4 WK THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2011

Sources: Geoffrey Mock, Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; CIA World Factbook (economic data); Natural Earth (map terrain) BILL MARSH AND JOE BURGESS/THE NEW YORK TIMES; PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAMAL SAIDI/REUTERS (LEBANON); KHALED DESOUKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE–GETTY IMAGES (EGYPT); KHALED FAZAA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE–GETTY IMAGES (YEMEN)

Reasons to SeetheEGYPT IS NOT ALONE.

Fed by the example of Tunisia, whose leader

was driven from power by demonstrations last month, anger has begun to boil over, or threatens to do so, across a number of Arab countries living under authoritarian rule or, in the Palestinians’ case, in a state of intermittent conflict. While the fury has varied roots, clues to its depth are offered by snapshots of rights violations reported by Amnesty Interna-tional and Human Rights Watch in the region during the last year.

ALGERIA

LIBYA

Cairo

IRAQ

SAUDI ARABIA

OMAN

Lebanon

TORTURE is prohibited, but former detainees report its use against them.

IMPUNITY FOR ASSASSINATION has severely divided Lebanese since 2005, when Prime Minister Rafik Hariri (on poster at right) was assassinated and suspicions focused on Hezbollah, acting in concert with Syria. HARASSMENT OF MEDIA: Lebanon's media community is robust, but some writers and bloggers critical of the army or officials are detained.

Tunisia (predating change of leadership)

SYSTEMATIC TORTURE and other mistreat-ment in police stations and detention centers.

SEVERE RESTRICTIONS on freedom of expression, association and assembly.

HARASSMENT by threats or prosecution, of journalists, human rights defenders and student activists who criticized the regime.

14% UNEMPLOYMENT RATE

13.4% UNEMPLOYMENT RATE

28% OF LEBANESEBELOW POVERTY LINE

Palestinian Territories

RECURRING CONFLICT between Palestinians and Israelis — especially in and from Hamas-ruled Gaza, which Israel has tried to isolate — worsens a long-standing humanitarian and human rights crisis.

ECONOMIC UPHEAVAL: Mass unemploy-ment, extreme poverty, food insecu-rity and food price rises caused by shortages have left four in five Gazans dependent on humanitarian aid.

FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT, DETENTIONS: Israeli restrictions and settlement activity hamper Palestinian movement in the West Bank. Rights organiza-tions cite arbitrary detentions by both Israeli and Palestinian security forces.

40% GAZA UNEMPLOYMENT RATE

70% OF PEOPLE IN GAZA BELOW POVERTY LINE

46% OF PEOPLE IN WEST BANKBELOW POVERTY LINE

16.5% WEST BANK UNEMPLOYMENT RATE

Syria

A LICENSE FOR ABUSE: Syria has been under a state of emergency since 1963. Political activists, human rights defenders, bloggers, Kurdish minority activists and critics of the government encounter arbitrary arrest, prolonged detention and prison terms.

SYSTEMATIC TORTURE and other mistreatment is reported in police stations, detention centers and prisons. INEQUALITY OF WOMEN in marriage and inheritance rights is enshrined in law; the penal code allows lower penalties for murder and other violent crimes against women in defense of family “honor.”

Jordan

SYSTEMATIC TORTURE: Reports of this and other mistreatment of detainees.

RESTRICTIONS ON FREEDOM OF EXPRES-SION were imposed in September under a law leaving journalists and others liable to prosecution for “insulting” the king, the judiciary and religion.

DANGER TO WOMEN who are accused of violating a family’s honor. Twenty-four were reported to have been victims of “honor killings” by family members in 2009.

Yemen

REPORTS OF TORTURE and other mistreatment of detainees by police and prison guards include use of beatings with sticks and rifle butts, kicking and punching, and suspen-sion by the wrists and ankles. RESTRICTIONS ON FREEDOMS include establishment of a court in 2009 to try cases related to the media, the confiscation of newspapers, and the use of troops to prevent publication by Al Ayyam, a large daily newspaper.

WOMEN face discrimination under the law and are subjected to early and forced marriage; they are believed to suffer high levels of violence within their families.

Egypt

A LICENSE FOR ABUSE is provided by a 30-year-old state of emergency. The authorities detain peaceful critics of the government as well as people suspected of terrorism and offenses against national security. Some are detained without charge or trial despite court orders for their release.

TRIALS of civilians are conducted before military courts, in breach of international fair trial standards and with no recourse for appeal.

SYSTEMATIC TORTURE and other mistreatment of political prisoners and individuals charged with common crimes is widespread in police cells, security police detention centers and prisons.

RESTRICTIONS ON FREEDOMS include detentions of journalists and bloggers. ELECTORAL PROBLEMS in the 2010 parliamentary contests included restrictions on opposition political parties and harassment of them.

RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION: Bahais, Coptic Christians and other minorities continued to face official discrimination, including limits on reconstruction of churches.

RALLYING CRY Khaled Said is alleged to have been dragged out of an Internet cafe by plainclothes police in Alexandria and beaten to death. Said has been adopted by Egyptians as a symbol of security forces’ brutality.

ARRESTED Tawakkol Karman, a journalist, was detained for taking part in a student demonstration expressing sympathy for Tunisians.

35% UNEMPLOYMENT RATE 45% OF YEMENIS BELOW POVERTY LINE20% OF EGYPTIANS BELOW POVERTY LINE

The Middle East

they did not get was a functioning Egyptian de-mocracy. The apocryphal comment about a for-eign strongman often attributed to FranklinDelano Roosevelt sums it up nicely: he may be ason of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.

History is rich with precedents. In 1959, therewas Fulgencio Batista of Cuba, darling of Ameri-can corporations and organized crime, fleeingwith an ill-gotten fortune of $300 million as FidelCastro’s troops reached Havana.

In 1979, it was Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, theshah of Iran, abandoning the throne in the faceof a revolt two years after President Jimmy Car-ter toasted his country as “an island of stability.”

In 1986, the turn came for Ferdinand Marcos,ousted by the Philippines’ People Power move-ment five years after Vice President GeorgeH. W. Bush told him at a luncheon: “We loveyour adherence to democratic principles and tothe democratic process.”

The list could be extended. Since World WarII, the White House, under the management ofboth parties, has smiled on at least a couple ofdozen despots. (“Friendly Dictators TradingCards,” marketed by a California publisher inthe 1990s, featured “36 of America’s most embar-rassing allies.”)

“It used to be anti-Communism,” said David F.Schmitz, a historian at Whitman College and au-thor of two books on the American attachment todictators. “Now it’s most often moderates whostand against radicalism in the world of Islam.”

Mr. Schmitz deplores the phenomenon, whichhe believes has too often bought an ersatz stabil-ity at a very high price. By backing an autocrat,he said, America often ensures that “the politicalcenter gets destroyed, giving credence to ex-tremists’ arguments and discrediting the U.S.”

After all, the man who felled Batista, the viru-lently anti-American Mr. Castro, is still in powermore than 50 years later. Cuban-American rela-tions produced a brush with thermonuclear warin 1962, a permanently crippled Cuban economyand — well, generations of successful anti-Cas-

tro politicians in Miami and beyond.Iran, too, got mired in a new brand of undemo-

cratic rule after the shah. The United States stillfaces a hostile regime ruled by ayatollahs andprotected by a brutal, profiteering Revolution-ary Guard — tough enough to have weatheredits own Egyptian-style uprising in 2009.

The Philippines are a less dispiriting example.With a belated but definitive push from Wash-ington, the dictator there gave way to democra-cy; however imperfect, that outcome suggests

that American-backed strongmen are not inev-itably succeeded by America-hating strongmen.

But Mr. Schmitz watches diplomacy from thetranquil distance of the academy. Ask a onetimepractitioner, Zbigniew Brzezinski, PresidentCarter’s national security adviser at the time ofthe shah’s fall, and you get a very different view.No administration, he noted, starts with an idealset of international partners.

“To conduct foreign policy,” he said, “we haveto deal with the governments that exist. Andsome of those are dictatorships.”

When Mr. Brzezinski and his boss encoun-tered the shah’s dictatorship, the only otherpower centers in Iran were the Communists ofthe Tudeh Party and the mullahs of the mosques,he said. As the popular revolt against the shahgrew, he said, the Carter administration was di-vided. Some officials thought Ayatollah Khomei-ni, returning from exile, might provide a reason-able alternative. Mr. Brzezinski disagreed.

“My view was that the shah should crackdown and then begin aggressive reforms,” he re-called. He lost the argument. Three decades lat-er, the United States is trying to prevent the the-ocracy that followed from getting nuclear weap-ons. It is at least an arguable position that Mr.Brzezinski’s formula of crackdown and reform, ifit had worked, would have produced better long-term results for the rights of Iranians, as well asfor international security.

Mr. Brzezinski says Egypt’s prospects if Mr.Mubarak is toppled are brighter than Iran’s in1979: “The army is respected and has a lot ofsupport across the country. There is a middleclass of sorts. And the Muslim Brotherhood isstill under control,” reducing the risk that a theo-cratic regime would emerge.

Mr. Brzezinski was Mr. Carter’s adviser whenMr. Sadat signed the historic peace treaty withIsrael’s Menachem Begin, and while he nowsays Mr. Mubarak’s time has passed, he by nomeans considers American support for him tohave been a tragic mistake. “I would say it was agood deal for the U.S. and for Egypt,” he said.Mr. Mubarak consolidated peace in the region

and was a “modernizer” at home, he said. “His-toric change outpaced the modernizer, as oftenoccurs.”

Rashid Khalidi, professor of modern Arabstudies at Columbia and a former adviser to Pal-estinian peace negotiators, rejects this brand ofrealpolitik. The ostensible benefits the UnitedStates has derived from its backing of Mr. Muba-rak are illusory, he said: the peace betweenEgypt and Israel has not yet brought a peace be-tween Israel and the Palestinians; oppression inEgypt has actually fueled terrorism, even ifsome of its Egyptian practitioners, like Aymanal-Zawahiri, the deputy leader of Al Qaeda, havefled Egypt proper; and as is self-evident today,stability did not last.

Other cooperation has left a stain on Amer-ica’s reputation. The Bush administration sentsome terrorist suspects to Egypt, where theylater said they were tortured. Today, protestersin Cairo hold up spent tear gas canisters withAmerican labels. Such policies were “bankruptmorally and stupid politically,” Mr. Khalidi said.

“I know it’s easy to talk about American beingtrue to its values,” he said. “But you know, some-times it makes sense.”

The evolving statements from the Obama ad-ministration show officials feeling their waythrough the tricky intersection of morality andpragmatism, as they separate from an ally of 30years. Every statement from the White Houseand State Department is parsed for nuance inEgypt, in Israel and at home.

When Mr. Obama said on Tuesday that an “or-derly transition” in Egypt “must begin now,” forinstance, Mr. Brzezinski winced. “I wish he’dsaid ‘should begin now.’ ”

“It sounds like an order,” he said. “Egypt is aproud country, and Egyptians aren’t going to lis-ten to orders. They might listen to suggestions.”

America’s Journeys With StrongmenFrom Page 1

DREW ANGERER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Partners Sept. 1 in the Oval Office.

A slide show on the twists and turns ofrevolutions throughout history.

nytimes.com/weekinreview

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