If you had a problem you wanted fixed, you went to the top. I can't tell you how many times I either heard or said myself: "Get the chairman, call the president, contact the king." What was brewing at the bottom was not deemed to matter all that much given how dependent we had become on the top.
Much of this world is now gone. The rest may yet be redefined and changed too. The Arab kings have fared considerably better than the presidents of the phony republics. Oil wealth in some cases, Islamic legitimacy and more enlightened policies in others, have spared the royals for now and given them more time to figure out how to adjust and survive.
Still, the proverbial bell may yet toll for them too. Challenges abound. The Saudi rulers are sclerotic and aging. King Abdullah is 89; Crown Prince Nayef is 79 and ill; and even Minister of Defense Prince Salman is no spring chicken at 76. The Saudi youth bulge is underemployed and increasingly unhappy.
Next door, egged on by the Saudis, the Bahraini royal family represses rather than reforms; and without the sure hand of his father, Jordan's King Abdullah is facing an increasingly unhappy East Bank constituency angry about corruption and their own dwindling perks. Only in Iraq, untouched by the Arab Spring, does the strongman of yesteryear in the person of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki seem to live on, though in a much more constrained form.
So what are the consequences of an Arab world bereft of powerful authoritarians? Four stand out in particular.
1. Not enough 411.
In the new Middle Eastern Oz, we don't know much. The advantage of dealing primarily with one guy was that you didn't have to know much; alternatively, with only one real wizard, you thought you knew more than you did. One strongman was good enough, particularly if he was seen to be working for you. We became pretty chummy with all these guys. Traveling with secretaries of state, we always went to Cairo first to consult with our good friend Hosni. Successive CIA station chiefs had very close personal relationships with the king of Jordan. There was little need to delve deeper, and it was a risk to do so. Indeed, in Egypt, we were actively discouraged from cultivating contacts among the Islamists and other opposition figures.
Now, reliable information on who's up and who's down in Egypt is much harder to find. Who's really in charge? And who are the prospective comers among the military and the Islamists? Whether there's a charismatic and ambitious younger military officer with a broad base of support or ties with the Islamists waiting to emerge is both a fascinating and worrisome question. And we really know very little about the decision making of the secretive and highly disciplined Muslim Brotherhood, and even less about the Salafis.
In other places, like Syria and Libya, acronyms (SNC, Syrian National Council; FSA, Free Syrian Army; TNC, Transitional National Council) have replaced the big men. That wouldn't be so bad if these groups were cohesive and well-organized. But in the case of the external Syrian leadership they're not. The United States Institute of Peace's Steven Heydemann, who follows these matters closely, talks of the SNC as an umbrella organization with an executive committee of about 10, a general secretariat of 35, and a General Assembly of maybe 300, plus an additional 11 bureaus whose membership isn't well known. Inside Syria, the situation is even more confusing and opaque. Insurgencies are by definition loosely organized. But the relationship between those armed elements doing the fighting and the Free Syrian Army, nominally headquartered in Turkey, is not at all clear when it comes to chain of command or formal affiliation. And we know very little about foreign fighters or al Qaeda's presence. Joseph Holiday, whose report "Syria's Armed Opposition" is about the best study on the subject, admits that his research was based largely on reports on YouTube and other opposition media outlets.
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