That money matters not because it will buy the U.S. goodwill -- it won't -- but because it can help stabilize the nascent democracies of the Arab world. The greatest threat to the infant regimes in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen is not religious extremism but economic failure. The Arab Spring has made Salafists more visible, more ambitious, and arguably more dangerous. But it has made many of them more pragmatic. Like the more moderate Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafists have formed political parties and begun, if grudgingly, to practice the arts of political engagement and compromise. Al Nour, Egypt's chief Salafist party, accepts the concept of a civil state, albeit with an "Islamic reference."
Religious extremism could still derail democracy, but we may give it too much weight because it is so obviously "bad for us." The frustration and embitterment of tens of millions of unemployed and currently unemployable young people is a more insidious danger. It is these young men who serve as eager recruits for a mob, and often for jihadist armies. Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen scholar, has suggested that the crowd trying to set fire to the U.S. embassy in Sanaa was drawn from Musayk, the dead-end neighborhood which lies below the embassy and some of the city's finest hotels. Sanaa, wrote Johnsen, overflows with young men looking for an outlet for their rage; last week's attack was "frustration and anger masquerading as protest."
Mitigating that frustration and anger has to be the long-term goal both of the nascent governments in the region and of U.S. policy. I don't know how much hope there is for Yemen, a desperately poor country rapidly exhausting its natural resources and plagued by both domestic rebellion and an American-backed war against an al Qaeda mini-state. Yemen looks like Afghanistan writ small. Still, President Abdu Rabbo Mansour Hadi is trying to serve as a bridge among the country's warring factions; and it's worth noting that two days before 5,000 people stormed the U.S. embassy, a crowd estimated (by one of its organizers) at 200,000 marched through the streets demanding the repeal of legal immunity for the despised former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. That would argue that Yemenis care more passionately about political justice than about illusory affronts to their religious faith.
Yemen is going to be very frail for a very long time; but economic assistance can make a more immediate difference in Egypt and Tunisia. (Libya will soon have enough oil revenue to stand on its own feet.) Of course, outside help will not matter nearly as much as domestic economic policy: the Morsy government will have to dismantle the bureaucratic and regulatory regime which has stifled economic life in Egypt, and ultimately challenge the insidious role of the military, which dominates much of the country's economy. Washington has a role to play here as well: Last month, a team headed by Robert Hormats, a senior State Department official, visited Cairo to discuss reforms in advance of final negotiations over the terms of the IMF loan.
President Obama probably deserves more credit than he has received for reacting calmly to last week's events. It's characteristic of him that he would be overly cautious about embracing the Arab Spring, but also steady in the face of heavy weather. (A Romney advisor has said that a President Romney would attach conditions to debt relief for Egypt.) Right now, Obama has all the political space he needs from an American public whose mind is completely elsewhere. It would become a lot harder for him, or Mitt Romney, to stay the course if the Middle East has another bout of temporary insanity. Is it too much to ask for American crackpots to hold off on the Islamophobia until, oh, 2013?
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