[R-G] Patrick Cockburn: "Why Have Moderate Reformers Failed So Uniformly across the Middle East?"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

 Patrick Cockburn asks: "Why have moderate reformers failed so
 uniformly across the Middle East?"  My answer is that so-called
 "moderate reformers" tend to come from upper classes and stratas,
 which distances their policies -- liberalism in political economy,
 appeasement of Tel Aviv and Washington in foreign policy -- and their
 cultures -- very secularized and, what is worse, sometimes secularist
 -- from those of the poorer majority who, unlike their betters,
 actually care about the Palestinians, and whose economic troubles
 (creating legions of young men too poor to marry in societies where
 extra-marital sex with women of their own cultures is very much
 discouraged) can't be solved by liberalism (more gender equality to
 enable more women to engage in wage labor and to make up for the end
 of "family wages" and scarcity of government jobs -- a classic liberal
 solution after the end of the post-WW2 economic boom). -- Yoshie

 <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/books/review/Cockburn-t.html>
 March 2, 2008
 The End of Jihad
 By PATRICK COCKBURN
 Skip to next paragraph

 DREAMS AND SHADOWS
 The Future of the Middle East.
 By Robin Wright.
 464 pp. The Penguin Press. $26.95.

 When the United States invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein in
 2003 it destabilized the whole Middle East. The American military had
 taken over the one Arab state with plenty of oil and a large
 population. Washington threatened to overthrow the governments of Iran
 and Syria. The first Shiite government to hold power in the Arab world
 in 800 years was soon installed in Baghdad. The entire region was
 engulfed by a tidal wave of anti-Americanism.

 The reaction to the invasion in the wider Middle East should have led
 to a greater focus on what Egyptians, Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese
 and Iranians were thinking. Long established autocratic regimes were
 discredited, less by any shining example of democracy being
 established in Baghdad than by their own inability to cope with the
 crisis. "Arab Majesties, Excellencies and Highnesses, We Spit on You"
 read a banner carried by protesters during a demonstration in Cairo in
 2006.

 Though the Middle East may be shaking under the impact of the war in
 Iraq, most countries have been getting less rather than more attention
 from Western news media and governments. Almost all the focus has been
 on Iraq. Newspapers and television companies strained their budgets to
 maintain large bureaus in Baghdad. Extraordinary events, like the
 victory of Hamas over Fatah in the Palestinian elections of 2006, were
 dutifully covered, but were overshadowed by America's ever deeper
 troubles in Iraq. Countries like Egypt and Morocco largely disappeared
 off the media map.

 It is one of the chief values of "Dreams and Shadows," Robin Wright's
 fluent and intelligent book about the future of the Middle East, that
 it is not solely concerned with the war in Iraq and its consequences.
 In describing the struggles of people from Morocco to Iran to reform
 or replace existing regimes she draws on three decades of experience
 in covering the region for The Washington Post and other newspapers.

 Opening on an optimistic note, Wright describes how in 1983 she stood
 across the street from the ruins of the United States Embassy in
 Beirut after more than 60 Americans had been killed by a suicide
 bomber. At that time, she recalls, it seemed that Islamic
 fundamentalists had the initiative and were shaping the future of the
 region. "Yet a generation later," she writes, "Islamic extremism is no
 longer the most important, interesting or dynamic force in the Middle
 East."

 It would be good if this were true, but in general the stories Wright
 relates of brave reformers battling for human and civil rights show
 them as having had depressingly small influence. She claims there is
 "a budding culture of change" represented by "defiant judges in Cairo,
 rebel clerics in Tehran, satellite television station owners in Dubai,
 imaginative feminists in Rabat and the first female candidates in
 Kuwait, young techies in Jeddah, daring journalists in Beirut and
 Casablanca, and brave writers and businessmen in Damascus." Sadly, her
 own research largely contradicts this thesis. Of the many opponents of
 the status quo she writes about, the only ones to have achieved a
 measure of success are religious movements: Hamas in Gaza and the West
 Bank and Hezbollah in Lebanon. She does not cover Pakistan, but the
 assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi in December shows that
 suicide bombers retain their deadly ability to shape events.

 Why have moderate reformers failed so uniformly across the Middle
 East? Not because of lack of courage. Wright describes how in Syria,
 Riad al Turk, first arrested for opposing a military government in
 1952, spent almost 18 years in solitary confinement in an underground
 cell the length of his body. He kept himself sane by making pictures
 on the floor out of thousands of hard and inedible grains he had taken
 out of the prison soup during his years of confinement. Wright also
 writes of heroes and heroines in a more minor, but still impressive,
 key, like Noha al Zeiny, a leading official in the prosecutor's office
 of the Egyptian Ministry of Justice, who was so disgusted by blatant
 official ballot rigging in an election she was supervising that she
 publicly denounced it in one of the few Cairo newspapers that dared to
 print her testimony.

 Autocratic regimes in the Middle East may be sclerotic, corrupt and
 detested by their own people, but they are very difficult to remove.
 Governments in Egypt, Syria and Libya that came to power by military
 coups in the distant past have learned how to protect themselves
 against their own armies and security forces. In each of those
 countries the Mubarak, Assad and Qaddafi families are establishing new
 political dynasties. President Hosni Mubarak, jokingly known to
 Egyptians as the last pharaoh, has, according to Wright, now held
 power longer than all but two other leaders in Egypt's 6,000-year
 history, and is grooming his son Gamal to replace him. Political
 reforms have been purely cosmetic. Osama Harb, the editor of a
 moderate foreign policy journal, International Affairs, denounced
 Egypt's supposed reform efforts as a sham but found he could not
 withdraw from the government's inner circle without endangering
 himself. "It should be easy to resign, to say no," he observed. "But
 not here. This is Egypt."

 Just one long-established regime in the Arab world has been kicked out
 by voters in a closely monitored election. It happened on Jan. 25,
 2006, when Hamas won a victory over Fatah, Yasir Arafat's very corrupt
 nationalist movement. It was the first time, Wright says, that an Arab
 electorate ousted an autocratic leadership in a free and fair election
 — a message that resonated throughout the region. The immediate
 response of the international community was to boycott Hamas. "The
 United States is like the prince in search of Cinderella," the Hamas
 leader Osama Hamdan told Wright. "The Americans have the shoe, and
 they want to find the kind of people who fit the shoe. If the people
 who are elected don't fit into the American shoe, then the Americans
 will reject them for democracy." Fatah was encouraged by the United
 States, Israel and the Western Europeans to ignore the results of the
 election and build up its military strength. An armed clash became
 inevitable, leading to the takeover of Gaza by Hamas gunmen in June
 2007.

 Wright has long been one of the best-informed American journalists
 covering the Middle East, and her reputation is borne out here. She is
 refreshingly skeptical of conventional wisdom about what is happening
 in the region, and her book will be essential reading for anybody who
 wants to know where it is heading.

 She is particularly good on the moribund nature of the regimes that
 now hold power and know they are too unpopular to allow any open
 expression of popular will (though some innovations, like satellite
 television and the Internet, have prized open their control of
 information). Both the Algerian election in 1992 and the Palestinian
 poll in 2006 showed that the West will not accept an election won by
 its enemies. But since the invasion of Iraq it is difficult to imagine
 a fair poll having any other result.

 Patrick Cockburn, a foreign correspondent for The Independent of
 London, is the author of "The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq."
 --
 Yoshie
 <http://montages.blogspot.com/>