Like Striking a Match

[Valin]

Hoover Digest:

The spark seemed so small. But the Arab autocrats had spent decades heaping up the fuel.
Fouad Ajami
7/14/11

Historians of revolutions are never sure as to when these great upheavals in human affairs begin. But the historians will not puzzle long over the Arab revolution of 2011. They will know, with precision, when and where the political tsunami that shook the entrenched tyrannies first erupted. A young Tunisian vegetable seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, in the hardscrabble provincial town of Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire after his cart was confiscated and a headstrong policewoman slapped him across the face in broad daylight. The Arab dictators had taken their people out of politics, they had erected and fortified a large Arab prison, reduced men and women to mere spectators of their own destiny, and the simple man in that forlorn Tunisian town called his fellow Arabs back into the political world.

From one end of the Arab world to the other, all the more so in the tyrannies ruled by strongmen and despots (Libya, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, and Tunisia), the Arab world was teeming with Mohamed Bouazizis. Little less than a month later, the order of the despots was twisting in the wind. Bouazizi did not live long enough to savor the revolution of dignity that his deed gave birth to. We don’t know if he took notice of the tyrannical ruler of his homeland coming to his bedside in a false attempt at humility and concern. What we have is the image, a heavily bandaged man and a tacky visitor with jet-black hair, a feature of all the aged Arab rulers—virility and timeless youth are essential to the cult of power in these places. Bids, we are told, were to come from rich Arab lands, the oil states, to purchase Bouazizi’s cart. There were revolutionaries in the streets, and there were vicarious participants in this upheaval.

A silent Arab world was clamoring to be heard, eager to stake a claim to a place in the modern order of nations. A question had tugged at and tormented the Arabs: were they marked by a special propensity for tyranny, a fatal brand that rendered them unable to find a world beyond the prison walls of the despotism? Better sixty years of tyranny than one day of anarchy, ran a maxim of the culture. That maxim has long been a prop of the dictators.

(Snip)

[Valin]

Hoover Digest: Lands of Little Rain

Drought may not be destiny, but a critical ingredient for democratic societies does seem literally to fall from the skies.

Stephen H. Haber and Victor Menaldo.

7/14/11

 

We wish we could say that democracy is coming to the Middle East and North Africa, but there are good reasons to curb our optimism. It is one thing to force a tyrant from the presidential palace. It is quite another to create a durable, democratic political system.

 

 

(Snip)

 

Why is autocracy so persistent in this part of the world? Some pundits suspect the region’s oil wealth is the cause. Yet the countries of the Middle East and North Africa were autocracies for centuries before they found oil; moreover, some of them, like Bahrain and Libya, have lots of oil, while others, such as Yemen and Egypt, barely have any.

 

Others suggest Islam. Yet Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, has become a democracy. Moreover, many of the persistent autocracies of the Middle East and North Africa—most notably Iran, Iraq, and Egypt—antedate Islam by more than a millennium.

 

(Snip)