The USA Ought to Avoid Meddling

The temptation to demand more active American support for the opposition to Mubarak in Egypt is legitimate, but something that the U.S. ought to resist. The revolutions in Tunisia and now in Egypt are popular revolutions, which have begun without American intervention, and on this road they must continue.

Those who would see more active American support to the opposition against Mubarak ought to ask themselves a question: Who would benefit? The U.S. has nothing to gain from taking a more active role in the events, and the last person the people who are revolting in Egypt want to listen to is an American president.

The West is facing a new situation. We are faced with popular revolutions that have no explicit leaders. In Tunisia, the people showed that they could — in less than a month, through demonstrations and without support from the West — oust a regime with an enormous security apparatus. The first subsequent demonstrations in Egypt therefore had the following slogan: “Tunisia is not better than Egypt.”

The message from the popular revolution in Tunisia was as clear as daylight for the people in Egypt: “If Tunisians can, so can we. We don’t need to rely on anything else but our own strength, and neither the USA nor any other power can stop the revolution.” Active American meddling or rhetoric against Mubarak would be like shouting before a deaf mob. The only effect such rhetoric could have is negative. It would create a feeling that the USA has lost control over the situation in the Arab world and therefore wants to win back influence and steer the revolution.

The USA’s history in the Arab world is complex. The USA has been able to rouse both feelings of hatred and inspiration. Many of the Arab world’s foremost intellectuals have found their new homes in the USA after fleeing from oppression. The superpower remains a dreamland for many educated and unemployed youth. After Israel, Egypt is the country that receives the most support from the USA, both militarily and economically.

But the USA’s support of Arab-world dictators has also engendered feelings of tremendous rage. Money has been used for enlarging police forces and security apparatus, two institutions hated by the people. The loathing directed toward American support for these regimes has been so extensive that even a person like Saddam Hussein, who played the anti-American card, was honored in the Arab world. In the summer of 2003, I traveled as a tourist to Tunisia, and many Tunisians reacted strongly when they heard that I was from Iraq. “You are from Saddam’s land! It’s like a bad dream that his regime has fallen. We love Saddam!”

The USA’s attempt to distance itself from Middle Eastern dictators and actively, through the so-called domino effect, democratize the region with the overthrow of Saddam has both stimulated and impeded the democratization of the region. Dictators realized that they must initiate reform in their countries and that they could no longer blame the misery in their nations on the West. A wave of reports and independent investigations into the Arabic nations’ difficult economic and political conditions were published and became accessible to the public. However, at the same time, advocates of democracy in the region have been associated with George W. Bush, the bloody war in Iraq and the occupation.

What we see today is a popular rising without American interference or control. A word that has resounded louder than any other during the Tunisian revolution has been karaamah, which in Arabic means “dignity.” Arabic culture regards a person’s dignity to be priceless. Should one lose their dignity, he or she is lost. Perhaps dignity in Arabic tradition can be said to have equal significance to an attack on freedom in the Western world. In the word karaamah resounds a person’s rights and value — the right to a dignified life, education, work and political participation.

The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt are about people who have lost their karaamah and want to reclaim it. It is about the more than 30 million Egyptians who live below the poverty line. It is about educated, unemployed youth who dream of the future, but know that only a minority who are close to power can live out their dreams. It is about engineers and teachers who must moonlight as taxi drivers to support themselves. And it is about the notion that the Arab world is the region with the least freedom in the world.

Those who want a more active American role ought to bear the following in mind: It is about Egypt now — not the USA.