David Ignatius: America and the Global Political Awakening

Listen to a recording of his speech:

Transcript:

When I became a newspaper columnist, one of my colleagues passed on a simple formula for success, which he expressed in three words: “Simplify, exaggerate, repeat.” That recipe has served me well over the years. But this afternoon, with the freedom to reflect that is offered by the Fisher Fellowship, I want to try something slightly different. I want to stand back a bit and think with you about the process of change that is taking place in the Middle East.

In my more than 30 years of covering foreign news, I have never seen anything quite like what is happening now in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and other datelines, to be announced. It’s impossible to know where this process is going—there are too many inflection points and uncertainties to allow that clarity--but perhaps we can at least understand the roots of this phenomenon and think about how it affects American interests.

As you can see from the title of my talk today, I view this process as part of a “global political awakening”—a movement for change that is enabled and accelerated by modern technology, to be sure, but is comparable to some other periods of revolutionary change in modern history.

(“To be sure,” by the way, is one of my favorite phrases. When I was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, we always included something we called the “to be sure” graf. The aim was to acknowledge the possibility that the entire thesis of the story was wrong. If you were writing a piece about, let’s say, the trend by business executives toward wearing colored shirts, you would include a paragraph high up that said: “To be sure, many business executives still prefer white shirts.” It was a way of covering all the bases,  like a well-hedged National Intelligence Estimate.)

So, to be sure, we may not be witnessing a political awakening in the Middle East. But I think we are.    

I owe the phrase to Zbigniew Brzezinski. Three years ago, with the 2008 presidential election approaching, I worked with Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft on a book that was published that fall with the title, “America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy.” The theme was that a global process of change was underway--and that the basics of American foreign policy needed to be re-imagined by the next president.

In my introduction to the book, I described the central insight of these two former national security advisers, both in their 80s, this way: “Both men describe a political revolution that’s sweeping the world—Brzezinski speaks of a global awakening, while Scowcroft describes a yearning for dignity. They want America on the side of that process of change.”

We are now seeing the full force of that political awakening, as it sweeps across the Middle East. What I would like to do this afternoon is think with you about how and why it has happened, what similar events have occurred in the past, and the consequences for America.

*

First, let’s look at the triggering event in Tunisia. It’s almost a case study in how complex systems fail: What seems a small event disturbs the equilibrium and produces a very large change in outcomes. It’s a discontinuity, a “tipping point,” as we like to say—an example of what mathematicians sometimes call “catastrophe theory.”

Think of the collapse of a bridge: Observers may see that the steel girders of the bridge are rusting away; they may see it sway and shudder with each vehicle that passes. But who can explain why it gives way after when the million and 1st truck rumbles across, when it didn’t fail for the previous million? The bridge’s collapse is a catastrophic event that was at once foreseeable and impossible to predict.

The same could be said for the “Arab Spring.” We knew that the political system in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria was rotten, and that popular discontent was growing. Those problems have been developing for more than twenty years. But who could have predicted the inflection point, the moment when fear became rage, and rage became action--that spread until it was a cascading wave of change.

Here’s how it began in Tunisia, as my colleague Marc Fisher assembled the timeline. It’s an astonishing story, all the more as we see each day its eddying repercussions.

On Friday, December 17, a street vendor named Mohammed Bouazizi in the town of Sidi Bouzid loaded his cart with what he told his family were the best oranges, dates and apples he had ever seen. On his way to the market, he was blocked by two police officers who tried to take the fruit from his cart. His uncle protested to the police chief, who told one of the officers, a woman named Fedya Hamdi, to let the man go sell his produce.

The policewoman was indignant about the complaint, and searched out Bouazizi, who had by now set up his stall in the market. She arrogantly carried off one basket of his apples to her car and was about to take another when he protested. The policewoman then hit the street vendor with her baton, and when he struggled to his feet, she slapped him—which made the young man weep with shame and anger.

“Why are you doing this to me? I’m a simple person, and I just want to work, ” Bouazizi cried out, according to people who were interviewed later by my colleague, Fisher.

Bouazizi went to city hall, to complain about this mistreatment, but no officials would see him and clerks told him to go away.

The humiliated young man was seething when he got back to the market, and he told other vendors that he would show people what a terrible injustice had been done—by lighting himself on fire. His friends didn’t believe him, but within minutes he had doused his body with paint thinner and, standing in front of the local municipal building, lit himself on fire. He died three weeks later in a hospital of severe burns.

In the interim, this sad little incident—this protest of a humiliated man who had no other way to express himself but self-immolation--went viral. Bouazizi’s cousin posted a cell phone video that he shot of a protest in Sidi Bouzid the day after the incident. An activist posted that on Facebook, Al Jazeera picked it up that evening, and suddenly millions of people were sharing the shame and rage of the Tunisian fruit seller.

Less than a month after the incident in the Sidi Bouzid market, President Zine Abdine Ben Ali had fled the country and his regime, once seen as one of the more advanced in the Arab world, had been toppled.  

The Tunisian rupture quickly spread to Egypt. On Jan. 25, just over a week after President Ben Ali had fled Tunis, an Internet entrepreneur named Wael Ghoneim and friends used Facebook to organize a demonstration in Tahrir Square to protest the regime of Hosni Mubarak. The protestors stayed in the streets, and the regime, in an attempt to stop the virus from spreading, turned off the Internet. That further enraged the public, and on Friday, Jan. 28, a much larger demonstration, drawn from a far wider array of Egyptian society, gathered in the square. It grew and grew. The military was summoned;  the protestors wisely embraced the soldiers as their army, not Mubarak’s, and the soldiers returned the embrace. In that moment, you knew how it would end.

On Friday, Feb. 11, less than three weeks after the first protest, Mubarak was gone.

*

I arrived in Egypt several days later, when huge crowds were still filling the square, day and night, and revolution was in the air. Let me describe what it felt like.

These massive gatherings—on Friday, Feb. 18, more than a million people filled Tahrir Square—were like a living organism. The crowd was spontaneous and only loosely organized, but it had the discipline and cohesion of a connected network.

As you moved through Tahrir Square, you passed from node to node: From a group singing patriotic songs to a solemn knot of mourners holding portraits of martyrs who had died in the Square, to a circle of leftists chanting slogans and waving banners, to a group of kids, jumping gleefully on army tanks.

Scientists sometimes speak of an “emergent phenomenon,” a self-organizing process that unites what appear to be discreet individual entities. That’s what Tahrir Square felt like, even a week later. It was at once a protest and a festival. An Egyptian friend told me that the army wouldn’t leave the square until the last Egyptian had his picture taken atop a tank.

In this cauldron of revolution, the normal divisions seemed to dissolve. That was the discontinuity--the break with passivity and division to a new state of unity and fearless confidence: The protests brought together Christians and Muslims; socialists and capitalists; young and old; Internet tycoons and poor people from the slums. They were all united in the demand that Mubarak leave office. And despite brutal provocation—as on the infamous “Day of the Camels”—they generally held to the promise of their slogan, “salmiyeh, salmiyeh,” peaceful, peaceful.

*

The virus has continued to spread, with fits and starts. After visiting Syria in late February, I wrote about a flash mob that had gathered in downtown Damascus to protest a policeman’s brutal treatment of a motorist he had detained. People emailed each other videos of the police beating, and soon hundreds of people were chanting slogans demanding dignity and freedom from harassment. That protest was defused when the Syrian minister of the interior himself arrived, thirty minutes later, to discipline the policeman. I wrote at the time that if President Bashar Assad didn’t follow through on what aides told me were his plans for reform, he might be too late. For one sure lesson of the Arab Spring is that delay can be fatal.  But Assad waited, and his regime is now in dire jeopardy.  

As I look back at these three months of protest, and try to find the unifying theme, I think back to the formulation of my mentors. There is a yearning for dignity, as Scowcroft said, and it is producing a political awakening. Of the many words chanted by the crowds in Tahrir Square, one of the most powerful was “karameh,” or dignity. My favorite summary of the emotional core of this movement comes from my colleague Nora Boustany, a Lebanese journalist, who translated for me an Arab proverb: “The artery of shame has ruptured.”

For Americans, that must seem like a strange concept. We are shameless, in the anthropological sense. But from the time I began covering the Middle East in 1980, I have been seeing what I now recognize was a shamed and broken political culture—a culture of passivity and resignation, which often expressed itself in negative and self-destructive acts of political violence, and accepted authoritarian governments and the slogans they used to justify themselves. As my Arab friends say, that was the culture of 1967—the culture of defeat, in which Arabs, with momentary exceptions, found themselves the pawns of a tiny but potent Israel and its superpower patron.

This is the culture that ended in 2011. That’s not to say that what lies ahead is necessarily benign, from an American standpoint. But the Arabs are now embracing a culture of activism and self-determination, as opposed to one of passivity and victimization.

*

The Internet and Facebook have played a role in this revolution. But I am not a material determinist. I don’t believe that the “means of information production” determine the course of history.

As I look back in history, I see other moments of sudden discontinuity, when people broke through the existing barriers of fear and defied authority—passing the message of revolt by the best available means. Tom Paine’s pamphlet, “Common Sense,” had an electrifying effect on American revolutionaries when it was published in 1776. When Ayatollah Khomeini swept to power in 1979, his rise was powered by an insidious new technology known as the “cassette tape,” which allowed Iranians to listen secretly to his sermons. The movement that spread across Eastern Europe in 1989 and toppled the Soviet empire was sometimes called the “fax revolution,” in honor of that liberating technology, and the first post-Soviet news agency proudly took the name “Interfax.” 

What’s discouraging, as you look back through this history, is what Crane Brinton famously called the “anatomy of revolution.” That book should be on every reading list this spring, but if you haven’t looked at it recently, here’s a brief summary:

Brinton noted that revolutions are born of hope, not poverty and despair. Their life arc moves from the uprising that displaces the old regime to a “honeymoon” in which a legal moderate government tries to rule, even as an illegal radical movement gains strength. The radical movement—the Jacobins, if you will, or the Leninists or (in our darkest imagining) the Muslim Brotherhood—tend to win because, in Brinton’s words, they are “better organized, better staffed, better obeyed.”

The radicals’ triumph brings on a period of fanatical activism, with purges and revenge attacks—and a growing “reign of terror.” Eventually the public demands order, and the street radicals are put down by a reaction that Brinton likened to the Thermidor Reaction in France in 1794. With order comes a new dictator who presumes to speak for the people—a Napoleon or Stalin or Khomeini.

A simple way to translate Brinton’s analysis is to say that revolutions are always lovable in their infancy, when they are spontaneous and leaderless, but tend to become less so as they age: The idealistic youth on the barricades, who seem drawn from the cast of “Les Miserables,” are replaced by small groups of determined revolutionaries who have the will and ideological or religious determination to steer the masses. And the revolutionary disorder, that seemed so exhilarating at first, becomes dark and insecure to the point that people demand order, and give up the freedoms they fought so hard to obtain.

I don’t mean to predict that the Arab Spring will turn to winter; as I said at the outset, it’s impossible now to make reliable forecasts. Defense Secretary Robert Gates  had it right when he three weeks ago that this is “dark territory;” it’s impossible to read the overhead imagery, if you will, and to know what’s down there, in terms of outcomes.

The rear-view mirror can be useful in times like these: Reading history reminds us that revolutionary change is a volatile and sometimes toxic process that confounds expectations.

The Arab Spring has been likened, for example, to the revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848, which was known in some countries as the “Spring of Nations.” Now that was a revolutionary movement! Marx and Engels sent the manuscript of the Communist Manifesto to the printers in February 1848, a few weeks before the revolution exploded in France. Recall the opening lines of that Manifesto:

“A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism. All the powers of Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this power.

Anyone who thinks that Muslim extremists invented intolerance or terrorism should read on in the manifesto:

“You reproach us with intending to do away with your property,” wrote Marx and Engels. “Precisely so; this is just what we intend….”

“The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course…Do you charge us with wishing to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.”

And this, in the Manifesto’s closing paragraph: “The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be obtained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at the communistic revolution.”

They failed, of course, that time around. They failed in France, they failed in Germany, they failed in Italy—although with some stirring fights along the way. Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” was actually set in the French revolution of 1832, but it has the same sense of virtuous disaster as the 1848 uprising, especially the leftist aftershock in June 1848 that was crushed by the forces of bourgeois France.

Marx did some superb “op-ed” journalism about these uprisings, collected in the book “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” Just after the famous opening passage where he says that history always repeats itself—first time tragedy, second time farce—Marx offers this superb observation, which I find apposite for the events of today:

“Men make their history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

*

The Russian Revolution is another troubling point of comparison for observers of the Arab Spring, largely because of the weakness of the transitional figure who seemed to embody the hopes of the revolution, the moderate social democrat Alexander Kerensky. The revolution itself had been accomplished with very little violence, in the protests that led to the abdication of Czar Nicholas in March  1917, Alan Moorhead’s study, “The Russian Revolution,” quotes the Soviet historian Nikolai Sukhanov: “The break had been accomplished with a sort of fabulous ease.”

Hearts in the West were aflutter at this initial Russian Spring. President Woodrow Wilson spoke on April 2, 1917 of “the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening the last few weeks in Russia.”

But Kerensky was no match for Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who plotted furiously against him even as he tried to make his moderate revolution work. Sukhanov, who describes Kerensky as “this noisy lawyer,” paints this scene in which Kerensky nervously tries to rally his moderate colleagues to fight off an attack of Cossacks:

“I demand that everyone—to do his duty—and not interfere—when I—give orders!”

By October, the conservatives and radicals alike had decided that Kerensky was hopeless, and that the situation required a firmer hand, which Lenin supplied. Brinton offered this epitaph for Kerensky, and his variety of moderate revolutionary:

“The eloquent compromisist leader seems to us a man of words, an orator who could move crowds but could not guide them, an impractical and incompetent person in the field of action.”

*

A final, depressing stop on this historical tour is the Iranian revolution. I do not want to make too much of the parallel to contemporary Egypt, but what’s striking is that the United States, just as now with Egypt, wanted Iran as a military ally, but also wanted to stress human rights. When President Jimmy Carter visited Tehran in December 1977, he proclaimed: “Iran under great leadership of the Shah is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.”

An August 1977 CIA analysis, cited by James A. Bill in his book, “The Eagle and the Lion,”  concluded its 60-page review with the prediction: “The shah will be an active participant in Iranian life well into the 1980s….There will be no radical change in Iranian political behavior in the near future.” 

I do not have to tell you that there are similar statements about Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt by Secretary of State Clinton, President Obama and others.

The initial Kerensky figure in revolutionary Iran was a neat little man named Shahpour Bakhtiar. Washington tried to work with him, and when he gave way on February 12, 1979 to Khomeini’s man, Mehdi Bazargan, President Carter expressed “continued hope for very productive and peaceful cooperation.”

For a gripping account of what happened in Iran over the next months and years, I commend a visceral new memoir by my Newsweek colleague, Maziar Bahari, called “Then They Came for Me,” about how the Iranian revolution was kidnapped in slow motion, and mostly out of western sight, culminating in the election putsch of June 2009 that triggered and then crushed the Green Revolution and led to Bahari’s arrest and torture in Evin Prison.

*

So I come back, somberly, to today and the Arab Spring. To say that there are dangers ahead is only to state the obvious, from an analysis of history and a reading of the daily news reports.

In Egypt, the first electoral test of the new democracy in the March 19 constitutional referendum led to a resounding defeat for the position taken by most leaders of the Tahrir Square revolution—and a thumping 77 percent victory for the position advocated by the unspoken alliance between the ruling Military Council and the Muslim Brotherhood. It was not a happy outcome, but this story is just beginning. The democratic revolutionaries have stepped up their own political organizing. They are forming robust new parties. They see the danger that their revolution will be hijacked—they read their history, too—and they are organizing against that outcome.

My column in The Washington Post tomorrow features interviews I conducted last week with three men I call “founding fathers” of the new Egypt: Mohammed ElBaradei, Amre Moussa and the business leader Naguib Sawiris. They didn’t make the revolution, but they took personal risks in supporting it before the outcome is clear; two are potential presidents and the third,  Sawiris, is a power broker in the new Egypt. They are tough, wily characters, with money and organizational skills. Suffice it to say that they do not remind me of Alexander Kerensky or Shahpour Bakhtiar. But we shall see.

*

Let me conclude by discussing the consequences of this Arab political awakening for the United States. I would make two basic points:

--First, the success of the democratic revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere is absolutely in the interest of the United States. I am not yet convinced that there are democratic revolutions underway in Libya, Yemen or Syria, but when if that happens, they will deserve our (non-military) support, too.

Egypt, in particular, is decisive. It has roughly 25 percent of the population of the Arab world. If democracy succeeds in Egypt, other nations will follow. Should the democratic experiment in Egypt by hijacked by the military, or by anti-democratic Muslim groups, the revolution will fail elsewhere.

This being the case, the United States must do everything it reasonably can to provide two things that post-revolutionary Egypt badly needs: financial assistance and help in creating a modern, democratic police and security service. The Egyptian economy is heading toward a severe cash squeeze this summer because of the drastic fall in tourism, foreign investment and some other economic activity since January. And insecurity is growing on Egypt’s streets because of the disarray and demoralization of the Egyptian police. Both problems are potentially fatal to the revolution.

This is a “use it or lose it” situation, in terms of western assistance. We will accomplish our goals best by acting discreetly, working with allies—especially those in Eastern Europe that have made successful transitions from authoritarian governments.

Visiting Harvard this week as I pondered these issues, I inevitably re-read the speech given here on June 5, 1947 by George Marshall as he outlined a program of assistance for the shaky democracies of Europe. He used language that was civilized, sexist, but also crystal clear:

“I need not tell you, gentlemen, that the world situation is very serious. That must be apparent to all intelligent people. I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation….The truth of the matter is that Europe's requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products - principally from America - are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help or face economic, social, and political deterioration of a very grave character.” Just so.

The stakes in Egypt are so high that it is unimaginable to me that we would continue to spend over $100 billion this year in Afghanistan, and leave aid to Egypt as a sorry after-thought. The Obama administration’s only offer thus far, I believe, is Sec. Clinton’s pledge of $150 million.

--Second, we cannot be sure that, even with our timely assistance, the democratic revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere will succeed. It is entirely possible that they will follow the downward course of other revolutions in history. The political awakening—this magnificent opening to the world—may produce a counter-reaction that has the effect of reducing freedom and democratic action, as has been the case in Iran since the June 2009 elections.

In situations like this, where the outcome is unknown and unknowable, it’s especially important to have a clear sense of where U.S. interests lie, and to make sure that they guide our policy. I am indebted to Steven Walt for reminding me that this catalogue of U.S. interests is actually quite simple to enumerate:

--We have an interest in the secure supply of oil from the Persian Gulf, and Saudi Arabia in particular, to ourselves and our allies.

--We have an interest in combating terrorist actions by Al Qaeda or other groups that seek to target Americans.

--We have an interest in the security and well being of Israel, our closest ally in the Middle East. We have a concurrent interest in a just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

--We have an interest in the growth of stable, democratic regimes and the expansion of human rights.

The intersection of these interests come is the zone of ambiguity in which foreign policy choices must always be made.

A final comment: I think President Obama has been wise to take a low-key approach to these developments—to let the Arabs write this new chapter in their history, without feeling they are taking dictation from the United States. He has been criticized for not being “tough” or “presidential” enough, but these criticisms are, to me, misfounded. And I think he’s absolutely right to let others who are closer to Libya fight most of that war—and figure out, in the process, just who the good guys and bad guys are.

But there is a time for low-key, and there is a time for clarity. On the final two strategic imperatives I cited—our obligation to assist the democratic revolution in Egypt,  and our need to be clear and forthright about our own national interests—I think President Obama needs to speak as clearly and forcefully as Gen. Marshall did at the Harvard Commencement 64 years ago.