Arab Spring Over, Islamists, Generals and Old Regimes Battle for Power From Tunisia to Syria
There are countless great sources for those who following the Middle East’s political clock by the movement of its second- and minute-hands. But for those looking to track the movement of the hour-hand, there are few better options than the New York Review of Books tag-team of Hussein Agha and Rob Malley. The former Palestinian negotiation adviser now at Oxford (Agha) and the former Clinton Administration Mideast adviser now with the International Crisis Group (Malley) have produced a magisterial body of analysis of the state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in an ongoing series of essays high in the nutrients of original observation and prescient prognosis. And now they’ve turned their unsentimental attention to the Arab Spring that has shaken up the region stretching from Algeria to Syria and Yemen over the past nine months, warning that the heady optimism of “Twitter revolutions” has given way to a season of Arab counterrevolution.
The regimes targeted in the Arab Spring came were products, Agha and Malley note, of the dashed optimism of an earlier era of revolutionary in the decades following World War II, which produced regimes promising to restore Arab dignity through modernization and social justice, yet which became corrupt, authoritarian shells bereft of all legitimacy — or even “authenticity” — and beholden to outside powers. The decrepitude of those regimes eventually forced their own citizens into open rebellion.