In English, they say "the devil you know (is better than the devil you don't)," and there is an equivalent expression in Arabic, "the misfortune you know…" Today, the young people who have risen up in every Arab country want change, and the rulers claim that they are planning for change, while the United States, Europe and the entire world supports change in our countries. If I can rely on the experience of the first 100 days of the Arab revolutions, I find that the change has been against the interests of Arab peoples in each country. However, this is not a final judgment. There is still time for reform to achieve what we all want, for the good of our countries. The Arab rage has also been termed the "Arab spring," even though it began in Tunisia around the end of the fall, and succeeded in Tunisia and Egypt in the winter, and stalled in the spring. But we are now in June, the last month of the spring; I give hope more of a chance than despair, and I await something good without being greedy. It would be enough if this month sees the nightmare of Moammar Gaddafi lifted from the Libyan people. In a previous article, I compared between the Arab revolutions and earlier, momentous revolutions. I focused particularly on the 1848 revolution in Europe, which began with great promise and ended in failure. Since that article, German Chancellor Angela Merkel compared our situation to the fall of communism in 1989, and recently, President Barack Obama made a comparison between our revolutions and the American revolution and the Civil War; he compared between Mohammed Bou Azizi and Rosa Parks, the African-American who refused to give her seat up on the bus, and launched the American civil rights movement. The Obama administration has tried every possible policy vis-à-vis the Arab revolutions. The White House remained neutral when it came to the events in Tunisia, and supported Hosni Mubarak until the Egyptian Army abandoned him. It spoke with extreme caution about Bahrain and is undertaking military operations against Gaddafi; Washington has supported Ali Abdullah Saleh, against the presence of al-Qaida, if not against the Yemenis as well. The current policy is one we heard from Obama in his speech at the State Department last month, when he said: "After decades of accepting the world as it is in the region, we have a chance to pursue the world as it should be." Is change in the Arab world in America's interest? Democracy and free elections will benefit the Arabs, but they will certainly produce anti-American (and anti-Israel) results. The Palestinian elections are a clear example of this; the White House insisted on them and they were won by Hamas, which the United States classifies as a terrorist organization, while we consider it a national liberation movement. If free elections were held tomorrow (in Tunisia they take place next month and in Egypt in three months' time), they will unfold based on the make-up of the individual country in question. Egypt has sectarian tension and Iraq and Bahrain have a sectarian struggle, while in Yemen and Libya the struggle is tribal. In Tunisia there is a division between the coast and the interior; the election results will reflect these particularities and elections, if held tomorrow, would lead to civil war in several countries. My personal hopes remain on Egypt. I expect it to awake from its current setback to lead the march, even though I believe the economic situation in the country is dangerous. The Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram expressed this in a red banner headline, "Talk of Egypt's Bankruptcy is Fiction," which means that the possibility exists. There is chaos in terms of security and hardened criminals have escaped from prison; there is news every day about their crimes. I believe we are seeing labor pains. I hope the elections are won by people who want freedom of opinion, and not just freedom of their opinion. While I am worried about the Salafi movement and its intellectual backwardness, I am confident in the wisdom of the Muslim Brotherhood. They have 80 years of experience in politics. If they win in the elections, I hope that Egypt will have an Islamic-oriented government in the manner of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, which enjoys wide popularity. On 12 June his party won a third term after benefiting from the experience of Necmettin Erbakan, whose Islamism frightened the Turkish army, which brought him down. I urge the Muslim Brotherhood to benefit from its experience as well as that of Turkey, so that we can see an Egyptian Erdogan, and not an Erbakan. [email protected]
