WHO'S REACHIN' OUT TO CAPTURE A MOMENT:

The Arabian spring: Suddenly, the political tectonic plates of the Middle East are shifting. Why is George W Bush being so modest about it? Jon Swain in Cairo and Sarah Baxter in Washington, 3/06/05, Times of London)

[I]n the past few days some prominent people in Cairo have acknowledged that Bush’s steadfast policy to advance democracy and freedom in the Arab world seems to be paying dividends and that the region is potentially on the verge of changes of tectonic proportions. Hisham Kassem, publisher of Egypt’s newest newspaper, Al-Masry Al-Youm (Egypt Today), talks of on “Arabian spring”.

“History will do Bush justice after he has left the White House,” Kassem said. “With his advisers he is today the most unpopular American president ever in the Middle East. But he is really a man who did this region good.

“The Americans have done a wonderful job. It is because of their pressure that we have had this opening in Egypt. Criticising Mubarak was forbidden prior to the pressure they put on him.”

But in a theatre just a few streets away from Kassem’s office, America’s role in Iraq is being attacked on stage to rapt audiences and critical acclaim in a play called Vietnam Two by Ahmed Abu Haiba, a moderate Egyptian Islamist.

In Egypt, as across much of the Arab world, it is believed that America wants to take control of the Middle East for its oil. The theatre audience claps and praises Allah every time the Americans suffer a setback.

WASHINGTON appears to understand this Arab ambivalence. The result has been a significant silence about the “Arabian spring”. From Tony Blair to Kenneth Adelman, a neoconservative bulwark of the administration and patron of Freedom House, there has been no crowing from the president’s friends. Bush has confined himself to a firm order to Syria to get out of Lebanon. There was no mawkish leap onto the Lebanese democratic bandwagon.

Just as Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” rhetoric, which so upset his west European allies, led to a private diplomacy that fatally wore away the Soviet carapace, so Bush’s first-term “axis of evil” megaphone diplomacy and military interventionism seem to have undergone a second-term transformation into subtle statecraft to coax the Middle East towards peace and democratic stability.

Even to articulate such an amibitious goal is to invite ridicule, however. Unlike the Soviet empire, the Arab lands are not one bloc but a vast swathe of discrete communities from the Atlantic to the Gulf, each with its own history, blood feuds, power elites and distinct response to local political pressures.

There is no coercive ideology to unify against or a central authority that, once shattered, would set the entire Arab nation on the road to democracy. Islam, with its Sunni-Shi’ite tensions, both unites and divides. The one unifier — outrage at Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians — has been exploited by Arab demagogues for half a century to keep themselves in power.

General Sir Peter de la Billière, the British Army commander from the first Gulf war and an Arabist with long experience of the region and its rulers, warned against euphoria last week.

“There’s a degree of change unthinkable five years ago, but it’s not dramatic and it’s not going to change the Middle East overnight,” he said. “Going from a tribal system to a democracy needs to be done gradually and in an ordered way. The rulers in Saudi fear Islam because they know it’s going to cause unrest. The fundamentalist elements in these societies are lined up against the more liberal parts and you have to see order and discipline somehow.

“Iraq may have had a great election, but it’s not order out of chaos; if anything it’s the other way round. We’re not out of the tunnel by a long way.

“Lebanon is okay — it’s a special case. It has always been a liberal country, despite the Syrian involvement. It’s always had a government; it’s quite different from Saudi Arabia and even Jordan.

“Kuwait was already moving down the democratic path and Bahrain has introduced elections; but we wouldn’t see either as being particularly democratic. These are different people with different heritages. To think that we can impose western democracies overnight is wishful thinking.”

Within this contradictory political landscape, even some of the shrewdest observers are baffled.

“You have a wind of change,” said Andre Azoulay, adviser to the king of Morocco (and the only Jewish adviser to an Arab head of state). “There is a breath of fresh air in the region. But I can’t tell you quite what it means.

“Is it coming from one place? It’s not being imposed from above — it is more a conjunction of different situations with a convergence now in a certain direction. It is not the answer or result of what the United States government is expecting, because it comes from inside these countries. There is an emergence of civil society. From Mauritania to the borders of Asia there is a new wind.”

And if they were erupting in Islamicist violence would folk be so fastidious in trying not assign America much blame? Yeah, right...

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 5, 2005 11:27 PM