Samantha Power: evaluation

Transcript context

…— but a democracy of sorts. But it’s worth defining one’s terms. Look, I think Tunisia’s now, as it happens, as we speak, going through a transition where the rule of law had to kick in in the wake of the death of the president. And even though Tunisia is experiencing terrorism, economic stagnation, the very levels of corruption arguably that gave rise to the Arab Spring in the first place, it’s a plucky democracy that has seen its leaders do something that other leaders in the Middle East haven’t done, which is to move away from the kind of winner-takes-all mindset. And I think, why has democracy not taken hold in other countries? You have families that almost wrote a how-to manual for how to inflict the most savage atrocities on their people — that in the case of Syria. In the case of Egypt and el-Sisi, a different kind of manual — not the same extreme tactics of incendiary weapons and napalm and chemical weapons and mass torture and so forth, but nonetheless willing to pull out all the stops to keep power because self-preservation and a mindset where if you practice your religion or believe that religion has a different place in society, you are like a terrorist. That’s the sort of Egyptian mindset. Could it have gone another way in Egypt after Mubarak’s fall with a different outcome to their first democratic election? Or, indeed, with the same outcome — which was probably inevitable, given popular will, all told — if the person elected to represent the Muslim Brotherhood had not had a winner-takes-all mindset? In Tunisia, you had the equivalent of a Muslim Brotherhood victory, but he recognized that the society is so divided that there had to be some kind of pacted transition. And it’s a tragedy that in the case of Egypt, at a time when the society was clearly divided, again, along similar lines as in Tunisia, that the idea on the part of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership, Warsi, was, “I’m in power. I may not have another election,” which was always the big fear. Then Sisi comes in and he says, “Now I’m in power, and now this part of society that doesn’t represent my worldview, you are to be excluded from any hand in governance, and effectively I may never have another free election.” Elections weren’t supposed to bring to office people who would have an election once in order to rubber-stamp their own power. It’s not only bad luck. There are no democratic institutions that have taken hold over time that have the kind of resilience and the rule of law behind them to have kicked in. But Egypt also suffered some bad luck, I think, in who the individuals were who were elevated. And in a lot of these societies, you see some of the best leaders leaving, or staying and becoming entrepreneurs or civil society members and being so repulsed by what politics has represented that they wouldn’t dare to be part of public life or public office. If I look at Iraq since the surge — not the last year and a half — but it seems there have been some pretty high economic growth rates. Some of that’s oil, but it’s not all oil. Is there the danger that 20, 30 years from now, people look back — they simply see Iraq as a successful US operation? The country has a funny kind of democracy. It’s growing; it’s getting wealthier. The rest of the region is doing much worse. Is that a possible scenario?…

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