Opinion The despots are done

Democracy is a messy all-or-nothing business. You can no more be a little bit democratic than a little bit pregnant. Yes,citizens go to the polls in Turkey,Lebanon and Israel and no dictator gets 99.3 per cent of the vote. They are lands of opportunity where money is being made and where facile generalisations,for all their popularity,miss the point. Turkey has not turned Islamist,Lebanon is not in the hands of Hezbollah,and Israel is still an open society.

All three countries,of course,are also wracked by division and imperfection; but then two great merits of democracy are that it finesses division and does not aspire to perfection.

Speaking of Hezbollah,remember all that alarm a couple of months back when a Hezbollah-backed businessman,Najib Mikati,emerged as prime minister? After that,Lebanon introduced the Libyan no-fly-zone resolution at the United Nations — a rare,if little noted,example of the United States and a Hezbollah-supported government in sync. Mikati is struggling with the give-and-take of Lebanese politics. Life goes on in the freewheeling way that has long drawn repressed,frustrated Arabs to Beirut.

Hezbollah is a political party with a militia. That’s a big problem. Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Shas party has an outsized influence over Israel because of coalition politics. That’s a problem. The Muslim Brotherhood will loom large in a free Egypt because it has an organisational head start. That may be a problem. Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party is a brilliant political machine with a ruthless bent. That’s a problem,too.

These are problems of different sizes. But give me all these problems so long as they present themselves within open (or opening) systems. They are far preferable to the cowed conformity of the terrorised societies of the now doomed Arab Jurassic Park,where despots do their worst.

It’s over: Enough of the nameless graves that whisper of horror,enough of the 20th-century police states in the 21st-century. Yes,it’s over for Ben Ali and for Mubarak. It’s over for Gaddafi,yes it is. How far it’s over for the other Arab despots and autocrats,whether of the oxymoronic “republics” or the royals,will depend on how far they can get out in front of their citizens’ demand to be heard.

You see,you can’t do Hama any more. You can’t do the Iraqi marshes. Perhaps you can kill dozens,but not tens of thousands. These despots relied on the limitlessness of their terror. But now people know. They communicate through the clampdowns. They are Facebook-nimble. The despots gaze into their gilded mirrors and,to their horror,see not themselves but the people who will be silenced no longer. They wonder then if their own myriad agents can be trusted. They are caught in their own web. They flail; they have gone too far to turn back but cannot go forward.

Bashar al-Assad,the embattled Syrian president,was about to say something Sunday,before deciding not to. He was trained in west London as an eye doctor. He’d better stop thinking Hama — where his father murdered at least 10,000 — and start thinking Hammersmith.

The Arab transitions will be long and bumpy but now that fear has been overcome,they are irreversible. The genie is not only out of the bottle,it’s shattered the bottle. I said of Libya in an earlier column: Be ruthless or stay out. So now the West is in,be ruthless. Arm the resurgent rebels. Incapacitate Gaddafi. Do everything short of putting troops on the ground. Gaddafi,as Obama has said,“must leave.” So that Libya can be an Arab country that is imperfect but open.