Arab uprising has familiar ring

Peter Goldmark, a former budget director of New York State and former publisher of the International Herald Tribune, headed the climate program at the Environmental Defense Fund.

For years savvy writers have talked about "the Arab street" as a shadowy alternative world to the dictatorships and petrocracies that have been the visible face of Arab countries.

Now the "street" has risen in rebellion, and the rest of us are rushing to catch up and respond intelligently.

When I was a young history teacher, one of the most difficult things for me to teach was the wave of spontaneous democratic revolutions against kings and emperors that swept across Europe in 1848. What did that extraordinary chain of rebellions tell us about what brings people to the edge of revolution?

What did it say about the universality of aspirations for democracy and liberty? What could we learn from this contagion, fed by powerful values that were conveyed initially only in the realm of abstract ideas by word and article? Through what alchemy did these abstract aspirations suddenly ignite and transform into street barricades and assaults on the palaces of monarchs? (Full disclosure: My great-granduncle helped lead such a revolt in Hungary in 1848.)

And now, suddenly, here it is again: the stunning, powerful, eruption of bravery and intense conviction, and a willingness to risk death in the attempt to remake the political order.

The rebels speak a language we do not know and their gestures and expressions at times seem foreign. But the themes of the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen and other places should contain familiar echoes for us.

The revolutionists are against dictatorship in all forms. They have had it up to here with government pillaging of their businesses and homes, secret police torture, the random brutality of state terrorism, and the punishment or "disappearing" of those who speak out against all this. While many of them are pious individually, they appear to seek to reorder and democratize the political structure, not to impose religious rule.

They seek to address the huge, illegally created gap between the wealthy and the poor in their countries.

And how do we respond, those of us who live in the Western democracies? We have dreamed of and waited for this day. And yet we seem hesitant and uncertain.

Our hands are not clean. In some cases, the United States supported the dictators, and in others we trained not only the military but the police who did the dirty work. But in the face of democratic movements who represent what our own revolutionary forefathers fought for -- can there be any doubt that we are on their side?

Military intervention, as in Libya, is a complex issue, as we are painfully discovering. But there are other avenues of support that are direct and available.

We should announce that the level of military aid we've been giving the dictatorships will immediately be made available for economic development and the creation of democratic institutions, in whatever form the new leadership wants.

We should play a leadership role in an international process to track the billions stolen by the dictators and send them back home for nation building.

We should use our influence and contacts with the military in these countries to get them to support the new democratic processes and the building of a constitutional government of laws.

The uprisings sweeping the Arab world, as disorganized and awkward as they may appear, represent the values and objectives we support. They have already accomplished in some countries what decades of American cajoling and billions of American dollars did not.

We should have our heads examined if we don't move clearly and practically in support of these movements. And by the same token, others would be right to question what America really stands for if we do not.