What Arab Spring?

I don't know who can claim coinage of the phrase "Arab Spring," but the phrase needs to be hit with weed killer because it's superficial, inappropriate and misleading. The echo of course is to "Prague Spring." But, let's take a quick trip back and remember what happened in 1968.

Alexander Dubcek became Communist Party leader in Czechoslovakia on January 1, 1968. What became the original Prague Spring began in April 1968 with an "Action Programme" of political, cultural and social liberalization. Dubcek's plans included a federalization of the Czech Republic into Czech and Slovak entities. Long moribund cafes, salons, and theater groups came alive. This looked like a long winter had indeed given over to new life. But, remember what happened next?

By late August, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia and a very brief, Prague Spring ended! The real playing out of the historical drama took many years. Our journalists have created a narrative more akin to "Law and Order" than to 21st century politics. In a television drama, the bad guy goes to jail in 46 minutes. It didn't happen in Czechoslovakia and it won't happen in the Arab world.

Dubcek was replaced in April 1969 by Husak, the Communist Party leader to whom Vaclav Havel addressed his famous 1975 Open Letter, by which time a reform movement had started to resurface some seven years later.

In the Arab world, Tunisia and Egypt have gotten rid of their despots, and they would seem on the surface to be the states with some political, cultural, and political infrastructure to support modernization. But, in the words of Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia, "...despots have gone, but a real transformation (in Tunisia and Egypt) has barely begun."

We have no idea where the current process of sequential, out-of-phase, cycles of unrest will resolve itself. If Tunisia and Egypt have the potential to become roses, our positions in Libya and Syria may have us grasping nettles.