Amin Shalabi looks at the assumptions on which US scholars are basing their readings of developments in the Arab region In the aftermath of the 11 September terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, US research centres and think tanks came under attack for their failure to predict these events and for their inability to gauge the situations in Arab and Islamic societies. Not only had the Middle East experts in these agencies failed to appreciate the socio-political dynamics that gave rise to militant Islamist trends in those societies, they had completely misdiagnosed the terrorist acts that had taken place in countries such as Egypt, which they had chalked down as local incidents that showed no indication of evolving into a global phenomenon. Today, Arab/Islamic world specialists in the US are once again feeling the heat, or at least cringing with embarrassment, this time for their failure to predict the wave of revolutions that has rocked the Arab world and for the erroneous premises and assumptions that underlay their assessments of conditions in the region up to the eve of these events. Political science professor Gregory Gause is one of the scholars who the Arab Spring has galvanised into a form of introspection with regard to their perspectives on the socio-political forces in the Arab world and their relationship with ruling regimes. In a discussion, in Foreign Affairs of July/August 2011, on democratic transformation and its connection to the fight against terrorism, he acknowledges that not a few voices in the US academic community had urged Washington not to encourage democratisation in the Arab world because the authoritarian regimes that were America's allies were safer bets for the future. Moreover, many cautioned that if democratic regimes did arise in the Arab world they would not be likely to cooperate towards the realisation of US goals in the region. But what are the assumptions on which US scholars based their readings of developments in the Arab region and of the relationship between ruling regimes and their societies? The first is that the ruling regimes had constructed military and security edifices strong enough to put down any domestic uprising and, because of the intimate interconnection between the regimes and their security apparatuses, the scholars presumed that the latter would never take an independent course of action. The Arab revolutions put paid to these assumptions. With the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, in particular, US Middle East experts suddenly woke up to the fact that they had lost sight of the role of the army in Arab politics. While they had devoted considerable attention to this dimension in the 1950s and 1960s due to the succession of military coups in the region, the overall stability that Arab regimes had sustained since then led scholars to imagine that the army was no longer a crucial political factor. These scholars presumed, secondly, that the economic reform programmes combined with accumulated wealth from oil revenues had enabled regimes to offer sufficient social and economic services to sustain domestic stability and offset political protest movement. Again, the Arab revolutions, especially in such non-oil producing states as Tunisia and Egypt, belied the premise. Although the economic reform programmes pursued by these two countries managed to stimulate relatively high growth rates, they ultimately succeeded only in creating a very narrow and flagrantly wealthy entrepreneurial class that became closely intertwined with the ruling class. At the same time, there was very little trickle-down effect among the broader public. Economic reform thus proved to have the opposite of its supposed intent: it generated widespread anger and frustration, as a result of which the nouveaux riche took the advantage of the first opportunity to smuggle their fortunes abroad when they realised they could not stem the rush of the revolutionary tide. Clearly, US experts proved unable to properly assess the impact of the economic reform policies adopted by Arab regimes or of how grossly these policies would be misapplied. Thirdly, the Arab revolutions confronted US Middle East specialists with an issue that they had imagined had long since met its sunset: Arabism and pan-Arab nationalism. While the wave of Arab nationalism that had been awakened and led by Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s had indeed ebbed in the wake of the Arab military defeat against Israeli in 1967, the Arab revolutions of 2011 had sparked a remarkable resurgence of this cause. It was no coincidence that the major uprisings that have erupted across the Arab world this year occurred at the same time and proclaimed the same slogans and demands. The mass protest demonstrations in Iran in 2009 triggered no echoes in Iran's Arab neighbours. But within a month of Bou Azizi's self- immolation in Tunisia, revolutionary movements surged across the Arab world. The Arabs, therefore, still possess a collective sense of cultural and political identity, even if they are spread across 20 different states. The Arab spring dispelled any residual doubts on this matter and that the events in one Arab country can have a powerful and unanticipated impact on another. It is well known that US civil society organs and the scholastic community, in particular, are active participants in shaping US foreign policy thinking. In view of the blurred crystal ball that us American Middle East experts have used to probe Arab societies, it was not odd that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would appear before the television cameras in the early hours of the Egyptian revolution to state, "The Egyptian regime is stable and Mubarak is a reliable ally of the US." That assessment certainly did not withstand the onslaught of the Egyptian revolution and it was not long before Washington decided that Hosni Mubarak was no longer an ally but a burden.
