Robert Fisk: Right across the Arab world, freedom is now a prospect
[Robert Fisk is The Independent's award-winning Middle East correspondent.]
In the dying days of the Ottoman empire, American diplomats – US consuls in Beirut, Jerusalem, Cairo and other cities – NGOs across the region and thousands of American missionaries, pleaded with the State Department and with President Wilson to create one modern Arab state stretching from the shores of Morocco to the borders of Mesopotamia and Persia. This, they believed, would bring a large part of the Muslim world into the democratic orbit of Europe and the West.
Of course, the Sykes-Picot agreement which had already secretly carved up the Middle East, a dying Woodrow Wilson and America's lurch into isolationism put paid to any such fanciful ideas. Besides, who knows if some Arabs might have preferred the "civilisation" of Rome and, just over a decade later, of Madrid and Berlin, to the supposedly decadent democracies elsewhere in Europe? In the end, the Second World War scarred Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Lebanon and left the rest comparatively unscathed. But this is the moment to recall the might-have-beens of history. For it is now just possible to recognise a future world in which we may be able to travel from Morocco to the Iraq-Iran border without a visa in our passports. Whether Arabs will be able to do this as speedily, of course, is another matter.
What is not in doubt is the extraordinary tempest passing through the region, the spectacular break-up of the Arab world which most of us have known for most of our lives and which most Arabs have known for most of their lives. From the mildewed, corrupted dictatorships – the cancer of the Middle East – is emerging a people reborn. Not without bloodshed, and not without much violence in front of them as well as behind them. But now at last the Arabs can hope to march into the bright sunlit uplands. Every Arab friend of mine has said exactly the same thing to me over the past weeks: "Never did I believe I would ever live to see this."..
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In the dying days of the Ottoman empire, American diplomats – US consuls in Beirut, Jerusalem, Cairo and other cities – NGOs across the region and thousands of American missionaries, pleaded with the State Department and with President Wilson to create one modern Arab state stretching from the shores of Morocco to the borders of Mesopotamia and Persia. This, they believed, would bring a large part of the Muslim world into the democratic orbit of Europe and the West.
Of course, the Sykes-Picot agreement which had already secretly carved up the Middle East, a dying Woodrow Wilson and America's lurch into isolationism put paid to any such fanciful ideas. Besides, who knows if some Arabs might have preferred the "civilisation" of Rome and, just over a decade later, of Madrid and Berlin, to the supposedly decadent democracies elsewhere in Europe? In the end, the Second World War scarred Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Lebanon and left the rest comparatively unscathed. But this is the moment to recall the might-have-beens of history. For it is now just possible to recognise a future world in which we may be able to travel from Morocco to the Iraq-Iran border without a visa in our passports. Whether Arabs will be able to do this as speedily, of course, is another matter.
What is not in doubt is the extraordinary tempest passing through the region, the spectacular break-up of the Arab world which most of us have known for most of our lives and which most Arabs have known for most of their lives. From the mildewed, corrupted dictatorships – the cancer of the Middle East – is emerging a people reborn. Not without bloodshed, and not without much violence in front of them as well as behind them. But now at last the Arabs can hope to march into the bright sunlit uplands. Every Arab friend of mine has said exactly the same thing to me over the past weeks: "Never did I believe I would ever live to see this."..