Yet this movement quickly disappointed both the Arabs who began it and the rest of the observing world. While succeeding in deposing a number of autocratic leaders of Arab nations, the movement was unable to install successor governments, and these nations found that they had merely exchanged one dictatorship for another.
Why did the Arab Spring turn into the “Arab Winter” as it was quickly re-named? The vast majority of Arabs, after all, are reasonable people who merely desire peace and liberty. What are the factors preventing the formation of civil governments?
Part of the problem was that the Arab Spring took down one set of governments without having a clear plan for which type of new government it would install. In this way, the Arab Spring invites comparison with the French Revolution: both removed harsh governments, and understandably so, but both failed to have prepared a new government which would be ready to take effect once the old government was gone. Ahmed Ragab writes:
The mass protests in January 2011 signaled the collapse of a particular political system that had lost all legitimacy. In other words, people believed that those structures could no longer possibly serve their interests and that they would rather jump into the unknown than continue with such structures. When Egyptians took to the streets and took down Hosni Mubarak's regime, there was no other clear alternative.
After the fall of Mubarak, who was indisputably an unsavory character, a confused scramble to develop a new form of government ensued. Wide-ranging discussions about the possible type of government and all manner of public demonstrations gave occasion to think about political science, but produced no workable practical results: the middle of a revolution is not the time to engage the public in a seminar about the theories of government. Numerous drafts of plans for governments and constitutions were presented, discussed, and revised. The citizens were called to the polls to vote a number of times.
However, these successive ballots failed to produce political institutions capable of earning people's trust, or of addressing the social, economic, and political grievances that motivated the original protest movement. The protests of June 30 signaled the failure of the entire post–January 2011 pathway to create a new stable political system that could earn sufficient popular support and trust.
Why was Egypt unable to form a new government? We may let Egypt stand as a proxy for the Arab Spring movements, because similar problems faced other countries like Tunisia and Libya. While the individual Arabs themselves are reasonable people seeking prosperity, peace, and liberty, they work under the burden of a collective society which does not seek prosperity for masses and which does not seek a politically or economically thriving middle class. While most individual Arabs have, like all other people, a natural human desire for freedom, they are living in a collective civilization which does not value political liberty. While Arabs, like citizens of all nations, prefer peace to war, they live in a collective culture which glorifies war.
The election of Mohamed Morsi in June 2012 was a failure of the Arab Spring. Morsi’s thug-like dictatorship differed little from Mubarak’s. To be sure, a nuanced difference exists between the two: Mubarak’s rule was a secular tyranny which coexisted with Islam; Morsi and his political party, the Muslim Brotherhood, were not Islamic but Islamist, and the difference between those two words reveals much.
There are millions of reasonable people who adhere to a nominal form of Islam and who call themselves Muslims; peaceful people who merely want liberty and prosperity; these people may be called Islamic.
The difference between “Islamic” and “Islamist” is significant.
An Islamist seeks the establishment of an Islamofascist state, a government which will enforce Sharia law. Islamism takes seriously the Qur’an’s injunctions against civil liberties, and takes literally Mohammad’s commands to wage war and kill.
Because the Arab Spring erupted without a constitutional plan ready for implementation, the power vacuum created by Mubarak’s departure was exploited by the Muslim Brotherhood. A revolution created by those who hoped for liberty, democracy, peace, and prosperity was exploited by Morsi and his Islamofascists who wanted the very opposite. Ahmed Ragab continues:
Fifty days after Morsi's election, 72 percent of Egyptians reported that they would reelect him, but ten months later, only 30 percent of Egyptians said they would reelect him. By June 2013, 78 percent of Egyptians felt that the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood was actually worse than they expected, and a recent poll revealed that about 75 percent of Egyptians don't think that the Muslim Brotherhood should be part of the future political project or process in Egypt.
Morsi’s stay in power was short. He was deposed in July 2013. A temporary government operated by Egypt’s military took over. The big question remains unchanged: can the Arabs - in this case, the Egyptians - find a way to a new government, rather than falling to yet another dictatorship? While they seek peace, their traditions make them susceptible to embracing warlike leaders. While the seek freedom, their culture makes them easy prey for tyrants.
What is true in Egypt is true of other countries swept up into the Arab Spring. Libya, long oppressed by insane dictator Muammar Gaddafi, overthrew his regime only to end up under the tyranny of an equally cruel Islamist dictatorship. Although Libya started, like Egypt, with a handful of hopeful young rebels who sought to establish a republic with freely-elected representatives, Michael Savage writes that
in Libya, the “rebels” were infiltrated by Islamist radicals, members of al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood who see the conflagrations around the Middle East as prophetic. To Islamist dictators and jihadis, the current uprisings are nothing less than a sign that the coming of the 12th Imam, the Mahdi, is immanent.
The people of Libya, finally freed from the oppression of Gaddafi, found themselves equally tyrannized by the Islamofascists who subverted what was originally a freedom-seeking revolution. Michael Savage continues:
Bottom line: Ghadafi was a monster. But the Muslim Brotherhood is a more dangerous monster. Before they killed Ghadafi in cold blood, Libyan “revolutionaries” had repeatedly attacked Ghadafi’s tribal homeland of Sirte. They were taking revenge on Ghadafi loyalists, terrorizing them and killing more than a thousand inhabitants of the region. One rebel fighter explained what was going on: “The Misurate brigades are taking their revenge for what soldiers originally from this village did to them. They are burning houses, stealing gold, and shooting animals.”
As the Arab Spring metamorphosed into the Arab Winter, some observers began to ask if there could ever be a free society in the region. Would every and any attempt at political liberty in the Middle East be doomed? Some alleged that a political leader outside the Arab world was
perpetuating the lie that there can actually be anything resembling “free and fair” elections in Middle Eastern countries when he knows, as the rest of us know, that a free election is an open invitation to the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamist groups to intimidate the population and take over control of countries in turmoil. The invitation to hold “free elections” in Middle Eastern countries with no history of democracy and no democratic infrastructure or culture in place is nothing less than a naive invitation to Islamist radicals to step in. The transition from a feudal Islamic theocracy to a modern democracy must be made very gradually, if it can be made at all. People with no history of establishing and maintaining democratic institutions must be led into their formation.
If we are to have hope for the establishment, in the Middle East, of a republic with freely-elected representatives, then we must understand those cultural elements which give a foothold to Islamofascism. Certainly societal traditions are roadblocks to civil liberty. Torture and the violation of human rights is not only tolerated in the governments of that region, they are understood as the proper functions of government. The understanding of governments and political processes needs to be reformed in order for these civilizations to embrace freedom. Michael Savage writes:
Government brutality is a fact of life in the Middle East. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an Islamist dictator like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or an old-fashioned third-world tyrant like Hosni Mubarak or Moammar Ghadafi. Middle Eastern countries since World War II generally have been held together by force.
Just as the French Revolution failed to bring lasting political liberty because it tried to change society when it needed only to change the government, so the Arab Spring failed and became the Arab Winter because it failed to change the societies and cultural traditions which are an obstacle to political freedom.
