It is the aspirations of young people for freedom, prosperity and individual and national dignity on the one hand, and the impossibility of achieving development without democracy, dignity and liberty on the other, that are the motors of change.


Since before the invasion of Iraq, the Arab nation began to regain its self-confidence. The youth of the nation wants to live as free and as prosperous as the youth of other nations. The globalisation of information and media uncovered the poorness of the conditions of their lives. The large participation of women and the youth in the Arab Spring revolutions is unprecedented in the Arab world. They lack jobs, healthcare, real education, freedom of movement and creation, healthy relations between women and men, clean habitation and environment, respect of their individual and national identity, integrity and culture, freedom of opinion, expression and assembly in civil society organisations, associations and trade unions. And on top of this, they lack justice, justice for themselves, for their co-citizens and for their sisters and brothers in other countries, of which Palestine is their never-ending concern.

It is certain that there are many currents among the youth of the Arab nations, but as the Arab revolutions expressed well, they are bound — be they Islamists, leftists, nationalists or liberals — by an unwritten constitution that springs from their Arab-Muslim culture, history and experience.

For nationalists, retaining control of national resources to serve the general interest is sacrosanct. For leftists, opposing the international chains of imperialism and globalisation is a baseline. For Islamists, resistance to foreign occupation, as written in the Quran, is a duty. Their interest lies currently in achieving unity in struggle. They are united by their Arab-Muslim identity. They share common principles and values as follows: natural resources, material heritage, and the riches of culture and civilisation are the property of the totality of the people; the totality of citizens constitutes the people; the people are the sole source of sovereignty and of constitutional, political and judicial legitimacy; government is responsible for and accountable to all citizens; solidarity between citizens — between generations, the able and ill, the elderly and young, the orphan and every human being who finds himself in a state of weakness — should form the basis of any government’s social policy.

The general interest is the justification and basis for the operation of the state, with every citizen, free of all forms of discrimination, sharing in the fruits of national wealth and social development.

Western propaganda, leftist as well as rightist, tends to undermine the importance of the Arab revolutions in the name of the election of Islamists as a majority in parliaments. They express by this their ideology that the Arabs, because of their Islam, cannot have a liberating revolution. The reality is elsewhere. Firstly, insisting on the Arab-Muslim character is a normal response to the animosity expressed by the neoliberal imperialists and comprador regimes towards Islam and Muslims, that violate Arab rights, interests and dignity, of which supporting Israel is the crying example. Secondly, the Islamist current didn’t, until now, break the unwritten pact among existing political currents on building a civil state. Thirdly, what is democracy if not reconciling the national state with all popular cultures and trends? Fourthly, the youth is not only waging a political revolution for power; it wages, including the Islamists, a revolution for societal change.

The factors and the immediate character of the struggle for power through elections are different from the factors and the lasting character of a societal revolution. The force within power will fade if it doesn’t correspond to the societal change. Power in a transitional period is temporary; a revolution is continuous. The chaos and economic difficulties engendered by the change, or created by the enemies of change, always weaken in the eyes of electors those who appear, in reality or supposition, as working towards a tabula rasa, especially when they don’t have a clear programme for change. This is not new in revolutions: the Jacobins of 1789 in France produced Napoleon I; the Blanquists in 1848 produced Napoleon III; in Russia, the Socialist-Revolutionaries produced Stalin; and the election after the youth revolution of 1968 in France produced a rightist parliament.

Outside the distinctions of each national context, there are geopolitical factors that also play a role in the Arab renaissance. The horrors of what happened in Iraq, on the one hand, and the United States’ military, political, financial and moral suicide on the other, are factors that made the Arab nation’s youth realise that the repressive, heavily armed regimes that respond to imperial and Zionist demands are nothing but paper tigers.

Added to the similarities in conditions under comprador regimes, these geopolitical factors produced a regional synergy that is the Arab Spring of democracy.

The invasion of Iraq was not only the first genocide of the 21st century but also the peak of the curve of the West’s capacity — that began with the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration — to decide the future of Arabs. The first Palestinian Intifada announced the beginning of the Arab masses taking their future in their hands without waiting for governments and leaders. This was followed by the political, civil and armed Iraqi resistance, the resistance of South Lebanon and the continuous resistance of Gaza. Increasingly, as imperial and Zionist forces tried to subjugate this rising backlash, they found themselves confronting the full force of Arab societies.

With Tunis followed by Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, we entered into a new historical transition period of change in the Arab world. Women and the youth work to achieve profound societal change. The state is reconciling with the Arab-Muslim identity of the people. Every social stratum is calling for liberty of opinion, expression and the liberty of organising itself. No maitre à penser — whether a state, a party or a person — can dictate positions anymore. The notion of a permanent entity leading the state and society has blown away with the wind. The ideology of no ideology is winning, and the solidarity among peoples too. Every aspect of liberation began to appear possible. It suffices to struggle in mass, peacefully and consciously. The future is open for the youth of the Arab world. The oppressive and neoliberal models and policies are falling. Condoleezza Rice wanted a new Middle East of pro-imperialist governments sustained by creative chaos; she got a Middle East of peoples who want to get rid of oppression, corruption, poverty and imperialist dictates.

Vive the Arab revolutions.

The new elected parliament in Egypt has the necessary task of changing the failed neoliberal model of a police state governed by a family for the benefits of foreign powers, capital and a comprador class — one that lives not off development but from different kinds of rent — into a democratic welfare state. It is a great task that should be accomplished with tact and with the support and comprehension of all economic actors,including the private sector,so as to avoid chaos or paralysis.

Social justice shouldn’t mean only ensuring the necessary better revenues for all, as this alone would result, among other things, in inflation. It should be simultaneously inciting better and larger production. The first urgent necessity is to attempt to ensure food security in the country. The agriculture and alimentary industry should be intensively and extensively developed. To avoid inflation, aid should be better directed to the producer, so as to incite him to improve his production and not only the product. The same thing applies to other sectors, including construction, transport, energy, health, family, education, jobs, training, the unemployed and the elderly.Aid to the person gives state administration the possibility of distributing revenues according to income, of selecting the products that should be incited to be produced, and to redistribute revenues and augment production without creating inflation and black markets.Deputies should urge the government, specialists and economists to put forward plans so that all families have a revenue, and at the same time that jobs can be created, production increased, monopolies and sources of black markets and corruption suppressed, competitiveness enhanced, the environment protected, administration and public services reformed and the budget balanced by reducing the deficit and public debts through improved commerce and real development. All Arab countries have a high potential for development. They have an abundance of factors of production that could be mobilised individually and collectively. It suffices to be mobilised rationally for the benefit of all, not only the few.

Social justice programmes cannot be achieved but through legitimate, democratic, stable institutions of the state. The base of any democracy is a free individual, woman and man, and a free citizen, woman and man. International human rights standards and treaties should be ratified and applied.

The legislature should ensure that state institutions apply these standards. The state is the state of all Egyptians. Public interest is imperative. Nothing in its laws, structures, procedures, and the behaviour of its agents, should serve — or show any form of discrimination against — any particular individual, group, or ideology, even if initiated by the government in the name of the majority. Special attention should be directed to the physical and moral integrity and dignity of citizens, especially women, minorities and children, to be guaranteed and applied by all state institutions.

Arab regimes are late in the process of democratisation in the world. One of the reasons is the role played by the big powers in supporting non-democratic regimes during their Cold War: for the West, dictatorial comprador regimes; for the East, one-party regimes. While democracy is a system by which society directs its public affairs, the end of the Cold War didn’t end the culture that accompanied it. The pro-Westerns limited their criticism of dictatorial regimes and demand for change by beginning a shy criticism of regimes based on the necessity of individual liberties in individual life without criticising the neoliberal globalised structure and the comprador class enforcing and profiting from it, while the leftists continue to see and think of revolution as a putsch of an avant-garde group establishing the dictatorship of workers and poor peasants as a way to suppress the State: their model is The State and the Revolution of Lenin. American culture is a liberal ideology of less state; the leftists adopted the ideology of one party that leads the state and society. Although world political culture abandoned both neoliberalism and putschism, these two cultures continue to have their avant-gardism in the Arab world.

In Egypt, this is expressed by two positions. The first is the insistence on transferring power to some liberals before any election or constitution. The second is to consider elections as a non-event. Between these, there are reasonable positions held by varied political actors. The first is the position supporting the drafting of a constitution first. Since de Tocqueville’s On Democracy in America, political science knows the danger of a state without recognised values or a constitution that limits the risk of the dictatorship of the majority vote. The constitution is a social pact to live and manage public affairs peacefully together. In a democratic state, non-respect of the constitution in decisions is considered a putsch, even if voted by a majority. The second legitimate position is that it is the elected assembly that should draft the constitution. This position is legitimate because a constitution is not given to the people but written by the people. Although there was the suspicion that religious parties wanted to impose a religious state, agreement on the Al-Azhar Document lifted this suspicion. The third is the position of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), expressed on 23 July, in the constitutional declaration, and in the roadmap for transferring power to an elected president.

The problem with the avant-gardists is that they take their legitimacy from themselves while the only legitimacy in a democratic state is the legitimacy borne from elections. Many things limit even this legitimacy. The first is the constitution, which should contain all kind of limitations to guarantee equality among citizens and prevent the dictatorship of the majority. The legitimacy of the legislative branch is also limited by time. The legislature should be re-elected periodically. Electing a deputy is not giving them the absolute power to decide everything in the life of electors.

It is only delegating to them while keeping the right to pull from them their powers, in the next elections and even before. The third limitation comes from the impossibility for the legislative and executive branches to direct social life in its detail. From this springs the role of the media, expressions of public opinion such as demonstrations, strikes, art, expert research, publications and statements, universities and research centres, freetrade unions, local elections and institutions, and specialised non-governmental associations. The fourth limitation comes from the several other elected bodies: the senate, the president and local administration. Each has its prerogative and legitimacy. The fifth limitation is the institutions of the state and its cultural heritage, because laws even voted will not be enforced efficiently without their acceptance and the possibility that the institutions concerned have faith in them. The opposite is a crisis in the work of the administration that should be addressed.

One problem in the thinking of the avant-gardists is the idea that the revolution is one act to install on the top of the state people that issue revolutionary laws. These laws would have no effect if not supported by the people. Society and the state apparatus and the country’s geopolitical relations make this thinking subjective, impossible to realise and in some aspects dangerous, even if it springs from a real thirst for liberty and progressive aspirations. In Egypt, in their slogans against SCAF, the avant-gardists didn’t present a workable alternative. All society appreciates their role in sparking the January 25 Revolution, but their slogans are seen as harmful, as the elections proved. Happily after one year, most of the youth have abandoned putschism and return to affirming, in group work and outlook, the importance of peaceful change, preparing already for future elections, after the success of the recent elections. No one can deny them this right and appreciated role, or attack it.

In a democratic state no group has a special political privilege. But in all states, democratic or not, the armed forces have a special functioning different from other institutions of the state. In all Third World countries, as in some capitalist countries, the military draft was not only to ensure capacity to face war, but also to develop strategic research and studies, industrial and civil infrastructure, train workers, to administer the public sector and to guarantee enforcement of the law and a civil state. It is to the constitution to decide, calmly and scientifically, the way the army works as an institution of the state, without harming national security and the national economy. In this domain we can say that as Egypt is targeted as a power, despite the absence of a state of war, the army should be prepared to defend national security in all domains of the state. Egypt is not living in a peaceful environment so as to reveal its military plans and budget publicly, although these plans and budget should be inspected and ratified by the deputies of the people.

A heavy responsibility lies on the shoulders of political groups, the elected of the people, and the government of Egypt. The more rapidly and transparently they apply necessary changes, the more the future of Egypt will shine. We are sure the love of the people of Egypt for their country and their confidence in its capacity will make this heavy task easier.

Much has changed, but more remains the same. Perhaps it was inevitable that this, the saddest lesson, would be played out: loss of hope from such a high of euphoria, borne of the unprecedented collective consciousness that appeared to grab the masses from nowhere — those beautiful 18 days in which no mistakes were made.

What a contrast to the catalogue of mistakes made in the days and months — indeed hours — that followed the departure of Mubarak. That is, as soon as the leaderless revolution needed leaders.

Many perhaps regret the indulgent celebrations held in Tahrir Square for weeks following 11 February, including handshakes and baby photo-ops with military soldiers who soon would be clearing the square by force, torturing artists with zeal, and subjecting the women of the revolution to virginity tests. And this was just the beginning. Some, too, might regret the lost time, and sense of buoyant surety, that led to the constitutional amendments defeat — the first and final (in that there was no revival) defeat of the revolution so soon after its supposed success.

It was in the wake of this defeat that calls gathered for a “second revolution”. The calls alone were acknowledgement of the failure of the first revolution. But even at this time most of the focus was on the “regime.” Few have been ready to understand that the problem is in the state. In this context, three incidents stand out on the sad path Egypt has taken in the last year; three incidents that perhaps cannot be outweighed by the positive changes that have survived, among which is a level of liberty of discourse unprecedented in Egypt’s modern history, prisoners of conscience of the revolution — first among which is Maikel Nabil — notwithstanding. These incidents increase in intensity and reveal something dark about the state that has survived as the former regime fell.

The first incident occurred on the first day of Ramadan. The plan to have a communal iftar in Tahrir Square was aborted as the Central Security Forces drove people out with sticks. To be sure, the stick generally is not an implement of fatal force. But there is something in the stick that is worse to the honest eye than the gun. Something representative about how the old regime thought of the people, and so gives its reappearance a particular significance. It was not 50 sticks, but 300. Some 300 sticks that had to be found, gathered from their place of storage, transported and handed out man by man, with instructions on what was coming next. It was on this day that the Muslim Brotherhood fell into line with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, for as a force they could not bring together Tahrir and Islam.

The second incident was the runaway vehicle near Maspero that literally drove over Egyptians, flattening them and killing them. Several vehicles were doing the same, but the APC that did so was several tons in weight and at no point in the video footage did it appear that it would stop. Rather, this was crowd control. The mask fell that night, 9 October. What was seen on the Corniche in the capital was really how the military regarded the Egyptian people: like sheep to be rounded up, and if necessary swept up. How heartbreaking now to see again the image of the woman who that night lost her fiancé, his face bludgeoned and distorted out of all proportion as she sat wailing, holding what the army had left of him.

The third instance is something akin to a war crime or crime against humanity: the open-air gassing of crowds of people on Mohamed Mahmoud Street. If Maspero was crowd control, Mohamed Mahmoud was pest control. It was quite a feat, indeed, to get the concentration of CS gas so high in open-air space that people died, asphyxiated. But this is what the military and the Central Security Forces clearly aimed at; testament to which is how they attacked field hospitals, killing even medical personnel there to help the helpless. It didn’t get worse than this, and heaven knows how deep and wide the economic catastrophe must be that Mubarak led the country into for the people as a whole not to simply refuse to participate in Egyptian public life after witnessing these horrid and impossible scenes.

And now here we are, a parliament full of suits. Of over 500, how many in there risked and lost? How many in there fought and won? Is it five, or is it 10? Is it one or two per cent of the whole? And so it is that when Dr Essam El-Erian, a decent man no doubt, arrives, it is the police who greet him, smiling, because we have carefully and successfully transitioned from one regime to a new regime in the making, without touching the foundations of the state itself, without touching its practices, its torture, its governmental rationality. How lost were the crowds and the intellectuals of the revolution, again in November, to call for the end of SCAF. The problem is not SCAF; it is the rationality of SCAF. The problem is not who, but how. The real issue is not taking power, but defanging power. What else, indeed, do rights really mean?

Over 1000 people died, and not for glorious nothingness. The so-called intellectuals of the secular left bear a heavy burden, if they could see it. In failing to put forward an economic plan for Egypt they allowed the people to turn against the revolution, tired and hungry.

In failing to form a solid and wide-ranging coalition they gave the revolution on a plate to the next best-organised political forces, including a newcomer that has nothing to do with the freedom of spirit, body and mind that was necessary to confront snipers and firebombs in January. And by failing to understand that a revolution must be led by its people, the people who constituted the revolution, not puppets of the like of ElBaradei, they sealed the fate of the revolution and the outcome of its last gasp, figuratively and literally: the zero political outcome that emerged from the heroic frontline resistance waged by football fans in Mohamed Mahmoud Street against the police that always brutalised them and means to continue doing so.

Same police force. Same sticks. Same rape by forced sodomy. Same tactics. Same governmental economic incompetence. Same one-party dominance. Same exceptional powers. Same bureaucracy. Same hall of mirrors. Same malaise. Same same same. The Arab Spring but an echo. Did we dream it?

Or perhaps something else can happen. Perhaps the people can start again to talk about freedom, and to practice freedom. Egyptians rose up for dignity. They refused torture. Real freedom is sovereignty of person; collective freedom is national sovereignty. Unless the rationality of the use of force is questioned it will not matter who exercises force, and it could even be a revolutionary. The idea of a social contract is that the people choose the cost of government; that is, the cost to their freedom of being governed. Political discourse in Egypt at present has accepted that replacing persons not structures and rationalities is the most important thing, and everyone in parliament is consciously or unconsciously complicit with this. But when the people called for the end of the nizam, the system, it meant more than persons; it was the violence of that system, and the costs of that government.

To SCAF: No more talk of foreign conspiracies. The Egyptian people are against the violence of the Egyptian state. They will oppose it regardless of what you pretend. Stop killing and beating the people.

To the people: It is time you took control of the mouthpiece. It is time for a completely free and cleansed media in Egypt. Otherwise you do not hear the truth of what happens; you hear what SCAF wants to you to hear, while people are fighting and dying still for your freedom.

To the politicians: Congratulate yourselves and pretend you are more respectable in parliament today than you were outside of it yesterday. But remember: the people are the greatest force in Egypt, and you cannot dictate — no more than Mubarak could — something as fundamental as the feeling of freedom.

And they have a human civilisation that is rarely matched by other civilisations. The existence of a class of intellectuals trusting their people is essential to make this potential a reality.

Some say that this sharp division is necessary because it will filter those who are patriots from those who are pro-Western. Arab dictatorships used this false argument for decades as a bulwark against criticism. They filtered people through repression and prisons. For our part, we do not understand why those who are against dictatorships and against foreign intervention are not patriots, and why Arab intellectuals cannot be against dictatorship and foreign intervention at the same time. To stand with dictatorships is standing against the youth of the nation aspiring to freedom and a better life, and it is the concept that the nation is sterile that produces but these regimes, which created the best conditions for foreign intervention because of the spread of injustice, sectarianism, oppression, poverty, unemployment, and divisions that have strangled the life of the youth, destroyed their energies and betrayed their dreams to live in freedom, wellbeing and creativity like the youth of other nations.

We did not ever believe that foreign armies, even internationalist ones, might have freed the Arab nation. A liberated nation is the nation that has control of its destiny, and so has been liberated by its own hands. But the scarecrow of foreign intervention will not prevent us from supporting the youths’ revolutions against dictatorships, whether republics or kingdoms. It is dictatorships, not democratic revolutions that beckon foreign interference. The youth should be prepared to struggle against both dictatorship and foreign intervention all over the Arab world.

The strength of the earthquake that the Arab revolutions created stems from the sufferings of the Arab nation and will not stop as long as the current circumstances of suffering continue as they are now. Therefore we think that democracy or democratic rights in Arab countries are not only necessary but also inevitable. And despite the complexity of alliances and conflicts between the regimes in the region, despite the diversity of conditions from one country to another, we think that the change towards more democratic regimes will affect all non-democratic regimes in the region, including Iran. It is the aspirations of young people for freedom, prosperity and individual and national dignity, on the one hand, and the impossibility of achieving any development without democracy, on the other, which is the motor of change.

Since before the invasion of Iraq, the Arab nation began to regain its self-confidence. This was reflected in the comprehensive and rigorous refusal of this invasion. It was reflected later in the rise of the Iraqi resistance — military, political and popular — and by its steadfastness despite the animosity of all surrounding regimes. The horrors of what happened in Iraq, on the one hand, and the United States’ military, political, financial and moral suicide in Iraq, on the other, spurred the Arab nation’s youth to realise that the repressive, heavily armed regimes that responded to imperial and Zionist demands as slaves are nothing but paper tigers. It has been proven so far. The youth were not scared when France threatened to intervene in Tunisia, nor when Israel threatened to occupy Sinai, or in the face of Mullen’s threats to occupy the Suez Canal during Egypt’s revolution. On the contrary, these threats led the army to join the revolution.

In Libya, the West stood at the side of the revolutionaries in order to abort and dominate the revolution and to prevent further unity between Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Will the West succeed in preventing the establishment of a free Libya in the final analysis? The West, especially Europe, is occupied more by selling its products than conquering lands. In oil, its aims are to keep the concessions given to them by the old regime. It is certain that there is competition between foreign powers to win the minds, hearts and money of the Libyan people. The issue depends on the consciousness and the will of Libyans. We do not think that the West in its current financial mess can engage in military battles against a united revolutionary people that defends its freedom and interests against dictatorship and imperial and Zionist plans. It is those who defend the falling dictatorship who undermine the revolution, creating conditions of weakness in the face of the West.

There is no doubt that the West and Zionism will try to thwart the earthquake of Arab revolutions, but the conditions of the global financial crisis do not allow the West to intervene with direct military force on all fronts, unless it faces a life or death situation, at least now. The Iraq war has proven that the US lost militarily and financially more than it had hoped to profit. Western countries use therefore indirect methods to create strife and division, throwing doubts on the integrity and intentions of the groups and participants in the Arab revolutions. These methods are not unknown to us. There are the same leaks by Zionist and Western agencies aimed at spreading the idea that these revolutions are a US plan. Do we forget the propaganda that Nasser, who led the nation against feudalism and colonialism and Zionism, is a US client? Some who now hail Nasser believed the sincerity of this Zionist propaganda in Nasser’s time, while the US’s real goal was to isolate Egypt’s revolution from the masses of the Arab nation.

With the revolution in Tunisia and Egypt, we are facing a unique and unprecedented revolution in the history of revolutions and rebellions. Any attempt to judge it with concepts belonging to previous revolutions will not lead to further understanding and discovery on its future, but rather to errors equalling political suicide by standing against progress.

The first characteristic of the current revolution is that it is a revolution of society against corruption and oppression and for a state of social justice. It is not a revolution of parties and revolutionary movements. There is no doubt that parties, revolutionary or not, want to jump into power and that they manoeuvre to this end, in both Tunisia and Egypt.

However, with every individual having taken his own destiny into his or her hands, parties are unable to reach power except via elections and legislation. No doubt also, there are many splits and conflicts within political movements due to the unprecedented and sudden freedom of opinions and beliefs, be they just or not, flourishing in the Arab world. Democracy advances through pacific confrontation of programmes, demands and opinions. But this leads some supporters of Arab dictatorships to panic and be suspicious of the current atmosphere. Indeed, they are used to no one being allowed to say a word without the approval of the “leading party of the state and society”.

In reality, the theory that there is no revolution without a revolutionary leadership belongs to the museum. The flame of democracy will not be put out by words, or by force. The historic movement of the Arab nation towards new social contracts based on dignity, development, liberty and rights is evident and inexorable. It is a movement collectively and individually owned by all. Because a democratic revolution is a society that leads itself to build a democratic state, the absence of leadership is irrelevant. Society composes its leadership temporarily and on the ground. Arab intellectuals should accommodate themselves to this new reality of political life. Doubting the people will not roll back the force of the Arab Spring.

Meanwhile, it is hardly as if the supposed political alternative, which was in power for two terms under Clinton, was a whole lot better. As well as being starved, Iraq was being bombed systematically throughout the 1990s, and for any pretence, including to divert attention from sexual favors offered in the Oval Office, while the Palestinians were being slowly strangled by the detailed and monolithic fascism of right and left Zionism, backed in all instances by both houses of Congress. For Iraqis and Palestinians, 11 September just brought more of the same, if only with more intensity and greater breadth, and a tad more viciousness.

The biggest change on 9/11 happened not outside the United States but within it. Once a rearguard protected by the state, the logic reversed, though until now not a single mainstream news source will say it. War that was always conducted by the US government against others was now conducted at home against Americans. Indeed, what is wrapped up as an international event is in actual fact a domestic event with a cast — until recently all dead except Osama Bin Laden — of foreign supporting actors. Now, in the capitalist world order, there’s nowhere greener than anywhere else.

Seen with the right eyes, 11 September 2001 marks the most visible crisis in the history of the capitalist-consumer model of life, and the capitalist-military state that survives off it, and reduces human life to it. The crisis has been so deep, and it’s possible impact so wide, that the step was taken to break social conventions in the realm of state actions that are so integral to the grand masquerade as to be almost untouchable. Reversing both blatantly and brutally the primary source of legitimacy of the modern state, that it would protect and facilitate the life of the people, the United States, or whoever controls it, turned against the people. The only way it could happen is because no one would believe it.

I will just give you the headlines. First, no credible evidence exists to explain how commercial airliners carrying nothing but jetfuel could bring down two of the largest man-made structures on earth. Specifically, structures designed to withstand multiple aircraft strikes. I remember standing in front of those towers. I remember the sheer size of them, and the steel encasing them, and that ran down the centre of them. No fire, ever, could have brought them down. No engineer, to date, has credibly explained how thousands upon thousands of tons of steel industry-certified not to weaken at temperatures far exceeding the burn temperature of kerosine not only gave way but gave way at freefall speeds.

Second, no one has explained the multiple explosions survivors, including firefighters, heard as those buildings came crashing down. And no one has explained at all how Building 7, which wasn’t even hit, collapsed late in the afternoon of 11 September, supposedly from simple fire, that otherwise has never taken down any steel structured building in history. And with these two points we’re just scratching the surface. It is horrible, because nearly 3000 real people, with families, children, wives, brothers, sons, daughters, and mothers, died that day. But the reality is that these were controlled demolitions, and no foreign entity — and in my view not even a foreign state — could have pulled that off, with all the detailed planning, access and execution that it would necessarily entail.

One million or more Iraqis would die in the next nine years following that day, and as a direct consequence of that day, and the lies spun up around that day. One million Iraqis out of an entire country — including its leadership — that had nothing to do with the events of that day. But even a million dead, which is near impossible for the mind to imagine, is not even the limit of the mendacity visited upon the world on that day, including on all Americans: 250 million people sent into a zone of panic, fear, paranoia, and ideological indocrination unfolding on a scale, strictly speaking, never seen before. Imagine that in some parts of Afghanistan, when so swiftly the carpet bombing began, people had never heard of 9/11.

Meanwhile consider the impact on the whole world of the attack of the US government, parts of it, or some linked to it, on the American people. Billions of lives if not dashed then limited. Not a place on the planet where you could walk with real freedom because of it. Governments worldwide falling in line with the Orwellian language and practice of a war that Dick Cheney promised would never end. Pause on that. A global war that would never end. For most people, globally, it was the candour of the announcement that was different: they were already living it. But for the American people, they became the wager in this: the support mechanism and the guarantee of it. Imagine that. Not only did the US government kill nearly 3000 Americans directly on 11 September 2001, it also made all Americans complicit in the genocides that would follow based in the self-serving and utterly false notion that the elite had an interest in protecting the American people.

So why did the US government attack its own people? It’s simple and it’s profound at the same time. Practically, it needed to send a message to all oil producers that no one could tamper with either the supply of oil to the United States, or the currency with which oil sales globally would be transacted. And so Iraq was always the target, but so too all the Arab world. But the next level down is where the real answers lie. What is energy policy ultimately about?

It is about that obscure matrix of control — political, economic, ideological, technological, material — that keeps nations on the wheel, and that constitutes a complex mechanism of protection in an era of mass society for a narrow class that actually owns the world, including all its people, having made from private property a system of global slavery. Yes. The capitalist class in America, probably in full knowledge of the capitalist class globally, bit off a chunk of its own people, to keep the system going as a whole, and to protect their own position. Because if and when the oil runs out, if there are no other distractions, they’re finished.

This is all context that fills in but the barest outlines of our shared lives in the last 10 years of world history. In a few paragraphs here, I can barely reveal the real substance or the real depth. It’s like me saying, “Think of an elephant.” You think of an elephant, and you see it. But if I led you into a room with an actual elephant, it’s something different. The actual reality is that there is an elephant, and we’ve been living in the shadow of it for 10 years.

If we imagine, however, alternatively that this elephant is stood at the centre of a labyrinth made of walls, sheilding us from the truth of its existence, it is also true that these walls have started to fall down. Last night, Egyptians literally tore apart one such wall with hammers and their bare hands. This is the wall in the Arab Republic of Egypt that Mubarak had constructed around the strategic standing of Egypt vis-a-vis Israel and its occupation of Palestinian and Arab lands. Elsewhere, across the Arab world, the uprisings of the people against US-sponsored dictators are disassembling scores of other walls, far greater than that outside the Israeli Embassy in Giza. The persistence of the Syrian people, and the Yemeni people, is now testiment to an unstoppable wave. No false regime will withstand the force of the Arab Spring.

And globally, Tahrir will be everywhere. The Arab uprising is a calling to the entire global South. It cannot not be heeded. The calling for something better than global slavery is a matter of situation for millions, if not billions, of people. Meanwhile, it is time for the left to actually give thought to the American people. From these people, it is true, have come armies. And from these people, it is true, have come economic predators. And from these people, it is true, have come advisers in cleaner methods of torture. And from these people, it is true, have come ideologies that have destroyed indigenous cultures. But it is a fact, too, that barely any people on earth were more betrayed than the American people. And most Americans are not even yet aware of the level of this betrayal. Who that has experienced it really envies Americans the catastrophic commercialisation of their common life?

We know now that the Reichstaag was burned by the Nazis. We know now many things in history that were not known to the people who lived through the events. One day, and it may be soon, the truth about 11 September 2001 will start to appear. Cracks have already opened. We are coming into a time of truth. The trickle becomes a stream, and the stream a river. The flood is around the next corner, and it will come from all of us. On that day, I hope, a real global solidarity can be born. Because the final truth is that, so far, we are all victims of the global capitalist class machine. But, we are billions, and the real conspiracies are tied to the few. Ten years on, they want to keep pretending that the world is full of threats. It isn’t. It is full of injustice that we can remedy. The world didn’t really change on 11 September 2001, but it can change now. There is a new air. It is all of ours to breathe. Theirs is unhealthy. Spit it out.

When we wrote our articles on Tunisia and Egypt, think tanks — even Arab ones — were doubting the sincerity and possible extension of the uprisings to other countries, for the notion of Arab as one nation escaped them, as well as the existing solidarity that mobilises people in the living creatures that are societies. Due to their ideologies, they were surprised that a revolution can be born in the street.

That the Egyptian revolution was born in the street on 25 January does not mean it is merely a conspiracy of some youth who used Facebook. There was an accumulation of struggles and demands spanning years. Workers strikes and sit-ins, political party meetings and campaigns, the protests of professional unions, artists and writers, youth demonstrations, trials, scandals, the refusal to implement judicial decisions, and so on, were for years the events of everyday life in Egypt. Every observer, including the head of the regime, was aware of the growing discontent among Egyptians. But the US and the EU, the Arab oil regimes, the IMF — the “they” opposed to the people — were satisfied as they controlled three strong pillars: the corrupted and corrupting comprador class, the repressive apparatus, and the means of communication, including the party, the newspapers and satellite channels; they didn’t bother with this discontent. Along with the enriching of the comprador elites, there was the deterioration of the living standards of the middle class, the suffering of the poor and the desperation of the youth, regarding the present and the future.

The spontaneity with which all existing currents of the youth joined Tahrir Square on the second day of protest showed that the revolution was not — and would not be allowed to be — governed by specific ideological currents, as well as the lack of need of a leader, individual or organisational, to develop the revolution. These two characteristics of the revolution made it impossible for the regime to suppress the growing masses in Tahrir. No leadership needed to impress, or possible to imprison and decapitate, and no ideology to divide or frighten the youth.

From 28-29 January when the youth defeated the police of the regime until 11 February when the army received the power to lead the state in a transitional period, the revolution became all the people of Egypt in a non-written coalition of forces whose character is anti-dictatorship, anti-corruption and anti-falsification of the people’s will. The first step in a successful revolution has begun: public issues are discussed by the public in public space, in a scene of liberty and general participation that has never been seen before in the Arab world.

Not only legitimate but legal

It is natural in such a scene that thousands of agendas flower, each pretending to be the real revolution, but we can generally distinguish two main currents. One avows stability and order, so as to make the transition successful; the other seeks rapid and deep change, so as to ensure the revolution’s success. Until now both are useful. One prevents the revolution from being a failed adventure. The other prevents the revolution from being merely a changing of faces. The result, as this was conducted through peaceful public dialogue, is that change is achieved through law and without violent clashes. Important decisions for change are taken by enforcing existent legal procedures and institutions. This is one of the characteristics of the Egyptian revolution that distinguishes it from the revolutionary heritage of the past. It is not only through legitimacy that it advances, but through legality too.

Much has been achieved to dismantle and punish the former alliance between political power and the comprador class that stood against the interests of Egypt and the people of Egypt, and all agree that much remains to be done to build a new democratic state by reforming the old one. The constitution, the structure, and the practice of the state should be changed, so that the state can defend public property and resources and at the same time benefit the poor and those on low salaries by adopting a new way of redistributing revenues. Also, so that the state can punish dictatorship and corruption and at the same time prevent the creation of new modes of dictatorship and corruption by democratising decision making and by reinforcing institutions and means of evaluation and control by popular participation. The state should create mechanisms for the protection of civil servants against the arbitrary and the corrupt, an independent system of administrative justice, an independent institution that investigates and evaluates all public spending of all state branches, guarantee the liberty and equal rights of all citizens, men and women, and at the same time enable them to live peacefully together by respecting diversity and the rights of minorities, whether political, religious, cultural or other.

The ongoing public discussions should produce clear programmes for the tasks to be accomplished, and associations to mobilise and organise the people. We believe they should step away from the circle of generalities and ideologies so as to produce coalitions on immediate and mid-term tasks and programmes.

By depending on the people’s interests and will, the Egyptian revolutionaries can lift Egypt from blindly following US imperialist and compromising comprador agents’ diktats and build, both politically and economically, an independent Egypt that bases its policies on the interests of the Egyptian people and on reciprocal benefits with its friends. The imperialist crisis, the failure of liberal and neoliberal globalisation, Egypt’s potential together with Arab solidarity and cooperation, would help in building a strong democratic modern and advanced Egypt in which its people live in prosperity, justice, dignity and freedom.

Parallel tasks of the revolution

Apart from exterior and international policies around which all Egyptians are in agreement, making the security and the interests of Egypt, and international conventions signed by Egypt, the guide for Egyptian foreign policy towards other states and in exterior relations,the deepening of interior changes is the actual role of the revolution. In this domain, from our point of view, there are three parallel tasks before the youth and progressive forces.

First, succeeding in the transitional period through efficient policies and decisions and by enlarging public liberties in order to resist internal and external counter-revolutionary pressures. The alliance between the army, the middle class and the youth should be preserved so that Egypt passes the transitional period without major difficulties, especially in terms of disorder and economic necessities. Differences should be solved through acceptable means of dialogue. The just demands of sectors of the population should be adopted, transformed into means of political organisation of masses, and a progressive programme.

Second, succeeding in the writing of a new constitution to guarantee a civil, democratic and functional modern state that can answer the challenges of liberty, good management and functionality. Progressive forces should avoid black and white clashes regarding the identity of the state. Egypt is an Arab-Muslim country whether it is stipulated in the constitution or not. This appurtenance is neither religious nor ethnic, but cultural and geopolitical. Giving the right to decide the legitimacy of laws to any persons other than the representatives of the people and the apparatus of the democratic state creates unnecessary divisions, threatens the principles of peaceful coexistence, establishes a non-elected elite model of the state, and would block the adaptation of Egypt to the new realities of society. Therefore, refusing Article 2 of the 1971 Constitution is just, but it is necessary to avoid a clash on this issue, pushed by reactionary Islamist or Coptic extremists, framed on identity. We would suggest a formula to this end: Laws are decided by the people, inspired by Islamic fiqh (jurisprudence), international laws and conventions, and values of peace, equality of citizens, tolerance and justice for all.

Third, we believe in any country transitioning from dictatorship to democracy the essential issue in the constitutional battle should be directed towards preventing corruption, preventing marginalisation of minorities, preventing repression, and developing the state to be a welfare state that is responsible for, among other tasks, delivering and developing public services in education, health, justice and equality, transport and communications, energy, electricity, water, money and exchange, measures and qualifications, preserving and recovering heritage, material and cultural development, and just revenues to all. Regarding the tasks of the state, the most important are: the administration of public riches and the national economy, the security of citizens and the territorial integrity of the land, the justice and the liberty of citizens, communities and groups.These should be accomplished by the institutions of the state with transparency, efficiency and democratically. The mechanisms to guarantee these should be clearly embedded in the constitution.

Much could be said about profiting from the past constitutional experiences of Egypt and other countries. We mention some urgent points:

The state is the state of all Egyptians. Public interest is imperative. Nothing in its laws, structures, procedures, and the behaviour of its agents should serve — or show any form of discrimination against — any particular individual, group, or ideology, even if initiated by the government.

Justice and enforcement of law should be independent. No individual or group has the right to enforce his own idea of justice. Only the state and its policies and decisions of justice can be enforced. Armed gangs and militias should be forbidden, and political and religious violence outlawed.

Developing the civil modern state

The development of Egypt will be solid and effectual if its aim and practice is to develop all its regions and mobilise all its resources. Solidarity between the capable and the weak, between generations, between rich regions and poor ones, is not only a moral obligation but is also an economic factor for an efficient economy. Enlarging the internal market and local production, both in agriculture and industry, mobilising all national resources, the recovery of the capacity of creation, initiative and production, as well as social peace, pass through this solidarity.

A modern state develops local elected institutions through decentralisation and democracy while preserving the unity of the state and its control and by being cautious not to create local feudalism through rights and funding. Local institutions weaken bureaucracy, oversee state actions, increase the people’s participation in public life, and are a school of political leadership. To increase participation, and accordingly the participation of all, we suggest a proportional system in local elections, and to fund local institutions via just and non-discriminating rules of funding in the budget.

The liberty of association in non-profit civil society organisations, in whatever domain and without arbitrary state interference, is necessary for modern societies to promote the legal activity and actions of its members. Only financing and finances are monitored by the state, to avoid their use for activities outside their declared purposes.

Discrimination in appointing, seconding and upgrading civil servants should be abolished in order to ensure that the right women or men are in the right place, and to combat corruption and the corrupting. Wherever possible, appointments should result from anonymous written examination, or be based on educational attainment and certificates. Civil servants should act according to the public interest, avoiding conflicts of interest, abuse of power, and serving any particular interest. Trade unions should defend civil servants and participate in matters concerning them individually or collectively. A system of administrative justice should be developed to make institutions work correctly. The regime that was and remains the target of the revolution is more than the sum of its persons. It is also an ensemble of administrative practices that in their everyday function constitute an apparatus that must be addressed by new democratic procedures and technical competence.

As for the choice of a parliamentary or presidential system, we believe Egyptians should decide on this question, including by looking at the experience of other countries. A fragmented parliament without a clear majority undermines the possibility of stability and long-term policies. A president with sweeping power ends up personalising the state. We suggest a combination between a majority two-stage mode of elections for parliament, two houses of parliament, the protection of the minority in parliament to prevent a dictatorship of the majority within it, the independence of the judicial branch, especially the constitutional council, the state council, an independent institution that investigates all public spending of all state branches, the independence of local powers, civil society, trade unions, media, specialists, and liberties of communication so as to monitor and prevent the government from using state institutions incorrectly. The president is the representative of all the people and the guide of all institutions. He has the right to stop unconstitutional actions and take his decisions with the aid of state institutions.

The role of trade unions is primordial in social change. Its weapon is the strike, but its policies are different under savage capitalism or in a welfare state. In a welfare state, trade unions should be integrated in decision making in all institutions — this is their way for developing the interests of their members, the economy, and how via the acceptance of efficient policies these could be achieved. Their weapon should be dialogue and negotiations, and strike as a last arm when demands are essential.

Equality of opportunity in funding political groups makes for a healthy democracy. The state should ensure that no outside agendas control national currents, but at the same time open up local and state funding and media to all groups.

A new model of revolution

Discussion on the constitution will continue as intellectual speculation if the coalition that made the revolution — the youth, the middle class and the army — does not continue as a coalition. The revolution would not win the elections and so realise a programme of change. The counter-revolution, although defeated politically, has the force of the statue quo ante and is capable of changing its skin in order to prevent the building of a civil democratic state. The forces of change have the ability of winning if a clear coalition is made, if conviction is maintained, and if ideological slogans are refused; this combined with a clear mid-term programme that can mobilise the people for change. Analysis of the constitutional amendments referendum shows it is possible. The 30 per cent that voted No could easily be turned into 60 per cent if it is well guided by a programme for calm, non-violent necessary change. Beginning a revolution is a matter of will. Succeeding in it is a science.

The Egyptian revolution heralded a new kind of revolution that is adapted to a large country of 85 million in the Third World in the 21st century. Its social forces by consciousness or necessity forced all revolutionaries of the world to re-examine their ideas of revolution because of what is accomplished: a large bloc without leadership enter in coalition to change the regime without using armed violence and to build a new state through legal procedures. The future tasks should be accomplished through the same maturity and spirit in order to not endanger the revolution or Egypt, for it is evident that the counter-revolution, internal and external, counts on divisions, chaos and economic difficulties to raise its head.

The Gaddafi regime does not differ in essence — while it is worse in practice and barbarism — from any other dictatorial Arab regime, such as those of Ben Ali or Mubarak, which consist in a family that rules through a police state, and an increasing integration of the local economy into global financial and market capitalism and associated policies. It is singular in its use of the “Green Book” to prevent, by law, any independent thinking and consequently any civil society groups, equating them to treason punishable by death. Gaddafi’s last attempt to suppress dissent was his attempt to block the possibility of an independently elected bar of lawyers, alongside his attempt to put the local police under the control of the military regiments of his sons.

The general Libyan youth uprising, echoing Tunisia and Egypt, and the rapid defection of his ministers and ambassadors, express the hollowness of Gaddafi’s regime. Because he has no popular support anymore, he decided to use ruthless force against the youth uprising, thinking that he risks nothing from the West after having accorded licenses for extracting oil to their companies, his agreements on fighting terrorism, the arms contracts, the expertise in military and police methods given to him by the US, Britain and other countries, and the lobbies he bought to strengthen his rule and ameliorate his image in the West and Africa.

Aborting the Arab Spring

If there had not been an uprising, the West wouldn’t be against Gaddafi. This was well expressed in the hesitation and the difference in position between the US and France and other countries towards whether to support the Libyan revolution. Since his reconciliation with the US began by abandoning the nuclear option, Gaddafi struck a calm cooperation with Ben Ali and Mubarak, imitating them in their cooperation with the West, and in their war against terrorism aligned with the West. In oil, armaments, services and strategic Arab questions, Gaddafi satisfied all Western countries and Israel, using this relation to silence criticism of his dictatorship and to reinforce his grip on power.

We consider the West’s military intervention as an attempt to abort, deform and control the general uprisings in the Arab world. Following Mubarak’s ouster, the Arab regimes, the West and the Arab intellectuals know well that the time of suppressing the Arab youth by force is gone, and that force will not stop the fire from spreading. While the Arab democratic forces supported the Libyan revolution against Gaddafi and demanded to aid it through the Arab League, the West and the Arab Gulf regimes preferred — for different reasons and to different degrees — that change comes from Gaddafi’s inner circle via Western military intervention, to discredit both Gaddafi and the revolution.

It is the Arabs and the Arab League that wanted to aid the Libyan revolution. The West aborted the Arab League’s attempt by taking the responsibility of the intervention and giving it to NATO. The Libyan revolution refused Western intervention firmly in the beginning, and continues to refuse any presence of foreign troops, hoping that the aid comes from Arabs and progressives around the world. We should recognise now that the US media’s manipulations, the Gaddafi supporters bought by money to ameliorate his image, the failure of the Arab League to act independently, the failure and the hesitations of progressives to defend the democratic Libyan youth, enabled Gaddafi to use force and advance until Benghazi. The content of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 expresses well this situation.

It is true that an intervention based on UNSC Resolution 1973 is different from the intervention in Iraq, but it doesn’t change that it is a Western military intervention that aims not to help the revolution, but rather to abort it and guarantee Western interests. It became a war against Libya to impose Western interests that the revolution cannot oppose without risking elimination. But we should realise that the interests of the West are different and conflicted too. This finds reflection in the ambiguity of UNSC Resolution 1973, which does not prevent Gaddafi from attacking cities or permit direct action to get rid of him, nor does it really protect the civilian population, nor aid the youth revolution. It is as if it gives permission to destroy Libyan armaments and infrastructure and wait that they be bought again or restored by Gaddafi or whoever will replace him.

The hypocrisy of humanitarian intervention

The NATO military intervention in Libya is to guarantee its economic and strategic interests, but above all to prevent profound cooperation between Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Such cooperation between three democratic adjacent Arab countries would constitute an efficient means to struggle against imperialist strategy in the Arab world. The Gulf Arab regimes, meanwhile, hate Gaddafi as he spent his 42 years in power conspiring against and attacking them.

The Western leftist discussions of Resolution 1973 express the same thing as their governments. They all forget that the circumstances of the resolution consist in a democratic uprising that is being suppressed by force. The majority appealed to their governments to interfere, instead of providing political help to the youth through recognition of — and aid to — the Transitional National Council (TNC), France being the exception that recognised the TNC rapidly for its own reasons. Some omitted any possibility of aiding the revolution because they consider Gaddafi’s regime a socialist regime that therefore has the right to suppress the revolution even if it is composed of all the people. Some refuse US and NATO intervention and reduce the Arab democratic uprising to a CIA and MI6 conspiracy. Some condemned the Western intervention without supporting the democratic uprising, which equals allowing Gaddafi to suppress the uprising by force.

All humanitarian intervention discussions, whether for or against, are based on hypocrisy: they avoid calling a cat a cat: i.e., there is a democratic popular Arab uprising that should be supported. Instead of recognising this, they discuss military intervention as if it is an ideological quarrel that is taking place in the West. To avoid taking a position, some in the left propagated Gaddafi and US propaganda to discredit the uprising. In discrediting the uprising, they reinforced Western attempts to control it by imposing its men and conditions. Happily, there is a minority in Europe as well as in the US that stand against the intervention but with the uprising, putting themselves in agreement with the overwhelming majority of Arab progressive intellectuals and currents, and saving the honour of the left.

Four conflicts in one

Western manoeuvres and military intervention did harm to Libya, to the Libyan people and to its revolution. But it cannot stop the revolution from achieving an independent democratic Libya in cooperation with its neighbours. The task may be harder now, but it continues to be achievable.

The Western strategy of divide and conquer began to crumble. Failing to see this is the same ignorance and ethnocentrism of the West when it touches Arab questions, the most well known of which is the Palestinian question in 1948 and after. Some in the West continue to think that Arabs cannot have a democratic revolution without Western leadership. Foreign powersdo not control the Arab uprisings that have marked the opening weeks of 2011: indeed, their agendas are the first victimsof these uprisings.

The war waged by Gaddafi against the Libyan people, denying them human rights and democracy, has given birth to four conflicts. The first is a war waged by Gaddafi against the people. The second is the one that began with the Western military intervention against Libya. This conflict cannot hide the third, which is competition concerning the Libyan future among the aggressors themselves. This is the reason the aid to the revolt became an aggression on Libya by the allies, opening the way to the fourth conflict. Now the Libyan revolution should struggle not only against Gaddafi but also against the forces trying to occupy Libya.

Despite the complication of the situation, progressives and peace loving people cannot but support the Libyan revolution, which would bring democracy and independence to Libya and back and reinforce the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. The Arab youth has decided to take its future, and the future of its respective countries, into its hands by building a civil democratic state to have liberty, justice and dignity. It may take years, but it is now certain and inevitable. It is the failure of the globalised model of a family governing through a police state and comprador elites. Libya is but one variation of this model.

And while President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton are being lauded for their supposed support for Egyptian democracy, no one is asking the key question Washington can’t answer: When will members of this US administration and the three previous face trial for crimes against humanity in Iraq?

Despite US hypocrisy, nothing will prevent the collapse of US geostrategic goals in the Arab region. It is not by direct confrontation that this is happening, nor by ideology. The interests of the people are opposed to the model of underdevelopment Washington and allies propose and police.

The year of revolutions

Across the Arab world, 2011 appears set to be remembered as the “year of revolutions”. In Iraq, ravaged by eight years of US occupation, plunder, destruction and death, protests have burst forth in Baghdad, Kut, Basra, Kirkuk, Ramadi, Sulaymaniyah and tens of other locations. As usual, the people face live fire.

We declare our solidarity with the people of Iraq in protest. We declare our solidarity with the martyrs of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, and all martyrs of Arab uprisings.

We put Washington on notice that it is your policies that are being defeated, and it is your alliances that are falling apart.

The region is witness to a rolling tide of Arab renaissance, led by the aspirations of the Arab youth. No injustice will be spared criticism. No lie will remain unexposed.

Support Iraqi protests!

Stand in support of the Iraqi people in their struggle against state terrorism and repression, generalised corruption, a falsified political process and its state apparatus, generalised lack and collapse of public services, poverty and unemployment, systematic abuse of human rights by the government and its militias, illegal contracts, treaties and a constitution imposed under occupation, and foreign plans to destroy Iraqi culture, economy and unity.

Stand in support of the Iraqi people’s struggle for freedom, democracy, dignity, unity and social justice.

Stand in support of the Iraqi people in their uprising, and in solidarity with all Arabs at this dawn of a new era!

The game is over! We demand that Maliki’s government leave without shedding the blood of innocent Iraqis on 25 February, Iraq’s “Day of Peaceful Anger”.

We demand that other states withdraw support from Maliki and not provide cover for a government bloodbath.

We are certain the people of Iraq will achieve victory, like their Tunisian and Egyptian brothers and sisters.

It is no longer respected to give orders.

The revolt begun by the Facebook youth on 25 January became a revolt of all the youth on 26 January, and a revolt of all society three days later. An unwritten social programme is agreed upon and embraced by all: building a sovereign democratic welfare state.

When we drafted our article “The Arab Spring of democracy” (Ahram Online, 18 January 2011), sensing an imminent Arab revolt, for various reasons we had Egypt in our minds. Egypt is the heart of the Arab world, the largest Arab state and the most advanced in many domains. While Tunisia and Egypt have common traits, they also have differences; Egypt was and remains the Arab state essential to facing Israel, with which it was at war on several occasions, resulting in a popular army and institutions of an army that are respected by its people.

We heard the 25 January call for protest and we saw the success of its mobilisation. Since then we decided not to write, aware that the Egyptian movements themselves would decide the success of their revolution. As we said in our previous article, this revolution is different: it heralds a new kind of revolution in Arab and Third World countries.

Already, many articles have been written about the Egyptian revolution. The majority have employed either non-applicable criterion taken from other revolutions to understand its nature and to portray it, or have attempted to hijack it or to give lessons to the Egyptian people. This revolution has its own dynamics, but it also sheds light on the wider Arab revolution.

Its first significance is that it is a pacific revolution. Neither theoretically nor practically do the Egyptian people advocate for the use of violence to achieve political ends. There are no traces of the rhetoric of civil war, armed insurrection or appeals to use force. On the contrary, it is the counter-revolution, orchestrated by the state, which has resorted to violence and intimidation, and which failed to break the revolt. The people stand united with the army, knowing that the sons of Egypt, conscripted from every family, defend Egyptians and not a regime. Meanwhile, the pacifism of the youth doesn’t mean that it does not defend itself and its revolution and peoples rights against the violence and provocations of the state. The more the state used violence, the more the youth stood resolute and the ranks of the demonstrations grew and spread to all sections of society.

Its second significance is that contrary to the leftist literature advocating a policy of tabula rasa in order for revolution to succeed, the revolutionary Egyptian youth is proud of its history, its country and state, including its army. What we hear in their slogans, literature and discussions is a call to change the state into a democratic welfare state, rather than to destroy the state apparatus and its institutions. Many factors lead to this equation. The first resides in the extent and complication of the modern state’s role in everyday life. Second, Egyptians are aware that the intertwinement of international trade with the national economy would make the isolation of Egypt for a long period of time an economic disaster. All also know the necessity of standing ready to defend the country against potential external aggression, Israeli or any other.

The third significance of this revolution resides in the absence of a culture of avant-gardism. We do not mean that there are no groups and individuals who paved the way for this revolt by their actions on the cultural scene. But none of them advocate for a putsch to reach power and implement what they would believe is the best for the people.

One reason for this leaderless phenomenon is linked to the impossibility of constituting a singular avant-garde under the regime’s repressive policies, and the ease any attempt would offer to power in decapitating this “leadership”. This difficulty of having an avant-garde turned into an advantage as the revolution became easily adopted as their own by all sections of the population. The longer it has remained leaderless, the more exposed has been the total confrontation between the people and the regime.

We are impressed by the largeness and spontaneity of the participation, whether in numbers, classes, genders, or political sympathies, while those who called for 25 January were few. Their demands have proven to be the demands of all the people. Through practical and realistic slogans, understandable by anyone, they demand real democracy and social justice. Through this process, the Egyptian people accomplished — with neither avant-gardism nor ideology, nor a large organisation — a collective thinking and carried forward actions that equate to a whole people in revolt.

We now know that in Egypt the two pillars of what we call the Third World state in a globalised world, based on a police state and a comprador class allied to international capital, has failed or at least lost all legitimacy. What will be built in the future, we think, depends on the consciousness of the Egyptian national movement and its determinations. The past 16 days proved the high consciousness and political maturity of the people. Already the potential divisions between secular and religious, Muslims and Christians, nationalists, leftists and Islamists, the poor and the middle class have instead, in unity, become the movement’s strength in diversity. The attempt by the counter-revolution to use force and to incite violence and divisions among the people has failed totally and will fail as long as the revolution adheres to its nature. The attempt to divide and conquer by alleging that this or that group is trying to take over is faced by the insistence of the movement, in its slogans and practice, that they don’t want to jump on the back of power. On the contrary, they insist that democracy and freedom should be for all.

The democratic change in Egypt frightens all in the West, and especially Israel. This alarm does not come from a threat of direct economic or military confrontation, but rather from the waking of the Arab world and the results implied by Arabs having a democratic state that defends the interests of the people. If Egypt becomes democratic, Israel loses the dream of dividing the Arabs in order to control them. It would also break the myth that Israel is the only state in the region capable of democracy. No wonder Israel regrets the collapse of the old structure, though it can do nothing about it. The Egyptians opened their mouths. This will be an ever-evolving phenomenon of expression and quest for their rights.

Apart from defending Egypt’s security, rights, and the culture of Arab solidarity, no current from within the revolutionary movement expresses a tendency to wage war against anyone. The Egyptians do not pretend that they will change the world order. They express the necessity of having relations according to mutual benefits. They do not lay claims to lead the Arab world either, though they know the importance of Egypt in the Arab world. No one thinks that terrorism will produce change or that without the state (as defended by leftist revolutionaries) and its institutions Egypt can defend its own people and land, or even this revolution.

Many different rumours are being spread in various quarters, alternatively saying that Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, or even the Americans are behind this revolution. Their purpose is to make the Arabs lose confidence in their own capacity and unity in change. Some, including Khamenei, tried to say it is Iran’s influence and example that touched the Egyptians, including exaggerating the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the revolution. It is true that the Iranian revolution was popular, but it resulted in a religious oppressive state, in spite of being anti-imperialist. The Egyptian revolt is for a democratic state not a religious oppressive state. Many Egyptians consider the appeal to use violence and religion propaganda in speaking of their revolution as serving the counter-revolution.

While the Egyptians in their literature consider the Muslim Brothers as one of the national groups, the majority in Egypt — as is made clear from the people participating in this uprising, their slogans and their expressions — are opposed to the concept of a religious state and to the use of violence. The reasons that the Egyptian revolution does not herald a religious state are multiple, including the specificity of Egyptian Islam, which in general is not directly political, the largeness of the secular middle class, the aspirations of the youth for increased individual liberties, the animosity of the army towards a religious state, coming from past confrontations, cultural competition in matters of democracy due to Egypt’s geographic belonging to the Mediterranean basin, and its economic reliance on being an attractive tourist venue. Even the Muslim Brothers themselves declared that they participate with others and do not encompass this uprising of the people.

Whatever is the immediate outcome on political power and its structures, the Egyptian revolution has already imposed the liberty of expression in society, imposed the necessity that change for all should go in the direction of defending sovereignty, public property and riches, and to use the state to realise social justice and solidarity. This is an expression of a deep culture in Arab countries and its principle of solidarity. Solidarity expressed in the terms “We love Egypt and we protect it” is in modern political thinking called the welfare state.

No one can know the immediate pace and the extent of change, for there are many trends in the state apparatus and many trends in the revolutionary movement. But all know there will be no viable power if they don’t work towards a welfare state. The ignorance of Western think tanks hoping that a police state with a comprador class can repress the will of the people indefinitely is well portrayed by their surprise when this state model could only resist three days in the face of a popular uprising.

In their analysis of the situation, some Western sympathisers with Egyptians share the same ignorance of the Egyptian situation and the conditions for 21st century revolutions as they apply a culture dating back to the 19th century. Although they accept the May 1968 principles of ecology, human rights, freedom of expression and individual liberties as normal in the West, they apply to Arab revolutions a kind of putschist conception of the revolution, and worry from the beginning of the Egyptian revolt about the lack of identified avant-garde leaders.

Egypt is a developing country but it is a modern country whose youth, which constitutes 60 per cent of the population, is as educated as their counterparts in Western countries. It is certain that there is large poverty and class differences in Egypt, but the middle class is as large as in Europe and suffers in the current neoliberal globalisation-driven financial crisis from the same deteriorating conditions while aspiring to the same opportunities and freedoms.

The difficulty for the Egyptian movement resides in how to navigate the change from a failed comprador state to a welfare state, while refraining from destroying the economy and state institutions. All are conscious that if they destroy the economy there will be no opportunity for building a welfare state. They defend change accepted by all walks of life and sections of society, through conviction and consensus. Time and balance of forces work for the revolution. The Arab Spring of democracy was born when all public affairs began being discussed in public.

The persistent insistence on the departure or non-departure of President Hosni Mubarak by Western media is staged to judge if the revolution has succeeded or not. This is a way to drain the revolution of its real content, wherein they gained what they wanted and their demands are already accepted by all, including the collapse of the concept of inheritance of power and the de-legitimisation of the continuity of the same structure and policies of the state. If protesters continue to speak of Hosni Mubarak’s departure it is not his person that is important, but rather the symbolic guarantee that things change.

Only Egyptians can decide what they accept or not. This is one of the grandeurs of the Egyptian revolution, because it follows its own dynamics without influence from obsolete examples. If the French produced the French Revolution of 1789 and the Commune of 1870, and became the example for revolutionary literature, and the Russians produced the October 1917 Revolution, the Arabs will give to the world and the Third World the example of the first half of the 21st century, by its pacifism, anti-avant-gardism, anti-neoliberal globalisation, and defence of the welfare state, national dignity and sovereignty.

In the Arab countries, the model of globalisation consisted of abandoning the Arab-Muslim character of the state, responsible for providing wellbeing to its society. It entailed the cancellation of the notion of the national state that emerged following World War II and the independence movement, and whose legitimacy is based on the notion of progress and of the wellbeing of its citizens. It also entailed the cancellation of the socialist aspirations of the people based on their desire for a welfare state and the provision of public services.

The model of globalisation implemented in the Third World, at times by force, like in Iraq, or by economic pressure, like in Egypt or Indonesia, or by its adoption in rich countries, like the oil producing states, led everywhere to the emergence of a comprador class, submitting to or wilfully participating in the integration of national economies into the global economy, leading to a state whose sole role is policing and protecting comprador regimes and the status quo for the sole interests of foreign and local capitalism. In parallel, everywhere, including in developed economies, this model serves to enrich the rich, impoverish the middle class and marginalise and alienate the poor.

In Tunisia itself, the illusion that this model seemed to be working very well was based on the authoritarian character of the regimes ruling the country since its independence. However, the result, like elsewhere, was an impoverished and marginalised people, both economically and politically, and a governing police state class getting richer, careless of the wellbeing of the local population and severely repressing any dissent in the name of market forces. But in our modern era, society is not an organisation that one can indefinitely repress nor an ideology that one can ban, but rather a living creature. No one can control it but itself.

If in the past the educated classes had the choice to migrate to other countries and participate in their development, the global economic crisis and the stagnation of Western economies and their allies have limited this possibility. The result of this situation is an army of educated and technically skilled unemployed youth in developing countries. Normally, they are the builders of the national economy, the guardians of the wellbeing of their communities, and aspire to their own fulfilment. The current political and economic situation in all Arab countries pushes this youth, which thinks profoundly that it has the right to live like anyone in a similar situation in the world, to revolt and at times despair.

After 1973, building on their victory, Arab governments thought they could open up to the West and that this process would bring peace and prosperity. Sadat’s economic liberalisation and the welcoming of US and Western corporations for investment signalled the end of the welfare state in the Arab world. Since then, the dream of self-development was abandoned and replaced by opening all Arab countries’ markets to foreign interests, although to varying degrees. This policy of liberalisation became a condition for receiving American blessings, first with Reaganism and Thatcherism, followed by world trade negotiations, and World Bank structural adjustment policies.

As Iraq refused, to some extent, to be integrated into this global neoliberal economy, it was obliged by conquest and force, and through the Bremer Laws, to privatise its oil industry and hand Iraq’s future over to foreign corporations. In order to open Iraq’s economy and free it of any obstacle to outside forces, whether economic, political, cultural or military, the occupation resorted to the physical destruction of Iraq’s capacity of self-development, both of its infrastructure and human resources. As proven by the Iraqi experience, foreign capital does not aim at real development of the economy but rather to destroy all existing capacities for self-determined development processes. Under the phase of imperialism’s finance capitalism led by the United States, the Third World is the last to profit from world progress and the first to pay for capitalist crises. Even Dubai’s financial institutions, which were portrayed as an example of what these policies could achieve, faced with the financial crisis were threatened with bankruptcy if other Emiratis didn’t come to their rescue.

All the illusions of progress that animated older generations since 1973 — like socialism, Arab unity and renaissance, Pax Americana in Palestine and integration of Western models, or Islam as the solution — have now proven unfruitful and unachievable, in spite of the determined struggle of Arab political currents for these ideals. The socialist model collapsed and was put on the shelf; Arab unity is no more on the agenda of governments; Islam as the solution brought only division and sectarianism, as in Iraq; the Pax Americana in Palestine did not stop Israel, while the integration and opening of local markets to the capitalist economy didn’t bring investment or solutions for the unemployed and the poor. It didn’t make the people, as they have the legitimate right to, participate freely in the public affairs of their country, nor benefit from the richness of their land and national economy.

Although the Arab youth might not be opposed to the grand dreams of older generations, still defended by various local political currents, and although these currents continue to have their influence, the Arab youth wants immediate change. The new generation is disillusioned. In Tunisia, it took its destiny in its hands and wants change now, and real change. As an Arab country, and living in a state in permanent exchange with its Mediterranean environment, the people of Tunisia realised that the model of globalisation is simple usurpation. No promise of wellbeing and development, liberty or democracy was fulfilled, and the system can be resumed to a generalised oppression, corruption and theft: a comprador governing class, a police state, and submission of the country to imperialist policies and interests.

The collapse of Ben Ali and his government is not only the collapse of an authoritarian regime, but rather of the globalisation model of finance capitalism and imperialism for Third World countries. The situation in other Arab countries, including oil-producing states, does not differ in last analysis. Maybe the situation is influenced by local economic, geographic and demographic composition of this or that country, but all know that integration into neoliberal globalisation did not and will not result in progress and development, but rather the enriching of some and the impoverishment of the majority, and the abandoning of the national interest to the interest of global capitalism.

We are certain that all Arab regimes, which share the same situation although with different ingredients, are now shaking because the same situation will produce the same results. We are also certain that all Arab regimes, all imperialists, all revolutionaries are now studying the causes of the success of the Tunisian experience. They all ask themselves, why did the Tunisians succeed in evicting their government while other similar uprisings failed? It is our point of view that everywhere in the Arab world there is the same situation and the same desire to change and to get rid of this model; the only difference is that the Tunisian revolt was spontaneous and non-ideological. It was not a conflict between one political organisation and another, but rather inspired by the consciousness and spontaneity of its youth realising that the conflict is between a dominant class against the people and the people against this dominant class. It is a revolt for dignity, freedom, democracy and wellbeing against a failed model of development. By experience other countries will arrive to the same situation.

Indeed, the success of the Tunisian phenomenon lies in its unity. Similar revolts, like the uprising for electricity in Iraq in the summer of 2010, did not succeed because of ideological divisions at the political level, mostly encouraged by foreign powers to divert Arabs from their real common interests. Everywhere, the Arab youth aspires to a life in dignity, freedom, democracy and development. The ideological conflicts, like in Iraq, mask the real interests of the people. These ideological and confessional conflicts are used by the governing classes to justify their policies and to hide their real practices. But sooner or later, the reality of the conflicts between the impoverished masses and the enriched governing classes will prevail.

While all Arab governments are shaking, and think tanks are giving advice to their governments on how to suffocate similar movements in their own societies, the Arab people has already declared that the Tunisian revolt represents hope, and saluted it as an example for them. Considering the shared model and influence European countries exercise on one another, it is no wonder that there were successive uprisings throughout Europe in 1848, or in 1968. Likewise, what can one expect in the Arab world when all think they belong to the same nation and live in the same conditions? How can Tunisia not influence other Arab countries, while all these countries belong to one Arab nation, which was originally divided by colonial forces into separated states?

We know that the West tells the Arabs that they are separated and independent countries when this suits its policies best, but it treats the Arabs as a bloc when this accommodates its own interests. Maybe the adverse forces of the Tunisian people, so as to save their interests, will try to contain the movement by changing faces, but the situation will continue to be explosive until there is a reconciliation between the interest of the people and the state in which they live. This is called democracy and independence, where the people and the state are masters of their present and future.

Is this a new era of renewal for the Arab world? Will this uprising succeed in bringing real change? Will, at last, Arabs exercise real democracy and sovereignty? Will other regimes, which share the same reality, foresee their fate and opt to change their structure peacefully, or will they unite to strangle the Tunisian phenomenon and deviate it from its goals? The future will tell us, but changing persons will not change the roots of the revolt. The Arab renewal may have begun in Tunisia.