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| Tariq ibn Ziyad illustration from Wikipedia |
I chose
today to paraphrase this think piece on the Arab Spring, written in Arabic for
the Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat. The author is Lebanese political analyst Iyad
Abu-Chacra, who holds a Bachelors’ degree in Political Science from the
American University of Beirut and a Masters from the School of Oriental and African
Studies (SOAS) in London:
These are frustrating hours for all those in the Arab
world who built high hopes on the spirit of revolution that gripped the
Tunisian street and ousted President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011.
Today, a year and a half since our so-called “Arab
Spring,” we find ourselves in the position of a deceived husband -- or should I
say the husband who deceived himself.
The courage of ageing and young Tunisian activists
took the country by surprise. Ben Ali fled as soon as his military and security
services refused to challenge citizens who had rediscovered their voice and
their will.
Egypt’s case was somewhat different. Gambits to
absorb the shock, which now appear to have been calculated by the army and
Washington, saw Hosni Mubarak leave office as a person. But power remained in
the hands of the effective “ruling party” – i.e. the army and a “security state”
it has been nurturing since 1952.
Elsewhere, under conditions of a growing
fragmentation of Yemen’s landscape, a recipe now known as the “Yemeni solution”
was concocted. It was a prescription for a limbless body politic, where tribal
and personal interests, extremist sectarian propensities and regional and
international political calculations overlapped. As a result, intended “central
state authority” effectively lost control over large areas of the country.
As we focus on Syria, U.S. Secretary of State Hilary
Clinton, God bless her, delights in telling us – after 15 months of conflicting
signals and wanting measures – the case is “complex.”
Anyone hoping to see the end of the Syrian people’s
nightmare is entitled to wonder: What is the bona-fide cause of the hesitation
by Washington, which was invariably eager to name the Syrian regime a sponsor
of terror? Hasn’t the State Department been blacklisting Syria year after year?
Haven’t successive administrations described Syria a “rogue state”? Didn’t
Congress pass the “Syria Accountability Act” by a 398-4 vote in October 2004?
Remember that President Bashar al-Assad assumed
office 11 years ago on the death of his father, who ruled the country for 30
years. So Washington is surely aware of the Assad regime’s nature.
For Washington and the international community to
continue parroting the mantra “the Syria situation is complex” can only mean
one of two things. Either they are truly incapable of confronting Moscow’s neo-tsars
and Beijing’s neo-emperors, or Washington and its Western allies are in cahoots
with Moscow, Beijing, Iran and Israel to parcel out influence in the Arab
region.
American democracy being built on, among other things,
the peaceful transfer of power, the current administration’s impotence
vis-à-vis Moscow and Beijing need not be permanent. The Republicans will sooner
or later replace the Democrats and change U.S. foreign policy.
What we see meantime is the Arab Spring inching in
the direction of the worst-case scenario. The region today is choosing between
two alternatives:
(1) “Political Islam,” which snatched, and is trying
to monopolize, the fruits of the Arab Spring, and
(2) “The security state” as in Egypt, which “went
with the flow” before giving the Islamists sufficient rope to hang themselves
by their lack of political acumen.
The outlook for Egypt is very gloomy, irrespective of
the presidential ballot outcome. Egyptian citizens who thought they had carried
out a revolution were given a terrible choice between a Mubarak regime
candidate and an Islamist carrying a religious agenda. This is when Egypt has a
10-million-strong Christian community, a disbanded national assembly and popular
distrust of the judiciary, party leaders and politics generally.
Any hope of an imminent dawning of a “civil state” in
Egypt is swiftly fading – especially and justifiably because of discontent
among Copts, who had to vote for the Mubarak regime candidate to ward off the
specter of the Muslim Brotherhood.
In Syria, where UN monitors decided to stop
“monitoring” for self-protection purposes, the catastrophe has turned
tragicomic.
The raison
d'être for the United Nations Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS) was to ensure Damascus’ compliance with Kofi Annan’s
six-point initiative – chiefly, a ceasefire, the release of detainees and
negotiations on the transfer of power. Syria approved the initiative simply to
bypass and abort it.
This is exactly what happened. By this writing, the
number of Syrians killed since the UNSMIS deployment had exceeded 3,000.
At the same time, there has been a quantum leap in
massacres committed by the regime against it own people – massacres that have
now taken a sectarian cleansing character in such places as the rural areas of
Homs, Aleppo, Latakia and Idlib governorates.
What transpires from the Houla and Qubair massacres
is that the regime is spearheading Iran’s sectarian design in the region. The
design is based on this premise: “What is yours is to be shared between us and
what is mine is mine alone.”
Having failed to regain control of every inch of the
Syrian territory, the regime is now bracing to carve out its own sectarian enclave
at the price of confessional bigotry, massacres and counter-massacres,
displacements and population exchanges.
Time then to recall the battle cry of Tariq ibn Ziyad, the
warrior who led the Islamic conquest of Spain in 711. When Tariq was informed
of the approach of the enemy, he rose in the midst of his men and, after having
glorified the Almighty, he spoke to his
soldiers thus:
“Oh my warriors, whither
would you flee? Behind you is the sea, before you, the enemy. You have left now
only the hope of your courage and your constancy. Remember that in this country
you are more unfortunate than the orphan seated at the table of the avaricious
master. Your enemy is before you, protected by an innumerable army; he has men
in abundance, but you, as your only aid, have your own swords, and, as your
only chance for life, such chance as you can snatch from the hands of your
enemy. If the absolute want to which you are reduced is prolonged ever so
little, if you delay to seize immediate success, your good fortune will vanish,
and your enemies, whom your very presence has filled with fear, will take
courage. Put far from you the disgrace from which you flee in dreams, and
attack this monarch who has left his strongly fortified city to meet you...”
