This was a shock to read in the New York Times:
After 2003, the edifice of the Arab state system began to crack elsewhere. In 2005, thousands of Lebanese marched in the streets to boot out the occupying Syrian Army; Palestinians tasted their first real elections; American officials twisted the arm of Hosni Mubarak to allow Egyptians a slightly less rigged election in 2006; and a new kind of critical writing began to spread online and in fiction.
The Arab political psyche began to change as well. The legitimating ideas of post-1967 Arab politics — pan-Arabism, armed struggle, anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism — ideas that undergirded the regimes in both Iraq and Syria, were rubbing up against the realities of life under Mr. Hussein. ...
All the Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi was asking for in December 2010 was dignity and respect. That is how the Arab Spring began, and the toppling of the first Arab dictator, Saddam Hussein, paved the way for young Arabs to imagine it.
Until the Syrian- and Iranian-fueled sectarian violence of 2006, it was even a topic of discussion in polite circles that winds of democracy were blowing in the Middle East due to our removal of Saddam and defense of the fledgling democratic government in Iraq. That violence and partisan resistance here to the surge offensive in 2007 that could not be accepted even when it worked succeeded in killing any ability to see any good from the Iraq War.
Iraqis certainly felt that they had a role in the Arab Spring (quoting Strategypage):
Iraqis believe their example was responsible for the pro-democracy movements in Tunisia, Egypt and in other Arab states. But that attitude is only popular inside Iraq, as the media in the rest of the world was generally hostile to the removal of the Iraqi dictatorship by foreign invasion, and still is. Thus Iraqis get little credit for the democracy they are building.
And I was not shy about giving George W. Bush credit for the chance to change the culture of the Middle East where regime opponents appealed to a feral Islamism to purify their governments and autocratic governments appealed to a tame Islamism to justify their rule:
Our victory in Iraq will change the rules in a region still frozen in the Cold War era standards of strongmen who rule without regard to their people or their well being. When the history of the Middle East in this era is written, President Bush may well be known as George the Liberator.
I, of course, feel no need to preface these thoughts with self-flagellation over the conduct of many stages of the war since we smashed a dictatorial regime in record time and defeated a number of insurgencies in a relatively brief time before leaving. We made mistakes--that's war. But Saddam made the biggest and most fatal errors--obviously--and even the Baathist resistance made a far bigger error (that I first addressed here in a post moved from the old Yahoo!Geocities post) that kept them from leading a national resistance to our presence.
But ten years after the invasion, it may finally be safer to explore the war in historical terms rather than political terms. Perhaps the American political psyche is beginning to change as well.
The Arab Spring may yet betray the hopes of those who want more than autocracy or Islamism, but that isn't the fault the Iraq War that provided Iraqis with the opportunity to hope for more than they'd had until then.
