Arab Street

A.D. in Basra reported that voters flocked to the polls amidst thick fog in that city, with turnout levels exceeding 84 percent at some polling centers and voters feeling safe enough to walk "in masses down the streets flying Iraqi flags and chanting for democracy in Iraq." (Other reports say turnout is about 80% in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown.) A.S. in Najaf toured 10 polling centers and quoted voter Ali-Hassoon al-Badri who said "electing our representatives is a basic right for everyone and it is not a gift from anyone." N.R. in Mosul reported that as the voting deadline drew to a close, "substantial numbers of people [were] coming to the stations" to vote, while Mosul's police command volunteered to drive in voters who lived at a distance from the polls. W. Z. reported from Erbil that one polling official was so happy with the vote "I can't even feel tired." A.T. in Babil reported, humorously, that an election official refused to let Babil's governor cast his ballot "until he showed his i.d. card," and some polling places broke out soft drinks while men and women voters sang celebratory songs. And in Hilla, A.T. reported, the city council provided 125 buses to take voters to the polls.

My, my. What kind of "Arab Street" is this? Not that anyone needs to be interested, but here's my take on where we are, and how we got here:

Five years ago, the most popular name for newborn male children in Indonesia and many Arab countries was Osama, and American flags were being burned all over the Muslim world. American interests, from embassies to ships, were being attacked with approval and impunity. The Arab Street was widely feared as a rumbling volcano, poised to erupt in a fury of militant Islam that would plunge the world into a nightmare of religious and cultural warfare. Al Qaida seemed to be everywhere, growing in boldness and attracting fighters by the thousands to its ranks, all dedicated to the destruction of the West in general and the U.S. in particular. Our retreat from Somalia was touted by bin Laden as emblematic of a U.S. grown decadent, lacking in resolve and cultural confidence, a superpower in name only, a spent case.

A great many foreign policy experts believed that the only realistic way to meet the Islamist threat was through a strategy of negotiation, accommodation, and coexistence, on the model of Cold War detente with the Soviet Union. The attacks of September 11 convinced Bush of the folly of that kind of rational approach with an irrational enemy, and he rejected it in favor of a much more idealistic and long-range alternative. The alternative combined a strong faith in both the power of capitalist economics and the necessity for political pluralism, together with an Enlightenment view of the nature, and the natural rights, of all human beings. It came, in other words, straight out of America's 18th-Century playbook, buttressed by the successful post-WWII remaking of the defeated fascist powers and by the negative example of communism's failure every place it was imposed. Bush's idealistic approach was widely characterized in intellectual circles, here and abroad, as naiveté or, better yet, as the product of his famously simple and unreflective mind. He went ahead anyway, while most of our traditional allies took a pass, or worse.

Barely four years after our invasion of Afghanistan, that country is a fledgling democracy and Osama sits largely silent in his cave, the upper echelons of his jihadist forces with few exceptions dead or in custody. The mighty tyrant, Saddam Hussein, sits humiliated in an Iraqi courtroom, his army destroyed, and his sons dead. Terrorists still plant bombs, but they are a remnant, their opportunity for historical significance gone. As ordinary Muslims recognize that the Islamist future offers nothing desirable, its appeal has dwindled to the fanatical few. There are clear signs that the Arab Street, from one end of the Muslim world to the other, is beginning to place its hopes on democracy. We are seeing, I think, the early stages of an epic historical-cultural shift.

One indicator is that America has gone from being the primary target of vilification, scorn, and hatred among Arabs to the grudgingly and reluctantly acknowledged bearer of hope for a radically different and more hopeful future. This is really more a stunning reversal than a shift, because five years ago every major tendency and all the momentum was strongly in the opposite direction. No aspect of this reversal would have happened on its own. It required a fundamental reorientation of American foreign policy, and the unflinching assertion of that policy in defiance of a corrupted UN and major countries whose financial interests made them allies of the Hussein regime. Whatever his shortcomings, Bush got the One Big Thing of our times right, he got it right from the beginning, and he never wavered.

America has now fought two wars on Muslim soil, remaining as infidel occupiers for some period following. And yet, despite that, we have managed to come into alignment with the Arab Street: the newly transformed one reflected in the quotes above that is clamoring for democracy and economic development, the one serving notice to every tyranny and faux democracy in the region, the one that represents the future. This new and improved Arab Street is a truly revolutionary force, and it's being created, expanded, and mobilized by what we are accomplishing in Iraq. That was, of course, the primary strategic purpose of our going into Iraq in the first place; even so, on any scale of probability, it is a remarkable and extraordinary outcome.

As an example of enlightened foreign policy and the judicious use of military power, nothing since the Marshall Plan comes close to the scale, difficulty, and importance of this attempt to move the tectonic plates of the Muslim world. There are many setbacks, false starts, and years to go. But a corner has been turned. As far as the opponents of this effort go, I think history is about to run them over from behind.

Byron