Democratic Thoughts Run Through the Arab Land

This is an excellent opinion piece written by Youssef M. Ibrahim.

(Excerpt)

Poke around conversations in the cafés up and down Dubai’s creek, the gold souks of downtown Jeddah, or in the privacy of a million homes across the vast Arab landscape and you might hear good things being said about the US President George W. Bush.

Intellectuals, businessmen and working class people alike can be caught these days lauding Bush’s hard-edged posture on democracy in Arab lands, cheering his irreverent handling of Middle Eastern rulers who are US allies as he puts pressure on them to hold free elections, release political prisoners and open trade.

And, it is very much an open secret that millions of ordinary Arabs openly embrace Bush’s unvarnished threats against Syria should it fail to pull its soldiers and spies out of Lebanon before the elections there next month.

It may not add up to a love fest for Bush in Arabia as much as it is a celebration by exponentially growing numbers of Arabs of their own liberation.

From Casablanca to Kuwait City, what Bush says mirrors, reinforces and, in fact, reflects what has long been in the heart: A yearning for human rights, justice, freedom, rule of law, transparency, limits on power and women’s rights. In short civilisation as we know it today in the 21st century.

The call for these most basic of rights has been murmured for a long time, but a confluence of events starting with the Arab satellite revolution of the past decade to the most recent assassination of Rafik Hariri on February 14 has transformed it into something resolute.

Its intensity differs vastly from country to country, but a common feature underpinning everything is the lifting of that fear which for decades has constricted the Arab mind.

People, men and women, are less worried about getting hurt or arrested than about conveying what is on their minds.

Regardless of Bush’s intentions - which many Arabs and Muslims still view with suspicion - the US president and his neoconservative crowd are helping to spawn a spirit of reform and a new vigour to confront dynastic dictatorships and other assorted ills in the Greater Middle East.
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Comparisons are being made between the pictures coming out of Beirut and the scenes from Tianamen Square sixteen years ago.

Around 100,000 students in Beijing led peaceful demonstrations in the spring of 1989, demanding democratic reforms. The Chinese government used overwhelming force to suppress the pro-democracy supporters. The violence resulted in hundreds dead and thousands injured.



Now, the same spirit of reform that fueled the Tianamen Square demonstrations is snowballing in the Middle East. It's not 100,000 students who are demanding freedom in Beirut. It's 1,000,000 people of all ages from all areas of Lebanon.

According to Ibrahim, the people have been emboldened in part due to "Bush's hard-edged posture on democracy."

"Free societies in the Middle East will be hopeful societies, which no longer feed resentments and breed violence for export. Free governments in the Middle East will fight terrorists instead of harboring them, and that helps us keep the peace. "

--George W. Bush