The Economist a few weeks ago had a special report on the Arab world. I really liked this article, Imposing freedom - Well that didn't work.
"Why did Mr Bush’s message of reform fail? One reason, a lot of Arab reformers say, is that he and his colleagues were—or at least became—the worst possible messengers. Thus Hossam Bahgat, founding director of a pressure group, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, admits to having been impressed and surprised when Ms Rice turned up at the American University in Cairo to say exactly what people like him had been longing to hear: that there would be no more American support for dictators. But when the American government then started to defend its own human-rights abuses at Guantánamo and elsewhere, he felt disgusted. ‘What we learnt from the Bush years was that reform was our own business,’ he says now.
In Arab eyes, the freedom agenda was also tainted by the war in Iraq. How could America claim to have Arab interests at heart while laying waste to one of the Arab world’s biggest countries (and, cynical Arabs add, the one most dangerous to Israel)?"
1 comment:
At its core Arab culture has become over the last 100 years both theocratic and authoritarian simultaneously.
Sadly while Europe was in the grip of the dark ages, Arab culture was blossoming. Arab thinkers were leading contributors to Architecture, mathematics, poetry, astronomy and literature, to mention a few.
I don't know when things went bad or why, but they did.
Suffice it to say that trying to impose "freedom" or "democracy" into a culture that hasn't really had either, in any amount, for generations, is bound to fail.
Cultures are like people; true lasting change can only come from within.
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