What is different this time in the Arab uprising in the Middle East and North Africa?

Certainly there have been changes from Cairo to Kabul, and portents of more to come. More to the point, they have been in the direction of democracy. When this millennium was ushered in, few would have dared to predict that in just a few years elections of any sort would be held or announced in Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Palestinian territories.

So in this decade  and especially this year, there are welcome surprises all across the Arab-speaking Middle East. Moreover it is at least arguable that, taken together, these events may amount to something big, that they might constitute the cracks in the concrete that signal the impending collapse of the building.

But without depreciating the value of these halting first movements toward democracy, we should be aware of how limited - for a variety of reasons - they are. They may go in the right direction but are just at the beginning of the road, and most can be expected to encounter strong opposition before they move much further.

A similar feature of the events of 1989 in Germany that is found in the Middle East is that those who manned the Berlin Wall were no longer willing to defend it. The Communist regimes had lost faith in communism and in themselves; they offered no resistance when the crowds pulled down the barricades.

The forces on the side of the west are fighting for democracy, as they were in Berlin. The demonstrators in the streets in Tunis, Cairo, Sana, Riyadh, and Beirut ect are now  demanding democracy, which is rather a different thing.

 What the men in the presidential palaces offer is closer to a hesitant gesture than to a radical break with the past. These rulers, who have held power unopposed for more than 25 years, were essentially opposed to constitutional reforms. They were instead making merely comestic reforms in order to satisfy the Americans and appease foreign critics. What is happening in the middle east today is comparable to what happened in the Iron Curtain countries in 1989 and the 1990's, or even in Ukraine a few months ago, when the people refused to accept half-measures and demanded instead full and honest elections and real democracy.

But of course the lands of the Arab Middle East - as is often pointed out - have had no significant experience of genuine democracy. Even the promise of democracy that has been held out to them has not been of the real thing.

The shape of the contemporary Middle East - the shape that the west were  trying to get Syria and Iraq and the others to change - was in large part designed by the British after 1918, when those lands were part of or under the influence of the Empire. The British officials who did the designing proclaimed Arab independence as their goal, but meant by that a mere formal independence subject to continuing British influence and control.

The West, embodied now by the United States, speaks the language of freedom again but, surprisingly, is  widely believed in the Arab world. A Middle Easterner need not be especially cynical, considering the region's oil and strategic situation, to suspect that America is pursuing its national interests rather than disinterestedly promoting democracy and the welfare of western Asia.

On the other hand, many Americans question whether it is either right or feasible to try to remake foreign countries in America’s image. And the more pragmatic ones note that if those nations continue to be ruled by strongmen, America can continue making deals with them; whereas if America installs democracies, they may well vote to eject them and their friends at their earliest opportunity.

Thus paradoxically, a skeptical Arab might suspect that the United States pursues its own selfish goals in the Middle East, while at the same time a puzzled American might worry that it does not.

President Bush, for his part, says one reason to forge democracies in the Middle East is that terrorists are produced by nondemocratic societies. Young people, goes this line of thinking, grow up frustrated in such societies, having no legitimate outlets for their demands; so by overturning the despotisms  America  can eliminate "the conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of murder." It is a plausible theory, and even a persuasive one.

On the other hand, it is refuted by Western history. In the 1960's and 1970's, terrorism became rampant - one thinks of the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Weathermen - in Italy, Germany and the United States, all of them free countries. Democracy, if it is a cure for terrorism, is at least not an infallible one.

For the moment no one can judge for sure whether the president's theory is valid: it has not been put to the test. The older order in the Middle East has not been overthrown; until it is a new one cannot be constructed.

One lesson of recent history is clear, however: the prospects in the Muslim world would be brighter if both the tearing down and the building up were done by Muslims rather than by the west.  Berliners brought down the wall; yet it was America that overthrew Iraq's dictator, not the Iraqis. And in large part it was America that arranged the election for Iraq's national assembly - although only the magnificent courage of the Iraqi people in voting at the risk of their lives made it possible. Now the NATO and other nations are doing all they can to overthrow the government in Libya under the guise of the united nation resolution, which states they should use all necessary measures to protect civilians. 

Installation of new regimes by the help of western powers will create secessions of ethnic and religious minorities; at some point an authoritarian leader may emerge; a theocracy might take power. All the west can do is help and hope. But as for claiming victory and heralding an unstoppable tide of democracy, it is far too soon.