re: "Arab Uprisings: The Limits of Diplomacy"

Charles Crawford explains about non-MTS ("Muddle Through Somehow") events.

Money quote(s):

"For far too long we all have got used to dealing with a sizeable group of miserable dictatorships and autocracies, some relatively benign and/or rich, others not. Even when truly appalling things happened, we looked away."

"Part of it goes right back to the depths of the Cold War and European decolonisation in Africa. Some sort of psychological/political reaction against European rule was more or less expected if not inevitable (and for Cold War leftists, highly desirable). The Soviet Union piled in, offering these newly liberated territories an ideological 'anti-imperialist' approach to the 'West' plus arms sales and the control-freak blandishments of central planning.

And it worked. Western/European liberal ideas which had quite respectable roots across North Africa were more or less wiped out in favour of a motley mish-mash of repressive national socialism and pan-Arab 'nationalism'."

This was a much wider phenomenon not limited to North Africa or the Near East, but extending to the whole of the "Non-Aligned Movement."

"(D)uring the Cold War we got used to making the best of dictatorships in all sorts of places. Unfortunately, when the Cold War ended we quailed at the thought of bringing the Arabs to have a hard look at themselves. We came up with no idea of a reforming partnership with the Arab world's misgovernments."

By then, things like OPEC and Arab terrorism had come into their own and many governments rightly feared rocking those boats.

"(T)he costs and benefits of policies compound up over time. Compounding stupidity dragging on for decades produces fearsome negativities, not least the public debt crisis threatening the credibility of the EU and USA alike.

The Middle East's compounding stupidities have led to a momumentally wretched outcome now."

And we ain't seen nothin' yet.

"It surely is better to do more or less honest business deals with dictatorships, as the very act of engaging with the professional western world gradually (OK, very gradually and perhaps at the risk of helping these villains stay in power) creates a new requirement rippling out into the local system for better training, accountability, due process, and so on. Constructive engagement and all that.

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the sheer longevity of these decadent Arab regimes is that it reinforced a quasi-colonialist quasi-racist idea that 'Arabs can't do democracy'.

In my 27 years in the FCO I don't recall hearing a single expert on the Middle East talking about how the region might become substantively more democratic. Planning papers on the issue were inconceivable and unwritten."

Constructive engagement is a seductive idea. We do it with un-free societies the world over, from China throughout the whole of the developing world. It might even work, perhaps, in the long run, if nothing else interrupts it.

(But something almost always happens to interrupt it.)

"Not only did Western governments suck up to 'Arab' dictatorships for far too long. Everyone did - Right, Left and Centre!

Above all, so did their own people. For the best part of fifty years tens of millions of Arabs have passively accepted brutal, unaccountable regimes, sub-optimal living standards, a desert of intellectual poverty, reduced choice and freedom. That's not our fault. It's theirs."

&

"It looks as if the Arabs are finally waking up - and realising in a rage what has been done to them by their own fatalism"