Have we really almost rolled around — yet again — to the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, this time amid much Bush administration and neocon self-congratulation, as well as media congratulations (grudging or otherwise) for an Iraqi-election-inspired spread of democracy in the Middle East? And what will we be congratulating ourselves on next year, when the usefulness of ‘democracy’ passes, oil prices continue to rise, and the war in Iraq grinds on?

Right now, we’re in ‘Arab Spring,’ ‘the Cedar revolution,’ ‘a mighty storm,’ and opinions on what’s actually going on in the Middle East are varied indeed. Youssef M. Ibrahim, a thoughtful former New York Times reporter, writes from Dubai for the Washington Post:

‘Listen to the conversations in the cafes on the edge of the creek that runs through this Persian Gulf city, and it is hard to believe that the George W. Bush being praised by Arab diners is the same George W. Bush who has been widely excoriated in these parts ever since he took office… Nowadays, intellectuals, businessmen and working-class people alike can be caught lauding Bush’s hard-edged posture on democracy and cheering his handling of Arab rulers who are U.S. allies… It’s enough for someone like me, who has felt that Bush’s attitude toward the Mideast has been all wrong, to wonder whether his idea of setting the Muslim house in order is right.’

Or could it be, as Robert Kuttner suggested recently in the American Prospect magazine, that democracy is indeed threatening to break out in the Middle East, but no thanks to Bush? Or are the Bush people just using a new ‘Arab Spring’ logo to ‘rebrand’ their failing efforts, as Naomi Klein suggests in the Nation? (‘Faced with an Arab world enraged by its occupation of Iraq and its blind support for Israel, the US solution is not to change these brutal policies; it is, in the pseudo-academic language of corporate branding, to ‘change the story.’)

Or is it possible, as conservative Toronto Sun columnist Eric Margolis proposes, that the man responsible for springtime in Lebanon is not George Bush, but Osama bin Laden, and that the democratic reforms breaking out in American client states in the Middle East are mostly ‘pure sham’? Or could it be that, in Lebanon at least, we’ve confused the urge of a significant segment of the public to be free of an occupying force with ‘democracy.’ After all, as Juan Cole writes at his Informed Comment website, ‘The Lebanese have been having often lively parliamentary election campaigns for decades. The idea that the urbane and sophisticated Beirutis had anything to learn from the Jan. 30 process in Iraq is absurd on the face of it.’

Or could it be that, as Seumas Milne writes in a fierce column in the British Guardian:

‘The claim that democracy is on the march in the Middle East is a fraud. It is not democracy, but the US military, that is on the march… What has actually taken place since 9/11 and the Iraq war is a relentless expansion of US control of the Middle East, of which the threats to Syria are a part. The Americans now have a military presence in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar — and in not one of those countries did an elected government invite them in. Of course Arabs want an end to tyrannical regimes, most of which have been supported over the years by the US, Britain and France: that is the source of much anti-western Muslim anger. The dictators remain in place by US licence, which can be revoked at any time — and managed elections are being used as another mechanism for maintaining pro-western regimes rather than spreading democracy.’

At the very least, there can be little question that the Iraq invasion and occupation has destabilized the region (as the neocons, who had long assumed that chaos would be their ally, hoped it would). But the Bush administration must know that genuinely free elections in its various client and allied states would likely sweep Islamic parties, including in some places the Muslim Brotherhood, into power. Not exactly a dream for them. So, in Iraq, they created a ‘democracy’ so weak (a gridlock-inducing two-thirds vote is needed in the new National Assembly even to form a government) that it would be unlikely to rule successfully over anything; while no administration official spoke up when Tunisia’s military strongman, in another U.S.-allied regime, won re-election with 94.5% of the vote (a total that might have made Saddam Hussein proud).

Less noted as well have been other destabilizing signs that might not serve the Bush administration’s story-line so admirably. For instance, the spread of terrorism in Kuwait as well as Saudi Arabia (with Jordan waiting in the wings), or the rise in the price of an AK-47 assault rifle in Lebanon from $100 in the pre-Cedar Revolution days to $700 now — a sign of the jitters and, undoubtedly, of fears that the country’s civil war might return. Or what about another kind of ‘spreading’ story: The Pentagon is set to introduce Matrix, a new remote-controlled land-mine system, in democratic Iraq by May. (These mines can evidently be set off by a soldier stationed at a laptop computer miles away, based on blips registering on his screen — a surefire formula for democratic ‘collateral damage.’)

Meanwhile, cheering away for an Arab spring, the Bush administration is also reportedly at work on the beginnings of a democratic winter in Latin America. The British Financial Times reports that a new policy is being formulated — ‘at the request of President George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice’ — to ‘contain’ Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. (Of course, the Bush administration has already tried to overthrow the man — a democratic coup d’etat, naturally.) Don’t these Financial Times quotes from Roger Pardo-Maurer, deputy assistant secretary for western hemisphere affairs at the Department of Defense, sound familiar? ‘Chavez is a problem because he is clearly using his oil money and influence to introduce his conflictive style into the politics of other countries… He’s picking on the countries whose social fabric is the weakest. In some cases it’s downright subversion.’ Don’t they do a pretty reasonable job of describing the Bush administration?

In addition to an Arabian Spring and a Latin Winter, it looks like we’re going to get a variety of bonus seasons: What about a UN Fall, thanks to the nomination of John Bolton as our ambassador there? Or a long, hot World Bank Summer, given the nomination of Paul Wolfowitz to be the bank’s next head? Or an Alaskan Thaw, thanks to the Senate’s vote this week paving the way for the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

When I consider the Iraq War and the Arab Spring, I can’t help thinking of the myth of Pandora. It seems, at least as Gustav Schwab tells the story in his Gods and Heroes, Myths and Epics of Ancient Greece, that Zeus, angry at Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods, had the fire-god Hephaestus create a beautiful woman, Pandora (‘she who has gifts from all’). Zeus then sent her as a present to Prometheus’s not-so-sharp brother, carrying a tightly closed box the gods had filled with baleful ‘gifts’ for humanity — and you know the rest. When Pandora opened the box, all the ills that humanity until then had avoided came tumbling out, leaving only one small good thing at the bottom — hope. Whether hope even made it out of the box seems to depend on which version of the myth you read.

For the global gamblers of the Bush administration, Iraq was that box. When they blasted its lid off, the resulting shock-and-awe blew back on everyone. But at the bottom of the box, there’s always that one small unpredictable thing. Thank the Bush administration, if you will, for the mayhem of the Middle East, but (as veteran journalist and Middle Eastern expert Dilip Hiro has made clear,) don’t thank any American government of recent times for an Arab spring, if it really comes. The historical record tells us otherwise. Just thank the gods above, or luck, or our natures, for the fact that, even amid mayhem, there’s usually hope somewhere; and that, despite every horror, there are usually human beings ready to make some modest use of it.

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture and The Last Days of Publishing.]

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