Interesting article, who could take the prospect of an 'Arab Spring' seriously when the toxic influence of Islam is everywhere in the ME? The reason that Western governments supported various authoritarian regimes in the region is that.they realised that revolution would first lead to chaos and then to brutal theocracies.

File the 'Arab Spring' next to that other neoliberal fantasy, the prospect of liberal democratic regimes in the former Soviet Union.

If people get the government they deserve / need , then the obvious question is what about Allah? Was Muhammed on a roll because his all-military , all-merciful pen and sword was just what the Arab market demanded? Byzantium won in Ukraine-Russia because its colourful Church ritual and pomp beat the other contestants for government religion. ( a bit like the Oz tradition for submarine bids).

The Arab spring never was.
It was always a revolt against states that failed in one way or another.
Their religion bans democracy so the population were never looking for
democratic governments. They were looking for better government and
cheaper food and fuel.

That their whole history is based on others providing and their
inability to understand why it is that non-Arab countries are usually
much richer than their slave based economies from old, and oil based
in recent times.

Arab countries are feeling the effects of the declining growth era
much sooner than "western" countries. I suspect that maybe because
their economic and political structures are still tribal and primitive in structure.

The refusal of US to submit to the will of the Hague, peace be upon it, is tribal and written in the book of civil war. Democracy may allow Bharaq Osama to join the civilised world after the bombing of violent Arabs brings a Christian peace. All this may be for nothing if West Australia's tribe secedes with its ore mountains, awaiting a profit.

We just can't help ourselves, can we? This whole article is a living example of the West's patronising superiority complex, which assumes that the Middle East must be saved from itself - and damn the consequences for the ME's people.

The so-called Arab Spring was different things to different countries. In Tunisia and Egypt (and now Yemen), it was mostly a genuine protest against puppet dictatorships, whose first duty was to their Western masters, not the people. None of these 'democratic revolutions' were conducive to Western interests, so they have been subverted by means of proxy counter-coups, using privatised armies of Western and local mercenaries.

In Libya, it was entirely a Western planned and financed proxy war to get rid of a leader who, among other things, threatened the global economy with plans for an African trade bloc and its own currency. (Libya was basically a replay of Iraq, but without the ground-troop invasion.) Gaddafi's 'rivers of blood' speech was taken entirely the wrong way by the Western media - deliberately so. Rather than threatening the Libyan people, he was warning his people and the world that the revolt was a Western-backed, al-Qaeda-driven terrorist campaign that, if not halted, would bring untold death and destruction to the Libyan people. How right he was!

In Syria, it was always another Western proxy war designed to get rid of a regime that is aligned to Iran and Russia. There's no Arab Spring about this whatsoever - it's purely geo-political in both intent and design.

How people of the West continue to not see the bleeding obvious pattern here is impossible to fathom, but seems to be a case of mass denial. Our view of ourselves as an infinitely superior culture, religion and race is too deeply embedded in our collective psyches. We'd rather destroy millions and millions of lives in faraway countries than ever give up our missionary zeal to remake the world in our own image.

Killarney and Bazz have posted a correct view. That is , add the two and divide by half, down the middle 50-50.

Bazz

'It was always a revolt against states that failed in one way or another.'

Most ME countries were not failed states until they were destabilised by superpower forces. Before the brutal sanctions regime was imposed by the UN in 1991, Iraq was NOT a failed state. It had a high standard of living, relative social and gender equality and, under Saddam Hussein, had full school enrolment and increased its literacy rate to 96% by 1991- winning the UNESCO prize for literacy three years in a row (1986-1989).

Neither was Iran a failed state either before or after the 1979 revolution, or in the period since. As with Iraq, it had a high standard of living and high literacy rates. Authoritarian rule was no worse after the revolution than under the Shah - it was only after the CIA overthrow of Mossedeh in 1953 that authoritarian rule was enforced.

Libya under Gaddafi's Jamahariya government was one of the greatest of all the ME success stories, achieving by far the highest standard of living in Africa and one of highest in the Middle East.

Afghanistan did have a lot of political instability in the decades prior to the Soviet invasion, but it was gradually modernising and achieving important social reforms under the left-wing government of the 1970s - including equal rights for women and redistribution of land to farmers. Had it been left alone, it would have gradually developed as a modern progressive country - but the CIA funding and training of the Mujahadeen destroyed all hope of that, and the rest is history.

Much the same can be said of Egypt under Sadat - similar pattern.

In Western eyes, the problem with all these countries had nothing to do with Islam or jihad or internal political strife - even though all those issues did exist. The problem was that all these countries took the SOCIALIST path to development - and the US-led West was having none of that. All these countries were deliberately destabilised to prevent any rise of socialism as a potential threat to Western interests.

Egypt was not a failed state, it was just that its oil production had
peaked and the subsidies on food and fuel were raised.
Mubarak was deposed because of the cost of food.

Iraq was not a failed state, it was just that they gassed their own
people as well as the usual Sunni/Shia carry ons.

Syria was not a failed state it was just the usual Sunni/Shia carry on.

I think it is reasonable to say that the upheavals that occur in these
countries are an indication that those states fail because of their
mode of government with democracy banned by Islam.