Opinion Hope and fear,in equal parts

The glow comes from watching people lose their fear and be willing to take enormous risks to assert,not a particular ideology,but the most human of emotions: the quest for dignity,justice and the right to shape one’s own future. I was in Moscow on Saturday morning — just as the demonstrations against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin were gathering. It was minus 4 Fahrenheit. A simple rule: Whenever 120,000 people gather to rally for democracy — and you can see your breath and can’t feel your fingers — take it seriously.

But that pit in the stomach comes from knowing that while the protests are propelled by deep aspirations for dignity,justice and self-determination,such heroic emotions have to compete with other less noble impulses and embedded interests.

Take Syria. I have no doubt that many of the Syrians mounting the uprising against the Assad regime are propelled by a quest for a free and pluralistic Syria. But have no illusions: Some are also Sunni Muslims seeing this as their chance to overthrow four decades of Alawite minority rule. Where win-win democratic aspirations stop in Syria and rule-or-die sectarian fears begin is very hard to untangle. The Assad family has run Syria as an Alawite mafia syndicate since 1970. While the Assad clan may have been a convenient enforcer at times for Israel and the West,it has also been a huge agent of mayhem — killing Lebanese journalists and politicians who dared to cross Syria,arming Hezbollah,funnelling insurgents into Iraq,serving as a launching pad for Iranian mischief,murdering its own people seeking freedom and spurning any real political and economic reform. Syria has no future under Assad rule. But does it have a future without them? Can this multi-sectarian population democratically rule itself,or does it crack apart? No one can predict.

You can’t have a democracy without citizens,and you can’t have citizens without trust — without trust that everyone will be treated with equality under the law,no matter who is in power,and without trust in a shared vision of what kind of society people are trying to build.

America has that kind of trust because it started with a shared idea that attracted the people. The borders came later. In most of the Arab states awakening today,the borders came first,drawn by foreign powers,and now the people trapped within them are trying to find a shared set of ideas to live by and trust each other with as equal citizens.

Iraq shows how hard it is to do that — the Sunni-Shiite divide still cuts very deep — but Iraq also shows that it is not impossible.

We often forget how unusual America is as a self-governing,pluralistic society. We elected a black man whose grandfather was a Muslim as president at a time of deep economic crisis,and now we’re considering replacing him with a Mormon. Who in the world does that? Not many,especially in the Middle East. Yet,clearly,many people there now deeply long to be citizens — not all,but many. If that region has any hope of a stable future,we need to bet on them.