On December 17, 2010, a street vendor in Tunis, named Mohammed Bouazizi, immolated himself in protest of the arbitrary seizing of his vegetable stand by a local government official. That act triggered the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia and a wave of public unrest throughout the Middle East that came to be called the "Arab Spring." Six years later, little remains of the hopes that the West saw in the Arab Spring. Instead, that spring has given way to a winter of economic stagnation and political violence that has plunged Syria, Libya and Yemen into bloody civil war, has led to widespread unrest in Egypt, Iraq and Bahrain, and threatens to destabilize Arab governments from Morocco to Saudi Arabia. What went wrong? Should the United States have moved more forcefully to support the various Arab Spring movements or did Washington fail to understand the true nature of the popular revolts? Simply put, should we have done more or done less?
The Western media was quick to characterize the uprisings as popular democratic revolts against corrupt dictatorial regimes. As the noted international affairs commentator George Friedman has pointed out, "For the Western media, anyone under the age of 30 with an iPhone is by definition a liberal democrat." Add to that the use of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter for social mobilization and the presumption of political modernity appears validated. That presumption was also reinforced by the fact that the "spokespeople" invariably identified and interviewed by Western media tend to be individuals who are fluent in English, typically have ties to the West and often times were educated in the U.S. or Europe. They come across as moderate, reasonable supporters of secular democratic government. The problem is that such spokesmen are rarely indicative of the nature or aims of these popular revolts.
ISIS terrorists ride tanks during a June 2014 parade in Raqqa, Syria
The reality is that the Arab Spring was never the popular democratic revolt that Western governments or the media made it out to be. In fact, the Arab Spring had little to do with democracy; although it certainly included some liberal-democratic groups. It was instead a reactionary movement led primarily by conservative, religious and Islamist elements against secular Arab regimes. The Arab Spring represented a rejection of the secular, socialist, pan-Arabism, nationalist, military regimes that had come to power in the period from the 1950s through the 1970s, and which have since devolved into little more that corrupt, crony governments ruling by brute force and a pervasive security apparatus.
The modern borders of the Middle East are largely the legacy of the post-World War I European dissection of the Ottoman Empire. A series of treaties, beginning with the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement, divided up the Middle East with little regard to ethnicity, religion, culture or historical association. Indeed, many of those borders were determined by a scramble for the region's oil wealth and a colonial policy of ruling by pitting various ethnic and religious groups against each other. The post-World War II Pan-Arab movement sought legitimacy by appealing to a broader Arab cultural unity in the context of a nationalist, secular, socialist, modernist ideology. Spurred by military revolutions, inspired by the original military-led, secular Ataturk revolution in Turkey following WWI, these regimes sought to create the same modern, secular regimes in the Arab world.
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