign policy.
Now that some of the dominoes appear to be falling, this has more to do with Facebook and the frustrations of young, educated adults who can’t earn enough money to marry than it does with tanks rolling into Baghdad, or naïve neocons guiding the State Department.
And even when democracy has followed, it’s certainly not always been in the best interests of human rights or regional stability. Lebanon is effectively a Hezbollah state, Hamas runs the Gaza Strip and a Holocaust-denier is in charge of the soon-to-be-nuclear theocracy of Iran. All of them, arguably, are in power because their people spoke – enough of them, anyway, to paper over a government.
In the Arab world, Jefferson will never be as well-read as the Koran. Pew Research surveys of Egyptian attitudes last year produced some startling results. Good: A majority of Egyptians believe democracy is preferable to any other kind of government. Bad: 82 percent support stoning women as punishment for adultery.
What’s next: a caliphate across the north of Africa, and surrounding Israel? Hardly. This fantasy fear of the paranoid right ignores the many differences in the Islamic world: Sunni from Shiite, petro-wealthy from poverty-stricken, Arab from Persian. Visit Turkey, as I did with my family a few months ago. To think that a prosperous, majority-Muslim and democratic Turkey will somehow go back to medieval values is absurd.
Perhaps, then, the baby steps of new democracies, with tiny Tunisia as the model, is the best hope. Unfortunately, recent history makes that option seem the least likely.
America has often been forceful in its naïvete. Just after World War I, President Woodrow Wilson became the first president to try to light a fire of democracy in the broken pieces of the Ottoman Empire with his “14 points of light” speech. The old imperial powers of Europe scoffed.
And then, George W. Bush cited Wilson in his call for a “global democratic revolution” led by the United States.
Bush’s belief “was based on a narcissistic view of Western values as universal,” wrote Caroline Glick in The Jerusalem Post last week. Certainly no fan of Obama, either, this hard-line Israeli editor by way of Chicago and Harvard criticized the United States for being clueless for too long.
In long-repressed states of the Arab world, what began as a modern keystroke revolution – and thus a peaceful one – may yet be put down with the classic tools of an old-fashioned dictator: clubs and thugs, as universal as those western values.
But in the Internet age, no authoritarian can keep his own people from knowing the truth. Millions of Egyptians are disgusted with their leadership. They have hope. They want change. And we should stand with them with the tools of an open society: ideas and technology, and maybe a deft diplomatic nudge. Beyond that, it’s out of American hands.
