THE SPINE JANUARY 26, 2011
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When one wave of revolution hits an Arab country it is very likely to hit several others. Like the revolts of the colonels. It started with a coup d’état of army colonels by Gamal Abdel Nasser (who supplanted his lackey Muhammad Naguib) in early 1953. There followed another coup of colonels in Syria which then teamed up with Egypt to comprise the United Arab Republic in 1956. The preposterous flag with two stars, one for each state, is about as deep as the union was. Then colonels in Iraq made all the right gestures for another high flown and extremely bloody revolution about which you can read in Elie Kedourie’s magnificent essay, “The Kingdom of Iraq: A Retrospect,” in The Chatham House Version and Other Essays. You should know that this great historian was denied his Oxford D.Phil. for his thesis which was later published to great acclaim as England and the Middle East. Sir Hamilton A.R. Gibb, whom I knew a little bit later when he was director of Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, led the campaign against Kedourie on account of his analyses and projections of Arab national nationalism and his dissent from the idolization of T.E. Lawrence. The conservative political theorist, Michael Oakeshott, brought him to the London School of Economics. (If you want to grasp why Harvard is so dreary a place for the study of the Middle East just think back to the bigoted man who ran its center 40 years ago. Given tenure spots, legacies at universities have long lives, long after the passing of this chairman or that. Kind of like Edward Said at Columbia. His theories are desiccated. But they will be taught more or less everywhere until the last assistant professor of “orientalism” expires.)
Now back to the other pan-Arab revolutionary ventures of the past: Yemen, Libya, Sudan. All of these governments are failures, dismal failures, even if they possess current oil supplies and plentiful oil reserves which only the last two of them do.
But then there are the parochial Arab governments. Based in territorial circumstances, hoisted on the shoulders of local tyrants, paying perfunctory tribute to pan-Arab interests while conspiring against them. Egypt, where the dictatorship now seems to be under threat from protesters, has been led by the pathetic Mubarak. He kept his country in penury, his poor poorer, his foreign policy docile, his military passive (after all, it doesn’t want to lose all its jet fighters to the Israeli Air Force again). He wages war against the Muslim Brothers, without which war whatever modernism Egypt has achieved would dissolve. Many of the “employed” in Egypt are paid not to work. Jordan is a decorous kingdom which at least half of its citizens—the Palestinians—would want overthrown. The king changes the cabinet every other Wednesday. Lebanon is about to fade from history or into history. The Saudis have not precisely betrayed Lebanon. But even their cash could not rescue a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional state, the only one in the Arab League. Chalk this one up to Damascus, Tehran and, alas, Washington.
As it happens, the populist Tunisian revolt now shows signs of spreading, at least to Egypt. Like Algeria and Morocco, the nasty politics of Tunisia didn’t seem to affect many other Arab states. It was not exactly self-enclosed. But it didn’t make waves either. Tourists visited Tunisia like they visited Morocco. Then one man immolated himself and the instinct to put oneself in danger spread. I don’t mean this disdainfully at all. After all, “the tree of liberty...”
Still, many have been killed...although the estimates of victims of the police have basically stopped since January 12. On that day, the count was “more than 50.” Who knows how the number has risen in the 12 days since? What is clearer is that the turmoil of protest has spread to other Arab countries: Sudan, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt. But not even Stephen M. Walt, self-styled “realist in an ideological age,” thinks that the stirring of protest will actually levitate in any other Arab country. Writing in Foreign Policy under his grim mug shot on January 16, Walt explains why “the Tunisian revolution won’t spread.”
The toppling of the Tunisian regime led by Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali has led a lot of smart people -- including my FP colleague Marc Lynch -- to suggest that this might be the catalyst for a wave of democratization throughout the Arab world. The basic idea is that events in Tunisia will have a powerful demonstration effect (magnified by various forms of new media), leading other unhappy masses to rise up and challenge the stultifying dictatorships in places like Egypt or Syria. The obvious analogy (though not everyone makes it) is to the velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe, or perhaps the various "color revolutions" that took place in places like Ukraine or Georgia.
I also don’t believe that what happened in Tunis will miraculously spread anywhere in the Arab world. Unless, of course, what occurs next in Tunisia is the coming to power of the Muslim Brothers or other close cousins of the jihadniks. To be sure, there is the Algerian model, not the armed conflict between the French and the National Liberation Front, but a virtual civil war between the draconian military and the vindictively pious which cost maybe a quarter of a million lives, many of them garroted in pure sunlight.
9 comments
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/opinion/23kaplan.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all "...Tunisia has a relatively large middle class because of something so obvious it goes unremarked upon: it is a real state, with historical and geographical legitimacy, where political arguments are about budgets and food subsidies, not the extremist ideologies that have plagued its neighbors, Algeria and Libya. It is a state not only because of the legacy of Rome and other empires, but because of human agency, in the person of Habib Bourguiba, one of the lesser-known great men of the 20th century. Bourguiba was the Arab Ataturk, who ruled Tunisia in a fiercely secular style for its first three decades after independence from France in the mid-1950s. Rather than envision grandiose building projects or a mighty army, Bourguiba devoted generous financing to birth control programs, rural women’s literacy and primary-school education. He cracked down on the wearing of the veil, actually tried to do away with Ramadan, and advocated normalizing relations with Israel more than a decade before Anwar Sadat of Egypt went to Jerusalem. Yes, he was an authoritarian, but the result of his rule was that Tunisia, with moderate political tendencies and no serious ethnic or sectarian splits, has been poised since the 1980s for a democratic experiment. In 1987, while faced by an Islamic rising, Bourguiba became too infirm to rule, and was replaced by his former interior minister, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, essentially a security boss with little vision, much like the Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak. ..." [at which point any comparison to Egypt ends...but still much better reading than this Peretz-jumblepost. BTW, it is not Lebanon that needs Saudi cash, but Syria, which thinks it can sell $50BIL in the global bond market :) ]
- K2K
January 26, 2011 at 4:16pm
"Jordan is a decorous kingdom which at least half of its citizens—the Palestinians—would want overthrown." Is that true? I thought that the Hashemites have done their best to co-opt the Palestinians. Wouldn't some Palestinians be perfectly happy living in a "decorous" Arab kingdom? Isn't Queen Rania a Palestinian?
- amidut
January 26, 2011 at 8:27pm
There is an interesting slant to the events in Eygpt. Eygpt is one of the enemies of Iran and often spars with them. About 18 months ago the world was watching an uprising in Iran as the Green Revolution started to take root. At that time Eygpt was a distant thought. Now while Iran cracks down and puts their boot on the throats of the protesters, Eygpt is in the crossfire of the Arab street. Will an Arab 'Democracy' have the ability to save itself? Will Egypt fall, and if so, would this have any effect on Iran? Hmmm...
- CRS9TNR
January 26, 2011 at 9:39pm
yes, Jordan's Queen Rania is a Palestinian. as to Egypt? Suez Canal. oy.
- K2K
January 27, 2011 at 12:26am
CRS9TNR poses interesting questions. In Tunisia and Egypt, the Islamic clergy, organized, advantaged with ideological clarity, and brutal like the Bolsheviks, could hijack the revolution. The Alexander Kerenskys of the Muslim world are at a distinct disadvantage. If the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood comes to power in Egypt, they would more likely rival Iran's Shi'ite Islamic Republic. In Iran, society has had a generation of bitter experience with Islamic rule. Not being Arab, it is less culturally smothered by Islam. so the results may be different. I doubt that the cross-currents among the 3 countries is as important as the internal dynamics in each.
- amidut
January 27, 2011 at 6:04am
even though The Spine has disappeared, the URLS live on, for at least today http://www.hudson-ny.org/1838/rachid-ghannouchi-islamist "Tunisia: Don't Be Fooled, Returning Islamist Rachid Ghannouchi Is Not a Moderate" by Gabriel Scheinmann "...He has praised the Palestinian Intifadas for "restoring the vigor of the Palestinian movement" for its long quest to defeat the "Zionist assault on humanity" and "their neo-Crusader allies," which "represents an intensified form of a global undertaking which today spreads octopus-like over the whole planet." Ghannouchi has triumphantly called for a global jihad against the "Zionist project"[11], berating Arab states for not committing their oil revenues to defend the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.[12] Ghannouchi is, moreover, absolutely opposed to any negotiated solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, swearing to wait out Israel's destruction. "Our Ummah," he wrote, "will tear every document signed in a state of capitulation and incapacity and will disregard every treaty that in a moment of weakness is forged to strip it of its right to struggle for the restoration of what has been usurped. The crusaders' occupation of Jerusalem lasted for about a century" and yet the Islamic claim to it was neither abandoned nor relinquished.[13] Following the end of the Gaza War in January 2009, Ghannouchi praised Allah who "routed the Zionist Jews," and labeled the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 as "the first step in the complete victory of all of Palestine and the holy places of the Muslims."[14] He branded the Palestinian Authority as illegitimate because it "has given up the choice if jihad in the way of Allah Almighty as an effective means of defeating the occupation and the liberation of the Islamic holy places," and called for the recognition and support of the Hamas government because it was "maintaining the Resistance against the Jewish Zionist occupation." Ghannouchi rejects and derides the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative as a "proven betrayal of the Islamic Nation and the Palestinian cause." Lastly, he tasks Muslims to "regard everyone standing with the Zionist entity, whether countries, institutions or individuals, as providing substantial contribution to the crimes and brutality of this entity; the position towards him is the same as towards this usurping entity." In short, Ghannouchi has declared war against not only Israel and the United States, but also the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Jordan, the European Union, the United Nations, and all other states that recognize the State of Israel. Sadly, Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi (no relation) has already met with Ghannouchi's deputy and has cleared the legal obstacles to herald the exiled Islamist's return to Tunisia. ..."
- K2K
January 28, 2011 at 11:54am
You can see the degree of respect this magazine extends to its more active readers in the way it simply removes a blog which was the congregating place for many posters for many years without so much as granting us the courtesy of a parting message, some sign that they are aware of us or appreciate our contributions.
- noga1
January 28, 2011 at 1:04pm
I feel like a proverbial rat who deserted the sinking ship a couple months ago. Quite honestly, I had not the foggiest notion that it was sinking. Only that I found myself growing increasingly frustrated with the interminable internecine disputes, so my own participation became more sporadic. Other projects and engagements began to take precedence. Many thanks are due to those of you who helped to educate me over these past five, six years and slowly moved me from the stance of bemused spectator to engaged crusader. You know who you are. L'hitraot!
- willjames77
January 29, 2011 at 10:16am
I was grateful for MP's introduction to Elie Kedourie, with his most distinctive take on the nature of British culpability for violent Arab politics.
- hcunn
February 13, 2011 at 9:10pm