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

foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • TUnisia
American diplomats have many reasons to avoid saying publicly what
they think privately about their less savory partners. An obvious and logical
one is that they want to preserve relationships that are necessary to advance
other U.S. goals—securing Egypt’s support for the Middle East peace process,
for example, or shoring up Ethiopia’s cooperation in fighting terrorism,
or getting Kyrgyzstan’s assent to hosting a U.S. military base.
I’ve always argued to my friends at the State Department that this kind
of thinking can be catastrophic in the long run. Consider, for example, how
many of the national security threats that the United States has faced in the
last decade stem from the misrule of two dictators with whom Washington
worked in the 1980s—Saddam Hussein and, arguably to a larger extent, Zia
ul-Haq of Pakistan. Somewhere in the State Department archives, there is
probably a cable from Islamabad circa 1980, incisively analyzing Zia’s political
repression, his Islamization of Pakistani society, and his creation of
proxy militant groups, projecting the implications for U.S. interests, yet rationalizing
public silence to maintain American influence.
In the short term, there are often tradeoffs between public criticism of
repressive allies and working with them to advance other U.S. interests. Perhaps
Pakistan in the 1980s, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, was
such a case—though one could just as easily argue that the billions of dollars
the U.S. provided Zia should have given Washington leverage to improve
his domestic policies. In such cases, where U.S. interests truly do require
“dialing back” public pressure, U.S. diplomats should at least acknowledge
the pragmatic reasons for counseling quiet persuasion rather than pretending
it is always the best way to influence dictators.
In reality, no amount of “high-level private candor” was going to convince
Ben Ali that allowing free speech or free elections was in his interest,
because it plainly wasn’t (even if it was very much in the interest of Tunisia
as a whole)—and the same was true for President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt
and others like him. Authoritarian rulers do not ease repression or agree to
checks on their powers because foreign officials convince them it is a good
idea in a private meeting. Such rulers make political concessions when it
is necessary to retain the support of key actors in their societies—from the
general population to the security services to economic and political elites.
But depending on the circumstances, public, external pressure really can
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