As a resident of an unforgiving neighborhood, the Israeli ambassador might have a more realistic assessment than many Americans of the Arab uprisings.
“We would like to be guardedly optimistic, but we have to be guarded,” is how Ambassador Michael B. Oren described his country’s attitude in remarks Tuesday at Colorado Christian University.
What he went on to say sounded a lot more guarded than optimistic, though.
While praising the courage of demonstrators who toppled dictators in Egypt and Tunisia, and who are perhaps poised to topple another in Libya, Oren also offered a caveat: They may talk about democracy, but “they don’t have a lot of experience with democracy.”
Democracy involves more than elections, Oren said. “Democracy means freedom,” whereas Arab societies are notoriously unfree — in terms of female rights, for example, or even the freedom of children to choose whom they marry.
Meanwhile, the only groups that enjoy funding, organization and clear goals tend to be Islamist. The Islamists have hijacked other uprisings, he warned — most recently in Lebanon, despite the gloriously hopeful Cedar revolution a few years ago — and they could do it again.
But what about prospects for some form of democracy in Egypt, I asked him later. Demonstrators there certainly seemed to include many with aspirations for Western-style freedoms. “Give it six months” before trying to draw conclusions, he replied. Whatever the hopes of some Egyptians, he reminded me, the Muslim Brotherhood took 20 percent of the vote in a recent election, and that election was rigged. They probably could have won 40 percent in an open contest.
Oren was not suggesting we stifle applause for the overthrow of tyrants. Israel is proud to be the only democracy in the Middle East, he said, but “would be prouder still if it were one of many.” But American labels don’t always apply when it comes to the yearnings of various factions in the Arab world — a fact Americans have been discovering for more than 200 years.
Oren is a historian, too, and in his 2007 book “Power, Faith and Fantasy, America in the Middle East, 1776 to the present,” he recounts the shock experienced by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson during a meeting in London in 1785 with the representative of the pasha of Tripoli over the depredations of the Barbary States. The Tripoli nobleman, ‘Abd al-Rahman, glibly asserted that Muslims had the “right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”
Part bandit, part fanatic, ‘Abd al-Rahman sounds eerily like an 18th century Osama bin Laden.
In “Power, Faith and Fantasy,” Oren predicted the Middle East was “unlikely to gravitate toward greater stability . . . but rather toward further terror, internecine violence, and war.” So while “Americans should continue encouraging democratic movements,” they must understand “that not all American values are transplantable to the region.”
After nearly 10 years of disappointment in Afghanistan and the cataclysm in Iraq, it’s hard to believe any of us still require that lesson.
But maybe we do. After all, who could not cheer on Sunday when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared the U.S. was “reaching out” to Libyan insurgents and was “ready and prepared to offer any kind of assistance”? Was transformational change in a region that needs it so badly within reach at last?
Maybe, but give it time before we get carried away, Oren would warn us — because history has not been kind to the optimists there.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
