Arab springboard: American democracy promotion didn't spark the Arab uprisings, but a shared hatred of our Middle East policies sure helped them spread.

• Author: Hagey, Keach
• Position: The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East - Book review

The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East

by Marc Lynch

Public Affairs, 288 pp.

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Four years ago, during the last spring before the global economy collapsed, I attended a house party in one of the grand, worn colonial apartments down the street from Tahrir Square. The fridge was stocked with beer. Various other forms of contraband circulated. The DJ played Michael Jackson. The only way to tell the difference between the Egyptian and expatriate guests was that the Egyptians were not drinking--though you'd never know it from the way they were dancing. Conversations ranged from Islam to search-engine optimization, but the exchange that has remained etched in my mind over the years is the impassioned debate between young, educated, politically engaged Egyptians about whether there was something in their national character that made them lack the courage to rise up against Hosni Mubarak.

After all, by this point--three years before crowds would assemble down the street and successfully demand Mubarak's ouster--some kind of national quirk was one of the only remaining logical explanations. Egypt under Mubarak was visibly crumbling. Unemployment was out of control. Young people couldn't get married because there was no way for young men to amass the money required to buy an apartment. Writer Alaa al Aswany had garnered international fame with a novel calling out the Mubarak regime for its corruption, hypocrisy, and brutality. Political dissidents gave interviews to CNN, and a generation of democracy activists flourished online, despite arrests and censorship from a shaken regime. Mubarak's ineptitude and disregard for his people's welfare were all documented and openly discussed--and yet nothing changed.

Until everything did.

One of the great contributions of Marc Lynch's excellent book on the Arab Spring, The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East, is his batting down of the widely held notions that the wave of protest that unseated Mubarak either came out of nowhere or was chiefly the result of American-generated social media. Facebook and Twitter played important roles, he argues, but no more so than Al Jazeera or the efforts of democracy activists across the region over the last decade. The U.S. played a role, too, but not the one the Bush administration signed us up for--spreader of democracy across the globe. Rather, shared opposition to unpopular American policies...