“Virtually no one in Washington expected such a snowballing of
events following Iraq’s elections,” recently explained the deputy
editorial editor of the Washington Post, Jackson
Diehl.
Said another way, virtually no one in Establishment D.C.
expected things would snowball the way Bush had predicted. Still,
reports Diehl, the evidence is obvious: “Less than two years after
Saddam Hussein was deposed, the fact is that Arabs are marching for
freedom and shouting slogans against tyrants in the streets of
Beirut and Cairo — and regimes that have endured for decades are
visibly tottering. Those who claimed that U.S. intervention could
never produce such events have reason to reconsider.”
The tottering tyrants to whom Diehl refers are “the desperate
dictators of Syria and Egypt,” the new targets of the perennially
outraged Arab street. What’s key here is the switch in demons, the
shift in the minds of the raging fist-pumpers who jump up and down
in the streets, a change in which devils they’re blaming for their
unrelenting humiliation and destitution. Always before, it was the
Great and Little Satan, America and Israel. Now it’s the crooked
devils in their own nearby palaces, homegrown demons like Bashar
Assad and Hosni Mubarak.
“These are autocrats whose regimes had remained unaltered, and
unchallenged, for decades,” explained Diehl. “There has been no
political ferment in Damascus since the 1960s, or in Cairo since
the 1950s. Now, within weeks of Iraq’s elections, Mubarak and Assad
are tacking with panicked haste between bold acts of repression,
which invite an international backlash, and big promises of reform
— which also may backfire, if they prove to be empty. They could
yet survive; but quite clearly, the Arab autocrats don’t regard the
Bush dream of democratic dominoes as fanciful.”
In a mountain hideout in Lebanon, Washington Post
reporter David Ignatius saw much the same story as Diehl had seen
in the streets of Cairo. Ignatius interviewed Walid Jumblatt, the
patriarch of the Druze Muslim community in Lebanon and, until the
recent assassination in Beirut of former Lebanese Prime Minister
Rafik Hariri, a man who went along with Syria’s occupation.
“I dined Monday night with Jumblatt in his mountain fortress in
Moukhtara, southeast of Beirut,” reported Ignatius. “He moved there
for safety last weekend because of worries that he would be the
next target of whoever killed Hariri. We sat under a portrait of
Jumblatt’s father, Kamal, who was assassinated in 1976 after he
opposed the initial entry of Syrian troops into Lebanon.”
Like Diehl, Ignatius saw a shift in devils during his talk with
Jumblatt: “Over the years, I’ve often heard him denouncing the
United States and Israel, but these days, in the aftermath of
Hariri’s death, he’s sounding almost like a neoconservative. He
says he’s determined to defy the Syrians until their troops leave
Lebanon.”
More broadly, Jumblatt tells Ignatius that the spark of
democratic revolt in Baghdad is spreading throughout the Arab
world. “It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change
has started because of the American invasion of Iraq,” explained
Jumblatt. “I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi
people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the
start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people,
all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We
can see it.”
In Lebanon, Ignatius witnessed a growing rage that was about
more than the assassination of Hariri, about more than Syria’s
occupation. “People want the truth about who killed Hariri,” he
explained, “but on a deeper level they want the truth about why
Arab regimes have failed to deliver on their promises of progress
and prosperity.”
They want the truth about why the Muslim world is, as Pakistan’s
General Musharraf described it, “the poorest, the most illiterate,
the most backward, the most unhealthy, the most unenlightened, the
most deprived, and the weakest of all the human race.”
It’s easy for a once mighty civilization to blame outsiders for
its decline, explains Bernard Lewis, a renowned authority on
Islamic affairs. At first, the Mongols were the top scapegoat, and
then the Turks, then the French and British, and, most recently,
“the Jews” and Americans.
The best hope for the future, suggests Lewis, lies with a change
in the question. Instead of asking “Who did this to us?,” the world
of Islam needs to ask, more self-critically, “What did we do
wrong?”
The good news is that’s exactly the question that is now,
finally, being asked by growing numbers of people all over the
Middle East.
