Why Hussein's fall won't be a Berlin Wall for Arab world

When an American marine momentarily placed the Stars and Stripes over a Baghdad statue of Saddam Hussein before it was pulled from its pedestal last week, the ebullient gesture inadvertently underscored an important reality of this toppling of a regime. It was planned and carried out by powers from outside Iraq, not from within.

For the Arab world, what is already being called the "Iraq earthquake" is not Algeria, which won its independence from France in a defining national struggle, or the Iranian revolution, which toppled the shah.

It is not Romania, where the people deposed the reviled Nicolae Ceausescu, or even arguably Afghanistan, where the Northern Alliance, hardened by years of civil war, played a crucial home-grown role in the ouster of the Taliban regime.

Instead, this liberation from dictatorship will have been effected by an American-led coalition. Although it remains to be seen just how this plays out, its different starting point could present, in turn, a different set of challenges. These range from a potential for dependence on the liberators to latent resentments as the euphoria of promised freedoms confronts the realities of a difficult and complex reconstruction period.

And it could pose difficulties for the United States as it seeks to improve its relations with the Arab world. "If this is another Berlin Wall, then it is the Berlin Wall being torn down by an outside power, and that's something very different," says Thomas Carothers, a specialist in democracy-building at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "You don't have the sense of a society participating in its emancipation or galvanized around a central idea or national project."

In such circumstances, building a sense of national purpose and direction, particularly among a mosaic of ethnic and religious groups, will not be easy.

The extensive looting that has accompanied Mr. Hussein's fall might be explained by the difficult economic straits that Iraqis have endured over 12 years of economic sanctions and a dictator's deprivations, says Edmund Ghareeb, a specialist in Kurdish and Iraqi studies at American University in Washington. But it also suggests a willingness to strike out against a hated regime when notions of a national structure or power to replace it are so weak.

"Iraq is such a complex and diverse society, [but] if the different tribes and clans feel isolated, they are likely to turn against any regime that doesn't take them into account," says Mr. Ghareeb.

The way the US handles its rebuilding role will help determine how long resentment will be felt in the Arab world. "There is kind of a depression in the Arab world that Saddam's regime fell so quickly, and it certainly has a huge impact that it happened at the hands of Americans," says Fawaz Gerges, a Middle East specialist at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y.

Page: 1 | 2