Britain’s Foreign Minister Hague thinks the “Arab Spring”, as he just had to call it, is going to be the event of the early 21st century, “greater than either 9/11 or the global financial crisis in 2008” and he compared it to the collapse of the Iron Curtain to its potential to advance human rights and freedoms. We all hope he’s right of course, while suspecting that his idea of rights and freedom in historical Palestine falls short of full rights for everyone who lives there, but this obsession in the West with finding comparisons shows no sign of letting up. Even though the uprising in Bahrain has gone sharply in reverse and Saudi Arabia and the United States are subverting the Yemeni revolution with their guarantee of “honourable exits” for Saleh and efforts to preserve the regime he would leave behind.

While some have compared the Arab uprisings to the Eastern Europe revolutions of 1989 in Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Hungary, others have plumped for the so-called “Rose Revolution” in Georgia in 2003 or “Orange Revolution” of Ukraine in November 2004-January 2005, which in both cases succeeded in ousting entrenched presidents. Some have tried to make comparisons to the “Cedar Revolution” when Lebanese demonstrated against Syrian tutelage after the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri in 2005, adding to the pressure that forced Syria to withdraw its troops in March of that year. But the suggestion of American manipulation behind the Lebanese protests and American-allied March 14 movement it spawned – even the name “Cedar Revolution” was coined by U.S. Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs Paula J. Dobriansky – has raised questions, to be polite about it, about whether it can be taken seriously as a precursor to the uprisings of 2011. In any case, Hizbollah matched the anti-Syria protests with its own in favour of Syria and against Western interference. Robert Fisk has also been pushing the Cedar Revolution Was First line.

When it comes to Egypt, the uprising to my mind was more of a consequence of the pressures created by the single-handed policy shift engineered by Anwar Sadat in his 11 years in office, and expressed in its most major achievement, the peace treaty with Israel. Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt was the child of that treaty. The police state and the foreign policy approved in Washington – both of which got worse as his reign slogged on – were the result of the realignment that Sadat created and which survived because American financial, military and political support established the appropriate bacterial environment for the growth of the security and business parasite classes that in the end proved too much to bear for too many Egyptians. The revolution was the sequel to Camp David.    

But I’m glad to see that journalists and politicians have more or less failed to stick the term Jasmine Revolution on the Tunisian uprising and Nile Revolution on Egypt’s. 🙂