http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/28/AR2011012803144.html?wpisrc=nl_pmopinions
Egypt protests show George W. Bush was right about freedom in the Arab world
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Mass protests clog Egypt, Pres. names deputy
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak named a vice president Saturday for the first
time since coming to power nearly 30 years ago, a clear step toward setting up
a successor in the midst of the biggest anti-government protests of his regime.
(Jan. 29)
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By Elliott Abrams
Saturday, January 29, 2011; 5:45 PM
For decades, the Arab states have seemed exceptions to the laws of politics and
human nature. While liberty expanded in many parts of the globe, these nations
were left behind, their "freedom deficit" signaling the political
underdevelopment that accompanied many other economic and social maladies. In
November 2003, President George W. Bush laid out this question:
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a.. Egypt protests show George W. Bush was right about freedom in the Arab
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b.. Join the discussion, Tuesday at 11 a.m. ET
c.. Obama administration could still get it right on Egypt
d.. Warily watching the Arab revolt
e.. Egypt's uprising should be encouraged
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"Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are
millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live
in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom and never even to have a
choice in the matter?"
The massive and violent demonstrations underway in Egypt, the smaller ones in
Jordan and Yemen, and the recent revolt in Tunisia that inspired those events,
have affirmed that the answer is no and are exploding, once and for all, the
myth of Arab exceptionalism. Arab nations, too, yearn to throw off the secret
police, to read a newspaper that the Ministry of Information has not censored
and to vote in free elections. The Arab world may not be swept with a broad
wave of revolts now, but neither will it soon forget this moment.
So a new set of questions becomes critical. What lesson will Arab regimes
learn? Will they undertake the steady reforms that may bring peaceful change,
or will they conclude that exiled Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali
erred only by failing to shoot and club enough demonstrators? And will our own
government learn that dictatorships are never truly stable? For beneath the
calm surface enforced by myriad security forces, the pressure for change only
grows - and it may grow in extreme and violent forms when real debate and
political competition are denied.
The regimes of Ben Ali and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak proffered the same line to
Washington: It's us or the Islamists. For Tunisia, a largely secular nation
with a literacy rate of 75 percent and per capita GDP of $9,500, this claim was
never defensible. In fact, Ben Ali jailed moderates, human rights advocates,
editors - anyone who represented what might be called "hope and change."
Mubarak took the same tack for three decades. Ruling under an endless emergency
law, he has crushed the moderate opposition while the Islamist Muslim
Brotherhood has thrived underground and in the mosques. Mubarak in effect
created a two-party system - his ruling National Democratic Party and the
Brotherhood - and then defended the lack of democracy by saying a free election
would bring the Islamists to power.
Of course, neither he nor we can know for sure what Egyptians really think;
last fall's parliamentary election was even more corrupt than the one in 2005.
And sometimes the results of a first free election will find the moderates so
poorly organized that extreme groups can eke out a victory, as Hamas did when
it gained a 44-to-41 percent margin in the Palestinian election of 2006. But we
do know for sure that regimes that make moderate politics impossible make
extremism far more likely. Rule by emergency decree long enough, and you end up
creating a genuine emergency. And Egypt has one now.
"Angry Friday" brought tens of thousands of Egyptians into the streets all over
the country, and they have remained there all weekend, demanding the end of the
Mubarak regime. The huge and once-feared police forces were soon overwhelmed
and the Army called in. Even if these demonstrations are crushed, Egypt has a
president who will be 83 at the time of this fall's presidential election.
Every day Hosni Mubarak survives in power now, he does so as dictator propped
up by brute force alone. Election of his son Gamal as his successor is already
a sour joke, and it is increasingly unlikely that Egypt's ruling elites,
civilian and military, will wish to tie their future to Hosni Mubarak rather
than seeking new faces.
Mubarak's appointment on Saturday of Egypt's intelligence chief Omar Suleiman
as vice president and of former air force commander Ahmed Shafiq as prime
minister suggests that Mubarak knows his own future is much in doubt. It also
suggests that the military is already in full control of the country and
preparing for the post-Mubarak period. If Suleiman and Shafiq have the full
support of the Army and would promise a free election in the fall, perhaps the
crowds would accept them as transitional figures once Mubarak resigns. But it
may be too late for Mubarak to hand-pick his closest aides to run Egypt if he
is forced out.
The three decades Hosni Mubarak and his cronies have already had in power leave
Egypt with no reliable mechanisms for a transition to democratic rule. Egypt
will have some of the same problems as Tunisia, where there are no strong
democratic parties and where the demands of the people for rapid change may
outstrip the new government's ability to achieve it. This is also certain to be
true in Yemen, where a weak central government has spent all its energies and
most of its resources simply staying in power.
All these developments seem to come as a surprise to the Obama administration,
which dismissed Bush's "freedom agenda" as overly ideological and meant
essentially to defend the invasion of Iraq. But as Bush's support for the Cedar
Revolution in Lebanon and for a democratic Palestinian state showed, he was
defending self-government, not the use of force. Consider what Bush said in
that 2003 speech, which marked the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment
for Democracy, an institution established by President Ronald Reagan precisely
to support the expansion of freedom.
"Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom
in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe - because in the long run,
stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty," Bush said. "As long
as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will
remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export."
This spirit did not always animate U.S. diplomacy in the Bush administration;
plenty of officials found it unrealistic and had to be prodded or overruled to
follow the president's lead. But the revolt in Tunisia, the gigantic wave of
demonstrations in Egypt and the more recent marches in Yemen all make clear
that Bush had it right - and that the Obama administration's abandonment of
this mind-set is nothing short of a tragedy.
U.S. officials talked to Mubarak plenty in 2009 and 2010, and even talked to
the far more repressive President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, but they talked
about their goals for Israeli-Palestinian peace and ignored the police states
outside the doors of those presidential palaces. When the Iranian regime stole
the June 2009 elections and people went to the streets, the Obama
administration feared that speaking out in their support might jeopardize the
nuclear negotiations. The "reset" sought with Russia has been with Prime
Minister Vladimir Putin, not the Russian people suffering his increasingly
despotic and lawless rule.
This has been the greatest failure of policy and imagination in the
administration's approach: Looking at the world map, it sees states and their
rulers, but has forgotten the millions of people suffering under and beginning
to rebel against those rulers. "Engagement" has not been the problem, but
rather the administration's insistence on engaging with regimes rather than
with the people trying to survive under them.
If the Arab regimes learn the wrong lessons and turn once again to their police
and their armies, the U.S. reaction becomes even more important. President
Obama's words of support for both the demonstrators and the government late
Friday, after speaking with Mubarak, were too little, too late. He said Mubarak
had called for "a better democracy" in Egypt, but Obama's remarks did not
clearly demand democracy or free elections there. We cannot deliver democracy
to the Arab states, but we can make our principles and our policies clear. Now
is the time to say that the peoples of the Middle East are not "beyond the
reach of liberty" and that we will assist any peaceful effort to achieve it -
and oppose and condemn efforts to suppress it.
Such a statement would not elevate our ideals at the expense of our interests.
It turns out, as those demonstrators are telling us, that supporting freedom is
the best policy of all.
Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on
Foreign Relations, where he writes a blog called "Pressure Points" on CFR.org.
He was a deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration.
He will be online to take questions from readers on Tuesday at 11 a.m. ET.
Submit your questions before or during the discussion.
Read more from Outlook, follow us on Twitter, and friend us on Facebook.
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