When camels fly

No one should take lightly the willingness of the opposition forces in Lebanon to stand up and point a finger at the Syrian regime and say ‘‘J’accuse!’’ for the murder of opposition leader Rafik Hariri. No one should dismiss the Palestinian election, which featured a real choice of candidates and a solid majority voting in favour of a decent, modernising figure—Mahmoud Abbas.

No one should ignore the willingness of some Egyptians to demand to run against President Hosni Mubarak when he seeks a fifth—and so far unopposed—term. These are things you have not seen in the Arab world before. They are really, really unusual—like watching camels fly.

Something really is going on with the proverbial ‘Arab street’. The automatic assumption that the ‘Arab street’ will always rally to the local king or dictator—if that king or dictator just waves around some bogus threat or insult from ‘‘America’’, ‘‘Israel’’ or ‘‘the West’’—is no longer valid. Yes, the Iraq invasion probably brought more anti-American terrorists to the surface. But it also certainly brought more pro-democracy advocates to the surface. Call it ‘Baghdad Spring’.

But we have to be very sobre about what is ahead. There will be no velvet revolutions in this part of the world. The walls of autocracy will not collapse with just one good push. As the head-chopping insurgents in Iraq, the suicide bombers in Saudi Arabia and the murderers of Hariri have all signalled: You put a flower in the barrel of their gun and they’ll blow your hand and your head right off.

I write all this not to suggest that we are on a fool’s errand in Iraq. I write it to underscore that we are on the first step of a long, long journey. The fact that the extremists and autocrats have had to resort now to unspeakable violence shows how much they have failed to win the war of ideas on the Arab street.

But the emerging progressive forces still have to prove that they can build a different politics around united national communities, not a balance of sects, and solidarity from shared aspiration, not a shared external enemy. There is still, throughout the Arab world, a very weak notion of statehood and citizenship. And there are still very few civil society institutions outside the mosque, and little historical experience with a free press, free markets or real parliamentary democracy to build upon when the walls fall.

The New York Times