A Tunisian and an American Walk Into a Bar...

This past weekend, my wife and I took a belated anniversary celebration trip to New Orleans. (Five years, and it seems like 50. Kidding!)

One night, we wandered down toward Frenchmen Street in search of some live New Orleans jazz, and lo, the city delivered.

While the band was on a break, I struck up a conversation with a fellow whiskey-loving patron and had one of those meandering, nice-to-meet-you type of conversations until I asked him, in relation to his accent, where he was from. “Tunisia,” he replied.

Tunisia is a small country in north Africa, with nice beaches and whose inhabitants speak Arabic and French. My U.S. Navy ship once hosted a handful of Tunisian officers for a summer. Tunisia rarely gets mentioned in American news, as eyes are generally focused elsewhere in the Middle East.

On January 14, the day before I met my new friend in the jazz club, autocratic President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled the country after weeks of violent street protests. He had ruled Tunisia for 23 years, and his flight has left a fragile coalition government attempting to maintain stability until a presidential election can be held in a few months. These are heavy things to discuss in a bar.

Yet, in vino veritas, and I couldn’t help but find out what he thought of recent events. “So, big things going on there,” I began hesitantly. “The president just fled.”

My friend exploded in surprise. “That’s right, man! That [expletive], he’s gone! It’s about time!”

I had opened the floodgates, and what followed was a frank and illuminating discussion on the events of the past few weeks and what had precipitated them.  

Al-Akhbar,  a Lebanese newspaper, published U.S. State Department cables from the WikiLeaks dump concerning Tunisia. They were uncomplimentary at best and incendiary at worst, describing rampant corruption in and around the ruling family. Being a plugged-in millennial, I thought a revolution sparked by WikiLeaks was enticing. The power of the Internet topples dictators!

Given such a ready source, I asked the Tunisian patron if he thought the WikiLeaks revelations had been a tipping point for the uprising.

“Well, people knew, man. People knew that she [Leila Ben Ali, wife of the president] was corrupt. Over a year ago, when I went home, we were talking about starting something. This put it out in the open, but we knew.”

In some ways, I think I had hoped that the WikiLeaks dump had been the falling pebble that started an avalanche. Of course, I wasn’t the only one; plenty of media outlets discussed “the first WikiLeaks revolution.” Perhaps, though, this was a reductive attempt to assert some “Americanism” into what is a truly grassroots movement. WikiLeaks and subsequent publications in newspapers made recently made Americans aware of the corruption in Tunisia, but the people had been living it for decades.

In November 2003, President Bush called for more democracy in the Middle East. Since that time, however, U.S. policy has focused on creating a stable government in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion and subsequent deposition of Saddam Hussein. As a secular supporter of many aspects of U.S. foreign policy, Tunisian President Ben Ali was essentially left to his own devices.

Despite President Bush’s hope to spread an American brand of democracy across the Arab world, the difficulty encountered in Iraq has precluded any aid from flowing to oppressed peoples. In the case of Tunisia, there was no invasion, no flag-waving foreigners looking to upend decades of authoritarian rule. Heck, there wasn’t even a Radio Liberty. When asked to comment on the growing protests the day before Ben Ali’s regime collapsed, Secretary of State Clinton demurred, “We can’t take sides.”

As an American who has traveled the Middle East and discussed U.S. involvement in the region with its citizens, I’ve always simply assumed a leadership role for our country in any move towards democracy. While this doesn’t seem like that dangerous an idea, it is certainly an egotistical one. What’s more, assuming direct American intervention is needed for a people to take control over their politics undersells the struggles these people go through on a daily basis.

Recent arguments over “American exceptionalism” indicate that, perhaps, I was not alone in my narrow focus. There is so much concern over whether or not politicians are strong enough believers in our own superiority, that a democratic revolution can literally sneak up on us. Right now, the situation in Tunisia is tenuous, but it seems unlikely that late American intervention could help in any way.

In the end, if the revolution is successful, it may be a great lesson for Americans. A people can come to, and earn, democracy without U.S. forces kicking in the doors.   

We live in an ever-increasingly connected world. With the addition of a few Twitter feeds, I can track the real-time progress of an uprising across the world. News flashes across the globe in an instant. I am an avowed globalist and believer in the cyber revolution, but nothing can really approximate the experience of my conversation in a smoky New Orleans bar with a stranger.

Knowledge is not necessarily understanding, and perhaps we in the States are too quick to insert ourselves into events we may not fully understand. Today, we should congratulate the Tunisian people on moving toward political freedoms we take for granted, and quietly reflect on how they earned them.