Something strange is happening along the Northern coast of Africa. Last month a 26 year-old Tunisian university graduate, destitute, unable to find work and provide for his family, tried selling fruits and vegetables from a cart in the local bazaar. Lacking the proper permits, he was harassed by the authorities in what he saw as a typical example of the endemic corruption in his country. In desperation, he set himself on fire, and started a conflagration which has yet to be quenched.
After Tunisians massed in their cities and towns, demanding the end to their strongman leader Ben Ali’s two decade old government, he fled the country to the (hopefully) safe haven of Saudi Arabia.
Reports of other suicides by fire have come in from Algeria and Egypt, in an echo of the Buddhist monks who protested the corrupt South Vietnamese governments propped up by the US in the mid ‘60s. Suicide revolutionaries are nothing new – when you have no hope, and you see your life as worthless anyway, why not make a statement and go out in (literally) a blaze of glory.
But more startling is the imminent demise of the government in Egypt. For over three decades, Hosni Mubarak has controlled this largest Arab country, sitting strategically along the choke point of much of the Western world’s oil shipments – the Suez Canal. For this, and for his willingness to make peace with Israel, Mubarak has enjoyed the overt and financially rewarding support of the United States.
Twenty-two years ago, people began to leave Hungary in droves into Austria, and the Communist leaders, usually so restrictive of their peoples’ movements, did nothing to stop them. Surely, we thought at the time, Russian tanks would then roll into Budapest, just as they had in 1956, and again in ’68 in Prague, and in 1980 in Poland. But Mikhail Gorbachev, either recognizing that his treasury was drained from so many years of imperial over reach, or feeling that it was time to allow an opening in the Iron Curtain, did nothing. Within a few months, the Berlin Wall was torn down, and Communist governments fell from the Baltic to the Balkans.
The end was so swift and peaceful, the significance of the fall of the Russian Empire, from within, not by a conquering army, was muted at the time. But the world changed radically that fall of 1989, in ways that were totally unanticipated even as late as the spring of that year.
We may be on the cusp of a similar change across the Arab landscape. While there is not a monolithic empire to fall, there are a number of leaders who have ruled by force for far too long, suppressing the potential economic growth of their people in favor of stability.
And, oddly, just as the combined efforts of Democratic and Republican US presidents lead to USSR and its client states rotting from within, their leaders unable to control the sweep of history anymore, so it might be that G.W. Bush and Barack Obama have unwittingly acted together, from wildly differing ideological viewpoints, both helping to bring the era of Arab despots to an end.
Recall that in 2003, 4 reasons were given for the invasion of Iraq: prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction, stop Saddam Hussein from killing more Iraqis, protect the oil production there, and bring about a democratic government which could be a model and a seed for change in the region. None of them, singly or as a group, were valid reasons for going to war, in the eyes of Obama and many others (myself included).
But once it started, then at least Bush saw the mission through to its messy end, with a final assist from Obama after Jan 20, 2009. It may not be Athens or Rome, but it is a fledgling democracy, with all the messiness and lack of coherence that entails.
Early on in his Presidency, Obama spoke to the Arab people, in Cairo, sending out the message that the US did indeed want to see the power to create and run governments spread from armies and endlessly “re-elected” presidents to a broader power base, one more accountable to the people governed.
The invasion of Iraq sent a message that the US wanted to assert its power in the center of the Muslim world, and threatened to alienate 1.5 billion people from us. Obama’s speech, and his government’s actions over the last month have tried, admittedly in small and incremental ways, to send a message that we want to see falsely elected governments which remain in power for decades to be replaced by ones more accountable to the needs of the populations there.
The downfall of those leaders in places like Syria, Egypt, Libya, and Morocco, as well as (although less likely in) Yemen and Saudi Arabia, if it happens, will be sudden and surprising. But the growth and development of more democratic structures, and the accompanying disappearance of corruption and force used to suppress dissent and economic innovation, will take decades. But I take hope that the frequent peaceful change in governments which has been occurring in eastern Europe for two decades now will soon no longer be surprising in the Arab world.