Published on The New Republic (_http://www.tnr.com_ (http://www.tnr.com/) )
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What Obama and American Liberals Don’t Understand About the Arab Spring
* Shadi Hamid
* October 1, 2011 | 12:00 am
Throughout the Arab spring, analysts and policymakers have debated the
proper role that the United States should be playing in the Middle East. A
small number argued that the U.S. should adopt a more interventionist policy
to
address Arab grievances; others, that Arab grievances are themselves the
result of our aggressive, interventionist policies; and still more that
intervention was simply not in our national self-interest. The Obama
administration, for its part, attempted to split the difference, moving
slowly,
especially at the outset, to censure dictators like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and
Bashar Al Assad in Syria, while eventually supporting aggressive military
action against Muammar Qaddafi in Libya.
The reasons for the Obama administration’s passivity during the Arab spring
have been many, but perhaps none is more helpful in explaining it than the
notion of “declinism.” With the exception of neoconservatives and a
relatively small group of liberal hawks, nearly everyone seems to think
America
has less power to shape events than it used to. An endless stream of books
and articles has riffed on this theme. The most well-known of the genre are
Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World, Parag Khanna’s The Second
World, and, from a more academic perspective, Charles Kupchan’s The End of the
American Era.The Obama administration has appropriated some of the main
arguments of this literature. An advisor to Obama described U.S. strategy in
Libya as “leading from behind,” which Ryan Lizza, in The New Yorker,
explained as coming from the belief “that the relative power of the U.S. is
declining … and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world.”
(http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-new-republic-for-ipad/id454525980?mt=8) But
in an ironic twist of fate, even as Americans seem to be placing an
all-time low amount of faith in their ability to effect change around the
world, many Arabs participating in the recent uprisings—despite their
apparent fear and loathing of U.S. power—placed a disproportionate amount of
their
faith and hopes upon us. Americans—and American liberals, in particular—
have yet to grasp this basic paradox. In their time of need, facing imp
risonment, torture, and even death, protesters, rebels, and would-be
revolutionaries still look to the United States, not elsewhere. Whether they
find what
they’re looking for is another matter.
DURING THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION, when anti-American sentiment spread like
wildfire across the Middle East following the invasion of Iraq, policymakers
on all sides of the political spectrum, but particularly liberals,
gravitated away from support for interventionism in general and democracy
promotion in particular. The “kiss of death” hypothesis—in which overt
American
support for Arab democracy movements is considered toxic to the cause—became
commonplace.
But it is worth noting that Bush’s short-lived embrace of Mideast
democratic reform—despite his deep personal unpopularity throughout the
region—did
not appear to hurt the Arab reform movement, and, if anything, did the
opposite. This is something that reformers themselves reluctantly admit. In
2005, at the height of the first Arab spring, the liberal Egyptian publisher
and activist Hisham Kassem said, “Eighty percent of political freedom in
this country is the result of U.S. pressure.” And it isn’t just liberals who
felt this way. Referring to the Bush administration’s efforts, the
prominent Muslim Brotherhood figure Abdel Moneim Abul Futouh told me in August
2006, “Everyone knows it. … We benefited, everyone benefited, and the Egyptian
people benefited.”
Liberals had often told the world—and, perhaps more importantly, themselves
—that the Bush administration’s destructive policies were a historic
anomaly. When a Democrat was elected, America would undo the damage. For many
liberals, including myself, this was what Obama could offer that no one else
could—a president with a Muslim name, who had grown up in a Muslim country,
who seemed to have an intuitive understanding of the place of grievance in
Arab public life. But, after President Obama’s brief honeymoon period, the
familiar disappointments returned. In a span of just one year, the number
of Arabs who said they were “discouraged” by the Obama administration’s
Middle East policies shot up from 15 percent to 63 percent, according to a
University of Maryland/Zogby poll. By the time the protests began in December
2010, attitudes toward the U.S. had hit rock bottom. In several Arab
countries, including Egypt, U.S. favorability ratings were lower under Obama
than they were under Bush. Indeed, an odd current of “Bush nostalgia” had
been very much evident in Arab opposition circles. In May 2010, a prominent
Brotherhood member complained to me: “For Obama, the issue of democracy is
fifteenth on his list of priorities. … There’s no moment of change like
there was under Bush.”
Indeed, while the Arab spring was and is about Arabs, it is also, in some
ways, about us. If for decades, the U.S. was seen as central in supporting
autocratic Arab regimes, so it was assumed that it would be just as critical
in facilitating their demise. Before the Egyptian revolution, the leader
of the liberal April 6 Movement, Ahmed Maher, told The Atlantic: “The
problem isn’t with Mubarak’s policies. The problem is with American policy and
what the American government wants Mubarak to do. His existence is totally
in their hands.” Islamists, meanwhile, have a specific term—the “American
veto”—dedicated to a belief in America’s outsize ability to determine Arab
outcomes. The United States, so the thinking went, could prevent democratic
outcomes not to its liking.
When unrest broke out in Egypt, activists therefore hung on every major
American statement, trying their best to interpret the Obama administration’s
sometimes impenetrable language. On Al Jazeera, Egyptians asked why the
U.S. and Europe weren’t doing more to pressure the Mubarak regime. Two of the
Muslim Brotherhood’s leading “reformists,” Esam el-Erian, as well as Abul
Futouh, wrote op-eds in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Futouh’
s op-ed—simultaneously overestimating America’s influence, decrying it,
and believing that, somehow, it could be used for good—is representative of
the genre: “We want to set the record straight so that any Middle East
policy decisions made in Washington are based on facts. … With a little
altruism, the United States should not hesitate to reassess its interests in
the
region, especially if it genuinely champions democracy.”
The more repressive the Egyptian regime became, the more impassioned the
calls grew. I remember receiving urgent, sometimes heartbreaking calls from
Egyptian friends and colleagues. One broke out in tears, telling me that if
the U.S. didn’t do something soon, the regime was going to commit a
massacre under the cover of darkness. That the military did not open fire
appeared
to confirm America’s still considerable leverage.
Two days before Mubarak stepped down, I met with several of the Muslim
Brotherhood’s youth activists. The well-known blogger Abdelrahman Ayyash—only
20 years old at the time—told me that he and other members broke out into
applause in Tahrir Square when Obama called for an “immediate” transition
to democracy in Egypt. Ayyash’s remark stood out because it echoed something
I have been hearing from activists across the political spectrum for more
than five years: Despite their sometimes vociferous anti-Americanism, they
almost always seemed to want the U.S. to do more in the region, rather than
less. Indeed, while the Egyptian activists were happy to see Obama act,
nearly all of them told me the administration stood by Mubarak too long,
siding with the protesters only at the last moment.
Across the region, activists were even less forgiving in their condemnation
of American policy, even as they called on Obama to do more to pressure
their regimes to democratize. In March, about a thousand Bahrainis protested
in front of the U.S. embassy in the capital of Manama. One of the
participants, Mohamed Hasan, _explained_
(http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5g-JquvB3w7eWXOXNBoaztp_iz8lg?docId=CNG.93280b7ec50a265e547c3fbb555a7
bba.01) why they were there: “The United States,” he said, “has to prove
that it is with human rights, and the right for all people to decide
[their] destiny.” And well before the most recent crackdown, the opposition
figure Abdeljalil al-Singace tried to give President Bush a petition signed by
80,000 Bahrainis—around one-seventh of the entire population—calling for a
new democratic constitution. In 2009, al-Singace wrote in The New York
Times that “it would be good if Mr. Obama vowed to support democracy and human
rights. But he should talk about these ideals only if he is willing to
help us fulfill them.” Al-Singace—by no means a liberal—is a leader of Al
Haq, a hard-line Shia Islamist group with sympathies toward Iran. Yet he was
not asking Iran, but rather Iran’s enemy, the United States, for assistance
in his country’s struggle for democracy.
This same logic holds true in places like Libya and Syria, where regimes
have effectively waged war on their own people, pushing, once again, the
question of external pressure to the fore. When you’re being killed, you don’t
particularly care who saves you. In the days leading up to the successful
U.N. resolution authorizing military force, Libya’s rebels were reduced to
begging for Western intervention. In Benghazi, one child held up a
memorable sign saying “Mama Clinton, please stop the bleeding.” The Arab
League,
the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference—
none of which are known as beacons of democracy—all called for a no-fly
zone before the United States did. “[The West] has lost any credibility,”
rebel spokeswoman Iman Bugaighis said at the time. In such instances, dislike
and distrust of the U.S. seems to be inextricably tied to a faith that we
can, and should, do the right thing.
EXAMPLES OF THIS SORT of exhortation are too numerous to note and have
been a regular feature of Arab commentary. The fact that so many activists,
secular and Islamist alike, believe—or want to believe—in America’s better
angels undermines the oft-repeated claim that aggressive support for
democracy will taint indigenous reformers. But this latter view is one that the
Obama administration appears to have maintained during, first, the Green
Revolution in Iran and, now, the Arab revolts. Indeed, this “kiss of death”
argument is particularly appealing to many liberals because it subsumes
arguments for inaction under the guise of helping reformers on the ground. In
effect, it argues for doing nothing at the precise moment that doing something
would be most effective.
Some liberals, in other words, would like the U.S. to manage its own
presumed decline and adapt to a changing world where America cannot and will
not
act alone. The Arab revolutions, however, make clear that there is no
replacement for American leadership, even from the perspective of those
thought
to be the most anti-American. This puts America in a strong position but
also a potentially dangerous one. While the world continues to look to the
U.S. for moral leadership, it often comes away disappointed.
This is likely, then, to be remembered as a costly era of missed
opportunities for the United States. The Obama administration, and liberals
more
generally, found themselves unprepared for the difficult questions posed by the
Arab spring. Far from articulating a distinctive national security
strategy, Democrats were content to emphasize problem solving, drawing
inspiration
from the neo-realism of the elder Bush administration. But a sensible
foreign policy is different than a great one. Pragmatism is about means rather
than ends, and it has never been entirely clear what sort of Middle East
the Obama administration envisions. Ahead of Obama’s May 19, 2011 speech on
the Arab revolts, the White House promised a comprehensive, “sweeping”
approach. Instead, the speech promised more of the same—a largely ad-hoc
policy
that reacts to, rather than tries to shape, events.
Of course, in the case of Libya, as Qaddafi’s forces marched toward
Benghazi the United States did act, albeit at the eleventh hour. In rebel
strongholds, Libyans raised American flags and offered their thanks to
President
Obama, something that is difficult to imagine happening anywhere else in the
region. The episode only reinforces the idea that, in their moment of need,
pro-democracy forces do not look to China, Russia, or other emerging
powers. They look to the West and, in particular, the United States. This is
what the declinist literature—and the Obama administration—seems willing to
discount. Economic power, as important as it is, is no substitute for the
moral and political legitimacy that comes with democracy. Declinists draw
disproportionate backing from statistics that paint a dim picture of American
military and economic competitiveness. Gideon Rachman’s January/February
Foreign Policy essay on American decline (subtitled “this time it’s for real”
) is based almost entirely on economic arguments. The moral components of
power, however, cannot be so easily measured.
But, more than nine months since the Arab spring began, America’s window of
opportunity is closing. Arabs can wait for a change in heart, but they
cannot wait forever. The conventional wisdom in Washington is that the Obama
administration has done a passable job in response to the Arab revolts.
Passable, however, is not good enough. The gravity of the situation demands
bold, visionary leadership—a grand strategy that capitalizes on an historic
opportunity for the U.S. to fundamentally re-orient its policies in the
region and make a break with decades of support for “stable,” repressive
regimes.
On February 9, 2011, I met with Abdel Monem Abul Futouh, who has since left
the Brotherhood and is now a leading Egyptian presidential candidate. He
was calm and collected, but, with Mubarak stubbornly refusing to step down,
there was a sense of fear and uncertainty in his voice. Halfway into our
conversation, he was already speaking in the past tense: “America has the
power to do something and it didn’t do it. They have democratic values in the
U.S. but then they support the opposite in the Arab world.” I asked him
what he wanted from the Obama administration. “We want the U.S. to stop
supporting corruption and dictatorship in the Arab world,” he replied. “As for
how? That’s for them to answer, since they’re the ones who need to do it.”
--
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