Revolution in the Arab World - Observation of a lost soul Blog

foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • rumblings
Minister Ahmet Davutoglu can drive the agenda. This is an oddly personalized
view of diplomacy. Qatar’s diplomacy may be clever, but its ability to
deploy its staggering wealth probably makes others inclined to appreciate its
cleverness. Turkish leaders may be smart and energetic, but they also command
a country with a powerful military and robust economy, membership
in NATO, and real and growing soft power appeal across the region.
The advancing age of a few individuals is not a satisfying explanation for
the declining influence of Arab leaders. States like Egypt and Saudi Arabia
have lost influence not only because of their leaders’ old age, but also
because of the deep unpopularity of many of their U.S.-backed policies. If
Hosni Mubarak were more vigorous, Egypt’s role in enforcing the blockade
of Gaza would not become any more attractive to most Arabs. Abrams, who
has long been a vocal advocate of democracy promotion in the Middle East,
would likely agree that the stultifying repression in these countries has impeded
the emergence of new leaders. But he, like many neoconservative advocates
of democracy promotion, rarely addresses head-on the reality that
the policies pursued by these friendly autocrats in support of U.S. policy
objectives contribute deeply to the unpopularity of those regimes. The Arab
core has been hollowed out in large part because of, not in spite of, its role
in American foreign policy.
The Bush administration sought to polarize the Middle East into an axis
of “moderates”—grouping Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and other likeminded
Sunni autocrats with Israel—against “radicals” such as Iran, Syria,
Hezbollah, and Hamas. The moderate Arab leaders mostly went along, cooperating
to a considerable degree in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and siding
against Hezbollah in the 2006 Israeli war with Lebanon and against Hamas
during the 2008 Israeli attack on Gaza. But public opinion was largely on the
other side, with broad majorities of the population in most of those Arab
countries angrily denouncing both the Israeli wars and their own leaders for
the positions they took in line with American preferences. To contain this
popular anger and to continue to help American policies (such as Egypt’s
enforcing the blockade of Gaza), those Arab regimes became increasingly
repressive. It is not an accident that after all the Bush administration’s rhetoric
about democracy promotion, it had almost completely abandoned such
efforts by early 2006, after the electoral victory by Hamas. Its legacy is a
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