We're Going to Have a Revolution, and Then. . . .

Sad story by Vivian Yee in the Times today about political unrest in Tunisia, the only place the Arab Spring led to a new democratic government. Tunisian democracy has endured for a decade, and the nation has the Arab world's freest press. But many Tunisians feel that the right to complain about their bad condition is the only thing they got:

Tunisia’s dictatorship is long gone. Its president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, fled the country in January 2011 after a brutal 23-year rule. Ten years later, Tunisians have built a democracy, however dysfunctional, complete with elections and — that rarest of Arab commodities — the right to free speech.

So it is that the protests, strikes and sit-ins seem to almost never stop. Graffiti gleefully denounces the police. Bloggers and citizen journalists howl about official mismanagement, heap scorn on political opponents and lob corruption allegations against government officials high and low, their Facebook posts then shared and amplified by thousands of fellow Tunisians.

But none of it has righted an economy heading for shipwreck. Nearly a third of young people are jobless, public services are foundering and corruption has increasingly infiltrated daily life. Opportunities for most people have become so scant, especially in Tunisia’s impoverished interior, that least 13,000 Tunisian migrants gambled their lives crossing to Italy by boat just in the last year. . . .

“Why did we revolt?” said Ines Jebali, 23, a sociology student. “Everything changed for the worse.”

Yet another people learns that the Revolution is just step one on a long, long road toward a decent and prosperous society. Habits of corruption die hard, and no government can magic a modern economy into being. 

One of the issues in Tunisia is government instability; they have had a dozen since they elected their first free Parliament. No party can establish stable control because the country is so closely divided between the mainly rural people who want the nation to be founded on Islam and those, mainly urban, who want a more western, liberal society. (Sounds familiar, no?) Plus, both parties are full of corrupt rent-seekers because, honestly, the whole country is full of corrupt rent-seekers.

Another issue is the belief that the only thing keeping ordinary people from earning decent livings is corruption. Tunisia certainly has a problem with corruption. But that is not the fundamental problem many Tunisians seem to believe it is. Even if corruption could be eliminated Tunisia would still be a struggling middle-income country with nothing special to sell the world. 

Yee's article ends on an optimistic note, focusing on political agitation among Tunisia's young city dwellers. I wish them well. But I am not optimistic that they or anyone else can cure the pain Tunisians experience from being torn between Islam and the west, and from being a not-rich country just across the Mediterranean from much richer lands.

Tunisia Fast-Forwards its History

The only place where the Arab Spring led to an enduring democratic government is Tunisia. The Tunisian elite is perhaps the most western in the Arab world, and the least Arab; I know a Tunisian man and he once told me, proudly I thought, that his people were "Berber-Phoenician-Greek-Roman-Arab-Turkish-French, and probably a few other things." Tunisian democracy has gotten this far through a remarkable spirit of compromise and a series of power-sharing agreements between the two main parties: Ennahda, a conservative Islamic party that has consistently gotten the most votes in Parliamentary elections, and Tahya Tounes (Long Live Tunisia), the secular party that has the most support in the urban middle class and has led all the governments so far.

The news out of the first round of presidential voting last week seems to be that Tunisian voters are already tired of bland, compromising centrism and looking for something new. The candidates from Ennahda and Tahya Tounes both failed to make the second round; instead the candidates will be a lawyer who says he has never voted before and a local media mogul in jail on charges of tax evasion:

There have been warning signs that this politics of consensus would prove hollow. There has been a sharp decline in public confidence in political institutions: Trust in parliament has fallen to 14 percent, and trust in political parties stands at just 9 percent, according to a recent Arab Barometer survey. That explains the low turnout for the Sept. 15 vote. Tunisians have been making their political claims through street protests: There have been up to 10,000 protests every year since 2016.

As to why, well

Promises of economic recovery have not been fulfilled, and both unemployment and inflation remain high. . . . Many Tunisians hope that this public rejection of the political elite will reset the system and revive the promises of the 2011 uprising for accountable, legitimate government and wider economic opportunities for all.

I have to think that globalization is also involved. Tunisians follow the news from Europe closely, so they know that Europeans are not at all satisfied with their own blandly centrist governments.

Democracy is a balancing act. For it to work, the voters have to demand accountability; otherwise it slides into corruption and back room dealing. But if what the voters are demanding is simply not possible, that won't work either, opening the way to grandstanding liars (ahem) and authoritarianism. The things Tunisian voters are said to be demanding make me nervous.

Post- Post-Colonial Algeria

Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud discusses what might come of Algeria's thus far peaceful revolution:

Rachel Donadio: What do you think happens next in Algeria?

Kamel Daoud: It’s hard to know what will happen, because for the moment, the regime isn’t doing much and is trying to buy time. But on the other hand, the Algerians are keeping up the pressure. There are still bigger and bigger demonstrations. For now there’s status quo. The regime is going to try to anticipate things by saying they’ll change the government and carry out reforms and start a national dialogue.

But I think this is the usual strategy that dictatorships turn to when they’re forced to. They try to start a dialogue and reforms, which is what I’d call the first phase. That’s what’s happening now in Algeria. I think the regime pushed Algerians’ sense of humiliation too far. We reached a point of electing a photo, which Algerians can’t tolerate.

There’s an even deeper force: demographics. Half of the Algerian population is under 30. The entire regime is old. The people of the regime are all 85 years old, and sooner or later this generational rupture was bound to cause a crisis. I also think that the generation of the decolonizers has come to an end all over Africa, but it arrived quite late in Algeria. And that was going to have consequences sooner or later.

Donadio: So is this moment of transition also important as a sign of how anti-colonialism has become less strong of a force in Algeria?

Daoud: Yes. For several years now, I’ve tried to write about how to get out of the post-colonial mentality. A lot of people reproached me for this—a lot of people in France and in the United States and elsewhere—because post-colonialism has become a comfort. For years, I’ve been writing about how we need to stop using post-colonialism as a complete and total explanation of reality. I think now we’ve reached a sort of political expression that’s very clear: People want to get out of the post-colonial era. They want to be done with that generation.

What Happened to Mohammed Morsi?

Ever since Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi was overthrown in 2013 I have been wondering what happened to him. Yes, he was from the Muslim Brotherhood, but he won the election; how could the Obama administration, after making so many public commitments to democracy in the Arab world, have turned so quickly against the only Egyptian leader ever chosen in a free election?

Now Times reporter David Kirkpatrick, who was their Cairo bureau chief at the time, has come out with an article that offers some context. First, it turned out that within Egypt, the people whose streeet protests led to the fall of the military regime and the holding of that fateful election were not really interested in democracy. What they wanted was a country more like Europe: more personal freedom, more equality for women, a freer and richer economy. When they got the Muslim brotherhood instead most of them decided to turn against the election and start calling for another military intervention.

There were also big divisions within the Obama administration over how to react:

“The people who wanted to have a different kind of relationship with the Egyptian people, including the president, were on an island in our own government,” Ben Rhodes, Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser, later told me. “There was a sense of inevitability about the military resuming control.”

The American military were especially leary, since they spent a lot of time working with Middle Easterners – Saudis, Kuwaitis, Israelis, the Egyptian military – who regarded the Muslim Brotherhood as just another ally of al Qaeda and a terrible danger to peace in the region. But not just the military:

Civilians in government were skeptical, too. Secretary of State John Kerry had grown close to many of the most fiercely anti-Islamist Persian Gulf royals during his decades in the Senate, even sometimes yachting with them. He had always distrusted the Brotherhood, he told me years later. When he visited Cairo for the first time as secretary of state in March 2013, he took an immediate dislike to Mr. Morsi.

“He is the dumbest cluck I ever met,” Mr. Kerry told his chief of staff as they left the presidential palace. “This isn’t going to work. These guys are wacko.”

Mr. Kerry got along better in his one-on-one meeting with Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. A former military intelligence chief, General Sisi had vaulted himself into the job of defense minister in a shake-up just a few months before.

“I will not let my country go down the drain,” General Sisi told Mr. Kerry, as he later recalled to me. He knew then that “Morsi was cooked.” General Sisi was prepared to intervene. Mr. Kerry felt partly relieved, he told me.

“It was reassuring that Egypt would not fall into a civil war or a complete massacre of the public or an implosion,” Mr. Kerry said, although he added, “I did not sit back and think, ‘Great, our problems are going to be solved.’”

Obama spoke to Morsi and urged him to make some dramatic gesture to his opposition, reminding him that Nelson Mandela made one of his own prison guards head of his presidential security detail.

“Be bold,” he added. “History is waiting for you.”

But Morsi would not or could not reach out to his opposition, so hardliners within the US government eventually got their way and we ended up endorsing the coup against him.

It's a sad tale. But it also makes me wonder: could a different man, in Morsi's position, have made those bold gestures, brought some of his opponents into his administration and engineered a different outcome? Or was Morsi simply in an impossible position, unable to make any concessions without alienating his own key supporters?

Are the divisions within Egypt simply too raw and deep to be bridged within a democratic system, or would it have been possible with the right inspired leadership?

How much difference can one person make in a nation's history?

The Arab Spring, Failed Hopes, and Self Doubt

The Arab Spring, a great movement for democracy, human rights, and hope, has crashed and burned. Outside Tunisia it has led only to some combination of civil war and renewed repression. Algerian writer and activist Kamel Daoud wrote a moving essay about these events for a French newspaper that has now been translated and published in the Times. It makes me wonder.

Daoud admits that the dreams of the protesters and the rebels are dead or dying, but he does not attribute this to any sort of natural disease. He believes that those dreams were murdered. They were murdered by dictators like Assad with their airplanes and poison gas, by cynical foreign governments, by lies. The liars claim that attempts to establish Arab democracy only empower radicals like the Islamic state and lead to chaos and foreign intervention:

For President Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, the Arab springs were “devastating conspiracies.” According to a private Egyptian television channel, even ‘‘The Simpsons’’ contained proof of untoward foreign designs in Syria. The political chaos in Libya has fanned distrust as well.

The foreign-intervention theory is used as a weapon against local dissenters. In 2016 Bouteflika, ailing and immobilized, announced that he would seek yet another term, after having the Constitution amended so that he could stay in office for the rest of his life. When his opponents countered his proposals by invoking democratic values, government media accused them of being traitors, Western agents or Zionists.

The case of Syria — subject to alliances with Iran or Russia and playing against Saudi Arabia, Qatar or the United States — gives weight to such propaganda. It seems to demonstrate that any demand for democracy eventually translates into chaos, and chaos invites the return of colonialism. The same goes for Libya. Better then to submit to one’s dictators than compromise oneself with foreigners.

I want to agree with Daoud that the dream of Arab democracy remains alive, and that things might have gone differently. But I am not sure. I am not much of a believer in luck or genius. I think most of what happens in history is driven by vast, long-term forces that we only partially understand and can rarely control. It seems to me that people who point out what happened in Libya when the dictator was overthrown are onto something. The situation did not degenerate into chaos for no reason at all; it degenerated because Libyans are deeply divided among themselves by region, tribe, class, attitudes toward Europe, and their interpretations of Islam, so much so that once the heavy hand of dictatorship was removed the situation spontaneously combusted. Can democracy flourish in such circumstances? Assad has held onto power in Syria not just because he has airplanes and poison gas, but because he has the support of many Syrians. Foreign powers meddle in Arab conflicts not just for their own nefarious purposes but because various Arab factions are always begging them to.

Consider events in Iraq and Egypt. In Iraq the US removed the dictator and his whole apparatus, and so far the result has been corruption, conflict, terrorism, the rise of the Islamic state, a devastating civil war, and the effective secession of Kurdistan. Consider the still smoldering ruins of Mosul, once one of the Arab world's great cities, as collateral damage from this experiment. In Egypt democracy was established and an election held, but the winner was from the Muslim Brotherhood. The secular, western-oriented people who began the protests and launched the revolution recoiled in horror from what their countrymen had chosen and allied with the military to overthrow the Morsi government and return Egypt to dictatorship. The hard, rational part of my brain says this all proves that most of the Arab world is simply not suitable for democracy.

But even as I reach that conclusion I doubt it. Americans always used to say that Latin America was unsuitable for democracy and pointed to the numerous failures, but right now most of the region is democratic, and some of those democratic nations are thriving. Am I just being smug and indifferent when I write off the dreams of Daoud and millions of others? Is my resignation just an excuse for the west's clumsy combination of military meddling and moral indifference? For my refusal to endorse spending American dollars and soldiers overthrowing Assad? I don't know.

I would never tell Daoud or an other citizen of a dictatorship to give up hope; hope is a precious thing in any circumstances. But I am not myself optimistic that things will get better in the Middle East any time soon.

Dark Surrealism after the Arab Spring

The news from Cairo:

Basma Abdel Aziz was walking in downtown Cairo one morning when she saw a long line of people standing in front of a closed government building.

Returning hours later, Ms. Abdel Aziz, a psychiatrist who counsels torture victims, passed the same people still waiting listlessly — a young woman and an elderly man, a mother holding her baby. The building remained closed.

When she got home, she immediately started writing about the people in line and didn’t stop for 11 hours. The story became her surreal debut novel, “The Queue,” which takes place after a failed revolution in an unnamed Middle Eastern city. The narrative unfolds over 140 days, as civilians are forced to wait in an endless line to petition a shadowy authority called The Gate for basic services.

“Fiction gave me a very wide space to say what I wanted to say about totalitarian authority,” Ms. Abdel Aziz said in a recent interview.

“The Queue,” which was just published in English by Melville House, has drawn comparisons to Western classics like George Orwell’s “1984” and “The Trial” by Franz Kafka. It represents a new wave of dystopian and surrealist fiction from Middle Eastern writers who are grappling with the chaotic aftermath and stinging disappointments of the Arab Spring.

Five years after the popular uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere, a bleak, apocalyptic strain of post-revolutionary literature has taken root in the region. Some writers are using science fiction and fantasy tropes to describe grim current political realities. . . .

“There’s a shift away from realism, which has dominated Arabic literature,” said the Kuwait-born novelist Saleem Haddad, whose new book, “Guapa,” is narrated by a young gay Arab man whose friend has been imprisoned after a political revolt. “What’s coming to the surface now is darker and a bit deeper.”

Fascinating how this same literary impulse has surfaced again and again when writers confront repressive rule, from Lenin's Russia to dictator-laden Latin America, and now to the Middle East.

In Tunisia, the Power of Civil Society

Interesting choice in Norway to award the Nobel Peace Prize to four organizations that have helped keep Tunisia's young democracy running:

The National Dialogue Quartet in Tunisia won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday “for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011.” . . .

The quartet comprises four organizations: the Tunisian General Labor Union; the Tunisian Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts; the Tunisian Human Rights League; and the Tunisian Order of Lawyers. 

A brief history:

Days after the vendor died in January 2011, the protests forced the country’s longtime dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, into exile. The Islamist Ennahda Party won the most votes in parliamentary elections that October, but it fell short of an outright majority. In August 2012, thousands took to the streets of Tunis, the capital, to protest a proposal to, among other things, remove the full equality of women and men guaranteed in the 1956 Constitution — and undo a secular political tradition that the French left behind.

The four groups honored on Friday were vital in helping Tunisia negotiate its way through the most serious threat to its nascent transition: the crisis that followed the assassination of the opposition politician Mohamed Brahmi in July 2013. The protests that came after threatened to undo the country’s democratically elected “troika” government, led by Ennahda Party.

The groups’ intervention helped pave the way for the troika government’s peaceful resignation, its replacement by a constituent assembly, the adoption of a new Constitution and the holding of parliamentary and presidential elections in October and November 2014.

Kaci Kullmann Five, chair of the Peace Prize committee, said,

An essential factor for the culmination of the revolution in Tunisia in peaceful democratic elections last autumn was the effort made by the quartet to support the work of the constituent assembly and to secure approval of the constitutional process among the Tunisian population at large. The quartet paved the way for a peaceful dialogue between the citizens, the political parties and the authorities, and helped to find consensus-based solutions to a wide range of the challenges across political and religious divides.

Which makes me think about what a society is, and how that relates to politics. Tunisia's relative success seems to have come because it has a mass of active citizens, from market sellers to lawyers to ministers in the government, who care about their country and want it to be a successful democracy. They want what many people around the world call a normal country, a place where people are free to get on with their lives and careers without fear of oppression or war, a place where human connections are not controlled by party or ethnic bloc. They have put the success of democracy above narrow interests of party, and as a result they have been able to reach the compromises necessary for democracy to succeed. In Egypt, Yemen, Iran, Libya, and elsewhere the spirit of compromise has been lacking, so movements toward democracy have failed.

Warlordism in Libya

The problem with waging wars for democracy -- one of many, but perhaps the worst -- is that civil war is not a good environment for democratic pluralism. On the contrary we often find that the political infighting typical of democracy impedes the organization of a unified war effort, so that wars tend to produce despots. This insight goes back at least to Thucydides, and perhaps much farther still.

Events in Libya seem to confirm it all over again:

In the crowded trauma room of a threadbare hospital, a procession of bedraggled soldiers files in, bearing a grim catalogue of wounds: shrapnel in the neck, gunshots to the chest, burned legs. Fierce fighting erupted here last week as a coalition of army, police, tribal militias and neighborhood volunteer forces launched a campaign dubbed “Operation Doom” to evict jihadist and Islamic State forces from their strongholds. . . .

At a rally I attended for two slain activists, the eastern government’s minister for culture and media struck a defiant note, lambasting the United States Navy for waiting offshore but doing nothing against the Islamic State, and accusing Israel of supplying weapons to the jihadists. The audience roared with applause when he mentioned the name of Operation Doom’s architect: Gen. Khalifa Hifter.

General Hifter is Libya’s most powerful and polarizing figure. A former confidante of Muammar el-Qaddafi and longtime army officer who defected in the 1980s, he launched “Operation Dignity” in 2014 — an unsanctioned military operation to drive Islamist militias from Benghazi and end a wave of violence and assassinations that had plagued the city.

But he didn’t stop there. General Hifter tried to bring the war to Tripoli and topple the government and its Islamist factions. It was a threat that contributed to the division of the country. Supporters questioned if he had gone too far by labeling more moderate militias as terrorists. When I met General Hifter last year, his contempt for political Islamists of all stripes was clear. “There are three options for them,” he said “in the ground, in prison, or out of the country.”

In other words, General Hifter is exactly the sort of figure so often thrown up by chaotic conflicts, an ambitious SOB with no respect for human rights who rises to power because no one else is doing anything decisive to bring the war to a close and restore some sort of normal life.

I wrote a few days ago about the completely different situation unfolding in Kurdish Syria, where a weak, pluralistic democracy is organizing a decent military effort. So the rise of strongmen is not inevitable. But if it is to be prevented -- if revolutions are to lead to a genuinely better state, and not just a different sort of tyranny -- then either people have to work very hard and selflessly for a long time to make it happen, or the fighting has to be led by a George Washington sort of figure who genuinely wants democracy to take hold. Both circumstances are unusual.

Corruption in Old Tunisia

Recent reports about the corruption of the old regime in Tunisia, under President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, reveal some of the issues that drove the Arab Spring revolts. The protesters were convinced that their governments were not only authoritarian but also stealing from them, and new reports on the Ben Ali regime show that they were not wrong:

A new research paper by World Bank economists released Thursday shows that companies owned by relatives and close allies of Mr. Ben Ali defrauded the state of $1 billion to $2.6 billion over a seven-year period by avoiding import tariffs. Researchers investigated the dealings of 206 companies between 2002 and 2009.

The findings represent one example of the cronyism that typified Mr. Ben Ali’s 23 years in power and that was one of the main drivers behind the uprising that overthrew him in 2011. Protesters vented their anger against Mr. Ben Ali’s family, and in particular his wife, Leila Trabelsi, a former hairdresser, and her businessmen brothers who had rapidly amassed great wealth. . . .

The World Bank detailed how the system worked in a first report on corruption under Mr. Ben Ali last year titled “All in the Family.” Firms owned by Mr. Ben Ali and his family dominated the telecommunications and air transportation industries, as well as real estate and other sectors of transportation, and were extremely lucrative, the report found.

By controlling the regulatory system of licensing and investment, the presidential family maintained a virtual monopoly in the sectors they chose, preventing competitors from entering the market and outperforming others in every aspect: employment, market share, profits and growth. Of the firms owned by the family that were confiscated, 220 accounted for 21 percent of all net private-sector profits in Tunisia, the report said.

So you can see why people were angry, and why they wanted to blame their poverty on the regime.

But on the other hand the removal of Ben Ali has not led to better economic times for most of the people; quite the contrary. The stability Ben Ali created, and his salesmanship with foreign investors, were very valuable, and their loss has had repercussions for all the citizens. I hope that in ten years Tunisia will have emerged from its slump and become a beacon of democracy and prosperity in the Arab world, but there is still a good chance that it will instead slide back down into civil war and terrorism.

Was corruption the problem? I have long been wondering how bad a thing graft really is, because sometimes it seems to me that it can be made to work very well. My instinct of course is to think that corrupt greed is always a force for evil, but because that is what I want to believe I have my doubts as to whether it can really be true. After all very few societies have met the standards of contemporary Denmark, and yet life goes on. In the 1865 to 1900 period the United States was very corrupt, more so than ever before or since, but it also enjoyed astonishing economic growth. Maybe things would have been even better without the Goulds and the Rockefellers siphoning off millions to their private accounts, but maybe corruption sometimes eased the way for modernization that would otherwise have been hard to achieve. (Could the railroads have been built without corruption?) Rapid industrialization has very often been accompanied by massive corruption and the accumulation of ill-gotten fortunes, from Britain in 1800 to China in 1995.

The history of the Arab Spring introduces another variable, whether corruption can contribute to stability. I would certainly never want to defend the regimes of Ben Ali, Mubarak, and so on, but on the other hand they at least kept the people fed and the lid on chaos. Maybe if they had been less corrupt they would have done even better, and the economies of their nations would have prospered; but on the other hand maybe keeping the wealth concentrated in favorite groups like the generals and the judges helped them keep control. Corruption involved stealing from many people, but among the beneficiaries were certain favored groups of the poor -- dictators and their wives had favorite charities to which businessmen who wanted their favor donated lavishly. Cheap bread for the poor was a feature of all those regimes.

I want to believe in democracy and fairness, but it may be that they can work only in prosperous, united countries. Recent events show that democracy can be dangerous, exacerbating tensions between different ethnic, regional, and class groups, to the point of civil war. I believe that more economic democracy would help the poor and the middle class in America, because our system is strong enough to survive any turmoil it would cause. But my insights into my own society do not necessarily translate readily into other places where very different people are living very different lives.

And yet -- are there no limits to greed? Why do people like Ben Ali and Rockefeller refuse to be happy with great wealth and power and insist on grinding on beyond the limits of what anyone could possibly use? Why keep piling billions upon billions instead of settling down with the first billion and starting to work on your reputation and place in history?

In Tunis, a Bad Day for Arab Democracy

The murderers who rampaged through the Bardo Museum in Tunis yesterday did more than kill 19 people; they tried to kill the Arab world's most successful democracy by stabbing it in the jugular of its crucial tourist revenue. It will probably work, too -- surely thousands of planned Tunisian vacations are being cancelled as I write. It saddens me to think that Tunisia may suffer the same fate as Lebanon, the moderate majority of its population dragged down into the angry morass of Middle Eastern politics. I hope Tunisians have the strength to forge ahead with their experiment but I don't feel very optimistic.

UPDATE

Picture from last night's anti-terrorism rally in Tunis. Heartwarming. More here.

Libya: the Aftermath of Regime Change

Here's a great summary of how bad things have gotten in Libya:

There is no overstating the chaos of post-Qaddafi Libya. Two competing governments claim legitimacy. Armed militias roam the streets. The electricity is frequently out of service, and most business is at a standstill; revenues from oil, the country's greatest asset, have dwindled by more than ninety per cent. Some three thousand people have been killed by fighting in the past year, and nearly a third of the country's population has fled across the border to Tunisia. What has followed the downfall of a tyrant-a downfall encouraged by NATO air strikes-is the tyranny of a dangerous and pervasive instability.

And that was written before the local Islamic State branch started beheading Coptic Christians.

I opposed the US and European air offensive that toppled Qaddafi, because I thought it would lead to a dragging civil war like the one in Syria, and I thought a quick massacre by Qaddafi's forces was less awful than that. But then when the dictator was driven from power so quickly, I thought maybe I had been wrong. But now it seems that Libya is having its lengthy civil war, just without Qaddafi to lead one of the factions, and my thoughts have circled back to something I said in March, 2011:

I still don't see how this can have a decent outcome.

Real Politics in Tunisia

Tunisia just held the second consecutive peaceful election since its revolution, real cause for celebration given how the Arab Spring has played out everywhere else. The two main parties were Ennhada, always described as "moderate Islamists," and Nidaa Tounes, generally described as "secular." With those descriptions in mind, westerners have generally cheered the victory of Nidaa Tounes. But Nidaa Tounes is a strange party, a mishmash of labor groups, feminists, environmentalists, and hacks from the old, dictatorial regime unified by nothing but opposition to Islamism. Their leader, 87-year-old Beji Caid Essebsi, is an old regime holdover not above accusing all his opponents of supporting terrorism, and some Ennhada activists are worried that he will use that excuse to break their party and arrest all of its leaders. In other words, the competing factions in Tunisia are actually much the same as in Egypt, and there is danger that the same scenario will unfold. So far, though, everyone in Tunisia has been more moderate, and things have been worked out through the democratic process. May they continue to do so for many years to come.

ISIS and Obama

It makes me sad, really. Obama came into office wanting to make peace -- in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Washington. But factional anger has defeated him everywhere. Republicans have fought him tooth and nail, sometimes at least for rational goals but other times in spasms of paranoia like the blowups over "death panels" and Fast and Furious. The Shiite politicians we empowered in Iraq mouthed the phrases of unity and democracy but in practice sought only to enrich their clans and shoot lots of Sunnis. In Afghanistan our goals were blocked by our alleged friends in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and by the tribalism, corruption and violence that has been the Afghan reality for 500 years. Obama's diplomacy has accomplished pretty much nothing; all his achievements have come from partisanship, drone strikes and Navy SEALs.

Obama has been sucked back into the Middle East vortex by the same basic forces that sucked in Bush. When the Trade Center went down, a chorus of voices said that the underlying problem was a Middle East dominated by thuggish dictators, religious fanatics, terrorists, and the Israel/Palestine conflict. The only way to keep America secure in the long term, they said, was to create a more economically vibrant, politically stable Middle East. Meanwhile a swath of Arab exiles was telling everyone who would listen that the "Arab people" longed for Western-style democracy and freedom but were being blocked by thugs like Saddam; remove a couple of bad dictators, they said, and a thriving, grateful Arab world would emerge.

Instead of that gleaming dream, what emerged from Shock and Awe was civil war in Iraq, anarchic chaos in Libya, worse thugs in Egypt, bloody repression in Bahrain, the fading of whatever hope there ever was for peace in Israel/Palestine, slaughter in Syria, and now ISIS. I think the fear that westerners fighting with ISIS will go home and launch terrorist attacks in Europe or the US is legitimate; I will be surprised if there are not a few such actions. But haven't we learned that we have no power to remake the Middle East in our image? Suppose we do "degrade" ISIS, allowing other elements to regain control of the spaces it controls. Who will those elements be? Will they make the region any more stable? The main rivals of ISIS in Syria are the local al Qaeda affiliate and the criminal regime of Assad; degrading ISIS will only help them. Allegedly we are going to train "moderate" militias to take on the fanatics and the government, which if it succeeds will only divide the country even further and prolong the fighting even longer. Who are we trying to kid?

I understand the pressure Obama is under. He commands vast military power, and all around him are people demanding that he "do something" about the ongoing slaughter. Only a truly hard-hearted man could resist forever, and Obama does not have that kind of steel.

So here we go ahead, dropping bombs in pursuit of impossible dreams.

Break Dancing vs. Religious Extremism

The Arab Spring began in Tunisia as a revolt against joblessness, economic stagnation, and government indifference. Since then the economy has gotten worse and unemployment has risen, especially among the young. Many young people have turned to Salifism and hundreds have gone to fight in Syria. But the democratic political system continues to function and other young people remain committed to modernization. One of them is Nidhal Bouallagui, 23, a veteran of the revolution who now organizes community centers to offer activities like theater, fencing, and break dancing:

“We want to expand this phenomenon all over Tunisia,” said one of the top break dancers, Alla Bouzid. “We want to eradicate the old mentality of people. We want the cycle of Tunisia to change. All this is happening since the revolution. We want to live how we want.”

In the contest for the hearts and minds of Islamic youth, the west has powerful weapons: freedom and fun.

A Deal in Tunisia

The last redoubt of hope for the Arab Spring is Tunisia, where democracy endures despite economic turmoil, terrorism, assassinations, and political gridlock. Things have looked bad lately, but yesterday the leaders of the main Islamic and secular parties announced a deal that establishes a caretaker government to plan new elections.

There began five months of demonstrations and political mudslinging, as the economy worsened and terrorist violence increased. “This tense political situation is conducive to terrorism,” Mr. Ghannouchi, a renowned religious scholar, said in an interview before the deal.

It was in this heated atmosphere that Mr. Essebsi threw down the gauntlet in a television interview and called on Mr. Ghannouchi to meet him and talk. “I said: ‘You are responsible for that’ ” — meaning the crisis that had gripped the country. “ ‘You have to be part of the solution. I invite you to do so.’ ”

I love that -- the world would be a much better place if people stopped stoking crises and worked harder to be part of the solution.

A "More Modest" Policy in the Middle East

As the Arab Spring continues to degenerate, word that after a major internal review the Obama administration has adopted a more focused, less radical policy in the Middle East:

At the United Nations last month, Mr. Obama laid out the priorities he has adopted as a result of the review. The United States, he declared, would focus on negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, brokering peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and mitigating the strife in Syria. Everything else would take a back seat.

That includes Egypt, which was once a central pillar of American foreign policy. Mr. Obama, who hailed the crowds on the streets of Cairo in 2011 and pledged to heed the cries for change across the region, made clear that there were limits to what the United States would do to nurture democracy, whether there, or in Bahrain, Libya, Tunisia or Yemen. . . .

Not only does the new approach have little in common with the “freedom agenda” of George W. Bush, but it is also a scaling back of the more expansive American role that Mr. Obama himself articulated two years ago, before the Arab Spring mutated into sectarian violence, extremism and brutal repression.

The blueprint drawn up on those summer weekends at the White House is a model of pragmatism — eschewing the use of force, except to respond to acts of aggression against the United States or its allies, disruption of oil supplies, terrorist networks or weapons of mass destruction. Tellingly, it does not designate the spread of democracy as a core interest.

Once again, it turns out that the world is much harder to change than we would like to think.

In Egypt, the Arab Spring Yields to a Season of Violent Storms

Back when protests for democracy first swept the Middle East, a cynical friend of mine scoffed at the idea of Arab democracy. "There are only two forces that count in the Arab world," he said, "the existing corrupt elite and the fundamentalists."

In Egypt this week the army has done its best to prove him right, unleashing a violent assault against camps of mostly peaceful demonstrators protesting the ousting of ex-president Mohammed Morsi. The furor of this attack appalls me. I understood why so many liberals inside and outside Egypt supported the army's removal of Morsi, who was proving to be an incompetent reactionary. But this slaughter shows why it was still a mistake.

There is always a profound cost to politics by gunfire. The French Revolution began its descent into tyranny when the liberals supported the intervention of the Parisian mob -- the mob may have been in the right, and powerful reactionary elements really were conspiring to undo the democratic changes under way. But when violence was allowed to serve as the highest court of appeal, the stage for Napoleon was set.

In Egypt, when the army swept Morsi out of office and into prison, the stage was set for yesterday's massacre. And what now? Will this explosion of mindless fury usher in peaceful reconciliation? Or will it lead instead to more violence and then yet more violence, as Egyptian fundamentalists respond in kind to the army's outrages? Will Egypt go the way of Syria, with an escalating Civil War that rages on and on partly because everyone is afraid to stop? Hannah Arendt:

The danger of the practice of violence, even if it moves consciously within a non-extremist framework of short-term goals, will always be that the means overwhelm the end. If goals are not achieved rapidly, the result will not merely be defeat but the introduction of the practice of violence into the whole body politic. Action is irreversible, and a return to the status quo in case of defeat is always unlikely. The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

Imported Wheat and the Fall of Mohammed Morsi

Vague accusations that Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi "mismanaged the economy" have been flung in all directions, but I have yet to see many concrete examples. Just now I finally stumbled on this one, from Reuters:

The biggest mistake deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi made during his year in power was dramatically reducing wheat imports, according to Mohamed Abu Shadi, the country's new minister of supplies. Lack of money and a quixotic attempt at making Egypt self-sufficient spurred the decline, say officials familiar with the matter. Mursi dreamt of making Egypt grow all its own wheat and allowed imported stocks to fall to precariously low levels. It hurt both the country's wheat stocks and Mursi's government.

The old Egyptian regime kept itself in power by a system of subsidies of essential goods, of which the two most important were wheat flour and gasoline. The cheap flour was all imported, making Egypt the world's largest importer of wheat. The problem with this regime, of course, is that it hurt Egyptian farmers, many of whom were supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was hard enough for them to compete with wheat grown on the plains of the US or Canada without the government subsidy. They wanted Egypt to be self-sufficient in wheat, both for ideological reasons -- how galling that the survival of Muslims should depend on the efforts of wicked westerners -- and because it would help them economically. When Morsi took power, he and his minister of supplies

promptly began talking about Egypt becoming self-sufficient by more than doubling its wheat production to meet its needs of over 18 million tonnes a year; at the same time they made big reductions in wheat imports and began eating through stocks. In May, Mursi was quoted during a festival to celebrate the harvest season at a farm near the northern city of Alexandria as saying: "By God's will, in two years we will be achieving more than 80 percent of our needs, and seek in four years not to import wheat." It was a an ambitious target; critics called it foolhardy.

So the ambivalent lessons of Egypt's revolution continue: this one could be summarizes as either "people need to eat, so protect the food supply" or  "to stay in power, be sure to adequately bribe the voters."

In Iraq, the Promise of Democracy

Fascinating profile in the Times today of Ali Dwai, governor of Maysan Province in Iraq and something of a folk hero. He came out of the Sadrist movement, which was very strong in this region, and he got his job as part of the deal by which the Sadrists supported a second term for Prime Minister al-Maliki in return for various goodies.

But now his proudest claim is to be "a son of Iraq," and his supporters say, "He takes care of everyone. He doesn’t make any difference between a Muslim or a Christian." He devotes his efforts to making the electricity and the sewers work, and to making his constituents feel like he cares about them:

Thursdays are reserved for constituents. He meets them one-on-one in his large reception hall, sometimes doling out cash from a discretionary fund, as he did recently when a young man admitted he could not afford to pay for his fiancée to have her hair done before their wedding.

Democracy is a risk; for a new democracy like Iraq, it is something of a leap into the dark. When it works, it can unite people behind a leader and make them feel like they all have some say in the outcome. A democracy is uniquely responsive to the wishes of its citizens, which makes a functioning democracy great thing to behold. Of course, sometimes instead it only increases tensions between competing groups, as campaigns become outpourings of anger or innuendo, which is what has happened in much of the rest of Iraq.

When it works, democracy also molds itself to local conditions and traditions. Ali Dwai's Thursday receptions are exactly the way leaders throughout the region have met their followers for a thousand years. By combining the smiling politician, the technocrat, and the tribal sheikh, he has given Iraqis a model of what democracy can be. We can only hope it spreads.

In Egypt, Politics without a Constitution

In Egypt, there is no constitution. A political struggle has now erupted there, which is interesting and important in its own right but also shows how politics works in such situations.

Right now, Egypt has no legislature. They have an elected President, Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. And they have courts, but all the judges are leftovers from Mubarak's dictatorial regime. The courts have tried to limit Morsi's power in various ways and otherwise insert themselves in the political process, invoking various old laws and pieces of the now discarded constitution in ways that Morsi and his supporters have found maddening. Some American commentators have called the judges' approach "Calvinball," after the game from Calvin and Hobbes in which the rules change constantly according to the whims of the players. The judges would probably say in their defense that somebody has to make sure that this political neophyte and his religious fanatic friends don't totally screw up the country before a constitution can be put in place and tested.

Two weeks ago, Morsi issued in a decree in which he asserted that the judges would henceforth have no power over him. All of his future decrees would stand, whatever the judges said. In particular, he and his party would take complete charge of writing the new constitution and arranging the popular vote on its provisions.

The reaction to this decree was immediate and intense, both within Egypt and abroad. It seems to me that a strong case could be made for Morsi' action. Yes, it was dictatorial, but Egypt is in exactly the sort of situation for which the Romans created the office of dictator 2500 years ago: the normal political process has broken down, and the state faces a crisis in which decisions have to be made but nobody has the authority to make them. Morsi is the only person in Egypt who has won an election since the fall of the old regime, so why not him?

Yet this logic swayed hardly anyone. Denunciations flooded in from Egyptian commentators and foreign governments, and huge demonstrations erupted. At first the demonstrations were centered in Cairo and were led by the same people who led the demonstrations against Mubarak, that is, mainly young, secular urbanites. The Presidential elections had shown that these people were far from Egypt's majority, since their candidate ran third behind both Morsi and a man representing the old regime. So at first Morsi tried to ignore the protests and soldier on, and his own followers organized counter protests. But the protests against his decree swelled and swelled, and they massed outside the Presidential Palace in a way that threatened Morsi with a choice between letting them sweep him out of the Palace or call on his enemies in the army to shoot the protesters, pretty much destroying his claim to represent a new kind of politics in Egypt. Opposition to the decree was heard from other parts of the Egyptian political spectrum, including supporters of the old regime and even some Islamists. The protests spread to other cities and even some towns.

Yesterday Morsi threw in the towel and cancelled his decree. Without a constitution, without votes, the people of Egypt had made it plain that they would not stand for the President's assertion of power. The conflict will continue, though, because Morsi still insists that the draft constitution written by his party will be put to a popular vote in just a week. The opposition thinks this is a mad rush designed to sneak through a document favoring the Islamists, and they want the vote delayed so the provisions can be debated. Stay tuned.

Why the strong reaction to Morsi's decree? Because of our reverence for the law. In almost all human societies, we rely on publicly known rules to guide our everyday conduct, and one of our most common words for a terrible situation or evil person is "lawless." We expect law to limit arbitrary power and protect us from violent usurpation. Societies with very weak governments, such as those of the early Middle Ages, sometimes develop an exaggerated reverence for the law, as if the constant repetition of principles had some magic power to restrain the wicked. And perhaps, sometimes, it did; even very thuggish rulers like to think that they are acting within their rights.

In our modern age of strong governments, we especially fear a leader who has put himself above the law. Most dictators therefore make a point of following the law themselves, at least most of the time. I am not sure that this makes much difference, in the end; certainly Stalin and Hitler were able to make their legal systems carry out whatever crimes and persecutions they wanted. Yet we still have this respect for law, and still expect to limit arbitrary power. When Morsi declared that no laws would apply to him, he seemed to put himself against the whole apparatus of law, order, procedure, rules, and so on that is one of the foundations of civilization, to declare that his own whims would take precedence over the codified experience of centuries. As he has learned, this was a terrible mistake.