Allan Massie: We must leave the Middle East to fight its own battles

THE ARAB Spring was generally greeted with enthusiasm here. It was 1989 all over again, sort of anyway, or 1789, whichever you prefer. Back then - 1789 that is - the Whig leader, Charles James Fox, hailed the Fall of the Bastille as the greatest event in the history of the world. The young Wordsworth declared "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ And to be young was very Heaven", a sentiment shared, one supposes, by many of the Egyptian students who camped out in Cairo's squares calling for the departure of president Hosni Mubarek. But, of course, things in Paris turned nasty within four years of the Bastille. There was the Terror and then the military dictatorship of Napoleon.

Not all revolutions turn out badly. Eastern Europe has been a better place since the crumbling of the Soviet Empire. Nevertheless, hopes vested in revolution often turn sour. Who in 1917 thought that the overthrow of the tsar would lead straight to the Gulag?

And already it is apparent that the turmoil in the Middle East is not a simple case of Good versus Evil. Mubarek has gone as desired, but it is doubtful if his authoritarian regime will be succeeded by anything like a true democracy.

Meanwhile, the Copts - Egyptian Christians making up 10 per cent of the population - a community established in Egypt centuries before Muhammad received the Word of God - are suffering outbreaks of persecution which are likely to grow worse. Mubarek's brutal police state was secular, as was Saddam Hussein's in Iraq. Iraqi Christians have suffered since Saddam's defeat; many have been driven into exile. Will the Copts suffer a similar fate? The new regime in Egypt may not be Islamist, but the Muslim Brotherhood, suppressed by Nasser, Sadat and Mubarek, will have a role to play in it.

Then there is Syria. President Bashar al-Assad, unlike Mubarek, has not hesitated to use force to try to subdue the protests. His regime has never shown any respect for human rights. Syria, like Mubarek's Egypt, is a police state, its jails full of political prisoners, many subjected to torture. We may reasonably think Assad's a ghastly regime, but would a successful revolution or a civil war make things better there?

As Charles Glass, an American journalist and author, who knows the Middle East better than most people in the US State Department or the Pentagon, writes: "The first victims of a war in Syria would be the religious minorities - the Alawites and the Christians." A successful revolution there would most likely replace one oppressive regime by another; only the victims would be different. So far, we have stood aside. We should continue to do so.Of course, we in the West give lip service to the ideal of democracy - except when it comes to Saudi Arabia, too important to the US and the economy of the western world for that to be risked there. The kingdom must be supported because God knows what would happen if the Saudi monarchy was to be overthrown. But we have intervened in Libya, in the name of human rights, and in the hope that the opposition to the dreadful Gaddafi will win and establish some sort of a democracy, or at least a regime which, at first anyway, will respect human rights as his does not. But, in truth, we know very little about the people we are supporting or about their aims, and while it is unlikely that any new regime could be worse than Gaddafi's, it is equally likely that it might be no better.

Meanwhile, as the Arab Spring turns to a sultry summer and perhaps to a grim winter, the Israel-Palestinian conflict remains frozen. Israel is, as its defenders remind us, the only democracy in the Middle East. So indeed it is, but this merely goes to show that a democracy can be as capable of pursuing oppressive policies as any authoritarian regime.

The Israeli government believes its intransigence is necessary as a means of self-defence. Yet its persistence in building settlements in the West Bank, which it conquered in 1967 and has occupied ever since, serves only to strengthen its most bitter enemies. There will be no solution of the Palestinian problem as long as the US gives uncritical support to Israel. The enthusiastic reception Congress recent gave Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggests that there is little chance of this changing.

So, amidst this confusion and turmoil, what lessons are there for us? The first, despite our involvement in Libya - which may yet end happily, but should certainly not be allowed to become deeper - is that the future of the Middle East will be decided by the people who live there, not by the US, Britain or France, whether acting under the cloak of Nato or not. Military engagement by the West should be avoided. That is surely the conclusion to be drawn from our experience in Iraq.

We may give verbal encouragement to a movement towards democracy, but we cannot successfully impose democracy on the states of the Middle East any more than we are able to do so in Afghanistan. It is, frankly, none of our business, and it is folly to suppose that it is.

Second we should recognise that intervention rebounds on the intervener. The US is resented because it has assumed the right to determine how other countries should be governed, and because its pursuit of the power politics of national self-interest - as it perceives this - is perceived as hypocritical. It preaches democracy and supports tyrannies which declare themselves to be friendly to America.

So we should step aside, pursue policies of non-intervention, and leave the countries of the Middle East to resolve their own future.The West is not the world's policeman and should not try to play that role. It only makes things worse - and they are bad enough already. We might remember that the Terror in France in 1793-4 was provoked by the determination of the monarchs of Europe - and the United Kingdom - to make war on France to reverse the course of the revolution and restore the ancien regime. That led to 20 years of war in Europe.