It's official: The term "Arab Spring" has to be retired. There is nothing springlike going on. The broader "Arab Awakening" also no longer seems valid. And so the strategist Anthony Cordesman is probably right when he argues it's best we now speak of the "Arab Decade" or the "Arab Quarter Century" — a long period in which a struggle for both the future of Islam and the future of the individual Arab nations blend into a "clash within a civilization."
When the Arab Spring first emerged, the easy analogy was the fall of the Berlin Wall. It appears that the right analogy is a different central European event — the Thirty Years' War in the 17th century — a mix of religious and political conflict.
Some will say: "You never should have hoped for this Arab Spring." Nonsense. The corrupt autocracies that gave us the previous 50 years of "stability" were just slow-motion disasters. Read the U.N.'s 2002 Arab Human Development Report about what deficits of freedom, women's empowerment and knowledge did to Arab peoples over the last 50 years. Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and Syria are not falling apart today because their leaders were toppled. It was because for too many years they failed too many of their people.
Also, "we" did not unleash the Arab Spring, and "we" could not have stopped it. These uprisings began with fearless, authentic quests for dignity by Arab youths. But no sooner did they seek governments grounded in real citizenship, than they found themselves competing with other aspirations — to be more Islamist, more sectarian or to restore the status quo ante.
Still, two things surprise me. The first is how incompetent the Muslim Brotherhood has been. In Egypt, the Brotherhood has presided over an economic death spiral and a judiciary caught up in idiocies like investigating the comedian Bassem Youssef, Egypt's Jon Stewart. Every time the Brotherhood had a choice of acting in an inclusive way or seizing more power, it seized power, depriving it of the base needed to make economic reforms.
The second surprise? How weak the democratic opposition has been. The tragedy of the Arab center-left is complicated, says Marc Lynch, a Middle East expert at George Washington University. Many of the more secular, more pro-Western Egyptian political elites, he said, had been "co-opted by the old regime" for its own semiofficial parties and therefore "were widely discredited in the eyes of the public." That left youngsters who had never organized a party, or a grab bag of expatriates, former regime officials, Nasserites and liberal Islamists, whose only idea was the old regime must go.
Since taking power in Egypt, "the Brotherhood has presided over economic failure and political collapse," said Lynch. "The opposition should be running in — not boycotting — the next parliamentary elections."
The old sources of stability that held this region together are gone. No iron-fisted outside powers want to occupy these countries, because all you win today is a bill. More Islam is not the answer. More of the Arab Human Development Report is the answer. But the democratic opposition youths don't yet have leaders to galvanize people around that vision.
Given all this, America's least bad option is to use its economic clout to insist on democratic constitutional rules, regular elections and political openness, and to do all it can to encourage moderate opposition leaders to run for office. We should support anyone who wants to implement the Arab Human Development Report and oppose anyone who doesn't. That is the only way these societies can give birth to their only hope: decent leaders who can ensure this "Arab Quarter Century" ends better than it began.
Friedman writes for The New York Times.