Baathism: An Obituary / The End Of An Ideology | The New Republic

Something to think about, as the slow collapse of Syria proceeds, is the ideas that created so many countries like it.  Like Communism, yet another God has failed.  But another one waits in the wings...

The bombed-out remains of the Baath Party Headquarters in Baghdad. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The political and cultural landscape of the Middle East, post-Baath, will be pockmarked by blighted zones that might otherwise have been a prosperous Iraq and Syria, if only the Baathist doctrine had not destroyed those countries. A cloud of intellectual bafflement and paranoia will hover overhead, consisting of the confused thoughts of everyone across the region who, in the past, talked themselves into supposing that Baathism was a good idea. And more than visible will be the triumphant zeal of Baathism’s principal rivals in the matter of grandiose revolutionary ideology—the champions of the single Middle Eastern millenarian doctrine still standing, once the Assad regime has finally gone. These will be the Islamists.

How long till we get out of the millenerarian mindset?  A little humility can go a long way to making the world a much better place.  It's people with a direct line to the truth who too often turn into monsters.


Baathism: An Obituary / The End Of An Ideology | The New Republic

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A small step

So far, so good.  Egyptians are voting, and it still takes place in the shadow of the military and the Mubarak constitution, yet it seems that irregularities are at a minimum. Nightwatch puts it in perspective:

The bottom line is that for the first time in 7,000 years, Egyptians voted for their head of state and will not know who it is until the votes are counted. This was a genuine choice and the first time that the identity of the country's leader will have been determined by a popular vote, hopefully, and not by not heredity, accidental death,military coup d'etat or military manipulation.

It ain't a liberal democracy.  It may even be an end to the overinflated hopes of the "revolution".   But for Egypt it's a step to something new.

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Update (29 May):  It looks like it's less rosy than it first appeared.  The runoff will be between the former prime minister and the official candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood.  I suspect Prime Minist Shafiq is there, in part, due to voter fraud, coupled with fratricide among the other candidates.  Seven protests have been filed, but four have been rejected for technical reasons and the others are from the fringe candidates.  More important, perhaps, more than half of the potential voters in Egypt don't seem to have voted at all.  Compare that to the first real election after the fall of Saddam, where people stood in line for hours and 62 percent of registered voters participated in selecting the Council of Representatives.  When a "revolution for democracy" is followed by a first presidential election in which half the voters don't bother to show up, that's an indication that the revolution has a pretty narrow base of support.

It was a matter of time

Mubarak is out because he had outlived his usefulness to the military, and now more of the Egyptian people are realizing it. The big question: will the military find enough common ground with the Islamists to keep control of the sectors each cares about the most?