Revolutionary chaos, radical order

THEORY
It’s worth returning for a moment to Edmund Burke, who said that the road from the Tennis Court oath to the guillotine was the inevitable unfolding of the French Revolution. Not every revolution ends in terror, but what’s worth examining in light of a recent posting, Revolution’s minimum entry requirements, is the balance of forces is muddied by other groups opposed to the regime who are not necessarily allied to the revolutionaries. These groups often win the initial political victory against the regime, such as the replacement of the tsarist monarchy in 1917 with the short-lived Kerensky government. These Russian moderates, like their counterparts in France, Iran, and many other countries in the midst of upheaval, are the main characters for only a brief chapter in the history of a revolution.

Frequently-repeated political forces cut short the rule of the moderates. The new government immediately inherits all the problems that inspired people to overthrow the old regime. Re-organizing and staffing the civil and military parts of the government is extremely difficult, particularly if many of the loyalists can’t or won’t serve the new regime. The moderates also fall prey to their own moderation. Their main rivals, the radicals, are often better organized, more experienced at clandestine political action, more convinced of the necessity of their victory by whatever means necessary, and more capable of articulating a clear ideology—their roadmap to the future—at a time of enormous confusion and anxiety. Kerensky’s cabinet won the right to be the first replacement for the tsar, but the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were already waiting in the wings to depose them.

Sometimes, analyses of revolution, like Crane Brinton’s or Lyford Edwards’, depend too much on “the Great Revolutions” in France and Russia. However, in more recent times, we’ve seen the same dynamic at work: once the old government falls, and a coalition of moderates takes its place, this cataclysmic event turns out to be only the prelude to the triumph of the radicals. It’s easy to forget, for example, that it wasn’t just the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamist supporters who deposed the Shah of Iran in 1979, but a broad coalition of many groups. Similarly, you often hear people mistakenly talk about the Taliban defeating the Soviets and taking power, when in fact it was the Tajik- and Uzbek-dominated mujahideen coalition that routed the Soviets and defeated the Najibullah regime. The Taliban movement was, in fact, a reaction to the corruption and brutality of the mujahideen. Again in 1979, when President Somoza fled Nicaragua after his National Guard refused to continue to defend him, the Sandinistas were only one of many groups who erected an interim government in Managua.

The way insurgents organize themselves creates an even more complicated political picture. There may not be one insurgent group, but several, sometimes united under a single banner, sometimes not. The FMLN in El Salvador’s recent civil war was actually an aggregation of five guerrilla groups, under some degree of joint command, but also often operating with equal independence. Guerrilla and terrorist groups usually have political front organizations, like the FDR counterpart to the FMLN, or the Sinn Fein complement to the IRA. The fronts often try to become a larger umbrella organization beyond the original insurgency, allying with or leading other groups opposed to the regime. These apparent divisions among insurgent groups, or between the insurgents and their political fronts, are sometimes real, and sometimes illusory. They always cloud estimates of how strong the insurgents really are, politically and militarily, and how much of a threat they represent in combination with other opposition groups.

In other words, insurgents don’t need to draw a straight line to victory from their first attacks to a triumphant march on the capitol. They often take advances and reversals of fortune in stride, waiting for the time when either they can win the kind of victory they plan, or take advantage of another political movement’s success at deposing the old regime.

PRACTICE
Not surprisingly, I have Lebanon on my mind while I’m writing this piece. The large, noisy, and effective opposition, which succeeded in deposing a pro-Syrian cabinet, has gained enough force to possibly force a partial or total Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. Meanwhile, everyone familiar with Lebanese politics is aware of the proverbial “dog that did not bark in the night,” Hezbollah. Hezbollah started as a collection of terrorist cells responsible for some of the most infamous bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations during Lebanon’s Civil War, including the 1983 simultaneous suicide attacks on the US Marine barracks and French paratrooper base.  Now, Hezbollah has many faces, much like Palestinian group Hamas in the occupied territories. Hezbollah has charitable organizations, a satellite TV station, a publication arm, and 12 elected representatives in the Lebanese parliament. Anyone who imposes the picture of the ragged, desperate terrorist on the current leadership of Hezbollah is sorely mistaken.

Hezbollah has supported the Syrian occupation, but so far has been very quiet about a possible Syrian withdrawal. A question I’ve yet to see pressed with any energy, in Western media circles at least, is who killed Rafik Hariri. The finger could point to Hezbollah as easily as the Syrians themselves.

Whoever was responsible for blowing up the car in which Hariri was traveling, Hezbollah is, of course, a classic “radicals in the wings” group. Nearly every other despotism, benevolent or savage, that the Bush Administration might like to topple has its version of “the radicals in the wings.” That’s not an argument for giving up on reform or revolution. It is, however, a stern warning for anyone who wants to proceed heedlessly, hurriedly, and ultimately, recklessly—which is a fair description of the Bush Administration’s handling of Afghanistan and Iraq. We may applaud the moderates who take power today, and bemoan the radicals who overthrow them tomorrow.

Comments

[Steven D]

Good to see you back posting again. Insightful as always. Last paragraph, furst sentence, "However" should be "Whoever" I think.

[Kingdaddy]

Whoops, thanks.

[J.]

Hezbollah's not being quiet any more. See yahoo article at http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050307/ap_on_re_mi_ea/lebanon_the_hezbollah_factor_5. That didn't take too long... I guess democracy will take a little longer than the Bush administration thought.

[Paul Yakov]

"Similarly, you often hear people mistakenly talk about the Taliban defeating the Soviets and taking power, when in fact it was the Tajik- and Uzbek-dominated mujahideen coalition that routed the Soviets and defeated the Najibullah regime." -3/4/05

"Routed" the Soviets?

Do you really believe that the mujahideen "routed" the Soviets?

Or is it more like Gorbachev simply pulled his army out of Afghanistan as a result of his policies of domestic retrenchment and worldwide political realignment with the rest of the world, namely the United States.

And Najibullahs' government fell apart in 1992 only because Moscow cut off its aid and General Dostum, leader of the Uzbeki militia, decided suddenly to switch his allegiance to the rebels.

Let's not get too hyperbolic in talking history.