On Dec. 17, 2010, Mohammed
Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, set himself on fire in a show of public
protest. The self-immolation triggered unrest in Tunisia and ultimately the resignation
of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. This was followed by unrest in
a number of Arab countries that the global press dubbed the “Arab Spring.” The
standard analysis of the situation was that oppressive regimes had been sitting
on a volcano of liberal democratic discontent. The belief was that the Arab
Spring was a political uprising by masses demanding liberal democratic reform and
that this uprising, supported by Western democracies, would generate sweeping
political change across the Arab world.
It is now more than six months
since the beginning of the Arab Spring, and it is important to take stock of
what has happened and what has not happened. The reasons for the widespread
unrest go beyond the Arab world, although, obviously, the dynamics within that
world are important in and of themselves. However, the belief in an Arab Spring
helped shape European and American policies in the region and the world. If the
assumptions of this past January and February prove insufficient or even wrong,
then there will be regional and global consequences.
It is important to begin with
the fact that, to this point, no regime has fallen in the Arab world.
Individuals such as Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak have
been replaced, but
the regimes themselves, which represent the manner of governing, have not
changed. Some regimes have come under massive attack but have not fallen,
as in Libya, Syria and Yemen. And in many countries, such as Jordan, the unrest
never amounted to a real threat to the regime. The kind of rapid and complete
collapse that we saw in Eastern Europe in 1989 with the fall of communism has
not happened in the Arab world. More important, what regime changes that might
come of the civil wars in Libya and Syria are not going to be clearly
victorious, those that are victorious are not going to be clearly democratic
and those that are democratic are obviously not going to be liberal. The myth
that beneath every Libyan is a French republican yearning to breathe free is
dubious in the extreme.
Consider the case of Mubarak,
who was forced from office and put on trial, although the regime — a mode of
governing in which the military remains the main arbiter of the state — remains
intact. Egypt is now governed by a committee of military commanders, all of
whom had been part of Mubarak’s regime. Elections are coming, but the
opposition is deeply divided between Islamists and secularists, and
personalities and ideological divisions in turn divide these factions. The
probability of a powerful democratic president emerging who controls the
sprawling ministries in Cairo and the country’s security and military apparatus
is slim, and the Egyptian military junta is already acting to suppress elements
that are too radical and too unpredictable.
The important question is why
these regimes have been able to survive. In a genuine revolution, the regime
loses power. The anti-communist forces overwhelmed the Polish Communist
government in 1989 regardless of the divisions within the opposition. The
sitting regimes were not in a position to determine their own futures, let
alone the futures of their countries. There was a transition, but they were not
in control of it. Similarly, in 1979, when the Shah of Iran was overthrown, his
military and security people were not the ones managing the transition after
the shah left the country. They were the ones on trial. There was unrest in
Egypt in January and February 2011, but the idea that it amounted to a
revolution flew in the face of the reality of Egypt and of what revolutions
actually look like.
Shaping the Western
Narrative
There were three principles
shaping the Western narrative on the Arab Spring. The first was that these
regimes were overwhelmingly unpopular. The second was that the opposition
represented the overwhelming will of the people. The third was that once the
unrest began it was unstoppable. Add to all that the notion that social media
facilitated the organization of the revolution and the belief that the region
was in the midst of a radical transformation can be easily understood.
It was in Libya that these
propositions created the most serious problems. Tunisia and Egypt were not
subject to very much outside influence. Libya
became the focus of a significant Western intervention. Moammar Gadhafi had
ruled Libya for nearly 42 years. He could not have ruled for that long without
substantial support. That didn’t mean he had majority support (or that he
didn’t). It simply meant that the survival of his regime did not interest only
a handful of people, but that a large network of Libyans benefitted from
Gadhafi’s rule and stood to lose a great deal if he fell. They were prepared to
fight for his regime.
The opposition to him was
real, but its claim to represent the overwhelming majority of Libyan people was
dubious. Many of the leaders had been part of the Gadhafi regime, and it is
doubtful they were selected for their government posts because of their
personal popularity. Others were members of tribes that were opposed to the
regime but not particularly friendly to each other. Under the mythology of the
Arab Spring, the eastern coalition represented the united rage of the Libyan
people against Gadhafi’s oppression. Gadhafi was weak and isolated, wielding an
army that was still loyal and could inflict terrible vengeance on the Libyan
people. But if the West would demonstrate its ability to prevent slaughter in
Benghazi, the military would realize its own isolation and defect to the
rebels.
It didn’t happen that way.
First, Gadhafi’s regime was more than simply a handful of people terrorizing
the population. It was certainly a brutal regime, but it hadn’t survived for 42
years on that alone. It had substantial support in the military and among key
tribes. Whether this was a majority is as unclear as whether the eastern
coalition was a majority. But it was certainly a substantial group with much to
fight for and a great deal to lose if the regime fell. So, contrary to
expectations in the West, the
regime has continued to fight and to retain the loyalty of a substantial number
of people. Meanwhile, the eastern alliance has continued to survive under
the protection of NATO but has been unable to form a united government or
topple Gadhafi. Most important, it has always been a dubious assertion that
what would emerge if the rebels did defeat Gadhafi would be a democratic
regime, let alone a liberal democracy, and this has become increasingly obvious
as the war has worn on. Whoever would replace Gadhafi would not clearly be
superior to him, which is saying quite a lot.
A very similar process is
taking place in Syria. There, the minority
Alawite government of the al Assad family, which has ruled Syria for 41 years,
is facing an uprising led by the majority Sunnis, or at least some segment of
them. Again, the assumption was that the regime was illegitimate and therefore
weak and would crumble in the face of concerted resistance. That assumption
proved wrong. The al Assad regime may be running a minority government, but it
has substantial support from a military of mostly Alawite officers leading a
largely Sunni conscript force. The military has benefited tremendously from the
Assad regime — indeed, it brought it to power. The one thing the al Assads were
careful to do was to make it beneficial to the military and security services
to remain loyal to the regime. So far, they largely have. The danger for the
regime looking forward is if the growing strain on the Alawite-dominated army
divisions leads to fissures within the Alawite community and in the army
itself, raising the potential for a military coup.
In part, these Arab leaders
have nowhere to go. The senior leadership of the military could be tried in The
Hague, and the lower ranks are subject to rebel retribution. There is a rule in
war, which is that you should always give your enemy room to retreat. The al
Assad supporters, like the Gadhafi supporters and the supporters of Yemen’s Ali
Abdullah Saleh, have no room to retreat. So they have fought on for months, and
it is not clear they will capitulate anytime soon.
Foreign governments, from the
United States to Turkey, have expressed their exasperation with the Syrians,
but none has seriously contemplated an intervention. There are two reasons for
this: First, following the Libyan intervention, everyone became more wary of
assuming the weakness of Arab regimes, and no one wants a showdown on the
ground with a desperate Syrian military. Second, observers have become cautious
in asserting that widespread unrest constitutes a popular revolution or that
the revolutionaries necessarily want to create a liberal democracy. The Sunnis
in Syria might well want a democracy, but they might well be interested in
creating a Sunni “Islamic” state. Knowing that it is important to be careful
what you wish for, everyone seems to be issuing stern warnings to Damascus
without doing very much.
Syria is an interesting case
because it is, perhaps, the only current issue that Iran and Israel agree on. Iran
is deeply invested in the al Assad regime and wary of increased Sunni
power in Syria. Israel is just as deeply concerned that the al Assad regime — a
known and manageable devil from the Israeli point of view — could collapse and
be replaced by a Sunni Islamist regime with close ties to Hamas and what is
left of al Qaeda in the Levant. These are fears, not certainties, but the fears
make for interesting bedfellows.
Geopolitical Significance
Since late 2010, we have seen
three kinds of uprisings in the Arab world. The first are those that merely
brushed by the regime. The second are those that created a change in leaders
but not in the way the country was run. The third are those that turned into
civil wars, such as Libya and Yemen. There is also the interesting case of
Bahrain, where the regime was saved by the intervention of Saudi Arabia, but
while the rising there conformed to the basic model of the Arab Spring — failed
hopes — it lies in a different class, caught between Saudi and Iranian power.
The three examples do not mean
that there is not discontent in the Arab world or a desire for change. They do
not mean that change will not happen, or that discontent will not assume
sufficient force to overthrow regimes. They also do not mean that whatever
emerges will be liberal democratic states pleasing to Americans and Europeans.
This becomes the
geopolitically significant part of the story. Among Europeans and within the
U.S. State Department and the Obama administration is an ideology of human
rights — the idea that one of the major commitments of Western countries should
be supporting the creation of regimes resembling their own. This assumes all
the things that we have discussed: that there is powerful discontent in
oppressive states, that the discontent is powerful enough to overthrow regimes,
and that what follows would be the sort of regime that the West would be able
to work with.
The issue isn’t whether human
rights are important but whether supporting unrest in repressive states
automatically strengthens human rights. An important example was Iran in 1979,
when opposition to the oppression of the shah’s government was perceived as a movement
toward liberal democracy. What followed might have been democratic but it was
hardly liberal. Indeed, many of the myths of the Arab Spring had their roots
both in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and later in Iran’s
2009 Green Movement, when a narrow uprising readily crushed by the regime
was widely viewed as massive opposition and widespread support for
liberalization.
The world is more complicated
and more varied than that. As we saw in the Arab Spring, oppressive regimes are
not always faced with massed risings, and unrest does not necessarily mean mass
support. Nor are the alternatives necessarily more palatable than what went
before or the displeasure of the West nearly as fearsome as Westerners like to
think. Libya is a case study on the consequences of starting a war with
insufficient force. Syria makes a strong case on the limits of soft power.
Egypt and Tunisia represent a textbook lesson on the importance of not deluding
yourself.
The pursuit of human rights
requires ruthless clarity as to whom you are supporting and what their chances
are. It is important to remember that it is not Western supporters of human
rights who suffer the consequences of failed risings, civil wars or
revolutionary regimes that are committed to causes other than liberal
democracy.
The misreading of the
situation can also create unnecessary geopolitical problems. The fall of the
Egyptian regime, unlikely as it is at this point, would be just as likely to
generate an Islamist regime as a liberal democracy. The survival of the al
Assad regime could lead to more slaughter than we have seen and a much firmer
base for Iran. No regimes have fallen since the Arab Spring, but when they do
it will be important to remember 1979 and the conviction that nothing could be
worse than the shah’s Iran, morally or geopolitically. Neither was quite the
case.
This doesn’t mean that there
aren’t people in the Arab world who want liberal democracy. It simply means
that they are not powerful enough to topple regimes or maintain control of new
regimes even if they did succeed. The Arab Spring is, above all, a primer on
wishful thinking in the face of the real world.
George Friedman,
Stratfor, August 16, 2011
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