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Our values and our long-term self-interest demand that we back the struggle for democracy in the Middle East One of the most precious attributes of democracy is freedom of expression, the ability to say what you think about anything you like. Yet as the people of Egypt strive for that right – some of them sacrificing their lives for the cause – there has been a strangulated sound coming from the throats of those who ought to be the clearest advocates of liberty. I am being generous when I say that Barack Obama, David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy and the rest of the soi-disant “leaders of the free world” have often struggled to articulate a principled and coherent response to the popular revolts that have spread from Tunis to Cairo. As Shakespeare has it: “There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat.” That there is a tide in the affairs of the Middle East is beyond question and whose side we ought to be on should not be in doubt. It is a leap of hope to believe that this has the potential to be as significant and liberating as the revolutions that swept eastern Europe in 1989. It is a leap, but one worth taking. The Arab world has a chance of breaking out from decades of dictatorship on to a much freer and more prosperous trajectory. The demonstrators in Tahrir Square represent a diverse collection of classes and interests, but they have been wonderfully clear about what they want. They do not seek a Chinese-style, totalitarian, market Marxism; they crave not the kleptocracy of Russia; they evince no desire to live in a caliphate. They want what we have in the west: rule of law, enforceable human rights, independent courts, free and fair elections and representative government. For all its imperfections, it is for liberal democracy that they yearn. We ought to be both cheered and cheering. And yet our representatives have often been heard writhing and spluttering. When Newsnight sought the assessment of Alistair Burt, the Foreign Office minister with “responsibility” for the Middle East, he did not aim for Shakespearean levels of eloquence about how to respond to sea changes. Opined Mr Burt: “It’s not for us to work out where the tide is going to go.” Should you ever go sailing on tricky seas, Mr Burt might not be the most recommended of crewmates. Still, it is a bit unfair of me to pick on the stutterings of a junior minister who has “responsibility” for the Middle East only in the sense that we all have some “responsibility” for global warming. In his inability to explain what was happening or to articulate what the British government thinks ought to happen, Mr Burt was only following the orders of his seniors. His boss, William Hague, has issued contorted statements, the normally eloquent foreign secretary hesitating to express a view on the grounds that is not for Britain to pick the governments of other countries. No, it is not. Many of the tragedies of the Middle East can be traced to the days when Britain and other western powers did impose rulers. But it is for the British foreign secretary to have a view about whether democratic government is to be preferred to dictatorship. It is probably not fair to lampoon Mr Hague too harshly when his equivocations mirror those of his superiors. When the pro-democracy protests erupted, the response from Washington, echoed by most of Europe, was to equivocate. It was only when Hosni Mubarak began to buckle that western leaders started to suggest there should be a transition to democracy. One of the tottering pharaoh’s last desperate gambits has been to send out paid thugs to try to cow those campaigning for freedom. Only then did the tone become more robust. At the beginning, David Cameron spoke respectfully of “President Mubarak” and the “Egyptian government”; by this weekend, the prime minister is using the much more pejorative “regime” to describe the crumbling autocracy. Now and finally, President Obama is publicly and explicitly calling for free and fair elections. Sheer shock is one explanation for this slow and initially temporising response. Officials and ministers frankly acknowledge – at least in private – that these convulsions have caught Washington, London, Paris, Berlin and Brussels with their pants around their ankles. To the many diplomatic and intelligence errors perpetrated by the US and the countries of the EU over recent years, we can add an almost total failure to anticipate this popular revolt against decades of repression. We could put this down to simple incompetence, but I fear that would be a bit too charitable. It is also the result of an ingrained assumption among too many opinion-formers and policy-makers in the west that certain parts of the world “can’t do democracy”, that there are fellow citizens of planet Earth who are somehow less deserving of freedom or less capable of exercising it. This pernicious prejudice has had adherents in the west over many decades at both ends of the political spectrum. There are the practitioners of rightwing realpolitik who defended vile dictatorships on the doctrine: “He may be a sonofabitch, but he’s our sonofabitch.” Elements of the left have been apologists for one-party regimes which call themselves “people’s socialist democratic republics”, a quadruple lie. This hypocrisy has been nowhere more pernicious than in the Middle East, where western governments have prostituted their avowed values for decades as a result of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the location of so much oil in the region, imperial legacies and, especially since 9/11, a short-termist view that “strong men” are the most reliable bulwark against extremist Islamism, al-Qaida and its murderous associates. This “realist” school of foreign policy has always had a bit of a cheek with its claim that dictatorships deliver stability, an argument especially hard to sustain in a region so riven with conflicts as the Middle East. Yet even as the flames of revolt lick their favoured Arab autocrats, the “realists” are still to be heard arguing that President Obama has been too precipitate in urging a democratic path for Egypt. They contend that those of us who dare to hope will prove to be naive idiots. The outcome, they warn, will not be the flowering of freedom on the Nile but an Iranian-style regime, a dictatorship at least as vicious as that of Mubarak, but one hostile to the west’s interests. This spectre is the bogey conjured by Mubarak himself. In fact, anti-western sloganeering and the burning of American flags have both been conspicuous by their absence. My instinct is that most Egyptians are much more likely to see Turkey as a role model rather than Iran. But let us concede that only fools and liars will claim to be sure of the ultimate outcome of the power plays between Egypt’s secular democrats, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and the army. Let us also acknowledge – for we would indeed be naive idiots if we did not do so – that Egypt is unlikely to progress from dictatorship to liberal democracy in one smooth step. It is in the nature of revolutions to be unpredictable and it is sometimes decades or more before we can measure their full consequences. Zhou Enlai famously quipped that it was “too early to say” whether the French Revolution was a good thing or a bad one. Is this an Arab 1789, 1848, 1917 or 1989? It is too early to say and may well turn out to be none of the above, but a transfiguration unique to its time and place. Having conceded that to the so-called “realists”, we must then ask them a question. Are they saying that Arabs are never allowed to aspire to democracy for fear that revolution might go the (highly country, culture and time-specific) way of Iran after 1979? That is a counsel of utter despair and racist condescension which consigns millions of people to the dead end of indefinite dictatorship. Anyone with any sense of history knows the road to liberal democracy can be bumpy and bloody. Britain took centuries to progress from tyrant kings such as Henry VIII to representative parliamentary government. Americans killed each other in a civil war which left more of them dead than any other conflict. The UK and the US have yet to reach a state of democratic perfection. But we also know something else about democracy, something which was best expressed by Winston Churchill: it is the worst form of government – except for all the other ones. Democracy is best at building stable, prosperous, resilient and tolerant societies over the long term. There has never been an armed conflict between two genuinely established democracies. The most promising path to sustainable peace and security in the Middle East and the most reliable bulwark against murderous extremism is not the chimeric “stability” of dictators. It is the nurturing of democracy. Our espoused principles and our long-term self-interest are both served by encouraging freedom. When liberty contends with tyranny, we should be on the side of all the citizens of the world enjoying the precious rights that we so take for granted. It is time that the leaders of the “free world” unknotted their tongues and said that with crystal clarity. Hosni Mubarak Egypt Islam Middle East Andrew Rawnsley guardian.co.uk