Blaming the victims for instability in the Middle East and North Africa

Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders has an intriguing take on “Arab Spring 2.0″ in today’s paper.

According to Doug, back in 2011 Western leaders were “jumping over each other” to support popular uprisings in the Arab world. But, due to how things have since turned out, particularly in Libya, their enthusiasm to get behind current popular unrest in Algeria and Sudan has waned mightily.

Doug poses the rhetorical question, “Would the Middle East and North Africa be in better shape if its strongman dictators… had been kept in place?” He finds his answer in Syria, where “the al-Assad regime remains in power… and the mass uprising against him was denied a victory, either through deliberate neglect or insufficient commitment from outside.”

Note the assumption that it is up to Western leaders, outsiders, to determine the course of politics in Arab nations. With the exception of Libya and Syria, no Western leaders anywhere were “jumping over each other” to support any popular uprisings in 2011, certainly not in Tunisia, or Egypt, or Bahrain, or Yemen.

In Egypt, the West backed away from Arab Spring from the beginning, and fully connived in the overthrow of the Morsi government in 2013.

In Libya and Syria, on the other hand, modest popular protests were soon fanned into regime-change operations via wholesale interventions by the West. Oddly enough, those were two secular Arab states which that had made reasonable, in Libya’s case exceptional, progress in human development. 

Libya was perhaps a special case. So few people, all that oil; that’s a combo bound to pique the interests of the humanitarian interventionists in the West, which it did.

The strongman dictator of Syria didn’t have a lot of oil, but did have the misfortune of sharing a common border with Israel, and that alone is enough to make a stable Syrian government a threat to US interests. Here’s a telling headline from the Guardian in 2012; Most Syrians back President Assad, but you’d never know from western media. That was Jonathan Steele on western propaganda, an unrelenting barrage of disinformation that has persisted right up until Doug’s column today.

As for the future, “getting behind the people in the street” in Sudan seems a dubious goal. The “educated, hopeful, next generation” will hopefully get educated sufficiently to understand that our “help” is generally not in the interests of the people we purport to be helping.

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Further reading on Sudan and Arab Spring

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/07/2013710113522489801.html

http://www.gallup-international.com/surveys/syria-poll-march-2018/

https://www.howwemadeitinafrica.com/the-decline-of-sudans-cappuccino-sipping-middle-class/44575/

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/04/quietly-angrily-washington-confronts-its-wayward-offspring-south-sudan-africa-diplomacy-foreign-aid-war-conflict-peace-deal-salva-kiir/