Wow, that was fast! M. and I were just talking last night about how we’ll know that the suddenly invigorated democratization trend in the Middle East is real and irreversible when the intelligentsia begin to argue that it was inevitable (as opposed to impossible, the conventional wisdom up to this point in time). And here, this very morning, is a NYT Times editorial laying the ground work already, by concluding: "The wonder is less that a new political restlessness is finally visible, but that it took so long to break through the ice."* The news article in the Chicago Tribune this morning deployed the alternate strategy of attributing all apparent progress primarily to the death of Arafat, with the Bush Doctrine trailing distantly as a secondary influence.
OH YEAH BABY! It’s all good.
It may all yet come to nothing, but this could turn out to be the point at which it was all over but the shouting, too. M. and I were also talking about how truly mysterious this sort of thing can be. We are both Cold War babies and grew up with the assumption that the Soviet Union would always exist, and that there would always be a Cold War, unless somebody screwed up and destroyed the planet and everything on it. And then you’re watching on tv about crowds gathering outside public buildings in Moscow, and Yeltsin addressing one of them over a bullhorn, and waiting for the tanks to roll in as they had in Prague. But they don’t come, and don’t come, and, at some undefinable moment, POOF, no more Soviet Union. I still don’t understand how that happened, exactly, how consensual reality just suddenly changed like that, in a way that utterly deprived the existing government of any power; how only consensual reality could have been holding all of that up in the first place, and why it had failed now and not in 1968. But a genuine anti-government protest in a country occupied by Syria that not only 1) occurs at all, 2) has thousands of participants, and 3) results in an actual change rather than a massacre should have been completely impossible, but somehow wasn’t. That may very well be the paradigm shift, right there.
Belgravia Dispatch has an email from a guy who was circulating and talking to the protesters in Beirut last Friday, btw. (And what looks like a nice round-up of responses to these developments in subsequent entries, but I haven’t read through it yet.)
*I kid, but the NYT editorial is actually pretty good, and summarizes all of the significant events thus far. I noticed that the Michael Jackson trial was the lead story on CNN.com all day yesterday, and a spectacular local murder trumped the story in the Trib this morning, so there’s a possibility that not everyone is really getting how astonishing the last few days have really been.
Update: Woot! M. found another one, employing a slightly different approach. All hail the paradigm shift!
Update 2: M. adds: Today's "Worldview" on NPR is must-listening for a cavalcade of people falling over themselves not to give more credit to the Bush administration or the Iraq election than absolutely necessary. (As the interviewer asked each subject whether American foreign policy was responsible for what was happening, I was reminded of Reverend Lovejoy's "...ooooh short answer yes with an if, long answer no with a but...") They very much wanted to make sure that everyone understood that this didn't mean that people in Lebanon/Egypt/the occupied territories liked Americans or George Bush. (Because otherwise, you know, the average NPR listener would naturally assume that we're beloved by all.) Highlights include the Lebanese newspaper editor whose comments amounted to "all right, maybe-- maybe-- things were sped up a little by events in Iraq and the presence of an American army across the border from Syria, but is it really important who might or might not be able to take credit?" and the Egyptian analyst (IIRC, an Egyptian professor at an American university) who was saying "well, elections will be good if people wind up voting on the issues, but if it all becomes a marketing campaign like elections here in the US then that's not really much of an improvement." Because, after all, there's no difference between an autocratic tyranny and a liberal democracy, right? And could you help me move these goalposts a little further that way? I smiled all the way to work-- if this is the level of quibbling from NPR's experts, then maybe we really are winning.
But perhaps I'm not being fair in my paraphrases-- memory and interpretation are tricky things. The show should be up on "Worldview's" site shortly. (It'll be the March 1 show) Judge for yourself.