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Speaking of Facile Arguments…

These arguments are facile, as Tunisia, with its very un-Islamic revolution, has just demonstrated, and Turkish democracy shows, and Egyptian restraint suggests. ~Roger Cohen Turkish democracy in its present form took roughly eighty years to develop to a point where an Islamist party could win a general election, form a government, and remain in power […]

These arguments are facile, as Tunisia, with its very un-Islamic revolution, has just demonstrated, and Turkish democracy shows, and Egyptian restraint suggests. ~Roger Cohen

Turkish democracy in its present form took roughly eighty years to develop to a point where an Islamist party could win a general election, form a government, and remain in power uninterruptedly for almost a decade. Until very recently, Turkish democracy was severely constrained by the military and the courts. Egypt has had less time to develop the habits and institutions of representative and constitutional government than Turkey had since the foundation of the republic. Tunisia’s “un-Islamic revolution” was “un-Islamic” because of two decades of severe repression of Islamists.

While the Egyptian government has used the Muslim Brotherhood as a foil to justify its abuses and keep the rest of the population from agitating against the government too much, the Tunisian government crushed Islamists to such an extent that it could no longer use them as a bogey to scare the rest of the population into obedience. Ben Ali was too effective in his program of forced secularization for his own good. In the same way, the success of Kemalism in securing the secularism of the Turkish republic and much of Turkish culture made possible the political enfranchisement of Islamists. Once they ceased to appear as threats to a secular society, they became an acceptable political alternative. If Egypt isn’t Tunisia, it isn’t Turkey, either. Citing these two as reasons to be hopeful about what Egyptian democracy might produce is not much better than the propaganda we heard before the invasion of Iraq that “we had done it” in Germany and Japan before when skeptics challenged the idea that the U.S. could install a functioning democratic government in Iraq.

The outcome in Tunisia is still not certain, and we might remember that triumphalist Westerners were crowing about the “Arab spring” of 2005 on account of the anti-Syrian protests in Lebanon. Almost six years later, there is not much in Lebanon for these people to celebrate. It’s true that Najib Miqati as PM is not the end of the world, but we can say that only when we lower our expectations considerably. At each false dawn of Iraqi elections, the “Cedar” revolution, and the Green movement, Western pundits reliably dismiss past experience and the reasonable arguments of skeptics, and each time they are proved wrong. Ideas that were thoroughly discredited are recycled as if nothing had changed from 2003. Now we have Roger Cohen channeling Rumsfeld saying that democracy is “messy.” Actually, Rumsfeld said freedom was messy, but the two words were used interchangeably and ignorantly by Bush administration officials all the time.

Egyptian Islamists are biding their time so far, and there does not appear to be any rival faction that can command the same sort of organization and numbers. Yes, this is partly the doing of Mubarak’s government: he wanted non-Islamist political opposition to be weak to make the Muslim Brotherhood the main alternative, thereby guarding against Western pressure for allowing political competition, but it does suggest something about the basic weakness of liberal democratic forces in Egypt that they are not merely disorganized, but do not seem to exist in large numbers. Considering the sharp social and economic stratification, high illiteracy rate, and considerable poverty in Egypt, this is not surprising.

Cohen writes near the end:

Still, Iran’s paranoid rulers will shudder at Egyptian people power.

That would be interesting, except that the rulers in Iran aren’t shuddering, or if they are they aren’t letting on that they are worried. Officially, the Iranian government is spinning the uprising as a new Islamic revolution. That is obviously self-serving propaganda. What is objectively true is that one of the main foes of Tehran in the region is on the ropes, the allies of Tehran’s proxy in Hamas are in a position to acquire some stake in the Egyptian government if the regime falls, and Israel may no longer have the luxury of taking “cold peace” with Egypt for granted. Iran is gaining from Egyptian weakness, and the same people who confidently predicted that the Iranian regime was fatally wounded now believe that the protests in Egypt are going to dislodge Mubarak’s regime. Of course, Egypt isn’t Iran, either, but that is one more reason to doubt the success of Egyptian democracy.

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