Street cred

Christopher Hitchens celebrates the virtual disappearance of the phrase “Arab street” from our political discourse:

In retrospect, it’s difficult to decide precisely when this annoying expression began to expire, if only from diminishing returns. There was, first, the complete failure of the said “street” to detonate with rage when coalition forces first crossed the border of Iraq, as had been predicted (and one suspects privately hoped) by so many “experts.” But one still continued to hear from commentators who conferred street-level potency on passing “insurgents.” (I remember being aggressively assured by an interviewer on Al Franken’s quasi-comedic Air America that Muqtada Sadr’s “Mahdi Army” in Najaf was just the beginning of a new “Tet Offensive.”) Mr. Sadr duly got a couple of seats in the recent Iraqi elections. And it was most obviously those elections that discredited the idea of ventriloquizing the Arab or Muslim populace or of conferring axiomatic authenticity on the loudest or hoarsest voice.

Hitchens cautions “those of us in the regime-change camp” not to claim the “street” either. And wisely so. Nonetheless, one can’t help but notice what is occurring in the streets of Lebanon right now.

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