Debt, Dictatorship And Democratisation

By Ruti Teitel and Robert Howse

This commentary was published in The Jordan Times on 24/04/2011 

 

After Saddam Hussein’s fall, the United States successfully pressed creditors to write off much of Iraq’s external debt. Senior American officials, including Paul Wolfowitz, later president of the World Bank, argued that the Iraqi people should not be saddled with obligations that the dictator contracted in order to enrich himself and oppress his subjects. Citing a long-standing doctrine in international law, advocates of a write-off claimed that Iraq’s debt was “odious”. As a result, the creditors were no longer protected under global legal rules.

As political change again sweeps across the Middle East, the issue of odious debt is back. But all debt that was contracted by a previous oppressive regime cannot, for that reason alone, be classified as “odious”. The question is this: how much of the money went to meritorious development projects, and how much went instead to prop up the regime and line its leaders’ pockets?

In the case of Egypt, for example, Minister of Economic Cooperation Faiza Abu Al Naga suggested in January that Mubarak himself was directing the country’s foreign-loan policy and “oversee[ing] the entire process”. Even if true, there may be nothing legally wrong with such an arrangement. After all, lending and aid to Egypt by the US and other Western powers have long been entangled with geopolitics, and using the tools of finance to back a loyal ally in an unstable region is not odious or illegitimate per se.

But, to the extent that the funds contributed to internal repression, or to the personal enrichment of the regime’s leaders, lenders may bear some responsibility, at least for relieving taxpayers of the burden of debt contracted against, or with indifference towards, their interests. This responsibility cannot be absolute or unlimited, however, and should be confined to situations where lenders were aware (or should have been aware) that the funds might be used for corrupt or oppressive ends.

The bulk of Egypt’s estimated $35-$37 billion in external debt is owed to official (governmental) creditors and multilateral and regional development institutions. At the same time that the World Bank publicly described Egypt as one of the region’s most corrupt countries, its own International Finance Corporation maintained Egypt as a leading customer.

Likewise, Tunisia’s foreign borrowing increased significantly in recent years, even as perceived corruption, as measured by Transparency International, worsened significantly. In both countries, a narrow elite managed and manipulated the economy for their own benefit, but found it easy to win praise from the international financial institutions whenever they made gestures towards liberalisation.

Debt relief will doubtless make it easier for new regimes to proceed with much-needed policies to create jobs, improve infrastructure, and develop human capital. But the case for debt cancellation is fundamentally about transitional justice. The risk of a hasty bargain with creditors for debt forgiveness is that it could preclude a process of accountability for the past.

Instead, an independent commission should be established to examine the previous regime’s foreign-borrowing policy, its objectives and effects, and what lenders knew (or could reasonably be assumed to have known) about those objectives and effects.

Such a commission should be composed largely of nationals who have broad public credibility, perhaps with a minority delegation of foreign experts. Its mandate should be not only to allocate responsibility for past decisions, but also to forge recommendations for transparent, accountable borrowing in the future. On the basis of such a commission’s findings, the new government should engage in discussions with its official creditors, including the international financial institutions.

Critics of forgiving odious debt argue that it risks discouraging future lending to some developing countries, given the uncertainty of being repaid. But where oppressive regimes are using foreign credit to postpone needed domestic political and economic reforms, that may be a good outcome.

At a minimum, creditors would have to examine more carefully those to whom they are lending, and where the money is really going. If creditors turn a blind eye to corruption and oppression, they should have to pay a price.

Robert Howse, a professor of international law at New York University, is the author of a study on odious debt for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Ruti Teitel, a professor of international and transnational law at New York Law School and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, is the author of “Transitional Justice”. ©Project Syndicate, 2011. www.project-syndicate.org

New Palestinian State: ‘Vote’ A Vital Universal Step

By Labeed Abdal
This commentary was published in The Arab Times on 25/04/2011

Presenting the proposed establishment of an independent Palestinian state to the United Nations (UN) for voting in September is a vital universal step, which will lead to a peaceful end to a prolonged dispute.

The Palestinians and all the international advocates of the proposal should consider the need to support the bilateral interests of both sides, in addition to narrowing the gap between the Palestinians and the Israelis.  The UN General Assembly has always been supportive of the legitimate dream of the Palestinians and more is expected of the Security Council not to veto the proposal again. 

I think the issue does not involve the Palestinians alone, because it also affects the moderate people of Israel who want peace in the region.  People from both sides are willing to live in peace as neighbors and to stop bloodshed and deaths.

A unified declaration of independence and full UN support are possible only if Europe will also promote the Palestinian state in the General Assembly.  This might convince all members of the Security Council to endorse the proposal.

However, seeing the same results only means that the endless dispute, along with its dire consequences, is more beneficial to some hidden parties rather than resolving the issue!

Syria: If Assad Falls

By Gwynne Dyer
This commentary was published in The Arab News on 24/04/2011

The anti-government protests in Syria have shaken the Baath Party's half-century grip on power.

The regime's security forces have killed more than 200 Syrians since the protests began in mid-March, but government spokesmen insist that they were shot down by "armed elements" who also attacked the police and the army. These armed elements are allegedly in the pay of the Israelis or of Al-Qaeda.

It's ridiculous, and nobody believes it, but what else are the official media going to say? That the Syrian people, without distinction of ethnicity or creed, are moving toward a nonviolent revolution aimed at overthrowing President Bashar Assad and the whole Baathist apparatus of power? They can't admit that, so they tell preposterous lies instead.

Assad's response to the threat has followed the pattern of other Arab dictators who have already lost power: He makes concessions, but always too little and too late. On Thursday, for example, he finally declared that the 48-year-old "state of emergency", which allowed the regime to arrest anybody and hold them without charge, has been lifted.

It wasn't much of a concession, really, since the security forces still have immunity no matter what they do and the courts are under the regime's thumb. But if Assad had announced it two weeks ago, it might have taken some of the steam out of the protest movement. Now it's too late: on Friday the protesters came out of the mosques after prayers as usual, and the regime's troops killed some of them as usual.

The Syrian regime seems even more unimaginative and inflexible than the regimes that have already gone under in Tunisia and Egypt, so it really could go down. It's time to ask what the fall of Assad and the Syrian Baathists would mean for the whole region. The answer is: It could change everything.

Syria is the lynch-pin of the alliance system that has defined the region's politics since the late 1970s. That was when Egypt made peace with Israel, and the "Islamic" revolution overthrew the Shah of Iran. It was a complete reversal of the old order, for Egypt had previously led the Arab resistance to Israel's conquest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, while Iran under the Shah had been America's closest ally in the Middle East.

Egypt, in order to regain its own Israeli-occupied territory, effectively abandoned the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and became a tacit ally of Israel. Jordan also made peace with Israel, and after Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 the south of that country remained under Israeli occupation for twenty years.

Of all Israel's Arab neighbors, only Syria remained a serious military opponent. Maybe the Baathist regime there would also have made peace with Israel if it could have got its own occupied territory in the Golan Heights back, but Israel was never willing to make that concession. So Syria was alone and desperately needed allies — and the only potential ally in sight was the new Islamic regime in Iran.

It was unusual for any Arab country to make an alliance with Iran. It was doubly strange for Syria to do so, because the Baathist regime there has always been militantly secular. But international politics makes for strange bed fellows, so Syria got into bed with Iran.

When the Hezbollah resistance to Israeli occupation emerged in southern Lebanon, it also became a member of this peculiar Syria-Iran alliance.  And when the Hamas movement emerged in the Gaza Strip, it also joined the club.

This ill-assorted group of countries and movements — Iran and Hezbollah, Hamas and Syria a totally secular state — has provided the only real opposition to Israeli policy in the region for the past 30 years. Without Syria, it would fall apart, and both Hezbollah and Hamas would be gravely weakened.

That could easily happen if the Baathists lose control in Syria — and almost every other government in the region is deeply worried by the prospect of a democratic Syria.

Iran fears the loss of its main Arab ally and condemns the Syrian protesters even as it praises the revolutionaries in other Arab countries. The remaining dictatorships in the Arab world are appalled that the rot has spread to Syria: If this bastion of tyranny can go down, what hope is there for the rest of them?

And Israel doesn't even know what to hope for. It loathes the Baathist regime in Syria and would love to see Hamas and Hezbollah weakened, but it fears that a democratic government in Syria would be an even more implacable enemy of Israel.

The same goes for the United States, so the Syrian protesters are entirely on their own. If the Baathists try to solve their problem by massacre, as they have done in the past, nobody will raise a finger to stop them. But the protesters could still win. Massacres don't always have the desired effect.

Morocco And Mediation In Libya

By Mohammad el-Ashab

This commentary was published in al-Hayat on 24/04/2011 

At least at the level of the Maghreb, Rabat could have played a role in hastening the resolution of the Libyan crisis. This is not because it enjoys a widest scope of influence, but because its connections with the sides involved in the crisis – and specifically the Libyan regime and the transitional council opposed to it – could have rendered it an acceptable interlocutor capable of combining the scattered propositions to reach a solution. Indeed, Morocco remains almost the only state that enjoys this proximity with the two conflicting parties. 

Few know that Moroccan Monarch King Mohammed VI presented his first university study on “The Arab-African Union” back when he was heir to the throne, but opted in his PhD for the Euro-Mediterranean choice, which he perceived as being the perfect embodiment of the idea to turn the Mediterranean Sea into a lagoon of security, peace and coexistence between the different civilizations, religions and aspirations.  

Although he granted more attention to fixing the internal home as a strategic priority, this did not prevent him from turning toward the Maghreb and Arab spaces and to maintain balance between the local and regional wagers. Therefore, Morocco’s presence at the heart of this equation qualifies it – one way or the other – to play a certain role, the least of which being the fact that it listened to the complaints of the two parties. In the meantime, its position alongside the international alliance did not lead to boycott with the collapsing regime, as there is no harm in listening if it can push toward overcoming the crises. 

Rabat might be on the brink of distancing itself from a policy based on confrontation with Colonel Gaddafi’s regime, with regards to the position to be taken toward the developments at the level of the Sahara issue, and it probably acted wisely when it did not connect the reports about some Polisario elements fighting alongside Gaddafi to its commitment to the support of the international alliance, as long as this alliance is respecting the decisions of international legitimacy. At this level, its experience stems from the instatement of the Arab Maghreb Union during a stage which witnessed the revival of hopes over the ruins of the diverging opinions over the latter issue. But the most eloquent message was seen in the announcement of its insistence on the unity of Libyan soil, i.e. its rejection of the Balkanization and partition scenarios being promoted by some and constituting mere half solutions.  

Colonel Gaddafi might have imagined his regime could still be humored, considering that Rabat – which concluded a unity deal with it in the eighties of last century – did so despite the pressures and threats to which it was subjected by its Western allies and especially Washington and Paris. It thus seems that the man did not draw the lessons from the tempestuous transformations, among which is the fact that what could be tolerated in the past was no longer so today. 

The issue – at the core – is not related to the Libyan regime’s relations with the West that kept awaiting an opportunity to eliminate it. The issue is deemed important when it comes to the regime’s relations with the Libyan people, and nothing can change the course of this conflict. Therefore, no mediation project can shift away from this track. It might shorten the ways leading to its consecration, but it will not replace, in any way, the greater action that is guiding the events. Consequently, Morocco can play a role by helping detect the way to exit the predicament.  

A lot has changed. The West, which now seems more inclined to use its influence to tighten the noose around the regimes that are fighting change, is the same which used to interfere by use of force to impose the control of these regimes whenever they faced uprisings or violent internal shakes. Did it not interfere at least twice to back up the ruling regime in the African Zaire in the sixties and seventies of last century? Did Belgium and France not interfere, for instance, to protect certain regimes in the Dark Continent?  

The standards are now different, but not to the policy of defending the interests. However, Morocco – which was present in the majority of the African events – might have seized the opportunity to reveal another type of mediation, to shed light on what the Maghreb Union could have accomplished had it not faltered. Still, such a Union without Gaddafi will be more functional on all levels.

Iran Ponders How To Deal With Those Who Disobey

By Huda al-Husseini
This commentary was published in Asharq al-Awsat on 24/04/2011
 
The coming months will be crucial for the Iranian regime, which does not want to divert its focus from the long-term goal, namely the US withdrawal from Iraq that will allow it to establish its influence in the country, and according to its belief, extend control from there across the entire Gulf Region. However, domestic unrest, alongside developments within the security, or rather repression apparatus, has begun to divert Iran's focus, and cause concern for the Iranian leadership.
 
The Iranian regime is closely watching developments in Syria, where the harshest measures have been taken against Syrian soldiers who refused to fire at demonstrators in Baniyas last week. The Iranian leadership is currently considering ways to deal with its own military officers, who refused to obey orders to fire at demonstrators. This "phenomenon" has caused panic amongst the political elite, and members of the Revolutionary Guard.
 
Over the past days, seven members of the Basij forces have been sacked, because they refused to execute their commanders' orders. They belonged to a group of military personnel who disobeyed their commanders' orders to fire at demonstrators in the streets of Tehran, on the 1st of March.
Those who refused to carry out the orders were placed in Evin Prison, where they were tortured. According to reliable sources, when they were investigated in ward number 209 (a location infamous amongst political prisoners for the mistreatment to which they are exposed to inside), the investigators asked them to reveal the names of their "commanders" (who urged them to rebel), and provide information on others "who were disloyal to the Basij orders."
 
The investigators were joined by senior officers of the Revolutionary Guard, which in practice has authority over the Basij. They wanted to find out whether their refusal to execute the orders had any connection with a letter that was sent in February, by a group of Revolutionary Guard officers, to the Revolutionary Guard commander, General Mohammad Ali Jaafari. In the letter, which was recently circulated on Persian websites, the officers declared their refusal to use violence against demonstrators.
 
In the prison, the Basij members denied any knowledge of the letter. Thus, they were dismissed from their posts.
 
Now, however, Iranian military leaders are considering stricter measures, and there is a debate among the most senior officials, regarding ways to deal with those who disobey. The need to put an end to such a behavior has now become more important, especially if it recurs as a result of the Revolutionary Guard officers' letter, refusing to obey orders to fire at unarmed Iranians.
 
Because of this incident, and for fear that it might happen again and spread, General Jaafari called a meeting of the Revolutionary Guard commanders last week, to decide what to do. He said there was a need to dismiss any personnel who do not execute orders, but some of his aides held the view that such rebels must be executed, firstly as a punishment to them and secondly, to send a message to all military ranks that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated.
 
During the meeting, Basij Commander Mohammad Najidi proposed the option of arresting the wives and children (over the age of 12 years) of those who might rebel in the future, as a means of deterrence. Yet the rest of the officers present said that the act of reprimanding the Basij fighters would be sufficient, in order to ensure that these people did not attract unnecessary attention, and to deprive the opposition of an opportunity to rally around their case, and turn them to symbols of "opposition to the Islamic Republic."
 
At the meeting, General Jaafari held a firm view that refusal to obey orders constitutes an unacceptable violation of one of the most prominent principles of the protection of the Islamic Republic of Iran. From his point of view, these principles are sacred. He said that the incident on the 1st of March in Tehran happened in front of a large crowd of demonstrators and, therefore, he feels that he must send out a message indicating that disloyalty cannot be tolerated.
 
In addition, and with permission from the Supreme Guide of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Jaafari ordered the Quds Force to set up a special unit to deal with defectors. The main aim of this unit is to secretly infiltrate the Revolutionary Guard divisions and Basij branches across Iran, in order to root out defection and provide "field reports" on traitors, so that they may be arrested and immediately tried.
 
Above all, Jaafari and other members of the Iranian leadership believe that any manifestation of rebellion within the army ranks, which might spread and get out of control, must be prevented.
 
According to the reliable sources, Jaafari secretly expressed to Khamenei his fear of the domino effect, as events in the region might motivate personnel under his command to resist the regime.
 
In this respect, he referred to some Libyan Army commanders who had abandoned Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. He feared that if news of the Basij rebels leaked out, it might lead to splits within the army and the Revolutionary Guard.
 
This fear proved to be valid after the incidents that followed the publication of the Revolutionary Guard officers' letter, who pledged not to fire at demonstrators. The officers said verbatim: "We promise our people that we will not kill or beat our brothers." It seems that they were inspired by the Egyptian Army's stand shortly before the downfall of former President Hosni Mubarak, and they stated this explicitly.
 
The letter that was distributed in February was signed by officers from the Rasulallah Branch in Tehran, some officers of the main headquarters of the Revolutionary Guard Command in Tehran, and officers from Isfahan, Qom, Tabriz, and Sanandaj.
 
The cause of the current panic within the Iranian regime is the possibility of large-scale disobedience that might lead to internal revolutions, starting from various military units in an uncontrollable manner.
 
The increasing concern within the Iranian leadership ranks in the past weeks has prompted a response to the demonstrations in Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz, where the regime has deployed thousands of plainclothes and uniformed security men. Furthermore, the leadership allowed security officials to make immediate arrests and resort to the use of force without hesitation. The Iranian leadership also cut off communication services, and imposed a blackout to block the opposition's activities.
 
In light of these developments, a potential rebellion within the armed forces (the army, the Revolutionary Guard, and the Basij) poses a clear threat to the stability of the Iranian regime. Yet Iran is currently attempting the impossible, trying to appear as one of the most powerful regimes in the region, and showing that its 32 year-old roots cannot be shaken. Yet the Egyptian regime that ruled for 30 years was overthrown by the army, at a time when both the Syrian and Libyan regimes are trembling, even though they have ran autocratic governments for more than 40 years.
 
The domestic events in Iran might coincide with the resumption of terrorist attacks in Iraq, and a movement in Kurdistan against the two ruling parties there (where demonstrations began on Monday). These two parties are allies of the Iranian regime, just as [Iraqi Prime Minister] Nuri al-Maliki is.
 
The events may also coincide with Iran's attempt to unsettle Saudi Arabia, through a bizarre threat to invade the kingdom. General Yahya Rahim Safawi told journalists on Monday that the presence of Saudi Arabia in Bahrain sets the wrong precedent, and that it might recur in the future. He said that Saudi Arabia itself might be invaded for the same reason for which it entered Bahrain.
 
This threat, even though it is not a genuine one, reveals the Iranian leadership's hidden intentions. It also reveals that the bold Saudi step has placed Iran in a difficult position.

Obama's Passover Liberation Theology

The U.S. president's Passover message drew the ire of Glenn Beck over Israel, but the story of Exodus has a civil rights history too

By Anna Hartnell
This commentary was published in The Guardian on 24/04/2011

The Obamas hosted a seder at the White House to mark Passover, 18 April 2011. Photograph: Rex Features

Issued on Friday 15 April, ahead of this week's Passover celebrations, Obama's quietly radical Passover message embraced the explosive mix of religion, Middle East politics and African American history that often fired, but also threatened to derail, his presidential bid. Obama's message to Jewish families around the world sees echoes of "that ancient instruction" to remember the Exodus out of Egypt in the "modern stories of social transformation and liberation unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa".

Described by Glenn Beck as "a slap in the face" for Israel and Jews generally, and widely condemned by those on the left as yet more evidence of the president's "timidity" when it comes to the Jewish state, Obama's message is a reminder of the visionary who proved so compelling during the 2008 election campaign. As the president explains, Passover "recalls the passage of the children of Israel from bondage and repression to freedom and liberty", inspiring "hope that those oppressed and enslaved can become free". While insisting on "our enduring commitment to Israel's security", Obama's message offers a prayer for "peace between Israel and her neighbours" and pledges to "work to alleviate the suffering, poverty, injustice, and hunger of those who are not yet free".

"Is it a stretch," Beck wonders, "to think that the president is referring to the Palestinians there?" Thankfully, it is not. The Obama administration's policies on Israel-Palestine have hardly been inspiring – the US decision in February 2011 to veto the UN resolution condemning the settlements on the West Bank and East Jerusalem as obstacles to peace being a particularly low point. But unlike Beck, the president's understanding of the Exodus story is not mired in the racism that so often goes hand in hand with this particular book of the bible.

"Israel is a democracy," Beck's rant on Fox News continues. "It's the closest thing to what we understand as freedom in the entire Middle East. We relate to that. But maybe more importantly we share common values." These values seem to be tied to a Judaeo-Christian heritage that necessarily excludes "Muslim nations". Indeed, as Beck goes on to recount the founding of America through the prism of the Exodus story – "the pilgrims settled here and believed that they were finishing the Moses story, coming to the promised land" – one wonders if his understanding of this Christian heritage isn't also staked on the genocide of Native Americans and built on the backs of African slaves.

From the 19th century and throughout the 20th, African American activists fashioned the Exodus story as a weapon against a racist culture fixated on the idea that God's "chosen people" must be white. Obama's Passover message is a reminder that the current president is in part a product of black political traditions that have often viewed the US itself as the "Egypt" of slavery. Martin Luther King, who saw the Exodus as a crucial touchstone for the civil rights movement, also saw the biblical story as a bridge between African American and Jewish suffering. Yet, in the 1950s, when condemning "the Egypt of colonialism", he was careful to distinguish Nasser's Egypt – at that time a potent symbol of anti-colonialism – from the land of the Pharaohs. King claimed that "the struggle of Moses" captures "something of the story of every people struggling for freedom".

While King's steadfast support for the state of Israel meant that he never explicitly identified with the Palestinians, his support for decolonisation movements across the third world points to the flexibility of a tradition that has long identified Islam and, indeed, an often metaphorical "Egypt" – commonly, alongside Judaism and the Exodus story – as allies in the struggle against racism. This kind of complexity clearly eludes Beck, but it does not escape Obama. As a politician who was partly shaped by a tradition that customarily claimed America as both the place of "Egyptian" slavery and the promise of freedom, it makes complete sense that stories of Egyptian democracy should take centre-stage in Obama's retelling of the Exodus drama.

It remains to be seen whether, in policy terms, Obama will live up to this vision. But these were not the words of the mere technocrat many claim is now occupying the White House.

But What If The Spirit Of Rebellion Spread To Iran?

By Robert Fisk

This commentary was published in The Independent on 23/04/2011

A new paperback thumped out of my mail package from London this week.

Tweets from Tahrir, it is called, and I sighed with distaste. As a hater of Twitters and tweeters and Facebooks – in fact, the whole bloody internet culture that is unlearning the world and teaching everyone to misspell the simplest words – it was a natural reaction. But I was wrong. A selection of the thousands of tweets sent from Cairo's Tahrir Square, it is deeply moving, a record of great courage, mostly by young people, facing Mubarak's legion of goons and regime thugs. Let me give you a taste of it, misspellings and all.

"Now that's a really big pro-Mubarak protest almost reaching Tahrir. From Galaa Street. Worrying" (from Amr Garbeia). "Real panic in tahrir. Square overrun by Mubarak demonstration" (Mo-ha-med). "I've seen spontaneous demos. The pro-demo isn't one" (Mo-ha-med). "Pro-change demo has regrouped and is pushing back the pro-Mub demo... Fuck reporting. I'm going in" (Moha-med). "Is this mubaraks answer to us?? Sending thugs to throw stones at us!" (Nora Shalaby). On and on they go, shouting that Mubarak should be prosecuted. Indeed, he is now being prosecuted!

"Christians will pray in Tahrir tomorrow and we shall circle them and protect them as they have protected us" (Wael Khairy). "Foreign press says Mubarak fortune at 40 to 70 BILLION dollars. These must be returned to the people of Egypt!!!" (Peace and Justice). "A revolution organized by facebook, spread by twitter and organized by a guy working for Google. I LOVE OUR REVOLUTION" (Mahmoud Salem). A man called Hossam says: "Haha I ca c the police like mice looking scared from the windows of their ministry building ... a soldier now murmered to me we r with u ... can't stop myself from crying. We will win." Mubarak, of course, tried to cling on. "Mubarak is staying. The bastard is staying" (Mahmoud Salem). "Hostile reactions in Tahrir now. Some waving shoes, others spitting on screens and women have broken into tears" (Mosa'ab Elshamy) And then, from Gigi Ibrahim: "Mubarak doesn't OWN Egypt!! Does he not understand the concept of a state?!"

Some of the tweets are very funny. This, for example, from Sultan Al Qassemi: "You know you're in trouble when: Iraq embassy in Cairo urges Iraqis to return home." Then "Mubarak to step down. I am not able to breathe" (Mohamed Hamama). The Egyptians pride themselves in getting rid of Mubarak faster than the Tunisians threw out Ben Ali. But they were getting blogs from Tunisia – how to bite on lemons to alleviate the tear gas – and later, interestingly, from Libya. An anonymous tweeter recalled her family's reaction: "My dad hugged me after the news and said 'Ur generation did what ours could only dream of. I'm sorry we didn't try hard enough'."

What strikes me is how the Egyptians mobilised in a quite different way from the Tunisians and – lucky for them – quite differently from the Libyans. Indeed, civil war has now stricken Libya and is in danger of striking Syria, too. The dictators all churn out the same idiotic nonsense: that the revolutions – the demands for freedom, liberty dignity – are all the result of foreign plots. Ben Ali said this; Mubarak said it ("foreign hands"); his vice-president Omar Suleiman talked of "bats in the night". Gaddafi blames al-Qa'ida and America (quite an alliance); Jordan's king has blamed foreign plots, too, and Assad did exactly the same this week. Saleh in Yemen tells his people that the plot is al-Qa'ida, Israeli and American. Ye gods! This is the kind of talk the Middle East had to listen to back in the Sixties. But today?

The Syrian regime is made of tougher stuff than Mubarak's police scum – they are infinitely more brutal – and Baathist backbone probably has something of the Gaddafi about it. There is too much shooting in Syria. And the effects can spill over into Lebanon, reflecting a Shia (Alawi) and Sunni dispute in Syria. Assad has already tried to implicate Lebanon in his crisis, which is preposterous. I prefer not to think about Libya. First we say we won't get involved. Then we bomb Gaddafi. Then we promise military "advisers" (soon, no doubt, to be kidnapped by Gaddafi's sleeper cells) and now we're doing a Waziristan and sending drones over Tripoli. What is this insanity that Cameron and Sarkozy – and Obama – have got themselves involved in?

But there's a non-Arab country with a very big stake in this extraordinary history. It is called Iran. I was interested to see what the Iranian ambassador to Beirut, Ghadanfar Rokon Abadi – a highly intelligent diplomat whom I have known since 1996 – had to say on the subject when he spoke to Lebanese students at l'Université Saint-Joseph this week. He congratulated the Egyptians on their revolution but preferred to suggest that all was well in Iran's Syrian ally. Here are his words on the Arab awakening: "The Egyptian revolution is the revolution of youth. Intellectuals followed them. But in Syria, it's not the same. To be successful, a revolution needs two conditions: firstly, a mental desire to revolt and terrible economic conditions. These two conditions are not present in Syria." Well, the ambassador could have fooled me! And how, I wonder, did the Iranian revolution come about in 1979? Did Iranians have a mental desire for revolt? Did they have terrible economic conditions? No, I rather think they wanted dignity and freedom – even if the current regime cruelly put down the 2009 post-presidential election demonstrations.

But Iran will watch Syria. Syria has a young president. But Iran's leadership is made up of rather old men – not as old as Mubarak or Ben Ali, of course – but it's the same dangerous equation: young people being told what to do by old guys. One of the reflections of the twitterers in Egypt was how proud they were that they could do what Tunisians did. We shall see what Syria holds for us in the coming days. But what if this spread to the east, beyond the mini-revolt in Iraqi Kurdistan to the very pillars of the Islamic Republic? Now that is the question many Arabs will be asking in the coming weeks. And if Iran remains peaceful, what if it loses its Syrian ally? And then what of the Palestinians? What if a million Palestinians in Gaza decided to walk "home" to the original "Palestine". While the Israelis are worrying about the fate of their favourite dictators, it might be a good idea to consider what people power can do in Palestine.