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Remember the days when we thought Egypt’s path to democracy was
a done deal? Western-trained Mohamed Morsi had invited the people to
come and meet him in Hosni Mubarak’s former presidential palace, the old
military toffs in the “Supreme Council of the Armed Forces” had been
pensioned off and the International Monetary Fund was waiting to bestow
some of those cruel deprivations upon Egypt that would ready it for our
financial benevolence. How happy the Middle East optimists were by
mid-2012.
Next door, Libya produced a victory for nice, pro-Western secularist
Mahmoud Jibril, promising freedom, stability, a new home for the West in
one of the Arab world’s most fecund oil producers. It was a place where
even US diplomats could wander around virtually unprotected.
Tunisia may have an Islamist party running its government, but it was
a “moderate” administration – in other words, we thought it would do
what we wanted – while the Saudis and the Bahraini autocracy, with the
purse-lipped support of Messrs Obama and Cameron, quietly suppressed
what was left of the Shia uprising which threatened to remind us all that
democracy was not really welcome among the wealthiest Arab states.
Democracy was for the poor.
Closing in
So, too, in Syria. By the spring of last year, the Western commentariat
was writing off Bashar al-Assad. He did not deserve “to live on this
earth”, according to French Foreign Secretary Laurent Fabius. He must