The Crushing Disappointment of the Arab Spring

How are you holding up under the unrelenting pictures of political murder, torture, and mass assassination (in some countries, like Syria, shall we call it genocide?) overloading your computer and your television sets – and all emanating from the Middle East?

The Arab Spring, which started in Tunisia (relatively bloodlessly), and spread to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and now Syria, has been one long horror story for far too many of the residents of these countries, with those of us in the West who are paying attention looking on via cable news, You Tube, and wherever else the videos coming out of this area are playing. (Journalists are officially banned from Syria.) And of course there is no “Persian Spring” in Iran.

But on this blog we deal in words, and so I am driven to refer you to some of the best written commentary and reporting that I’ve found on the web. I do this because, like you, I am sitting far far away from the action, and my sympathies as an American are with those who are fighting for fundamental human freedoms, “One World” freedoms if you will. It has been tough and depressing to watch these good people being, for the most part, tortured, shot at, killed, disparaged, and written off as a threat to the tyrants, dictators, and fundamentalists who will not tolerate dissent.

Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal reports from Cairo, where the televised revolution found a good many of us in the West cheering on the young students who led the successful effort to depose long time Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak, that:

“Senior Egyptian officials have warned nongovernment organizations that taking U.S. funding would damage the country's security. The Egyptian government has also complained directly to the U.S.

"I am not sure at this stage we still need somebody to tell us what is or is not good for us—or worse, to force it on us," Fayza Aboul Naga, who has been Egypt's minister for planning and international cooperation since before the revolution, told The Wall Street Journal.

Such strong reaction has led U.S. officials to express concern that the Mubarak regime's resistance to democratic freedoms has yet to be shaken off by the new military-controlled government, which is overseeing the country until elections slated for September.”

Even though there has been a change at a certain level of the system, the system is still there," said a U.S. official. 

Shortly after Mr. Mubarak's ouster, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said some of the $250 million in annual economic aid for Egypt would be redirected to "support the transition and assist the economic recovery."

And Mr. Trofimov goes on in detail to report how U.S. good intentions and efforts to promote democracy are seen as a threat by Egypt’s interim leaders.

Mr. Trofimov has also, at great length, reported the violence aimed by Islamic fundamentalists (Salafists, they are called) at the Christian Copt community in Egypt  -- violence that has escalated beyond the ability or desire of Egyptian authorities to control it. To quote part of his story:

QENA, Egypt—Five weeks after the fall of the Egyptian regime, Ayman Anwar Mitri's apartment was torched. When he showed up to investigate, he was bundled inside by bearded Islamists.

Mr. Mitri is a member of the Christian Coptic minority that accounts for one-tenth of the country's 83 million people. The Islamists accused him of having rented the apartment—by then unoccupied—to loose Muslim women.

Inside the burnt apartment, they beat him with the charred remains of his furniture. Then, one of them produced a box cutter and performed what he considered an appropriate punishment under Islam: He amputated Mr. Mitri's right ear.

"When they were beating me, they kept saying: 'We won't leave any Christians in this country,'" Mr. Mitri recalled in a recent interview, two months after the March attack. Blood dripped through a plastic tube from his unhealed wound to a plastic container. "Here, there is a war against the Copts," he said.

His attackers, who were never arrested or prosecuted, follow the ultrafundamentalist Salafi strain of Islam that promotes an austere, Saudi-inspired worldview. Before President Hosni Mubarak was toppled on Feb. 11, the Salafis mostly confined themselves to preaching. Since then, they've entered the political arena, drawing crowds and swaying government decisions. Salafi militants also have blocked roads, burned churches and killed Copts.”

Again, Mr. Trofimov’s entire report can be found on WSJ.com.

So, let’s be clear. There are many “worldviews” out there. Even from countries where the United States is providing huge amounts of money to help “democracy” develop.

Which brings me to Fouad Ajami. You may know him from his many appearances with Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper on CNN. And his columns in the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers. Ajami is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and co-chair of the Hoover Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.

Ajami, in his writing and television appearances, has portrayed the Arab Middle East as a vast jail, where the inmates (ordinary citizens) have been trapped and brutalized for over three decades.

In a recent WSJ column, which was headlined: “Syria: Where Massacre Is a Family Tradition – The mask of the Assad regime finally falls, and the world is forced to confront its illusions about Iran’s ally and Hezbollah’s patron,” Ajami wrote in part:

“The Arab Spring …. arrived late in Syria, three months after it had made its way to Tunisia and Egypt, one month after Libya's revolt. A group of young boys in the town of Deraa, near the border with Jordan, had committed the cardinal sin of scribbling antiregime graffiti. A brittle regime with a primitive personality cult and a deadly fault-line between its Alawite rulers and Sunni majority responded with heavy-handed official terror. The floodgates were thrown open, the Syrian people discovered within themselves new reservoirs of courage, and the rulers were hell-bent on frightening the population into their old state of submission.

Until the Arab Spring, nothing had stirred in Syria in nearly three decades. President Hafez al-Assad and his murderous younger brother Rifaat had made an example of Hama in 1982 when they stamped out a popular uprising by leveling much of the city and slaughtering thousands. Now, the circle is closed. President Bashar al-Assad and his younger brother Maher, commander of the Republican Guard, are determined to subdue this new rebellion as their father did in Hama—one murder at a time. In today's world it's harder to turn off the lights and keep tales of repression behind closed doors, but the Assads know no other way. Massacre is a family tradition.

It took time for the diplomacy of the West to catch up with Syria's horrors. In Washington, they were waiting for Godot as the Damascus regime brutalized its children. In his much-trumpeted May 19 speech from the State Department—"Cairo II," it was dubbed—President Obama gave the Syrian ruler a choice. He could lead the transition toward democracy or "get out of the way." Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has since used the same language.

But one senses this newfound bravado is too little too late. With fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and now Libya, few leaders in the U.S. or Europe want to see the Assad regime for what it truly is. Yet the truth is there for all who wish to see. Ask the Syrians deserting their homes and spilling across the Turkish border about the ways of Bashar and his killer squads and vigilantes with their dirty tricks. They will tell us volumes about the big prison that the regime maintains.”

Ajami’s words, spoken with sincerity and grace and purpose on CNN throughout the Arab Spring, had a great deal to do, I do believe, with forcing the US. to finally pull the rug out from Mr. Mubarak, and to intervene in Libya (finally, before the last dissident could be slaughtered) with first U.S. and then NATO air strikes) to keep the dissidents alive. And now comes Syria. Where we sit and watch and hope the rest of the (can we dare use the word “civilized?) world can bring some kind of pressure on the Syrian regime to stop killing its citizens.

But, sadly, I doubt that intervention will come for the Syrian people. They are on their own. And we are left to ask, once again, what kind of world do we want to live in, and if it is a peaceful, democratic, freedom loving one, what can or should we do as a nation (or civilization) to promote it? And what happens when the efforts to promote democracy are firmly rejected? And what do you say to that?