Arab Spring: ‘It’s time to rethink’ US approach to the Middle East, says Kim Ghattas

Kim Ghattas: I remember messaging back and forth with a revolutionary in Egypt when I saw how elated they were that they had actually managed to bring down Hosni Mubarak and they thought about how — this was it, this was a turning point, there was no going back. From now on, it would be freedom and justice and democracy. I said, “Be careful,” because the elation of revolutions are not enough to solidify your gains. Because we had been through a revolution in Lebanon in 2005 when millions took to the streets and managed to push out Syrian troops who had been occupying the country for decades. And that was a huge victory. However, it was almost a Pyrrhic victory because what happened was the Syrian troops were gone, but the system — the deep state — remained.

As I was covering the State Department, I traveled with Hillary Clinton to Egypt just over a month after Hosni Mubarak had fallen. And she met with a group of revolutionaries who had been at Tahrir Square. And she asked them, “How are you preparing for elections?” That was the next big challenge. And the answer from one of them was, “We don’t do politics, we don’t do elections, we just do revolution.” And that was a very telling moment about the huge disappointment that was coming their way as revolutionaries because the army and the Muslim Brotherhood were getting organized for the elections. And we saw the result of that.

It’s a very mixed bag. I think Syria is a very big failure of the Obama administration. And it’s very distressing to see that no officials from that administration have been willing to acknowledge where they’ve gone wrong and what they could have done differently. And it’s very distressing to see [former] President Obama say that him stepping back from that red line that he had drawn about Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons, whereby he said that if that would happen, the US would be forced to strike. And then in the end, he backed out from that.

President Obama described that as one of the best decisions or the one he was most proud of. That’s not how it’s seen in the Middle East — not only because it showed weakness, not only because it signaled that Bashar al-Assad could continue to kill with impunity, but also it opened the door to Russian involvement in Syria. Russian involvement has been absolutely devastating and deadly for the Syrian people.

But the other place where the Obama administration went wrong with Syria is that they gave a lot of vocal support, which made the Syrian opposition think that the cavalry was coming. And then they gave only very little actual support, just enough bullets to sustain the opposition and the rebels, but not enough for them to win decisive victories against the regime.

I find it really problematic to hear American presidents sound defeated when they talk about the authoritarian rulers of the region as though there is nothing they can do about it. They pretend that it’s only because young people rose up that an American president could finally see the back of someone like Hosni Mubarak. These authoritarians are kept in place in large part by American support and by American money.

And I’m not one to blame all of the region’s problems on America — far from it. I wrote a whole book about the responsibility of local regional players like Iran and Saudi Arabia. But really, American foreign policy is about status quo. And it is also a lot about interest. It is about values. And that’s why they support human rights activists and NGOs and give funding to humanitarian organizations and USAID and all of that.

But American foreign policy is also about access to resources, about selling weapons and protecting peace treaties between Israel and some of its Arab neighbors, and protecting Israel’s security. So it’s a bit too facile for American presidents to say, “Oh, well, there’s nothing we can do about these authoritarians.” There is a lot that they can do. And it’s time to rethink the traditional approach to the Middle East, where it is believed that it’s either stability with a dictator or chaos if we allow democratic forces to try to undo a system. It isn’t this terrible binary choice. That’s not the only choice we have. Look at how things are unfolding in Sudan. Look at Tunisia. I think these are great examples of what can happen when geopolitical interests don’t stand in the way of democratic change in these countries.