Egyptian revolution, one year later: Uncertainty of the ‘Arab Awakening’

By Paul Wolfowitz

Last March, when it was just turning spring in Washington, the visiting foreign minister of Morocco, Taieb Fassi Fihri, offered this caution about the changes that were sweeping through the Arab world: “the Arab spring is here,” he said, “but we are not sure that the summer—Arab summer” will follow. Maybe “we will go directly [in some places] to a dark winter, like . . in Iran in 1979.”


Already the climate in the Arab world has turned much colder and the skies are darker. Some people are now saying—with a kind of grim satisfaction—“we told you so.” But told us what? That these changes might lead to bad things and we should stop them? The notion of an “Arab spring” may have conveyed excessive optimism, but the notion of stopping it would be like trying to stop the tides. Regimes that depend on their people’s fear to survive cannot last once that wall of fear is broken, except by an even deeper descent into violence and terror.
The apparent stability of those dictatorships was illusory and their demise was inevitable. Moreover, the old order in the Arab world was not such a great thing, even by the standard of what’s good for the United States, much less for the people of those countries. What is to be lamented is that the preceding calm was not used to develop civil society organizations, political parties, and legal institutions to prepare the way for a more open political system. It is not an accident that Arabs who are now free to vote are voting in large numbers for Islamist political parties, the ones that had been best able to survive the repression of the dictators.
If the images of people risking their lives in the name of freedom inspired too much optimism, there is a danger now of too much pessimism. The process still has a long way to run before we will have any clear idea of the eventual outcome and, indeed, the outcomes are likely to differ widely from country to country. The term “Arab Awakening” or even “Arab Uprising” might better convey the sweep and uncertainty of what is happening.
Three years ago, when President Obama spoke at Cairo University, he was applauded for the mere announcement that he would discuss democracy and women’s rights, the only two of seven issues to be so welcomed. Even people who are critical of the United States often aspire to the values that we stand for. At a time when so much is in flux in the Arab world, it is important for the United States to speak up strongly in support of democracy, religious freedom, women’s rights, and the rule of law.