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I blame Bush.
But, seriously, it cracks me up how Friedman always includes something to demonstrate his liberal bona fides. Unqualified praise for Bush is grounds for termination at NYT.
Note: this guy is NOT a conservative
Winds of Change?
Twenty years ago, I wrote a book about the Middle East, and recently I was thinking of updating it with a new introduction. It was going to be very simple — just one page, indeed just one line: “Nothing has changed.”
It took me two days covering the elections in Beirut to realize that I was dead wrong. No, something is going on in the Middle East today that is very new. Pull up a chair; this is going to be interesting.
What we saw in the Lebanese elections, where the pro-Western March 14 movement won a surprise victory over the pro-Iranian Hezbollah coalition, what we saw in the ferment for change exposed by the election campaign in Iran, and what we saw in the provincial elections in Iraq, where the big pro-Iranian party got trounced, is the product of four historical forces that have come together to crack open this ossified region.
First is the diffusion of technology. The Internet, blogs, YouTube and text messaging via cellphones, particularly among the young — 70 percent of Iranians are under 30 — is giving Middle Easterners cheap tools to communicate horizontally, to mobilize politically and to criticize their leaders acerbically, outside of state control. It is also enabling them to monitor vote-rigging by posting observers with cellphone cameras.
I knew something had changed when I sat down for coffee on Hamra Street in Beirut last week with my 80-year-old friend and mentor, Kemal Salibi, one of Lebanon’s greatest historians, and he told me about his Facebook group!
The evening of Lebanon’s election, I went to the Beirut home of Saad Hariri, the leader of the March 14 coalition, to interview him. In a big living room, he had a gigantic wall-size television broadcasting the results. And alongside the main TV were 16 smaller flat-screen TVs with electronic maps of Lebanon. Hariri’s own election experts were working on laptops and breaking down every vote from every religious community, village by village, and projecting them on the screens.
Second, for real politics to happen you need space. There are a million things to hate about President Bush’s costly and wrenching wars. But the fact is, in ousting Saddam in Iraq in 2003 and mobilizing the U.N. to push Syria out of Lebanon in 2005, he opened space for real democratic politics that had not existed in Iraq or Lebanon for decades. “Bush had a simple idea, that the Arabs could be democratic, and at that particular moment simple ideas were what was needed, even if he was disingenuous,” said Michael Young, the opinion editor of The Beirut Daily Star. “It was bolstered by the presence of a U.S. Army in the center of the Middle East. It created a sense that change was possible, that things did not always have to be as they were.”
When I reported from Beirut in the 1970s and 1980s, I covered coups and wars. I never once stayed up late waiting for an election result. Elections in the Arab world were a joke — literally. They used to tell this story about Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad. After a Syrian election, an aide came in and told Assad: “Mr. President, you won 99.8 percent of the votes. It means that only two-tenths of one percent of Syrians didn’t vote for you. What more could ask for?”
Assad answered: “Their names!”
Lebanese, by contrast, just waited up all night for their election results — no one knew what they’d be.
Third, the Bush team opened a hole in the wall of Arab autocracy but did a poor job following through. In the vacuum, the parties most organized to seize power were the Islamists — Hezbollah in Lebanon; pro-Al Qaeda forces among Iraqi Sunnis, and the pro-Iranian Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and Mahdi Army among Iraqi Shiites; the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan; Hamas in Gaza.
Fortunately, each one of these Islamist groups overplayed their hand by imposing religious lifestyles or by dragging their societies into confrontations the people didn’t want. This alienated and frightened more secular, mainstream Arabs and Muslims and has triggered an “awakening” backlash among moderates from Lebanon to Pakistan to Iran. The Times’s Robert Mackey reported that in Tehran “chants of ‘Death to America’ ” at rallies for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week were answered by chants of “Death to the Taliban — in Kabul and Tehran” at a rally for his opponent, Mir Hussein Moussavi.
Finally, along came President Barack Hussein Obama. Arab and Muslim regimes found it very useful to run against George Bush. The Bush team demonized them, and they demonized the Bush team. Autocratic regimes, like Iran’s, drew energy and legitimacy from that confrontation, and it made it very easy for them to discredit anyone associated with America. Mr. Obama’s soft power has defused a lot of that. As result, “pro-American” is not such an insult anymore.
I don’t know how all this shakes out; the forces against change in this region are very powerful — see Iran — and ruthless. But for the first time in a long time, the forces for decency, democracy and pluralism have a little wind at their backs. Good for them.
I blame Bush.
But, seriously, it cracks me up how Friedman always includes something to demonstrate his liberal bona fides. Unqualified praise for Bush is grounds for termination at NYT.
You must be joking, doobs: William Kristol, David Brooks, William Safire, John Tierney, Tom Friedman, Judith Miller. And that's just off the top of my head. It might be a funny thing to say, but it's totally inaccurate IMO.
"forces against change in this region are very powerful"
Friedman, a Jew, bought all the headed lies about Iraq, so of course he's going to justify his erroneous support for the phony Iraq war.
The Muslim cultures are truly incapable of democracy, totally, now and for decades. Political corruption, politicized/corrupt police, army, judiciary, absence of a political/judicial/legislative infrastructure, and uneducated populace.
Friedman is totally wrong, laughably wrong, again.
Iraq was/is/will be not about democracy, but about oil.
lol @ revisionist bush history in june of 2009
And this years' winner of the coveted Spurstalk head of The Year Award goes to......
boutons_
This guy has always supported the Iraq war. He even got a unit of time named after him.
Victory is always one Friedman Unit away...
I take any trash talk from DarrinS, or from any other wrongies here, as best-in-class compliments.
Thank you. You love me, you really love me.
To get back on topic, GFY.
He agreed with the justification, but he was very critical of the execution. Pretty much where I stand.
Not even people on "your side" like you.
The problem is, the issue ultimately is not whether it was a success or a failure, but whether should the US continue on this course of Neo-Wilsonian democracy spreading through the use of the state's armed forces (or being the "world's police" - take your pick)?
If Americans find the Iraq invasion objectionable simply because it failed or that some of the methods employed were dishonorable, objectionable, and/or _________ (insert your favorite term here) then we're still caught up in a cult of state worship in which citizens live through the state and its triumphs. Had Iraq been a quick success, nobody would have cared and it would have simply been yet another affirmation of American exceptionalism and a great exercise in living vicariously through the US military.
Hey, democracy is spreading. Let's go spread some more! Plus did you notice how the entire nation tends to unite prior to a new war? That's exhilarating. Such a great opportunity for the state to tackle some other 'problems' as well without bothering too much with little things like the legislature. Too bad Bush wasted it....
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"we're still caught up in a cult of state worship in which citizens live through the state and its triumphs"
That's not true for everybody, just the less twerps who need that emotional crutch to validate themselves.
That's true for the wrongie "scoundrels whose first and last refuge is to wrap themselves in the flag" but "have better things to do" while the poor white/black/brown kids die for the wrongies' imperialistic machoisms.
There's a lot of people who don't live and breathe "USA Number 1" and don't run around with, need a psychological crutch of, a sense of superiority over all the sub-humans who aren't Americans.
You don't think spreading democracy in the ME is in the best interest of US national security?
A really interesting part of Friedman's article was how technology (internet, cell phones, etc.) has really brought about change in that part of the world. No one really wanted to comment on that.
How did that work out in the West Bank and Gaza? Iraq? How might it work out in places like Egypt?
It seems to me important not to beg this question. "Spreading democracy" is not automatically consistent with the principle of self-determination or with national security. The bromide that democracies are inherently more stable and more peaceful than other kinds of government seems to me not well proven. And the arrogance that presumes to foist it on others is facially anti-democratic and imperialistic.
No. We're hated in that part of the world. A hatred that has a lot to do with our attempts to tell everyone in the ME how they should be doing things. All a democracy does is allow people who hate us to elect a government who hates us. If we're looking for the best interests of US national security then we should be looking for pro-American monarchs, like we have in Saudi Arabia. Of course political correctness won't allow us to invade someone and install any other form of government, so whenever we want to spread our influence abroad it has to be under the guise of "spreading democracy".
So far, US democratic *evangelism* in the ME has spread danger and instability.
The same could probably be said of East Germany and Eastern Europe (in general) after WWII. But look at it today.
you're right. all it took was fifty years and economic collapse.
The Soviet sphere of operations? We let them have it, uncontested. We did nothing when they cracked down in Hungary in 1956 or Prague in 1968.
What the are you talking about DarrinS?
why stop there?
it's almost impossible not to think of Team America: World Police when I see posts like this
How many times in the past have I said that history will treat him well?Oops, history may vindicate Bush
What surprises me is that it's in a NY Slimes op ed!
Its just ing stupid to argue about long term consequences with our actions in Iraq right now. It may turn out well, it may turn out poorly...
And for those of you who think that the US has screwed up the ME, well, read some history about how ed up that area has been since, oh, I don't know, forever. I'm not saying that the US didn't cause problems, I'm just saying that those problems or others just as sever have been there before we took a hand.
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