A Challenge to Obama and the "Arab Spring"

Islamic radicalism has returned to challenge the United States, the president’s policies and the new democratic governments that have emerged from the popular uprisings.

Islamic radicalism, obscured during the last few years by the vigor and nobility of the “Arab Spring,” has now returned to challenge the United States in style, particularly the policies of President Barack Obama, and by extension the new and still weak democratic governments that have emerged from the popular uprisings. This challenge, whose result is still undecided, coincides with Obama’s moment of greatest weakness, a few weeks from the elections, and right in the midst of the definition of the course toward which the Arab world is directing itself.

The attacks on North American and Western embassies and symbols which began Tuesday and has spread to over 20 Muslim countries from North Africa to Asia, let up yesterday after numerous acts of violence that left various people dead, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya. They created a feeling of anarchy in some large capitals, such as Cairo, and triggered worldwide alarm. If the protest movement contains itself here, its consequences would be limited: yet another disturbance in a naturally agitated region. But if it reproduces itself and carries on over several days, it could end up having considerable effects, as much in the countries affected by the protests as in the U.S. electoral process.

The attacks began with the excuse of a video posted since June on YouTube which claims to be the trailer of a nonexistent movie in which the figure of Mohammed is seriously denigrated. The video proceeds from the substrate of the nation’s subculture where provocative elements of the extreme right are stirring. It is a coarse and semi-clandestine product that, obviously, does not deserve more attention than what the fanatics that put it into circulation want to pay it.

But there has been sufficient opportunity, coinciding with the anniversary of September 11, for the extremist forces of the Islamic world to send a message that they have not disappeared. The death of Osama bin Laden, the end of the war in Iraq, the beginning of withdrawal from Afghanistan, and above all, the taking of Arab streets in recent years by much more diverse and reformist forces had created the illusion that radicalism was buried. The recent protests, symbolized in the raising of an al-Qaida flag at the U.S. embassy building in Tunis, have served to remind that it is not so.

However, with all the concern that these events have generated, not all of what has occurred in recent days is reason for pessimism. First of all, one must take into account the dimensions of the protests. According to the accounts of various correspondents, the groups that attacked embassies or burned flags in no case exceeded more than a few hundred; nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands that occupied Tahrir Square and other plazas in the region over weeks or the prolonged heroism of Syrian combatants.

More significant yet is the reaction of the governments involved. The Libyan authorities have already detained those considered guilty of the murder of the four U.S. officials, avoiding, perhaps, the U.S. Navy having to carry out justice on their behalf. From Tunisia to Yemen, those nations’ security forces, now obeying the orders of democratic governments, have employed themselves energetically to avoid more violence, something that, generally, they have attained. In Egypt, after a day of vacillations, President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood roundly condemned the protests and prevented them from becoming greater.

The case of Egypt is particularly important, because it deals with the country that has up to now been the most important U.S. ally in the Near East and where the most Islamist party of the entire Arab Spring governs. For Washington it is entirely a challenge to maintain relations with the country on the level of a close collaboration.

Therefore, radicalism is faced with the challenge of impeding it. The Arab world finds itself at the difficult crossroads of advancing toward the Turkish model, where democracy lives side by side with a modern vision of Islam, or religious fundamentalism. U.S. foreign policy also is at stake in this bet.

Obama supported the greater part of the Arab revolutions, with the exception of the uprisings in the Gulf, and has deposited in the governments born of the uprising all of his hopes that the U.S. can maintain its influence in the region. It is a labor much more complicated than buying the loyalty of a few dictators. But it also is much more profitable in the long term.

The democratization of the Arab world is the only definitive guarantee of stability in the region. Its construction is a titanic labor that, surely, will take years and is going to encounter multiple obstacles. Events like this week’s provoke dismay and give arguments to fatalism or to those who view Islam as incompatible with democracy and modernity. But it would be illusory to think of the transformation in the Near East as a fluid and tranquil process. The extremists, who previously justified themselves in the fight against the militarism of George Bush, now will have to openly show themselves against the progress of their own people, however many movies they rely on.