The Arab Spring hypothesis was simple: Arabs hate the US because Arabs want Islamist rule, the US is seen as propping corrupt autocratic secular regimes against the will of the people. If Islamists are allowed to rule through a form of illiberal democracy, they will eventually have to moderate along the lines of Christian parties in Europe, they will no longer hate the US, there will be no more wars in the Mideast and Israel will be safe.
This is obviously a load of BS. It might sound simple and elegant to a westerner, especially one racked by liberal guilt. But anyone with any understanding of Islamists could've (and did) predicted this would not work.
So how did it go? In Egypt the MB came to power, immediately moved to disenfranchise large sections of society, started supporting Jihadist groups, undermined the army, and lead to the creation of a critical mass of anti-Islamism that exploded in a conflagration of epic proportions. The US refused adamantly to accept that there is genuine societal refusal of Islamism in Egypt because that flies against the vogue theories of neo-cons and Arab Spring hypotheses. In Libya elections gave the MB a majority in parliament which they used to fund militias loyal only to them. When they lost the following elections, they moved to systematically deconstruct the vestiges of statehood that Libya ever had in a drawn out civil ... spat. In Yemen, democracy brought to the forefront a dominance of Al-Qaeda in multiple provinces, separatism in the South, and a sectarian war in the North that pretty much disintegrated the national army.
But the mother of all demonstrations of the utter and complete idiocy of the thesis behind the Arab Spring is of course Syria. In Syria the US, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar for divergent reasons insisted that Asad was the only problem and that by him going everything would be peachy. A gigantic civil war driven blind spot developed as the allies were busy trying to spin the media. In this blind spot ISIL rose from the ashes of Iraq, leading to the astounding scene of the siege of Kobane in Syria as ISIL and Turkey besiege a Kurdish town likely to be exposed to mass slaughter if it falls.
So what went wrong? A few catastrophic idiotic assumptions by the Obama administration went wrong.
First, the assumption that Islamist parties would go the way of Christian parties in Europe is demented. It ignores major difference in the nature of both religions, in the origins of the parties in both regions, and in the histories of the regions. The Arab world has a history of colonialism, no major regional wars in recent history to install a pacifist attitude, the religion has not passed through a period of secularisation, and liberal values are in no way part of social values in the Mideast as they are in Europe.
Secondly, the majority of Arab countries are entities that are entirely based on concepts of post-colonialist Arab nationalism. This is particularly true of Syria where there was no other glue holding together the country. The Arab spring was almost entirely driven by Islamists wanting to get to power through either guns or ballot boxes or both. The US knew this, and pretty much wanted it. But said Islamists are Sunni, and as Libya has shown clearly they have absolutely no intention of granting anyone who doesn't toe their line any quarters. In such a situation, what was the expected reaction of the Shiia, Alawis, and Christians of Syria? Were they expected to lie down and be subjected to a gradual but unavoidable campaign of ethnic cleansing along the lines of the Christians of Iraq? As the US, Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia poured weapons and foreign fighters into Syria through the borders of Turkey were they expected to surrender to the mass slaughter coming, or were they expected to respond with equal ferocity.
But above all, the assumption that moderate Islamists are the only party capable of confronting and moderating radical groups was the cardinal error in the Arab Spring hypothesis. It shows the Obama admin has absolutely no idea how Islamists function and that it was easy prey to the bilingually bifurcated media machine of the MB. Because Islamists have never ever made any radical revision of the basic principles that drive all of them, they are all very vulnerable to being bullied into more radical positions by groups to their right. Given enough time, the MB in Libya certainly and without delay turned Jihadi, in Syria, the MB will inevitably gravitate towards ISIL. Leave a bunch of Islamists alone and through a convoluted process of medieval argument and head chopping they will all accumulate towards the extreme right and coagulate into one pulsating murderous sectarian monstrous entity.
And that is far worse than anything the autocratic allegedly corrupt regimes of the Pan-Arabist era could have produced.
Arab Spring indeed.
This is obviously a load of BS. It might sound simple and elegant to a westerner, especially one racked by liberal guilt. But anyone with any understanding of Islamists could've (and did) predicted this would not work.
So how did it go? In Egypt the MB came to power, immediately moved to disenfranchise large sections of society, started supporting Jihadist groups, undermined the army, and lead to the creation of a critical mass of anti-Islamism that exploded in a conflagration of epic proportions. The US refused adamantly to accept that there is genuine societal refusal of Islamism in Egypt because that flies against the vogue theories of neo-cons and Arab Spring hypotheses. In Libya elections gave the MB a majority in parliament which they used to fund militias loyal only to them. When they lost the following elections, they moved to systematically deconstruct the vestiges of statehood that Libya ever had in a drawn out civil ... spat. In Yemen, democracy brought to the forefront a dominance of Al-Qaeda in multiple provinces, separatism in the South, and a sectarian war in the North that pretty much disintegrated the national army.
But the mother of all demonstrations of the utter and complete idiocy of the thesis behind the Arab Spring is of course Syria. In Syria the US, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar for divergent reasons insisted that Asad was the only problem and that by him going everything would be peachy. A gigantic civil war driven blind spot developed as the allies were busy trying to spin the media. In this blind spot ISIL rose from the ashes of Iraq, leading to the astounding scene of the siege of Kobane in Syria as ISIL and Turkey besiege a Kurdish town likely to be exposed to mass slaughter if it falls.
So what went wrong? A few catastrophic idiotic assumptions by the Obama administration went wrong.
First, the assumption that Islamist parties would go the way of Christian parties in Europe is demented. It ignores major difference in the nature of both religions, in the origins of the parties in both regions, and in the histories of the regions. The Arab world has a history of colonialism, no major regional wars in recent history to install a pacifist attitude, the religion has not passed through a period of secularisation, and liberal values are in no way part of social values in the Mideast as they are in Europe.
Secondly, the majority of Arab countries are entities that are entirely based on concepts of post-colonialist Arab nationalism. This is particularly true of Syria where there was no other glue holding together the country. The Arab spring was almost entirely driven by Islamists wanting to get to power through either guns or ballot boxes or both. The US knew this, and pretty much wanted it. But said Islamists are Sunni, and as Libya has shown clearly they have absolutely no intention of granting anyone who doesn't toe their line any quarters. In such a situation, what was the expected reaction of the Shiia, Alawis, and Christians of Syria? Were they expected to lie down and be subjected to a gradual but unavoidable campaign of ethnic cleansing along the lines of the Christians of Iraq? As the US, Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia poured weapons and foreign fighters into Syria through the borders of Turkey were they expected to surrender to the mass slaughter coming, or were they expected to respond with equal ferocity.
But above all, the assumption that moderate Islamists are the only party capable of confronting and moderating radical groups was the cardinal error in the Arab Spring hypothesis. It shows the Obama admin has absolutely no idea how Islamists function and that it was easy prey to the bilingually bifurcated media machine of the MB. Because Islamists have never ever made any radical revision of the basic principles that drive all of them, they are all very vulnerable to being bullied into more radical positions by groups to their right. Given enough time, the MB in Libya certainly and without delay turned Jihadi, in Syria, the MB will inevitably gravitate towards ISIL. Leave a bunch of Islamists alone and through a convoluted process of medieval argument and head chopping they will all accumulate towards the extreme right and coagulate into one pulsating murderous sectarian monstrous entity.
And that is far worse than anything the autocratic allegedly corrupt regimes of the Pan-Arabist era could have produced.
Arab Spring indeed.
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