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February 28, 2005
Watching the Mid East Pot Bubble
WaPo columnist Jackson Diehl presents a hopeful analysis of the ongoing ferment in the Middle East autocracies (via Instapundit):
[Mubarak and Assad] are autocrats whose regimes had remained unaltered, and unchallenged, for decades. There has been no political ferment in Damascus since the 1960s, or in Cairo since the 1950s. Now, within weeks of Iraq's elections, Mubarak and Assad are tacking with panicked haste between bold acts of repression, which invite an international backlash, and big promises of reform -- which also may backfire, if they prove to be empty. They could yet survive; but quite clearly, the Arab autocrats don't regard the Bush dream of democratic dominoes as fanciful.
Diehl goes on to recall how none of the "experts" he interviewed in 1989 had a clue that the Berlin wall would soon fall. Army generals are not the only ones guilty of planning for the last war.
Diehl concludes:
[The possible Middle East transformation] also won't be entirely Bush's creation: The tinder for ignition has been gathering around the stagnant and corrupt autocracies of the Middle East for years. Still, less than two years after Saddam Hussein was deposed, the fact is that Arabs are marching for freedom and shouting slogans against tyrants in the streets of Beirut and Cairo -- and regimes that have endured for decades are visibly tottering. Those who claimed that U.S. intervention could never produce such events have reason to reconsider.
Diehl is correct in pointing out that the conditions for reform have been ripening for years, just as it did in Eastern Europe and the USSR. The yearning for individual freedom is universal, after all. But if the Eastern Europe scenario repeats itself in the Middle East, you may bet your retirement savings on the certainty of the left launching a revisionist campaign to discredit Bush's role. After all, we all know that is was Gorbachev who brought down the Berlin wall. The left is never wrong.
UPDATE: Austin Bay has more on Diehl's article--and brings Tom Friedman into it also.
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