Lowering the bar for Arab Israelis. By Ilan Manor. Jerusalem Post, December 28, 2015.
Opinion Jounal: Still Dreaming of the Arab Spring. Sohrab Ahmari interviewed by Mary Kissel. Video. Wall Street Journal, December 17, 2015.
Death of the Arab Spring Revisited with Sohrab Ahmari. Interviewed by Philippe Assouline. The Lip TV, December 29, 2015. YouTube.
Ahmari:
Disorganized urban liberalism couldn’t compete with the politics of tribe—or Islamism.
Thursday
marks a bitter anniversary in the Arab world. On Dec. 17, 2010, a Tunisian
fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set
himself on fire after the authorities confiscated his goods and beat him. The
incident sparked an uprising that within weeks would topple Tunisia’s venal
autocracy. Protests spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria. Despots from
Morocco to Mesopotamia felt the heat of popular anger. Many couldn’t withstand
it.
Yet today
the Middle East is less stable, and less hopeful, than it was before the Arab
Spring. Five years ago, the denim-clad, smartphone-wielding Arab liberal became
the region’s avatar. Now the knife-wielding jihadist and the refugee have risen
to prominence instead.
Each
Arab Spring country is unhappy in its own way. Tunisia is the only success
story among the bunch, having adopted a secular constitution and completed
several peaceful power transfers. As Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia’s
moderate Islamic Ennahda party, recently told me, “We’ve remained on the bridge
of democratic transition while others have fallen off.” True, but the
birthplace of the Arab Spring is also the world’s top exporter of fighters for
Islamic State, or ISIS.
The
situation in Egypt is similarly mixed. The country is once more ruled by the
officer corps and back to its prerevolutionary funk: repressive and paranoid,
yes, but also stable and on the path of economic reform.
Things
are far worse in Yemen and Libya, which have ceased to exist as unified states.
Yemen has disintegrated into its sectarian constituent parts, forcing
neighboring Sunni powers led by Saudi Arabia to intervene militarily to prevent
the Iranian regime from turning the country into a Shiite satellite. Libya is a
lawless playground of smugglers and ISIS. Then there is Syria, with its barrel
bombs, 250,000 dead, and four million refugees.
At the
height of the movement, I edited an anthology of essays by young Middle East
dissidents. The essayists described an Arab world where men and women were
equal, blasphemous cartoonists were tolerated and gay people could live openly,
among other fantasies. The book’s now-cringe-inducing title: “Arab Spring
Dreams.”
How did
dreams turn into nightmares? The standard account has it that by crushing or
co-opting opponents, secular autocrats like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak empowered
Islamist outfits that were the only remaining channel for dissent. Once the
dictators fell, the liberals were quickly sidelined as Islamists and remnants
of the old order battled for dominance.
It’s a
theory riddled with contradictions. For one thing, it underestimates political
Islam. As early as the 19th century, Islamist intellectuals had called for
restoring Islam’s lost glory and expelling Western pollutants. To say that the
movement’s grip on the region is a reaction against secular dictatorship is to
deny Islamists’ agency and inherent ideological drive.
Secular
Arab nationalism had already exhausted its energies by the time Mr. Mubarak and
colleagues were overthrown. But as the rise of ISIS shows, Islamism represents
a longer historical wave only beginning to crest. Many in the West imagined
removing the dictators would also diminish Islamism’s attraction. Events didn’t
pan out that way.
Nor
could Arab liberals forge a third way. The “Revolution 2.0” model of
leaderless, social-media-driven protest was effective against unpopular
regimes. But it proved insufficient for winning power, and the liberals failed
to articulate a coherent ideological alternative with broad appeal. Had they
spent half as much time learning from Israel how to plant democracy in Middle
East soil as they did demonizing the Jewish state, today the liberals might be
in a better position.
The
biggest Western misstep was to treat the quest for freedom as somehow separate
from the contest for geopolitical mastery. In Egypt, the Obama administration
was likely powerless to prevent the pro-Western Mr. Mubarak’s downfall, but the
White House in the subsequent months did little to shape the outcome of the
revolution. Washington favored all actors equally, as though Egypt were
Luxembourg and the Muslim Brotherhood just another center-right party.
In
Libya, the U.S. removed Moammar Gadhafi under a legal abstraction—the
responsibility to protect—then swiftly abandoned a country with few viable
institutions to its tribal furies. In Syria, President Obama declared that
Bashar Assad “must go,” and then watched impassively as the Iran-backed tyrant
continued to kill and gas his own people, triggering a refugee crisis that has
overwhelmed Europe.
The
slaughter has continued for nearly five years. In the long term, the most
perilous consequence isn’t the birth of a terror state stretching across Syria
and spilling into Iraq but the destruction of U.S. credibility. The Arabs know
you can’t impose order without being present and engaged in their world.
As for
ordered liberty, five years after Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated, the freest
Arabs still are those who are citizens of Israel. Millions fleeing other parts
of the region are rendering their own judgment about the state of Arab
civilization. The intellectuals and activists don’t dare imagine another
uprising because they know that, given an opening, large numbers of Arabs will
demand Shariah law, repression of women, and ethnic and sectarian revenge.
Perhaps
that’s an unfair judgment, but it follows from a political culture that prizes
honor, tribe and piety above reason and compromise. Viewed in that light, it
isn’t just the years since the Arab Spring that the region has wasted, but the
whole century since it was freed from the Ottoman yoke.
