Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

( first published 4th of March 2011)

North Africa and the Middle East are needless to say, in the middle of a once in a generation set of events that have already led to the downfall of two regimes with a third in Libya hopefully to follow. The most noted and quite rightly applauded characteristic of all of the recent uprisings is that they have been internal revolutions led by the people and the grass roots democratic movements of those countries. It seems finally that the masses have stood up to their tyrants with amazing results. Talk of a repeat of 1989 is featuring in the public domain and one wonders if more regimes fall how long it will be before commentators begin to reach into the attic dust off and then resurrect that all too fateful term ‘the end of history’.

Even if not everyone is getting quite that far ahead of themselves and sales of John Lennon’s Imagine aren’t making too dramatic a comeback, at least we can all agree on the point that US led Neoconservative style regime change has expired as a method of liberating the peoples of the Middle East from dictatorships which they are proving perfectly capable of doing themselves with many fewer casualties. Or can we?

Once the waves of euphoria die down and the situations in both Egypt and Tunisia are re-assessed we have to confront some disappointing truths. In both cases only the head of the regime has been removed and in its place has arisen the all too familiar faces of the close associates of Ben Ali and Mubarak. In the case of Egypt the new acting president, Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, is a lifelong friend of none other than… you guessed it, Hosni Mubarak. The expert judgement of Robert Fisk on the situation has already forewarned of a short period of relaxed government followed by the introduction of emergency power acts and there is little so far in the history of the Middle East to suggest otherwise. Maybe this is where Roger Daltrey and The Who can be credited as being a superior musical accompaniment to these events, rather than Lennon, with their lyric ‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss’.

So if Robert Fisk is vindicated within the next year or so, we will still be looking at an Arab world with only one functioning democracy, that infamous neoconservative creation, known as The Republic of Iraq. This begs the question of whether removing more than just the head of a regime and restructuring the power institutions of the state, as the case of Iraq, is our most effective tool so far for bringing credible democracy to the Middle East than popular uprisings? Could a people’s revolution have succeeded in Saddam’s Iraq? The whole sale slaughter of both the Kurdish and Shia opposition during his reign and the forced dispossession of the Southern Marsh Arabs sadly suggests otherwise. Should we also have left Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Kuwait to the method of people’s revolution? And aren’t the Libyans currently deploring Western inaction?

I sincerely hope that the argument of this article is proved wrong, but just in case of the unlikely event of history repeating itself, which has been known to happen, we should not be so quick to right off the neoconservative method. I am aware that this article might have a rather repulsive ‘the empire strikes back’ feel to it for most anti-war readers. However, they still have their work ahead of them if they wish to forge a viable alternative, splendid isolationism or shouting war criminal at heads of state not being options.