Year Four: The Arab Spring Proved Everyone Wrong

Year Four: The Arab Spring Proved Everyone Wrong
July/August 2014

Shortly after the Arab Spring broke out at the tail end of 2010, two narratives took hold in the West. Optimists hailed a region-wide birth of democracy, as though the Middle East and North Africa were following the path blazed in Eastern Europe during the anti-communist revolutions of 1989. Pessimists fretted that the Arab world was following Iran’s example in 1979 and replacing secular tyrants with even more repressive Islamist regimes.

Both narratives turned out to be wrong, and not just because their adherents had the wrong narrative. Any narrative superimposed over this series of events was doomed to be wrong.

The Arab Spring isn’t one thing. Many countries in the Middle East and North Africa are experiencing wrenching change, but unlike in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, each affected country is moving in different and sometimes opposing directions. Each has its own history, its own narrative.*

So what are we supposed to make of all this?

First, understand that any one-size-fits-all policy prescription for such a diverse region is guaranteed to be wrong somewhere. Libya needs state-building. Egypt needs gradual reform. Morocco needs as much diplomatic support from the US as possible. Syria, at this point, needs a miracle. Tunisia doesn’t need much of anything.....

Gradual change, as long as it’s in the right direction, should always be preferable to violent breaks with the past, but sometimes a violent break is required. There was no other way to get rid of Muammar el-Qaddafi, nor is there any other way to get rid of Bashar al-Assad. You want them out of their palaces? You’re going to have to shoot them out of their palaces. Whether that’s worth the cost is a question with no easy answer.

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continued ... http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/year-four-arab-spring-proved-everyone-wrong

good informative read highlighting many of the realities of the Arab Spring, however, the author doesn't address the emergence of an Islamic Caliphate from the ruins of Iraq, or those warning against this outcome that some Islamist's have long yearned for.