Just when it seemed that things couldn’t get worse for capitalist culture in the Middle East, we now have to absorb the backward blow of a dismal 2007. The region is more than ever trapped in enmity, pushing the advance of free minds and markets further into oblivion; Lebanon is facing a sustained threat to what remains of the 2005 Independence Intifada, with the increasing likelihood that Syria will re-impose some form of hegemony in the coming years; and 2008 is looking very much like it will only exacerbate the tensions of this past year.
So much for your Christmas cheer. Complicating matters is the price of oil. It’s moving inexorably upwards, helping the likes of Iran, Russia, and others who have a vested interest in seeing the United States remove itself from Iraq and downgrade its power in the region. Whatever the merits or demerits of such ambitions, they are sure to make Washington angrier and more frustrated than it already is in the Middle East, so that some form of conflict is likelier. And where there is conflict, liberty withers.
As one observer put it so well, while crises in much of the world tend to unblock situations and create new opportunities, those in the Middle East only make things worse. The tectonic plates of the region lock further, so that the probable outcome is a major new earthquake.
Everywhere, on one side of the regional divide or the other, the matter of liberty is being ignored. If the Middle East is facing a new cold war, as the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has argued, then on one side of this partition you have Iran, Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas; on the other you have the mostly Sunni-led Arab states, particularly Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, backed by the United States. While all the parties disagree on quite a lot of things, the net impact of their degenerating struggle, and an unmentioned point of agreement between them, is that now is not the time to allow democrats to be empowered, or even to allow civil society to display new vitality.
In Iran, for example, where society presents the greatest opportunity for a liberal breakthrough in the region, the prospect of a war between the US and Iran can only be nefarious for liberty. Not only would most Iranians probably rally to the side of their state, no matter how oppressive, a conflict would give that state even greater means to control the society.
In Syria, the issue of liberty is not even being seriously discussed. President Bashar al-Assad has stifled civil society much as his father did, and the brief “Damascus spring” is a distant memory. The regime is bolstered by an improving economic situation, thanks to Iraqi refugee money, Arab investments, and Iranian funding. Syria remains vulnerable, however, as its oil reserves are almost finished and investment moods can quickly change. But for the moment Assad is stronger than he has been in years, and his people are torn between apathy toward a system that forever seems to be going nowhere and fear of what the regime’s departure might bring. Worse, the international community refuses to create new options by working on strengthening Syria’s democratic forces. It accepts the idea that it’s either Assad or chaos, and in so doing fortifies the regime.
In fact, Assad has shown just how far he is willing to go by trying to return to Lebanon in one way or another. The Syrians, in coordination with an undemocratic Hizbullah, have provoked chaos in Lebanon in order to turn themselves into the inevitable interlocutor on the country’s future. When France recently engaged Syria on the Lebanese presidential election, that strategy seemed to be working. A liberal space was opened up in Lebanon in 2005. Is it about to be closed again because of Western foolishness?
On the other side, too, liberty is largely a figment of the imagination. The Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, is focused on his own succession, particularly ensuring that his son takes over power. There can be no democracy when the prevailing vision is of a republican monarchy. And the regime is hitting out everywhere, with even youthful bloggers being tossed into jail and tortured. Saudi Arabia is little better, with its participatory system in congenital lockdown. What freedom there is happens behind closed doors, with the regime alarmed by a rising Iran and an Iraq that might at any moment destabilize the kingdom.
One can go on. 2005 was supposed to be the year of grand democratic transformation in the Middle East. Partly it was; but it was also a trigger that autocratic regimes in the region needed to circle the wagons and ensure that liberty would be suffocated in the egg. Free minds are flat-lining in the region, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.
