The Revolution and the Arab

The Revolution and the Arab Street(s) - Thomas Friedman had a fascinating piece yesterday on how the war is playing in the "Arab Street".

For starters - there is no "Arab Streets" - according to Friedman, there are three streets - Arab liberals, the chattering classes, and officials in the various governments. Each is having different reactions to what Friedman calls "the revolutionary side of US power", which Friedman describes:

for Arabs, American culture has always been revolutionary — from blue jeans to "Baywatch" — but American power, since the cold war, has only been used to preserve the status quo here, keeping in place friendly Arab kings and autocrats.

. Friedman goes on to quote an Arab professor:

I spent this afternoon with the American studies class at Cairo University. The professor, Mohamed Kamel, summed up the mood: "In 1975, Richard Nixon came to Egypt and the government turned out huge crowds. Some Americans made fun of Nixon for this, and Nixon defended himself by saying, `You can force people to go out and welcome a foreign leader, but you can't force them to smile.' Maybe the Iraqis will eventually stop resisting you. But that will not make this war legitimate. What the U.S. needs to do is make the Iraqis smile. If you do that, people will consider this a success."

There is a lot riding on that smile, Mr. Kamel added, because this is the first "Arab-American war." This is not about Arabs and Israelis. This is about America getting inside the Arab world — not just with its power or culture, but with its ideals. It is a war for what America stands for. "If it backfires," Mr. Kamel concluded, "if you don't deliver, it will really have a big impact. People will not just say your policies are bad, but that your ideas are a fake, you don't really believe them or you don't know how to implement them."

So in other words, we can't screw up the post-war period.

And I don't think we will. George W Bush is not George HW Bush. He's not motivated primarily by a desire to stabilize the region - he is truly, as Friedman says, applying a revolution to Iraq.

Unlike most revolutions, the American Revolution had an upside for those who survived it. We need to make sure the American Revolution in Iraq bears more resemblance to ours than to, say, the French or Russian or Nicaraguan versions.

Posted by Mitch at April 3, 2003 07:52 AM