Washington and the Undemocratic Arab Spring

Has the U.S. begun to worry yet about the trajectory of what is called the Arab Spring, and what is in truth a “fundamentalist winter”?

After more than two years of Arab revolutions or uprisings — which the U.S. has supported, nurturing them from behind the scenes, perhaps — it appears Washington is concerned, confused and pessimistic about the future of these countries where things have developed, as we have seen.

In the U.S. Department of State’s annual report on human rights, we find that Washington has become more pessimistic than last year; in the text of the report, we read, “The hope of the early days of the Arab Awakening has run up against the harsh realities of incomplete and contested transitions.”

These words might seem confusing: Did Washington help create these upheavals and assume control of them in one way or another, or did they catch it by surprise?

Perhaps scholars, investigators and others who follow what happens in Washington, specifically in August 2010, noticed the extremely important presidential directive that Obama sent to all executive agencies to prepare for changes they were to see in the Arab world. What happened, happened, so where is the surprise the Department of State talks about? Or was the directive carefully prepared and planned to cause divisions?

Whether Arab failure or U.S. conspiracy, the end result is that they have begun reporting, “The transition to democracy in the region will not be linear, and there surely will be setbacks.”

Why Are People Not Shocked by the Department of State’s Report?

Evidence shows that the day after the U.S. secretary of state submitted the report to his department, he emphasized the idea of apostasy or setbacks in support for democracy and human rights in the transition states — such as Egypt, Libya and Tunisia — accusing their governments of dragging their feet on securing the rights of marginalized populations (i.e. minorities) in the course of establishing democratic institutions.

John Kerry’s ringing statement contradicts and ignores his position during his recent visit to Cairo, where he closed his eyes to the killing of more than 40 Egyptian citizens in one day. All he saw was the Muslim Brotherhood’s progress toward democratic government, which counts numerous Egyptian religious and political groups as “personae non grata.”

The U.S. government’s pessimism is a model that calls for a new reading, a reading between the lines, of the American view toward the movements called the Arab Spring. Will Washington bet on the losing horse in advance, even though there are other options besides fundamentalist movements in the region?

Taking the Egyptian model as an example, the analysis may lead us to understand that the American mentality has held contradictory ideas for a long time.

It is a fact that, after some 30 years of friendship between former President Hosni Mubarak and Washington and important strategic services provided to a number of administrations from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama’s, the U.S. government unethically and improperly abandoned him through the testimony of Henry Kissinger, the most famous fox of U.S. strategy.

But it is the American way to abandon friends for the sake of one’s own interests? What’s more, this comes after they had lost trust in Washington, being aware of the mechanisms it had used previously in its relations with leaders of allied nations.

Washington Chose To Bet on the Muslim Brotherhood; What Was the Result?

The result is Washington’s puzzlement about Egypt’s bet on Mohamed Morsi and the Brotherhood after a faltering start to the desired American-style democracy. Why is it puzzled now?

It is puzzled simply because there is a large and clear disparity between the nominal and official values the U.S. has announced and the pragmatic mechanisms through which Washington seeks to achieve its goals in Egypt, whether around cooperation on minority issues, women’s rights, protest laws and freedom of expression, or in the Brotherhood’s sectarian rhetoric.

Ten months of Brotherhood rule in Egypt have confirmed what Professor Emile Nakhleh, former senior official in the CIA, described: He believes the fears and suspicions of Arab secularists, liberals and non-Brotherhood Muslims that as soon as the Brotherhood came to power through elections, it would block democracy and replace it with its special version of theocratic rule.

Has Washington’s Pessimism Made It Change Its Methods for Dealing with the Most Pressing Issues in the Region?

Take a look at the Syrian case: What do you see?

The rhetoric now revolves around supporting the “moderate opposition” rather than the Syrian revolutionaries or al-Qaida-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra; this indicates the direction of the rudder has changed in the hand of the navigator, the U.S.

However, the impact from changes in states where radical factions have come to power has been a disaster, not just a minor incident. So, did Washington really want this chaos, or did its predictions betray it as usual?

Either way, it is the people of these countries who are the real losers.