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Four Differences
First, Eastern Europe’s oppressed nations were still well educated, so they were well positioned for a re-start in 1989. And they’d all had democratic traditions before 1939. Education in the Greater Middle East is so poor and so discriminating that it ranks somewhere in the neighborhood of crimes against humanity. And aside from Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Turkey, Israel and, briefly, Iraq, the Middle East has never known democracy.


It has no place to re-start from. It would all be brand new.

Second, Eastern Europe’s oppression was largely fueled from Moscow. In the undemocratic abysses of the Middle East, the oppression is home grown, one independent from the other, though each reinforcing the other as if by tradition and solidarity, the way Europe’s old monarchies reinforced each other before 1789. Leaders play on the cult of personality, the father-of-the-people fantasy that appears to have a few frames left in the reel.

But the majority of the Middle East’s autocracies and dictatorships are all American client states, all aided and armed by the United States. Their police states’ thugs are trained by the U.S., their truncheons and ammo are manufactured by the U.S., their dictators are legitimized, wined, dined and largely enabled, in the eyes of each country’s masses, by the U.S.

In oil-producing nations, those dictators are largely financed by American gas-guzzling: the difference between the Saudi Arabian and North Korean police states is one of degrees, not of substance.

In some degrees—women’s rights and the religious policing of “vice”—Saudi Arabia is more oppressive, making it little different than the Taliban. Yet Saudi Arabia is one of America’s closest allies—without a peep from the American public’s conscience.

Third, in 1989, the Soviet Union was exhausted economically. The United States isn’t there yet. American dollars still finance Middle Eastern oppression. American troops are still on Arab soil in more than half a dozen Mideast nations. American strategy still hinges on that axis of authoritarianism that keeps the people quiet: it’s easier for American presidents to deal with less than two dozen robed and titled thugs than to deal with the noisy democracies of 350 million Arabs.

Fourth, American calculations over Eastern Europe weren’t distorted by American vassalage to Israel and American distortions of the Islamic threat. They very much are in the Middle East today. The Obama administration’s reluctance to endorse democracy in Egypt as in the rest of the Middle East results from fears that, as in Gaza, democratic elections would lead to Hamas-like leadership by such parties as the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s a narrow-minded, frankly stupid and often bigoted view that reduces and defines all Arabs according to American prejudices and ignorance—as opposed to American ideals and traditions.

An Avalanche of Fearful Misconceptions

There’s not enough space to set straight a half century of American stereotype about Arabs and Islam, so let’s just take the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the closest thing Egypt has to an organized opposition: It is not a clone of al-Qaeda. It explicitly rejected al-Qaeda in the 1990s because of al-Qaeda’s embrace of violence, just as it rejected violence as a legitimate, let alone an Islamic, tactic.

It is a conservative organization, but in the sense that America’s religious right organizations are conservative. It has no less democratic aspirations, and respects social work on behalf of the poor as an institutional responsibility far more than the American religious right does. That’s largely where the Muslim Brotherhood gets its respect in Egypt—from masses in a country where the majority of its 82 million people live in abject poverty, to the indifference of the government.

Egypt has a peace treaty with Israel. But Sunni Egypt in 2011 is not Shiite Iran in 1978: the revolution unfolding in Egypt is not ideologically driven. It is politically driven. Iran wanted to spread the Shiite creed in 1978. Egyptians just want to have their own democracy. They have zero interest in spreading anything, being too busy trying to survive, and needing, at most, to spread a little wealth around at home. They need the peace treaty with Israel the way they need to keep the Suez Canal safe and sound: both have been among their few economic boons. So has the break from going to war every seven years. They’re not about to mess that up.

“A Republic, If You Can Keep It.”

Benjamin Franklin was asked on the street about what had just been achieved. The question elicited one of his more famous quips: “A republic, if you can keep it.” Egyptians could create for themselves the same hopeful circumstances, in roughly the same, unfortunate isolation as the United States were in 1787, though the Egyptian model would unquestionably have an Egyptian, not a western, imprint.

It would be wrong to say that America is losing legitimacy in Arab eyes for refusing to embrace the democratic movement, that legitimacy having been squandered many times over in the past few decades, the past 10 years especially. To Arabs, American prevarication, the rank hedging of bets, is no longer surprising. Protesters call Mubarak an American stooge.

Besides its shaky legs, that’s the most disheartening thing about the Egyptian revolution, and its echoes elsewhere in the Middle East: The imprint of American ideals, of inspiration, of aspirations, is gone. The United States is no more revered politically in the Middle East today than the Soviet Union was in Eastern Europe in the 1980s. In some regards it’s despised (think American indifference to human rights violations, think blind American support for Israel). It is still revered for its materialism, for its KFC’s and sitcoms and shoot-em-up movies, even for its universities for the lucky rich few who can make it there. But materialism is no substitute for the more powerful emblems once indistinguishable from the American brand abroad: liberty, democracy, support for the oppressed.

That brand is no longer sold in Egypt or the Greater Middle East, except in the souvenir shops of old sentimentalists.