Bad but not hopeless

News from the Arab uprisings this morning is particularly grim:

• In Egypt, the police and army are attacking pro-Morsi demonstrators, causing what appear to be well over 100 deaths;
• In an unconfirmed report, Italian Catholic priest and opposition enthusiast Paolo Dall’Oglio is said to have been killed by opposition Islamists in Syria;
• The American mission in Yemen remains closed as the US continues its heightened drone war against militants.

Add to these items the Islamist government in Tunisia finding itself unable to protect non-Islamist politicians from assassination and Libya’s continuing difficulty in gaining control over revolutionary militias and you’ve got a pretty ugly picture.

I don’t want to minimize any of this.  It is all real and problematic.  But it is not catastrophic.  Revolutions have their bad moments (and days, months and years).  Some of them end badly.  There is no guarantee that won’t be the case in the Middle East, with some or all of the uprisings.

Egypt is in the most peril.  It has not found a steady course but lurches between extremes:  either military-backed secularists or Muslim Brotherhood/Salafist dominance.  Co-habitation of the two has proven unworkable.  It is hard to picture how today’s crackdown can put things right.  The Islamists will find it harder to compromise.  Secularists and minorities will fear even more a return of the Brotherhood to power.

Syria is no walk in the park either.  While the opposition has been able to reply to government military advances in Homs with offensives in the west and in Damascus, there is no sign of either a negotiated outcome or a clear-cut military solution.  It is hard to picture that Bashar al Assad will restore control over the entire country, but it is also hard to picture that the opposition will win a definitive victory.

Yemen‘s National Dialogue Conference has been proceeding better than many expected, but the big challenges still lie ahead:  preparation of a new constitution, elections and restoration of governance to large parts of the country that have little remaining relationship with the authorities in Sanaa.  The drone war does not make any of that easier.

I am more optimistic about Libya and Tunisia, both of which have had at least some success in opening up previously autocratic regimes and beginning to establish new and more democratic rules of the game.  In Tunisia, secularists are pitted against Islamists, but most are playing more or less by the same rules.  In Libya, there really aren’t any secularists, but there are extreme Islamists and associated militias that are making life extraordinarily difficult for the authorities, who have democratic legitimacy but lack the means to counter the extremists.

The United States is not a major protagonist in any of these revolutions, even if most Egyptians are quick to assign the Americans blame for whatever goes wrong.  There is also, so far, little impact on vital American interests, though the situation in Egypt could deteriorate in ways that endanger Israel and Yemen‘s Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) directly threatens the US.  Most concerning though is Syria, where Al Qaeda is gaining more than a foothold and the threat to neighboring Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq is all too clear.

I don’t begrudge President Obama his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.  But when he gets back I do hope he’ll have thought long and hard about how to make sure the Arab uprisings end for the better.  Here’s a hint:  many of these countries need not military intervention but stronger civilian assistance to meet the needs that their populations are now free to express.