Duke - Bruce W. Jentleson https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/author/bruce-w-jentleson en The Remaking of the Middle East https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/remaking-middle-east <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"> </td></tr><tr><td valign="top"><div class="media-header top2">It started with a vegetable vendor. That last insult and last extortion by a Tunisian municipal official was too much for twenty-six- year-old Mohammed Bouazizi. He set himself aflame. And the fire spread.</div><div id="container-addins"><div id="addins" class="sidebar"><div class="sdesection" style="display: none;"> </div><p class="bodycontent-2010"><span class="articletitle-blogstyle style1"></span>Within weeks, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisian dictator for almost a quarter century, fell and fled. The next month, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, in office even longer than Ben Ali, was brought down. The even longer-serving Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh appears (as of this writing) on his way out. In Syria, the Asad dictatorship has been ratcheting up repression trying to stay in power. The Bahraini monarchy fell back on “neighborly” military reinforcement. There have been stirrings in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. And there’s Libya: Muammar Gaddafi started to unleash such massive brutality against the Libyan people that, with the support of the United Nations and the Arab League, a broad-based coalition including the U.S., NATO, and some Arab states intervened.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">All we know for sure is that it’s not if but when and where there will be more instability in the Arab world. As we try to keep up on CNN, the blogs, and other sources, it’s helpful to step back to get a deeper grasp on why this is happening and what the challenges are for U.S. foreign policy.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Why now? And why not just an isolated case or two, but a region-wide trend?</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Much has been made of technology, with many observers attributing these upheavals to a “Facebook-Twitter” revolution. There’s some truth to that. Information and communication are always key to reform and revolution. During the Cold War, Soviet dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Soviet Jews improvised their samizdat, reproducing documents with carbon paper, Xeroxing, or however they could. Facebook and Twitter are samizdat on steroids—so much faster and with such wider reach.</p><div class="media-header top2"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 670px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050611/images/050611_middleeast_5.jpg" alt="Aspirational youth: With the majority of the Arab world under thirty, young people—like these Egyptian protestors—are demanding greater economic and political opportunities." width="670" height="300" border="0" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Aspirational youth: </strong>With the majority of the Arab world under thirty, young people—like these Egyptian protestors—are demanding greater economic and political opportunities.<br /><span class="photocredit">Peter Turnley/Corbis</span></p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">But while new technologies have been crucial tools, there were six other deep societal dynamics being tapped into:</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">THE WIZARD OF OZ EFFECT: Recall the scene when Dorothy pulls back the curtain and reveals that the great Oz was nothing more than a small, unimposing man? The first Arab dictator falling punctured the aura of invincibility surrounding political leaders and countered the sense of popular powerlessness. It also served as a “demonstration effect,” pointing the way for other nations. “Generations believed we could do nothing,” one protester in Jordan affirmed, “and now, in a matter of weeks, we know that we can.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">POLITICAL REPRESSION: While Mubarak long had rigged elections, his party “winning” almost 95 percent of the seats in thefall 2010 parliamentary elections took this to an extreme. While Gaddafi long had been repressive, his prisons were getting ever fuller, the torture ever more severe. And while al-Assad long had ruled with an iron hand, a resonant chord was struck when the police responded to the slogan “The people want the regime to fall”—written on a wall in the small city of Deraa—by arresting the group of children who’d done the scrawling.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">SOCIOECONOMIC INEQUALITY: Egypt, for example, was 109th in the world in GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita, and 101st on the Human Development Index (including education, life expectancy, and other social indicators). Moreover, the gap between the rich and poor had been widening in recent years, and made all the more appreciable—and objectionable—amid a spate of gated communities being built in and around Cairo and other major Egyptian cities.</p><div class="media-header flr" style="width: 346px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 345px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050611/images/050611_middleeast_3.jpg" alt="Committed to action: A Bahraini Shiite cleric chants slogans against Saudi and Bahraini leaders in front of the Saudi Embassy in Tehran as Iranian police stand by." width="345" height="280" /><p class="caption-text"><br /><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Committed to action:</strong> A Bahraini Shiite cleric chants slogans against Saudi and Bahraini leaders in front of the Saudi Embassy in Tehran as Iranian police stand by.<br /><span class="photocredit">Associated Press</span></p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010">CORRUPTION: The need to continually pay small-scale bribes to the local city officials was what drove Bouazizi, the vegetable vendor, to suicide. But the corruptionwas broadly systemic. Ben Ali’s family and cronies lived in luxury, as did Mubarak’s and the others. While Tunisia and Egypt were “only” 59th and 98th on the NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) Transparency International’s corruption index, Syria was 127th; Yemen and Libya tied for 146th.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">GENERATIONAL CHANGE: About 60 percent of the population in the Arab world is under thirty. The median age is around twenty-six. This “youth bulge” was not being met with anything close to the economic, political, or personal opportunities being sought. This generation didn’t buy as much into the heroic narrative of anticolonialism that partially palliated their parents and grandparents. In these and other ways, the gap between the aspirations of Arab youth and the actualities of their lots was wide and getting wider.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">GENDER: In 2002, the Arab Human Development Report, written by a group of prominent Arab intellectuals and policy experts, stressed the gender gap as particularly acute in their countries. Political change presented an opportunity to make real progress in narrowing that gap. Particularly interesting along these lines was a point made in a recent<span class="pubtitle"> New York Times</span> report about how technology empowered young women in traditional villages, allowing them “to bypass the men—fathers, brothers, husbands—who circumscribed their worlds and their ability to communicate. They cannot go to the park unaccompanied and meet friends, but they can join a chat room or send instant messages.”</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">It’s important to emphasize that what we’ve been seeing is a mix of a common regional pattern, but also national differences. Bahrain has major Sunni-Shia divisions. Yemen has a tribal structure; Libya, a particularly erratic dictator. Civil society is relatively stronger in Egypt than in other countries, the middle class relatively more extensive in Tunisia than elsewhere. Iran, which has brutally repressed the Green Movement that arose in protest of the stolen June 2009 elections, may—or may not—be able to keep the lid on. So while we can speak of regional trends, we also have to focus nation by nation to understand why the revolutions have been happening in one place but not another and taking different forms.</p><div class="media-header flr" style="width: 346px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 345px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/050611/images/050611_middleeast_6.jpg" alt="Larger than life: Tunisian demonstrators hold a poster of vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, who committed suicide after police confiscated his wares; he became a martyr." width="345" height="540" /><p class="caption-text"><br /><div class="media-h-caption"><strong>Larger than life: </strong>Tunisian demonstrators hold a poster of vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, who committed suicide after police confiscated his wares; he became a martyr.<br /><span class="photocredit">Associated Press</span></p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="bodycontent-2010"><br /><strong>What Should U.S. Policy Be?</strong></p><p class="bodycontent-2010">The U.S. thus needs both an overarching regional strategy and country-specific ones. Even at that we cannot determine any of these countries’ futures. But we can help shape them. Some guidelines for doing so:</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">First, our policy needs to be flexible, multifaceted, and coalition-minded. Flexible means no one size fits all. Military and diplomatic strategies have to be situation-specific—for example, intervening militarily where most justified, as in Libya, while in other cases, such as Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen, using strategies best geared to those situations. Multifaceted means drawing on a broad range of tools and policies. These include both political reform and economic assistance, and a mix of initiatives that are public, private, and through NGOs. Coalition-minded means working multilaterally, with international institutions and with other states that also have interests at stake and capacities to bring to bear. Indeed, in this twenty-first-century world, while the U.S. still has an important leadership role to play, there is very little that we can accomplish on our own.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Second, in bilateral relations with Arab states, the balance needs to shift with less emphasis on the old adage “He may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB,” and more on “Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” There still needs to be a balance: Purism in promoting democracy is neither practical nor prudent. But one administration after another, in trying to straddle these, has kept the heavy foot on the “our SOB” side. Some rhetoric gets devoted to democracy, some pressure brought for reform—but only some. What happens when successor regimes come to power through more violent means? What happens when they come to power, as well, with more intensely anti-American orientations—sentiments that would have been mitigated had change come more civilly and without such close identification of the U.S. with the dictatorial regime? The risk is a lose-lose for U.S. interests and ideals alike.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Third, we must not make the same mistake with political Islam that we did in the Third World during the Cold War, when we lumped together most leaders, parties, and movements that in any way smacked of radicalism as part of the Soviet orbit. Some certainly were, like Kim Il Sung in North Korea and Najibullah in Afghanistan. But in so many other cases, the leaders, parties, and movements had their own local-national identities and agendas that, even when containing anti-American elements, carried possibilities for cooperation or at least coexistence. Political Islam is here to stay. It will be part of the political mix more often than not. We cannot be for political change if we exclude all political Islam. We have to distinguish between those that are fundamental enemies, like Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups, and those with which we have differences but with which coexistence and cooperation may be possible.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Fourth, democracy does not spring forth like Athena from Zeus’ head. It takes a long time to build. “It’s an entire country that needs to be remade,” as a Tunisian mayor put it. “It’s not going to be one year, or two years, or three years. It’s going to be an entire generation.” In Egypt, the anti- Mubarak unifying effect quickly gave way to mixes of electoral contestation and behind-the-scenes maneuvering and waves of repression against some of those who led the revolution. Nor is sustainable political stability only about elections and political process. It has to be democracy that delivers on the economic and social-justice issues that underlay the revolts, and on which the internal political competition and overall stability of the system depend. That means more than just GDP growth rates and larger amounts of foreign investment; it also has to be about greater equity and penetrating beyond elites into societies to alleviate problems. For instance, consider the case of a village in Yemen that was left so destitute that it turned to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to provide teachers for its schools.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Fifth, real progress on Arab-Israeli peace is now that much harder, yet that much more essential. Israel is becoming even warier of peace agreements. Arab regimes may resort more often to the diversionary script of invoking the Zionist enemy. But if there is no Arab-Israeli peace soon, there may well be another war.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">Still, even the optimal outcome of these policy guidelines would not make the Middle East a fully stable place. Unless we finally reduce our dependence on oil, we will continue to leave ourselves vulnerable to the when—not if—of the next oil market crisis and its cascading effects on our economy and on our everyday lives. We’ll also end up putting ourselves back on the wrong side of history that we’re now trying to get off of. Energy independence is not possible, but reducing energy vulnerability and enhancing energy security are.</p><p class="bodycontent-2010">And that’s up to us.</p><br /><span class="byline">Jentleson, a professor in Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, has worked on Middle East policy in the Obama and Clinton administrations. His most recent books are </span>American Foreign Policy: The Dynamics of Choice in the 21st Century <span class="byline">(4th edition, W.W. Norton) and </span>The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas, with Steven Weber <span class="byline">(Harvard University Press).</span></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2011-06-01T00:00:00-04:00">Wednesday, June 1, 2011</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/050611_middleeast_1.jpg" width="670" height="400" alt="Revolution, continued: Two months after Hosni Mubarak was forced out of office, tens of thousands of Egyptians crowded Cairo’s Tahrir Square to demand his prosecution. Associated Press " /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/bruce-w-jentleson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Bruce W. Jentleson</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/may-jun-2011" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">May - Jun 2011</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">A foreign-policy expert considers the causes and effects of recent unrest in a historically troubled, and perennially vital, part of the world.</div></div></section> Wed, 01 Jun 2011 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500275 at https://alumni.duke.edu