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  • Forecasting the Arab Spring
  • Cole M. Bunzel (bio)
Reuel Marc Gerecht, The Wave: Man, God, and the Ballot Box in the Middle East, Stanford, Hoover Institution Press, 2011. 160 pp. $19.95

Since the December 2010 flight of Tunisian strongman Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali amid demonstrations calling for the “fall of the regime,” and the inspired uprisings among Egyptians, Libyans, Syrians, and others, Western analysts have spilled a wealth of ink interpreting the events of the so-called “Arab Spring.”

Initially, skepticism reigned regarding the prospects for further prode-mocracy revolts to follow Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution. Even as the final days approached for the regime of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, seasoned observers held firmly that political change in Cairo would not come overnight. “Game over,” declared one authority on modern Egypt in early February 2011, affirming that Mubarak had “outsmarted the opposition” and concluding that “the chance for democracy in Egypt is lost.”1 Nine days later, Mubarak was gone.

At first, this cautious take on the Arab Spring’s potential appeared reasonable, especially given the past half-century of modern Arab history. Not since the 1950s had the Arab states, in the form of the radical Arab nationalism inspired by then Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, experienced revolutionary turmoil on a massive scale.2 Since that time, autocracy had, it seemed, planted deep roots in the Arab world. Many experts therefore predicted that the unrest would be quickly squelched—brutally and decisively—as Iran’s prodemocracy Green Movement was after June 2009.

Looking back in September 2011, one easily recognizes that the autocrats’ staying power was taken for granted and that the democratic urgings of the Arabs, grown irrepressible, were overlooked. There is at least one scholar, however, who may claim some noteworthy exemption from these oversights.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, completed The Wave: Man, God, and the Ballot Box in the Middle East in October 2010, a mere two months before the onset of the Arab Spring. Arguing that the Middle East was on the cusp of a democratic transformation, his book focused on how the emergent democratic order would be heavily infused, at least initially, with an unsavory political Islam. Yet despite his very hard-nosed and unsympathetic appreciation of the Islamic fundamentalism he predicted would play a leading role, Gerecht still holds great hope for the [End Page 127] coming political reordering of the Middle East. It is an argument with much merit, and a hopeful vision that the United States, in light of the Arab Spring, must support.

The “wave” is a reference to the late Samuel Huntington’s famous study of democracy’s trajectory in the developing world from the 1970s to the 1990s, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late 20th Century (1991). According to Huntington, this period witnessed the third significant onset of democratization in modern times. Yet despite that wave’s relative success in parts of Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, Huntington observed that no country in the Islamic Middle East save Turkey had “sustained a fully democratic political system for any length of time.”3 By the time of Gerecht’s writing, Huntington’s statement still rang largely true.

Nevertheless, Gerecht anticipates the imminent demise of that era of autocracy. “[W]hat if Professor Huntington’s ‘third wave,’” he asks, “is arriving in the Middle East just a little late?”4 In the book’s four succeeding chapters on the Iranians, the Arabs, the Turks, and the Americans, he expounds on his argument and asserts that indeed it is, explaining why, furthermore, “2011 might, just possibly, be decisive” in democracy’s regional advance.5

Unlike Huntington, whose study The Wave is meant to update and complement, Gerecht does not adopt anything like a scientific approach to his subject. A former case officer in the CIA and a graduate of Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies, Gerecht employs prediction and analysis that flow from his unique career experience and area studies academic background more than from statistics or poll numbers. Observing that democratic ideas, “durable and aggressive,” have come to command mass appeal in the Middle...

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