Farewell Syria?

At the beginning of the Syrian uprising in 2011, few were the experts who pondered the disintegration of the Levantine map that the French and British forced into its current shape after World War I.   

Now every other article is pronouncing on the certainty that the modern Fertile Crescent is on the brink of collapse and very likely to bring down with it the entire postcolonial regional setup. Most of the speculation is neither sensationalist nor baseless--nor new. The whispers in fact started soon after the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003 and the country began to dance to the jarring tunes of its discordant pieces. But to have both Syria and Iraq—the two jewels in our Levantine crown—tottering thus is all but killing the logic of containment.

It’s a fool’s errand, predicting the shifting geopolitics of the region. By the week, the picture keeps changing. A few of the supposed constants remain, but, as the past two years have taught us, those can hardly anchor the moment anymore than they can predict the horizon. How well could we have foreseen Recep Tayyep Erdogan’s volte-face with Bashar Assad? How well could we have forecasted the soft coup in Egypt that retired Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi and Chief of staff Sami Annan, announcing the new accommodation between the Muslim Brothers and the SCAF?  How much dare we depend on the constancy of Saudi Arabia’s aversion to the Brotherhood as it watches the emerging Turkish-Qatari-Egyptian alliance drawing strength from it?

And what of this dizzying prospect? The demise of the Assads and the rise of Sunni Jihadism in the Levant transpire. Similarly alarmed, Iran, Hezbollah and Israel, today’s three nemeses, find themselves forming (by sheer providence if not by design) a stealth front against—you guessed it—the new Sunni Crescent. Wild, you think? Welcome to the neighborhood!

Still, not all is a shadow in this fog of politics.

Let’s concede the easy ones, first. That we Arabs have never really stopped conjecturing about the longevity of the map is one measure of the failure of postcolonial regimes in finessing the utter crudeness and fundamental illegitimacy of the original British-French scheme. That our successive leaders would always condemn this particular western conspiracy all while pounding their chests in defense of its progeny only served to show up the dubiousness of what colonialism begat.  

Mind you, the hypocrisy also has been ours as a people. Without even suspecting a hint of irony, we continue to pine for Arabhood, sing for country and swear by tribe and family, happy to swing between our parallel worlds and their parallel identities.

The truth is, however attached or accepting we became of our newfound countries and passports, something about this whole trip never really rang true. If the Levant has, say, since 1920, been the stuff of bad fiction, then ours, as Levantines, has been the lousiest pretense. Given the choice, most of us would probably opt out, even 100 years on--but for this paradox: even those among us who vilify Sykes-Picot and all that derived from it find ourselves rooting for a Syrian solution that respects the very legacy we so detest. Because as arrogant and irresponsible as the initial carve up was, tampering with it would be just as devastating to human life.

Let’s also concede that, in the Middle East, volatility is unusually susceptible to miscalculation or even political lethargy. Ignore a flashpoint or sit on it, and soon enough it might engulf you. More poignantly, spilt blood is the drink of beasts. And Syria today is a river of blood. So, although I have argued here and here that there is no regional or international intent to redraw--or just let it all hang in--this part of the East Mediterranean, we don’t need such like connivance to find ourselves…hanging. Many fault lines—sectarian, ethno-religious, geopolitical…-- crisscross the Syrian war, each a fuse to a powder keg.

Leaving the heartbreaking human toll aside, because it clearly is not figuring in the calculus of any political party, already the struggle for Syria has broken the country’s back. Already Jabhat al Nusra, a Jihadi militia that self-consciously places itself outside the revolution’s umbrella has overtaken the armed rebellion. Already the influx of Syrian refugees into Lebanon is teasing its precarious sectarian politics, while the turbulence is dangerously enfeebling its economy. Already the inrush of Syrians into Jordan is straining the resources of an overburdened monarchy and galvanizing extremists of Jordanian origin. Already the Sunnis of Iraq are feeling emboldened by the possible fall of “Alawite” Syria and challenging their dysfunctional Shi’ite led polity.

Add to these furious elements the restless Kurdish question in Syria, Iraq and, of course, Turkey, polarization between southern and northern Yemen, simmering Shi’ite discontent in Bahrain, Islamist muscle flexing in Kuwait and rumblings in Saudi Arabia’s oil rich (and very Shi’ite) Eastern province and you will have gathered enough of the building blocs of mayhem that could, through any number of plausible scenarios, overthrow the regional postcolonial order.

But it makes little sense to go down that road. There are too many variables you could play any which way you like. It’s more than enough that it is finally in sight. What matters more at this juncture is where Syria, at present, stands.

Two years into the uprising, many ambiguities rule: the actual resilience of the ruling clan, the very private conversations between President Assad and the Russians, the very private messages between him and the Arabs, the degree to which Jihadis could incapacitate post-Assad Syria… But the most elusive dynamic has been that between the Russians and the Americans--not because the two are so far apart, but because, on the substance, they’re so close.

When, in contemporary times, have we seen the US visibly less enthusiastic about supposed allies as it has been about the Syrian opposition? When have we seen it, in the Middle East, this opposed to a regime and yet this sensitive to the costs of removing it? More tellingly, when was the last time the US was happy to give a competitor such political leverage over a critical file? When have we seen it put such palpable pressure on Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to toe the line on an issue this close to their heart and desist from arming and funding the Islamist rebels, especially Jabhat al Nusra?

The bottom line is this: without Russia’s cover, Bashar Assad’s chances drop to near nil; and without the US’s indulgence, however conditional, the opposition is all but mince meat. Hezbollah and Iran can help the Syrian President sabotage their enemies’ plans, but they cannot, on their own, shore him up over the long run. And while the opposition might like to believe that Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey can deliver Syria, the fact is they can’t.

Here’s another bottom line worth keeping in mind: The US, Israel, Turkey and the Arab Sunni countries cannot hope now for a clean victory over Assad. For, oh, so many reasons, not least among them the frightening failure of the opposition to coalesce into a political and military force that is cohesive, sound and reassuring to the many skeptics inside and out, Assad has succeeded in denying his adversaries the pleasure of a relatively tidy and expeditious end to the crisis.

 It’s either a US-Russian settlement on a very complicated and delicate political transition, or unbearable strain on Syria, as Assad finally retreats to a now much cleansed Alawite enclave and the war distills into a Sunni-Shiite conflict that inflames the whole area.

A very reliable rumor has it that the Americans and Russians have agreed to wait until Assad’s term ends in 2014 to kick start the transitional process. Bad idea! This is the right time for the two to come to a formal understanding. Doubtless Syria cannot for much longer bear more high stakes haggling over its head. Doubtless as well that these two powers have milked the debacle for all that it is worth. While Assad, technically, still counts, the US can with considerable gratification declare that a neutered Syria is in hand. But while the country is lost to the Assads, it is not the opposition’s for the taking.

Whether it intended this “win-win” equation, the seeming Russian and American impasse could easily take credit for making it happen. So, whatever Putin dearly wants that Obama is not willing to cede—and clearly the list transcends Syria, reaching perhaps as far as Europe’s oil and gas pipelines—the time is now to make a deal. Because from here on, especially for the US and its Middle Eastern allies, Syria’s anguish may well become their own.

As I was writing this post, I recalled this precious snippet of history:

On December 1, 1918, two years after the Sykes-Picot agreement, the British and French prime ministers got together for a chat at the French Embassy in London.  According to the note taker, the conversation went something like this:

Clemenceau opens: "What do you want to talk about?"

Lloyd George declares: ‘Mesopotamia and Palestine.’

Clemenceau: ‘Tell me what you want?’

Lloyd George: ‘I want Mosul [in Iraq].’

Clemenceau: ‘You shall have it. Anything else?’

Lloyd George: Yes, I want Jerusalem too.’

Clemenceau: 'You Shall have it.'[1]

Afterward, we are told, Lloyd George was heard muttering to himself, "Mosul has oil. Palestine is Holy Land; Syria, what is Syria?"[2]

Lloyd George has his answer now.

---

[1] Jeremy Wilson’s Lawrence of Arabia, p. 589.

[2] Zeine Zeine’s The Struggle for Arab Independence, p. 57. Footnote no 38.

The Kindness Manifesto

The ever so talented J. V. Shepperd, a great friend and a woman of wisdom, shared with me her manifesto at the dawn of 2013. I asked her permission to let my readers in on it, and she kindly agreed.

What if we all owned a safe and comfortable house in a village where humanity was sacrosanct and the community robust from the benefit of every resource at work on the elimination of disease, the provision of clean water and defense of the world peace we take for granted? 

Our towns could be the infrastructure of whole states and countries whose battles are fought with and over words, sentence structure, placement in the line.  A conquest between poets, or patterns and colors of light splashed on the concrete walls of our enduring structures.  The enemy's wounds and our own would be painful, unforgettable, perhaps a salve in our eventual healing but never fatal.

War's prize is communication with the booty of shared wisdom.  Let the entire nation rejoice in the beauty that one city can make over another. And if language is the construct that shapes what we are, our words would define, compel and invent us, and outside the walls of our civilization "destruction" is left on the pavement, idle, empty and unable to kill, where it proves no threat to an unknown future of unformed and magnificent ideas that can't be splayed across a classroom in the dead brains of formerly growing minds.

Fear, hatred and its cruelty are sheathed by intelligence, tolerance and the inability of ignorance to take the day.  Religion isn't our difference but our celebration and borders aren't east west divisions with covetous lines but passageways.  Savagery is not in the lexicon by noun or engagement. 

And if our laws provide us with allegiance - it is to meaning and theory, not to the practice of what already exists. Because improvement is a constant democracy that we owe to our children.   

If it's true that only crazy people believe that they can change the world, then let's be crazy and change. 

And in the 2013 months to come let's hold ourselves in check to the things that we could say in favor of goodwill that just may become the default in silence, and make kindness our quiet declaration.

Don't Peep at Egypt Through the Keyhole

This is what Professor Mona al Ghobashy had to say back in August about the revolutionary push and pull in Egypt:

Until the people attain a reliable voice within the state, the logic of popular politics will continue to disturb the designs of elites. The uprising was the booming opening salvo in this engagement, putting paid to Mubarak’s hereditary succession scheme. The next casualty was the Brothers’ short-lived plan to share the presidency with the SCAF, undone by the conflicting interests of the principals and the rise of maverick outsiders like Sabbahi and Abu al-Fotouh who captured the people’s imagination and a considerable share of their votes. Future presidential elections will be similarly charged episodes of real competition, with insiders seeking to regain their hold on executive power, outsiders rattling at the gates and Egyptian voters as the arbiters.

Last week, Egyptian protestors stormed Cairo’s presidential palace, literally “outsiders rattling at the gate.”  What has been extraordinary about Al Ghobashy throughout the Egyptian crisis is her real feel, as a scholar with astonishing rigor, for what is at stake in this fight for Egypt. While most presumably seasoned observers have been busying themselves with Islamist versus liberal collisions, a contrived slice up of Egypt that distracts as much as it misleads, Al Ghobashy has put pen to wound: the unremitting struggle to force open the hitherto shuttered political arena and break the elite’s tight hold over the country’s unfolding participatory politics.

Reducing the current crisis to little more than a tug of war between an organized Islamism with an electoral mandate and a contingent of disparate liberal groups with some revolutionary credentials is akin to peeping at Egypt’s agony through a keyhole. And to argue, in the name of an even keel, that each side has its legitimate grievances, misunderstood motives and lamentable shortcomings is to miss the entire point of the uprising and to misdiagnose the reasons that are refusing for it to quiet down—not in spite of but precisely because of the army and the Muslim Brotherhood’s best efforts to wrap things up.  

In this vein, unanimous non-Islamist rejection of the exclusionary methods which underwrote the draft constitution and outrage against Mursi’s decree impregnating the presidency against judicial oversight were expressions of real and perfectly justifiable fears that the proverbial gate was shutting down again. And when the Muslim Brothers failed to bend non-Islamist will, compelling the group to resort to militia-like behavior—lethal threats, batons and shotguns galore---which was of a piece with other incidents of naked bullying, cynical opportunism and overreach, suspicions hardened into convictions.

Why mince words? In this defining struggle, there is no room for hedging about the principle of the matter and conjecturing about stark clear actions that have no need of interpreters. The moment is not politics as usual, and the disagreement is not about garbage collection. Jason Brownlee’s take--astoundingly in MERIP of all publications—that "Mursi and the Brothers are overseeing an autocratic transition due to their structural position, not because they are inherently more autocratic than any other group,” betrays breathtaking ignorance at all levels of Egypt’s quandary. It flies in the face of historical precedence and assumes that the MB’s deftness in exploiting the mechanics of democracy somehow cancels out its utter contempt for the fundamentals of it. If Islamism, whatever its shape and where ever it reigns in the Middle East, has proven adept at anything it is in riding on the shoulders of democracy towards autocratic governance.  

To be sure, dissent is growing within Islamism, the Muslim Brotherhood included. These audible rumblings reflect, in fact, the very success of political Islam in Islamizing societies across the region and exposing itself in the process to the hard tests of life. For a while now, everywhere in the region, discourse has been taking shape around the place of civic rights and pluralism in the politics of Islam. But such pursuits do not yet attest to the MB’s recognition of the mood of our times and its decision to play catch up.  So far, in fact, these post-Islamist trends have by turns embarrassed and angered the group rather than persuaded it to embrace aspirations larger than its own.  That is why every open MB dissenter is actually an ex-member.

And that is why the Brotherhood’s latest battle cries for “the rise of Islam and the rule of the Quran,” and against secularists and heretics, atheists and degenerates, feloul (remnants of Mubarak) and autocrats, have been at once offensive and purifying: in one go, the organization has managed to vilify a faith-filled opposition and many pious Egyptians beside, while offering in blunt punch lines the essence of its plan.  Suddenly, the distance between the Brothers’ rhetoric and actions is all but wiped out.

The chants from the other side --“Egypt is not Iran. Egypt is not Ikhwan…I am not a heretic and I am not an atheist”—are in their own way, eloquent ripostes to the Brotherhood’s unyielding dogmas and a nod to history’s toll. Don’t discount the language of the streets as mere venting in a furious climate; it is almost always the one through which the real story is told.  To buy into the fiction that Egypt’s is a conflict between liberals and Islamists is to sleep through the real faceoffs: that between “outsiders” pressing to get in and “insiders” trying to keep them out; equally, that between Islamism and its post-Islamist progeny. And many are the threads that bind both.

If it were just the so-called liberals wreaking this havoc, the game would have been over a long time ago and President Mursi would not have had to scurry from his palace’s backdoors, let alone rescind his constitutional decree. Had the MB held a solid majority of the electorate, then the argument against illiberal majoritarian democracy would have been compelling enough (see Michael Wahid Hanna’s piece in Foreign Policy). But the helplessly convoluted and flawed electoral process that inflated parliamentary representations and Mursi’s razor thin 51% leap into the presidency are themselves cautionary tales against sloppy interpretations of popular mandates.

This sloppiness most likely stands behind the MB’s latest miscalculations and explains its rage against grassroots resistance. The sloppiness that continues to diminish the quality of many an analysis which take election outcomes at face value, neglecting to scrutinize the electoral rules that are designed to distort actual electoral heft and probe the deeper meanings of the tally. Had Mursi and his party undertook such an exercise, they would not have pounced upon the presumed openings that their electoral victories appeared to give them. Then again, maybe they did precisely that, saw what Al Ghobashy sees, and, as is their wont as practiced opportunists, moved to grab as much as they could in the race for Egypt.

In trying to sink deep their anchor in the country’s post-revolutionary politics and join the ruling elite, it has been paramount for the Brothers, who neither provoked nor lead Egypt’s revolution, to ride the good will or acquiescence of constituencies much bigger and more diverse than theirs. Today, they have the parliamentary system on their side, the presidency in the bag, a deal with the military, a draft constitution peppered by key clauses, the very vagueness, even seeming innocence, of which is intended to ease the ascendance of Islamist interpretations. Not bad!

But these trophies have come at a huge cost for the Islamist movement, none more damaging than having to spell out its intentions, show its true colors and bare its teeth way too early in a game that has just started. 

No Need to Speculate Anymore about Tunisia's Ennahda and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood

We are all very grateful to Tunisia and Egypt's Islamists for swiftly--and with astonishing rigor--settling a decades' long debate about Islamism in the Middle East.

You would have thought, with a map long dotted by Islamist regimes of every breed, that there wouldn't be much to disagree about by now.  At a minimum, the Iranian (1978--), Sudanese (1989-), Afghani (1996), Turkish (2002) and Gazan (2006-) examples--not to mention the 80-year-old Saudi kingdom--have been extremely helpful guideposts to the intentions and methods of Islamism, however diverse the orientation of the parties that thrive in this rich ecosystem.

Indeed, the most instructive lesson of these patterns in Islamist-governance--be they monarchical, militaristic, clerical, Talbani, Sunni, Shiite, brotherly, parliamentary--stems from the one essential feature that unites them:  in every single case, with the exception of Turkey, they were unhindered by pluralistic political traditions and unchecked by countervailing state institutions; and in every single case  they dug deep an extremely oppressive mode of rule. That's not a matter for conjecture, that's a matter of fact. Notably, when, by 2010, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had finally managed to defang Turkey's once fearsome secularist military and judiciary, his authoritarian inclinations asserted themselves, appreciably degrading the country's democratic credentials. In a candid moment, during a recent private meeting with regional and international businessmen, Erdogan likened Islamism's commitment to democracy to “catching a train. When you get to your station, you get off.”

And yet as heavily as the balance sheet weighs against political Islam, debate was still raging as Ennahda and the Muslim Brotherhood moved to assert their dominance in their two countries. There is a good reason for this--a no-brainer, actually.  Ideologies always come under stress when they descend from high theory into mundane practice. Trust life to mock the absolute certainties of the zealous. And trust  our religiously zealous ideologies to make a mess of things, trivializing the divine by shoving it everywhere in the muck of humanity and its factional politics where it most assuredly was never meant to belong.

Hence the advent of post-Islamism! Well before the Arab eruptions, discussion had been increasingly focused on post-Islamist trends, those necessarily emanating from the success of fundamentalist movements in ensconcing themselves in the state and/or society almost everywhere in the Middle East. The friction between the purity of dogma and the complexities of human problems had tested Islamism's promise, exposed its shortcomings and tarnished its appeal. Inexorably, it brought into serious doubt the wisdom of forcing religion to legislate politics.

Dissent within the camp--most potent from the once most ardent--began to challenge Islamism's knack for reactionary explanations of the word of God and his prophet and looked to long violated civic and human rights to redress the dangerous lopsidedness in the message. By way of a case study, there is none more telling than the Iranian one, but retreats register everywhere fundamentalism holds the levers of power.      

For a while now, Islamist intellectuals no less than rights activists have been pushing for more dynamic interpretations of Quranic texts and a more discreet role for religion in public life, one that recognizes and respects the presence of the Other and the vitality of pluralism to the health of, first and foremost, Islam itself.  The call, then, has been for a serious reform of Islamism, lest the people finally boot it out  entirely. As Akbar Ganji, an early follower of  Khomeini and subsequently one of Iran's most celebrated human rights defenders put it, "Ideologizing religion opens the way for a totalitarian system, and by its tendency toward violence, war-mongering, and restricting freedoms, it inevitably encourages secularism and apostasy..."

And so, when, in 2011, the Arab revolts rocked Tunisia and Egypt, the chatter naturally centered on the degree to which their Islamist parties had absorbed the lessons of their own history and those of their Middle Eastern cousins. More importantly, since the uprisings had energized long smothered polities, the main question became, Will Ennahda and the Muslim Brotherhood respect, even embrace, pluralism and citizenship as the basic precepts of the two emerging  democracies?

Well, we can stop the incessant speculation now. Let's not beat around the bush, throwing about the ifs, buts and maybes that are designed to make of  hope a compelling argument. The bottom line is this: precedence counts, actions count. Words don't, unless they are juxtaposed against actual deeds for authenticity.

So far, Ennahda and the Muslim Brotherhood's tenures indicate that they are loyal bona fide members of the old club.  While the Ennahda government struggles to solve people's severe economic problems with recipes as hard to digest as Ben Ali's, Rachid Ghannoushi is caught on camera privately counseling Salafis to be patient, for their day in the sun will come. Meanwhile, NGO reports are methodically highlighting policies or omissions that are eroding various canons of democracy.

As for Egypt's MB, its performance on questions that are central to the health of the democratic process--from ill-disguised flouting of non-Islamist propositions in the assembly charged with drafting the new constitution to President Mohammad Mursi's latest bid for extraordinary powers--has been at once clumsy and blunt, giving ample ammunition to its detractors while leaving its apologists looking like chumps. In this vein, the input (or rather output) of former senior MB members, such as Shawkat al Kherbawi, about the group's tactics, power struggles and ultimate aims has been especially educational. What's more, it does not look like the Brothers will be able to point to any quick economic wins anytime soon to quiet raging hearts.

That neither Ennahda nor the MB have yet routed Tunisia and Egypt's democratic forces should not be put down to lack of intent. There's plenty that the two players could have done to reassure society at large of their genuine commitment to diversity and civic values, especially since neither party walked away from the polls with sweeping mandates. Issandar el Amrani's commentary in the National on President Mursi's latest move nails it:

Were Mr Morsi a beloved national leader of the stature of a Nelson Mandela, he might have pulled it off. But he is the backup candidate of an organisation - the Muslim Brotherhood - mistrusted by many of his countrymen. He was elected (narrowly) by a coalition brought together by the fact that his opponent was worse.


Perhaps the most illuminating finding since the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings is not how well Islamist organizations have evolved but how visibly intolerant civil society has become of their antics. This is not to underestimate their tenacity or skills. They may well be succeeding in weakening institutional resistance to them--in this area, they have always been at their most talented. However, it remains to be seen if post-Islamist realities have taken deep enough root, as advocates claim, and if the countercurrents are strong enough to temper Ennahda and the MB's ambitions and significantly clip their wings.

Judging by the push back we are witnessing as I write, Tunisians and Egyptians are signaling that no one--least of the Islamists--has the benefit of their doubt. And how right they are!          

On Obama and the Middle East

The Ever So Inspiring Vexing Obama

How many times did we hear it said around the world, in 2008, that Barak Hussein Obama is the new president of the new America?

It isn’t just the fresh African-American heritage and its mix of Christian and Muslim blood that had the crowds rhapsodizing in ecstasy. It’s that he harks from the old colonies and yet inhabits Rome so comfortably; the education, the worldliness, the sophistication, the very sharpness of him and—here comes the whopper—that he’s so self-satisfied and superior. Unnerving as that made Obama to many Americans, it actually added that extra halo over him among his foreign admirers.

Once sold on the résumé, it was very easy for his partisans to make the leap from profile to policy. For them, the compelling logic went, Obama’s style of leadership and conduct were bound to be as transformational as his person.

It was thought, who better than this American president to refashion the purpose and use of power in a world that seems to be walking briskly towards a radically different era. It isn’t just that emerging centers of influence—all non-western—have been giving the old club a run for its ideas and money. Technology’s innovations also have been chipping away at the deep-set walls between center and periphery. Civil societies have been bypassing their governments, forging transnational links and making robust common cause. Even capitalism itself, already sullied by the IMF and its neoliberal agenda in the league of developing nations, was taking a battering in much of the West by 2008. To boot, the US was finally showing the serious strains of its military and financial excess.

It helped, of course, that, in the endless battles between imperium and its foreign dominions, indigenous grit, facing overwhelming military might, stood its ground and occasionally won. In this movie, Vietnam ran like a preview of things to come.  

And so came Obama on the heels, we must never forget, of a frighteningly insular man called Bush, with a frighteningly adventurous troop. Thus the hope, the clamor and the Nobel Prize. The expectations of many Americans (and otherwise) were that the change would be dramatic, loud enough for us to hear the crusts of international politics shift.

Truth be told, plenty were the skeptics, none more than President Obama himself, enumerating the constancies that belied the fast-moving trends. His very own Oslo speech, upon receiving the Nobel peace prize, waxed eloquent about the seductiveness of lofty ideals once tempered by the irresistible logic of power politics.

Amongst us Middle Easterners there’s always been fury—as there should be—at an atrocious US track record that could stretch as far back as President Woodrow Wilson’s failure to offer more than lip service to the constructs of democracy and self-determination that graced his famous 14 points. President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning to England, France and Israel to withdraw from the Sinai in 1956 is a very lonely moment when American interests coincided with Arab ones.

And yet, however deep our outrage, it’s not every day that we get to hear a politically savvy thinker, like Hamid Dabashi, bemoaning an American president thus: “Oh, how deeply did he betray that hope! He coulda been a contender!" We are very much in the habit of taking offense at American violations of our national integrity or disregard for our political yearnings, or, worst of all, its collusions that tear at the very fabric of our lives. Rarely do we criticize an American president for disappointing our hope in him, since we were conditioned a long time ago not to entertain such silly sentiments.

It took an Obama to rekindle the poetry. So, going back to Dabashi: Obama “coulda been a contender” for what exactly? 

Although he doesn’t quite say it, I suspect Dabashi was hoping that this American presidency might usher in an age of imperial enlightenment of a sort, watershed achievements like a juridical withdrawal from Afghanistan, a palatable peace treaty in Palestine, a more balanced policy towards Iran… Overall, a concerted effort to shorten the distance between the US’s high minded Jeffersonian principles and its hard-edged interests.

Just to be clear, as mindful as I am of the absurdity of pairing imperialism with enlightenment, my tongue was nowhere near my cheek when I was writing the above paragraph. The proposition that a retrenching US must reimagine itself in the region—to show more suppleness and farsightedness in pursuing its interests--is one that has been made by policy makers and critics alike. Leaving the very fundamental but elusive matter of justice aside, the rationale is that, notwithstanding blunders like Iraq, it might seem like the US has not done too badly over the past century, standing as it does now alone, with all its previous rivals nearly vanquished or snapping at its coattails. But the cumulative effect of its connivance with and/or indulgence of the Middle East’s most reactionary and predatory countries (Israel included) has been ruinous to the prospects for stability that the US needs most today as it retreats and pivots towards more pressing spheres.

Judging by the hyperbole in Dabashi’s lamentations, Obama’s record so far—at least for his betrayed fans--is more than disappointing. The kill lists, the soaring number of drone-strikes and other such like loathsome prerogatives of empire shock, while “servility” to Israel infuriates. Needless to say, the US’s reliance on multiple yardsticks in navigating the current Arab uprisings—quick uptake in Tunisia and Egypt, firepower in Libya, silence on Bahrain, studied reluctance on Syria…—have invited the usual cries of foul play.

But the truth is that Obama’s tactics point to tentative departures from old policies and new frictions with longstanding allies that have translated into openings for those of us playing on the opposite side of this perennially dirty game of geopolitics. He predictably gave way on Yemen and Bahrain, but rebuffed Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah on Egypt’s Husni Mubarak, moved swiftly on Tunisia and is still derailing Qatari and Saudi efforts to arm Syrian insurgents, quite a few of whom are extremely unattractive Islamists.

He has yielded to Israel, as any American president would, on Palestine, but he has stubbornly and effectively resisted it on Iran. One could argue that Israel’s unusually audacious efforts to manipulate great power interests on an issue much bigger than its size—even if it is such a “special” friend--were bound to fail. But the art of Obama’s diplomacy, which publically mined Israeli dissent as much as it capitalized on the US’s sheer heft is not lost on Netanyahu and his camp—it certainly shouldn’t be lost on the rest of us. And double standards do pervade the cocktail of sanctions against Iran, but I’d be interested to hear a serious counterargument on the better path of war from other than those whom history has already proven insane.

Clearly, Obama is not thinking of the good people of the Middle East when he insists on flexibility in this very uncertain climate. And he might well be embracing alliances with forces, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which might be as averse to a freer, more democratic politics as the old regimes. But precisely because of the fluidity of the times and the US’s dimming star, Obama has had to listen harder and watch carefully the swing of the pendulum. We should all remember that one of his more intriguing qualities is how well he manages to unsettle his supposed friends.

And since Dabashi himself describes the man as a mere opportunist, the hint for our opinion leaders to quit the outrage, take the opportunity, catch up with the grassroots and help make irreversible and resounding our newfound vibrancy.

In one of the more lucid takes on the “bewilderingly diverse and ferocious energies” recently unleashed in the Arab region, Pankaj Mishra, one of the more robust public intellectuals seguing between East and West, posits that the revolts are but the latest manifestations of a century-long struggle by the people of Asia to wrestle themselves free of Western domination. The US, no less than the colonial powers of old, has long resisted, at a huge cost in resources and lives, this trajectory. Even now

Republicans calling for President Obama to ‘grow’ a ‘big stick’ seem to think they live in the world of Teddy Roosevelt. Liberal internationalists arguing for even deeper American engagement with the Middle East inhabit a similar time warp; and both have an exaggerated idea of America’s financial clout after the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s.

 If the main question before us is whether the final push towards a “post-Western era…will be as protracted and violent as Europe’s mid-20th century retreat from a newly assertive Asia and Africa,” it is certainly arguable that an opportunist at the White House is all we need to manage the transition with the least damage possible. When we breathed a sigh of relief at the reelection of Obama, did we not phew with that in mind?