Wie der Westen gemeinsam mit den „moderaten“ arabischen Regimen den Nahen Osten ruiniert

Düstere Worte von Rami G. Khoury im Daily Star:

The Middle East has suffered so much homegrown tyranny and sustained external assaults that it has become a dangerous pressure cooker, given that a majority of citizens live with enormous, still-growing dissatisfaction in their economic, social, ethnic, religious, or national lives. If the pressure is not relieved by allowing the region and its states to define themselves and their own governance values, the pot will explode. I suspect we are witnessing both things happening together these days.

Rami G. Khoury

On the one hand, Islamist, ethnic, sectarian, and tribal movements are growing and flourishing all over the Middle East — and are aided by Iran — in a dramatic example of collective self-assertion. On the other hand, massive external pressure, led by the US, some Europeans, Israel, and some Arab governments, fights back, hoping to keep the lid on a region trying to define itself and liberate itself from the modern legacy of the American, British and Israeli armies.

The pervasive incoherence of this bizarre picture makes it perfectly routine for Arab monarchies to support Salafist terrorists, for Western democracies to ignore the results of Arab free elections, for Iranians and Arabs, and Shias and Sunnis, to work hand in hand while also fighting bitter wars, for Islamists and secular Arabs to join forces, for freedom lovers in London and Washington to support seasoned Arab autocrats, for Western and Arab rule-of-law advocates to sponsor militias, and for Israel and the US to perpetuate Israeli policies that exacerbate rather than calm security threats and vulnerabilities in the region.

Short-term panic, medium-term confusion, and a long-term absence of direction have long defined the policies of all actors in the Middle East. These characteristics have only become more obvious as confrontation, defiance, and war in the region interact to signal the end of an era and the start of a new one. The Great Arab Unraveling is in its very early days. More harrowing things are yet come.