Advancing a Free Society

The Arabic word shamata has its own power. The closest approximation to it is the German schadenfreude—glee at another’s misfortune. And when the Twin Towers fell 10 years ago this week, there was plenty of glee in Arab lands—a sense of wonder, bordering on pride, that a band of young Arabs had brought soot and ruin onto American soil.

The symbols of this mighty American republic—the commercial empire in New York, the military power embodied by the Pentagon—had been hit. Sweets were handed out in East Jerusalem, there were no tears shed in Cairo for the Americans, more than three decades of U.S. aid notwithstanding. Everywhere in that Arab world—among the Western-educated elite as among the Islamists—there was unmistakable satisfaction that the Americans had gotten their comeuppance.

There were sympathetic vigils in Iran—America’s most determined enemy in the region—and anti-American belligerence in the Arab countries most closely allied with the United States. This occasioned the observation of the noted historian Bernard Lewis that there were pro-American regimes with anti-American populations, and anti-American regimes with pro-American populations.

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On the face of it, the similarities of the undoing of the terrible regimes of Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gadhafi are striking. The spectacles of joy in Tripoli today recall the delirious scenes in Baghdad’s Firdos Square in 2003—the statues pulled down, the palaces of faux grandeur and kitsch ransacked by people awakening to their own sense of violation and power, the man at the helm who had been full of might and bravado making a run for it, exposed as a paranoid and pretender, living in fear of his day of reckoning.

In neither case had the people of these two tormented societies secured their liberty on their own. In Baghdad, the Baathist reign of terror would have lasted indefinitely had George W. Bush not pushed it into its grave. There had been no sign of organized resistance in that terrified land, not since the end of the 1991 Gulf War and the slaughter that quelled the Shiite uprising.

Libya offered its own mix of native resistance and foreign help. A people who had been in the grip of a long nightmare saw the Arab Spring blossom around them. On their western border, the Tunisian kleptocracy had fallen and the rapacious ruler and his children and in-laws had scurried out of the country. Ruler and ruled in Libya saw themselves in the Tunisian struggle, for Gadhafi had been an ally of the Tunisian strongman.

But it was Egypt, the big country on Libya’s eastern frontier, that shook the Libyan tyranny. In February, after a popular insurrection that held the Arab world enthralled, Hosni Mubarak bent to his people’s will and relinquished power. Six days later a spark caught fire in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city. A reluctant American president was pulled into the fight. Gadhafi’s fate was sealed—NATO would function as the air force of the rebellion.

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(photo credit: The U.S. Army)

Who, today, does not thrill to the spectacle of freedom in Tripoli? A brave people, civilians in the main, exiles who returned to their devastated country, students with no military skills—all headed to the front in their pickup trucks to reclaim their homeland from a tyrant who had turned it into a laboratory for his mix of megalomania and derangement. These are the people who have made this rebellion.

It was not perfect, that campaign that upended the kleptocracy in Tripoli. NATO did not always perform brilliantly. The Obama administration didn’t have its heart in that fight. We second-guessed the rebels in Benghazi and their intentions at every turn. We would not release to them sequestered Libyan funds that could have leveled the killing field and brought the fighting to a close a good deal sooner. A new doctrine was spun to justify American passivity: "Leading from behind," it was called.

But all this can be taken up at another time. Suffice it to see the brigades of freedom make their entry into Tripoli. How can those of us in lands of freedom resist a giddy sense of satisfaction that the tyrant’s favorite son, Seif al-Islam, is now in captivity? It makes for poor governance in our world to label your own people "rats" and "traitors." After years of fear and submission, the people had gone out in an assertion of their dignity.

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In the manner of all momentous rebellions, the Syrian upheaval has been rich in iconography and lyrics and political language. A people long repressed have come out to give voice to what has been on their minds for four decades of silence. One placard read, “Like Father, Like Son,” to remind themselves, and their ruler, that they have been in the grip of this tyranny for far too long.

But the truth of it is that Bashar al-Assad, though in every way heir to his father’s despotism, lacks the guile of the old man. Hafez Assad bent things to his will but had a knack for avoiding terrible storms. He was the quintessential survivor, alternately playing arsonist and fireman for three long decades. He was an Alawite, from a historically persecuted community of peasants, and thus tread carefully, keen on avoiding a sectarian war. Not so with Bashar, the entitled prince, who has now set off what is, for all intents and purposes, a civil war within Syria, and in the process left his regime a pariah among nations.

It was a moment of reckoning for the regime of Bashar Assad when the Saudi monarch, King Abdullah, recalled his envoy from Damascus and spoke out against the “killing machine” in Syria and the regime’s brazen brutality. A day later, from Cairo, the grand imam of Al Azhar, Sheikh Ahmad al-Tayeb, arguably Sunni Islam’s most prestigious religious authority, called on the Syrian rulers to desist from facing unarmed protesters with “live bullets and iron and fire.” His followers should no longer, he said, remain silent “in the face of a human tragedy that can’t be accepted religiously, when we know that the shedding of blood only increases the ferocity of rebellions.”‘

Continue reading Fouad Ajami’s Wall Street Journal op-ed…

(photo credit: Maggie Osama)