With uprisings stalled, for now, in Bahrain and Syria, it appears that North Africa's revolutionaries -- first in Tunisia, and then in Egypt and Libya -- have been the most successful of the Arab Spring. At the same time, despite early rumblings, revolution remains highly unlikely in Algeria and Morocco.
COMMENTS (7)
More...
What these three more successful revolutions have in common besides geographic proximity is the presence of popular Islamist movements that now enjoy a once-in-an-epoch chance to govern. But "the Islamists," though largely perceived as monolithic in the West, are in fact quite different from one another. Whereas the leadership of Tunisia's Ennahda -- which took nearly 42 percent of the vote in Tunisia's first post-revolutionary elections last month -- has managed to incorporate both a French-style gender equality code and a liberal interpretation of sharia law into its platform, some Islamist hardliners within Libya's Transitional National Council (TNC) appear keen to establish polygamy as a means of social control. And while both these movements are committed to obliterating the remnants of the old regime, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is increasingly allied with a reconstituted military dictatorship.
Though close in terms of geography, the upheavals in these countries stem from disparate conditions and promise varying outcomes. Indeed, these states are dissimilar enough that a significant threat to their future is that the West may apply a cookie-cutter approach to all three. Four years ago, Robert S. Leiken and Steven Brooke observed in an article in Foreign Affairs, "U.S. policymaking has been handicapped by Washington's tendency to see the Muslim Brotherhood -- and the Islamist movement as a whole -- as a monolith." There is little to indicate that the present administration has manifested a new outlook. To the contrary, statements from influential policy circles have done little to challenge the notion that the Brotherhood, for example, is one movement with a unified transnational agenda.
To the contrary, in recent congressional testimony on the Brotherhood from Robert Satloff, the director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, there is a not-so-subtle statement about a coherent international agenda: "The Brotherhood is a profoundly political organization that seeks to reorder Egyptian (and broader Muslim) society in an Islamist fashion."
While this statement may be true in that it highlights a general ambition of Brotherhood franchises in all Arab countries, it is the distinctions, not the similarities, that stand to help the United States pinpoint the opportunities for engagement -- and the think tank does not appear to have devoted sufficient resources to identifying them.
In Libya, where the armed insurgency, now poised to gain political power, the new leadership contains veterans of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which, though now disbanded, was an ally of al Qaeda. Though the group's primary target in the nineties was the Qaddafi regime itself, statements by its former leaders, including Libyan rebel commander Abd al-Hakim Belhaj, indicate that the movement considers itself to be part of a broader international "jihad." He adopted the language of al Qaeda in referring to the United States as "crusaders." After the 1998 American missile strikes in retallion for the al Qaeda East African embassy bombings, the LIFG released a statement decrying the attacks and essentially calling for vengeance.
SUBJECTS:
(7)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE