The War in Libya and the "Arab Spring"

nhboy

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"Why has there been such a flowering of revolt in the Arab world in North Africa and the Middle East in the past few months? Is there a common root cause to protests and revolts, whether ultimately successful in creating less-oppressive regimes, in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere?

I think there are many reasons for the Arab Spring. One of the key reasons is the decommissioning over the past decade of the Palestinian national question. Everyone asks: What impact will the Arab Spring have on the Israel-Palestine issue? I think a more pertinent question is: What impact did the Israel-Palestine "peace process" have on the Arab world? It is impossible to overstate how reliant Arab dictators were on the unresolved Palestinian national question as a way of justifying their authoritarian rule and controlling their own people's aspirations. They effectively offset their own peoples' desires for self-determination through the Palestinian issue, justifying Arab authoritarianism and brute coherence as a necessity for the "grand showdown" over Palestine. It was deeply cynical...and it fell apart following the winding down of Palestinian nationalism. The lack of pro-Palestine placards on the Arab protests has been striking. This time people are fighting for themselves.

Also, there is the sheer corrosion of these regimes. They are simply old and withered and they have a serious crisis of succession. As we can see in Gaddafi's sons, and in Mubarak's too, there is no obvious person for these creeps to hand power to. So the very age of their regimes became a problem. I think this explains both Mubarak's and Ben Ali's obsession with hair dye and Gadaffi's penchant for botox. It's cosmetic surgery as a way of disguising political and physical exhaustion. Also, the speed with which the authoritarian yet flimsy regime in Tunisia fell revealed to the Arab people that their rulers—bereft of their Palestinian cause, lacking legitimacy, old, decrepit, caked in make-up—could be relatively easily pushed aside."
 
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