Posterity may save a kind word for Omar Suleiman, one of the more significant figures in the Arab Spring who officially died an obscure death in an American hospital nearly a decade ago.
His ghost reflects on the state of his region. He looks at the recent events in Tunisia, the West’s poster child of a regional democratic outlier. No longer. He looks at his country’s other neighbours: Algeria, Libya, and beyond, to Syria and the Lebanon. Even sunny old Morocco is looking rather shaky.
Maybe it’s a North African, Levantine or Mediterranean disease: each regime there can’t resist messing about in the politics of the others. The more their politics loosen up, the more they mess about. And that now almost ritually includes more countries from further afield.
It didn’t have to be this way. Suleiman, like several of his contemporaries, was well trained by the Soviets. Party and social order fit together. Egypt showed, better than most, how it was done. In Egypt the army, the state, accomplished something.
Some people think that’s again the case: that a club of hard men will keep the peace in this part of the world. The ghost has his doubts. Egypt’s regime won’t last. All such regimes, like all political careers, end in failure. That’s also true, again, further afield. One by one the Soviet Union’s erstwhile clients have fallen, apart from the Alawites, whose days are almost certainly numbered. Those of the British and the Americans will follow too, someday. Dynasties and other contrivances only appear formidable in the moment, and the moment never lasts. The House of Saud, the Hashemites, the Zionists – all anarchists to themselves, undone by the rotten compromises they make to stay in power, will all eventually go the way of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, their holy and unholy rivalries supplanted, reinvented, and repeated by others with their ‘outside backing’. A wise old Israeli once told him, ‘we Semites understand power in our blood; the problem is we can never manage to wield it’. A racist statement? Probably. But also probably true.
Speaking of Israelis, the ghost has seen a nice review written by one about a new book on the Second World War:
This is exhilarating and energizing; unfortunately, not long after setting out on the long journey between the book’s covers, one must concede that the ambition to revise, disrupt and overturn convention ends up in what can only be described as a concoction of bizarre assertions and outlandish speculations, held together under a well-weathered ideological umbrella masquerading as a daring new interpretation of the past.
It isn’t the only recent book about that war which provokes such a reaction. To sell books nowadays, one must go out of one’s way to épater le bourgeois, as it’s the authors, not the books, that are meant to sell. But don’t some people want, or need, a daring new interpretation ‘fitting for our time’?
Suleiman’s ghost still has his doubts. Maybe he should have trusted more of his instincts. Maybe he made the wrong sort of enemy, and one or two unwise friends. Maybe he thought too well of his opponents and not well enough of his allies. Maybe he shouldn’t have given that lifeline to the Brotherhood. Maybe he should have fought harder. Like those people in the streets ten years ago, maybe he deserved a better story with a better ending, or maybe one at least a little less fickle. Yet, was he not brave? Was he not loyal? Was he not right?
Maybe, on reflection, it’s just better to be forgotten.