Question in the Middle-East

“Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?”

- Richard Nixon, Act 1, Scene 1 of Nixon in China, by Alice Goodman and Richard Adams.

As fires of revolution swirl through Egypt and sparks land in the dry grass of Yemen and Jordan, this is a question that urgently needs an answer. Americans are deep in an isolationist period, locked in bitter, obsessive domestic political battles. So the country was caught by surprise by the events in North Africa and the Middle-East.

News from the Middle-East for most people is something like a soap opera, they check in from time to time to follow the story, but see how little has changed. The news from that region appears to be a dreary, predictable succession of car bombings and failed peace talks.

Progress in the region was glacial. But, few people heard the cracking of the ice as the glacier began to fall apart. Progress is now a flash flood, with policy makers splashing around trying to figure out how to swim safely to shore.

In less than two weeks, American policy went from supporting President Hosni Mubarak as an ally who was stable and in control, to scrambling to ensure he transfers power to another ‘friend” we “we can work with” as he leaves. We have embraced the newly minted Egyptian Vice-President Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s best friend and a politician viewed by most Egyptians as Mubarak-lite.

With this policy we make one friend, but millions of enemies.

American policy is paralyzed by the fear of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a repeat of the 1979 Iranian revolution. The media has played into this fear. Nobel Prize winner Mohamed El-Baradei is no longer the first mention as the Egyptian opposition leader, and the Muslim Brotherhood is. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is described as a widespread, well organized opposition group, which it is not.

They were caught as flat footed as the Americans by the events in Egypt. They are not in the position Ayatollah Kohmeini was when the Shah fell. They are a small segment of the opposition and do not have the broad based support needed to take over a revolution and lead the country.

While American policy makers and the media exaggerate the similarities between Iran in 1979, they seem to go out of their way to down play the possibility that this is “1989 in the Middle-east,” They cite the lack of a Superpower imposing a monolithic political system on a unified culture, as the Soviet Union did in the Eastern Europe, as the reason.

But Eastern Europe was not, and is not, a unified culture. There were significant cultural differences between the countries who slipped the Soviet leash between 1989 and 1992. But those revolutions were rooted in the same impulse.

They were not revolutions against the Soviet Union but revolutions against a hopeless present and a worthless future. They overthrew governments that had plundered the economy to benefit an elite while ignoring the needs of the common citizen. That is an important similarity between the European revolutions of 1989-1992 and the revolutions in the Middle-east of 2011.

Young people all across the Middle-east feel they have no future. In Egypt per capita daily income averages $2. This is the income of average educated people trying to earn a living. Such a low income level is the rule across the region and not the exception. Whereas there may not be a common system like Communism in each of these countries to push against, we need to beware of the common foundation of despair that underlies the region.

An article posted on Al Jazeera describes the current situation the Middle-east as “revolutions politely waiting in line.” (http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/20112282246404549.html). According to the post’s author, grassroots opposition groups are organized in each country, waiting for Egypt to finish its revolution before going full throttle with their own.

This seems to be true.

As the American media keeps a tight focus on Cairo, it missed the protests in Jordan that brought down the government there. In addition to Jordan, protests have taken place in Bahrain, Algeria, Yemen and Palestine. These governments all have some dependency on America whether politically, economically or simply foreign aid.

The current revolutionary impulse also threatens countries that are not tightly aligned with US interests. If the Government in Egypt falls it is possible for the Iranian opposition to reignite the Green Revolution. Even though they didn’t materialize, the Syrian government should be worried that 12,000 people risked government internet monitoring and “liked” the Facebook page calling for massive demonstrations in Damascus after prayers this Friday.

Regardless of how it all ends, the Middle-east and North Africa, will never be the same. Over the next couple of years Americans will have to ask over and over again “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?”

And we will have to get the answer right.