Thursday marks a bitter anniversary in the Arab world. On Dec. 17, 2010, a Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after the authorities confiscated his goods and beat him.
The incident sparked an uprising that within weeks would topple Tunisia’s venal autocracy.
Despots from Morocco to Mesopotamia felt the heat of popular anger. Many couldn’t withstand it.
Yet today the Middle East is less stable, and less hopeful, than it was before the Arab Spring.
Five years ago, the denim-clad, smartphone-wielding Arab liberal became the region’s avatar.
Now the knife-wielding jihadist and the refugee have risen to prominence instead.
...How did dreams turn into nightmares?
The standard account has it that by crushing or co-opting opponents, secular autocrats like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak empowered Islamist outfits that were the only remaining channel for dissent.
Once the dictators fell, the liberals were quickly sidelined as Islamists and remnants of the old order battled for dominance.
...The biggest Western misstep was to treat the quest for freedom as somehow separate from the contest for geopolitical mastery.
In Egypt, the Obama administration was likely powerless to prevent the pro-Western Mr. Mubarak’s downfall, but the White House in the subsequent months did little to shape the outcome of the revolution.
Washington favored all actors equally, as though Egypt were Luxembourg and the Muslim Brotherhood just another center-right party.
In Libya, the U.S. removed Moammar Gadhafi under a legal abstraction—the responsibility to protect—then swiftly abandoned a country with few viable institutions to its tribal furies.
In Syria, President Obama declared that Bashar Assad “must go,” and then watched impassively as the Iran-backed tyrant continued to kill and gas his own people, triggering a refugee crisis that has overwhelmed Europe.
The slaughter has continued for nearly five years.
In the long term, the most perilous consequence isn’t the birth of a terror state stretching across Syria and spilling into Iraq but the destruction of U.S. credibility..."
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