Gaddafiphilia. By Fouad Ajami. The Daily Beast, January 29, 2013.
Ajami:
Two
years on, we speak of the Arab rebellions in a manner we never did of the fall
of communist dictatorships. A quarter century ago, it was only cranks who
bemoaned the end of the communist tyrannies in Europe. There was chaos aplenty
in those post-communist societies and vengeful nationalist feuds; those captive
nations weren’t exactly models of liberalism. In Yugoslavia, a veritable prison
of contending nationalisms, the fall of the state that Josip Broz Tito held
together by guile and fear, ethnic cleansing, and mass murder, had put on
display the pitfalls of “liberty” after decades of repression. And still, faith
in the new history was to carry the day.
That
moment in freedom’s advance was markedly different from the easy disenchantment
with the Arab rebellions. Those had been dubbed an Arab Spring, and it was the
laziest of things to announce scorching summers and an Islamist winter. The
Arab dictatorships had been given decades of patience and indulgence, but
patience was not to be extended to the new rebellions: these were to become
orphans in the court of American opinion. American liberalism had turned surly
toward the possibilities of freedom in distant, difficult lands. If George W.
Bush’s “diplomacy of freedom,” tethered to the Iraq War, had maintained that
freedom can stick on Arab and Muslim soil, liberalism ridiculed that
hopefulness. This was a new twist in the evolution of American liberalism. In
contrast to its European counterpart, American liberalism had tended to be
hopeful about liberty’s prospects abroad. This was no longer the case. The Arab
Awakening would find very few liberal promoters.
Nor was
American conservatism convinced that these Arab rebellions were destined for
success. Say what you will about the wellsprings of conservative thought, the
emphasis is on the primacy of culture in determining the prospects of nations.
For good reasons, Arab and Islamic culture was deemed to present formidable
obstacles to democratic development. The crowd would unseat a dictatorship only
to beget a theocratic tyranny. Iran after the Pahlavis was a cautionary tale.
. . . . . . . . . .
From
one end of the Arab world to the other, this seemed like the dictators’
paradise. History’s democratic tides had bypassed the Arabs. There was no
intellectual class with the tools and the temperament necessary to take on the
rulers. The intellectuals had been cowed or bought off or had opted for exile.
On the margins of political life, there was a breed of Islamists biding their
time. The secularists were too proud, too steeped in the conceit of modernism
to take the religious alternative seriously.
. . . . . . . . . .
These
were, on some level, prison riots that had erupted in the Arab world. The
dictators had robbed these countries of political efficacy and skills; in the
aftermath of the dictators, we were to see in plain sight the harvest of their
terrible work. These rulers had been predators and brigands: they had treated
themselves and their offspring, and their retainers, to all that was denied
their subjects. The scorched earth they left behind is testament to their
tyrannies. Liberty of the Arab variety has not been pretty. But who, in good
conscience, would want to lament the fall of the dictators?
