February 6, 2011
IT'S NEVER TOO LATE TO BLAME THE TRANSNATIONALISTS:
The forces unleashed in Egypt can't be turned back: The upheaval spreading across the Arab world is at heart a movement for self-determination. The west resists it at its peril (Seumas Milne, 2/02/11, guardian.co.uk)
The US administration's floundering response to the peaceful revolt, first hailing the Mubarak regime's "stability" then demanding an "orderly transition", is a reminder of the decisive support western governments have given to Arab autocracies such as Mubarak's for decades – as well as their arrogant determination to keep a grip on whatever might follow him. The echoes of the winter of 1978-9, when US and British politicians rushed to Tehran to prop up the shah as millions demonstrated against his brutal regime, are unmistakable.The US could have pulled the plug on Egypt's dictatorship, which it funds to the tune of more than $3bn a year, at any time. But the western powers have long regarded democratisation of the Arab world as a threat to their control of the region and its resources. Hence Nicolas Sarkozy's backing for Tunisia's kleptocratic despot Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali until the day he was chased from the country.
Tony Blair, still Middle East envoy of the US-led "Quartet", this week characteristically blurted out the real attitude towards democracy in countries such as Egypt among the west's powers-that-be. The Egyptian president had been, Blair said, "immensely courageous and a force for good" – this of a man who has jailed and tortured tens of thousands of political prisoners – because of his role in maintaining peace with Israel. Change in Egypt had to be "stable and ordered", Blair explained, because the Muslim Brotherhood might be elected and public opinion in the Middle East could "end up frankly with the wrong idea".
So there is some historical or divine justice in the fact that the tipping point for Tunisia's unfinished revolution, which in turned sparked the Egyptian revolt, was the impact of the west's own economic crisis. Falling living standards and rising unemployment as a result of the 2008 crash were the "final trigger", the exiled Tunisian Islamist opposition leader Rachid Ghannouchi told me before he returned home last weekend.
That fed into escalating discontent over mafia-style corruption, gross inequality, repression, censorship, torture and poverty. In Egypt, where 40% of the population is living on less than two dollars a day, the economic pressure has been even greater.
But more profoundly, the upheaval now spreading across the Arab world is at heart a movement for self-determination: a demand by the peoples of the region to run their own affairs, free of the dead hand of largely foreign-backed tyrannies. It's not a coincidence, or the product of some defect in Arab culture, that the Middle East has the largest collection of autocratic states in the world.
Most survive on a western lifeline, and the result across the region has been social and economic stagnation. There is a real sense in which, despite the powerful challenge of Arab nationalism in the 50s and 60s, the Arab world has never been fully decolonised.
the Arabs are still paying the price for Wilson's League of Nations.