Arab Spring now turns to Summer. The ripples from waves after wave of revolutionary fervor, for what can only be described as democracy pure and simple, now reach back from that region to our own shores, and they are heading for us. And so we find in ourselves and our dialog and our policy a feeling of foreboding, of fear even, as if somehow we too might be in harm's way. And, indeed, we do seem somehow to be stuck right in the middle of the whole thing, both temporaly, with uncertain outcomes abounding, and philosophically, with ironies and paradoxes about the USA being both the champion of democracy and the defender of its enemies.
In times such as these it might behoove us to step back and ask: what is really going on?
I hate to say it, and as a critic of the Iraq War I know it will appear contradictory and likely to alienate my peace loving confederates, but it appears that it is precisely the brutal campaign of shock and awe and ultimately regime change that ironically inspired what we are witnessing today.
Whoever we believe, whatever the real reason, it remains incontrovertibly true that in the spring of 2003 the United States of America initiated a shocking and awful war against the government, and people, of Iraq, which in the first four years resulted in the loss of anywhere between 100,000 and a million human lives, depending on which source you choose, and cost, according to a conservative estimate by Paul Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, over three trillion dollars to the USA alone.
Quite simply, this incredible and unaffordable loss of money and human life, in all its sloppiness, bluntness and literally overkill, showed the Arab world that even a leader as intractable as Saddam Hussein could be ousted. Needless to say, this is a horrible price to pay to provide such an illustration. But now that the fire has been ignited, we ought to be honest about the context. Obviously, the current climate of war and revolution finds its origins in several sources, but to deny that what we are witnessing today grows from what we started only a few years ago is to deny ourselves the opportunity to do the right thing now.
A few caveats. First, I am not saying, as many on the far right are, that this fact makes the war more justifiable. I have always argued that our aims could be far better achieved by dropping a few hundred thousand Ipads loaded with some good chat software and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest translated into Arabic over the Middle East.
Second, Shock and Awe is just the original cause. The proximate cause is, of course, Wikileaks and what it did to a Tunisian fruit seller named Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire and ignited the Arab Revolution. The revelations made public in the secret cables from the US Ambassador, of the amazing corruption of President Ben Ali and his family, infuriated the Tunisian population in a way nothing but the truth can do.
And third, the cause is obviously the entire history of oppressive government in that region. So it's not just the war. And while my point is not that the war is then to be praised, it is rather to draw a contrast between the amazing expenditure that it represented, and how a much smaller expenditure on our part toward the efforts being made today would yield such a more efficient result.
Syria is gunning down its own people, so far hundreds of them. But the US won't even freeze Bashar Al-Assad's assets (they are only freezing his brother's). No one would argue that Syria is a bad place and Bashar, like his father Hefez, are bad people, but because of strategic considerations, we won't support the democracy movement there. We refused to help Libya until Sarkozy and the Arab League forced our hand. Saudi Arabia is a brutal monarchy, utterly opposed to democracy and human rights (and equal rights), teaches its children that Jews are the devil and to devote themselves to a lifelong hatred of Israel and the US, and yet we continue to sponsor them to this day. Egypt was no better, and our country threw - since the Peace Accords, over $65 billion - down what turned out to be the drain trying to keep Egypt on our side and help their government repress its people.
How could the very country that invented the idea that it is virtuous to overthrow your government when it's oppressing you be so unable and unwilling to live up to its ideals? And why do we kill ourselves (for that is always what we do when we kill others) mounting these over-the-top, blunt assaults that are maximally inefficient, only to fail to grasp the opportunity to do so much good so much more efficiently, as we now could do in the Middle East?
It seems the greatest danger in making mistakes as massive as the ones we continue to make is drawing the wrong lessons from them. The only good thing to come out of Iraq is the Arab Revolution! Forget how or who or why, but all the same, the Arab world got to see with their own eyes that governments could come toppling down. And forget how much we've defiled our own values, these values are, despite every perversion to which they have been subjected, they are still at the core of what motivates those fighting for freedom today in scores of countries around the world. But because of the massive stupidity of Iraq, we now are afraid to raise a finger. But that is drawing the wrong lesson. Even the slightest help, even One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest translated into Arabic, would yield a giant result.
