Has the phrase "teachable moment" become cliched, yet?
Barack Obama has signaled that he intends to use restraint in handling the surge of uprisings in the Arab world. I don't know whether or not Obama fears being guilty of further imperialism or fears being accused of being guilty of further imperialism. His restraint is justified by a respect for the autonomy of the that "other" civilization. It is true that it is axiomatic to liberalism that assistance can be rendered without interfering with the autonomy of the assisted, as Leon Wieseltier pointed out today. There is much cynicism about liberal intervention and the capacity for disinterested or benevolent intervention. This comes from a legacy of Vietnam and now the Global War on Terror.
Bush used democracy promotion as an ex post facto "pretext" for involvement in Iraq. And democracy promotion become a strategy Afghanistan under the technical moniker counterinsurgency. But fewer serious analysts familiar with the facts on the ground see inchoate democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The uprisings in the Arab world stem from multifactorial causality, like all complex human events on a large scale. But fundamentally they are anti-authoritarian movements. To call them democratic movement is to make the western mistake of associating all anti-authoritarian uprisings or popular movements with democracy. In the recent history of the West such movements and uprisings have been democratic. Anti-authoritarian resistance can occur under auspices other than democracy.
Do not equate the exertion public will with democracy. Democracy involves technicalities. It is a special case of a popular movement. But public will is more general than democracy. Arabs are perfectly capable of imposing tyranny on themselves, just as the citizens of Athens once were. The ambivalence of natural human tendencies and the desire to live in an unnatural state of righteousness are capable of creating religious orthodoxy amongst free people, so long as the true believers are among them.
The justification of restraint now is not to avoid interference with the natural course of events and subvert the autonomy of the Arab world. The justification is to teach ourselves a lesson about the complexity of popular force. When we see popular uprisings, they are not acting in the spirit of our Founders, and we are not looking at our reflection in looking at them. I don't think we implanted a germ of libertarianism in the Middle East. Nor are the examples from our history necessarily instructive for them. In fact, there is as much anti-Americanism in their midst as anti-authoritarianism. Their anti-Americanism is not just anti-imperialism, but it is against the culture of the west as well. They may well be pessimistic about the prospects of democracy merely because it is our way.
Our guiding principles in the region have been keep the oil flowing and keep the masses under control. That's the exhausted set. But if the Middle East and North Africa emerge as an empire of Islamists built on popular force, we may be able to see a potent alternative possibility. We may be able to define ourselves in contradistinction to them. We may be able to build a moral core on the difference in principles that we see. And we can be aided an abetted in that by the fact that we no longer are responsible for buttressing dictatorships for our own cynical concerns, though we cannot extract our historical influence from the present state of affairs--and that is a point that should not be glossed over. We can be less responsible for the state of the future than we were for the state of the past. Having the State department continue flirting with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is not the way to do it.
And for our distance we may learn something we have not learned in the past about the nature of free people, that we are merely a species of free people and what we have become may have been as much circumstantial as a product of the power of public will. We can learn about our own democracy by being able to define it as a species in the genus of products of human freedom. But this will take powerful restraint.