My friends at Reason magazine asked me to participate in their roundtable discussion about what is now being called the Arab Spring. Here is my contribution.
Why has there been such a flowering of revolt in the Arab world in North Africa and the Middle East in the past few months? Is there a common root cause to protests and revolts, whether ultimately successful in creating less-oppressive regimes, in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere?
The Middle East has been seething with discontent against its rulers for a very long time. Though dictatorships always have a base of support among those who benefit from the system and from those who fear the alternative, every autocratic regime in the region without exception is unpopular. The list of complaints varies somewhat from place to place, but a hatred of oppression, corruption, and economic stagnation seem to be common denominators.
In the Arab countries, there are at least two distinct types of people taking to the streets at the same time—democrats and Islamists. (Islamists aren’t really part of Iran’s Green Movement as they are already in power in Tehran.) The democrats want a more open and less repressive government while the Islamists yearn for a faith-based authoritarian regime which they believe will somehow work better than the failed secular states already in place.
It’s impossible to say in advance which of these two factions will win out over the other in post-revolutionary struggles for power. Maybe neither faction will come out on top. Egypt, for instance, could remain in the hands of the military, frustrating liberal reformists and Islamists alike. My guess is that the idealists who are swooning right now will be disappointed, and that the gloomiest pessimists who expect every revolution to turn out like Iran’s did in 1979 will be relieved. That’s just a gut feeling, though. The Middle East is too weird for easy predictions.
All this really did start in Tunisia, which, by the way, has the best chance of success as the country’s culture was semi-democratic to begin with even as the system itself was not. The overthrow of Ben Ali proved that internally-driven regime-change was possible, and the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt proved that internally-driven regime change was not only possible but likely to succeed if enough people pushed hard enough at the same time.
Is the impulse to challenge repressive regimes likely to spread to other countries in the region and, if so, which ones?
No country is immune at this point. A while back I thought the Libyan and Syrian regimes would emerge more or less unscathed because they are so much more ruthlessly repressive than the others, but if Qaddafi isn’t safe, no one is safe. That doesn’t mean Syria’s Bashar al-Assad or Iran’s Ali Khamenei will actually fall, but it does mean they could face the biggest internal challenges they’ve ever seen as mass uprisings are producing results in one country after another.
What should the role of the United States in the region be as events unfold?
Americans should side with the region’s liberals and democrats against entrenched autocrats and radical Islamist revolutionaries alike, but it’s not clear that we can actually do much in most of these places. Obviously we can’t impose a no-fly zone over every police state, nor would that be a good idea if we could. Throwing our moral support behind democratic movements is as much as we’ll be able to manage most of the time.
Some of the Middle East’s dictators are our allies, so that of course complicates things. Bahrain, for instance, hosts the U.S. fifth fleet, and Iran thinks it could replace our fleet with their own in the event of regime-change. The Jordanian government has a real peace treaty with Israel. It’s not in our interests to see those governments fall. We have leverage in both places, though, that we don’t have in Libya, Syria, or Iran. We can and should push friendly dictators toward liberalization and reform, and we absolutely should not tolerate the slaughter of unarmed demonstrators. If our allies insist upon acting like thugs we should cut them loose, and we almost certainly will even if they are otherwise useful. That’s what Barack Obama did with Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and that’s what George W. Bush did with Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan after the infamous Andijan massacre in 2005.
We need to be on the side of democrats everywhere, or at the very least not hostile to them, even where they’re in the minority and too weak to prevail. And we should forget about even trying to appease bigoted maniacs like Egypt’s terrorist-supporting cleric Yusuf Qaradawi because he and his ilk are going to hate us no matter what.
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