A Berlin Wall Moment in the Middle East?

On December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year old fruit seller in the Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid stood in front of the local governor’s office and set himself on fire after pouring a can of gasoline over his head. He died of his burns on January 4. While Bouazizi’s immolation was startling, his despair was not. News of his suicide spread quickly, mostly by Facebook, setting off a month of civic demonstrations by secular working- and middle-class Arabs, protesting the country’s corruption and its dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

On January 14, Ben Ali, the leader of Tunisia for more than two decades, fled to Saudi Arabia with his wife by private jet, leaving fist-shaking mobs behind in the capital city, Tunis. The toppling of Ben Ali sparked hopes that the liberation of this North African country of 10 million would set off democracy movements in other countries of the region whose sclerotic dictatorships are every bit as oppressive as Ben Ali.

Was Tunisia the Berlin Wall moment for the Middle East?

The “statehood” of most countries in the Middle East was invented by drawing lines on a map after World War I to divide feuding nomadic and ancestral tribal lands. Tunisia has always been a state with ancient origins that predate the Roman Empire. The Tunisian colony of Carthage was founded around 800 B.C. – one of several stopover points along the Tunisian coast established by seafaring Phoenicians who put ashore every night. It became the strongest of the Punic (Phoenician) settlements and thus the capital of a North African empire.

"Africa" was originally a Roman term that meant Carthage (Tunisia) long before it meant anything else. Jutting out of North Africa into the Mediterranean across from Sicily, Carthage was strategically located to control all of the western Mediterranean and thus became a vast commercial power. As the power of Rome grew, the Carthaginians and Romans were drawn into three wars, known as the Punic Wars, which were fought during the century between 246 B.C. and 146 B.C. These ended with the defeat and destruction of Carthage.

When the dominance of Rome came to its end, Carthage-Tunisia remained the gateway to North Africa first under the Vandals in the 5th century, then the Byzantines, the medieval Arabs, followed by the Turks, and finally the French in the 19th century.

After the Roman general Scipio defeated Hannibal in 202 B.C. outside modern-day city of Tunis, he dug a demarcation ditch, or fossa regia, that marked the extent of civilized territory in North Africa. It was reminiscent of the legendary Pillars of Hercules whose inscription, Non Plus Ultra, (nothing more beyond), served as a warning to sailors and navigators to go no further.

The fossa regia retains similar relevance today where its visible remains run southward from Tabarka on Tunisia’s northwestern coast and then turn directly eastward to Sfax, another Mediterranean port. The towns beyond the fossa regia have fewer Roman remains, and today tend to be poorer and less developed, with historically higher rates of unemployment.

The town of Sidi Bouzid, where Bouazizi immolated himself, lies 130 miles south of ancient Carthage and just beyond Scipio’s fossa regia.

When Tunisia won independence from France in 1957, Habib Bourguiba became the Arabic version of Ataturk and the embodiment of the modern Tunisian state. He was the country’s first president, or more accurately, its fierce secular dictator for the next three decades. Though he was Muslim, Bourguiba rejected militant Islam. He was an advocate for normalizing Arab-Israeli relations a decade before Anwar Sadat of Egypt went to Jerusalem. He gave women the right to vote, scrapped polygamy, and cracked down on wearing the veil. He devoted public resources to women’s education, birth control, and elementary education rather than his personal aggrandizement or large expenditures on building projects and an army. In fact, Bourguiba made sure the army remained apolitical and small, a legacy which kept the recent overthrow from being bloodier.

In one of a series of internal crises, his interior minister, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, saw an opportunity to usurp power, and in 1987, he had Bourguiba declared too infirm to rule in order that he might depose him in a bloodless coup. But Ben Ali was not the measure of the man he replaced. He lacked a vision for Tunisia other than to plunder it, little different than the regime of Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak. Ben Ali’s primary goal has been to maintain internal order, which he accomplished by killing and torturing Islamists and other dissidents.

In fairness to Ben Ali, it could be said that he presided over an economy that grew rapidly at about an annual rate of 5% due largely to tourism. A middle class developed. Social progress during his 23-year dictatorship extended beyond the fossa regia – somewhat.

But in Ben Ali’s Tunisia, virtually all business activities were under the supervision of the regime. That included the vegetables young Bouazizi was trying to sell before he made himself a human torch. Business permits were sold to poor people to raise the revenue that income taxes and sales taxes failed to supply, and Bouazizi didn’t have one.

Although he had a college education, Bouazizi, like many college-educated young people in Tunisia, couldn’t find a job. One in three college-educated can’t find a job in Tunisia. Selling fruits and vegetables illegally – i.e. without a permit – at least provided him some money for his widowed mother and family. But when the police confiscated his produce, they essentially denied him access to any livelihood. His suicide was his last act of freedom.

Early this month, Hillary Clinton lectured a group of Arab leaders telling them that many Arabs on the street had “grown tired of corrupt institutions and a stagnant political order.” She didn’t reveal how she knew this but went on to say, “If leaders don’t offer a positive vision and give young people meaningful ways to contribute, others will fill this vacuum.”

Before its government collapsed, Tunisia was failing not because it neglected to “offer” its people opportunities, as Clinton so confidently suggested; it was failing because it denied them opportunities, as in the case of Bouazizi. Excluding poor people from Tunisia’s market economy because they didn’t have connections or the proper permits was the modus operandi of Ben Ali’s “shakedown” government, little different than a mob’s protection racket. If people got desperate enough, they would find the money – or steal it.

When WikiLeaks recently published thousands of embarrassing confidential cables from America’s ambassadors around the world, among them were several from Robert F. Godec, our ambassador to Tunisia. One report, now posted online, stated “Whether it’s cash, services, land, property, or yes, even your yacht, President Ben Ali’s family is rumored to covet it and reportedly gets what it wants.” Godec went on: “Corruption . . . is the problem everyone knows about, but no one can publicly acknowledge.”

The Marie Antoinette of Tunisia was 74-year old Ben Ali’s second wife, Leila Trabelsi, a gold-digging former hairdresser who is 20 years younger than her husband and seems to have been positioning herself to take over the family business. Allegedly, she stole a ton and a half of gold from the central bank, worth $56 million, and had it loaded on the private jet as she and Ben Ali were escaping to Riyadh last week.

Her greed knew no limits. She even introduced her children and relatives to her schemes, which had them living like millionaires (which they were) inside the fossa regia. They stole with abandon. Their avarice was so profane, that even sycophants were criticizing the family, causing Ben Ali to allegedly call a family meeting and warn, “If you want money, at least do it with discretion.” During the 23 years Ben Ali ran the country, he and Trabelsi accumulated wealth for themselves estimated at $5.2 billion, which is deposited in French banks.

A WikiLeaks cable exposed the disbelief of Ambassador Godec after attending a dinner at the beachfront mansion of Leila Trabelsi’s son-in-law. Frozen yogurt had been flown in from St Tropez and the family pet was a tiger who consumed four live chickens and prime cuts of beef daily. Another cable described how one of Trabelsi’s relative’s stole a $3 million yacht from a French businessman, had it repainted, and unashamedly anchored it just off shore from his beachfront house.

"Corruption in the inner circle is growing," Godec wrote to the US State Department. "Even average Tunisians are keenly aware of it. And the chorus of complaints is rising. Tunisians intensely dislike, even hate, Leila Trabelsi and her family . . . even those close to the government express dismay at her reported behavior."

As the excesses of the Ben Ali regime are becoming public, we should be asking why our government has been backing people like Ben Ali and other corrupt leaders in the Middle East. In his State of the Union speech Tuesday night, after some undeserved breast beating to take credit for the recent independence vote in south Sudan, Obama had this to say:

“And we saw that same desire to be free in Tunisia, where the will of the people proved more powerful than the writ of a dictator. And tonight, let us be clear: The United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all people. (Applause.)

Yet before Ben Ali fled the country, Hillary Clinton was asked directly about the Tunisian street protests and America’s response. Her answer? "We can't take sides."

Here was a moment in history for Obama, who some have called the smartest president in history, and Clinton, who has been called the smartest woman on earth, to have seized what good fortune had dropped in their laps and say unequivocally that America supports self-determination, opposes extremism, and will not support corrupt governments and leaders. Doing so would have thrown support behind people throughout the Middle East and North Africa who could topple the regimes that are doing more to increase terrorism than a hundred bin Ladens.

Instead, Clinton and the president she represents chose to stay on the sidelines. That is, until it was safe to take sides, once Ben Ali was out of Tunisia.

I can’t imagine Ronald Reagan not taking the side of the East Germans who were pushing against the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. It was Reagan, whom Obama says he admires, who said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” – wasn’t it?

Bush 43 became an advocate of promoting democracy abroad after 9/11. That horrific event made it apparent that national security was as much about what went on inside of states as it was about the behavior of those states among the nations of the world.

Yet when Obama became president, he made it clear that he was cautious about promoting democracy throughout the world. He even went so far as to apologize to rouge states like Iran for America’s past meddling in their affairs. His approach has been to “appeal” to the leaders of Muslim countries and to “seek mutual understanding” rather than to support reform movements. He showed that intent only too well when he refused to voice support for the Iranians protesting the disputed 2009 reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The absence of a strong American voice virtually assured that the arrested protestors would be held without trial, abused, and denied basic civil rights. Absent outside pressure, the Iranian mullahs and Muslim leaders like Egypt’s 82-year old President Mubarak have become more oppressive.

We are entering a time when the citizens of an authoritarian regime have a weapon that offsets the power of a police state – social media. The American and French revolutions would not have been possible without the printing press and the political papers circulating in the 1ate 1700s – the social media of its day. The Cold War was at least partly won because the West spent billions to broadcast the Voice of America and to smuggle photocopiers and fax machine into Soviet countries. As people networked to understand how fragile the Soviet regime was, economic failures could no longer be hidden and change became inevitable.

Today, the social media empower angry activists to share awareness that other people are angry and move those people to take action. Eighteen percent of Tunisians have a Facebook account and even more have other ways to message each other. To say how much this helped them overthrow a dictator in a popular uprising would be speculation, but their protest quickly went viral despite Ben Ali’s attempt to unplug them. The fact that they were able to quickly use proxy servers to subvert his efforts suggests that they had been thinking about their communication networks for a long time.

The Tunisian uprising has now spread to Egypt, where protests calling for Mubarak’s ouster have been going on for five days, and to Yemen, where calls for the resignation of Ali Abdullah Saleh are in their third day. The demonstrations seem to have started among the Internet-savvy middle class, but since Arabic language cable television makes the Middle East a virtual community, protests are seen by a broader audience than social media reach, emboldening more people to get involved.

The feckless foreign policy promoted by the US State Department for decades supported dictators, thinking it was the best defense against radical Islam. The fact that these dictators crushed all dissent, even reasonable outrage against their abuse and unequal access to economic opportunities, was ignored. It was just the cost of doing business with tyrants. Those chickens seem to be coming home to roost. "What started in Tunisia is not over," shouted the crowd at a Yemen university campus. They are probably right. Whether the Middle East is on the cusp of a Berlin Wall moment or a 1979 Shah of Iran moment is the question.

A blogger in Tunisia seemed to have caught the spirit of the moment: “It actually happened in my lifetime,” he said. “An Arab nation woke up and said ‘enough.’”

It’s now up to Obama to decide if he wants to be a player or a spectator.