In the Middle East, all bets are off when deluded
Westerners spring into action.
By Peter Hitchens
IT IS BECAUSE we no longer understand our own societies that we
cannot understand other countries. We learn little from their
problems and crises because we have stopped thinking about our own
constitutions, laws, and liberties. The disappointment of the
supposed Arab Spring—better described as an Arab Spasm—follows only
a few years after the similar broken hopes that attended the fall
of communism. Also cast aside are the brief delusion that China
would become free once its people owned automobiles, and the theory
that countries that hosted McDonald’s burger bars would never go to
war with each other. The last of these optimistic fancies was blown
to pieces when Russia and Georgia, both thoroughly colonized by the
Big Mac empire, fought their savage little conflict in 2008.
The abiding belief that we can plant democracy anywhere, and
that it will then flourish in harmony and love thereafter,
is never cured by facts or upset by anomalies. It is immune to
warnings. And whenever intelligent people ignore facts and defy
reason, something interesting is happening. What is it this
time?
When George W. Bush first suggested that democracy might be
brought to the Middle East—the last wretched excuse for his Iraq
adventure—a few haggard skeptics wearily pointed out that there
might be a problem with this scheme. Put simply, majority rule in
these countries would inevitably mean Islamist rule. In several of
them, divided between Sunni and Shia, it would also mean sectarian
rule and a choice between cruel repression and civil war.
Enthusiasts for liberal intervention dismissed these doubts as
“simplistic,” one of those words always used by people who want to
appear cleverer than they are. But for some years the question was
not tested. Now it has been, and the simplistic skeptics have been
shown to be right in every particular, most especially in Egypt,
where nice liberal-minded ACLU types are currently excusing a
classic army putsch. Yet for some reason it is still considered
impolite for those of us who were right to laugh and jeer at those
who were wrong. I am not sure why. Mockery is a good teacher, and
leaves a lasting mark on the sort of mind that is untouched by
ordinary criticism or mere facts.
Tunisia, where the Arab Spasm began, fell swiftly under the
domination of an Islamist movement, “Ennahda,” and of its armed
militia, the League for the Protection of the Revolution. Of
course, gullible commentators have continued to refer to this party
as “Moderately Islamist” or “Mildly Islamist,” dishonest
expressions designed to comfort their deflated optimism rather than
to tell the truth. They had simperingly entitled Tunisia’s revolt
“The Jasmine Revolution.” But it smelled rather less sweet when the
main secular opposition leader, Chokri Belaid, was murdered (as I
write this, news arrives of the similar murder of the prominent
Tunisian left-wing figure Mohammed Brahmi). It grew still more
bitter when Salafist militants, who often work alongside Ennahda’s
militia, attacked the U.S. embassy and an American school in Tunis
in September 2012. The response of those media and politicians who
had rejoiced over the change was to look the other way. These
reversals, though mentioned, did not receive anything like the
interest and coverage that the initial protests had been given.
Much the same thing happened when the Libyan revolution ended in
the grisly mob-murder of Muammar Gaddafi, and many other massacres
and crimes of the sort that happens when order collapses and there
is no law. That revolution, too, was followed by many signs that we
had helped enthrone our enemies, and that Libya is in grave danger
of becoming a failed state, if it does not break apart or fall
under Islamist domination. These portents have included the virtual
kidnapping of Melinda Taylor, an officer of the International
Criminal Court, and the desecration (proudly filmed by the
perpetrators) of a British war cemetery in Benghazi dating from the
1940s. These iconoclasts took special care to smash the gravestones
of Jewish soldiers. The most obvious sign that things had gone
severely wrong was of course the mob murder of the U.S. ambassador,
Christopher Stevens. This crime was not unpredictable, coming as it
did three months after a failed attempt to murder the British
ambassador, Sir Dominic Asquith, with a rocket-propelled grenade.
The outrage against Sir Dominic was barely mentioned by Western
media who had blithely urged on the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi
and given unstinting sympathetic coverage to the rebels. The
killing of Ambassador Stevens at least attracted some notice. But
it did not compel a re-evaluation of our Pollyanna approach to the
Arab Spasm, in Foggy Bottom, in the White House, or in Downing
Street.
AGAIN AND AGAIN, the facts made no impression on the theory. Nor
did the internal contradictions of the West’s own actions. The
enthusiasm of Western governments for democracy and street protest
faded and faltered in Bahrain, where a nascent uprising was crushed
with cruelty and torture. This behavior went largely unreproved by
Washington, Paris, and London, and by the BBC, which had given
uncritical, even encouraging, coverage to the Arab Spasm elsewhere.
Those who had applauded calls for “liberation” in Tunis,
Benghazi, Tripoli, Cairo, and Damascus somehow managed to remain
silent and incurious about the strange absence of any sort of Arab
Spring in Saudi Arabia, the most important Muslim country of all.
They also refused to take sides in the extraordinary events in
Turkey, a major Middle Eastern Muslim nation that, though not
itself Arab, remains highly influential among Arabs. Turkey’s
undoubtedly democratic government, repeatedly confirmed in office
by free votes, lacks some other features of civilization. It locks
up astonishing numbers of journalists, railroads opponents into
prison after suspicious show trials remarkably free of evidence,
and, in the jargon of the era, “kills its own people” with violent
police suppression of peaceful protest. Had there been any real
principle involved in the West’s support of Muslim protests, then
the repression imposed by Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, would surely have engaged the wrath and scorn of Mrs.
Hillary Clinton, Mr. John Kerry, Mr. David Cameron, and the BBC.
Somehow it didn’t, and it doesn’t. They reserve their lectures on
democracy and freedom for Vladimir Putin’s government in Russia,
which is strikingly similar to that in Turkey, if slightly less
inclined to lock up journalists. They make it clear that they would
be quite pleased by a Moscow Spring. And rather than supporting
peaceful, secular protesters against Mr. Erdogan’s club-wielding,
gas-squirting police, they give their backing to violent,
intolerant militias in Syria.
If you are not puzzled by now, you should be. None of this makes
sense if it is taken at face value. If there is a thing called “the
West” that is in favor of “Democracy,” then why does it not favor
“Democracy” in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, or Turkey? As this “West” has
cast aside many of its own liberties in the supposedly desperate
war against Islamic fanaticism, why does it help Islamic fanaticism
into power in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, while continuing to be
militantly opposed to the same fanaticism in Iraq and Iran? Why
does it noisily support such fanaticism in Syria? Why is Islamism
described as “moderate” or “mild” only when we have helped to put
it in power? Why is it then forgiven, or excused, actions that
would otherwise have inflamed us with righteous wrath? And, if we
are so attached to democracy, why is it that we have, in the end,
connived at a military coup against “Democracy” in Cairo? Though of
course we cannot possibly call it a military coup, or U.S. aid to
Egypt would have to cease under American law, and the whole
military balance of the Middle East would wobble and
stagger.
There are many theories about how the Arab Spring began, and how
it came to be sustained. No doubt there are plenty of reasons why
the people of these poor, ill-governed, and repressive societies
might wish to get rid of their governments, simply because they
hate those governments, and they are unjust, corrupt, and
incompetent. But this only answers a small part of the question.
The world is full of such governments, which come and go, and are
often replaced by others not very different from those they
supplanted. Mostly, nobody cares. Who, in the “West” for instance,
even knows that Vietnam stages public executions, often for
“economic crimes,” during which the condemned have whole lemons
placed in their mouths to prevent them from protesting or screaming
at their fate?
I have no explanation for events in Tunisia, but I was struck by
the very strange behavior of the authorities when unrest first
erupted in Cairo. A word instantly understood in the Arab Muslim
world is Mukhabarat, the universal name of the violent and
stupid security apparatus that sustains all these governments. I
have met these people myself in Egypt, when they first ruthlessly
suppressed and dispersed a small, peaceful protest against the Iraq
War. Later, tipped off by an informant, they descended on a café
where I was interviewing some of the demonstrators, and arrested
them all for the crime of talking to me. These musclemen
contemptuously ignored me, but the photographer who was
accompanying me was given a nasty taste of totalitarian power in
action. They lifted him bodily from the ground, stripped him of
about $10,000 worth of equipment, and dropped him in the dust. They
were terrifying, and wholly in control. To defy them probably meant
death, and certainly a severe beating.
So when I watched the initial demonstrations against Hosni
Mubarak in Cairo, I was amazed at the feebleness of the state
response. I have assumed ever since that an order had gone out from
somewhere to let this particular protest succeed. It is well-known
that the high command of the Egyptian Army were angry that
President Mubarak was planning to install his unloved son
Gamal as his successor. Unable to persuade the doddering, willful
president to drop this dynastic, North Korean plan, they had to
find a way of ejecting the Mubaraks while keeping control
themselves. Since U.S. aid to Egypt, which keeps the army alive,
cannot legally be paid if there is an open military putsch (see
above), it is easy to see why it might have been thought best to
let the crowds overthrow Mr. Mubarak in the name of
democracy.
Like most such plans, it went further than intended, and turned
into a genuine popular revolution. And, like all genuine popular
revolutions, it was not very nice.
Western observers were quickly seduced, as they tend to be by
other people’s uprisings. Their main contact with the
demonstrations was with the civilized, English-speaking Cairo
elite, educated at the American University and living Westernized
lives. Perhaps that is why they failed to give proper attention to
the crudely anti-Jewish aspect of the Cairo crowds, the Stars of
David scrawled on trampled pictures of Mubarak, the scribbles on
the walls snarling “Mubarak is a traitor for keeping links with
Israel,” or the repeated mob attacks on the fortified Israeli
embassy in the Egyptian capital. Those who reported the obscene
attack on the CBS reporter Lara Logan in Tahrir Square also mostly
failed to mention that her assailants yelled “Jew! Jew! Jew!” at
her. In fact it was the suggestion (taken up by the crowd) she
might be an Israeli that turned the already frightening incident
into a nearly fatal one.
Anyone who spends any time talking to members of the Egyptian
elite, or indeed the elite of any Arab or Muslim country, rapidly
encounters such attitudes even among the educated, unmoderated by
political correctness or post-Holocaust sensitivity. These views
(which can charitably be explained as an expression of discontents
that have no other permitted outlet) are usually accompanied by
wild conspiracy theories of the sort that abound in immature
societies, rendered infantile by censorship and despotism. The most
bizarre fantasies of this kind were once confided to me in all
seriousness by a respected and experienced general in his Cairo
apartment.
WE CAN BE grateful, I think, that the Egyptian spasm went no
further than it did, and that the Muslim Brotherhood, an old and
experienced movement under the control of graybeards, was there to
contain it. The Brotherhood’s rather old-fashioned ideas of Islamic
governance will soon be superseded by the far more sectarian ideas
of the Salafists. They have grown in influence thanks to Saudi
money, which pours into those mosques and schools that adopt
Riyadh’s fierce Sunni puritanism. Their power also increases daily
because so many young men from all over the poor oil-free parts of
the Arab world go to Saudi Arabia to find work, and return home
full of Salafist zeal.
It is in Saudi Arabia that I think we may look for one of the
keys to explaining the selective enthusiasms of the “West.” Saudi
Arabia is closely linked to Washington and London by oil, money,
and weapons. In most of the Arab revolutions, the rulers who fell
were enemies of Saudi Arabia, whereas Bahrain’s Sunni government is
a close ally. Syria is especially loathed in Riyadh because its
heretical Alawite rulers are friends of Shia Iran and of Shia
Hezbollah. Increasingly, the Sunni-Shia divide is becoming more
important in the Middle East than the Israeli-Arab conflict.
That might all be perfectly normal cynical foreign policy, of
the sort that all major nations selfishly pursue. We need secure
oil supplies and markets for our weapons. We rightly fear chaos in
Saudi Arabia.
The troubling thing is that that this is dressed up as idealism, and that supposedly intelligent journalists and politicians seem to believe their own propaganda. And here we come to the worst element of all, the trumpeted pursuit of “Democracy.”
Democracy is not what made the Anglosphere nations great. In fact they greatly distrusted it—or else why was Washington D.C. built miles from anywhere, and provided by Pierre L’Enfant with wide avenues, which could easily be swept clear of mobs with a whiff of grapeshot? I might add that the U.S. Senate itself was originally protected from what Edmund Randolph called “the fury of democracy” and until the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913 (opposed by several honorable people including Elihu Root) was not elected by popular vote.
The real heritage of liberty comes from other sources—the rule of law over power that began with Magna Carta, habeas corpus, separation of powers, jury trial, freedom of the press, and the independent judiciary. These safeguards, as it happens, have been weakened or belittled just as the powers of the West have conducted their noisy love affair with democracy at home and abroad. It is democracy, egged on by a gullible fourth estate, that has given us Homeland Security and its arbitrary powers, and liberal interventionism. It is the same democracy, aided by atrocity propaganda, that has been used to override old concerns for national sovereignty. Yet it is only in sovereign nations, which make their own laws, that liberty can be successfully sustained.
It is easy to see why revolutionaries and world government enthusiasts might be keen on this new age of idealistic wars and mob rule dressed up as “people power.” It is harder to understand why any sort of conservative would fall for it.
See Also:
http://tinyurl.com/l4ysw3v
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