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Posted by on Jan 21, 2013 | 10 comments

The Prognosis is exceedingly grim….

…for the Arab Spring.  I’m banging on about this, partly because of the bloody fool in my comments section a while back.  Anyway:

These statistics are all the more tragic because they could have been avoided. The February 2011 ouster of Mubarak was followed by a pronounced fiscal downturn, leading many to conclude that the country’s new, Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government—for all of its bluster to the contrary—wouldn’t impose radical changes on the country’s political direction. Instead, conventional wisdom held that the new powers-that-be in Cairo would, for both economic and political reasons, opt for a process of “creeping Islamization”—a slow, gradual changeover of the country’s civilian bureaucracy and legislature which wouldn’t rile international markets or spook jittery investors.
The conventional wisdom turned out to be wrong.

 

No kidding, really?

  • http://de-avanzada.blogspot.com/ Daosorios

    It took them less than I thought they would to realize this!

  • http://www.facebook.com/peter.moritz.351 Peter Moritz

    As I said – a stillborn baby that, or more apt – and Islamist spring and not an Arab.
    And with Nato weapons sent to the “democratically” more or less inclined of the Libyan “revolution” the so called freedom fighters lost no time to infiltrate Mali after having settled score in Libya.
    At least the Algerian powers that are lost no time with negotiations and responded as they had to: bomb the shit out of the fuckers. They killed and would have killed the remainder of the hostages anyway.

    • ThePrussian

      Peter, you are absolutely pushing at an open door with me when it comes to the ghastly support of the Saudi regime. One of the reasons I am strongly in favour of developing alternatives to oil, and a move towards nuclear power, is draining the economic impetus from that regime.

  • Michael R

    Rational people make predictions: gravity falls; Islam is a “undeniably a religion of conquest” (Sam Harris, The End of Faith). Therefore anyone who understands Islam would expect the Arab Spring to fail. To describe it as “grim” makes as much sense as getting emotional about gravity.

    Obama, the “great community organiser”, failed to do any community organising aimed at acknowledging Islam’s militant nature and somehow reforming the religion before toppling the dictators and unleashing Islamic fundamentalism (not that Islam is in any way reformable, I’m just speaking hypothetically).

    Obama presumably takes Indonesia and Turkey as models for Muslim democracy. Both those states are aberrations, not norms, for Muslim countries. Being democratic, they are in defiance of Islamic doctrine, which is theocratic not democratic.

    • DavidGaliel

      Arab countries are not inherently Muslim countries, and Egypt is as different from, say, Syria or Tunisia or Kuwait (much less Iran) as the US is from Canada or the UK or New Zealand. Referring to all Middle Eastern non-Israel nations as some blurry, uniform mass of undifferentiated “Others” is not an enlightened nor historically accurate view. it is lazy, biased analysis.

      • Michael R

        According to Wikipedia, most of Arabia is 90% Muslim:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Muslim_Population_Pew_Forum.png

        Regardless of what historical differences there may be, the tendency of Muslim countries will be towards Islamic doctrine – just like gravity. Turkey just banned books on evolution, and has hundreds of journalists/military locked up or charged. Inch by inch, they return to being Ottomans, their true nature. Now that colonial forces are gone, and dictators are toppled, the Muslim world is pulled towards theocracy (as their doctrine dictates) and barbaric sharia law, just like gravity.

        I may indeed be lazy, but you don’t need to be smart to notice gravity and Islamic doctrine. You, on the other hand, are presumably one of the Pollyannas who think that we can change the Muslim world without mass apostasy (not that I’m advocating interfering). Keep fighting gravity, you never know when you might defy it.

  • DavidGaliel

    A) The Arab Spring is not just Egypt. I notice you don’t write a lot about Tunisia or Libya – or anywhere else your bias doesn’t hold.

    B) Democracy sucks sometimes – but it’s better than the alternatives, which in this case was Mubarak’s brutal tyranny. No discussion about the events in Egypt is honest if it occurs in a vacuum, without acknowledging its history.

    C) The situation in Egypt is anything but stable, and the people still have the option of ousting Morsi – and, if the economy continues to falter and unpopular edicts are imposed, they very well may.

    D) The electoral dominance of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was not pre-ordained; a great deal of responsibility lies with the strategic and tactical incompetence of the secularists’ campaigns, and the West’s mishandling of events.

    E) Anyone who presumes to predict the future in the Middle East is a fool. Even in Westernized Israel, the current election results are surprising everyone. Don’t count out the power of the people, just because they happen to be Arabs.

    F) You keep harping on “the bloody fool”, rather than welcoming the only person here who dissents from you in your comments. Everyone else is a sycophant which means you are preaching to your choir. Rather than resorting to schoolyard insults, you should welcome some diversity of ideas and a little challenge to your assumptions.

    • ThePrussian

      Just to take that last point: You ran your mouth on the assumption that anyone who was gloomy about the Arab Spring was just being howwid. Well, that certainly makes you a bloody fool.

      • DavidGaliel

        It’s interesting that you made the choice not to engage substantively, instead to find a way to respond childishly and irrationally. That is a choice you have made.