Arab Spring

philosophised at 2:20 AM

The more I read about the Arab Spring, the more divided my opinion becomes. Many people take a very clear side regarding the Arab Spring, but I find myself kiting between the camp that says that the Arab Spring will usher in a new era of political instability and military escalation, to the camp that portrays the Arab Spring as a success in the making and will make the Middle East a far more humane place in the future.

I am really ambivalent regarding where I stand on this.

When I first read about the NATO sending in air support to enforce a no-fly zone above Libya, I thought that it was the right thing to do to protect the civilians from an imminent massacre. A few days later it was apparent that the no-fly zone has turned into an air raid to provide support for the rebel army, and in my opinion this went beyond the mandate for a no-fly zone that was initially aimed at minimising civilian casualties, and instead actively taking side in an armed conflict. I'm not so sure about whether this is a right thing to do anymore.

Then there is this issue that still puzzles me. Why do we intervene in Libya, and not Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Sudan? Politicians seem to draw the line somewhere, though the arguments made were extremely nebulous.

For example, Hilary Clinton responded to a CBS interview about why the US did not intervene in Syria by saying that "What’s been happening there [in Syria] the last few weeks is deeply concerning, but there’s a difference between calling out aircraft and indiscriminately strafing and bombing your own cities, than police actions which, frankly, have exceeded the use of force that any of us would want to see."

My first impression is that she is saying that we should not intervene in Syria because the Syrian government is only shooting people, not bombing them like Gaddafi did. So is that where we arbitrarily draw the line between intervention and non-intervention?

I also find myself questioning whether a military intervention automatically guarantees human right. I still think that there's a huge logical gap here. The main reason for my scepticism is that the Arab population is still largely illiberal as far as I can tell, and there is this very prominent example of an illiberal democracy in the Middle East — Iran (though many people are very keen to deny the fact that it is a democracy at all) — that some argue is worse off, or at least no better than before the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

There is a transfer of power going on now, and some would characterise that as a power struggle. Those that are victorious may very well not be democratic, and those that are democratic are not likely to be liberal. In fact I think it's more likely that the Arab Spring will culminate with the establishment of several illiberal democracies, than Libyans and Egyptians and Tunisians and Syrians becoming liberal Frenchmen overnight. Nobody seems to give much thought to that. However, what is truly worrying is how the Europeans and the US will respond to these illiberal governments should they form.

The world seems to be cheering on when the revolution seized the whole region, but regrettably few pragmatists had gotten their hands dirty and talked about the less pleasant outcomes of the Arab Spring. The best scenario is of course these nations turning into Britains and Frances. That will make the world a better place and I'll be the first to celebrate, but I seriously don't see that happening any time soon. People should be more willing to tread into the grey areas and take a deeper look at reality to realize that we are not living in the world of Narnia. People and nations do not and cannot change overnight. We need to have more realistic expectations.

PS. Well, I realized that I drifted towards scepticism again even though I started off saying that I was neither here nor there. I noticed that there's not much to be said if you are not a sceptic, because human right is obviously important and that massacres are obviously wrong and pigs don't fly. No one is seriously disagreeing on these premises. However politicians still go ad nauseum about how we should not stain our conscience by not intervening, that we can have another success like that in Bosnia, that Gaddafi is an evil man, and violent crackdowns on protesters are deplorable, and so on. These are obvious, but we like to hear the obvious. It feeds our wishful thinking.