The Egyptian Debacle
By ROGER COHEN, NYT
LONDON — Of all the promise of the Arab Spring — for citizenship and agency in the lives of peoples long subjected to servility and humiliation — perhaps the greatest was the idea that the region could escape the paralyzing political trap that offered Western-backed dictatorship or radical Islamism as its only alternatives.
For decades, since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Middle East has been caught in this crippling vise. All the ousted strongmen, from Hosni Mubarak in Egypt to Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, were insistent that only they stood between their nations and jihadist takeover. This was the currency of their argument to the West. From Washington to Paris, the appeal worked. Money and backing flowed.
In fact, of course, these repressive Arab societies — so illustrative of Western hypocrisy in their power structures, so deadening to the hopes of the young, so shot through with nepotism and cronyism, so distant from a glimpsed modernity — resembled factories for militant Islam rather than bulwarks against it.
When the only place to gather is the mosque, when “secular” equals Western-backed dictatorship and when “elections” amount to a rigged farce, the consolation of the Islamist cause grows. It was not for nothing that Al-Qaeda flourished in the incubator of Arab despotisms, nor that Mohamed Atta, a leader of the 9/11 attack, issued from Mubarak’s Egypt.
(More here.)
LONDON — Of all the promise of the Arab Spring — for citizenship and agency in the lives of peoples long subjected to servility and humiliation — perhaps the greatest was the idea that the region could escape the paralyzing political trap that offered Western-backed dictatorship or radical Islamism as its only alternatives.
For decades, since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Middle East has been caught in this crippling vise. All the ousted strongmen, from Hosni Mubarak in Egypt to Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, were insistent that only they stood between their nations and jihadist takeover. This was the currency of their argument to the West. From Washington to Paris, the appeal worked. Money and backing flowed.
In fact, of course, these repressive Arab societies — so illustrative of Western hypocrisy in their power structures, so deadening to the hopes of the young, so shot through with nepotism and cronyism, so distant from a glimpsed modernity — resembled factories for militant Islam rather than bulwarks against it.
When the only place to gather is the mosque, when “secular” equals Western-backed dictatorship and when “elections” amount to a rigged farce, the consolation of the Islamist cause grows. It was not for nothing that Al-Qaeda flourished in the incubator of Arab despotisms, nor that Mohamed Atta, a leader of the 9/11 attack, issued from Mubarak’s Egypt.
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home