Going Down in Up-Risings

When Timothy McVeigh blew up the Albert P Murrah federal building in downtown Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, he killed 168 people, the worst terrorist attack on US soil until the September 11, 2001 airliner explosions took down two World Trade Center buildings and damaged the Pentagon. But McVeigh’s attack was something else as well: an armed internal uprising against an incumbent government. Indeed, armed insurrection is always a crime in the nation affected… unless the attacker succeeds. And as we witness a sequence of nations toppling or about to topple in North Africa and the Middle East, it is hard to remember that such rebellious efforts seldom work. Although times are different today with networked social media and the clear ability of the world to witness, in real time, the events of almost any insurrection online and on television, when a central authority is strong enough and willing to deploy violent repression at any cost, that central government usually prevails.

We think fondly of people willing to sacrifice their own lives in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya in order to effect regime change and topple corrupt political systems led by dictators with repression on their minds. Bahrain is negotiating with the protesters; Syria just shoots them. There’s a hint of the American Revolution in these efforts, but frankly, Egyptian and Tunisian leaders went down pretty fast… leaving their top jobs by their own will early in the game. Egypt’s military may have accelerated the change, but it still isn’t entirely clear that there has been a bona fide regime change in Egypt at all… just one group has been moved aside. Colonel (and yes, there are generals in Libya) Muammar Qaddafi is one of those who elected to go with the majority of leaders faced with rebellion, invoking his power over the military (the units that remain) to strike back hard and fast, attempting to crush the rebel forces.

Picture long civil wars, armies camped out “in the mountains” building strength, occasionally coming down to implement a guerrilla strike on the incumbency, returning quickly to the hills… a process that often consumes many frustrating years and usually ends in defeat. Foreign intervention often turns the tide; remember we had Lafayette on our side during our rebellion hundreds of years ago. But foreign intervention often works the other way, noting how Soviet forces crushed the Hungarian rebellion in 1956 (pictured above). Will Libya topple given the externally applied “no fly zone”? Muammar says he’s willing to negotiate an election, now that huge chunks of his military are destroyed and rebels have made some recent strong advances.

Erica Chenoweth (an assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University), writing for the March 9^th New York Times, asks the very legitimate question as the most effective technique for regime change when a powerful dictatorship or unpopular central government controls an unwilling majority: peaceful resistance or violent rebellion? I’ll add a second question to that vector of thought: how does the culture of the underlying nation define the nature of the resistance? Indeed, in the machismo of the Middle East, could Mahatma Gandhi have led the same kind of passive resistance that eventually drove the British from South Asia?

Dr. Chenoweth writes: “Consider the Philippines. Although insurgencies attempted to overthrow Ferdinand Marcos during the 1970s and 1980s, they failed to attract broad support. When the regime did fall in 1986, it was at the hands of the People Power movement, a nonviolent pro-democracy campaign that boasted more than two million followers, including laborers, youth activists and Catholic clergy.

“Indeed, a study I recently conducted with Maria J. Stephan, now a strategic planner at the State Department, compared the outcomes of hundreds of violent insurgencies with those of major nonviolent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006; we found that over 50 percent of the nonviolent movements succeeded, compared with about 25 percent of the violent insurgencies.”

It also seems as if the countries that have faced serious discontent evidenced by non-violent resistance often produce the desired results. Chenoweth continues: “If the other uprisings across the Middle East remain nonviolent, however, we should be optimistic about the prospects for democracy there. That’s because, with a few exceptions — most notably Iran — nonviolent revolutions tend to lead to democracy… Although the change is not immediate, our data show that from 1900 to 2006, 35 percent to 40 percent of authoritarian regimes that faced major nonviolent uprisings had become democracies five years after the campaign ended, even if the campaigns failed to cause immediate regime change. For the nonviolent campaigns that succeeded, the figure increases to well over 50 percent.”

Has the world changed sufficiently to alter the success rates of violent insurrection? How many of the challenged Middle Eastern nations remaining will change their political systems and leadership structures? In a flurry of rapid change, sometimes it is relevant to look at history’s lessons.

I’m Peter Dekom, and change is inevitable… but resistance to change is often a fact of human nature.