The Arab Spring's outcome will take decades to work out. We must remain engaged and work the problem as an opportunity and not look away is if the unrest is a curse. I think this is about right:
Did the fall of Saddam break the myth about the power of such dictatorships? It is not unrealistic to think that Saddam’s trial could have planted the idea that dictators may face a reckoning in the end. How much did this contribute to the Arab Spring? The Berlin Wall did not fall because somebody kicked it: the ideas propping it up collapsed much earlier, with the Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in Russia. The idea that the Arab Spring was triggered by a self-immolating street trader in an obscure Tunisian town is just not credible. ...
A philosopher with an Iraqi background asks the rhetorical question: ‘A young man from the city of Al-Salt in Jordan decides to infiltrate Iraq and blow himself up in a book market together with a couple of hundred people. His family celebrate his martyrdom and people in the area congratulate them on that glory. Why is that the fault of George Bush?’
The US certainly bit off more than it could chew in Iraq, but this may have shaken the region out of stagnation that has dominated the lives of at least two gene-rations. It may take another generation to be able to evaluate the true impact.
I take exception to the notion that we bit off more than we could chew in Iraq. We did win, after all. Yes, the war was more difficult than envisioned. But that was because of our enemies and allies--not because of Saddam's power of resistance--as the author even admits:
How much of the chaos that followed the removal of Saddam was caused by the regimes that the US was ‘engaging’ with? Syria and Iran openly promoted the chaos; but Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Yemen and even the UAE sheikhdoms didn’t help. In invading Iraq, was the US fighting against the whole regional system?
Yes, our enemies, Syria, Iran, and al Qaeda, fought us in Iraq. But our regional allies at best refused to help us because these largely Sunni governments hated the idea of a Shia-led Arab government. At worst, they allowed their own jihadis 9and the cash to sustain their murder sprees) to flow to Iraq so we would kill them there. We had to chew longer and harder to digest the war, but we did it.
Notwithstanding that, do read the whole thing. As I wrote many years ago, when the history of the Middle East for this era is written, Bush 43 may well be known as George the Liberator:
Our victory in Iraq will change the rules in a region still frozen in the Cold War era standards of strongmen who rule without regard to their people or their well being. When the history of the Middle East in this era is written, President Bush may well be known as George the Liberator.
A self-immolating vendor in Tunisia was surely the proximate cause of the Arab Spring. The underlying cause is yet to be fully explored. We may require historians not so invested in their ahistorical anti-war opinions.
