Ross Douthat Nails It (John Ballard)

Douthat writes much better than I so go read the rest of what he says. It's short and to the point.

Today's wave of violence, likewise, owes much more to a bloody-minded realpolitik than to the madness of crowds. As The Washington Post's David Ignatius was among the first to point out, both the Egyptian and Libyan assaults look like premeditated challenges to those countries' ruling parties by more extreme Islamist factions: Salafist parties in Egypt and pro-Qaeda groups in Libya. (The fact that both attacks were timed to the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks should have been the first clue that this was something other than a spontaneous reaction to an offensive video.)

The choice of American targets wasn't incidental, obviously. The embassy and consulate attacks were "about us" in the sense that anti-Americanism remains a potent rallying point for popular discontent in the Islamic world. But they weren't about America's tolerance for offensive, antireligious speech. Once again, that was the pretext, but not the actual cause.

Just as it was largely pointless, then, for the politicians of 1989 to behave as if an apology from Rushdie himself might make the protests subside ("It's felt," he recalls his handlers telling him, "that you should do something to lower the temperature"), it's similarly pointless to behave as if a more restrictive YouTube policy or a more timely phone call from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the anti-Islam film's promoters might have saved us from an autumn of unrest.

What we're watching unfold in the post-Arab Spring Mideast is the kind of struggle for power that frequently takes place in a revolution's wake: between secular and fundamentalist forces in Benghazi, between the Muslim Brotherhood and its more-Islamist-than-thou rivals in Cairo, with similar forces contending for mastery from Tunisia to Yemen to the Muslim diaspora in Europe.

Navigating this landscape will require less naïveté than the Obama White House has displayed to date, and more finesse than a potential Romney administration seems to promise. But at the very least, it requires an accurate understanding of the crisis's roots, and a recognition that policing speech won't make our problems go away.

Any questions? 

Comments

[Ruchira]

John, did you read this blog post of mine? You may have because it was among the finalists in a 3 QD politics competition.

http://accidentalblogger.typepad.com/accidental_blogger/2011/02/the-mideast-uprisings-a-lesson-for-strong-men-mad-men-and-counterfactual-historians.html

The Arab Spring may have to first go through a couple of prolonged bitter winters and scorching summers before it segues into a mellow autumn. But who knows? A mix of ignorance, poverty and religion is never a guarantee for text book social outcomes.

[John Ballard]

Wonderful essay, Ruchira. But no, I didn't read it until now. At the time that was written I had embedded myself as far into the front lines as the Internet would allow me to go. The last thing on my mind was US foreign policy and implications for the president. I was confident then, as I still am, that Barack Obama is the smartest, most circumspect, fully informed president we have had in my adult life. Somewhere in the back of my mind I felt he knew everything that was going on and was deliberately keeping hands off (for a change). Every time I saw another report, video or photo of what was unfolding I was amazed that for the first time in my memory we were watching popular revolts, without anybody chanting anti-American slogans or burning American (or even Israeli) flags. The absence of anti-American images was surreal because the regimes being overturned were all sustained by the US!

About that time this is what I was doing. When I was not on an assignment I was glued to the keyboard.
http://www.newshoggers.com/blog/2011/02/sandmonkey-to-israel-chill-.html
http://www.newshoggers.com/blog/2011/02/so-many-links-so-little-time.html
http://www.newshoggers.com/blog/2011/02/yemen-tweets-tom-finn.html
http://www.newshoggers.com/blog/2011/02/libyan-notes.html
http://www.newshoggers.com/blog/2011/02/dark-underside-of-the-libyan-uprising.html
http://www.newshoggers.com/blog/2011/02/the-arabist-reads-the-morning-papers.html

And besides, it was clear by then that Wael Ghonim and the critical mass he had inspired had their hands firmly on the throttles in Tunisia and Egypt and my excitement was palpable. It was like being present at the birth of a baby.