The dread: That the guns trained on the protesters of Tahrir Square in Cairo will eventually open fire, just as they did in China’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, ending that country’s brief grab for democracy after three weeks of demonstrations. The Egyptian military tells protesters it won’t open fire as long as the protests are peaceful. That’s a cue for the government’s agents provocateurs to light the fuse when the time comes.
The doubt: That the follow-through in any of these Arab nations will be as democratically sustained as the revolutionary passions fueling the movements. Too few credible opposition leaders are ready to assume leadership. That’s what happens after decades of dictatorship: there are no trained leaders to step in. And too many forces are arraigned against the movements, including, sadly and pitifully, the United States.
The disappointment: To see the rest of the Middle East, where freedom and democracy are no less alien, sit out the movement. Where are the protesters of Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran, each a nation with unelected, illegitimate leaders? Where, for that matter, are the protesters of Iraq and Afghanistan, where the American illusion of democracy is not nearly as convincing as the authoritarian regimes in place now? Qatar’s al-Jazeera has been providing gripping, round-the-clock live coverage of the revolutions. Egypt just censored al-Jazeera’s broadcasts anywhere in Egypt and revoked the accreditations of the satellite station’s journalists in Egypt.
But it’s not as if Hamad al-Thani, the leader of Qatar, who founded and funds al-Jazeera—enlightened and more liberal than most Arab leaders as he may be—is any more legitimate than his cohorts elsewhere in the region. He breaks fewer skulls, Qatari prison conditions are not significantly different than Florida’s, but he’s still an unelected leader ruling by those old and wacky presumptions of hereditary or divine right (the Moroccan king actually thinks he’s a descendant of Prophet Mohammed, though by DNA he has more in common with Pee-Wee Herman).
The embarrassment: To hear the leader of the Arab League—a league of 22 nations, 20 of them entirely undemocratic and therefore illegitimate—call for multi-party elections in Egypt, as he did Sunday, after sitting out that sort of declaration for as long as the league has been around. That’s to be expected from the current crop of Arab leaders. Far more embarrassing is to hear President Obama and Hillary Clinton sound no different than the leader of the Arab League: vague declarations about the need for elections, but no commitment for democracy now, no conviction, no inspiration for the protesters, certainly no endorsement of their demonstrations, and continued tacit support for Mubarak. It’s American-made tear gas, after all, that’s been raining down on protesters, part of the $1.5 billion in military aid the United States sends Egypt every year. No let-up of that rain in the forecast.
“This is an ongoing conversation that American officials have had for 30 years,” Clinton told an interviewer on Jan. 30, well behind the curve. And what has that achieved? (About.com's Deborah White has a less jaundiced take on Obama and Clinton.
It’s Not Just the Last 30 Years
There’s also a false demarcation between the Mubarak years and the years that preceded them.
Democratically speaking, Mubarak was neither an improvement nor a step back from the regime of Anwar el-Sadat that preceded it, no matter how much and how justifiably the West admired Sadat for making peace with Israel. Sadat, too, was a dictator in his 11 years as Egypt’s president, as brutal and unforgiving as Mubarak. It was in Sadat’s prisons that Ayman al Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s Number 2 man today, was tortured, and in his prisons that Zawahiri’s vision of a Muslim caliphate turned from a peaceful one to a violent one. Sadat was no improvement from the preceding regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser, no matter how much the Arab world admired Nasser for briefly appearing to give Arabs some dignity in the face of Western or Soviet designs. Mubarak, in sum, extended by 30 years a non-democratic, dictatorial habit of rule that has defined modern Egypt and the greater Middle East.
Which is what makes these demonstrations so remarkable, and so tenuous.
Not Quite the Middle East’s 1989
The comparison with Eastern Europe chucking off 45 years of Soviet oppression in 1989 is tempting. But it’s inaccurate. It raises false hopes resting on false parallels, particularly since this time around the United States is on the wrong side of history, the down side of influence, the backside of respect: you don’t see on Tahrir Square, as you did in Tiananmen Square 22 years ago, anyone brandishing replicas of the Statue of Liberty. You won’t even see Barack Obama’s face on placards and mugs, as you did in Cairo two years ago, when he delivered another one of what, in retrospect, was an empty-hope speech about the West’s relations with the Muslim world.
In 1989, the nations of Eastern Europe were liberating themselves from oppression with unqualified American support. They were returning to the democracies they’d been before World War II. They were getting rid of the Soviet Empire’s hold, an empire that itself would vanish two years later. But the Middle East today, from Morocco and Mauritania in West Africa all the way to the border of Pakistan in South Asia, is what the Soviet empire was in the 1980s—a black hole of repression and regression—with significant differences.