The protests in Cairo are now in their third week, and despite everything that has happened in the furious, violent yet ultimately hopeful 15 days in the Egyptian capital, the bond between President Mubarak's regime and his western allies, the US in particular, appears if anything to be strengthening. Of course, old habits and instincts forged over three decades of mutual strategic interests are not going to crumble overnight. President Obama and Senator John McCain have both been at pains to stress how Mubarak has been a friend to the US and an ally on the questions of Israel-Palestine and Islamist movements. Now, after days of policy being made on the hoof – one minute saying Egypt was stable, and the next calling for change – Washington seems to think that they and Mubarak are out of the woods.
As a western journalist who's lived and reported from the region, the world view and belief that goes into forging this notion is perhaps the most shocking aspect of this whole crisis. The reason is the stark and utterly different ways in which the anti-regime protests in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen are perceived and analysed in the Arab world and in the west. We may all be watching the same live pictures from Tahrir Square or downtown Tunis but they are seen to mean two entirely different things.
In every corner of the Arab world there is the open appreciation that this is a moment in which the world has changed. The Arab governing consensus of the last 50 years is shattered and there is no going back – regardless of what formula, compromise or brokered timeframe is arrived at for "a managed transition", to use the oft-repeated diplomatic euphemism of the moment.
And yet switch on most mainstream western TV channels or open the newspapers and there is still a lot of umming and aahhing: will the Muslim Brotherhood come to power? What about stability in the region? How should the west now deal with rulers who were for so long its allies? How should the west help to bring about transitional bodies, etc ... It sometimes seems that it's not just the autocrats who aren't getting the message of "GAME OVER"; many western governments and analysts don't seem to get it either.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing at such moments, yet you would be hard pressed to find many people who have lived and worked in the Middle East as journalists, diplomats or businessmen for any length of time in the past three decades who would be completely surprised at the social and demographic changes that have produced this political convulsion. The revolutions taking place now in the Arab world, and those that will inevitably happen in the coming months and years have been 30 years in the making.
The Arab world has been undergoing irreversible social change in this period that the west and Arab rulers just ignored. One incredible statistic sums this up: two-thirds of the 350 million people in the Arab world are under 35.
This is a new generation that does not see its own society and the world in the same way that many in the west do. I was in Tunisia during the overthrow of Ben Ali and western analysts were telling me that Tunisia was a one-off and that a country such as Egypt was completely different, with a too-strong security apparatus. Now, analysts are saying that the Egyptian example simply cannot happen in Yemen (because the society is too tribal), that it can't happen in Syria because Bashar al-Assad is not as reviled as Mubarak, and so on.
This generation of young Arabs have grown up in a period where an independent, brave and global Arab media has developed. They are all able to see and empathise with each other's lives: Egyptians know how Jordanians live, Yemenis know how Algerians feel. That wasn't true 20 years ago. Young Arabs see the repression, corruption, dashed aspirations and youth culture that is emerging from Iraq to Morocco – and what's more they are able to communicate about it.
These aspirations, demands and ambitions are universal. They all watch Arab Pop Idol, they all follow their own hip-hop artists rapping about poverty and corruption ... and yes, they're all on Facebook.
Globalisation has also meant that millions of Arabs from places such as Syria, Egypt, Algeria have migrated, worked and experienced life abroad, and they have seen things they want to have back in their own homelands.
This isn't just about the buzzwords of democracy, human rights and free and fair elections. It is about hard-nosed calculations of where our interests in the Middle East lie in the next 30 years. Make no mistake, while this new emerging generation in the Arab world aspires to the western ideal of an open and free life, they have grown up in societies and economies where slowly but tangibly, countries such as Russia, India, South Africa and most prominently China are starting to do business and woo the young entrepreneurs, bureaucrats and diplomats of the Arab world.
A question that has been asked in a whisper around the Middle East in the past five years has been: why always wait around for the west when we have the Chinese knocking on our doors, who don't make us jump through one hoop after another. Just look at where China has got a foothold recently – it's an oil producer in Iraq and Sudan, it has huge interests in Iran and it's heavily engaged and drilling for oil in Ethiopia. I've even met Chinese businesspeople and technicians in northern Pakistan, and on a beach on the Red Sea in northern Somalia, barely three hours' sail from Yemen.
China is gaining firm footholds in the region, and will continue to do so unless we realise that the game is completely and utterly over for those leaders we have relied on for the past 30 years. This new generation will not forgive us for continuing to hanker after aged autocrats whose time is clearly up, instead of going after this new generation who will rule this region. From the Arab perspective, it sometimes looks and feels like the US and its European allies are losing their Middle East hegemony in a fit of absentmindedness.
William Hague is right to be one of the first (if not the first) foreign ministers of a major western power to go to Tunis and meet the still embryonic government taking over from the Ben Ali regime. But it's not just about making these gestures after the event – the whole Arab world has to know that we too are now looking towards the region's future, rather than trying to shore up its past.
Our interest now is to be seen as being a committed friend and supporter of the aspirational movement that is emerging on the streets of Arab capitals. If we drag our feet or seem reticent, we will lose credibility and currency with the new rulers that will undoubtedly emerge in the coming months and years. The strategic cost to us by dithering will be seismic in the long run – and to the benefit of countries like China.
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/08/arab-order-west-rageh-omaar
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