A Time to Build Up, a Time to Break Down

The seasons are turning, and as the Arab Spring approaches its first anniversary, change is afoot across the Arab world.

It's been a historic few days in the Arab world, as Libya proclaimed its liberation after the death of Gadhafi, the U.S. set to withdraw all its troops from Iraq by Christmas, and Tunisia having held its first ever election. On that last count, some are just happy that it happened in the first place, regardless of its result. Others, such as The Atlantic's Elizabeth Dickson, advise that the Tunisian election results will be a real test for whether the competing ideologies of secularism and Islamism can co-exist peacefully in the Arab world. Polls indicate that the leading Islamist party, al-Nahda, could take as much as a quarter of the vote, making it the largest bloc among the constituent assembly's 217 seats. But in Tunisia, "a country that has long been one of the Arab world's most moderate," any hardline Islamism stands to be tempered by both the country's history of liberalism – women's rights, freedom of religion – and the 100 or so other political parties vying for power, the most popular of which are largely secular. So a fascinating session of horse-trading is all but guaranteed to occur once the results are officially posted, the first taste of democracy in North Africa not even a year after such a dream would have been deemed ridiculous.

In The Globe and Mail, Michael Ignatieff dismisses concerns that Islamists will soon be in power in Tunis, Tripoli, and Cairo, asking "what, exactly, is the alternative? Why are we so afraid to trust Islam with democracy?" It's not as though every form of governance that came before the Arab Spring – "pan-Arabism, through Arab socialism and Baathism, through military dictatorship and finally the family kleptocracies of Gadhafi, Saleh and Assad" – really did much to improve the lives of the citizens of Egypt, Syria, Libya, Yemen and so on. "The peoples of the Middle East know this, and this may be the single most important reason why they will try to make democracy work," writes Ignatieff, even if it's a little more Qur'an-heavy than what the West might hope for. At least in Libya's case, there's oil, and lots of it, and that can help provide the new country with the funds necessary to create civil institutions after having them go untended for 42 years by Gadhafi & Co. Few things get citizens to vote for stability, moderation, and peace like owning property. Libya's mineral wealth may yet push the renewed country in that direction.

Meanwhile, Iraq will soon be free of the remaining 40,000 U.S. troops still there eight years after first invading the country upon the premise that they'd be greeted as liberators. Jonathan Steele concludes in The Guardian that the withdrawal, quietly announced by Obama on Friday, marks "a complete defeat" of "the neocons' grand plan to use the 2003 invasion to turn the country into a secure pro-western democracy and a garrison for U.S. bases that could put pressure on Syria and Iran." Suicide attacks still ravage mosques and markets throughout the country. Baghdad is now almost as "Shia-dominated" as Tehran, and without a U.S. presence in Iraq, the conditions for Iranian influence to grow in the region have rarely been so ripe. And there's no question for Steele over who deserves the blame for that: "It was Bush who gave Tehran its strategic opening by invading Iraq, just as it was Bush in the dying weeks of his presidency who signed the agreement to withdraw all U.S. troops by the end of 2011, which Obama was hoping to amend." Well, he wasn't able to, as apparently there's a limit to how long Iraqi civilians can cope with American soldiers living above the law in their homeland. So ends the last pre-Arab Spring American adventure in the Middle East; not with a bang but with barely a news release.