Bret Stephens: Is There an Arab George Washington?
[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.]
On learning that George Washington intended to follow up his victory at Yorktown by retiring to his farm at Mount Vernon, George III told the painter Benjamin West: "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world." The British monarch may have wound up stark raving mad, but he knew a thing or two about the seductions of power.
We celebrate Washington today as the greatest of the founding fathers. But the fame he gained during his lifetime owed mainly to his willingness to relinquish the vast powers he had repeatedly been granted, and which were his for the keeping. That's a rarity in the history of revolutions, in which the distance from liberation to despotism—from euphoria to terror—is usually short. The French Revolution began with a Declaration of the Rights of Man. It very nearly ended in an extinction of those rights.
The uprisings now sweeping the Arab world threaten to retrace that familiar arc. Consider the irony of last month's massive protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Until Egypt's corrupt but tolerant monarchy was overthrown in 1952, the square was known as Midan El-Ismailiya after Ismail Pasha, the great 19th-century Egyptian Westernizer. It became Liberation Square only after Gamal Abdel Nasser's 1952 coup, yet another calamitous revolution that began brightly with promises of democracy.
Now we're being told that this time it's different. A day after the demonstrators began to gather on Tahrir Square last month, an Egyptian friend of mine—a former independent member of parliament with close ties to the secular opposition—explained that difference: "It's a revolution without papas," he told me. No Nasser, no Ben Bella, no Arafat, just ordinary people in their millions demanding their long-denied civil and political rights...
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On learning that George Washington intended to follow up his victory at Yorktown by retiring to his farm at Mount Vernon, George III told the painter Benjamin West: "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world." The British monarch may have wound up stark raving mad, but he knew a thing or two about the seductions of power.
We celebrate Washington today as the greatest of the founding fathers. But the fame he gained during his lifetime owed mainly to his willingness to relinquish the vast powers he had repeatedly been granted, and which were his for the keeping. That's a rarity in the history of revolutions, in which the distance from liberation to despotism—from euphoria to terror—is usually short. The French Revolution began with a Declaration of the Rights of Man. It very nearly ended in an extinction of those rights.
The uprisings now sweeping the Arab world threaten to retrace that familiar arc. Consider the irony of last month's massive protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Until Egypt's corrupt but tolerant monarchy was overthrown in 1952, the square was known as Midan El-Ismailiya after Ismail Pasha, the great 19th-century Egyptian Westernizer. It became Liberation Square only after Gamal Abdel Nasser's 1952 coup, yet another calamitous revolution that began brightly with promises of democracy.
Now we're being told that this time it's different. A day after the demonstrators began to gather on Tahrir Square last month, an Egyptian friend of mine—a former independent member of parliament with close ties to the secular opposition—explained that difference: "It's a revolution without papas," he told me. No Nasser, no Ben Bella, no Arafat, just ordinary people in their millions demanding their long-denied civil and political rights...