Victory! NY Times: Islamism Finished!; And Obama Lets Other Middle East Governments Stay in Power!

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By Barry Rubin

Karim Sadjampour, who is associated with the Carnegie Endowment, tells us--in the New York Times, of course:

"The Arab risings have revealed that Iran's revolutionary ideology has not only been rendered bankrupt at home, but it has also lost the war of ideas among its neighbors."

Yep. It's all over! We (i.e., the lovers of democracy) have won! Islamism is finished. So Iran's regime is about to fall; a pro-Islamist dictatorship doesn't rule in Syria, a Hizballah-dominated government didn't just take over Lebanon; Hamas doesn't run the Gaza Strip; the Muslim Brotherhood didn't just hold a one million strong demonstration in Cairo; the Taliban isn't making a resurgence in Afghanistan; Islamist forces aren't becoming increasingly powerful in Pakistan or advancing in Somalia; and Islamists aren't playing a central role in the growing Muslim communities of theWest! Those bloody insurgencies in the southern Philippines and Thailand will soon be over.

Thank goodness. What a relief. I sure feel good.

And that explains why the Iranian rulers are denouncing the uprisings and are really afraid. What, they aren't? In fact, the radicals and Islamists are celebrating, though one might not know that from much of the American mass media.

Here's what Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal said:

"Today we are witnessing Cairo returning to its natural state, after it disappeared from that state for a long time....The people in Egypt and Tunisia have given us back our lives."  He was speaking at the opening of the eighth Al-Quds (Jerusalem) International Foundation conference, being held in Sudan and funded by Iran.

Somehow Sadjampour doesn't persuade me though I'm sure that hundreds of thousands of New York Times readers are now assured that President Obama has waved his wand and the Islamists and anti-American radicalism have all been turned into computers, I-pads, X-boxes, and other computer equipment for the new age of hi-tech Middle East peace.

But there is real good news, too.  The Obama Administration has apparently decided to let the Jordanian, Saudi, Moroccan, and a half-dozen other still-existing monarchies remain in power for the present. This Wall Street Journal article is as important as the Washington Post piece I analyzed recently. It reports:

"Instead of pushing for immediate regime change—as it did to varying degrees in Egypt and now Libya—the U.S. is urging protesters from Bahrain to Morocco to work with existing rulers toward what some officials and diplomats are now calling "regime alteration."


"The approach has emerged amid furious lobbying of the administration by Arab governments, who were alarmed that President Barack Obama had abandoned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and worried that, if the U.S. did the same to the beleaguered king of Bahrain, a chain of revolts could sweep them from power, too, and further upend the region's stability."

The article points out that the key people in persuading the White House to back up a bit were the leaderships of the State and Defense Department (see my analysis of the current policymaking process in the Obama Administration).

Barry Rubin is Director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His books include Islamic Fundamentalists in Egyptian Politics and The Muslim Brotherhood (Palgrave-Macmillan); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East, a study of Arab reform movements (Wiley). GLORIA Center site: http://www.gloria-center.org His blog, Rubin Reports, http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.