Inglorious revolutions.

• Author: Bell, David A.

Two and a half years after it began, the revolution was widely considered a quagmire, even a disaster. Rebels had made disappointingly little headway against the forces of the hated tyrant. The capital and the country's second major city remained under his control. Foreign powers had provided sympathy, but very little real aid. And despite promising to respect human rights, rebel forces were committing widespread abuses, including murder, torture and destruction of property. In short, the bright hopes of an earlier spring were fading fast.

This may sound like a description of Syria today, but it also describes quite well the situation of another country: the young United States in the winter of 1777-1778. George Washington had taken refuge in the miserable winter encampment of Valley Forge. Philadelphia (then the capital) and New York were both in British hands. France had not yet agreed to help the new republic militarily. And in areas under rebel control, loyalists were being persecuted--far more than most American school textbooks admit.

There is little reason to think that conditions in Syria will turn around the way they did in the United States between 1778 and 1781, when the American revolutionaries managed to eke out a military victory. But the comparison illuminates a different point. Historically, very few revolutions have been quick successes. They have been messy, bloody, long, drawn-out affairs. Victory has very rarely come without numerous setbacks, and, unfortunately, without abuses carried out by all sides. It has generally taken many years, even decades, for the real gains, if any, to become apparent. Yet today, international public opinion and international institutions usually fail to recognize this historical reality. There is an expectation that revolutions, where they occur, must lead within a very short period to the establishment of stable democracy and a full panoply of human rights, or they will be viewed as failures.

Consider, for instance, the disappointments that followed the Arab Spring and the resulting worldwide hand-wringing. Thomas Friedman, that great barometer of elite American conventional wisdom, wrote in May 2011 about the young Arabs who had begun to "rise up peacefully to gain the dignity, justice and self-rule that Bin Laden claimed could be obtained only by murderous violence." Less than two years later, he was lamenting that "the term 'Arab Spring' has to be retired," and comparing events in the region to the seventeenth century's massively destructive Thirty Years' War, in which areas of Central Europe lost up to a third of their populations. Many other commentators throughout the world now write off the Arab Spring as a disaster and failure, pure and simple. But arguably, not the least of the problems bedeviling the Arab revolutionaries of the last two and a half years has been the absurdly inflated expectations they have had to live up to. Put simply, they have been asked to achieve the sort of rapid and complete success that hardly any predecessors, including in the West, ever managed. The same has been true of the "color revolutions" of the past decade in the former Soviet Union, which commentators like Melinda Haring and Michael Cecire, in a recent Foreign Policy article, have been quick to label "terribly disappointing."

But think for a moment about the point that some other major revolutions had reached two years or so after they began. Two years after the first shots of the American Revolution, Washington had not even gotten to Valley Forge, and victory looked very far off indeed. Two years after the beginning of the French Revolution, a huge and dangerous conflict was opening up between the country's political factions, and that summer King Louis XVI severely exacerbated it by trying to flee France and join an enemy invasion force. Many more years of chaos and bloodshed would follow. Two years after the beginning of the Latin American revolutions against Spain, the First Venezuelan Republic had already collapsed, with Spain reestablishing its authority. In each of these cases, the revolutionaries themselves also failed, often quite spectacularly, to behave in a manner that modern human-rights activists would have condoned. Even the West's paradigmatic example of a "good revolution," Britain's "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, was only "bloodless" and "quick" if one equates Britain with England, and fails to consider the extended series of destructive wars that convulsed Ireland and Scotland for decades thereafter. The historian Steve Pincus has written that "far from being aristocratic, peaceful, and consensual," the Glorious Revolution was "popular, violent, and extremely divisive."

Why do most observers today seem so oblivious to the historical record of revolutions? What are the...