If you missed Hussein Agha and Robert Malley’s long piece The Arab Counterrevolution in the New York Review of Books a couple of weeks ago, as I did, go back and take a look. It’s not the least bit dated and is, in fact, one of the better analyses published lately of what is called the Arab Spring.
Middle Eastern liberals, they argue, only affected the direction of Arab history this year for the briefest of periods. The Arab revolution began on December 17, 2010, when Mohamed Bouazizi kicked off the revolt against Tunisia’s dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali by setting himself on fire in the town of Sidi Bouzid. The Arab revolution ended, they say, on February 12, the day after Hosni Mubarak was removed from his palace in Cairo. Men with guns and theology have been in charge of history’s direction since then.
“The outcome of the Arab awakening,” they write, “will not be determined by those who launched it. The popular uprisings were broadly welcomed, but they do not neatly fit the social and political makeup of traditional communities often organized along tribal and kinship ties, where religion has a central part and foreign meddling is the norm. The result will be decided by other, more calculating and hard-nosed forces.”
A military junta rules Egypt and is cutting deals with Islamists. A motley collection of armed rebels is in charge of Libya. The ruthless Bashar al-Assad is still the tyrant of Syria. Tunisia looks better, as should be expected, but Islamists are gaining strength even there where they are weakest. Political liberalism (in the general and classical sense) has always been marginal in the Arab world and it still is. We shouldn’t expect mature democracies to emerge over there until that changes. The Arab Spring may well be the beginning of liberalism’s rise, but that doesn’t mean it’s dominant yet.
Agha and Malley go off the rails a bit when they argue so-called moderate Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood may turn out to be the West’s best allies against armed Islamists. That is unlikely. Most Sunni Arab terrorist organizations of the Islamist bent splintered off from the Muslim Brotherhood. Unless armed Islamists start targeting Egyptian civilians first and foremost, as their counterparts did in Iraq, Islamists of every variety will almost certainly band together against Westerners and the Arab world’s own liberal and genuinely moderate “infidels.” After all, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is currently aligned with the totalitarian Salafist movement, from which al-Qaeda springs, and is openly hostile toward not only Israel and the United States but also everyone and every party in Egypt that does not toe its line.
The West’s best and most natural allies in the Middle East and North Africa are the region’s liberals, which is why American foreign policy makers should do everything in their power, even when not much can be done, to give them a lift.
[...] WINTER? “The Anti-Liberals Strike Back.” Middle Eastern liberals, they [Hussein Agha and Robert Malley] argue, only affected the direction [...]