Eberto blog

MIDDLE EAST OUTCOME IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SEE

revolutions" spreading in overlapping arcs from Tunisia and Egypt to Yemen and Libya.

So I thought it not unusual for me to ask: "What would you GUESS would be the outcome of these revolutions? Just your intuitive feeling?"

To my surprise, no one said anything.

So I asked the question again, stressing the importance of the word "guess," as against something you would write in a formal academic paper.

Again, no one said anything. Finally one friend, who has held important positions in the region, volunteered: "It's impossible even to speculate about at this point -- besides, we don't even know if these are revolutions yet."

I mention this little personal anecdote because it is so typical of the mood here in Washington. There are no certainties, even much-qualified ones; instead, all we have are questions, voiced over and over and over again.

Was Egypt a revolution? Is Libya a revolution or merely a rebellion? Will these conflicts devolve into new autocratic regimes instead of democratic ones? Why are we involving ourselves in Libya anyway, when we're already in Iraq and Afghanistan? Should we be in favor of the government in Yemen, which has supported us on anti-terrorism, or on the side of the rebels? And is Syria next on the list?

In this season of revolt brewing and boiling over across the Middle East, I can't help but feel that the press, and particularly television, is hardly helping us in one area to grasp the central -- and inevitable -- uncertainty of these revolts. The media criticism of American and NATO involvement in Libya has trivialized the seriousness of the moment by asking one question ad infinitum: "How do we know what will come out of this?"

Well, the answer is that we don't, that we can't, and that we won't, perhaps not for decades. Remember that when Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was asked his opinion of the French Revolution, he answered, "It's too early to tell." And that was a mere two centuries after that revolution. Remember, too, how many decades it took the egalitarian impulses of our Civil War to become embedded in law and practice, and how World War I, the "war to end all wars," led directly to World War II within merely a quarter of a century.

Equally foolish and self-defeating, it seems to me, are the endless questions on TV interview shows or newspaper editorial pages about how President Obama can say we want to see Gadhafi removed, while the U.N. Security Council says we are taking part in military actions in Libya in order to protect the Libyan people.

Anyone who has taken part in a neighborhood organization, YMCA council or school board meeting knows that when there are many participants (as there are nations in NATO), leaders often need to finesse differences in order to get something done, and that wording needs to be crafted so that all sides can come out feeling that at least they have not totally lost. That is what has happened in Libya; and, frankly, congratulations!

It makes me think of Gen. Douglas MacArthur on the USS Missouri at the ceremony marking the end of the war in the Pacific when he refused to humiliate the defeated Japanese because he knew that he would have to work with them in the future.

Then comes the other question as to whether these actually ARE revolutions, or merely a congeries of little revolts. Me? I opt for revolution. When you have country after country, and people after people, and tribe after tribe arising against a status quo of 50 or 60 years, these are revolutions, linked by their complaints and hopes, on a scale of those of 1848, 1917 or 1989 in Europe.

To those who say we have handled it badly or too late, I point them to the words of the moderate and well-informed professor Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland: "Could the United States have acted earlier? Not if Security Council backing was necessary: A U.N. resolution was unlikely without Arab League support. But once the Arab League agreed, the U.N. Security Council moved rapidly.

"Could Washington have acted earlier without U.N. support? Only at a high cost, both internationally and in Arab public opinion.

"The Obama administration has rightly been careful to balance the region's suspicion of the West with the need to intervene. While this does not satisfy everyone, the receptivity in the region to the international intervention -- and Gadhafi's inability to sell it as 'a colonial Crusader' war -- is itself extraordinary, given historic opposition to Western intervention."

So I have a hard time figuring out why exactly we should criticize the administration for getting universal approval (the U.N.) and serious allies (NATO, the Arab League) in its attempts to help the people of Libya.

But, of course, care must be taken. Remember how Lenin and his furtive communists hid and waited behind the Russian Revolution's barriers while "the people" fought in the streets. Only when it was relatively safe did the Reds come out and take over the revolution, never giving up until the wondrous days of 1989.

That kind of takeover of the young Facebook revolutionaries by the radical and not-so-radical Islamists, particularly in Egypt (the Islamic Brotherhood and the Salafists) and Yemen (traditional Islamists), is surely possible.

So we must wait and watch, for this is a moment of consummate historic importance, and its outcome will be more Machiavelli than military. As someone said along the way, "We have not yet reached the end of the beginning, much less the beginning of the end."