Did Obama’s Promise Trigger the Arab Revolt?

My good friend Jim Fallows, national correspondent for the The Atlantic, asked me to be part of a team to publish guest blogs while he is using the 'down time' to finish a book.  I am assigned, with three other people, for this week.  Attached is my first entry, which I am also distributing as a blaster.

Enjoy,

Did Obama’s Promise Trigger the Arab Revolt?

Chuck Spinney

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/01/did-obamas-promise-trigger-the-arab-revolt/70486/

During his brilliantly run campaign of 2008, Barack Obama electrified the world with vague promises of change in foreign policy as well as domestic policy.  (My take on his campaign strategy can be found here.)  Two and a half years later, those promises are ashes.  Nowhere is that clearer in foreign policy than in the Arab world. 

In contrast to the euphoria surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Arab Revolt of 2011 leaves one with a disquieting sense that we may be standing on the wrong side of history.  People power and the promise of democracy worked spectacularly well for the United States when the tyrants in Eastern Europe collapsed twenty years ago, but I think it may be working against us in the Arab world of 2011.  

Clearly, the explosion of people power in Tunisia and Egypt caught the U.S. flat footed, and to date, has triggered only embarrassingly incoherent responses by our political leadership.  If you doubt this, I urge you to watch this video of Shihab Rattansi’s interview of State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley on Al Jazeera, or read this report describing Obama’s empty platitudes on about the crisis in Egypt.

The revolt shows signs of spreading.  America’s “friends” in Tunisia and Lebanon have already fallen to democratic pressures; as I write this, Hosni Mubarak teeters on the brink of collapse in Egypt, and there is potential for a collapse in Yemen as well as in the Palestinian Authority.

Are we witnessing a chain reaction, where each collapse begets more collapses?   Will the Arab revolt spread to Jordan, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, or elsewhere, or will it peter out?  

Of course, no one can reliably predict how an ongoing interplay of chance with necessity will unfold over the coming days and months. But a question’s unanswerability does not mean one should not think about it’s ramifications.  

Many of the problems are the same from country to country: grossly unequal distributions of income and conspicuous consumption by rich elites; masses of undereducated poor; high unemployment, especially among the young (including college graduates); rising food prices; corrupt autocracy, official nepotism etc.  The forces for a spreading revolt  are in place across the region and will not go away, even if tyrants like Mubarak manage to retain their grips on power in the short term.  

Mr. Obama did not create the forces driving the Arab revolt.  Indeed, the seeds were planted long ago, when myopic cold-war foreign policies began to oppose the democratic/nationalist aspirations of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran and Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt in the early 1950s, and when we began to prop up reactionary regimes in the oil states, while winking at Israel’s illegal colonization schemes after the 1967 War.  

But I do not think President Obama is blameless.  

Obama did surprisingly little to fulfill the hopes and dreams he unleashed worldwide during the election of 2008. Moreover, he deliberately magnified them in the Arab world with his 2009 Cairo speech. But coupled with his continuation of America’s cynical policies to prop up tyrannical Arab regimes, and particularly his spectacular failure to rein in the illegal Israeli settlements in the so-called Arab-Israeli Peace Process in 2010, Mr. Obama may have inadvertently exacerbated the explosive combination of frustrated expectations and business-as-usual that pressurized the current eruption of resentment, anger, and alienation among the Arab people in 2011.  

It is difficult today to appreciate the expectations he unleashed.  I witnessed firsthand how his promises of change pumped up Europeans, Turks, and Arabs during 2008.

I am retired and have been living with my wife Alison on a sailboat in the Mediterranean for nine months out of each year, since we crossed the Atlantic in 2005.  (FYI, this is a link to her travelblog of our adventures.)  During the summer and fall of 2008, we cruised the coasts of southern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel.  We spent time in harbours and took inland tours, including a side trip into southern Jordan.   

I try to chat up our many European sailor friends as well as locals I meet to learn about their conditions, lives, politics, culture, etc.  Just about every one I talk to is an ‘average joe,’ living somewhere along the lower two-thirds of the food chain.  Conversations may be in pidgin and sign language, but I generally connect.  Despite this microscopic point of view, I am confident Obama’s promise electrified people in Europe, Turkey, and the Arab world during his 2008 campaign.

In fact, the impression he created boggled my mind.  Once in a small shop in Syria, for example, a man of about 20, asked me in French, Syria’s second language, if I was French or English.  I responded, pointing to my chest, saying slowly, ‘Aameerikaa.’ He broke into a huge grin, put his arm around me, and started chanting ‘Obama, Obama, Obama,’ while pumping a ‘thumbs up’ with his other hand, ending with a ‘high five.’.  While this was an extreme example of the attitude, it was also typical in one sense: as soon as you said you were from the U.S., Europeans, Turks, or Arabs would start talking enthusiastically about Obama.  

To be sure, I am only one guy, but I can say without exaggeration, this kind of enthusiasm was exhibited by at least ninety per cent of the people I saw (Israel excepted). Europeans, Turks, and Arabs really wanted Obama to win the election.  More importantly, they were excited about the prospect of America moving onto a positive trajectory. 

That enthusiasm is now a faded memory, but the frustration between the rising expectations he triggered and a stagnant reality is not.  

Consider how far those hopes have fallen: Israel just humiliated President Obama by scuppering his belated attempts to revive the peace process (which even included an offer to buy off the Israelis with 20 more Joint Strike Fighters in return for a settlement freeze of only 90 days).  Coming after his 2009 Cairo speech, the humiliation by the Israelis demonstrated either his helplessness or hypocrisy to the Arab world.  The publication of the Palestinian Papers delegitimized Mahmoud Abbas and other leaders of the Palestinian Authority by revealing them to be Quislings and the peace process sponsored by the United States to be a fraud.  The message could not be clearer: If Arab people want change, they must do it themselves. 

So, while Obama did not create the inequalities at the root of discord, I think his empty rhetoric sharply widened the expectation-reality gap that is fueling the Arab Revolt of 2011. (For the record, Obama’s candidacy and election made me feel proud to be an American and he is the only politician my wife and I have ever given money to.)