Vive La Tunisie: Absolutely. But now what? (Franck Prevel/Getty Images)
If Tunisia--if the Arab world, for that matter--had the equivalent of Craig Ferguson's Late Late Show, the host would have come out these last few evenings and announced: It's a great day for the Arab world (the way Ferguson begins every show with his trademark It's a great day for America line, and rarely snarkily).
And it has been. Not just for Tunisia, but for the entire Arab world, that mass of repression and somnolence so reminiscent of the Soviet Union at its stupefying worst (the mass concentration camps and Stalinist murders aside, of course). Finally in Tunisia an unshackling from thuggery and dictatorship. Shame on Europe and the United States for having enabled Ben Ali all these years, shame on Paris for having stood by him to the last minute, until it became apparent that he was a man without a country anymore and the French president, so ingloriously turning his back from his former vassal, forbade ben Ali's plane from landing in Paris on Saturday.
Shame, of course, on the United States and Europe for continuing to enable the brutes and thugs of Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan ... and the list goes on: your tax dollars still hard at work propping up these dictatorial blights on history and the Middle East.
If only Tunisians could show the way. Liberty would finally be spelled in Arabic. In Egypt on Monday, Abdo Abdel Moneim, a 50-year-old restaurant owner, decided to imitate Mohamed Bouazizi's Self-Immolation in Tunisia on Dec. 17, the self-immolation that sparked the protests there and led to ben Ali's fall. The Egyptian restaurant owner was protesting not getting his share of subsidized bread for his restaurant. There's been reports of other self-immolations--several in Algeria, one in Mauritania, where a military dictatorship took over that formerly nominal democracy and radicalized it.
That's the problem with police states that rid themselves of their dictator: who's going to step in? For 23 years in Tunisia, Ben Ali ensured that there was no opposition, no dissent, no trained replacement. He was it. There are no democratic institutions in Tunisia. There is no seasoned opposition. It's just as probable that whoever takes over will be a different shade of Ben Ali, but not a significant change. Another thug, another strongman, another eventual dictator. You don't see the Obama administration courageously taking a stand on behalf of the protesters, you don't see American foundations, institutions, non-governmental or even governmental--why not the State Department?--descending on Tunisia with help, the kind of help George Soros gave eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union, financing and educating slews of democratic vanguards, helping write their constitutions, helping them set up the sort of democrat9ic foundations necessary after half a century in Soviet oblivion.
No, none of that for Tunisia. The Obama administration and the Europeans are taking the quietly contemptuous posture of the hypocrite: the wait and see, disguised as non-interference. The street protesters don't even have a name they can rally around, not even a weak one, like Iran's Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who despite his shady past as an Ayatollah henchman could still pass himself off as a member of the opposition in that country's rehearsal for its eventual unshackling.
The American response so far regarding Tunisia has been downright reprehensible for its coyness and continued misjudgments. Not only does Hillary Clinton, the putative secretary of state, continues to be MIA on the most important issues; where she did release a statement, as she did on Jan. 16, she declared the United States "encouraged by recent remarks by Prime Minister Ghannouchi and Interim President Mabazza indicating a willingness to work with Tunisians across the political spectrum and within civil society to build a truly representative government." Really? Ghannouchi and Mabazza, two old and dirty hands from the Ben Ali years, suddenly to be trusted with "a willingness to work with Tunisians across the political spectrum"? It wasn't long ago that Clinton was chanting the virtues of Morocco, that slightly milder dictatorship, too.
Nor are the Americans overly eager to encourage the street to revolt elsewhere in the Arab world. Not at all. To the contrary. There's quiet rallying going on behind the scenes, the way European monarchies rallied around Louis XVI in his last cowardly days as he tried to escape, regroup and attack his own people to save his royal hide. The dictators of the Middle East--old enemies--are now all friends. They're friends, because it's in hours like these that they discover that thuggery only has company among other thugs. They're despised, they're reviled in their own countries, these Mubaraks, these Qaddafis, these Bouteflikas, for good reason. Their people loathe them, loathe the admiration these dictators manufacture for themselves, literally, on every street corner--the cult of personality, the crock of legitimacy. Not surprisingly, Ben Ali's destination, once Paris forbade him (or, actually, his shopping-crazy wife) landing rights, was Saudi Arabia.
Talk about another regime that needs a boot-n-flick in the robes.
Their day is coming. It'll have been well deserved. The same can't be said for the immediate consequences of these revolutions. It's too much to hope that they turn out like Eastern Europe's did in 1989: peaceful (but for Romania's), single-minded returns to the civility and plurality of democracy. Eastern Europe had at least known democracy before. The Middle East hasn't. It won't be a rebirth, but a brand new birth, if that. And Islamists are waiting in the wings for their opportunity at playing midwife, especially if they themselves can be the new overlords. Maybe you can't blame the United States and Europe for their dreaded wait-and-see attitudes.
Then again, you very well can: if Islamists have a chance in this day and age, it's because the West has for so long enabled these regimes to prevent democracy from taking root, instead giving Islamists the legitimacy they never otherwise would have enjoyed. As Malcolm X might have put it (the same Malcolm X who, had he lived long enough, would have also questioned the thuggery of the Saudi regime he briefly admired under its religious veils), the chicken are coming to roost all over the place.
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