The Arab Spring

The revolt, begun in my beloved Tunisia, offered great hope. Having spent my two years in the Peace Corps in Tunisia, I was both interested in and proud of their struggle to overthrow their oppressors. I was not particularly concerned about the Islamist branding of most of the freedom movements--in Tunisia and in the rest of the Arab World. Having been ruled cruelly by imitations of secular democracies, it's quite natural that they would gravitate towards non-secular systems. It's important to remember that there are as many branches and disputes within Islam as within Christianity--and you can have a thousand fundamentalists who don't agree on what the Quran (or Bible) says.

As the Arab Spring spread to Egypt, a badly failed state, my pessimism began to take hold. It is not so much that the protestors really won, it was that the Egyptian army decided not to kill civilians to protect an old man whose days were clearly numbered. Now, they are obviously willing to kill civilians to protect themselves. And Americans, afraid of the Islamic Brotherhood (with some reason) and terrified of the Salafists (with great reason), don't know for whom to root.

We have the same problem in Syria. By our standards there are no good guys. If we and NATO landed, we'd have no idea whom to shoot and whom to protect. The Alawite minority can't give up power because they know the Sunnis would exterminate them. The Sunnis, backed by Al Qaeda, can no longer tolerate being ruled by the Alawite minority who oppresses them and whom they consider to be heretics.