Quote:
Originally Posted by kirklancaster
No, sorry MTVN - you are posting from a totally different perspective from T.S and certain others, though T.S does keep changing his stance.
I agree with most of what you say and I genuinely respect your passion and belief in what you are saying - it is patent.
|
Thanks Kirk, but reading the post that TS made just before mine I do agree with a lot of what he says, and a lot of what he's said throughout the thread. I don't agree with the theory of who's pulling the strings though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by James
From the article.
I'm no great expert on the subject, but surely the Syrian civil war (which has fueled extremism) started because of the Arab Spring protests, and those started because people in a lot of these countries were sick and tired of being ruled by dictators.
I do think we blame ourselves too much for a lot of these problems.
|
Mmm to some extent maybe. But the character of opposition forces was IMO always a lot more sinister than we in the West realised, not just in Syria but elsewhere. I'm not sure it's coincidence that in the countries where we once hailed the birth of the Arab Spring there now exists chaos, violence, and hotbeds of dangerous ideologies. Perhaps the only country that has emerged in a reasonable state is Tunisia. Egypt turned reactionary and is now essentially a military dictatorship. In Libya you have numerous warring militias fighting over Gaddafi's ruins. In Syria the only meaningful opposition that now exists is that of the extremists; ISIS and their cronies.
I'm sure there were some in the original Arab Spring protests who craved western style democracy and were sick of their dictators, our media seized on that to present it as the long-awaited Arab awakening, evidence that the Neocons were right all along - they all wanted democracy really, we just needed to show them they wanted it. But the opposition was also always less unified than we liked to think, it was always plagued by infighting, differing motivations and ethnic/religious tension. A lot of these Middle Eastern countries have always been melting pots of such tensions, and as brutal as they were the only things keeping a lid on those tensions were the dictators. They go and you have a dangerous power vacuum, as you have now in Libya, in Iraq, and to some extent in Syria, though it'd be worse if Assad had been removed. A lot of Middle Eastern dictators were/are monsters, but they understood their countries. We didn't. Almost every country in recent years that we thought was ready to rise up against their leader has gone to hell.
I'm reading a book atm on how much of a failure it was to try and impose western style democracy on Iraq and it has this quote in from T.E. Lawrence. He was writing in 1917 but it seems to apply today: "Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is."