Push Mideast Toward Reform Before A Second Spring Returns To Further Extend The Chaos – Or Is Mubarakism Right?
By
Bret Stephens
Feb. 15,
2021
Ten years
ago, as masses of demonstrators filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square, I made a modest
bet with a friend that Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s dictator of nearly 30 years,
would hold on to power. My thinking was that Mubarak controlled the army, and
the army could see that the choice Egypt faced wasn’t between democracy and
dictatorship. It was the choice among Islamism, chaos — and him.
I lost the
bet, but I wasn’t entirely wrong.
Mubarak
himself, of course, soon fell, raising broad hopes that decent, stable,
representative democracy might yet establish itself not just in Egypt but
throughout the Arabic-speaking world. But as a devastating report on Sunday
from The Times’s Ben Hubbard and David D.
Kirkpatrick reminds
readers, virtually none of those hopes survive.
A demonstration in Beirut, Oct 20, 2019, where huge protests failed to
change Lebanon’s corrupt, sectarian political system. The New York Times
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In Tunisia,
where it all began, the economy and government sputter. In Syria, the dead
number in the hundreds of thousands and refugees in the millions — and Bashar
al-Assad is still in power. In Libya, Muammar el-Qaddafi’s ouster has led to a
decade of militia warfare. Iraq and Syria were both brutalized by the Islamic
State until it was largely snuffed out. Yemen has collapsed into a regional
proxy war while millions face starvation. Lebanon — a garden without walls, as
my late friend Fouad Ajami used to say — is a failed state. Egyptian politics went
from dictatorship to democracy to Islamism to dictatorship within the space of
30 months.
“The hope
for a new era of freedom and democracy that surged across the region has been
largely crushed,” Hubbard and Kirkpatrick write. “The United States proved to
be an unreliable ally. And other powers that intervened forcefully to stamp out
the revolts and bend the region to their will — Iran, Russia, Turkey, Saudi
Arabia and the Emirates — have only grown more powerful.”
So, was
Mubarak right? Is Mubarakism right? That is, is the best political option for a
country like Egypt some kind of authoritarian system that avoids the outward
brutishness of a figure like Saddam Hussein but also keeps its billy clubs
close at hand?
That’s a
question that stretches beyond the Arab world. Want to know how Vladimir Putin,
Xi Jinping or Ali Khamenei justify themselves in jailing dissidents and
cracking heads in Moscow, Hong Kong or Tehran? They point to the wreckage of
Syria, symbol of resistance to authoritarian rule. Want to know how they
justify their anti-Americanism? They point to a picture of Benghazi, symbol of
America’s reckless use of power in pursuit of its feckless humanitarianism.
A mural in Cairo’s Tahrir Square after Egypt’s revolution depicts ousted
President Hosni Mubarak and his former ministers, June 25, 2012. The New York
Times
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In short,
the words “Arab Spring” — scare quotes included — have become a powerful
empirical argument for repression. There’s a psychological argument, too. “It
is ultimately a cruel misunderstanding of youth to believe it will find its
heart’s desire in freedom,” says Leo Naphta, a major character in Thomas Mann’s
“The Magic Mountain.” “Its deepest desire is to obey.”
It’s
foolish to dismiss these arguments: They are a major reason both the Bush and
Obama administrations mostly found failure in the Middle East. Cultures and
societies that have known varieties of despotism for their entire history don’t
become liberal democracies from one season to the next. Nobody is born with the
habits of a free mind. They’re difficult to learn and tempting to dismiss.
But it
would be equally foolish to settle for Mubarakism. The Arab world exploded a
decade ago and has been collapsing ever since not because of the absence of
repression but, to a large degree, on account of its accumulated weight. Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi may bet he can rule Egypt by being a more charismatic (and more
repressive) version of Mubarak. That’s not a bet the United States should help
him make.
That
doesn’t mean the Biden administration should look for opportunities to distance
itself from el-Sisi or other autocratic allies in the region like Saudi Arabia.
But Secretary of State Antony Blinken can adopt the advice that John McCain
offered a decade ago, just before Mubarak was toppled.
“We need to
be more assisting but also more insisting,” McCain said in 2011, as part of “a
new compact with our undemocratic partners.” Economic aid to Cairo or security
guarantees for Riyadh? Yes: The U.S. has real enemies in the region and doesn’t
have the luxury of conducting its foreign policy as a moral vanity project.
But
assistance has to be accompanied by gradual but definite steps toward economic
and political liberalization, starting with the release of nonviolent political
prisoners. Regimes that muzzle their people’s voices eventually push people
into venting their frustrations from muzzles of a different sort.
If the
first lesson of the Arab Spring is that revolutions fail, the second is that
repression ultimately makes revolution more likely and more deadly. The lesson
for the Biden administration is to push our partners toward reform before a
second spring returns to further extend the chaos.
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Bret L.
Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won
a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was
previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post.
Original
Headline: What We Learned From Mubarak
Source: The New York Times
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-politics/push-mideast-toward-reform-second/d/124314
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