The Full Flower of the Arab Spring

It was so drearily predictable, and I did, (if I may quote myself from February 2, 2011:

It is said that a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience. Right now, the optimism that I hear from the administration and the MSM in the midst of a very fluid situation sounds very much like the hope for the second marriage.

The problem with the optimism that many are expressing for the revolutions in the Middle East is that, while there are many examples of happy marriages, there are no examples of democratic Islamist regimes. The Middle East was substantially converted to Islam following the dictates and example of Muhammad whose rule and religion was spread by the sword. This situation has not changed substantially since Mohammad’s death in 632. Before Mohammad the region was ruled by Romans, king and Pharaohs; after him it was ruled by Caliphs. There is no - zero - example of Democracy in the Middle East with the exception of Israel and a very shaky state – Iraq – which was created, nurtured and shaped by the American military following the invasion under George Bush. To repeat, there is no history or political culture of representative government in the Middle East.

The one unifying factor in the region is Islam, a religion that demands submission to its political and theological dictates on pain of death. Not since Henry the Eight created the English church and became its political head have rulers held such secular and religious power.

And now it has come to pass.

Egypt's Mursi called "pharaoh" for seizing new powers

Egypt is once again a dictatorship, but this time the dictator is a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, an assembly of Muslim fanatics who hate the West and think that Hitler’s solution for the Jews did not go far enough. And he has essentially been crowned by the “smart diplomacy” of the Worst President Ever.

Looking around me, does it seem strange that most of the people who are paid to write or opine on developments around the world were so wrong? And if you are Roger Cohen, remain so wrong? There are a few professions where being wrong – drastically, incredibly, extremely, extraordinarily wrong – is not an impediment to success. One is politics, the other is opinion writing.

Here is NY Times columnist Tom Friedman:   Lessons From Tahrir Sq. in which he advises the Israelis and the Palestinians to look to the revolution that took place in Egypt and emulate it.

Colum McCann catches the spirit in this NY Times photo essay on the Arab Spring.   It's a virtual love song to the Arab Spring that would be x-rated if it were any more explicit.

THE BREATH AND HUM of democracy seemed almost a libidinous thing in parts of the Middle East, but, in truth, the body heat had been simmering for years. The protests took hold in Tunisia in late 2010 after the street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire. The kindle caught and the spirit of his self-immolation lit a fuse across the region. A wave of protests struck Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan. Almost as soon as protesters in Cairo were being herded away from Tahrir Square, they were dancing at the news of Mubarak’s resignation.

In December of 2011 the editors of the Washington Post still believed.
Keeping the Arab Spring alive

The best cure for what ails the Middle East is what it has lacked: free debate and democracy. In the short term, that may lead to mistaken policies or greater friction with the West. But over time extremists and fundamentalists are more likely to be discredited. The Arab world’s huge and rising young generation wants the freedom and prosperity it sees spreading in much of the rest of the world — and the rest of the world should be betting on that.

It looks like that bet just lost.  The question is why anyone would bet their lives and the lives of millions of people on an outcome that had no remote chance of happening?  Liberals really do live in their own universe where their wishes, hopes and fantasies are reality. 

And Turkey, which is actually part of NATO, is now swinging into the Islamist orbit, shedding 90 years of secular government.   The current regime is purging the military while providing resources to groups attacking Israel.

It must be asked: how does it benefit America's interest to replace dictators who do business with us with fanatical despots who hate us, burn our flag, invade our embassies, seek to destroy our allies and in their religious hears want to see us dead? 

Michael Totten has an excellent article on Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.  He recounts how carefully chosen, indoctrinated and vetted the Muslim Brotherhood is.   It's a very select, insular group.  Not anyone can join and not everyone who joins can stay.  And then there's the problem of Egyptian society and culture itself.

Egypt’s deeply embedded illiberalism isn’t exactly a secret. It’s the country’s most obvious political characteristic, one that imposes itself on the observant almost at once. Egyptian blogger Big Pharaoh explained it to me this way the first time I visited Cairo seven years ago: “Most of the armed terrorist groups we see now were born out of the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood…My biggest fear is that if the Muslim Brotherhood rules Egypt we will get Islamism-lite, that they won’t be quite bad enough that people will revolt against them. Most Egyptians don’t drink, so they won’t mind if alcohol is illegal. The same goes for banning books. Most Egyptians don’t read. So why should they care if books are banned? Most women wear a veil or a headscarf already, so if it becomes the law hardly anyone will resist.”

But sure, the Brothers threw the word “democracy” around when they were on their way up, especially when gullible foreign journalists were in town. They got a big kick out of portraying themselves as religiously conservative democrats, as though they were the Egyptian equivalents of Germany’s Christian Democrats or the Republicans in the United States. But their slogan is and always has been “Islam is the solution.” They’re only moderate compared with the totalitarian Salafists.

Morsi promises that his dictatorial powers are temporary. Feel free to believe that if you find it credible. Hey, it might even be true. Weird things happen in the Middle East all the time. The army could remove him tomorrow. Other regime components might tell him to get stuffed, making him more Hugo Chavez than Fidel Castro. The “street” might throw the country into ungovernable chaos. Morsi might even feel enough pressure from abroad that he dials it down. But whatever happens later, he just proclaimed himself dictator. If he isn’t stopped, that’s exactly what he will be.

At Newsbusters: Remembering Some of Those Who Said the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt Wasn't a Threat to Democracy

"David Gregory: Muslim Brotherhood 'Matured,' 'Sophisticated,' Egypt Not Comparable to Iran", the NBC "Meet the Press" host said that "They don't want to turn it into an Islamist state. They have matured politically in that sense and are rather sophisticated."

At Reuters on January 29, 2011, Security Correspondent William Maclean relayed the insistence of Kamel El-Helbawy, "an influential cleric in the international Islamist ideological movement," that those who feared the Brotherhood were in essence engaging in paranoia

Mohamed ElBaradei ..."You know, the Muslim Brotherhood has nothing to do with the Iranian model, has nothing to do with extremism ... The Muslim Brotherhood is a religiously conservative group. They are a minority in Egypt. ...They are in favor of a wording on the base of constitution that has red lines that every Egyptian has the same rights, same obligation, that the state in no way will be a state based on religion. And I have been reaching out to them. We need to include them."

Tariq Ramadan, professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford and "the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928," ... "Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is a democratic partner, not Islamist threat.


Barack Obama: “The Muslim Brotherhood is one faction in Egypt. They don’t have majority support in Egypt, but they are well organized and there are strains of their ideology that are against the U.S., there’s no doubt about it,”

NOTE: Edited from time to time.  The Arab Spring is evolving daily and no where has it brought either democracy or peace.