Out of the frying pan...

It is the Lockean view that people get the government they deserve, formulated as a response to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, where King James II fled his kingdom never to return. For Hosni Mubarak, decamping to Sharm el-Sheikh can only be a staging post on the route to exile (unless Israel sets up a protectorate in Sinai with him as ruler to stop anyone opening the borders with Gaza – as one member of Likud said yesterday, the Jewish state has always looked to its own security rather than rely on some treaty or other). For the masses of Egypt, they have a new government, but it bears more resemblance to William III’s rule than democracy. Whereas the Nasserist state was part military, part civilian, now an Army Council is in complete charge – they used to call such councils juntas. In fairness, the army is overwhelmingly popular in Egypt (despite losing two wars with Israel with two more indecisive) and in absence of any prominent leaders emerging from the protestors, someone had to take charge. There is no Lech Walesa or Vaclav Havel in the crowds. But military men have a poor record of setting up democracy (witness Fiji or Myanmar) and then staying out of it (see Turkey and Thailand). Moreover, in Africa, political rights are fragile, if they exist at all.
I agree with Sir Malcolm Rifkind (and William Hague) with the call that Israel needs to be less bellicose in its language, for that will only antagonise the Arab street of those autocrat rulers who are pliant to Western concerns, but I disagree of his choice of targets next on the list as Syria and Libya. I myself thought of this as an Arab 1989, to have it confirmed by John Simpson, Timothy Garton-Ash, Sir Malcolm and indeed innumerable other analysts – it’s like when that cargo ship ran aground off the south-west coast of England and I thought ‘Whiskey Galore!’, as a million others had exactly the same brainwave.
We saw with the so-called Green Revolution in Iran last year that states with a strong security apparatus and implacable leaders don’t fall, in Tommy Cooper’s phrase, ‘just like that’. 1989-91 was only possible because while the instruments of repression were available, the leaders (with the exception of Ceaucescu) had no stomach for turning the guns on their own people, either because they were reformist or fearful of the consequences if they did turn to violence. In Romania, the army turned on their dictator and his hated Securitate. In Egypt, they had a wobbly neutrality.
Syria is a bête noire of the USA and Libya has always been maverick – they have little to lose if Washington disapproves of their repression and, like Habsburgs in the Netherlands in the 1550s, a timely display of force has stifled opposition baying for change. Egypt though is one of the key cultural hubs and the most populous nation of the Arab region. It will embolden the original instigators of this zeitgeist in Tunisia to continue with what they have started and hearten others to think if Egyptians can do it, so can we. I was surprised to see protests in Khartoum, given that the regime there in Sudan is not flavour of the months in the West, but incidents have now been seen in an arc from Mauritania through Algeria, Jordan to Yemen. The latter is particularly weak as it was already battling both an Islamist insurgency (when is a war not a war – when it’s an insurgency) and a separatist uprising; on the verge of being a failed state, were the long-time leader to go the result may be less happy than along the Nile.
Israel can’t complain if the peoples of neighbouring countries want to choose their own governments – it has long bragged of being a shining democracy in a sea of autocracy to justify nationalist policies. Peace with Israel may be unpopular in Egypt and Jordan, but politicians with legitimate mandates in Cairo and Amman will not necessarily tear up international treaties. The absence of the death penalty in the UK is unpopular with much of the electorate here, yet the sanction is still banned as a form of judicial punishment. And indeed Tel-Aviv is detested by many Turks, yet Ankara, though recently hostile, has not begun a conflict on the back of that. Any real fear is not that Egypt and others will be another Iran in 1979, but an Algeria in 1992, when the military cancelled elections that Islamists (who ironically cared little for democracy) were about to win, prompting a backlash that led to tens of thousands dying in the uproar during the years that followed. People get the government they deserve. For the moment, it is military. Who knows what will follow?